77 replies to this topic

[solbanger]

One thing that seems to be overlooked is that we need some viable way to escape the solar system to prevent extinction. One good solar "burp" and we could lose the earth. A lucky(unlucky) gamma ray burst that hits us head on would flash fry the whole solar system. Eventually if humans want to avoid extinction we will have to branch out to other solar systems. It'll just be a question of do we do it with FTL drives or slow boats that take 500 years to reach the nearest star.

Simple become a purely psychic entity that needs no food, water or sleep, and does not get damaged by normal matter. Instantaneous transport here we come!

If you think about it a little maybe our bodies are just the first step, a chalice of mental wine if you will, and that they are destined to remain earthbound in a sense. More than likely we will develop telepathic augmenters or some other mental device that would allow us to explore the universe before we create some sort of contraption that can brave the perils of space-time expansion. If you think about it, this makes more sense than physically arriving at some place or just floating around in a capsule designed just so our bodies are able to exist in space. Think of the device as the ultimate telescope, where we can scan the available universe for glimmers of Earth substitutes, and probably other intelligent life forms in the blink of a dream cloud. Using a psychic probe we could 'see' the insides of the most caustic gas planets, observe a million year history of the moon in a flash or even swoop through an event horizon. Perhaps the mind even has the powers of translation and discussion between the most alien of devices, such as being able to translate an alien cybernet? And why not since human programming is a series of translatable logic loops itself. This is why I find the newer incarnations of Star Trek a tad disingenuous. Why use a plodding starship to scan for things when the mind, as we suspect, can work as the ultimate Enterprise?

I mean what seems easier? Augmenting the capabilities of our minds to the level we suspect is capable (albeit after solving the riddle of the quantum mechanical particle-wave paradox) or developing an artificial wormhole system that hopefully doesn't vacuum up the sun? If there exists advanced civilizations, then they too would probably have this psy-tech in place, and quite possibly enable us to download our consciousness to a device that can print out a new body if need be. As for why they don't show themselves, right here, now? Beats me. Maybe they wish to avoid snapping the time line.

[Vgamer1]

Instantaneous transport here we come!

Sorry, I don't see how "instantaneous transport" follows from this. I agree that it would be way smarter to transport our "minds" rather than our "bodies," but at that point they will pretty much be one and the same anyway. Information, just like everything else is limited by the speed of light. So even still it would take 100 years to travel 100 light years.

I do like your scenario of being basically purely mental beings though. It makes a lot of sense that at some point we would abandon our original bodies for a more superior set of "hardware."

[Luna]

I doubt all theories which includes time as more than a measure variable! I also doubt most theory that use the word "infinite" to say "impossible"
Meanings, I doubt speed barrier, I doubt time travel, I doubt time even exists, I doubt hyperspace, I doubt the multi-verse, at least outside of our own universe, I also doubt "out side of our universe" as I believe the universe is just infinite vacuum with matter inside it.

We will not need hyper drive that throws us into another dimensions, there are enough ways to manipulate the universe in order to "throw ourselves" forward.
Then again, that's also a theory!

[valkyrie_ice]

To be honest, I don't think we know enough about the universe's true structure to determine if FTL warps are possible.

Also, all of these theories deal almost exclusively with "space as we perceive it", in other words the limited universe of which we are aware with limited human perceptions. Physics deals with the effects we can see, mathematics deals with that universe in concepts we understand, our understandings are limited by the very tools created by our attempts to understand.

I believe interstellar travel is not only possible, but inevitable. Even the singularity is unlikely to change the fact that we are, at our deepmost centers, human, with all the drives and desires that make us what we are. As illdefined and illogical as human is, it is something we will be unlikely to escape from, ever. Even the drive to AI is intended to create an artificial lifeform which we will "recognize" as human, which means that even our creations will carry those same characteristics.

To me, that means any "advances" which do away with those "human qualities" as illogical and ill defined as they are, will be unlikely to be accepted by the majority of humanity. Removal of emotions, desires, etc, even if they are "good for the species survival" will create a "human" that most of humanity would find "alien" The same goes for the hive mind concept, multiplicity, uploading, etc. Social development lags far behind technological, but there are unique qualities that we value regardless of race or gender. One of those qualities is the sense of curiosity that drives us to explore. Curiousity alone will drive us out of our solar system eventually.

As for the comment made about virtual worlds being an escape route that some may take, that is indeed possible, but I see something far different from my experiences in Secondlife. Escape into virtual worlds isn't as big a desire as some may think. What I see is a desire to bring the virtual world into reality. Most of the people I deal with want to be their avatars, not in the rather fanciful pretend world of SL, but in everyday life.

So to be blunt, unless we become UNHUMAN, we will eventually travel to other stars and eventually probably even beyond our very universe.

[solbanger]

Instantaneous transport here we come!

Sorry, I don't see how "instantaneous transport" follows from this. I agree that it would be way smarter to transport our "minds" rather than our "bodies," but at that point they will pretty much be one and the same anyway. Information, just like everything else is limited by the speed of light. So even still it would take 100 years to travel 100 light years.

I do like your scenario of being basically purely mental beings though. It makes a lot of sense that at some point we would abandon our original bodies for a more superior set of "hardware."

Quantum mechanics offers possibilities that are not limited by the speed of light. Hence the theory of instantaneous transport.

[treonsverdery]

Personally I've seen detailed predictions of the future made during 1999 be true during 2008 Thus a data FTL transfer is demonstrated I'm certainly wondering what effect having a loud psychic source a light minute from a receiver would show

this is kind of like a revealed vision:
ummm it has to do with the geometry of changing topology when vertices are changed removal of vertices to a thing passing through a geometric space changes nstance of being such that previous form is translated to a different > plus is farther distant than its previous material direction

kind of like if eentsy luke skywalker is flying through a box of cereal then ripping the side of the box off changes lukes position plus velocity to different than lightspeed position based on a isness change of lukes shared vertice geometry of the way the number of vertices around luke have changed

The prechange way is the kind of thing that would make human beings laugh Just imagine someone perhaps casually jesting a the fossil record whilst changing the geometry of time from multidirectional to skinnydimensional The fossil record is a kind of could of were rather than a been kind of a fractal sponge rotated through god's eye can be aligned across the content dimension N where a fractal space is area of gaze.n

a lazy persons ride through zelazny's amber
apparently during the change a majority of the universe energy was hidden

linked transitory formalism is a postchange way I think there are other ways as well

hint http://www.youtube.c...feature=related is drawing with post change remnants of spacetime

Edited by treonsverdery, 23 February 2009 - 07:13 AM.

[j0lt_c0la]

An Alcubierre drive is not breaking the relativity rules, per se, rather it's an example of following the rules to the letter of the law rather than the spirit. The ship doesn't travel faster than light, it bends space so it can travel a short distance and end up at a far destination. Here's a good way to visualize what this really means. Grab a piece of paper. Draw two dots really far away from each other. What's the shortest path between the dots? Did I hear "a straight line"? Yes, if you're two-dimensional. Fold the paper so the dots touch. Now how close are they? An Alcubierre drive is like folding the paper. Within my limited understanding, you wouldn't get the nasty relativistic effects because you're not traveling that fast, you're just shortening your path. However, you need exotic matter to create the damned thing (which we aren't entirely sure exists yet), which makes our laments about how we can't currently make enough antimatter for use in practical applications look like a little kid whining about who got the last cookie.

[kismet]

By Einstein's laws faster than light travel is possible, but not relative to any stationary observer. I think there may be some disagreement in this thread on what "faster than light travel" actually means. It is of course possible that we can prove Einstein wrong somewhere down the line (i.e. wormholes). However, I have only heard of wormholes in a purely philosophical/sci-fi sense. I'm not aware of any scientific theories that would support the actual possibility of wormholes. Maybe someone can enlighten me though.

I think wormwholes exist as valid mathematical concepts and are not ruled out by our current understanding of physics. The wikipedia articles on physics are usually outstanding (and I believe factually accurate). If even people like Kip Thorne considered wormholes, I'm sure the theory must have some merit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worm_hole
http://en.wikipedia....ster-than-light

[valkyrie_ice]

My personal pet theory is that we will develop a way to convert a vessal entirely into pure vibrational energy within the superstring matrix, and recreate it in another location after having made it's trip entirely through hyperspace in near instantanious travel, in essence a form of controlled quantum leap.

My secondary theory is the development of stable wormholes between two fixed "Gates" in each inhabitable solar system, with a fixed negative time value of milliseconds, allowing travel as well as communication between systems. As this will require a physical vessal to travel to each system in order to set up the gates, it is limited to the speed with which such vessals can travel.

A third possibility is that we may find a way to control gravity, and thus be able to create a vessal capable of creating a large enough gravity well to create it's own wormholes between two points and thus be able to "skip" through space via multiple short wormholes.

Edited by valkyrie_ice, 27 February 2009 - 08:00 AM.

[johnf]

One thing I'll inject here is that FTL or such magical tech isn't needed for us to become an immortal species, living all across the galaxy.

Fermi's paradox ("Where are they?" since aliens should already have been here) was based on the position that we can already think of many way to get to nearby stars within thousands of years, across the galaxy and on the way to others within hundreds of thousands of years.
Dyson coined the phrase "the Greening of the Galaxy": As time goes on and colonies around nearby stars grow up to our K=2 status, the light we see from those stars starts to cahnge. As the ecliptic gets built up with habitats & such, the sunlight is blocked and then re-emitted as long-wave IR waste heat. Eventually the star gets surrounded by a cloud of warm stuff in its "Dyson cloud".
The light we'd see from the stars isn't actually green, but it represents the temperature of warm life, so we'd see this stain of liquid H2O temperature "green" spread across the sky.
In his novel "the Wanderer", Fritz Leiber speculated that the clouds of stuff we see blocking our sight of the inner galaxy is in fact inhabited star systems...

Our prospects for building up to this only look better all the time, even without things like contained fusion, nanotech assemblors, immortality, FTL, artificial gravity, etc.
Macrolife is the concept that a space colony with everything that makes it work, is in fact a life form which can grow, move, and reproduce.
How long for us to be sure we know how to make Macrolife work long enough for an interstellar comet-hopping colony to get to a comet around another star?

Anyway, we have ready means to take habitation of the whole solar system out to the Oort cloud, and that should keep us busy & rich as a species for the next thousand yars or so.

Edited by johnf, 08 April 2009 - 09:58 PM.

[thestuffjunky]

i big answer.... an invention is made to make the magic of sciences easier, and sciences have lead to immortality, with these sciences, medicines and most importantly technologies, then it would depend on the necessity of the invention(warp drive) and the ambition of people who are 'choosing' to live forever continue to explore the universes. with the speed of science discoveries and all the perks of immortality, i say enjoy the ride because there are trillions of things to learn right now and forever....

[ImmortalityFreedom]

Cyropreserve me, and its possible

[Brain_Ischemia]

Gosh this poll is old...

While to me it sounds almost laughably absurd for me or anyone else alive today to assert that some technology is "not possible" considering the long and consistent history of similar predictions that have fallen flat on their face, and considering the unimaginable (literally) discoveries about the nature of the universe and technological advances that will undoubtedly be made in the future...I still have to say "no".

While warp speed sounds nice, it also seems an overly simplistic way of circumventing the speed of light, and I don't have much confidence that the speed of light can ever circumvented no matter how awesome the level of technology attained.

If so, this isn't necessarily that much of a bummer anyway. My guess is that our ancestors will be intelligent machines who won't mind too much spending several thousand years journeying between stars at close to (but not more than) light speed.

[Traclo]

I believe that it was pointed out before in this thread, but it's nice to know that once we start approaching the speed of light the subjective time our journey takes will get smaller and smaller. So even if we were immortal and traveling the stars don't expect to be able to 'read every book ever written' as you may not have time.
As long as you don't mind leaving behind everything that you don't take on the journey forever you can rest assured that it won't really take the millions of years that the distances suggest.
So in a way warp drive IS possible.

Go time dilation!

[shifter]

So what your saying is, if we wanted to travel to an object 10 light years away, and we did so at the speed of light, it would only be 10 years to an outside observer? But those in the ship would experience the journey in seemingly less than 10 years?

Perhaps at those speeds, there is no more 'passage of time'. So infact, we don't need immortality to travel interstellar distances.

I believe that it was pointed out before in this thread, but it's nice to know that once we start approaching the speed of light the subjective time our journey takes will get smaller and smaller. So even if we were immortal and traveling the stars don't expect to be able to 'read every book ever written' as you may not have time.
As long as you don't mind leaving behind everything that you don't take on the journey forever you can rest assured that it won't really take the millions of years that the distances suggest.
So in a way warp drive IS possible.

Go time dilation!

[Brain_Ischemia]

So what your saying is, if we wanted to travel to an object 10 light years away, and we did so at the speed of light, it would only be 10 years to an outside observer? But those in the ship would experience the journey in seemingly less than 10 years?

Perhaps at those speeds, there is no more 'passage of time'. So infact, we don't need immortality to travel interstellar distances.

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Twin_paradox

[treonsverdery]

I thought of how to do this once It had like sideways mice n concentric geometries It might be like

"onion" personality generator with directional specificity

visualize mice each capable of uploading a personality Then visualize the number of personalities the group has a quantity then visualize that these groups of mice have a nestable geometry
then the nested geometries of mice occupy space If you change the personality of one of the mice then kind of like pachink or fractals at a specific repetitive geometry the personalities of other mice are changed The chemistry of the mouse brains is modified with quantum entanglement which is superliminal thus you can predictably create a duplicate of a personality at a distance faster than it would take light to get there

the idea here is that a transhuman is aware of the utility of immanentizing instantly at a like personality object that just uses a few mathematically predictable nudges to be fully mathematically equivalent A spatial chronocolloid is built

On earth this could be created with some goofy AI program that has say a few million possible personalities yet has a quantum entagnlement sensor that nudges a few out of millions of computers running the similar AIs to create software duplicates at superliminal speeds I figure if I can think of that a cleverer person has a superb opportunity to reprogram near area nanites to convey data knowledge

programming white goo to make what is beneficial near the duplicated personality

thus it gets a person there plus surrounds them with what they would carry with them Also once the spatial chronocolloid is built an AI or mouse can actually go backward chronologically as well as forward amidst the chronocolloid

The idea of the mice being sideways has to do with predictable groups of aiming the immanentization of the travelling being

[Reno]

Grammar man, grammar. Just reading that gave me a headache.

I have little doubt that FTL drive will be invented. Though, the odds of it being invented in the next 25 years are rather slim. I imagine that once friendly AI comes on the scene theories about FTL will really start to gain traction. If the big bang could throw matter across millions of light years in a fraction of a millisecond, then it is possible to go faster than light. We just need to understand more about the forces behind these types of events.

Edited by bobscrachy, 20 October 2009 - 04:29 AM.

[Brain_Ischemia]

(nt)

Edited by Xanthus, 08 November 2009 - 01:21 AM.

[Alex Libman]

I think faster-than-light travel is a great example of human curiosity superseding actual economic priorities. We'll need a couple thousand years of rapid exponential population growth (and we're currently projecting irreversible decline past 2040) before this solar system becomes too small for us and it will become economically viable for us to expand elsewhere. Worrying about this now is kinda like a caveman wanting to learn advanced IPv6 routing before learning how to build a fire!

Also life without FTL isn't so bad, especially if you're immortal.

As for the Fermi paradox - maybe all alien civilizations develop their equivalent of Al Gore and reduce themselves to an environmentalist dystopia similar to what Ayn Rand described in Anthem?

Edited by Alex Libman, 30 March 2010 - 10:19 AM.

[Luna]

I remember there were articles about things (like radio waves?) being faster than light but "it's ok" because it "had no information". we'll find a way.

[mikeinnaples]

I remember there were articles about things (like radio waves?) being faster than light but "it's ok" because it "had no information". we'll find a way.

http://www.livescien...t_backward.html

[Luna]

nope, it isn't this one, something newer.

might have been this:
http://www.universet...ter-than-light/

well it is basically the same.. I don't get the "backward" part though O_o just hope people don't start saying that it traveled back in time O_o @@..

But that fact that the pulse is faster than light IS information, isn't it?

Edited by Luna, 30 March 2010 - 05:00 PM.

[hotamali]

f I'm not mistaken, the universe is now accelerating in its expansion, and galaxies will one day careen away from each other at FTL speeds. Since space is expanding with the moving galaxies, they wouldn't violate the speed of light. So any kind of warp drive would probably need to bend spacetime.

[Forever21]

Its already invented. I have one in my backyard.

Wait, that could be a warp drive or someone's 1989 Tercel. Dont know. I'll check in the morning when I'm sober.

[Athan]

Per this paper and others, warp drive a la Alcubierre is seeming less and less likely. Thankfully wormholes haven't been disallowed under current theory as of yet besides the exotic matter/ANEC-violating energies requirement integral to that form of FTL travel; that and wormhole theory has flourished since the late 1980s, a slightly lengthier and fairly less controversial period than (scientific) warp drive's 16 or so year history.

Really though we need to have a solid understanding of quantum gravity before we can attack FTL travel with some real power, not to understate the significance of recent advancements.

Edited by Athan, 10 April 2010 - 01:51 AM.

[Reno]

Really though we need to have a solid understanding of quantum gravity before we can attack FTL travel with some real power, not to understate the significance of recent advancements.

That will come with AI and molecular nanotechnology.

[Lallante]

I vote yes, but it might not even be necessary. Other forms of travel may make it obsolete before it's even invented, like star gate.

The type of travel described in the article is essentially a 'stargate' in that you can instantly move your ship to anywhere else, bound only by the energy cost of dilating space (which would be in some way connected or proportional to the distance travelled). Given the vastness of these likely energy costs (and the calculations required to pinpoint destination accurately) its not entirely improbable that the effect would be generated by a fixed structure at the embarkation point (the "gate").

[treonsverdery]

If the humans can mutiny
then I can tell them how to make one

its like this: there are telepaths
have these telepaths go to a 3 light second distance from recievers
measure their actual FTL communication

create telepathic nonconscious lab tissue
use this as an ansible (FTL radio) to copy the arrangement of matter from place to another at FTL
outing telepaths gives rapid FTL travel

[President Kush]

I vote yes, but it might not even be necessary. Other forms of travel may make it obsolete before it's even invented, like star gate.

the stargate is stupid, and not fast. say you wanna go to a star system 100,000 light years away. Well you still gotta get there the "regular" way to build the stargate on the destination end. even if you could build a spaceship that goes the speed of light (impossible) but lets say 99.9% speed light (theoretically possible) it would still take you about 100k years to get there before you had a working star gate.

warp drive is much better, so are traversable wormholes (like a stargate just without having to build the gates) Of course at this point we just don't know, it may take 50, 100, 1000 years to acheive, or maybe just not possible based on the laws of physics. Of course none are ruled out completely by our current understanding.


and btw...what makes you think that a startgate would be easier to invent than a warpdrive? not even considering the 100k years it would take you to go build the destination gate?