[1] The word "lossless" alone ought to raise eyebrows since, as far as I understand it, FTL travel is far more plausible than circumventing the laws of thermodynamics.
Space Operas are mythologies disguised as a language creation process.
Just track Star Maker to Star Wars, Lucas unconsciously took the bait and visualized scale invariance using motion control, and what space film first used motion control? 2001.
Contrary to the headline, Voyagers 1 and 2 are off traveling into interstellar space, bringing Johnny B Goode and some other stuff to any aliens who go meet them.
Okay, we can sum this one up real quick: "I can't conceive of anything larger than myself or longer than my lifespan having value, therefore it is a literal impossibility on par with actual flying dragons"
Also "I have never studied a foreign culture in any level of detail"
ETA: but also everything you really need to know is right at the top: "my 'controversial' book is out now and you should buy it"
Wow, that is a really sophomoric analysis. Considering interstellar travel to be infeasible on the basis of duration or distance is a narrow perspective. If we lived much longer, or if our metabolism was much slower, it wouldn't be as much of an issue.
The amount of energy required is the only sensible perspective from which to analyze interstellar travel. If you make things really small, again, it's not much of a problem.
The author also neglects the time dilation. Go fast enough and the time dilation takes care of the duration.
Give my team the resources and I'll put a few billion base pairs of Picard's DNA into orbit around Proxima long before Daenerys is riding a dragon.
Agreed, he's confusing FTL travel, which has profound theoretical objections, with general interstellar space travel, which has no such issues, space rocks like Oumoumoua do it all the time. To a million-year-old, immortal alien ET, a journey of a hundred or a thousand years is trivial. An absolute paucity of imagination here.
Not only that, but there are quite a few scientifically sound concepts that escape the tyranny of the rocket equation. Pre-seeded trajectories, particle beam propulsion, sails etc. Breaking the wall of light might not be possible but beating the current rockets by orders of magnitudes is enough for interstellar travel. And that is only an engineering problem.
My personal favorite these days is innumerable 'smart' pellets, bacteria sized, steering themselves using albedo-changing surfaces toward the ship's magnetic sail to transfer their momentum, allowing for constant acceleration.
Wasn't there some brouhaha about they Voyagers entering the interstellar medium a while back?
So... sure... one might argue we're not going to get star-trek-esque warp factor 9 kind of interstellar travel, but that's different than saying "we'll never have interstellar travel."
And there's an old adage in physics... if a young physicist says something is possible, they're probably wrong. If an old physicist says something is impossible, they're probably wrong. I have "wonderful" memories of an older astrophysicist in the 1970s telling me why it's impossible for humans to directly detect exoplanets.
I agree with the authors primary assertion... Star Trek, Star Wars and all the other "big" SciFi shows are probably more like "Science Fantasy." There was a decent discussion of what "Science Fiction" really was in the preface to one of the Arthur C. Clarke novels (sorry, can't remember which one.) Clarke suggested that "SciFi" should try to limit the amount of hand-wavey science-fantasy. In the stories I've written (and many of the corporate market analyses), I try to explicitly call out one or two bits of physics that change while keeping everything else in line with consensus reality.
But my disagreement w/ this article comes from what seems like an argument with no evidence. My mentors as a young physicist were still fans of Bertrand Russell (which might let you guess my age.) That era of science was sort of high on Karl Popper who was big on falsifiability. If you say something like "feature X is impossible in the future," then you have to wait until the future before you can determine whether the statement is true or false. And the problem with statements like this is a) there's an aweful lot of future out there, and b) we don't claim to understand all of physics.
If the author would have said "It looks very, very unlikely we'll have Star-Trek-ish warp drives by (what was it?) 2250," I would have heartily agreed. As of yet, I don't think we have any ideas about how to bend local space with an anti-matter reactor. (And if you're screaming at me about the Alcubierre Drive, sure, but the descriptions I've seen require "negative mass" which I don't think we have a handle on.)
And as a reminder... the second word in "science fiction" is "fiction". Though I (and I think the author of the original piece referenced in this post as well) would prefer "sciencism fiction." Much of what we call "Science Fiction" really is fantasy dressed up in futuristic looking clothes. Either to escape the mundane present or to hide political messaging. Or because the author thought it would be fun.
In summary... I guess what I'm saying is... Predicting things is hard. Especially about the future. It seems more correct to say "While we can't predict the future, the likelihood we're getting warp drive in the next 300 years is on par with Mets winning the World Series in game seven against the Cardassian Black-Rocks, which is to say slightly less likely than fire breathing dragons setting the Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland alight with their igneous breath."
AGI will take longer that breath holding but less than a century which is not so long in the scheme of history. Then AGI run spacecraft, maybe powered by fusion, can go visit some stars.
Charlie Stross did, in my opinion, a better analysis ( https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_hig... , discussed on HN at the time at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456 ) where his math seems to show that even lossless matter to energy conversion with lossless[1] conversion of that energy to thrust wouldn't make interstellar travel feasible.
[1] The word "lossless" alone ought to raise eyebrows since, as far as I understand it, FTL travel is far more plausible than circumventing the laws of thermodynamics.
Space Operas are mythologies disguised as a language creation process.
Just track Star Maker to Star Wars, Lucas unconsciously took the bait and visualized scale invariance using motion control, and what space film first used motion control? 2001.
Contrary to the headline, Voyagers 1 and 2 are off traveling into interstellar space, bringing Johnny B Goode and some other stuff to any aliens who go meet them.
Not with that attitude it won’t
Okay, we can sum this one up real quick: "I can't conceive of anything larger than myself or longer than my lifespan having value, therefore it is a literal impossibility on par with actual flying dragons"
Also "I have never studied a foreign culture in any level of detail"
ETA: but also everything you really need to know is right at the top: "my 'controversial' book is out now and you should buy it"
Wow, that is a really sophomoric analysis. Considering interstellar travel to be infeasible on the basis of duration or distance is a narrow perspective. If we lived much longer, or if our metabolism was much slower, it wouldn't be as much of an issue.
The amount of energy required is the only sensible perspective from which to analyze interstellar travel. If you make things really small, again, it's not much of a problem.
The author also neglects the time dilation. Go fast enough and the time dilation takes care of the duration.
Give my team the resources and I'll put a few billion base pairs of Picard's DNA into orbit around Proxima long before Daenerys is riding a dragon.
Agreed, he's confusing FTL travel, which has profound theoretical objections, with general interstellar space travel, which has no such issues, space rocks like Oumoumoua do it all the time. To a million-year-old, immortal alien ET, a journey of a hundred or a thousand years is trivial. An absolute paucity of imagination here.
there's immortality?
Not only that, but there are quite a few scientifically sound concepts that escape the tyranny of the rocket equation. Pre-seeded trajectories, particle beam propulsion, sails etc. Breaking the wall of light might not be possible but beating the current rockets by orders of magnitudes is enough for interstellar travel. And that is only an engineering problem.
My personal favorite these days is innumerable 'smart' pellets, bacteria sized, steering themselves using albedo-changing surfaces toward the ship's magnetic sail to transfer their momentum, allowing for constant acceleration.
It's not an "engineering" problem, it's almost always a physics problem. If life is involved it's also an ecological and bio problem.
Wasn't there some brouhaha about they Voyagers entering the interstellar medium a while back?
So... sure... one might argue we're not going to get star-trek-esque warp factor 9 kind of interstellar travel, but that's different than saying "we'll never have interstellar travel."
And there's an old adage in physics... if a young physicist says something is possible, they're probably wrong. If an old physicist says something is impossible, they're probably wrong. I have "wonderful" memories of an older astrophysicist in the 1970s telling me why it's impossible for humans to directly detect exoplanets.
I agree with the authors primary assertion... Star Trek, Star Wars and all the other "big" SciFi shows are probably more like "Science Fantasy." There was a decent discussion of what "Science Fiction" really was in the preface to one of the Arthur C. Clarke novels (sorry, can't remember which one.) Clarke suggested that "SciFi" should try to limit the amount of hand-wavey science-fantasy. In the stories I've written (and many of the corporate market analyses), I try to explicitly call out one or two bits of physics that change while keeping everything else in line with consensus reality.
But my disagreement w/ this article comes from what seems like an argument with no evidence. My mentors as a young physicist were still fans of Bertrand Russell (which might let you guess my age.) That era of science was sort of high on Karl Popper who was big on falsifiability. If you say something like "feature X is impossible in the future," then you have to wait until the future before you can determine whether the statement is true or false. And the problem with statements like this is a) there's an aweful lot of future out there, and b) we don't claim to understand all of physics.
If the author would have said "It looks very, very unlikely we'll have Star-Trek-ish warp drives by (what was it?) 2250," I would have heartily agreed. As of yet, I don't think we have any ideas about how to bend local space with an anti-matter reactor. (And if you're screaming at me about the Alcubierre Drive, sure, but the descriptions I've seen require "negative mass" which I don't think we have a handle on.)
And as a reminder... the second word in "science fiction" is "fiction". Though I (and I think the author of the original piece referenced in this post as well) would prefer "sciencism fiction." Much of what we call "Science Fiction" really is fantasy dressed up in futuristic looking clothes. Either to escape the mundane present or to hide political messaging. Or because the author thought it would be fun.
In summary... I guess what I'm saying is... Predicting things is hard. Especially about the future. It seems more correct to say "While we can't predict the future, the likelihood we're getting warp drive in the next 300 years is on par with Mets winning the World Series in game seven against the Cardassian Black-Rocks, which is to say slightly less likely than fire breathing dragons setting the Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland alight with their igneous breath."
This sounds like a resolution for the Fermi paradox.
Maybe after we invent AGI. But don't hold your breath waiting for either one.
AGI will take longer that breath holding but less than a century which is not so long in the scheme of history. Then AGI run spacecraft, maybe powered by fusion, can go visit some stars.
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