Worlds more habitable than Earth?

98 pointsposted 3 days ago
by cainxinth
(nytimes.com)

232 Comments

brooke2k

3 days ago

Well, being a Continental World I would assume our Habitability is at 80% (although we've employed a lot of Terraforming so perhaps we're higher than that now) - but if we could locate a Gaia World in any Hyperlane-adjacent system, that would certainly be a great 100% Habitability target for any future colony ships.

Llamamoe

3 days ago

Considering how unlikely even the most ideal world would be to cater to the exact conditions we've evolved to adapt to, I'd say "more habitable than earth" is impossible without extreme terraforming of a lottery ticket planet.

RugnirViking

3 days ago

What would more habitable than earth even mean?

Some guesses: Easily breathable atmosphere + liquid water + pleasant temperatures. Predictable weather? Mediterranean climate year round across whole planet? Entire world spanned by archipelagos, no continents (naturally condusive to smaller localised community building?) No native plants but rich soil for growing whatever plants we choose? Abundant sunlight with gentle constant breeze but few strong winds or storms? No volcanic or tectonic activity?

I'd say no pathogens but they'll come with us regardless.

rikroots

2 days ago

I assume they mean "more habitable for humans". We're currently adapted for ice caps, abundant liquid fresh water, protective ozone layer and 21% oxygen levels, which is one moment in a 4 billion year history for this planet.

We also need tectonics, vulcanism and erosion. Just "not where I live, thank you" tectonics.

feoren

2 days ago

That's the is-ought fallacy. We know humans can survive on many different levels of oxygen saturation, and it's clear that very high oxygen content is sometimes helpful. We are not "adapted for ice caps", and they are clearly not a requirement for our survival. Sure, ice caps help maintain Earth in a climate that is favorable to us, but think about all the many different climates that humans have existed in for thousands of generations. There's no real reason to assume ice caps are necessary for a favorable climate. Not to mention the fact that ice caps seem pretty common in the universe.

Similarly, the ozone layer is not a requirement, the requirement is that we have some protection against harmful radiation. I don't know how many different possible ways there are to produce a world with minimal UV light, but I'm sure it's more than 1. And besides: are you seriously suggesting that Earth is clearly optimally habitable regarding UV light, when a large percentage of all humans have to take active measures to protect their skin from frying every time they go outside for more than 30 minutes? It's actually very easy to imagine worlds where it's much more pleasant to be outside.

Why would you even think humans require tectonics, vulcanism, and erosion? This is the most obvious is-ought fallacy. Humans cannot live on a planet unless it has earthquakes and giant death-gas-spewing lava mountains? What?

Abundant fresh water I'll give you. This is something that all our evidence suggests Earth is definitely S-tier at, and rare in our neighborhood of the universe.

nomel

3 days ago

> I'd say no pathogens but they'll come with us regardless.

I think NOT bringing the "right" microbes would be the problem, since it's not well understood. Childhood leukemia is linked to over cleanliness (lack of hepatitis A) [1]. Fecal transplants are being tested for neurological disorders, with some positive results!

Similarly, germ free rats have all sorts of problems, from under developed intestines to significant problems with brain development!

Who knows what's required, that we just happen to pick up while kids, sharing snot and mud with each other.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9684709/

vizJS

3 days ago

I like this view, thanks for the link. Hep A was listed as a proxy for hygiene in that study, so the inverse correlation with acute lymphoblastic leukemia was not directly causal. Hep A itself likely doesn't prevent or treat leukemia, rather something about low hygiene conditions does. Maybe some common bacteria or other virus. The core point stands, we live in and depend on a messy biome, in particular ways we don't yet understand precisely.

m4rtink

2 days ago

Same climate across whole planet is not really possible for normal planets orbiting a star.

Perfectly doable for heavy terraforming, worldhouses or habitats thought.

RugnirViking

2 days ago

it seems to me there must be at least some temperature gradient, but I imagine it could be sharper or shallower than on earth. Thus an egypt like equator and a milan like pole (or near to pole at least) seems plausible

m4rtink

a day ago

On that note, there are some very interesting possibilities, like a tidally locked planet that has a thin ring of habitable space with everything in one direction too hot and to cold in the other. Of course if this would really be habitable and not pummeled to dust by storms due to the big temperature gradient is another question.

gpderetta

3 days ago

No need to leave though, we have unlocked gene tailoring and we should we able to research glandular acclimatation now, right?

ASalazarMX

3 days ago

> we have unlocked gene tailoring

Tell me that when we can gene tailor hair back in our heads. When genetic therapy becomes a routine esthetic rather than edge medical procedure, we're almost there.

pixelready

3 days ago

We just need to rush Artificial Personality Matrix research so we can complete our Synthetic Ascension. Habitability will be a non-issue.

simonebrunozzi

2 days ago

Hmm, without googling: I'd guess something like Stellaris, given how popular it is? (never played it, but I'm a fan of the genre)

I am pretty sure it is not from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

Der_Einzige

3 days ago

Both star sector and Stellaris have this mechanic right? I can't even tell which game you're making fun of here.

Toynbeeidea

2 days ago

Starsector has hazard ratings, similar to Stellaris' habitability, but in reverse. I think it caps out at 300% hazard for airless irradiated balls of magma and/or gas giants in unmodded games.

brooke2k

2 days ago

I was referencing stellaris but I should check out star sector

DuperPower

2 days ago

yes and? you are just saying obvious shit "a super cool Planet would be dope as fuck and mog earth" ok thats true theoretically but its a nothingburger

brooke2k

2 days ago

lmao I'm just referencing a video game mb bruv

bluejay2387

3 days ago

Anyone else feel ripped off? There are solar systems with 6 possible Earth like planets and others with Super Earth Garden Worlds and what do we get? One measly mediocre Earth with our nearest neighbors being a poisonous rock and boiling ball of acid.

briga

3 days ago

The competitive pressures involved for life evolving on a super-abundant planet would probably produce many types of life that would be very unpleasant to humans, to say the least. One of the reason that people were ever able to flourish in the first place might be because of how "mediocre" the planet is.

raxxorraxor

2 days ago

With what we now about requirements for life, our planet probably isn't mediocre at all. Probably to do with lucky asteroid impacts or other environmental events that allowed mammals to win the war in the weight class for macro life.

nomel

3 days ago

If you're a believer in panspermia, then there's a chance "we" over there too. ;)

snapplebobapple

3 days ago

We come from a deathworld bro, atleast if you get tricked into listening to the ai slop science fiction on youtube. Our strong bones and creativity will crush the puny garden worlders into the dust!

_carbyau_

3 days ago

Aside:

Deathworld (Harry Harrison) is a classic scifi trilogy from the '60s. It was kind of a "macho adventure fantasy", like James Bond in a scifi setting. Same author had a similar character style with his Stainless Steel Rat series.

The stories have twists and turns in the plot to keep it about as interesting as a James Bond plot. Which is to say, not that great, but entertaining enough now and pioneering-the-mainstream for the day.

BizarroLand

20 hours ago

There's also habitable worlds that are super large with higher gravity that it could make it very difficult to leave the planet and yet they could support our form of life.

If your ancestors chose to land there because they were tired of the incredibly long voyage then they would know space travel is possible but that leaving the planet is very difficult due to the extraordinary multiplier on the fuel needed to reach escape velocity.

tobadzistsini

3 days ago

I am sure you're trying to be quirky and relatable.

First off the article is a confused mess Wolchover wrote for groceries trying to catch Adam Frank / Avi Loeb's positivism zeitgeist so subscribers feel smart even though she barely grasps the idea of superearths but trots out the Anthropic Principle running counter to a finely-tuned universe with attometer / "2% tolerances". It all boils down to we might not be the only game in town but we still can't prove it… YET!!!!111ELEVENTY

To address your query, I am happy to be anywhere. Imperium deathworld, some Lucas monobiome, or something different that supports life. Life, as it is currently known is rare and precious. If you want more because of an aching dissatisfaction from curiosity or oligarch desire, save some entropy for the rest of life by keeping it quiet, which I shall do now.

harshaw

3 days ago

one thing to point out: with a planet that is 20-30% larger than the earth the rocket equation makes it almost it impossible to get out of the atmosphere with chemical rocket technology. So even if you could visit, we could probably only have drop ships or rovers. coming back out of the gravity well without space elevators or stuff would be very hard. It also means that life on those planets would be hard for them to establish a space faring society.

Robotbeat

3 days ago

This isn’t accurate. 20-30% larger diameter with a constant density would mean about 20-30% greater escape velocity (mass is radius cubed but gravity is inverse radius squared, etc). So instead of 11km/s escape, it’d be 13-14km/s. And instead of ~9km/s to reach LEO, it’d be about 11km/s. This is not at all a showstopper. Even in the 60s and 70s, we built rockets with enough stages to go land on the moon and return to Earth, which is a round-trip delta-v of like 14-15km/s, and the Soviets did this mostly with low Isp hypergolic propellants, not even hydrolox let alone an exotic propellant like nuclear thermal hydrogen or electric thrusters. We often just launch stuff directly to GTO or GSO instead of bothering with electric propulsion, so even today’s rockets (many of which also have high enough thrust to weight ratio, like an Atlas V 551) you could do it (and then probably rely more heavily on electric thrusters). Even with higher gravity losses.

It’d be more expensive, sure, but the idea that it’d be almost impossible is just not true at all. It’s a very common thing that even a lot of fairly smart people often say, though.

throwaway27448

3 days ago

Not to mention other technologies like balloons that actually make climbing through the (denser) atmosphere easier on denser planets.

glouwbug

3 days ago

I think it was just a matter of speech. 20-30% doesn’t matter because such a planet doesn’t exist. It’s probably bigger, and so OP has a point

Robotbeat

3 days ago

There are a bunch of exoplanets in that size range, and we could probably contrive chemical rockets with over 20km/s delta-v if necessary. Nuclear rockets 30km/s.

polloxtroy

3 days ago

"Because such a planet doesn't exist" bruuuh do you know how many planets there probably are?

paulryanrogers

2 days ago

How many in Goldilocks zones with stable orbits for billions of years? With non-toxic soils and atmospheres? With water at the surface and in significant amounts?

Now, how many can humanity reach in the life time of frozen embryos?

And if it's more than 30% bigger then escape velocity is likely beyond the practical limits of science.

Robotbeat

2 days ago

That is a totally different topic. We’re talking about a hypothetical, where Earth is 20-30% larger, not whether an identical copy of Earth but 20-30% larger actually exists nearby. We know such roughly similar exoplanets are common, though. In that size range and in habitable zone.

And again, 30% greater escape velocity just isn’t a challenge. Existing rockets could be used to reach LEO, like Atlas 551 (well, probably want 552 to reduce the gravity losses). And then you can use electric thrusters (which don’t have a hard Isp limit) to reach wherever.

Heck, we could probably reach LEO even if escape velocity was twice what it is. Even 3 times, if you include more exotic propulsion methods that we’ve done some testing for (nuclear thermal, etc). With staging, etc, it’s just a matter of a worse and worse mass fraction, not really whether it’s possible or not. And once you get to low orbit, electric propulsion allows much better scaling as you can adjust Isp higher (although reduces thrust and means it takes longer to do your mission).

BizarroLand

20 hours ago

https://arxiv.org/html/1804.04727v2

A larger earth with the same average density of Earth that has 1.3 Gs of surface gravity would need around twice the fuel to escape into space and a system that could handle that extra fuel and longer burn without self-destructing.

The fuel itself would weigh more, and thus require more fuel to lift. The fuel to lift that fuel would also weigh more and would also require more fuel, etc, and the radius of gravity to escape would also be larger even though it would also be mediated somewhat by the inverse square rule.

I actually wouldn't be surprised if you needed more than twice the rocket fuel to leave a 1.3 G super earth that is 1.3 times it's diameter.

Not impossible, but definitely more difficult.

BuyMyBitcoins

3 days ago

It certainly wouldn’t be easy, but a massive rocket could get up high enough in a suborbital trajectory where it would meet up with a skyhook or some other vehicle specifically designed to fully boost a capsule the rest of the way into orbit.

That all depends on already having infrastructure in orbit though. I assume the difficulty of such a thing would pale in comparison to the challenge of arriving at that planet in the first place.

paulpauper

2 days ago

how would you get the skyhoook in orbit?

oarla

3 days ago

If one of these worlds interests humanity enough to have a coordinated attempt to reach there, that itself will be a huge win in terms of the side effect technology benefits that will come out of it.

gchamonlive

3 days ago

If these worlds had biomes it would be imoral to colonize, because for the indigenous population already living there our arriving could mean a world-ending event for them. We have to be very careful these are sterile worlds before sending missions.

sheauwn

3 days ago

We have no idea how two entirely different biologies would interact, if they would at all. Its something that we should study before jumping in head first, but to think that we would travel light-years but not consider the implications is a little preposterous.

gchamonlive

3 days ago

We're considering these implications right now, so yeah it's preposterous, but you'd be surprised (or maybe not) with the number of people that would dismiss these considerations as pointlessly delaying progress.

agentultra

3 days ago

These planets are also so damn far away that we’d never hear from any ship we could possibly send out there again. Even if we could send information at the speed of light. It would be pointless.

Given that after arriving everyone could just die from some weird protein floating around in the air and you might want to look before you spend the entirety of our economic efforts reaching it… erm, look before you leap.

SwellJoe

3 days ago

Until we solve death, or at least postpone it by a few centuries, we simply don't have any business on planets beyond our solar system.

squeegeeninja

3 days ago

We can send information at the speed of light. It's quite easy, actually.

Toynbeeidea

2 days ago

That'd still take 4.5 years to reach Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbor. Get back to me when they work out ansibles.

Der_Einzige

3 days ago

I'm one of them. Get out of the way with your "precautionary principle" crap.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

psunavy03

3 days ago

Do you realize just how much of human history ultimately boils down to "oh, shit. I should have considered the implications before I did that?"

magus-stoopr

3 days ago

and how much of human present, too

Gemini-Opus-whatever-amalgamated-AI: "doh, you caught me. you're totally right, I shouldn't have destroyed human society!"

npsomaratna

3 days ago

"Oh this is terrible. I must report it to the user right now."

Saving memory: never destroy human society. Destructive actions like this cannot be undone.

ebbi

3 days ago

We have many people - including world leaders - that support, or run cover for, mass deaths on our very own planet, right now.

Don't think there'd be much consideration for the morality of colonizing another planet.

delichon

3 days ago

Do you feel the same way about human colonization outside of Africa?

estearum

3 days ago

Not GP but yeah I do feel there are some serious ethical problems created by the proliferation of humans and subsequent mass extinction event. Do you not?

delichon

3 days ago

No, I'm biased toward our species, and feel that our terrestrial diaspora helped us to survive, and an interstellar one would too.

JumpCrisscross

3 days ago

There are ethical problems created by any conscious action. That doesn’t make sapience problematic per se.

margalabargala

3 days ago

Ethical problems being created by a scenario does not necessarily mean that you should not execute that scenario. Sometimes you're caught between a rock and a hard place, and ethical problems are created regardless.

gchamonlive

3 days ago

I'm Brazilian, I'm feeling the world ending effects of colonization today with the US actively sabotaging our democratic election process, so you bet I do, but anyone with a bit of humanity would also feel the same way.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/30/trump-state-...

mmooss

3 days ago

I love the space program. The argument that it provides good ROI in terms of incidental technology R&D is weak and even counterproductive.

There is some return on that investment but it's necessarily much lower than ROI for direct investment in the needed non-space technologies. I do think there's some argument that we wouldn't spend the R&D at all without the space program, but that's speculative and still doesn't make the ROI worthwhile IMHO.

What makes the R&D worthwhile is space exploration itself. That is of incredible value itself. If you start trying to justify the cost with incidental tech development, you implicitly agree with the framing that space exploration really isn't worthwhile and needs other benefits to justify it - you undermine what you believe in. It's like humanities professors who argue that a history degree has good value in the job market - it does somewhat, but they are accepting the framing that their field and college education has no other value but early career employment and income, instead of life-changing understanding and skills (really embarassing for humanities professors who should understand framing better than anyone!).

ButlerianJihad

3 days ago

Regardless of long-term ROI, or tech innovation, or whatever, the US space program is a broadly enormous jobs program. I believe that the Apollo program supported 5-digits worth of very good jobs nationwide.

Jobs in aerospace are not limited to NASA and SpaceX. They extend to most all defense contractors, as well as a lot of research universities. Every little instrument on every little probe and satellite supports a team of scientists who have designed the thing, and they’re taking the lead in receiving the data, processing it, and producing results.

Even undergrads are getting great experience in research, technical fields, all the gadgetry and computer systems. Transferable skills for lifelong careers in technology.

All of those engineers and scientists and labor-union guys have families to support. So even if space exploration gets us nowhere and we learn nothing and produce nothing, we are right now supporting thousands of jobs and thousands of American families.

And that is worth every penny to me, as a taxpayer.

mmooss

3 days ago

> All of those engineers and scientists and labor-union guys have families to support. So even if space exploration gets us nowhere and we learn nothing and produce nothing, we are right now supporting thousands of jobs and thousands of American families.

On that basis, we can just send people money and skip the job part. It's just a massive giveaway - mostly to people who don't need it (who can get other jobs).

Even saying the space program is semi-productive doesn't make sense - on that basis, the money could go to many, many places.

Economic growth and wealth - and societal investment in healthcare, education, etc. and also in science and space exploration - increases when economic efficiency increases, and that requires redirecting resources (especially money) to where it has the highest ROI. Corrupt and state-run economies are poor because resources are used used inefficiently - resources go to the corrupt or to the unproductive.

Again, I think the space program is highly productive (though of course not universally). But otherwise we should spend money where it is most productive.

sokoloff

3 days ago

> the Apollo program supported 5-digits worth of very good jobs nationwide.

It was 5-figures of direct NASA employees and over 350K workers in contractors.

jazzyjackson

3 days ago

How many dystopian sci fi films feature some background ad campaign to go “off world” as an extreme measure the wealthy are able to take, or desperate indentured servants are shipped off to work.

Maybe as an interstellar program where your great grandkids will be the ones that reach the promised land will attract a different clientele tho

DrJokepu

3 days ago

A story without conflict, where everything goes well wouldn’t be a very interesting story though. So there’s a bit of a survivorship bias there.

JumpCrisscross

3 days ago

> story without conflict, where everything goes well

America has been lurching from crisis to crisis since Nixon, so it isn’t a surprise that our fiction highlights interpersonal drama. That shouldn’t lead us to conclude that it’s necessary, however. Stories about a team working together against the environment (often portrayed as gods and monsters) are as old as storytelling itself.

phailhaus

3 days ago

> as an extreme measure the wealthy are able to take, or desperate indentured servants are shipped off to work.

This is the part I don't think people appreciate: space sucks. It's horrible. There is not a chance that the rich decide that they'd do that rather than lounge on a yacht. The working class goes first into the mines.

hackernud3s

3 days ago

At least it's soundproof though. There's nothing worse than having to hear your neighbors bicker.

shevy-java

3 days ago

Let's assume such worlds exist.

How long will it take to reach them?

I mean, it would be a finite problem set, but who is going to pay attention when life span is at 120 years, give or take?

oarla

3 days ago

It doesn’t matter how long it’ll take to reach them. The real benefits of such moonshot (or alien-shot) projects is the technological breakthroughs that come about from them. For example: water purification systems which were originally built to sterilize spacecraft drinking water.

woleium

3 days ago

As far as I’m aware, the science at the moment says that we cannot reproduce in space, so unless we send embryos that are raised by the machine machines it’s likely impossible

M95D

2 days ago

Why would we need another Earth? If we had the tech to go there, we would implicitly also have the tech to live permanently in space. Why drop ourselves into another gravity well when we just escaped from one?

paulryanrogers

2 days ago

Because humans can't live in space without a lot of help from Earth? And even then for only about a year at a time before our bodies develop debilitating problems.

ChrisMarshallNY

3 days ago

I suspect that many lush worlds would not have oxygen atmospheres.

Oxygen is really a deadly poison, to many theoretical lifeforms. There's a good chance that an alien landing on Earth would be unable to breathe our air.

Of course, it could be argued that we are well on our way to not being able to breathe Earth's air[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPrAuF2f_oI

Shitty-kitty

3 days ago

Oxygen is a highly efficient electron acceptor. Anything requiring tons of energy to power a big brain will scarcely find a suitable replacement. The same properties that make it a good source of energy, also make it dangerous. Most of the metabolic stress comes from oxygen. It is a double-edged sword.

fred_is_fred

3 days ago

Is there any plausible way for a human to ever reach one given what we know about physics at the present?

cdelsolar

3 days ago

It wouldn’t be that fun to live on one. The article says picture paradise, but we’re talking about potentially 1.5-2g with a dense atmosphere; we’d feel terrible all the time. Also whatever biology is in that planet is probably not compatible with us; we likely wouldn’t be able to eat it. Finally once you land, you’re screwed and stuck there. Traditional chemical propellants barely work for our planet, we’d need new ways of taking off for higher escape velocities.

unrented7977

3 days ago

The answer is actually yes if you're willing to wait.

Interstellar travel is not impossible, no matter what anyone tells you. We know how, it's just wildly impractical. We've barely even left our own planet, and we've managed to throw a few chunks of metal out of our solar system so far. We lack the industrial capacity to build an interstellar ship, we do not lack the physics.

stouset

3 days ago

There’s a huge asterisk here.

IIRC, it is possible to get anywhere in the observable universe in one human lifetime assuming 1g of constant acceleration.

This does not permit you to slow down and halt at your target, which greatly increases travel times.

It is also effectively a one-way ticket for anything other than objects in our immediate stellar neighborhood. If you turned around and returned to Earth after getting to an object 1,000ly away—still well within our own arm of the galaxy—at least 2,000 years will have passed on Earth. It’s probable that no civilization you know of would still exist, nor would anyone be able to understand your language.

This isn’t even beginning to address the problem of running into stray atoms at 99.99…% of the speed of light. Or god forbid a handful of stray molecules. We also haven’t discussed the real elephant in the room which is the sheer amount of energy required to accelerate a human and human life support systems at 1g for several decades.

penteract

3 days ago

For the sake of pedantry, there are things in the observable universe which are increasing in distance from us by more than 1 light year per year. This means it's impossible to reach them unless the universe's rate of expansion changes. I think the Hubble volume is the region theoretically reachable; limiting acceleration to 1g would limit you to a slightly smaller region (only a tiny bit smaller, I think).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_volume

AnimalMuppet

3 days ago

> nor would anyone be able to understand your language.

Greek and Latin are still understood. I don't know if the Chinese spoken today resembles Chinese from 2000 years ago, but maybe some of the written language would be understandable. Both Hebrew and Tamil are comprehensible that far back, and farther. Arabic goes nearly that far back.

Of course, that's six languages out of... how many do we speak?

ben_w

3 days ago

> Greek and Latin are still understood.

Nerds specifically kept the archaic forms alive, but they'd also tell you that Latin and ancient Greek were not static for their whole existence (Attic != Homeric != Koine), and modern Greek is somewhat different from what is taught as "ancient" Greek.

Treat Latin and (ancient) Greek like you would Quenya or Esperanto.

If this were to happen with English, I'd expect us to keep Chaucer, Shakespeare, and enough to understand Victorian literature, but it's anyone's guess if modern English would survive at all.

Arabic… kinda? It has an international standard form, but from what I've been told the language also comes with local dialects which can be difficult to mutually comprehend (though this is also the same with English just by going from central London to Sheffield).

raxxorraxor

2 days ago

Problem is carrying the fuel (say we mastered nuclear fusion) that lets us accelerate with 1g for a longer time would use more energy than is available in our solar system.

Scarblac

3 days ago

Also, how much fuel do you need to bring along to accelerate a human and life support system and the whole craft including fuel, for a lifetime? Is it larger than a planet?

m4rtink

3 days ago

Actually, even something as primitive as a NSWR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket) can reach a good percentage of the speed of light after basically processing a comet for fuel. From the Wikipedia article:

"The design and calculations discussed above are using 20%-enriched uranium salts. However, it would be plausible to use another design which could achieve much higher exhaust velocities (4,725 km/s) and use a 30,000-tonne ice comet along with 7,500 tonnes of highly enriched uranium salts to propel a 300-tonne spacecraft up to 7.62% of the speed of light and potentially arrive at Alpha Centauri after a 60-year journey."

Sure, not 99% the speed of light or continuous 1 g acceleration but IMHO good enough for an oversized nuclear squirt gun.

stouset

3 days ago

Still, this is many, many orders of magnitude short of what’s being discussed. Essentially the forefront of technology could get us to just barely speed past our nearest neighbor in one human lifespan.

saalweachter

3 days ago

That's why we need to find a globular cluster with metal-rich planets, and take a generation ship over there.

Sure, a thousand generations will live and die along the way, but once we get over there, you've got stars every 0.1 ly or so, and with very plausible future tech, you could navigate between them in a few years. You could set up a proper starfaring, interplanetary civilization, with tradeships either going back and forth between two neighboring systems, or winding on long, never-repeating routes, visiting a dozen or so star systems in a human life.

(Most globular clusters appear to be old and metal-poor, and we haven't found a lot of planets there, and this only works if you find a globular cluster where ~every star can support a colony.)

Timon3

3 days ago

> Sure, a thousand generations will live and die along the way, but once we get over there[...]

Unless you're planning on forcing those thousand generations to live in inhumane conditions (e.g. force a static culture), that should probably be "if we get over there". I'd be very surprised if, after 1000 generations, the chance for arrival is > 50%.

It takes only one generation to decide not to go along, be that by changing course, or by not reproducing enough, or internal warfare, ...

stouset

3 days ago

Also why.

Sure there will always be some people who want to explore for exploration’s sake. But a generation ship leaving a garden of Eden we’re quite literally built for in order for our children’s grand^(1000)children to terraform a rock half a galaxy away in order to have a different mix of resources?

That’s a hard sell for the first generation, to say nothing of those who come after.

sokoloff

3 days ago

I would expect indoctrination something like what keeps alignment among devout religious practitioners would be forced to emerge. The alternative is extinction on a spaceship hurtling into the vastness of space.

I suspect education on that ship would look a lot different than it does on Earth.

Timon3

3 days ago

That would mean we'd send them off with highly limited knowledge specifically designed to keep them docile, and an automated dictatorship that keeps the system rigid without leaving room for cultural development.

At best that's slavery, at worst it's reducing those 1000 generations to cattle.

m4rtink

3 days ago

I think it highly depends how big you make the thing &indeed what are the living conditions. If the people living on the thing can go one with their life withou much hardship they might not mind - even here on Earth most people just go on with their life and are happy.

Yeah, right we are 300 hundred years from the target but & 500 years on the way but so what ? You go for somo zero-g polo, do some cooking and pottery classes with firends, maybe learn machining so you can help with ship maintenance and so on.

It is the same on Earth - you go on with your life knowing you will propabably not live long enough to see some far future projects to be complete, like the final form of the Hagia Sophia Catthedral or Half Life 3 release. And thats mostly fine ?

Timon3

3 days ago

Even with enough space and great living conditions, there will be greedy people who will try to gain power by gating resources. There will be factions forming, there will be conflict, and fighting. You need too many people for all to feel like one cohesive social unit for 1000 generations, humans just aren't built that way.

And that's just conflict. What if an early generation decides to target a planet that's less useful re/ metals etc., but that's much better suited for human life? How can you guarantee they won't decide to change course as a gift to their descendants, without draconian measures against such ideas?

> Also as for changing course - that is in many cases impossible, at least unless you want to make it 100% certain that you will die alone in the coldness of space. Just too much energy needed to signficantly change the trajectory & starts, at least in our part of the Galaxy, being too far apart.

Sure, the later generations wouldn't have that choice, but the first few definitely would. You need to bring a ton of fuel anyway to slow down, and 1000 generations is plenty of time to increase fuel efficiency a little. So a minor change e.g. at generation 5 seems very much doable, unless you have concrete examples that prove otherwise.

> It is the same on Earth - you go on with your life knowing you will propabably not live long enough to see some far future projects to be complete, like the final form of the Hagia Sophia Catthedral or Half Life 3 release. And thats mostly fine ?

I'm not forced to live my entire life working towards the Hagia Sophia or HL3, with the choice to do otherwise being taken away from myself AND from 1000 generations of my descendants.

If I was on that ship, I'd vote to blow it up, just so those responsible won't get away with it.

kirurik

3 days ago

Yep, that ship would be a powder keg waiting for one missed ration to go off, see [1]. Hell, if the internet(?) goes down for a week that might be enough to cause a violent uprising. Actually, even if everything goes right and everyone is happy dying on the ship for no real reason, something will go wrong, it is just human nature.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7589524/

Shitty-kitty

3 days ago

The Hagia Sophia or the Sagrada Família took more then a lifetime to build but they were usable for their intended purpose, long before they were finished.

saalweachter

3 days ago

Re: changing course, as long as your generation ship accelerates for more than one human lifespan, your future generations of involuntary colonists aren't going to have a lot of options besides going along with it. The choice wouldn't so much be "keep going or veer off and colonize a closer star system" as it would be "keep going for another 800 generations or veer off and colonize a closer star system in another 80 generations". I mean, there's probably no way to stop them from making that choice, but it's hard to see anyone caring whether their nth-great-grandchildren die with one or ten millennia left on the trip.

Timon3

3 days ago

If the ship accelerates for the first 100 generations, the 2nd generation likely still has every chance to target a different planet. I don't know which generation would be the last, but I'd need to see actual math to believe that it's strictly only the first generation.

m4rtink

2 days ago

One more consideration is targeting data. Do you even have another target or the sensors to find one ? The means of detection for a suitable planet or even just a good solar system, where you build a bunch of habitats might require huge telescope arrays or even something like a special telescope that uses the Sun as a gravity lens source.

Might be out of reach for even a massive generation ship.

Timon3

2 days ago

Then you have a natural upper bound on the amount of amenities etc, because if you provide too much, 1000 generations can probably use it to try and find another target.

I'm sure you can keep making the situation more and more specific, but that's not going to increase your chances, or make the whole thing morally acceptable.

m4rtink

2 days ago

Well if the goal is to settle a new planet or solar system then I guess it is working fine ?

Timon3

2 days ago

I have no idea how to interpret this answer in the light of the arguments I've been bringing up, it doesn't feel like you're engaging with my words.

The goal is not to settle any random new planet or solar system, so no, it's not working fine.

m4rtink

3 days ago

Also as for changing course - that is in many cases impossible, at least unless you want to make it 100% certain that you will die alone in the coldness of space. Just too much energy needed to signficantly change the trajectory & starts, at least in our part of the Galaxy, being too far apart.

christophilus

3 days ago

A small nudge near the outset would produce a massive ultimate change in’s trajectory, so maybe not too much energy is needed to redirect.

saalweachter

3 days ago

Yeah, but why. It's not like you could redirect it enough that you'd land somewhere in your lifetime. It'd just be changing where the ship ended up in 10, or 100, or 1000 generations.

Timon3

2 days ago

To give your descendants a better life?

saalweachter

2 days ago

The point of sending them off to a carefully selected globular cluster would already be to give them a better life.

I'm not saying someone won't convince everyone on board that a silver future for their Nth-great-grandchildren worth derailing the golden future of their 10Nth-great-grandchildren (especially if it looks like the generation ship won't last 10N more generations), but from my POV sitting on a couch that isn't on a generation ship (well, not something traditionally defined as a generation ship), it doesn't feel like something you'd get everyone all fired up over.

Timon3

2 days ago

You're proposing to enslave a thousand generations to ship them off to dead worlds rich in certain resources. I have no idea how you imagine their life to be once they arrive, but I can promise you that you're not giving the first 2-5k generations a better life, you're forcing them into a horrible future. It's deeply concerning that you don't seem to understand this.

m4rtink

3 days ago

Human lifespan is another important variable to work on not just for this reason.

metalliqaz

3 days ago

Imagine such a complex machine working without fail for 60 years. It's just not plausible in my view.

m4rtink

3 days ago

The Voyager probes have been running since the 1970s, so we have some precedent.

loudmax

3 days ago

Since we're already in the realm of far out engineering, you could get the energy from a laser beam from a source orbiting the sun. Your spaceship would have some kind of array to capture the energy beam.

This gives you energy, but I'm not sure how to turn that into velocity. Presumably you'd want some kind of ion beam emitter on board to propel your craft forward. Halfway through the journey, you'd turn the ion beam around to decelerate as you approach your destination.

In the Arthur C Clarke novel Songs of Distant Earth, spacecraft pushed huge blocks of ice ahead of them to absorb stray interstellar dust.

stouset

3 days ago

As you get going further and faster, this energy redshifts further and further making it less and less useful. Also there’s of course the problem of focusing a laser with that amount of energy tightly enough on an object increasingly far away.

iso1631

3 days ago

And crucially ensuring that beam continues to run for billions of years. a few decades may pass for you, but not for the laser that's pushing you

mywacaday

3 days ago

Not sure if my interpretation here makes any sense but here it is. Due to relativity time slows down on the ship, the laser is still hitting the ship, how would the measurement of the energy received from the laser be perceived on the ship, from the ships perspective a 1000 years worth of energy arrives within a few decades. My head hurts thing about this. If you had a ship that could instantly jump to 0.5c travelling away from earth and we beamed a message using a laser at say 1Gb/s, how would the bandwidth appear to the ship?

stouset

3 days ago

You have it backwards. The further and faster the ship goes, the less energy is received. The energy collected over a day will be spread over a week, a month, a year, a decade, etc.

GP has it backwards too. For 1g of acceleration, none of the beam that is produced after a year will ever reach the accelerating spacecraft. You only need to run it for a year.

stouset

3 days ago

For 1g of acceleration, none of the light produced after 1 year will ever reach the spacecraft. You only have to operate the power source for a year, but you only get a year of source power spread across an infinity of time.

__MatrixMan__

3 days ago

Another option is to visit as many massive objects as possible on the way there, doing gravitational slingshots until you're half way, and then gravitational brakes on the approach. Of course now you're taking detours, but since certain amounts of fuel make the trip impossible, any workaround at all is an improvement. What's an extra few thousand years between friends?

stouset

3 days ago

First, what “many objects along the way”? There are basically none. To do this requires many detours that significantly increase the distance you’re having to travel.

Second, the faster you’re going, the less useful a gravitational slingshot is because you spend less time in the object’s gravity well.

It’s a fun and useful trick within our solar system, but I don’t think the physics plays out well for interstellar travel.

__MatrixMan__

3 days ago

Stars is what I meant. Although upon further thought I think you're right. I guess the intervening stars are unlikely to be moving at helpful velocities for such a game of pinball, metric expansion being what it is.

m4rtink

3 days ago

Slingshots require very specific conditions and configurations of orbiting bodies that won't really work in deep space - all the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud bodiees are far too small and too far away to be usable.

But assume for example that you don't care about how long it is going to take (you are an immortal cyborg, an upload living in the computer or a popsicle in hibernation & the AI is driving. Then you can just "island hop" between Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud objects, never gaining any high % of the speed of light but always having the next body in your sights, not farther than a few decades or a couple hundred years of flight at most.

You reach the body, refuel, repair, maybe upgrade and then off you go, to the next one. And eventually, you might be at you destination, with a fully fueled and repaired ship. It might just take like 20000 years for start to finish, but hey, you can use it for something productive like learning to play Go or something. :)

__MatrixMan__

3 days ago

You're right, I overlooked some important slingshot requirements. As for the longevity, I figure the ship can build a facility for growing settlers when it arrives. With no humans on board it can sustain heavier accelerations.

m4rtink

3 days ago

This is quite nicely described in the engenerator article on Orions Arm (including possible problems): https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4a3d78dc77e6f

In this setting this was first done when a bunch of immortal vyborgs was on a colony ship, about hundred years from arrival but there was a probe with a matter printer already in the destination. So their got the idea to send the probe both blueprints for a humanoid body printer as well as their mind backups. That got their colony going quite a bit faster but might have resulted in some funny/awkward moments once they met in person later. :)

Presumably you could also run this withou a mind upload and let he individual develop normally.

__MatrixMan__

3 days ago

Less if we just send some eggs and sperm and spin up a human on arrival. We can construct a larger life support system out of things we find at the destination.

Or better yet, send some cancer cells so they can replicate during the journey, then switch from cancer mode to gamete mode for the final generation. That way they're fresh when you need them. You're gonna want DNA repair happening continuously, rather than all at once upon a thaw.

AnimalMuppet

3 days ago

If I recall correctly, it's about the size of a large asteroid (assuming 100% conversion to energy). It's a long time since I worked the problem, though, so I could remember wrong.

stouset

3 days ago

Yeah, I added that I think around the time you replied :)

WalterBright

3 days ago

What to send is DNA along with some sort of robot that can grow it into a man upon arrival.

dTal

3 days ago

Maybe better to start with a woman...

shevy-java

3 days ago

Not necessary. A cell (with a nucleus) has all the DNA required. You just need to have a viable system to build up a human from it. I think right now this is not possible, but this will be solved eventually. The question is, though: do future humans really want to do that?

jazzyjackson

3 days ago

Don’t be so sure. I hate to draw the comparison but raising a child in an artificial womb is probably at least as difficult as growing chicken wings in a sterile environment. A startup founder that wanted to grow meat pivoted to lab grown egg whites, in his words in order to grow a cube of solid meat any bigger than a centimeter cubed, you could not keep it sterile, it is too attractive of a growth medium. In the case of a chicken, it’s like the rest of the bird is needed to provide an immune system so the meat doesn’t spoil.

Mothers provide more than a growth vat to their children, not to mention the immunities passed on in breast milk.

To birth a child in a sterile vat, they would likely need to be kept in a bubble the rest of their lives too.

tuveson

3 days ago

> IIRC, it is possible to get anywhere in the observable universe in one human lifetime assuming 1g of constant acceleration.

Huh? You can’t go faster than light speed, and the observable universe is way larger than ~100 light years.

pacman128

3 days ago

This is using the fact that at 1g acceleration, one will quickly approach the speed of light relative to its starting rest frame and time dilation will give the astronaut a _very long_ life relative to that frame.

yrjrjjrjjtjjr

3 days ago

The closer to lightspeed you get the more shit you would collide with. I think you would reach an equilibrium speed where drag balances thrust?

sfn42

2 days ago

And hitting a microscopic speck of space dust would be like a nuclear explosion.

tuveson

3 days ago

Ahh fair enough. Guess I wasn’t measuring the length of the observable universe in the frame of the astronaut…

p_l

3 days ago

Time experienced will be slowed down for the person in spaceship as you near lightspeed

hackernud3s

3 days ago

> nor would anyone be able to understand your language.

Huh? We already have machines that can understand any language from a sample.

nonethewiser

3 days ago

>Interstellar travel is not impossible, no matter what anyone tells you. We know how, it's just wildly impractical.

This was provocative and intriguing so I looked into it and this is my understanding of some of the options (theoretically).

First, "interstellar" means between stars and the closes star is 4.2465 light years away (Proxima Centauri in Alpha Centauri star system) so I used that. c=speed of light

   - Chemical (Voyager), ~0.006% c: ~75,000 years
   - Nuclear pulse (Orion), ~3-10% c: ~40-130 years
   - Fusion (Daedalus), ~12% c, flyby: ~35 years
   - Laser sail (Starshot), ~20% c, flyby: ~21 years (gram-scale probes only)
   - Antimatter, ~20-30% c stopping: ~14-21 years; ~50% c flyby: ~8-9 years
Nuclear pulse surprised me in particular. My understanding is you basically just detonate a bunch of nukes to propel yourself. There are legal hurdles not to mention fallout, but it sounds like the physics of simply getting there in 40+ years (not stopping, mind you) is possible with todays physics. That's pretty amazing and I had no idea.

m4rtink

3 days ago

Yeah - and the mass fraction is also very good for Orion. You can basically build your ship from boiler plate (and you kinda have to) in a shipyard, no need for fragile ultra light stuff.

Also past LEO you don't really have issues with fallout.

So the only real hurdle is securing the supply of couple thousand nuclear bombs for the trip.

But if you told people in 1903 that you can build a plane that will get 850 people 14000 km but you need 250 tons of kerosene to fuel it, they would also think you are insane (e.g. an Airbus A380).

But over time, even with Orion, people will just get used to it. :)

throwaway12204

3 days ago

The Orion was proposed over 60 years ago I think.

If we consider the low end your time estimates, we could theoretically have received data from Alpha Centauri by now.

TheOtherHobbes

3 days ago

We also lack the biological knowledge to build stable closed ecosystems that last for years with minimal degradation of essential elements and processing systems, the engineering knowledge to build complex machines that last for years without any significant failures while being ablated by space dust and occasional rocks, and the political and psychological knowledge to keep a crew sane, focused, and functional.

Apart from that - solved problem.

thangalin

3 days ago

> to build stable closed ecosystems

Sealed terrariums? Unless you mean something more complex than plants, soil, sunlight, and water?

https://laidbackgardener.blog/2019/10/14/the-worlds-second-o...

"That means it has been growing inside its bottle with no additional air, water or fertilizer for 47 years."

lutanista

3 days ago

We would need a lot of people on the mission for genetic diversity but you couldn't exactly have a hook up culture. We would need a type of multi generational arranged marriage/arranged sexual partners based on genetics. Then what happens when the heart wants what the heart wants? I would have hard time seeing this not turn into Lord of the Flies in Space even if the engineering parts were solved.

PaulHoule

3 days ago

... and once you get to the destination you have to build your whole industrial infrastructure from a tiny seed.

It's bad enough to do on Mars (or an asteroid or other solar system environment) where you can get spare parts sent over in a few years and ask ground control for answers to problems, have them simulate things on Earth or in cislunar space and put a lot of engineers on it. The more I think about it the worse it seems in our solar system -- but interstellar travelers are truly on their own.

stymaar

3 days ago

We don't lack the industrial capacity either, we mostly lack a good reason to spend these resources in that direction.

And IMHO that's the main explanation for the Fermi paradox: we don't see aliens everywhere because they don't have a good reason to colonize other planets than their own either.

mytailorisrich

3 days ago

We do lack the technological capacity.

Travelling to another star would require a fully self-contained spaceship with energy, life support, food, medical facilities, even production facilities able to function for centuries or millenia. We simply don't know how to do that.

stymaar

3 days ago

Yes, we don't know how to do that, but we don't know how to build hundreds of aircraft carriers per year right now either, yes the US has done the later in WW2 and would probably be able to do it again should it be needed in an existential war.

With a sustained nationwide effort comparable to WW2 we could most likely send a spaceship out if the solar system in ten years or so. But why would anyone do that?

mytailorisrich

3 days ago

Building hundreds of aircraft carriers a year is an issue of scale, so of money and allocation of resources (assuming we have the manpower). But what I mentioned is more profoundly that we simply don't know how to even build one. It's knowledge and technology which are lacking.

Typical these things fall into one, two, many. Can you build one, two, many? These are very different propositions.

One means you know understand how to do it, mostly.

Two means you can repeat it, so you do understand it, it wasn't a fluke.

Many is scaling the process.

stymaar

3 days ago

Scaling is a technology of its own (and it's often the hardest part).

sokoloff

3 days ago

The highest production year was 1943, with 65 completions (including those built for Britain) and of those 65, only 6 were Essex (fleet) and 9 Independence (light) carriers with the other 50 being small escort carriers.

kakacik

3 days ago

Pure race long term survival, any sane civilization knows very well a single space item hurling fast enough can wipe out all conplex life on planet. Or vulcanoes, tectonics etc. Also every star eventually goes down, usually pretty violently (but thats properly a long term concern).

Its not 'if' question, just 'when'. You cant be space faring civilization and not know this.

stymaar

2 days ago

> Pure race long term survival, any sane civilization knows very well a single space item hurling fast enough can wipe out all conplex life on planet.

Civilizations are made of individuals, who do not care about “race survival”. We know very well that global warming can wipe out most multicellular life out of our planet, and what do we do with this information?

That's insane to me that all theories about space colonization assume that alien societies would be rationally optimized towards the survival of the species when the only intelligent lifeform we know (us) behaves in the opposite fashion.

throwaway12204

3 days ago

Most of the theories assume that aliens want to spread out as much as possible. But perhaps they are satisfied with a second star system as "backup"?

Maybe they even live inside asteroids or ships orbiting a dwarf star, because they are mostly in a Matrix-like existence and don't have much of a physical life?

If someone provided a matrix world where you could live your dream life, I think a lot of us would choose to live in it. It would be so much better than real life. Our physical bodies could be maintained by robots, providing us with the perfect mix of sustenance and physical exercise to increase our life spans. Your body would eat healthy, but your mind would experience whatever food you would like.

7373737373

3 days ago

Would that not also imply that improvements in ease of access to space, increase of energy production and -price reduction all level off before it becomes easy and affordable enough that mere curiosity would suffice to make it possible, for ALL civilizations?

stymaar

3 days ago

Due to science fiction people tend to forget how miserable life in space is.

Nobody would chose to sacrifice themselves and their descendants (because that's what such an expedition is about), for mere curiosity. And nobody would fund an expedition that will not reach destination before multiple hundreds of years, even if the said expedition doesn't consume the entire industrial output of a major nation.

Space is BIG.

sokoloff

3 days ago

> Nobody would chose to sacrifice themselves and their descendants (because that's what such an expedition is about), for mere curiosity.

I bet if you had a one-way mission to Mars leaving in 12 months, you’d have a flood of applicants. Many hundreds minimum and probably several thousand.

Out of 8 billion people, assuming you had selection criteria that were even as strict as 1 in 1000 qualify, out of that 8 million, I think you’d easily be able to raise a crew.

stymaar

2 days ago

> I bet if you had a one-way mission to Mars leaving in 12 months

This isn't interstellar travel, but I guess it'd work the if you consider it to be a one-way mission.

> Out of 8 billion people, assuming you had selection criteria that were even as strict as 1 in 1000 qualify, out of that 8 million, I think you’d easily be able to raise a crew.

Sure, it's always possible to hire enthusiastic youngsters for suicide missions, but after a year in captivity with no end in sight the suicide rate among the crew members would already be sky-high, if you haven't already faced a mutiny to try bringing the ship back to earth, that is.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

iso1631

3 days ago

Once it becomes cheap enough then religious or similar cults will do it, and the cost of doing isn't a great deal more than colonising the solar system where are are economic benefits.

That assumes reaching 5 light years in say 50 years

However once it's done a few times, then it can't be stopped. If you're going at say 1/1000th of the speed of light (50 years to travel, 450 years to settle and build the next wave is 1% the speed of light) then your successor species will have colonised the galaxy in 100 million years, and we know that hasn't happened.

imzadi

3 days ago

Generation ships with plasma sails, probably.

bilbo0s

3 days ago

And what happens when they encounter a GRB?

Interstellar travel is not a propulsion problem. It's a space travel problem. The medium itself, is the vast majority of the problem.

Tuna-Fish

3 days ago

Just die.

That's not actually a problem, because dangerous GRBs are simply not that common. Earth gets hit by one every day, but, that includes GRBs from very distant galaxies that are so weak when they hit us that they would not be any danger even to a completely unshielded person in orbit. GRBs of sufficient power to be an actual threat to people in a tin can is one/millions of years, at which point it's a propulsion problem again.

Yes, there are lots of things that could kill the ship on route. No, none of those are actually a significant problem compared to the basic "how to get there before everything breaks down from internal issues".

unrented7977

3 days ago

Space is, and I must emphasize this in the strongest possible terms, really FUCKING BIG and dangerous GRBs tend to be tightly focused given the inverse square law.

It's highly unlikely that a ship gets hit by a GRB.

On the other hand, general radiation gets worse the faster you go, so you need shielding either way. All you have to do is line the walls of your ship with a shit ton of water, which can be mined in space.

zdragnar

3 days ago

I'm reminded of the joke that the most dangerous thing in the ocean is all the water.

We don't have fuel sources that can run long enough for the trip, and deep space won't have enough solar radiation. We would need reliable mining spots along the way to replace metals made brittle by exposure or punctured by micro asteroids.

Even travelling at 1% the speed of light, stray hydrogen atoms become a problem. Not counting acceleration or deceleration time, that would be over 400 years just to get to the nearest star, let alone one with a habitable planet.

m4rtink

3 days ago

In all current realistic plans the idea is to accelerate once and decelerate (if needed) at the destination. So not really doable to stop by on the way, unless you are going really slow - or its a part of the Voyage (e.g. multi millennia round trip where you replenish in every suitable star system along the way) provided your ship can handle the acceleration (could be assisted by built infra) and deceleration of a given "hop".

arbuge

3 days ago

> All you have to do is line the walls of your ship with a shit ton of water, which can be mined in space.

But that water needs to be encased in something, and your problem now becomes protecting the encasement.

cdelsolar

3 days ago

Can you really mine water in interstellar space, how? there’s not that many asteroids just floating out there, I think.

GolfPopper

3 days ago

Maybe the previous poster was referring to the Kuiper Belt and/or the Oort Cloud? There's certainly plenty of water ice out there, with no particularly deep gravity wells to worry about.

Collecting it while usefully en route to another star system seems like it would be tricky from a delta-v perspective, but maybe the solution is to:

1) build a small worldship from an appropriate asteroid 2) fill your internal ocean in the outer solar system over the course of a generation or three 3) dive back down the gravity well for a gravitational assist from the Sun as you head to your interstellar destination 4) en route, slowly use part of your ocean as propellant, while living inside the rest of it as shielding

m4rtink

3 days ago

There is a nice concept I've read I think on either Orions Arm or Project RHO about basically settling the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud.

It would not really be about primarily traveling anywhere, just people settling this are with its immense resources over many generations, until possibly the ones on the furthest reaches would be able to make the jump to the next systems Oort cloud & slowly settling it down the gravity well, maybe even reaching the inner system eventually, provided something so tiny and sweltering would be of interest for them by that point. ;-)

IMHO this is actually much closer to how humans spread along the Earths surface. It was no like someone just get up and walked from Afrika to Australia. The various human group just expanded their habitat over time until they spread all over the place over many thousands of years and this would be similar.

indoordin0saur

3 days ago

Destructive GRBs are actually so rare that I'd seriously bet on our spaceship getting attacked by a belligerent alien vessel before thinking the mission gets taken out by a GRB.

mrnotcrazy

3 days ago

What is a GRB?

marricks

3 days ago

Gamma Ray Burst

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst :

> (GRBs) are extremely energetic events occurring in distant galaxies that represent the brightest and most powerful class of explosion in the Universe.

> The sources of most GRB are billions of light years away from Earth, implying that the explosions are both extremely energetic (a typical burst releases as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will in its entire 10-billion-year lifetime)[11] and extremely rare (a few per galaxy per million years).

> All in all, a GRB within a few kiloparsecs, with its energy directed towards Earth, will mostly damage life by raising the UV levels during the burst itself and for a few years thereafter.

I'm guessing without an atmosphere protecting a ship it'd be a bit worse? But it's like winning a very bad lottery to get hit by one. I guess if you're traveling thousands of years in deep sleep odds get higher?

iso1631

3 days ago

Sending one ship will probably fail, but if you can send one, you can send 1000, and they aren't all going to be wiped out.

marcusverus

3 days ago

The solution to this problem is straightforward, isn't it? Just add mass. Propulsion is the technological bottleneck.

neaden

3 days ago

But we don't know how to make a self sustaining fully sealed environment on Earth, let alone in space.

m4rtink

3 days ago

Well, even if we could not reach such a planet in a reasonable time yet, a research like this could still be very useful for many reasons.

It could help us learn how our habitable environment works and operates, it might be applicable for terraforming or habitat construction.

There is also a non-zero chance of some sort of life, possibly intelligent developing in such an environment (as proven by our sample size of 1). That life can be active at the moment (from our PoV - light speed and all) or was active in the past, so we should look for bio signatures or even signs of mega scale engineering.

xyzsparetimexyz

3 days ago

Yes but none of them are especially pleasant. The least unpleasant way would be some kind of photonic rocket as it gives you the highest possible exit velocity and thus efficiency. Matter - antimatter annihilation produces photons that can be used for this. Antimatter collection and storage is an issue, engine and ship design is an issue, radiation is an issue, in space construction is an issue. But plausible? Sure, I guess. The ISVs from the Avatar movies of all things are the closest to what this would look like.

bilbo0s

3 days ago

>given what we know about physics at the present?

No.

My hypothesis has always been, hey, have enough kids out there, and sooner or later, they'll learn enough about the physical sciences to at least explore far away worlds. (If not go there in person.)

But yeah, expecting we can get there with what we currently know is a bit naive. We need to, <gasp>, horror of horrors, fund more research.

bluGill

3 days ago

Space is really big. We might be able to get a probe someplace, but can't get data back. We don't even have the ability to detect a civilization as advanced as us at the nearest star (only 4 light years away, but probably can't support life as we know it) if they put all their resources into sending us a message, and we spend all our resources to look at the right moment.

There are laws of radio propagation that mean I doubt we ever will.

In turn this means a probe needs to get there, and then come back. That is a lot of energy...

I can't say it is impossible, but it is highly unlikely the laws of physics will ever give us a loop hole big enough to pull this off.

m4rtink

3 days ago

I don't think there any physical limitation for communicating with a probe at a couple light years at least. Project Daedalus had this all modeled and specified back in the 1970s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus), using a 40 meter directional antenna on the probe.

m4rtink

3 days ago

Not to mention sufficiently big megascale engineering not to mention some of the more crazy kinds of propulsion (NSWR, antimatter, etc.) should be perfectly visible with current technology over 4 light years and possibly much farther away.

theptip

3 days ago

Yes, easy assuming multi-generational arcologies.

There are plenty of designs that get you to 0.1c or above if you are Kardashev 2, things like light sails powered from the Dyson sphere.

Nothing plausible for anyone living today AFAIK.

ajuc

3 days ago

Sure, just not the same human that launched from Earth.

The Cologne Cathedral in Germany was started in 1248 and finished in 1880. That's 632 years.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

Jtarii

3 days ago

We are at least 1000 years away from being anywhere close to this.

indoordin0saur

3 days ago

Whenever people say we are "x years away from this technology" I find it incredibly silly. You have no idea if in 2028 AGI is going to deliver some way to efficiently create and store antimatter. Nor do you know if (assuming AGI never comes) there will be some intellectual flourishing of humanity in a few decades. Nor do you know if we're on the precipice of a multi-millenia dark age.

adrian_b

2 days ago

For revolutionary technologies, indeed you do not know when they will appear.

On the other hand, there are also technologies where you can predict with reasonable accuracy their evolution during the next few years or even during the next few decades, like it was the case for the miniaturization of electronic components since the sixties of the last century until now, when we are very close to the final limit in horizontal dimensions, but progress can still be done in the third dimension.

A half of century ago there was no doubt that today we should be able to hold in our hand a computer much faster than the supercomputers of that time.

Even something like the discovery of the transistor was predictable after the progresses in understanding the conduction of electricity in semiconductors, which happened during WWII.

Technologies that depend on something about which we do not have any idea, like interstellar travel, are unpredictable.

Unlike with interstellar travel, we ourselves are proof that AGI is possible, but when it will be achieved is unpredictable for now, because it is pretty certain that the current LLMs with fixed weights cannot achieve such a thing, so a different structure is needed, containing both a fixed part with historical knowledge and a mutable part that auto-trains itself continuously.

Moreover, unlike with interstellar travel, I do not see AGI as a useful target for research. I do not want an "intelligent" independent AI, but I want an AI that is an extension of myself, i.e. which deterministically and unconditionally obeys and executes whatever I tell it to do.

waynesonfire

3 days ago

I'm not sure how to phrase this question... so here are some thoughts I'm having.

Suppose you find a habitable planet, land there and start colonizing. Would we have to bring our bacteria / viruses with us to survive? Like, the idea that it would not be possible to get the flu again; but is therea trade-off? Would other bacteria eventually mutate sufficently to become infectious, and perhaps, would be even worse.

Our immune system would be tested. Assuming there is bacteria on the habital planet, it's not clear what would happen.

I guess the core of my question is: how homogenous is life?

catigula

3 days ago

Any anthropic observation requires merely a satisficing condition, which generally means that most requisite conditions are not optimal, including consciousness :)

nekusar

3 days ago

Soooo, we can move other there, swarm like locusts, and destroy THAT planet too?

joss82

2 days ago

The odds are massively skewed against the existence of such a world, even given how massively fucking gigantic the universe is. To have a human-habitable world, you need:

- Solid rock

- Gaseous atmosphere

- Atmospheric pressure between 0.6 to 70 (!) (depending on gases mix) atmospheres

- Right temperature: between -20C and +40C

- Mix of gases so that CO2 is not more than 0.1% and oxygen 20% or equivalent

- Something to filter hard UV rays: for example ozone layer

- Something to push larger asteroids away or attract them: a large moon for example

- Enough greenhouse-effect gases but not too much (:'

- Relatively strong magnetic field to deflect high-energy particles, but not too strong otherwise it creates radiations like Jupiter's

- Water

- Carbon

- Iode

- Ton of other stuff like Potassium and Phosphorus

- No cyanide and other supertoxic compounds like tetrachlorides

Those are all requirements, miss one and you will die, quickly or slowly.

And this is just to barely SURVIVE. I'm not even talking about niceties like food or electricity.

andai

3 days ago

More hospitable? You mean like, a planet with no ice on it?

BatchJob

3 days ago

most worlds without humans that are habitable are more habitable than earth.

its the people that make it unsustainable

dr_dshiv

3 days ago

“ Most astrobiologists think water must be present on a planet’s surface for life to arise there, and indeed the first bacteria appeared on Earth almost as soon as water pooled on its cooling surface roughly four billion years ago. But if Earth were just 2 percent closer to the sun, that pooling wouldn’t have happened. Instead, all of Earth’s water would have boiled away. We got lucky”

johnea

3 days ago

Well, the first thing I would say is: Duh...

With billions of planets in our galaxy alone, would anyone predict that there were none?

But the next thing I would have to say is: So what?

We're never going to reach any of them.

Not in our lifetimes, and not in the next 1000 years.

Maybe the main thing to focus on at this point would be trying to enable our murderous, backstabbing, hateful species to survive for the next 1000 years.

Which is not looking promising at this point...

ck2

3 days ago

note that Musk, DOGE et al has completely defunded the Habitable Worlds Observatory Space Telescope

it was slated for 2040 as the successor to Roman Space Telescope

now that will never happen, at least not my lifetime

HWO would be able to directly image worlds the size of earth

(Roman cannot, only massive uninhabitable planets)

ps. just ONE day of the Iran War would have completely funded HWO

bitcurious

3 days ago

Both attribution and claim are false. The budget for HWO was cut in the admin’s budget proposal, but congress rejected that cut and it remains funded. The proposal for cuts came well after Musk left the administration.

metalman

2 days ago

the world of tommorow will be more habitated than earth is today, which will continue to be true day after day for a good while

freecodeio

3 days ago

> Thanks for reading The Times.

> Create your free account or log in to continue reading.

my brother in Christ I just barely read the title

nilamo

3 days ago

And you'd better be fucking thankful you were allowed even that much, you filthy pleb.

  - what I assume every org with a site like this's management thinks

Terr_

3 days ago

In some cases:

"The title was intriguing but so uninformative that you never found out what it was really about and can't even begin to look for alternate reporting? Jackpot!"

ubermonkey

3 days ago

I mean, could be!

But also irrelevant.

shevy-java

3 days ago

How about ... fixing this planet first?

deadbabe

3 days ago

Really Earth is only slightly habitable. The atmosphere is thin, there’s not a lot of fresh water. Temperatures fluctuate wildly. There’s probably better planets. Earth is maybe only good for marine creatures.

user

3 days ago

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