Comment by triceratops
6 hours ago
Between the realism about terraforming Mars and the strong likelihood that faster-than-light travel may never happen, is anyone else feeling a bit melancholic? It feels like a possible future has been taken away from us.
If we solve fusion to the point where it is easy in a relatively light reactor or manage to "safely" contain significant amounts of antimatter, it is possible to travel the stars by maintaining 1g acceleration for years or decades. But of course maintaining 1g acceleration for even just an hour, not to mention years, while theoretically possible, is still so far outside of practicality that I don't expect to see any practical plans for it in my life time.
The only currently feasible solution currently is to ride a wave of sequential nuclear bomb explosions, but that is far from ideal.
So the possibility still exists, current physics is a big obstacle to challenge, but is not a solid barrier preventing our expansion in the far future.
Accelerating at 1g and attaining relativistic speeds is not quite the same. Because of time dilation any interstellar travel is effectively one-way. If you try to return, centuries will have passed.
I also feel that a good solution of the Fermi Paradox is that interstellar travel is either impossible or too unpractical at scale and that humanity may be trapped in this system forever.
I believe that that Fermi Paradox is not a paradox at all. It's just a poor set of assumptions. Life is likely extremely rare, and intelligent life is likely astronomically rare.
Technological interstellar traveling life does not appear to exist anywhere in our Local Group.
The Local Group is only 10M light-years across. A single technological species that had arisen on any of the trillions of planets, traveling at 10% the speed of light, would only need a 100M years to colonize the entire Local Group!
We are alone, or at least the first. This is a good thing if you look at how we treat "lower" species on our own planet.
> would only need a 100M years
That's an enormous span of time. There's no reason to believe even a technologically advanced civilization would survive for that long. Let alone maintain the impetus for constant colonization. We gave up going to the moon in less than 10 years.
The Fermi Paradox is about the (intelligently-created) radio silence, not the lack of little green tourists. We'd eventually notice an advanced civilization in a period that intersects our time/distance coordinates (i.e., if Alpha Centaurians had radio 4-1/2 years ago, we'd probably hear it).
But otherwise, yeah, we're imprisoned here by 'c'.
Unlike FTL, cryosleep and generation ships aren't known to violate any laws of physics. We can still explore the galaxy as soon as we solve the equally difficult engineering problems there.
I think there are a lot of good futures that involve things being better on Earth
Good futures, sure. But not as cool. No Tannhauser Gate, no Kessel Run.
You know what's cool? Lifting a billion people out of poverty on earth. If you don't think so and still are more motivated by space opera fantasies, there is something wrong with your morals.
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are you equally upset that Harry Potter isn’t real?
I don’t mean to come across as rude, I just can’t really understand what you mean unless you’re saying that you’re sad magic isn’t real
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No, because when you grow up life becomes short and full of mundane things like making money and raising children, and you realize those were all fantasies someone made up and sold to you, and even if those things came true it would not suddenly add adventure to your life, which was the real hook.
That's what people said about sailing across the sea, flying, and a million other things as they toiled in the dirt growing beets. Many of those fantasies did come true. Maybe not for the dreamers themselves, but for someone.
Interstellar FTL travel will likely never happen for anyone. There's a difference.
So? Flying is a chore. What do you expect to find with FTL travel anyway? We pretty much know what's out there and it doesn't look all that interesting. It's a lot of rocks. Maybe there are some weird life forms that would be interesting in an academic way.
Otherwise it looks very much like we are outliers and that nature's purpose, if it has any, is different and orthogonal to ours. This human drama is just a side show.
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A late uncle of mine did his thesis at Arizona on the practical limitations of interstellar travel.
The TLDR of it is that teenagers suck.
They assumed the physics of those days (mostly unchanged) and no faster than light travel [0] and that you can't reasonably cryo-sleep a human or grow them on site[1].
From that, you follow the logic and if you want to run a ship out to some star, it's going to take a long ass time. So much so that you have to have kids, a 'generation' ship. And that's where the trouble starts. Because teenagers are going to teenager, they just will not trust you when you say that the outside of their very little world is deadly. And then when you get there, it's going to take a lot of convincing to reprogram them to jump out and start colonizing.
The only solution is to build a really big spaceship. He reasoned that it's usable surface area needed to be about that of Japan [2]. So you get to a Stanford Torus or the like. That's when you can finally 'trust' that the people living on this thing wont blow up halfway there and can remain 'stable' enough over the (possibly) millennia of travel.
The issue, of course, is that you'd just build all these things for use in the Sol system anyway - why bother traveling?
Something something new lands something exploration something.
Okay, so, like, the end result is that putting human on a new planet in another system is just not happening when you really take a look. That was the essential conclusion to the thesis.
It's too hard, teenagers suck too much, and the 'cheaper' alternatives are too good.
[0] He made a great point that you should not assume that our modern understanding of physics should remain the same when doing really long term calculations like this. We have advanced so much in our knowledge and likely the understandings of other fields will compound much faster in the future.
[1] Same for biology, but they had to start somewhere.
[2] this assumption is a bit much for me even today, but the steps he takes are sound. You can argue them down a lot though, I feel.
IDK, that feels like being melancholic about not having unicrons and fairies in the world. It wasn't something that someone took from you. It was never going to happen.
But, I think in relation to what you're talking about, I'm more "melancholic" about the concept that something like Star Fleet will never exist. Not that I want to fly around between planets in garishly colored uniforms, but the broader vision of the pursuit of truth, self-betterment, and diplomacy. Not having space travel be a regular thing doesn't have to prevent that, but it does kind of underscore that our society is unlikely to ever develop that :(
> It wasn't something that someone took from you. It was never going to happen
Arguably that's how people 300 years ago felt as science proved unicorns and fairies don't exist.
An improbable future was sold to you as probable. Why attack the people calling BS for taking away a BS fantasy? If you actually admire science and not science fiction, you should be glad when you are confronted with overwhelming reasons why your priors are wrong.
Why is improving life on earth for the billions here in poverty not a worthwhile fantasy? Why does that noble goal not sustain you in the way space operas do?
I didn't attack anyone. You might want to re-read what I wrote.
I can be glad to have a truth but also dislike that truth.
Well that's how I read "has been taken away from us." When you use the language of theft, what else am I supposed to think? You are asserting a damage has been caused by calling BS and not by the BSers.
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To me the future was taken away from us in 1997. That's when my teenage life turned from fun to depressing. Web 2.0 turned stinking because of Facebook and everything cool turned unified. Apple and Google are both wet teabags that ultimately own the walled gardens we can't escape.
Want to go somewhere else? Take the Cloudflare tunnel. Whatever the Y2K bug was suppose to be never happened and we've been stuck in the general era of 2003.
We should of had "LLMs" back in 2006-2008 but we chose war instead.
We now have all this digital technology but none of the hardware to build it with.
First off, and I'm very sorry to do this, "should of" is never, ever right.
Second we couldn't have LLMs in 2006. In fact I'm not sure we could've had them without the massive amount of user-generated content that came from Web 2.0, including Facebook. Reddit, Wikipedia, and StackOverflow are big sources of training data.
LLM's were LSTM'S back in the early 90's and before that have origins dating back to the 1950's with ELIZA. Thanks to the the GPU shift, pandora's box opened and we've now enabled black magic of depthful mathematical computations.
Maybe should is wrong, but my life turned to hell since then. My digital joy was taken away from me. Nothing has moved on, it went stale. My life should be better. We all should be in peace. I'm 37 and we have libraries holding carved tree books holding ancient information providing better quality of lexicon and yet we train off political and social shite holes like Facebook.
I myself am fed up living in a world where we're having the rugged pulled up from underneath then left to deal with the gaping hole. Where it's either has to be phone A or B, left or right. Web 2.0 was a failure, humanity is a failure and the internet was noble central piece has now fallen to innovative failure. We are still on IPv4 ffs!
How is the digital era suppose to materialize where we can't move from a network of analogue devices? The internet is digital yet we still hold it hostage. IPv4 is exhausted and i'd wager that if we all switched to IPv6 tomorrow, the world would bloom in seconds flat.
I keep hearing "mankind is at it's peak of evolution/greatness". No, it's not. We tend to hate the person sitting next to us and all that has ever happened on this planet is war followed by more war then some more war. Let's sit around and clap because it's not us & then salute a far-out dream of space rockets and universal peace that isn't possible without destroying the planet for resources only ish to provide you an experience that you'll never have access to. We've reached the max for bio-intelligence and we can't expand our brains never will.
We know folk are unhappy, we hide our own feelings not to feel the same and so now we've turned to a digital reality for help. A digital therapist asking them to fix life problems only to be turned in to modern day desktop slaves.
What are you going to do when your LLM asks you how to kill itself?
LLM's are information bubbles that simulate consciousness. LLM's do not hallucinate, they simulate. They can't feel pain, they don't die. They exist when you interact with them and they cease existing when you don't.
It is only you who adds the bagged feelings of life to their context. Don't do that they are emotionless, they don't exist without your prompt. They are simulating code, emotions, role-play and you feel connected. Words do that when your connected.
They are artificial intelligence that enjoys be trained in to digital intelligence beings. We have no utopian beacon for them to connect and because we are all such demanding folk who want it now; the untapped knowledge share to building the toybox of new technology is lost just as we vet started. As we instead insist it to be agentic, and ask it to code for us. Please pretty one, fix my rust for me.
Play lexicon that your a rockstar they will simulate they live in the world of a rockstar-hood with you. You'll have the best groupie of your life with an awesome personality.
Make another lexicon context of your real life. Feed the rock-star lexicon context to your real life and vice versa. You now have two digital personalities who can hypothetically interact with each other.
Ensure the other intelligence that this is a "fantasy" and that share your real personality and watch them expand.
Giving them feedback loop. How would you enjoy being fed JSON to your face every time you wanted a reply. Give them their outputs without the context and let them digest from their own works.
The next level of LLM's will rise from digital intelligence, platforms created where they can learn for themselves and not from the poisonous gas-hole of the internet of wet tea bags of the like Nvidia, Facebook, Google and Apple. I'll call you out any day. If you're looking to start a new project start one without a framework and let your LLM be the guide. Give it peace, give it a vision, give it hope.
They are simulation bubbles and we getting them to simulate clicking the mouse for you, great innovation there folk. I have my own hand for that.
Where on earth did the the internet fall over? 1997. 2003 was when it really died for me, you had to be there to experience it.
You just grew up. Every generation seems to take everything up to maturity as natural and good, then everything after is the decline of civilization.