SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Stephen Hawking wants humanity to pursue a Mars mission in the mid-2020s rather than the mid-2030s:
Prof Stephen Hawking has called for leading nations to send astronauts to the Moon by 2020. They should also aim to build a lunar base in 30 years' time and send people to Mars by 2025. Prof Hawking said that the goal would re-ignite the space programme, forge new alliances and give humanity a sense of purpose.
He was speaking at the Starmus Festival celebrating science and the arts, which is being held in Trondheim, Norway. "Spreading out into space will completely change the future of humanity," he said. "I hope it would unite competitive nations in a single goal, to face the common challenge for us all. "A new and ambitious space programme would excite (young people), and stimulate interest in other areas, such as astrophysics and cosmology".
Prof. Hawking also talked about interstellar travel:
[We'll] never know how hospitable Proxima b is unless we can get there. At current speeds, using chemical propulsion, it would take 3 million years to reach the exoplanet, Hawking said. Thus, space colonization requires a radical departure in our travel technology. "To go faster would require a much higher exhaust speed than chemical rockets can provide — that of light itself," Hawking said. "A powerful beam of light from the rear could drive the spaceship forward. Nuclear fusion could provide 1 percent of the spaceship's mass energy, which would accelerate it to a tenth of the speed of light."
NASA usually talks about planning for "Mars 2035". Who is trying to get there by 2025?
A Mars mission architecture SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk will unveil in September will call for a series of missions starting in 2018 leading up to the first crewed mission to the planet in 2024, Musk said June 1.
Related: Elon Musk's Plans for Mars and Beyond Revealed
Elon Musk Publishes Mars Colonization Plan
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Wednesday June 21 2017, @06:22PM (15 children)
There are other possibilities. Cryonics, uploaded minds, generation ships, etc.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 21 2017, @06:32PM (14 children)
You loose the connection to the world you left behind then or it's not you that travel on but mere your intentions.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 21 2017, @06:50PM (3 children)
And it sucks to be that kid in the middle who is born on and dies on a generation ship. Or at the end when your people finally arrive at a mildly Earth-like fixer-upper exoplanet.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @10:34AM (2 children)
Actually I've very often wondered about that. They arrive on the planet, and then it's like:
"OK, kids, because great-grandma and great-grandpa decided to come here and die on the ship, you're going to have to leave everything you know behind and work yourselves to death to try to eke out a living on an inhospitable ball of mud for the benefit of people who you'll never know or care about, assuming our guesses about the planet are correct and you're not headed somewhere where the daily temperature is 1,100 degrees, and assuming that the 150-year-old equipment you've been traveling with is compatible with the planet and actually works. You're so lucky!"
Plus there's the question of where the economic benefit of this is, or governmental. You're throwing away vast sums of money to send people on what is probably going to be a suicide mission the first time around, and assuming they even make it to the destination, the travelers' descendants, that had no say in the decisions, will be the ones who really have to pay the price.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 22 2017, @11:17AM
It's a whole other ball game.
1. Various technological developments (widespread nuclear fusion and cheap solar, advanced recycling, matter conversion, robots, lab-grown foods, etc.) make living on Earth a breeze. The cost of energy and food plummet. Maybe it will result in a utopia, maybe not.
2. Reusable rockets and other technologies make setting up a base on the Moon, Mars, Ceres, Callisto, Enceladus, Titan, etc. a "cheap" proposition. Nuclear fusion is used to provide energy for a base/colony and set up industrial processes on-site. That's especially important where solar power is ineffective. It is also possible to put bases on Mercury and Venus.
3. Spread out to any icy body. That includes Triton, Pluto, Eris, Sedna, Orcus, etc. You don't have to have a million settlers at each location, just robots and/or a small number of settlers is fine. Artificial gravity could really help in these locations, but we can't count on that. Terraforming may be possible on Mars or Venus. Paraterraforming (atmosphere filled domes) could be used on other locations.
4. By the time some centuries have passed, it should become clear whether interstellar travel is easy or feasible. Exoplanet targets will be well studied by this time, with surfaces and atmospheres characterized and life located if it exists. The benefit to humanity is that if a colony can be established on an Earth-like world, a greater population can reside there without having to live indoors and in low gravity conditions.
Generation ships are a last resort method of interstellar travel. We may find it possible to build ships that can reach 0.1c, which would take about a century to travel 5 light years (including slowing down). Combine that with life extension, and you can avoid the common generation ship perils. Only a small amount of settlers need to be sent since the first thing they will do when they land is direct robots to build robots/industry, and artificial wombs and digital DNA sequences can be used to start a population rapidly.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @02:04PM
Nobody gets any say as to which country or place they are born in. So how is this any different?
If the ship is so great, then stay on the ship. You bet you would be pleased your grandparents left on the ship and missed out on the complete destruction of the planet (insert nuclear war/comet impact/etc here).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Weasley on Wednesday June 21 2017, @09:44PM (7 children)
I'm guessing this is some kind of opinion you have about the concept of mind uploading. You don't believe that virtual minds should be considered people? I'm guessing your mind upload wouldn't view it this way though. While organic humans may forever be tied to earth like planets, virtual minds may colonize the universe.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by kaszz on Wednesday June 21 2017, @10:48PM (6 children)
It is yet to be determined if a virtual mind will be like people or just a shadow of them without any original thought or creativity. It's not even sure that it will be a mind and not something lesser.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Weasley on Thursday June 22 2017, @01:01AM (5 children)
If there's some part of the mind that cannot be simulated, then it's supernatural. Nobody (who's opinion is useful in this matter) realistically thinks there's something supernatural about the brain. Therefore it can be simulated.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 22 2017, @01:18AM (3 children)
Not possible to simulate doesn't imply supernatural. It might just be a consequence of using specific natural phenomena that information technology may not accurately replicate. But the simulation projects will certainly involuntary explore their own limits. And that will be interesting.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday June 22 2017, @05:18AM (2 children)
If something follows natural laws then when those laws are known it can be simulated.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:19AM (1 child)
Not always. Or rather it can but there may be no practical way to accomplish it.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday June 22 2017, @03:59PM
The only case I can think of where that may apply would be if more computing power is needed than is currently available, in which case all you need to do is wait.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:42AM
you cannot simulate the supernatural in its own domain , which is irrelevant . whatever else in our domain can be simulated. p ity that the world afawk can be modeled only probabilistically. which means that given a perfect sim of a brain you cannot prove any of the following
- sim is completely equivalent
- sim fakes convincingly but the quantum field has a different behavior so the quantum effects the brain inherently takes advantage of make it different . the sim is self contained while the mind is an antenna tuned to ta different station
- his quantum field interacts with the sim brain like with any real one which had the same outcome ad the first svenario but is funfamentally different.
two observations. i do not subscribe to some pseudo theological assertions linking the quantum field to the conscience or the supernatural. but the assertion The field yields statistical randomness so we can replicate it with generayed randomness is philosophical garbage
second observation a brain will never be a proper sim if it is merely cloned from naturally existing ones. tjat is a prosthetic brain. might eben work. but the true sim brain is the circuitry that made the simulated entity evolve and prevail for simulated time.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday June 22 2017, @05:22PM (1 child)
Maybe. Depends on which sci-fi you read.
But is this a reason to not try?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 22 2017, @05:30PM
Or try using other methods. Technology development is fast enough that people on their way to another star system might actually be run up by a later launch using advances in science and improved technology.