Where we’ve been and where we’re going…

Humans are bipedal apes. Yet we find that rather odd because our ape kin aren’t usually bipedal on the ground. Did we get bipedal on the ground too, or did some other environment suit that peculiar locomotive style better? A sextet of pictures from a Public Library of Science article….

Gorilla female plucks a stick from a swamp floor

…which evokes so many resonances for me. Look at how she walks clutching that stick.

At the other end of our journey, as a species, is the prospect of Interstellar Migration. The Ultimate Project is a plausible plan for an Interstellar colonization mission, but of World-Ship proportions. The basic plan is for a vast million-person “Star City” to traverse 20 light years at 0.002c (600 km/s) on a ten millennial journey to a new star system for humanity. For propulsion the Star City will use immense D-He3 fusion rockets, taking a century or so to build up speed.

Such fusion drives have exhaust velocities of ~ 15,000 km/s, so I wonder why the Star City isn’t going faster? To avoid interstellar debris, which is pretty lethal at speeds over ~ 0.01c, and to spend as much time between the stars as seems reasonable, I suspect. Such a Star City would allow for incredible astronomical collaborations between it and our Solar System, for example measuring the nearby Galaxies with stunning precision – imagine parallaxes out to the Virgo Super-Cluster. Thus why I call it “Star City” as it seems more like a mobile Observatory than a colonizing mission.

Read more, check it out, and best of all any contribution you make now will, possibly, shape events 500 years from now when the Project launches.

4 Replies to “Where we’ve been and where we’re going…”

  1. Well, would this be something like Europeans in the 1300s thinking about developing a massively large raft to transport a city across the Atlantic to the New World? It would make for some interesting discussions but ultimately wouldn’t come to much.

    The first ships to cross the Atlantic were much smaller and less expensive. Then technology further developed to powered ships and even aircraft. So the idea of developing a huge raft never did and never will become reality because it was never necessary at any point even though our technology now allows us to construct it.

    I would like to see those of us interested in interstellar travel try and figure out what exactly how that first truly interstellar craft will be designed. There are a lot of good ideas but no consensus as far as I can tell. I personally think that it is going to be very small such as a few grams or even less.

  2. Hi John

    The designers of the Project estimate there will be interstellar probes this century or next, so the first missions will be tiny if nanotech proves as fruitful as hoped. But the Project is about a minimalist interstellar colonization program – what can be done with conservative extrapolations of technology? What timescale is needed?

    What it means is that a real plan for such a mission exists, and thus everything we do to improve it is building on a common foundation. I don’t like World-Ship concepts personally, but the idea of a “movable city” kind of appeals and so I look at it in that light. It might be pointless to actually colonize planets when it does “arrive” – perhaps it will merely see stars as refurbishment points and continue cruising the Galaxy, like George Zebrowski’s fictional “Macrolife” colonies and Dandridge Cole’s ideas from the 1960s.

    A network of roving “Star Cities” might be a better way for intelligence to embrace the Galaxy, rather than moving into star systems and chewing up the planets for a relentless exponential growth imperative. A surviving Star City means we are able to control our exponential urges and think about living on an astrophysical timescale. Chewing up the Galaxy to make computronium and enshelling every star with Matrioshka Brains… seems kind of too biological for our post-biological successors in my mind.

  3. Hi Adam,

    Your reply has me becoming very philosophical.

    I guess being a biological entity I find the idea of expanding to other solar systems, and developing new civilizations there to be an exciting idea. It sort of like that cycle of life thing.

    To have a star city spending most of it’s time in deep space makes me wonder what the point is. Would there be any challenges? If so, would they be real or just manufactured challenges to try and make life interesting? Maybe it’s an American thing…you know…”Go west young man, go west”!

    Maybe “our post-biological successors” would find art to be the ultimate fulfillment or perhaps the contemplation of nothing as the highest form of existence. I’ll take the challenge of colonization any day.

  4. Hi John

    The Star City is a mobile observatory allowing millennia of deep space observations. As I see it people might travel to and from it via beaming their physical/neural descriptions down to the molecular level and being remade at the other end. “Copying” only in a simplistic sense, but if we can demonstrate that consciousness and identity are patterns of molecular activity and not the molecules themselves, then precise “copies” aren’t copies at all.

    Not yet proven, but reasonable. Those recent studies on the “neuro-stasis” of neocortical neurons give me reasons to doubt this idea, but only experiment will tell us if consciousness & identity can persist in a different substrate to one’s birth neurons.

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