I believe it is humanity's ultimate destiny to evolve into an interstellar society!

[Hammerfest]

I believe it is humanity's ultimate destiny to evolve into an interstellar society!

Sounds like fun! Be sure to let us know how that goes.

[Doctor Amadeus]

Yep. Big how and what that Williams look like will be nothing like we imagine.

[Masark]

i think andromeda will collide with the milky way before our sun novas, still that's 4.5b years away, plenty of time

"collide" is a bit grandiose for the event. Galaxies are 99.9999...% empty space. Out of the 400 billion or so stars in our galaxy, the number of collisions expected to happen during the merging of our galaxy with Andromeda is in the single digits.

[Mihalik]

I don't see how.

I was watching a documentary on voyager, if you put the earth and the sun on a table, the next cloest star on that scale would be over 6 miles away.

Voyager, which is the fastest thing around (10 miles per second) has only just left the solar system and it did that after 35 years. In interstellar terms its not even off the front doorstep.

So unless we do some sc-fi shit like wormholes or teleportation, it ain't happening in the next few thousand years.

Reaching out to other solar systems and colonizing them wouldn't be impossible.

There are a couple of things that are needed for it, neither are wormholes or teleportation.

1, The desire to do so and the willingness to make the massive investments of money, human lives and labor into a project that realistically would have no tangible return beyond the abstract knowledge that you did something good for the human race.

2, Humans who undertake the journey need to accept to reevaluate what it means to be human.

Such an undertaking might require generations. During that trip the offspring of those on board would likely see massive changes to their bodies, health and psychology.

Once they reached their destination further adaptation would likely be required. Which would make those people quite different physically, mentally and probably culturally.

Tho to be honest before we start looking beyond our solar system we ought to take a hard look at things like Mars, the Jovian, Saturnian, Neptunian lunar systems, Venus if colonization is the plan.

[Theodarzna]

Evolve implies a biological process.

Pop culture is also a bad gauge of things. The problem is we have no actual idea about what an Interstellar society looks like. What would that even be? Given one doesn't exist we find people often use Sci-fi fantasy stuff like Star Trek to fill in the gap where actual knowledge exists. Mankind has never been an interstellar society, nor have we ever seen one, so we really don't know what an interstellar society or civilization or species actually looks like. We don't know what ideology, or ideologies come with that or lead to that. We don't actually have any way of knowing what to build towards.

It isn't like video games or sci fi television. Facts are we don't know what it would even be.

Maybe we are building towards Star Trek, maybe its more like Warhammer 40k out there. We really can't know what that sort of thing will look like.

[Adam Jensen]

Won't ever happen.

Humans are too interested in killing each other over petty differences like what god they believe in or what skin color they are or on which side of a line they live on, to actually band together and do great things. I mean, we're a species that fought wars against Protestants and Catholics for centuries. Let me explain that to you, we fought wars because one group of people believed in the same god slightly differently than the other one. Millions of people died because Hitler had a hard on for stealing land and cleansing undesirables. Somalia became a mess because warlords decided they'd keep western aid and resources for themselves rather than their fellow countrymen.

Every war in history happened because of someone's greed and stupidity. Every single one.

Look at China. They're going all out genocide on the Uyghurs, building concentration camps and harvesting organs from still living victims.

Look at the Middle East, where we've been fighting barbaric shitheads since 2003 (Al-Qaeda and ISIS, not Islam in general). People who toss gays off rooftops and sex traffic women while preaching about the sins of the Western nations.

We can't get our act together. We can't get along with our neighbors and you think we'll become interstellar some day?

We gotta get rid of this violent tribalism bullshit first. We're not going to get past a massive physics hurdle like interstellar travel if we're too busy continuing to be dicks to one another.

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i think andromeda will collide with the milky way before our sun novas, still that's 4.5b years away, plenty of time

Our sun will never go supernova. It's too small.

It'll swell into a red giant, and then for a few billion years shrink and swell as it consumes the last of its fuel and then shrink again into a white dwarf. At that point, it's dead, there's no fusion happening. It'll be about the size of the earth and it'll spend the next few trillion years cooling off to a black dwarf, the final stage of most stars that are not large enough to supernova, and a stage so distant that it hasn't happened to a single star in the universe yet.

[Theodarzna]

Humans are too interested in killing...

Does any of that stop us from going to the stars? As I said, we don't know what a space faring civilization even is, what it would look like. All people are going by is what either video games or scifi television programs present. We don't actually know what the road map would really be. Assuming the physics hurdle is even possible to be overcome.

[cubby]

What would you think of a person who believes that democracy and freedom will ultimately triumph over tyranny and oppression and then humanity will expand into space? Humanity will abandon failed outdated ideologies like fascism, communism, and unequal greedy capitalism.

I believe that worldview wholeheartedly.

Pop culture often reinforces those views.

Will it be a free society like America or Canada to lead humanity to the stars or will it be a despotic authoritarian society like China?

The only part of your thread title that makes it unobjective is "believe" and "destiny". Otherwise, it's our only hope of long-term species survival. I could not agree more.

Are you a reader of science fiction?

[Erwarth]

We will self-destruct before it happens

[Afrospinach]

i think andromeda will collide with the milky way before our sun novas, still that's 4.5b years away, plenty of time

Our sun will not be friendly in 4.5 billion years, nor will it nova.

[Misuteri]

The most interesting analogy I’ve seen on this followed this argument pretty closely....

A planet can only become interplanetary in travel if it avoids self-destruction which is highly unlikely as harnessable power becomes more accessible.

- We master fire.
- We master gunpowder.
- We master fission.
- We master fusion.
- We master.... X

Now that we’re in the fission age everyone has access to fire and gunpowder. If we move to or beyond fusion people will likely be able to gain access to fission or fusion which is capable of obvious destructive nature and only requires one mistake or purposeful use to wipe out millions or a planet.

So if a power source greater than fusion, which we do not yet know about or understand, is required? The power sources that precede it will likely result in destruction on a planetary scale before it is mastered.

[avitush]

We will self-destruct before it happens

As much as I hate to say this....yeah, I think that's probably what's going to happen. People will find some way to fuck things up beyond repair long before we make it that far.

[Gaexion Ramza Beoulve]

I know where we're going

but I do not know the way.

[Unholyground]

We will become machines first, our natural evolution is merger with machines then to be replaced fully by them.

[Vodenbog]

2, Humans who undertake the journey need to accept to reevaluate what it means to be human.

Could I bother you to elaborate on this?

What conclusions do you think should come from this revaluation?

[Sylvandoh]

Imagine believing in an embellished and romanticised human concept such as "destiny"...

[Mihalik]

Could I bother you to elaborate on this?

What conclusions do you think should come from this revaluation?

Spending extended periods of time in low gravity environments changes our bodies. People born and raised in low gravity environments (microgravity would be even more impactful) would be anatomically quite different than humans born on Earth. Bone structure, immune system, circulatory systems etc would all change.

There are some things you can do to mitigate some of these effects, such as building the decks of a ship perpendicular to the direction of the engines, then have a constant 1G acceleration, which would simulate earthlike gravity conditions, not exactly, but close enough. This is not something you can do on other planets tho.

We also don't really know what the effects would be on the human psychology to be so disconnected from Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect...ody#Future_use

I remind you, we already struggle with such differences as skin color. How will people react when they meet someone 9feet tall with an elongated bone structure who wouldn't be able to support his own weight under earth like gravity, and would die of anaphylactic shock just from breathing in our atmosphere.

[PC2]

We don't actually have any way of knowing what to build towards.

Same as on Earth, we build towards more people and useful resources.

[Shadowferal]

More empty rhetoric...overpopulation is a problem with limited resources.
Denying that fact means there will always be problems and no one will know why until they accept that fact.

[Endus]

Before I dig into a specific response, I just want to note that the idea that democracy and such will "ultimately triumph" over tyranny is fundamentally nonsense; there is no victory condition. Tyranny will always be a risk. It's still a fight worth fighting, but you need to abandon the idea that it's a fight that can ever be won. It requires constant, unending vigilance. Once you get complacent, you get tyranny.

Reaching out to other solar systems and colonizing them wouldn't be impossible.

There are a couple of things that are needed for it, neither are wormholes or teleportation.

1, The desire to do so and the willingness to make the massive investments of money, human lives and labor into a project that realistically would have no tangible return beyond the abstract knowledge that you did something good for the human race.

2, Humans who undertake the journey need to accept to reevaluate what it means to be human.

Frankly, we have the technology to do this now. And have had it for a while.

If we assume we're building a generation ship, because we don't have engines that'll take us to a neighbouring system any faster, then the issue isn't really the engines at all; you'll pack on whatever fuel you need to get them fired up, and the rate of acceleration doesn't matter; what's shifting is the length of the journey, but in a generation ship, that's not a huge deal, you're already planning against obsolescence and such.

You need a few things;
1> The ability to maintain a renewable biosphere that supports human life. We have the TECH to do this, we just need to figure out the exact techniques, but that's a matter of fiddling, not innovation.
2> Radiation shielding to protect passengers, particularly since we're talking about lifespan voyaging, and we need to remain fertile to produce new generations. We're also gonna need a lot of water, so that can like cover a lot of it.

Really, that's close to it. You're gonna WANT to train interim generations, to have a strong societal framework, etc, but those are policy issues, not technological. You could, in theory, focus on agrarian maintenance for "interim" generations, but it's probably more useful to train everyone in each generation than to try and rebuild an educational base from a society that's gone intellectually fallow. But generational ships are massive, massive resource sinks, on the order of hundreds of trillions of dollars in today's valuations. That's the barrier. Not new tech, just that they're stupidly, amazingly costly to actually build and fuel up for a journey. Until we get serious robotic automation and resource extraction off-Earth, it's not gonna happen, and even then, we probably need a system-killing event to provoke it.

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Spending extended periods of time in low gravity environments changes our bodies. People born and raised in low gravity environments (microgravity would be even more impactful) would be anatomically quite different than humans born on Earth. Bone structure, immune system, circulatory systems etc would all change.

There are some things you can do to mitigate some of these effects, such as building the decks of a ship perpendicular to the direction of the engines, then have a constant 1G acceleration, which would simulate earthlike gravity conditions, not exactly, but close enough. This is not something you can do on other planets tho.

We also don't really know what the effects would be on the human psychology to be so disconnected from Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect...ody#Future_use

I remind you, we already struggle with such differences as skin color. How will people react when they meet someone 9feet tall with an elongated bone structure who wouldn't be able to support his own weight under earth like gravity, and would die of anaphylactic shock just from breathing in our atmosphere.

FWIW, the "easier" solution to the gravity problem is centripetal force.

Build the generation ship as a big-ass cylinder. Spin it along its central axis, the same axis the thrust is along (not technically required, but it simplifies things). Centripetal force will make "down" be the same as "outward". You can spin it up to match whatever G-force you want. There's some weirdness with things like throwing, but it's something we adapt to fairly readily, apparently.

During thrust periods, you'll have issues because "down" will shift from "outward" to "outward/aftward". Open water can be handled with a large retaining wall it can slosh up against during these times, people can sit and get ready with warning. Deceleration is the same vector; just flip the ship around with some light, slow nudges that nobody will really feel.

Doesn't take any real tech. Just some forward thinking on design. Stuff sci-fi authors have been talking about for literally decades, I might add; the whole "retaining wall for water" I'm pulling straight out of Arthur C. Clarke's Rama books.