I can't shake a suspicion that if we get the ability to travel at relativistic speeds, our biology will ignore physics, and we'll age just like we do now
We will. At relativistic speed your body will age according to the proper time you experience (the length of your path in 4-space) it's just that you and your pal on earth will experience different proper time. Why would your Timex tick more slowly but you wouldn't? You hit 70 years old and your watch tics off a second?
On April 11 the news broke that Trump was planning to "gut" NASA by 50%, and 5 days later a paper is released announcing NASA may have found the first planet with life on it. I can't tell if I'm too cynical or not enough.
In that Heinlein novel (one of the so-called “Heinlein Juveniles), they got around the light speed limit for communication by using telepathic twins, one on the ship, the other on Earth, and telepathy operating instantaneously. It’s interesting to me (maybe not others though) how much ‘40s through ‘60s SF assumed that psi powers were plausible enough to base story lines on them. Doc Smith’s Lensman series was based on a telepathy device (the Lens), Asimov’s Foundation series had multiple opposing groups working with psi powers, the aforementioned Heinlein novel as well as his famous Stranger in a Strange Land (which while intriguing, doesn’t hold up for me), Larry Niven used telepaths to talk to dolphins…but eventually the notion of psi powers dried up and blew away.
As regards the possibilities of extraterrestrial life…I’m not expecting telepathic slime either.
Duke U. was home to the Rhine Laboratory of Parasychology from 1930-1965 that did a lot of experiments like the one Bill Murray is conducting at the beginning of Ghostbusters:
You have to wonder if Dr. Rhine manipulated the results in.the same way Bill Murray‘s character did when the subject was a pretty young woman. My recollection is that many of Dr. Freud‘s and Dr. Mesmer‘s patients were also women.,
They don't need telepathy. They could use quantum phenomena with entangled particles - as far as I understand, these are not subject to the speed of light.
That's correct (I am not a physicist) but I'm unsure how you would use that for communication. The entangled pairs must be created together. So you do that on earth and go far away and read the spin on the one that's on your spaceship. If it's up, you know the one back on earth is down. How does that help? Spitballing if you could somehow take a large number of entangled particles with you, you could use them for a binary code. Except how would you select them? You don't know the spin until you measure and how would people back on earth get signaled which ones you selected?
Maybe some clever sci-fi writer has figured it out.
Also presumably the messages on earth would be painfully slow and intermittent, like texting with a doped out retard, while the messages on the ship would be amazingly fast to the point of incomprehensibility, like texting with a ADD speedfreak.
The identical twins who are the main characters in the book think they are communicating using their own unique language, as twins often do. But under testing, it turns out they can still whisper together when separated by great distances.
And it turns out that telepathy isn't limited by the speed of light.
Starships are limited by the speed of light, but the Mass Conversion engine lets them accelerate to close to the speed of light in one year and decelerate in a second year.
Those three premises are really a great setup for a sci-fi story. Unfortunately, Heinlein got bored after that, dropped in an abbreviated version of the outstanding action climax from "Starman Jones," and wound up with a quick proto-Lolitaesque ending where the hero returns to earth to marry his great-great-great-grandniece who is effectively his great-great-great-grandaughter.
Heinlein was kind of a perv, but the limits of 1950s juveniles kept his pervier instincts in check.
Part of the fascination with psi powers might have been the mid 20th century subconscious battle against materialism. That is, as we learned more and more about biology we began to suspect that the brain and therefore the mind were solely material, i.e. there's no spirit and our consciousness is kind of an illusion and we have no free will.
If we have psi power potential, and if that power could violate the basic laws of physics, we feel special again.
You can be an atheist and a non-materialist, but it's challenging. It helps not to think too deeply. I see a few people trying to square that circle now that AI appears to be able to do a lot of our tricks.
In "Time for the Stars," the people who go on the interstellar voyages are the identical twins of the people who stay on Earth to communicate with them by twin telepathy. It's a helluva premise for a novel.
All the "psi" stuff was and is incredibly boring. (As is all the other super-power, super-natural schlock with unfortunately infects a whole lot of entertainment today.)
All of it collapses completely under any sort of logical or empirical enquiry ... pretty much like all the entire minoritarian narrative--"racism!", "gender", "nation of immigrants", disparate impact, "you go grrl!", QWERTY++, "oppression", "pride!", "race does not exist", "gender assigned at birth", "many kinds of families", "diversity is or greatest strength!", refugees, "benefits of immigration", 51' ladders, CRT, butt-kicking-babes, "the murder of George Floyd" ...
Sadly, a whole lot of people are reality adverse and a whole lot more are easy marks.
Of course if you go deep into quantum and relativity a lot of things collapse under any sort of logical or empirical query, and yet, as far as we know today, are correct.
Of further course, that does not imply that any of the other things you mention are correct. There's a million ways to be incorrect for every way there is to be correct.
> In that Heinlein novel (one of the so-called “Heinlein Juveniles), they got around the light speed limit for communication by using telepathic twins, one on the ship, the other on Earth, and telepathy operating instantaneously.
How does instantaneous telepathy address the problem? You still get a total of zero communication because, by the time one twin has something to say, the other one is dead.
In Heinlein's novel, telepathic links turned out to be fairly hereditary, so the identical twin who went to the stars kept in contact with his great-grand-niece or the like on Earth. This led to a vaguely incestuous love affair when the narrator returns to earth. Heinlein and Nabokov were pretty much on the same wavelength. Heinlein followed Nabokov's career and I suspect N followed H's career (see N's great sci-fi short story "Lance.")
There is a paradox around most explanations of time dilation for which I’ve not heard a good explanation. Why do we assume the twin remaining on earth ages much more than the space traveler returns and not the other? After all, from a relativistic perspective, the earth twin is moving away from the space twin at nearly the speed of light. There is no fixed point of reference. If it helps the thought experiment, think of both twins on identical space ships. One accelerates away from the other, obtains near light speed, coasts for a while, decelerates, and then repeats the process back to the other ship. Which was moving and which was stationary from a relativistic perspective? Which twin ages more?
I get the need to adjust GPS satellite clocks to factor for greater distance from the gravity well of earth and orbital velocity.
I guess this is why I made a C in my relativity/quantum mechanics class in 1970.
I like the "angels or apes" framing for alien life. Think of intelligence as a vast spectrum - human intelligence is just a single point. Any alien intelligence we encounter is likely to fall elsewhere on that line, probably far from us. So they'll almost certainly be either "apes" (far below us, like microbes) or "angels" (far beyond us).
> Any alien intelligence we encounter is likely to fall elsewhere on that line, probably far from us.
Regarding encounters on the same point on that line, I stumbled upon the online graphic novel "Aztec Empire," which is about the events that you think it's about. It's good, though also politically correct, so far -- no mention yet of the habits that the Spaniards found disagreeable, at a distance and then up close.
If the universe teems with life then perhaps we should stop trying to contact it. Imagine you're in a dense jungle at night. You're unarmed. You suspect leopards prowl the jungle. Would you make lots of noise or remain as quiet as possible?
Perhaps, although I agree that keeping your presence unknown to the greatest extent possible makes the most sense for us and probably for anyone else that is theoretically out there. Plus the distances involved are so massive that there could be millions of civilizations but the signatures of their existence still have millions (or billions) of years to go before they reach us.
I am currently in the second book of the Three Body Problem, in which there is a segment of society that welcomes an alien invasion and extermination of humanity (no doubt we have people like that today). Overall an interesting concept for a book but frankly I have found it to be a real slog. Obviously the book is translated from Chinese so to my eyes there are some odd cultural outlooks and phrasing, but I am starting to think it's just not that good aside from the premise.
The show really isn't faithful to the book other than the general concept. The eye-rolling casting and themes there don't make me want to watch the next season.
The ideal length for sci-fi is the short story or novella. Long enough to get everything developed and once that's done, you deliver the hard-science gut punch or quantum paradox. There are some exceptions like Frank Herbert's magnificent far-future universe building in Dune, but having got his universe through its God-Emperor arc he started to flounder (he was also a grief-stricken widower by that point).
Speaking of Dune, the Denis Vilneuve version is good but only just so. What's missing is the scale at which humans who rule entire galaxies would think and the demi-god self image humans would have of themselves. (Dune 1 had some of this vibe but it got dropped in 2.0 and we'll see if he picks it up again in 3.0). And of course Vilneuve had to bring in his 21st century sensibilities so you have Baron Adolf Hitlerkonnen and Chani, Girlboss of the known Universe.
Florence Pugh is adorable and I'd love to have her as my squeeze. But I don't really see her as Her Extreme Imperial Highness, Daughter of the Padishah Emperor and Chronicler of the Golden Lion Dynasty. Christopher Walken was inexplicably subdued; Jose Ferrer's depiction was much better.
Right, Dune has a scale problem. Why are the desert dwelling Fremen of this one planet so important? Sure, there are more of them out there in this dry desert than you'd expect, but there are dozens or hundreds of inhabited planets, many of which presumably have much larger populations. Presumably, Dune was anticipating the rise of OPEC and the phenomenon of underpopulated desert countries holding the world hostage for oil.
The Fremen had the religion, which is what impressed Frank Herbert so much about Islam. You give Arabs Islam, and they proceed to conquer and homogenize everywhere from Morocco to Indonesia with it.
Star Wars had its own weird scale problems. They have the tackle that really can build planet ships but somehow nobody gets around to terraforming desert or snow planets so they can be more productive and pay more taxes.
“The Trump administration is reportedly planning to cut NASA’s science budget in half, eliminating future space telescope and other astrobiology projects. If that happens, Dr. Krissansen-Totton said, “the search for life elsewhere would basically stop.”
Ok, good to know that even in its Science section, the NYT did manage to somehow blame Trump for an otherwise interesting, intriguing story. So the end focus is that Trump is destroying a program for the search for life on other planets, new worlds.
Whew! Even in the non- political news, it’s reassuring that the NYT knows exactly where its priorities lie at all times—blame Trump, because racist, fascist, etc. and etc.
They just operate on the logic: if problems can be traced to Trump, however tenuously or tangentially, name him. I think many of their subscribers find it comforting. "Ah! Trump causing more trouble! But don't worry: once he's gone, things will get much better." I don't begrudge them their hope.
absolutely...also I'm not sure I agree with Sailer that we shouldn't blow up the moon or at least carve a monument into it. I bet Trump would fund a Mt. Rushmore mission to make his young face the Man in the Moon.
No, I really didn't read much sci-fi from after 1966's "Moon Is a Harsh Mistress." I've read several Stephenson novels and the Chinese "Three Body Problem," and enjoyed those, but most of my knowledge of sci-fi is from the Heinlein-Asimov-Bradbury-Clark golden age.
I read some post-Golden Age 1960s sci-fi like Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" and various Robert Silverberg books. But I didn't really like the post-censorship sci-fi as much as the more boyish stuff that came before. For example, I've never read any of Heinlein's novels from after he got over his cerebral problems of the late 1960s when he finally woke up and discovered that he was rich and famous from hippies like Charles Manson buying "Stranger In a Strange Land" and censorship was over and he could now write whatever twisted stuff he felt like.
Now that SpaceX, Boeing are basically taking over rockets, might there be an opportunity for some gazillionaire to find a viable commercial model to finance looking for green algae in our quadrant of the Milky Way?
We're not traveling interstellar distances. Hitting a stray space rock at relativistic speed is Game Over Man.
Regarding NASA, they spent $20 billion and were a decade late on JWST. But the JWST origami design, which had to minimize weight and volume, is no longer necessary in an Elon World of much lower launch costs.
There are many theoretical workarounds to the problem of space debris. Some of them — like sacrificial shields, mass drivers, and particle vaporizers — don't even require new physics.
Yeah, the power requirements and engineering seem brutally challenging. But hey, we've come a long way in just the last 1000 years. I should more optimistic. Who knows what will be possible in 3025.
It seems like searching for likely planets to colonize is doable in this century with reasonable advances in technology. For example, the James Webb space telescope is sensational.
But ... getting humans to planets we find promising will require vast improvements in technology. Future generations may or may not pull that off.
I wish them well.
I wouldn't mind if during what's left of my rather limited lifetime, we discovered a plausible planet to settle. I could die happy knowing we have a target, even though we'd have no idea yet how to get there.
Setting aside the physical problem of getting there, what about food? Or all of the bacteria and fungi necessary to make human life work? Proteins on earth are composed of the same 20 amino acids out of over 500 found in nature. Life around another star might use a different set, in which case food there, whether plant or animal, might not be digestible?
Panspermia might conceivably "solve" this problem. But really, so far as the possibility of space travel is concerned, Einstein's speed of light limit is all you need to know. It's not actually a speed limit (as laymen think of the term) as a fundamental constant of nature which, according astronomers (and again for reasons that I do not pretend to understand), can be shown to be the same throughout the observable universe.
Bottom line: Musk's dream of colonizing the Milky Way and beyond can be ruled out as a physical possibility now and forever. It makes me wonder about the sanity of this otherwise brilliant engineer?
You would have to build a planet-sized, self-sufficient biodome and send it off, never to return to Earth. Entire generations, civilizations would live and die on the planet-ship. The planet-ship would have the means to build and launch other planet-ships. Pretty challenging, but who knows what humans will be capable of in 5,000 years.
Who am I kidding. Humans will be half-mad, illiterate ferals slowly going extinct in 5,000 years. Or 500 years.
Not only pretty challenging, but the energy requirements to accelerate even tiny pieces of matter to near-speed-of-light are so astronomical, approaching infinity the closer you get -- look at the power requirements of the Cern Hadron accelerator, and that was just for protons!-- as to rule that out too.
Unfortunately even a mass-conversion engine won't allow a ship to travel fast enough for relativity to make voyages much shorter for the passengers.
Total conversion of the entire ship's mass and converting all of the energy to kinetic energy to move it gets you to about 80% of the speed of light. At which point the time dilation factor is only about 0.5, i.e. for every year on the ship, 2 years pass on Earth.
This is...impractical. To approach this, let alone pass it you need an external engine.
Heinlein was handwaving this to write his story, as have a number of other authors.
Heinlein's peak as a novelist was 1952's "Starman Jones" when he was 45, but he badly screwed up Einstein's relativity theory. So he came back in 1955 with the more elegant "Time for the Stars." But he probably didn't get it all that right then, just more than in "Starman Jones."
The paper sounds like horseshit to me. While industrial chemists are also defined as life, the methods used to produce dimethyl sulfide commercially involve materials or conditions that are likely to be found in multiple places in our galaxy in a sphere 1000 light years radius.
While "120 light years is really far" for humans or vehicles to physically travel, if even algae like primitive life form can be ascertained (say by detecting glucose or chlorophyll or amino acid like molecules), it will mean a lot. Universe as we know has billions of galaxies each with billions of stars. If 'algae' can be detected within a 'short' neighborhood of 120 light years in our own 'backyard' (Milky Way galaxy), it is very probable that advanced life forms, even intelligent ones may exist (or might have existed) in many places in the universe.
I can't shake a suspicion that if we get the ability to travel at relativistic speeds, our biology will ignore physics, and we'll age just like we do now
We will. At relativistic speed your body will age according to the proper time you experience (the length of your path in 4-space) it's just that you and your pal on earth will experience different proper time. Why would your Timex tick more slowly but you wouldn't? You hit 70 years old and your watch tics off a second?
> Einstein’s E=MC Squared
You couldn't find the superscript and just said "fuck it"?
Yes.
It's ALT0178 on the numeric keypad, but I have no idea if it works on a Mac
E=mc²
I'm too old to learn that.
I cheat by looking up symbols on the web and then cut and paste. Takes a little time though.
You could always use the Character Map
In Windows, Window key + . [period] brings up emojis -- scroll down to find symbols.
I'm too old for emojis.
On April 11 the news broke that Trump was planning to "gut" NASA by 50%, and 5 days later a paper is released announcing NASA may have found the first planet with life on it. I can't tell if I'm too cynical or not enough.
Definitely not enough.
They should have named it Vulcan.
Fun fact: the planet Vulcan was invented by 19th century physicist to account for anomalies in Mercury's orbit (later explained by relativity)
In that Heinlein novel (one of the so-called “Heinlein Juveniles), they got around the light speed limit for communication by using telepathic twins, one on the ship, the other on Earth, and telepathy operating instantaneously. It’s interesting to me (maybe not others though) how much ‘40s through ‘60s SF assumed that psi powers were plausible enough to base story lines on them. Doc Smith’s Lensman series was based on a telepathy device (the Lens), Asimov’s Foundation series had multiple opposing groups working with psi powers, the aforementioned Heinlein novel as well as his famous Stranger in a Strange Land (which while intriguing, doesn’t hold up for me), Larry Niven used telepaths to talk to dolphins…but eventually the notion of psi powers dried up and blew away.
As regards the possibilities of extraterrestrial life…I’m not expecting telepathic slime either.
Duke U. was home to the Rhine Laboratory of Parasychology from 1930-1965 that did a lot of experiments like the one Bill Murray is conducting at the beginning of Ghostbusters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine
It seemed quite scientific at the time.
You have to wonder if Dr. Rhine manipulated the results in.the same way Bill Murray‘s character did when the subject was a pretty young woman. My recollection is that many of Dr. Freud‘s and Dr. Mesmer‘s patients were also women.,
Probably.
The story of the Rhine Lab at Duke U. is of current relevance but it's fading from memory.
They don't need telepathy. They could use quantum phenomena with entangled particles - as far as I understand, these are not subject to the speed of light.
But also do not allow communication faster than light (for reasons I don't claim to understand).
That's correct (I am not a physicist) but I'm unsure how you would use that for communication. The entangled pairs must be created together. So you do that on earth and go far away and read the spin on the one that's on your spaceship. If it's up, you know the one back on earth is down. How does that help? Spitballing if you could somehow take a large number of entangled particles with you, you could use them for a binary code. Except how would you select them? You don't know the spin until you measure and how would people back on earth get signaled which ones you selected?
Maybe some clever sci-fi writer has figured it out.
Also presumably the messages on earth would be painfully slow and intermittent, like texting with a doped out retard, while the messages on the ship would be amazingly fast to the point of incomprehensibility, like texting with a ADD speedfreak.
That's pretty much what happens in "Time for the Stars" or vice-versa.
IIRC not all the links survived it. I still think that telepathy was a plot device.
The identical twins who are the main characters in the book think they are communicating using their own unique language, as twins often do. But under testing, it turns out they can still whisper together when separated by great distances.
And it turns out that telepathy isn't limited by the speed of light.
Starships are limited by the speed of light, but the Mass Conversion engine lets them accelerate to close to the speed of light in one year and decelerate in a second year.
Those three premises are really a great setup for a sci-fi story. Unfortunately, Heinlein got bored after that, dropped in an abbreviated version of the outstanding action climax from "Starman Jones," and wound up with a quick proto-Lolitaesque ending where the hero returns to earth to marry his great-great-great-grandniece who is effectively his great-great-great-grandaughter.
Heinlein was kind of a perv, but the limits of 1950s juveniles kept his pervier instincts in check.
Part of the fascination with psi powers might have been the mid 20th century subconscious battle against materialism. That is, as we learned more and more about biology we began to suspect that the brain and therefore the mind were solely material, i.e. there's no spirit and our consciousness is kind of an illusion and we have no free will.
If we have psi power potential, and if that power could violate the basic laws of physics, we feel special again.
Heinlein was pretty much a moderate in this. He didn't believe in traditional religion but he wasn't a total atheist either.
You can be an atheist and a non-materialist, but it's challenging. It helps not to think too deeply. I see a few people trying to square that circle now that AI appears to be able to do a lot of our tricks.
I think he wanted an excuse to compare the people who went out to those who didn’t.
In "Time for the Stars," the people who go on the interstellar voyages are the identical twins of the people who stay on Earth to communicate with them by twin telepathy. It's a helluva premise for a novel.
All the "psi" stuff was and is incredibly boring. (As is all the other super-power, super-natural schlock with unfortunately infects a whole lot of entertainment today.)
All of it collapses completely under any sort of logical or empirical enquiry ... pretty much like all the entire minoritarian narrative--"racism!", "gender", "nation of immigrants", disparate impact, "you go grrl!", QWERTY++, "oppression", "pride!", "race does not exist", "gender assigned at birth", "many kinds of families", "diversity is or greatest strength!", refugees, "benefits of immigration", 51' ladders, CRT, butt-kicking-babes, "the murder of George Floyd" ...
Sadly, a whole lot of people are reality adverse and a whole lot more are easy marks.
But math, logic and empiricism are your friends.
Of course if you go deep into quantum and relativity a lot of things collapse under any sort of logical or empirical query, and yet, as far as we know today, are correct.
Of further course, that does not imply that any of the other things you mention are correct. There's a million ways to be incorrect for every way there is to be correct.
> In that Heinlein novel (one of the so-called “Heinlein Juveniles), they got around the light speed limit for communication by using telepathic twins, one on the ship, the other on Earth, and telepathy operating instantaneously.
How does instantaneous telepathy address the problem? You still get a total of zero communication because, by the time one twin has something to say, the other one is dead.
In Heinlein's novel, telepathic links turned out to be fairly hereditary, so the identical twin who went to the stars kept in contact with his great-grand-niece or the like on Earth. This led to a vaguely incestuous love affair when the narrator returns to earth. Heinlein and Nabokov were pretty much on the same wavelength. Heinlein followed Nabokov's career and I suspect N followed H's career (see N's great sci-fi short story "Lance.")
IIRC, and it has been decades, she declared her intention early on. Redheads are a force of nature.
There is a paradox around most explanations of time dilation for which I’ve not heard a good explanation. Why do we assume the twin remaining on earth ages much more than the space traveler returns and not the other? After all, from a relativistic perspective, the earth twin is moving away from the space twin at nearly the speed of light. There is no fixed point of reference. If it helps the thought experiment, think of both twins on identical space ships. One accelerates away from the other, obtains near light speed, coasts for a while, decelerates, and then repeats the process back to the other ship. Which was moving and which was stationary from a relativistic perspective? Which twin ages more?
I get the need to adjust GPS satellite clocks to factor for greater distance from the gravity well of earth and orbital velocity.
I guess this is why I made a C in my relativity/quantum mechanics class in 1970.
I like the "angels or apes" framing for alien life. Think of intelligence as a vast spectrum - human intelligence is just a single point. Any alien intelligence we encounter is likely to fall elsewhere on that line, probably far from us. So they'll almost certainly be either "apes" (far below us, like microbes) or "angels" (far beyond us).
> Any alien intelligence we encounter is likely to fall elsewhere on that line, probably far from us.
Regarding encounters on the same point on that line, I stumbled upon the online graphic novel "Aztec Empire," which is about the events that you think it's about. It's good, though also politically correct, so far -- no mention yet of the habits that the Spaniards found disagreeable, at a distance and then up close.
https://bigredhair.com/books/aztec-empire/about/
If the universe teems with life then perhaps we should stop trying to contact it. Imagine you're in a dense jungle at night. You're unarmed. You suspect leopards prowl the jungle. Would you make lots of noise or remain as quiet as possible?
I'd be concerned, if the universe actually teemed with life. But the universe is bizarrely empty.
Perhaps God meant it to be that way.
Perhaps, although I agree that keeping your presence unknown to the greatest extent possible makes the most sense for us and probably for anyone else that is theoretically out there. Plus the distances involved are so massive that there could be millions of civilizations but the signatures of their existence still have millions (or billions) of years to go before they reach us.
I am currently in the second book of the Three Body Problem, in which there is a segment of society that welcomes an alien invasion and extermination of humanity (no doubt we have people like that today). Overall an interesting concept for a book but frankly I have found it to be a real slog. Obviously the book is translated from Chinese so to my eyes there are some odd cultural outlooks and phrasing, but I am starting to think it's just not that good aside from the premise.
I watched the Netflix show. Kind of interesting but with distracting casting choices.
As far as keeping our presence unknown, I think we blew that decades ago.
The show really isn't faithful to the book other than the general concept. The eye-rolling casting and themes there don't make me want to watch the next season.
Agreed. I would need to hear amazing positive reviews to watch the second season.
The ideal length for sci-fi is the short story or novella. Long enough to get everything developed and once that's done, you deliver the hard-science gut punch or quantum paradox. There are some exceptions like Frank Herbert's magnificent far-future universe building in Dune, but having got his universe through its God-Emperor arc he started to flounder (he was also a grief-stricken widower by that point).
Speaking of Dune, the Denis Vilneuve version is good but only just so. What's missing is the scale at which humans who rule entire galaxies would think and the demi-god self image humans would have of themselves. (Dune 1 had some of this vibe but it got dropped in 2.0 and we'll see if he picks it up again in 3.0). And of course Vilneuve had to bring in his 21st century sensibilities so you have Baron Adolf Hitlerkonnen and Chani, Girlboss of the known Universe.
Florence Pugh is adorable and I'd love to have her as my squeeze. But I don't really see her as Her Extreme Imperial Highness, Daughter of the Padishah Emperor and Chronicler of the Golden Lion Dynasty. Christopher Walken was inexplicably subdued; Jose Ferrer's depiction was much better.
Right, Dune has a scale problem. Why are the desert dwelling Fremen of this one planet so important? Sure, there are more of them out there in this dry desert than you'd expect, but there are dozens or hundreds of inhabited planets, many of which presumably have much larger populations. Presumably, Dune was anticipating the rise of OPEC and the phenomenon of underpopulated desert countries holding the world hostage for oil.
The Fremen had the religion, which is what impressed Frank Herbert so much about Islam. You give Arabs Islam, and they proceed to conquer and homogenize everywhere from Morocco to Indonesia with it.
Star Wars had its own weird scale problems. They have the tackle that really can build planet ships but somehow nobody gets around to terraforming desert or snow planets so they can be more productive and pay more taxes.
The Dark Forest theme - explored in the Three Body Problem trilogy.
“The Trump administration is reportedly planning to cut NASA’s science budget in half, eliminating future space telescope and other astrobiology projects. If that happens, Dr. Krissansen-Totton said, “the search for life elsewhere would basically stop.”
Ok, good to know that even in its Science section, the NYT did manage to somehow blame Trump for an otherwise interesting, intriguing story. So the end focus is that Trump is destroying a program for the search for life on other planets, new worlds.
Whew! Even in the non- political news, it’s reassuring that the NYT knows exactly where its priorities lie at all times—blame Trump, because racist, fascist, etc. and etc.
They just operate on the logic: if problems can be traced to Trump, however tenuously or tangentially, name him. I think many of their subscribers find it comforting. "Ah! Trump causing more trouble! But don't worry: once he's gone, things will get much better." I don't begrudge them their hope.
Yeah they'll cut the search for life elsewhere, but they'll keep the DEI administration positions.
I find the search for life to be one of the less interesting uses of space telescopes. Way behind -- making cool/beautiful/humbling images.
Or hitting a golf ball on the moon.
absolutely...also I'm not sure I agree with Sailer that we shouldn't blow up the moon or at least carve a monument into it. I bet Trump would fund a Mt. Rushmore mission to make his young face the Man in the Moon.
Maybe Jeff Bezos can chip in from his launch-my-wife-and-her-friends-into-sub- orbital-space-in-a-giant-dildo-budget.
That looks giant to you?
The New Shepard Dildo is 93 meters height and 7 meters width, which is one enormous vajayjay.
Ya- it doesn't come across on a polite web forum like this but my joke was implying that I have an enormous penis. I am ashamed of myself.
You are a horrible man
Mom?
Actually, it looks more like a Hitachi vibrator.
hehe
probably another nothing burger. Anyway Steve, have you heard or read the 1995 novel "The Killing Star"?
No, I really didn't read much sci-fi from after 1966's "Moon Is a Harsh Mistress." I've read several Stephenson novels and the Chinese "Three Body Problem," and enjoyed those, but most of my knowledge of sci-fi is from the Heinlein-Asimov-Bradbury-Clark golden age.
I read some post-Golden Age 1960s sci-fi like Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" and various Robert Silverberg books. But I didn't really like the post-censorship sci-fi as much as the more boyish stuff that came before. For example, I've never read any of Heinlein's novels from after he got over his cerebral problems of the late 1960s when he finally woke up and discovered that he was rich and famous from hippies like Charles Manson buying "Stranger In a Strange Land" and censorship was over and he could now write whatever twisted stuff he felt like.
Now that SpaceX, Boeing are basically taking over rockets, might there be an opportunity for some gazillionaire to find a viable commercial model to finance looking for green algae in our quadrant of the Milky Way?
Knowing Musk if he found a new galaxy he would probably name it Snickers.
I would think TwiX.
I have no idea why he would name it that but I like it.
We named a candy bar after a galaxy so let's start naming galaxies after candy bars.
We're not traveling interstellar distances. Hitting a stray space rock at relativistic speed is Game Over Man.
Regarding NASA, they spent $20 billion and were a decade late on JWST. But the JWST origami design, which had to minimize weight and volume, is no longer necessary in an Elon World of much lower launch costs.
The brilliant Casey Handmer has a plan.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/11/30/it-is-time-to-build-the-monster-scope/
There are many theoretical workarounds to the problem of space debris. Some of them — like sacrificial shields, mass drivers, and particle vaporizers — don't even require new physics.
We owe it to ourselves to try like we can do it.
Yeah, the power requirements and engineering seem brutally challenging. But hey, we've come a long way in just the last 1000 years. I should more optimistic. Who knows what will be possible in 3025.
It seems like searching for likely planets to colonize is doable in this century with reasonable advances in technology. For example, the James Webb space telescope is sensational.
But ... getting humans to planets we find promising will require vast improvements in technology. Future generations may or may not pull that off.
I wish them well.
I wouldn't mind if during what's left of my rather limited lifetime, we discovered a plausible planet to settle. I could die happy knowing we have a target, even though we'd have no idea yet how to get there.
Setting aside the physical problem of getting there, what about food? Or all of the bacteria and fungi necessary to make human life work? Proteins on earth are composed of the same 20 amino acids out of over 500 found in nature. Life around another star might use a different set, in which case food there, whether plant or animal, might not be digestible?
Panspermia might conceivably "solve" this problem. But really, so far as the possibility of space travel is concerned, Einstein's speed of light limit is all you need to know. It's not actually a speed limit (as laymen think of the term) as a fundamental constant of nature which, according astronomers (and again for reasons that I do not pretend to understand), can be shown to be the same throughout the observable universe.
Bottom line: Musk's dream of colonizing the Milky Way and beyond can be ruled out as a physical possibility now and forever. It makes me wonder about the sanity of this otherwise brilliant engineer?
You would have to build a planet-sized, self-sufficient biodome and send it off, never to return to Earth. Entire generations, civilizations would live and die on the planet-ship. The planet-ship would have the means to build and launch other planet-ships. Pretty challenging, but who knows what humans will be capable of in 5,000 years.
Who am I kidding. Humans will be half-mad, illiterate ferals slowly going extinct in 5,000 years. Or 500 years.
Not only pretty challenging, but the energy requirements to accelerate even tiny pieces of matter to near-speed-of-light are so astronomical, approaching infinity the closer you get -- look at the power requirements of the Cern Hadron accelerator, and that was just for protons!-- as to rule that out too.
To be accurate, they saw possible signs of life 120 years ago. Climate change was real back then, so who knows?
Unfortunately even a mass-conversion engine won't allow a ship to travel fast enough for relativity to make voyages much shorter for the passengers.
Total conversion of the entire ship's mass and converting all of the energy to kinetic energy to move it gets you to about 80% of the speed of light. At which point the time dilation factor is only about 0.5, i.e. for every year on the ship, 2 years pass on Earth.
This is...impractical. To approach this, let alone pass it you need an external engine.
Heinlein was handwaving this to write his story, as have a number of other authors.
Heinlein's peak as a novelist was 1952's "Starman Jones" when he was 45, but he badly screwed up Einstein's relativity theory. So he came back in 1955 with the more elegant "Time for the Stars." But he probably didn't get it all that right then, just more than in "Starman Jones."
The paper sounds like horseshit to me. While industrial chemists are also defined as life, the methods used to produce dimethyl sulfide commercially involve materials or conditions that are likely to be found in multiple places in our galaxy in a sphere 1000 light years radius.
I guess Musk's plan is to go and never come back?
I'm trying to get my head around they can tell at 120 light years away?
While "120 light years is really far" for humans or vehicles to physically travel, if even algae like primitive life form can be ascertained (say by detecting glucose or chlorophyll or amino acid like molecules), it will mean a lot. Universe as we know has billions of galaxies each with billions of stars. If 'algae' can be detected within a 'short' neighborhood of 120 light years in our own 'backyard' (Milky Way galaxy), it is very probable that advanced life forms, even intelligent ones may exist (or might have existed) in many places in the universe.