And that comment only gives a measure of the quality of your attitude and thinking.
Musk has made rocket stages which could return to land and be reused.
If anything the Tesla in space shows more of a penchant for showmanship than delusion or an inability to accomplish revolutionary technological feats.
That depends on what people expect from such an effort. To be sure there are far more difficulties than most people imagine. In some ways it is easier to colonize space itself where we can put stations closer to the sun for power and agriculture and more easily give them a rotation for a better imitation of the proper amount of gravity.
But your nay-saying, without a proper assessment of what is possible and what is not possible, is as unrealistic as many science fiction portrayals of Mars colonization.
For most things, like the alchemical dream of turning lead into gold, it is not really a question of whether we can do them but whether they are ultimately worthwhile. We CAN make a colony on Mars just as we CAN turn lead into gold. But will it be any more worth the effort in the end? Maybe not.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
22
Nonsense. It isn’t going to happen any more than economic nuclear fusion ever is or interstellar communication. As you agree.
I only MIGHT agree if you carefully explain exactly WHAT is not going to happen.
Economic nuclear fusion? I wouldn’t bet on that one as an impossibility. To be sure fusion reactors are a dam site more difficult than fusion bombs. But naysaying at this point looks more foolish to me. Looks to me like this is still an active area of research. Why it looks like they are building a fusion reactor in southern France. I don’t think we can say that this effort will certainly fail. Clearly a lot of people don’t think so.
Interstellar communication? Perhaps you left out some qualifier, because interstellar communication already exists in the sense that we get all kinds of information from other stars. Now if you had said faster than light communication then I would have agreed with you. And that certainly means no interstellar telephones, because communication with the nearest star to our own is going to take 4.3 years each way, and 8.6 years is quite a long wait for a reply.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
24
Carefully: nobody has a spare hundred trillion dollars. And I wouldn’t trust a rocket man who can’t produce cars effectively.
[Get the space elevator working and we’re in business. That’s impossible but infinitely more probable than]
Fusion. Containment. Sorry: C . O . N . T . A . I . N . M . E . N . T There is no economic fusion plant anywhere and never, that’s never, will be. OOOH! Are you telling me that the French have overcome the eternally unsolvable 70 year containment problem without telling anyone else? That they are now the masters of the universe? I know they always thought so.
So, all radiation is communication is it [because it carries ‘information’ in the form of quanta]? The nearest civilizations will be in the 1-10 kly range. And, again, nobody, anywhere, ever, can build a transmitter powerful enough for 2 orders of magnitude, call it a useless 3, less.
I remember a university electrical engineering professor telling us that fusion is (and always will be) about 30 years in the future. (And it was about 30 years ago he told us that.)
[We can use fusion to make things “go boom”, but cannot use it to make anything “go putt-putt-putt” - was his technical way of putting it.]
Dick was very perceptive conceptually. Much of his material might be considered “obsolete,” but the basic concepts were intriguing. It was good fodder to flesh out.
His stories have been adapted into quite a few movies:
The Adjustment Bureau
Minority Report
Total Recall
Bladerunner (of course)
A Scanner Darkly
I agree on the space elevator! That would be a feat and would keep us from having to “push stuff backwards really fast to move forward.”
To what degree is it “impossible but infinitely more probable” than fusion reaction to generate usable power? Do you have a ratio?
Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars)? He describes a space elevator in that series, as well as some of the incredible risks…
Space elevator? Now that one sounds absurd to me. I can be a naysayer on that idea. A real tower of Babylon – that one!
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
30
Aye fmiddel. Loved them. Believed them! He surpasses himself with Aurora.
From the conclusion of this - one has to search on: ‘On the strength of the space elevator cable - arXiv’ - despite the false hope in the introduction, it’s hopeless. Economic nuclear fusion isn’t even wrong. Without both, we’re going nowhere. Ever.
The fusion reactor they are building in France is a European Union plus six other countries collaboration. And to be sure the purpose is experimental not economic. They hope to demonstrate that they can produce more energy than is put into it… but… only for 20 minutes. It uses magnetic confinement. So in any case, nobody is saying there are no problems to overcome.
But there is a big difference between things we simply don’t know how to do and things which science shows to be impossible. Faster than light is impossible – not even logically coherent in the structure of space-time, and all the scientific revolutions of Thomas Kuhn’s imagination are not going to change that fact.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
36
I feel your pain ; ) nearly as bad as Bank’s Against A Dark Background. The US & Chinese will talk about militarizing the Moon, but won’t, that’s it. We’ll make ever better probes for Europa et al, that’s it. Our technology will creep up until we can detect biogenic oxygen on an extrasolar planet, that’s it (which can change nothing here or elsewhere in fundamentalism). Nothing else. Ever. An array of radio telescopes in Earth orbit? Hubble III? Fiddling while… Ohhhhhhh yes! Remember global warming anyone? THAT’S it!
No… all the exotic mass and energy we can imagine will make no difference whatsoever. Faster than light is not logically coherent at all. PERIOD. Frankly the best way to understand this is that the speed of light is simply how we perceive an infinite speed. It is not a speed limit at all. You can go faster and faster without limit spending more and more energy without limit and go places as quickly as you would like… it is just that from everyone else’s point of view you never get to the speed of light.
Let me repeat part of that. You can go to the nearest star as fast as you would like. You can theoretically go to the nearest star, Apha Centauri, in only seconds. It would take many many times your mass energy to do so. But you could theoretically do that. But those here on Earth watching will never see you go faster than light. and thus 4.3 years will pass on Earth even though for you only seconds have passed. Like I said it is the structure of space-time itself and the way time and space are put together. Going faster than light leads to logical contradictions and thus is the stuff of a complete dream-world only, where you don’t have to make any sense whatsoever.
But there might be options (fanciful perhaps) that let us transcend vast distances without traveling at or faster than the speed of light “in our universe.” Ideas like wormholes, hyperspace, or whatever.
Kind of…never say never.
Man was never meant to fly.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
40
Always say never when it’s staring you in the face. Fermi was right for the wrong reason.