this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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The thing I hate about that phrase is it assumes technological progression magically stops for a BILLION years (then the sun becomes too bright and boils our water). If we go extinct it's not because the sun exploded but something else. If we survive the next billion years, we are going to be in fucking space.
This assumes that faster than light travel is possible. Without it humans will not be escaping the sun.
You dont have to go faster than light to get to another star. It's not easy but you couldn't possibly imagine a billion years of technological development.
What about those generational ships with closed ecosystems where people live and inbreed for hundreds of years until they reach another system?
You mean to say millions of years. The tech needed to accelerate enough to make the trip in hundreds of years is also far outside the realm of physics as we know it
The orion drive is basically an engineering challenge. Very little new tech required. It could reach nearby stars in hundreds of years with no new physics.
The problem isn't travel time, it's speed. Space itself is continuing to expand, at a faster and faster rate. It's expanding so fast that we'll actually never reach far out with conventional means. We'd just endlessly drift through the darkness because we wouldn't be able to go fast enough to reach anything. A generation ship would simply not be able to get anywhere, ever.
I mean, maybe we can make it into another very close system, but what are the chances that there's anything even close to being habitable?
On a local level the expansion of space cannot overcome gravitational attraction to a certain scale, roughly around the size of our local galaxy cluster. We'll always be able to reach anything in our local galaxy cluster without FTL travel.
Our galaxy is not ripping apart yet. And our galaxy is moving closer to several others. You can certainly get to other stars without FTL
Well, good luck then. We'll await your journey reports.
I'll get back to you in a million years. brb
Your sense of scale is off. The amount of stuff held together by local group gravity is more than we can ever get bored with.
The amount things that we can reach without FTL is so large that humans could explore and colonize for billions of years without ever feeling like we are running out of space.
if we started now we would have a billion year head start. we can play the tortoise in this race.
Even if ftl is fully off the table, a billion years of technology advancement is a... Lot. Like, we could probably just make a new sun at that point.
Not saying it's likely, the likely outcome is we go extinct because of our own dumb stuff