Give it up, Anakin, I have the high ground

By | October 5, 2010
2 Comments
Digital art by Les Bossinas (Cortez III Servic...

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Brian Wang has some additional thoughts on potential technologies for starship propulsion. There’s no shortage of possible approaches, that’s for sure. It turns out that the star drive used in Avatar is a plausible choice — who knew?

While some are dismissing interstellar travel as hopelessly unrealistic and/or pointless, Brian begs to differ. We need to be at a different level of technological and economic development in order to seriously consider mounting such an effort, but Brian says there’s a way to get there. It begins with, of all things, weather control:

If we have moderate levels of molecular nanotech or really push non-molecular nanotech so that we can make 20 million tons of the balloons for the Hall Weather control machine

The balloon needs to be somewhere between a millimeter and a centimeter
in size. It has a very thin shell of diamond, maybe just a nanometer
thick. It’s round, and it has inside it an equatorial plane that is a
mirror. If you squished it flat, you would only have a few nanometers
thick of material. Although you could build a balloon out of materials
that we build balloons out of now, it would not be economical for what
I’m going to use it for.

Then that also gives us Kardashev level 1. Current world energy
usage and generation is at about 20 terawatts. Getting all solar power
means about 2000-5000 times current power levels. We would be 1000
times richer and able to spend 1000 times more on space without
increasing the fraction of the overall economy to space. The overall
fraction is about 2 million to 20 million times less than overall
energy and resources.

Currently about 12% of the respondents to our survey on motivations for star travel say that we’ll never go. Presumably, several of these folks are transhumanists who predict that the singularity will give us new projects to work on and that implementing the mega-engineering required to achieve the Kardashev levels will be thought a poor use of resources.

And they could be on to something. If we’re all uploaded cyber beings, there are easier ways of getting around in deep space than building massive starships. But then we may not all go that direction. A remnant of mostly original substrate humanity might decide to develop such technology — if their robot / transhuman overlords allow them to, that is.

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  • stephentg

    The physical requirements of a physical human body are a tough one to provide for on a generations-long mission to (even) the nearest stars.

    And then, once you get there, will there be a planet like Earth that could allow an human to live comfortably? Not likely.

    Von Neumann probes look more likely to me.

  • kc3ddd

    There’s a saying, “Once you’ve escaped earth’s gravity, your’e halfway to anywhere.” Because that is the hardest part of any space voyage.

    So, just in case some of you didn’t see this story about a
    British aerospace company that says they will build a true space plane in ten years, here’s the link:

    http://www.theengineer.co.uk/in-depth/analysis/out-of-this-world/1004713.article

    I wonder if in ten to fifteen years, we will have the technology so that the fuel to escape gravity doesn’t have to be carried but is transmitted aboard as needed. That would make it a lot easier.