Image via Wikipedia
Brian Wang provides some more insight:
The 100-Year Starship study is trying to create a vision that makes business sense yet will motivate generations to development and create manned interstellar spaceflight. Develop a business case and an enduring organization.
The 100-Year Starship study will examine the business model needed to develop and mature a technology portfolio enabling long-distance manned spaceflight a century from now. This goal will require sustained investments of intellectual and financial capital from a variety of sources. The yearlong study aims to develop a construct that will incentivize and facilitate private co-investment to ensure continuity of the lengthy technological time horizon needed.
This is starting to sound interesting. On the one hand, I love the idea of long-term, multi-generational projects. We need a lot more of that sort of thing.
On the other hand, how can we prepare for a technological accomplishment 100 years from now? Imagine the world of 1910 planning a trip to the moon, which of course occured only 59 years later. How could people living in a world where steam-powered locomotives and ships were the height of technology, a world that had only known airplanes for seven years, possibly come up with a working model for getting to the moon?
Actually, Jules Verne outlined a plan for getting to the moon in 1865, which we can round off to an even century before Apollo 11, nearly 40 years before the Wright brothers made their first flight. Sure, Verne got some pretty important stuff wrong, but it’s intriguing how much he got right. So maybe trying to outline a spacefaring project 100 years hence isn’t a bad idea – as long as we keep it pretty broad and don’t get married to details like method of propulsion. (Verne proposed a cannon firing a space capsule in the form of a huge artillery shell.)
But there’s a wrinkle: technological acceleration. The year 2110 may be a much more remote future from here than 2010 was from 1910. Even if the “big S” singularity doesn’t occur between now and then — in which case all bets are off – a few developments in nanotechnology and energy production could render our most lucid scenarios as quaint as Verne’s cannon.
