The Accidental Weblog

Wow, this is exciting, but since I missed my date with landing on the moon nearly forty-two years, I’ve lost interest in visiting other planets myself. There is still plenty to see and do here on the Cool Green Hills of Earth.
But in the future, it will be necessary for humanity to spread to the stars. Question is,how do we get there. With no FTL drive on the drawing board, generational ships may be the answer. Do we send the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Not likely, we send our best and brightest. By accelerating to near-light speed, the time the travelers will have spent on any voyage will be greatly shortened. What to use for reaction mass: interstellar gasses.
All this has been addressed in science fiction stories since the 1940s. The technology to do all this may well exist; the will to do it is in question.

Dunno. Believe I’ve opined as much previously, but there’s a whole lot of problems with sending the poor huddled masses over distances like that. Like if the place is halfway seasonable, there’s probably already a biology there, not necessarily real compatible with ours. Like the energy budgets for that kind of travel make it kind of insane.

I can see the sense in putting our genome other places in maybe the much longer run. The ‘eggs in multiple baskets’ notion. But as a valve on poverty and overcrowding here, the basic physics doesn’t particularly recommend interstellar travel. If we’ve got the wherewithal to send large, living bipeds to Betelgeuse, we’ve probably also got the wherewithal to come up with additional habitable space for them also picking up flux from Sol. Or, far better, just manage our own ecology wisely enough that it’s not such a problem.

But still, yes, insanely exciting. Game changer in every way. And even if it was increasingly in the cards, of late, there’s nothing like this kind of confirmation.