Space exploration: Where do we go from here?

[Handyman]

Humans will not be around in 4.5 billion years...

 

[Kepler]

Not sure how we prevent the sun from running out of hydrogen, and then expanding in size to envelop the earth.

Or how to violate known physics.

We've been seriously investigating physics for 500 years. Now let's do that 40M more times.

 

[Kepler]

Rockefeller & Carnegie are still the wealthiest people to ever live and it's not close. They literally had entire industries in their pockets.

They are also the one of the key reasons people realized that there needs to be an upper limit to wealth.

Rockefeller was calculated to control 3% of the wealth of one country. Mansa Musa supposedly controlled half the wealth of half the world.

 

[dxmnkd316]

Not sure how we prevent the sun from running out of hydrogen, and then expanding in size to envelop the earth.

Or how to violate known physics.

until only very recently, flying was but science fiction. Even science fiction has been around for a short time. Writing barely longer than that. Language barely longer yet.

Our definition of "Physics" is meaningless and has no bearing on the actual laws that govern the universe. "Physics" is only fixed on extremely short timeframes.

 

[MichVandal]

until only very recently, flying was but science fiction. Even science fiction has been around for a short time. Writing barely longer than that. Language barely longer yet.

Our definition of "Physics" is meaningless and has no bearing on the actual laws that govern the universe. "Physics" is only fixed on extremely short timeframes.

Except there have been flying animals and insects since well before humans walked the earth. The only thing preventing humans from doing it was understanding. We even knew it was possible to go faster than sound before we did it, as bullets had been doing well before the X-1.

Traveling faster than the speed of light is quite different than that. Mind you, we have been accelerating particles to very close to that for decades, and understand the energy required to do that for sub atomic particles. Time won’t change that.

 

[dxmnkd316]

Except there have been flying animals and insects since well before humans walked the earth. The only thing preventing humans from doing it was understanding. We even knew it was possible to go faster than sound before we did it, as bullets had been doing well before the X-1.

Traveling faster than the speed of light is quite different than that. Mind you, we have been accelerating particles to very close to that for decades, and understand the energy required to do that for sub atomic particles. Time won’t change that.

In our current understanding, yes.

 

[Kepler]

until only very recently, flying was but science fiction. Even science fiction has been around for a short time. Writing barely longer than that. Language barely longer yet.

Our definition of "Physics" is meaningless and has no bearing on the actual laws that govern the universe. "Physics" is only fixed on extremely short timeframes.

Exactly.

Physics isn't reality, it's twice removed: it's a model of the metaphysics that is prevalent. We'll keep gathering more data and we'll keep creating more comprehensive models and like I said, I'm an optimist. We'll figure it out.

 

[MichVandal]

We've been seriously investigating physics for 500 years. Now let's do that 40M more times.

Humans have been studying astronomy and physics for millennia. Just putting equations to them recently.

 

[Kepler]

Humans have been studying astronomy and physics for millennia. Just putting equations to them recently.

We've been gathering data for millennia. Most of our theorizing, until quite recently, was a colonoscopy on the Angry Man in the Sky.

But let's give us 10k years to be generous. OK. Now we do that 2,000,000 more times. With our technology and our ideas increasing in their power and explanatory value exponentially all during the time.

We aren't even ants yet, we are bacteria. We aren't even flatlanders, we are barely a point with no dimension.

 

[MichVandal]

Exactly.

Physics isn't reality, it's twice removed: it's a model of the metaphysics that is prevalent. We'll keep gathering more data and we'll keep creating more comprehensive models and like I said, I'm an optimist. We'll figure it out.

Ok. But the models are converging on some pretty drastic laws pertaining to speed and energy relative to long distance space travel.

 

[Kepler]

Ok. But the models are converging on some pretty drastic laws pertaining to speed and energy relative to long distance space travel.

"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." --Lord Kelvin, 1897

It is very likely that all of our known data and concepts are a tiny special case bounded by the temporary limitations of our current locality.

 

[MichVandal]

We've been gathering data for millennia. Most of our theorizing, until quite recently, was a colonoscopy on the Angry Man in the Sky.

But let's give us 10k years to be generous. OK. Now we do that 2,000,000 more times. With our technology and our ideas increasing in their power and explanatory value exponentially all during the time.

We aren't even ants yet, we are bacteria. We aren't even flatlanders, we are barely a point with no dimension.

Don’t bound your understanding of what people knew based on the history you have been told. People knew the earth wasn’t flat for millennia. And there were many groups of people who did appear to have a very strong understanding how things worked, but they lost out on who won the battles.

We are not smarter now than we have been, we just have a better way of recording info and passing it on.

 

[Kepler]

Don't bound your understanding of what people knew based on the history you have been told.

Uh... I'm not even sure where to begin, except to say I've read a few books in my life.

This conversation is starting to resemble this meme, and I think I'm out.

 

[LynahFan]

Don’t bound your understanding of what people knew based on the history you have been told. People knew the earth wasn’t flat for millennia. And there were many groups of people who did appear to have a very strong understanding how things worked, but they lost out on who won the battles.

We are not smarter now than we have been, we just have a better way of recording info and passing it on.

I do not come close to grasping your point. Congratulations to those guys who figured out the earth was round. How was their theory of quantum gravity? There exist realms of physics that they could not imagine, because they didn’t have even the most rudimentary instruments to observe them.

i guarantee that once our descendants develop dark matter detectors and then technologies that harness the physics of dark matter, they will look back at Einstein and marvel at how primitive was his understanding of “true physics.” And you’ll probably be there saying that some misunderstood grad student once knew something about dark matter but couldn’t make his prof listen.

 

[MichVandal]

I do not come close to grasping your point. Congratulations to those guys who figured out the earth was round. How was their theory of quantum gravity? There exist realms of physics that they could not imagine, because they didn’t have even the most rudimentary instruments to observe them.

i guarantee that once our descendants develop dark matter detectors and then technologies that harness the physics of dark matter, they will look back at Einstein and marvel at how primitive was his understanding of “true physics.” And you’ll probably be there saying that some misunderstood grad student once knew something about dark matter but couldn’t make his prof listen.

I’m sure they will. But that doesn’t make them smarter. It just means they are developing off of the smart people of our era. Like Einstein to Newton. Newton didn’t invent gravity just as the wright brothers didn’t invent aerodynamics. They just worked with with what others figured out before them.

Humans understood civil engineering way before engineering was a formal thing. Otherwise they would not have built the massive buildings in Rome or Athens or Egypt, etc.

BTW, just because we don’t fully understand gravity, or all of the observations that support dark matter and dark energy doesn’t mean we will be able to travel at the speed of light. The holes in our understanding of physics doesn’t point toward that ability, as far as I can see. Seems more like it will further constrain it.

 

[MichVandal]

Uh... I'm not even sure where to begin, except to say I've read a few books in my life.

This conversation is starting to resemble this meme, and I think I'm out.

You post as if it’s just European science that mattered. Or opinion. People understood more of what they observed that you want to give them credit for. All of the various empires over time didn’t form from aliens.

Steel was figured out in the Middle East hundreds of years before it was in Europe.

People have always been smart. Always. Again, what has changed is our ability to store information and pass it on. Meaning Newton built off of others work in math, Einstein built off of Newtons work along with advancements it math.

We are still governed by the same physics, our ability to understand them has expanded by our ability to observe and pass on that information. Dark matter (if it’s correct) existed prior to our sun starting to fuse hydrogen. We have been better able to observe its effects as we have learned about optics and electromagnetism.

And as we understand that, c is becoming an actual limit. And all of our observations back that up.