Taz writes:
Anyway, it kinda ticks me off everytime I see very smart people telling people about the impossibility/impracticality of interstellar travel. All their reasons are purely 20th/21st century science and technology. To loosely quote a science fiction character whose name I can't think of right now, there are a million ways we can travel vast distances in space without using the humongous amounts of energy predicted by current science, and most of them we can't even think of. To stamp our feet down and declare that it is simly impossible or impractical for humans to travel to lightyears away using our current level of technology is, I think, extremely arrogant. Again, the people of Kristofer Kolumbus' time never imagind there'd be 747's karrying hundrids of peepel halph wai around the worald in less than 2 days.
Hey, if you can figure out a way to exceed the speed of light, I'm all ears (or eyes). Sure people scoffed at human flight or lunar landings, but the state of the art in physics may be a bit trickier.
Perhaps you may be looking at the problem of interstellar flight from the wrong direction. If the human lifespan can be extended into thousands of years, what is a little trip to Altair that only takes a few hundred in the overall scheme of things? After all, one could get the latest in movies and music (as the speed of light permits) would be available for entertainment. Perhaps to spice things up, there could be a still, a few seeds of that killer BC/Amsterdam weed or psylocibin spores. Now the sexual selection may be a bit tight with only a few thousand to choose from, but I am sure one can match their standards to the environment as people have done throughout history.
Now I understand that there may be objections to this scenario as many fundamentalists who believe the 1950s are the ideal would prefer to send out an all-male crew to explore the universe but I am afraid that during several hundred years of spaceflight some may get bored with just dancing backwards.
More to the point, I would find it very surprising if life does not exist within Europa, Ganymede, and now even Mars considering the environments where life manages to thrive here on earth. Just need to dig down under the surface.
Edited by anglagard, : correct a mispelling
Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider - Francis Bacon
The more we understand particular things, the more we understand God - Spinoza
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