Semi-OT: We will go to Stars.

[Randallw]

Originally posted by Alneyan:
Ah, but the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy provides with the perfect answer to this problem. Let's see: there is nothing faster than light, save for bad news, whose speed is subject to completely different laws (*). Such are the words of wisdom contained in the Guide.

What do you build the bad news powered ships out of to stand the stress of travelling so fast?. I know, build it from the same material they use for little girls dolls. Since at the site of every plane crash there is a little girls doll miraculously unharmed the material must be the strongest known to man. .
But seriously. I read on a news site that Stephen Hawking has changed his mind about all matter being sucked into blackholes.
I found the following link
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996151
Perusing the link shows me that I don't exactly understand the point, but my own point is that if Stephen Hawking can admit he was wrong perhaps Einstein might have been wrong about the limit to the speed of light. I am no physicist so I can make no argument, merely point out the possibility of a mistake.

[FLX]

I think that you're giving it a bad focus.
Why do WE have to be abe to reach stars?, if we can travel at 0'01·C, then none of us will reach Alpha Centauri... but if you can build a self sufficient vessel, with an habitable biosphere, maybe the gradchilds of our grandchilds could settle in a far distant world. The matter is NOT lifespan, a human individual cannot live forever and i hope we never reach that point, but the HUMAN beeings can, as specie .

[dogscoff]

Really? But what can you say about Antarctida? It's much more human friendly than Mars (plenty of air and water) but it's not colonized. Where are whose famous pioneers you're reffering to?
Another example - ocean bottom: whole new Earth to explore.

Antartctica is protected by loads of treaties and various international (dis)agreements, otherwise governments would have had people living there by the thousand and exploiting the resources decades ago, but point taken, and the same could be said of various deserts and other inhospitable places around the planet.

However there are plenty of dispossessed, persecuted, oppressed, evacuated or just plain unhappy people in the world who'd love to set up their own little societies in those places, given the opportunity- it's just that they are all too damn poor to (a) get there and (b) buy the equipment they'd need to survive once they do. Those people who could afford (a) and (b) are quite comfortable where they are, thanks very much. After all, if you can afford to colonise Antarctica, you can afford a cosy little house in the first world somewhere.

However this will change. The "richer" populations of the world are fragmenting into lots and lots of little subcultures and subsets of subcultures. As populations increase and with improved communications to bring like-minded folk together, even fairly obscure subGroups can number in the thousands and actually look and behave like real communities. What I'm getting around to is that some of these Groups will inevitably splinter from 'mainstream' society, being dissatisfied with the politics or economics they live under or whatever. And these are people from the rich parts of the world, so as the prices of space/ Antarctic colonisation come down they will actually have the money to go off and try to set up their own societies here and there.
I remember reading about one internet community a while back that was raising money to build an artificial island in the middle of some ocean and set up their own nation. I don't think they got very far, but they had a lot of members and it shows that the intent is there.

Hell, if you won the lottery, wouldn't you
be tempted to found your own little city-state of like-minded people somewhere? (Do a google for the "The World" project- a kind of real-life Magrathea off the coast of Dubai, where they are building designer paradise islands for celebrities.)

I don't belive into the exploring nature of humanity anymore. It's exhausted.

No it isn't, it's just that we don't have much left unexplored on this planet, so that instinct doesn't have much of an outlet now.

[Makinus]

about my earlier affirmation, the speed of photons traveling in opposite directions was explained already by other, but the Quantum Entanglement theori was not.

I found the following article in eikipedia that explains what Quantum Entanglement is and what are its consequences:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

According to the article Quantum Entanglement is possible, but because of the imposibility of defining the way in wich an entangled particle colapses it is impossible to transmit any kind of information using this method, some scientists provide possible solutions for this barrier but the general consensus is that these "solutions" have their own impossibilities and can´t be used to transmit information in FTL speeds...

So Oleg was right and i was wrong, because while Quantum Entanglement really exists and 2 entangled particles can change states simultaniously over huge distances in a FTL way, this method can´t be used to transmit information because you cant predict in wich state the entangled particle will collapse...

[Makinus]

dogscoff: about you idea of sendin AI controlled ships to other stars, you know a novel called "Songs of Distant Earth"?

In this novel Robotic ships carrying human genetic material are sent to other stars, where robots will create human beings "in vitro" and grow and teach them to adulthood, and then the humans would take control and colonize the world...

[Randallw]

Many years ago I read a novel where the humans had been transported by robot ship in vitro then grown at the new system. Later in the novel the female lead finds out the enemy humans on the other planet includes men. She wonders why the women on the other planet would do something as superflous as grow men when its more efficient to only raise women.

[Yimboli]

Correct me if I am mistaken: You cannot go faster than the speed of light through a *vacuum*. You can, however, go faster than the speed of light through a different medium, such as water. Water slows the speed of light significantly, and you can make a particle go faster than how fast light goes through water - and weird things happen.

Yes? No?