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200 years seems very likely for at least a colonization of the moon.

biccat wrote:

FITZZ wrote:Seriously...any life on other worlds will rue the day the populace of Earth seeks to "branch out and expand".

Should that stop us from branching out and expanding? What deference do we owe to other species "right to exist"?

Oh of course not, after all, we as a species have spent eons perfecting the art of fething each other over in one way or another...no reason our "Manifest Destiny" should remain Earthbound.

Agreed. If anything, we could teach other species the art of back stabbery. Kindda like missionaries but instead of peace its about how to get as much out of others for yourself as possible by doing as little as possible.



Im also with Melissia, 200 years we will have some folks living on the moon. Thats plenty far enough out to say itll happen, unless something terrible happens to the Earth zombie APOC style. Fingers are crossed. Toes too

I'd say a thousand.

Maybe.

The day you can make space travel/living comfortable is the day you get a colony.

I like how someone noted it was like the eldar fall.. We just need to build a webway.

I'm really interested in when people think we'll achieve FTL travel.

We've never been able to predict the future, particularly when it comes to technology; we should be cruising around in flying cars by now, according to 50's serials.

We seem to advance quicker in areas which make money (consumer electronics) than things which may be of potential use to the advancement of mankind.

As I said, it's hard to predict. The cynic in me thinks we won't have FTL travel ever. The slightly less cynical part reckons a thousand years. But the one who's come to expect the unexpected reckons it may only be 100 years....

biccat wrote:

KingCracker wrote:Looking back on History....that WILL happen. It seems to work out for the better most the time lately but uh....it hasnt always ended well

We're going to blow up Mars again? Haven't they suffered enough?

Self-sufficiency on Mars will be interesting since it will basically depend on when the initial settlement of Mars occurs. If settlement is in the near future and intersteller mining and transport of material isn't economically feasable (i.e. Earth still has plenty of resources), then Mars' self-sufficiency will be a good thing since it will reduce the draw from Earth. At that point the Earthians probably wouldn't have a problem with Mars seceding.

But if Mars is settled in the far future as a mining colony, Earth would take great offense to a self-suffiency movement on Mars, especailly if Earth is dependent upon Martian shipments for basic resources.

The secret is to make them dependent on oxygen. Its all about the oxygen baby.
Didn't the Arnoldator teach you anything?

GazzyG wrote:I'm really interested in when people think we'll achieve FTL travel.

We've never been able to predict the future, particularly when it comes to technology; we should be cruising around in flying cars by now, according to 50's serials.

We seem to advance quicker in areas which make money (consumer electronics) than things which may be of potential use to the advancement of mankind.

As I said, it's hard to predict. The cynic in me thinks we won't have FTL travel ever. The slightly less cynical part reckons a thousand years. But the one who's come to expect the unexpected reckons it may only be 100 years....

Flying car has been possible for years. It's just not really practical. Think about it, every time there is car accident or a car on the road. In a flying car you are not going to be able to pull over to a nice stop and your gonna crash into something pretty good.

The biggest problem with space colonization is that it's really expensive to do and there isn't much reason to do it. People move where there is opportunity (usually economic) for them, they don't try to expand just to arbitrarily fill space - there are plenty of ghost towns in the Western US and cities like Detroit with huge swathes of unoccupied buildings, but you don't see lots of people packing up to move to those spots. Having people live on mars or in an orbital hab is cool, but unfortunately just doesn't make sense to do on any large scale.

GazzyG wrote:I'm really interested in when people think we'll achieve FTL travel.

FTL travel would require throwing out a lot of current physics and adding a lot of completely new physics. It's not a matter of just sorting out some minor problems, or refining an old theory in a new domain, you have to completely trash a huge chunk of established knowledge to manage practical FTL. It's not just 'oh, find a way around relativity', even with just newtonian mechanics and a perfectly efficient engine you need a ship with around 95% of it's mass as fuel just to accelerate up to C and back down again one time. "Achieve FTL travel" is really "achieve a way to create really incredible amounts of energy out of nothing" for anything that's not some sort of teleportation.

Unfortunately, FTL is really just wishful thinking, it's not just a matter of refining something we can already do until it's good enough.

We've never been able to predict the future, particularly when it comes to technology; we should be cruising around in flying cars by now, according to 50's serials.

It's perfectly possible to make flying cars, the problem is that they're wildly impractical. They're way more expensive than conventional cars to make, use an order of magnitude more fuel, require far more traffic control, require lots of new infrastructure (landing pads and the like), are far more dangerous in an accident, and are far more useful as a terrorist weapon. It would probably be possible to power one with nuclear power like they did in a lot of old SF, but that's expensive to develop, dangerous, and EXTREMELY politically unpopular.

They're really one of those things that sound really cool to think about but just don't work in practice. It's like video phones - the technology is there, cheap, and readily available, but actual video calls are rare. People prefer to just talk or text (which is really a throwback to telegraphs), we don't want video for every conversation the way old SF did.

For colonization of the moon, I would say within 70 years. (Not like cities, but maybe some permanent stuff like research bases.) For actual cities, etc, I would say 150 for the moon, 200 for mars, or maybe even sooner.


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Brother Coa wrote:How long time will pass before Mankind start colonizing planets?
We have several serious claims:

-Russians and Chinese are planing Moon base by 2030.
-US are planing man to Mars until 2040.

What do you guys think? My opinion is that we won't colonize Moon or Mars until 2100, maybe somewhere in the middle of 2100's.
And we won't colonize other stars until we find some FTL technology that can give us some reasonable time to get to the nearest star ( less than 4 years ).
So what do you think?

There is the idea of a generation ship for interstellar travel. Just throwin that out there. (Generations of crewmembers live and die aboard the ship before it reaches it's destination.)

GalacticDefender wrote:There is the idea of a generation ship for interstellar travel. Just throwin that out there. (Generations of crewmembers live and die aboard the ship before it reaches it's destination.)

The thing about that is there's no need to bother with a destination. Since a generation ship is just a space habitat with engines, why not make the ship your home and just make stops once in a while to replentish supplies? If you've got a ship comfortable enough for people to spend their whole life on board, it doesn't seem like you need to stop and make a 'permanent' home somewhere else.

I think that the typical SF 'find planets and colonize them' just isn't going to happen, even if we manage to get easy FTL. I think space habitats and things like permanent generation ships are far more likely, since they have so many advantages. You can build them a bit at a time, can merge and split units based on political changes, it's easier to collect solar power and minterals from the solar system, space travel is way easier with no gravity well, and so on. This is even more true if, as it appears, planets earthlike enough that you can survive in jeans and a t-shirt are rare or nonexistent.

BearersOfSalvation wrote:

GalacticDefender wrote:There is the idea of a generation ship for interstellar travel. Just throwin that out there. (Generations of crewmembers live and die aboard the ship before it reaches it's destination.)

The thing about that is there's no need to bother with a destination. Since a generation ship is just a space habitat with engines, why not make the ship your home and just make stops once in a while to replentish supplies? If you've got a ship comfortable enough for people to spend their whole life on board, it doesn't seem like you need to stop and make a 'permanent' home somewhere else.

I think that the typical SF 'find planets and colonize them' just isn't going to happen, even if we manage to get easy FTL. I think space habitats and things like permanent generation ships are far more likely, since they have so many advantages. You can build them a bit at a time, can merge and split units based on political changes, it's easier to collect solar power and minterals from the solar system, space travel is way easier with no gravity well, and so on. This is even more true if, as it appears, planets earthlike enough that you can survive in jeans and a t-shirt are rare or nonexistent.

Energy is limited. You couldn't sustain an entire society indefinitely on one ship. You would have to time it just right, so people don't run out of resources for survival halfway though the trip or something. You could last for an extremely long time on one ship, but not forever. It is also a heck of a lot easier to settle down on some rock somewhere than to build everything yourself. The main structure you need (the surface of a planet) is already there. And millions or even billions of people I just do not see living on a space habitat. (maybe millions, but not billions). Planets are just easier to colonize than open space. (providing they have at least partially good conditions. I'm not saying colonizing venus would be easier than building a free floating colony)

Although I do think colonization for the sake of colonization is unlikely. There would be a reason of some sort, like mining or even cultural differences.

GalacticDefender wrote:Energy is limited. You couldn't sustain an entire society indefinitely on one ship. You would have to time it just right, so people don't run out of resources for survival halfway though the trip or something. You could last for an extremely long time on one ship, but not forever.

You can't sustain anything indefinitely anywhere, eventually the 2nd law of thermodynamics catches up to you. You can put your ship into orbit around a star and use solar power or gather hydrogen to power fusion engines and last as long as any society orbiting that star can, then when the star nears the end of it's life you just move on to another one. There isn't any limit to how long you could last on one ship, because nothing stops you from bringing power or materials back to it.

It is also a heck of a lot easier to settle down on some rock somewhere than to build everything yourself. The main structure you need (the surface of a planet) is already there. And millions or even billions of people I just do not see living on a space habitat. (maybe millions, but not billions). Planets are just easier to colonize than open space. (providing they have at least partially good conditions. I'm not saying colonizing venus would be easier than building a free floating colony)

From what we've seen, rocky planets are more like venus or mars than like 'an ecosystem completely compatible earth's that produces an atmosphere with just the right amount of oxygen for us and no toxic byproducts but with no intelligent life'. Even on earth, there's very little area that you can live year round with just 'the surface of a planet' as a structure, you need shelter from storms, cold, and the sun, so I really don't think having some rock in another solar system would help. You're going to need places to grow food, recycle air, recycle water, generate power, manufacture goods, and so on - all of which you need to create whether you're on the ground or in space. I don't see anything that's actually easier about colonizing a planet than space unless the planet is absurdly close to earthlike. And to top it off, if you're able to travel to another planet, you're going to be traveling there in a working habitat, which gives you a place to start!

Making one gigantic habitat and trying to shove billions of people into it would be pretty dumb with realistic materials, but there's no reason to stick to one single structure. With millions of orbiting structures, you can support populations up to the point that you start to run out of metals in the solar system for building habs.

BearersOfSalvation wrote: Unfortunately, FTL is really just wishful thinking, it's not just a matter of refining something we can already do until it's good enough.

No-one said it was. But with quantum science advancing every day, who knows whether a lot of current physics rules won't be well and truly rendered obselete in the near future? The rules of physics don't govern what happens, they describe what we observe to happen. If what we observe changes, then the rules have to be rewritten to accommodate this. To assume that this will never happen is to assume that we currently know everything. Which, you'll have to agree, is laughable.

It's perfectly possible to make flying cars, the problem is that they're wildly impractical. They're way more expensive than conventional cars to make, use an order of magnitude more fuel, require far more traffic control, require lots of new infrastructure (landing pads and the like), are far more dangerous in an accident, and are far more useful as a terrorist weapon. It would probably be possible to power one with nuclear power like they did in a lot of old SF, but that's expensive to develop, dangerous, and EXTREMELY politically unpopular.

They're really one of those things that sound really cool to think about but just don't work in practice. It's like video phones - the technology is there, cheap, and readily available, but actual video calls are rare. People prefer to just talk or text (which is really a throwback to telegraphs), we don't want video for every conversation the way old SF did.

I don't know why people are seizing upon this literally. It was thrown in there as an example of how people in the past saw the future and how wrong it was. Nothing more. I could've picked on food pills, travelators, hoverboards, ray guns - you name it.

Personally, I'm quite an optimist when it comes to mankind's ability to discover and create. Current physics doesn't allow FTL travel - I heartedly agree with this. But 150 years ago, respected scientists thought that travelling faster than 30mph would cause you a heart attack. Nowadays we laugh at such notions. As we, in turn, shall be laughed at in the future for our inability to see the obvious.

In danger of becoming labeld as a non beliver in this mather, I voted that we will destroy ourself before we managed to get to another world. But hey, we do need a new thing to waste money& time on so go ahead.

Trondheim wrote:In danger of becoming labeld as a non beliver in this mather, I voted that we will destroy ourself before we managed to get to another world. But hey, we do need a new thing to waste money& time on so go ahead.

I don't know that we'll destroy ourselves (though I suppose it's possiable), I just think we have more than enough " Earthbound" problems to attempt to solve before we worry about "Who get's to play Capt. Kirk" and spread " Humanity" to the stars.

GazzyG wrote:No-one said it was. But with quantum science advancing every day, who knows whether a lot of current physics rules won't be well and truly rendered obselete in the near future? The rules of physics don't govern what happens, they describe what we observe to happen. If what we observe changes, then the rules have to be rewritten to accommodate this. To assume that this will never happen is to assume that we currently know everything. Which, you'll have to agree, is laughable.

The smart money is not on all of current physics being rendered obsolete in the near futre. The problem is that science is build up by describing lots of things that we observe, it's not just that some guy thinks up an idea, other scientists say 'that's cool', and they slap it into a textbook. Science fictional FTL travel runs utterly counter to lots of observations about how the universe works, and not just obscure theoretical stuff that doesn't do anything, but really basic things like 'conservation of mass-energy', and theory used to come up with numbers to make GPS work. It's just not a matter of discovering a little edge cases are slightly different and so need some special handling.

Current physics states clearly that there are things we don't know yet, so even if we assume current physical theories are 100% accurate in what they describe, that's wouldn't be an assumption that we know everything.

Personally, I'm quite an optimist when it comes to mankind's ability to discover and create. Current physics doesn't allow FTL travel - I heartedly agree with this. But 150 years ago, respected scientists thought that travelling faster than 30mph would cause you a heart attack. Nowadays we laugh at such notions. As we, in turn, shall be laughed at in the future for our inability to see the obvious.

That's a load of crap, 150 years ago people had been riding horses for millennia, and no one with any sense thought that taking a horse to a gallop would cause you to have a heart attack. The argument of 'well, because people used to believe this silly thing all scientific knowledge is wrong' doesn't work when the silly thing is something no one believed, or one fruitcake said, or someone sort of said but the quote was badly out of context, or someone said 'we don't understand how this works' instead of 'that's impossible', or someone said 'we can't make something that does that' instead of 'that's impossible.'

Um, no the idea that traveling faster than a horse would kill a person was accepted. Y'know, cause trains and cars would create such a shock that the heart would stop. And babies be stillborn, and etc etc.

OT I voted 200 as I think the tech will get there and human greed will follow.

GalacticDefender wrote:There is the idea of a generation ship for interstellar travel. Just throwin that out there. (Generations of crewmembers live and die aboard the ship before it reaches it's destination.)

Why would it be a generation ship? We'll have solved the pesky degeneration from aging thing long before we reach the point of feasible interstellar travel, seeing as how the former could come as soon as the next couple of decades, while the latter is closer to a century off, at the least.

BearersOfSalvation wrote:

GalacticDefender wrote:There is the idea of a generation ship for interstellar travel. Just throwin that out there. (Generations of crewmembers live and die aboard the ship before it reaches it's destination.)

The thing about that is there's no need to bother with a destination. Since a generation ship is just a space habitat with engines, why not make the ship your home and just make stops once in a while to replentish supplies? If you've got a ship comfortable enough for people to spend their whole life on board, it doesn't seem like you need to stop and make a 'permanent' home somewhere else.

I think that the typical SF 'find planets and colonize them' just isn't going to happen, even if we manage to get easy FTL. I think space habitats and things like permanent generation ships are far more likely, since they have so many advantages. You can build them a bit at a time, can merge and split units based on political changes, it's easier to collect solar power and minterals from the solar system, space travel is way easier with no gravity well, and so on. This is even more true if, as it appears, planets earthlike enough that you can survive in jeans and a t-shirt are rare or nonexistent.

Expansion wouldn't be about finding more territory to live in, but about disseminating humanity throughout the Galaxy. Having a physical presence on planets would be part of that, though the notion of colonization as we think of it now might be far obsolete, so such a presence could be largely or entirely mechanical labor, harvesting resources or reshaping the face of a world for the controllers' amusement. The romantic idea of nomads or weary settlers trying to start a new life is rather unrealistic compared to the far more likely scenario that the humans in question would be closer to living gods (sufficiently advanced technology and all that) than they would be to modern humans, and so would have rather unfathomable goals by modern standpoints. Assuming humans are still around and it's not just a living god created by them that's spreading itself through the galaxy, of course, which would make its motivations even more unfathomable.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:Expansion wouldn't be about finding more territory to live in, but about disseminating humanity throughout the Galaxy. Having a physical presence on planets would be part of that, though the notion of colonization as we think of it now might be far obsolete, so such a presence could be largely or entirely mechanical labor, harvesting resources or reshaping the face of a world for the controllers' amusement.

But why would anyone care about having a physical presence on planets? If your goal is spreading throughout the galaxy, you can do that better without wasting time on planetary surfaces. You've already solved the problems involved in living in space by the time you get to another star system. On the low end of technology it's just extra work to go down into and out of a gravity well and deal with weather and earthquakes and the like, you're better off harvesting what you need elsewhere. On the high end, a planet is a very inefficient structure, you can get much more use out of it by disassembling it and making a bunch of engineered things instead of one gigantic ball of rock (and breaking up a planet for parts is probably easier to pull off than most SF terraforming projects).

I just don't see significant colonization (or other sorts of presence) on planetary surfaces unless you force it by making up carefully tuned technology. Once you can live comfortably in space, you can expand and trade and play and whatever else you want to do there. I agree with the rest of what you've said, the problem for most SF is that writing about godlike transcended humans is a bit difficult and doesn't offer much connection with modern-day humans.

mrwhoop wrote:Um, no the idea that traveling faster than a horse would kill a person was accepted. Y'know, cause trains and cars would create such a shock that the heart would stop. And babies be stillborn, and etc etc.

1832: The American No. 1 was the first 4-4-0, the first of its class. It was capable of regular speeds of 60 mph with its 9.5" by 16" cylinders. Designed by John B. Jervis, Chief Engineer for the Mohawk & Hudson.

30mph is just a galloping horse, the fastest horses actually get up to the low 40s, so 30mph is just 'as fast as a horse', not faster than a horse. The speed record for a human sprinting is something like 27mph, so 30mph is only a little bit more than 'faster than a person can run'. Respected scientists who worked with biology or physics didn't believe that riding a fast horse would kill you. I'll certainly believe that idiots may have published or said nonsense, and that some of the idiots might even be scientists in unrelated fields, but there's no way that scientists who's science had anything to do with the topic believed that.

Just doing a quick google search for train speeds shows that 49 years before 150 years ago there were trains capable of a regular speed double the 'instant death' speed that you claim scientists believed in, and in England in the 1860s (the decade before 150 years ago) average train speeds were 35-40mph without mass deaths.

Good, I see that you are deciding between Mass Effect and Fallout. I personally thing that we won't destroy our-self, and if nothing else we will just progress....

If you wan't prof - just see 1963. We could destroy our civilization back then. Now we can only progress forward. And why do you think that Warp Barrier is impossible to breach? Same thing they said about men fly, and see now.

Brother Coa wrote:Good, I see that you are deciding between Mass Effect and Fallout. I personally thing that we won't destroy our-self, and if nothing else we will just progress....

If you wan't prof - just see 1963. We could destroy our civilization back then. Now we can only progress forward. And why do you think that Warp Barrier is impossible to breach? Same thing they said about men fly, and see now.

Estimates for creating warp travel on a power basis are something like half the power generated by all the suns in this galaxy. I know those history channel episodes on Star Trek Tech would come in handy!

Frazzled wrote:

Brother Coa wrote:Good, I see that you are deciding between Mass Effect and Fallout. I personally thing that we won't destroy our-self, and if nothing else we will just progress....

If you wan't prof - just see 1963. We could destroy our civilization back then. Now we can only progress forward. And why do you think that Warp Barrier is impossible to breach? Same thing they said about men fly, and see now.

Estimates for creating warp travel on a power basis are something like half the power generated by all the suns in this galaxy. I know those history channel episodes on Star Trek Tech would come in handy!

What? All Suns?
Where did they finish their school
It's not that hard, you only have to make space around you push you across space, and if you can get past that you are on the horse.
There is so much we need to learn to understand space, we didn't get past our moon and we are already debating about what's in the 50'th galaxy from ours....
Only time will tell if they are right or no...

I think within the next century well see a semi independent moon base at least as a forward base to send ships across the solar system. As it is its woefully inefficient for every ship to have to escape earths orbit just to start their journey. Of course as others point out this could happen faster or slower depending on how willful governments and corporations are to spend big investment to make it a reality and feasible.

Brother Coa wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

Brother Coa wrote:Good, I see that you are deciding between Mass Effect and Fallout. I personally thing that we won't destroy our-self, and if nothing else we will just progress....

If you wan't prof - just see 1963. We could destroy our civilization back then. Now we can only progress forward. And why do you think that Warp Barrier is impossible to breach? Same thing they said about men fly, and see now.

Estimates for creating warp travel on a power basis are something like half the power generated by all the suns in this galaxy. I know those history channel episodes on Star Trek Tech would come in handy!

What? All Suns?
Where did they finish their school
It's not that hard, you only have to make space around you push you across space, and if you can get past that you are on the horse.
There is so much we need to learn to understand space, we didn't get past our moon and we are already debating about what's in the 50'th galaxy from ours....
Only time will tell if they are right or no...

Pssh yea, we ONLY need to make space push/pull us through space! I mean, cmon man...thats like....easy to do. I do it with my toaster. The space travel not sex.