Holy hell is this thread turbofucked. Sylas arguing that the most popular answer to the Fermi Paradox is the only possible answer and then dying on that hill makes for some bad reading.
My favorite answer: The Prime Mover switched the "Enable Life" bit some 4ish billion years ago and said, "Let the games begin."
Excuse me, i'd hardly call it the most popular answer? I asked AI to list the most popular answers to the fermi paradox and not one of them was "The fermi paradox is retarded and is based on a really stupid assumption". no, I only get the following:
The Rare Earth Hypothesis: The conditions for life to arise and evolve to intelligent levels are exceptionally rare, making it unlikely for life to exist elsewhere.
The Great Filter: There may be a "filter" that prevents life from reaching advanced stages, such as a barrier in the early stages of life or a catastrophic event that wipes out civilizations.
The "Dark Forest" Hypothesis: Advanced civilizations might be intentionally hiding, perhaps due to a fear of other powerful civilizations.
The "Big Silence": We may be the only intelligent species in the universe, and other civilizations may not have developed the ability to communicate with us.
From the wiki here is the chain of assumptions:
There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun. <-- Ok
With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets in a circumstellar habitable zone. <-- Yep
Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the Sun. If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago. <-- still good
Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step that humans are investigating. <--Here it is! this assumption is retarded.
The rest of the logic is based on this false premise and is therefore meaningless.
Just to clarify, when I say FTL, I don't mean actually traveling faster than light in terms of linear speed. Mathematically it has been shown that it could be possible to warp space in a localized region and so long as you could produce propulsion, you could effectively "ride the distortion" and achieve the ability to travel distances in space faster than light could normally without actually going faster than light in the linear travel sense. If I recall, the original equation would have required all the energy in the universe (practically impossible), but later it was refined to effectively require the energy in a star. Maybe not impossible if we reached kardashev scale 3 civilization, but it is still no where near the realm of possibility based on our current technology or understanding and resources.
I think it is bold to state it will never be possible because that presumes we know all there is to know. Not a guarantee we ever will find a way, but one should concede that there remains the possibility that there could be.
Yes I know you don't mean accelerating to FTL, unlike furry you seem to have an understanding of math.
The energy to fold spacetime is somewhat known theoretically, it's a black hole. just hop in and hope you pop out from a white hole somewhere else in the universe. it's always going to be a one way trip with no way to communicate back the results so it's use for colonizing galaxies is meaningless and unknowable. Same is true for all such theoretical "natural" methods of FTL travel, finding wormholes and traveling through them before they collapse, etc.
Building a device to harness the energy required to create manmade blackholes or wormholes or whatever, assuming its even possible to make these things much less stabilize them or miniaturize them enough to slap them on a spaceship? Then you end up back in fantasy realm, type 1-3 "civilizations", Dyson spheres and shit. How much matter does it take to build a Dyson sphere? Oh twice as much matter that exists in the solar system including the entire Oort cloud? Ahh cool story bro. So we spend a few hundred thousand years sublighting back and forth to the next 3-4 available stars lassoing up and gathering up all the matter and bringing it back to build a device to harness all the Sun's power. Then somehow we transfer that power to a space ship, with hopes and wishes and fairy dust I guess.
It doesn't work. You want to know how I know it doesn't, cus someone would have already did it.
It's just hogwarts in space.
Fusion power would allow you to travel to nearby star systems within a few dozen years with starships larger than the biggest shipping containers we build today. Seeing as how Voyagers which are 1970s tech, no reason to think advanced societies couldnt build colony ships that can sustain themselves for 20-30 years.
And you dont need to find Earth like worlds to sustain civilization spreading out. As long as the system has anything like Mars, Titan, Pluto or even a Kuiper Belt you will be able to easily sustain and expand your civilization if you can harness fusion power.
uh what?
Fusion is just a more energy efficient style of nuclear power to fission. Making bigger atoms from little atoms rather than what we currently do, which is make little atoms out of bigger atoms. All it does is create heat.
All we use any of it is to heat fucking water to make steam. we use that steam to spin turbines which spin magnets that make electricity. We'd use that electricity for some sort of X-Ray ionic propulsion like the Xenon thruster or whatever else kind of engine we come up with that works solely off of electricity.
Fusion doesn't change that, it just changes what we can use for fuel (hydrogen, super abundant element) to heat water, rather than super heavy rare minerals like uranium or plutonium.
Fusion is nice and most likely necessary so that we can stop at asteroid belts and mine ice, which gives us hydrogen and oxygen, both things we'll need. There aren't any gas stations in the universe that sell uranium. But fusion doesn't make our car faster, that's ridiculous.
All of human invention is just building better mouse traps, figuring out more efficient ways to exploit physics to get work done. In all of our efforts we've found nothing more efficient than the fact that water+ heat creates steam, which rises, and as it rises it cools, becomes liquid again, which is heavier than air so it falls back down, allowing us to create an endless steam cycle loop with very few moving parts outside the turbine, and all it requires is heat. We've just upgraded from trees to coal to oil/gas to nuclear for the source of the heat, but the underlying physical properties we're exploiting have not changed.
this post is getting too long i'm not going to quote kharzette's weird icicle ship post, but will say the energy required to increase velocity does in fact, follow the laws of physics and will increase exponentially as you approach c, so no putting a giant icicle on the front of your space ship doesn't let you zoom around at speeds many times the speed of light.
