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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

> I know it's nearby on galactic scales but it's practically about 450,000 Earth years away with current technology :-)

If we had the political will, the Orion design could get people there in, what, 200 years, and that's with '70s technology.

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> If we had the political will

It takes more than that. We need political maturity and stability. There is no way we can send people today on a 200 years journey and be sure they will both make it and be able to create a somewhat stable society on the other side.

Also, that would be a earth level effort, another thing that is seriously irrealistic right now. The very best we can achieve right now is the ISS and that's pathetic even compared to current tech.

The biggest push in recent years has been around privatisation of space exploration. It is going to take decades, probably centuries before a commercial model of space settles down and non-profit utopist project like that would be conceivable.

Would a vessel from 50 years from now beat the original crew there? If we assume we are advancing speed-wise by X% each year, the poor folks sent and likely put into cryo-stasis would get lapped by people who left 10 years or 25 years after them.

There are a number of SF stories where this is the plot.

Imagine waking up out of your cryo-stasis and seeing humans already living on the planet you were sent to colonize? That would be weird, to say the least.

I bet there's a science fiction novel about that

If there isn't someone should write it.

I have read one. Many years ago, don't remember much about it. But I'm pretty sure it also discussed how all of the "future folk" were disgusted with the smell of the ones that had been traveling in cryo for 200 years. Too much perfume/deodorant...they didn't like the flower smells anymore as I believe they had engineered themselves to not perspire any more.

The Orion program had this potential on paper. Nuclear bomb propulsion is a complicated thing, but we don't understand if it's a feasible propulsion method in practice, like, at all.

Political will in this case brings us more understanding of the feasibility of this propulsion method, but it's way too big of a stretch that political will alone would get us to the nearest starts in 200 years.

Actually we do know it would work. The fundamental physics are sound.

A pusher plate can in fact transfer net positive momentum from a series of explosive shockwaves detonated aft of the pusher plate in the desired direction of travel. There’s plenty of video footage from the Hot Rod tests showing it working. https://youtu.be/Q8Sv5y6iHUM

The hot rod test article was actually donated to the national air and space museum unfortunately it is not currently on display. https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/propulsion-tes...

And for the realities of scaling up from conventional explosives to nuclear detonations you can read a little more here http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclearspace-03h.html and http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesigns2.ph... (scroll down till you get tot project Orion and they have a pretty good summary) And the Project Rho information has links to lots of the technical details and material as well if you want to learn a lot more.

The propulsion could work. What about sustaining life for 200 year biospehere without any external resources?

What about interstellar debris?

What about deceleration?

And that's just the feasibility of the colony ship, then there's colonization/terraforming, etc.

I'd be thrilled to see such an effort take shape, but to say "it would work" has marginal relevance to "the project is feasible".

Are you talking about the propulsion system where a series of nuclear explosions push the vessel along?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

yes, we should explore (and eventually exploit) all forms of propulsion and decide between them based on physics, not politics

That Orion project was a failure though. No tangible results to exploit.

my point is that because of fear of nuclear no further research was done. It is now super hard to even get enough material for a rector/battery such as the one on Curiosity

I think it more just ended than failed.

> If we had the political will, the Orion design could get people there in, what, 200 years, and that's with '70s technology.

No,the version of Orion that is mostly an integration challenge over 1970s tech would take almost 7 times that long to get to Alpha Centauri as a missile (i.e., without turnover to decelerate to relative rest.)

The even more speculative version was estimated to cut that by a factor for ten to only 133 years, but that's still to a target 1/3 the distance of this one, and still without deceleration.

If you enjoy the idea of propelling space ships using nuclear explosions, look up nuclear salt-water rockets (NSWRs, or Zubrin Drives). The idea is to dump pipes full of sub-critical amounts of radioactive salts out engine, combining outside the ship in a continuous nuclear explosion.

If I remember it correctly, the fast project would make 4 light years in ~150 years. So that would be 450 years (probably less, because it's on constant acceleration).

> If I remember it correctly, the fast project would make 4 light years in ~150 years.

133, but that's getting there as a missile (one-way acceleration, no turnover and decel to relative rest.)

Imagine being the child born on the ship on a crash course to this new planet.

And imagine you're the first ship to arrive only to find out

a) that the planet is not habitable and there were some wrong assumptions about it

b) that the planet is already occupied by a different form of life and there's no warm welcome to us

Sounds like the premise of Aurora! Which definitely turned me off the idea of multi generational starship travel. It's not ethical.

This is also assuming

A) Human engineering can create something that can last 200+ years of space travel. We don't even build houses anymore that can feasibly last 100 years.

2) People don't go mad and kill each other or do a mutiny

III) Any number of stray objects from asteroids to rogue planets that just slams into the ship and causes major malfunctions

d) Food and life support sustainability

I mean... there are SOOOOOOOO many more problems than actual politics. This is where, and it hurts me to say this, the politicians are right to say "are you insane?".

Of course we’re far from it, if ever possible. I was just being playful on the whole premise of “colonizing” another earthlike planet

Oh, I'm not bashing you at all. You're absolutely correct. You bring up extremely important things to realize when discussing space travel. Especially long term missions. Political will being the reason why these missions haven't happened, as someone else mentioned, is total crap. It's just an easy excuse to not think of ACTUAL consequences and live in a scifi fantasy.

Yes I agree, we seem to be working on the wrong problems or get the priorities wrong. We keep on inventing newer technologies which come with newer problems while the ship is slowly but surely sinking. Sometimes I wonder what would it take for all of us to join a concerted effort to concentrate on the real problems we have. Technologies seem to veer into an escapist route, some way for us to run away from the problems we do have: virtual reality, leisure space travel, AGI, synthetic life, immortality.. I hope we'll eventually wake up in the last hour, at least to acknowledge where we've gone wrong.

I think this is exactly why there's an apocalypse fantasy/fetish. It's in our psyche that we're all focused on... well... dumb shit. A post-apocalypse lifestyle makes you focus on what I think we can all truly appreciate as important. There's a lot of interesting studies done on localized disasters where the idea of community actually erupts out of it. People working together and sharing, regardless of their "social status". It's all short lived until the outside world aid arrives and you still get a few bad actors in the mix (though it seems statistically, no where near as many as we think). Generally though, it takes hell on Earth for us to regain our "humanity".

Not trying to be edgy, but I think a lot of society problems stem from more and more globalization. When you're less than a drop in a gigantic pool of people, it's hard to feel like anything matters. Not saying the closed off, nationalism system is any better in the long term. It's just hard to determine a balance to the system. And with that lack of balance, we run away into the escapes you mentioned.

Sigh... well, I just ruined my day thinking about this crap again.

I have a similar experience from my childhood. I grew up under communism in eastern europe and I remember the crisis we were going through at the time, food was rationed and there were long queues everywhere. People were even joining queues without knowing what was being sold and some would start lining up overnight. I was a kid back then and didn't experience the adversity first hand but I could see and sense what was going on. Aside from these things, however, I remember how helpful and inclusive the community was. People were sharing whatever they had, whatever they cooked, recipes, anti-establishment jokes, books, video tapes, etc. There was this sense of belonging that now has dissipated completely. I was struck with a deja vu when I visited Cuba a couple of years ago. People are poor but are sane and happy in their own ways and they have time for one another. There are still disparities but not like in a western society when one counts their pennies and the other their billions. Romania, the country I grew up in, has been engulfed in corruption and asides from a cities with large concentration of wealth, everything is in disrepair, the community disappeared almost completely and everything seems to have gone downhill for the past 30 years. In no way am I decrying the communism, it was brutal to many, but what has ensued after the fact was a veneer of shiny nothing.

So, I was born in the USA, but my parents are from Poland and left a few years before the collapse. They shared many similar stories with me over the years. Generally, when the environment is bad, the local people are good. But the reverse is true too. When the environment is good, people tend to suck.

It's weird to be honest. A lot of books/movies think utopia arises in the land of plenty. But I guess a real utopia is where we all suffer against a common threat/enemy. That's when we're most human?

But when it comes to communism, it does have it's upsides. Like now in Venezuela, almost everyone is equally poor as shit. Thus, criminals don't rob people. Bullets cost too much money compared to how much they can rob from people, if they even have anything. That's a win... I guess. Great way to stomp out crime. Make everyone too poor to even bother robbing.

Meh. 200 years aro they would have called you insane for wanting to fly between continents, let alone to the moon.

They also would have called you crazy for saying you wanted to turn lead into gold with alchemy. Fact is, most of the time the people who say something can't be done are right.

Yeah but they don't matter. All the trying was worth it, because I can fly halfway around the Earth for a few hundred bucks now. If in a different world I got gold out of lead but no airplanes, it would be fun too, but in a different way.

If the no-sayers really won and nobody tried, we would have neither.

> They also would have called you crazy for saying you wanted to turn lead into gold with alchemy.

Which is doable but exceptionally expensive.

Not a strong argument against the ship unless you're calling it a waste of money.

Nitpick: we can actually transmute, either by fusion or fission. Sure it's not economically effective, but then neither was Apollo.

The crazy ones are the ones that change the world/universe. For the right price, it would make sense to invest in such a venture.

> d) Food and life support sustainability

Could we just send frozen embryos of humans and then have the ship auto thaw and gestate them 16 years to arrival?

With another 2-300 years of technological progress this doesn’t seem outlandish mission at all.

that sounds highly unethical. none of those people agreed to go on the trip

did any of us agree to go on our current trip? I do see your point but I think eventually humans might do it.

Man, B is a good problem to have.

Imagine being the child born on a small island, or in a country to which few other countries are willing to grant visas, or simply to parents who don't have much money.

Imagine being the child born on the ship on a crash course to this new planet.

Here's one for you. What if WE are the children currently on a 'ship' (Earth) being sent somewhere..? ;-)

You could get their corpses there, sure.

Just got to make sure we put on the side of the ship, "Greetings from Earth!"

"They sent us a space ship full of corpses?" "Must be an intergalactic message of war."

That's almost as bad as receiving an unlabeled box with a copy of Misery in it.

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