Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisSD | Hacker News Reader

Say we invent life extending technology or generational ships. What happens when someone gets to Alpha Centauri? What can they do?

View on HN

What could any explorers in the history of mankind do when they got to an unpopulated island or continent? Spread, inhabit, and help ensure the survival of their species.

Whether or not you agree, some people like the idea of humanity surviving as a multi-solar system species.

I'm not sure Alpha Centauri has any inhabitable planets, at least for our biology as it stands today, but what we learn along the way might render that moot.

See my reply to adrianN. Getting there is only a small part of the hurdle to establishing a viable colony, let alone one that can prosper enough to spread further.

Alpha Centauri might not be the best destination, but for suitable systems the travelers could go forth and multiply, eventually sending out ships of their own.

But that makes it a much more costly operation (both in money and risk). Even a nearby star system with a habitable planet would be hard to get going because the settlers that go there would be cut off from their home planet. They would need to take with them everything necessary not only to establish a colony but to thrive (and stave off potential extinction level events which, when your population is small, is far more likely). And there would be little help from homeworld. Even information would take at least the speed of light to get there.

And this is just the tip of the ice berg. I agree with jandrese that people underestimate just how much of a hurdle this is.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

When talking about interstellar distances people just aren't equipped to think about the scales involved. They're so far outside of the scale of human experience that our brain really struggles to understand the magnitude of the problem.

We're talking about billions of dollars to set up a short term test camp on Mars, and by interstellar standards that is close to nothing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com