I mean a few hundred years ago people believed humans could not ever fly, but it happened, and we take it for granted now.
We got to the moon, Mars, and several other solar system bodies in the past half century without any mimicry.
Maybe you don't, but I have very strong optimism for technological advancement, and also for modifying our life form to rid ourselves of our tendency to destroy things before heading to other stars. When I say "we" will go to other stars, it won't be Homo sapiens, but another species that we will create as our successor.
>We got to the moon, Mars, and several other solar system bodies
You're conflating humans and probes, which are vastly different.
I disagree. Robots can build infrastructure far ahead of human settlement, such that everything already exists when we are ready to travel.
We can also potentially re-engineer our own life form, or create an entirely new inorganic lifeform, to withstand various conditions, including radiation and a wider range of temperatures. That will be our successor.
We are only beginning to understand genetics in the past decade. We have a long, long way to go, and a lot to understand. Science is still at its infancy.
Also, this is something I could never say in an academic context, but deep down I don't believe in conservation of energy, partly because the big bang itself violates it. Yes, I would be ridiculed for saying this in a scientific context, but so would someone in the 1500s for saying that the Earth goes around the sun. I think at some point in the distant future we will not be reliant on stars as our energy source.
If you truly do not believe in the conservation of energy, I think we're done here since none of my arguments will be good enough for such wild speculation.
Human bodies suck because they need to eat, need to poop, complain if what they eat isn't tasty, fight with each other, and get cancer, but our legacy as intelligent life doesn't need to continue in our current carbon-based meat bag form.
This reads like an ungrad astronomy major fever dream.
Yes, it reads like a dream. Technological breakthroughs of the past were created by people with dreams, not by skeptics.
I do think it’s possible that our best hope for navigating the transition beyond the singularity involves transplanting our humanness to another kind of life form. I’m not necessarily talking about uploading… more about a staggered intergenerational transition mixed in with life as we know it. I realize that to some people, this will continue to sound like crazy talk, until one day it isn’t. It’s ok if you are one of those people :-).
Let's say it takes ~8 minutes to get to LEO vs 4,380 minutes to get to the Moon. That's a factor of ~550x longer flight time for a distance 2000x further.
Alpha Centauri is 1500x further away than Mars. It currently takes ~7 months to go from Earth to Mars (at 25,000 mph), assuming similar scaling that comes out to only 400x the flight time, or just about 230 years.
We may get humans to Mars. It's technically possible. But I don't think we will ever live there.
Submarines work well because we didn’t bother making them anything like fish.
There is, but extrasolar objects don't have engines and do very low energy transits.
We'd need a large habitat, a power source that can last for a couple thousand years and a lot - and I mean a LOT - of reaction mass to accelerate it and to brake it when it arrives at its destination. Ideally, it'd be preceded by numerous robotic probes that'd chart the worlds ahead for possible refueling stops (that could add a couple thousand years to the mission) and have a number of possible targets lined up on a reasonable trajectory so that if the next system is not really that hospitable or doesn't have anything worth doing a very large delta-v for, it can just press ahead to the next destination.
Another thing it'd need is a lot of determination to build it, to seal it with a population, test it for generations to make sure the ecosystem works and is stable, and then send it out into the unknown without any possibility of returning to Earth. It's very long term engineering we rarely do.
Reaching 10% would be enough to visit nearby stars within a lifetime.
And once we can extend human life spans to many hundreds of years these journeys become even more achievable.
As I said elsewhere, I think the disconnect here is between potential and probable. Homo sapiens have twice come to the edge of nuclear oblivion already (being saved only by luck essentially), and I would wager we are are speeding much faster towards nuking each other than reaching the stars.