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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

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JumpCrisscross

> People, as a mass, only explore to find new resources due to scarcity

Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media.

> thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return

Everyone on these ships would be a celebrity on Earth. (Ideally, if they so chose.)

Again, a simple reading of one-way trip settler-explorers across history similarly rejects this notion.

> If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems

The first several of these ships are likely to end in catastrophe. The first to succeed will be breaking down on arrival. If we learn to build luxurious space habitats it will be through these endeavours.

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> Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media.

A week in Bali is not the same thing as interstellar travel…

> A week in Bali

Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the folks who launch off on their own into the deep wilderness for years on end. Not only for vanity, but largely to do groundbreaking research?

Yes.

Are you confusing "adventurer" and "explorer"? There are plenty of contemporary adventurers (motivated by ego, fame, personal achievement) but explorers? Not so much.

Sure, individual weirdos can do that for a few years. But you're talking about literally millennia of travel. Hundreds of generations of people living their entire life on the bus never getting to the destination before they die. Trapped out in the cold empty void of space with literally nothing around, for their entire lives, and the lives of their children, and their children's children, for longer than we have had the written word. Never even knowing if the destination is worth it.

In this exercise, it's 400 years. A long time, yes, but nowhere near what you're suggesting.

We don't have anywhere near the engine technology to make it anywhere worth going to in 400 years. That's orders of magnitude more difficult.

Anywhere that might sustain life is no closer than a couple thousand years away if we develop ultra-efficient almost magical engines that only bend the laws of physics instead of breaking them outright. Stuff like accelerating the propellent so hard that it picks up enormous amounts of relativistic mass, like every gram of propellant weighs effectively a ton because you've accelerated it so close to the speed of light, which requires some kind of ultra-dense power source that makes mere matter-antimatter annihilation look like burning a match.

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