Lee Billing's must read post on technological and economical hurdles of building a Starship:
Given the magnitude and number of extreme technological and economic challenges that must be overcome to achieve starflight, it's difficult to imagine what, in fact, a civilization capable of interstellar travel would look like. Probably not much like us--more than anything else, projects like Icarus and Daedalus seem to tell us that we are presently as distant from interstellar travel as the stars are from Earth. And, at least until our culture's prioritization of short-term profit once again aligns with pushing the limits of the ultimately possible, that's likely to remain the case.
Perhaps someday one of these starship designs will take us out of the solar system on voyages to other living planets, other cosmic oases, strewn among the stars. Or maybe all the methods conceived today will in the fullness of time bear no more resemblance to actual starships than airplanes have to birds. Either way, it's worth remembering that the 100,000-year duration of interstellar voyages we can undertake right now is but the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. It may actually be more effective to adapt our expectations to those timescales, and to attempt to master such long-term planning rather than trying to brute-force our way to Alpha Centauri.
In expanding outward into space, patience, not velocity, may be the greatest virtue. After all, we're already on an interstellar spacecraft called the Earth, sailing with the Sun and its retinue of other planets around the Milky Way in circuits lasting 250 million years. Only by carefully preserving and cultivating the relatively bountiful and accessible resources of our planet and the solar system will we ever escape their confines. For now, it's wise to reflect that in our headlong rush to go ever faster and farther, we may only be fooling ourselves.
Given the magnitude and number of extreme technological and economic challenges that must be overcome to achieve starflight, it's difficult to imagine what, in fact, a civilization capable of interstellar travel would look like. Probably not much like us--more than anything else, projects like Icarus and Daedalus seem to tell us that we are presently as distant from interstellar travel as the stars are from Earth. And, at least until our culture's prioritization of short-term profit once again aligns with pushing the limits of the ultimately possible, that's likely to remain the case.
Perhaps someday one of these starship designs will take us out of the solar system on voyages to other living planets, other cosmic oases, strewn among the stars. Or maybe all the methods conceived today will in the fullness of time bear no more resemblance to actual starships than airplanes have to birds. Either way, it's worth remembering that the 100,000-year duration of interstellar voyages we can undertake right now is but the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. It may actually be more effective to adapt our expectations to those timescales, and to attempt to master such long-term planning rather than trying to brute-force our way to Alpha Centauri.
In expanding outward into space, patience, not velocity, may be the greatest virtue. After all, we're already on an interstellar spacecraft called the Earth, sailing with the Sun and its retinue of other planets around the Milky Way in circuits lasting 250 million years. Only by carefully preserving and cultivating the relatively bountiful and accessible resources of our planet and the solar system will we ever escape their confines. For now, it's wise to reflect that in our headlong rush to go ever faster and farther, we may only be fooling ourselves.
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