There are dreams that are achievable, unrealistic dreams that can be achieved but where the odds are hugely stacked against you, and then there are those dreams that are just… dreams without any chance of achievement.
Achievable dreams would include that cherry/unfired WWII-era 1911, the restored & modernized E-type Jag, etc. They are out there, you just haven’t found one yet or else you don’t have the moolah on hand to buy it when you do.
Unrealistic dreams… well, there’s that night in bed with Salma Hayek, winning Powerball, finding that cherry/unfired WWII-era 1911 for only $500… you get my drift.
And then there is that category of dreams where there’s no chance in hell of success. And here’s where I’m going to get into trouble, but oh well:
Space travel and extraterrestrial planet colonization.
What bollocks. Given the vast distances between planets, even-vaster distances between habitable (by us) planets, it requires not only advanced science of a degree unimaginable — which may be possible — but most of all it requires a bending of the laws of physics (e.g. the time/space continuum, the frailty and short shelf life of the human body, etc.), which is not so easy.
So while it’s all very nice to ooh and aah over Elon Musk’s latest wizardry, at some point realization is going to set in and we’re going to discover that it’s just an impossible dream.
Nice song, great lyrics, but that’s no way to go through life.
Let’s face it: we’re stuck here on good old Planet Earth, and that’s the beginning and end of it. We’ll just have to deal with it, and come to terms with the fact that in a few million years’ time, this planet will become uninhabitable (swallowed by the Sun, our own red star in the making) and all life as we know it will cease.
(I don’t want to hear about Mars — when our sun becomes a red dwarf, it too will be swallowed into the eternal fire / black hole whatever.)
And then, to quote Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister of Great Britain (1902 – 1905):
“Imperishable monuments and immortal deeds, death itself and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest.”
He may have got the dimming of the sun wrong — it’s more likely the opposite — but the final outcome will be the same.
At least it’s in the very distant future, so there’s that.
I think it is entirely possible that SpaceX will make it to Mars or the moon and establish a presence there. That company has achieved so much in the field in such a short time, that it is highly probable they will continue on that trajectory (so to speak). This despite their other corporate failings (they had a chance to hire a brilliant engineer, but blew it with a flawed standardized ability test – ask me how I know, lol).
Your point is well taken though that we, as the flimsy “bags of mostly water” will never be able to get out of this solar system – at least in our current form. That doesn’t mean that some species with distant links to our DNA won’t achieve that in something less than a million years. Will we as a species give those distant relations a chance to do that? Will we devolve and destroy ourselves like what happens over and over again in Africa?
Not my concern, really – by that time my dust will be dust, or toxic radioactive sludge. My soul if I have one will be elsewhere.
“You can wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first”
Maybe those drones flying over New Jersey lately are illegal aliens from outer space that are here to take us on a journey throughout the cosmos.
More than likely though is that those are deep state funded crooked politician approved surveillance devices that will be used by the gestapo to shove it up UrAnus
I’m optimistic about humanity reaching the stars. If a spaceship takes a thousand years to get there, so what? That’s a small thing against the survival of the species.
If you want to look at things that really aren’t going to happen, look at fusion power. Tell me, how do you start a fusion power plant without an external power source?
Back when I was a drinker, I gave some thought to space travel and colonization of other planets. Here’s what I came up with.
Where will we live? Used rocket bodies, now that Musk’s people have shown that we can gently land the d*mn things. BUT! Food, water, oxygen, creature comforts, will ALL have to be sent up for us, let’s say to the moon. The more people we send, the more “stuff” will have to follow.
Why go? How will we justify the ginormous expense of going/being where we don’t naturally belong? “Why, we could mine natural resources that we’ll find there!” Okay, where? for all the times we’ve been to the moon, both mechanically and in person, have we found anything of any interest or value yet? If we ever do, then what? How do we access it? More rockets with heavy equipment to dig the holes and gather the treasures. More people to operate the equipment. More shelters. More crap.
Then what? Do we ship the ore home or process it there and ship the end product? If we find iron (or any other metal) how will we process it? Build smelters and factories, you say. Uh-huh. Steel requires great amounts of heat and oxygen. The heat can come from electricity which can be produced by a nuclear reactor which will also have to be shipped there and constructed in place. Then you will need a way to move the electricity from the reactor to the smelter. You’ll need to ship an entire electrical grid to the moon along with more people to construct and maintain it.
It starts to get really complicated. What happens if just one of those supply rockets doesn’t make it where it needs to be, when it needs to be there? Launch malfunction, guidance problems, there are millions of things that could go wrong, and everything will come to a screeching halt while the rocket people send up another load of whatever was lost in order to resume the process.
See where I’m going here? Drunk or sober, there’s just no way, even with Biden signing the checks, to make the production of any kind of resources off-planet worthwhile.
My solution: declare the moon (or Mars) a Native American reservation. Get the big hotel companies to build “resorts” for the tourists, and make sure they include top line casinos. It will all pay for itself with enough profit to build more in other locations. And tax the sh*t out of it to fund even more space exploitation. You’re welcome.
There’s an Engineering axiom that goes ” We don’t know what we don’t know”. It’s easier to say – ” Nope – can’t be done. Can’t fly faster than the speed of sound. Can’t go faster than a mile a minute. Can’t sail across the ocean – you will fall of the edge of the world. Don’t be foolish, both the sun and the moon revolve around the world as anybody can plainly see.
Faster than light travel? inter-dimensional Travel via Portals? Warp Speeds – Fission Power – The transfer of consciousness from our fragile bodies to some other form – all todays science fiction – tomorrow’s science facts.
I choose to believe it’s all possible. Without unachievable goals progress stops.
Fusion Power – we already have fission power – But the people who know better don’t want us to use it.
Allow me to put on my math nerd hat, while sticking with your achievable/improbable/impossible categories.
Our sun will expand to a red giant in some four billion years, give or take, probably engulfing the Earth. So if we scale the life of our star to a year, it’s currently mid June.
The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid about three days ago. So while we, in our current form, won’t be traveling to another star, getting to Mars, or one of Jupiter’s moons, is insurance against the far more immediate threat of getting hit by another big rock and becoming just another extinct species in the fossil record. Worry about things that are likely in the next hundreds to millions of years (microseconds to hours in our one year scale) before what’s inevitable in six months.
Mark D
First of the Earf has a few Billion, not Million years.
Second, light speed is nature’s speed limit in relativistic frames of reference. That means that even if we could find a way to travel vast distances in shorter periods of time (worm holes, warp drive, etc), it would be irrelevant to those of us who stay put. Since approaching light speed also slows down time and limits information flow, we would have no way of knowing if someone was successful or not.
Send someone into a black hole and as they approach the black hole it takes an infinitely longer time for them to descend (in our frame of reference). Eventually they simply appear to fade away into oblivion, never to be seen or heard from again (assuming they don’t succumb to spaghettification). What’s the point in that?
Meanwhile there are plenty of interesting ways to die here on Earth. I, for one, don’t want to spend my last moments in some metal tube drinking my own pee.
Have to differentiate between in-system travel (months) and interstellar jaunts (decades, centuries.)
The key thing is that men like Diaz and Musk do get born and sometimes get to enact their fantasies. What makes USA different from fifteenth-century Portugal or Spain is that fewer of us are born with an ingrained need to prevent other people from fantasizing.
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I am Ozymandias, king of kings!
Elon isn’t getting out of the Solar System, but lots of good reasons for us to go to Mars. And, it’s on his dime, not mine.