The thing I hate about that phrase is it assumes technological progression magically stops for a BILLION years (then the sun becomes too bright and boils our water). If we go extinct it’s not because the sun exploded but something else. If we survive the next billion years, we are going to be in fucking space.
You dont have to go faster than light to get to another star. It’s not easy but you couldn’t possibly imagine a billion years of technological development.
You mean to say millions of years. The tech needed to accelerate enough to make the trip in hundreds of years is also far outside the realm of physics as we know it
The orion drive is basically an engineering challenge. Very little new tech required. It could reach nearby stars in hundreds of years with no new physics.
On a local level the expansion of space cannot overcome gravitational attraction to a certain scale, roughly around the size of our local galaxy cluster. We’ll always be able to reach anything in our local galaxy cluster without FTL travel.
Your sense of scale is off. The amount of stuff held together by local group gravity is more than we can ever get bored with.
The amount things that we can reach without FTL is so large that humans could explore and colonize for billions of years without ever feeling like we are running out of space.
The thing I hate about that phrase is it assumes technological progression magically stops for a BILLION years (then the sun becomes too bright and boils our water). If we go extinct it’s not because the sun exploded but something else. If we survive the next billion years, we are going to be in fucking space.
This assumes that faster than light travel is possible. Without it humans will not be escaping the sun.
You dont have to go faster than light to get to another star. It’s not easy but you couldn’t possibly imagine a billion years of technological development.
What about those generational ships with closed ecosystems where people live and inbreed for hundreds of years until they reach another system?
You mean to say millions of years. The tech needed to accelerate enough to make the trip in hundreds of years is also far outside the realm of physics as we know it
The orion drive is basically an engineering challenge. Very little new tech required. It could reach nearby stars in hundreds of years with no new physics.
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On a local level the expansion of space cannot overcome gravitational attraction to a certain scale, roughly around the size of our local galaxy cluster. We’ll always be able to reach anything in our local galaxy cluster without FTL travel.
Your sense of scale is off. The amount of stuff held together by local group gravity is more than we can ever get bored with.
The amount things that we can reach without FTL is so large that humans could explore and colonize for billions of years without ever feeling like we are running out of space.
Our galaxy is not ripping apart yet. And our galaxy is moving closer to several others. You can certainly get to other stars without FTL
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I’ll get back to you in a million years. brb
if we started now we would have a billion year head start. we can play the tortoise in this race.
Even if ftl is fully off the table, a billion years of technology advancement is a… Lot. Like, we could probably just make a new sun at that point.
Not saying it’s likely, the likely outcome is we go extinct because of our own dumb stuff