Ask HN: Stark Trek - How far are we?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=604477

by kyro • 17 years ago

37 53 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Seeing Star Trek last night (a great movie, btw), I couldn't help but genuinely feel depressed that I wasn't born 500 years from now.

For you physicists, and those knowledgeable about this sort of space development, how far do you estimate we are from becoming a universe like that of Star Trek? Sure, it's just a movie, and apologies if this may come across as a silly post, but I've always been pretty amazed at the thought of a space world.

I'm not a physicist by any means, or a person who has any significant grasp on physics theory, but hopefully this post will spark some interesting and educational (for me) discussion about physics, the future of space development, and how far we are from making significant steps towards space societies.

EDIT - Just to clarify, I'm speaking more to the technological side of achieving such societies, and less about the social dynamics, etc.

evgen• 17 years ago

You need to take Star Trek and the reality it posits within the context of its time. Star Trek was initially pitched as "Wagon Train to the stars"; think back to the westerns of the 50s/60s and you will see a lot of similarities in narrative structure as well as the idea of roving "law enforcement" wandering around a lawless frontier dispensing "justice." The basic problem is that if technology progresses along a line similar to what the TV shows and movies suggest then there is no way that society will remain in a late-20th century stasis to match the shows/movies.

There is some good "hard" sci-fi out there that you should read if you want some interesting suggestions regarding "what will life look like in X years" and I will let others jump in with some of their favorites (e.g. Vinge, Bear, Stross, etc)

MichaelApproved6• 17 years ago

We're still trying to get back to the moon, haven't built a nuclear power plant in decades (US) and our bodies fall apart in zero G.

I doubt we'll be touring other planets in even the next 100 years.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

And yet we went from the first powered flight to landing on the moon in 66 years.

Its 106 yrs (nearly) now since the wright brothers first took to the air and barely 40 since Apollo 11 touched down. So I'd suggest that 100 years is an age to fix those problems in :)

The issue is, I think, that we lost interest in the moon and stars. The space race was driven by politics and so we got there by sheer force. Then it all slackened off again. But I think the next generation will have grown up with enough modern Sci-Fi to think "I wonder if...." and hunger for the sky :)

MichaelApproved6• 17 years ago

If star trek taught us anything it's that we're a plucky race that can do almost anything (provided we overcome our violent history).

But I'm judging the next 100 years on the past 20. We did squat compared to what we're potentially capable of. NASA lost about 50% of it's unmanned Mars missions. What a joke.

tsally• 17 years ago

I say this in the most serious possible way. I hope in the next twenty or thirty years Russia or China builds a base on the moon and puts weapons on it. I'm not sure how useful weapons on the moon would be tactically, but at least a refueling/rearm station. You're right, getting to the moon was political. Sadly, the only way I can see to make it political again is the weaponization of space. Having another world power do this would jump start our space program in a drastic way.

EDIT: I apologize for the American bias in my post. When I say "our" I am referring to NASA. I think collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and/or the Russian Federal Space Agency would be good to some extent. Of course, this type of collaboration would probably prevent space exploration from becoming a political issue. And for reasons previously described, eliminating the politics from space exploration is probably a bad idea.

byrneseyeview• 17 years ago

The future is weird. Asking how many discoveries away from reaching Star Trek is like asking how many Ivy League degrees you need before you turn into Obama.

The whole space opera thing is fairly unlikely. It's more likely that the world we'll be able to simulate in our own solar system will be much more interesting than any world we'd be able to visit outside of it.

The future depends on what you extrapolate; Star Trek goes from trains to planes to space; right now, lots of interesting fiction goes from PCs to ubiquitous computing to uploads. Whatever's next is unlikely to resemble any of that in any way.

trapper• 17 years ago

"It's more likely that the world we'll be able to simulate in our own solar system will be much more interesting than any world we'd be able to visit outside of it."

Good point, I had never thought of it like that.

troystribling• 17 years ago

Space exploration as portrayed in "Accelerando" by Charles Stross, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(novel), seems far more practical than portrayed in Star Trek. In Accelerando interstellar spaceships are the size of beer cans and full of electronics.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

We already have all of the technology we need for a spacefaring society, and probably have had it for some decades. Our economy is stuck in a local maximum, where there is no short-term economic benefit to going there.

Read Zubrin's _Entering Space_ for details.

http://www.amazon.com/Entering-Space-Creating-Spacefaring-Ci...

For example, the original Orion project had a means of traveling to Saturn in a year. (Using nuclear bombs to power a spacecraft.)

The various studies on space colonization are also interesting. T.A. Heppenheimer summarizes some of them (in particular, the famous Stanford Summer Study) in his book "Colonies in Space."

Interstellar travel is another thing entirely, though.

kqr2• 17 years ago

I think the main problem with the Star Trek scenario is "faster than light travel". Of course, traveling faster than light really isn't possible however most of the alternate mechanisms proposed, e.g. worm holes, etc. don't seem that feasible either.

I think more realistic is that man gets a toehold on space by being able to harness resources from other planets / asteroids. If people can become self-sufficient in space, perhaps generation after generation, we can creep out further into space.

But it takes a big initial commitment and it's unlikely we'll ever resolve all the problems on earth so I'm not sure how much of a priority it will be.

MichaelApproved6• 17 years ago

You're not trying to travel faster than light, you're tying to bend space.

To understand, take a piece of paper and imagine you're on one end of it trying to get across. Instead of traveling the length of the paper just fold it in half and jump to the other side.

eugenejen5• 17 years ago

I hated this example of folding space. This example just shows us how confused we are about "folding".

When you folding a paper. Your reference frame is outside that piece of paper. You also possess energy supply outside the paper to exert the deformation of the material on the paper. But you did not posses the energy to fold the "space" around that paper.

In fact, even you fold it, you and that piece of paper are still in the same 4-d space time. Unless you are the lucky intelligent beings that are living on that piece of paper such as a colony of bacteria. Now it is the time to jump to the other side the paper!

So I guess the first step to construct a warp drive is to figure out questions:

1. "Can we as bacteria living on that piece of paper evoke help from extra dimensional source and energy from it?"

2. "Can we as bacteria living on that piece of paper control this mechanism?"

3. "Can the above mechanism to be achieved without ruining basic physics laws such as law of matter energy conservation, laws of thermodynamics in marcophysics scale".

As long as we figure the possibility for those questions in physics, then we will know can we travel like Star Trek.

Don't get me wrong. I love Star Trek. And my undergraduate major was physics. But I know very few general relativity theory and problems. What I just said is just consider what is necessary if we want to fold the space time.

jerf• 17 years ago

The problem with this approach is that it looks like anytime you bend space like that, you create a vacuum-energy resonance that destroys the space-time structure you just created. I'm not a physicist and I've never seen anyone state this as a universal rule, but it has come up in the recent analysis of the warp drive (won't try to spell that A-guy's name), in Hawking's analysis of what would happen if we tried to drap a wormhole around such that we can use it to travel FTL, and a couple of other things I've seen too.

I always find it amusing when people look at these hypothetical designs and say "Hey, it must be possible!" Because what I see is a universe that absolutely hates FTL and will destroy anything that looks like it might achieve it with extreme prejudice, yanking the space-time rug out from underneath your atomic feet.

vaksel2• 17 years ago

you never know, the thing with physics, is that a single discovery can turn everything upside down and lead to millions of inventions

castis• 17 years ago

aye, waits for the LHC to come back online

MichaelApproved6• 17 years ago

My lucky lotto numbers are 1,11,17,21,44,69

vaksel2• 17 years ago

That doesn't look that lucky, I've never seen a lotto drawing that had 1 in it

marketer• 17 years ago

What are the market forces driving deeper space exploration? There aren't any I can think of except recreation and science experiments.

What's hot right now in aeronautics seems to be better communication and navigation satellites. Maybe these will push the boundaries of space technology?

SapphireSun• 17 years ago

Asteroids. No corporation driven by quarterly returns will spring for that, but there is an enormous amount of raw material there. If we had a very cheap source of propulsive energy, it might be profitable to transport it back.

kaffeinecoma• 17 years ago

I'd say about 20-30 years away: http://markii.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/kurzweils-singularity...

kineticac• 17 years ago

we barely know enough about what's on this planet and how it works let alone go anywhere else. 500 years might not be enough.

dkokelley• 17 years ago

The biggest inhibitor I think would be the lack of economical justifications for it. We don't need the space (or rather, what we would like is the space to be close. Take a plane trip across the U.S. and you'll find a whole lot of empty), and our natural resources will last us for the foreseeable future.

What benefits are there? What we would need is a space 'gold rush' if we wanted to realistically expect any sort of real progress in that direction. Maybe we'll discover that there's oil (for example) on Mars. Maybe we'll see a lot more space speculators.

That's it for financial issues. Of course finances will drive the technology. The most prominent pieces of technology we're missing are faster than light (or warp) engines, and artificial gravity. Warp would let us travel very far very efficiently, and artificial gravity would allow humans to spend extended periods of time in space. A couple other things we're missing are materials to build such starships (not sure if we have anything that would hold such large ships together in space), replicator and transporter technology, phasers, shields/forcefields, and last but not least, proton torpedoes. If anyone knows of technology listed above that exists today, please let me know.

3pt14159• 17 years ago

warp engines: not needed for colonization. Materials: plentiful, no shortage. Replicators: missing, no obvious food alternative around. Transporter Tech: unneeded. Phasers: unneeded. Shields: unneeded. Photon (or proton) torpedoes: unneeded.

All we really need is a way to be confident that if we send some people out, they will be good for 1000 years. That means food and environment, not forcefields and transporters. Look into the experiments where they tried to isolate humans from the earth environment by sealing them in a airtight greenhouse. (hint: the ants started dieing within a month)

lionheart• 17 years ago

Well, if I understand correctly, 99% of the cost of space travel is getting out of Earth's gravity well.

Once you're up there, moving around is pretty easy.

So, space elevators that could bring down surface-to-orbit costs would probably drive a huge boom in space exploration.

No idea how soon we'll have those though.

Retric• 17 years ago

That depends on what you mean by space. LEO to Geosynchronous orbit is still a lot more than 1% of energy to orbit.

Anyway, orbit is only 17,000 MPH which is way to slow to go travel to the next star. Traveling at at 17,000 mph would take about 40,000 years to travel one light year. The good news is you slowly accelerate in space over a long time, so smaller high efficiency engines would work just fine. The bad news is the closet star is over 4 light years from earth.

So getting something the size of the space shuttle to the next star in 1,000 years would take 2x (168^2) as much energy as it takes to get to LEO. ~56,500 * 2.2 * 10^12J = ~10^17 jules for comparison that's ~28 thousand megawatt hours.

mpk• 17 years ago

> I couldn't help but genuinely feel depressed that I wasn't born 500 years from now.

The thing is - we have no way of knowing what life in the future will be like. There might not be anything we recognize as human life there in the first place.

I'm continuously amazed by the here and now. I've been all around the world. I have friends all over this planet. I communicate with people all over the world via the net every single day. And my friends? Ha! They could be anywhere and all I have to do is pick up my cell phone and call them. ('Uh, can I call you back, I'm in Singapore for some work thing and it's 4 am here..').

I love speculative sci-fi, but not to the extent that I want to not be born in this age. Put things into perspective if not living in the super-happy-fun sci-fi future gets you depressed.

radley• 17 years ago

Agreed. I'm happy to live in this future where we can at least play around with this caliber of imagination.

I'm not cut out for farming or the floppy wigs of the past.

lesbianmonad• 17 years ago

Interesting question. In the developed world, the last three decades seem to have only entrenched class power and moved us further from a post-monetary society; however there are many encouraging developments in the periphery that could bear much fruit over the next quarter century. History, as always, will be written from the future.

simanyay• 17 years ago

There is a very interesting book Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku (http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Impossible-Scientific-Explorat...). It is exactly about those questions.

gcv• 17 years ago

We need to solve the problem of producing energy. I think that human progress, even in the short term, depends entirely upon "breaking" the first law of thermodynamics. Clearly, no one will successfully create energy out of nothing, but I hope that physics will one day invent a way to cheaply and cleanly tap into energy sources which produce a huge yield. We have nuclear reactors today, but they are enormously large, expensive, and difficult to maintain. The day that you can buy a car --- or a wristwatch --- powered by atomic energy, you can say that the future arrived.

This energy source does not have to be atomic, except we don't know of a fuel more densely packed with energy than atoms. E = mc^2 and all that. In most science fiction, this problem has been solved using mumbo-jumbo technology, such as matter-antimatter reactors. Whatever; maybe someone will one day think of a way to make that work. Solving the energy problem means that the vast amount of effort currently directed at, e.g., oil production, stable trade with parts of the world which produce and sell hydrocarbon fuels, and climate maintenance can free up to really push things forward.

Just think of the rockets we could build if they didn't need to use awful rocket propellants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_propellant) or nuclear explosions for fuel. And I'll try to make sure the controlling software for those rockets uses Lisp. :)

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

I've always been pretty amazed at the thought of a space world.

Great! 'cos you're living on one :)

Very far. We can't travel faster than light and at the moment not even close to it. We have vague ideas that warp drives might be possible, but generating, containing and manipulating enough energy to work in some of the suggestions is also currently unthinkable. We're at the stage of needing multiple unpredictable breakthroughs to get anywhere close, and that leaves travel to the nearest extra-solar anything taking many years.

Also, the Star Trek technology is very inconsistent, I don't think we are going that way. I haven't seen the new film (yet) but from the TV series, there are numerous questions. How come nobody else ever has Geordie-style visors as an option? Or any kind of optical or neural enhancement or display? Or any kind of body armour?

Why is there no nanotechnology anywhere except when the Borg turn up? Why isn't there an anti-Borg good cyborg species? They destroy entire star ships so frequently and inconsequentially that they must have tremendous manufacturing capability, but wouldn't that have more ramifications somehow? How come Picard has a replacement heart and Geordi a brain-connected replacement vision, and everyone can be rebuilt by the teleporter, but they all have wrinkles and age and die? Why don't they throw half the Enterprise away and replace it with a much smaller holodeck with simulated rooms? Why does nobody ever ask the computer anything interesting? Why can't Data improve himself or replicate himself? Or merge with the ship's computer? Why has nobody built a machine to pick up what Deanna Troi's empathic sense does and done away with the whole "Computer, where is x?" "x's badge fell off so I can't find them" thing?

Why is nobody sitting at home on Earth and using the magical instantaneous subspace communication to explore with unmanned spacecraft?

So, yeah - space: big, cold, empty. planet bankruptingly expensive.

ewiethoff2• 17 years ago

"Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence." -- Leonard "Bones" McCoy, 2009

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

> I couldn't help but genuinely feel depressed that I wasn't born 500 years from now.

What does it mean to say you wish you were born 500 years from now?

Explain: what would have to happen for that to be so?

dhughes• 17 years ago

Maybe we were all born 500 years later, only it was 2009 instead of 1509.

pookleblinky• 17 years ago

I also found Star Trek to be disappointing in its depiction of technological change. It is, at base, little different than all the other sci-fi depictions of housewives in space and Colossal-sized vacuum tube intelligences.

It's a common bias to overestimate technological and societal change in the short term, and underestimate them in the long term. Think of those McCarthy-era AI guys promising GAI in a decade: I bet you $100 that their vision for the next 4 decades was surprisingly conservative and unimaginative. The same men who imagined GAI in their lifetimes were most likely the same men who could not imagine the full societal implications of civil rights legislation.

I should expect the world in 500 years to be as unimaginable, complex, and alien as the world now is to someone from the 16th century. I hate to make an argument from fictional evidence, but there is no reason at all to prefer a Rodenberry future as opposed to an Egan future. The former is refuted by witnessing how pervasive and tempting it is to anchor future change on the present.

If Charlemagne and Shakespeare could understand the future, it's a bad indication for how realistic you are being.

Devilboy• 17 years ago

Be happy you weren't born 500 ago instead!

eugenejen5• 17 years ago

I think physics is not the only answer to this. The following technologies and organization maybe more useful in certain case.

1. The capability to have all my DNA sequences stored.

2. The capability to create an organism that has exact DNA sequence as me.

3. The capability to have all my memory inside my brain read out.

4. The capability to restored all my memory to the organism created in step 2.

5. The capability to remove aging effect on my brain and body.

6. An organization that is willing to keep the technology and data above passed down by time without errors and is willing to teach the resurrected me what the new world is and help me to fit in without questions and still grant me freedom or treat me as a 2nd class citizen.

If there exists such technologies and organizations, we are all endowed with eternal life and are capable of seeing all new possible technologies in Star Trek to show up...

jlof• 17 years ago

A solution to (trans)personal space exploration might be synaptic level brain imaging with blue brain -simulation and becoming V-ger yourself. But what comes to capability of seeing all the possible new Star Trek technologies, the only good solution is eternal life as movie audience. ;)

stevedekorte• 17 years ago

Our society isn't nearly as hierarchical, militaristic, conformist and fascist as that depicted in Star Trek but I could see us there in a few hundred years.

Ask HN: Stark Trek - How far are we?

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