There's some physical law why someday a human can't live for, oh, say 600 years? There's a strong possibility that we'll find the genes responsible for aging and be able to turn them off or slow the process, within the next century.

There's some physical law why we can't someday send out human genetic material under the care of automatons (computers/robots) which would generate humans at the other end?

Some physical law why we can't create multigenerational habitats that are self-sustaining, someday?

Some physical law that says these are impossible?

You used the magic word "mystery". Case closed. There are things we don't know.

Will humans leave the solar system in the next century? I dunno. It's possible, but as *I* said, we got a whole solar system to exploit before we need worry about other stars, especially since we've yet to find any with planets even close to ours.

But, now you're putting conditionals on it. Just concede, you're embarrassing yourself.

Certainly...the Wright brothers, David Bushnell, Thomas Edison, ... they all violated the laws of physics... as they were known a thousand years ago.

But, your arrogant ass has the final answer to life the universe and everything, huh?

How about dazzling us with the unified field equation?

You mean like chia pets, the pet rock and "The Clapper"? ;-)

I'm not aware of any who did so in violation of the laws of physics.

The great inventions that make modern civilization possible were created by people who really, really, really, really , really, really, REALLY wanted the answer to be yes.

You know, sometimes the correct answer is, "No",,, as in "No, our species will never travel to the stars"… even if you really, really, really, really, really, really, REALLY want the answer to be "yes".

You can see the same thing with women's voting patterns. They might really, really… want socialism (and $17T in debt and $211T in unfunded mandates) to work. Sorry. No.

Faster to execute, slower to code, for most of us :)

Actually, assembler is faster. ;-)

That's all you've got, Jabberwocky? ;-)

I give you scientific reality.
You give me wishful feeling.
Besides, we already know what's "on the other side of the mountain".

All "wants" are relative.

A human who decides that he "wants" to see what is on the other side of the mountain is free to make the trip.

That's not true for someone who "wants" to see what's going on at Proxima Centauri. To go over that "mountain" requires more resources than any one person can command.

In case you haven't noticed, half of the population doesn't "want" to go over the mountain at all. They only "want" to sit at home, have someone take care of them and make babies.

Look at the funding for NASA. Compare it to the $211 trillion that women have already committed to future social welfare spending. More than half the population would forgo a trip "over the mountain" for a set of new drapes.

I think I was quite clear.

I do believe it's possible that human corpses will leave the solar system… purely by accident or perhaps even by way of some bizarre suicide. We have the technology NOW to send corpses out of the solar system. It may take 30+ years of travel time - but what does a corpse care about that?

Setting aside the corpses for a moment and speaking only of live human beings:

I don't believe a human will ever leave the solar system. Even by accident. Ever.

To leave the solar system, in this context, is to presuppose a place to go. The nearest star is 4.2+ light years away. The massive amount of resources, the long trip, the planning necessary to get a live human out of the solar system all indicate that there should be some purpose to the effort. There is no reason to shoot a human out of the solar system (alive) just for them to die years later in the middle of nowhere.

Homo Sapiens will never visit any solar system than this one.

Support your (erroneous) conclusion.

As you point out, I know more about relativity than any human in the world prior to the start of the 20th Century. :-O It's not surprising that someone living in a Newtonian world would expect speed to increase linearly with force. I know better. My predictions are therefore tempered by vastly superior knowledge of relativity, and whether you want to quibble over "hubris", this is a fact - and you know it.

In the world of science, new discoveries are not accorded validity at the outset. There follows a period of testing, of counter-theories, of challenges. When the European team "discovered" that neutrinos travel FTL, the scientific community did what it usually does: It tried to replicate the results. That failed and the FTL neutrino was seen to be an error in measurement.

Relativity has been under that microscope for more than 100 years and has not required modification. Note that it didn't negate the Newtonian world view. It merely refined it in areas where humans had no prior experience. If you use Newtonian mechanics to compute the amount of force necessary to accelerate a mass for any projectile whose speed could be measured in 1905, the difference between that result and the result with relativity applied would have been impossible to detect. As an example: Suppose one had a gun that could fire a bullet at 50,000 fps (roughly 10x the top speed of a bullet from a rifle). How does the Newtonian prediction differ from the relativistic prediction? Well, 50,000 fps is about 0.00005c. At that velocity, relativity makes a difference of roughly 1 part in a billion - far too small for 1900s technology to measure.

So while relativity deepens our knowledge of the physical universe, it doesn't really upend Newton at any velocity with which humans had contact in pre-relativity times. Correspondingly, it's extremely unlikely that any further understanding of the universe is going to invalidate relativity. We may find, for example, that when galactic-scale masses are involved, that the relativistic mass increases at a slightly higher or lower rate That will be very useful information in the event that we need to accelerate a galaxy to near the speed of light, but otherwise, the new theory will be irrelevant to everyday life in much the same way that relativity is (generally) irrelevant. I've already given one example where relativity WAS relevant - the GPS system. But outside the realm of traversing gravity wells or LHC-type experiments, I'm hard pressed to come up with others. Perhaps you can?

ironically, relativity may have application on the scale of the very small. The design of the Cray computer (and fast computers since) required rather precise lengths of cabling. Why? Because the data had to arrive at the same "time", and if one cable was longer than another, the data would be "out of synch" and the computer would be degraded or fail. Where or how relativity will apply is not something I've fully considered in this context - but I wouldn't be surprised if it played a role.

But on a large scale?

Relativity, when you reason it all out, basically says we'll never reach the stars.

While brain size is a rough predictor of intelligence, it's not dispositive. Were it otherwise, the Sperm Whale with brains 5x humans and elephants with roughly 3x the brain mass would be the smartest animals on the planet. Of course, the 11% size advantage of male humans over females would tend to support your contention? ;-)

Either your mass is increasing or it isn't. If your mass is increasing, you are turning into a black hole. Your own gravity will pop you down to a singularity.

And it's not just your mass that's increasing; your dimension along the line of travel is decreasing. 0 * X * Y = 0. Your volume approaches zero, your mass approaches infinite, you fall out of the universe.

Men are hardwired, women are softwired... right?

>> how is mass "created" with an increase in velocity?
That's what relativity is all about. Some more recent writings express the increase in force necessary for acceleration in terms of momentum… but it works out to be to-mae-toe to-mah-toe.

By the way, your math sucks. ;-)

F=ma.
m->∞
What force is required to increase a?

You're right about the mass becoming infinite at c, but you don't seem to appreciate what that means. The force necessary to accelerate a nearly infinite mass is… nearly infinite. But it's not a linear relationship.

In fact, this is where "intuition" breaks down. In the Newtonian universe, mass doesn't change. So if you double the force applied to an object, you double the acceleration. But at relativistic speeds, doubling the force doesn't get you double the acceleration. F still equals ma, but m is changing.

To accelerate even a particle as small as an electron to the speed of light would require more energy than exists.

I've done the math for the apparent mass for the a few points in the velocity/mass curve. Note that at .9c, if increasing velocity by .00009c costs one "unit" of force, by the time you reach .9999c, the same increase in velocity costs about 100 "units". The mass increases faster than the velocity.

0.9 2.29
0.99 7.09
0.999 22.37
0.9999 70.71
0.99999 223.61
0.999999 707.11
0.9999999 2236.07

Since there isn't enough energy to accelerate any mass to c, you don't have to worry about the rest of your speculation. Length can't go to zero. Volume cannot become zero. You don't become a singularity. Your mass isn't infinite and you don't tear holes in anything.

So, if that's the basis for all interstellar drives - we're out of luck.

We do indeed live in the boonies. But some plan on going to Mars. I found these amusing… tomorrow's Mars explorers… once they finish raising the remaining 98% of their funding.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...

You should sign up now! (Maybe you already have?)


Ocean voyages have indeed taken years to complete. However, I am unaware of any multi-year voyage without making landfall. Can you think of one?

One other thought on longevity generally: As our life spans have increased, new maladies have surfaced. From a Darwinian perspective, our design only requires us to be functional long enough to see our offspring reach reproductive age. In other words, everything after the age of 30-40 is gravy.

When the average life span was in the ~40-45 range, there were lots of causes of death that rarely manifested themselves. How long has Alzheiner's been around? When did brittle bones start becoming a widespread concern? Cataracts? Arteriosclerosis? In order to get some diseases, you basically have to "outlive" your design. As longevity is increased, I expect we will see new failure modes that we haven't even anticipated. There could be millions of them.

Consider for a moment the capacity of the brain. If we lived the equivalent of 200 "normal" human lifetimes (50 years each), what would we remember? Is the data structure sufficiently robust to enable function after the first 300 years? Or does the data degrade and become garbled? The very nature of the brain doesn't lend itself to things like "regeneration" or "transplants". How would you do a "memory upgrade"? Would we still recognize the mind of a 1000 year old human as sentient? Or would it be degraded beyond recognition?