• current@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Near enough to be relatively confident in how much we won’t progress in terms of colonizing space. The general public severely underestimates the limits to space travel & survival. It’s not like I can tell you exactly what or when technology will be like in some exact point in the future, but it’d probably be a few hundred years until we could actually make nation-sized space colonies, and there’s pretty much no future where space habitation replaces or becomes greater than Earth habitation, unless we go ahead thousands if years. There were a few interesting astrophysics papers estimating that near-lightspeed and FTL travel tech is like 8000 years away lol.

    “Future technology” can’t solve all of our problems. It’s not magic.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      8 months ago

      76 years ago was 13 years before Yuri Gagarin would become the first human in space. It was 4 years after the V2 rocket became the first artificial object to enter space. This is plenty of time for multiple technological revolutions to happen. We’re already on the verge of one with fully reusable superheavy lift rockets, most people don’t grasp just how big a change will come from having that sort of cheap bulk cargo access to space.

      it’d probably be a few hundred years until we could actually make nation-sized space colonies

      There’s no need to make nation-sized space colonies, just make lots of smaller ones.

      There were a few interesting astrophysics papers estimating that near-lightspeed and FTL travel tech is like 8000 years away lol.

      I would like to see those papers. Making technological estimates on that scale, especially for something like FTL that has no physics backing it at all, is highly dubious.

      “Future technology” can’t solve all of our problems. It’s not magic.

      There’s no need for magic, this is really just a question of economics.