Sure, but this sea is so big you usually don't run into the bigger fish. Humans will probably remain alone for thousands more years, which at the rate of current progress is more than enough to start traveling between stars and building shit.. even if we don't really need to.. we will do it just to have something to do.

The dude said put a human brain in a machine and bring embryos. Where is all this taking colonies of living humans coming from?

It's like instead of reading and imagining as asked you just defaulted back to standard 1960s giant generational spaceship ideas.

It's fun to get in your 2 cents, but it's nice if ppl can read and stay on topic a little.

Nah, we will have nearly unlimited production in 100-200 years as robots can start to make robots. It won't take anywhere near thousands of years. Look at how fast humans have progressed just in the last 200 years from like steam power to modern day computing and nanoengineering. In another 200 years we will look like an alien super civilization compared to what we are now at this rate.

The whole point of colonization is to find a 1G Earth like planet where we can live in a normal biological forms and not suffer low gravity or weird planet syndrome or long term radiation.

We don't need more places to live really. The Earth won't run out of resources or get filled up by out of control population and copying the human brain to a machine which lets us live almost anywhere is probably MUCH easier than traveling between stars.

We don't be sending living humans that age like you thinking, we will send tiny probes and beam humans as data and we will do it because we can, not because we have to.

Of course there is use to share data between worlds, that's just silly. You think because they can't IM there is no use for communication. GO HOME YOUR DRUNK!

You don't have to send humans in big ships, you can send tiny ground based laser powered probes that setup a receiving station and then beam the human mind as data that can go the speed of light. None of that put you up against the fundamental forces of the universe like trying to carry enough fuel and food to bring humans through space or pretending you can keep human in stasis for thousands of years and not have them turn to mush.

Yes there is, you copy a human brain to a machine, you send a probe use laser propolsion. The probes sets up a recieving station and you send the human as data.

No laws of physics broken and you get fractional light speeds out of the probes and full light speed out of the humans beamed as data.

The reason you think physics need to be broken is because your brain is stuck thinking we need to send humans in space ships, which might be impossible due to the onboard energy and mass you'd need to bring or the immense time it would take.

If you use tiny probes you get to 1/10 or 1/4 the speed of light and actually hop between stars with your probes fairly easily and without risking lives/you can always backup any living humans to a machine but the accelerating large amounts of mass is too much of a problem.

So you solve that problem by not doing it, you approach everything with an ultra low mass solution because that's part of the fundamental limit of physics.. mass doesn't like to accelerate. Space time doesn't want mass to accelerate easily, so stop thinking of that as you main way of doing things and it becomes a lot more possible.

You have to get brain to machine transfer tech to make it work, but that tech is going to be super useful for a lot more than just space travel and it doesn't break any laws of physics to make a copy of a human brain and beam it as electromagnetic waves without all those pesky mass limits.

It's not the easiest thing to do, but at least you don't have to bend physics or invent impossibly high density portable energy sources.

Humans will just expand because they can and production will be virtually unlimited with more robotic automation.

Interstellar travel should be very possible if you just make tiny ships and then bean humans a the speed of light do the outpost you setup with your tiny laser propulsion probes.

BUT you have to stop thinking about it as sending humans in spaceships between stars because that part might never happen.

We will have unlimited robotic labor by the time we are doing stuff like this so there is no need to worry about those issues. You will have so much cheap production that everything will be dirt cheap and people will be bored enough to try crazy space exploration ideas.

Humans might tear themselves apart, but you won't really have production and resource problems AND a lot of these ideas don't compete against domestic improvement anyway so you will be doing both constantly like now.. just at a much faster rate.

Plus there are few single inventions that would benefit humans more than the ability to transfer a human mind into a machine because that opens up all kinds of new doors so you would want to do that even if you didn't care about space travel and you want the robots to automate your production as much as possible.. so you're already building everything you need for space travel for domestic uses anyway.. there is no real loss there just more reasons to do the same thing.

You send a swarm of probes using laser propulsion and they land on the destination planet and self assemble communication and then you beam humans over as electromagnetic radiation because that's a thing you can do if you can put the human mind into an electronic format. You can hit fractional light speed light like that because the probes are small, the tricky part is the landing, but I suspect we can make that work using gravity, light energy from the star in the new solar system, atmosphere and the fact that it doesn't have to land super soft.. but you do have to slow down a lot with minimal power, which is tricky but should be doable. It's all about going super low mass on everything you send through space.

You don't need to carry the humans in the ship and you can lose some probes along the way, you just need one to get there and start a harvesting and assembly process to build the basic infrastructure.

Then you can send humans at the speed of light and clone them at the destination and all you risked was tiny probes accelerated by ground or space based lasers aka the lowest mass possible to keep speeds high and complexity low.

I think the premise of copying the mind to a machine is the right direction and you can do it like that, but it would be faster to try to make the initial "Seed" trip using the lowest mass ship possible and not carry any human because if you have mind to machine tech you can also beam humans at the speed of light, so you goal is to setup a receiving station and beam humans... because basically the only thing that travels through space fast enough is electromagnetic radiation like light and radio waves. Everything else has to either be flung with impossible supernova level forces or accelerated with super energy dense fuel that doesn't exist. We need something that can accelerate over time and not be limited by fuel or size so much, tiny probes accelerated by lasers fit the bill better than anything else I can imagine using known physics.

So instead of that I would say you just send swarms of self assembling robots at a fraction of light speed using ground or space based laser propulsion. You keep the ships ultra small so they can get up to a fraction of lightspeed and hopefully slow down using gravity and surviving the landing. Slowing down is one of the harder parts.

Traveling at fractional light speed might be dangerous due to random debris in space at those speeds so you don't know if all your probes will survive and it doesn't really matter since they have minimal value.

The robots build a receiving station and basic outpost on the remote world and then you can send humans at the speed of light as data instead of fighting the mass acceleration and huge amounts of time problem.

The important part here is that this method allows you to travel at lightspeed without breaking or pushing the laws of physics to the max once you establish your outpost/receiving station. There is no impossible amount of energy needed, the hard parts are copying the brain to electronic format, making some half smart self assembling robots and slowing down the microprobe from fractional light speed to landing speeding while being at max distance from the laser propulsion source AND doing all that with the lowest possible mass of course so you can actually get to fractional lightspeed.

Once you have your outpost setup you can send humans to control machine or clone the human and perhaps transfer there intelligence into the clone as far as seed biological life on a suitable planet.

However... once you have the human brain copied and working in a computer it begs a new question. Why spend all the effort looking for just Earth like planet when a human mind in a machine can live almost anywhere, including just inside a giant computer using ultra low resources.

Once you can copy a mind and render it in a computer you have a whole new way of sustainable existence and long term survival that biological lifeforms can't really compete with. Sure we will be trying to find Earth like planets, but it might turn out that we can build robots that build robots so much longer before we can travel to another solar system that you basically have planet building technology in your own solar system before you can actually find and get to another Earth like planet. Who knows how close the nearest Earth like planet really is, it could be hundreds or thousands of light years away. If so we will be building planets before we ever get there because the most we are likely to go is maybe 1/4 lightspeed and that's mostly just with the tiniest probes possible.

As far as carrying fuel and accelerating a larger ship. I think it's fundamentally not possible for anything but the shortest trips and that kind of slows down the process exponentially AND really getting probes to the would be target planet is a lot more important because you really need good data on it before you commit.

Sooo for now we need ground based microprobes that we can accelerate to 1/10-1/4 the speed of light because that technology might be something we can do soon AND we need those probes going out to target locations ASAP since that will take most of the time and in the 50-100 years it takes to get a probe to another planet we can figure out self assembling robots and mind to machine transfers.

I think that's actually a lot more practical than giant ships with ridiculous amounts of mass/fuel and you eventually can transfer humans at light speed between locations. You can "spider web" out through the universe a lot faster using that kind of low mass max reasonable speed approach. You're not investing huge amount of effort into a ship that will be gone for decades or hundreds to thousands of years and you really need to send probes first anyway so you'd be waiting for those to get there also.. why not just send probes than can assemble receiving stations and send humans like that.

I love calling them Fusion Panels just to mess with people.. but they are too!

Oil demanding is peaking and there are more than enough places in the world to meet demand, stop being such a pussy!

I think that will wind up being one of it's more profitable uses because I don't see how it's beating landlines or even cellular long term. It sounds impressive, but it doesn't actually have a lot of subscribers which suggests real demand might be kind of low since it's generally more expensive than cable and less flexible than cellular so people have to be in the ever more rare areas that don't have cable internet AND where people want to pay for cellular phones AND satellite internet while most people without cable will settle on cellular only.

To me it will be hard to find a lot of profit in the model because it's complex and cable and cellular keep expanding, but for mission critical stuff in remote areas it could easily be the best option.. it's just that's kind of a low volume market for that amount of work.

I think 3d printing might make it so it's not that hard to get to SpaceX levels of cheap and beyond without as much specialized hardware, especially for the smaller more common payloads.

We aren't going to get AI and there probably won't be many AIs. You are imagining everyday robotics with AI, but they will only have machine learning, not sentience.

We aren't going to put living programs in our TVs and vaccum cleaners and we don't want to enslave AI for simple labor jobs either, that's all just good programming and machine learning.

MOST of what you imagine AI doing will just be done by machine learning that has no chance of developing sentience.

Meh, this reads like some silly gadget advertising. How would direct infrared radiation really evenly cook popcorn better than an air popper and who really wants another kitchen gadget just for popcorn. I don’t think the cost of my air popper is a problem that needs fixing, nor will direct infrared be much different since it’s just resistance heating most gadgets.

I would not bother thinking I can predict and just plan to stay adaptive at all times, which is a strategy I generally prefer in life anyway. Things not changing much is kind of a boring way to live just for max prosperity.

Honestly, there isn’t a big need to mine space because humans only live on a tiny fraction of the planet, called the crust, and that crossed only makes up for about one percent of the mass of the planet.

Humans haven’t even touched 99% of the resources here on earth so you know really space mining is like a fun exercise for imagination but not really useful unless you find amazingly rare minerals, that we somehow really need for something and can’t synthesize on earth, which, I doubt, because, more or less, whatever we find in space, will be able to synthesize on earth for less money than the cost of mine.

When a planet forms, you know the bulk of those interesting heavy materials are in the center of the planet so that’s still where most of earths minerals are and the crust we’ve been mining is just a tiny tiny sample of the real content.

Go look at a picture of the planet and book Halfin the crust really is compared to the mantle in the core and you’ll get an idea about much untapped resources. There are on earth and will remain here on earth for a long time and probably be more accessible than any type of space mining.

At the end of the day, though many people may not like it it’s still kind of hard to find good reasons to establish significant industry or colonies in space when humans are so highly evolved for earth, like conditions and earth has so much more accessible resources than anywhere else in the solar system for humans.

It’s kind of like earth is the jam of the solar system, and there isn’t much more high value targets out there around here. It would’ve been wonderful if Mars was a more earth like an habitable planet, and all we really had to do was get to it and humans could thrive, but it’s a lot more like a giant death trap than an opportunity.

The biggest real opportunities for going to the moon and mars is basically just to look at the rocks and expand our scientific understanding of solar system formation because the mars and the moon don’t have tectonic plates so much weather so the geology there has been preserved for billions of years unlike here on earth, and those are like the best records of the solar system formation, and that’s really the bulk of the value not colonizing super hostile locations and I know that’s not what everybody wants to hear but it’s kind of the same problem that we had in the 60s.

It’s a simple answer is because humans are super squishy in space and Mars at its closest orbital proximity is about as far as we think we could actually get and not murder the astronauts. All the extra effort is just to shorten the trip a little bit because humans are that bad at being in space for extended periods of time and you’re talking about a lot of the months just in zero G transit with no rescue likely. When they do down to Mars gravity we don’t yet know how well they can function after months in zero G. It’s still an engineering problem, but most of the engineering is around, trying to figure out how to preserve humans evolved from earth in completely different conditions.

The asteroid belt may as well be a different solar system. It’s so far away humans cannot survive the journey and live launching from the moon or even Mars doesn’t change that much. The only reason it matter with Mars is because Mars is just close enough to be a viable target to send humans vs just probes and rovers.

As it stands now, most exploration will have to be done by machines and not humans because we don’t have anything close to artificial gravity.

If it weren’t for that, we could sail over there and not worry about shaving off a few months here and there. Its not like you slow down in space so you’ll get there eventually but what condition will the humans be in by then.

All the effort to shorten the trip it’s just about reducing the impacts on the humans that you hope to deliver to a new planet and at the very least say you did it. How much there is to really do on Mars is an entirely different question and we may find that our need to be there is rather limited because people only value their lives more and more and I don’t see how life on Mars will ever be anything but hostile.

There isn't really much increased demand.

You can always go underground and the Earth will more or less remain habitual until the sun melts it. Movies are to make you imagine, but not to decide your entire viewpoint on everything. You should imagine more than just the plots to movies as your future.

You are right, futurology is filled with tabloid/conspiracy theory types. It's an endless fight to bang simple logic into their comic book brains.

Meh, robots will be open source and everyone will have them, especially as they start to be able to build themselves and have almost no real value/cost.

You may as well say computers are going to take over the world in their current form because like they are scary and think fast.

I don't see why you need space mining. If you look at the size of the planet vs the tiny crust we live on there will always be more than enough resources on Earth and building BIG structures is either silly or not necessary. Instead everything will go tiny, low mass and high efficiency, not big big big.

It will be more like a race to the lowest mass with humans putting their brains into computers and then that is what really allows space explorations/colonization beyond just the very close destinations.

All these mega structure ideas assume some kind of endless population growth and more or less avoid the more likely scenario of humans putting their brains into machines and not needing most of those things anymore.

I think we will be able to copy our brains into machines, but I don't know that we will have actually solved the issues with humans living in low gravity because gravity is such a fundamental problem like going faster than light. Soo actually I'm not sure people will ever really live on the moon or mars in biological form because it will mostly just be painful.