Comments on: Charlie Stross: we’re probably never going to build starships

By: Fedman Kassad

Fedman Kassad — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:57:08 +0000

John, Charlie is most definitely not having a failure of imagination. I’d suggest going through the last few posts on his blog (and, time permitting, delve into the enormous amount of comments) where he explores each avenue of potential interstellar travel, including giant generation ships moving very slowly. There is quite a number of (sometimes counterintuitive) problems that appear there, not the least of which is stability of human societies on millenial timescales required for interstellar voyages.

Also, building a human from a sperm and egg is quite feasible on earth, where we are immersed in a “soup” of microbes and the rest of the biosphere required to produce a complete human. But building one from a fertilized egg and basic nutrients in a sterile environment equals not building one at all (just count the tiny critters happily keeping your gut working properly and then expand that number across the entire human body).

Also, much of general “handwavium” such as antimatter (where both production and storage were huge impracticalities) has been thoroughly shot down, especially in the comments.

By: delt0r

delt0r — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:53:27 +0000

I have run the numbers. An Antimatter craft could do 50% c with very believable technology. The hard part is the antimatter that may have a efficiency bound well below .001% in energy. But even pretty low figures for that –a 1000km plant inside the orbit of mercury could generate a enough antimatter to… well matter.

But i could not agree more on the “ship” thing. Its like this with just plain LEO access. Everyone seems to think it should look like a plane (space planes). Well trains don’t look like ships or planes. Why do space access vehicles need to look like planes?

By: Ian Sales

Ian Sales — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:34:53 +0000

Paul, Williams might not have been published in the UK until his (solo) Astropolis trilogy, but his earlier works with Dix are pretty good. From what I remember, Echoes of Earth, Orphans of Earth and Heirs of Earth all suffered a little because it was populated by multiple copies of the same small cast. Definitely worth trying, I think.

By: Fedman Kassad

Fedman Kassad — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:20:55 +0000

I’m nearing the end of Vast by Linda Nagata – not exactly CD-sized wisps, but the basic principle is there, with multicentury travel times at tiny percentages of lightspeed of and self-regenerating and selfaware nano-based ships that can backup/reconstruct the crew as needed. Recommended, though with a caveat – I have not reached the very end, so that may still be a letdown.

By: John Hunt

John Hunt — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:39:21 +0000

Charlie Stross has got some useful points but he’s having a failure of imagination.

– into the aforementioned CD-sized machine
– a machine capable of surviving in deep space
The problem is that he assumes that we must travel at relativistic velocities. But if we choose to go considerably slower then we don’t have to be down to CD-sized machines and we don’t need to worry about relativistic dust particles. Cosmic radiation is much reduced in interstellar space than near our sun. We have superconductors requiring minimal energy input which would need no cooling beyond Jupiter with strengths tens of thousands greater than the Earth’s magnetic field. Pioneer 10 still functions after 37 years. If designed with a longer-term power source we could design a craft that could power up after hundreds of years of being in the deep freeze.

– industrial infrastructure capable of building more of itself
– the equivalent of those 300,000 NASA technicians and engineers
200 years of more progress should be enough for us to produce self-replicating nanotechnology and universal assemblers. Provide those with the blueprints for industrial machines of increasing size and various purposes and they should be able to produce an industrial base.

As for the “the equivalent of those 300,000 NASA technicians and engineers” the key here is not to produce a system with that much ability but to produce that many people and then provide them with aerospace education. The information for the education itself can be stored in very little mass. 10^20 atoms should be more than enough. 100 million gigaatoms = 1 milligram +/1.

The challenge is to produce the people. But, surprisingly we’re not actually that from from being able to do this. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/may/19/science.health (11th paragraph).

For a more extensive write-up of such a mission see: http://www.peregrinus-interstellar.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=135&Itemid=60