What if Country X starts building a starship in, say, 40 years and it works and off they go.
Then Country Y invests in new technology and starts building their new ship in, say, 100 years.
It's possible and likely that Country Y's starship is more capable and faster than Country X's ship as they would have waited for and capitalized on scientific breakthroughs that make interstellar travel better.
This is the same idea as waiting to buy a computer until they're faster, on the assumption that the faster computer will give you the answer sooner. About twenty years ago, this idea was quantified and published in the paper "The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking on Large Computations", which you can read here:
Country X will have 40 years of experience of actually being in space and might learn much more valuable knowledge than the theoretical advances made by country Y.
> It has been argued that an interstellar mission that cannot be completed within 50 years should not be started at all. Instead, assuming that a civilization is still on an increasing curve of propulsion system velocity and not yet having reached the limit, the resources should be invested in designing a better propulsion system. This is because a slow spacecraft would probably be passed by another mission sent later with more advanced propulsion (the incessant obsolescence postulate).
The "incentive trap" has also been referred to as the "incessant obsolescence postulate", in this paper from 2011 titled "Energy, incessant obsolescence, and the first interstellar missions":
(edit: I presume the downvotes are for linking to Researchgate? I know they're not held in high regard like Arxiv, they're more like a sleazy Linkedin for academics, but if there's valuable content there why not use it?)
Are you asking for a value judgment? Or what exactly is your question? This can happen for example in some games like Master of Orion. You send a ship to the border, and before it gets there, you've already researched, built, and deployed a faster version. Sometimes it changes things, sometimes it doesn't. If your sole purpose is simply to arrive then it hasn't changed a thing. If you are planning to fight aliens when you get there, however...
For example, in the Honor Harrington books by David Weber, the Manticore system colonists traveled to their target a couple hundred years in hibernation. But as it was likely propulsion technology will advance before they reach their destination, they also left part of their money in a trust fund back on Earth, to make sure the Manticore system won't get squatted in the meantime.
This proved to be a sound idea, as practical FTL drives have been invented after the colony ship has departed and they have been greeted by the Manticore Trust navy upon arrival, that has secured the system a couple years earlier, arriving by the newfangled hyper drive. :)
Interesting. 100 years is a long time. Would this be a generation ship [0]? If so, I'm curious about their discussion of the moral and ethical considerations of committing children to such a journey.
Is this program dead? I had a look through the website and couldn't see much to suggest otherwise other than their writing prize in July last year. The list of partners too was a bit weird, all branding consultants and design agencies.
> the endeavor was meant to excite several generations to commit to the research and development of breakthrough technologies to advance the eventual goal of interstellar space travel
It doesn't seem that the purpose is to come up with a working concept but rather a concept that's interesting enough to push the topic forward and tickle the imagination of scientist, engineers, etc. for generations until the practical implementation is achievable. So I expect right now branding and design are more useful in popularizing this.
I hope the future of interstellar travel is not these gigantic starships. It's like starting a project of building a gigantic Zeppelin in 1900 in order to get able to get to moon in 100 years. Teleportation seems more convinient to me and much less financially and socially devastating.
There should only be one Manhattan style project now: figure out how to download consciousness into a machine. Besides conferring immorality, this would also make interstellar travel time scales irrelevant.
If we could do this wouldn't we spin up minds-in-machines to do all sorts of cognitive tasks on demand and shut them off when the task is done (or they abandon their task) like a virtual machine.
Imagine making a copy of someone like Fabrice Bellard [1] and spinning up 100 of them to write your flappy bird clone for you and then shutting them off.
Would this be a terrible crime, or a paradise? This is an idea known as Hansons "ems" [2].
>this would also make interstellar travel time scales irrelevant.
Not really. You're assuming this "machine storage" mechanism can preserve state forever. Even if you manage to upload consciousness losslessly and maintain all the ineffable qualities of "life" or "soul" or whatever (that we don't even really have solid philosophical definitions for), you'd still need to contend with data corruption and bit rot over cosmic time-scales.
You basically encode a message (say, it's 10 some data storage unit unit long) into a much bigger lot of chunks (say 1000 0000 units), which you then transmit. As long as you receive a pre-determined amount of the chunks (1000 units might be enough), regardless of order, you can reconstruct the original message.
With speed of light lag, you can't really expect re-sends & will have to use some encoding working on a similar principle to this one.
Frank Herbert's take on this had humans enslaved for a few centuries before the Butlerian Jihad got humans back in control of themselves and instituted a ten thousand year taboo on 'thinking machines'.
Sci-fi is great for postulating dystopian outcomes so we can at least anticipate bad choices and guard against them.
I fear that the rush to integrate humans with machines will miss something essential and end up replacing true consciousnesses with philosophical zombies.
I guess if the transfer process is perfected then you don't have to worry that much about HW failure or rot. Very little of today's data actually disappears due to these causes.
Imagine today's equivalent of having your data on 2-3 hard drives, in the cloud, on 3 email addresses, and in a printed copy. You will backup a brain dump every evening to a satellite backup storage and 3 data centers around the world, maybe even to a cold or hot spare body. Someone stealing or altering a copy of you, or altering you (lots of philosophical questions around who is you anymore) would be the real worry.
If anyone told you today your life depends on a piece of electronic data in your possession I'm sure you wouldn't let HW failure or data rot become a problem. Your birth certificate is in a single paper copy and it's damn hard to get a replacement and yet most people have no problem keeping it safe for decades.
That sounds more like a recipe for missing the window of opportunity, that should over time fix all our environmental & resource issues once and for all thanks to the (in comparison to Earth) limitless resources of Earth.
"Did jesus die for Klingons?" can be answered the way that Mormons answer the question for Americans.
That is, Quetzalcoatl came to the middle east to offer the good word.
(I always tell Mormon missionaries about Quetzalcoatl and they haven't heard of him, but the Quetzalcoatl cult did start around the same time as when Jesus came +/- 100 years or so.)
Readit News
Then Country Y invests in new technology and starts building their new ship in, say, 100 years.
It's possible and likely that Country Y's starship is more capable and faster than Country X's ship as they would have waited for and capitalized on scientific breakthroughs that make interstellar travel better.
https://archive.org/details/arxiv-astro-ph9912202
If it's a period of collapse, perhaps complete collapse, humanity will have lost an opportunity by delaying the launch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
An interesting example was "Interstellar Travel - The Wait Calculation and the Incentive Trap of Progress"¹, which somehow isn't on libgen [yet?].
1. http://www.jbis.org.uk/paper.php?p=2006.59.239 - The incentive trap of linking to a £5 download for fifteen year old paper is another paper entirely.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1066
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260275150_Interstel...
(edit: I presume the downvotes are for linking to Researchgate? I know they're not held in high regard like Arxiv, they're more like a sleazy Linkedin for academics, but if there's valuable content there why not use it?)
For example, in the Honor Harrington books by David Weber, the Manticore system colonists traveled to their target a couple hundred years in hibernation. But as it was likely propulsion technology will advance before they reach their destination, they also left part of their money in a trust fund back on Earth, to make sure the Manticore system won't get squatted in the meantime.
This proved to be a sound idea, as practical FTL drives have been invented after the colony ship has departed and they have been greeted by the Manticore Trust navy upon arrival, that has secured the system a couple years earlier, arriving by the newfangled hyper drive. :)
The lore is quite amusing and poignant. Many of them met a sad end in one way or another, reminiscent of Fallout.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship
Not to develop a ship that can travel for 100 years. (Even though that might be the case)
It doesn't seem that the purpose is to come up with a working concept but rather a concept that's interesting enough to push the topic forward and tickle the imagination of scientist, engineers, etc. for generations until the practical implementation is achievable. So I expect right now branding and design are more useful in popularizing this.
Seems like this was a big scam.
Sure, but there is that pesky problem where the solutions need to be theoretically possible.
Imagine making a copy of someone like Fabrice Bellard [1] and spinning up 100 of them to write your flappy bird clone for you and then shutting them off.
Would this be a terrible crime, or a paradise? This is an idea known as Hansons "ems" [2].
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard
- https://ideas.ted.com/are-you-ready-for-the-impending-age-of...
Ian Banks' Culture novels look at this a few times.
Appreciate the article links, will read them after work today.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/FallRevolu...
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Not really. You're assuming this "machine storage" mechanism can preserve state forever. Even if you manage to upload consciousness losslessly and maintain all the ineffable qualities of "life" or "soul" or whatever (that we don't even really have solid philosophical definitions for), you'd still need to contend with data corruption and bit rot over cosmic time-scales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_code
You basically encode a message (say, it's 10 some data storage unit unit long) into a much bigger lot of chunks (say 1000 0000 units), which you then transmit. As long as you receive a pre-determined amount of the chunks (1000 units might be enough), regardless of order, you can reconstruct the original message.
With speed of light lag, you can't really expect re-sends & will have to use some encoding working on a similar principle to this one.
Sci-fi is great for postulating dystopian outcomes so we can at least anticipate bad choices and guard against them.
More seriously, if we can send software, why care about this muddy consciousness stuff?
Of course, if the philosophical zombies end up being evangelistic transhumanist zealots, we'd be screwed.
Are you under the impression that hardware never breaks down, or that media never rots, or that software never fails?
Imagine today's equivalent of having your data on 2-3 hard drives, in the cloud, on 3 email addresses, and in a printed copy. You will backup a brain dump every evening to a satellite backup storage and 3 data centers around the world, maybe even to a cold or hot spare body. Someone stealing or altering a copy of you, or altering you (lots of philosophical questions around who is you anymore) would be the real worry.
If anyone told you today your life depends on a piece of electronic data in your possession I'm sure you wouldn't let HW failure or data rot become a problem. Your birth certificate is in a single paper copy and it's damn hard to get a replacement and yet most people have no problem keeping it safe for decades.
That is, Quetzalcoatl came to the middle east to offer the good word.
(I always tell Mormon missionaries about Quetzalcoatl and they haven't heard of him, but the Quetzalcoatl cult did start around the same time as when Jesus came +/- 100 years or so.)