Response to the common skeptic's argument that interstellar travel is inherently unfeasible.

Originally posted by Nanocyte
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, this argument still relies on the implicit assumption that alien life would have roughly the same lifespan as humans, and for some reason, I can’t recall ever hearing anyone counter this seemingly unjustified assumption. Consider the following:

a) Even on our own planet, there is a very wide range of lifespans among various organisms. There are animals that live for hundreds of years, and some, such as the lobster and the Turritopsis nutricula jellyfish that are considered to be biologically immortal ....

b) We still really don’t have a solid idea of how life forms in its initial stages, and we have no way of knowing if the replication errors that occur in life on Earth that we generally attribute to aging are universal, or even common. It could be that the evolution of life on other planets has allowed for even more complex organisms to live for thousands of years, ....

c) I would argue that it’s not only plausible, but likely, that civilizations that have reached a high degree of technological development sufficient for long-distance space travel would also have developed a fairly strong ability to artificially compensate for inherent biological problems. Things like artificial organs, cybernetic implants, genetic manipulation...

Now, assuming that an alien lifeform did have a lifespan significantly longer than a human’s, travel to distant stars would suddenly seem much more feasible.

Your argument basically concedes the point to the skeptics. You are saying ETs have developed a long life and/or use robotics to achieve greater longevity, therefore they can handle the extremely long time it takes to traverse the Universe, maybe. I'm thinking it would be pretty boring traversing the cosmos for tens of thousands of years, but that's just me. The point, though, is that you agree with the skeptics about their primary argument.

Subsequent posts suggest that the Laws of Physics are not the same all over the Universe or that ET has developed Warp Drive. The problem with these explanations is that they are completely speculative and rely on your imagination. I think it is fine to speculate, but the fact is that's all it is. It doesn't answer the question. It does not address the skeptics' major issues. Warp Drive comes from a TV program. Invoking it is plugging a gap with, well, science fiction with the emphasis on fiction. You haven't addressed the questions with anything substantive.

The third issue is people saying, well, they're here or even that we've talked with them, so the fact that they are here proves inerstellar travel is feasible even though we don't understand exactly how they did it. In order to answer this we have to suspend our disbelief for a moment and just and just assume for a moment that people realy have talked with ET and they say they are from the Pleiades, therefore interstellar travel....

Do you believe them? A few years ago when they discussed the issue with people they claimed to be from Venus, or Mars, or Clarion. The George Adamski story is essentially the exact same story Steven Greer tells today. It's just that we are more sophisticated today and know Venus' surface temperature is about 500 degrees, whixh would cook a nice baked potato in an hour, but cook your own goose much faster, and we know the atmosphere of Mars is about 3% that of Earth and no, John Carter couldn't wear shorts there and stay alive. Oh, and Clarion doesn't exist. It's not that it is hiding; it's that it isn't there.

So the Argument from the Presence of ET is a slippery one we have not yet resolved. Even at face value, which we have agreed to for this exercise, they have lied to us in the past. There's no reason to believe they have had an epiphany and are now telling the truth. Basically what we have here is a phenomenon that chooses to pretend to be ET so as not to upset us too much. A few hundred years ago they pretended to be fairies.

I really do not claim to know if intrstellar travel, i.e.: The Bludgeon through Space Approach, is feasbile or not. I just know the arguments for its possibility have yet to sufficiently answer the skeptics' issues.

Originally posted by OpenEars123
Good point!

What gets me is that people will say it is impossible going by 'our' laws of physics. What makes our physics so perfect and final? We are an under evolved race, therefore our laws of physics are under evolved. Just my 2 pence.

The truth is, anyone that knows physics knows it's certainly not impossible. So, by definition, the above is purely a straw man argument.

It's not impossible but, given the current understanding, it would take more energy than there is in all of the mass of the entire universe:

In theory, they say, it’s possible to construct a wormhole or warp bubble, which would shave a few millennia off of your travel time. But constructing it would take a lot of juice — whose source would be something called “the negative energy associated with a quantum field.” The problem is, to get enough energy to make a warp bubble big enough to hold a spaceship, you need negative mass “about 10 powers of 10 (i.e., 10 orders of magnitude) larger than the total mass of the entire visible universe!”

Source

Also:

Significant problems with the metric of this form stem from the fact that all known warp drive spacetimes violate various energy conditions.[8] It is true that certain experimentally verified quantum phenomena, such as the Casimir effect, when described in the context of the quantum field theories, lead to stress–energy tensors that also violate the energy conditions, such as negative mass-energy, and thus one can hope that Alcubierre-type warp drives can be physically realized by clever engineering taking advantage of such quantum effects. However, if certain quantum inequalities conjectured by Ford and Roman hold,[9] then the energy requirements for some warp drives may be absurdly gigantic, e.g. the energy equivalent of -1064 kg might be required[10] to transport a small spaceship across the Milky Way galaxy. This is orders of magnitude greater than the estimated mass of the universe. Counter-arguments to these apparent problems have also been offered.[2]

Chris Van Den Broeck, in 1999, has tried to address the potential issues.[11] By contracting the 3+1 dimensional surface area of the 'bubble' being transported by the drive, while at the same time expanding the 3 dimensional volume contained inside, Van Den Broeck was able to reduce the total energy needed to transport small atoms to less than 3 solar masses. Later, by slightly modifying the Van Den Broeck metric, Krasnikov reduced the necessary total amount of negative energy to a few milligrams.[2][8]

Source

You seem to be interested. You should read the info at those two pages.

If the science of Physics indicated that FTL travel was "impossible," then why would Physicists be working on achieving it?

Harte

reply to post by Harte


Thanks for the post, that was interesting stuff!

Originally posted by OpenEars123
reply to post by Harte

 

Thanks for the post, that was interesting stuff!

Such a kind and intelligent response deserves more. Here

Harte