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[Starver]

Let's test it all with with the Second Ark, then?

[smjjames]

I'd like to see you try reaction-wheel reorienting a 1 ton craft "Snappy damn fast". Unless you have a REALLY strong reaction wheel, it's going to take time to move that mass.

Really, a craft big enough to carry a human is going to be too heavy to do a "snappy damn fast" reorientation.

[Mech#4]

Would you need things to turn that quickly in space? Space is big, really big, and I'd think you'd have plenty of time to co-ordinate turning and calculations before you need to use them.

[Madman198237]

In fact you DO have plenty of space and time to do such maneuvers, and we can and do quite easily design spacecraft to not need to spin on a dime, because spinning on a dime is STUPID when you can't afford to have anything shaken loose.

As for human brains (since I missed some discussion), we can still learn to do something non-mathematical (or even mathematical things if we have the aid of a calculator) faster than a computer, in general. A computer must be reprogrammed to do something new, a human merely adds it to the list of things they know how to do.

Also, humans have opposable thumbs and the ability to use them for many, many tasks. Never underestimate the raw power of the opposable thumb. Especially if you give it a wrench and four other fingers and tell the conveniently-attached brain how to fix that one silly loose bolt that would kill a decades-long huge robotic mission because it's right in the [name your mission-critical part that can't have a loose bolt in it for its intended purpose, there tend to be a few of them on any space mission].

[Dorsidwarf]

Also, reaction wheels don’t work like Kerbal Astronaut Death Program where they’re a magic box that
flings multi-ton craft around at 500rpm and accelerates infinitely, they’re more like fine-tuning and intertiall dampeners. That’s why large craft need reaction control systems with thrusters of some kind in general.

Sending humans anywhere will always be more expensive than sending a robot to do the same thing (until you get to stuff like planetary operations and large scale activity/ manipulation I guess) in space, cause we’re big, expensive, and need refuelling that can’t be provided by solar panel. The flipside is that there are missions where robots are not reliable or complex enough to compete, and that is unlikely to change barring an advent of true AI

[Max™]

There is always the problem that space isn't as exciting as Babylon 5 or (eeesh) Star Wars might make it look sometimes.

Instead of whooshing and strafing around dramatically in your little personal zero-G-mobile, it's like steering a canoe by farting two weeks before you need to be somewhere, and quietly farting the whole two weeks or so until you're close enough that you can... what, fly up to a dramatic stop?

Hah! Nope!

Turn your ass around and begin farting until your canoe comes alongside your destination, which incidentally is probably hauling ass along several different theoretically exciting trajectories--based on your choice of  reference frame--but in fact you'll seem to be in one of two states: bored and still, or TERRIFIED AND TOO FUCKING CLOSE TO SOMETHING OH GOD WE'RE ALL GON-

Now, where was I, oh yeah, phhhbbbbbppppppttttttt-pooot-pweeerrrmp-poof. Close enough to dock with whatever you spent the last month to come see, and what is it?

A ROCK!

WOW, CAN'T FIND THOSE ALL OVER THE PLACE ON EARTH, but hey, here's a rock WITHOUT ALL THE STUFF AROUND IT!

Wooo, neat!

Scales will be kinda wonky because your brain can handle "mountain in the distance" fine, but "mountain against a black infinite sea of empty death" is harder to sort into a bin of comfortable references, but good news, if anything happens to get close enough to your mountain for this to be a problem, YOU'RE GONNA DIE, HA HA HA, WEEE, FUCK WHY DIDN'T WE SEND ROBOTS OUT HERE?

I could be getting all the same "fun" (for certain loose definitions of fun, mind you I'm a dwarf fortress player who spends time perfecting his skill at dovetailing joints and sharpening tools for fun) by jacking into some glorious higher-than-actual-reality-Infinite-Bullshit-HD-Resolution VR and piloting a drone along parts of the journey (or all of it, ha ha fuck it, why not, slap an IV and colostomy bag onto that ultra-VR package!) to see the same sights, experience the same experiences, but without the permadeath and ridiculous up front cost of hauling a big bag of plumbing and air filtration into space and around the inner solar system.

[Madman198237]

Regular space, yes. It's kind of 99.999999999999999% empty space. That *might* be why we call it "space", actually.

But the things in it can't actually be seen on Earth, they can tell us things about the universe we can't [usually] discover from Earth, and people can do more than any robot to actually collect the data we want and need.

Also, we go to space not because it is easy, but because it's out there and we should go there, screw the difficulty

[Max™]

This is why you should be psyched (and pissed at all the delays) for the Webb and excitedly looking forward to it eyefucking your skull with SCIENCE!

Long term: near Earth is fairly easy, we'll fuck around up there as long as we're able, moon isn't much harder.

If we can keep our shit together long enough to visit Mars and Venus we can probably work up a justification to set up cloud/canyon bases and I wouldn't be surprised to see an asteroid or two pick up some business/military oriented inhabitants.

Afterwards if we don't end up retreating back to the ground we'll probably end up on a long term project of turning as much shit as we can into computing shit, I like the term computronium there. If we keep at the computronium project we'll need to start taking apart planets and whatnot, maybe even get really exotic and start shit like starlifting material from the sun, but the end goal will be a shell of smart matter grabbing all the energy from the sun, using that energy, and passing waste heat on to further shells until the sun looks like a dim hazy infrared source from another star.

Why not go to other stars?

We might but people will probably get mad about wasting potential computronium which could be used to simulate a universe just like this one accurately enough to see what it is like at the next star or any other star, or any number of other universes, because physics sucks like that, sorry.

[Starver]

Probably you're 'farting' at full(/optimal) power as much as possible at the beginning and then stopping, turning round and then doing the same in more or less the same time-frame as you suicide-burn aimed to 'stop' you at (or next to) your target. Give or take the relative motions of source and destination, the inequality of the fuel weights as you burn through the supplies and the concept of (possible multiple) transfer orbits at either end.

If you've got enough potential in your thrusters to make the acceleration burn almost up to the mid(ish)-point and the deceleration then starts as soon as you turn round then that'll be a best-transit-time bonus, and if you can make that a acceleration 1g then you've additionally solved the problem of keeping humans and their assorted biome fragments habituated to a non-microgravity environment.

But that'd not be a chemical rocket, probably, interstellar, nor even intrastellar/interplanetary. Maybe something Orionesque, maybe after a big upgrade (and/or massively parallel array) in ion-spewing drive systems. Or techs wot we know not yet of.

[KittyTac]

This is why you should be psyched (and pissed at all the delays) for the Webb and excitedly looking forward to it eyefucking your skull with SCIENCE!

Long term: near Earth is fairly easy, we'll fuck around up there as long as we're able, moon isn't much harder.

If we can keep our shit together long enough to visit Mars and Venus we can probably work up a justification to set up cloud/canyon bases and I wouldn't be surprised to see an asteroid or two pick up some business/military oriented inhabitants.

Afterwards if we don't end up retreating back to the ground we'll probably end up on a long term project of turning as much shit as we can into computing shit, I like the term computronium there. If we keep at the computronium project we'll need to start taking apart planets and whatnot, maybe even get really exotic and start shit like starlifting material from the sun, but the end goal will be a shell of smart matter grabbing all the energy from the sun, using that energy, and passing waste heat on to further shells until the sun looks like a dim hazy infrared source from another star.

Why not go to other stars?

We might but people will probably get mad about wasting potential computronium which could be used to simulate a universe just like this one accurately enough to see what it is like at the next star or any other star, or any number of other universes, because physics sucks like that, sorry.

Here's the problem. To completely simulate our universe, we need a computer half the size of the universe (even with data compression). And that thing would collapse into a really big black hole. Not a good idea.

[smjjames]

I think that's just with todays technology, in the far future, who knows how advanced the capabilities will get.

[KittyTac]

I think that's just with todays technology, in the far future, who knows how advanced the capabilities will get.

No, those are fundamental physical restrictions. You cannot infinitely compress data, there is a hard limit for data compression.

[LordBaal]

Wtf? Brain jars used to move ships around? Was this thread taken over by the Omnissiah worshipers?

And data storage so far has the theorical limit of atomic storage? Dunno if there's subatomic storage yet, but that sounds like messing up with isotopes or quantum properties of matter.

[Starver]

Straight data compression may be still a problem (although a bit of RLE on all that space with identical nothingness/near-nothingness in it wouldn't hurt for starters, or an equivalent) but if we go to first principles, we could just assume that hitting upon the same algorithm as the universe actually follows we can just procedurally generate anyplace (and anytime!) we want. The requisite seed needn't be huge (assuming we get the right one), and the procedures may be not overly complicated (once we get them right) and then we only need to simulate sufficient breadth of scope and resolution for our purposes, which we can just make sure the product of these two items never gets larger than our computing power can handle. (Also, we don't need it to be 'realtime', and can work with fractional FPS if need be).

In fact, there's a short story I recall reading online not so long ago that uses this "it's turtles all the way down" idea, where all-but-one all-but-one of the chain of 'realities' simulating themselves are shown to be merely recursive simulations (although where we start isn't that one that isn't in the middle of a chain), but I can't easily find it right now.

[KittyTac]

I don't quite get what you mean.