The Fermi Paradox

Once a payload is about 2000 k out there, the microgravity makes the compensating equations pretty simple. Once again, the Navy's rail gun is absurdly overpowered for this type of use. But for it to be in a state of dynamic stasis, you'd want a cable that's about 36,000 k long. That would keep the cable in place by the balance of the tendendy to fall into the gravity well, and the tendency to fly out due to the rotational effect. Two thousand k is not nearly far enough--and would require far more enerby to operate efficiently. It would be boring for the people who had to ride the elevator for five days up to orbit or down to the surface, but they'll just have to get over it.

You were talking about the "Zubrin,McKay proposal for getting water/Ns and COs and some O2 onto Mars (with a concomitant rie in temp of about 3 C PER WHACK event. As I read about the S/M concept, it had pretty been much dropped by any international committee on Mars Colonization because the full load of "Ice Ball" hits would render Mars uninhabitable for several centuries . (And we are a species of poor strategic abilities). So I think the concepts of "mining gase and combining that with building "Greenhouse gas" factories , or using "Space mirrors"will probably be the chosen technologies because humans could gradually populate the areas even before the atmosphere was at a critical T/P/O level.

Were just sitting here speculating so theres really no "correct answer", just some proposals and some considerations about "fatal flaws" I think that e are no longer in the realms of SCiFi about the concept of terraforming.

Your point of having a Martian atmosphere go bye bye with just a decent sized bolide hit or a decent size solar Mass ejection would be a big problem for a planet with such a gravity . All the work of building an atmosphere would have to be started all over and there would need to be some kind of emergency restoration system (or else all the cities would need to be DOMED or UNDERGROUND for the long term.

Id love to be able to go and do the first resource surveys (especially be running a group of kids doing a "chemical oxygen survey" (Wherein wed be looking for minerals of SO4/CO3/ (probably carbonotites) and all kinds of Silicates (Si3O8/SiO2/SiO4 etc).Theres lotsa "bucket oxygen just sitting in rock structure and we can use the residue as building material as we mine oxygen)

and an associated problem with a rail gn propulsion to NEO would be that humans couldny handle the acceleration from earths surface so people would be ferried by the elevator or a shuttle.

The initiation of deeper space travel accelerating to 25% (c) I what the ion motors would do. However, probably anything "Deep Space" would only be done AFTER we cut our teeth on MArs.

I don't think we lack vision in the space sciences industry. Weve got a lot of smart people who could pull this off. What we lack is will, and leadership to mount a huge multicivilizational project such as Terraforming MArs or Deep SPace Travel and be able to have a bunch of countries pledge substantial prt of their GDPs tosuch a project.

Maybe well have to work on that aspect first.

The distances between stars are so vast, the cost of such travel so overwhelming, that there is nothing you could plausibly bring back from such a trip which would make any sort of economic sense. It would always be vastly cheaper to manufacture whatever it was you wanted.

The ONLY thing you might ever really want from another star system would be information, and there are probably better ways to get that sort of information.

But first, we have to kill of all those _____________________ bastards. (Insert bigotry of choice: Muslim, Commie, Infidel, Yellow-skin, White Boy, etc.) We've talked about this before, and i think the initial efforts will be commercial. Getting an international consortium to set up a space elevator could be the spark that lights a very moest fire, after which mining companies head to the asteroid belt.

we will expend the large amounts of capital as a species when we are endangered by the inevitability of Galactic Entropy or something more localized.

I don't think that "mining" dysprosium or gadolinium is in the long term basis of our exploration of deep space.

In the next 5 or so years, there is a huge international MULTIDISCIPLENARY program to set up these huge (30 to 45 meter D optical telescopes to try to locate exoplanets. This is probably a first step to determine a cosmic "rod map" of potential landing sites.

Some kids from the Harvard Princeton astro circuit have posed an informational alert in that we can now "scan" a galactic area for spectra of what wed consider "Pollution" residues so we should add that crap to our exoplanet scans

Well, i wrote of starting a modest fire. I think that commercial efforts will get us off the planet and moving, in the short run.

Immediate targets for exploration should be Mars, Phobos, and Ganymede, for obvious reasons.

But the basic answer to the Fermi paradox is probably that physical interstellar travel is probably gigantically rare and that the only reason there ever is for it is escape i.e. somebody's home system is about to get blown up for some reason so they boogie.

As far as we know, Id agree. But its what we don't know that is the driver for intergalactic travel.

All sciences have loopholes.

BECAUSE IT IS THERE!

Astronomers have a mystery on their hands. Two large radio telescopes, on opposite sides of the planet, have detected very brief, very powerful bursts of radio waves.

Right now, astronomers have no idea what's causing these bursts or where they're coming from. And nothing has been ruled out at the moment — not even the kind of outrageous claims you'd expect to see in tabloid headlines.

http://www.npr.org/2014/07/26/335335653/close-encounters-of-the-radio-kind-mystery-bursts-baffle-astronomers?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20140726

I heard about this on the radio this AM. Its probably some kind of burst associated with a sun systems death, but until they rule anything out, anything else is a possibility.

Imagine the day that the Fermi Paradox is disproved by actual intelligent beings whove reached out fom deep space and we have to decide, with our primitive means of EM communications, how can we do a "send all" return message?

We know our own technology will take several thousand light years to get back to the source.

Thir own technology may also not be too advanced if all they can use is EM also.

Embedded within the bursts are packets of information as to how to overcome(c) and develop a new type of "intergalactic radio" gizmo.

They are already breaking the rules of the Federation.

What's this, Rocky? Fan mail from some alien?

No, Bullwinkle, this is really important . . . just watch!

I'd certainly like to know the driver for intergalactic travel when travel when each galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars and the galaxies are so far apart compared to interstellar distances.

The "driver" is that we still don't know much about human capabilities. Who would have thought we could send rockets to Mars? It was not that long ago that people would have said, anyone speculating such a thing 'is crazy.'

Maybe, it takes 'crazy' thinkers and thinking to accomplish what most people think are impossible.

What I mean is that there is little reason to travel to other galaxies, when our own contains 100 - 400 billion stars and intergalactic distances are so great compared to interstellar distances. What is the motive when there are so many stars to visit in our own galaxy?

Your's is only one opinion. I think most humans like exploration and the achievements we have made during the past century.

As I id before, e will trvel through our own glxy on the way to the Universe at lrge. It a form of a phrase, it not a point of argument that you seem to be trying to make.
Ill stipulate to the fact that we will, by the very nature of cosmogeography, explore our own galxy fist. Theres no argument there at all. Whats yer point besides wanting to pick a fight?

Longstanding pet peeve. Many movies, for instance, refer to intergalactic travel, simply because they don't have the faintest idea of the difference between a galaxy and a solar system. There is really no reason to say intergalactic travel when you don't mean anything of the kind. Furthermore, our galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars and the distance to another galaxy is very large compared to the distance between stars. I can't see much motive to go to another galaxy. We're certainly not going to run out of unexplored stars in the Milky Way. To me, it's like someone saying "nucular" instead of "nuclear" because they have pretty much never thought about the subject in their lives or having no idea that the sun is a star.