While flying, taking the train and driving, I had alot of time to think. I read a great deal of Collapse. I’m more than a little sad that LJ has suffered as a result of work, my commute, and WoW. I’m now working out far more frequently than I had been during grad school, but still far less frequently than I would like to be.
Other thoughts included population pressures and social norms. Tuff Voyaging by George R R Martin, The Mote in God’s Eye, and Collapse (among others) had alot of interesting thoughts on the topic. In particular, Collapse talked about Rwanda and showed how it matched Malthusian expectations with regard to overpopulation. Also, the acceptance of war as a necessary means of population control (compare that to the morality of abortion, another topic discussed in The Mote in God’s Eye, or starvation). I also thought Niven’s Protector made an interesting commentary on tribalism, and by extention nationalism, and it’s potential consequences, if one chooses to look at it in that light.
Space travel (we really should send probes first. I calculated how long it would take a probe to reach Alpha Centauri, assuming .1g acceleration the whole way (obviously reversing direction at the halfway point). It wasn’t terribly long, but I don’t know what kind of merry hell relativity would play with it. Never got that far in physics.) Also, colonies on other planets within the system or interior to hollowed out asteroids (an option that
Transportation played another role in my thoughts, with respect to air travel. A giant gaping emissions problem. We need to develop a reasonable interregional (and international) alternative that damages the environment less than the airplane, while wasting no more time. My off the cuff thoughts included shadowrun-esque, aerodynamically shaped, lighter than air vehicles (at least partially solar powered), and maglev rail.
those were the big things, anyway.
I just read some sci-fi book about going to the alpha centauri. They went at 1g accel and got there in 17 years earthtime, 9 months spaceship time. That seems like a long time to me. I assume the author crunched the numbers reasonably.
My view on air travel is that we really will get along fine without ubiquitous air highspeed travel like we do now. Blimps or similar could make similar trips at significantly longer travel times with less fuel use. Interestingly you could probably scale down their speed quite drastically to make them even more energy efficient (closer to ships in energy use). Rail trains can be run at around 200mph. None of this gets close to the 550mph+ planes we have now, and I don’t really see that it’s going to be a huge problem.
These days we can work without leaving our house. Can’t we communicate personally, businesswise, and so on without swapping regions or continents? Travel is mind-expanding and all, but we can all just get used to longer trips.
I think that we could accomplish more and expend less, though it would be a dramatically different economy. Much tighter knit local networks, and much more regional variation.
Also, I was looking at the travel time ignoring relativistic effects. I believe that is equivalent to the time experienced by the traveler, though I wouldn’t swear to it. I was also looking at 1/10th g acceleration, which would increase the traveler time by a factor of a little more than 3 (square root of 10…) and probably, due to reduced speeds and thus relativistic effects, probably less than 51 years earth time. So, not a short jaunt, but still within a human lifetime. A young scientist on the team that developed the probe might reasonably be around when it arrives (even with the three years lag time before it transmitted back).
I don’t know about anyone *currently* working on colony ships, but there’s a whole loud bunch pushing for colonizing the Moon. Some of them are, as you might expect, in NASA, but there’s a fair number that want to go it without governmental assistance/interference. I’ve got links to them at a website I drew up at the office on missions to the Moon-they’re all the way at the bottom of the list. You could say, with fairness, that the plan (at least today-NASA is beholden to Congress & the White House, after all) is to use the ISS as a testbed for deep-space travel & colonization, while we head back to the Moon to build a permanent base (most likely, just like the ISS, with help from other nations).
If you are getting close enough to the speed of light for relativity to come into play, you’re going pretty damn fast already. That is probably not so much a problem as the inertia of the fuel (assuming that you are carrying it with you). The first unit of acceleration requires tremendously more thrust than the last unit, given the sum of the mass of the ship and the entire trip’s worth of fuel. It’d be curious to see how much fuel is required to maintain a constant acceleration.
I had been thinking about solar sail &| ion drive, but that led me down a long path on wikipedia. The issue is complex. =)