Interstellar travel (was: Not that I WANT to terraform Mars...)

--- In spacesettlers@y..., "Dr. Omni" wrote:
> From:
> To:
> Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 2:45 AM
> Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: Not that I WANT to terraform Mars...
>
> I can't help but think that interstellar travel will be viable
> before terraformation is. Not that BOTH will nessesarily be
> impossible forever.
> [snikt]
>
> Well, I really don't know. If someday some faster-than-light
> propulsion system (warpdrive, wormhole, whatever) is invented,
> which I much doubt,then I think that interstellar travel will be
> viable. Otherwise, I think that we will just send interstellar
> automated probes, but never manned interstellar ships, to nearby
> stars.

As nice as warpdrive or stargates or such would be, it isn't necesary
for interstellar trips of, say, a hundred light years or less. NAFAL
spacecraft (of Island One size or larger) will do the job quite
nicely. It would take scads of energy, but then, that's what the sun
is for! I'm fond of laser-pushed lightsails; other stuff might work.

> Still, I think that inevitably people will colonize other planetary
> systems, even though they will never get aboard interstellar ships.
> How that can be possible?

By uploading the mind into a computer and transmitting the data to
another computer at the other star. The other computer was sent
earlier by unmanned probe (laser-pushed lightsails again, with
onboard anti-matter engines for braking at the target system).

> It is simple: people just have to colonize the trillions of comets
> of the Oort Cloud. Then, someday, hundreds of thousands of year in
> the future, another star will get close enough to the Sun so that
> its cometary cloud will intersect with the solar one. Then, people
> living at the Oort Cloud will be able to migrate to the extrasolar
> comets making an interplanetary-scale trip, no different from the
> journeys between solar comets.

At which point there ships are, by definition, starships.

> The other planetary system gets colonized, and then when it
> "collides" with yet another star system, the cycle repeats, leading
> to a very, very slow "chain reaction" that eventually will populate
> the whole galaxy (after a few hundreds of million years)... I saw
> this method as described by Carl Sagan in "Pale Blue Dot", but I
> think that it was imagined by someone else long ago.

Well, if you're in no hurry... I suspect that they will find people
already there, people who were a bit more... impatient.