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

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Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2001 1:56 AM
Subject: Interstellar travel (was: Re: [spacesettlers] Re: Not that I WANT
to terraform Mars...)

[snikt]
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.
[snikt]

The question is: will people get aboard generation ships like the ones that
you describe above? I wouldn't. As far as I know, generation travel is
something beyond any human experience in history, and basically no one would
like to get aboard a ship - even a city-sized ship - that ultimately would
be his/her coffin. I concede that, in a population of billions (or
trillions) of people, you would certainly find enough whacko to fill your
generation ships, but this colonization wave would be zillions of times
smaller than the one that would happen with FTL travel.

My lack of motivation to get into a generation travel would be even stronger
in a scenario where the Solar System is getting colonized. Why should I bury
myself in a coffin ship so that my great-grandsons will explore new worlds,
if I myself can explore a virtually inexhaustible supply of new worlds in my
own planetary system?

[snikt]
> 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.
[snikt]

That's the beauty of the "cometary diffusion" way. The goal of this people
that eventually will colonize the whole galaxy is not to travel to other
planetary systems: at any given time, their goal is to start new colonies in
nearby planetesimals. But the side effect is that Humanity spreads across
other systems in the process...

Lucio Coelho