The sad reality is space travel like sci-fi will most likely never happen. For the following reasons;

-No faster than light travel

-using wormholes etc..to get around light speed requires way to much energy, like stars to whole galaxies worth. Can't imagine ships with stars/galaxies worth of energy inside their power plants.

-acceleration crushes everything, no foresable way to counter it again without using stars worth of energy. Anti-gravity doesn't seem possible without vast energy or simply rotating rings like in space stations.

There is surely intelligent life out there but we are all totally isolated from each other for eternity. What is more likely is a future like the matrix.

As we learn more in modern physics it seems to put more nails in the coffin for sci-fi But not all is lost....

Future quantum or organic computers will be able to create a virtual reality so real we will all descend into it in prefernce to boring reality. And in that reality, if you wish, space travel would work! You could live a star trek/soase reality. If that's what you want. The energy and computing requiements are much more realistic.

Yeah, it's much more realistic. That's what makes it so scary to me. I mean, what happens when you don't want to come out of the virtual reality? If it's so preferential to actual reality, so many people will get hooked to it,and never come out, and humanity will have a major problem on it's hands...

Please note, I'm not bashing your reply. I've had that thought before too. And it gives me the creeps.

Don't need to come out. In the far,far future there would be nothing wrong with living your whole life there. Indeed many people may have no physical existance at all. The technology providing the virtual reality would be nearly as robust as the physical universe itself. No need to worry about system "crashes" etc..

To us now the system would probably look like some gigantic super organism in a dyson sphere around sun. Humanity would have long ago evolved into something more adaptive than it's current primate form. One could send ships to other stars and have the occupants virtualized. This way time could pass at any rate for the occpants. So to them the trip could take minutes if you wish. Additional dyson sphere's could be built around other suns.

yah that’s what they said about the sound bearer. And don't say "but that’s different then the light bearer" no its not (well it is buts its not.)People said that it can never be done they even made theories that proved that it was impossible but now we have jets that can go four times the speed of sound. But back to the my point humanity has a few chosses it can choose
1:humanity will be so involved with technology that we will merge are selves with this technology becoming immortal in a suet of metal and just stopping and then we will expanded ourselves by sleeper ships and if we find other sentient life we think of our selves as superior and assimilate them thinking that our way is the right way. I call this the cybermen approach

2:we will just kill our selves and that will be that, earth will take back what was hers and it’s done. fate will hold what will happen next to earth not us.

3:will we get FTL drive one way or another and we will expand and show the universe what it means to be an earthier

4: it will be like the book 'Logan’s run' having a super computer taking care of us till a serrate point in our lives.

So... what happens to the cotinuing advancement of the human race? What creeps me is that this appears to be a technological dead-end. If everyone's "in the system" there will be no-one to look out for furthering mankind. We will have trapped ourselves, by becoming unwilling (and quite possibly unable) to create further technological leaps that pertain to the real world. It will be another Dark Age, except it'll have a few more flashy gizmos that our unenlightened ancestors didn't have

Sup all! Just got the game, think its dandy. Been waiting for something like this since the last Homeworld game. Was inspecting the topics on the forum, this one looks interesting so…
I find the topics you all are covering quite fascinating but I am disturbed at the lack of reference to where the original ideas come from and the lack of genuine understanding behind them.
When you talk about virtual reality and artificial worlds of digital input I think ‘Nuromancer’ by William Gibson (1984) covers it best. (bty all the ideas in the Matrix were essentially yanked out of this book). If a digital reality does come into existence do not assume that everyone will just suddenly dive in and think it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread. There are always holdouts, people who are stubborn, fearful, to smart to be fooled by it or just prefer the real reality over the digital one. In truth a massive VR system will probably be beneficial to the human race, as we continue to grow in numbers or across the stars social stress will increase and more outlets like VR will be essential to the prevention of conflicts. It will only be a minority “cyber junkies” that fully lose themselves to the VR systems.
Now when you mention religion in space you’ve got to look to the classics. Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ (1966) has got it all. A family feud dating back to the Trojan wars, psi witches, science guilds, and ‘a race of fanatical exiles fighting in the desert over a scarce resource awaiting the holy war’ (boy doesn’t that sound familiar?). If the human race is to survive and evolve we will do it in space and we will bring all of the problems we had on earth with us. It will be gritty and messy and it will take a long time to get to any sort of next stage in our development. Sorry Star-Trek fans, the probability of a unified earth and a ’star fleet’ are close to zilch unless you feel like lobotomizing most of the planets population.
Dune also brings up the point of space travel. I keep seeing on the posts, “but inter stellar travel takes to much power!” “Physics and relativity don’t allow for it to be feasible!” Blah, blah, cry me a river of preconceived lockstep thinking. The power of the mind has no limits! Humanity made the wheal and traveled land, we made boats and traveled the seas, then plains to fly the skies, now rockets go into space every week. We are explorers of both the physical and metaphysical worlds, who is to say we cannot control the fabric of space time itself. We only use ten percent of our brain capacity at any given time al just look at what we have achieved with it, now think of what a hundred percent could do! All of reality is based on perception, change your perception and you change your reality.
My apologies, I seem to have written a small novel. I will try to be more humble with my other posts. Have fun milling over it, I had fun reading you alls posts.

this is a myth fyi

a really, really old myth

Neurologists have put forward many theories as to why that myth exists. The best one I have come a cross is that Einstein quipped "The average person typically only use 10% of their brains".

Its claimed that the popular press took this as absolute fact, reporting that Humans only ever utilised 10% of their brains, whereas in fact Einstein was being facetious

That in itself may only be a myth, but it raised a chuckle in me

Regards
Zy

I understand your point of view. Virtualized people could still interact and research the real world through proxies if they wish, and I'm sure they would. There would still be scientists. Just imagine weird and amazing organic machines (maybe like the Vorlon technology in B5) doing research, controled by/inhabited by, virtualized scientists. We would still be doing all the same stuff as now just through new bodies in a sense. Bodies which are more robust, adpatable for science research. Other people would be doing other tasks/jobs just like now. In the VR world there would be many portals through which to interact with the real world. I wouldn't have to be a deadend, if anythig these new bodies could increase the rate of discovery, just like our current tools have. These machines/ships could be sent out at sub-light speeds to explore and simply run the virtualized people at a slower rate so they don't get bored shitless waiting to get the star X. (Just look at the poor people on the bridge of the enterprise standing around waiting 40hrs to get to gerbilis 4, how uterally boring and tiring for the feet what a horror job!)

My main point was that the future could be more an development of our inner and local world rather than an outward mass exploration via FTL travel. Exporation would be done at sub-light speeds over 1,000yrs by ships with virtulized people eventually.

I know we broke the sound barrier and have learnt to fly, sail etc... But sadly that does not actually lend any evidence that we can develop FTL travel, they are independent events. Based on current best theories and research it looks very bad indeed FTL wise. One can never predict the future with certainty so of course something left-field could appear. I personally hope so!

I was just saying based on everthing we know up to today I believe our desendents will move towards a hybrid VR/real world in a dyson sphere like setup rather than spaceships with FTL drives trading etc .. over 1,000 ly's. But there will still be an exporation component.

Right on, well said, Using warp drive and worm holes may be a possible way of going
faster then the speed of light, but the problems with these technologies is that
they take to much energy and even if you could power these devices, it would be
illogical because the energy of a star could be use for more importent things like
powering a civilization for billions of years, instead of going on a round trip to the ofter side of the galaxy just to visit a dead barren world.

And please don't me about these higher dimensions that we can use to travel faster
then the speed of light, because I have three reasons why we can't use these
dimensions in the first place.

1. There is no guarantee that these higher dimensions exist at all, because there
is no evidence to support there existence and please don't tell me that
scientist say that higher dimensions exist because they only say that these
dimensions are theoretical.

2. Even if higher dimensions do exist, there is no guarantee that we can open one
up and go in one.

3. If we can open up a dimension and go in one, theres no guarantee that humans or
machines or the ship itself, would survive the trip to make it to its
destination, examples why humans, machines and the ship would not survive the
trip in the dimension would be, High energy radiation would disable the ship and
kill all the humans on the ship and unkonwn forces could tear apart the ship,
or there might be a entity that would attack the ship and destroy it. The laws
of physics might be diffent in that higher dimension and the ship might not work
well or may not work at all in that dimension and the same might go for the
humans to and I can list more examples, but I don't have the time.

"All of reality is based on perception, change your perception and you change your reality."

What? That doesn't make sense. Something does or doesn't exist, is or isn't possible. Simple as that.

*Sorry if I came off as gruff. I just don't belive in metaphysics.*

Anything can be possible, its only the matter of doing it. What if for some reason, our minds are too primitive to achieve FTL. What if we either need to change who we are or are gifted with the technology by a race that isn't limited like we are. We often consider ourselves intelligent but when compared to what creatures might even now exploring reality, we may merely be beasts. Needless to say, it is very likely that by the time we reach FTL, we won't even be human.

It's interesting how every Science Fiction book/movie/game anything really, always has us finding out space travel on Mars, and look at what planet we recently found Frozen Water on. I swear, there's more to Science Fiction than imagination.


But, I think the reverse would happen. We'd fight it out, IN space to avoid destroying the world we are going after aka we learned from our mistakes on Earth on how not to take a dump where you sleep at, and turn ground conflicts to a minimum (not excluding crime, like mobs etc.. just super power vs super power warfare). But yes, regardless of the fact that it is infinite resources we will still want it here and now.

NASA is to announce how easy it will be to inhabit mars. This due to the new probe on mars.

Well, we've all been assuming so far that the universe is infinite. That is quite impossible. It is, of course, quite impossible to move any faster than the speed of light; that has been conclusively mathematically proven, and not merely by Einstein. This light barrier is not, as some of you have suggested, simply a pessimistic idea that something cannot be done with our technology; it is a mathematical fact that no matter how fast you go, light will still be moving faster. If this be so, then, of course, the various galaxies in the universe cannot be moving any faster than the speed of light. If this be so, then we can calculate the absolute maximum radius of the universe by calculating exactly how far a beam of light would travel from the location of the center of the Hubble Flow during the approx. thirty billion years that the universe will exist. (This being about how long there will still be usable energy in the universe.) Furthermore, an extremely conservative estimate of the probability of life-supporting planets coming into being comes out to be one over a one with fifteen zeroes behind it. Meaning that, at most, there is one life supporting planet in each galaxy, and there is, furthermore, no guarantee that all planets capable of supporting life will have life on them, or at least not of a complex sort.