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Yes, welcome to my talk with you if you
want to, which is the what's the slogan
of the general national
movement?
I do not claim to have invented any of
the ideas within this talk myself.
It's essentially an excerpt from the
internet. So there'll be a lot of
thoughts, things and a lengthy
list of posts in the end.
And also, I've given
the normal digital version of the same
talk of the open mind in
all this. So I'm with you
a few times that you should to get
a sound, and maybe you can
post the YouTube
anyway only.
Let's get started soon.
You certainly know this image
or one from the internet
or TV, or you don't know it
from radio anyway.
You see your planet and it's
probably it and you're quite familiar
with it because it's where we live.
Unfortunately, it's also
only where we live.
So there's a lot of blank space music
and do all this blank space, which
extends in all directions here.
Still, pretty much nearer humans.
Well, we could be happy with that.
But there are many problems the face
problem
on planetary scales,
and we would presumably
like to continue living on this planet
for serious amounts of time.
We're not quite sure how much
modification the planet or
the substance making of the ecosphere
of the planet can actually take.
So some scientists may, from three,
try to find, say,
safe limits.
How much we can push all these systems,
how do they do that?
They did not try to find basic
points of they sure this is what should
they say, OK?
We have some understanding
of some of these subsystems,
and we know that our current
understanding will probably break down in
some limited conditions where we
assume that nonlinear linearity will
start to appear.
And as long as we stay within
those limits, we actually understand that
we can predict that this instance will
make more of a stable and ultimately
be so everything could possibly happen.
This might be no problem at all that we
don't know that.
And since you only got one try thing
to take off here, obviously
this is not very exciting science
because you do realize you cannot
do experiments, but
you know how to think about it.
There's a bit of shortage of materials
for trying all the barriers and seeing
which ones the wife and children.
So they decided you can't just do this.
Theoretically, simultaneously, this is
not experimentally validated in any way.
So what are the main current
problems the
planetary existence of planetary systems
face?
One is probably quite well known from
public media, which is to take ozone
depletion because
there's a theory that stratospheric
ozone prevents
ultraviolet radiation to reach the
surface in the ozone
is going to get more harmful rather
than radiation, which causes
skin cancer in humans, and also that
the same sorts of animals
and plants.
And actually, this is quite a success
story for humanity so far because
they calculated that
the safe haven would be 95 percent
of the pre-industrial amount of strength
through zone, and the current level is
actually quite variable, as can be
observed over three years,
somewhat less.
But they aren't quite
sure that the old stage will be reached
around 2070 again.
Similar problems exist for
fresh water usage.
Same thing with the 4000 kilometer
cubed per year,
humanity overall is using approximately
2600 of them, so there's still
some wiggle room for us.
Similarly, for allowances, mental
illness that as long as is
converted to agricultural use,
it has different absorption and
reflection properties
and also different effects on
other chemicals like,
for example, the nitrogen or phosphorus.
There's nobody lot.
Most people have never heard about, which
is ocean acidification.
So what is the problem here?
The increasing
carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere
generates or causes
a change in
the ocean or whatever
of the ocean, which means that
more calcium carbonate can be sold
through the water.
And you would not necessarily mean
petroleum.
But for all the more time which
actually build their shells, don't this
calcium carbonate and the.
Change it more energy intensive
to actually build B cells, and presumably
they built these cells because they
lost their geometry.
But because they need them for protection
from predators, meaning that
once the soldier
gets too
different from the evils
that'll be lost to the ocean,
they're really
going to be large.
Changes in plankton levels,
which will cause some change in their
motility, which will cause changes
usually don't are too good
for those predictable actions.
Then the other two things they'll put you
about something like aerosol
concentrations, which cause
global cooling level and also a lot of
health problems in humans and presumably
other animals.
And all chemical pollution that is
producing a lot of sulfur,
unseen chemical eats, which also
do stuff. We don't know exactly what they
do because there are so many of them.
So it's very hard to actually quantify
the here
and there is climate change. Everybody
knows what climate change.
You should have around 350
million coming out of
the film. We have already and production
seems to slow down at any rate
in the world, and nitrogen and phosphorus
cycles may influence production.
And the problem is that
by initially doing intensive
agriculture, we need to put more nitrogen
in the soil.
And all this additional nitrogen is
in the air, ending up in the rivers and
the ocean, and
you're changing his education and also
doing other stuff.
And then there's diversity laws.
People think that it would be safe.
If you have 10 times metrics, you could
say the extinction rate of species
three currently around
applies to transform that level,
depending on which individual looking at.
And also, we have some
limited raw materials that are used
to good, loyal coal, whatever.
And this is actually an image from the
German Wikipedia. Anyway, in the
bar chart shows oil reserves
discovered in the past, and the black
dots show avoid production.
And obviously there is
some difference for some years already,
some at some point in the future, there
won't be that much of an event.
People are very
non-degree. Maybe something that will be.
Some people say, okay, peak oil will be
here in 10 years.
Some people claim it has already
occurred.
The International
Institute, some international oil
producing association, actually says it
will meet within the next 50 years.
It doesn't really matter if
it is normal 50 years, even 200 years.
If you're talking about continued
survival of humanity, we need to
get away from that resource usage,
obviously, and quite fast actually
didn't exist for their wrong.
Here is the cold calls for limited
approximately three years, 49 and
120 years to call it current
consumption level and
the dual metals materials, including for
long periods.
Fortunately, the planet core consists
of a lot of metals. Unfortunately, it
gets a little bit harder to mine them
once it gets to them.
So plus it has actually increased.
I tried to compare it to something not
too inflationary, so I compared it to
raise prices.
And if you do that comparison to actually
see a price increase by a factor of
another two to five over
30 years, and I fully expect that to
continue.
Yes. So this is like
soft limits anyway.
This is not just to universe, which will
take years to evolve.
And then there are also in the slightly
more violent ways. 390 like, OK,
well, I'm everybody knows
all that danger, I think.
And while the research for the top
reasons, I don't me to be here,
I'm sure.
Yes, it's and there's actually
quite a long list of critical situations
which evolved during and after
the Cold War.
For example, there were
some sort of haven't really had a divorce
and according to such incidents,
would have been answered by nuclear
nuclear strikes.
And then it continues, however, and then
something went wrong with the actual
execution of the plan will see
a little bit of that.
Four years later, they found out that
actually there were no technical
blockades to stop all the
ICBM fighting an engineer,
one rogue engineer group.
So you have to be historically careful.
And then in 1979,
very technical people will watch the
training tape, essentially, which showed
incoming missiles some superior
complete control over their shoulder
or whatever, and pull that, oh shit,
we're currently being attacked from the
president and so on.
And only a few
minutes later, they actually figured out
that they which were watching it tape
and stopped the preparation for
construction.
Yes. Similarly, the other
way around.
And in 1983, the Soviet
Union believed that they were being
attacked by the United States.
If I remember correctly, it was due to
something else.
And some of these concerns actually
were only defuzed because
various actually single soldiers refused
to let orders. So there were very few
orders, like if these and those things
happen, then so the concentrated press
this button.
Yes, the very
precisely specified stuff happened.
The issue of
presumably not stopping the nuclear
work, which would otherwise have
happened.
In my opinion, this is not a very
sustainable way of keeping humanity life,
depending on the people are following
orders.
You might think it would be quite
conservative estimate.
Unfortunately, if we see a panic
over the last 50 years on about,
say, since the end of
the Second World War, we would
have been there, but there was a two
percent probability of actually nuclear
war. Starting would not necessarily
mean total extinction of humanity.
It was quite simply mean.
And of current civilizations, you know
it?
Yes. If we just.
Projected this rate into the future for
a few years, they come force behind
the survival chance is actually not quite
that good. Sixty six percent,
which is a lot lower than
I would like them to be.
And it obviously a little brother wants
to go to 12:03pm.
Yes.
And then there are other bad things which
could happen like a global pandemic,
which, you know, thanks to international
answer. I think the spread of a fostered
meaning we would have a lot shorter time
frame to the countermeasures like
quarantines or even necessary research
into vaccines.
And also, we get new, exciting pathogens
by genetic engineering, which is simply
being done for weapons research
laboratories and also maybe some
kitchen things or which that's
also not even the dangerous climate.
And then they are more exotic but more
nerdy waste, wasteland, humanity like
strong similarity
or whatever. Because I can tell you
something, man. This is how we decide to
support the continued continued existence
of mankind. It would be extremely
difficult to to say
it's a very nice understatement, in my
opinion.
One can argue endlessly about the
entry probabilities of these things
happening, but they do exist.
This is the man.
From that point on, I think, Okay,
so what do we do?
Option one is this
one. I try to find a nice image of trees
and elves and stuff
like that, but I wasn't able to find
one which is actually know
under a free license.
So it took a screenshot of one of my
favorite games.
Anyway, the
common name of this option, I'd say, is
tree hugging.
So we do
all green stuff like we are
one percent renewable energies
and
we will use one percent renewable or
recycled raw materials, which sounds
nice on the surface, but it's actually
quite hard to do that in construction, in
concrete and fertilizer because
you need to get this, that phosphorus
for the fertilizer from somewhere.
And so far as I know, that's
pretty much only manure sources and they
are going to be depleted in
a few hundred years as well.
Then you would
need to have global nuclear disarmament.
And if you also want to stop this
more exotic risk like you are throwing
out or whatever have you.
You would also need to have a research
stop for this dangerous technologies
because otherwise, at some point in time,
somebody will make a breakthrough there.
This is very hard because you need to get
all these points right.
If you just overlook a thing of these
risks, it
could still
kill humanity.
I mean, we don't need a pandemic
anti-nuclear war.
And so it once we just need one of them
to go from,
oh, well, as in,
we would rather not
like to happen.
But even assuming we succeed on all these
points, we have other problems
because Mother Nature is not actually
interested in keeping humanity life.
I mean, there are all kinds of random
encounters in space.
For example, in meteorites,
they happen.
They don't happen that often, but they do
happen.
And from one
kilometer from one kilometer
diameter upwards, they're actually
dangerous to civilization.
It heavily depends on you pick location,
so it could either essentially
smash Antarctica into smaller ice.
Nobody really cares. But the penguins
could also smash North America
to small silicon chips, which
would obviously have a larger impact on
global economy
and
inevitable,
which
happens a lot more often.
So there's this very nice volcanic
exclusivity index, which basically just
assigns random numbers to volcanic
explosions.
Larger number means more stuff explodes.
And this is basically
how I feel. They made up the numbers.
So it's not just the euro and the euro is
OK. There is some mountain and some
lava is coming out of it, and then
it scales by a material amount
anyway.
Approximately every 5000 years, one
of these index eight incidents happen,
which means there's more than 100 cubic
kilometers of material ejected.
This usually leads to global cooling
because of all the dust in
the upper atmosphere layers.
And actually, a small
incident happened in 1816,
which is what you will find
on this year without a summer solstice on
there. That was the last time that
the back that the civilized
world actually had problems
producing sufficient food.
The food failure of the crop
failures extended across North America
and Western Europe at the same time.
And these were large trade centers back
then, so this was actually perceived as a
worldwide food shortage.
The large incidents could most likely
lead to stronger of these effects,
and they are usually global.
So it's not like it will kind of explodes
in South America and South America is
being affected. But if it kind of
explodes anywhere and the world is
affected.
And there's another very
sad observation, namely, we do not know
about any civilizations apart from our
one so
far, even though we
looked into space and we tried to find
some. So either the start
of will introduce intelligent or let's
just say, building civilizations
kind of life is very unlikely
or this kind of life is unlikely to
spread into space.
And if we wish
to spread humanity into space, then
we better make sure we understand
why that is.
So it could either be the case
that we are
already lucky because we had started
some intelligent life from this trend and
we are here or there is still
a reason in our future
which so
far could all the other intelligent
species will not see.
And this is a totally open question yet,
but it is cause for some concern,
in my opinion, because it could well be
that the is in the future.
So what do we do?
Challenge accepted.
So maybe we can fix all these problems
at home?
Well, I'm a
computer scientist in Turin
and stuff with digital things.
And but computers break, and
the usual strategy is to try to
correlate the breakage.
So if you have a complex system and you
wish to make sure that some parts of it
always survive, you need to correlate
the risk that
stuff breaks,
usually in computer terms.
There would be backups or whatever or
distributed systems and similar things
can be done to humanity in principle,
even if you just just
consider it a mass colony.
We
have a backup against most of the
planetary disasters.
Just present it because a meteorite is
striking only one planet at a time
and we'll count will only explode in one
planet. Even a pandemic might conceivably
be stopped a lot better if they are long
travel times between two planets.
But once you start thinking big, you
obviously also have to consider the more
correlated risks like supernova and
insanity.
But they are not that bad.
Actually, I thought that the blast radius
would be lost. Not, you know, this is not
a true blast radius, but the radius.
Well, interesting effects still happen to
ecosystems.
Let's just specify that way.
And obviously, this is a very fuzzy
measure, but you need to put some
limit on this anyway.
The more common supernova type two is
relevant up to approximately 30 light
years, which means we
need to travel some 40 like, you know, 70
like us or something to be actually safe
and supernova type 1A, which are a
lot rarer but look brighter
and
have effect across approximately 1000
ideas. And, well, space is large and in
the largeness of space, really
enormous stuff happens.
And the largest
problems
are gamma ray bursts, which
are extremely bright sources for
radiation.
However, the brightness is not only
caused by total energy levels, but also
because of the geometry of
the explosion.
So most of the energy is ejected into a
single beam, which means that while
such events have effects
on ecosystems across approximately 6000
light years, it's like a beam
extending from the explosions.
If you would
have fewer colonies in a triangle, for
example, it's impossible to hit all three
of them with a single beam.
So we don't need to actually travel this
6000 light years to get safety there.
Yes. And then there is a totally
different argument for why we should
start colonizers colonizing
space real soon now, because
we're not just wasting the resources of
our planet.
If we assume supplied travel
for all eternity, which many people do.
We lose approximately one galaxy per year
from the reach of the universe because
the universe is expanding and at some
point in time, we simply cannot reach
certain galaxies anymore because
the expansion of the universe is faster
than light light speed.
And then you cannot ever possibly reached
again.
So what does that
mean in a typical galaxy, according
to Wikipedia, and we'd have across
approximately 100 billion
stars.
It looks like things would be
approximately in 1.6 percent of all these
systems. And if we assume that an Earth
like 10 like Earth can sustain
one billion humans for 50 generations,
which I'd say is doable if you're a bit
careful,
then
each second humanity loses raw resources
for approximately 2.5
billion lives, which is quite a lot,
meaning that
as we talk, multiple populations
of this planet essentially being wasted
because we are not well, we are giving up
the chance to bring up these resources
and do stuff with it.
Yes.
So I presume I
convinced you that we would like to do
this.
Then the next question is, OK, what do we
need to do there?
How long should the colony need to be?
And we don't have.
Real experimental data on humans for
minimum viable population size.
But there is a problem, if you take
two small population, then inbreeding
will very fast eliminate
divergence in the
genome, meaning that
after a while you have totally
genetically identical humans, which
in itself isn't necessarily a problem.
But once you get a pathogen or some
other evolutionary pressure on this
group of people, there's a high risk of
just all of them dying.
This is usually what happens to animal
populations once they get too small.
But we have historical precedents, and
there was the Pitcairn Island.
Was this the bone?
Ultimately,
anyway, so people
move to an island essentially isolated
from it, from the rest of the world, and
they had a stable population across
approximately 200 years.
Whether that can be a debate about how
stable, in particular sociological state
of these people actually were, but they
survived and.
Yes, and,
you know, scientists like, no, so
people have thought about, OK, can we
maybe buy simulation or theoretical
observations, predict
minimal necessary population sizes
and medium term here means some
hundred years.
So with only 50 people, you could
probably keep up with a colony for some
years.
If we talk long term a few thousand
years, we need or we would need 500
people.
And actually, the
effect of human population size, meaning
the number of individuals with totally
divergent genomes, you would need to
represent all currently existing human
genes. It's not that large, so it's only
11 to 12 million people.
You would need to totally, very carefully
selected put on a colony to actually
have a copy of each
gene variant currently here on Earth.
But we don't know where exactly these
genes are because we don't scan
the DNA for everybody, but it's just
theoretically right.
And for once, a radiation exposure could
actually pretty useful because the
problem is not like bat genes,
as it is sometimes naively
assumed that if you have inbreeding, then
bad genes will be able to get expressed.
Well, they are getting serious.
But this very high
evolution and pressure on these very
specific aliens leading to the fast
elimination of them.
The problem is actually that after a
while, you have total uniform genes,
totally uniform genomes there, and
radiation exposure means higher mutation
rates means they actually get more
diversity.
OK. What could we do with another colony
except having a
backup so some
people are not totally convinced just by
saying, OK, we could save humanity from a
lot of disasters, but I say, Yeah, but
what's in for me?
For example, money?
What can we do with another planet?
And we could get raw materials for local
consumption, which gets more interesting
in the low points.
With more population, we can possibly
get raw materials in a shallow gravity
well, meaning we can colonize
space faster and do more interesting
stuff about expanding that much energy
because launching stuff from the ground
of Earth actually quite expensive.
We can gather more solar energy,
and in particular, we can support more
population and more population.
My opinion could in particular
lead to a trade of culture and science
because trading information or data is
quite cheap compared to actually trading
stuff.
And you have a large network effects.
So just because if you have twice
the population, you probably get more
than twice the research rate and
even cultural trade, whatever that is.
So I fully expect that
this will be more than just a linear
increase.
Also, history has shown very useful
byproducts of all space research,
and
they can even be a political argument
being made that a lot of the
economy support actions
by large.
Political organizations could just as
well be done by space research projects
because they may not use putting
money in the economy and getting people
to work on stuff.
For example, in Germany, there
in Germany, there are projects restoring
historical buildings and historical
epochs, and that can totally tell you
that the return of investment on a
historical part is negligible.
I mean, it's like the historical park
afterwards looks like historical park
pretty much like it was beforehand, say,
100 years ago. In another 100 years, you
have to do another restoring project
and then this continuous ad infinitum.
Not very useful, in my opinion.
Whereas research
adds up.
You do research ones and you also
get all the nice economic effects of
trickle down, whether that exist
somewhat, but the pretty much the same
economic stuff would happen.
Must you get additional research output?
Yes, and then we are talking about cost,
so how costly is it actually to
say create a moss colony
initially wanted to humorous, arbitrarily
infinite amounts of money?
That's not the case.
So and that's actually
publicly announced an approximate
budget plan for
hypothetical Mars mission consisting
of seven to 10 people.
And they
said that it would be
now seven to 70 billion dollars
to say 50
billion euros
of this. Approximately half of it is just
rocket boosters and booster rockets to
get the stuff out of the gravity.
Well, just as a competition,
the defense budget, for example, of
Germany, is nearly that amount 30
billion euros.
So it's not like an arbitrary amount of
money. This stuff you can see,
for example, the European Union actually
pay for it if you want to.
Yes, but I didn't also
did not only talk about Mars, so this
must promise essentially sort of like
neither has a plan how to do it if they
just wanted to do it and had the money
which people could, in theory, give them.
But there is also promise escaping the
larger risks like supernova and gamma
ray bursts, and we will obviously need
interstellar travel.
Things don't look that bright
in that area.
So there was the Joint Propulsion
Conference in Hartford, Connecticut, in,
I think, 2004.
Was it anyway that time frame?
Approximately.
And it was the joint statement at
the end saying it is highly improbable
that humans will ever explore beyond the
Solar System and
other people from the same conference
essentially said, OK, yeah, but a trip to
Proxima Centauri, which is quite a new
star system, which is
maybe
useful planets, would need
one or two times more energy than the
entire Planet Earth currently generates
again. And there were some plans how to
actually do that.
And most of these plants had
some kind of totally
inconceivable
device
in it, for example.
Ten million, you give it later.
So if only we could have a 10 million
years later. Yeah, we could do
interstellar travel from this if we
don't. And this continues for a lot of
design. So like, OK, we can do
interstellar travel, given 500
grams of anti-matter.
Yeah, but we don't.
And so conclusion shit.
And this is
anyway a conclusion some people have
taken.
The other conclusion, which is at the end
of every research paper, is more science
is clearly needed,
so we can't do it yet.
Right?
Let's just do some back of the envelope
calculations, so say we want to
accelerate one metric ton,
say three humans,
plus some stuff.
I mean, this is the back of the envelope.
If you take 10 times, the amount doesn't
really matter because it's still order of
magnitude stuff we're talking about here,
but say we want to accelerate one metric
ton to 10 percent like speed, which
would give us a travel time of 40 to 50
years to a nearby star systems.
So this is not like pleasant, but it's
doable.
If you find a sufficiently insane
people, you could just send them on this
mission.
You're going to get an insane space
colony.
But yeah.
Better than nothing, right?
And
actually, there are some organizations I
talk about later, like most one, they
are currently screening candidates
for a one way mission to Mars with
a survival survivability probability
probability of, I don't know, certainly
not one percent.
And they are like having
tens of thousands of applicants.
So this is totally not a problem to find
sufficiently insane people.
Yeah, I mean, seriously.
And OK,
leaving us with the problem of finding
sufficient energy to do
it.
But actually, it's not that much.
So this is a speech of a
relativistic effects shouldn't matter
that much. So just use classical
mechanics and from afar to do the
calculation and resulting in an
energy need of approximately
four point five times
10 to the power of 17 Joule, which
is
something in particular one
thirtieth of the total energy production
of the USA in 2001.
So this is not actually inconceivably
much. And 2001 is
already more than 10 years ago.
So the total energy production of the
United States of America and the world as
a whole has increased by another
factor of, I don't know, two to three
years. So at
least.
And so
this mass is this energy is actually
five kilograms equivalent,
which was
a little bit contrary to my intuition,
which is why I am mentoring
you.
And the other question is, can we
accelerate it fast enough?
Maybe we can only do this with
accelerations which which would kill
everyone.
But it turns out you only need, say, one
thousand for one year to
get this one
ton accelerated.
And it's not very much so.
You also don't need big thrusters or big
rocket engines. You just need a little
bit of push.
So in theory, we could do that.
OK, so how Trekkies and what could
we actually put on our spaceship
device thing to make a move?
And currently we have solid fuel and
liquid fuel and all this kind of rocketry
having a specific impulse of 250
seconds. And the second union?
Totally. Really me the headache.
Sorry.
Yeah, maybe
a little bit depends on the exact
technology.
Again, I'm
maybe I didn't mention that. So I'm
by profession, a theoretical computer
scientist by Trekkies.
I'm just random hacker guy.
So I've totally
no real
clue about this. All I
ever talk about in this talk is from
Wikipedia and
the internet.
So I would certainly ask answer questions
in the end. I hope this time, but
don't expect me to personally have done
anything to further this course except
talking to people
or
actually contributed any kind of
research.
And anyway,
the specific impulse is this very
weird time unit, which essentially
means how long you can sustain
this thrust, which would actually push
up the rocket by the same force its
way just pulling it down, which
kind of makes some sense if you're trying
to stand on the floor, but this guy is
shaking his head, so probably it's wrong.
And you
can see it as an issue.
Yes.
So if you just want to compare stuff,
then it's OK, right?
Yes.
So we have solid fuels.
And then there are
there was this idea of a solar sail.
So essentially you just put a big
parachute in space, which reflects
photons
or
other kinds of radiation, and hope that
the Sun shines on it and pushes pushing
it away. And this sounds to me like
science fiction until you realize that I
think it was. Japan actually already
had a successful mission accomplished
using this technology to monitor the Sun
using some kind of a satellite,
and it achieved the delta
velocity of only one meter per second,
which is really miniscule in six
months. But it was a prototype also for
this propulsion device, so this was
already tested in production use and
successfully.
Same thing with ion thrusters.
So the problem with solid fuel rockets
is that you propellant a lot of
mass away from the rocket.
Quite fast, but quite fast.
It's not incredibly fast.
And the idea for ion thruster is to
propel stuff away from your rocket
incredibly fast, but use less stuff.
And the advantage is that you need
less stuff to carry around with, meaning
that you need to accelerate less stuff in
the beginning of the journey.
And this gives rise to this higher
specific impulse as a which is, as we
have learned, kind of rate of efficiency
and
creating these high exhaust velocities
needs a lot of power.
But this can, at least at this level,
still be done by solar sails or
nuclear reactors,
as in
what they called you.
Are this the
nuclear
reactors, which essentially work by using
the heat differential between some
self-sustaining slow nuclear reaction
and rest of space?
So it's not like a real nuclear
power plant up there?
And then
there is this very complicated
called variable specific impulse magnet
plasma rocket
and
which essentially is like an iron
thruster, but using magnetic fields to
accelerate stuff.
But has the added advantage of
being able to provide a lot more thrust
at the cost of lower specific inputs if
you actually need that for some kind of
maneuver?
And this totally
if you
read these lines, it sounds a lot like
science fiction until the people
mentioned that NASA's going to employ
such a 200 kilowatt device in 2015
to the ice to stabilize the orbit.
So it's not like this is science fiction.
This is actually currently being
deployed, essentially.
Yeah. And then this is stuff we have used
or are pretty much about using.
And then there is propulsion research, so
upcoming stuff we could possibly do.
The first point
is just better anthracis, essentially.
So by doing
ion
thrusters differently, namely using a
little bit more acceleration stages
and some engineering filling,
there are not yet finished with.
And you get a lot higher specific
impulse, basically by accelerating
stuff even faster.
And this is in the face of what I would
call initial engineering.
So it was theoretically predicted
and it was built and people looked at the
actually realized exhaust velocities and
weren't quite totally happy.
And then they were trying to get a little
bit more efficiency out of their
prototype. But it is essentially there
to.
Then there was a very
weird idea of the Q thruster.
The problem I already talked about is
that you need to expel stuff from your
rocket and all this stuff you want to
expel. You need to take with you
initially.
But what if you could expel something
else? So, for example, in a
typical jet engine, you expect a lot of
hot air in space.
You could conceivably expel oxygen, you
have hydrogen you have collected from
space,
but you
can expel apparently something even
stranger, namely virtual vacuum
particles, which exist
only
in some kind of theoretical physical
models.
An interesting thing is people have built
a prototype and it seemed to work,
so I don't really care why.
Yes.
And so they're currently
trying to build a larger prototype
and providing one newton at the power
consumption of three kilowatt, which
would actually give us our
one to ten percent light speed at 30
megabit power consumption.
And you know, this is hard to do in space
because of the because
of the heat generated from all this power
generation, but it's not totally
out of limits, right?
You know, then there is a lot of other
more exotic stuff like some guy have
thought up a nice way to actually
create
photons and expel those from the rocket
and in and
gather
all the of impulse into
the rocket. Only problem is you need a
lot of anti-matter and you don't have
that.
And then there's interestingly,
the
drive, which promises faster than
light travel by doing some weird
spacetime hikari. I'm totally not
understanding.
And again, the interesting thing is
another claims they have for prototype,
and they're currently trying to measure
whether they'd actually affect spacetime
by doing something interferometer
experiments.
And in my August talk, I'd said, OK,
the initial experiments are being planned
and they're currently running, and the
first results are slightly positive, but
not yet significant.
So it looks like there might be something
happening, actually, which would be
awesome, obviously.
And there are some official statements
from the other which are publicly
available from the website saying,
actually, if they're anywhere on space,
special relativity, and
maybe so
we don't totally.
Not that yet. And also, let
me
warn you about that one, because there's
a lot of
journalists
reporting of the latest results, saying
they managed to reduce the
mass of the vehicle from
the size of Jupiter to the size of
500kg
comparable to some early space probes.
And this is actually right they reduce
the necessary mass to five one kg,
but the journalist didn't get it that
it's not about a physical mass, but
mass equivalent energy.
So it needs approximately 250 kilograms
of antimatter to do that.
Yet we're not there yet, obviously.
Yes, and I think
this will be on the
last topic I want to start.
And who is actually doing all this stuff
and how much resources are we actually
spending on this stuff?
I'm presuming that this is important to
get humanity across the next few
thousand years. One would think that
maybe we could actually spend some money
on it.
Yeah, we
do, in a sense.
So then NASA approximately gets
17 or six billion dollars and
so on. So on the Russian federal space
agency, next one, then ESA, then the
Japanese, Chinese and Indian one.
You can read all this in this.
So it's just that
there are also some private institutions
coming up now because some people
apparently are not quite
happy with a.
The speed of the official government
research
and the first
company totally gave me the laugh, the
laughter when I looked at their homepage
because it looks like a restriction of
GeoCities. I totally
recommend visiting
this
second link down there.
You'll find it lovely webpage
looking exactly like a 1990s
GeoCities homepage.
There's a knife friend. This ugly
animations and stuff like and looks
totally ridiculous until they tell
you that they have two prototypes of
inflatable habitat stuff already in orbit
and are going to dock them to the ICAC in
2015.
So, yeah,
apparently the skills are totally
different.
Then there is this Planetary Resources
Committee. They're actually called
planetary resources.
They are, well,
having some kind of believable business
plan trying to really mine asteroids.
Currently, they are selling shared
time slots on very cheap
telescopes in low
orbit and
to get their business started.
And then there is the nonprofit Mars
One, which essentially is just trying to
get one last colony going.
And they all these people are trying to
screen the applicants currently.
Also, they have signed the contracts
for the first unmanned mission test
missions, essentially to start in 2015
16. So this also stuff moving actually.
Yes, bringing me to this, in my opinion,
very, very sad.
Slight because the question is okay, we
are giving some money to this
institution, so we are doing something to
ensure continued survival
of humanity. But is it much?
And let's try to answer it this way.
The gross world product in money, which
is not totally accurate, but we need some
numbers to compare.
It is approximately
84 times 10
to the power of 12. This would be
trillions if I'm not wrong.
So this is the productivity
we have
or
what the economists see of the
productivity anyway.
So what do we do with it?
1.5 of these 10
trillion dollars go to military expenses.
Some of this might actually help space
expansion, like high energy research
going on research for orbital launches.
But a lot of it is just ammunition tanks,
boring stuff.
I mean, you don't have a return of
investment on this stuff. It just
explodes when it's gone.
If you're unlucky, it's also something
else explodes and then your return of
investment is quite negative.
And then you have international tourism.
OK, I am not against tourism here because
we can travel all over the book, but
there is a lot
of money going
in that, though it's just ordered
by big
things, I believe humanity
could do a little less with without
totally dying or be becoming
very unhappy.
And then there are signs.
So I like science, obviously.
So this is just for competition.
And then there is marketing.
We spend half a trillion dollars
approximately on marketing those
worldwide marketing budgets of everybody
combined and guest and
a lot of things. And the number comes
from Wikipedia. So it's not my guessing,
but it must be around this somewhere
and in life, and this is ridiculous
compared to the next bullet, namely what
we actually pay for space stuff, which
is approximately, I don't know, seven
percent of that.
So we are spending significantly less on
ensuring that we can spread the space and
save humanity than we spend
on trying to sell stuff to people.
And marketing, unfortunately, is quite a
zero sum game. So if Coca-Cola and
Pepsi start a marketing war at war, you
either get one brown water
plus caffeine or the other one, but it's
not going to make a life of difference,
and certainly it's not necessary to spend
all this money on such stuff.
So, yeah, this kind of ends
my presentation.
Excerpt from the Internet Thing.
And if there are questions or some need
of discussion, please start now.
So for questions, please line up of the
microphones.
And where's the signal angel?
OK?
Are there questions from the internet?
There are two questions from the
internet. One is, could we
also use this speak by effect for
acceleration just as the Voyager are
posted?
Yes.
So people have done that.
You can do it, obviously.
That would save
a lot of
fuel
or stuff you need to take with you.
It might lengthen.
Some travel times might not
necessarily mean much for interstellar
travel, though, if I'm not totally wrong
because you actually need to accelerate
for quite long times across interstellar
medium, where there isn't much to
accelerate with using swing vice.
But I'm not a spice engineer, so I might
be fundamentally wrong about
the mechanics here.
OK?
And just one shot in addition to
that one, because in swing
by at least using other orbits
might be a very, very, very interesting
way for and relationships to leave the
galaxy because they are
rock
stars traveling across
the gravity of lots of galaxies.
And if you're thinking about real big
time scales, this might be a very energy
efficient way to move a lot of people
around.
OK, thank you.
Another problem is how to
slow down for arrival in another solar
system. I think you cannot swing down
around the planet from
0.1 percent of light speed.
Yeah.
Well, you essentially slow down the same
way you accelerated.
You turn around and then you fly the
thrust of the other way.
This means you accelerate and decelerate
approximately the same length of time.
There are some ideas about accelerated
decelerating with solar cells,
in particular just deploying
a large solar sail and letting the
creation of the target star decelerate
you. But thrusters would probably be
a faster way to actually
break.
But this means you need to take the
propellant all the way with you,
obviously.
OK, thank you. So far, those are all
questions from the internet.
OK, so microphone one two and then
the one in the back.
Hi, thank you for the
first part of your presentation.
I really loved the way, how you
enumerated the problems that we have on
this one only planet that we have,
and I'm a proponent
of your first option, the tree hugging.
And so when you moved away
from that saying that, that's
a difficult thing to do and
we should go for the second
option, my question
is which right do we have
to destroy this planet for the rest
of the living creatures and then
just leave?
Well, this is a
very philosophical
and possibly moral question, and indeed,
it's totally right to ask that one.
But then again, there is a lot of planets
out there where we would destroy no
creatures whatsoever.
So say the Moon.
If you totally dismantle the Moon, there
are not many species going
to be very sad about it.
Same thing probably goes for
Mars. And unfortunately, also
probably goes for a lot of Earth analogs.
And yes, you can make an argument that
the galaxies or the universe's resources
are to be shared fairly
and they are fairly means to more
intelligent species than us.
And I'm not totally opposed to
that, but
I think that
at least a few more planets would add a
lot of safety
for
very low costs, even if
you take all the other species we don't
know about into account.
OK, can we continue this?
Yeah, later on.
Indeed. Thank you.
Hi.
Two quick remarks and a question.
Firstly, mark solar sails.
If they get too big, they get kind of
fragile and you have to.
Yeah, it's just not handball anymore.
I think that's not really a way to
transport a big vehicle.
A second remark to the supernovas
that shouldn't be a problem because they
are mostly like the big stars that really
produce supernovas when they die are
concentrated in the center of the galaxy.
So if you want to travel there, you
know it shouldn't be a big problem
because you don't have stars in the in
the arms of the galaxy.
Well, I mean,
I mean, to say something,
this sounds sensible,
and but if I remember correctly,
there was one of these many pages I read,
there was actually a concrete store named
within the vicinity of our Solar System,
which might conceivably undergo
supernova to type explosion
within
the near future.
And a few million, two billion years.
But anyway, this stuff exists,
OK? Not often, but it does.
Yeah.
But the probability probability is
pretty, pretty low, I think.
And on the last slide,
I was wondering what with the wealth of
the money was? I mean, if you add up all
the numbers, it's only like,
Oh yeah, a lot of five trillion.
So I think a lot of it goes actually to
consumption. As in food, clothing
construction, it's quite
hard to get.
Even these numbers were spread all over
the internet. It's very hard to get
any kind of numbers for gross,
global anything except military
expenditure and
total gross product because everybody is
criticizing this military thing.
So there is a lot of numbers for that
one. But apart from that, it gets very,
very hot.
OK, thank you.
So I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. I'm going to like make like
all the German freight.
Do you?
Sorry, it should be the microphone to the
back first.
I I I have a
question towards population
growth when you consider
the current rate of population growing
on the planet.
Do you think it's feasible that we reach
the time of interstellar
interstellar travel till we reach the
capacity of the human population
or a planet?
And let's say we do that.
One would be the time that the population
will double again on the next planet we
arrive.
Um, so my personal,
not very real fond opinion on that is a
very pessimistic one.
So I expect that
we will hit population growth limits
one or the other hard way, actually.
So they will be over food shortages or
some other resource depleted, possibly
leading to significant economic problems,
which is also, in my opinion, a
good reason to do this space expansion
soon because we're currently having
the possibilities to do all this stuff
while we are not fighting for food,
concrete, fertilizers, whatever,
and then obviously you can't sustain
exponential population growth on
a non exponential growing number of
planets. So, yeah, it's kind of obvious.
So at some point you either get a hard
limit or you need to limit our population
growth some other way.
And yeah, it doesn't look like it
currently, unfortunately approaches
things.
The red shirt disappeared
again.
Oh, you're going to die.
Hey, whoa.
Yeah, so I'm
sorry for all the Germans, but
I didn't. So any numbers on your
papers about like nuclear
propulsion because like,
I'm sorry, there is a lot of like stuff
that could be used and technology that we
already have that a load was
kind of like trouble and just kind of
like, Oh,
you mean like Project Orion, for example?
I mean, that's one of
the most. Yeah, there is like Nervo.
There is like a see.
There is like anti-matter
triggered fission.
I mean, many.
So I certainly omitted a lot of
possible physically possible propulsion
systems. One I very specifically know
about is this arena here where you
essentially have a huge lead shield
and explode a lot of
hydrogen or fusion efficient
bombs below this shield in quick
succession, which would actually be an
awesome way to provide huge amounts
of propulsion to a large spaceship.
It only has some downsides, like other
countries not liking a lot of nuclear
explosions in the atmosphere and
possibly if you do it wrong.
Nuclear fallout But it's not necessarily
that much of a problem if you actually
know what you're doing, but many of these
things were
conceived and then discussed and then
discarded as we are not probably going to
do that. And I might have
wrongly excluded some of these options,
which really, in the end, save humanity.
And I just admit to them from talk
business, I was too stupid.
That might totally happen, actually.
So please read more of this Wikipedia
to find out and
for you numbers.
The woke prediction of like anti-matter
is around four nanograms
per
year, but we
have global world production of
antimatter. So think five years ago,
five or 10 years ago, it was like, OK, we
have created positron and
everybody's like, Yeah, and now we have
like a worldwide production of antimatter
in various particle accelerators.
So in my opinion, this is a lot of
progress, actually.
But yes, it is in the range of nanograms,
indeed.
Yeah,
thank you. And no, the one with the I'll
believe it's the space invader reflector.
Yes.
Oh no.
First of all, I can add to the swing by
question.
It will help you get out of the Solar
System and it will help you a lot.
But for the total interstellar voyage,
it will not make much of a difference.
It's like if you wanted to walk from
Sweden to South Africa,
it's like the metro that helps you get
out of Oslo, but then you still need to
get to South Africa.
Thank.
Yeah. What what I was going to
ask you is in your research, did you
find a certain tendency of some
of the thinking about this
problem having changed over time?
Was there a time when people were
thinking about it more or are we thinking
about it now more than ever?
It a little
bit. So there was during,
I'd say, 30s to 60s
a lot more optimism in that
regard. And then as there's always
this Typekit curve, right?
And then everybody got a little bit
pessimistic and all the critics showed
up. And problem is, I cannot actually
answer that question for, say, the last
10 to 20 years because my local filter
bubble is very heavily
constricted on some futurist forums.
So I might totally have of wrong feeling
for the dispersion of the
opinion across the world population
there.
All right, thanks.
I have a question,
if wouldn't it be sensible to
look at the problems of
space travel with the
same skepticism
that's on looking on solving the problems
here on Earth?
And what would deaths do of
your presentation ideas?
So one reason why I believe that this
space expansion thing might actually be
more workable than solving the resource
stuff on Earth is that
there are some economic interests
actually doing it.
So it's very hard to convince everybody
on Earth to reduce carbon dioxide
production, for example, and you need to
convince pretty much all large
industrialized nations.
But you only need to convince one or two
large industrialized nations to do space
exploration to win this.
So it might be a lot easier on this
political level.
This is
in the main
only quality I'm feeling there.
On a similar note, don't you think
that it's actually doesn't really solve
the problem you proposed as
opposed to the tree hugging option?
Because with the space explosion thing,
OK, let's say we use all the military
budget in the world to put a few people
on Mars. Then we have a colony there
that might be our option in case
something goes horribly wrong and the
Earth is destroyed and humanity is wiped
out. But until we get to the
point that we can put a big
fraction of the people on from planet
Earth to Mars, that would be
not the military budget, but like
a few million times, the military budgets
are pretty, pretty unfeasible.
So we still have to deal with all the
environmental problems here on Earth
unless we just care about the survival
of the species as a whole and don't
really care that a very
big portion of it is going to die anyway.
OK, so I'm starting to
answer this very soon anyway.
So saving some
maybe upcoming advances
in anti-aging technology.
We are all going to die soon.
So it
is, in my opinion, mainly a
matter.
So there are two things you can optimize
for. One is the happiness of current
population or living population.
Let's say it, and then it makes total
sense to go more towards this tree
hugging to have a very soft limiting
approach to population growth, meaning
that everybody who ever starts a life has
a happy life and a long life, and then
answered in some way.
But then the question is, what about all
these other lies that we did not start
because we didn't have the resources for
them?
So you can either
if you optimize for, say, average
utility off of people, then this
option is good. But if you optimize for
total utility, then it's
totally insensible because you only get a
few people compared to billions
of trillions, actually.
Yeah.
I just wanted to to do a
smart small remark regarding the air
regarding this travel speed at
air travel time thing and
ways around special relativity.
I think if you go fast enough, then
special relativity is actually going to
help you with that because
if you move fast enough, then
a lot of although it might take a
thousand years at that speed at that
below light speed for the spaceship to
travel to the other planet.
The time which will pass for the
astronauts and the spaceship will get
smaller and smaller with
the
speed of the spaceship, and you can get
them there in seconds for the astronauts.
But it will still take a thousand years
for the other people outside the
spaceship.
So you certainly cannot do it in seconds
because they actually need to accelerate
to that speed without just pushing
everybody can the bottom.
But yes, you can do it within a
reasonable timeframes like 30
to 40 years, even for distances
vastly larger than a few hundred.
Yes, indeed. Correct.
One problem is that you need to have
all this energy for actually accelerating
that fast, but it might be solvable.
And the other one, it's a shifting from
radiation, so you're going to crash into
random stuff.
And even very small random stuff like
hydrogen atoms in intergalactic
space are quite energetic.
If you're traveling at light speed
and generating a lot of ionization
in
your spaceship, meaning in
humans.
Yeah, and we don't take it that well.
But yeah, it is still I mean,
they're the ideas for magnetic shields or
electrostatic fields, shields.
So it's not inconceivable to actually do
that once we get the good energy source,
which is, I believe, the main problem
here.
Um, what? You haven't gone to
space elevators and
one of your one of your
main problem you always said is
like getting mass and getting things
into an orbit.
And the only thing I don't really know
a lot of about them, but the only thing I
always hear about them is actually we
got all the technology we would need
to build them.
We just on building them.
Yes, this is essentially the same
problem.
We also have this Mosconi.
We kind of do know how to
approach that, that we have been
spinning carbon nanotube fibers
in some in the UK for a few years,
and it looks like they would be strong
enough to actually build a space elevator
that way.
So it's not like the technology is not
there. It's mainly there is no political
will to spend the resources.
And so this would be one way to solve
this. To solve the problem of the gravity
of this, we would still need to propel
all the spaceships to
Mars or some other stellar systems.
There are also other launch options like
huge coins, so they are actually some
designs accelerating a spaceship
totally on the ground and then launching
it directly into space from there.
So apparently that can be done if you're
willing to spend a lot of
power and a lot of
length to do it.
But it's not impossible either.
Thanks.
Another question since
we made such a mess
already here.
And as you suggested, if we send
some insane people to colonize the
next planet and we get this
kind of insane colony there,
what what's the point if they are going
to repeat all of our mistakes?
OK.
The question is it
totally in my opinion, the question is
what do we want to achieve personally
auspicious, but in particular personally?
So it is.
This is also what I try to tell
to some guys microphone too.
It is a question.
What are you trying
to achieve
in the end? In the end, as in a few
billion years,
so
rule your mouth, you have shaped the
universe in a meaningful way.
Or will we have managed to
kind of continue living on this planet?
This is OK. I mean, this is a valid
option, totally available option because
it means that we might be able to
guarantee a very
happy and resourceful life for every
human ever come into
existence from now onwards.
But it means we are going to have only
a few billion to maybe one trillion
humans across the lifetime of the
universe, meaning we can create
a lot less cool stuff.
A lot less cool culture, a lot less cool
science, a lot less cool anything.
This is essentially my reason for
just creating more population
and surely life on Mars Colony or
even for
move away will not be a very
happy life. You need to survive.
You need to actually like build
habitation from rocks and not like
coal. A big construction company, there
is no construction company on Mars.
It will be a very unhappy life and
we will reduce the average happiness
of humans.
This off?
OK, we have time for two short
questions, and these are the very last
ones.
Well, Australia started as a colony
of criminals.
So
yeah.
And we're doing fine, thank you very
well.
Although there might be some people
in Australia happily objecting to that
statement, that's a side note.
So it brought my diplomatic efforts in
Australia, so it had at least some.
Yeah.
Well, I'd like to to answer the
question before
why we should send people to Mars if
we probably would mess
up our
civilization on Mars as well.
Well, if you are that pessimistic,
you can, in my opinion,
just go and shoot yourself because
nothing will matter.
What we should, what we should
really do, what we should really
keep in mind here is that
a colony on Mars will be
very much different.
As you pointed out, life on Mars will be
very much different from life on Earth.
So there will be a completely
new form of civilization and a completely
new form, a completely different form
of culture there, which
means there is an actual chance
to make things better and
to get things different.
And I think the chances of achieving that
in such a
different and an alien environment
as another planet
will be much higher
than just trying to start over on Earth.
Thank you. I think that's a very nice
conclusion for this talk.
Yes, indeed. Thank you very much and also
thank you all for your attention.