The goat is already aware, it just sees things… Differently…
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The author ignores the forefront of current technology: A.I. and nanotech.
We do not need to send humans to Planet B.
We only need to send nanomachines capable of re-building humans there.
Science to do this is only decades away.
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Well, duh. Because Rudolph Gloder is worse.
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Who pissed in your wheaties, dude? Speaking as someone who is on the cutting edge of computational materials science, I think KSH probably has a better understanding of this stuff than you do. When someone in that situation says “possible within a generation or two” there’s a very strongly implied “might” in there, because if they’re talking about a generation or two, rather than ten years out, they’re talking about things that are fundamentally divergent from what we’re doing now, rather than a logical progression from it. These things are by their very nature unpredictable. I would call his assessment of tech in this book on the pessimistic side, but really less than a standard deviation on the pessimistic side. Nobody complains when SF authors move way further than that on the optimistic side.
That said, there are a lot of issues with the book, notably what people have already mentioned: sending robot probes ahead to build out the infrastructure in space, do research on the ground, and establish that earth organisms can live there. If you can’t build good enough robots to do that, your chances of making sub-light interstellar colonization work are pretty slim.
Aurora is a good book, but so fucking depressing that I haven’t finished it yet.
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Yeah, I started getting annoyed that suddenly a few people were like “since your opinion isn’t reinforcing the negativity we must demand you source your claims!” As if I was posting some alternate theory of relativity or something and not just expressing an opinion (like everyone else is doing here without references). It just felt a little hypocritical.
Anyway… cool idea and not fuzzy :D. I’m kind of back and forth on the quantum entanglement. I keep reading up on it to try and educate myself more but it only seems to make me more confused. I’ve seen convincing arguments on both sides but it seems like the consensus right now is that even if you could get it to work in a stable way that information still can’t be passed back and forth. And yet changing the state of the quantum particle in itself seems to be information. I’ve also heard that even if you couldn’t pass back and forth communication you could still use it like a code key for conventional communications. Again I get lost in the technical talk when I start reading about it.
The way I look at it is even if we can’t use it in the way that seems obvious there still should be some application that can come from the process. People are clever 
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A tree will never move. Yet it still sends its children off to make their fortune elsewhere.
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Aurora is pretty depressing.
Yes KSR is certainly more qualified than I am. I consume a lot of science, technology and theory information when I can get my hands on it and what I do know is that Robinson’s views - on this topic at least - are not shared by those in the relevant fields. Please feel free to fact check that. You’ll find his views on this are atypical. The reason this caught my attention is because I consider myself a fan of his work and it was jarring to see him say things here that go against his previous decades of comments and writing on this subject. He’s incredibly talented but he is not a scientist any more than I am so I’ll trust experts in the fields of physics and the disciplines that would be involved in terraforming rather than him, and there’s a broad consensus in those fields that we will be able to accomplish these things. The only arguments you’ll find in those communities is how long it will take.
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So, you’re saying that because there’s a slim chance we still might be able to blow our wad onto another planet, we should give up on this one? Screw everyone left behind (i.e., nearly everybody)?
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“In the next ten years” is code for “We don’t know how to do it, but someone will figure it out, won’t they?”
Lots of horrible diseases will be cured in the next ten years, and have been for decades.
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I’m as skeptical of “never-ever” predictions as I am of “high-frontier” silliness (it’s fun, but that’s all). But I see what KSR is on about, and I think he’s basically right, because any decedents of Earth who colonize space will not be us delicate protein-bags. For humans, Earth, and just maybe our home Solar system (but even then we’re not talking baseline humans) are the limit. And so what? Life changes. We’re just one link in the vast web of cosmic evolution, not it’s ultimate end. I find that fact encouraging. It makes us part of something bigger. How sad it would be if we were the culmination of celestial complexity.
I could wax poetic about a fluid continuum of silicon machine substrates and carbon-based organics, but I’d be pissing in the wind. No one can predict the future. The only thing I think we can really say with some confidence is that any expansion of what we recognize as intelligence into the Solar system is going to take at least the same time-tables as it took our own finite species to get out of Africa and become, for better or worse, the stewards or doom of this particular planet. So we’re talking millennia to hundred of millennia. Still a geological sneeze, but the distant future for us alive now. Then, if it can even be done, megayears for their decedents to reach the stars. A cosmic sneeze. I don’t buy the impossible mindset. It’s as reductionary as the High Frontier.
But the upshot is that none of it happens unless our technological civilization survives this century. And there’s no way that happens without us taking our responsibility to the Earth seriously. Space expansionism and taking care of the Earth isn’t an either/or proposition. If we want intelligence to spread to the stars, we’ve got to make sea-changes in how we relate to the homeworld. For my part, I want us to make those grassroots changes, both because we live on an awesome planet the complexity of which we’re only beginning to really appreciate (the universe within), and because out there is a whole universe of other universes within which, by the principle of of universality (i.e. what happens in one place probably happens with different permutations elsewhere because the laws of physics hold sway across the heavens), we ought to send ambassadors, however far removed from us, who can remember their heritage and who can compare notes and learn orders of magnitude more than we can here and now.
But no one gets off Earth if we ruin the cradle. Dead children of Earth tell no tales.
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No. That is not what I was saying. I’m saying that we shouldn’t avoid sending humans to other planets just because it doesn’t benefit us. We can and should do other things that do benefit us here, but we should also send out seeds, even if they do not all find fertile soil.
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One could add economical, but economic problems are trivial compared to the rest, as economics is amenable to adjustment on demand. Reality is not so tractable.
Sigh. You might as well say that human nature is amenable to adjustment on demand. This explains why our Federal government is running 33 cents of every dollar in deficit and our politicians are still promising more. Apparently, some think scarcity of resources and labor are not in the realms of Reality.
Human nature is too expensive - I simply cannot afford it.
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Perhaps you could afford Human Nature Lite - all you’ve come to expect from Human Nature, in a convenient, easy-to-handle package – and priced for affordability! There are leasing plans available to fit any lifestyle!
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A composite of quixotic nexi entrained through communitisation of archetypal structures, expressed as a flux of entelechy within the boundaries of necrotic ambulation?
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If you mean the bit about island syndrome, I’m not really enough of a biologist to say.
I think it’s likely, but there’s no guarantee we’ll find any way to travel faster than he describes.
I think it’s very likely that we could get to the point of being able to terraform another (lifeless) planet, if we don’t trash this one too much to maintain industrial civilization before we get to that point. The issue he points out, being that alien life is very likely to be toxic to us (even if not virulent, or particularly toxic, likely to cause irreconcilable autoimmune reactions in baseline humans) is not one that I’m aware of having been discussed much in the literature on terraforming, and is certainly far further beyond what we can confidently predict than what it would take to terraform a lifeless planet is.
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I’m pretty sure there are no generation ships in those books.
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