The arithmetic of interstellar travel

“no one has sent a detectable signal in our direction”

Synchronicity as just a few days ago I was thinking about the Pioneer plaque that Carl Sagan helped make possible. I asked a couple of people in their 20s if they knew about this plaque and neither did. I’m in my early 50s and remember it well.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

“assuming linear scaling (again, very generously)”

Not generous at all, very mean. Getting from Earth surface to Earth orbit takes the vast majority of the energy. Getting from Earth orbit to the Moon is relatively trivial.

“By hypothesis, that would require the ability to live in interstellar space for thousands of years. A civilisation with that ability would have no need of planets.”

That’s entirely true though.

Which bit are you offering up btw? Nullabor or something? Don’t you have to pay us to take that?

Oh, also, one wants to spread out to avoid extinction by gamma ray burst. This requires one to spread out quite a lot. A space habitat will not help, and 2k light years is a pittance.

There is a third possibility; that intelligent life is common, but that the development of science requires the right sort of conditions. Some historians of science maintain that in the 17 century doctrines that were close enough to be true to be getting on with came to be accepted by thinkers, but that there was little real evidence that they were true. If anything like that is true, then the development of science depended on a lucky and unlikely set of circumstances.

Not that I’m one of those techno-utopians or anything, but this arithmetic is very questionable. It’s not merely a matter of energy cost being largely at the beginning. If someone is going to do long-distance far-below-lightspeed space travel, the two main possibilities are to either have a functioning society on the ship, or a group of frozen colonists on the ship that are woken up by machines at the destination.

In either case, people on Earth aren’t paying for the whole trip. They only pay to build the spacecraft. If there’s a society on board, they take over costs from then on. If there are frozen colonists, then the length of the trip is essentially irrelevant from their point of view, as long as the automatic revival machinery lasts. And presumably the ship isn’t going to burn fuel the whole time so the cost isn’t directly proportional to the distance at all.

Alternatively, the people on the spacecraft could try to minimize apparent travel time by going up close to lightspeed and using relativistic time dilation effects. That could mean a lot of fuel, but presumably it wouldn’t be used unless there was a cheap way of supplying that at the start or using a ramscoop or something.

“almost certainly more habitable than the new planets”

Did you take climate change into account?

Hmmm…an economist tackles space travel. Can we assume a wormhole?

Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee make an argument in Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe for splitting up “habitable” into some distinct categories. They note that very simple life seems to emerge about as soon as it’s physically possible for it to do so, and to go live just about everywhere it’s physically possible to do so, even in places we used to think there just wouldn’t/couldn’t be anything thriving. But the thing is that having a long thriving history of bacteria is no guarantee that you’ll ever get multi-cellular life, let alone anything complex enough to make the tools necessary to send and receive signals across interstellar distances. Bacteria (and monera and so on) are rugged things. Multi-cellular life has a tendency to fall over and die when the environment gets harsh, either acutely or chronically.

We’ve come close to the extinction of all complex life here on Earth several times, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign that the close calls we’ve had represent the ceiling on how harsh extinction events can be. It’s not at all clear that the universe as a whole has the patience to leave life-bearing worlds alone long enough to get things like us going very often.

As others have said, this notion of ‘cost per light second’ is nonsense. You need to pull out of the earth’s then the solar system’s gravitational well. That’s the main cost, not some mythical cost per unit distance. Don’t they teach physics in Australia any more?

It’s also weird to see these half joking self lacerating comments about people being a bad sort of thing to have about in the cosmos (Mao Cheng Ji, Anarcissie). The horror, sublunary filth “besmirching” the heavens.

Somewhat OT, but there’s some interesting discussion going on about a paper that puts the origin of life billions of years earlier than when Earth began 4.5 billion yeras ago, the authors using Moore’s Law to help derive their answer.
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2013/05/moores-law-and-origin-of-life-study-in.html?m=1

PJW, P.Z. Myers identifies some very basic flaws in Sharov and Gordon’s work.

Re: Sending preserved human genetic material by small spaceships might be a feasible means of spreading the human species outside our solar system.

How do we arrange for the genetic material to be gestated, birthed, and raised to adulthood?

theology : prayer :: space travel : hard sciences

“… why would we bother?”

Yes. Probably also written by a Theologian before Columbus’ expedition. (Setting aside for the moment the Eurocentric bias).

However, the point is that this article is an excellent example if how economists are the new Theologians leading us into a new Dark Ages.

Why bother getting out of bed in the morning? ( I am sure there is a nice economic argument about that).

@Hector St. Claire

How do we arrange for the genetic material to be gestated, birthed, and raised to adulthood?

It would have to be some type of really advanced automated raising room for the first generation. I have no idea if that’s possible, but it has showed up in Science Fiction – Arthur C.Clarke wrote a book about a colony that was founded that way.

On the main topic-

There could actually be a large number of alien civilizations in the galaxy, but simply so separated by time and space that it’s almost impossible for them to interact with each other. We’re not blasting intelligible radio signals out into space like we used to (most of it is digital now), and even then those signals would be hard to tell apart from background noise more than a couple of dozen light-years out. The only realistic way for a distant civilization to detect us would be if we had the extreme fortune to hit their solar system with something from the Arecibo radio telescope or a focused military radar (which is extremely unlikely).

And interstellar travel doesn’t fill me with confidence. It either requires staggering amounts of energy to go even a decent chunk of light-speed, or the ability to engineer incredibly complex starships that can survive and work after centuries or even millenia in interstellar space. The former mostly relies on highly speculative technology (aside from Orion, which only gets you up to 3-5% of light speed if you want to stop when you get there), and the latter requires the type of engineering reliability we can only dream of. It could just be that most alien civilizations don’t bother sending starships and/or probes, since with the same space infrastructure and energy you could build yourself the type of space telescope array that would make astronomers weep with joy.

@Donald Johnson

Maybe we’re like ants surrounded by human artifacts they have no way of recognizing as such.

It could be. I’ve always figured that would be the most simple answer to the Fermi Paradox – we just haven’t been looking long enough. We’ve only visited a fraction of our solar system with actual probes, and everything else has been pieced together from telescope imagery.

Timing matters a lot, too. If an alien probe passed through the solar system in 960 CE, we’d never be the wiser.

More generally, there’s a lot of potential limits, including some that aren’t obvious at first. I remember astronaut Don Pettit pointing out in an essay that if you were living on a planet with a radius 50% greater than that of Earth (not impossible with all the “super-Earth”-sized planets we’ve found), you wouldn’t be able to get into space with any chemical rockets.

What price survival? Somewhere out there is a great, big rock, or a supernova, or a gamma-ray burster, and it’s got our name on it. If we’re still on this rock when it comes along, we’re gone. Do we care enough to preserve this mess we call civilisation? If not, why bother at all?

People who, quite rightly, react with disgust at those who whinge about how much it will cost to prevent global warming seem to have no problem with shooting down humans in space — the only way the species will, in the long run (or as long a run as there is) survive — as too expensive.

In my more pessimistic moods, I wonder if planets aren’t like dandelions, whose function is to provide the initial habitat and raw materials that allows for maybe one species to reach a point where it can escape out into space, where energy, room, and raw materials are essentially boundless — but the planet is depleted in the process, a dandelion head empty of its seeds. The species that make it off their homeworld drift into the universe and survive; the ones that exhaust their resources — the easily-extracted ores and energy supplies — without expanding into space, well, they get stomped on or sliced to ribbons in the great cosmic lawn mower.

I have a bad feeling I know which one we’re going to wind up being.

Before embarking on a journey of 1,200 light years, surely we should do a little more searching in our own neighborhood. Last year, astronomers announced discovery of an earth-sized, but non-habitable exoplanet in Alpha Centauri B, four light years away. That’s within reach of current or near future technology. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of time before we find something close and habitable.

Curious calculations. Let me supply two other sets for the sake of comparison,

Genome Sequencing

Human Genome Sequencing Project,
Time to completion = 13 years, (from 1990 to 2003)
Cost = 3 billion USD

Full human genome sequencing today (2013)
Time = Approx 1 day
Cost = Approx 1000 USD

This equals a cost factor reduction of 3 000 000 in just over 10 year

Raw computing power of a CPU

The fastest supercomputer in the world in 2000 was the IBM ASCI White at the DoE-Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA, reaching 7,2 TFLOPS (i.e. 7,2*10E12 FLOPS)

It cost 110 million USD, weighted 106 ton, and draw 3 MW of power to run and an additional 3 MW for cooling totaling 6 MW.

In slight over 12 years, you can buy a standard high end Graphic Card for a gaming desk top computer for approx 500 USD, which will give you 5 TFLOPS raw computing power, that weight approx 1 kg and draws max 250 W

That equals a cost factor reduction of 275 000 in 12 years.

John Q. is right.

As advances in astronomy steadily raise our estimates for all the early items in the Drake equation, the evidence is becoming overwhelming that the Great Filter lies ahead of us. At this point, by any reasonable standard of proof we know that colonization of other solar systems is simply impossible. Given the frequency of earthlike planets, and what we know about the evolution of life on this one, if the chances of life migrating out of its original solar system were greater than zero, they’d already be here. So it cannot be done. Sorry, guys.

However, I don’t draw as pessimistic conclusions from this fact as John does. It seems clear that the technological hurdle for self-extermination of civilization on one planet is vastly lower than the hurdle for implanting it on another. (And we human beings depend vastly more on the specific ecology of earth than SF solipsism wants to admit.) And, the same expansive, dynamic, competitive impulses that lead to technological progress and, in an open space, endless expansion, in the closed space of this planet, push toward war and environmental collapse. So any society that would eventually expand to other solar systems, will wipe itself out long before then.

But it also seems to me that it’s perfectly possible to halt the process before then. If we get rid of capitalism and the state — the two main locuses of competition — there is no reason we can’t bring technological progress to a halt and establish a society that could be sustained on earth indefinitely. I presume this has happened to intelligences elsewhere. The condition of survival on one planet is to rein in the forces of competition, expansion and conflict. Which is good – it means we can finally organize society around the development of our capacities as human beings, instead of endless accumulation of stuff.

On one other point — people often talk about the importance of space colonization as insurance against extinction in an asteroid impact, etc. But I can’t help thinking, a technology that can redirect asteroids can send them towards the earth as well as away from it. The baseline probability of a massive asteroid impact on earth is very low. You don’t need to be terribly cynical view of history to think that if there were people living out there, it would be much higher, .

@JW Mason

iven the frequency of earthlike planets, and what we know about the evolution of life on this one, if the chances of life migrating out of its original solar system were greater than zero, they’d already be here. So it cannot be done. Sorry, guys.

We barely even know a fraction of what it would take to really put numbers in the first few variables of the Drake Equation. Our astronomy is impressive, but still quite limited – we just found the first planet that I really consider a serious possibility for being truly “Earth-like” in Kepler-062f recently.

As for “already be here”, how do you know they didn’t come and go in the past? We’ve been looking at the sky with something other than the naked eye for only 500 years, and humanity in general has only been around for 200,000. There’s at least another 4-5 billion years in which aliens could have passed through the solar system without us being the wiser. That’s why I always make sure to talk about separation in time and space.

More generally, I find it rather presumptuous that people think aliens capable of interstellar space flight will spam space with self-replicating machines (another speculative technology). We have no idea what they might think, or consider important to do in space. This is where someone says, “Yeah, but if there’s just one who does ” but so what? That “one” might be over in the Andromeda Galaxy, or even in another Galactic Supercluster. Or they might not have been born yet.

The condition of survival on one planet is to rein in the forces of competition, expansion and conflict. Which is good – it means we can finally organize society around the development of our capacities as human beings, instead of endless accumulation of stuff.

That’s already happening with the rise of the Service Economy, the expansion of digital goods and non-physical entertainment, and so forth. We don’t see it yet, simply because so much of the world is still at the point where accumulating some physical goods would be a huge boon (read: China, India, Africa), but it’s heading that way, along with birth rates dropping towards the replacement level world-wide.

But I can’t help thinking, a technology that can redirect asteroids can send them towards the earth as well as away from it.

All technology is like that. Fire can be used to cook your food and warm your home, burn down a forest, burn down someone else’s home, or burn down a forest to shape it the way you want (like with the Amerindian population of the Americas).

The presumptuousness is on the side of people who think that interstellar travel is possible, and yet that *every single one* of the millions or billions of civilizations who could potentially do it, have chosen not to.

Talking about the limits of astronomy is also a sign of confusion. We have *already* established that there are is a very large number of earthlike planets out there. Further improvements in astronomy can only raise that number. And the larger the number of habitable planets, the lower the (already microscopic) probability that interstellar travel is possible, because the larger the number of civilizations that would all independently have to have chosen to forego it.

One thing that always strikes me about SF fanboys in these conversations, is how uninterested they are in science.

until such time as we stop believing that “The logic of Darwinism” implies that being able to settle other planets means that some species would inevitably grab all of them.

And yet, it does.

Is the assumption that human life would be traveling 1200 light years at the speed of the Apollo vessels? Because even if you assume infinite funding and travel at the speed of light, I can assure you that a society of 10,000 people would not survive a millennium in a tin can. At least not without devolving into madness.

If human beings are ever going to travel outside of the solar system it’s going to be via some scientific breakthrough that has not yet occurred, which allows travel faster than the speed of light (wormholes or something, I don’t know…)

@JW Mason — I think your logic is flawed. Interstellar travels could still be possible, the fact that extraterrestrial life hasn’t visited Earth (OR HAS IT?!) just means that no neighboring stars have seen such civilizations evolve. The universe is a big place. You can hop between solar systems and still not get very far. Who knows what’s going on in the next galaxy over, or even just 10 solar systems over?

@JW Mason: The problem is we don’t have specific reasons why it is impossible. Yes, no one has done it, but at the same time the possibility of sending lots of Pioneer like probes that are robust enough to reactivate when passing by a star and emit some simple morse code signal isn’t ruled out by any law of physics.

In 1950 you would have predicted no one would summit Everest.

As advances in astronomy steadily raise our estimates for all the early items in the Drake equation, the evidence is becoming overwhelming that the Great Filter lies ahead of us. At this point, by any reasonable standard of proof we know that colonization of other solar systems is simply impossible. Given the frequency of earthlike planets, and what we know about the evolution of life on this one, if the chances of life migrating out of its original solar system were greater than zero, they’d already be here. So it cannot be done. Sorry, guys.

I don’t know why anyone would believe that the Great Filter is a thing to be taken seriously. We certainly don’t have any great amount of evidence, much less a “reasonable standard of proof,” that it is impossible to colonize other solar systems. You may feel as sorry as you like, but what you’re saying is basically conjecture and speculation; the truth is that we have no reliable data regarding the possibility of exoplanetary colonization. The universe is quite a big place, and there’s a lot about it we don’t know.

@JW Mason

You don’t understand the reasoning here. If it is possible to colonize other solar systems, then it only takes *one* civilization to do so for the entire galaxy to be colonized.

“Capable of interstellar travel” is not the same thing as “colonizing the entire galaxy”. We’re capable of going to Mars in the next ten years – hell, we could have done it in the 1980s, just like how the Space Enthusiasts and Von Braun thought we would in the 1960s. But we didn’t, and it looks very much like we’re not going to do it for the foreseeable future.

The presumptuousness is on the side of people who think that interstellar travel is possible, and yet that *every single one* of the millions or billions of civilizations who could potentially do it, have chosen not to.

No, the presumptuousness is on the people who assume that there must be millions or billions of civilizations, and that they know enough about what they might be like (or what technology might entail) to assume that if they merely have the capability to expand to other solar systems, then the whole galaxy is bound to fill up.

Even “colonization” is a huge assumption. Why would aliens want to live in any particular solar system, as opposed to visiting it? Why would they even want to leave their own solar system en masse?

Talking about the limits of astronomy is also a sign of confusion. We have *already* established that there are is a very large number of earthlike planets out there. Further improvements in astronomy can only raise that number. And the larger the number of habitable planets, the lower the (already microscopic) probability that interstellar travel is possible, because the larger the number of civilizations that would all independently have to have chosen to forego it.

We have established no such thing. Kepler and other observers have confirmed 885 planets, with another 2300 planet-candidates out there. A tiny handful of them (less than two dozen) have planets with a range of mass, radius, and orbital that might make it possible for them to be habitable, and even that stretches things a bit – Kepler-062e got called “habitable” even though it receives so much sunlight that it’s probably a super-Venus at best.

Occasionally you’ll hear some astronomer say that our galaxy “might have as much as 100 million earth-like planets”, but it’s just one or more of them taking the ratio of planets that might be habitable and applying it to the number of stars out there in the Milky Way.

@Omega Centauri

I read the rare earth book too. I was unconvinced about the need or rareity
of having a Jupiter (to supposedly absorb enough potential impactors, to make
impact extinction sufficiently rare…). I am also unconvinced about the
need for a large moon, i.e. an unstable climate encourages adaptable life
-maybe thats what intelligence needs to emerge.

Same here, and there have been a couple of studies more recently that cast doubt on the “protective Jupiter” idea. Apparently the worst scenario would be to have a planet with 0.15 to 0.20 times Jupiter’s mass where it is – and the best would be to simply have no gas giant there at all.

Actually I have a means of spreading technological civilization throughout the galaxy (whether biological -or machine), that doesn’t violate physics. All that is required that humans don’t yet have, are a power source (fusion), and interplanetary travel robust enough to allow colonization of Kuiper Belt objects.

Not exactly. You also need the ability for those interstellar ships to reproduce themselves at the destination in order to send out more ships into interstellar space. That’s speculative at best, since right now it takes an entire technical society just to produce rockets capable of moving significant mass into orbit. We can only speculate about what type of infrastructure it might take to build spaceships capable of traveling in deep space.

We have actual problems that we might like to solve on earth before we think about expanding to the stars For Great Glory. It’s called “prioritizing,” you might want to look into it.

To extend your comparison a bit, at the time of the Apollo landing, the state of the art computer was the IBM 360, which ran at about 0.03 MIPS and had 10Mb hard disk modules. The state of the art in air transport was the Boeing 747, and the land-speed record for wheeled vehicles had been set at just over 400 mph. Need I say more?

This assumes that different technologies scale in the same way. I don’t know why you would assume that. To examine the air transport issue, there’s a very obvious barrier to higher speed air transport: the Mach barrier. Also, things like nonlinear scaling of drag with velocity in general. The problems of interstellar travel, such as they are, are completely different in nature. It may or may not turn out to be possible to travel between the stars, but we won’t learn anything about whether it is or not from looking at earth-based air transport.

But it also seems to me that it’s perfectly possible to halt the process before then. If we get rid of capitalism and the state — the two main locuses of competition — there is no reason we can’t bring technological progress to a halt and establish a society that could be sustained on earth indefinitely. I presume this has happened to intelligences elsewhere. The condition of survival on one planet is to rein in the forces of competition, expansion and conflict. Which is good – it means we can finally organize society around the development of our capacities as human beings, instead of endless accumulation of stuff.

I read this two or three times scratching my head and wondering what it could mean, before I finally realized Mason equates “technological progress” with “endless accumulation of stuff” and not with “development of our capacities as human beings.” It’s clear enough in the text, but is such a strange view to me it took a while to assimilate. Now I know who these people are that say Kubrick’s 2001 is a boring movie – they are drawn from those who wouldn’t disturb the universe, and whose fondest, most forlorn, grandest hopes for humanity involve nothing more than “sustainability” and living in peaceful harmony with nature.

Will B: “Let’s accumulate more stuff and technology, endlessly—and more planets, more experiences, more epics of discovery and settlement. Let’s indeed follow the logic of Darwinism, the oldest commandment of Nature, and of Nature’s God—to be fruitful and multiply, and spread to the farthest reaches of the universe.”

It’s always hard to know when something is a Poe or not.

Naturally, I believe that the universe has already been taken over by an advanced species that just so happens to hold exactly *my* civilizational, cultural, and personal preconceptions. So they laugh just as hard as I do when some alien life form goes on about how they have to settle other planets because of Nature’s God.

Why do people obsess about interstellar colonisation? Because they don’t want to die, and they believe that dying as a civilisation or as a species is analogous to dying as a person, the person being them; which it really isn’t.
Our civilisation and our species are going to die, either at the heat death of the universe or before, and if ultimate extinction is going to make our civilisation meaningless it’s meaningless now. Alternatively, a civilisation that isn’t meaningful unless it’s infinitely extended is a pretty poor guide to making moral distinctions today.
Adding, for good measure,
(a) that I’m astounded that nobody has linked to the much more technical exploration of the practical issues of space colonisation by Charlie Stross over at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high-frontier-redux.html
and
(b) I’m mildly surprised that nobody really seems to believe in evolution. Whatever reaches the stars in a thousand million years, it’ll resemble us as little as we resemble our ancestors of that vintage, which is to say hardly at all. See Alan Coren’s discussion of the issue at http://livetoad.blogspot.com.au/2009/12/somebody-up-there-like-me.html

Chris B, yes, I too find that worrying about our progeny who are multiple evolutionary timespans down the winds of time rather irrational. If we could be magically time transported to meet them, but couldn’t even recognize them as the same species -or understand them, would we care about their future prospects?
We forget the major explosion of multicellular complexity took a hundred million years or less. And that stuff looks really really alien to us.

“If we could be magically time transported to meet them, but couldn’t even recognize them as the same species -or understand them, would we care about their future prospects?”

Nothing sentient is alien to me.

A bit of physics-based comparative arithmetic for interstellar travel:

The energy required to boost a ton to a moderately relativistic velocity (kinetic energy = rest mass, ~100 exajoules) is nearly one billion times the energy required to boost a ton to the Moon. The total current human power consumption (~15 terawatts, if one includes burning dung for cooking) would suffice to boost 0.17 milligrams per second, if the energy could be applied efficiently.

A civilization contemplating fast interstellar travel would need to have somewhat greater resources at its disposal.

On interstellar travel see NASA on the Alcubierre Drive;
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110015936_2011016932.pdf

On economists writing about it see:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf

Jerry Vinokurov #67: “This really isn’t as profound as it sounds, because nothing can be used to ‘precisely predict whole systems,’ in this way.”

You manage to miss the point. Yes of course ratiocination is all we have for prediction and control. And you miss, as well, other reasons it fails in complex systems: It is also a well-known phenomenon that n-body computation is intractable for precise prediction. This is a different phenomenon from chaos, and (I would argue) it applies independently to the problem of prediction for any complex system that is modeled as some sort of n-compartment system, which is all of them.

But more important, this problem of precise non-prediction is indeed a very big problem for one of the things we are interested in treating, a couple of things actually, not only climate but species extinction. Why? Because in this situation, all that scientists do is point to statistical aggregates of results. You know that 3 degrees is coming, more or less, in a century, more or less — but golly, it turns out that isn’t good enough, yet. Because these are very big policy questions, questions that go outside of science, and your lack of precision is not counteracting an enormous inroad into contrarianism and confusion by vested interests who will lose money if things don’t go their way. So it’s “not your fault”.

Well guess what? We have arrived at an alternative definition of “ratiocinative/technological hubris” that would be hard to improve upon: Scientists who think that what they can do, is all that they NEED to do. This is exactly the sort of sloppy policy logic that economists fall back on too. But in a complex system that cannot be precisely predicted, you are never only a scientist.

Since we’re being quantitative here…

At the velocity mentioned above (~0.87 c), time dilation is only a factor of 2 (alleviating 50 years of ship-time boredom per century of flight), while typical interstellar gas looks like a relativistic particle beam with a power density of 100 kilowatts per square meter. On impact, interstellar dust grains deliver about 1000 times as much energy per unit mass as a thermonuclear bomb. Shielding a fast vehicle becomes an interesting engineering problem, even for an automated probe.

“On behalf of my fellow Australians, I’m going to make a counter-offer…”

I’m not quite sure whether Prof. Q. is being ironical here. Is this a reference to the possibility of rehabilitating and resettling large areas of Earth currently deserted? I’m sure that is possible, with careful attention to water- and land-management practices, recycling and conservation in general, and I guess it would indeed amount to a much more practical alternative to interstellar/interplanetary colonisation.

But then the irony (if it is irony) gets deeper when you consider that there may be some people (though thinly scattered) who actually think such places belong to them. Is Prof. Q. making a sly reference to the problem of interstellar colonists finding and displacing primitive aliens with their (the colonists, that is) superior technology? Is this a reference to what happened during the Age of Discovery here on Earth, when lots of relatively primitive people (on the Guns, Germs and Steel scale, anyway) were dominated and/or displaced and/or slaughtered and/or infected by Europeans?

Apollo spending peaked at $6.7 billion in 1966, while GDP of the USA was $780 billion — both figures nominal. In that year primary energy consumption of the USA was 55 exajoules*. Let’s pretend that energy expenditure is proportional to dollar expenditure. That would mean Apollo energy expenditure peaked at 470 petajoules in 1966. Let’s scale that up by a factor of 300 trillion for the interstellar job, and convert to watts:

(470 * 10^15 * 300 * 10 ^ 12) / (365 * 24 * 60 * 60) = 4.47 * 10^24 watts. Or about 1 percent of the total energy output of the sun. I wouldn’t immediately dismiss the premise in fiction, but that’s about the best I can say of it. Clearly passenger-bearing interstellar travel awaits some combination of improved passengers, destinations nearer than 1200 light years, and industrial production uncoupled from human labor.

*Originally given in Statistical Abstracts of the United States as 51864 trillion BTU — what an ugly unit. One exajoule is about 1.05 quadrillion BTU.

Charlie Stross’ discussion of solar system colonization is surprisingly shallow (though he gets lots right), he doesn’t actually seem to have appreciated Gerald O’Neil contributions (someone who is not at all a quantitative slouch). But, in agreement with his basic point, solar system expansion will only be economical from the moon, i.e., potential colonists will have to be born and raised there, feed off of locally grown food stocks.

O’Neill, Zubrin, and many other space colonization enthusiasts have tried to find material incentives for colonization. The numbers just don’t work with present or easily foreseeable technology. The political economy of very large space projects dooms any project too grand in its sweep. The projects that can be done incrementally, and maybe eventually turn a profit, are likely to be automated to the hilt and no stepping-stone for colonies.

O’Neill envisioned zero gravity and advanced automation enabling super-productive orbiting factory workers that could quickly pay off their expensive infrastructure. I think he probably had it backwards. There’s not much economic advantage to zero gravity manufacturing, advanced automation will arrive first on Earth where you don’t need radiation-hardened electronics, and if people inhabit space they will do so because they first became comfortably rich on Earth and were looking for some adventure to spice up their lives. The SF story of fleeing Earth for a better economic life in the space colonies — patterned after migration in the age of sail — doesn’t make sense when you look at what Earth has and what space has. It’s like migrating to Haiti to escape the economic problems of Michigan.

@ J W Mason: What the hell does ‘the logic of darwinism’ (by which I assume is meant natural selection) have to do with a self consciously teleological species, like us?

And nice job channelling the spirit of Hesiod. Which of course calls forth Homer @ 55.

You manage to miss the point. Yes of course ratiocination is all we have for prediction and control. And you miss, as well, other reasons it fails in complex systems: It is also a well-known phenomenon that n-body computation is intractable for precise prediction. This is a different phenomenon from chaos, and (I would argue) it applies independently to the problem of prediction for any complex system that is modeled as some sort of n-compartment system, which is all of them.

Many-body problems are intractable for the same reason that chaotic systems are intractable: because they are coupled systems of nonlinear differential equation. Take away whatever the “body” is and just look at the math; the formalism is the same. Many-body systems are not necessarily chaotic, but they can exhibit chaos, which is just sensitivity of trajectories to initial conditions. They can also be stable (e.g. the solar system). None of this is really “different” because what drives the unpredictability is the way the differential equations are coupled to each other.

But more important, this problem of precise non-prediction is indeed a very big problem for one of the things we are interested in treating, a couple of things actually, not only climate but species extinction. Why? Because in this situation, all that scientists do is point to statistical aggregates of results. You know that 3 degrees is coming, more or less, in a century, more or less — but golly, it turns out that isn’t good enough, yet. Because these are very big policy questions, questions that go outside of science, and your lack of precision is not counteracting an enormous inroad into contrarianism and confusion by vested interests who will lose money if things don’t go their way. So it’s “not your fault”.

I don’t understand why you are using the words “statistical aggregated results” as a pejorative. What else should they be looking at? Why is it not enough to know that 3 degrees are coming over the next 100 years, coupled with what we do know about the way local environments respond to global climate change?

You mention contrarians, but I don’t understand the point. Contrarians aren’t people who are interested in being convinced by the facts, so this discussion is useless insofar as it concerns them. Your right-wing uncle is going to tell the same “if the globe is warming how come it’s cold in January” “joke” that he tells every year; the precision or lack thereof of global climate models is hardly the point here. Yes, global climate change is a big policy question, I would say the biggest of our time, but that has zero to do with any point about “precision” or whatever. The science is good enough to forecast what it needs to forecast, and has been for some time; we can improve the reliability of the forecast by collecting better data, or using better methods, but ultimately it’s all “statistical aggregation” anyway. If your point is that it doesn’t have the argumentative force that an “exact” prediction would have, then sure, I agree, but we’ve already established that exact predictions are not available anyway.

Well guess what? We have arrived at an alternative definition of “ratiocinative/technological hubris” that would be hard to improve upon: Scientists who think that what they can do, is all that they NEED to do. This is exactly the sort of sloppy policy logic that economists fall back on too. But in a complex system that cannot be precisely predicted, you are never only a scientist.

Who are these mysterious scientists who think this? Indeed, I am not only a scientist, but I wasn’t ever arguing that scientists shouldn’t be part of policy debates or that it’s sufficient to live one’s life hermetically sealed in a lab. I was just responding to a point you made, in the context of talking about actual scientific work, which struck me as bizarre and totally inaccurate. If you want to talk about how scientists should participate in policy debates, I’d love to have that discussion, but it wasn’t the one I thought was going on here.

Of course it is about policy input. I didn’t write pejoratively about scientific work, I pointed out that it cannot make a precise prediction in certain situations, and this sometimes has dramatic consequences. There is a formal limitation in our method of thought that has caused environmental problems in the past (and I think that is where the misplaced distrust of technology comes from, which is what my original comment was about). And now the very same limitation, because it gives imprecise results, is not convincing enough people to adopt a proper climate policy. So to answer your question, it is obviously NOT enough to know that 3 degrees are coming over the next 100 years, or else the policy would be changed by now.

@John Quiggin said, “To extend your comparison a bit … The state of the art in air transport was the Boeing 747, and the land-speed record for wheeled vehicles had been set at just over 400 mph. Need I say more?”

To your question, I would say, yes,

Two things,

First, one reason I took the example of the mapping of the human genome was, that from the perspective of a scientist in the field 1990, the project was truly on the borders of science fiction, and if you in all seriousness had proposed that in 20 years time, you would be able to sequence a whole human genome in a day, he/she would probably give you a frozen smile, while discreetly calling 911.

The reason this changed (in such a dramatic fashion), was both due to improvements in existing technology beyond anything anyone then could (or did) foresee, and, completely new technologies no one had even dreamt about.

In regard to the expansion in raw computer power, this is “only” a quite well known continuation of a progress that started about 60 years ago, but, that in its nature is highly non linear.

I would say that as humans, we are equally inept in handling both these aspects of technological change, i.e. the unknown and the non linear.

Second, time frames. If you view human travelling, not from an arbitrary time point taken 1969, but spanning the last 10 000 years, you will find that it did not change in a constant linear fashion, but very much in short dramatic fits and starts. When viewed since the mid 19th century, it has changed very much indeed, and I do not think that “journey” has stopped, but we do probably have to wait a while for other technological developments to make it possible (or rather) economically feasible to take the next big leap…

Looking in the hindsight mirror, I would say a lot of humility is in order; we simply do not know, and can often not even begin to predict. What we should know, from our past experience, is to expect the impossible to become reality.

Side note, I was curious whether your op was truly serious, but I find these aspects of human nature, thinking and perception, truly fascinating and important.

Do they have to be nonlinear differential equations? I would think that any compartmental system is indeterminate (unless the equations are simultaneous) because the final result would depend on where you start the calculations. I can think of a tiny, nondifferential, linear system that is completely indeterminate: “4 x 8 – 1”. The two results are “31” and “28”. Chaos! Arithmetic introduced parentheses to avoid chaos: (4 x 8) -1. They look like two little crutches, to prop-up ratiocination at its very beginnings.

Vonnegut had a good idea in The Sirens of Titan, a robot sent as a messenger from a distant planet. It’s a slow way to transmit information (although the bandwidth of physically shipping media in bulk is still pretty good) but a quick way to carry on a conversation, since the interval between question and reply is no longer constrained by distance.

I’m not entirely sure if @12 is joking about colonising space to escape climate change, but it’s a sentiment I’ve seen before from otherwise intelligent people and I think it reveals the muddled thinking underlying a lot of space colonisation talk.

It’s not just that the technology to survive indefinetely in space is far or terraform an earth like planet less demanding than the technology to produce self sustaining colonies anywhere on earth or make the entire planet hospitable to life. It’s that it’s a considerably less advanced version of the same technology. By the time we could survive off earth there is nothing we could do to it to make it uninhabitable.

Moreover as J. Quiggan points out the technology to make Antarctica habitable is orders of magnitude less advanced than the technology to survive indefinitely in outer space. The same goes for the surface of the oceans and much of our orbit. We aren’t going to run out of space any time soon, what we lack is the resources to make that space habitable. Which, incidentally, another planet doesn’t get you any closer to than interstellar space: terraforming mars, or carpeting it in dome cities, is almost certainly more difficult/expensive than building an equivalent amount of just as nice orbiting habitat.

Of course the flipside of this is that colonisation and “ships” is the wrong framing, what we are talking about is building self sustaining habitats that can survive in space. After that, where to put them is a minor question, but “at the bottom of a gravity well” is rarely going to be the right answer. If they feel like visiting Alpha Centuri, the generations aboard during the “journey” won’t be particularly disadvantaged compared to the ones at the destination.

The other important point is that the technology we need to colonise space isn’t physics or mechanical engineering, it’s ecology, agricultural science, closed loop resource management. Our current locomotive technology is enough to put us in reach of enough space to do us for a very long time. What we lack is the ability to survive without extracting resources from existing ecosystems – what we need is the ability to create closed loop, sustainable habitats, to get our resource needs down to stuff that can be had in an asteroid belt. Which is also what we need to not drive ourselves extinct on earth, making most of the conflict between space cadets and hippies unnecessary.

In other words, we don’t need to go to Kepler-62 to escape climate change, but if we can’t deal with climate change we can’t get to Kepler-62, not in a spiritual or political sense but quite literally technologically: all the environmental problems we deal with on earth are a small preview of the problems facing us off it.

Once again we are hearing assertions from the ill-informed that human life is possible in Australia. But this is sheer nonsense.

Let’s talk about travel costs first. When I take a taxi home from work, a distance of some 5 miles, it costs at least £12 and often more like £15. Roughly £3 per person per mile, then. Australia is some 25,000 miles away from London.
Now, these “Australians” claim that the population of their “country” is around 23 million. To transport all these people the 10,500 miles to Australia – by taxi – would therefore cost £724 billion.

This is more than half the total GDP of the United Kingdom even today! It’s ridiculous to suppose that in the past – when the UK economy was much smaller – it should have embarked on such an economically crippling effort in order to establish a remote and largely irrelevant settlement on the other side of the world.

Therefore, Australia cannot possibly exist.

In case anybody is interested, here’s a link to the Wikipedia article on the Multifunction Polis mentioned by Prof. Quiggin at 91:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multifunction_Polis

Maybe optimists (?) can safely (?) assume that we haven’t been colonized because by the time all these starhopping alien civilizations achieve the capability of surviving indefinitely-long interstellar travel, colonizing a planet’s just not worth the effort. They’d probably spend more time mining plutonium or whatever the hell else they’re in need of, and AFAIK we don’t have any reason to believe that our planet is unusually plutonium-rich.

Alternatively, accepting the conclusion that all human life will end eventually, and that subduction will completely obliterate any evidence of our existence long before the Sun novas, actually implies that humanism is all the more important, imperative, immediate. If there’s only finitely many people we can’t justify reassuring ourselves with the prospect of an indefinitely sustainable future society doing the work for us — there’s only finitely many people ever, meaning the particular experiences of the ones alive now matter a lot more than they might under an infinite system.

“Let’s indeed follow the logic of Darwinism, the oldest commandment of Nature, and of Nature’s God—to be fruitful and multiply, and spread to the farthest reaches of the universe.”

Yes, God wants you to be fruitful and multiply, but the logic of Darwinism, doesn’t it dictate you, for this purpose, to mutate into something that can easily survive in space and move very fast?

the logic of Darwinism, doesn’t it dictate you, for this purpose, to mutate into something that can easily survive in space and move very fast?

Hasn’t it already?

The same logic would lead to the conclusion that birds have not evolved into things that can fly.

Falkland Island are even a more recent Terra nullius case. They ere settled Bay the Spanish in the early 18th century, abandoned and permanently settled by the Brits only in 1830`s.

Actually, sorry, cancel that – there were earlier Polynesian settlers, but they were extinct by the time the island was discovered (and later settled) by Europeans.

“The same logic would lead to the conclusion that birds have not evolved into things that can fly.”

I honestly spent several minutes trying to guess what you meant here, but alas. Please, now I must know.

#101 but does the the maths still work if you use the population of the colonists, as JQ does, not the current population of Australia?

“The fact that no-one has sent a detectable signal in our direction suggests that intelligent life forms similar to humans are very rare.”

Not necessarily. The first attempts to detect signals directed towards us began only fifty-odd years ago, and it’s only recently that more systematic searches have begun for signals or evidence of artifacts. Certain things can be excluded–there don’t seem to be any Dyson Spheres within a few hundred light years of our solar system, for instance–but other things cannot. (It’s entirely imaginable that there might be ships moving about in the Kuiper belt even now, beyond our ability to detect them.)

The state of observational astronomy has advanced significantly over the past couple of decades, but not enough to come to any definitive conclusions about whether there is anyone out there nearby or not.

= = = Moreover as J. Quiggan points out the technology to make Antarctica habitable is orders of magnitude less advanced than the technology to survive indefinitely in outer space. The same goes for the surface of the oceans and much of our orbit. We aren’t going to run out of space any time soon, what we lack is the resources to make that space habitable. Which, incidentally, another planet doesn’t get you any closer to than interstellar space: terraforming mars, or carpeting it in dome cities, is almost certainly more difficult/expensive than building an equivalent amount of just as nice orbiting habitat.

Of course the flipside of this is that colonisation and “ships” is the wrong framing, what we are talking about is building self sustaining habitats that can survive in space. After that, where to put them is a minor question, but “at the bottom of a gravity well” is rarely going to be the right answer. If they feel like visiting Alpha Centuri, the generations aboard during the “journey” won’t be particularly disadvantaged compared to the ones at the destination.= = =

That’s basically the argument that the City Beautiful people and the advocates of mass exurbanization use to explain why New York City (particularly Manhattan and Brooklyn) cannot exist and, given that it does, will shortly be abandoned. _No one_ could possibly like living in those conditions (in the Village::on a planet) enough to keep doing it of their own volition; the whole thing will (soon collapse::move to the Oort Cloud). Might want to read some Jane Jacobs.

Cranky

Why We’ll Never Meet Aliens

http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2013/04/why-well-never-meet-aliens.html

And did you allow for the possibility that the planets are moving away from us possibly faster than anything we could send to them could move towards them.

If we’re doing interstellar travel, we’ll be moving faster than most things in this galaxy, so that’s not an issue.

Or what the probability is that the spacecraft would be damaged or destroyed by radiation or collisions before it got there?

Collisions are unlikely. Space is big.

Radiation is an issue, especially at high speed (as pointed out earlier). Shielding is a problem. Clarke (and others, probably) proposed a huge block of ice.

NomadUK @ 32: This is missing the point. Or at least the point from my perspective. The reason to avoid ecological disaster is that it will cause lots of deaths. I don’t really care about humanity’s survival so much as I care about all the people that have to die to go from having humanity to not having it. If something wipes out all life on earth, I will not be much relieved by humanity suriving on another planet. All those people still died. You may have a different perspective, but I actually doubt that very many people truly have the moral priors that you imply. It is worth spending money to prevent massive deaths on earth from any number of sources, global warming or maybe asteroid collisions. But the goal is preventing avoidable death of human individuals.

What price survival? Somewhere out there is a great, big rock, or a supernova, or a gamma-ray burster, and it’s got our name on it. If we’re still on this rock when it comes along, we’re gone. Do we care enough to preserve this mess we call civilisation? If not, why bother at all?

The technology for providing an independent reservoir of humanity elsewhere in the solar system or galaxy devours its own “eggs in one basket” rationale as soon as it exists. If you have an automated industrial-base-inna-can, and have mastered closed-loop life support, Earth is as good a place to deploy it as anywhere else. Even in the aftermath of a gamma ray burst, asteroid impact, or global thermonuclear war, Earth is still far more hospitable to human life than Mars or the moon. If you have to grow all your food inside a sealed facility, and carefully filter air and water from the outside, that’s still easier than growing vegetables on Mars and wringing air and water from the stones.

On the other hand, suppose you don’t have the industrial-base-inna-can and closed loop life support systems worked out yet. What’s the humanity-preservation angle in launching Martian, lunar, or orbital colonies when they still depend on Earth? It’s like the backup plan for surviving global disaster is climbing the nearest tall tree. Humans don’t become meaningfully more extinction-resistant in space while their space colonies still need Earth.

In a few hundred million years the sun’s energy output will increase such that Earth becomes too hot for humans and other multicellular organisms. This might be mitigated by a space sun-shield, at least for some additional tens of millions of years. But eventually Earth will be swallowed up by a giant red sun. Is it time to flee the solar system then? Not necessarily. When the sun is a red giant, Neptune will be practically balmy, with a thick atmosphere and the whole surface turned to a liquid water ocean. The surface gravity is close to 1 g. If controlled nuclear fusion isn’t available by the time the sun exits red gianthood, I don’t think there will be any fleeing the solar system anyhow, but if it is, Neptune holds enough deuterium to power a technological civilization for billions of years after the sun stops providing adequate energy. The problem of how to escape the solar system in order to preserve humanity or its deep-future heirs is about the least urgent of all possible problems.

What rot. Extrapolating future technologies from today’s technology is a vast mistake. Until Copernicus, everyone thought the Earth was the center of the universe. In the 19th century, we didn’t even know there was more than one galaxy. The speed of light has already been exceeded in quantum tunneling and in quantum entanglement. Quantum science is in its very infancy. This writer is like an ancient person predicting it would always take always a year or more to go around the Earth because only horse and slave-rowing boat travel could ever be used.

“The speed of light has already been exceeded in quantum tunneling and in quantum entanglement. ”

I thought of writing “Quantum!” as a one-word retort to the original post, but didn’t know whether people would treat it properly as a Terry Pratchett reference.

The problem with extrapolating Apollo program costs is that current spaceship technology involves trying to ship everything up that is all prepared on Earth. There is a large infrastructure involved in making the food and preparing it, and so on. The only real experiments in what sort of life-support system would be needed on long scales is Biosphere 2. Current manned space missions are more like sending an RV up there with a lot of cans of food, air scrubbers and bottled air. A Biosphere 2 type of mission would involve sending a much more massive can – about 1/2 acre per human. We have no experience with such size vehicles. Also, the experience of the Biosphere 2 crew was that those 8 people spent all their working day tending to 3 acres. And that land area was needed to provide the oxygen to support those 8 humans. A multi-generational ship to another planet will need to be much larger to support the genetic diversity needed for the colonists to survive to reach the destination. Of course you’re signing up future generations for lifetimes of serfdom, which is pretty much incompatible with any definitions of democracy or libertarianism.

A far more useful learning experience would be to build a cylinder with approximately 5-10 acres of land and use “Mars Cycler” type orbits. These are low energy orbits that would take a vessel from Earth orbit to Mars orbit (according to the wikipedia article on the subject, earth to mars trips range from 3 to 10 months each way). A permanent crew (probably all called Sam Bell if human, and Huey, Louie and Dewey if robots) could keep the ship in operation and carry passengers, cargo and other ships to Mars and back. The collapse of the country sending the astronauts is a real issue, after all, there were men on Mir while the Soviet Union collapsed under them, and they had no way home until the successor state sent up a rescue mission. A guaranteed ride home is a very important.

Logistics is where the problem is, and where the solutions will come from. Even if we make a conventional mission to Mars, it would be smart to ship a cargo capsule of food, water and oxygen every time there is a launch window (about every 26 months). Part the capsules in orbit around Mars and let them sit there for as long as it takes for a manned mission to get going. Since the US has a 70% success rate sending ships to Mars (about 50% success rate for Russia/Soviet Union), a lot of spare parts need to be sent.

As for “why should we do this?” If you measure how much the world spends on makeup each year, you can see where our current world’s priorities lay – and space is not one of them. People were complaining about the cost of the Apollo program back in the 1960s. But we’ll spend more on football each year than a manned mission to Mars costs. Or bailing out wall street. Maybe we can fund it with some sort of “reality show”, like The Truman Show – Mars Edition.

What rot. Extrapolating future technologies from today’s technology is a vast mistake. Until Copernicus, everyone thought the Earth was the center of the universe. In the 19th century, we didn’t even know there was more than one galaxy. The speed of light has already been exceeded in quantum tunneling and in quantum entanglement. Quantum science is in its very infancy. This writer is like an ancient person predicting it would always take always a year or more to go around the Earth because only horse and slave-rowing boat travel could ever be used.

There actually is not evidence for information or matter travelling faster than the speed of light in vacuum, not in the laboratory nor outside of it.

Even ancient people understood that sound travelled much faster than horses, and light much faster than sound. They had natural examples of very fast phenomena even if they couldn’t imagine how human transportation might approach those speeds. Humans are no closer to building FTL transport today than they were in the time of Copernicus. Creating an FTL starship isn’t just Space Program writ large, it’s a delusional aspiration akin to building a mobile phone that uses astral projection instead of electromagnetism for communication. Science is as much about discovering natural limits as discovering natural opportunities. The light speed limit looks pretty firm.

There certainly are some great pieces of physics left to resolve: dark matter and dark energy, a quantum theory of gravity, the origins of inertia… But there’s no indications that any of these areas will allow you to travel faster-than-light once understood. People are building theories of FTL travel not because of some observed special relativity violation that needs explaining but because the actual observations point to answers they don’t like.

It’s like flying to Hong Kong to escape a house fire in NYC.

How so? I’m talking about immature space colonies that still need regular supplies from Earth because they can’t survive on their own. Just like the International Space Station is an appendage of terrestrial society rather than an escape from it. There are people who want to build orbital, lunar, or Martian colonies on the strength of the “eggs in one basket” sound bite without figuring out how to be independent first. I think they’ve got it backwards: figure out how to become self-sufficient with a small number of people on Earth’s surface first, where mistakes are cheap, THEN start spending the much larger sums to do it away from Earth. That is if the justification given is genuine and they’re not just throwing one argument after another against the wall until one sticks and pays for Martian adventures.

As long as the fuckers on my list die before I do, I have no problem with extinction.

Very nice, thanks.

My read on the Fermi Paradox is, temporal window in which tech civilizations use discernable EM radiation is very small. What, for us, 60-70 years? Before it all goes to fiber and short range wi-fi?

Thanks for finally noticing what should have been obvious from the start.

How bizarre. You start off by talking about “ratiocination” and its inability to predict trajectories of complex systems; I point out that this is simply a feature of our world and nothing can be done about it, and furthermore that the things we can do are more than sufficient to convince those who can be convinced; you then accuse me of point-missing despite the fact that you have, in the end, come to agree with the very point I made in my first response to you. If it was so “obvious” why did you spend so much time ignoring everything I was actually saying?

You appear to believe that when someone points out that the inability to predict complex systems gives an inroad to corporations who want to stop policy, that constitutes an attack upon the science itself. That is inept.

Look, first of all, you really didn’t bother to understand the basic technical aspects of what you were talking about. In particular, you resisted, and may still be resisting (I can’t tell for sure), the central point that I keep hammering, which is: understanding large scale dynamics of complex systems is enough. It’s enough to tell you a great deal about what will happen if those dynamics are altered, and there’s no serious debate about this point.

The other bit which for some reason you are failing to acknowledge is that literally any measure of uncertainty is enough for those who wish to scuttle science-based policy to jump in. Given that Certainty with a capital C is an impossible standard to meet, any wiggle room at all will allow people to play god-of-the-gaps type games with error margins. This is a fundamental fact about the world we live in, and it’s something scientists have understood for many decades now, if not longer. What doesn’t make sense on the basis of this information is arguing that some kind of “technological hubris” is at fault for the problems of actually effectuating policy. I mean, it’s not that there’s never any tech hubris in general out there, it isn’t to blame for the problems of modeling climate change and species extinction.

None of this constitutes an “attack on the science” in and of itself, but this does:

Because in this situation, all that scientists do is point to statistical aggregates of results. You know that 3 degrees is coming, more or less, in a century, more or less — but golly, it turns out that isn’t good enough, yet.

Regardless of whether you intended these two sentences to be pejorative, they are. You’re mischaracterizing the state of the science, the information that it gives you, and the effect it has on policy discourse. You’re basically saying that if scientists could do the impossible, that would be enough, but they can’t, and that’s not good enough, even though it obviously is good enough given what we actually know.

There’s no way to maintain this as a coherent position about what scientists are actually capable of delivering and what the policy implications of that delivery ought to be.

As for, “b) further accuracy isn’t going to sway people who aren’t already convinced by the incredible wealth of evidence we possess,” this is surely nonsense.

No, it isn’t. The problem here, again, is that you don’t seem to understand either the standards of evidence in play, or what the research is actually telling us. I won’t be so bold as to say that there’s no further data out there that could be marshaled on the subject of climate change, but it’s pretty close: we’ve got satellites, ice cores, tree rings, species migrations, ocean level gauges, and finally, basic physics. It’s not any one thing, but you take the intersection of all those pieces of data, you get a comprehensive picture of what’s going on with global climate. At this point, any refinement that we get to this modeling paradigm is going to make some difference at the margins but it won’t change the overall conclusions. If “total accuracy” is pictured as a mine of gold, then we have already exploited something like 95% of that mine; sure, it would be nice to get that other 5%, but it’s not going to make a terribly large difference in the end.

But again, you are likely to misunderstand this comment to be an attack on science instead of an observation of how real people react to things.

By the criterion you have set forth, for people to be convinced by the extra accuracy, it would require that science deliver the impossible. By setting that up as the standard, you are effectively making a critique of science: you are saying that we need a standard of a particular strength, but science has failed to deliver it. And what I’m telling you, and what any scientist will tell you, is that the standard is just impossible to meet. That’s not a function of any sort of Hobbesian “ratiocination,” it’s just a basic fact about the world. The tools we have at our disposal cannot, even in principle, produce what you ask, but unfortunately we cannot throw away those tools and get new ones that can. Demanding these outlandish things only plays into the hands of those who want to spread misinformation about the levels of confidence that scientific research programs can actually deliver.

I will restate my basic thesis, as regards climate change: we understand the gross-level dynamics reasonably well. We know the different components that are driving global warming. We have very reasonable guesses for what will happen to different parts of the world as the globe warms, although necessarily those guesses come with rather wide error bars. At this point, it’s not about precautionary principles, or anything else: it’s about averting global catastrophe. There are people who do not accept this consensus, but they cannot be convinced by any improvement in accuracy of global climate models. The kinds of accuracies that might theoretically convince them are unavailable as a matter of principle. Therefore, the right thing to do is not to get bogged down in the small-time details of whether we can shave another significant figure off our error margin, but rather to push the fact that climate scientists have pretty unambiguously come to a consensus about what’s happening and why. Getting involved in critiques of ratiocination is misguided and plays into the hands of the deniers, while generating infighting between people who should be allies (e.g. this thread).

To put it in perspective. The earth has gone about 90 degrees around the galactic center since dinosaurs went extinct. In that time numerous stars will have passed within a light year of earth. Some of them probably had habitable planets.

Jerry Vinokurov, as I predicted, once again you entirely misinterpret my comments to be an attack directed at the science.

tarnuranic => transuranic

So is it your opinion, then, that the rhetoric of the reportage of the science is at an absolute top limit, where no more supporters for mitigation policy can be gained, but some can be lost (due to infighting, etc)?

No, it’s not. The rhetoric is actually abysmal, and I believe that it’s connected to the other things I’m talking about. Here’s the rhetorical problem, in a nutshell: even the tightest scientific investigations are accompanied by errors. When the problem is not easily constrained, as is the case with large, complicated systems like a global climate, those errors are going to be larger. But most non-scientists don’t really understand this whole “error bounds” thing very well, so the rhetorical maneuver that deniers like to pull is putting the emphasis on the uncertainty of the measurements. Where the reportage becomes abysmal is that the reporters don’t understand it either, so instead of putting the emphasis on multiple convergent lines of evidence, they allow deniers to spout their nonsense uncritically. This is what I’m getting at when I say that any margin of error allows dishonest people who want to exploit that margin to jump in, if they’re allowed to do so without being challenged.

I do think that we can win supporters, but I don’t think we can do it by improving the accuracy of the results. I could be wrong about this, but everything I’ve read leads me to believe that most of the lines of evidence that are available have been exploited, which means that improvements will be marginal. We are unlikely to discover some new evidence that’s going to revolutionize our understanding of global climate. The correct thing to do is to emphasize just how much it is that we do know, which is a lot. Point out the changes in migration patterns, the disappearing ice of the Arctic, the drought we’re experiencing across many parts of the globe. Talk about the fires in the western U.S. These are things that are happening, right now, to people; if you get all that information into the conversation and never let up, you have some hope of getting across to people. But I don’t think it’s realistic to think that if we shave another 5% off the error or something the public is going to go, “Oh, now we believe you.” That’s just not how science is perceived.

Don’t people read von Daniken any more? We have plenty of evidence that interstellar colonisation is possible, because it happened to our own planet.

Is there an emoticon for “I don’t really mean that, please don’t fire me”? But I did wonder what evidence was being considered above for determining the question of whether or not interstellar travel had taken place, given the argument that it should have taken place by now if it were possible, if not the results of the investigation of Earth’s past.

“The fact that no-one has sent a detectable signal in our direction suggests that intelligent life forms similar to humans are very rare.”

For more evidence that intelligent life is very rare, just look at the history of the earth. Large complex animals have existed on earth for 230 million years, yet intelligent animals only evolved (approximately) 2.5 million years ago. If evolution always favors the development of intelligence you would expect it to show up relatively soon after complex vertebrates developed. Look at flight: the ability to fly is a very complex trait (so complex human engineers still haven’t replicated the flight of a bird) yet it showed up long before intelligence. The late development of intelligent animals suggests that perhaps it was a fluke, brought about by a rare combination of circumstances.

JQ@1158
Yes, although there’s always the possibility that some civilization around a nearby star (a few tens of light years) decides to spend the energy to narrowcast at each nearby star for a few years, presumably with a much longer budget cycle to cover thousands or millions of years. I.e., the hope would be that they send for a while, get noticed, and the receiver can build an equivalent transmitter, and send back.

Different diesciplines think on different time scales. Computer folks think in nanoseconds, geologists in million of years.
Astrophysicists/cosmologists:
one was giving an after-dinner talk to a general audience.
She said something about something “recent.”
I raised my hand and said, “could you explain to people what ‘recent’ means to you?
“”Oh, within last 2 billion years.”
Likewise, Proxima Centauri is really, really close…

There’s also always the chance that a habitable planet within a couple of light years has civilization that might pick up on radio signals before it becomes impossible to tell them from background noise. There are a lot of potntial planets we’ve missed because of technical limitations (Kepler can only see planets for solar systems it can see “edge-on”.

What does harmony with nature mean in this discussion? Nature itself isn’t harmonious – we used to believe in the idea of the climax ecosystem, but ecologists have abandoned it with more evidence. And a lot of landscapes considered pristine were heavily modified by ancient people.

The fact that we have not detected civilizations:

Could also mean that their species uses DRM to encrypt everything and their radio waves are indistinguishable from background noise. Just think about how our current TV waves would appear to a distant observer: viewable from the 1950s to 1990s and decreasingly viewable since then, and gone by the final switchover to digital TV broadcasting. It is quite possible that their cleartext TV signals passed the Earth in 1350 (to pick an arbitrary year) – that we didn’t have electronics invented during the narrow window of time when it would have been possible to perceive their signals.

I predict that all alien races have lawyers and lobbyists pushing their own copyright term extension acts and digital restriction mismanagement.

I suspect most commenters here have not followed the discussion over in Dan Kuehn’s Facts & Other Stubborn Things website, so I trust I won’t be violating etiquette too much by quoting something I said there:

Making a more serious point, on rereading Quiggin’s original post at Crooked Timber, I tend to think he’s less interested in the economic nuts and bolts of star travel than with philosophical issues: Given the sizable costs of money and time, and the likely low reward for such expenditures, why should anyone even want to go to the stars? Which reduces to existentialism, as best I can see; the answers aren’t to be found in economics or engineering, even if economists and engineers — and all the rest of us — choose to grapple with such questions.

http://factsandotherstubbornthings.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-question-for-quiggin-on-interstellar.html

Jerry Vinokurov #161:
Okay, so we won’t use the tipping points argument unless we are asked, and we are going to stick to the preponderance of evidence argument. Note two things about this: One, that the preponderance of evidence argument is a regular rhetorical way to overcome the lack of precise prediction (or proof, in the legal system), and this re-enforces my beginning point, that the lack of precise prediction is the central problem of climate policy.

Number two, the preponderance of evidence argument is easily defeated by the “obtuse” and evil”, who will then say, “Things have always changed anyhow!” In fact, they ARE saying that. So you would need to pile on a huge preponderance of evidence, and there is a sort of self-limiting upper bound in this situation, largely due to the limited amount of attentional timespan and the limited number of hours in the day for an individual person to intake media.

What is more likely to change things is fear, in fact, a “mild” tipping point. If, for example, an unpredicted heat spike crashes world agriculture for a year, before the temperature returns to the main trend, it would cause tens of millions of deaths and a global panic. Horrible, and people over at RealClimate assured me that it is unlikely — and so I am convinced that it will happen in a decade or two.

“It’s still bad, but it’s not as bad as it used to be.”

It was actually better in the late 1970’s. We didn’t know as much then, but to anybody paying attention, the climate was going to be a big problem. I remember a Bioscience study in the mid-80’s that discussed the possible effects of climate change on biodiversity, and I have been paying very close attention ever since. I think I was the first person to formulate the argument that climate change might accelerate extinction, due to previous habitat fragmentation by humans, which inhibits some species migration and replenishment. I could know more about climate change than you do. With one big exception: my interest was never in learning the mathematical models because I already knew from ecosystem studies that they would not be precisely predictive, and so something else was needed. To confirm my fear, corporations became adept during the Reagan years in using the uncertainty of science against scientists, who were easily made to look like fools in public fora.

One reason for this (though not the only reason) is that scientists did not have the language to counter the complaints for more evidence and better prediction. This is because complex systems indeterminacy had been restricted to a few people looking at general systems, and most scientists were unaware of it, or in denial that it would affect their studies, or they were unable to muster the words to help the public understand it, and were caught like deer in the headlights at public discussions.

Since I never doubted that the climate and biodiversity situations would get worse, my interest thus became the public rhetoric of uncertainty. I predicted this was going to be a pointed political fight, 30 years ago. When RealClimate started I predicted the Inhofe committee was going to diss the climatologists and I’m not sure that they believed me until it happened. So I am glad to hear that scientists are finally waking up. It is yeoman work indeed.

Okay, so we won’t use the tipping points argument unless we are asked, and we are going to stick to the preponderance of evidence argument. Note two things about this: One, that the preponderance of evidence argument is a regular rhetorical way to overcome the lack of precise prediction (or proof, in the legal system), and this re-enforces my beginning point, that the lack of precise prediction is the central problem of climate policy.

No, it doesn’t work that way. “Preponderance of evidence” isn’t a rhetorical anything; it’s just the fact of the matter about the state of the research. The lack of precise prediction is a problem for climate policy only in the sense that it’s a problem for policy in general; a substantially higher level of certainty is unavailable.

Now, of course that’s a problem in the sense of effectuating policy, but again, it’s a problem in general. The certainty we have with regard to climate change is far greater than the certainty on which many economic policies have been based. And yet the relatively poor accuracy of economic models hasn’t stopped anyone from doing economics and implementing policy. Why is that? The answer can’t be in the accuracy of models in general.

Number two, the preponderance of evidence argument is easily defeated by the “obtuse” and evil”, who will then say, “Things have always changed anyhow!” In fact, they ARE saying that. So you would need to pile on a huge preponderance of evidence, and there is a sort of self-limiting upper bound in this situation, largely due to the limited amount of attentional timespan and the limited number of hours in the day for an individual person to intake media.

This is a problem, but I don’t know what to say; the obtuse and evil will always fight you. I’m saying that, from any objective standpoint, we know enough to know what we need to do. The difficulty is convincing people of this. But we do have enough evidence to convince the people who are capable of being convinced by evidence; for the others, we will never have enough evidence anyway, so bemoaning the fact that we can’t do the impossible isn’t very productive.

Let me provide a concrete example: the evidence that smoking causes cancer is mostly statistical. It’s a combination of studying the effect of the impact of substances contained in cigarettes on tissue (the micro-level) and an epidemeological studies (the macro-level) that track smokers over time. Now, there are people out there who smoked all their lives, never got cancer, and died at 90. Clearly we don’t have the tools to individually project every person’s “cancer trajectory” but that hasn’t stopped the medical community from linking smoking and cancer. Nor has it stopped plenty of other policy actions. We vaccinate, we pay attention to air quality, etc. All of these things are, to some extent or another, based on statistically aggregated evidence.

So there are plenty of examples of policies being implemented on such grounds. The question we should ask is why it’s been possible to accomplish that. I think the answer has many components, not least that, e.g. smoking affects people directly, produces visible evidence of harm, and so on. It’s also a smaller scale; it’s easier to conceptualize “if I put burning tar into my lungs this is not good” than it is to conceptualize “putting an invisible, otherwise harmless gas into the atmosphere leads to catastrophic warming two hundred years later.” It’s like asking people to conceptualize cosmological scales, it’s alien to them.

What is more likely to change things is fear, in fact, a “mild” tipping point. If, for example, an unpredicted heat spike crashes world agriculture for a year, before the temperature returns to the main trend, it would cause tens of millions of deaths and a global panic. Horrible, and people over at RealClimate assured me that it is unlikely — and so I am convinced that it will happen in a decade or two.

Yes, unfortunately that’s probably the case. There’s an apt Russian proverb to this effect, translated loosely as “a man won’t cross himself until he hears thunder.”

One reason for this (though not the only reason) is that scientists did not have the language to counter the complaints for more evidence and better prediction. This is because complex systems indeterminacy had been restricted to a few people looking at general systems, and most scientists were unaware of it, or in denial that it would affect their studies, or they were unable to muster the words to help the public understand it, and were caught like deer in the headlights at public discussions.

Maybe this was true in some fields, but at least in climate science, I know that Lorentz did his work on chaos in the late 60s. Feigenbaum did his pioneering work in the mid-70s. And of course, as previously noted, the three-body problem goes back to Poincare at the end of the 19th century. In physics, at least, people were well aware of these sorts of things, although my general impression is that a lot of that research didn’t migrate out of physics to other fields until the mid-80s.

Since I never doubted that the climate and biodiversity situations would get worse, my interest thus became the public rhetoric of uncertainty. I predicted this was going to be a pointed political fight, 30 years ago. When RealClimate started I predicted the Inhofe committee was going to diss the climatologists and I’m not sure that they believed me until it happened. So I am glad to hear that scientists are finally waking up. It is yeoman work indeed.

I think there’s something to be gained from reimagining how we talk about uncertainty, sure. But you can only do so much. Rather than dwell on what we can’t, and will never be able to do, I’d much prefer that we focus on what we do know and can do. Our lives are governed by fundamental uncertainties, but we keep living them anyway.

Jerry Vinokurov, Lee J. Arnold…

Some time back, on another blog, I suggested that the distinction is a bit like the legal distinction between standards of proof; “balance of probabilities” and “beyond reasonable doubt”. I suggested that there was little point in offering a balance of probabilities proof to somebody who was only interested in beyond reasonable doubt. But I also suggested that we make lots and lots of decisions every day on balance-of-probabilities-based arguments (“Should I take an umbrella with me? Should I invest in equities?”), and that the demand for beyond reasonable doubt proofs – as eg. demanded by the denialists – was often unrealistic and, frankly, silly.

Your argument is that we have a high uncertainty whether anyone may fall off a bridge, but this does not prevent us from requiring that bridgebuilders put on railings: So therefore, how can uncertainty be a special problem for climate policy? –The problem is that you are using the word “uncertainty” as a scientist: to name a specific numerical measure in statistics, and its related usage. That is not its original meaning, not its primary meaning, and not its common meaning. For people who are not scientists, which is most of them, the fact that climate effects are distant, or hard to conceptualize, or hidden, is part of the usage of “uncertainty”. You are never going to change this, and most especially you will fail if you begin by lecturing people that they don’t know what they are talking about. On the other hand “preponderance of evidence” is originally the name of a method of argumentation: a rhetorical strategy, by definition.

@John Quiggin #171

There has been some decent work on space resources recently, although we’ll see how it pans out.

The NASA asteroid capture mission is a precursor to space resource mining. The moon may not be necessary.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/history/features/asteroids.html

Planetary Resources(an asteroid mining startup) estimates that a 30 meter diameter asteroid would contain $25-$50 billion of platinum. Which is roughly 5 times the amount of platinum that all humans use in a year:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/24/us-space-asteroid-mining-idUSBRE83N06U20120424

John Quiggin, I am also sorry to hijack your comments thread! In the post you wrote, “If on the other hand, the emergence of intelligent life is common, then the evidence suggests that its disappearance, through processes like nuclear war, must also be common.” …I think this in fact is the case. For example, to pick an earthsize planet close to us, the closest really, and in a habitable range of its star, consider our own sister, Venus. Now, Mars ain’t no kind of place to raise your kid, in fact it’s cold as hell, but life might have started a bit earlier on Venus, and already disappeared… I wish you to note that: (1) Venus’ atmosphere is largely carbon dioxide, (2) it is covered in clouds, and (3) it is around 500 degrees C. on the surface. Therefore I think it may be possible that Venus once had something like the U.S. Republican Party.

I shouldn’t jump into the middle of such an erudite conversation, but it’s being carried on at such a high level that it misses the sorts of things that sway people. As measured by polls, the popular consensus concerning climate change varies with the weather, swelling in summer and shrinking in winter. A recent study found that many consumers found energy-efficient light bulbs less desirable if their packaging mentioned environment benefits; they were actively hostile towards the idea of taking care of the planet.

Too many of our fellow citizens consider their traditional identity more dependable than facts, which seem to change from week to week. Better education is about as utopian a prescription as atheism, in the sense that there wouldn’t be a problem if this was the cure for it.

Gordon @174: Yes, “beyond a reasonable doubt” and “preponderance of evidence” (i.e., your “balance of probabilities”) are the terms for these separate standards for U.S. criminal and civil courts. For example, O.J. Simpson, a U.S. professional athlete and Hollywoodish celebrity, was not convicted of the murders of his wife and her lover by the state in criminal court. So then the relatives of the victims sued Simpson for “wrongful death” in civil court, and won by the preponderance of evidence. The difference in penalties are: criminal imprisonment vs. civil damages, in this case “compensatory” and “punitive” financial damages to be paid by Simpson to the relatives.

However, “balance of probabilities” leads to another problem in the climate policy debate: the denialists can bring in other confusions. What evidence is the judge willing to allow into this court? Well of course, there is no judge. We have total freedom of speech. This has allowed climate denialists to introduce a balancing-weight into the probabilities: i.e., the presumed jeopardy to personal economic freedom, technological development, and economic growth. Of course these are all nonsense — but explaining WHY they are nonsense is a task that is even more complicated than explaining climate science. Why is it even more complicated? Because 1) economics is a complex systems science too, but, 2) it doesn’t have hard inputs like physics and chemistry at its basis; instead you’re meandering into personal preferences and future interest rates, and, 3) economists themselves have been as divided on this as they are about what to do to get out of the current employment slump. So this has been quite a successful tactic to sway the harried and uneducated, and even convincing some people who understand the climate issue: The denialists make a LARGER balance of probabilities.

This sort of thing led me by 1978 to think that a general-systems language that could include ecology and economics in the same picture might be useful in a future where a main problem was going to be, most essentially, that the sheer inundation of complex information would drown environmental policy and destroy the planet. If you are interested, google “ecolanguage” (single word, otherwise you get studies of the prose of Humberto Eco).

I see that Oreskes and Conway have a chapter on freemarket fundamentalism’s strong connection to anti-science propagandists. The authors may have been reading some Crooked Timber discussions years ago.

1) See p.12 and then Appendix F. Of PDF at Fake science 2
This includes ~50 thinktanks , most of whom got tobacco money, and some hint of what they promised to do for it. Look up almost any of them in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library.

2) then the tobacco companies worked with Koch-funded thinktanks to create the Tea Party. See this, on Quarterback Behind the Scenes.

3) As far as I know, Naomi and Wrik weren’t reading Crooked Timber. As to why I might know check Acknowledgements in Merchants of Doubt.

The book’s origins go back to 2004, when she’d done an award lecture that briefly mentioned the abstracts survey. I don’t recall if she proposed doing the 1-page essay for Science or Don Jennedy (then Ed in Chief if Science)asked her, but that got done… And then she started getting hate mail and weird phone calls. Benny Peiser tried unsuccessfully to refute her (with Tim Lambert doing a good debunk of him). In Oct 7 2005 Science she did a book review if Chris Mooney’s Republican War on Science… Fred Singer’s lawyer showed up threatening to sue her and Science. She backed what she said, lawyer disappeared.
By early 2007, she was looking deeper into the Weatern Fuels Asdiciation’s efforts, Singer and the 3 at George Marshall, and speaking on that at places like Stanford. The Monckton/Schulte/Ferguson/SPPI attack on her happened then, trying to redo Peiser, using Monckton’s endocrinologist.

In Sept 2007, she sent me the chapter used for the book proposal to review and the free market theme was already there.

P.250 talks about fact that despite all the talk about free-market, Singer and GMI folks all made their careers on government funding, had very little experience with commerce or industry, and that many business people actually welcome stable, clear regulation.
That wasn’t in the draft, but as a longtime Silicon Valley corporate executive, I observed to Naomi and Erik that it was especially annoying that all these thinktank guys had no clue about real competitive markets.

Lee A. Arnold (at 184) –

Thanks for the link to ecolanguage.

Bad Jim (at 182) –

I have seen a lot of arrogance demonstrated by scientifically literate people trying to explain climate change to others. It’s a huge turn-off for most people, and I suspect does a lot of harm. Back in the days when we were being entreated to “reduce, reuse, recycle”, and the big issue was pollution there was more widespread acceptance of the need for environmental sensitivity and a good deal less patronising exhortation than seems to be the case now.

There was also less threat. Although anti-pollution campaigners, for example, pointed regularly to the negative consequences, there wasn’t “The End Is Nigh!” feeling promoted by current AGW campaigners. Often it comes across as “The world is about to end and it’s Your Fault!” People don’t react well to that sort of thing.

@AndyFromTucson at 160:

“Large complex animals have existed on earth for 230 million years, yet intelligent animals only evolved (approximately) 2.5 million years ago. If evolution always favors the development of intelligence you would expect it to show up relatively soon after complex vertebrates developed. Look at flight: the ability to fly is a very complex trait (so complex human engineers still haven’t replicated the flight of a bird) yet it showed up long before intelligence. The late development of intelligent animals suggests that perhaps it was a fluke, brought about by a rare combination of circumstances.”

Good reasoning but bad numbers. Intelligence only took 230 million years to involve once you got to “large complex animals”. I’m not exactly sure about the definition of “large complex animals”, but if we just put the bound at multicellular life, then we still only take 600 million years.

However, to get from single-celled life to multicellular life took nearly 3 billion years. (If you want to subdivide, it was a billion to oxygen, and then a billion to eukaryotic cells, and then a billion to multicellularity.) But to get from Late Heavy Bombardment to single-celled life was only a hundred million or so. (And if life survived from before the LHB, then that’s still only a couple hundred million since the solidification of the planet.)

So the step to intelligence is harder than the step to flight, but it’s only comparable to the original origin of life, rather than the hard step of getting multicellularity going.

One of the problems in this discussion is the presumption that humans are the only intelligent life forms on this planet.

As the discussion above has made clear, we are not displaying the sort of competence we’ll need to keep spaceship earth working for the next thousand years, which bodes ill for our spacefaring aspirations.

We have alternatives, though. In her notorious story “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain”, James Tiptree, Jr. described a scientist who devised a pathogen to rid the planet of all primates. On his trip around the world he contemplated a bear, and wondered whether it would be their turn next.

By the way, if you’ve ever wanted to look straight into a grizzly’s mouth, there’s video! (It’s not that much different than being nuzzled by a dog.)

If you can have the technology where a community of 10 000 people can live in a closed ship over 1200 years, then you have the technology where 10 000 people can live on the moon or Mars without support from Earth. Unless there is a technological breakthrough soon permitting faster-than-light-speed travel, mass colonisation of the moon and Mars will come a lot sooner, say in a couple of generations. It therefore seems more useful to spend our brain cells worrying how we will handle that (and who gets to exploit the resources) since it’s a lot more imminent…