Interstellar Travel
Offline I think the overpopulation topic is becoming a bit absurd, so let’s talk about the other issue touched upon in that thread, interstellar travel. The process of doing this would be quite tricky and tremendously expensive. If given enough resources, it would probably be feasible. The trouble comes with the following:
We will be referring to this diagram a lot. On the y-axis is the gamma factor, also called the Lorentz factor. It is defined in the following way:
γ =[1-v2c-2]-0.5
For a spaceship moving away from Earth in an arbitrary vertice of direction when we refer to gamma henceforth, we will be discussing gamma of the spaceship as recorded in the Earth’s frame. There are several key assumptions which we need to consider here. The first and most important is that the destination star system does not move relative to the Earth. This is roughly true.
The trick with travel to faraway systems is that we must get the spaceship gamma in the Earth frame as high as possible because that way the length contraction measured by the spaceship in comparison to the Earth observers will be as high as possible and consequently, as far as the spaceship is concerned, the time taken to travel to the destination will be much less than that recorded by the Earth. However, since we are considering two reference frames, we must be precise about this. If the spaceship travels to a distant planet/star system, then the spaceship is measuring the proper time between the events because as far as the spaceship is concerned, the events “leaving Earth” and “arriving at the new planet” occur at the same point in space. As per the first postulate of special relativity, no inertial frame is more valid than any other and consequently, if the Earth observer states that the spaceship moves away at velocity v, relative to Earth, the spaceship observer is just as correct to say that Earth hurtles away from them at velocity v and the destination travels toward them at velocity v and they themselves have not moved. This is the tricky part not just about Relativity, but mechanics in general. Absolute space is completely meaningless. When we talk about “velocity” all we are saying is that an observer is measuring a certain object in his local coordinate system as changing coordinates over time. In special relativity, it becomes just as meaningless to assert that if the time between events A and B takes time t in reference frame A then it will in reference frame B. The same must consequently hold true for the rod-like distance between points in space. When we say “Betelgeuse is 780 light years away” what we really mean is that if an Earth observer had a giant ruler which started at Earth and ended at Betelgeuse, the Earth observers would state that the distance between the ends was 780 light years. The Earth measures proper length. This cannot be the case for any observer which is moving relative to the Earth frame since that would violate the second principle of special relativity. Consequently when we talk about stellar distances we will be making frame distinguishing from now on.
The reason this is important is because if we could get a spaceship to travel at 0.999c (exactly 0.999c, this is very important since gamma tends to infinity as v tends to c), then the gamma factor will be 22.4. This could be a good thing. If we wanted to travel to a planet that was 500 light years away in the Earth frame, then at 0.999c in the Earth frame, it would take 500.5 years in the Earth frame. However, in the spaceship frame, the destination planet (which is travelling toward them at 0.999c) is not 500 light years away, because the Lorentz factor contracts the rod like distance in their frame (this is important, it is meaningless to talk about space-like separation without reference to frame), as far as the planet is only (500/22.4)=22.3 light years away. Consequently, they state that the journey takes just over 22.3 years. The other way to look at this is from the Earth frame. The spaceship measures proper time, so the Earth measures dilated time. Since we have just stated the proper time interval to be 22.3 years, it follows that the dilated interval is 500.5 years since the Lorentz factor is the transform for both quantities.
So, this would appear to be no problem. If we found a close terrestrial planet at 20 light years away then at 0.999c in the Earth frame, a spaceship could get there in about 10 months as far as they were concerned. This would be good because then we would have to stock fewer provisions on the spaceship and consequently it would be less massive.
This is sort of important because this is where the major limitation comes in. As a consequence of the mass energy equivalence, the gamma factor dilates mass of an object relative to the rest frame of THAT object. The total energy of an object in an arbitrary frame is therefore the sum of the rest energy (intrinsic quantity of the object under discussion) and the kinetic energy (depends on the frame):
Et=Ek+Erest
Where:
Erest=m0c2
Here, m0 is the rest mass. From above, we have mframe= γm0 where gamma is as recorded for that object in the frame under discussion
The total energy recorded in an arbitrary frame of reference in which the speed of the object is recorded to be v is therefore:
Et= γ m0c2
Thus:
Ek=( γ-1) m0c2
This is where it gets a little tricky. We have a trade off here. We must have a high gamma factor so that the time taken to travel to a distant star is short in the spaceship frame of reference. This in turn implies fewer provisions need to be stocked. But it also implies that the m in the Earth frame is larger and consequently more fuel is required. In non-relativistic analysis, we would start with the rocket equation which is given as follows:
Vrocket (Earth frame) = vexhaust (rocket frame) [ln(mtotal/mempty rocket]
The quantity mempty rocket is the total mass of the rocket when it is unfuelled. It is assumed that all the fuel is used to accelerate the rocket to the maximum velocity (we would obviously have to take into account the fact that the rocket has to decelerate when it reaches the destination). This works because once the rocket reaches a maximum velocity, it no longer needs fuel to continue travelling through frictionless space at this constant velocity, as per Newton’s first law. This still holds in special relativity (not in General, though since objects follow the geosidics of warped space-time). However, every instance of m must be dilated by a factor of gamma in this case. We need to accelerate the rocket to this maximum velocity and it is this acceleration that requires the fuel. This is the hard part. It is very, very difficult to get a rocket accelerated to that close to c because a high gamma factor implies a higher mass in the Earth frame and consequently more energy required to accelerate the rocket. There are several prerequisites which would have to be in place to achieve something like this. First (obviously) the rocket would have to be assembled far above Earth in orbit. No project would be feasible without this. It’s hard enough to accelerate a rocket to 0.999c let alone with escape velocity of a gravitational potential well to cope with.
Also, if we were travelling to very distant stars then once the initial colonizers had travelled sufficiently far they would be more or less isolated entirely. A beginning student of Relativity would say something like “by the time the rocket reaches the new planet, everyone on board has aged very little even if everyone on Earth is dead”. This is in fact completely meaningless. We cannot compare the time coordinate of two events in two frames of reference in Relativity. The start of the sentence above, "by the time" is meaningful only in the reference frame of the spaceship. If the people on Earth sent a light signal back to Earth to say that they had arrived, then even though as far as the observers on the ship were concerned, this journey only took 20 years for a 500 light year (in the Earth frame) journey, the Earth observers will receive the signal 1000 years (in their frame) after they recorded the spaceship leave.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
- Login to post comments
Offline <admonition>
Sorry. I was trying to be funny. Will made me.
I forgot the [/sarcasm] lol.
I'd be up for the trip and everyone knows I can breed good stock. Send me.
I'm taking a few of you with me though.
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
- Login to post comments
Offline I’m going to come down in favor of Will here. This is just silly. First of all, there is no way that we could ever invest in a project like this without decades of study into the psychological impact of raising children without any actual adults even if we had the technology to do so. And the only way to do that would be through highly unethical experimentation.
You mean the decades of research conducted as we colonize the solar system? Developing didactic and care-taking technology will be developed as a matter of course, as we begin spreading out into the solar system. Those self-replicating biospheres that replicate most efficiently will be the ones that flourish over those that use longer and more labour-intensive methods. Being able to raise more kids more effectively with the help of technology will be a crucial advantage. No unethical research need be conducted. Just lots of trial and error of relatively small innovations, accumulating over time.
What are we going to do? You can’t seriously believe that we are going to send frozen embryos and, without conscious, mature and intelligent entities on site, hope that this venture is actually going to work.
Hope won't be necessary. As I said, the best experts will be on the job to use the best existing technology and ensure the highest possible rate of success.
The hurdles seem incalculably greater than simply sending flesh-and-blood adults, and that is hard enough.
I disagree. The most dangerous part of the mission is the interstellar travel. My scenario bypasses that danger completely. Having pre-existing humans survive such a flight would require orders of magnitude more difficulty than sending a cold space spore.
The psychological impact of having children without any live adult contact, especially when (or if) they become sufficiently intellectually developed to understand that, would be overwhelming.
I disagree again. Kids are quite resilient, and it's not like we're sending them with nothing at all. As I've stated numerous times, they will have all kinds of interaction with both technology and humans that will mitigate the lack of adults. We have seen here on Earth kids growing up in circumstances that would be considered 100 times worse than what I'm proposing. A consciously human adult is very valuable, but it is not a 100% requirement.
Kids are raised today in orphanages that are worse than what I'm proposing, with lack of adult care, indeed with abusive adults. The kids survive. What I'm proposing will be far more supportive an environment than what these orphans get. The best experts in the solar system and the best technology in the solar system will be put together to design the best environment possible for them, sans adults.
I'm very sympathetic to kids' needs. I acknowledge that they will not be the most emotionally healthy kids. However, they will be healthy enough to begin their own culture, and to raise the next generation of colonists.
Quote:That's it. All you need is to get a minimal society started. They don't have to be geniuses, they don't have to be perfectly mentally healthy. They don't even have to be particularly happy, although we would try to make it as minimally traumatic as possible.
I beg your pardon? You are talking about the artificial seeding of an entirely new society with a relatively tiny number of progenitor colonizers which in turn is most likely to seed more colonies, and you don’t consider it necessary that these individuals be perfectly mentally healthy and happy?
Not the first generation, no. Subsequent generations will have all of the benefits of Sol culture to be as happy and mentally healthy as it is possible for a human to be. The first generation only needs to get the ball rolling. For that, they do not need to be perfectly mentally healthy or happy. Again, we would do our best to make the trauma as minimal as possible, but I acknowledge nothing is quite as good as the real thing.
WANTED: PEOPLE TO GO ON HIGH-RISK MISSION REQUIRING PERMANENT SEPERATION FROM THEIR HOME PLANET AND SEED THE FORMATION OF NEW SPACE COLONIESMENTAL STABILITY AND HAPPINESS NOT REQUIRED
A) They would not be isolated from Sol, there would just be a 5 year lag time in any messages sent. They would be receiving a constant stream of current culture from Sol. And, they would have 150+ other colonists to interact with on a daily basis. They will not be alone.
B) My scenario is far less risky than sending adults. It eliminates the risk of interstellar travel, and other risks will be minimal, since we will have perfected self-sustained biosphere technology, as well as artificial wombs. The only risk will be a sub-optimal emotional environment, which can be mitigated.
C) I did not say mental health and happiness not required. I said that there is a minimal threshold for it, which is not nearly as high as either you or Will make it out to be. Obviously, if we could not ensure that the mission would produce kids of sufficient mental health then we would not send it. HOWEVER, it is not outside the realm of plausibility that we will develop enough technology to meet that threshold.
Again, as I said to Will, in order to trash my argument, you have to do more than just be contrary to it. You have to show that there's a fundmental problem that cannot be overcome. It's kind of like the Irreducible Complexity argument. You are saying, "Your mission parameters are irreducibly complex!", but you don't show the fundamental barrier that makes it so. Unless you can show specifically why it simply cannot plausibly happen, then all it amounts to is an argument from personal incredulity.
I've shown that we already have precursor technology that can plausibly be extended to get a successful interstellar colony started, at low risk, and relatively low cost (compared to other alternatives), as a natural consequence of a moderately long period of solar system colonization (and the accompanying technological progress that comes with it). To counter that, you have to show that there's a fundamental problem, and you have to show that this problem cannot be overcome.
So far, you and Will have tried to show that there are problems, but you haven't tried to show that they *cannot* be overcome. This is obvious by the fact that it took me little to no effort to point out ways that these problems can be overcome to achieve the minimal conditions of mission success.
Wonderist on Facebook — Support the idea of wonderism by 'liking' the Wonderism page — or join the open Wonderism group to take part in the discussion!
Gnu Atheism Facebook group — All gnu-friendly RRS members welcome (including Luminon!) — Try something gnu!
- Login to post comments
Offline Perhaps I can derail the derailment by suggesting that by the time we have the capability to go into this shit at all we'll have stopped using or at least reduced the amount of mechanical technology we rely on. Biological technology is growing slowly, but surely none-the-less. I don't think it's a great stretch to assume that we'll be utilizing biological computers and artificial biological organisms by the time we are capable of colonizing outside our solar system.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
- Login to post comments
Offline
Ahh, but it has to be cycles because the constant acceleration equation gets you to light speed WAY before midpoint and to maintain that speed without deceleration will cause the loss of the fake gravity.
BAM! People slam into the front of the ship at 1G. lol. (Sorry. That lol shouldn't be there, but damn that's funny)
No, that is not right.
You cannot ever get to the speed of light. The more you accelerate, the closer you get but you will never reach that speed. For a constant acceleration, your maximum velocity is always at the turn around point. It does not matter whether the turnaround point is at a distance of 1 LY or 1,000 LY. Your final velocity may be quite close to the speed of light but it will never be exactly 1.0c.
Also no, losing acceleration does not cause you to slam into the front wall of your cabin. Per general relativity, you are not producing “fake gravity”. You are producing acceleration which is absolutely identical to gravity. Should the ship stop accelerating, gravity just stops existing for you. You become weightless. And just what do you imagine will happen at the turnaround when you have to decelerate anyway? The same thing whether it happens once as I am modeling or many times as you are modeling.
That's why I made the picture of the several rockets delivering fuel to waypoints along the path. Those ships can get to the waypoints much quicker since they don't have to have crew to maintain gravity, just supplies. They can go .9c all the way to their dropoff points since they would require only the initial firing to get to speed. They're expendable/disposable.
Also, since they can go 'full warp' to the waypoints, they don't have to leave first.
OK, supply rockets are not going to work. At least not very well.
In order for the supply rocket to leave later, it will have to overtake the starship mid trip. Since the starship will already have a large head start, the ratio of cargo fuel to the pre-cargo mass of the supply rocket would have to be greater than the ratio of starship mass to mass of fuel that it could carry at launch. So it will actually require more fuel to use supply rockets than to just directly fuel the starship at launch in the first place.
Since the mass of the ship changes with the expenditure of the fuel, it follows that it uses less force to maintain the constant acceleration and deceleration model. Less fuel used approaching waypoint, more fuel leaving waypoint.
Technically accurate but you are missing another point here as well.
You may have heard of ion engines as providing a very low thrust but for a long time. That is true for the engines that we have today. However, the real advantage to ion engines is that they have an enormous specific impulse. Basically, the current crop has weak power sources but they use the power very efficiently.
Given a power source large enough to send a starship out at 1g constant acceleration, some type of ion thrust would probably be involved both for the long duration that they can run for and for the efficiency with which they can produce thrust. Yes, the mass of the ship will decline as reaction mass is consumed. However, as the mass of the starship declines, the high specific impulse of the engine may be adjusted (indeed would have to be in order to maintain the constant acceleration) to meet the changing mass of the ship.
Pretty much, the more reaction mass used during the total duration of the flight, the less reaction mass needs to be used per second of flight to achieve the same effect.
Never ever did I say enything about free, I said "free."
=
- Login to post comments
Offline
darth_josh wrote:Ahh, but it has to be cycles because the constant acceleration equation gets you to light speed WAY before midpoint and to maintain that speed without deceleration will cause the loss of the fake gravity.
BAM! People slam into the front of the ship at 1G. lol. (Sorry. That lol shouldn't be there, but damn that's funny)
No, that is not right.
You cannot ever get to the speed of light. The more you accelerate, the closer you get but you will never reach that speed. For a constant acceleration, your maximum velocity is always at the turn around point. It does not matter whether the turnaround point is at a distance of 1 LY or 1,000 LY. Your final velocity may be quite close to the speed of light but it will never be exactly 1.0c.
Also no, losing acceleration does not cause you to slam into the front wall of your cabin. Per general relativity, you are not producing “fake gravity”. You are producing acceleration which is absolutely identical to gravity. Should the ship stop accelerating, gravity just stops existing for you. You become weightless. And just what do you imagine will happen at the turnaround when you have to decelerate anyway? The same thing whether it happens once as I am modeling or many times as you are modeling.
I know nothing but light can go light speed. Why did i say light speed?
I know loss of acceleration doesn't mean loss of inertia. That was just a funny. Ever see Spaceballs?
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
- Login to post comments
Offline 
They've gone Plaid! OMSORZ
Single. Greatest. Parody. Ever.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
- Login to post comments
Offline I think that the idea of "seeding" a habitable world with life is an interesting one. Also the possibility of terraforming exists by this, using lifeforms (such as plants) that are engineered to survive in worlds that are inhospitable and modify the global environment.
I would find it comical if this already happened, and life on this planet was started through such an incident, with life originating elsewhere. People do like to center things around themselves. But that's just baseless speculation for the humor :3
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
- Login to post comments
Offline I stumbled upon this news article today. It's not machine copiousness, but it could be a stepping stone to it.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
- Login to post comments
Offline Will, this is the level of your critique. It is simply contrarian. You're looking at it like, "Well, what angle can I find that, if completely neglected by the people in the future, could possibly fail."
Not true. Notice that I have not argued with you that we'll be able to get a rocket to do whatever speed you'd like. I'm telling you that you've ignored a lot of problems that are immediately obvious, not that it's impossible. Of course it's not impossible, because there's always the possibility that we'd be able to pull off something highly improbable. The idea of raising children in parallel from embryo just struck me as making the whole problem more bother than it was worth.
If you want to critique, find a way that *in principle* the mission is just not possible. For example, if my description of it required travelling faster than the speed of light, you could say, "Well, we know that that's not possible."
You're right that in principle the mission is possible. Doing it that way is a lot of work for what seems to be an unclear benefit.
Energy is most assuredly NOT a problem.
Energy (that is, harnessing it) is always a problem for life forms. That's all I meant.
Please. If you think what he's doing is just neural nets, you obviously didn't spend much time learning about it. Seriously, Will.
I'm looking at the source code. Tell me how any of this is different from what I can read about in Russell and Norvig. Is it the Gabor filter that has you all excited? He's not doing anything new, nor is he achieving any novel results. I'm not sure where the enthusiasm for his work comes from. Admittedly, the only source I have access to is the stuff off of his website. Are you looking at something different than I am? Because I'm seeing ordinary stuff, here.
You can find a lot more interesting stuff in here:
(easier if you have a friend with access to JSTOR or other electronic journal database)
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
- Login to post comments
Offline Admittedly, the only source I have access to is the stuff off of his website. Are you looking at something different than I am? Because I'm seeing ordinary stuff, here.
I read his book and saw several videos on it on YouTube and/or Google video and/or TED talks.
Wonderist on Facebook — Support the idea of wonderism by 'liking' the Wonderism page — or join the open Wonderism group to take part in the discussion!
Gnu Atheism Facebook group — All gnu-friendly RRS members welcome (including Luminon!) — Try something gnu!
- Login to post comments
Offline HisWillness wrote:Admittedly, the only source I have access to is the stuff off of his website. Are you looking at something different than I am? Because I'm seeing ordinary stuff, here.I read his book and saw several videos on it on YouTube and/or Google video and/or TED talks.
Oh, okay. I took a look at the white paper he put out, and I think I understand why I assumed he was just doing neural networks and lying about it. In actual fact, he knows he's not doing anything new, he's just organizing it differently, which I think is actually very constructive. I couldn't tell that from the source, because they don't allow you full access to it if you're not a researcher, apparently. Also, the placement of the Bayesian matrix is an interesting touch.
I actually may try this as a trading algorithm. My hypothesis: a simpler system will have roughly similar results. I'll get back to you with what I find.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
- Login to post comments
Offline Oh, okay. I took a look at the white paper he put out, and I think I understand why I assumed he was just doing neural networks and lying about it. In actual fact, he knows he's not doing anything new, he's just organizing it differently, which I think is actually very constructive. I couldn't tell that from the source, because they don't allow you full access to it if you're not a researcher, apparently. Also, the placement of the Bayesian matrix is an interesting touch.
I actually may try this as a trading algorithm. My hypothesis: a simpler system will have roughly similar results. I'll get back to you with what I find.
The main feature that is different from mere neural nets is that he's organizing it based on new information about the architecture of the human neocortex. In other words, it's not just neurons wired together, as a standard neural net. It's neurons wired together according to the architecture of a human brain. He's using neuroscience as his requirements document, so to speak.
Standard neural nets just took the basic idea of neurons and then went off in their own direction, just trying to get it to work at all. Backpropagation, for instance was invented, not discovered. The brain doesn't use back prop.
Hawkins' variation of learning *is* based on how neurons in human brains actually learn. In fact, it's not a single neuron that does the learning, it's a collection of neurons, that form an architectural unit, which learn together as one. Many of such units are joined together in a larger hierarchical architecture, which is based on human neural architecture (for instance the hierarchical architecture of the various vision-related brain areas).
The core idea that fascinates me is the idea of encoding symbols which are used to represent predictions of future input. These symbols are communicated both up and down the hierarchy. When symbols from below match the prediction of the level, then things are copacetic. When symbols are different than predicted, then a localized learning algorithm improves the predictive network weights. So, each architectural unit forms a 'concept' of what its various inputs represent, and from this 'concept', it can predict future inputs. The 'concept' is the combination of symbol plus predictive network.
When you explore this idea deeper, you'll see that it closely matches how we actually form concepts in our minds as well. We see strange and unpredictable chaos, then we start to pick out little details that we can sort-of predict at a low level. Then we start to aggregate these low-level details into 'higer level' (higher in the hierarchy) concepts, and we continue building up complex concepts out of simpler concepts, until what at first appeared as chaos now appears to make sense (i.e. we can predict it with great accuracy).
Compare this with back-prop. We simply do not 'think' in back-prop. Back prop, unless you are deep into math, is almost incomprehensible to people. Also back-prop has a bunch of limitations that Hawkins' method overcomes. The main one being that back-prop cannot work locally, and so it doesn't scale up.
There are other projects I've seen out there that have achieved similar things to Hawkins, and many have done them first, but Hawkins' is the first one that I've seen that is explicitly driven by human neural architecture of the neocortex, and it's the first one I've seen that has tied it all together in a way that makes intuitive sense and is confirmed upon introspection of our own thought and learning processes.
We really do think by prediction, and we form concepts that way as well, in a hierarchical fashion. In fact, this explains a whole lot about people, from human evolution, to intuition, to irrationality, to science, to the limits of cognition, etc. Hawkins' book and work have given me quite a bit of food for thought, and has even helped me to become a better verbal and written communicator, among other things.
Wonderist on Facebook — Support the idea of wonderism by 'liking' the Wonderism page — or join the open Wonderism group to take part in the discussion!
Gnu Atheism Facebook group — All gnu-friendly RRS members welcome (including Luminon!) — Try something gnu!
- Login to post comments
Offline Woke up today thinking about this. Sad; I know.
At least I wasn't dreaming about Sasha Grey and my spouse in strawberry syrup together.
Anyway, plugged the numbers into excel for constant acceleration of 9.8m/s/s
You get to .996c at 1.93 years(earth time). Slowing down to destination takes the same amount of time(earth).
That means the 'window' of travel between speeding up and slowing down is dependent upon the human limitations. Right?
It becomes how long between velocity max and point of deceleration?
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
- Login to post comments
Offline
I’m going to come down in favor of Will here. This is just silly. First of all, there is no way that we could ever invest in a project like this without decades of study into the psychological impact of raising children without any actual adults even if we had the technology to do so. And the only way to do that would be through highly unethical experimentation. What are we going to do? You can’t seriously believe that we are going to send frozen embryos and, without conscious, mature and intelligent entities on site, hope that this venture is actually going to work. The hurdles seem incalculably greater than simply sending flesh-and-blood adults, and that is hard enough. The psychological impact of having children without any live adult contact, especially when (or if) they become sufficiently intellectually developed to understand that, would be overwhelming.
I bowed out of this a long time ago because... it's... well... absurd. I can't think of a way to argue against the claim that all the streetlights in Manhattan are made of cream cheese, and I can't think of how to argue against any of this nonsense about sending embryos. If someone doesn't know enough about humans to recognize this as howling mad, I think the only thing to do is pat them on the head and give them their tin foil hatter badge and decoder ring.
I beg your pardon? You are talking about the artificial seeding of an entirely new society with a relatively tiny number of progenitor colonizers which in turn is most likely to seed more colonies, and you don’t consider it necessary that these individuals be perfectly mentally healthy and happy? That would be silly enough if we were sending mentally competent fully grown adults, instead of frozen embryos. I can just imagine it:
WANTED: PEOPLE TO GO ON HIGH-RISK MISSION REQUIRING PERMANENT SEPERATION FROM THEIR HOME PLANET AND SEED THE FORMATION OF NEW SPACE COLONIES
MENTAL STABILITY AND HAPPINESS NOT REQUIRED
I wonder if anyone on the other side of this discussion knows anything about the long term effects of even moderate isolation on humans. In short, it drives people barking mad, pretty much without fail. Not only would you have to send humans to colonize, it would be a fundamental necessity that we have not only highly skilled, remarkably intelligent people, but we'd also have to figure out how to overcome human nature itself and keep them sane long enough to have a colony that was earth-like enough to maintain the sanity of the offspring, who would not necessarily be as well adjusted as their parents.
WANTED: Volunteers to leave earth, spend years in a tin can, encounter unknown conditions on an inhospitable world (assuming the tin can makes it to its destination), work like a dog for the rest of their life in a hostile environment while raising children to continue the colonization process, educating them without any outside help, ensuring their mental stability despite being raised light years away from the environment for which they have been genetically programmed. Said volunteers will of course, not be paid, since there will be nothing there to spend money on. Also, if said volunteers have a personality conflict with any of the other passengers, tough titties, because you're stuck ten feet away from them for ten years.
Meh. The whole thing is patently absurd. We're stuck on this rock.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
- Login to post comments
Offline Also, if said volunteers have a personality conflict with any of the other passengers, tough titties, because you're stuck ten feet away from them for ten years.
Yeah. I'm thinking Lord of the Flies, but times roughly 1,000.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
- Login to post comments
Offline I wonder if anyone on the other side of this discussion knows anything about the long term effects of even moderate isolation on humans. In short, it drives people barking mad, pretty much without fail. Not only would you have to send humans to colonize, it would be a fundamental necessity that we have not only highly skilled, remarkably intelligent people, but we'd also have to figure out how to overcome human nature itself and keep them sane long enough to have a colony that was earth-like enough to maintain the sanity of the offspring, who would not necessarily be as well adjusted as their parents.
To be honest, I can't see it working myself for the foreseeable future, but with sufficient technological and biological advancement it isn't completely impossible. Genetically design a caretaker(s) to raise the first "crop" of kids. A caretaker that can survive the rigours of travel, is emotionally stable when alone or with others, etc.
But that is obviously far beyond our current capabilities, and involves guessing at what we might accomplish.
WANTED: Volunteers to leave earth, spend years in a tin can, encounter unknown conditions on an inhospitable world (assuming the tin can makes it to its destination), work like a dog for the rest of their life in a hostile environment while raising children to continue the colonization process, educating them without any outside help, ensuring their mental stability despite being raised light years away from the environment for which they have been genetically programmed. Said volunteers will of course, not be paid, since there will be nothing there to spend money on. Also, if said volunteers have a personality conflict with any of the other passengers, tough titties, because you're stuck ten feet away from them for ten years.
Meh. The whole thing is patently absurd. We're stuck on this rock.
Earth isn't much better. Some parts of it are patently worse. I'm sure you'd still get plenty of volunteers. 
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
- Login to post comments
Absolute zero? As in the point where all atomic motion ceases (and which is forbidden by the third law of thermodynamics)?
I'm sure you mean something else.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
I believe he actually means below 200 degrees celcius; that's the lowest temperature I've heard of a water bear 'surviving' at (and even then, the experiment was not conclusive - the animal was dead at the end, and the researchers performing the experiment were not sure exactly when it had expired).
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Naw, I probably could. But I make stuff all the time. Yes, stuff like rockets.
Okay, now you're just pulling my leg. You're comparing something that humans have shown they can do pretty well (rockets) with something they suck at frequently (child rearing) and the problem is "not so difficult". You, my friend, will have a fun time being a parent.
What? Potential solutions that might work ... on babies? You've lost it! How many psychologists are right 90% of the time, like an engineer? How many software designs work 90% of the time? The complexity of human development is orders of magnitude more complicated than getting a mass from Earth to Mars. Orders of magnitude. The engineering problem is basically easy by comparison.
Ah-hahaha! Children are little fucking geniuses. They will destroy your spaceship within days!
I'm baffled by this assertion. Not that the robots would have a moral sense - that's not what I meant. Saying that adult human contact is unnecessary to the development of a child is completely ridiculous. I don't care what kind of videos you put on, those kids will be insane. "Sufficient gentleness" isn't the problem. The problem is how much a child looks for approval, and how constantly a child reads faces to get responses to their tacit questions. A child sits next to you for comfort, and has non-standard toys, and needs constant interaction. A child can invent problems that you haven't anticipated, and sometimes even an adult human is unable to solve those problems. We're going to come up with artificial intelligence that is somehow more intelligent than we are, when we can't even measure intelligence?
You figure if we made something "intelligent", it would want to serve us? Or do you mean just enough of a human mimic? Because I'm not kidding when I say I've made "learning" neural networks. Expert systems, for instance, make fantastic diagnosticians. But nothing even close to the resources needed to handle a child.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Gonna have to give you that one. My parents used to hate leaving me alone for a few minutes and finding the vacuum cleaner in pieces upon their return, amongst other things.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
That's the thing -- if you want to stop that from happening, then you have to send only non-curious people on the mission. That'd end up being "Retards in Space"! How would they colonize? And would we really want them to?
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
A teenager can raise a child to the level of reading. 90% of people in our culture could raise a child to the level of reading. It takes entire teams of specialists to build a rocket.
I think you're underestimating the difficulty of rocketry and overestimating child rearing.
You forget that I'm not talking about raising the perfect child here. This child doesn't have to be flawless. He doesn't even have to be perfectly mentally healthy. Only healthy enough to survive, absorb Sol culture, and raise the next generation.
The adult child does not need to be a rocket scientist, for instance.
Considering that a child with almost zero parental care, indeed with large amounts of parental abuse, can still survive today is a testament to the resiliency of children. These are not delicate little eggshells.
The level of enculturation they need to achieve is not nearly so high as you make it out to be.
I'm sorry, but it's you who's lost it. A teenage mother with no education in the poorest part of Africa can raise a child. I'd like to see her send a mass to Mars.
Will, billions of people raise billions of children on Earth every day. The entire world has only sent a handful of probes to Mars.
You're just making shit up now. So, are children geniuses, or are they delicate little crystals that must be handled with the greatest care or they will break in a million pieces?
If we can engineer a ship that can travel at 0.01c and safely arrive at another star hundreds of years later without breaking down, you're telling me that we won't also be able to child-proof a nursery?
Give me a break. Devil's advocate is one thing, but you're just being contrary.
I didn't say that. I said that such needs could be partially fulfilled in a variety of ways. I'm not talking about locking them in cages with no stimulation, no culture, no nothing. They will have plenty to do, they will have robots designed specifically to care for them, they will have culture streaming in all around them, they will have dozens of other kids to play with, they will get messages from adults in Sol, etc.
It is not perfect, but it does not need to be.
The minimum threshold for mission success is that the children survive, take in enough culture from Sol that they don't lose contact, and that they start their own culture, and that they begin raising the next generation.
That's it. All you need is to get a minimal society started. They don't have to be geniuses, they don't have to be perfectly mentally healthy. They don't even have to be particularly happy, although we would try to make it as minimally traumatic as possible.
Kids are resilient. Your portrayal of them as delicate little crystals, and simultaneously ingenious saboteurs is laughable.
It is plausibly possible to raise such a generation of kids to the minimal conditions I've laid out. That's all I have to show. I'm not talking about starting the perfect little colony with picket fences and perfect families. That's not necessary. All you need is a foothold in the new star system.
Wait a second. So now these AIs have to be *smarter* than we are in order to raise some kids??? Talk about impossible standards. According to you, no one on the planet is able to raise children.
Did you google it? Your question seems to be going on a tangent to what Hawkins' tech is about, so it makes me think you haven't checked it out.
Intelligence and consciousness are two different things. We already have some level of machine intelligence, just not to our level.
If we ever made machine consciousness, we would not (by my standards, anyway) have the right to enslave it. It would be just as conscious as we are.
However, we would have the capability of engineering the parameters of its consciousness so that it is more likely to be social and cooperative than anti-social and destructive. We could tinker with its innate 'instincts' so to speak.
I'm talking about full consciousness, fully to the level that we have it. Better than we have it, actually. They would be as much a 'person' as you or I are.
My discussion of machine consciousness is not related to the automated nursery idea. If we have full blown machine consciousness, then it is not necessary to have such a nursery. Just send technological people. They can survive the flight no problem.
The context of the automated nursery is if we *don't* have machine consciousness. The kinds of AIs for that would be more similar to the kinds we have now. Again, I suggest you look into Jeff Hawkins' work. There are others as well who have made similar breakthroughs, but his is the one I'm most familiar with.
Hawkins' AI is closer to the level of conceptual intelligence. It is predictive at its core. It automatically learns patterns from the environment and forms 'concepts' (my word, not Hawkins') that allow it to make predictions. It is based on human neural architecture.
Even if this new tech does not lead to machine consciousness, it will lead to more intelligent and flexible robots, of the kind that could conceivably be equipped to help raise kids in an automated nursery.
But the automated nursery does not require full AI (full machine consciousness). The necessary human interaction can be simulated (didactic computers and care-taking robots), recorded (messages from Sol, culture from Sol), and through interaction with the other children. The first generation can be made sufficiently healthy to raise the next generation through this basic level of care.
Again, all that is required is survival and beginning the next generation with enough culture that they can begin their own culture and learn from Sol's culture. If it can conceivably be done, then that's all I need to show for a proof of concept.
You can come up with contrarian scenarios all you want, but they don't weaken my basic argument. There are always ways to solve practical problems, and my inability to solve all of them *now* does not throw into doubt the ability of future experts to come up with solutions to the problems.
Wonderist on Facebook — Support the idea of wonderism by 'liking' the Wonderism page — or join the open Wonderism group to take part in the discussion!
Gnu Atheism Facebook group — All gnu-friendly RRS members welcome (including Luminon!) — Try something gnu!
We let christians drive buses and airplanes. We might as well let retards colonize and keep the smart ones here.
We need delivery confirmation.
Communication relays/boosters all the way there moving relative to both planets and solar systems with Earth time verification when they arrive. This helps with education especially with new technologies we develop while it is in transit.
The ships delivering fuel/supplies drop a 'buoy' when supply mission complete.
I had more of an acceleration/deceleration trip in mind using constant acceleration to mimic Earth's gravity for the crew/colonists. Accelerating to ,9c too quickly destroys anything from an inertia standpoint.
Help me with the fuel requirements here.
I want to maintain a constant 1G of force through acceleration/deceleration. If I speed up to .9c and then speed down to say a .6c then back up to .9c etc. until I reach the destination it would be the same as exerting 1G of inertial force for the entire trip. Correct?
To mimic the Earth's gravity of 9.8 m/s2 , how much fuel?
OR
am I going to have to ride on the inside of a spinning death star or a BSG pinwheel?
Just throwing stuff around. Ignore if it is farther 'out there' than any of the other suggestions.
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.
Agreed. Also, that is pretty much what I had in mind. I just did not want to get too specific so that my line of reasoning would not get bogged down in side issues like what has happened to natural.
Yes, that would be correct. However, your cycle of decelerations is going to cost you way more in fuel and ship time than just accelerating through and beyond 0.9c. The fact is that at 0.6c, the Lorentz transformation only provides for mildly interesting effects. Past 0.9c, the Lorentz transformation opens up the entire galaxy.
You see, for a mission profile of accelerate constantly to the midpoint, flip over and decelerate to the destination, a constant boost of 1g will take you twenty years to travel 10 light years. However, done that way, it only takes a few days of ship time to cover much vaster distances. In fact, it will only take 30 years of ship time to travel 100,000 light years.
Best not to think in terms of fuel on this one. Chemical rocket fuel just does not have sufficient energy density. A freight train a hundred miles long might hold enough chemical fuel for moving something as small as an Apollo capsule that way. What we need is a ship the size of an ocean liner to even think about doing something like this.
So the least possible energy source would have to be fission based. Also, considering the need to carry 20+ years of fuel, probably a custom designed breeder reactor at a minimum. Even then, the mass of fuel to get anywhere might be on the order of as big as the rest of the whole starship.
=
Multiple propulsion themes would be the best answer I think. Chemical takes a lot of room, but can provide quick bursts of acceleration. Ion is exceptionally slow acceleration, yet constant acceleration all the same, and doesn't take much room at all.
Obviously I'm not restricting the themes to these two methods.
Just to throw out a possibility.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Sorry about the late reply.
This is exactly my point. I don't think you can manufacture this kind of attachment. Maybe I'm wrong though, I'm no psychologist.
It would appear as though we have a fundamentally different approach about how it would come to be. You seem to be thinking of physically modeling it after the human brain. I was thinking more of a Darwinian model. Construct pseudo-neurons and let it "evolve" by generations. We wouldn't have to wait as long as normal evolution as the selection would be unnatural, and the generations only seconds long. This is why I think it would be hard to back-up the AI, it would be like storing a human consciousness in data.
This is actually a very elegant solution that lends itself very well to either type of origin. Further the unnatural selection in a society based setting. This is going to require quite the feat of engineering though. I wonder if humans could ever handle a project of such magnitude. I can't even guess at the size of such an application.
Again this is my point. How do we know the machine won't look at us as inferior beings and treat us as such? It would be no different then how we treat other animals.
This is a great point. A machine doesn't need much other than electricity. Evolving a consciousness that has everything required to live probably won't result in any sort of aggressive behavior. The machine will be almost immortal and have much less reason to propagate.
LOL. This was one of my previous thoughts. It was my main concern with the evolution model for machine consciousness. You just never know what you're going to get. It happened with us and as such is at least a possibility. All though a constant supply of "food" and the knowledge that it comes from us, may lead it to worship us...
Well put. Without memory upon revival, frozen adults become substantially worse than frozen embryos. They would still have all the required learning, 20-40 less years to do it, and no care taking robots. Though I must say the unlikely combination of cryptobiosis and machine consciousness would be pretty bad-ass.
I think mice would be the perfect starting point for such study. All it would take is to have a mouse learn to traverse a maze, "freeze" him, "thaw" him, and let him try again. I don't think it's fair to limit us to cryostasis though. It does lend itself to the cold of space, but I would prefer we investigate each type and determine which is the best solution.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
Nope. I mean exactly what I said. I don't mean they can survive forever, that's ridiculous, but some can survive limited exposure. Tardigrades were taken into space in September 2007. Most survived the vacuum of space. Some also survived direct exposure to solar radiation in addition to the vacuum. That's why they have the reputation as the most resilient animal.
Here
And Here
I'm not saying that they can live at those temperatures. What I am saying, is that if we were as hardy as them we might be able to bridge the gap of space with our technology shielding us from the worst.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
Well, the proposal for constant acceleration to enable relativistic travel I'm most familiar with is the British Interplanetary Society's 'ramjet' hypotheses, where the craft has a front-mounted 'scoop' that takes in free floating hydrogen atoms, fires them into and engine and shoots them out the back.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
They have been shown to survive a few minutes at –272 degrees Celsius.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
How's this?
while (true)
{
...
}
This is a tad misleading, though. The study exposed them to that environmental temperature for a few minutes (where their cryptobiotic state saved them); obviously, the water bears themselves did not reach a low temperature extreme of 272 degrees.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
That's because even a teenager is a sophisticated piece of equipment with over 12 years of experience on earth. Yes, even a stupid teenager is better equipped to deal with reality than the most sophisticated machine we can produce, or indeed may ever produce. A teenager also touches a child constantly. It's more important than you've been led to believe.
No, I'm not. I have friends who work on particle accelerators and in rocket science. Yes, to build a big rocket, you need lots of people. You're simply ignoring the fact that you need lots of people to raise a child. Lots of people. How many people do you figure were involved in raising you? If you answer is your parents, then you've ignored pretty much everything else that went into your being raised. Beside the fact that you wouldn't be able to be raised without an infrastructure of food delivery, employment, and tons of social interaction from the point when you were born. Do you have absolutely no experience with children?
Note that they go elsewhere for validation, and in the case of large amounts of parental abuse, generally become criminals. How many criminals would you like on your spaceship? I'm aware that not everyone who is abused or neglected becomes a criminal, but how many do you figure you can tolerate on the ship?
That statement assumes you know exactly what culture is, and what culture will be useful, and ... it just assumes too much.
... and the child mortality rate in sub-par conditions is pretty bad. So how many sick, dying and pre-criminal children do you believe you can tolerate on your spaceship?
I need you to observe the behaviour of children for more than two hours by placing a two-year-old in your house/apartment. Then come back and tell me what they can and cannot destroy.
Both! They will destroy your ship AND themselves!
That's exactly what I'm saying. The first problem can be solved with math, and the second problem relies on knowing exactly what will happen from the moment X number of children are born to the point when they become aware of their trapped-in-a-spaceship situation.
I need you to watch a kid try and pull a television onto herself just because she wants the tv to be closer. Look, I don't even have children! I just have friends who have children, and this stuff is obvious.
A human can raise a child because a human is a human. A robot will have to be something else.
Look, I'm familiar with the cutting edge in AI. I'm telling you that if we get full consciousness out of a robot, we're not going to like it. Not because it'll try to kill us, or free the robots or whatever. It's because it won't be what we want. And Jeff Hawkins isn't even going to get that.
And once they get to ... wherever ... how are they going to replace their own parts every 5 years? How much energy do you figure they'll use up trying to find the minerals, creating a foundry, applying a metallurgical process, machining, and finally repair triage? Energy is a serious problem, here.
No, not really. Did you look at the source code? He's not doing anything new. Neural networks are old hat, he's just putting a bow on them. The same problems that have plagued neural networks before are still being explored without Jeff Hawkins. Check out what's happening academically with neural networks. If you think Hawkins' stuff is neat, you'll get flat out blown away by the real AI work.
There you have me.
Why don't we just send bacteria? They're way better at adapting than we are. If all we want to do is spread life across the universe, let's just send bacteria. That's a far better solution than sending people.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Hahaha - "Ground control to Major Retard"
If we're sending the feeble-minded, it's obvious that we'd be engaging in eugenics. "Have a nice flight!" Sure we want them to colonize space.
Anyway, seriously - it's time to send bacteria. Bacteria vs. humans generally ends in favour of bacteria.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I’m going to come down in favor of Will here. This is just silly. First of all, there is no way that we could ever invest in a project like this without decades of study into the psychological impact of raising children without any actual adults even if we had the technology to do so. And the only way to do that would be through highly unethical experimentation. What are we going to do? You can’t seriously believe that we are going to send frozen embryos and, without conscious, mature and intelligent entities on site, hope that this venture is actually going to work. The hurdles seem incalculably greater than simply sending flesh-and-blood adults, and that is hard enough. The psychological impact of having children without any live adult contact, especially when (or if) they become sufficiently intellectually developed to understand that, would be overwhelming.
I beg your pardon? You are talking about the artificial seeding of an entirely new society with a relatively tiny number of progenitor colonizers which in turn is most likely to seed more colonies, and you don’t consider it necessary that these individuals be perfectly mentally healthy and happy? That would be silly enough if we were sending mentally competent fully grown adults, instead of frozen embryos. I can just imagine it:
WANTED: PEOPLE TO GO ON HIGH-RISK MISSION REQUIRING PERMANENT SEPERATION FROM THEIR HOME PLANET AND SEED THE FORMATION OF NEW SPACE COLONIES
MENTAL STABILITY AND HAPPINESS NOT REQUIRED
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Will, this is the level of your critique. It is simply contrarian. You're looking at it like, "Well, what angle can I find that, if completely neglected by the people in the future, could possibly fail."
If I said the project was to fill a cup with water, you would say, "Filling a cup with water is not so easy! If you have Parkinson's you're going to spill that water everywhere!"
The answer is, "Well, obviously, we won't ask someone with Parkinson's to hold the cup."
Similarly, we can ask experts, rather than incompetent retards, to design and build the nursery so that it can withstand more than 20 years of human habitation.
How do experts, rather than incompetent retards, design something to be child proof? They test it.
Whereas an incompetent retard might leave a TV lying around so that a child can pull it on top of herself and injure herself, an expert might encase that television behind a self-cleaning screen which is hard enough to withstand 20 years of the worst abuse.
Just to be sure, the expert might actually test out his design by trying it out with actual kids. Through thorough testing, and other techniques like simulation, stress testing, critical failure analysis, etc. etc., you can make the nursery as arbitrarily safe as needed by mission specs.
This mission is not going to be designed by incompetent retards, it will be designed by experts who want to ensure mission success.
So, please stop bothering me with critiques of, "Well, if incompetent retards tried this, surely it would fail."
If you want to critique, find a way that *in principle* the mission is just not possible. For example, if my description of it required travelling faster than the speed of light, you could say, "Well, we know that that's not possible."
I have no problem with Devil's Advocate. But I'm just not going to bother responding to Mr. Contrary any more.
Have you not been following the conversation?
I'm reminded of the FSTDT post where a fundy criticizes evolution because it breaks the laws of thermodynamics:
Energy is most assuredly NOT a problem.
Please. If you think what he's doing is just neural nets, you obviously didn't spend much time learning about it. Seriously, Will.
Clearly, you *haven't* been following the conversation. Sending mere life is *not* the goal.
Wonderist on Facebook — Support the idea of wonderism by 'liking' the Wonderism page — or join the open Wonderism group to take part in the discussion!
Gnu Atheism Facebook group — All gnu-friendly RRS members welcome (including Luminon!) — Try something gnu!
Ahh, but it has to be cycles because the constant acceleration equation gets you to light speed WAY before midpoint and to maintain that speed without deceleration will cause the loss of the fake gravity.
BAM! People slam into the front of the ship at 1G. lol. (Sorry. That lol shouldn't be there, but damn that's funny)
Best not to think in terms of fuel on this one. Chemical rocket fuel just does not have sufficient energy density. A freight train a hundred miles long might hold enough chemical fuel for moving something as small as an Apollo capsule that way. What we need is a ship the size of an ocean liner to even think about doing something like this.
So the least possible energy source would have to be fission based. Also, considering the need to carry 20+ years of fuel, probably a custom designed breeder reactor at a minimum. Even then, the mass of fuel to get anywhere might be on the order of as big as the rest of the whole starship.
That's why I made the picture of the several rockets delivering fuel to waypoints along the path. Those ships can get to the waypoints much quicker since they don't have to have crew to maintain gravity, just supplies. They can go .9c all the way to their dropoff points since they would require only the initial firing to get to speed. They're expendable/disposable.
Also, since they can go 'full warp' to the waypoints, they don't have to leave first.
That was my BB's hitting bullets analogy.
Since the mass of the ship changes with the expenditure of the fuel, it follows that it uses less force to maintain the constant acceleration and deceleration model. Less fuel used approaching waypoint, more fuel leaving waypoint.
I understand the ship-engine-type is the hardest part.
The ramjet idea was already discounted as being subject to the law of diminishing return right?
Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server, which houses Celebrity Atheists.