alt Hacker NewsAm I the only one who feels mind boggling amazement followed by a sense of depression that we are too short-lived, too primitive and too weak to be able to visit and explore these distant galaxies?
It is like we are given a glimpse of this insane and terrifyingly beautiful expanse with the knowledge that that's all it will ever amount to. Like a child looking through the glass window at the limitless world outside without any hopes of reaching it while knowing that she will never be able to get out of the house.
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Unlike a grassy field in a sunny Earth day, space is cold, dark, deprived of oxygen and bombarded by radiation, and the few rocks that exist in the vast void of nothingness are pretty much just lifeless rocks. So yeah, enjoy our house, it's pretty neat here. It would be cool to explore this dark desert, but it's not hard to find happiness inside if you try.
Unless you believe in fairy tales and santa claus, mankind will never reach them. Sure, we will settle surrounding few hundred light years, maybe a thousand in next million years, if we as mankind are extremely lucky, I talk range somewhere 1:1000 to 1:million. Other chance is show or quick death.
Beyond that, no real settling, just some probes that will take tens of millenia to come back (or send signal back).
Think about all the stuff and beauty we have now, to experience and explore it on our pale blue dot, trivially reachable considering our recent past, and all that will be almost inevitably lost to future generations. Compared to what we have here, stuff in cold hard vacuum or some illusions of beauty pale in comparison (and that comes from a guy who loves astronomy). You can experience it now, in its original form and not some crappy re-creation of good ol' days. Trust me, future generations will be wishing for many reasons to be able to live now (at least those healthy).
I don't believe we will find some magic above-c transport in Star trek style. Sure, its a nice fantasy and we would love for it being true, but thats not how reality works. Same as some beardy old dude in the clouds fantasy, having for some reason very strict bronze-age morals yet letting billions innocents suffer immeasurably without a care in the world(universe). But of course there is magical wonderland after its over here, pure magic in D&D style with alternate realities/planes/universes or whatever those folks who wrote it up thought made sense back then.
Have you gone to a National Park?
(assuming you live in the US)
You can get similar amazement here on earth, normally within 1-day drive of where most people live, by just visiting a National Park.
We take for granted the beauty of Earth, and so much is still undiscovered here at home.
Mortality can be a tough thing to accept. But, if it helps, just know that it is always a spectrum - it is never binary - in that everything has an end (as far as we, and our physical/cosmological models, can understand).
We've got it better than pretty much every other type of animal life on earth (with a few exceptions) - insects or our pets, for example - so while we might not have "cosmological endurance", let's call it, we've still got it pretty good. :)
Agreed that it's a shame we can't explore everything, though!
You can always redirect your depression into constructive optimism by working to help ensure that eventually, our descendants might have a chance to be able to do so.
Nope, I feel the same sense of depression about space. I love it but I absolutely feel that. We see these beautiful things and will likely never, as a species or as individuals, even get NEAR seeing them in person.
If you do feel that way, beware that it's a rhetorical trick. More:
You haven’t even finish exploring your own planets in solar system
What exactly do you hope to find ? It's not like we're living in a Star Trek universe where every solar system has a warp civilization.
No need for nihilism.
Alpha centauri is approximately 4.37 light years away. Project starshot is already aiming to get there. This can take anywhere from 20 to 50 years depending on the mission. We already have a spacecraft from 1977 that is still operating today which proves our potential to build on a 50 year timeframe. We'll likely have humans somewhere in our solar system besides earth before anyone attempts to go to alpha centauri but besides that I also think we would be able to live much longer. Life expectancy increases are around 1% or 0.8% per decade at its current pace. There's no guarantee this continues but even so, if that's the average in the coming decades then we'll expect people to live hundreds of years by the time we can send a ship to alpha centauri.