• balderdash@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    3 months ago

    But doesn’t the generation ship / cryogenic technology / nuclear technology make intergalactic travel possible (albeit very slow)?

    • Canaconda@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      3 months ago

      In theory yes… but the oldest frozen specimen of humans we’ve found is only a few thousand years old. We don’t even know if long term cryogenic reanimation is possible.

      Assuming the ship travels at 10x our current capabilities we’re still looking at ~8,000 years to reach our closest stellar neighbour at only 5 lightyears away.

        • Canaconda@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          3 months ago

          We’ll still run into the same assumption/problem; shelf life.

          Consider how memories work. Every time you remember something, your brain alters that memory slightly. Even looking at how the brain parses the data through several cortex (visual etc) implies that consciousness is potentially inseparable from the components of the brain. In this video about Cockatoo intelligence they speculate that birds brain anatomy causes them to think in ways that seem limited to us.

          Basically we don’t even know if its possible to preserve human consciousness for that long. Similar to cryogenics we have to question if reanimation is even fundamentally possible after centuries.

          • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            3 months ago

            Then take the solar system with us. Strap a solar thruster to the sun, and off EVERYTHING goes. It’s a byproduct of figuring out starlifting, and that buys us all the time in the universe, at least till we run out of Hydrogen and Helium to shove into the sun as fuel, but there’s literally entire solar systems worth of that stuff hanging around in deep space. Like 72 solar masses per cubic light year of “empty” space.

            • Canaconda@lemmy.ca
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              3 months ago

              Strap a solar thruster to the sun

              So like if you visualize how the sun/planets actually move around the milky way. It seems plausible to focus solar flares to alter our trajectory. We’d still be stuck in the whirlpool but we could change lanes.

              • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                3 months ago

                I think that you might think that the flares are a whole lot bigger than they actually are, or that the sun is far less massive than it actually is. You’d need a LOT more energy than those puny flares to move the sun.