[ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 06:54:27PM -0700, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 4:30 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> > So in order to get out into space we must prevent collapse.
> > This should be our first and foremost priority as a species.
> 
> I don't think this is the only choice Eugen. We can collapse in such a
> way that most of our civilization's scientific knowledge survives, and

I see a big problem with engineering collapse. It's a degenerate
state and really easy to reach: all you have to do is to keep
doing nothing. Collapse is default. The end-game of a food fight
for the last scraps on the table is probably a total nuclear 
exchange, which reduces the carrying capacity to next to nothing. 
The survivors of a depopulated, contaminated world will have to 
claw their way back -- to add insult to injury in a depleted-resource 
environment. It is possible to build archives which would assist
with the bootstrap but this is expensive, and this is not being done
on a sufficient scale.

If we collapse, further prognosis would be dim. This world has
less than a gigayear of habitability left, and even that time would be 
interpunctuated with extinction events.

> is pushed forward by the (hopefully) wiser survivors of said collapse.
> 
> Those wise survivors can get into space and assure the continuity of

In order to get to space you need the entire supply chain of a space
faring civilisation. Rebuilding this is a devastated, depleted world
is much, much harder than it's been for us, even if you know how.

> our civilization even after a collapse, and they might be in a better
> place to do so politically than we are today.

If you go through a hunter-gatherer phase (assuming, your population
size isn't below critical, especially considering the enhanced mutation
background, and you'll be sitting duck to any supervolcanism/spontaneous
climatic excursion/asteroid impact event) you'd be just screwed up as
us cognition-wise.

I think the only good chance we have is now, and we're wasting it good.
 
> I hope this is the case, as collapse seems rather difficult to avoid
> on the current track. Perhaps this could be a side effect of having
> watched both 'Contagion' and 'Too Big to Fail' within the last week...
> LOL... I'm usually a little more optimistic.

You shouldn't be an optimist. These are dangerous to themselves and
others. You should be a realist. 

http://www.mamieyoung.com/dailydawdle/I%20think%20this%20is%20piss.jpg