[ExI] Fwd: [tt] The Stars Are Not Too Far

[ddraig]

Hey, Charlie, plug from Vernor Vinge - well done!

Dwayne


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
Date: 14 October 2011 02:18
Subject: [tt] The Stars Are Not Too Far
To: tt at postbiota.org



http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/10/the-stars-are-not-too-far?WT.mc_id=0

The Stars Are Not Too Far

Vernor Vinge

Later this month, Tor Books will publish my new novel, The Children of the
Sky. This is an adventure on the Tines World, a sequel to A Fire Upon the
Deep.

Over the years, I’ve written about the likelihood of a Technological
Singularity, that is, that we humans may soon use technology to create or
become beings of superhuman intelligence. If the Singularity happens,
interstellar travel will probably become very easy, even without
faster-than-light travel: AIs could probably fit in starships the size of a
can of soda, boosted by almost-ordinary lasers. Such minds could tune their
own consciousness so that the missions would seem as fast as they please. See
Charles Stross’s novel Accelerando for a brilliant vision of interstellar
travel in a Singularity era.

On the other hand, the decisions and even the motives of superhuman minds are
beyond our ken. Back in the 1960s, editor John W. Campbell, Jr., rejected my
attempt at a godling story with the comment (close to an exact quote): “I’m
sorry, Mr. Vinge. You can’t write this story — and neither can anyone else.”
Brief forays are possible (as with Accelerando), but writing sustained
adventure in a post-Singular universe is a hell of a challenge. All space
opera writers face this problem, even if they themselves don’t believe in the
Singularity; after all, many of their readers do think the Singularity is
coming. So we writers have come up with a number of explanations for why the
Singularity is irrelevant to our space stories or why the Singularity never
happens. For instance, there are the Zones of Thought in the universe of A
Fire Upon the Deep.

I think the Technological Singularity is the most plausible noncatastrophic
scenario for our near future. On the other hand, anyone who is serious about
the future (science-fiction writer or not) should also be thinking about what
the consequences will be if the Singularity does not happen. See my own talk
about this at the Long Now Foundation.

If there is no Singularity, humanity could be destined for something like the
space operas we enjoy so much — and the Twenty-First Century could be the
time when we step onto the interstellar stage. Science fiction readers and
writers are not the only people who think this: by the time you read this
posting, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) should already
have held their 100 Year Starship meeting in Orlando, Florida.

I’m attending that meeting and I plan to contribute my own $0.02 worth to the
conversation. Spreading civilization beyond this Solar System is the best
long-term assurance of human survival. Even without the Singularity, it could
be begun in this century — if we can achieve industrial production on an
interplanetary scale.

But decades can pass with virtually no progress. Now in 2011, we know several
methods for interplanetary space flight that could reduce travel in the inner
solar system to the scale of sea travel in the seventeenth or eighteenth
century. The problem is that we can’t use such methods until we are already
at least in orbit. And that is the key technical bottleneck: even after
adjusting for inflation, the price of delivering a kilogram of payload up to
low-earth orbit is about the same in 2011 as it was in 1969.

Another forty years of such disappointing progress will leave us with nothing
but faded dreams. Without drastically cheaper launch systems, money spent on
probes and manned space flight is limited to small and super-expensive
payloads — and research about other aspects of spaceflight operations is
condemned to be theory without benefit of practice.

Developing a cheap orbital launch system may be a hard problem; certainly no
one has demonstrated a solution and the last forty years have shown us how
inapproprate a government-controlled megaprogram can be for problems without
sure solutions. In my Long Now talk cited above, I make suggestions for how
this impasse may be broken. A military arms race between Earth’s superpowers
would probably do the trick; having short-term, deadly deadlines can work
miracles, but such a military path would also be a ghastly, dangerous thing.
There are other ways, safer ones. I suggest:

   Privately sponsored competitions such as the X-Prizes. These give
companies and small groups a motive to demonstrate key technological
solutions, with the risks borne by those groups and companies.

   Real economic prizes in the form of promises from governments and/or the
largest corporations: “Give me a price to orbit of $X/Kg, and I’ll give you Y
tonnes of business per year for Z years.” Again, the financial risks are
taken by the developers who accept the challenge.

   We should abandon the idea of a government program to develop the “one
true method”. In particular, there should be no government money up front. In
an era where cheap launch solutions are still waiting to be discovered, such
funding simply suppresses all other methods — most likely suppressing the
one(s) that would really work.

If we can break the launch-price bottleneck, this century can be the time
when humankind spreads across the inner solar system out to the asteroid
belt. Twentieth Century science-fiction dreamed of the power of such a
civilization, and those dreams may still be the truest prophecy of our time:
At the end of the Twenty-First Century, with asteroid-based industries
supporting GDPs a million times what we have now, interstellar flight will be
a doable adventure!

The stars are not too far.
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