A Work in Progress

Panel: Laura Burns (M), David Brin, Gregory Benford, Joe Haldeman, Albert Jackson

An interesting panel that raised some good points, particularly if you want to write a story based on current knowledge and technology

My Notes

• Non-excluded magic — something that happens we didn't foresee
• A lot of science fiction is moving back into the solar system, so why don't we?
• Starting points:
• Experiments that are being done now by putting people in a tin can and seeing what they need to survive and how they adapt
• What do you need to end up with when you reach your destination
• The first starships will probably carry an AI
• We can get within a few % of light with technologies we know--we just have to build them big
• One other SLT (slower-than-light) technology is fusion
• Generation ships where stations become so self-sustaining that they just leave
• Comets, but you need a different species of human to live there
• Suspended animation: enabling technology is developing
• AI: goes to the asteroids, makes copies of itself and moves outward; it could fill the galaxy with copies of itself—within three million years (an eyeblink in astronomical time)
• How difficult it is to create a micro kilogram starship that can flash by a sun and collect data, wave a flag—very expensive, but a fraction of the cost of a full-blown human mission
• Exploring our own solar system should put us in better shape for interstellar flight
• The past two centuries really didn't start until their 14th year—that's next year
• What are we looking for?
• G-type stars with Earth-like planets
• What about the weird exceptions?
• The second-closet star to us (a brown dwarf) was discovered just last year
• Habitable worlds around brown dwarfs might be the largest population of habitable planets in our area
• Energy beamed from your home solar system
• Microwaves would be more effective than lasers
• If you can sustain acceleration, then a living person can see the stars
• 1g acceleration and you can reach Andromeda in 26 years, but the sweetheart you kissed goodbye—and it was good-bye
• Fusion is just another rocket—and you still have to carry the fuel
• Beings that live on the "roof" of the world
• The reason to think about starships now is to look at what steps we need to take in the next century
• You have to wonder, "Where the heck is everybody?"
• The closest it is we get to the stars, the weirder it is