As long as we aren't trying to fuck with the transporter technology that kills you and makes another you somewhere else, I'm fine.
But if the another you is undistinguishable at the quantum level... then it's still you (as seen by external observers, and honestly, I could use a break).
I suggest to you https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667991
There's also a Family Guy episode that touches on this issue... but it's less philosophical since neither version realizes the other exists. That and some doubles/originals die in convenient ways.
I believe I have read that it's literally impossible to copy an object's quantum state without destroying it, so in a real sense a transporter that's indistinguishable at a quantum level would be moving you rather than creating a copy and killing the original.
To my surprise and delight, the article itself confirms Betteridge's Law of Headlines by starting off with:
A provisional answer is “no.”
Personally, I've never really seen the need for such a thing. There's no great rush to jump dozens of light years away when we have hundreds of planets and moons and other large bodies we've barely even taken a glimpse at right here in our own back yards. We can go right up to a Kardashev II civilization without having to travel more than a few light hours away.
Don't need to go light years, it's the speed that's important.
If you can hop to Mars in 8 seconds instead of 8 months we can explore our backyard a lot better.
There's no great rush to jump dozens of light years away when we have hundreds of planets and moons and other large bodies we've barely even taken a glimpse at right here in our own back yards
None of those are habitable
It's not particularly likely that any of the planets or moons around other stars are habitable either. At least not "step out of the ship and take a nice deep breath of the fresh air, picking an apple off of a nearby tree and making some kind of comment about how it's like Eden" habitable like is so common on TV. It's likely that if there's a native biosphere then that planet is going to be incredibly hostile to alien life like us.
Build habitats. If you've got the tech to build a starship then you've got the tech to build a habitat, it's way easier. Habitats will give you exactly the environment you want, not whatever you happen to find.
As long as the atmosphere is roughly similar, the native biosphere would have very little defense against us. Sure, some of the defenses that local plants and animals developed against each other might cause issues, or they might not.
We would be an invasive species on the grandest scale. A completely foreign biology would maybe have useful nutrients, or maybe not. That would be the key, but the periodic table will be the same everywhere, and chemistry being what it is, we'd probably see similar molecules, at least the simple stuff. Basic hydrocarbons and such.
The complex biochemistry would be vastly different. That could trip up human explorers.
the native biosphere would have very little defense against us.
Why is it that way around, instead of "we would have very little defense against the native biosphere?" Especially considering the native biosphere has the home court advantage, it's already well adapted to the environment it's in and has a planet's worth of diversity to draw on when dealing with new competitors.
A new biosphere often has zero resistance against an invasive species.
All those tricks that the local biosphere have are targeted against other parts of the biosphere. It's called the co-evolutionary arms race. Prey species get better at defending themselves, and predators get better at targeting weak points in their prey. Predators can become super specialized. And in this specific case, herbivores can be considered predators to plant species.
An invasive species slips in when there is no local predator to eat them. Often because no predator can adapt to the new invasive species.
To back this all up, just look at the history of humanity transporting plants and animals all over the place and fucking shit up, all because we figured out the absolute best defense against our own predators, being too fucking smart for our own good.
The only way an alien biosphere could defend itself against us is if the planet it was on had an excess of heavy metals or other poisonous elements like arsenic that became a part of the biosphere itself.
Technology to make a planet habitable is far more likely and within our grasp, than to travel faster than light. To add to that, you'll likely experience time-dilation with most methods of FTL travel. It's also doubtful that warp technology is possible to compress space without any ill effects with the space being compressed. Subspace doesn't exist.
Yeah, that's a pretty strong statement. I'm sure if we had the technology it would see a ton of use. Could we survive without it? Sure, but that goes for most useful technologies.
Warp drive, replicator, holodeck, transporters.... So many technologies in ST that would change everything if they existed.
Particularly replicator and transporter. It would completely pancake down the entirety of the manufacturing and transport industries.
I'd not trust transporters, but replicators would be great. If I had replicators, I'd open a replicator restaurant, then hire a few chefs to just cook random stuff all day to scan and then give out to the guests.
Maybe I'd travel around the world, scanning the best and freshest ingredients. But I'd travel by shuttle, not transporter.
With something like an Alcubierre drive you can still travel between planets fairly fast. (Though this concept needs basically dark matter or some type of negative energy)
Even missions to Jupiter and Saturn take 5+ years in travel time one way with normal Hohman transfers and gravity assists that still allow for orbaital capture.
Even if you could simply find some type of fuel that would allow something like the Epstein drive (from the Expanse) where you can accelerate at 1g for 1/2 the trip and decel at 1g for the second half that would cut the travel time down to something on the order of like 9 days to Saturn or so.
Using a warp drive for that purpose would be like using a suborbital rocket to pop down to the local mall for some groceries.
9 days is too long to spend on a trip to Saturn? That's quite the first-world problem, there. Especially given that by the time we've got drives like that we'll likely have life extension and/or hibernation technologies to make the trip's duration irrelevant.
In any case, as the article says, warp drives are probably not possible anyway.
Don’t agree. Play a little Elite Dangerous or any game that can simulate scale of our solar system. Moving around it, even at multiple times the speed of light can be useful.
Imagine making a trip to Ganymede within a day. It would allow for civilizations expansion while maintaining supply chains and not require each place to be wholly independent.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice to go fast. I'm saying it isn't necessary.
Or possible, which makes the debate somewhat moot. We'll get by with sublight speeds.
The biggest problem is sustaining 1g for 9 days straight. It might not sound like much, but it's a huge amount of delta-v.
Using an Alcubierre drive, would not only reduce the time for the trip, but also the normal space delta-v required, so the amount of fuel, efficiency, and so on.
warp drives are probably not possible anyway
That's not what it says, and for good reason.
Right now, the work on the math for a warp bubble, done over the last 30 years, has reduced the energy requirements by some dozen orders of magnitude. A form of negative energy is already being used in experiments like LIGO, and a few years ago, what could be considered as "negative mass" was discovered in phonons.
As long as either the theory, or the math, leading to Alcubierre's calculations doesn't get disproven, warp drives are "possible", we just don't know "how"... and so far, all related experiments are rather going in the direction of getting to the how, not in the direction of disproving it.
because, much like the show the warp drive is from, it's not about colonization or exploiting resources, but meeting new people and going new places
There won't be any new people there until our colonies get there in the first place, so it's a self-solving problem. Tourists can travel as fast as the colonists can.
Tl;dr: we dunno. 🤷♂️
If there is a way to make it happen, it'll be interesting to find out how the universe resolves the resulting causal paradoxes. What happens if the cause of an event is able to observe the event before causing it? What happens if the cause of the event responds by not causing the event?
I think the best we can hope for if we get very very lucky with future laws of physics is a cheap way to travel near but slightly below lightspeed. Maybe some sort of way to lower the rest mass of matter.
It's much more likely there will be no immediate application of whatever the full laws are, because new physics only appears in very extreme circumstances we can't easily replicate.
Yes, you can try to change time-space before and after the space aircraft. Basically manipulating space around you. So instead you moving through space.. You move the space around you. Allowing you to accelerate at to speeds within seconds without causing harm to yourself.
No, but on the brightside you got a much better chance of it having a 10 Forward.
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