Did Philip Rosedale Just Solve Fermi's Paradox? "Too Much Energy is Required To Go Exploring" on an Interstellar Level

Sorry Matt, but the math says we can't actually go... interstellar.

Philip Rosedale, who actually started out studying Physics in college, has a fun post that throws water on the popular notion (at least among technophiles) that we'll soon be traveling to the stars. Philip says the math doesn't add up:

Consider the very closest star to earth - Proxima Centauri. It is 4.4 light years away, which is about 100,000 times farther away than Mars. To send a spaceship of the size of the SpaceX Starship there in two years would require… wait for it… around 200 years of our current global energy production. In different units, it would require around 1,700 times the energy contained in all the nuclear weapons in existence. And that’s to make one trip to the closest star. Going farther - lets say across our galaxy - would require 8.5 Million years of energy production to fill up the gas tanks.

I thought solar sails might solve the energy problem, but that's way above my pay grade. [SEE UPDATE BELOW FROM PHILIP]*

He goes on to suggest this is the answer to Fermi's Paradox, i.e. if there's thousands of aliens civilizations out there, where the fuck are they? With his math, their absence is actually common sense:

It seems possible that the answer to the Fermi Paradox may be that too much energy is required to go exploring, even for technologically advanced beings. 

One surprising conclusion is something he's mentioned to me before for the first book, but he says it again here -- virtual worlds could supplant our yearning to visit the stars, if they were made on massive scale:

It may make more sense to make the moon into computronium and use it to simulate new worlds where new forms of life can evolve that we can then visit with. If inner space is enormously more accessible and interesting than outer space, why leave home?

Read the whole thing here!

* UPDATE, 10:22PM: Just got this from Philip about solar sails as a possible solution: "They remove the weight of propellant, but the power of the laser gets lower as you get father from earth, so you need more and more power to get something there. But yeah I should analyze that case too. But I think the laser power to launch a good sized ship with a solar sail would be many gigawatts. Probably would ignite the atmosphere, etc." And no, you can't just sail from the solar rays themselves: "That works too but at the lumosity of the sun, only incredibly small things could be sent."  So... send an armada of sail-powered nano-bots?

Comments

[Winter]

4.4 light years in 2 years.. ?

I wasn't aware we'd found out how to travel 2x the speed of light.

What'd the energy costs look like if we went there at 1/10th the speed of light? Assuming a world in which computers could reliably steward a small colony of humans on a multi-generational voyage?

For that matter, what about an entirely machine crew, aka a rover/voyager style reconnaissance 'probe' visit? Send the machines that can get there, take readings and report them back. Sure, waiting 44 years for the probe to get there is hard, and the 8.8 year turn-around on communications would be obnoxious, but at such speeds, even within a single lifespan we could build, launch, and get the probe there, and get data back from it.

Of course we don't even have practical technology to get us to those speeds either. Our current tech gets us more like 0.5% the speed of light, so talking about the energy expenditure to get to speeds we can't reach is, necessarily based on our current understanding of physics and our own capabilities.

We're not even a Type 1 civilization on the highly speculative Kardishev scale yet. Our society can barely prioritize building technology that lasts more than a few years because we're obnoxiously obsessed with the lucrative opportunity to charge to replace, repair, and upgrade things. A blender than lasts a lifetime? In this economy?

The idea of humanity being able to collect and harness even 10% of the sun's energy output is almost laughable when you take humans into account. Imagine how much we'd have to change as a society, to consider multi-generational, multi epoch projects on the scale of a Dyson Sphere, or even a Halo style ring.

We are still barely infants. Modern humans haven't even had our first million years. We haven't even been writing things down for more than a few thousand years.

[sirhc desantis]

Ah so Saint Phil of the Ultimate Sales speaks... :)
There is no Fermi Paradox. Deep space and deep time cover all of that - at least in our monkey perception. Besides, you don't need 'energy'. Huge lumps of mass will bring any point close enough to nip over easily. And as the current thinking involves 'we don't have a clue so lets label all things with dark energy and hope no one notices we have reverted to ectoplasm as an explanation' why not:)
And another thing if all stuff is 'fields' where are they anchored? And referenced to what? After decades of following physics its hilarious these days. Woo Woo Paltrow has nothing on current stuff =^^=