Re: Travelling the Stars

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Dec 11 1998 - 05:20:11 MST


mark@unicorn.com writes:

> A more fundamental question would seem to be: *Why* would you want to go to
> the stars?
>
> Survival, resources, curiousity maybe, but there aren't many reasons to
> go through all that trouble if you don't have to.

Most likely most people (and >people) would be content to stay at
home, watching soap operas, trading idea futures or automorphing into
jupiter brains with more interesting internal worlds than the
external. But a small percentage would move outwards, mainly for
curiosity or to get away from all the weirdos.

> Once you start to talk about the kind of powers we discuss here,
> stars are little more than balls of hydrogen gas wastefully burning
> themselves up. Why not dismantle them for fuel and live in mobile
> habitats in free space?

Perhaps because you have to get there first?

Dismantling stars is a few orders of magnitude of technology / energy
use beyond just travelling relativistically.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y


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