It would be quite tricky to create space opera science fiction that actually obeys the laws of physics, which clearly dictate that space colonisation is not possible because everything is just too far away.
The Expanse starts out at least attempting to do realistic physics, but it ultimately brings in some crazy alien technology to let them do more Star Trek-style exploration.
Space colonization is entirely possible - just not with lifespans like ours. Which are long for mammals, granted, but not especially long in an absolute sense. There are sponges older than the United States; there are trees that first bloomed before Ur. Meanwhile Alpha Centauri is mere centuries away. We will never get there, personally, but *something* absolutely could.
Perhaps an sentient Tardegrades type lifeform could make it, hibernating in the vast chasm between the stars.
Pretty far-fetched though.
If AI managed to figure out von Neuman replication that might also work, sending spores to the asteroid belt to bootstrap the colonising technology. Non-biological intelligence could wait forever.
Your note that Star Trek has never done a proper relativistic time dilation story in hundreds upon hundreds of hours is really striking, and speaks to the power of the pseudoscientific technical manuals that "explain" how warp drive "actually works."
The closest I can think of is that one planet in Voyager's "Blink of an Eye," which is accomplished through a different sort of handwaving (the magic of tachyons), or (I suppose) the various time-travel stories that have people encountering their ancestors or descendants (which have the tropes of the classic time dilation narrative with a different cause). But by and large the need to retain pre-Einsteinian physics for warp travel has seemingly overriden the need to find new stories they haven't done multiple times yet over 60 years of Trek production!
> In short, the science of the 22nd century and beyond have reset back to the science of the 19th century.
That's a very interesting observation; you could add that transporter technology --I'd argue AI too-- and space travel itself is configured to reset 22nd century *metaphysics* to the mid-20th century. Narrative comprehensibility probably depends more on that short of unspoken shared assumptions than on science qua science: a perpetual motion machine introduces no difficulty with the audience, but having duplication-and-death as a regular part of life as an Starfleet officer would make for strangeness that'd add to the cost (and depending on your preferences, interest) of the story.
> Ironically, though, according to our present scientific understanding, even that would be conceptually impossible, because reassembling the body perfectly on the other end would require knowing the position and velocity of every particle—and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle posits that it is impossible to know both things at once about any given particle. Hence the Star Trek writers invented a device that—as with the magic of the warp field—would counteract twentieth century physics and return us to the world of classical mechanics.
Not quite. The Heisenberg principle does not just prevent *measuring* already-existing positions and momenta perfectly, though that is the conventional presentation; it prevents such perfectly well defined states from existing in the first place. Single-momentum (or position) states are mathematical conveniences, not real physical states any process could prepare. Your momentum and position are already distributions: Star Trek's error is assuming there's something to be compensated for in the first place. The "kill and clone" interpretation is basically correct, if you demand complete fidelity: no-cloning is an absolute physical law, but the only constraints on transmission are engineering. If biology is basically classical, on the other hand, there are no constraints at all - you can copy *measured* states to your heart's content, and personal identity tout court is on uneasy ground.
It would be quite tricky to create space opera science fiction that actually obeys the laws of physics, which clearly dictate that space colonisation is not possible because everything is just too far away.
The Expanse starts out at least attempting to do realistic physics, but it ultimately brings in some crazy alien technology to let them do more Star Trek-style exploration.
Space colonization is entirely possible - just not with lifespans like ours. Which are long for mammals, granted, but not especially long in an absolute sense. There are sponges older than the United States; there are trees that first bloomed before Ur. Meanwhile Alpha Centauri is mere centuries away. We will never get there, personally, but *something* absolutely could.
Perhaps an sentient Tardegrades type lifeform could make it, hibernating in the vast chasm between the stars.
Pretty far-fetched though.
If AI managed to figure out von Neuman replication that might also work, sending spores to the asteroid belt to bootstrap the colonising technology. Non-biological intelligence could wait forever.
Your note that Star Trek has never done a proper relativistic time dilation story in hundreds upon hundreds of hours is really striking, and speaks to the power of the pseudoscientific technical manuals that "explain" how warp drive "actually works."
The closest I can think of is that one planet in Voyager's "Blink of an Eye," which is accomplished through a different sort of handwaving (the magic of tachyons), or (I suppose) the various time-travel stories that have people encountering their ancestors or descendants (which have the tropes of the classic time dilation narrative with a different cause). But by and large the need to retain pre-Einsteinian physics for warp travel has seemingly overriden the need to find new stories they haven't done multiple times yet over 60 years of Trek production!
> In short, the science of the 22nd century and beyond have reset back to the science of the 19th century.
That's a very interesting observation; you could add that transporter technology --I'd argue AI too-- and space travel itself is configured to reset 22nd century *metaphysics* to the mid-20th century. Narrative comprehensibility probably depends more on that short of unspoken shared assumptions than on science qua science: a perpetual motion machine introduces no difficulty with the audience, but having duplication-and-death as a regular part of life as an Starfleet officer would make for strangeness that'd add to the cost (and depending on your preferences, interest) of the story.
Yes! If they all consent to be constantly killed and cloned as a matter of course, they just are not comprehensible to us as human beings anymore!
> Ironically, though, according to our present scientific understanding, even that would be conceptually impossible, because reassembling the body perfectly on the other end would require knowing the position and velocity of every particle—and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle posits that it is impossible to know both things at once about any given particle. Hence the Star Trek writers invented a device that—as with the magic of the warp field—would counteract twentieth century physics and return us to the world of classical mechanics.
Not quite. The Heisenberg principle does not just prevent *measuring* already-existing positions and momenta perfectly, though that is the conventional presentation; it prevents such perfectly well defined states from existing in the first place. Single-momentum (or position) states are mathematical conveniences, not real physical states any process could prepare. Your momentum and position are already distributions: Star Trek's error is assuming there's something to be compensated for in the first place. The "kill and clone" interpretation is basically correct, if you demand complete fidelity: no-cloning is an absolute physical law, but the only constraints on transmission are engineering. If biology is basically classical, on the other hand, there are no constraints at all - you can copy *measured* states to your heart's content, and personal identity tout court is on uneasy ground.