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Thank you very much for your commitment! ====================================================================== Yes, welcome to my talk with you if you want to, which is the what's the slogan of the general national movement? I do not claim to have invented any of the ideas within this talk myself. It's essentially an excerpt from the internet. So there'll be a lot of thoughts, things and a lengthy list of posts in the end. And also, I've given the normal digital version of the same talk of the open mind in all this. So I'm with you a few times that you should to get a sound, and maybe you can post the YouTube anyway only. Let's get started soon. You certainly know this image or one from the internet or TV, or you don't know it from radio anyway. You see your planet and it's probably it and you're quite familiar with it because it's where we live. Unfortunately, it's also only where we live. So there's a lot of blank space music and do all this blank space, which extends in all directions here. Still, pretty much nearer humans. Well, we could be happy with that. But there are many problems the face problem on planetary scales, and we would presumably like to continue living on this planet for serious amounts of time. We're not quite sure how much modification the planet or the substance making of the ecosphere of the planet can actually take. So some scientists may, from three, try to find, say, safe limits. How much we can push all these systems, how do they do that? They did not try to find basic points of they sure this is what should they say, OK? We have some understanding of some of these subsystems, and we know that our current understanding will probably break down in some limited conditions where we assume that nonlinear linearity will start to appear. And as long as we stay within those limits, we actually understand that we can predict that this instance will make more of a stable and ultimately be so everything could possibly happen. This might be no problem at all that we don't know that. And since you only got one try thing to take off here, obviously this is no t very exciting science because you do realize you cannot do experiments, but you know how to think about it. There's a bit of shortage of materials for trying all the barriers and seeing which ones the wife and children. So they decided you can't just do this. Theoretically, simultaneously, this is not experimentally validated in any way. So what are the main current problems the planetary existence of planetary systems face? One is probably quite well known from public media, which is to take ozone depletion because there's a theory that stratospheric ozone prevents ultraviolet radiation to reach the surface in the ozone is going to get more harmful rather than radiation, which causes skin cancer in humans, and also that the same sorts of animals and plants. And actually, this is quite a success story for humanity so far because they calculated that the safe haven would be 95 percent of the pre-industrial amount of strength through zone, and the current level is actually quite variable, as can be observed over three years, somewhat less. But they aren't quite sure that the old stage will be reached around 2070 again. Similar problems exist for fresh water usage. Same thing with the 4000 kilometer cubed per year, humanity overall is using approximately 2600 of them, so there's still some wiggle room for us. Similarly, for allowances, mental illness that as long as is converted to agricultural use, it has different absorption and reflection properties and also different effects on other chemicals like, for example, the nitrogen or phosphorus. There's nobody lot. Most people have never heard about, which is ocean acidification. So what is the problem here? The increasing carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere generates or causes a change in the ocean or whatever of the ocean, which means that more calcium carbonate can be sold through the water. And you would not necessarily mean petroleum. But for all the more time which actually build their shells, don't this cal cium carbonate and the. Change it more energy intensive to actually build B cells, and presumably they built these cells because they lost their geometry. But because they need them for protection from predators, meaning that once the soldier gets too different from the evils that'll be lost to the ocean, they're really going to be large. Changes in plankton levels, which will cause some change in their motility, which will cause changes usually don't are too good for those predictable actions. Then the other two things they'll put you about something like aerosol concentrations, which cause global cooling level and also a lot of health problems in humans and presumably other animals. And all chemical pollution that is producing a lot of sulfur, unseen chemical eats, which also do stuff. We don't know exactly what they do because there are so many of them. So it's very hard to actually quantify the here and there is climate change. Everybody knows what climate change. You should have around 350 million coming out of the film. We have already and production seems to slow down at any rate in the world, and nitrogen and phosphorus cycles may influence production. And the problem is that by initially doing intensive agriculture, we need to put more nitrogen in the soil. And all this additional nitrogen is in the air, ending up in the rivers and the ocean, and you're changing his education and also doing other stuff. And then there's diversity laws. People think that it would be safe. If you have 10 times metrics, you could say the extinction rate of species three currently around applies to transform that level, depending on which individual looking at. And also, we have some limited raw materials that are used to good, loyal coal, whatever. And this is actually an image from the German Wikipedia. Anyway, in the bar chart shows oil reserves discovered in the past, and the black dots show avoid production. And obviously there is some difference for some years already, so me at some point in the future, there won't be that much of an event. People are very non-degree. Maybe something that will be. Some people say, okay, peak oil will be here in 10 years. Some people claim it has already occurred. The International Institute, some international oil producing association, actually says it will meet within the next 50 years. It doesn't really matter if it is normal 50 years, even 200 years. If you're talking about continued survival of humanity, we need to get away from that resource usage, obviously, and quite fast actually didn't exist for their wrong. Here is the cold calls for limited approximately three years, 49 and 120 years to call it current consumption level and the dual metals materials, including for long periods. Fortunately, the planet core consists of a lot of metals. Unfortunately, it gets a little bit harder to mine them once it gets to them. So plus it has actually increased. I tried to compare it to something not too inflationary, so I compared it to raise prices. And if you do that comparison to actually see a price increase by a factor of another two to five over 30 years, and I fully expect that to continue. Yes. So this is like soft limits anyway. This is not just to universe, which will take years to evolve. And then there are also in the slightly more violent ways. 390 like, OK, well, I'm everybody knows all that danger, I think. And while the research for the top reasons, I don't me to be here, I'm sure. Yes, it's and there's actually quite a long list of critical situations which evolved during and after the Cold War. For example, there were some sort of haven't really had a divorce and according to such incidents, would have been answered by nuclear nuclear strikes. And then it continues, however, and then something went wrong with the actual execution of the plan will see a little bit of that. Four years later, they found out that actually there were no technical blockades to stop all the ICBM fighting an en gineer, one rogue engineer group. So you have to be historically careful. And then in 1979, very technical people will watch the training tape, essentially, which showed incoming missiles some superior complete control over their shoulder or whatever, and pull that, oh shit, we're currently being attacked from the president and so on. And only a few minutes later, they actually figured out that they which were watching it tape and stopped the preparation for construction. Yes. Similarly, the other way around. And in 1983, the Soviet Union believed that they were being attacked by the United States. If I remember correctly, it was due to something else. And some of these concerns actually were only defuzed because various actually single soldiers refused to let orders. So there were very few orders, like if these and those things happen, then so the concentrated press this button. Yes, the very precisely specified stuff happened. The issue of presumably not stopping the nuclear work, which would otherwise have happened. In my opinion, this is not a very sustainable way of keeping humanity life, depending on the people are following orders. You might think it would be quite conservative estimate. Unfortunately, if we see a panic over the last 50 years on about, say, since the end of the Second World War, we would have been there, but there was a two percent probability of actually nuclear war. Starting would not necessarily mean total extinction of humanity. It was quite simply mean. And of current civilizations, you know it? Yes. If we just. Projected this rate into the future for a few years, they come force behind the survival chance is actually not quite that good. Sixty six percent, which is a lot lower than I would like them to be. And it obviously a little brother wants to go to 12:03pm. Yes. And then there are other bad things which could happen like a global pandemic, which, you know, thanks to international answer. I think the spread of a fostered meaning we would have a lot shorter time frame to the countermeasures like quarantines or even necessary research into vaccines. And also, we get new, exciting pathogens by genetic engineering, which is simply being done for weapons research laboratories and also maybe some kitchen things or which that's also not even the dangerous climate. And then they are more exotic but more nerdy waste, wasteland, humanity like strong similarity or whatever. Because I can tell you something, man. This is how we decide to support the continued continued existence of mankind. It would be extremely difficult to to say it's a very nice understatement, in my opinion. One can argue endlessly about the entry probabilities of these things happening, but they do exist. This is the man. From that point on, I think, Okay, so what do we do? Option one is this one. I try to find a nice image of trees and elves and stuff like that, but I wasn't able to find one which is actually know under a free license. So it took a screenshot of one of my favorite games. Anyway, the common name of this option, I'd say, is tree hugging. So we do all green stuff like we are one percent renewable energies and we will use one percent renewable or recycled raw materials, which sounds nice on the surface, but it's actually quite hard to do that in construction, in concrete and fertilizer because you need to get this, that phosphorus for the fertilizer from somewhere. And so far as I know, that's pretty much only manure sources and they are going to be depleted in a few hundred years as well. Then you would need to have global nuclear disarmament. And if you also want to stop this more exotic risk like you are throwing out or whatever have you. You would also need to have a research stop for this dangerous technologies because otherwise, at some point in time, somebody will make a breakthrough there. This is very hard because you need to get all these points right. If you just overlook a thing of these risks, it could sti ll kill humanity. I mean, we don't need a pandemic anti-nuclear war. And so it once we just need one of them to go from, oh, well, as in, we would rather not like to happen. But even assuming we succeed on all these points, we have other problems because Mother Nature is not actually interested in keeping humanity life. I mean, there are all kinds of random encounters in space. For example, in meteorites, they happen. They don't happen that often, but they do happen. And from one kilometer from one kilometer diameter upwards, they're actually dangerous to civilization. It heavily depends on you pick location, so it could either essentially smash Antarctica into smaller ice. Nobody really cares. But the penguins could also smash North America to small silicon chips, which would obviously have a larger impact on global economy and inevitable, which happens a lot more often. So there's this very nice volcanic exclusivity index, which basically just assigns random numbers to volcanic explosions. Larger number means more stuff explodes. And this is basically how I feel. They made up the numbers. So it's not just the euro and the euro is OK. There is some mountain and some lava is coming out of it, and then it scales by a material amount anyway. Approximately every 5000 years, one of these index eight incidents happen, which means there's more than 100 cubic kilometers of material ejected. This usually leads to global cooling because of all the dust in the upper atmosphere layers. And actually, a small incident happened in 1816, which is what you will find on this year without a summer solstice on there. That was the last time that the back that the civilized world actually had problems producing sufficient food. The food failure of the crop failures extended across North America and Western Europe at the same time. And these were large trade centers back then, so this was actually perceived as a worldwide food shortage. The large incidents could most likely lead to stron ger of these effects, and they are usually global. So it's not like it will kind of explodes in South America and South America is being affected. But if it kind of explodes anywhere and the world is affected. And there's another very sad observation, namely, we do not know about any civilizations apart from our one so far, even though we looked into space and we tried to find some. So either the start of will introduce intelligent or let's just say, building civilizations kind of life is very unlikely or this kind of life is unlikely to spread into space. And if we wish to spread humanity into space, then we better make sure we understand why that is. So it could either be the case that we are already lucky because we had started some intelligent life from this trend and we are here or there is still a reason in our future which so far could all the other intelligent species will not see. And this is a totally open question yet, but it is cause for some concern, in my opinion, because it could well be that the is in the future. So what do we do? Challenge accepted. So maybe we can fix all these problems at home? Well, I'm a computer scientist in Turin and stuff with digital things. And but computers break, and the usual strategy is to try to correlate the breakage. So if you have a complex system and you wish to make sure that some parts of it always survive, you need to correlate the risk that stuff breaks, usually in computer terms. There would be backups or whatever or distributed systems and similar things can be done to humanity in principle, even if you just just consider it a mass colony. We have a backup against most of the planetary disasters. Just present it because a meteorite is striking only one planet at a time and we'll count will only explode in one planet. Even a pandemic might conceivably be stopped a lot better if they are long travel times between two planets. But once you start thinking big, you obviously also have to consider the more correlat ed risks like supernova and insanity. But they are not that bad. Actually, I thought that the blast radius would be lost. Not, you know, this is not a true blast radius, but the radius. Well, interesting effects still happen to ecosystems. Let's just specify that way. And obviously, this is a very fuzzy measure, but you need to put some limit on this anyway. The more common supernova type two is relevant up to approximately 30 light years, which means we need to travel some 40 like, you know, 70 like us or something to be actually safe and supernova type 1A, which are a lot rarer but look brighter and have effect across approximately 1000 ideas. And, well, space is large and in the largeness of space, really enormous stuff happens. And the largest problems are gamma ray bursts, which are extremely bright sources for radiation. However, the brightness is not only caused by total energy levels, but also because of the geometry of the explosion. So most of the energy is ejected into a single beam, which means that while such events have effects on ecosystems across approximately 6000 light years, it's like a beam extending from the explosions. If you would have fewer colonies in a triangle, for example, it's impossible to hit all three of them with a single beam. So we don't need to actually travel this 6000 light years to get safety there. Yes. And then there is a totally different argument for why we should start colonizers colonizing space real soon now, because we're not just wasting the resources of our planet. If we assume supplied travel for all eternity, which many people do. We lose approximately one galaxy per year from the reach of the universe because the universe is expanding and at some point in time, we simply cannot reach certain galaxies anymore because the expansion of the universe is faster than light light speed. And then you cannot ever possibly reached again. So what does that mean in a typical galaxy, according to Wikipedia, and we'd have across approximately 100 billion stars. It looks like things would be approximately in 1.6 percent of all these systems. And if we assume that an Earth like 10 like Earth can sustain one billion humans for 50 generations, which I'd say is doable if you're a bit careful, then each second humanity loses raw resources for approximately 2.5 billion lives, which is quite a lot, meaning that as we talk, multiple populations of this planet essentially being wasted because we are not well, we are giving up the chance to bring up these resources and do stuff with it. Yes. So I presume I convinced you that we would like to do this. Then the next question is, OK, what do we need to do there? How long should the colony need to be? And we don't have. Real experimental data on humans for minimum viable population size. But there is a problem, if you take two small population, then inbreeding will very fast eliminate divergence in the genome, meaning that after a while you have totally genetically identical humans, which in itself isn't necessarily a problem. But once you get a pathogen or some other evolutionary pressure on this group of people, there's a high risk of just all of them dying. This is usually what happens to animal populations once they get too small. But we have historical precedents, and there was the Pitcairn Island. Was this the bone? Ultimately, anyway, so people move to an island essentially isolated from it, from the rest of the world, and they had a stable population across approximately 200 years. Whether that can be a debate about how stable, in particular sociological state of these people actually were, but they survived and. Yes, and, you know, scientists like, no, so people have thought about, OK, can we maybe buy simulation or theoretical observations, predict minimal necessary population sizes and medium term here means some hundred years. So with only 50 people, you could probably keep up with a colony for some years. If we talk long term a few thousand y ears, we need or we would need 500 people. And actually, the effect of human population size, meaning the number of individuals with totally divergent genomes, you would need to represent all currently existing human genes. It's not that large, so it's only 11 to 12 million people. You would need to totally, very carefully selected put on a colony to actually have a copy of each gene variant currently here on Earth. But we don't know where exactly these genes are because we don't scan the DNA for everybody, but it's just theoretically right. And for once, a radiation exposure could actually pretty useful because the problem is not like bat genes, as it is sometimes naively assumed that if you have inbreeding, then bad genes will be able to get expressed. Well, they are getting serious. But this very high evolution and pressure on these very specific aliens leading to the fast elimination of them. The problem is actually that after a while, you have total uniform genes, totally uniform genomes there, and radiation exposure means higher mutation rates means they actually get more diversity. OK. What could we do with another colony except having a backup so some people are not totally convinced just by saying, OK, we could save humanity from a lot of disasters, but I say, Yeah, but what's in for me? For example, money? What can we do with another planet? And we could get raw materials for local consumption, which gets more interesting in the low points. With more population, we can possibly get raw materials in a shallow gravity well, meaning we can colonize space faster and do more interesting stuff about expanding that much energy because launching stuff from the ground of Earth actually quite expensive. We can gather more solar energy, and in particular, we can support more population and more population. My opinion could in particular lead to a trade of culture and science because trading information or data is quite cheap compared to actually trading stuff. And yo u have a large network effects. So just because if you have twice the population, you probably get more than twice the research rate and even cultural trade, whatever that is. So I fully expect that this will be more than just a linear increase. Also, history has shown very useful byproducts of all space research, and they can even be a political argument being made that a lot of the economy support actions by large. Political organizations could just as well be done by space research projects because they may not use putting money in the economy and getting people to work on stuff. For example, in Germany, there in Germany, there are projects restoring historical buildings and historical epochs, and that can totally tell you that the return of investment on a historical part is negligible. I mean, it's like the historical park afterwards looks like historical park pretty much like it was beforehand, say, 100 years ago. In another 100 years, you have to do another restoring project and then this continuous ad infinitum. Not very useful, in my opinion. Whereas research adds up. You do research ones and you also get all the nice economic effects of trickle down, whether that exist somewhat, but the pretty much the same economic stuff would happen. Must you get additional research output? Yes, and then we are talking about cost, so how costly is it actually to say create a moss colony initially wanted to humorous, arbitrarily infinite amounts of money? That's not the case. So and that's actually publicly announced an approximate budget plan for hypothetical Mars mission consisting of seven to 10 people. And they said that it would be now seven to 70 billion dollars to say 50 billion euros of this. Approximately half of it is just rocket boosters and booster rockets to get the stuff out of the gravity. Well, just as a competition, the defense budget, for example, of Germany, is nearly that amount 30 billion euros. So it's not like an arbitrary amount of money. This stuf f you can see, for example, the European Union actually pay for it if you want to. Yes, but I didn't also did not only talk about Mars, so this must promise essentially sort of like neither has a plan how to do it if they just wanted to do it and had the money which people could, in theory, give them. But there is also promise escaping the larger risks like supernova and gamma ray bursts, and we will obviously need interstellar travel. Things don't look that bright in that area. So there was the Joint Propulsion Conference in Hartford, Connecticut, in, I think, 2004. Was it anyway that time frame? Approximately. And it was the joint statement at the end saying it is highly improbable that humans will ever explore beyond the Solar System and other people from the same conference essentially said, OK, yeah, but a trip to Proxima Centauri, which is quite a new star system, which is maybe useful planets, would need one or two times more energy than the entire Planet Earth currently generates again. And there were some plans how to actually do that. And most of these plants had some kind of totally inconceivable device in it, for example. Ten million, you give it later. So if only we could have a 10 million years later. Yeah, we could do interstellar travel from this if we don't. And this continues for a lot of design. So like, OK, we can do interstellar travel, given 500 grams of anti-matter. Yeah, but we don't. And so conclusion shit. And this is anyway a conclusion some people have taken. The other conclusion, which is at the end of every research paper, is more science is clearly needed, so we can't do it yet. Right? Let's just do some back of the envelope calculations, so say we want to accelerate one metric ton, say three humans, plus some stuff. I mean, this is the back of the envelope. If you take 10 times, the amount doesn't really matter because it's still order of magnitude stuff we're talking about here, but say we want to accelerate one metric ton to 10 perc ent like speed, which would give us a travel time of 40 to 50 years to a nearby star systems. So this is not like pleasant, but it's doable. If you find a sufficiently insane people, you could just send them on this mission. You're going to get an insane space colony. But yeah. Better than nothing, right? And actually, there are some organizations I talk about later, like most one, they are currently screening candidates for a one way mission to Mars with a survival survivability probability probability of, I don't know, certainly not one percent. And they are like having tens of thousands of applicants. So this is totally not a problem to find sufficiently insane people. Yeah, I mean, seriously. And OK, leaving us with the problem of finding sufficient energy to do it. But actually, it's not that much. So this is a speech of a relativistic effects shouldn't matter that much. So just use classical mechanics and from afar to do the calculation and resulting in an energy need of approximately four point five times 10 to the power of 17 Joule, which is something in particular one thirtieth of the total energy production of the USA in 2001. So this is not actually inconceivably much. And 2001 is already more than 10 years ago. So the total energy production of the United States of America and the world as a whole has increased by another factor of, I don't know, two to three years. So at least. And so this mass is this energy is actually five kilograms equivalent, which was a little bit contrary to my intuition, which is why I am mentoring you. And the other question is, can we accelerate it fast enough? Maybe we can only do this with accelerations which which would kill everyone. But it turns out you only need, say, one thousand for one year to get this one ton accelerated. And it's not very much so. You also don't need big thrusters or big rocket engines. You just need a little bit of push. So in theory, we could do that. OK, so how Trekkies and what could we actually put on our spaceship device thing to make a move? And currently we have solid fuel and liquid fuel and all this kind of rocketry having a specific impulse of 250 seconds. And the second union? Totally. Really me the headache. Sorry. Yeah, maybe a little bit depends on the exact technology. Again, I'm maybe I didn't mention that. So I'm by profession, a theoretical computer scientist by Trekkies. I'm just random hacker guy. So I've totally no real clue about this. All I ever talk about in this talk is from Wikipedia and the internet. So I would certainly ask answer questions in the end. I hope this time, but don't expect me to personally have done anything to further this course except talking to people or actually contributed any kind of research. And anyway, the specific impulse is this very weird time unit, which essentially means how long you can sustain this thrust, which would actually push up the rocket by the same force its way just pulling it down, which kind of makes some sense if you're trying to stand on the floor, but this guy is shaking his head, so probably it's wrong. And you can see it as an issue. Yes. So if you just want to compare stuff, then it's OK, right? Yes. So we have solid fuels. And then there are there was this idea of a solar sail. So essentially you just put a big parachute in space, which reflects photons or other kinds of radiation, and hope that the Sun shines on it and pushes pushing it away. And this sounds to me like science fiction until you realize that I think it was. Japan actually already had a successful mission accomplished using this technology to monitor the Sun using some kind of a satellite, and it achieved the delta velocity of only one meter per second, which is really miniscule in six months. But it was a prototype also for this propulsion device, so this was already tested in production use and successfully. Same thing with ion thrusters. So the problem with solid fuel rockets is that you propellant a lot of mass a way from the rocket. Quite fast, but quite fast. It's not incredibly fast. And the idea for ion thruster is to propel stuff away from your rocket incredibly fast, but use less stuff. And the advantage is that you need less stuff to carry around with, meaning that you need to accelerate less stuff in the beginning of the journey. And this gives rise to this higher specific impulse as a which is, as we have learned, kind of rate of efficiency and creating these high exhaust velocities needs a lot of power. But this can, at least at this level, still be done by solar sails or nuclear reactors, as in what they called you. Are this the nuclear reactors, which essentially work by using the heat differential between some self-sustaining slow nuclear reaction and rest of space? So it's not like a real nuclear power plant up there? And then there is this very complicated called variable specific impulse magnet plasma rocket and which essentially is like an iron thruster, but using magnetic fields to accelerate stuff. But has the added advantage of being able to provide a lot more thrust at the cost of lower specific inputs if you actually need that for some kind of maneuver? And this totally if you read these lines, it sounds a lot like science fiction until the people mentioned that NASA's going to employ such a 200 kilowatt device in 2015 to the ice to stabilize the orbit. So it's not like this is science fiction. This is actually currently being deployed, essentially. Yeah. And then this is stuff we have used or are pretty much about using. And then there is propulsion research, so upcoming stuff we could possibly do. The first point is just better anthracis, essentially. So by doing ion thrusters differently, namely using a little bit more acceleration stages and some engineering filling, there are not yet finished with. And you get a lot higher specific impulse, basically by accelerating stuff even faster. And this is in the face of what I would call initial engineering . So it was theoretically predicted and it was built and people looked at the actually realized exhaust velocities and weren't quite totally happy. And then they were trying to get a little bit more efficiency out of their prototype. But it is essentially there to. Then there was a very weird idea of the Q thruster. The problem I already talked about is that you need to expel stuff from your rocket and all this stuff you want to expel. You need to take with you initially. But what if you could expel something else? So, for example, in a typical jet engine, you expect a lot of hot air in space. You could conceivably expel oxygen, you have hydrogen you have collected from space, but you can expel apparently something even stranger, namely virtual vacuum particles, which exist only in some kind of theoretical physical models. An interesting thing is people have built a prototype and it seemed to work, so I don't really care why. Yes. And so they're currently trying to build a larger prototype and providing one newton at the power consumption of three kilowatt, which would actually give us our one to ten percent light speed at 30 megabit power consumption. And you know, this is hard to do in space because of the because of the heat generated from all this power generation, but it's not totally out of limits, right? You know, then there is a lot of other more exotic stuff like some guy have thought up a nice way to actually create photons and expel those from the rocket and in and gather all the of impulse into the rocket. Only problem is you need a lot of anti-matter and you don't have that. And then there's interestingly, the drive, which promises faster than light travel by doing some weird spacetime hikari. I'm totally not understanding. And again, the interesting thing is another claims they have for prototype, and they're currently trying to measure whether they'd actually affect spacetime by doing something interferometer experiments. And in my August talk, I'd sa id, OK, the initial experiments are being planned and they're currently running, and the first results are slightly positive, but not yet significant. So it looks like there might be something happening, actually, which would be awesome, obviously. And there are some official statements from the other which are publicly available from the website saying, actually, if they're anywhere on space, special relativity, and maybe so we don't totally. Not that yet. And also, let me warn you about that one, because there's a lot of journalists reporting of the latest results, saying they managed to reduce the mass of the vehicle from the size of Jupiter to the size of 500kg comparable to some early space probes. And this is actually right they reduce the necessary mass to five one kg, but the journalist didn't get it that it's not about a physical mass, but mass equivalent energy. So it needs approximately 250 kilograms of antimatter to do that. Yet we're not there yet, obviously. Yes, and I think this will be on the last topic I want to start. And who is actually doing all this stuff and how much resources are we actually spending on this stuff? I'm presuming that this is important to get humanity across the next few thousand years. One would think that maybe we could actually spend some money on it. Yeah, we do, in a sense. So then NASA approximately gets 17 or six billion dollars and so on. So on the Russian federal space agency, next one, then ESA, then the Japanese, Chinese and Indian one. You can read all this in this. So it's just that there are also some private institutions coming up now because some people apparently are not quite happy with a. The speed of the official government research and the first company totally gave me the laugh, the laughter when I looked at their homepage because it looks like a restriction of GeoCities. I totally recommend visiting this second link down there. You'll find it lovely webpage looking exactly like a 1990s GeoCities homepage. There's a knife friend. This ugly animations and stuff like and looks totally ridiculous until they tell you that they have two prototypes of inflatable habitat stuff already in orbit and are going to dock them to the ICAC in 2015. So, yeah, apparently the skills are totally different. Then there is this Planetary Resources Committee. They're actually called planetary resources. They are, well, having some kind of believable business plan trying to really mine asteroids. Currently, they are selling shared time slots on very cheap telescopes in low orbit and to get their business started. And then there is the nonprofit Mars One, which essentially is just trying to get one last colony going. And they all these people are trying to screen the applicants currently. Also, they have signed the contracts for the first unmanned mission test missions, essentially to start in 2015 16. So this also stuff moving actually. Yes, bringing me to this, in my opinion, very, very sad. Slight because the question is okay, we are giving some money to this institution, so we are doing something to ensure continued survival of humanity. But is it much? And let's try to answer it this way. The gross world product in money, which is not totally accurate, but we need some numbers to compare. It is approximately 84 times 10 to the power of 12. This would be trillions if I'm not wrong. So this is the productivity we have or what the economists see of the productivity anyway. So what do we do with it? 1.5 of these 10 trillion dollars go to military expenses. Some of this might actually help space expansion, like high energy research going on research for orbital launches. But a lot of it is just ammunition tanks, boring stuff. I mean, you don't have a return of investment on this stuff. It just explodes when it's gone. If you're unlucky, it's also something else explodes and then your return of investment is quite negative. And then you have international tourism. OK, I am not against tourism here because we can travel all over the book, but there is a lot of money going in that, though it's just ordered by big things, I believe humanity could do a little less with without totally dying or be becoming very unhappy. And then there are signs. So I like science, obviously. So this is just for competition. And then there is marketing. We spend half a trillion dollars approximately on marketing those worldwide marketing budgets of everybody combined and guest and a lot of things. And the number comes from Wikipedia. So it's not my guessing, but it must be around this somewhere and in life, and this is ridiculous compared to the next bullet, namely what we actually pay for space stuff, which is approximately, I don't know, seven percent of that. So we are spending significantly less on ensuring that we can spread the space and save humanity than we spend on trying to sell stuff to people. And marketing, unfortunately, is quite a zero sum game. So if Coca-Cola and Pepsi start a marketing war at war, you either get one brown water plus caffeine or the other one, but it's not going to make a life of difference, and certainly it's not necessary to spend all this money on such stuff. So, yeah, this kind of ends my presentation. Excerpt from the Internet Thing. And if there are questions or some need of discussion, please start now. So for questions, please line up of the microphones. And where's the signal angel? OK? Are there questions from the internet? There are two questions from the internet. One is, could we also use this speak by effect for acceleration just as the Voyager are posted? Yes. So people have done that. You can do it, obviously. That would save a lot of fuel or stuff you need to take with you. It might lengthen. Some travel times might not necessarily mean much for interstellar travel, though, if I'm not totally wrong because you actually need to accelerate for quite long times across interstellar medium, where there isn't much to accelerate wit h using swing vice. But I'm not a spice engineer, so I might be fundamentally wrong about the mechanics here. OK? And just one shot in addition to that one, because in swing by at least using other orbits might be a very, very, very interesting way for and relationships to leave the galaxy because they are rock stars traveling across the gravity of lots of galaxies. And if you're thinking about real big time scales, this might be a very energy efficient way to move a lot of people around. OK, thank you. Another problem is how to slow down for arrival in another solar system. I think you cannot swing down around the planet from 0.1 percent of light speed. Yeah. Well, you essentially slow down the same way you accelerated. You turn around and then you fly the thrust of the other way. This means you accelerate and decelerate approximately the same length of time. There are some ideas about accelerated decelerating with solar cells, in particular just deploying a large solar sail and letting the creation of the target star decelerate you. But thrusters would probably be a faster way to actually break. But this means you need to take the propellant all the way with you, obviously. OK, thank you. So far, those are all questions from the internet. OK, so microphone one two and then the one in the back. Hi, thank you for the first part of your presentation. I really loved the way, how you enumerated the problems that we have on this one only planet that we have, and I'm a proponent of your first option, the tree hugging. And so when you moved away from that saying that, that's a difficult thing to do and we should go for the second option, my question is which right do we have to destroy this planet for the rest of the living creatures and then just leave? Well, this is a very philosophical and possibly moral question, and indeed, it's totally right to ask that one. But then again, there is a lot of planets out there where we would destroy no creatures whatsoever. So say th e Moon. If you totally dismantle the Moon, there are not many species going to be very sad about it. Same thing probably goes for Mars. And unfortunately, also probably goes for a lot of Earth analogs. And yes, you can make an argument that the galaxies or the universe's resources are to be shared fairly and they are fairly means to more intelligent species than us. And I'm not totally opposed to that, but I think that at least a few more planets would add a lot of safety for very low costs, even if you take all the other species we don't know about into account. OK, can we continue this? Yeah, later on. Indeed. Thank you. Hi. Two quick remarks and a question. Firstly, mark solar sails. If they get too big, they get kind of fragile and you have to. Yeah, it's just not handball anymore. I think that's not really a way to transport a big vehicle. A second remark to the supernovas that shouldn't be a problem because they are mostly like the big stars that really produce supernovas when they die are concentrated in the center of the galaxy. So if you want to travel there, you know it shouldn't be a big problem because you don't have stars in the in the arms of the galaxy. Well, I mean, I mean, to say something, this sounds sensible, and but if I remember correctly, there was one of these many pages I read, there was actually a concrete store named within the vicinity of our Solar System, which might conceivably undergo supernova to type explosion within the near future. And a few million, two billion years. But anyway, this stuff exists, OK? Not often, but it does. Yeah. But the probability probability is pretty, pretty low, I think. And on the last slide, I was wondering what with the wealth of the money was? I mean, if you add up all the numbers, it's only like, Oh yeah, a lot of five trillion. So I think a lot of it goes actually to consumption. As in food, clothing construction, it's quite hard to get. Even these numbers were spread all over the internet. It's very hard to get any kind of numbers for gross, global anything except military expenditure and total gross product because everybody is criticizing this military thing. So there is a lot of numbers for that one. But apart from that, it gets very, very hot. OK, thank you. So I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm going to like make like all the German freight. Do you? Sorry, it should be the microphone to the back first. I I I have a question towards population growth when you consider the current rate of population growing on the planet. Do you think it's feasible that we reach the time of interstellar interstellar travel till we reach the capacity of the human population or a planet? And let's say we do that. One would be the time that the population will double again on the next planet we arrive. Um, so my personal, not very real fond opinion on that is a very pessimistic one. So I expect that we will hit population growth limits one or the other hard way, actually. So they will be over food shortages or some other resource depleted, possibly leading to significant economic problems, which is also, in my opinion, a good reason to do this space expansion soon because we're currently having the possibilities to do all this stuff while we are not fighting for food, concrete, fertilizers, whatever, and then obviously you can't sustain exponential population growth on a non exponential growing number of planets. So, yeah, it's kind of obvious. So at some point you either get a hard limit or you need to limit our population growth some other way. And yeah, it doesn't look like it currently, unfortunately approaches things. The red shirt disappeared again. Oh, you're going to die. Hey, whoa. Yeah, so I'm sorry for all the Germans, but I didn't. So any numbers on your papers about like nuclear propulsion because like, I'm sorry, there is a lot of like stuff that could be used and technology that we already have that a load was kind of like trouble and just kind of like, Oh, you mean like Project Orion, for example? I mean, that's one of the most. Yeah, there is like Nervo. There is like a see. There is like anti-matter triggered fission. I mean, many. So I certainly omitted a lot of possible physically possible propulsion systems. One I very specifically know about is this arena here where you essentially have a huge lead shield and explode a lot of hydrogen or fusion efficient bombs below this shield in quick succession, which would actually be an awesome way to provide huge amounts of propulsion to a large spaceship. It only has some downsides, like other countries not liking a lot of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere and possibly if you do it wrong. Nuclear fallout But it's not necessarily that much of a problem if you actually know what you're doing, but many of these things were conceived and then discussed and then discarded as we are not probably going to do that. And I might have wrongly excluded some of these options, which really, in the end, save humanity. And I just admit to them from talk business, I was too stupid. That might totally happen, actually. So please read more of this Wikipedia to find out and for you numbers. The woke prediction of like anti-matter is around four nanograms per year, but we have global world production of antimatter. So think five years ago, five or 10 years ago, it was like, OK, we have created positron and everybody's like, Yeah, and now we have like a worldwide production of antimatter in various particle accelerators. So in my opinion, this is a lot of progress, actually. But yes, it is in the range of nanograms, indeed. Yeah, thank you. And no, the one with the I'll believe it's the space invader reflector. Yes. Oh no. First of all, I can add to the swing by question. It will help you get out of the Solar System and it will help you a lot. But for the total interstellar voyage, it will not make much of a difference. It's like if you wanted to walk from Sweden to South Africa, it's like the metro that helps you get out of Oslo, but then you still need to get to South Africa. Thank. Yeah. What what I was going to ask you is in your research, did you find a certain tendency of some of the thinking about this problem having changed over time? Was there a time when people were thinking about it more or are we thinking about it now more than ever? It a little bit. So there was during, I'd say, 30s to 60s a lot more optimism in that regard. And then as there's always this Typekit curve, right? And then everybody got a little bit pessimistic and all the critics showed up. And problem is, I cannot actually answer that question for, say, the last 10 to 20 years because my local filter bubble is very heavily constricted on some futurist forums. So I might totally have of wrong feeling for the dispersion of the opinion across the world population there. All right, thanks. I have a question, if wouldn't it be sensible to look at the problems of space travel with the same skepticism that's on looking on solving the problems here on Earth? And what would deaths do of your presentation ideas? So one reason why I believe that this space expansion thing might actually be more workable than solving the resource stuff on Earth is that there are some economic interests actually doing it. So it's very hard to convince everybody on Earth to reduce carbon dioxide production, for example, and you need to convince pretty much all large industrialized nations. But you only need to convince one or two large industrialized nations to do space exploration to win this. So it might be a lot easier on this political level. This is in the main only quality I'm feeling there. On a similar note, don't you think that it's actually doesn't really solve the problem you proposed as opposed to the tree hugging option? Because with the space explosion thing, OK, let's say we use all the military budget in the world to put a few people on Mars. Then we have a colony there that might be our option in cas e something goes horribly wrong and the Earth is destroyed and humanity is wiped out. But until we get to the point that we can put a big fraction of the people on from planet Earth to Mars, that would be not the military budget, but like a few million times, the military budgets are pretty, pretty unfeasible. So we still have to deal with all the environmental problems here on Earth unless we just care about the survival of the species as a whole and don't really care that a very big portion of it is going to die anyway. OK, so I'm starting to answer this very soon anyway. So saving some maybe upcoming advances in anti-aging technology. We are all going to die soon. So it is, in my opinion, mainly a matter. So there are two things you can optimize for. One is the happiness of current population or living population. Let's say it, and then it makes total sense to go more towards this tree hugging to have a very soft limiting approach to population growth, meaning that everybody who ever starts a life has a happy life and a long life, and then answered in some way. But then the question is, what about all these other lies that we did not start because we didn't have the resources for them? So you can either if you optimize for, say, average utility off of people, then this option is good. But if you optimize for total utility, then it's totally insensible because you only get a few people compared to billions of trillions, actually. Yeah. I just wanted to to do a smart small remark regarding the air regarding this travel speed at air travel time thing and ways around special relativity. I think if you go fast enough, then special relativity is actually going to help you with that because if you move fast enough, then a lot of although it might take a thousand years at that speed at that below light speed for the spaceship to travel to the other planet. The time which will pass for the astronauts and the spaceship will get smaller and smaller with the speed of the spa ceship, and you can get them there in seconds for the astronauts. But it will still take a thousand years for the other people outside the spaceship. So you certainly cannot do it in seconds because they actually need to accelerate to that speed without just pushing everybody can the bottom. But yes, you can do it within a reasonable timeframes like 30 to 40 years, even for distances vastly larger than a few hundred. Yes, indeed. Correct. One problem is that you need to have all this energy for actually accelerating that fast, but it might be solvable. And the other one, it's a shifting from radiation, so you're going to crash into random stuff. And even very small random stuff like hydrogen atoms in intergalactic space are quite energetic. If you're traveling at light speed and generating a lot of ionization in your spaceship, meaning in humans. Yeah, and we don't take it that well. But yeah, it is still I mean, they're the ideas for magnetic shields or electrostatic fields, shields. So it's not inconceivable to actually do that once we get the good energy source, which is, I believe, the main problem here. Um, what? You haven't gone to space elevators and one of your one of your main problem you always said is like getting mass and getting things into an orbit. And the only thing I don't really know a lot of about them, but the only thing I always hear about them is actually we got all the technology we would need to build them. We just on building them. Yes, this is essentially the same problem. We also have this Mosconi. We kind of do know how to approach that, that we have been spinning carbon nanotube fibers in some in the UK for a few years, and it looks like they would be strong enough to actually build a space elevator that way. So it's not like the technology is not there. It's mainly there is no political will to spend the resources. And so this would be one way to solve this. To solve the problem of the gravity of this, we would still need to propel all the spaceships to Mars or some other stellar systems. There are also other launch options like huge coins, so they are actually some designs accelerating a spaceship totally on the ground and then launching it directly into space from there. So apparently that can be done if you're willing to spend a lot of power and a lot of length to do it. But it's not impossible either. Thanks. Another question since we made such a mess already here. And as you suggested, if we send some insane people to colonize the next planet and we get this kind of insane colony there, what what's the point if they are going to repeat all of our mistakes? OK. The question is it totally in my opinion, the question is what do we want to achieve personally auspicious, but in particular personally? So it is. This is also what I try to tell to some guys microphone too. It is a question. What are you trying to achieve in the end? In the end, as in a few billion years, so rule your mouth, you have shaped the universe in a meaningful way. Or will we have managed to kind of continue living on this planet? This is OK. I mean, this is a valid option, totally available option because it means that we might be able to guarantee a very happy and resourceful life for every human ever come into existence from now onwards. But it means we are going to have only a few billion to maybe one trillion humans across the lifetime of the universe, meaning we can create a lot less cool stuff. A lot less cool culture, a lot less cool science, a lot less cool anything. This is essentially my reason for just creating more population and surely life on Mars Colony or even for move away will not be a very happy life. You need to survive. You need to actually like build habitation from rocks and not like coal. A big construction company, there is no construction company on Mars. It will be a very unhappy life and we will reduce the average happiness of humans. This off? OK, we have time for two short questions, and these a re the very last ones. Well, Australia started as a colony of criminals. So yeah. And we're doing fine, thank you very well. Although there might be some people in Australia happily objecting to that statement, that's a side note. So it brought my diplomatic efforts in Australia, so it had at least some. Yeah. Well, I'd like to to answer the question before why we should send people to Mars if we probably would mess up our civilization on Mars as well. Well, if you are that pessimistic, you can, in my opinion, just go and shoot yourself because nothing will matter. What we should, what we should really do, what we should really keep in mind here is that a colony on Mars will be very much different. As you pointed out, life on Mars will be very much different from life on Earth. So there will be a completely new form of civilization and a completely new form, a completely different form of culture there, which means there is an actual chance to make things better and to get things different. And I think the chances of achieving that in such a different and an alien environment as another planet will be much higher than just trying to start over on Earth. Thank you. I think that's a very nice conclusion for this talk. Yes, indeed. Thank you very much and also thank you all for your attention.