| Barney Oliver QUOTES / QUOTATIONS |
Above all, I would not expect a wise race, at great expense, to set loose an army of self-replicating robots.
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Another misconception that helps sustain the dream of interstellar travel - and it is an exciting dream - is that present day rockets are terribly inefficient.
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Antimatter is not a source of energy for us, it's a method of storing energy, compact but inefficient.
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Further, the problems associated with nuclear power, which many people fear, are present a fortiori in antimatter, which explodes violently on contact with any normal matter.
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Further, we seem to have lost our own lust for domination as the importance of the brotherhood of man has become clearer.
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If interstellar travel is as time- or energy- demanding as the above figures indicate, it is far from obvious what the motive for colonization might be.
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In our eagerness to discover other life it would seem a poor strategy to devote billions to manned interstellar flight before we have thoroughly tested SETI.
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In the past, on Earth, it has largely been to exploit foreign resources and to expand the domestic territory.
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It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance.
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No one can deny the excitement of visiting another world.
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Present annual world energy consumption is about equal to the annihilation energy of 4 tons of matter.
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Surely the joining through common technology of these two independent but sentient life forms would be evolution's finest hour.
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The essential point we want to make is that interstellar travel, far from being easy, presents problems for which we do not have valid solutions.
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The factor most ignored in discussing interstellar flight is the kinetic energy that must be invested in the ship to make its tons of matter move at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.
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The known methods of producing anti-protons require, for their formation, millions of times the energy they will release when they contact protons.
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The main problem here is not that we don't known how to contain antimatter, which we don't; its that we don't know how to obtain it - in quantity.
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The sun and its retinue of planets drift as a group through the vast gulfs of space that separate the stars.
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Therefore, say these impeccable logicians, ETI must be rare or, even better, perhaps we are the only intelligent life after all.
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This allows us to believe that some-day, when our technology is up to the task, the cost of interstellar travel will drop dramatically.
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To those of us who have belatedly faced reality, the space-faring myth has begun to fade.
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Years of science fiction have produced a mindset that it is human destiny to expand from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, to the stars.
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