ssorenn, Star Trek? Really? 'The warp drive folks? And I have watched too many of them? Very few generational ships exist in Sci Fi (although the wonderful Rama is one of the best).

"and how,Mr chairman might you suppose we will get there of vice versa"

1) that's not how you use vice versa 2) as Draugnar has stated, things like generational shifts or approaching Near The Speed Of Light (not at, but very close, as in 99.99%) are totally possible things in the future. Not in our lifetime probably, but certainly possible.

*ships yes I have been drinking

And its possible to win the lotto

It is hubris to think we are the most advanced of the civilizations. There may already be ships on their way to earth from another system that may well arrive in our lifetime. They may be on a journey of hundreds of years already and only need another 40 or 50 years to complete it. We simply don't know.

"And its possible to win the lotto"

Yes, it is. Ask any winner. In fact it is not only possible, but probable that eventually someone* will win the lotto.

go camp out at area 51 and wait

i did not say it was impossible to win the lotto

Area 51 has already been documented as a test site for top secret government aircraft. The SR71 was tested there, just to name one. nd I'm not saying what will happen, but what might happen.

you might win the lotto too

Nom but you did say it was impossible to meet alien life unless we could break the speed of light.

thats what i believe

And no, I could never win the lotto. I don't play.

for a poker player im a little surprised...got to have a chip and a chair

Here is where the problem resides. You insisted you were right and that everyone else was wrong, even when provided with sound logical alternatives to breaking the speed of light. You can hold your belief just as a lunatic may believe they are, in fact, Napoleon. It doesn't make you right.

The lottery isn't poker. Poker is a game of skill. Especially cash games like I play.

i can insist im right all i want, come on over and stop me

lmao the funniest thing about this is that he's not even joking

Just gonna rebump this for the new page b/c it's definitely worth watching

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jY5BjGADv4

Generational ships probably won't happen. Choosing people with the right stuff to start such a mission from a pool of hundreds of millions is one thing. Choosing people to keep it going from a pool of a few hundred, many of whom are likely resentful about being there in the first place, is very much something else. I can't imagine the idea ever being tried unless we were desperate to leave Earth.

There may well be answers to the "where the hell is everyone" question here on Earth. We have had complex life here for rather a long time. Intelligent life seems a remarkably recent phenomenon. Have other intelligent creatures evolved before us and failed, or are the conditions required for intelligent life to even get started extremely rare even on a planet full of life?

Haha... ssorenn, you are an ugly drunk I'd not like to meet in real life when you are loaded.
To the matter at hand: We are not yet ready, but if mankind does not exterminate itself I am totally convinced that we, as a race, will try out deep space exploration before too long. It won't be a colonization effort at first, not even science that drives it but simple greed and the need for resources. The first company that wants to develop deep space mining has already been founded and the younger ones of us might even see the first tries within their lifetime.
But money is being spent on research in the field of human survival in space and the knowledge and techniques developed to satisfy our greed will be the ones that will carry some of us off to the stars one day.
Generation ships are a difficult proposal all around, but not impossible to achieve. I strongly believe that if someone builds one, there won't be a problem to crew it. Diminishing knowledge during the voyage is indeed a problem, but would be possible to counter via ruthless selection and genetic manipulation (no one would want or need handicapped people there, so why not just space them and breed a new batch of babies...

Not impossible to achieve, no, but entirely undesirable. Even if you do manage to usher in future generations able to do the job there's no guarantee that they would want to. The crew that arrives at the destination could easily be a collection of disloyal ungrateful arseholes akin to the founding fathers of the United States.

Ships that can keep a human population in stasis will be a far better option than a generation ship for virtually all scenarios.

I agree on the undesirable part, but i can imagine several totally different scenarios that would compell a group of people to do it anyway.
If the crew that arrives does as well as the founding fathers they might do pretty well (one might say about the United States what one wants, but they were successful in a way). Also do not disregard the fact that, once under way, they will have virtually no alternative but to carry the mission through to the end or die trying. I imagine that to be quite a motivational factor.
Imagine that the ones trying the mission stem from a fanatical society, religious or otherwise. Their mindset and their motivations to achieve their goal would be totally different from the ones that drive us right now and likely more successful. Isolated groups of humans tend to grow more fanatical maybe increasing their chance to live through the hardships.

You are of course right that a solution involving stasis would be far superior but noone can predict the advancement of science and i like to plan and imagine scenarios that are pretty much within our reach right now.

I wouldn't say stasis was further away than generation ships. Indeed, I suspect stasis will be somewhat easier. A generation ship would have to be huge, maintain it's own gravity, have extensive medical facilities, lots of R&R to stop people going mad, require a colossal amount of energy...

A stasis ship is essentially a cargo hold full of coffins and a reentry system strapped to a massive engine. It has far fewer engineering hurdles, and the biggie (stasis) is one with a host of other applications that will draw funding to it.

@ssorenn: So, you tell us that Alpha Centauri is "100 light years from earth", and on that basis we could never visit another solar system unless we invent faster-than-light travel?

100 light years?? Really??

It's amazing you think we should listen to your views about science, if that's the level of your ignorance on the matter.

Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light years away from us. 4.37. Not 100.

So, if you could travel at just 20% of the speed of light, you could get to Alpha Centauri in 30 years. That's still a long journey, and currently beyond our capabilities, but your argument that we'd need faster-than-light travel to get there is deeply flawed.

I wonder what kind of nasty headache he's going to wake up with today.

Pretty predictable degradation of the conversation, wouldn't you say?

But the ones who usually degrade it were behaving.

Lol what's the most shocking in this thread is that no one called ssoren out on his retarded 100 light years away comment. its around 2 or 3 light years away ya moron.