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Humans will never go past Mars (ghostofcarnot.substack.com)

submitted 1 week ago by ghostofcarnot to c/futurology

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Space is really spread out, and we will forever lack the means to get around it fast. Space also happens to be highly inhospitable to human life. For these reasons, I submit that no human will ever go farther than Mars.

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[–] metaStatic@kbin.earth 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The laws of physics have been nearly complete for many decades

it's been 100 years and we still haven't made any progress on the measurement problem besides thinking up reasons not to think about it.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 week ago

Measurement definitely appears somehow, and we have a few ideas how. The simplest and increasingly most accepted just being that there's no new physics, and parallel universes as a result. None of the interpretations really have technological implications, beyond maybe a maximum size for quantum computers.

The Standard Model of particle physics itself has been around for 50, and I'm not sure it has any industrial applications to date. It just doesn't come up at energy densities we've found a reason to use. The parts of physics we know are missing happen in such extreme environments we can't even collect data on them right now.

I'd say it's unlikely but not impossible that any truly new and surprising technology will come out of quantum gravity or GUT. And then we're done for good.