No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar System)

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

What do you mean by that?

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

Except I didn't say that. Don't get all Garamet on me and cut up my post and then respond incorrectly to it.

Let's look at what I wrote:

"We don't know how the gravitational pull from other stars will affect it. We barely understand the edge of our solar system."

No where in this statement do I say a degree.

"We also don't know what's out there. For all we know there is a asteroid traveling between star systems that gets close enough to it to slightly change it's course. Not much. Maybe a degree. But a degree over hundreds of years? Big difference."

Oh look..... here's where the word degree is. And it's caused by an asteroid traveling between stars.

Is an asteroid a star? No. No it isn't.

And before you chime back with your usual BS yes I know the odds are insane but since we have very little to no clue what is and isn't flying outside of our solar system it's possible for something to fly close enough to change Voyager's direction even if only by one degree.

The point is that the expectation that we will always be able to find Voyager (assuming we still remember it) is not realistic.

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people?

Yeah, wake me when she shows up.

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

...Unless, of course, there is a nuclear war and apes become the dominant species.

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

Apes are the dominant species.

It's interesting to speculate on a post-apocalypse rebuilding of society. If you imagine it being in 10,000 years let's say, very little if any human technology will still be usable. At the same time, most of the easy to access oil reserves will still be depleted. It's possible any future society could stall at an early twentieth century level of development.

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

Wait a second.....and honest-to-goodness intellectual discussion occurs in the Red Room and, instead of chiming in, you get pissed off?

It seems that, when opportunity knocks, Grout wants to complain about the noise.

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

I think it would take considerably less than 10,000 years to get back to where we are if we were knocked back to primitive culture. On the negative side, there has been resource depletion but survivors of our hypothetical catastrophe would have the smarts necessary to begin somewhere around the 16th century - as in, they'd effectively be starting in a situation not that different from the first colonisers of the Americas.

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

I think any reset would set us further back than 500 years. Those skills that people were doing routinely 500 years ago have been lost and will have to be rediscovered.

You have to eat. Gardening and farming are done by some today, but how many of the posters on this board would know how to raise a garden for a little extra food, much less to survive on until next year's crop comes in? How many here would know how to can or preserve the food they grow? How many here would know how to cook or can on a woodstove when electricity is no longer available.

Evenflow would know how, but when he can't get fuel for his farm equipment, even he is going to have to learn some new skill sets.

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

IMHO it depends on what type of disaster hits us. If it's something that knocks the human race to the door of extinction then it may take a long time.

I disagree here because there will be plenty of resources in the dead cities. Salvage will be a booming business for a long time. Even if it's just salvage to melt down metal and use it for other things.

Plus resources will bounce back. Take a significant chunk out of humanity and you will see forests growing back, sea life restocking itself.

I don't think the resource problem is that big of a problem.

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

Since you have made it very clear you will not take kindly to anyone pointing out facts that disagree with you, I will leave you to your opinions.

Have a nice life.

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

And it's also possible that, because oil wouldn't be so easily accessible, they would find something else and avoid getting stalled on an oil-based economy, the way we have.

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

That is an EXCELLENT point. We've already picked all the low-hanging fruit in terms of oil. If technological civilization did have to restart, it would have to do it without the advantage of (most) easily accessible petroleum. And that would make things rather difficult...

Much easier said then done. We have all the (non-petroleum) resources earlier civilization did and MUCH greater knowledge, and we STILL have a tough time coming up with an economical alternative to oil for many uses. I don't think someone in 1900 could invent a better solar cell or wind turbine or nuclear reactor than we could.

If human civilization were to step back to, say, 1870 and petroleum were much more difficult to come by, it would be much harder to replicate industrial developments since then. If there were some cheap and easy alternative to oil, it could be used...but there isn't. Oil is just so darned economical.

An alternate 20th Century with little accessible oil would play out much more slowly. The automobile and the airplane would be longer in coming, more expensive, and less capable. Electricity would still be generated by coal and hydroelectric power, but they would eventually be supplanted/supplemented by nuclear or natural gas.

I imagine that, without oil, attaining our current technological capability would take 50-100 years longer.

Re: No thread on this? What the fuck is wrong with you people? (Voyager leaves Solar Syste

"Economic" being the operative word. If there's no functioning economy or industry to speak of, the impact on either would not be an immediate factor to consider in the development of technology.

Wood-fueled steam engines both for transport and generating electricity, supplemented by solar panels, windmills and hydroelectric dams, then hydrogen as combustion fuel, followed by the rediscovery of fission, and then they can spend a couple hundred years with fusion being "just around the corner."