Space 14: A Quick Trip to the Technology Gift Shop

(continued from here; yes I did a bit of georgelucasing; original of that last post was way too long, sorry)

Technology Requirements/Assumptions

Given that we won't have Warp Drive/etc, what are we actually going to need/have in order to be able to get places? Or, rather, what's the best we're going to be able to do, sticking to known or at-least-vaguely-likely physics? Are we completely screwed when it comes to getting out to the stars, or is there a way to make it work? I think there is, but it's not going to be pretty, and we have to think big.

Let's start with my wish list, which I'll admit is still a bit ridiculous. To some extent it's really more of a best case scenario and it's also biased towards making the calculations easier (cf. all of the places where I'll be assuming 100% or near-100% efficiency).

To be sure, trying to predict where technology is actually going to be, say, a thousand years from now is at best risky; we have no idea when the next thousand-year dark age is going to set us back (I remain appalled that Archimedes came within a hair's breadth of inventing calculus, that Ptolemy pretty much did invent Fourier series, that the 2nd century Romans really were on the verge of industrialization, that if it weren't for the 3rd century collapse, we might have had all sorts of things 1500 years earlier).

On the other hand, these aren't predictions so much as stuff we're going to need eventually and we'll get it whenever we get it. Unless we truly are screwed.

But, at least, everything on this list is (IMHO) way more plausible than what everybody assumes we're going to have that I was complaining about before: ( Dear Santa, )

Space 15: Doing the Boldly Go Thing and Infesting the Universe

(continued from here)

How exploration will work

First: the explorer probes will need to be slow. This is a side-effect of how stupid rockets are. Because in the case where you're arriving at a system for the first time, rockets will be the only alternative for slowing down, you'll need exponential amounts of fuel for that, and since the explorer has to carry all of its deceleration fuel with it, you then have to accelerate all of that fuel at the start of the trip,... so there'll actually be this doubled exponential factor in there.

But if we don't try to get anywhere near lightspeed it won't be too bad. Since all of the terraforming is taking thousands of years anyway, nobody's going to care about the explorers being slow.

Numbers for this:
( some numbers, etc )