Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?

It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.

I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?

  • illi@sh.itjust.works
    9·
    6 days ago

    As far as we know, traveling through time backwards is impossible.

    Traveling through time forwards is very much possible though - in fact we are doing exactly that right now!

    • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
      2·
      5 days ago

      I explicitly said ‘return back as though less time had passed’ - i.e. backwards time travel - was theoretically impossible.

      I never claimed travel forward though time was not.

      • illi@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        5 days ago

        It’s not about returning back in time - it’s just one place would travel forward slower than another place.

        • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
          2·
          5 days ago

          You’re telling me what I was talking about? Returning back in time is exactly the comment I was responding to.

          This is incredibly random but I’ve been wondering lately what might happen if we colonized a place where comparatively speaking time moves much faster than on Earth.

          In theory you could bring back years of advancement in a shorter timespan, but this is obviously just a pipe dream.

          This goal is impossible for the reasons I explained.

          • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            3·
            5 days ago

            You need to work on reading comprehension.

            The concept being brought up is that we could compress years or centuries of research into a small time frame and ‘bring it back’ to our world, not go back in time. Obviously nonsense, but not actually physically impossible.

            • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
              1·
              5 days ago

              Yep how do you bring back the advancement chief?

              Travel? Cool, by the time it arrives, the exact same amount of time will have passed locally as remote. The 100 years of advancement will arrive after your local advancement + travel time. So it will already be out of date. Useless.

              You’d have to use faster than light travel, or communication - eg by quantum entanglement over a distance ten million orders of magnitude greater than we’ve ever witnessed it. Woah, did someone say that this is fundamentally impossible with our current understanding and technology? Yes, they did. Reading is fun.