Comments by "DynamicWorlds" (@dynamicworlds1) on "Cool Worlds" channel.

@guidojones6107 obviously by solar wind I was referring to that created by other stars. There's also cosmic wind in the interstellar medium in interstellar space. And yes, at relativistic velocities and over the large areas of a solar/magnetic sail it would be significant. Less posturing and more educating yourself, please.
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@AzLツ It's better if you just know it as standing for "nuclear thermal rocket" and that it's to be avoided it in all other contexts. You'd gain nothing of value from this knowledge so just leave it be.
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Even if there isn't (though I expect at least a soft limit), the idea that we would see constant expansion is questionable at best. Already we see an increasing and global trend towards urbanization and a leveling off of population growth. In other words, already we are seeing evidence that we aren't going to expand into some galaxy-spanning empire and that's before we get our fill of space colonization trying to expand to fill the solar system. We look to our past behavior and assume that means we're going to put Dyson spheres around every star we can get our grubby little hands on as we continue having exponential population growth when really we get an entirely different picture if we extrapolate current trends foward. Maybe the thing we want as a social species is NOT to be as far away from each other as humanly possible. On the subject, it seems notable that pretty much ALL our fiction seems to view a war between Earth and a Mars colony as inevitable. Maybe our future is to bloody our own nose one last time and finally recognize how short-sighted our history of colonization always was. Far more likely, I think, is that we will stay around our own star as long as we can and move to another star (singular) only when our current one is reaching the end of its life. Of course, such modest and nomadic civilizations would be far harder to detect than galaxy-spanning empires, so it would make sense that we haven't detected them yet.
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 @ratking93 that's a good thing. When the internet tells you NOT to look something up, believe it.
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We'd need to eventually move systems when our sun goes red giant, but in the short term I agree. We're already seeing an increasing trend toward urbanization on Earth as the advantages to living close together continue to outweigh the advantages to living spread out, and as we head deeper into the information age, that's only going to be more and more true. We're also seeing our population growth level off, so it's not like we're going to need a galaxy worth of space for humans to live in. O'Neill cylinders are also WAY more practical than terraforming. And that's all without figuring out true VR. Sure, I'd be excited to get photos from planets around other star systems, but there's just WAY too much to miss out on by actually going there unless everyone else was coming too.
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@SabrecatFromSpace bad analogies. We're talking about something that would take a massive amount of people, time, and resources to accomplish, not something people will be able to just decide to do on their own as a hobby.
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The assumption that we would see constant expansion is questionable at best. Already we see an increasing and global trend towards urbanization and a leveling off of population growth. In other words, already we are seeing evidence that we aren't going to expand into some galaxy-spanning empire and that's before we get our fill of space colonization trying to expand to fill the solar system. We look to our past behavior and assume that means we're going to put Dyson spheres around every star we can get our grubby little hands on as we continue having exponential population growth when really we get an entirely different picture if we extrapolate current trends foward. Maybe the thing we want as a social species is NOT to be as far away from each other as humanly possible. On the subject, it seems notable that pretty much ALL our fiction seems to view a war between Earth and a Mars colony as inevitable. Maybe our future is to bloody our own nose one last time and finally recognize how short-sighted our history of colonization always was. Far more likely, I think, is that we will stay around our own star as long as we can and move to another star (singular) only when our current one is reaching the end of its life. Of course, such modest and nomadic civilizations would be far harder to detect than galaxy-spanning empires, so it would make sense that we haven't detected them yet.
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 @blas_de_lezo7375 you don't, but careening into solar wind at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light will slow you down quite a bit. Deceleration is what solar sails are best at.
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 @peterd9698 exactly! Between all the interstellar dust and solar wind and such, decelerating isn't an issue for a solar sail. That's one of the main advantages to using one.
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@stupidburp it does require braking against the interstellar medium as well, yes
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