/sci/ - Science & Math

Timeline for the /sci/verse:

2000/2100: The Diamond Age
Nanotech Revolution, wealth reaches every level of society, expansion into space by independent groups of like-minded nerds that now have the means to build their own spacecraft.

2050: First multi-purpose, fully-functional, Drexlerian molecular assembler built. Soon spreads into the general public.
2054: Telepresence becomes a standard formality in most countries across Asia and the Americas.
2055: Earhport is built on Lima November One site.
2057: Large settlements on the Moon.
2058: Fullairs in cities work as aeroponic farms.
2060: First commercial low-scale fusion plant.
Lightcraft from Earthport take 2000 tonnes of cargo into space every day, spaceplanes and Lightcraft in total take 20,000 people.
2070: Construction of the Asimov Array begins.
2077: Mercury Power Project begins.
2081: Ceres Settled
2090: Destructive, partial, error-prone mind uploading.

Within a single day of time-objective, it had outrun all the previous human probes: Voyager 1 and 2, having barely left the magnetosheath, were now behind. They barely moved at a few kilometers per second while the Carl Sagan could travel the distance between the Earth and the Moon in a second and two-fifths. A trip to Alpha Centauri would take four years to the Interstellar Vehicle, while the two Voyagers slowly circled the galactic barycenter and would spend hundreds of thousands of years in flight until reaching the light of another star.
Back to the small picture: He would have carried her along, Leopard Girl most certainly knew how to manage the gigantic fullerene wings pushed by the momentum of light. But the Carl Sagan only had room for one person: The entire crew area (Yes, David included, life support and computers included) had a total mass of less than two tones. That was the Nanotech Revolution. That was ultimate efficiency.
And carrying an extra gram of dead mass meant more fuel, or, in this case, more surface area, and more surface area meant both a greater area for relativistic impacts to damage the sail (Even though it would be cannibalized and disassembled for flight, only to be reassembled and redeployed for arrival, this process took time and it took too much of it, enough for the ship to encounter something) and a greater initial acceleration: The tanks barely held at twelve thousand gravities (He had been warned that they could only take up to nine thousand, that he would be killed or crippled, but even when a cyborged Robert Zubrin explained it to him, he still refused to lower the cruise ceiling. They brought in Charles Pellegrino hoping everyone’s favourite paranoid would be enough to scare David into turning the sail further away, to reduce the g-forces, but he refused).

Transhumanism? Hell yes, but only after they solve the quirks with bionano.

Here's a reason why NOT to become a cyborged man, at least not until they solve the aforementioned quirks:

http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416521461/1416521461___5.htm

"Scanners Live In Vain", Cordwainer Smith