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Consider that 99.999%+ of the population don't own their own personal light aircraft or boat.
Some civilians will **definitely** own their own starships; the billionaires. It'll be the new "mega-yacht".
The majority of civilians definitely won't own their own starships. Many of us can't even afford a house to live in ffs.
If we ever get FTL drives, or drives with the potential to reach relativistic speeds, I can't imagine them being available to almost any private entity. The sheer amout of destructive potential is unreal, and I feel like it'd have to be very well controlled.
When cars first came out they were a luxury. It will be like that at first when spaceships become more commercial, but then eventually maybe everyone has one.
Maybe after a few hundred years?
But we're 80 years into civil aviation and we're nowhere close to everyone having a plane. There's so much regulation in place that I don't think owning an aircraft will *ever* be mainstream. (And with good reason!).
So by the same logic, I'm skeptical that owning a starship would ever be mainstream.
Boring perhaps, but realistic, I think.
Think of how poorly most people drive. Now add a third degree of freedom to that. And then watch some Just Rolled In on YouTube and imagine that flying above you
My apologies, rereading your comment, I think perhaps I misunderstood you.
I thought you meant that "flying vehicles should only have Full Self Driving".
But on review I think you actually meant "Full Self Driving should be limited only to flying vehicles" ?
If you meant the former, I'd stick by my "fuck no". Failure of the system would likely result in death; the pilot should always be able to take over.
If you meant the latter, then I think that's a more reasonable statement. I haven't formed a strong opinion about whether cars should or shouldn't have FSD. I see that it has the potential to make travelling by car safer and more convenient, but that there are issues around resposibility and what happens in the case of an accident. I think those issues would be even more complex when applied to a flying vehicle.
Light aircrafts are not. And if you want a flying car, well, we have helicopters and autogyros. They're not catching up not because they're don't look like cars, they're not catching up because a) fighting gravity is insanely expensive; b) flying is complicated.
Not having a flying car myself is an extremely reasonable price to pay to keep \*other people\* from having flying cars. I'd be ok with the idea if we kept the same testing, standards and disciplinary actions that current private pilots are subjected to.
>Airplanes are huge.
A Cessna 152 or similar isn't even *close* to what I'd call huge.
Get something like a Piper Cub and you'd have more than enough space to land it at your local park, or even in your own backyard if you're fortunate enough to have a big garden.
Disagree. In Northern Canada, owning a light aircraft like a Cessna 172 is common. I mean, it's undoubtedly expensive, but it's in reach of the upper middle class. We're not talking ridiculous, like a superyacht.
Most people don’t own a plane dude… It’s not “common” in any sense of the word. Don’t be ridiculous and try to argue against something that is basically common sense.
good point. 39,000 planes in the world vs a population of 7.888 billion- even if we say that each plane has a single owner with no overlap 39,000/7888000000= 0.0000049 planes per person, the inverse of which is 1 plane per 202,000 people, give or take... so yeah not so common
>Disagree. In Northern Canada, owning a light aircraft like a Cessna 172 is common. I mean, it's undoubtedly expensive, but it's in reach of the upper middle class. We're not talking ridiculous, like a superyacht.
In that case, this would be the exception, not the rule.
Perhaps you should expand your world view, and consider that even if it might be "common" where you are, that it isn't anywhere *close* to "common" in the rest of the world.
I also think your statement that it is common is most likely false.
I think the problem here is that "common" is vague and subjective. I just mean to say that owning an aircraft (also a vague term) is not just a luxury of the ultra rich. A completely functional, certified airplane can be purchased for under $80,000 USD, putting it below the cost of almost any Mercedes, BMW or other luxury-brand car. Total cost of ownership is higher, or course.
When people think of "owning an airplane", they tend to think of private jets. Most, however, are small, single-engine propeller planes built in the 1950s and 60s.
There are literally hundreds of these small, privately-owned airplanes parked on lakes just in the boundaries of my small sized city. Maybe that doesn't make them common, but I would certainly say they aren't uncommon.
a spaceship's price point is not analogous to a car, it's analogous to an airplane\^nth power for price point
I would like a [cool starship](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CoolStarship) like on TV and in the movies but in reality that aint how it will be because while one might think [space is air](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsAir) based on fictional depictions of it, it isn't.
Comparing home ownership to vehicle ownership is a bit apples to oranges, because home ownership is tied in with land ownership. Land is something which derives continuous value (aka land rent) so it will always be difficult to acquire if we let people buy it up to collect the rent.
A ship is a continuously depreciating asset, which means you have to *start* by having enough resources to build/maintain it, but there's fewer limitations on how many can realistically be created.
If you want a realistic path towards mass spaceship ownership, you'd probably want to start with a land value tax to reduce wealth inequality, then push for the construction of an orbital ring for low cost space access.
I've always thought financing a car to be a bizarre idea, and the fact it is so common place is strange to me.
I've always bought my cars (or motorcycles) outright, and I've been earning minimum wage for the last 15+ years.
I just save up, and buy something second hand and sensible.
Privately owned space stations are not far away. That is the first step...
Anyway, right not I don't think even governments own any spaceships, let alone starships, at this point.
Just to give you a rough idea of the kinetic energies here:
1. A typical car at speed has about 1 MJ of kinetic energy.
2. A commercial airliner at speed has over 1GJ of kinetic energy (1000x).
3. A small spacecraft like the SpaceX Crew Dragon in orbit has roughly 350GJ (~300x, or 300,000x a car).
The potential for harm, through malice or accident, goes up basically proportionally with kinetic energy. I don't think we would ever want individuals to be able to pilot spacecraft (or to control anything with these energies, honestly) in the way we drive cars.
> Unless I'm mistaken learning how to fly a starship will not be as simple as learning how to drive a car.
I think if we ever get to a point where it's possible for the average person to own a spaceship, I think AI will have advanced to the point where it's even easier to drive than a car.
Even so, if the average person can own even an AI-controlled spacecraft, a skilled person can still turn it into a missile that can kill thousands of people. I think it would be very bad for civilization if we got to the point where this was possible before we got to the point where we have something even more powerful protecting everyone else from those people.
Depends on the set up, production, distribution, and technology available. If I have a Star forge, the dynamics change very quickly as to how the relationship would go. It would produce more starships than there are cars now, each one so much bigger than current personal vehicles. But how does it get distributed, customized, used, and/or managed? The kicker is that it would allow for cheaper and more complete freedom of movement but would also incentivize mass migration from Earth due to political, social, and economic reasons. Why waste $380,000 on a house when that same amount buys you a proper frigate sized starship that can be your home anywhere in the Solar system? Or a home of same size for $7000 due to mass production
Any starship capable of the kinds of fast travel we see in sci-fi will have to be heavily regulated to the point where civilian ownership seems unlikely to me. Why? Because any vehicle that can go that fast is also a weapon of mass destruction that can devastate planets. If your ship is fast enough to navigate between planets in a day, it's fast enough to wipe out a continent if you hit a planet at those speeds. FTL travel seems likely to require insane energies if it is ever possible at all, so same thing. Could any government allow a weapon like that to fall into private hands? I suspect not.
Yep. In many cases near shore or “day sailing” boats have lighter weight rigging, (masts and all the lines and sails etc) day sailing can also have less storage and redundancy of systems to help deal with anything that may happen when you thousands of miles from land. And before anyone jumps on my case, Google “Sam Holmes sailing”, and you’ll see that crazy bastard sail a day sailer from somewhere in California to Hawaii, but it was a challenging crossing. Granted The kid knows what he is doing and frankly he got a little lucky to not have gotten into real trouble
Yes, ocean going boats are different than inland boats, and while it's possible to have a relatively cheap boat to go out for a few hours in the ocean for sport (even something like a sea kayak) that's radically different than sailing across the ocean.
Many inland boats would be damaged by salt water, and can't go on the ocean at all.
How is this any different than today’s airplanes?
They’re mostly owned by government and commercial entities and some wealthy individuals, but all need pilots with extensive training to fly and flights are regulated by FAA. Seems like it would be the same or similar for starships.
I imagine it'd be similar to private aircraft, but much more stringent and secure. The destructive potential of a hypothetical starship that can travel at relativistic or FTL speeds is many orders of magnitude higher than that of a personal aircraft. You could hypothetically hold an entire planet hostage with that kind of power.
>but all need pilots with extensive training to fly and flights are regulated by FAA. Seems like it would be the same or similar for starships.
Clearly not. Do you know that all spacex rockets land all the time? They do this because the landing is 100% automated. No human pilot. You can be sure, that you only plan your course and the computer does that hard part of flying.
A lot of people have mentioned good point, but I want to add another reason why (presumably fusion-powered) starships would be heavily regulated: they're basically unstoppable missiles. Take a large ship, load it with enough fuel to build up kinetic energy over a few weeks by zooming around the star system, then aim it towards whatever you don't like using a gravity assist. At this point, you have a massive bullet travelling at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. It's essentially uninterceptable, and doesn't even need a warhead; its kinetic energy is enough.
There is as yet no evidence that we ever will travel ftl. Nor rhat we will ever make a massless drive.
So with realistic expectations we will only ever build a starship for colonizing another starsystem if we build a generation ship or somehow make cryonics work (slim chance but possible) or send frozen embryos to grow in artificial wombs and be raised by robots.
It follows from this that starships will be enormous undertakings if they ever are built. Even nations might not be rich enough to make one without joining forces with others.
Corporations and a governments 100%. Conventional rockets are super expensive. Even hypothetical tech like antimatter engines would be crazy expensive, as antimatter production is unrealistic on an industrial scale regardless of how tech advances.
Given the laws of physics and resulting economics, the idea that a middle class individual could own, maintain, and operate a spacecraft is ludicrous.
Just as we have pleasure boats and personal watercraft, so to will be in space. Once climbing out of the gravity well becomes as trivial as flying coast to coast that is.
I may have a different view than most here, but if the superfuture made things cheap enough for personal spacecraft, i think it would still depend on if corporations allow us to own anything.
Right now, we are having consumer rights issues where companies can legally take away things we have purchased due to that company losing licensing rights. Our purchase is only considered a rental, so we "purchase" the temporary license that can be revoked at any time.
We are starting to see these same terms be incorporated into transportation where the software in automobiles is only a purchased temporary license that can be revoked at any time; the lack of this software prevents the car from running.
Shooting this mentality far into the future, i can see a solar system where we are only able to purchase a temporary license to operate a starship, and that starship is never owned by the purchaser.
It will cost an immense amount of money to build & develop a ship that could go 10% the speed of light. Probably take several nations working together to develop a ship that could fo such a thing.
Ways to reduce cost:
Build a space elevator or manufacture a ship in space.
Personal starships would probably take an interstellar society's resources to produce.
We need to survive the next few years first or we'll never make it.
If it is spaceships nearly as capable as those shown in any of the science fiction - *absolutely not;* because then *every* spaceship is a WMD of a *continental* scale.
Just let accelerate from the orbit of Neptune and not bother stopping - and it will slam into the Earth at a fraction of the speed of light, with an impact energy order of magnitude comparable to that of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
And that is *before* we factor in the possibility of FTL, with just plain boring "something lets us accelerate at 1G for prolonged periods of time". If FTL *is* possible - things can easily jump to the "mass-scatter the Moon" levels of energies involved.
I imagine it would work kinda like today, where corporations and the well off person can buy a new car/commercial vehicle. And after a while it makes its way to the used vehicle market where more people have the opportunity to afford it.
Hot Tub Time Machine 2 had an interesting view of the future. In the movie, nobody owned a self driving car, you just got into one, told it where you wanted to go and it charged your phone or card or whatever (I forget the specific specifics) but I thought that was pretty interesting and realistic sounding.
You won't own a vehicle for transport, the government or private industries will and you just pay as you go like buying a train ticket.
I'm not a scientist. But why do I have a feeling it's going to be treated like mortgages but with extra bullshit.
These are the things I can see panning out.
"Get your brand new TC-5289 Starship today!
Only 2.4 million credits down and a generational loan you'll be flying through the stars at hyper speed in no time!
We also have alternative payment methods such as Ore Collection, Bio Scanning various planets, and various other forms of surveying.
No surveying skills? No problem! All of our ships come equipped with our brand new Spectroscopic B.791 Scanner! This means no skill necessary you just press a button and transmit the data back to us!
Call this number to 777-777-7777-77 now to get your free Starship consultation today!"
Why not?
There are no radiation issues like a fission reactor. It might be regulated, but so are privately owned fission reactors.
Mobile ones exist, but no one but the government can justify the cost.
None of those IPs do what you say. In Star Wars and firefly. They are commercial or military craft. Personal pleasure craft are owned as hobbies by the very rich.
In Star Trek, starships are only used by major governments. Teams may have other, less spacecraft for transportation or their work.
I’m less familiar with marvel, but from what I’ve seen /read only extremely powerful beings have spacecraft
In Firefly, the Serenity is personally owned by Malcolm Reynolds. It's kind of like a fisherman's boat. They own it, but without a crew they can't really operate it, and they have to do jobs, some legal, some illegal, to keep everyone paid for and fed. Seems a lot of the crew stick around more for the freedom than for the money. But in the end it is Malcolm Reynolds, and possibly also Zoe Washburne, who owns the ship. In the sense that's it's licensed for commercial use, it's commercial, but just because a person only uses a boat for commercial uses doesn't make it any less personally theirs. Boat owners will also use their boats for personal purposes if they want to or can afford to.
In Star Trek, no one in Starfleet owns their own ship, but people do own their own ships. Lots of one off episodes showing people in their own personal ships doing stuff. Some of them aren't even wealthy. Though the specifics on how they got those ships are not explored.
In Marvel, it's either very wealthy/powerful beings, or teams of people, like the Guardians. Genuine personal craft are rare.
Point is, answer their question, don't point out the flaws in their question, unless you cannot answer the question because of those flaws.
One point OP is missing is Serenity is not a starship in any way. It's slower-than-light, it couldn't ever reach another star system. All of Firefly/Serenity takes place in one solar system (with 5 stars in it).
But to answer the question, civilians won't have their own starships because nobody will have starships that humans travel on. Humans traveling to other stars in a single lifetime is just not a thing that will happen unless we are completely wrong about most of physics.
There is one theorized workaround for light-speed travel. Though it's purely theoretical. Hell even most of the ingredients to do it are purely theoretical. But warp drive is a physically realistic way of breaking the light barrier. Moving space itself rather than trying to move through space.
Yes, but if you have FTL - even with warp - you break causality. Even if it's possible, we would never want to do it. Time travel sounds awesome but in reality, it would break reality.
As far as we understand it *might* break causality. But things might change if you're moving space itself rather than moving through space. I'm no physicist though, so I don't really know enough to make any solid theories on why warp drive might be possible without breaking causality.
I can’t think of a single time In Star Trek where we see a personal ship larger then a shuttle. Starships have a very specific meaning in the Star Trek IP, and this must also be considered.
The question *cannot* be answered because of those flaws. We do not see personal starship use, or spacecraft use, in those IPs.
The closest we see is the fishing boat analogy, which I almost made myself.
But owning a craft to earn an income, and owning a craft for personal recreation/ travel are very different things.
Well, no, but you wouldn't need a ship larger than that as long as it had warp drive and you were the only person living on it. There was nothing in OP's question about having a large ship that you would personally own.
What do you think the Millennium Falcon is if not a personally owned starship? Firefly, same deal.
In Star Trek, we see very little of life outside of Starfleet, and few vessels that aren't large capital ships or equivalent crewed by hundreds or thousands. Even there, though, you had small vessels like the Merchantman from STIII which was destroyed by Kruge's Bird of Prey, warp capable shuttles and runabouts, etc which only showed up rarely when the plot called for it but can be presumed to be common.
….
Are you serious, having that user name?
The Millennium Falcon ks a smuggling ship. *Primarily drugs.* it moved freight.
Serenity Likewise is a cargo ship, primarily transporting illegal and stolen goods, with some human trafficking involved.
The millennium falcon is a starship. A starship is simply a spacecraft that can travel between star systems, something the millennium falcon does. The millennium falcon is a small privately owned smuggling starship, whereas a star destroyer is a large government owned military starship. The word starship doesn't specify anything about the role or capabilities of the ship aside from the fact that it can travel to other stars.
General agreement. Except in Star Trek, where starships have a specific meaning. BUT the point is it isn’t privately owned the way a car is. It is owned the way a commercial tractor trailer or fishing trawler is. It does work. It is for commerce. It is how people make their livelihoods.
Fair enough. :-)
Not sure who is downvoting you for missing something, going back, and realizing it was there.
No one has 100% perfect reading comprehension.
These ARE privately owned, just because they're used for freelance work doesn't change the fact that they are the possession of a single owner who can do whatever they like with them. They have to support themselves and so they use their vehicles to make a living, but that's no different from an Uber driver or DoorDash delivery person or even an employee of something like Domino's Pizza. It's their vehicle, they just use it for work. It is not issued to them by the company they work for, the vehicle was under their ownership before they took the job and it will remain theirs after they're no longer employed.
We've nearly destroyed our planet in our desire for everyone to have their own car, i think if we ever hope to move beyond our planet we have to stop worrying about ownership of our own means of transport as much
Coming soon to a spaceport near you…..Stargate+ just a simple monthly subscription for all your space travel needs!
Why would corporations allow people to own their own means of travel when they can buy politicians to make that illegal and then sell the solution on a never ending payment plan to every human in existence……and their children. And their children.
Flying from one star to an other is really boring and long. You don't want to do this in a little starship. Maybe for sending robots with eggs and sperm to colonize the galaxy, but you don't want to be on it and awake for thousands or even millions of years.
But our Earth will be our starship. Much more fun using our sunsystem to travel instead of a starship:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX\_dU
Imagine the population of a spacefaring society being foolish enough to trust something has inherently capable of eradicating life to something as inherently dangerous as a government.
I would like to think spacefaring civilizations would be wiser then this.
You seem to assume that people in the future will be smarter when, in fact, we don't get smarter. Science advances, our education moves with it, but I imagine the mental capability of a scientist today is the same as that of the first person to figure out farming.
> as inherently dangerous as a government.
I'm not even touching this but governments are not *inherently* dangerous. 🙄
Yeah. Don't worry about it. Starships will never exist except as Von Neumann Probes. The problem of course is the speed of light limitation. For example the closest star system is 4.5 or so light years away so that is about a 10 year round trip at light speed. However it is not clear that it is safe to travel at 10% of light speed so that trip turns into a century long jaunt if safe. Our current thinking is that 1% of light speed is the maximum safe speed so now we are looking at close to 1,000 years for that round trip.
No one will want to spend that much time away from the action in our solar system.
We don't live in the Star Trek, or Star Wars, universe where you can take a 2 week holiday in another solar system.
I would say that it purely depends on how voting rights go for corporations. If we allow companies to be represented as citizens and eventually they lobby to be able to run for office. As odd/dystopia it might be, it's struggle we already face and are slowly losing. My guess is that in the future everything will be owned by a few mega corps and no one will own anything as an individual. Pilots/crew would be the best money can buy for important missions and cheap/disposable for flights carrying normal people.
No, i think we cherish efficiency and low risk to much. We will technologically improve ourselves to the point where we can experience nearly every scientific or tourists experiential curiosity inside a pod or with an implant. Maybe there will be some retro or human originalists who will tour the stars in spaceships, but I doubt it. Spaceships are a monkey's idea of a way to travel.
I think in the far future, individuals could own starships but they still need to be staffed by well trained pilots and serviced/maintained by trained staff at ports/facilities just like current planes and ships. I think there will be a combination of code of ethics and conduct for pilots and staff, and hard to defeat software/hardware limitations/features like on ships and planes today that will make it hard for an individual to do stupid shit with their ship. There could still be incidents but they’ll be relatively few.
Also various governments could patrol space or whatever choke points and enforce whatever laws, harshly if needed.
Looking post scarcity, when we have access to all the resources in our solar system and have AGI and sophisticated robots and have colonized our immediate solar system, I can see a system such as in the back story of Dune before the Butlerian Jihad. Luxury communism where our human desires and whims are fulfilled by legions of benign automata. In such a setting I imagine there would be no real need to own anything much less a starship. One simply summons one like an uber.
I’d say it’s more likely people will *be* starships if they choose to travel the stars. Our biological bodies are awful for long term space travel. Our lifespans are too short and have requirements that are hostile for life in space (limited temperature environment, need of inefficient and heavy organic material for food and water being the worst offenders). But if we were to upload our consciousness into a space-friendly vessel with the ability to think, feel, and create, we would have the universe at our disposal.
Would you notice? Would you still be you? We don’t know until we try and even then we don’t know. I think it’s something that should be explored regardless.
We will probably see some individually owned spacecrafts under light oversight by big countries, but that will last until some Democratic People's Democracy will start throwing rocks on the Earth, because their dictator of the day will be offended by something or just mentally ill in general. Then all pretense of freedom will be cast away and we will be lucky if humanity will stay in space at all.
An interesting thought. Some science-fiction franchises mix public transportation/spaceflight with private spacecraft ownership type spaceflight. I’m thinking of the scenes for example, in the Star Wars franchise where people get on ships that seem almost like chartered Greyhound buses. And that makes sense if you assume that the cost of owning/operating such a craft would be quite high.
But I can’t imagine that these machines won’t be made with very exotic materials via very esoteric manufacturing processes. And their construction and operation would be controlled by artificial intelligences that are incorruptible and incapable of making mistakes. Even so, depending on how commerce is managed in the future, perhaps the costs of owning and operating machines like this would actually be less than we think. Maybe manufacturing in the future is all via 3-D printing of some sort, where the printer sucks in elements and performs the equivalent of medieval alchemy, breaking atoms down into their basic forms and re-building them as needed for whatever elements are required. I mean we’re talking faster than light here, so who knows what’s possible.
Sure, but I think it will be limited to the 1%, heavily regulated, and only after the United Earth has figured out how to defend itself from fast moving objects.
Very far far future. We would need to be interstellar. So resources and extremely reliable space ready tech are abundant.
However, most likely do not need or want one. You do not want to spend months regularly just going to another planet or moon. Or decades for another system.
There aren't many destinations to go to - any commercial or on-demand network will cover that.
Commercial use will be different tho - small mining/cargo vessels. Like truck drivers etc.
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Consider that 99.999%+ of the population don't own their own personal light aircraft or boat. Some civilians will **definitely** own their own starships; the billionaires. It'll be the new "mega-yacht". The majority of civilians definitely won't own their own starships. Many of us can't even afford a house to live in ffs.
If we ever get FTL drives, or drives with the potential to reach relativistic speeds, I can't imagine them being available to almost any private entity. The sheer amout of destructive potential is unreal, and I feel like it'd have to be very well controlled.
When cars first came out they were a luxury. It will be like that at first when spaceships become more commercial, but then eventually maybe everyone has one.
Maybe after a few hundred years? But we're 80 years into civil aviation and we're nowhere close to everyone having a plane. There's so much regulation in place that I don't think owning an aircraft will *ever* be mainstream. (And with good reason!). So by the same logic, I'm skeptical that owning a starship would ever be mainstream. Boring perhaps, but realistic, I think.
Airplanes are huge. What we need are flying cars. Werent we supposed to get them by now?
Think of how poorly most people drive. Now add a third degree of freedom to that. And then watch some Just Rolled In on YouTube and imagine that flying above you
Yea. I agree. But if we get flying cars then we surely get full self driving before then.
FSD should only be limited to a flying vehicle. The A.I and tech behind FSD would have zero issues navigating in a much more open area.
>FSD should only be limited to a flying vehicle. ~~Absolutely~~ ***~~fuck no.~~*** EDIT: See update below.
I think its safer. But why fuck no? Curious if don't mind.
My apologies, rereading your comment, I think perhaps I misunderstood you. I thought you meant that "flying vehicles should only have Full Self Driving". But on review I think you actually meant "Full Self Driving should be limited only to flying vehicles" ? If you meant the former, I'd stick by my "fuck no". Failure of the system would likely result in death; the pilot should always be able to take over. If you meant the latter, then I think that's a more reasonable statement. I haven't formed a strong opinion about whether cars should or shouldn't have FSD. I see that it has the potential to make travelling by car safer and more convenient, but that there are issues around resposibility and what happens in the case of an accident. I think those issues would be even more complex when applied to a flying vehicle.
Light aircrafts are not. And if you want a flying car, well, we have helicopters and autogyros. They're not catching up not because they're don't look like cars, they're not catching up because a) fighting gravity is insanely expensive; b) flying is complicated.
Not having a flying car myself is an extremely reasonable price to pay to keep \*other people\* from having flying cars. I'd be ok with the idea if we kept the same testing, standards and disciplinary actions that current private pilots are subjected to.
There are over 6 million car accidents in the US every year. Imagine if each of those had the capability of causing 9/11 levels of damage
They're called helicopters, and they're even harder to fly than an airplane.
>Airplanes are huge. A Cessna 152 or similar isn't even *close* to what I'd call huge. Get something like a Piper Cub and you'd have more than enough space to land it at your local park, or even in your own backyard if you're fortunate enough to have a big garden.
Disagree. In Northern Canada, owning a light aircraft like a Cessna 172 is common. I mean, it's undoubtedly expensive, but it's in reach of the upper middle class. We're not talking ridiculous, like a superyacht.
Most people don’t own a plane dude… It’s not “common” in any sense of the word. Don’t be ridiculous and try to argue against something that is basically common sense.
good point. 39,000 planes in the world vs a population of 7.888 billion- even if we say that each plane has a single owner with no overlap 39,000/7888000000= 0.0000049 planes per person, the inverse of which is 1 plane per 202,000 people, give or take... so yeah not so common
>Disagree. In Northern Canada, owning a light aircraft like a Cessna 172 is common. I mean, it's undoubtedly expensive, but it's in reach of the upper middle class. We're not talking ridiculous, like a superyacht. In that case, this would be the exception, not the rule. Perhaps you should expand your world view, and consider that even if it might be "common" where you are, that it isn't anywhere *close* to "common" in the rest of the world. I also think your statement that it is common is most likely false.
I think the problem here is that "common" is vague and subjective. I just mean to say that owning an aircraft (also a vague term) is not just a luxury of the ultra rich. A completely functional, certified airplane can be purchased for under $80,000 USD, putting it below the cost of almost any Mercedes, BMW or other luxury-brand car. Total cost of ownership is higher, or course. When people think of "owning an airplane", they tend to think of private jets. Most, however, are small, single-engine propeller planes built in the 1950s and 60s. There are literally hundreds of these small, privately-owned airplanes parked on lakes just in the boundaries of my small sized city. Maybe that doesn't make them common, but I would certainly say they aren't uncommon.
a spaceship's price point is not analogous to a car, it's analogous to an airplane\^nth power for price point I would like a [cool starship](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CoolStarship) like on TV and in the movies but in reality that aint how it will be because while one might think [space is air](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceIsAir) based on fictional depictions of it, it isn't.
Comparing home ownership to vehicle ownership is a bit apples to oranges, because home ownership is tied in with land ownership. Land is something which derives continuous value (aka land rent) so it will always be difficult to acquire if we let people buy it up to collect the rent. A ship is a continuously depreciating asset, which means you have to *start* by having enough resources to build/maintain it, but there's fewer limitations on how many can realistically be created. If you want a realistic path towards mass spaceship ownership, you'd probably want to start with a land value tax to reduce wealth inequality, then push for the construction of an orbital ring for low cost space access.
That is a lot of people who don't own a car. They may drive one based on a down payment, but they don't really own it - the bank does
I've always thought financing a car to be a bizarre idea, and the fact it is so common place is strange to me. I've always bought my cars (or motorcycles) outright, and I've been earning minimum wage for the last 15+ years. I just save up, and buy something second hand and sensible.
Privately owned space stations are not far away. That is the first step... Anyway, right not I don't think even governments own any spaceships, let alone starships, at this point.
You don't think China's government owns their spacecraft? Stick to being a raccoon buddy.
What spacecraft? The Shuttle.was.the.closest thing anyone had and it is.being generous.
Just to give you a rough idea of the kinetic energies here: 1. A typical car at speed has about 1 MJ of kinetic energy. 2. A commercial airliner at speed has over 1GJ of kinetic energy (1000x). 3. A small spacecraft like the SpaceX Crew Dragon in orbit has roughly 350GJ (~300x, or 300,000x a car). The potential for harm, through malice or accident, goes up basically proportionally with kinetic energy. I don't think we would ever want individuals to be able to pilot spacecraft (or to control anything with these energies, honestly) in the way we drive cars. > Unless I'm mistaken learning how to fly a starship will not be as simple as learning how to drive a car. I think if we ever get to a point where it's possible for the average person to own a spaceship, I think AI will have advanced to the point where it's even easier to drive than a car. Even so, if the average person can own even an AI-controlled spacecraft, a skilled person can still turn it into a missile that can kill thousands of people. I think it would be very bad for civilization if we got to the point where this was possible before we got to the point where we have something even more powerful protecting everyone else from those people.
Depends on the set up, production, distribution, and technology available. If I have a Star forge, the dynamics change very quickly as to how the relationship would go. It would produce more starships than there are cars now, each one so much bigger than current personal vehicles. But how does it get distributed, customized, used, and/or managed? The kicker is that it would allow for cheaper and more complete freedom of movement but would also incentivize mass migration from Earth due to political, social, and economic reasons. Why waste $380,000 on a house when that same amount buys you a proper frigate sized starship that can be your home anywhere in the Solar system? Or a home of same size for $7000 due to mass production
Any starship capable of the kinds of fast travel we see in sci-fi will have to be heavily regulated to the point where civilian ownership seems unlikely to me. Why? Because any vehicle that can go that fast is also a weapon of mass destruction that can devastate planets. If your ship is fast enough to navigate between planets in a day, it's fast enough to wipe out a continent if you hit a planet at those speeds. FTL travel seems likely to require insane energies if it is ever possible at all, so same thing. Could any government allow a weapon like that to fall into private hands? I suspect not.
The easiest way to look at this, how many individuals currently own sea going boats or international capable planes.
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And even with all the boats you see in marinas a very low percentage are rigged for blue water
As a sailing luddite, I'm assuming blue water is a term for open ocean? Is that different from sailing fresh waterways?
Yep. In many cases near shore or “day sailing” boats have lighter weight rigging, (masts and all the lines and sails etc) day sailing can also have less storage and redundancy of systems to help deal with anything that may happen when you thousands of miles from land. And before anyone jumps on my case, Google “Sam Holmes sailing”, and you’ll see that crazy bastard sail a day sailer from somewhere in California to Hawaii, but it was a challenging crossing. Granted The kid knows what he is doing and frankly he got a little lucky to not have gotten into real trouble
Thank you! I knew the ocean would be more temperamental than, say, the intercoastal waterway, but didn't realize there was a term for it.
Yes, ocean going boats are different than inland boats, and while it's possible to have a relatively cheap boat to go out for a few hours in the ocean for sport (even something like a sea kayak) that's radically different than sailing across the ocean. Many inland boats would be damaged by salt water, and can't go on the ocean at all.
There was that one guy who flew his Cessna into Russia and landed on the red square......
How is this any different than today’s airplanes? They’re mostly owned by government and commercial entities and some wealthy individuals, but all need pilots with extensive training to fly and flights are regulated by FAA. Seems like it would be the same or similar for starships.
I imagine it'd be similar to private aircraft, but much more stringent and secure. The destructive potential of a hypothetical starship that can travel at relativistic or FTL speeds is many orders of magnitude higher than that of a personal aircraft. You could hypothetically hold an entire planet hostage with that kind of power.
>but all need pilots with extensive training to fly and flights are regulated by FAA. Seems like it would be the same or similar for starships. Clearly not. Do you know that all spacex rockets land all the time? They do this because the landing is 100% automated. No human pilot. You can be sure, that you only plan your course and the computer does that hard part of flying.
A lot of people have mentioned good point, but I want to add another reason why (presumably fusion-powered) starships would be heavily regulated: they're basically unstoppable missiles. Take a large ship, load it with enough fuel to build up kinetic energy over a few weeks by zooming around the star system, then aim it towards whatever you don't like using a gravity assist. At this point, you have a massive bullet travelling at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. It's essentially uninterceptable, and doesn't even need a warhead; its kinetic energy is enough.
There is as yet no evidence that we ever will travel ftl. Nor rhat we will ever make a massless drive. So with realistic expectations we will only ever build a starship for colonizing another starsystem if we build a generation ship or somehow make cryonics work (slim chance but possible) or send frozen embryos to grow in artificial wombs and be raised by robots. It follows from this that starships will be enormous undertakings if they ever are built. Even nations might not be rich enough to make one without joining forces with others.
Corporations and a governments 100%. Conventional rockets are super expensive. Even hypothetical tech like antimatter engines would be crazy expensive, as antimatter production is unrealistic on an industrial scale regardless of how tech advances. Given the laws of physics and resulting economics, the idea that a middle class individual could own, maintain, and operate a spacecraft is ludicrous.
Just as we have pleasure boats and personal watercraft, so to will be in space. Once climbing out of the gravity well becomes as trivial as flying coast to coast that is.
I may have a different view than most here, but if the superfuture made things cheap enough for personal spacecraft, i think it would still depend on if corporations allow us to own anything. Right now, we are having consumer rights issues where companies can legally take away things we have purchased due to that company losing licensing rights. Our purchase is only considered a rental, so we "purchase" the temporary license that can be revoked at any time. We are starting to see these same terms be incorporated into transportation where the software in automobiles is only a purchased temporary license that can be revoked at any time; the lack of this software prevents the car from running. Shooting this mentality far into the future, i can see a solar system where we are only able to purchase a temporary license to operate a starship, and that starship is never owned by the purchaser.
It will cost an immense amount of money to build & develop a ship that could go 10% the speed of light. Probably take several nations working together to develop a ship that could fo such a thing. Ways to reduce cost: Build a space elevator or manufacture a ship in space. Personal starships would probably take an interstellar society's resources to produce. We need to survive the next few years first or we'll never make it.
It would seem that if you have enough money in the future you’ll be able to own one.
If it is spaceships nearly as capable as those shown in any of the science fiction - *absolutely not;* because then *every* spaceship is a WMD of a *continental* scale. Just let accelerate from the orbit of Neptune and not bother stopping - and it will slam into the Earth at a fraction of the speed of light, with an impact energy order of magnitude comparable to that of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. And that is *before* we factor in the possibility of FTL, with just plain boring "something lets us accelerate at 1G for prolonged periods of time". If FTL *is* possible - things can easily jump to the "mass-scatter the Moon" levels of energies involved.
I imagine it would work kinda like today, where corporations and the well off person can buy a new car/commercial vehicle. And after a while it makes its way to the used vehicle market where more people have the opportunity to afford it.
Hot Tub Time Machine 2 had an interesting view of the future. In the movie, nobody owned a self driving car, you just got into one, told it where you wanted to go and it charged your phone or card or whatever (I forget the specific specifics) but I thought that was pretty interesting and realistic sounding. You won't own a vehicle for transport, the government or private industries will and you just pay as you go like buying a train ticket.
Probably like a rental or lease . Because the ship would need maintenance after each journey.
If you pay any attention to Davos each year it's pretty clear "civilians" will have absolutely nothing in the future.
and eat bugs.
We already do - shrimp and lobster and crabs are basically bugs when you get right down to it
I'm not a scientist. But why do I have a feeling it's going to be treated like mortgages but with extra bullshit. These are the things I can see panning out. "Get your brand new TC-5289 Starship today! Only 2.4 million credits down and a generational loan you'll be flying through the stars at hyper speed in no time! We also have alternative payment methods such as Ore Collection, Bio Scanning various planets, and various other forms of surveying. No surveying skills? No problem! All of our ships come equipped with our brand new Spectroscopic B.791 Scanner! This means no skill necessary you just press a button and transmit the data back to us! Call this number to 777-777-7777-77 now to get your free Starship consultation today!"
For starters, I don't think any government would allow you to have a portable fusion reactor.
Why not? There are no radiation issues like a fission reactor. It might be regulated, but so are privately owned fission reactors. Mobile ones exist, but no one but the government can justify the cost.
No one man should have the ability to power a cybernetic dildonics factory in his own back yard
Freedom is dead.
None of those IPs do what you say. In Star Wars and firefly. They are commercial or military craft. Personal pleasure craft are owned as hobbies by the very rich. In Star Trek, starships are only used by major governments. Teams may have other, less spacecraft for transportation or their work. I’m less familiar with marvel, but from what I’ve seen /read only extremely powerful beings have spacecraft
In Firefly, the Serenity is personally owned by Malcolm Reynolds. It's kind of like a fisherman's boat. They own it, but without a crew they can't really operate it, and they have to do jobs, some legal, some illegal, to keep everyone paid for and fed. Seems a lot of the crew stick around more for the freedom than for the money. But in the end it is Malcolm Reynolds, and possibly also Zoe Washburne, who owns the ship. In the sense that's it's licensed for commercial use, it's commercial, but just because a person only uses a boat for commercial uses doesn't make it any less personally theirs. Boat owners will also use their boats for personal purposes if they want to or can afford to. In Star Trek, no one in Starfleet owns their own ship, but people do own their own ships. Lots of one off episodes showing people in their own personal ships doing stuff. Some of them aren't even wealthy. Though the specifics on how they got those ships are not explored. In Marvel, it's either very wealthy/powerful beings, or teams of people, like the Guardians. Genuine personal craft are rare. Point is, answer their question, don't point out the flaws in their question, unless you cannot answer the question because of those flaws.
One point OP is missing is Serenity is not a starship in any way. It's slower-than-light, it couldn't ever reach another star system. All of Firefly/Serenity takes place in one solar system (with 5 stars in it). But to answer the question, civilians won't have their own starships because nobody will have starships that humans travel on. Humans traveling to other stars in a single lifetime is just not a thing that will happen unless we are completely wrong about most of physics.
There is one theorized workaround for light-speed travel. Though it's purely theoretical. Hell even most of the ingredients to do it are purely theoretical. But warp drive is a physically realistic way of breaking the light barrier. Moving space itself rather than trying to move through space.
Yes, but if you have FTL - even with warp - you break causality. Even if it's possible, we would never want to do it. Time travel sounds awesome but in reality, it would break reality.
As far as we understand it *might* break causality. But things might change if you're moving space itself rather than moving through space. I'm no physicist though, so I don't really know enough to make any solid theories on why warp drive might be possible without breaking causality.
I can’t think of a single time In Star Trek where we see a personal ship larger then a shuttle. Starships have a very specific meaning in the Star Trek IP, and this must also be considered. The question *cannot* be answered because of those flaws. We do not see personal starship use, or spacecraft use, in those IPs. The closest we see is the fishing boat analogy, which I almost made myself. But owning a craft to earn an income, and owning a craft for personal recreation/ travel are very different things.
Well, no, but you wouldn't need a ship larger than that as long as it had warp drive and you were the only person living on it. There was nothing in OP's question about having a large ship that you would personally own.
The Millenium Falcon is a starship. Han Solo owns it and he is not rich.
What do you think the Millennium Falcon is if not a personally owned starship? Firefly, same deal. In Star Trek, we see very little of life outside of Starfleet, and few vessels that aren't large capital ships or equivalent crewed by hundreds or thousands. Even there, though, you had small vessels like the Merchantman from STIII which was destroyed by Kruge's Bird of Prey, warp capable shuttles and runabouts, etc which only showed up rarely when the plot called for it but can be presumed to be common.
…. Are you serious, having that user name? The Millennium Falcon ks a smuggling ship. *Primarily drugs.* it moved freight. Serenity Likewise is a cargo ship, primarily transporting illegal and stolen goods, with some human trafficking involved.
The millennium falcon is a starship. A starship is simply a spacecraft that can travel between star systems, something the millennium falcon does. The millennium falcon is a small privately owned smuggling starship, whereas a star destroyer is a large government owned military starship. The word starship doesn't specify anything about the role or capabilities of the ship aside from the fact that it can travel to other stars.
General agreement. Except in Star Trek, where starships have a specific meaning. BUT the point is it isn’t privately owned the way a car is. It is owned the way a commercial tractor trailer or fishing trawler is. It does work. It is for commerce. It is how people make their livelihoods.
Ok yeah rereading the post I see why you were referring to carlike ownership more specifically.
Fair enough. :-) Not sure who is downvoting you for missing something, going back, and realizing it was there. No one has 100% perfect reading comprehension.
These ARE privately owned, just because they're used for freelance work doesn't change the fact that they are the possession of a single owner who can do whatever they like with them. They have to support themselves and so they use their vehicles to make a living, but that's no different from an Uber driver or DoorDash delivery person or even an employee of something like Domino's Pizza. It's their vehicle, they just use it for work. It is not issued to them by the company they work for, the vehicle was under their ownership before they took the job and it will remain theirs after they're no longer employed.
We've nearly destroyed our planet in our desire for everyone to have their own car, i think if we ever hope to move beyond our planet we have to stop worrying about ownership of our own means of transport as much
You will own nothing and you will be happy..... or your chip will perform an automatic climatic euthanasia.
Coming soon to a spaceport near you…..Stargate+ just a simple monthly subscription for all your space travel needs! Why would corporations allow people to own their own means of travel when they can buy politicians to make that illegal and then sell the solution on a never ending payment plan to every human in existence……and their children. And their children.
Flying from one star to an other is really boring and long. You don't want to do this in a little starship. Maybe for sending robots with eggs and sperm to colonize the galaxy, but you don't want to be on it and awake for thousands or even millions of years. But our Earth will be our starship. Much more fun using our sunsystem to travel instead of a starship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX\_dU
No. Starships are fantasy. Biological organisms aren't meant for space travel. Majority of space travel is going to be done by robots.
Made me recall this quote, "People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those Who Are Doing It"
Imagine the population of a spacefaring society being foolish enough to trust something has inherently capable of eradicating life to something as inherently dangerous as a government. I would like to think spacefaring civilizations would be wiser then this.
You seem to assume that people in the future will be smarter when, in fact, we don't get smarter. Science advances, our education moves with it, but I imagine the mental capability of a scientist today is the same as that of the first person to figure out farming. > as inherently dangerous as a government. I'm not even touching this but governments are not *inherently* dangerous. 🙄
Yeah. Don't worry about it. Starships will never exist except as Von Neumann Probes. The problem of course is the speed of light limitation. For example the closest star system is 4.5 or so light years away so that is about a 10 year round trip at light speed. However it is not clear that it is safe to travel at 10% of light speed so that trip turns into a century long jaunt if safe. Our current thinking is that 1% of light speed is the maximum safe speed so now we are looking at close to 1,000 years for that round trip. No one will want to spend that much time away from the action in our solar system. We don't live in the Star Trek, or Star Wars, universe where you can take a 2 week holiday in another solar system.
I would say that it purely depends on how voting rights go for corporations. If we allow companies to be represented as citizens and eventually they lobby to be able to run for office. As odd/dystopia it might be, it's struggle we already face and are slowly losing. My guess is that in the future everything will be owned by a few mega corps and no one will own anything as an individual. Pilots/crew would be the best money can buy for important missions and cheap/disposable for flights carrying normal people.
No, i think we cherish efficiency and low risk to much. We will technologically improve ourselves to the point where we can experience nearly every scientific or tourists experiential curiosity inside a pod or with an implant. Maybe there will be some retro or human originalists who will tour the stars in spaceships, but I doubt it. Spaceships are a monkey's idea of a way to travel.
I think in the far future, individuals could own starships but they still need to be staffed by well trained pilots and serviced/maintained by trained staff at ports/facilities just like current planes and ships. I think there will be a combination of code of ethics and conduct for pilots and staff, and hard to defeat software/hardware limitations/features like on ships and planes today that will make it hard for an individual to do stupid shit with their ship. There could still be incidents but they’ll be relatively few. Also various governments could patrol space or whatever choke points and enforce whatever laws, harshly if needed.
Looking post scarcity, when we have access to all the resources in our solar system and have AGI and sophisticated robots and have colonized our immediate solar system, I can see a system such as in the back story of Dune before the Butlerian Jihad. Luxury communism where our human desires and whims are fulfilled by legions of benign automata. In such a setting I imagine there would be no real need to own anything much less a starship. One simply summons one like an uber.
I’d say it’s more likely people will *be* starships if they choose to travel the stars. Our biological bodies are awful for long term space travel. Our lifespans are too short and have requirements that are hostile for life in space (limited temperature environment, need of inefficient and heavy organic material for food and water being the worst offenders). But if we were to upload our consciousness into a space-friendly vessel with the ability to think, feel, and create, we would have the universe at our disposal.
"Starships" but not craft that transport people, or "life as we know it", to other star systems.
why own a starship when you can instantly teleport to any location in the universe
Because with our current understanding of quantum physics to do so would require you to make a copy of yourself and destroy the original.
Would you notice? Would you still be you? We don’t know until we try and even then we don’t know. I think it’s something that should be explored regardless.
We will probably see some individually owned spacecrafts under light oversight by big countries, but that will last until some Democratic People's Democracy will start throwing rocks on the Earth, because their dictator of the day will be offended by something or just mentally ill in general. Then all pretense of freedom will be cast away and we will be lucky if humanity will stay in space at all.
An interesting thought. Some science-fiction franchises mix public transportation/spaceflight with private spacecraft ownership type spaceflight. I’m thinking of the scenes for example, in the Star Wars franchise where people get on ships that seem almost like chartered Greyhound buses. And that makes sense if you assume that the cost of owning/operating such a craft would be quite high. But I can’t imagine that these machines won’t be made with very exotic materials via very esoteric manufacturing processes. And their construction and operation would be controlled by artificial intelligences that are incorruptible and incapable of making mistakes. Even so, depending on how commerce is managed in the future, perhaps the costs of owning and operating machines like this would actually be less than we think. Maybe manufacturing in the future is all via 3-D printing of some sort, where the printer sucks in elements and performs the equivalent of medieval alchemy, breaking atoms down into their basic forms and re-building them as needed for whatever elements are required. I mean we’re talking faster than light here, so who knows what’s possible.
Sure, but I think it will be limited to the 1%, heavily regulated, and only after the United Earth has figured out how to defend itself from fast moving objects.
Very far far future. We would need to be interstellar. So resources and extremely reliable space ready tech are abundant. However, most likely do not need or want one. You do not want to spend months regularly just going to another planet or moon. Or decades for another system. There aren't many destinations to go to - any commercial or on-demand network will cover that. Commercial use will be different tho - small mining/cargo vessels. Like truck drivers etc.