Another major issue–why in the world would you want to get water from inside the Earth-moon gravity well, and have to go through all the bother of launching it off the moon, when it’s free for the taking in comets or carbonaceous chrondroids (20% H2O by weight)?

You’re still being terribly unfair to asteroids, relegating them to a bolthole. Read Gerard K. O’Neil’s High Frontier, or John S. Lewis’ “Mining the Sky”– they aren’t just nuisences, and they aren’t just bolt-holes.
They’re probably the future of the majority of humanity.

I like Joe Mills’ point 5. I’d been thinking along the same lines, using mirrors in existing orbits. I hadn’t seen that one in the literature, Joe– do you have a reference? Flinging the rock inwards might use more delta-V, but I like the simplicity; no need for on-orbit manufacture of a huge mirror array before you get your industrial base set up.

What if everything in the universe has to be thought about before it can appear? I tilt towards the side that says this is a load of rubbish but who knows?

It is a pity but I live in the UK and don’t get sci-fi science as it sounds pretty good. Have you heard of the variable speed of light theory?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light

This may bring the universe closer to us once we realise that this is the case. Then again it may be just a load of old rubbish.

I appreciate your optimisim, but simply discovering the unifying particle doesn’t mean that we’ll automatically be able to start using for spacedrives. (We already have electronic components that allow a single electron to jump from one point to another inside it’s physical body, without traversing the intervening distance… but this hasn’t led us to building a warp drive.)

I’m here to discuss hard science and engineering solutions to a theoretical problem. Not to just wave a magic wand and say, “We’ll discover “X”, and suddenly we’ll be homesteading the galaxy!” That kind of pie in the sky stuff is great if you’re writing a novel, but it doesn’t really turn my crank at all.

I do tend to agree with you, though, on the sentiment that the solutions to interstellar travel may take us down roads we hadn’t really thought about before. I caught the season premire of “Sci Fi Science” last night, and watched as a whole new way of achieving it was presented. (Hint: cut out the ships entirely.) The episode is entitled “Colonizing the Galaxy” and is even more “blue sky” than some of the stuff you’re suggesting…. except that this means of interstellar travel doesn’t break any laws of the universe.

Check it out.

Once flight was thought to be impossible and that was about 100 years ago so who knows what will happen in the next 100 and who knows what will not happen in the next 100 years?

I have also had this idea that perhaps, space and time change dramatically around planets when compared to deep space. Perhaps the laws of physics are different the further you get from gravity’s affect. This may mean that space is more restrictive and then again it may mean that we rewrite the books.

Of course if the laws of physics change then the speed of light may change. There are quite a few things about the universe that we don’t understand such as dark matter. Let’s hope Einstein isn’t wrong but even he had to fudge a few things.

Try this-

http://www.weirdwarp.com/2009/05/not-faster-than-light-but-fast-light-is-it-possible/

Unfortunately, that scenario isn’t very likely, when you start to examine the realities. For one thing, The Higgs Boson is still theoretical. Even if/when we finally move toward a “Theory of Everything” it doesn’t mean that we’re suddenly going to have anti-gravity, time-travel, or massless spacedrives dropped in our laps. In all liklihood, the best we’ll ever be able to attain is about .3 of c. I say this, because it seems to be the default speed that mass gets ejected from a star when it goes nova. If it takes an entire star exploding to push a hunk of molten rock to that speed… what does that say about our chances of matching it with relatively limited fission/fusion drives? Or even matter/antimater engines of some sort.

Nope, far from being dinosaurs, I think “world ships” or possibly “sleeper ships” or even “seed ships” might be the only viable starship designs for the next several thousand years, at least.

Even more likely… by the time we, human beings, reach the outer edges of our solar system, our A.I.s may have evolved to the point where they could make the trips far more easily than we humans could… They wouldn’t need food, water, atmosphere… time would be meanigless to them…and the difference between our natural minds, and those that we’ve built in a computer lab, would be pretty much non-existant.

In the overall scheme of things though ark ships, in my opinion, are dinosaurs that would become extinct pretty quick when the structure of the universe is discovered. Something like the Higgs bosun (sometimes called the God particle) may eventually give us a way of making the mass of objects zero. This would then allow spacecraft that could be built with no mass and that would overtake the ark and its poor people that are taking thousand years to get to their new world. I bet they would be pretty hacked off to arrive at their planet and to find an ancient civilisation that had come from Earth.