Laser propulsion has been achieved experimentally, guns have already been deployed in space, and we already have an extremely small scale Dyson Swarm that we use to provide energy for solar weather observations.

@AlphaCoronae promising! do you have any source on the guns?

@Stralor They might be referring to the firearm that was test-fired in 1974 by the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3#On-board_gun

Fun fact: Microwave were first used to safely thaw frozen hamsters. Sadly it only works for things that are hamster size, not people size.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#:~:text=cryogenically%20frozen%20hamsters

To my knowledge, said space elevator materials would need properties so far beyond anything that we can even imagine let alone manufacture that it is basically impossible. So much harder than a generation ship or the like that I would consider it Clarktech. I would love to be proven wrong because they would be very useful besides the impossible tensile strength requirement of the primary structural member. Theoretically active supports (structural components that have properties beyond any static material but require constant power, usually by way of magnetic confinement of charged particles moving very fast where the forces only need to be fully manageable at the ends) could allow such a structure, but that is one of the most fail-deadly things I can imagine.

What does this mean exactly ?

@dionisos I'm thinking something like Star Trek teleporters, but could be a variety of things. "Local" in this case means not interstellar

@Stralor But does this means real teleportation, ie faster than light ?

@dionisos wouldn't have to be. data transfer at light/sub-light would work for local level transport and teleportation would still be a significant advancement

@Stralor Ok, I assume it has to be almost at the speed of light, and that isn’t just disintegring something, sending the data, and then reconstructing it at another location, or if it is this, it has to be at least something the size/complexity of a human (otherwise we can already do that)
I am thinking of something like quantum teleportation but at a macro level.

(I feel somewhat silly arguing about resolution criteria from a market like that xD )

@dionisos we can already do that for smaller/ less complex objects? do you have a source? unless you mean strictly quantum particles, but this would have to be mass even if not living organisms, imo, otherwise it falls more under uses for communication (à la Ansible)

@Stralor I was thinking about the "teleportation" of quantum particles here.
Oh ok, so you mean the actual mass of the object have to be moved ?

@dionisos it could be recreated/ reformed at the destination. so quantum particles acting as the medium (whether that's data or otherwise) would be fine, but it needs to be dramatically upscaled to practical objects, and ideally humans

If we're going all sci-fi with this question, would transferring a human consciousness to a remote vessel/body in a different star system without the need for the human's original body to make the journey count as the criteria to end this market?

@Quroe sure!

Is this defined as the process being useful energy positive? I think we can already do fusion at the expense of useful energy.

@Quroe yes, definitely

@Mich Solar sails already exist! do you mean some other implementation of them?

@Stralor Woops sorry I didn’t know they had already been successfully used

@Mich all good! feel free to edit it to something else, or I'll just N/A it

@Stralor Thanks. I’d like to put « Laser propulsion », but I can’t because it’s been more than 1 hour

@Mich okay I'll edit it for ya!

We likely already live in a simulation.

If we further simulate a human mind in a computer, it can live for an arbitrarily long time, which might not be the case with minds in the current level of simulation - carbon dies quickly.

So, do emulated minds count? Assume they're fully indistinguishable from the wetware mind being emulated.

@BrunoParga sure why not!