Slashdot Mirror
Hyperdrive and Space Propulsion
Interested reader writes "MSNBC has an article covering the recent Space Technology and Applications Forum in New Mexico, which included a frontier physics session on hyperdrive, wormholes, and other blue sky ideas. The idea is a revival of NASA's long-dead (and heavily criticized) Advanced Propulsion Project."
Well, I don't know about the hyperdrive, but I clicked on the hyperlink in the article and I was immediately on page 2! Amazing!
I believe the proper technical term is: pie in the sky ideas.
NASA has no comment, but are reportedly checking into the technology of Lost in Space to determine the validity of Star Trek's claims.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
... we could see our grand children zipping to Mars and beyond for their honeymoon or school picnic....
Interesting but scary
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
I agree that we should be taking care of this planet as best as we can, but that should not stop us for pursuing the means to find and reach others.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I would say that I would be very surprised if any propulsion of the sort noted here will be put into production in my life time. But I also have no doubt that we will at some point, discover a way to permit us to distant stars.
We wont find this breakthrough if we dont look for it. As long as the false and impossible ideas are shot down, whats the harm in listening to these wild ideas?
Afterall, some day, someone my actually be on to something. It would be a shame to disregard the idea just because it sounds impossible on the face of it.
END COMMUNICATION
Did they discuss how we can reduce the risk of jumping/exiting hyperspace/getting out of warp and ending up into large mass concentrations (planets, stars etc).
...
It is a real problem. One of the BSG raptor crews ended up in a mountain two weeks ago
If we stay stuck on Earth we are going to continue to overpopulate the planet until we consume ourselves to death. Population control is inevitable if we do not expand, and with population control comes the cheapening and commoditization of every human life.
Of course the alternative is we can find new worlds to populate.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I keep getting an image in my head of Newton's Laws of Whittlin', and it won't go away.
Damned teh Human Race for trying to find ways to reach more resources.
Everything you say is true. However, we have a lot to gain from gathering precious minerals and raw materials from other planetary bodies, moons, etc. The fact is we are running out of a lot of important resources, many of which could be easily obtained from elsewhere if we only had the means to reach "elsewhere".
My hyperdrive is so fast, I will be out of the solar system by the time this comment gets modded up.
Here's what people said about other blue sky ideas:
You will fall off the edge of the world.
Man cannot fly!
I can go on, but I'll just leave this as a quote from someone else.
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. Arthur C. Clarke
Everything you say is true. However, we have a lot to gain from gathering precious minerals and raw materials from other planetary bodies, moons, etc. The fact is we are running out of a lot of important resources, many of which could be easily obtained from elsewhere if we only had the means to reach "elsewhere".
Of course it would make much more sense to reduce or remove the need for these minerals and metals.
Common sense is not so common
Colonizing other worlds and fixing our own are not mutually exclusive goals.
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2006/03/12/busines s/news/20_27_233_10_06.txt
Charging customers to send them into space is a lofty goal for any business owner, and perhaps particularly in an area whose economy draws much of its strength from the availability of cheap land.
But that's the goal that Bill Sprague has set, and he even said that he chose Temecula largely because of its low cost of living relative to the coastal cities where his aerospace suppliers are based.
Sprague is building a 52-foot rocket. By October 2007, he hopes, passengers with $250,000 to spend will be able to ride it to the edge of outer space, where the curve of the Earth is visible and where the planet's gravity is slightly weaker than at the surface.
"If they look in any direction except at the Earth, they'll see black," Sprague said. "It'll be just the sun sitting in a sea of blackness. The stars will be visible."
Cool article, although the fact the rocket parts are only valued at $3mil right now would make me concerned about riding in it.
Then throw out that PC right away! You're burning coal to post here, hypocrite. What use could that possibly serve the human race?
Why not deal with a quantum mirage or other quantum mechanical effects than to try to accelerate ourselves to fractions of the speed of light? Special relativity tells us that the faster we go the massive we get, and not to mention the acceleration itself would be a huge stress to the occupants or payload, unless you want to take weeks to accelerate to high velocities.
Why bother with those complexities when you have the possibility to "travel" faster than the speed of light by using alternative methods?
As an experimentalist, it's refreshing to see someone making such a comment.
The owls are not what they seem
If we focus too much on reducing the need then when we finally do run out we won't have a method to get more from elsewhere. If we focus on being able to get more resources from elsewhere then we'll be able to do so if we need to.
Also, these are entwined fields of study. A lot of the research going into space travel is focused on making fuel and other resources last for as long as possible onboard a space craft. Any advancements in that field will end up being used more broadly.
What makes you think a bunch of space scientists are even capable of fixing the world we live in?
For that matter, why do you spend so much time working in (your career of choice), when you ought to be out fixing the world you live in?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
John Campbell and the rest of them got caught in the Bell Curve Effect - just like when Graham Bell beat Elisha Gray to the patent office, Gene Roddenberry beat the others because the others got caught in a time dilation field where time slows down when you approach the speed of light. Gene Roddenberry's "Warp Speed" uses Deus Ex Machina technology to nullify time dilation and thus Captain Christopher Pike made it to the front steps of patent office first. Technically speaking, that is.
But then he had an... accident... and Captain Kirk actually got into the office and filed the patent.
Of course we heard Captain Pike had an accident in space and landed on a distant forbidden planet, but that was just a cover up.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
It can be when the resources are limited and the solutions expensive.
how could they leave infinite improbability drive? no wonder we are not going anywhere.
Actually one scientific theory holds that it is extremely unlikely we're ever to meet any non-terran organisms that are comptabile with our own physiology. So while we might find inhabited planets, even ones that aren't too different from our own at a glance, our biology will be completely incompatible with theirs, so if we tried to eat each other, we'd die from starvation. Makes diseases transmitting extremely unlikely.
The rest of the world can f**k itself. I can feed myself, it's all I care about.
If I bought a Jacuzzi tomorrow, would that mean a bunch of kids in Africa would starve to death? Yes? Well, tough luck. I don't care.
Bottom line: if we want to do something, either sending cowboys to space or building hotels at the bottom of the ocean, let's do it. Screw the poor, they never counted anything anyway.
Think of something you despise. Not just anything, an idea. Say, freedom of speech. (This is purely hypothetical, mind you.)
Now, how do you resolve the ensuing conflict (whereby you believe, to the point of valuing it over your life, the non-freedom of speech) that happens when you meet a believer in freedom of speech (also to the point of valuing it over their life)?
Do you see the problem? It's a very gross oversimplification, but the fact of the matter is the problems of Earth aren't Earth's problems at all - they're the problems of humanity. And some would go as far as saying they aren't problems at all, but what makes us human.
So long as men and women have beliefs for which they would gladly die, there will be conquest and there will be war. Thus it has been since the dawn of time, and thus it likely shall always be. To die for an idea - that's something uniquely human. Of all the forms of life we presently know of, only we will do that.
Humanity has gotten along just fine over the past ten thousand years or so, even with conquest and war. So why should we face annihilation through gross short-sightedness, just because humanity doesn't follow the rules of some utopian fantasy?
Nothing is impossible!
It came to me in a dream... The engines don't move the ship at all. The ship stays where it is and the engines move the universe around it!
Might be precisely because.
Honestly, I don't think we really know how much we've fucked this planet up. I'm sure the real data is either kept locked away or drowned out by the noise of paid-for studies and nonsense pseudo-science.
But if we assume that either the planet is already beyond repair, or will be so before humanity as a whole learns better (and remember that for the 1 billion or so of us westerns who are slowly starting to get the idea, there's 5 billion africans and asians who also want to drive SUVs and live in luxury!) - well, if we assume that Earth is probably a lost cause anyway, then that's the best reason I can think of to move somewhere else.
Now if we find out that there's no way to do that in the timeframe we have left down here - that's when the real fun starts.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"that they're planning to conquest other worlds instead of fixing the one they live in :-/"
;-).
Which sounds like a real argument but isn't. While it would be nice to fix this world, the one and the other have nothing to do with each other. And I'd rather the high and wild physics guys would keep their attention fixed safely somewhere outside the solar system I'm living in thank you (just joking, but a grain of real concern nevertheless
This planet is unfixable, nobody cares enough. A lot of people care, just not enough. And apart from some professional care takers' opinions and programs, the average solution put forward by your average shocked person are laughable. So if we're really messing it up too far, well, maybe we'll try and clean up a little. Let's hope we find viable alternatives for our more messy activities before we pass some critical treshold.
For the rest, just look at every humanitarian, ecological or political issue that in itself forms a sizeable threat to us or this planet. See if you like how we're "fixing" it. Not that some people aren't doing what they can and some organizations aren't great. Just, if you look at it all, you realize it isn't a bad idea to have some mad scientists look outside the solar system as well. They wouldn't be any good anyway in finding "solutions for this planet".
Most things are easily fixed anyway. It just takes investments (paid with money), sustained effort and lots of coordinated actions. Starting with good will between people with opposing viewpoints and different interests. Ahahahaha.
Simply put: take the combined budget of the US and Europe on military spending for ONE year, and you already have the money to fund half a century of all programs on acknowledged "big" problems like poverty, disease, education, clean water, most environmental issues etc etc etc. on a world scale, yes sir.
Problem is, even saying this is deemed political, liberal etc etc etc. So, while most problems are easily solved, we think it makes more sense to invest in a better club to hit our neighbor with. And well, for a talking monkey society that even makes a sort of horrible sense. After all, how can you trust that other alpha male and his friends NOT to kick your country in the bollocks and steal your mates? You can't, you just can't. Even Bush starts to make sense with his pre-emptive strike thing (the bloody uber-religious idiot fascist), which is fancy for "I saw you looking at my mate, so I'll kick you inna fork FIRST".
So, in short, without all the emotion: let's just try to do what we can on ALL fronts that aren't at least directly geared at killing us off as fast as possible, eh? Warp? Bloody good idea. Helping mankind? Sounds great.
Bet you half a dollar we'll have warp drive first.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
...And cavemen should still be in the cave, trying to perfect life there. Have you heard of "Wound licking"?
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
The problem I see is that while it may be possible to break the light barrier without breaking causality and using up infinite amounts of energy (and getting infinite mass), we ourselves may be keeping us from discovering it. He's right; this needs non-mainstream thinking. Creativity is severely dampened by this-is-impossible cries. Some might see a challenge in it to disprove this, but even then, the fact that it is considered impossible is cemented in the mind, thereby having an impact on creativity. Also, the fact that sometimes, the scientific community behaves like the church condemning heretics (just read the part with the difficulties getting a hearing about this exotic propulsion concepts), and that consequently, there are MANY crackpots in these "forbidden zones" which create an enormous noise, do not make things really easier. This might be too complicated for an innovation made by some weird genius in his basement, but the powers that could handle it might be too narrow-minded.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
A isn't true, B might be (we don't know yet). Also, in order to expand "information space", you need to expand in physical space. And by killing off dreams about the last real frontier, you aren't doing any good. Just like the farmer boy who always dreams about moving out and becoming something greater, but who is forced by his parents to remain in the farm.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
I also object to the parent's use of "conquest." Our friendly relations with the simple, stone aged people of planet Khalet, while they may seem harsh, will eventually bring these aliens our human ideas of civilization and technology, which will doubtless serve them much better than their Eden planet ever could have....
heck we cant even return to the moon!
:)
and they are thinking of other stars
one step at a time people (look at the chineese at the rate they are going they will get to the moon faster that the US, im sure by 2020 the chineese will have the biggest economy in the world while the US fight of some war in YET ANOTHER MIDDLE EASTERN COUNTRY)
anyways thats my rant [itll probably be modded down out of existence...]
Your opinion is yours. but it sounds awfully like the 19th century opponents of trains. "ooh the human body cannot sustain speeds in excess of 20 mph, it's just unnatural". Railway travel (general) "I see what will be the effect of it; that it will set the whole world a-gadding. Twenty miles an hour, sir! - Why, you will not be able to keep an apprentice boy at his work! Every Saturday evening he must have a trip to Ohio to spend a Sunday with his sweetheart. Grave plodding citizens will be flying about like comets. All local attachments will be at an end. It will encourage flightiness of intellect. Veracious people will turn into the most immeasurable liars. All conceptions will be exaggerated by the magnificent notions of distance. -- Only a hundred miles off!--Tut, nonsense, I'll step across, madam, and bring your fan'...And then, sir, there will be barrels of port, cargoes of flour, chaldrons of coal, and even lead and whiskey, and such like sober things that have always been used to slow travelling -- whisking away like a sky rocket. It will upset all the gravity of the nation...Upon the whole, sir, it is a pestilential, topsy-turvy, harm-scarum whirligig. Give me the old, solemn, straight forward, regular Dutch Canal - three miles an hour for expresses, and two rod jog-trot journeys -- with a yoke of oxen for heavy loads. I go for beasts of burden. It is more formative and scriptural, and suits a moral and religious people better. -- None of your hop skip and jump whimsies for me." Source: From the Western Sun of Vincennes, Indiana, July 24, 1830, as quoted by Seymour Dunbar in A History of Travel in America, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1915, Vol. III. p. 938. http://www.foresight.org/News/negativeComments.htm l
Just keep your horse then...
Exactly why we need to find a way to get off this planet faster. Earth cannot sustain economic growth as it is now unless we limit it (impossible), or find new resources. It's all about Lebensraum, mein Freund. "Kuwait's largest oil field has peaked and is now in decline," "there is serious speculation that Saudi Arabia's giant Ghawar oil field is either at peak or is very close," "Global warming is clearly a fact," "The antarctic is melting off at an uncomfortable clip not to mention Greenland" "Population growth continues unabated "
Other than that, the biggest shock I got out of the article was NASA in the same paragraph as "heritage technologies". Supporting the technologies of the past is NOT what we're paying taxes to support NASA for. Particularly since we're not going to get space industrialization with launch costs of a few thousand dollars a pound, and that's about as good as we can do with rockets.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Simply put: take the combined budget of the US and Europe on military spending for ONE year, and you already have the money to fund half a century of all programs on acknowledged "big" problems like poverty, disease, education, clean water, most environmental issues etc etc etc. on a world scale, yes sir.
Tried that. Didn't work.
Problem is, even saying this is deemed political, liberal etc etc etc. So, while most problems are easily solved, we think it makes more sense to invest in a better club to hit our neighbor with.
No.
Take Africa, for example. It would be easy to make sure that every child in Africa had enough to eat. There's more than enough food left over in America and Europe to do that.
But if you ship that food to Africa, it ends up rotting on the docks, or stolen by thieves, or armed rebels, or the government (if you can even tell the difference). These people are profiting by making other people's lives a misery. Sending more aid just results in more theft. You could send in troops to protect the food, but (a) that would cost far more than the food itself, (b) the countries in question won't let you, and (c) hey, you just spent the entire military budget on rice.
This is what Paradigm Shifts are all about.
Paradigm Shifts are moments in history when the truth, as seen by the majority, changes to an other one.
No one can force one of these to happen as they are bound by the passing of the generations (sometimes many: see religion), when old encrusted ideas literally die with the oldest generation.
This means it take time, there is just no way arround it, but eventually a new "The Truth" arrises (which can also be a revived old truth, and will include some new false things), which will replace the old one.
And suddendly (maybe) the light speed will be a problem no more.
Have faith (and patience)!
Ernest.
Ernest J.W. ter Kuile
So, to summarize, while solutions are simple, implementing them is not. I'm sure it's not too hard to interpret my ramblings that way. And my main point was: it's no use to lament the fact that physicists are looking at warp drives to solve interesting puzzles instead of looking at for instance world hunger. Lots of people look at that, find solutions which are in itself simple enough but need too much good will and sustained effort (and not only from the haves, also the have nots, or the haves among those countries that have lots of have nots).
Cheers.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Look at the physical volume of your computer.
Remember the physical volume of ENIAC.
The physical volume of the DataVault of a Connection Machine is much, much greater
than that of a 250GB SATA disk.
The last real frontier isn't that big thing in sky! People stare up at the sky and think
of colonizing foreign worlds. We're too immature yet for that. The whole species is.
Remember Q in the last episode of ST:TNG, at the end, in the courtroom.
Vector spaces of financial data, vector spaces of word frequencies. Spaces of files. Spaces of ideas. That's where we're at.
In no uncertain terms, physical space is increasingly irrelevant.
Tell that to the asteroid that's barreling down on us (and make no mistake, there is one - we just don't know where or how far away it is).
This navel-contemplation point of view is interesting. But that nasty "real world" will get in the way from time to time.
If you want a more esoteric argument, also consider that it's entirely possible that human information space is limited by physical space. That is, we simply don't explore possible avenues because of the physical space we're in. This is usually called "necessity is the mother of invention."
Well, we don't need hyperdrive for that. The Solar System has ample reasources, enough to sustain a far larger population than what we have with energy production being a non-issue for a period of a few billion years and enough power to make high speed, but still slower than light, intersteller travel cheap and affordable.
Say it with me people, Dyson Sphere.
The MPAA is not cool enough to have ninja lawyers. And they're all employed by the EFF anyways.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Sure, a few blackboards for a few mathematicians and physicists might seem like a cheap way for NASA to look like it is doing something today but stabilizing the wormhole is going to be a bitch in 24th century dollars.
Until propellantless propulsion is invented any long range space travel is just a hallucination of virtual reality.
But it would be okay to have sex with them, right?
No , than it's a simple solution wich cannot be implemented simply .
Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself
As long as we're appropriating money for nonsense, can I have $40 billion to discover the slow-motion Gravity Bubble? Lifts Immense Loads In Total Silence, trading gravity particles for time. The equation is T=Gc^2.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Perhaps you missed the internal and external parasites which radically reduce the life-span of the Khaletians? Not to mention the friggin' blecharoids that sneak into their huts at night and take their offspring off of the dirt floor right under their olfactory pads.
I'm not even going to get into the the last pandemic of garuda virus.
I'm sure the real data is either kept locked away or drowned out by the noise of paid-for studies and nonsense pseudo-science.
Yeah, there's quite a derth of info on GW, pollution, urban expansion, threatened species, etc (some of which is paid-for and nonsense). All of it hidden away in Google.
Those Africans would do well to climb that ladder of technology so they can feed themselves, live healther, have fewer children, etc. Luxury, by the way, is a relative term. They would consider a real house a luxury over a hut, even if it's a double-wide.
I'm prepared to go with that, but that's just word games. If you genuinly don't see my point, let's leave it at that.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
> Sure, a few blackboards for a few mathematicians and physicists might seem like a cheap way for NASA to look like it is doing something
Administrator #1: "If we start a Department of Mathematics, all we'll need to buy is pencils, papers, and erasers."
Administrator #2: "If we start a Department of Philosophy, we wouldn't need to buy the erasers."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So long as men and women have beliefs for which they would gladly die, there will be conquest and there will be war.
Not necessarily. One could be ready to die instead of rejecting his God, as long as one doesn't want to impose his idea of God onto others, I see no problems.
Some ideas imply enforcing them onto others. For example, if you believe in freedom, you can't possibly allow slavery around you. But some ideas can be kept to oneself. If we could all agree on the first kind of ideas, idea war wouldn't be necessary, and people could still gave beliefs for which they would gladly die.
How does population control cheapen life? We selectively breed all sorts of animals, much to their own benefit. We have many animals that are far stronger and healthy than the average human on this planet.
It is technology and unrestricted population growth that cheapens life. Where once only the most fit survived, now the most depraved and monsterous get by due to the genius of higher forms of humans. Billions are alive only due to the generosity of a few.
How are billions of people living in barracks style housing projects not cheapened? When we look at the beauty and vigor of more healthy civilizations of the past, are these people not total contradistinctions of say, Classical Athens? Will we have timeless statues of these creatures? And what of the lowest forms? Are we to imprison 1/4 of our population, when we could have prevented them from ever being born?
Eugenics is the safest, most sane, AND humane way to deal with the desires of human nature, the power of our technology, and the constraints of our world.
Only the best should survive, and the only way to do that is to arbitrarily set standards of physical fitness; both psychological and aesthetic. Only the intelligent and beautiful should be allowed to reproduce. Criminals, the mentally deficient, the insane, and the ugly should all be sterilized.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Its not FTL but baby will it get the ball rolling. I'll just run this by everyone here... With all the talk lately about a space elevator, I got to thinking after a sort of recent slashdot discussion, just what advantages would a space elevator offer over a tower launch? I contacted the man responsible for a similar idea, the skyramp (warning: hideous javascript menu may break firefox), Carlton Meyer, and had a dialogue in which he pointed me to a tower launch archive.
The ideas I see bandied about there are similar to what I had in mind, which would be essentially an 11km tall tower (think pylons rather than skyscrapers, based at sea), with evacuated airless launch tubes, using nuclear reactors to power a maglev or pulley system to accelerate vessels to escape velocity. These would then emerge above the end of the troposphere, with it's associated weather and air pressure, and have little to no fuel needed to escape the earth's gravity, meaning you could do a lot more while you were up there. At 1m/s acceleration, you would be at escape velocity when you exit the top of the tower.
Not only would this enable multiple launches daily, it is, unlike the space elevator, readily achievable with today's technology, and financially viable as well. Given NASA had an annual budget of $16.2 billion for 2005, and a nuclear power plant costs a cool billion to build, give or take, we could have this up and running in a few years. And once we are up there...
Space has got vast, essentially unlimited resources. One recent story pointed out the trillion dollar iron asteroid up there. The thing has about 5 tons of steel for every man, woman and child on earth. And thats just one of god knows how many... billions more?
Once we leap the cost to escape hurdle (as I think I have managed), we can proceed to use these resources. There are several obstacles in the way of this, first of which is zero gee mining, we have no idea how to do it. We can either mine the ore out there, or bring the asteroid back into orbit and slice it up there. Or slice it up and send it back to orbit. I would be opposed to moving it back into orbit for processing, purely for the debris issue. Perhaps a lunar base would have some merit there.
So we set up a mining and processing operation either on the moon or in deep orbit, and start cutting and processing one of those bad boys. Whats the first thing we build? A bigger processing and mining operation. Space exploration, much like the internet, has to be a largely incestuous affair at first, existing solely for its own benefit.
Once we have that mastered, we can move to algae pods in orbit for food production, oxygen refining, and fuel production (biodiesel or chemical engines), all of which can be powered by the immense energy of the sun, and use the raw materials abundantly available in space. Whether you ship that stuff back to earth or use it for further colonisation, its a vital step.
The production of automated scouts is also a high priority; a vast amount of surveyor and prospector drones to sweep and map every square inch of every rock and gas in the system, out to the Oort cloud, and figure out what they are made of. I'd err on the side of quantity rather than quality, still no reason not to have either. This could be combined with deep space observatories that would make hubble look like the end of a coke bottle.
So now we have a manufacturing bridgehead, a good idea of what's interesting out there, and a cheap means to launch to orbit. Actual manned system ships would come next, to either colonise or investigate the system. The rest, as they say, is (future) history.
A lot of this would require automatio
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Texas Instruments has announced plans to revive its flux capacitor project.
"take the combined budget of the US and Europe on military spending for ONE year, and you already have the money to fund half a century of all programs on acknowledged "big" problems like poverty, disease, education, clean water, most environmental issues etc etc etc. on a world scale, yes sir."
The US and EU already spend double their collective defense budgets on social welfare programs and have not achieved these goals. How would 1/50th of that budget per year eliminate poverty and disease for the entire world?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
1) new planets ARE new resources. Resouces would be more limited if we *don't* travel.
2) Expensive... so? We're not putting the money onto the rocket and blasting it into space. All the money spent on a project getting people to another planet actually stays on this planet, ready to be spent again on the next thing.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Not that I am a proponent of it one way or the other, but this would not necessarily be the case however if there is any validity to the idea of panspermia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia.
Yup... Because we know stuff like transparent aluminum can never come true. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
When cryptography is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy
correct?
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Disclosure: I am a neuroscientist.
I think the most likely way we're going to get intelligence to other stars is to send AI computers, since they wouldn't mind the long wait. Even if creating AI is hard, if Moore's law holds, in 50 years we'll be able to simulate every neuron in a whole human brain on a computer in real time, so even if we don't understand intelligence, we'll be able to reproduce it. And if biological life is so important to you, send some frozen embrios (or info about their DNA on hard drives, and stock chemicals for building embrios from scratch) and artificial wombs with the computers too - let them build a colony, then defrost their kids.
Far-fetched? In my opinion, it's much more likely than being able to keep whole humans happy on a 100 lightyear trek. Yes, Moore's law might not hold up, but I predict we'll be able to upload brains before sending our fragile bodies intact to distant stars.
Patrick
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
Ummm, when?
They're perfectly safe.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Bah, you know what will happen is that they'll try to build this stuff, can't get it working, and then revert to Apollo-era technology again.
It originally appeared on Space.com where it occupies only one page.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
The problem with the NASA hyperdrive program is not that it costs money, the problem is that people like you think it's going to be an alternative to cleaning up our act here at home.
You will not get off this planet, and neither will many generations to come. There won't be self-sustaining space colonies, and there won't be interstellar travel. We either live on this planet or we die on this planet. Deal with it.
According to Kirk's Law, of course it is! Kirk's law, of course, states "If her species is sentient, it's okay to bang her."
Of course "okay" does not imply "a good idea" -- the Horta is sentient, but Kirk was wise enough not to give her a go, as she'd certainly cause third-degree little-captain-burn.
It's one thing to deal with the very real fact that we can't just up and leave. It's quite another to argue against researching ways to leave on the basis that we shouldn't ever because we can't now.
.001% want to work on some pie-in-the-sky plan instead of the ordinary mundane make-work, why should we stop them?
We only need 2% of the population to be productive to pretty much support everyone else. So if
Oil & efficiency has brought us into the age of Science and Art. I say to the artists: stop trying to tell the scientists what to do.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I know this is kind of pointless but it's nice to see Dr. B mentioned in a normal article. He taught my Space Systems Concepts class a year ago at UCF and I have met with him a few times as an advisor for our senior design project with the Nanosat-4 competition. He's pretty heavy into the propulsion side and is developing an operational Microwave-Electro-Thermal thruster. Interesting guy but a bit obessessive with the aliens thing. He always throws klingon references into his school lectures/presentations. I won't give his precise work location but it's at Cape Canaveral.
Planetes
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
Here's another way to view the math - if you start at standstill (i.e. v(0)=0) and expect to be moving at 11km/s at the exit of the tube, your average velocity is Vaverage = (v(exit) - v(0))/2 = 5.5km/s. Using this number you can calculate the time to traverse the launch tube: t = distance/Vaverage = 11km / 5.5 km/s = 2 seconds. You can also calculate the acceleration: a = v(exit)/t = 11km/s / 2 = 5.5km/s^2. So relative to 1 g = 9.8m/s^2, your launch system will require occupants and payload to sustain about 561 g's for the 2 second launch.
For electrical and mechanical payloads, that's achievable. Many small atmospheric-study payloads have been gun-launched to orbital altitudes, but on ballistic trajectories. Cited accelerations are on the order of 12000-14000 g's for very short durations.
For people and critters: pink goo.
I guess it'll be fine to have sechs with "them".
However, the session might not bring you the same satisfaction as you'd get by having sechs with women; not that we know in slashdot anyway.
I think I won't be too please to have sechs with a cow with 8 boobs; and a green alien with slime vigina + 3 dicks won't please me too much. Good question though.
Now if we find out that there's no way to do that in the timeframe we have left down here - that's when the real fun starts.
That's exactly what I was looking for. All men equal when the Tsunami strikes Hong Kong, Boom, where you gonna run now B*?
Seriously, people forgets their priorities in life unless they're pushed down to the point when they're deprived of their basic needs. That's when they know what's important and what's not. I hate seeing kids forgetting that.
Wait something is fishy here. 2 seconds to traverse the launch tube is wildly out there. Even to accelerate to 30m/s would take a lot longer than that. What you are looking at with this system is a slower initial acceleration, and then power being applied every meter (perhaps in increasing amounts) via a maglev system (one or more rails). So the time taken to cross each 1m second becomes shorter and shorter, but the actual speed increase (in terms of pressure) stays the same. Its not like a cannon blast. And how do cars reach 27m/s in 3 or 4 seconds? I think your numbers are a little off, there.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Simply put: take the combined budget of the US and Europe on military spending for ONE year, and you already have the money to fund half a century of all programs on acknowledged "big" problems like poverty, disease, education, clean water, most environmental issues etc etc etc. on a world scale, yes sir.
Yup. But it remains a question whether Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jung Il and the other then rulers over Northern America and Europe would really care and even if they did, whether you'd be allowed to speak freely about any disagreements in policy you might have.
I'm not saying our defence budgets are optimal or efficient, but I wouldn't say they're completely unnecessary either. It just doesn't work that way.
Indeed. Call it the human factor getting in the way. Which is why I said it doesn't make sense to lament the fact that some physics guys are looking at warp drive instead of world hunger.
I'm not going against the military budget per se. Well, um, actually I am. I'm naive that way. It was just the grossest example I could find of taking things out of context just because you feel the world should be different.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Quantum theory is still not connected to the theory of relativity. Until we have a unified Physics model that explains the universe, we can not be certain if it is possible to 'warp space' and travel to other stars.
At the time of Newton, the theory of Gravity was the ultimate achievement of the human mind. Then came Einstein who showed that Newton's theory was a specific solution for a specific set of states, and that a more generic model exists.
Who is to say that we are not in the same situation now? there are still things unexplained: a) the cosmological constant K, b) the accelerating expansion of the universe, c) the leap from the Quantum world to the macroworld d) the Cassimir effect, etc. Until we can solve all these, and many others, under the same Physical model, we can not really say if we can have 'hyperdrive' or not.
Given that the quantum world is so strange and "unrealistic", my gut feeling is that warp drive is possible. If we ('we' as humans) do not pursuite every possible solution, we do not know what is possible.
And let's not forget the side-discoveries...for example, we may discover infinite energy, or teleportation, or something that will foundamentally alter the situation on Earth to the better (no more wars for material things is one thing that springs to mind!)...
But they are highly dependent goals: if we find other worlds, then we might respect our world more, especially if those other worlds have life.
Well, first of all, your numbers are wrong. But since we're both painting with a broad brush, who cares.
Second, the point you're making is sort of the point I was making. Actually spending that money differently won't solve anything. But it could. The numbers and projects come from UN studies and programs actually being implemented and then extrapolated and put against the military spending of one year. And could theoretically be applied on a world wide scale. But they can't of course. So, whatever numbers we use, it's all a pipe dream. But one important enough to keep dreaming.
Third, achieving the goals of any project is very important, but making the effort even more so. After all, you can't possibly suggest that our defense projects achieve the goals that we dare to put out in public? They achieve lots of goals, but not the ones we could compare with "solving world hunger". They don't make the world a better place for instance.
Otoh, the same argument that those in favor of even more sophisticated and interesting ways to disembowel their fellow man constantly use can be used to defend spending on social wellfare and other so called non-economical spending. Imagine a world without that.
You don't have to, I've been to some of the places where they don't do that sort of thing. It's incredibly cruel to devide the people you meet into categories like "whatever happens to your health, if it's even mildly life threatening, you're a gonner" and "a new heart? why certainly sir, just grab your check book". Hearing their political representatives say proudly they have closed a lucrative deal with the US to modernize their military makes you want to buy one of those sophisticated toys yourself and do some localized surgery. Especially when said politicians keep getting in the way of each and every humanitarian effort because it is "destabilizing" while not spending one penny themselves because why should they?
So, while I might think the money could be better spent, it's quite safe for you or anybody else to suggest otherwise. We're all just pissing in the wind and in a hundred years we'll all be dead.
Which brings me back to my real point: thank god some physicists are looking at warp drive. They actually look beyond the here and now, which is a major accomplishment and it serves no real purpose to let those guys work on world hunger.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I fixed your statement for you:
"[Until it becomes possible to have an action without an equal and opposite reaction] any long range space travel is just a hallucination of virtual reality."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Well, let's say you're at the last meter of the tube, and you're going 10999m/s. Over the last meter of the tube, you increase the velocity to 11000m/s. Delta-v is 1m/s, time is (roughly) 1m divided by 10999.5m/s or 0.000090913s. So acceleration is about 10999.5m/s^2, or 1122G. For a 100kg human payload (well, former human, after 1122G), you need 12.1GW at this point of the launch, and of course very few useful payloads will survive this acceleration. This is an even worse scenario than constant acceleration at 561G like an earlier poster calculated.
Back To The Future fans might note that a 10kg payload will require 1.21GW.
But just because your physics don't work out is no reason to poo-poo the idea. Let's figure out the real numbers involved and see if we can make it usable. Let's suppose we want to build a launch tube long enough to accelerate at a constant 5G and reach 11km/s. This will take 224 seconds. At an average velocity of 5.5km/s, we need a tube 1232km long. A 100kg payload will need a constant 27MW power source, but since the acceleration is only needed for four minutes, the energy used is only about 1700kWh. At Alabama Power's rates, this would only cost $117. So now our only problem
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
So an 11km launch tube, going at 5 gees, gets us almost 8% of escape velocity. And you're telling me that a tube 1232km long is needed for full escape velocity? Methinks I need to hire an actual physicist for a couple of days to get the facts here, cos a whole lotta numbers ain't adding up. :D
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Just doing a "back of the envelope" calculation and an understanding of raw structural engineering, I fail to see how you can get a tube up that high.
OK, Mt. Everest is about 9km, and it is in theory possible to construct a tower over 3 km, so in absolute raw theory this may be possible, but highly unlikely. Besides political implications, the Himalayas are also aligned east and west, which is not a very good orientation for spaceflight.
Perhaps more reasonable and something that would be useful in this context is to use Mt. Chimborazo in Equador. Discounting the fact that this is a volcano and not a geologic uplift mountain like Everest (with related dangers that the top of the mountain could blow up at any time wiping out the launch system), building a tube up to its 6200 m summit is goiing to be an impressive feat. Still, if you have it go on an east-west alignment taking into account that it is only 1 degree north of the equator, you get additional tangential velocity from the Earth's spin + some significant height. It might work, but just barely. Even here I think you can get at most about 7 km into the sky, not 11.
Also keep in mind that if you are intending to scar up mountains in this way, you have to find a government that is inclined to bend over and let you repeal just about any environmental impact laws that may exist.
I find it hard to believe that this approach is going to be used unless there is some huge amount of traffic of stuff going into space, and mind you places like Mt. Chimborazo are also going to be ideal candidates for a space elevator as well, which is equally exotic but at least has some significant more engineering which has gone into the design and development of such systems.
This is a "back burner" project that may or may not get built. The rationale for building a system like this on the Moon, however, is more justified, especially as you can build the "evacuated tube" on the Moon without even having a tube, and the escape velocity is significantly lower. It would also be a good place to build a proof of concept device first before you start to strap people into the launcher for a much harder to engineer device here on the Earth.
And about half of that came true. Chuckle.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Can you please define "fix?" As far as I'm concerned, this one isn't broken. The fact that it will be exhausted by the time your grandkids want to use it doesn't affect me. And no matter what we might do, today, there are some things we can't possibly "fix." Like the fact that the sun will eventually run out of fuel. Nothing in the universe is permanently in equilibrium, so where is the value in trying to force Earth some kind of unnatural equilibrium? The universe IS change. We have to find ways to change with it.
"We have nothing in common, your attitude annoys me, and your political views are appalling."
Just hoping to clarify the math a bit more... Mr. Yak injected an extra zero into his calculations.
The relevant formulas are:
Not as bad as ShavenYak made it out to be, but still way hard to accomplish. The real killer in the numbers is that nasty "^2"... To double the final velocity, the tower must quadruple in size (all other things being constant).
A few final thoughts:
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
If you had read my response, you would have realised that the evacuation is a non-issue. And the acceleration is not unfeasable, just incredibly bad for the health. The more people I talk to, the more realisation I have that the acceleration is a serious issue. However it appears now that this system is very useful for getting people and equipment into geosynchronous orbit, at a miniscule fraction of the current cost, and en masse. And keep in mind that this is without chemical rocket assistance. If you add even a small amonut of extra thrust (nowhere near what the shuttle uses) you can go just about anywhere you like. But orbit is sufficient for now. Once there, the rest of my suggestions could easily be put into play. Its a whole lot easier to get from orbit to escape than it is to get from ground to escape, especially when you can shuttle up components at a rate of a few thousand tons a day.
:D
One way or the other I have gotten some wildly variant responses in terms of the acceleration required and its effects, which tell me that a lot of people really have no idea. Also its worth mentioning that this system would effectively shelve any space elevator ambitions for the forseeable future, so I am getting a lot of flak from that crowd. Some serious research shall be done.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Yes, I thought something was amiss, and I barely understood the equation, heheh. I have been thinking about the fact that its relatively easy to insert something into GEO with this system (and very very cheap, comparitively speaking). It would be an idea to build components for further exploration up there, since its far easier to escape the earth's gravity well from GEO than from the surface, especially if you can move a few thousand tons of components up there every day. Not to mention that if you combine this system with a chemical propellant (much less than would be needed for the shuttle, for example), you could go pretty much anywhere you liked.
Also, I discussed building it laying down with Carlton Meyer, the skyramp guy. Apparently almost all of it would have to be vertical or you're dealing with some serious forces that we really don't have the engineering to handle right now.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Zero gee mining, heres a notion. Its like eating a half ton of cheese; you can't fit your mouth around it. So you cut it up into smaller segments, with cheesewire. So lets take say a rectangular frame of adjustable size (from a few hundred meters to many kilometers), power it with solar power, even a satellite ring of solar reflectors which it deploys when it reaches its target. These power lasers or some kind of diamond saw arrangement going from one side of the framework to the other, which slice the asteroid up. That doesn't resolve your problems, however, since now you have slices of asteroid falling all over the shop.
So when a laser passes through a segment of rock, foam of a sticky sort gets pumped in behind it (I don't think this exists right now, but its not impossible, I am sure) to keep the bits stuck together. Then, just keep cross sectioning the rock until you have manageable bits, which can be broken off. Then the third part of the ensemble comes into play.
The refinery, nearby, would be fed chunks of asteroid, and superheat them to seperate components. Not having gravity, a massive centrifuge (centriforge?) would be needed to seperate the parts into their elements. Split up, cooled, and shaped, these ingots of asteroidy goodness could then be shipped back to a manufactory in orbit, or processed on the spot (unlikely given the complexity of the components to be designed, circuit boards, ceramics, the lot). Even bare rock could be used as nutrients for algae pods.
Since we don't know whats out there, I can't begin to say which components could possibly be manufactured in space, and which would need earth based supplies, at least at first. Once we have a vast stream or streams of ore sailing back towards earth, dozens of these rigs slicing up rocks, and more being built, the sky is indeed the limit. Also another factor is that cutting up even one decent sized asteroid might take years, so it might be better just to slice off bits from it, maybe encase it in some kind of foam or resin first for stability.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Convert here
Man, you really need that seminar!
v = 11000 m/s (escape velocity, more or less)
a = 500 m/s^2 (a bit more than 5 gs)
Unfortunately, 1G is about 10 m/s^2, not 100 m/s^2, so ShavenYak is correct.
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
Suggestion: Build it laying down. A ramp instead of a tower. A 242 km ramp, curving up towards some mountains and a "final bit" that's like your proposed tower clearing the main atmosphere.
The curving bit sounds a little troublesome. Converting horizontal velocity to vertical velocity requires a force. If that's provided by the curving tube, then the tube, capsule, and their interface would have to be able to support much more force than just launching vertically to start with. Any additional reinforcement on the capsule takes away from payload.
Yes, the only curvature would be at the very bottom, I reckon. The vast majority would be straight up. I would envision eight or ten loading bays arrayed in arms around the tower, leading into a singe central launch tube, so you could load and prep a good few ships while others are launching. Also the arms could serve a double function as structural support.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
DOH!
I stand spanked.
I hereby retract all posts I have made on Slashdot.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
My newsreader would encode/decode the post if you pressed ^D. I sure hope nobody did it using pattern analysis when it was always rot-13.
It's cool that you can do pattern analysis you hblsfd whtu gsi bnjskw.
Man, you really need that seminar!
People who just laugh this away remind me of the "slippery slope" people for gay marriage. So much of what we already have is through impossible ideas, why do we feel the need to be realist now? How much did our ancestors create in the name and pursuit of magic, gods and the divine, which would be seen as impossible to the scientists of today? It is not necessarily the end product, but the journey that matters. Who knows what we'll create along the way. Many medicines where found while looking for the cure to other diseases. This is no different. Even if we don't acieve Warp Drive, we may find something different that could be just as useful. We understand so little about the universe, it's snobbish, in my opinion, to laugh up wonderous theory.
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
Nothing fishy; just math and basic physics. You know the boundary conditions - v(initial) = 0, and v(exit) = 11km/s. With an 11km-long launch tube, you've got a pretty well-defined system. If you start with the easiest scenario - a constant-value acceleration, starting from standstill, you can calculate the necessary equations:
... math. It doesn't have an opinion. You may not like the answer, but that doesn't make it wrong. The system you asked for - escape velocity at the end of an 11km launch tube, starting at standstill - defines the environment. The math told you what you'd need to do in order to achieve those goals.
... it's math. Embrace the Math, it's powerful stuff. As for the car accelerating to 27m/s in 3 seconds, it's all about horsepower (or kW outside the US.) Using the same equations above, v = at says (27m/s) = a (3s). Solving for acceleration, a = 27/3 = 9m/s/s, or about 1g (not terribly impressive.) Performance cars have upwards of 300hp (220kW) powerplants, which probably isn't "power at the wheel." Another poster indicated the need to have about 12.1GW to put 100kg through your launch tube ... that's 5 orders of magnitude more power required. Nah, the math is consistent.
a = a (which happens to be a constant)
Integrate to get velocity:
v = a * t (which happens to be the equation for a line intersecting with [0,0])
Integrate to get distance:
d = 1/2 * a * (t^2) (which happens to be a parabola)
If you have an 11km tube, and you enter it at zero velocity, and exit it at 11km/s, the above equations define the *minimum* acceleration necessary to meet the requirements. If you substitute a more complex acceleration profile and do the integrations, you'll come out with similar equations, but the peak acceleration is going to be higher at some points than with the constant version.
And the math is just
Turn it around. I'll give you some "artistic license," too. I'll allow you to have 100g constant acceleration over the duration of the launch, and make the assumption that we invent some tech that allows hyu-mons to survive the stress. The d=1/2at^2 equation dictates that 11km=1/2(100*9.8m/s/s)(t^2). It'll take 4.738 seconds to traverse the tube. You now know "t", so you can calculate the exit velocity as v = at = (100*9.8)*(4.738) = 4643.24 m/s. Unfortunately, that's not quite LEO orbital velocity (7.5km/s), so you're passengers will need additional protection from the ballistic trajectory (and subsequent re-entry).
It's not my opinion