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Star Trek Shields Now a Possibility?
An anonymous reader writes "British scientists have announced their intent to build a Star Trek-style magnetic shielding system to help protect astronauts from radiation. 'There are a variety of risks facing future space explorers, not least of which is the cancer-causing radiation encountered when missions venture beyond the protective magnetic envelope, or magnetosphere, which shields the Earth against these energetic particles. The Earth's magnetosphere deflects many of these particles; others are largely absorbed by the atmosphere.'"
Next on the list: lightsabers, and the ability to find capuccino foam by itself :)
This is damn peculiar...
(I really should have raised them)
Maybe with this kind of a shielding system we might be able to put a man on the moon for real.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
They'll probably need to leave them turned on at all times, so no one will get to say "Shields Up!".
[Insert pithy quote here]
Star Trek style shields also block energy weapons and solid objects, not just radiation. Pretty much the only thing they don't stop is Borg.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Astronauts, you say ? I can definitely see many applications right below the magnetosphere. Tired of the wife, kids, mortgage, urban stress and immune to http://www.davesdaily.com/pictures/302-fukitol.htm ? Energize !
Once again, the movies/tv shows have lead the way to developing new technology!
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
Course, it wouldn't be long before Jack-Ass had shields around someone's nether regions, and shot it with a gun.
I hope we have cleared that up, dammit.
to build a warp drive...once I become a world famous physicist...and overcome some of those pesky power problems.
This is great for charged particles but what about space dust, micro-meteors, and photon torpedoes, not to mention phasers?
This is great but it's not Treknology. Not as we know it, not as we know it, Jim.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So does that mean when went sent people to space before, they got exposed to all kinds of particals and stuff? Are they still ok? If so, then do we really need this?
Or....did we fake the moon stuff?
"Denny CRANE"
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
This was reported on slashdot three years ago. The space.com article linked to from the 2004 slashdot summary is actually much more detailed in terms of the science. The big engineering problems with this approach still have not been solved. (1) If you're not using superconducting magnet coils, a large, static magnetic field requires a huge power supply to keep it going. That's not practical for foreseeable, near-future technologies for going to Mars, which will need to use very small payloads. (2) Superconducting magnets are unreliable, finicky beasts, at least from my experience here on earth. You need big, heavy cryostats full of liquified gases. It's not necessarily a good idea to have a vital piece of safety equipment for your spaceship depend on an inherently high-maintenance, low-reliability technology. (3) Large electric fields are hard to maintain because you get arcing and discharges. I used to work at an electrostatic accelerator that used megavolt potentials, and it would start sparking at the most inopportune times, for reasons like, e.g., someone leaving behind a speck of lint inside the accelerator. When a spark would happen, you could hear it all through the building, and the energy released was equivalent to dropping a VW bug off the roof of a building. Again, low-reliability, high maintenance. (4) Although it's possible to use tricks to get rid of some of the particles, or channel particles to a place where they're not as harmful, you still have to deal with the fact that you have particles with both signs of charge, which feel forces in opposite directions from the same field. What repels one attracts the other. Also, if the particles get channeled to a certain place, and impact on something solid, then you get extremely intense secondary radiation at that spot.
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Can they be made really small?
Won't anyone think of the bees?
Star Wars shields and technology. Everyone knows an ISD beats Enterprise any day :-)
there is a lab in the southwest (nevada i think) where they generate fields as strong as the earth's magnetic field (in otherwords, what theyre looking for here).
the power consumption of the machine used is about the same as dayton ohio.
good luck mounting that generator on your back.
additionally, equating them to star trek shields is a bit of a stretch. it will block the same type of radiation the magnetosphere blocks, in other words, good luck deflecting lasers or solid matter. I get the feeling in order to do that you would have to make a shield with orders of magnitude more magnetic power, then for objects with mass engineer gravitic shielding a-la babylon 5.
in other words, star trek style shields are, very optimistically, at least 250 years away, and more realistically 700 to 1000 years away, assuming we last that long as a species.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Captain Kirk: Raise Shields!
;)
Mr. Spock: Captain, may I remind you that these new shields developed by British scientists rely on Magnetic fields and as a result...
Captain Kirk: Not now Spock!
Chekov: Shields up, Captain!
Lights flicker, ship powers down. Emergency lights light up**
Captain Kirk: Spock! What happened?
Mr. Spock: It appears that the magnetic shields have erased our hard-drives. Our ship is powerless.
Captain Kirk: KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!!!!!!!!
Disclaimer: I have no idea if magnetic shields would really erase hard-drives, but oh well!
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Hmm, what would be the energy requirements to create a "magnet bottle" to a distance of 20-30 kilometers? They got the idea for the shield from fusion reactor tech, but I'm guessing one would need a Warp Core to power this thing... Oh ya, and not have every piece of metal in the ship pinned against a wall :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Nothing can penetrate it. Nobody even tries.
But for destructive capability, her glaring eyes are far more powerful than lasers, phasers, or photon torpedoes.
She sails through life like a queen, beautiful, peaceful, and serene.
But let someone raise her hackles, and watch out!
Theose gov scientists could learn a thing or two from her.
Let me know. I will be happy to lend/lease her time for research.
I'd have a holodeck with a seven of nine program. For when I got tired of T'Pol. Jeez.
I am not a crackpot.
This is obviously the "deflector" that's been invented and not the "shield". Any 3-year old trekkie knows this. ;)
No, no, no, dude.
You only need bio-gel packs and iso-linear chips. But, only the green ones.
If you use the red ones and get them mixed up, you'll need Data to save your ass.
Weren't the Borg capable of predicting the next frequency hop of the shields, thus modulating their own weapons and transporters to correspond with the shield frequency, thus making the shields useless.
Or some such nonsense.
Wake me up when they invent Photon Torpedoes.
As long as they can redirect primary power from the sheild to the deflector dish, I will be happy. They will have a deflector dish right? ... Right?
I can see it now at the Didcot Science Centre (English spelling):
Manager: How long until we can get the shields operating?
Engineer: Eight Years
Manager: Eight Years?
Engineer: Yes, but you don't have eight years, so I'll do it in two.
Manager: Do you always multiply your design estimates by a factor of four?
Engineer: I have a reputation to maintain, sir.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Fry says:
"Shields at maximum Yarnell!"
Steak dinner. Pfftssshshzzzz.
A Guinness. Pfftssshshzzzz.
Can replicators only make food? Still, not bad...
we really need to make further advances in the technology of modulating energy through dilithium crystals first
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Scotty, mod him up.
I intend to build a perpetual motion machine
Just spin up a pendulum in vacuum. It just keeps going and going and going... wicked! Now you can move on to more challenging pursuits like a closed system energy generator.
My how slashdot has fallen. If these are "star trek shields" I'm an Aardvaark. How the fuck did this one get past the editors? Were they asleep at the time?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Looks to me this is the same thing that Robert M. Winglee was doing back in 2001 with Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2)
http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/M2P2/
Torchwood brings results. ;)
Seriously: Could be neat if they really get it to work.
No, some scientists have said they intend to build one. I intend to do a lot of things, it doesn't mean they get done.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
bah, Nikola Tesla would've had these guys beat 70 years ago if he had funding for his teleforce weapon. Imagine, entire countries surrounded in an impenetrable force field! With a couple million dollars, he might have stopped WWII.
I don't read TFA, but as other ppl said ( This thing is just like the magnetosphere ),
I think in the future colonization of planets, like mars, could be useful.
I'm not sure, but I think that mars don't have a magnetosphere like earth ( or if has it,
isn't strong enough to be effective). With something like that, could be possible
to make more easy to terraform mars!
Maybe that kind of "shield" allied with some nanomachine technology could help
colonization and terraforming of other planets...
You're mixing up the order. First you build the warp drive, then you'll automatically become famous.
"Raise them!"
(*whine, thrash, pout*)"I CAN'T!"
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
...oh hell, yes I am nitpicking.
In Star Trek, the shields were not magnetic but like other such technology manipulations of gravity and spacetime. From the POV of a particle headed for the shield, it would appear the whole ship moved out of the way and from the POV of the ship, that the particle moved aside. The active deflector array to the front did a combination of this and energizing of debris ahead to break it up, ionize it, push aside easier. Larger objects had to be avoided altogether but gas and dust could be dealt with which otherwise would be instant destroyers of a ship moving at high speed.
Read the Star Trek the Next Generation Technical Manual. Then go and Google for terms such as Alcubierre, Hutchison effect, crystal channeling charged particles, etc. You can see it is almost as if we have a really good idea of what we need to do to get there, but not the technical reproducible specifics. As if something unconscious is trying to get through to us.
Maybe someday someone will think, "hmmmm, if the electrostatic field is in the way of fusion, maybe instead of overpowering it with magnetic or gravitational means, we could find a way to cancel out the fields to let the particles merge easily... Hmmmm..."
Just musing...
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Could this be used in deep-sea explorations? Or would these shields only deflect energy and not matter?
While I might not know much on holodeck technology, I have quite extensive knowledge of breasts, yes, real ones (I know not many codewriters do) and I remember an MTGV special on the beach she did a few years ago and they had a nice natural droop to them in a two piece bikini.
I vote they are real and probably not as specttacular as we would hope.
By re-routing power from auxiliary nacels, cutting life-support from the lower decks, and turning off the holo-deck, they might just be able to reverse polarity by de-coupling the anti-matter containment field to properly reconfigure a photon torpedo to the borg frequency. Thus, Tea, earl grey, WILL... be hot.
6. Generate ad impressions
7. Profit!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Well then you know I'm OK because my favorite show is "The Golden Girls"
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I'm waiting to see the magnetic shield that protects me from X-Rays, Gamma Rays, and other even higher frequency electromagnetic radiation.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Star Trek shields are static based, defense deflectors are gravity based.
I thought the main deflector was the big EM rig but it's used for navigation?
Chances are that all they need is a Dollar Store, toy bar magnet...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
So tinfoil won't work, then?
Indeed, if by "a few types of radiation" you mean, "no types of radiation at all."
Not correct: it will not work for neutral radiation (neutron and gamma) but will deflect charged particle radiation just fine.
And doesn't technically deflect anything away, but instead traps stuff. causing the particles to precipitate at specific locations (which can be more heavily shielded) at the poles.
It is a real shame that nobody thought to tell us physicists about this because we have been using magnetic fields to deflect charged particles for years. Whether or not a particle is trapped (or where it is deflected to) depend entirely on the shape of the magnetic field and the momentum and charge of the incoming particle. You can trap particles but it is by no means a requirement.
Interestingly with a high enough magnetic field you can actually affect neutral atomic matter through: see this video of a floating frog. This is due to an effect called diamagnetism (not paramagnetism which the video claims it is). It is certainly the case that the fields they are considering are no where near enough for this to be a noticeable effect but if they could increase the strenght a few orders of magnitude (and shield the astronauts) you might start being able to have something a little more Star Trek like.
I wish someone would work on one that could shield a person from gunfire. Of course, these are Bri-ish scientists - they not quite facing the same problems us Yanks have.
La Vida Vegas
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't filling the 'bubble' with superheated plasma effectively melt the spacecraft as well? We currently make the magnetic bubble by projecting magnetism inwards (with the equipment on the outside). But projecting it outwards and then filling it with plasma, the spacecraft will be in contact with plasma. Seems like more thought is needed.
So what you're saying is that now all we have to do is to find a really long carpet...
This is definitely a huge breakthrough, because everything else we need to do now can be accomplished by modulating the phase of these sheilds and creating tachyon bursts by reversing the antimatter flow through the deflector shield grid... But the big factor will be determining how much energy can be put through the system before she cannah take anymore...
irresponsible. They will stop a projectile weapon, but they attract worms like crazy.
You may all go to Hell and I will go to Texas - Davy Crockett
I think I have a patent on this one... Should I sell it to Microsoft? Or should I license? For data/virus protection? Or for identity protection? Any advice?
With all these geeks here on /. I'd have figured someone would have mentioned the difference between shields and the main deflector on ST. The two systems are completely separate - the deflector is designed to move particles out of the way during warp drive whereas the shield and its associated emitters are designed to protect against foes.
Now if only it could deflect questions about what I was doing last night...
You misspelled "Keptin"
No. Once again, science fiction writers far predating TV shows and movies such as EE "Doc" Smith and his many predecessors, peers and those that followed led the way, and TV lamely followed. But that's OK. You go back to watching TV. Books might make your head hurt. Full of words, they are. Very annoying. And that whole "theater of the mind" thing... I mean, what if you blow a projector bulb in your cerebrum?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It is actually more akin to the deflector dish. It is what was responsible for deflecting small particles and the like from the path of the ship. At warp 10, even a single molecule would have the force to destroy the ship.
today is spelling optional day.
Next week I'm going to announce my intent to sleep with every hot celebrity in Hollywood. That doesn't mean it's even remotely possible.
Now we just need forward thrusters to divert the power to, from these shields.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
Lost In Space had prior art on this in 1965! Their invisible "Force Field" caused all BEMs to bounce right off it, at a radius of about 25 feet, I'd estimate (about the depth of a sound stage, coincidently).
Six of Nine...aka Borg Barbie. And those aren't breasts, they're special-purpose cybernetic processing implants...silicone chips, as it were. Mooohahah...I'd like to peta her flops.
This is JUST a magnetic cover to protect astronauts, not a defense shield to protect you from Phasers.
As usual slashdot misquoted the story.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
With every space shot and every disintigrated satellite, more space debris is produced that makes it ever less likely that the next space shot will be successful. Eventually, shields against this debris will be necessary if we're ever to escape Earth's bonds. The recent demonstration by China of a targeted satellite's destruction was one of the most space polluting events in history.
With this technology, we can finally send humans safely out of the Van Allen belt!
This means that we can finally go to the moon!
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Our British Starships will all be called the "HMS Ark Royal" (Her Majesty's Starship) and we won't need any of this complicated "NCC-1701" rubbish - just a nice big Union Jack on her bows.
Our starships will be crewed by stout and hearty jolly Jack Tars who wear red jackets for the only reason that we are British.
And when we first encounter the Vulcans, we shall of course be most polite to them, not stare at their pointy ears and invite them in for tea, scones and a game of table tennis.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm thinking it would be a lot easier to just use the magnetic field to focus the solar wind into a small point and then let it hit a relatively small radiation shield. So instead of trying to drag along 30km of plasma, you use a superconducting ring tailing the spaceship. The magnetic field generated would deflect all incoming radiation into the centre. With some finer adjustment you could probably focus the incoming particles into a few squre centimeters where you can collect them in a small lead or uranium bottle, which would also absorb the gamma rays generated as they impact. Heck, the particle stream might even be interesting for scientific purposes. With a bit of tweaking it might even be possible to generate the electricity needed to power the thing from it. Send it through another magnetic field to separate the positive and negative particles and you got yourself a nice little DC-generator.
Your question assumes they are at any time not asleep while approving stories.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.