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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.'"
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]
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.
Funny, this being slashdot, I'd have thought your first choice would be either a holodeck or seven of nine. :-P
(Though admittedly in either case the boobs in question aren't real, but hey.)
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I hope we have cleared that up, dammit.
Holodeck -> See "World of Warcraft"
Seven of Nine -> Search Google for "Tribble Porn"
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.
Find free books.
Can they be made really small?
Won't anyone think of the bees?
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
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.
Fast moving space dust and micro meteors (really the same thing actually) can be stopped by far more mundane means. You don't even really need to stop them per se, you just have to build your spacecraft to survive them. Remember that inflatable stations have been seriously considered - the reason is that a few pinhole leaks aren't going to be the end of the world if you have a contingency in place for them (duct tape perhaps? :-)
Radiation, on the other hand, generally isn't so easy to block. You can mostly ignore it if the spacecraft is unmanned, which is the best solution most of the time, but if you have to have astronauts up there, then they need some sort of shield.
Physical radiation shields generally rely on putting enough mass in the way to protect the people on the other side, and while that's fine for a nuclear reactor or a fallout shelter, it's a bit of an issue when you need to carry all that extra weight up to orbit. Getting the same protection without all the extra weight would be a big advantage. Pity it can't be adapted to non-charged forms of ionizing radiation.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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
MY EYES! The goggles, they do nothing!
Actual pictures are quite difficult to find, but... here you are.
I could see it selling to the furry market...
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Scotty, mod him up.
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
I believe the shields were able to focus their energy in original series episode #303, "The Paradise Syndrome". I recall Spock pulling out a small circuit-board from under the console and making a few small adjustments to focus the shield energy at the proper vector to thwart the attacking Klingon warbird.
yes, but will they be able to randomly shift the frequency of the field to keep the borg at bay?
Yeah. Since photons have no charge, a *magnetic* shield doesn't nothing against radiation. This article is about a magnetic shield to deflect charged particles like cosmic rays and solar wind.
It won't stop electromagnetic radiation, but that's not the only kind of radiation. Alpha and beta particles both count as radiation, and they can both be deflected magnetically.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
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 don't know what is more worrying, your knowledge of star trek
or the fact you know the exact episode this happened
Having a little experience with this question the answer that always seems to come up is between "no boobs and fake boobs, I'll choose fake boobs."
Oddly enough that's true in the porn industry as well.
Real is spectacular. These silicone-stuffed ladies are operating under entirely false pretenses. if silicone is what you like, buy a RealDoll. Guaranteed less expensive than the real thing over time, and those breasts are just what you want.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
>> Seven of Nine -> Search Google for "Tribble Porn"
>
> MY EYES! The goggles, they do nothing!
MY EYES! The Google, it does everything!
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.
According to the article, the purpose of the magnetic field is to hold a layer of plasma in place around the vessel. Plasma is made up of charged particles, and charged particles interact with gamma radiation through compton scattering and the photo-electric effect. This "shield" will reduce incoming gamma radiation via those phenomena.