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Telepresence — Our Best Bet For Exploring Space
Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute recently wrote an opinion piece for the NY Times discussing the limitations of our space technology. He makes the harsh point that transporting human beings to other star systems isn't a reasonable goal even on a multi-generational time frame. However, advances in robotics and data gathering could instead bring the planets and stars to us, and do it far sooner. Quoting:
"Sending humans to the stars is simply not in the offing. But this is how we could survey other worlds, around other suns. We fling data-collecting, robotic craft to the stars. These proxy explorers can be very small, and consequently can be shot spaceward at tremendous speed even with the types of rockets now available. Robot probes don't require life support systems, don't get sick or claustrophobic and don't insist on round-trip tickets. ... These microbots would supply the information that, fed to computers, would allow us to explore alien planets in the same way that we navigate the virtual spaces of video games or wander through online environments like Second Life. High-tech masks and data gloves, sartorial accessories considerably more comfortable than a spacesuit, would permit you to see the landscape, touch objects and even smell the air."
Uh... Aren't they forgetting the inconvenient slowness of the speed of light?
Unless they solve the FTL comms problem it takes seconds even for a short distance like Earth to Moon.
So if you are going to explore some far away place, telepresence will still require you to ship some human to the general vicinity.
But let's see what you think when some other alien civilization's robotic probes start enslaving our planet.
really.
This planet is entirely populated by lag monsters!
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
The real first step in exploring the stars will be re-evaluating what it means to be human. This article assumes that our descendants will be flesh-and-blood, with all of the weaknesses that that entails. But why should we bind our offspring to the ancient, easily-corrupted, and not so easily amended DNA that we ourselves use, when we could give them minds of silicon and arms of steel which fold up in an instant to sleep for the journey from star to star? Or better still, why not send a simple automaton, and transmit its brain at the speed of light? Human is as human does, I suppose, and the human era will quickly draw to a close if we decide that human must mean flesh and blood.
...you are interested in something other than sports, iPods, and Coach bags.
If your society can't be bothered, you're damned to spend more willingly on the NFL each year than you begrudge the entire space program.
Enjoy your cell phone.
kulakovich
Check out Project Camelot interviews and/or the Disclosure Project if you wish to know what is hidden from you...basically the posted article is crap.
...come to think about it, they will need to send robots to build the jumpgates. But once they are in place hyperspace will take us anywhere! I can hardly wait!
Put me on the first ship that isn't coming back. I think the prospect of living out your life as part of a colony on its way to who-knows-where in the cosmos is a pretty neat idea.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
And I thought GoLive had a lag time challenge.
"Uh... Aren't they forgetting the inconvenient slowness of the speed of light?"
Send a craft with a virtual reality simulation of a crew running on board. On the journey have the VR simulation recreate contemporary earth culture. The VR program fabricates various crises for the 'crew' so as to keep them occupied and to distract them from the knowledge that they are in a simulation.
When the craft arrives at the destination connect the VR simulation to robots through short-range-high-bandwidth radio connections. Have the VR simulation be updated by the robots interactions with the real world. Then beam the simulation back to Earth and run it locally with humans plugged in to it.
'Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?'
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we are going to have to put some human beings somewhere else besides this one ball of rock.
Saying that even multi-generational ships are not "a reasonable goal" begs the question (and is debatable... after all, this is an "opinion piece").
Reasonable or not, eventually it will be done. I have nothing against robotic explorers, but only as precursors to something better.
Not the proposal exactly (well with latency actually yes), but...
Robot probes don't require life support systems, don't get sick or claustrophobic and don't insist on round-trip tickets.
They also can't use intuition and years of training and curiosity combined to go, "hey what's that" as they glance over to the side at something a rover would have just rolled past.
We could learn more in a day of manned exploration of Mars for example than we have with the entire exploration effort to date.
Humans are too flexible not to send out for exploration, and I hate to say it but far cheaper to build (though again you have the issue of latency).
I also refuse to believe we'll never be able to freeze and re-animate a living person hundreds of years later, though that will take a good long while to get right.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The humans on earth can only "experience" what has been observed by the remote observer. If the remote observer passes by a planet and scans it at a great distance, the human explorer will be placed into a distorted bizarro world with poor resolution, and lifting a rock cannot be done because the remote explorer could not check to see what was under the rock.
Alternatively, you can have an AI "fill in the gaps" and assume what was under the rock. In that case you might as well play a video game.
For telepresence ("feeling being present in a remote place") you need to be able to have real-time response to your actions, not only watching what essentially amounts to a souped up QuicktimeVR. The interactivity is not optional and that doesn't come from VR goggles and gloves but from the realtime feedback look. Which is obviously missing, unless your want to do something like use alien planet data for playing CounterStrike or be happy with 6.47*10^11 ms ping ... (that is the roundtrip time to Epsilon Eridani mentioned in the article - 10.5 light years away).
It is a pity that people talk about virtual reality and related fields without even understanding the basics - but that is the consequence of media hype surrounding this field, together with people calling non-immersive, often even non-interactive applications "virtual reality". Computer games, SecondLife, QuicktimeVR are not VR, period - you cannot really achieve meaningful feeling of presence there. Of course, it sounds and sells better if you stick a gee-whizz sticker on the box ...
My God ... It's full of flying phalluses
First post, last in spelling bee.
Wait, do Klingons use Webex? I know the Borgs Twitter but it's always the same line over and over. They've got a social network that would make Facebook look absolutely amateurish.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I'm ready. Hell, I'm 52 (errrr, uhhhhm, 53 tomorrow) and I'm ready to go. What's wrong with the younger generation? For that matter, what's wrong with MY GENERATION?!?!?!
Build that big assed Roman Candle, give me some room and some food, and light that bastard off!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
What to do if something unespected happens? Abort, Retry or Fail?
Telepresence will enable us to see what happened a lot of time ago, but takes out human choices for all practical reasons for interesting enough distances.
How is this news? The goal is already to gather data in as high a resolution as possible. Simulations are already in place for the data we have.
Sorry, but I simply fail to see the novelty.
I, for one, would welcome them !
Squirrel!
The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time goes (relative to home).
Only at significant fractions of c. Accelerating and decelerating people to those speeds will take many years.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"transporting human beings to other star systems isn't a reasonable goal even on a multi-generational time frame"
Transporting human beings to other continents across the Atlantic isn't a reasonable goal even on a multi-generational time frame - commonly held view until people actually ignored the negative "can't do it" speakers and did it.
I want the human race to survive if the Earth takes a big hit.
Did you mean to write "when" instead of "if" here?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Please do that before you get off the toilet, next time.
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3 weeks after reaching the new star system. Hmm... guess I'll just off myself now. We need more in place. The ability to MOVE there would do it. We'd fork into a group of earth folk and space faring folk. With the earth so incredibly tiny the last few years it is hard for us as a society to give up being connected. But 500years ago people could do it I'm sure there would be enough people willing to do it now. Actually I think some people would be willing to zoom around the earth at light speed to go into the future a few hundred years even if they didn't get to leave the planet :p.
Great, glad to see we're exhausted our own solar system and are ready to explore the rest of the galaxy using disposable space drones. Yay for space trash.
I swear, if we ever do find intelligent life it will probably be because they've come to serve an eviction notice.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There was quite a good discussion of this on Charlie Stross's blog [British sci-fi author] some time ago:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html
It goes on at quite some length, but even if you can't be bothered to read the whole thread the initial essay is quite interesting.
For those who can't be bothered to RTFA, he questions firstly the practicality of ever sending humans out of the solar system, and secondly asserts that within the solar system
there's not really any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don't exactly scurry to move our families there
The purpose to the universe may be to create a life form capable of propagating throughout it. We will do this or the universe will eventually wipe our slate clean and start over, as it has repeatedly done before.
To venture out into the great dark with course perilous and fate unknown, to almost certain death. Of hope none for return, and faint to survive to my dotage. With a prize no less than the survival of human life after the inevitable apocalypse?
Sign me up too.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
More advanced robots, that we developed (along with much faster propulsion systems) in the decades since the originals were launched.
Hat tip: Carl Sagan, I think. Or maybe Azimov.
- Alaska Jack
Sending "watchers" first, robots, AIs, telepresence, etc, could avoid some of the risks, but will we have enough time?
If there is one resource we have a shitload more than we need or know how to handle its - people. Should we really care for their safety back on Earth?
1.8 people die every second. 106 every minute. Do we hold a minute of silence for those 106 every other minute? People are highly expendable.
Safety is not a problem. If you send colony ships time is also not a problem. Even technology is not really a problem - even now.
Problem is in the liftoff price per kilogram.
Once we get it down to around the price of an intercontinental flight today - colonial-sized ships will start costing something like cruise ships today.
When we get it down to what it costs in gas to drive 100 km today - colony ships will be cheap as jumbo-jets are now.
Only then - we will not be interested in going outside the solar system cause there is enough to keep us busy and well fed here for couple of centuries.
Well... most of the people that is.
Some of us will be busy digging habitat holes in an asteroid or two, strapping some engines to it and pointing it towards the nearest exoplanet.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
At a constant deceleration of 10gs it would only take a month. This is survivable by humans probably in good conditions as provided by a spaceship. 5gs is definitely survivable for 2months. I take it you are using current ship speeds.
Who cares, we're not going to be accelerating at much more than 1g in any case, and probably a great deal less.
(B) At that acceleration, how long does it take to reach a significant fraction of c?
0.95c is about turnover speed for a 1g trip to Alpha Centauri. It'll take about 21 months to reach that speed, and another 21 months to stop. So Alpha Centauri at 1g is about 3.5 years away.
Everything else is farther, of course. But not a lot farther, since you've done the slow part already. Twenty years can get you anywhere in the galaxy at one g.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Humans can sustain an acceleration of 10m/s^2 (a little more than 1g). One day (86,400s) would lead to a speed of 864,00m/s. To reach a speed of .9c (270,000,000m/s) would require about a year. It would require the same amount of time to decelerate. The problem is that even a speed of .9c does not give you much time dilation. We have gamma=1/sqrt(1-.9^2), which is 1/sqrt(1-.81) or 1/sqrt(.19), which is 1/.44, or about 2.3. Hence, one would age 44 years on a 100-light-year voyage.
Huh? The galaxy is 100,000 light years across. Even at .95c, that's a lot longer than twenty years... or were you planning to accelerate past c?
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Yes, a slow Ion Drive to get the vessel up to speed, enough power to change direction if the ship isn't on target exactly, and solar sails to deploy for the deceleration phase at the target star system with an aim to go into orbit in the habitable zone. From there the vessel can launch probes at interesting objects in the vicinity, acting as a hub for data collection to resend to Earth (although there is an argument for a lot of redundancy, but it might be easier to just send three vessels to each star systems).
It'd probably only cost a few hundred billion.
If humans can't - eventually, somehow - go there (where ever that be), what's the point of exploring? Humans motivation to explore is purpose, the desire to know about it, to get there, to own it and to use and profit from it.
(A) What is the maximum acceleration that the human body can withstand?
Unless they are sleeping the whole trip, it is unlikely that they will find comfortable more than one g.
B) At that acceleration, how long does it take to reach a significant fraction of c?
If you call significant c/2, it takes arround t=(c/2)/g= 1.5E7 s or around half a year.
And you don't want to hit the destination or pass by, so halfway speeding up and halfway slowing down.
A: For extremely short durations, a small sample size of humans have survived 150G. However, the green 50G shock stickers are commonly used on dummies to equate to major injury. 9G is about the most anyone can take without blacking out, even lying down. I suspect for long-term endurance you may be limited to 2 or 3G and even that would require extreme physical training.
B: Google calculator can easily answer this one: http://www.google.com/search?q=c%2F(9.8m%2Fs^2*3). Replace the 3 with whatever acceleration rate in G's you want.
The hard part, of course, is finding a powerplant that could actually do that.
Sort of like where we are right now with explorations of Mars; the first Mars Rover searched for life and didn't find any. Now the Mars polar probe has discovered what may be anomalous methane readings - but we can't remotely reconfigure the probe to figure out what we're actually discovering. A new generation of Mars probes will be needed with better sensors to either prove or disprove the notion of Martian life.
Which is not to say that a generation or three of robotic probes wouldn't be a good and valuable thing to do before shipping valuable people to other star systems. But robotic and "telepresence" sensors make very little sense except as the first step that will eventually lead to human exploration and colonization.
I think something like this is a perfect idea. Load it up with as many cool features as you can, shoot it off somewhere REALLY far away...and 50 years later, when it reaches it's destination, we will have greater access to the technology required to utilize it.
Just think, google milky way!
There are a lot of people I'd like to nominate to send on that one-way ship with you, but that wouldn't be fair to you ...
As per usual, fact follows fiction:
Clifford D. Simak's "Time Is the Simplest Thing" explored this possibility, though they utilized remote viewing in combination with it as well.
The idea is to go somewhere where you must hump like crazy for the survival of humanity.
Table-ized A.I.
True, for our current knowledge of relativity and quantum physics.
According to the special theory of relativity (SR), instantaneous communications would violate causality because it would allow one to transmit information backwards in time under some circumstances. Special relativity has been *very* well tested, so scientists are pretty much sure that FTL communications is impossible.
OK, let's see how they tested SR. They did measurements here on earth, and in satellites circling the earth. In particular, the Michelson-Morley experiment has been repeated many times by many different researchers to a very high level of precision. So this seems to close all loopholes, right?
Not quite. First of all, an absolute frame of reference exists, it's the background radiation of the universe. We are moving at 370km/s against this background. So, one of the basic premises of SR, that the laws of physics are independent of the frame of reference, needs a qualifier added: measuring the background radiation temperature of the universe depends on the absolute velocity of the observer.
There has been conjectures for over a hundred years that inertia is caused by acceleration against this background, so maybe absolute velocity must be considered too for some effects, as well as absolute acceleration. Perhaps instantaneous communications can only be performed in some but not all reference frames, that would exclude the possibility of causality violation.
I'm not saying that FTL communications is possible, not even that it's probable to exist, all I'm saying is that one must be careful to observe the limitations of our experiments before we extrapolate too far our theories.
10gs are survivable by a human in very good condition, for a few minutes. Don't try to get up while you're doing it.
We need modern dirigibles. They would be lighter than air. The launched ship wouldn't even need to be very big. If it is to be hone of a colony, it can be enlarged as the population increases. All you would need is a source of materials for enlarging the skeleton and generating more gas. If not carried on board, we can use robotic scout vehicles to search among the asteroids. Once, in space, the actual gas isn't very important, I would recommend that it be something breathable by humans, animals, and or plants, so that the entire ship can be used.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Is that what the NASCAR people are trying to do?
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
You are missing how time dilation works, it's not linear.
If the distance is greater than a few lightyears then you are going to be moving faster than .95c, say perhaps .98. At that speed the effects of time dilation are going to be even greater.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
In order to get really really fast ships, with some kind of propulsion that could get you up to 0.9 c. Typical rocket propulsion hits a law of diminishing returns limit at around 0.35 c... based on that, I tend to see very high subluminal speeds as not much different on the technological scale as the various types of superluminal travel. That is we can see ways where you can do it without breaking the laws of physics, but any actual, practical technology to do it is as yet unimaginable.
Actually, as I'm writing this, I'm thinking a light drive, where your propellant is photons may be capable of doing it (since you don't have to carry propellant), but it would require such huge power levels, you run into new technological hurdles. Admittedly, that is a much simpler than folding space-time into bubbles, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a severely limiting factor there as well.
Of course, there's still plenty of interesting stuff to be done within the solar system. All that requires is long-term habitat design, radiation protection, very-low-loss recyclables, space-based fission reactors, and cheap orbital access. You know, easy stuff.
Build that big assed Roman Candle, give me some room and some food, and light that bastard off!!
Wow - you really know how to party for your birthday!
I'm hoping we can use this upcoming SETI tech so you can invite me to the next one!
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Ah, okay-- I misunderstood. I didn't realize he was talking about 20 years in the traveler's frame of reference.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
> High-tech masks and data gloves, sartorial accessories considerably more comfortable
> than a spacesuit, would permit you to see the landscape, touch objects and even smell
> the air.
We could experiece the entire world this way from the comfort and safety of our life-support cocoons. No need to expose ourselves to nasty, dirty reality at all.
Just put on your full-body feely suit with feeding and elimination attachments and never take it off.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Here's an idea... we can do what we've always done which is BOTH. We were putting men on the moon and planning men on mars whilst sending 'telepresence' probes to Saturn and Jupiter. We can put men on mars and plan to orbit further out whilst out 'telepresence' maps out Pluto and beyond. And we continue to push outwards with the probes paving the way with their data and humans following up and doing what we do best.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
For instance, if we could build a flying structure that take the pressures in Saturn or Jupiter, we would first likely send these as we do know, as pretty autonomous robots. However, at some point we will likely send people to orbit, for more immediate control, even if they people never go into the planet.
Likewise, it is about time we send more advanced instruments into interstellar space, particularly to categorize the heliopause and the interaction with interstellar space. Several of these, maneuverable without the aid of solar cells, is an issue of fuel, but could also be latency issues. People stationed at the outer planets could be helpful.
I see this article mostly as an argument over funding. Human space flight is costly, and those funds could be used elsewhere. However, human space flight has it place, as a robot cannot internalize the full level of details and make the snap decisions well trained humans can. We are doing the right thing. Human exploration where it practical, and robot exploration where is not. It is not true that the space program, or any country, is stagnant. There are robots exploring the sun, and there are four craft that will hopefully survive to cross into interstellar space. This is science. All together. It is a naive statement to say that robots are the best choice.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Why not? He is just not thinking outside the box.
Get out of the rocketship model for a space craft and into something else . . . details of which will
be included in my upcoming novel . . .
Seriously, though, I used to think like he is but I had a breakthrough one day and realize that we really can do the multigenerational space travel thing. Make a list of what the problems are and then tackle each logically. The worst problem is radiation.
I am not saying what my ideas are because I will put them in my novel. But I also am not going to shamelessly plug myself or my writings.
I was thinking while unconscious possibly in a coma full of drugs to keep your blood from pooling or your brain turned to mush. While strapped in to a body fitting wall in a shape retaining suit. Maybe you could have your blood pumped back up for you as well. I did not think they'd be walking around being like "fuuuuckk my balls are saggy".
Anyways astronauts are some of the few people in the world that are already in very good condition. And they are already well trained for multiple Gs. I think the first few missions we'd do at around 5gs to make sure nobody's brains turns into mush.
a traveler at a velocity 0.9 times the speed of light will make the trip in only a few years
A speck of paint put a nearly quarter inch wide pit in the window of the space shuttle.
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/space_junk.html
Bear in mind as the article mentions orbital velocities are as slow as 17,500 mph. The speed of light is approx. 670,000,000 mph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
If you're going at 0.9c, hitting anything the size of a golf is going to end your trip real quick!
A golf ball has the mass of about 0.046kg.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/ImranArif.shtml
At 0.9c it would have about 5.4*10^15 J of KE.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Relativ/releng.html
In contrast, a 20 kiloton fission bomb has about 8.4*10^13 J.
http://www.chemcases.com/nuclear/nc-09.htm
Another way to look at it is this... you're not going towards Alpha Centauri at 0.9c ... Alpha Centauri is coming towards you at 0.9c.
Granted the space between here and Alpha Centauri is mostly empty, but what are the chances of hitting anything within a couple of orders of magnitude of the mass of a golf ball b/w here and Alpha Centauri? Even hitting something 1/100 its mass at that speed is going to be like a small nuke going off.
To be politically incorrect, the problem with the robotic exploration of the solar system and beyond is just that it is much too slow. We have found less about Mars, for example, in 40 years than we did about the Moon in the first Apollo landings. The recent Mars Exploration Rovers are phenomenal achievements, but astronauts could have explored the same area in maybe a week. The search for life on Mars is now at 30 years and counting, and we may (at present rates) know something definitive by the middle of the next decade.
Recent NASA/ESA reviews have discussed Jupiter and Saturn mission planning through 2040, and these missions will not deal with the biological exploration of either Europa or Titan. FInding out if there is life on Europa will take (given current planning) well into the 2060 period at best, and probably into the next century.
My prediction is that this will continue until it is overtaken by events, such as an efficient manned space-flight program in China or India.
As far as Seth's essay is concerned, neither human or alien expansion into the galaxy is likely to be focused on stars, and so the travel time to stars is not really relevant.
... is that it solves the short term problem of "I want to go there, but I can't". It does nothing about the fact that if human beings are to outlive our current home then we HAVE to find a way to journey into the stars. And that isn't necessarily about out-living the sun (measured - we hope - still in hundreds of million if not billions of years). It also means the possibility in decades, centuries or millenia to come of a good ol' fashioned "ELE" - to use the "Deep Impact" term.
Hey guys, chill out. All the design work has already been done for human space exploration. Just copy the models and science used in star trek when it come out this spring
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Twenty years can get you anywhere in the galaxy at one g.
Try 74,000 years. Our Milky Way galaxy is approx. 100,000 light-years in diameter. We are about 26,000 light-years from the center. Even at the speed of light, it would still take us 74,000 years to reach the far side of the Milky Way galaxy.
Twenty years would only get us, well, about 20 light years away from our Solar System which is drop in the bucket compared to the size of our galaxy.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Yes, and if you continue such acceleration, there would be really serious time dilation. With constant 1-g acceleration the subjective time to go 100 light years is just over 9 years.
Having said that, I don't think that is how people will do long distance travel - the dangers of collisions is very strong. (Anything you collide with is basically turned into energy, a 1 kg rock would have the energy of a multi-megaton bomb.) Going to the stars will take either multi-generational ships or manipulating space time.
You are ignoring time dilation. Read the thread's subject!
This'll only work if it costs someone their left testicle, and is sponsored by CISCO.
Or at least has huge CISCO product placement opportunities.
My robot went to Alpha Centauri, and all I got was this lousy hologram T-shirt.
Table-ized A.I.
Seth Shostak is unfortunately a staunch believer that technology will never overcome the current scientific laws for space.
I had an email exchange with him long ago over this very subject- whether ET might possess superior technology and be able to cross space without actually crossing the distance. He refused to even allow for that possibility and seemed certain that any type of space warp technology would require more energy than was possible. I recognize the limitation of our science today, but dismiss him as closed-minded to what reality is and the fact that it will undoubtedly change in very significant ways in the future that we cannot predict today based on our current understanding.
That said, its no surprise that he supports 1970's exploration technologies relabeled as "telepresence". Voyager 1 was telepresence technology. Yay, lets drop all ambition of overcoming the obstacles and stick with 1970's technology. Thanks Seth...great work predicting the future- it will be just like the past!
"Robot probes don't require life support systems, don't get sick". Hey Seth, there's a little thing called cosmic radiation. Heard of it? Over time it destroys electronics. Sure, we can make it to Saturn, or even Pluto. But when you're talking about 4.22 light years to the closest star, the travel time for a robot probe is in the 10's of thousands of years using conventional science.
It's simple: Make it a one-way trip. This wouldn't necessarily be a suicide trip - it may still be cheaper to make it a one-way trip and send regular "care packages" containing food, water and other things needed to sustain permanent human life on Mars than to make it a round trip, and with humans living the rest of their lives on Mars, a HUGE amount of exploration and study could be done.
Yes, I know, it's slightly controversial, and it relies on many things going right (followup supplies reliably arriving) and CONTINUING to go right (followup supplies continuing to be sent in spite of political changes), but the cost/benefit ratio is so much greater than a visit-and-turnaround mission, it should be seriously studied.
Tag lost or not installed.
The original poster said .9g. Of course, if you go .999g, your time dilation is much better.
In the perfect execution of technology. If you please I'll put mine in a distributed network of highly redundant biological organisms each acting in his own best interest programmed by millions of years of evolution.
We're not just talking about one rock here. We could be talking about some rocks a mile or more across, some no bigger than a pea, and all the sizes in between in the standard distribution. For every rock the size of Mount Everest we'll see at peak a hailstorm of minivan sized rocks. If they're bodies foreign to the solar system they'll come in on hyperbolic tracks and we'll see each one only once, and only for a few months. A rock like that you don't have time to turn it - the only safe course is not to be where it's going. Or rather, not to be going through where it is. Each one will have its mass multiplied by far more kinetic energy than solar orbital velocities could give it. And the hailstorm will go on for a hundred thousand years.
I certainly hope somebody's tracking the frequency of visible rocks on hyperbolic tracks through the solar system so that we can see what direction they tend to be coming from (and hence, which direction we're moving in) and their frequency so that we may become duly alarmed when it's time.
So no, science is never going to solve this problem with any answer except to spread out the squishy bags of flesh far apart enough that no one thing could get them all at once.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The thread's heading is "Ignores time dilation". That certainly applies to him! :-)
The Andromeda Strain anyone? Except instead of unicellular organisms, we have minute robots ...
There is nothing faster than human thought, not even light. Send telepathic astromen, have them interface with telepathic mission controllers, instant data link.
We just need to dust off that old CIA telepathy secret program and fully develop our abilities.
TFA makes a very good case that remote space science is better done by robots.
When people go, it is not for the science. They do science because they are there, but it's not the reason they go. We go because it's what we do. We have to do it. It's what we are.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I would think that if the point of science is to learn how to do something to benefit mankind, what better thing can science do than to have man learning how to live in space?
Compared to that, there's no useful reason to really send a robot into space. Trivia about other planets is nearly as useful as hard facts about how people would live there.
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It's too expensive for a private bunch of people to do, but eventually, spaceflight will get to the point where say, a bunch of white supremists could just bail on earth and set up a little nazi state on the moon, or a bunch of enviros disgusted by humanity could set up shop in their new world of mars.. there's ultimately a place for every ideology to live in. We don't have to learn tolerance if we can just get ourselves into space. There can be worlds for blacks, for whites, for gays, for catholics, protestants, democrats, republicans, and everybody can just have their own planet. maybe humanity is just like a giant cell of information that has accumulated so much it simply has to divide. we spread out across the galaxy, lose touch with each other, dividing, and dividing, until the enviros, nazis, protestants, whites, blacks, catholics, jews, all become separate species and evolve differently.
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Is there a method for space ships and their robot passengers to navigate and communicate back to Earth if the Sun is so far it's nothing more than a dot indistinguishable from other suns? How do we know our star maps are accurate? They're all based on approximations. A small degree of error could cause communication transmissions to be light years off target.
Camping on quad since 1996.
to Where's Waldo?
Were that I say, pancakes?
think outside the box and beyond conventional technology, how about utilizing quantum entangelment for instantanious reception and manipulation
okay, considering that the universe is in constant motion as are the galaxies and planets, what if we could launch a craft into space and decelerate it in relation to the motion of the universe, giving the effect that the ship is stationary and the universe itself is shifting around the craft placing it in a vicinity closer to another star system ?
Self-replicating space probes with slightly messed-up behavior priorities, anyone?
The moon isn't a planet, it's a moon.
mysql> SELECT * FROM `places` WHERE `place` LIKE 'home`; Empty set (0.00 sec)
But the biggest problem is going to be finding a course that you can take without colliding with a wart at that speed. It will be difficult to avoid anything at that speed. Also there is the problem of energy. With speed your mass increase too, which requires more energy for the same amount of acceleration. It eventually gets very difficult to accelerate.
I know relativity can forever tie us to this rock. But maybe we could survive on colony sized space ships and mine the planets. I don't know if the nearest star system will be reachable in the very near future.
We will need a laser weapon to vaporize any speck that comes in our way, and hope that there is nothing large on our way.
Space exploration is not easy but I hope that we do it anyway.
First off we will need to fix this dark matter thing. If there is anything wrong with Newtonian equations of gravity at low accelerations (MOND, pioneer anomaly) then we will chart bad courses.
...the problem with ALL forms of robotic exploration that we can manage at this time is that you have to know what you want to do BEFORE you get there, and there's very little ability to change the itinerary once the device is launched.
Certainly, I expect something like this would require something of a self-configuring and certainly autonomous unit, but STILL you are contrained by your design suppositions. Look at the Mars landers, since Viking(s). It seems that robotic devices now are a tradeoff: either broad-function with little ability to pull out detail in-depth data, or extremely narrowly configured to test very specific hypotheses. If you didn't pre-suppose you might find something of interest, you wouldn't design a device to test for it, obviously; in that sense sending humans is an exercise in sending grossly over-engineered capacity with maximum flexibility - sometimes it makes sense, most often not. I'd supposed that a few million years of evolution has made the human animal one of the more efficient data-gathering tools and once you design a machine with sufficient flexibility to even approximate human capability, you run into weight, size, and reliability issues that begin to dwarf even the life-support requirements for the fragile humans.
The constant flow of surprises from the Mars Rovers and Cassini (just to name a couple) suggests to me that it's really a very hard job to 'pre-expect' what you're going to find sufficiently to design the right instruments. We're not talking about known-unknowns, but the most unknowable unknowns. It's probably that I've been reading too much Silverberg, but part of me almost expects that despite sending dozens of probes to Mars already, once we get there we're going to be confronted with some gross and obvious weirdness that it just never occurred to us to check for, like the first explorers land and hear a pervasive music playing in the air.
This always seems to be presented as a false dichotomy, and I don't understand it. OF COURSE automated probes are going to do the bulk work of exploring. Frankly, I'd say anything else would be rather stupid. You could send a relatively simple 'standard' set of probes (a couple of orbiters, a couple of dropped landers, maybe a dropped rover) to a broad swath of targets at relatively low cost and very high speed. Maybe you send out 100 (1000?) probes and cull the data to draw down to one or two destinations that are "interesting" enough to send a team of humans.
Eventually humans will go, if only because the ultimate question isn't just data-gathering, it's about the HUMAN utility of such places. And you can only finally be sure of THAT once you send some human guinea pigs, er, explorers to check it out.
-Styopa
It is common sense that it is impractical to send humans to other star systems. In fact, it is impractical to send robots! Even with some massively great propulsion technology that can get us to 10% the speed of light then it will still take around 4 decades to get there. Robots are the best answer to long range missions. Physical human exploration should be focused on the Solar system colonization and utilization. We should develop high speed long range propulsion for automated systems and should we realize that one day it will be practical for humans to go to these far away places then redevelop the technology for that but the simply fact of the matter is that for at least the next few hundred years, we're stuck here in the Sol system.
How come we are taking this guy seriously. SETI is where the ID people got their inspiration. We all know how ridiculous ID is, SETI is based on the same principles, so it is obviously ridiculous as well.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
...that WE go anywhere. Having become mostly accustomed to this planet, I would like to suggest that we hurl our robots across space, accompanied with the most basic and hardy forms of life available. I'm not 100% sure what they are, but bacteria, moss? Perhaps sling a dead cat into the ship at the last minute, bursting at the seams with maggoty life?
We haven't found life on Mars, let's put some there and see what comes out. Before the space program is actually destroyed by war.
As others here have pointed out, by the time the craft gets to the targeted alien planet, the original researchers who implemented the idea of "telepresence" will have been dead a long time and those who are responsible at the time the craft gets there will be wondering "what the hell is that blinking red light for on that console".
Take the second or even the third ship. They will beat the first one there by years!
There was a science fiction story about an "ark ship" that left and when it reached the planet, it was already inhabited by humans who got their on a "fast ship" developed right after the other ship left.
Instead of being colonist, they got the short end of the stick and behind financially for the rest of their lives.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Not to be critical, but I think your math is a little off. If you're traveling at .95c, you could beat light to Alpha Centauri. Are you sure you don't mean 4.5 year? It seemed to me that a friend and I calculated it one and determined it would take 6-7 years at .75c. However, that was years ago, and I could be wrong.
Never Underestimate Human Ingenuity or Determination. We will indeed send people all over this galaxy, for nothing substitutes for on site work. Over and over again those of limited imagination say that this or that is impossible to do, and almost always proven wrong by a set of determined people with broad imagination and greater talent. Ask that Phonecian floating on the Med. if we will ever put anything (or land) on that silvery ball in the night sky. Given time, will, and imagination, anything is possible (especially given the fact that we still know very little about the limits of physics or space time). An engineer can do anything :0)
He means twenty of the traveler's years.
I wasn't ignoring time dilation, I was focusing on the "reality" of time occurring outside of the spaceship. The OP seemed to ignore the fact that humans will be discovering new physics and technology over the span of say the 75,000 years of "real time" occurring outside of the time dilated spaceship. Even though the travelers experience only 20 years of travel, when they arrive, chances are they will be greeted by "people from the future" who have long since already arrived and developed thousands of years of history/technology/culture. Hell, so much time may have passed by the time the 20 year traveler gets there, the star system & planets may have long since been abandoned.
So while it may feel "smart" to focus on what's going on inside the spaceship, you are missing the forest for the trees.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
I think it's strange that there's not more talk about sending a probe to Alpha Centauri, even if it would take many generations to arrive. Just to get videos and measurements sent back from there would be an amazing accomplishment, and probably would lead to advancements in our understanding of the universe.
Here is a good article I found about how long it might take.
I have an alternate idea for interstellar propulsion. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of it, but I've yet to see it discussed anywhere.
The idea is to latch on to a nice sized comet/asteroid which is headed in more or less the desired direction of travel. The lander would consist of a nuclear reactor power source, some sort of rail gun or mass cannon, and a couple of mining robots. The robots would slowly eat away at the asteroid, mashing up its mass into little balls or packets. These packets would then be shot off at regular intervals at insanely high velocities, each time causing the craft to accelerate.
About 2/3's of the asteroid mass would be used to get up to speed. This would be followed by a time of cruising. Then finally, the last third of the mass would be shot forward to decelerate the craft as the destination neared.
I think this has potential for extremely high speeds, much more that what is practical with conventional rockets. The nuclear reactor provides gobs of power, and the mass of the space rock provides a way to use that power productively.
It seems a lot of people here believe the biggest reason for sending people into space is the ability for mankind to survive if/when a cataclysmic event happens. That could be 500+ years in the future. Supposedly we need to colonize other planets/solar systems to ensure mankind exists forever.
The question I ask is, why? Why do you care that mankind exists forever? I understand you don't want to die, or have your children or grandchildren suffer. If something were to happen in 1000 years from now though, why do you care. It will be to people who will never know you existed or 10 generations after you. They likely won't know who Bush was, who Brad Pitt was, who Elvis was, or even who Billy Dee Williams is!!
Hey, I like my fellow man and am not looking for the end of the world, but I don't care that much on the state of mankind in 5000 years either. I also contend that it would be easier and quicker for people to learn to live under the sea than in deep space.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Perhaps, but that's not what you said in your post. Also, the far side of the galaxy is 126,000 light years away, not 74,000 light years, which is the distance to the near edge.
Shostak fails to consider that antimatter is a practical fuel. Right now, the processes we have to make it are sadly inefficient, but this doesn't matter much, because we have lots of energy - yes, it's called the Sun, good 'ol Sol, and if antimatter factories were produced en masse and positioned in a close orbit of the sun, the energy available is great (Never mind the fact that the sun creates antimatter itself - we don't know how to get any of that, currently). Antimatter is so ultimately powerful a fuel that a spacecraft visiting these orbital antimatter factories, using antimatter as fuel for the return journey, would have lots left after the journey for other uses.
In addition, there is the feasability of gravity assisted acceleration. This is the process whereby a small body gains velocity from the rotational energy of the large body by means of a carefully calculated 'flyby' trajectory. This is what the star-crossed (no pun intended) Apollo 13 mission used to return to earth, and it has been used to plan 'The Interplanetary Network' of such trajectories, changing angle at LaGrange points of various bodies. It turns out that the effect is multiplied by an addition of energy at perigee, such as that which could be provided by antimatter engines.
I really don't have the time or room to spell it all out here, you'll just have to wait until my books come out.