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Project Icarus: an Interstellar Mission Timeline
astroengine writes "What would the infrastructure supporting an interstellar mission look like? Considerations such as fuel sources, mining methods, interstellar spaceship construction activities and maintenance are being analyzed, all of which would be carried out before even reaching the ultimate interstellar goal. Project Icarus is currently unravelling the complexities of this operation and recently created a nifty animation of how one of the many fuel tanks may be recycled as communication relay pods en route to nearby stars."
Project Icarus is currently unravelling
Oh well, at least you misspelled unraveling.
Unless the Human Race spreads to other worlds, systems, and galaxies, we are dead as a species. The Universe is littered with the remains of races who never escaped their home solar system.
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Hopefully this will encourage people/organizations/other to put effort into space exploration, as there hasn't seemed to be much going on as of recent, but for the occasional happening.
I question naming the project Icarus... maybe you don't want to pick a guy who fell to his death for trying to fly too high.
I mean, isn't Icarus associated with failed ambitions?
I suppose they are planning on a really close flyby to the star
We have nothing even close to what's required. Ever. Get over it. There was no such thing even in the full swing of the Space Age. Nothing much has changed since then. The first one who says "computers" will have to show how a 747 fueled with iPods can get anywhere.
If that's too subtle for you, we have no materials and no energy sources for this. Throw away your Star Trek DVDs and engage your fucking brains.
because the idea is for it to:
and then plunge into the destination star, destroying itself?
Maybe we should go for project Daedalus.
Let's assume full deceleration at the target star has been achieved ... By that time, near-Earth telescopes would be sufficiently advanced to verify and inform the Icarus computers ...
... that the pre-warp technology museum on Starbase 235 is prepared to receive it in docking bay 19.
I saw "Project Icarus: an Interstallar Mission Timeline" and thought we were finally going to research a way to dial the ninth chevron. Alas, disappointed yet again.
the point in the timeline where after generations, the crew gradually forgets about their mission,
divides into castes, and has a civil war...until the ship has arrived at its destination and is
on the brink of destruction, and a lone plucky teenager and sidekick discover the original
mission and saves everyone
Of course, it is ending with tonight's episode.
Considerations such as fuel sources, mining methods, interstellar spaceship construction activities and maintenance are being analyzed, all of which would be carried out before even reaching the ultimate interstellar goal.
Let's think about what this statement is really saying, and then slap our heads with a "Gee, Beav! Y'think?" I know that when I decide to walk across a huge desert that I wouldn't consider little trifles like food or water beforehand...
Just use an interstellar ramjets and cold sleep. At least until we make contact with the Outsiders and get hyperdrive technology.
And if you see something that looks like a pair of sock puppets do not trust it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The ability to manufacture and create new technologies is pivotal in the success of interstellar travel. The people need to be able to continuously develop new methods of improving the experience. The problem is a finite design is released while newer methods are being developed back on earth. This results in a severe limitation of the capabilities of the mission. The pre-existing infrastructure will require n+x redundancy.
This mission needs the ability to seek out new materials. I would start with creating deep space manufacturing and materials stations and then build the interstellar travelers in space. Food will be required to be grown and harvested while in space. Most likely this will initially require a plant-based diet for those on board. Water generation is always a concern but hydrogen and oxygen are available from various sources.
Peta-bytes in reading material and other ways for people to be active will be paramount in the missions success. I would also give a years worth of time for people to acclimate to the new way of living. The change will be drastic.
Once all of this is achieved then several theoretical experiments can commence. By this point in time a great distance from earth will be reached and very drastic experimentation, harnessing black-hole energy as an example. This point will finally allow humans to begin to get out of this current primitive level of existence and begin to enjoy the myriad of wonders that await us all.
The main problem with going on the first journey is that you are bound to picked up on the way there by a faster ship sent years later, crewed by people more advanced than yourself. Which means your whole journey was rather pointless, you could have done it all in a simulator. I think most societies must perfect virtual reality before they leave their own solar systems. So then why go anywhere, you can be anywhere and do anything right at home.
Good grief, what makes you think we know, now, that future tech will never find a way to get to the stars in any reasonable time with a reasonable energy cost?
Good grief, use current tech limits to whine that chemical rockets can't do the trick.
Good grief, whine that current physics knowledge won't allow faster than light travel or even communication.
Good grief, whine that we know everything today and will never ever come up with any new ideas. Wormholes? Science fiction without the science. Too afraid to come up with any alternatives because we already know there aren't any. 107 years ago saw the first controlled (barely) powered (barely) flight (barely). You'd have stopped there even though we have thousands of years ahead of us that will make the last 107 look as slow as those 107 made the prior 107 years look.
People like you would never have even kept a lightning strike fire going "because we don't know how to start one ourselves".
Never would have tinkered with Newcomen's engine to make it better, never would have dreamed of putting it on rails or in a boat, because 5 psi isn't good enough and it burns too much wood and we will never know how to make better metals or find better fuels.
Never would have investigated the speed of light in ether, never would have wondered why it showed no variation, never would have wondered where radiation came from, never would have wondered about anything.
On and on, whiners like you are left in the dust by those who dream. What a dreary world you live in.
Infuriate left and right
These guys probably thought, with society's short attention span, they'd waited long enough to fool everyone! But I just watched Die Another Day last night, so I know exactly what Project Icarus is! These guys are North Korean plants!
However, if they're willing to give me some quality time with Rosamund Pike... I'll gladly turn a blind eye to their machinations.
#DeleteChrome
... who remembers the Danny Boyle movie Sunshine?
I fear that the fate of Project Icarus has been preordained, and it's not very good...
One major project 'section' I notice missing from their site is the crew. They cover the goal of reaching a star within a human lifetime, but I didn't see anything about it being multi-generation. Sending out a bunch of 20 year olds on a 50 year mission seems to leave little time for serious research at the destination planet, assuming they all even live that long.
I'm all for making some attempts at interstellar travel, but it almost has to be designed with a sustaining colony in mind. That means enough crew that, after accounting for typical numbers of deaths, birth defects, etc, can produce a genetically viable long-term colony.
There are a few problems though that human society has to get past, particularly from the typical American view-point:
- One-way trip; we are sending the entire crew to their deaths, whether they procreate or not, never to return to earth.
- Planned breeding. With a small population the exact pairings must be planned out in advance to prevent genetic problems. IVF or even the old turkey baster may be sufficient to get around the social aspects of actual intercourse. This will also likely mean multiple children by different fathers.
- Forced careers/labor. With each generation--particularly if the are born and raised into adulthood while still on board a ship--most will need to fill certain highly skilled roles. I can imagine this would harken back to older times where parents passed on their specific skills to their children.
There is also the issue of what if they arrive at the target planet and discover it really isn't habitable? There probably need to be contingency plans to make the trip to the next possible candidate. This is something that they could be actively looking for during the trip itself.
After a colony is established and a couple generations (with very large families) then the majority of the above can go away and begin to turn into a typical human society.
Seriously, folks, why are we so eager to spread our dysfunction? Until we can manage the basics of sanity here on Earth, we have no business spreading to the stars. I'm not even talking about an idealised society of some kind; I'm just suggesting basic stability, justice and social order. Two thirds of the globe live in grinding misery,most of which is entirely preventable. I'd even go so far as to say that 85% of human misery is self-inflicted; the remainder is inherent in the human condition.
By any reasonable metric, social science has fallen abjectly behind "hard" science. In my view, this is because of the primacy of subjectivism and relativism in the humanities, but I'm certainly open to other explanations. I'm not opposed to space travel, even interstellar travel, which is almost entirely wishful thinking by the innumerate, I just think we should put our own house in order before we trash our neighbour's place.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
Please get help, and get on some better medication. We've been watching you go downhill for years now. Schizophrenia is a hell of a disease, and untreated, it can lead to you becoming a danger to yourself and others.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Icarus might want to avoid it. Just sayin' ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
I think the smallest possible intersteller vessel is probably an Earth-like planet in orbit around a Sol-like star. So now the question is, where are going??
- davevr
to everyone commenting about human concerns with such a mission, RTFA/site. The purpose is a thought experiment to design a mission to send an unmanned probe to nearby stars, in the same vein as a similar inquiry almost 40 years ago, Project Daedalus. There is really nothing "nerd nutty" here, but instead an interesting discussion about a very achievable goal.
...after the guy responsible for the first pilot-error accident?
Exceeded the rated service ceiling of his aircraft, inducing a thermal environment that caused primary structural debonding, and left a parabolic trail of wax, feathers and Greek obscenities into the Sea of Crete...
rj
I recall hearing about a fun concept. It would use a solar sail only 2 molecules in thickness and a single chip payload weighing only a gram or two. It would be accelerated by laser to 0.25 to reach Proxima Centauri in about 17 years and beam close-up pictures home. No need to decelerate.
Does that qualify as an interstellar mission?
Unbuntu will never hit that target if they continue to push that Unity stuff down the throat of their user base. I'm a Unbuntu user and would like it if they gave a choice at upgrade time. Unity could be a choice (even the default choice) but they make it hard to install a different desktop. You have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get other than Unity.
Oops! I read the summary, logged it and went to the wrong article. Mea culpa!
Because I keep being told that they are 'the same as us', yet without any evidence...
Oh, wait...
How about we start off with an inter-PLANETARY craft first and maybe a moon base.
1. Rockets to LEO -- "check"
2. permanent space station at LEO -- "check"
3. Interplanetary craft at LEO for travel to other locations in solar system
4. permanent outpost on the moon (get there via #3)
5. manned trips to other planets/bodies in solar system
6. permanent outposts on other planets/bodies in solar system
7. TBD
8. reaching other star.
We need to become interplanetary soon-- but we didn't evolve for multi-year trips through space, we evolved for Earth. Before going interstellar, we are going to have to have some serious eugenic progress, like repairing the vitamin C synthesis pathway that evolution destroyed because of insufficient selective pressure. I'm in favor of getting up and running on Mars and the moon, and then just holding off on anything else until science, basically, stops-- and the S-curve of knowledge hits its upper limit. This universe may be infinitely large, but its underpinning rules are not infinitely complex. There are things we will never be able to do, and we should know what those things are before we fling ourselves into the cold reaches of space.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPn-lTytfGo might help you "get it".
In other news, a program has been started to implement ancient puzzles into videogames to find a male individual with high mathematical skill, preferably a little overweight and little social attachments to be working on this project icarus.
It violates what we currently know how to do, in Physics. 100 years ago, we didn't know how to produce anything like a laser, or how to split or fuse atomic nuclei on demand, or how to pack a billion switches onto a square inch of silicon. Today, we don't know how to bend spacetime in a way that lets us travel faster than the speed of light (according to an outside observer).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Ok. So the mathematics require that nothing of mass can travel faster than light, because light is always observable to everyone at every speed. According to Einstein, there is no doppler effect with light: Light looks the same to a person standing still as to a person moving. That's the assumption that all of this nonsense about nothing traveling faster than light is based on.
In order for that to be true, we have to accept that light always travels at a constant speed. Experiments have confirmed that light does not appear more quickly or slowly depending on the direction and speed of the traveler. Thus, when moving away from light the distance must change to be shorter (for a constant speed light beam traveling to the target), or get longer when moving toward a target. The light will cover the distance to the observer in the same timespan. In addition, an object moving has more mass than an object at rest.
These are all assumptions based on observations of objects moving at an incredibly slower relative velocity to the objects or phenomenon they are measuring (light).
Einstein's solution was that space and time are warped by gravity, making all of this possible. Observations have held it up to be true.
I think that the problem here is not that light travels less distance as you move away from it or that it travels more distance as you move towards it, or that light changes speeds, or that mass changes or that empty vacuum warps and we ride upon its physical surface like boats on the sea.
Let's try some different assumptions.
1. We know that objects travel faster than light in at least one place in the universe – in a black hole objects are accelerated to speeds at which light reflecting off of their surfaces or emitted by the objects cannot reach escape velocity. Thus, things falling into a black hole must be traveling faster than the speed of light.
2. It follows from 1 that an object traveling faster than the speed of light away from a single source of light is unobservable.
3. Mass is the measurement of the amount of matter in an object.
4. It follows from 2 that the only way to add mass to an object is to add matter.
3. Matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from matter to energy or energy to matter.
5. Distances between two stationary objects in space cannot change.
6. An object set in motion moving from one stationary point toward another stationary point will eventually reach the other point.
7. The object will be observed to have moved over both time and distance. That is, the object cannot simply jump from one point to the other.
If all of those are true, as they have been observed to be in science, then faster than light travel is possible, but unobservable as it occurs. If an object travels faster than light, then it will outpace the light reflected from it and the object will appear before you at the second point ahead of any light reflected from its surface can be observed.
In addition, an object traveling faster than light cannot see anything behind it, only things ahead of it as light emitted or reflected from objects ahead will hit the object and light traveling toward the object from behind will not hit the object.
The amount of energy needed to accelerate an object to the speed of light is constant. Any energy introduced above and beyond that amount against the object in the direction of travel will accelerate the object beyond the speed of light.
To prove that distance is constant, I submit that if you were to accelerate one proton, p', to 50% of c towards a second proton, p'', traveling at 75% of c, that the relative velocity of p' to p'' is greater than the speed of light, and that they will collide closer to p' point of origin than p'', proving that distance is constant even at 'relativistic' speeds.
Furthermore, I submit that the energy released by the collision will be equal to the energy released by 2p hitting an imaginary stationary object of ze
Did they figure out how much that fuel tank is going to cost? I'm guessing about as much as the ISS.
Support SETI@home
what we need is a way to directly turn electricity into momentum without using any mass.
I just hope those IT guys get the credit they deserve this time. They do a hell of a job.
Shiny with lots of lights, a few of them blinking.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I remember it , Slumdog Millionare
Everyone wants to trash on this idea because it's too futuristic or beyond what we are capable of. That sort of logic is and has always been a failure in the making. Projects such as asteroid mining will surely come before the full construction of an interstellar space ship but I can't see removing credit from a group of scientist that is thinking and presenting new ideas.
The human race needs people trying to see over the next hill. They may be wrong on 90% of their work but there will be 10% that is still good when the time comes to develop interstellar space ships.
We need more people thinking. Not less.
AC
The Yellowstone Caldera is by far the greater threat. Sure an asteroid could trigger an extinction event but if Yellowstone decides to build up to a terminal belch, it will make the Yucatan strike look like a rainbow on a warm spring day.
With application names like ZynAddSubFX and Guayadeque, I'm sure they can come up with something apt.
Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
I've never seen a project more stupid than this ... Spend the absurd amount of described resources and time to build a ... probe? WHF?
With these resources would be much more useful to make an entire lunar base, and use it as a starting point to build things less extravagant and more realistic.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time