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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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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?
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.
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.
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
What is the story to which you're alluding to? The only science-fiction work I know of where the people of a generational starship forget the mission and start infighting is Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun . What other books have such a plot?
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
...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?
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.
This is the premise of A.E. Van Vogt's story "Far Centaurus", which I learned about via Barnard’s Star and the ‘Wait Equation’, an article/blogpost on the same topic on the Tau Zero Foundation site.
Oops! I read the summary, logged it and went to the wrong article. Mea culpa!
Another similar story would be Pandorum. Good flick.
Only if, adding insult to injury, their crew too has to fly into an eternal blue&green Vista boot screen. ;-)
As you seem to see the final episode, will salvation be as easy as Rush&Eli getting to install Linux at last (comes with a FLOSS driver for Chevron 9 out of the box) ?
Orphans of the Sky
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPn-lTytfGo might help you "get it".
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...
Unbuntu will never hit that target if they continue to push that Unity stuff down the throat of their user base.
Yep, and they might start an interstellar war if they send Unity to Alpha Centauri.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
To add to the list: The Dark Beyond the Stars by Frank M. Robinson.
Did they figure out how much that fuel tank is going to cost? I'm guessing about as much as the ISS.
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Einstein's solution was that space and time are warped by gravity
The idea of space per say being warped by gravity is a vague and probably inaccurate analogy rather than an observation. The warping is of a purely mathematical nature. That is, the analogy makes us believe that we understand the math even though we don't. The mathematics is able to make accurate predictions with or without the pseudo-idea of curved space, the idea of which was actually introduced by Minkowski, not Einstein. Minkowski was more a mathemetician than a traditional scientist-as-experimentalist and the idea was never originally intended to reflect the nature of reality per se.
Also the actual mathematics implies a curving of space-time which is *not* the same thing as curved space. Space-time is not even really a thing, at least not a thing that we are capable of picturing in our minds. The pseudo-concept is just a convenient shorthand for the elegant (but extremely complex) math which itself is the great achievement of relativity theory with its superb predictive value. Our various explanations of the math are highly suspect and the idea of space itself being curved into a 4th physical dimension (not time) is itself both utterly unproven and not even implied by the math.
1. We know that objects travel faster than light in at least one place in the universe â" 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.
The speed at which an object enters the event horizon of a black hole has nothing to do with light not being able to escape its gravity well and certainly does not imply faster-than-light speed. The way I imagine it is this: A black hole is black because the speed at which photons (reflected or emitted) travel is not sufficient to reach escape velocity. Picture a photon being slowed down until it just falls back down toward the surface of the superdense matter of the black hole. Of course this only makes sense if you believe in photons with mass and photons which can be slowed or reversed in direction through a spooky-action-at-a-distance (aka gravity). I tend to find the idea of light-as-a-stream-of-particles easier to imagine than the massless wave alternative or some spooky combination of the two, but the truth can only be determined by experiment.
I believe the usual analogy would involve first pretending that our naive idea of space and space-time are equivalent and then imagining that 3d space is somehow a thin flexible fabric which can be deformed by objects with mass like bowling balls, lead shot, ball bearings, and marbles. Of course photons are often considered to be without mass, but it is really just another way of imaging the photons sort of falling back down. Into the bowl like depression in the space-time fabric too steep for it to escape. But by focusing only on the path of a massless photon and not on what is causing it to actually move you can try to escape the problem that Newtonian ideas of gravity would have with a massless object.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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).
No. These are theoretical prediction that have been confirmed for every case tested. Human beings accelerating things to very near the speed of light is a daily occurrence. Google "synchrotron" to see how many are currently operating.
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.
That's not true. From the perspective of an outside viewer, no object ever reaches the event horizon. It's a fall that takes an infinite amount of time. It's one of the pitfalls of using black holes for transit. You need to go back in time when you exit from the other side. From the perspective of someone falling into a black hole, they never exceed the speed of light, they calculate that the outside universe is receeding, even though the light falling in is strongly blue-shifted and they don't even notice the event horizon.
3. Mass is the measurement of the amount of matter in an object.
No. Mass is the amount of energy (of all forms) that an object possesses.
4. It follows from 2 that the only way to add mass to an object is to add matter.
No.
5. Distances between two stationary objects in space cannot change.
That depends upon your definition of stationary and distance. An observer can change the distance between them by accelerating himself.
6. An object set in motion moving from one stationary point toward another stationary point will eventually reach the other point.
That depends upon how you define toward, but yes, if you define toward as the direction and velocity necessary for it to reach the other point, it's a tautology
I'm not sure what you were trying to prove about faster than light travel, but it's clear you need to study some relativity. Distance is changed by relativistic velocity. That's the one part of the solution to the twin paradox. Two twin's, one stays home, one travels at 99% of the speed of light to a star 10 light years away and back. The one that stays at home ages 20 years and sees that his brother traveled 20 light years. But once the traveling brother got to 99% of the speed of light, the distance between the earth and the distant star is only 1.4 light years. There's a lot of other stuff you should learn about simultaneity, too.
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Stephen Baxter: Ark
what we need is a way to directly turn electricity into momentum without using any mass.
Rogue Ship, by Alfred E Van Vogt
If the Centaurians actually use that crap, the war will have only losers.
we already have sent interplanetary craft to all the planets (New Horizons to arrive at Pluto in 2015), why wouldn't it be time to plan unmanned interstellar trip?
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
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
So, knowing our luck as a species the asteroid will probably impact the caldera.
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
Unity would never allow us to send it to Alpha Centauri. It's too busy preventing war and bringing peace.
In Robert J. Sawyer's "Golden Fleece" is similar, but they don't forget the mission.
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