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DARPA To Sponsor R&D For Interstellar Travel
Apocryphos writes "The government agency that helped invent the Internet now wants to do the same for travel to the stars. In what is perhaps the ultimate startup opportunity, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plans to award some lucky, ambitious and star-struck organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years."
I wonder where the money is REALLY going...
http://www.stltoday.com/news/science/article_3eb9f408-c955-11e0-8349-001a4bcf6878.html
and
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/08/darpas-very-expensive-sci-fi-projects-future/41427/
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/science/space/18starship.html?_r=1&hp&gwh=30EB3709176A86B1A438FEC050C5C291
This article showed up elsewhere over a month ago:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/nerds-darpa-wants-your-advice-on-interstellar-flight/
1. Invent internet
2. Invest in travelling to other stars
3. Expand internet to said stars
4. ???
5. Profit!
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
"I owe the credit card company twelve thousand dollars, why don't I skip breakfast today?"
Maybe we'll get some good sci-fi stories out of the submissions.
Esp since the first [insert quantity here] submissions will be previous sci-fi story lines.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
It's nice to see that there is still at least some ambition left in our society.
No, more like: "I owe the credit card company twelve thousand dollars, why don't I skip buying that new MacBook Pro, iPad 2, the 50" plasma TV and the new PS3?"
Until FTL travel becomes a possibility
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.
Uh, no. The research and infrastructure buildup necessary to actually carry out such a mission could easily take over a hundred years. But if the _study_ on what would be necessary to do it takes a hundred years, or even ten, then you're doin it rong.
Also, if the study takes over 100 years, the grant works out to $5000 a year. Although perhaps the kind of organization that operates on $5000 a year would take awhile to get things done...
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
3 SS Modules (1 habitation, 1 life support, 1 solar), 2 SS Components (1 fuel, 1 propulsion), and 8 SS Structural to put them together... of course, more points for more modules.
Is a bit more than support for one graduate student for five years. Almost nothing, in other words.
Breakfast is immediately useful this is more like saying "why don't I skip putting pocket change into my great great grandchild's college fund?"
Yeah, please. Let's not spend any money on science. Science is clearly the equivalent to a plasma TV and a playstation. Is this the teabaggers' War Against Intellect taking fruit, or it just another symptom of a different underlying cause?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
$500k stretched over 100 years isn't going to do much research. $500k over 1 year will produce a paper that says we'll need a lot more money
At last we will be able to get rid of all of those useless hairdressers, telephone sanitisers and middle management types.
some lucky government contractor is going to get a half mil for coming up with some bullshit, we wont possibly be able to test anytime in the foreseeable future
your tax dollars at work, hey darpa, I hear Joplin could use some new schools for the future that is here and now ...
Dude - those are necessities. Why don't we just agree to go 3-1/2 weeks between haircuts instead of 3, and call it good. And if, for some reason, I need to go sooner than 3-1/2 weeks, then I'll promise to skip my PPV that day.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Methinks you need to check your sense of proportion. If you're even paying attention to a single $500k budget item during the current crisis, you might as well be bailing out the Titanic with a soup ladle.
$500,000 << $14,000,000,000,000
I think a more appropriate analogy might be "I owe the credit card company 12 million dollars, why don't I skip that cup of coffee this morning." We're talking about 7-8 orders of magnitude here.
I mean, if it's going to take 100 years, then that $500k seems like a good investment if we're going to be hiring a whole team of "researchers" full time. But I suspect that 500k isn't really going to be stretched that thin ;-)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If you're even paying attention to a single $500k budget item during the current crisis, you might as well be bailing out the Titanic with a soup ladle.
Except for the fact that cutting many $500k items adds up to a significant amount of money? No, clearly these cuts are not additive at all. And the reason why you cut lots of things that are small first is because they are usually the most easy things to cut.
DARPA To Flush More Taxpayer Money Down the Toilet
FTFY.
I have a crazy idea. Instead of flushing this money down the toilet, why don't we use it to pay the government's debt instead?
The time it would take for the water to swirl down is longer than it takes the federal government to rip through a lousy 500K. Here's a tip: the federal government's spending habits need drastic fixes, not penny ante items like this. No, it isn't a good start because it's so incredibly miniscule. 500K isn't even a rounding error. You trivialize government debt problems by commenting this amount of spare change should go towards fixing that problem.
Yes, because I claimed at all that cutting just this one thing will solve all budget problems. Oh wait, I didn't. But if you start cutting MANY of these things they *gasp* add up to a much larger chunk of money. Funny how addition works, right?
$500,000 for a hundred-year study? No wonder we aren't attracting people to science & engineering these days.
And by cutting all that little things from the damn science budget that will ruin us all, you might even manage to keep another pointless war running. Teabagger heaven!
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It sounds like someone at DARPA is just *really* upset over Stargate Universe being cancelled.
Right! All you have to do is find 28 million programs of this scale, and we'll be back on our feet!
Yeah, I saw this twilight zone episode. It didn't go too well for the guy's psyche.
Get a web developer
Where are the private investors? The billionaires with more money than they know what to do with? How come none of them are sponsoring anything related to space? Is it just too high risk? How much would $20 billion buy? Or even $10 billion, or $5 Billion?
i know how you can get over the whole motivation issue, tell the crew on the ISS that zombies have overtaken the earth and everyone dead, well part from the person telling them, they quite clever i'm sure they can knock something up and be at Alpha Centuari in a jiffy, no flaws in this plan, just make sure it not an all male crew.
Don't they realize that faster than light travel has been proven to be impossible? I think that all the spaceship sci-fi crap has caused too many otherwise intelligent people to focus their efforts in such fruitless endeavors where they would otherwise be able to research things that really do help society as a whole.
Well, you did say it was flushing money down the toilet, which was a pretty unfounded claim considering you spouted it on an invention that was funded by DARPA.
The whole POINT of DARPA is to throw money at projects that aren't likely to succeed right away, because if DARPA doesn't do it, no one will and it will never get done.
The internet never would have happened if DARPA hadn't flushed money down the toilet for it, because when the internet/arpanet was first being assembled, no one saw any sort of profitability in large networks of computers - and in fact when the idea first started being looked at in 1968 no one saw profitability in consumer computers at all.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
When you can't pay your bills, yes, they should be cut.
We are 14.6 trillion dollars in debt with no way of paying it off other than letting our kids and grandkids pay for it somehow or devaluing the US dollar to nothingness (which is already happening).
Plus, whenever you have the government involved in giving out money left and right for research, without a clear, attainable goal, you end up with nothing but a request for... more money.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I rarely say this. I am always willing to spend money for basic research, where an immediate benefit is not obvious. But interstellar travel? Now? Ridiculous. Baby steps, please. Such a project for a permanent station on the dark side of the moon would already be very ambitious, but at least not totally scifi. Next step a permanent space station on Mars. If this can be accomplished and is more or less routine, it might start to make sense to think about interstellar travel. But certainly not earlier.
If the US government passed 10 of these every single day for the rest of eternity, and taxes were evenly divided among every man, woman and child in America, the resulting cost would still be less that 6 USD annually per capita.
How do I apply for the Seed Money?
I already have a British police call box in my garage. But there are some interior sizing issues.
Once human consciousness can be stored in a machine, we can send relatively slow, machine-manned interstellar ships to explore the galaxy.
Well, given your sig, I probably shouldn't even answer. First step to the light - realize that government debt is not analogous to household debt. Second step - realize that the research budget is negligible already. Third step - realize that when you spend (and we should like mad in this recession) spend for something that has a chance of giving you future profits. If you get this through your libertarian brainwashing, you might realize that the waste lies elsewhere.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The 100 year starship project is supposed to study what it will take to sustain private sector investment into a long range program of building a starship.
http://www.100yss.org/about.html
It is not itself a 100 year project to build a starship, or a 100 year project to figure out how to sustain investment...
Also, if you're interested in interstellar research, check out Centauri Dreams:
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/
If the research is useful and worthwhile, it should be defended on its own merits, not on the principle of, "our government spends way more than that anyway, so comparatively, it's like, free." If you piss away 50 cents a day, every day, at the end of the year you've pissed away about 180 bucks. Doesn't sound like much, but when you start pissing away 50 cents a day, every day, on 50 different things... it adds up quick.
Budgeting & spending needs to be prioritized - the government isn't exempt from this exercise, though it tries really hard to be. This may be "really interesting science," but is it as valuable as funding... cancer research? obesity research? AIDS research? Renewable energy research? Battery & fuel cell research? If it's not more valuable... why are we spending the money on studies of interstellar travel, instead of funding someone's cancer research for another 6 months? If it is more valuable, then someone certainly should be able to provide arguments for that value (including what sort of returns on the investment we expect) besides, "it's barely any money."
When you're running out of money and borrowing to finance your lifestyle, something's got to give. In this case, I don't see much potential return from "studying interstellar travel," so I'm not sure I'd consider this a good use of our limited resources at this time. By all means, feel free to present your arguments for the merits of this study - just make sure they don't include the phrase, "and that's barely any money at all."
It has nothing to do with Anti-Intellectualism as some others have suggested, and everything to do with prioritizing the allocation of our limited resources into the most pressing & urgent needs. It may be "interesting science," but is it "important to us, as a society," over all other competing needs? I'd say no.
Taxes should theoretically be used for collective good. DARPA and NASA are from the Libertarian perspective (which I can only assume you lean towards) the best possible places to throw money. There is no real politics or vote buying involved in funding these agencies... it is just tax money you are investing in the collective understanding and capability of our citizenry.
So I have another crazy idea: how about people stop demanding the government stops funding any program they don't directly use. Not only is that not going to happen, and thus is a waste of time, it creates an intellectual dishonesty around the debate of debt and government finance, which is why the issue is not seriously addressed.
The bottom line is that if you are willing to point out our government is not living within its means, then be willing to yourself be without things you want. It doesn't make sense for any government to remove all of the parts that one group of people find irrelevant, if for no other reason than that the representation our government is supposedly dependent on requires us to not give in to the tyranny of the majority. Further, while the call for action is important, it is the call for free information upon which we can make decisions that should be most heeded. You have certainly identified a problem, but supposing you have identified solution is silly. You don't have the information to do that... neither do I. That's part of the game that our government plays. How are we supposed to express dissatisfaction if we don't have the information to demand alternatives?
FanFictionRecs.net
If the research is useful and worthwhile, it should be defended on its own merits[...]
Ok, how about this. In order to even begin to think about starting to build an interstellar ship there are many, many problems that need to be solved. Each and every one of them has potential benefits to the people right down here on planet Earth.
Cheap transit to LEO.
Orbital mining for metals and volatiles.
Artificial intelligence and other computer science areas.
New energy storage and generation technologies.
Genetic engineering.
Advanced hydroponics.
Yep, nothing in there worth researching at all.
if anyone wanted to spend any time with earthlings at all, well, they would have built an interstellar highway is all i'm sayin'....
Good people go to bed earlier.
This is half a million dollars we're talking about here, a drop in the bucket by government standards. It probably costs that much every time a fighter jet flies.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The private investors are investing in things like non-orbital launch systems (Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites); orbital launch systems (SpaceX); and orbital space stations/hotels (Bigelow Aerospace). All of these private ventures would never have happened if it weren't for almost half a century of government funding of NASA and the Air Force before that.
There are whole classes of radical advancements that, simply, can't happen without significant initial investment without a guarantee of success. Examples of such things include space travel and the nuclear bomb. Historically, some of these kinds of discoveries have been made because an individual monarch was willing to take a gamble (ex. Queen Isabella funding Columbus) but modern business structures are designed to work against such things because they are often wastes of money (ex. the search for El Dorado and the fountain of youth).
When it comes to traveling to other stars, there are obvious advantages to be had to science as well as humanity as a whole. On the other hand, even if it works in the end, there are no obvious profits to be made on it with our current understanding of science. Any resources we find in a distant solar system would be so hard to transport back to Earth that it'd be cheaper to just manufacture it (atom by atom) in a particle accelerator (which we could do with present technology). In such cases, governmental spending is the ONLY way for it to get done.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Yep, move a thousand soup ladels, enough to empty the water out of the bottom deck broom closet...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I wouldn't say I have mixed feelings, since some things don't mix well.
on one hand, I think investigation into interstellar travel is cool, and would be nice to see someone working on, even if just to see what comes out of the research. Long term, very cool projects.
On the other hand... I thought that foreign wars were stretching it for a "Defense Department". Interstellar travel? What exactly are they defending against?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The high cost to the human race's colonisation of space is caused by the complexity and danger of reaching and leaving escape velocity within the earth's atmosphere.
The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts, and the need to cover it with the equivalent of bathroom tiles.
There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.
Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.
What NASA should be doing is creating rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which when combined make very good rocket fuel, because of Newton's third law.
Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safe vacuum of space, no atmosphere = no friction = no heat = no bathroom tiles and no foam shielding on the external fuel tank.
Less bathroom tiles + insulation foam = less rocket fuel = less pollution in the Mexican Gulf.
Once we can accelerate and decelerate space craft with rocket fuel that is obtained from outside of the earth's gravity well, space travel becomes cheaper by many orders of magnitude, ok the capital cost would be very high, but once the systems are in place, the number of human beings, living in space increases exponentially.
A good example for the way very high capital cost projects work, is the Panama canal.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
If they can do it, why can't we? Maybe the government knows something that we don't. (Queue spooky music)
If the research is useful and worthwhile, it should be defended on its own merits, not on the principle of, "our government spends way more than that anyway, so comparatively, it's like, free."
Yes indeed - I was addressing the usefulness of snidely commenting that the money is best spent towards debt payments, not the worth of any particular program this size. When the federal Department of Labor alone is pissing away $300,000,000,000 on nobody knows what (checked unemployment lately?) the Department of Agriculture is wasting 15,000,000,000 paying farmers not to grow crops and the Department of Education 100,000,000,000 on teaching to standardized tests, it's strikes me as silly to go on about $500,000 or even a hundred little projects at 500K each.
You're wasting your time. No matter how many times you correct these idiots, they continue to execute their brainwashed programming.
Think about it. Launches are expensive. Spaceflight is expensive. Nobody has found a pure gold asteroid, and even if they did it would take more money to get any of the gold back to Earth than the gold would be worth. Communications satellites only exist because the phone companies can charge users a fortune in bills over decades.
Private investors don't give a shit about technology, and certainly certainly not for technology that has no possibility of a financial return.
Remember, billionaires got that way because they're damn stingy and only give in order to get more. Wannabe billionaires are even more that way. Where they donate, it is purely for tax reasons. (They can offset all the taxes from income and capital gains and still make a fortune.) It's not for charity and it's certainly not for the benefit of industrialists who could become rich if the technology pays off. This isn't even putting the billionaires down at all. This is simply the logic of economics and it is the logic of economics that create the uber-wealthy in the first place.
The ONLY people who have both the money AND the incentive to do this kind of work is government. That is why the US and USSR have space programs and Argentinia (which had no shortage of private individuals with know-how for sale after the war) does not. If private investors had any motivation to actually do something in space (as opposed to paying an agency to lob yet another radio/tv/bittorrent relay into orbit), it would have already happened. The closest we've seen yet are Virgin Galactic (which doesn't even reach orbit) and some guys launching small rockets from old oil rig platforms (who, incidentally, you don't hear much about these days).
As for half a million - it might sound a lot but it would pay for five mid-grade private sector researchers for a year. Not equipment, computers, space, or anything else, just the salaries of those five people. Public sector workers would be cheaper - you could get easily two or three times as many - but this is funding for a private effort so you're limited to five. This research is going to require pushing what we know about human hibernation to the absolute limits. It is going to require some amazing work on radiation shielding. In order for the people on board to develop normally, it is going to require some fantastic developments in materials science (you will need a vehicle 3/4 of a mile in diameter to be able to develop artificial gravity without inducing motion sickness - and then you will need to figure out how to put that vehicle in orbit).
And, yes, those are mid-grade researchers. Top-end researchers in the private sector would limit you to two or three people, which wouldn't even get you enough to have one specialist per major problem to be solved.
This is another reason the private sector is a Bad Choice for this kind of work. Public sector scientists are much much cheaper and, since they have access to shared regional or national computation resources, don't require as much money to get a project like this off the ground. The private sector is simply not cost-effective for this kind of work.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When I need to find room on the server, I always find it best used of my time and effort to search out and remove a couple thousand 5kb files instead of the single 37gb file.
drastic fixes = actually counting how much you are spending trivial or not
I said:
You responded:
Thank you. That's *exactly* what I was asking for - not a handwaving "you'll never even notice the money's gone anyway, so just shut up with your complaints about spending." These are areas we could expect to make some breakthroughs in if we were to undertake a manned interstellar travel program. However, are these technologies (and by extension, is manned interstellar travel) something that is important to us, as a society? And should it take priority over other things that we consider more important?
My entire point is that the discussion about priorities needs to be had, and had about every program the government is funding. If it's not a priority for us as a society, why are we spending the money? If there are other, competing, under-funded priorities we consider more valuable, why isn't this money allocated to those higher-priority projects?
The simple fact of the matter is this: many of the things you listed are already actively funded & being researched today... so why the sudden need for a vague catch-all grant that won't seriously fund much research in any of these areas, other than to produce a paper saying "There's a raft of problems - including our current understanding of the fundamental laws of physics, which may simply not be flexible in ways which would allow us to travel to other stars with a reasonable cost or time frame - which we need to solve before we can go to another star. So we need billions more in funding to work on solving them."
Great response. At least there are a few moguls out there who are trying to make a business out of space. Tourism is a noble business, if not as romantic as groundbreaking scientific exploration. I can't wait for the space hotels. Once big business figures out how to get the infrastructure in place, other advances should follow in quick succession. There will be a tipping point.
I've already sent them my SWITS (Single Wide Interstellar Travel Standard) for adoption. NASA refused it but I think these guys are a lot smarter. I've even included weight restrictions for duct tape.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Current government debt is primarily generated by the medicare and social security entitlement programs. I find this totally unacceptable since I have been paying both medicare and social security taxes ever since I started working. The age demographics are responsible for most of the problems but there is also a lot of bureaucratic waste contributing to the problem. Military spending as a percentage of the GDP is less than a lot of countries in the world. It is the operational costs incurred by the military deployments over the past 12 years that is responsible for increased military spending. R&D and even foreign aid to other countries are a minuscule part of the budget. US corporations may have a lot of loop holes in the tax code but they also are subject to one of the highest tax rates in the world. When people talk about how bad the US debt is they never seem consider the actual income side of the equation. The US generates so much revenue that a few smart policy changes and tax adjustments could eliminate most of this debt in 4 or 5 years or at least lower it to a reasonable problem. The Clinton administration was able to virtually eliminate deficit spending and reduce the overall debt in only 8 years. Governmental debt is noting like personal debt. The number of factors capable of influencing the national debt do not translate to the personal debt calculations. If DARPA wants to contribute money to a project such as interstellar research I say that is a good thing even if they produce no tangible results in my lifetime. While research like this might ultimately lead no where there is still the chance that the research results can be applied in other areas.
Fair enough, and I agree - all of these programs should be reviewed, I'm not suggesting that we should only be looking at projects costing 500k-1mill, or anything like that. And it's entirely possible that there's a dozen medium-sized 50mill projects in the DoL and DoA that are pissing away money on less value than this study would provide, and are far more worthy of being cut. Absolute dollars spent is just about the worst metric to use to judge the worth of a project. Some 800 billion dollar expenditures are incredibly valuable. Some 8 dollar expenditures are useless.
My basic opinion on the matter is that we figure out what's a social priority for us and what's not before we spend the money. Then we continue funding the valuable ones, and cut the useless ones. My issue with this grant specifically is that I don't see how it'll produce much to justify its existence - 500k will not go very far to fund much actual scientific research.
http://www.gocomics.com//nonsequitur/2011/07/08
irony (n) 1. using the Internet to trash government spending on DARPA projects
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
You could make any number of good arguments for this research, but that argument is complete crap. I can explain why with only a single sentence:
Trillion dollar budgets are made up of lots of smaller expenses.
The problem is, everybody thinks that their $5,000 or $50,000 or $500,000 expenditure is important. At some point, you have to judge the relative importance of all of those small expenses, or else you're never going to actually reduce government spending. Thus, the argument that the budget for any project is "a drop in the bucket" and therefore not worth worrying about is an inherently specious argument. Further, that sort of thinking is exactly why we have a budget problem in the first place.
Instead, you should argue that it would be far too easy to eradicate all human life on Earth through nuclear war, runaway global warming, some sort of germ warfare or catastrophic natural disease, launching too much garbage into the sun, etc. Therefore, the best bet for humanity's long-term survival is to get at least some of us off this rock at distances so vast that near-instantaneous travel from place to place is infeasible.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Perhaps you'd like to look at the ROI that [D]ARPA gets from its research. For example, take a look at ARPANet. A few million of up-front investment gave the US government all of the tax revenue that every company in the .com boom paid, and the ongoing tax paid by companies like Amazon, ISPs, and so on. That tax income alone is enough to finance all [D]ARPA projects of this nature.
Your analogy would be more accurate if you said 'I owe $12,000 to the credit card company, I'll save my $2 bus fare by not going to work today'.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
so why the sudden need for a vague catch-all grant that won't seriously fund much research in any of these areas[?]
Because saying: "In 30 years it will be impossible to feed everyone in the world using current technology due to shortages of petroleum based fertilizers, increased fuel costs, and exhaustion of arable land. We need to invest money into advanced, sustainable hydroponics or we'll be facing a Malthusian catastrophe" just doesn't have the same ring to it. Something like this is designed to capture the public's imagination and even more importantly, is meant to attract attention to a wide range of specialties who wouldn't normally interact.
There is no real politics or vote buying involved in funding these agencies
Actually, that's not really true. Look at where NASA contracts get awarded - they're very regional. While a lot of that spending is worthwhile, it's also used to buy votes.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
From what I have seen it would take from thousands to tens of thousands of years to travel to the nearest star. Instead of having generations upon generations living and growing up on a ship, with only the first generation actually having a choice in the matter, I have a better solution. Send DNA. "Grow" humans once you get there. Assuming we can even build something that can last that long, you send a ship with the tech to grow a human outside of the womb. If the ship gets there and there is no viable planet for sustaining life then you don't start the "growing" process. If it gets there and we find an Earth-like planet that has a chance to sustain life, then "grow" a small set of males and females which would then be the first generation of humans to seed that planet. Sure its a bit far fetched from what is possible today, but it seems to me to be way more viable than sending people on a 20000 year trip not knowing if it will ever result in success. Can you imagine being one of the generations to grow up in the middle of a trip if were were to just ship people off in to oblivion? I would be pissed knowing I will never see Earth or even the destination, and rather be confined to a ship my entire life, since I grew up in say year 1000 of a 20000 year trip. Unless we can prove Einstein wrong and travel the speed of light, I thinking "growing" humans at the destination is the only viable way.
Hope it would go better than the Falcon test flights. 9 minutes into the flight, "Sir, we have lost communication with the... "
I suppose it's all on scales at this point... You're correct about the NASA contracts, I just can't concern myself with that level of vote buying when the default position of our government is orders of magnitude more corrupt.
FanFictionRecs.net
I owe the credit card company twelve thousand dollars. So why don't I skip buying insulin to keep myself alive and turn off my phone service even though I am expecting a call about a new job with a twelve thousand dollar signing bonus?
I have a crazy idea. Instead of flushing this money down the toilet, why don't we use it to pay the government's debt instead?
And what would that achieve, exactly? You would reduce the overall balance sheet of the economy, since the government's debt may be less than it would otherwise be, but also somebody's assets are less.
It is futile to think about the cost of government in monetary terms. The only useful measure of cost of government is to think about whether the government's spending uses real resources (goods, services, human labor) that could otherwise have been enjoyed to further the well-being of private citizens in a better way.
So DARPA will employ scientists and engineers and support staff for more pie-in-the-sky research. That adds directly to economic activity, and will indirectly lead to new technology that can increase productivity. That's a pretty good use of real resources in my book.
And as far as the debt is concerned, you're simply worrying about a non-problem.
From what I have read on the subject of interstellar space travel, we need two mechanisms to be order to make the journey in a somewhat reasonable fashion:
1. Faster Than Light (FTL) travel
2. A habitat with artificial gravity of some sort.
FTL travel may not be as science fictiony as we think. Anyone remember the episode of Futurama where they explained how the ships engines worked? They worked by moving space around the ship rather than moving the ship around space. Thats sort of the concept behind what may turn out to be a real life warp drive. Take a pocket of space and move it rather than your ship in order to achieve superluminal speeds. The issue is that in order to do that you need some exotic stuff called negative energy, and so far its existence hasnt even been verified yet, and apparently if it does exist the only way to generate it would be to use the most powerful stuff in the universe: antimatter. And that stuff is so expensive you could spend every piece of currency on earth and not even get enough to make a paperweight from. So for now were stuck at sublight.
Artificial gravity isnt so hard. Any circular, spinning habitat will do. But I for one hope we can discover and learn to manipulate gravitons somehow in order to generate or counter gravity at will. That way we could actually build ships that look like the Enterprise and are livable inside for an average joe. It would also enable us to be 100% certain that we could colonize planets that dont have gravity similar to Earths, which I think is going to be very important if you are sending people out to explore the galaxy. Right now the biggest question in my mind with regards to the potential colonization of Mars or the Moon is how the human body will react to fractional gravity. We know how the human body reacts in microgravity, and obviously we know how it reacts in normal gravity, but we have no idea how life will be for people living day to day on planets with gravity just a fraction of the earths. If it is anything like microgravity and you have to stay active all the time, it will be unfeasible for anyone without military discipline to live a normal life because of the strict routine. Discovering how to use and manipulate gravity itself would allow us to fix that. We could augment the planets natural gravity with artificial gravity and bring it up to a point where any normal human could live there, thus enabling us to colonize worlds of any size as long as their gravity is less than 1g.
It's also a terrible analogy for two reasons:
First, the Titanic is too extreme an example because far too much of the ship was gone, and the ship could not possibly have been saved by any amount of bailing. The U.S. government isn't anywhere near being on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, so the analogy fails miserably.
Second, the captain of a chip certainly can't bail out the entire boat with a single soup ladle. However, the captain can scream at all the other occupants of the boat if they aren't doing their part, and if each person on the boat lifts a ladle, they can move a whole lot of water. In a similar way, the people at the top shouldn't be paying attention to the $500k budget items; the people at the bottom should be. The people at the bottom aren't; therefore, the people at the top should be paying attention to why the people at the bottom aren't paying attention. It's a systemic problem that can only be solved with a systemic solution.
One great way to effect a reduction in the federal budget would be to give managers and line-level employees bonuses for finding ways to cut costs. Another way to effect the desired reduction would be to provide a "rat out" line in which government employees could report wasteful spending to a watchdog group with the power to enact disciplinary action. Finally, you could go along way towards effecting budget cuts by disabusing managers of the notion that if their department reduces its operating costs, then that money will be removed from their department's budget in the following year (and by making commensurate policy changes as needed to ensure that such cuts do not happen).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110810-antimatter-belt-earth-trapped-pamela-space-science/
Until FTL travel becomes a possibility
Not just FTL, but order-of-magnitude-faster-than-light with magic deflector shields so you didn't get vaporized if you collided with something big like a hydrogen atom. Or wormholes that can pass more than a squirt of randomized radiation.
Even traveling at ~1c will take a minimum of about 4 years, probably much more, to get to the nearest star (that depends on how your we-haven't-invented-it-yet space drive works - how long will you spend accelerating/decelerating, will you experience time dilation etc). You might need warp drive to get even close to 1c (e.g. in the Steven Baxter book Ark - they had warp drive but it still took decades to get to anywhere likely to have a habitable planet - and because it was a Stephen Baxter book everything went pear-shaped).
And even with a slower-than-light "generation ship" there's some hard questions to ask about the energy budget. I notice that even hard SF authors, when they use sublight travel, have been tending to go for imaginary power sources rather than assuming that good ol' nuclear power will let you get there in any reasonable time. (e.g. Stephen Baxter used grand-unified-theory drives, Alistair Reynolds has magic "conjoiner" drives... Greg Egan uses boring old antimatter, but assumes everybody can upload themselves to a computer and fit on a tiny spaceship).
Maybe the first step should be to work out how to build a self-sustaining colony in space: you'll need the same technology to build a generation ship, even if you build an OMFTL drive into a DeLorian you'll need to build a space motel in any star system that doesn't have a nice habitable planet and, if we never work out how to get out of the solar system, a few space colonies would be awfully useful when it came to exploiting the solar system without continually crawling in and out of gravity wells.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
For approximately one year (355 days) ought to get you very close to light speed!
You'd need substantial mass for shielding from the passive (free floating) hydrogen nuclei etc.
With time dilation trips of almost any distance should take about 2.8 years (ship time) even if
in real time it lasts millions of years.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Just ask Global Dynamics, they already have a mission to go to Titan.
First humans burn before coming even close to any star.
2. 100 years? http://dieoff.org/page125.htm
....for the paywalled link warning.
Our fastest current thruster, ION propulsion, can theoretically get us to the closest star in about 81,000 years -- about 2,700 human generations. Maybe some kind of self-sustaining ark spacecraft could do this. There is a completely theoretical idea of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion which could reach about 5% the speed of light which would make the trip about 85 years.
Leverage the lunar resources and build a mag-boost transportation(highway) to the moon. Power the magnetic boosting system ...) to pay for moving materials to the moon. As a side effect you have a magnetic
with large solar sails and collectors.That would hold it in place, power the gyro's and electro-magnetic boosters. Send materials
from the moon to earth(titanium, aluminum,
boosting system that could launch vessels at high speeds,just need to re-align the mag-boosters....
Still, 500,000 divided by 100 years, WOW, you mean DARPA would give me a whopping $5000 a year to research this? Where do I get in line (for the exit)?
- Good news everyone! Our spaceship has landed at our designated destination. - Yey! - Bad news is that it is around 6000 celsius degrees out there so our ship will melt in 1.53 seconds.
The whole POINT of DARPA is to throw money at projects
that have vital national defense applications for the USA. The Internet was built to enable reliable communications in the event of a nuclear war. Easy, direct application.
that aren't likely to succeed right away
right.
because if DARPA doesn't do it, no one will and it will never get done.
For interstellar travel this isn't DARPA's problem. NSF, maybe, but DARPA is over-funded at least to the degree it can spend money on this kind of project.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Therefore, the best bet for humanity's long-term survival is to get at least some of us off this rock at distances so vast that near-instantaneous travel from place to place is infeasible.
It's all true, but it has nothing to do with DARPA's mandate. They might as well work on faster-cooking spaghetti.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Waste exists everywhere.
And yes, research isn't a huge part of the budget, but if you ask -anyone- drowning in debt they don't make huge purchases most of the time but a lot of little things. A $3 coffee here, on Visa a $10 CD there on a mastercard, a $20 trip to the movies on the weekend on American Express, and it all adds up.
And no, we should not spend like mad, we should instead focus on not creating another bubble. Solidify our currency with a commodity so it actually makes sense to save again, cut taxes, end the wars, reduce our prison population, privatize whatever we can privatize and scale back the government.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
http://feeds.nytimes.com/nyt/rss/Science
I (like many I'm sure) are sick of this fucking paywall so using this RSS feed in your favorite reader (I use Google Reader) allows you to read the content without having to pay them.
user@host$ diff
Yeah. Cut taxes from a historic low when the revenues suck. Sure. Brilliant. The only points I can fully agree with is stopping the wars and reduce the prison population. The rest is juicy voodoo economics...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
if $500,000 can "invent" anything useful for interstellar technolgies it already would have been. This is just a way of funnelling money into the hands of some connected people, directly or indirectly.
This reminds me of a Bloom County comic thread. Opus gets a grant from the government to build a missile defense system. He blows the money even thinking he bought Bolivia at one point. Eventually he finds out that he is getting called to the carpet to see his results and freaks out because he has not done anything.
Opus and friends come up with a ludicrous plan of gluing or sewing trillions of dollar bills together end to end to make a space wall to stop missiles. As they are on the floor of congress they propose this plan.. and ask at the end "Did you buy it?"
Next frame: News paper headline - "They bought it!"
I love bloom county.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
gtfo moron
Around about 1990, I attended a talk by Robert L. Forward at Hughes Aircraft, where he reviewed the results of a study he had completed for the USAF regarding anti-matter propulsion, primarily regarding further development of anti-matter production and storage methods. A reasonably good introduction can be found here. It was fascinating, in large part because virtually every concrete step towards reliable production of "fuel" ended with the comment "this would make a great graduate project."
I haven't looked at the details for the DARPA RFI (PDF), but I'm guessing that by this point, a lot of the grad work has been done (thesis refs, anyone?) and that for this first 1 year contract, they're looking for input on the economics of scaling up the grad work. For those seriously interested, I'd bet the 100 Year Starship Public Symposium this September in Orlando would be an excellent next step. Unfortunately, it's too late to submit papers, or respond to the RFI.
Luke, help me take this mask off
A more realistic and achievable project would be terraforming Mars: eg: developing bacteria that can live and Mars and transform it's atmosphere into something better for us (as happened on Earth billions of years ago).
What, you thought they would actually do something useful for the money, beyond breathless descriptions and snazzy computer graphics?
The previous post has it right. Some areas of research, like, say, microprocessor design, are getting plenty of money. For interstellar travel, the question is what areas are *not* getting enough, or even any, funding? Figuring out where the holes are you can do for 500K. Filling the holes, obviously, will take more, but you can at least get started on them at a low level.
Some basic questions include:
(1) In 100 years, would we be sending humans? or an AI?
(2) Since technology keeps improving (we hope), how short does the trip need to be so that ship A built in 2100 is not passed by ship B built in 2120 which can travel faster?
(3) Do you plan for "a mission" (one of a kind thing), or general diffusion of society to the planets, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, then other stars (many shorter trips in all directions)
(4) Where are we going? a Centauri, because it's closest? The nearest star with a bunch of planets? Do we even need planets? If we have learned to live all over the Solar System, including the Asteroid Belt, maybe we just need a star and some rocks to use.
That stargate has to be around here somewhere.
Really? Assuming we actually can't go that close to the speed of light, much less faster, shouldn't we be looking at uploading our consciousnesses to quantum dots first so the payload is manageable?
Clearly the brass at DARPA have not seen a single episode of Star Trek. The show portrays the type of military/civilian heirarchy such an endeavor would require organizationally as well as the design of a spacecraft that can achieve interstellar travel. There is an abundance of technical data regarding the craft known as Enterprise, and although the science behind how it synergizes is similar to a strainer; Inventing technology that won't exist for 100+years and describing all its inner workings is quite impossible.
Star Trek also explores the sociological aspects of interstellar travel, mainly crew relations during routine and abnormal circumstances. Some of the insights given into the human psyche are profound, let alone the fact that the possibility of alien intelligent life exists and what terran-alien interaction would actually involve. And as far as ethics, I think the portrayal of a peaceful exploratory civilization is more than fitting, any civilization capable of reaching the level of technology required to travel the stars and ultimately interact with alien races should be modest enough to know that diplomacy and sound judgement are the only plausible code of behavior.
It's a shame Mr. Roddenburry is not around to collect his half million in funding grants and continue "researching"'
is to extend individual lifetime or mental capacity exponentially (or both). We are running dry of the lifetime of our best minds before more complex subjects can be grasped well enough to make progress. If you can extend the productive age even only to 100-150 years, it would allow multidisciplinary research depth unseen at the moment. All else is secondary... (and direct result of extended individual productive lifetime). I always wonder why most humans quietly cope with aging, truly disturbing cognitive dissonance.
Every time an interstellar space travel article appears on slashdot it seems like everyone forgets the basics.
1. FTL is not necessary at all. A generation ship or unmanned vessel that can reach .1c or higher is quite practical for exploring many of the more interesting local star systems. Without FTL we won't be exploring Andromeda any time soon, but for local Milky Way systems it's not a problem or any kind of excuse for not exploring. We have some very interesting systems close by.
2. Spacecraft capable of 0.1c were buildable even half a century ago. They are certainly buildable now. They are just very expensive.
3. We now actually have somewhere interesting to go: the Gliese system. At only 20 light years away it would take no more than a couple of centuries to reach with current tech.
The first step toward an interstellar mission, either manned or unmanned (its systems would have to be hugely redundant if unmanned) would be to start a permanent manufacturing facility on the mooon and maybe at Lagrange points L1 or L2
The lunar facility would be responsible for mining, smelting, casting, and machining spacecraft parts from whatever ore can be extracted from the lunar surface. Scouting for lunar locations with useful ores like aluminum, magnesium, iron, silicon, other semiconductor elements, and uranium would be a first step.
The individual parts could then be ferried to a Lagrange point facility for final assembly of the spacecraft.
Setting up off world manufacturing itself might take us a century to get up and running, but it is a necessary first step to any sort of interstellar mission. Until/unless we can invent some kind of space/warp drive or cheap antimatter manufacturing we are stuck with fusion and that means off world manufacturing facilities.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Starships won't happen. By the time we become technologically advanced enough to build an honest to goodness starship we will have developed the means of compressing human consciousness into a streams of laser light. Instead of sending starships out into space, we send Von Neumann probes that will build space stations for receiving the interstellar equivalent of a broadband connection. Think of it also as the equivalent of the data in your hard disk to the cloud. Then all we need at the far end is to build the android or bioroid that will house the "brain" data.
Just to list them:
- Light Speed (workaround highly advisable)
- Protection (unless you want those poor astronauts to die from radiation)
- cargo space (food, fuel and spare parts)
- atmosphere (you need a supply large enough to reach the other star and possibly for the journey back)
- how to get that thing into space (it'll probably be large)
Now, seeing light speed is a universal constant, you can't simply go faster then light. So either you need a lot of fuel and a lot of time (generation ship, which are huuuuge) or you need to find a workaround. With the workaround you'll probably need a LOT of energy and where are you going to get that?
Traveling to other stellar systems will be amazing. Mankind's future is in space, seeking out new resources to sustain Earth's ever growing population. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSkxPghXTCg
There is no "dark side of the moon". A side of the moon always faces the earth, but it doesn't always face the sun.