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Starships In a Century?
An anonymous reader writes "In the New York Times, Kenneth Chang writes about the 100-year starship conference, where 'an eclectic mix of engineers, scientists, science fiction fans, students and dreamers' discussed ideas for how to travel across interstellar space, including 'how to organize and finance a century-long project; whether civilization would survive, because an engine to propel a starship could also be used for a weapon to obliterate the planet; and whether people need to go along for the trip.' Some of the proposals were pretty far out, such as Joseph Breeden's concept for an engine-less starship (propelled using a gravity slingshot on a near-sun trajectory). Others were a little less forward thinking, although still futuristic by current standards of space exploration: nuclear rockets, fusion, lightsails, and so forth. So, can we go to the stars? Wait a hundred years, and we'll see!"
Sci Fi convention regurgitates things they've seen on TV so far.
plus general products hull
I can't read the paywalled article, but is the reporter confusing a "100-year starship" (i.e. a starship that makes a 100-year trip) with "100 years of stellar propulsion development"?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Does anyone have a copy of the article's text? From here I only get a "You need to log in to read this article" screen.
The Queller Drive, invented by Ernst Queller.
Unless we can harness the energy of the atom much better, and design propulsion systems around Fusion Explosions with enough power to hyper accelerate us at higher than gravitational effect of earth, star travel is going to be very unlikely. And nobody knows the effect of 2G acceleration over long term (probably worse than weightlessness) because we can't simulate it for more than very brief periods.
We'll need something like Warp Fields that distort Space/Time in order to avoid the limitations of our earth bound bodies.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The standard razor for any vaporware tech is,
"Five years away" = "we have the general physical principles down but there are a lot of implementation details unresolved".
"Ten years away" = "we're not really sure about the physics, and/or the economic feasibility has yet to be established".
"Twenty years away" = "some guy wrote about this in a journal and a few people in the field may believe it could work".
Now, "100 years away" = "Not. Happening. In Your Lifetime, or anyone else's".
Dog is my co-pilot.
Project Orion
I find all the BS that gets thrown around about how technology from the middle of the last century like space travel or fourth generation nuclear power is "only X decades away" rather annoying. It makes me feel like we're living in decline portrayed in the Foundation novels.
Who let an article through with a paywalled source?
SAMZENPUS!!!!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I recently read Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime and my head is still abuzz with speculation over the coming technological singularity. Consequently, I can't help but see these attempts at predicting the tech of a century hence as the equivalent of ancient Romans speculating on how many could fly. Just as we now laugh at the beliefs of the ancients (or even folks in the 19th century) for their belief that flight would be accomplished by flapping wings, surely these conceptions of spaceflight will seem naive in a few decades or a century. Sure, maybe AI and limitless energy won't arrive so soon, so one feels a need to do such engineering now, but it may all prove superfluous.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/
Beware - extreme nerdism and math.
Make sure you click on the "show topic list" in the upper right of the page.
Does this mean if we settle on a planet going round some other star the city there will be built... on rock and roll?
If so, I suspect that radio communication may prove a problem due to interference from some guy called Marconi playing the mamba. Personally, I don't care who goes to that type of place though.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Someone's been somke'n that intergalactic wacky tobaccy
We went from the Wright Brother's primitive wooden airplane that carried two passengers and could fly for about a minute; fast forward to where we have an Airbus A380 that can carry around 900 passengers, fly 15,000kms at a speed of 900km/hour. That is progress.
I can't read the paywalled article
Seems to be mirrored here:
www.bendbulletin.com/article/20111018/NEWS0107/110180407,
aerospaceblog.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/not-such-a-stretch-to-reach-for-the-stars/
or
www.bbcwordblog.com/not-such-a-stretch-to-reach-for-the-stars.html
is the reporter confusing a "100-year starship" (i.e. a starship that makes a 100-year trip) with "100 years of stellar propulsion development"?
The symposium premise was that it would take a hundred years of development to be ready to launch a starship.
Cut military budge per year in HALF. Take the money and dump it into a starship program. We'll be on Alpha Centauri in five years.
We have the ability to send craft out of the solar system now.
We could probably send a manned craft out of the solar system too... ... getting them back [and alive] may be a little bit more of a challenge however.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
We need only perfect cryogenic technology; once we can preserve our bodies for hundreds of years on end, it won't really matter how long it takes to get to the next star. Indeed, it is more likely that a human designed AI piloted craft/probe will reach the next star before our biological selves. Of course, one hundred years from now, humans will most likely be very different than we are now (genetic, nono-machine enhancements ect...)
Well that was an uninteresting article, all it said was it wanted my money.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
Keep the military budget the same and militarize space, via guise of competing with the rising superpower of China. Nothing spurs innovation like a nice cold war.
Does that make any sense? What if the robots that we create are, in some sense, our evolutionary ancestors? We send them out into space and tens of thousands of years from now they begin to self-replicate and send information back to the motherland, as they spread themselves out to viable planets in the galaxy. I know that doesn't appeal to my own sense that some day I'd be able to see, touch and feel the universe with my own body, but the reality of the vastness of space and the physical limits that appear to be in play - seemingly make that impossible. Perhaps these robots would tote along human embryos in stasis, such that if another earthlike planet were ever found they could be 'grown' and educated.
If we do that a foreign military will wipe us off the map in one year.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to colonize the ocean first? A great deal of resources are under the ocean floor, and finding a way to live and produce under the ocean seems to be more beneficial than trying to make our way out to the stars before we are ready to do so. The pressure difference under water would give us more tech to use in space, and be a bit cheaper.
(don't know what they are saying, paywalls suck and leading me to one is irritating) ...to get off this rock - but I don't see us leaving the Solar system until long after we've spread out through the solar system itself - and that's going to be challenge enough for our species. The energy costs are prohibitive for any kind of 'commuting' from any planetary gravity well as it is, so we'll have to be so adept at space travel that we don't need to a) use any raw materials coming from planets and b) we'll have to have a population that is born, lives, and reproduces outside of orbit. It would help if we make advances towards true longevity, too. Any interstellar trips are going to take a LONG time - and the investment in such a thing can't be huge; it's the problem with planetary gravity wells writ large and we're not going to be sending anything but information back and forth from our interplanetary 'conquests'.
I just don't see that happening in 100 years, as much as I'd like to. Maybe 1000, if we can keep civilization going that long. It's a huge problem, the energy costs are orders of magnitude higher than getting off of the Earth (and we have enough trouble with that) and the logistics are worse - where do we get volatiles along the way? How do we survive such a trip anyway? We can't even choose rational destinations at this point in our technology!
Having said that, I'd like to believe that we'll get there. Eventually.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
war will be beginning. I don't think we'll make it to 100 years.
"propelled using a gravity slingshot on a near-sun trajectory"
Nice idea, but Space is non-empty. there is enough dust and whatnot out there to slow such a ship and leave it slower and slower. Not good.
And then, when you get where you're going (as if you're choosing where you go), you get to decelerate. Unless orbiting a star was the intention all along. In which case, we got this star right here, plenty of orbital slots available.
No, we'll be using engines.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Undiscussed problem areas:
1) It seems a stable biosphere is bigger than "biosphere II" which was pretty freaking big for just a couple people.
2) It seems humanity needs something a bit bigger than West Virginia to not screw up genetically. Too much kissing cousins is not so good. I did date a total hottie from WV in the 90s who made jokes about her home states genetic issues, its not that they're ALL messed up, just a high (and growing?) proportion, which is worrisome. On the other hand, "tropical islands" seem to have turned out OK.
3) Who goes? The "Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy" implied all the Nobel prize winners might be a winning combination, for them, but I'm thinking maybe all the politicians, mbas, and illegals might be a winner, for us. Also see HHGTTG.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
In 1985 was tought that we would have by now in every home fusion reactors, antigrav vehicles, and even fax machines under each tv set. And internet was somewhat absent. To have starships in 100 years not just must be practical (like in "not requiring the energy output of our entire planet for a year to get to other star") but also the culture (as in "is profitable to build and investigate with that goal") should go in the same direction.
Shorter term goals, like developing self-sustained colonies in space (not city sized, but for a somewhat small crew to do somewhat interesting space tasks like investigation, asteroid mining or moving, space labs/factories, etc) are more feasible and could make enough profit to have in 100 years something in the middle scale up there
When's the 100 year butler robots and 100 year flying cars convention coming?
Our current interstellar ships all used a slingshot. In fact, we couldn't leave the Solar system with just engines.
But my opninion is that we should make interplanetary travel more efficient before we even think of interstellar. Our own star system still has many interesting things.
Some of the proposals were pretty far out, such as Joseph Breeden's concept for an engine-less starship (propelled using a gravity slingshot on a near-sun trajectory)
Since the actual site was scarce on details I'm wondering how this guy expects to get to the sun (much less escape earths' atmosphere) without an engine. This is a great idea but I still think it's better to figure out how to make a permanent space station in earth's orbit. We are so far behind a starship right now that we (usa) can't even get to our own space station without someone else helping us. In general I think the human race has quite a while before we are mature enough to start exploring the galaxy.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
I'll be happy if we have something that lets us mere Humans putter about in the inner solar system (Jupiter and sunward) within the next 100 years. Interstellar is just wishfull thinking...
I'll happily zip on over there in my 1985 fusion-powered flying car.
I believe they've missed the point of the conference.
The real question is "How do you build 1000 starships". Building one starship is like building one disposable rocket. We need to look at the entire economics and ecosystem required to manufacture this en-mass on a repeatable sustainable basis otherwise we are looking at a one-off moon mission that is not sustainable in the longterm.
When the zerg rock up, 1 starship is not gonna be enough.
In 100 years, oil will be a thing of the past. That's a big roadblock, considering that globally, fossil fuels are used almost exclusively as our power source. Developing and implementing technology that can deliver the same amount of power we use now, even if it does happen in time, will discourage large non-vital uses of energy for awhile. Assuming that it is accomplished, I think it will be far more than 100 years from an energy viewpoint alone.
We will have interstellar travel when we decide that interstellar travel is more important than bread-and-circuses, that personal responsibility is more rewarding than entitlements, and that "long term investing" involves a time period greater than one fiscal quarter.
...yeah. I'll get back to you on that.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Before we start talking about space flight and getting us all excited, lets get that whole living to 150 years old thing figured out first so we can all enjoy the awesomeness of space travel before we die of over population!
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
The article has been reprinted several other places on the web. Try this link, for example:
http://aerospaceblog.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/not-such-a-stretch-to-reach-for-the-stars/
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
fuck me i was born too soon
I would really like us to start working (conceptually for the first few decades) on a colonization ship that we would send, ASAP, to the nearest habitable extrasolar planet we find. Yes, it would be slow, and if all goes well, ships launched later will beat it to the destination, perhaps by centuries. But not all might go well, and if it doesn't, I'd like the comfort of knowing that there's a place far away where humanity (and other life) got a clean start.
Of course, a ship that we could power with this century's technology (nuclear explosions) would be slow. It would take centuries to reach its destination. Obviously, it couldn't have people on board. But it could have all the genetic material to make people, as well as things like wheat, ladybugs, gut bacteria and all the other flora and fauna we'd like to bring with us. It would all be in deep freeze during the journey, and hatched once the ship has arrived. The first humans would gestate in artificial wombs and be raised by robotic parents with advanced parenting AI. This is another technology which isn't available, but it's not a century away, either. All the stuff would have to be very heavily shielded, because centuries of exposure to cosmic rays can do a lot of damage. I would propose doing this with many layers of microscopically thin sheets of lead, which could be laser etched with machine readable pits to contain all the valuable data that our civilization has produced. There would be some redundancy so that damaged sections could be recovered based on what's read off from the intact sections.
I think the most serious technological challenge to pulling this off would be in the field of robotics. We would need more or less autonomous robots to scout the planet, land, harvest resources and build factories for their own replication, as well as a habitat suitable for the biologicals. This would be quite a challenge, but it's almost entirely a software (AI) problem, and I don't think it will go unsolved for all that long.
Since I was a small child at Expo 63 and Expo 67, they have been promising fusion power and interstellar travel in 10-20 years ...
Let's get real and realize we're more likely to be able to use technologies we actually have patents for now, not pipe dreams that are always "in the future".
Robots we send off into space will do perfectly well, and then they can merge with alien civilizations and come back to destroy their makers.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think this sums it up nicely http://www.amazingsuperpowers.com/2009/12/back-in-my-day/
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
The logical answer is not to start until your trip time is short enough that a later, faster ship is likely to pass you. That means push propulsion development until it appears to stall. For example, if you can do 10% of the speed of light, that comes to a 43 year trip to Alpha Centauri. If it looks like you can increase performance to 11% within 4 years, keep working, cause that will cut 4 years off the trip time, and more for any longer trip. If it looks like you can't, go ahead and launch. Given that current technology can give us maybe 0.1% of lightspeed at best, leading to a 430 year trip, for the moment the answer is keep working.
Tell me how you measured this to confirm such a conclusion?
Thanks for more misleading information.
We need to explore our own solar system first.
I had a random idea several days ago, concerning venus.
You could theoretically punctuate the runaway greenhouse effects in that planet's atmosphere using custom engineered microbes. This technology is well within our grasp.
What the microbes need to do, is create small atmospheric colonies held together with "fluff", similar to dandilion fluff. The microbes themselves should be chemoallotrophs, using a sulfur hydrogen cycle. The kicker is what kind of fluff they should produce.
The poblem with venus is that it had absurd amounts of co2 and other dangerous greenhouse gasses. We need a way to sequester carbon and nitrogen compounds in a highly thermally stable form, to reduce thoe levels. Such a material needs to withstand temperatures over 2000 degrees F. Amusingly, the petrochemical industry has already created such a substance, called "amarid." It is used to make bullet proof vests, and thermal insulation walls where previously abspestos was required. It does not melt, and strongly resists ignition. It is formed into fiber using a chemical solvent process.
Using atmospheric bacteria to produce amarid fibers would create a biological process that would slowly rain that fluff onto the planet's surface, inceasing surface albedo, and simultaneously redusing atmospheric co2 and nitrogen compound levels (like ammonia).
The hard work would be designing the custom microbes; something that would have industrial uses here on earth. (Amarid is currently expensive to produce. A biological process for synthesis would greatly reduce production costs.) Delivery via a lander would be quite easy (compared to safely landing scientific equipment) as it just be a ballistic aerosol can, and having it land by crashing would be a non issue.
Granted, cleaning up all the amarid all over the planet's surface after the temperatures drop would be a long term project for a colony to undertake, but the fibers themselves would make fantastic construction materials. It is one of the strongest and most durable plastics in existence.
I suspect it could be created using an enzamatic process, since it bears a strong chemical resemblence to protein molecules.
Considering that in 100 years we have causes a pollution crisis on earth, runaway proliferation of such microbes could work the inverse, if they are aggressive replicators.
If you want to eat once you get to Fiji, you don't have to bring your food with you on your 15 connecting flights. You can eat the food grown in Fiji so you don't incur any transportation costs.
By contrast, your plan amounts to building a series of outposts on a chain of desert islands in a barren sea. Not only do you have to bring all the food you'll need once you get there, you also have to bring enough food to feed all of the people manning all of the outposts along the way because they have no way to feed themselves. Instead of being convenient rest stops where travelers can pick up fresh supplies, these outposts would be a drain on the travelers' supplies.
Even if your outposts are self-contained habitats that perfectly recycle all of their resources (a hard enough problem in itself), you just need to swap "food" with "energy" and the problem remains the same.
There is a growing consortium of Hackerspaces that are preparing a reply to the DARPA RFP
For details see the hackerspaces.org website project page: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hackerspaces_Global_Space_Program
and read the discussion, basic proposal, etc.
Then join in!
flying cars.
Be seeing you...
What you get from a planet slingshot is your velocity plus objects velocity (as relative to, say, Earth). So you wouldn't actually leave the sun any faster than you were able to fly toward the sun. The way it works is that you direct yourself from Earth to, say, Mars, in such a way that you are flying head on towards Mars... i.e. your velocity relative to Mars is greater than your velocity relative to Earth, then you can use Mars to be traveling at your velocity relative to Mars in any direction that you want.
The mass of the object has nothing to do with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_slingshot
What the parent is saying is that we ain't going anywhere without prioritizing allocation of resources to get there. I'll avoid nitpicking the parent's individual points.
I hope engineers and scientists take a look at fusion-powered plasma turbine, because it can make interstellar travel much more feasible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSkxPghXTCg
First and foremost, we need a 'Bureaucracy Engine' to propel us past idiots who keep putting up red tape.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/science/space/18starship.html
0.1% lightspeed would be 4300 years. And if we ever got project orion off the ground, I think we could manage around 5-10% lightspeed.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Vinge was one of the authors in attendance. Talking over drinks with him, and some of the other authors during the social on the last night (fun game of public storytelling), they seemed to believe in the concept as much or more than most attendees. Although we were able to make a game of how much they mentioned "singularity" during their panel (20+), they still noted that ideas only come to fruition if they are discussed and worked on. Waiting for a hypothetical singularity to solve all hurdles helps no one. It may not even happen. There is a very real possibility that energy limits will hamper our current trend of short term, exponential growth.
Also, as needs to be constantly reiterated, the idea of the 100 YSS project is not to build a starship right now. It is to develop a long lasting (100+ years), financially stable organization that can develop the capabilities, technologies, and social movements necessary to complete such a task. Not nearly as sexy as warp drive, but damned necessary. Unfortunately, the pop-sci view was reflected in attendees, with financial / economic panels lightly attended vs packed rooms for warp bubble discussion.
We can go to other stars now if we wanted it. The technology is available.
For energy and propulsion, you use nuclear power.
For gravity, you use rotation.
Build a large enough spaceship which can host gardens and animals, and you have a small Earth that can easily approach relativistic speeds and reach nearby starts in one generation.
A hundred years?! Goddammit, I'll be dead by then! Unless some pretty amazing advances in medicine happen in the next decade. Besides, I was promised a flying car by now, it is the 21st Century.
Can I at least get a flying car? How about ubiquitous electric cars? Aliens? Sexbots? Anything? *crickets*
Come on!
IANA (working) physicist either, but I did get a degree in it. Sure, it's a statistical assertion. The assertion is not that it's impossible for entropy to decrease, just that it's absolutely fantastically improbable. I make an effort to keep up on developments in physics, and I've seen absolutely nothing that would lead me to believe that there's anything to "useful violations" of the second law. If anyone has a citation that says something different, I would be really, really interested in reading it.
... it's still, according to everything we know, impossible (reports of speed limit violating neutrinos notwithstanding - almost every physicist, including those who reported the phenomenon, thinks this is an error in the data). So I guess we're done here.
This is a non-sequitur. Sure, we have airline service all over the world. How does this lead to the conclusion that interstellar travel is likely or practical?
Ok, after the first iteration, you'll be in interstellar space. What are you going to build the next station out of? How will you power it? Where are you going to get people to volunteer to man these things? What are they going to do with themselves after the next station is built?
I can hardly believe it's even necessary to say this, but obesity != acceleration.
I'll stop now. Suffice it to say that if we could power starships with handwaving, we'd be to the Andromeda galaxy by now.
If you don't care about radioactive contamination of the earth's atmosphere, or the fact that we don't really know how to make a self-contained ecosystem, or anything about the psychology involved in keeping people contained in a starship for many, many years (read up on Biosphere II for some fun problems encountered in both these topics), or the fact that R&D, building, and operating costs for this thing would be freaking enormous, and that there's no obvious (monetary) payoff, and that because of that no one has shown even the slightest interest in funding this... then, sure, it's "solved". If you care about any aspect of the problem other than the theory behind the propulsion system... not so solved.
There was a substantial element of luck involved in those cases. The founding populations happened to not have too many recessive, fatal mutations. They didn't happen to run into any diseases that no one had resistance to. This is not to say that these problems couldn't be solved, but they're not nothing.
Another undiscussed problem: the psychology/sociology of having some quite small number of people cooped up on a relatively small spaceship... forever (essentially). Biosphere II ran into this problem too.
I'm sure you're right - it should be possible. But the point is that we don't know how to do it, and we'd have to spend some considerable amount of time and money to figure it out... in addition to all the other time and money requirements to build a starship. Who's paying for all this?