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!"

Comments

In other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sci Fi convention regurgitates things they've seen on TV so far.

Re:In other words...

[Dammital]

No.

It was 600 smart people all in one place: engineers, technical managers, educators, academics, NASA representatives from Ames and Glenn and MSFC, and everyman types like me, all of whom understood the magnitude of the challenge.

It was a gathering where you could dare to use the word "starship" in a sentence and nobody would crack a smile.

There were tracks on propulsion (light sails, nuclear thermal and hybrid nuclear technologies), habitat creation (bioengineering, microgravity challenges, plasma shields), education (there were lots of educators in the audience), organization, ethics. One university type - I forget his name - boldly asserted that there would be useful violations of the second law of thermodynamics in a couple of years. (I didn't quite believe that, so I did a little reading when I returned; it seems that the second "law" is more like a statistical assertion, so maybe he's got something. IANAPhysicist.)

There was a track on fringe technologies too, those FTL and warp drives you laugh about. I didn't attend that one; at the conference wrap-up the track moderator only said politely that there "was no concensus".

A double handful of SF authors were there and a couple of Hollywood types too, all conducting their own research.

Nobody came here expecting to be beamed up. Nobody was thinking Flash Gordon or Jean Luc Picard. Everyone fully appreciated the immensity of the project, the audacity of such a thing, the difficulty of the undertaking. It was inspiring to be in the company of people who had thought seriously about some of the issues, and who dared to dream big. All brainstorming is like this.

An underlying theme, mentioned several times during the conference, is that Earth "is a single point of failure".

Per the organizers: "The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society will be publishing a select number of papers in a special issue. Date of the special issue has not yet been announced."

Awesome example of timeline shift

[Scareduck]

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".

This problem was solved in 1958

[Wonko the Sane]

Project Orion

The biggest design above is the "super" Orion design; at 8 million tonnes, it could easily be a city.[7] In interviews, the designers contemplated the large ship as a possible interstellar ark. This extreme design could be built with materials and techniques that could be obtained in 1958 or were anticipated to be available shortly after. The practical upper limit is likely to be higher with modern materials.

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.

Re:This problem was solved in 1958

[Rei]

Orion is such an obsolete concept, I don't know why people keep citing it. At least cite something like Medusa. It's superior to Orion in every way -- captures more energy, weighs less, exposes the crew to less radiation, has a gentler pusher stroke, scales down better, etc. Basically, you invert the paradigm; the explosions occur *ahead* of the spacecraft, which is *towed*, not pushed, by a large "parachute" that catches the explosive force.

Nice work, editors!

[GameboyRMH]

Who let an article through with a paywalled source?

SAMZENPUS!!!!

Re:Nice work, editors!

[ElectricTurtle]

I've noticed that most email field verification just looks for an '@' so I prefer to use haha@your.mom

"Starship conference?"

[Dogtanian]

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.

Re:Probably Not

[vlm]

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.

Unnecessary. I'll never visit Fiji but humans DO have airline service to Fiji.

How long can you stand to travel as opposed to being "home", lets say a year. Build a station, send it out one years distance, however far away that is. Build the next station, send it out two years distance. Keep pushing stuff on the train and you'll eventually hit the next star.

Your argument is we "need" for some unspecified reason, to have all this high tech junk so there's only about 4 of these stations between us and the next star. My argument is who cares if there's 4 or 400 or 4 million stations between here and the next star, it'll all work just as well as a colonization / space travel policy. Much as I like the idea of air service to Fiji, I frankly don't care if I need to make 15 connections stops and transfers were I to try it. Even if my body could never reach Fiji, we still technically as a species have flight service to Fiji.

The majority of the human population might therefore eventually live "enroute" on various stations. OK, so what?

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.

Sure we can. Take a large (to get lots of data) melting-pot of a nation (to remove racial effects) and have their corporate owned government propagandize them to eat grains and corn syrup and other carbs until their weight doubles. Wait a lifetime, analyze the results. Hmm, I wonder where we could run this experiment? It would seem that a lifetime is not so good, a year or so is frankly no big deal.