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Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise In 20 Years
Nancy_A writes "An engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail — building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the starship Enterprise. The ship would be based on current technology, and would take about 20 years to construct, at a cost of roughly $1 trillion. 'We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let's do it,' writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE-Dan."
An "Enterprise-type" starship is a misnomer at best. An ion drive to get to even the closest star would have to be a "generation" ship. It would take generations of people, born, liviing, dying, to reach the nearest stars.
The alternative would be some sort of 2001-type hibernation, which also would not be anything like the Enterprise.
"Beam me up Scottie, there's no intelligent life in this article."
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
screw the starship...just give me the holodeck. without the glitches preferably.
I smell the mother of all kickstarters launching in 5, 4, 3, 2 ...
They can't even build a website to withstand Slashdotting. You'd trust them building a ship to take you into space?
I could not find this project on kickstarter
The proposed ship would be starship Enterprise in the same sense the space shuttle Enterprise is the star ship enterprise. Not really a star ship if it can't travel between the stars... So why spend 20 years and 1 trillion dollars building a ship to explore the solar system? I think it would be much cheaper, quicker and more feasible to simply build an armada of probes to explore great tracts of the solar system in a much shorter period of time for much less money then a single ship flying from world to world.
Would it be a series NX-x of NCC-1701x?
There is no doubt that in a situation of species-threatening emergency that mankind has, today, the technology to construct a quite large object in earth orbit and give it enough engine power to move through the solar system (Orion drive or whatever). The problem is that we do not have the technology to get stuff out of the Earth's gravity well with anything greater than 0.1% efficiency, and in the process of building that Enterprise-sized object we would destroy the Earth's atmosphere and ecosystem. So until a 10,000x better surface-to-orbit launch technology comes along this ain't gonna happen.
sPh
Once the petroleum runs out in Arabia, perhaps the Mullahs can be persuaded to teach that the 21-virgin plan has been expanded to include ultimate sacrifice for space exploration. My keyboard is "snarkyless", unlike the commentary.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Awesome.
Technological reach is never the problem. Political reach is.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If the ship accelerates under constant acceleration per the description then at the front side of the saucer those on the gravity wheel will feel
1G - A
and those on the back side of the saucer will fell
1G + A
So every loop around the gravity wheel you go through 2A of gravity variance As the +A thrust vector rotates from your feet to head and side to side of you.
Sea-sickness prevails.
It might have a lot of "detail" but an error this glaring just seems that they have missed a whole lot of other stuff.
1) Building a high-tech gadget means it will be obsolete before it is half done. This is not like building a cathedral.
2) No one has a trillion dollars to spend on this.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
This is nothing like the Enterprise except in shape -- and it would be pointless to duplicate the shape.
And besides, in the Enterprise world, dilithium crystals (with antimatter in there somewhere) were the power source of "reality", and "ion power" was what made Scottie get all wide-eyed.
With current technology, we'd end up with a generational sublight ship. Keeping in with the Star Trek theme, this would be closer to the SS Botany Bay which according to Star Trek canon was launched only 18 years ago. Of course, that turned out horribly wrong, so maybe it's not the mission to emulate.
Joking aside, making such a ship would be very neat. But the guy needs to stop pretending that it has anything to do with Star Trek or it's Enterprise. We could call it Enterprise if we wanted, but picking that shape would be silly -- there are much more practical shapes to be had. And considering just how expensive this would be, we should be trying to make it practical rather than novel.
I'd have more faith in his ideas if he could provide a working website first.
Even quicker if it was a collab between this project and Planetary Resources. That price could come down considerably.
And who knows, maybe in the next few decades we will crack the universe open and develop some sort of new tech to actually make it a starship and not just "planetship".
A lot of our knowledge on high energies is based heavily on experimentation and theoretical limits we think are there because we see a curve on a graph.
But as we know, correlation is not equal to reality most of the time on the very large or very small.
Quantum Mechanics regularly screws with the heads of scientists every year for fun.
Likewise, the very large, General Relativity literally breaks down at very high energies because we still haven't really been able to test it on the large scale, only observe a few things appear to fit the model
Then there is the motherload of confusion, dark matter and energy, which is just completely out there at the moment, we haven't a clue what it is, just what it does.
What do we know?
The next century is going to be extremely exciting for science and the human race. More so than the industrial age.
Let's just hope this planetary resources thing goes well, and countries don't get too cocky and decide to nuke each other.
and be similar in size with the same look as the USS Enterprise that we know from Star Trek.
Not according to the picture. The picture depicts it as longer than Burj Khalifa is tall. That means it is about 3 times bigger than the enterprise was supposed to be.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
build a space elevator and use it to get the parts to space and build the ship there.
Seriously, is this a joke? The very first thing I'd chuck away when building a star ship inspired by Star Trek is the design of the Enterprise. There are countless way better, suitable and even more realistic space ship designs than that fragile contraption.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Soon as that 1000x-stronger-than-spider-silk cable material is invented, the electrical charge problems are solved, and the people living under the fall path of a broken cable accept the risk we are good to go. Just a few minor engineering obstacles to be sure.
sPh
Sounds like a good kickstarter project. I'll chip in.
Actually, having NASA embark to "building the actual Enterprise" might be just what the US needs to get funding back into space. You have to get the public on board. In the 60's rockets were cool and new, now they are old hat. "Why do we need to do that, we did it before".
The enterprise is horribly designed. Honestly it's good for Skiffy but it sucks in reality. This is where this guy falls on his face hard. There are other designs that real engineers have came up with that would work better, even just a long round tube is a lot better design than this.
Plus building something that huge is ridiculousness, unless you are thinking ARK ship for people to leave earth and never return, but even then the enterprise is the worst possible design you could use.
what is next? let's lift the Yamamoto off the ocean floor and fit engines to it to turn it into a space battleship?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It should be BAD-Dan, as in "Be A Dork".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If you can't build and host a proper website, how are you going to build and operate a freakin' spaceship?
We just spent that much getting revenge for 911 and the meter is still running. By the time we pull out and add up all the benefits to soldiers the number I heard was 3 to 5 trillion. The point is just what we spent to date in the middle east would fund the project and which is likely to yield more benefits? It would even end up quasi commercial because most first world countries would sign on to have their scientists on board and pay to have probes launched. In the end it could pay for itself and it could become a source for locating and harvesting rare earth materials that are in short supply here on Earth. Cut 50 billion out of the military budget which isn't hard and there's your funding.
so, for the tune of $1 Trillion dollars, why re-create a ship, who's entire design merits is based on asthetics of Hollywood, and without its most important part, the faster than light "Warp Drive" and self sustaining matter/anti-matter reaction that can power it almost indefinately.
While I am a big fan of the TV shows and movies, and I very much for space exploration, this is bogus. Step back into reality dude. A real life model of the USS enterprise is nothing more than a gimmick. At the cost of $1 trillion its an unaffordable gimmick for ANYONE.
Mabey when space technology advances in 50-60 years, if it does(space age is OVER), it'd make a very nice concept for a space cruise liner. One giant gimmick, where you dress the crew up in star trek inspired uniforms, and treat the guests to a retro-futuristic ride through space with 60s music and dance parties, stage acting, and gimmicky goodness.
A slightly more realistic run at sending a probe to a nearby star.
http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/
This is the real thing, folks!
Seriously though, I want to get excited about space travel. I grew up on a diet of sci-fi books and whatever NASA was doing I'd be watching closely.
Coming to slashdot these days is like being hit by a brick of cynicism. "The governments and the corporations are corrupt, what's the point in even trying to change things?". It makes me sad.
If we can't even get excited about our childhood fantasies (Trek etc), what's left?
This seems like either the deeds of mighty Captain Pirk of Star Wreck fame, or the "invention" of transparant aluminum.
I am officially gone from
Then we can have a beowulf cluster of Enterprise ships!
Wow, I can't believe the amount of people that are comming out of the woodwork to say 'this is stupid'. Honestly, humanity needs to pour massive amounts of funding in leaving the planet. Sure we don't have the technology to warp spacetime, but goddamn it, the solar system is a big place and it's a great start. Having the resources of multiple planets at our collective disposal could open up a new golden age of human exploration. Why is everyone so small minded about this?
Now we just need to find somebody with the money...
Time to build starship: 20 years.
Time to reach nearest star: 10,000 years (*)
Based on these numbers, wouldn't it be better to let technology progress a little bit further?
(*) IANAA, not an astronomer
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I'd rather a Six, from Tripping the Rift.
The Faster than light thing is a problem as no one knows how to make it work. Discovery one (2001 Space Odyssey) may be possible though. Sans Hal. Maybe Siri could substitute.
I think if I were an engineer, looking to built large megastructures in space, with sufficient shielding for human occupants, I think I would look at a sphere first. Minimum surface area to enclose a given volume. Build from the inside out. Controllable rotational gravity; outer compartments are filled with water and storage; further in, put people and living space; further in still, put a radiation storm shelter (humans can cope with microgravity for short periods with no ill effects). Besides, if you were building a spacecraft not designed for reentry, there would be no need to make it aerodynamic.
Perhaps we should be taking our inspiration from the Death Star, not the Starship Enterprise.
Columbus didn't sail three Caravels across the Atlantic "just because." The one thing missing in the history of space exploration has been a solid reason to do it. So far, it's been a somewhat aimless pissing match between superpowers -- let's put people on the moon with golf clubs, or float around the planet in a pressurized tin can for 6 months. Whoopee. Things get far more interesting for tribes of bald monkeys when there's a concrete reward involved - mining rights, vast wealth, land, military superiority and so on. Sadly, the whole "space" thing is going to be a bit of a farce until there's profit of some kind to be had. *Then* it gets interesting. And not necessarily in a good way.
http://www.space.com/14656-japanese-space-elevator-2050-proposal.html
no comment
Researcher Translation
i have been waiting for someone to do this, i want to go to space!
We already spent a trillion on the bailout/stimulous/tarp etc.
too late.
Easy to accept as an abstract concept, hard to rationalize if you love space.
The average Joe who lived between 1930 and 2000 probably had a much greater sense of progress and optimism about their lives and the world than somebody born from 1960 onwards.
Somebody who lives between 2000-2070 will probably experience:
1 Mars mission (country undecided)
Three or four economic crises that cripple North America and Europe
4-8 small/medium terrist activities with a death toll of between 3 and 4 figures (up to 6 figures possible but very unlikely)
But let's not forget - Better Gadgets!
at a cost of roughly $1 trillion
So a fraction of what we spend on the military finding new ways to blow things up or on wall street bailing out incompetent bankers, then? We definitely have our priorities don't we?
Yes, we do. Without a military our civilization would fall to a more aggressive civilization. A military is necessary to create the environment where your civilization can do something other than be a servant to another.
Go read a copy of "Guns, Germs and Steel", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel. In it there is an example of a society that turned pacifist. IIRC a group of pacific islanders migrated to another island and eventually lost contact with their former home. This group started out aggressive and became pacifist during their isolation. Their parent society remained aggressive. When contact was re-established some small number of generations later (2, 3 ?) the isolated group was enslaved by the parent society. Keep in mind that this is how people that were blood relatives with the same culture and beliefs, other than the pacifist part, were treated. Pacifism loses unless *everyone* else is also pacifist.
Could we spend our resources on the military more efficiently, yes. Do we need a large military capable of projecting power globally, yes, isolationism won't work any more. Could we get involved in global affairs less, yes, that WW1 Wilsonian let-the-locals-sort-it-out idea is probably best. Assuming of course the sorting-it-out is strictly a local affair.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wikipedia, the source of all possible wisdom, says on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_(Star_Trek) that "According to The Making of Star Trek, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's original plan did not include transporters, instead calling for characters to land the starship itself. However, this would have required unfeasible and unaffordable sets and model filming, as well as episode running time spent while landing, taking off, etc. The shuttlecraft was the next idea, but when filming began, the full-sized shooting model was not ready. Transporters were devised as a less expensive alternative, achieved by a simple fade-out/fade-in of the subject. Transporters first appear in the original pilot episode "The Cage". The transporter special effect, before being done using computer animation, was created by turning a slow-motion camera upside down and photographing some backlit shiny grains of aluminium powder that were dropped between the camera and a black background." Citation given is Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside Star Trek the real story, 1996, ISBN 0-671-00974-5.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
He's just using the name Enterprise to try to get attention Things the enterprise has that his proposed ship does not:
Lock the nut up. Comparison to sci fi should only be made when the tech is functionally identical. In any case not by engineers but rather journalists or observers. This idiot is just sensationalizing for personal gain.
Great plans for a really big space station maybe but at a cost of 1 trillion I seriously doubt this will come to fruition any time soon. Pipe dreams.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
This guy is proposing something using one of the most powerfull images / analogies we have as his inspiration. Yes , the design might be horrible, and there are a lot of reasons why some elements of his proposal would not work, frankly speaking we don't know! There are also a lot of the elements would work! If you look at his roadmap he is proposing 11 years of research and within those 11 years technologies are proposed, prototypes build etc, etc, etc. Then there is the moment of final ship design, not before! What he is envisioning is a huge platform (the amount of room we have will make it possible to use this for all kinds of things) which we can use to really explore our solar system and use the industry and momentum that this creates to get a sustainable program of the ground which will make us an true spacefaring species. He is not saying we should leap ahead and only do this when we have the 1G drive or when the Warp drive is invented. He is saying we should start with what we already are capable off and learn from it. Any argument that we have other problems which we as humanity should solve first (hunger, desease, war) are all true, but that would mean everybody should also stop doing other things, like going on vacation and buying this just to big car, etc, etc. Just think about how many launch sites we would need to get te stuff to build this Enterprise up there and where these launchsites are best located. Also think about how many jobs this creates and inventions it requires and what that does to solve te forementioned problems. There is nothing more powerfull then a common goal I for one applaud the effort he put in here and he gets my vote. I sincerely think that we as humans should make the trip. Other proposals like sending probes is like watching a football match on the television. Yes it is very exciting and maybe cheaper, but it is no where near the experience you get by actually being in the stadium! (when his website is back up a.k.a. can handle the load again i am going to read further on what his thoughts are)
--
Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
The site is Slashdotted, so I don't know what this guy is claiming, but off the top of my head, there are just a few things the Star Trek Enterprise had that we don't have the technology for:
- Warp drive. So yeah, kinda the whole point; I might as well stop now. But I'll go on...
- Phasers, shields, photon torpedoes, tractor beams. Hopefully we don't need them, but they're a big part of what's useful in the Enterprise if you take away the warp drive.
- Transporters. No great loss.
- Artificial gravity, unless derived from rotation or constant acceleration. But neither of those would be compatible with the Enterprise design.
constant acceleration just keeps on giving.
Suppose A = 0.1 m/s^2. That's quite insignificant compared to the 9.8m/s^2 of 1G (2 orders of magnitude).
Then, on the last second of day 10, you have a speed of (10 * 24 * 60 *60) * 0.1 m/s^2 = 86400 m/s.
That's 86 km/s, by the way.
How long would it take you to get to Mars at this speed, if it was constant (it isn't, every second you're going 0.1 m/s faster)? /60 / 60 = 1 442.88194 hrs. /60 / 60 / 24 = 60.120081 days.
Let's say Mars is 3 AU from earth (average for mars-sun is 1.5 AU, and obviously earth-sun is 1 AU, so that sounds reasonable).
3 AU = 448 794 000 000 m. 448794000000 m / 86400 m/s = 5 194 375 s. 5 194 375 s / 60 = 86 572.9167 min. 5 194 375s
5 194 375s
Note, after 10 days of flight, they've already covered part of the 3 AU. But if they hadn't, even if thrust was stopped, they'd still reach Mars within the next 61 days.
So yeah, small A will get you to Mars in 90 days.
(@GGP: set the rotation axis to the direction of the flight. You're back to constant gravity.)
No. We do not have the technology to build USS Enterprise. Fucking nerds..... They're known to be exceptionally smart, but now they're becoming stupid.
Why would you be worried about the risk of thread falling on your property, outside of Pern? You don't believe that old saw about a penny dropped off the empire state building being lethal, do you? Mythbusters sank that one pretty conclusively.
And we have viable cable materials, just no way to manufacture them in scale. The electrical charge problems are troublesome, though, as are the difficulties of making a climber vehicle.
The kind of money that no country could possibly spend right now.
...could do this in a year or two. Wake up people! We've had uber technology that has gone un-used and forgotten from the 80's for christ's sake. People just have to work together, understand the risks, eliminate all the 'red-tape' and do this as a world instead of just countries. It's not hard, open your mind.
... notions of space-faring humans buzzing around the universe. We are a long way from being able to feasibly accomplish this
If one were really interested in expanding the breadth of human knowledge of the universe we would dump the proposed $1T (cheap! ) we would spend in building some sci-fi jackoffs wet dream of a 'starship' and invest in more probes, bigger telescopes , and what am I forgetting...... oh, yea, education.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Amen (sine the cash crunch bit)
That's cheap. Where do I send my $1,000? I'm sending extra to make up for those without vision.
Well, we have cables strong enough to build elevators on the Moon and on Mars. And on neither place is there a problem will people living underneath the fall path. The electrical charge problems don't exist on the Moon. (Not sure about Mars.)
But the stable ecosystem problem means that we can't support people out there yet, even so. That's the real major problem. Submarines aren't a good example, as even at the extreme they come up for air every month or so, and they've got plentiful access to water, so if worst came to worst they could electrolyze it for Oxygen. (Don't know if they do, but they *could*.)
A stable habitat implies, among other things, that it can supply it's own food, air, and water from locally available resources at a rate sufficient to keep it stable. So far we can't do that unless air and water are readilly available externalities. (Given ammonia, Carbon Dioxide, Methane, and water as available externalities (comets, Jovian orbit asteroids, etc.), we need LOTS!! of energy to convert them into food, air, and water. And that's if we move out to where those resources are available. Closer in asteroids are dry, because the volatiles have evaporated. So the ecosystem needs to be really TIGHT. Transporting the stuff up form Earth is not only expensive, it is a vital dependency that makes planning to live there unreasonably dangerous. Politics that you have nothing to do with can kill you without warning, and even by accident.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
By the time we build it, everything on it will be obsolete. Look at the spacecrafts initially sent to the moon and early satellites. Our current hand held phones have more capable computers those did and are much smaller and cheaper as well.
By the time this thing gets built its materials will be obsolete, we will have stronger and better materials, more powerful computers, better cameras, better propulsion systems, etc... all at a much lower price.
I say we wait until we can build this thing much more reliably for much less instead of wasting taxpayer money we don't currently have.
Building an Enterprise without a warp drive would be like building a Titanic powered by galley slaves.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Let's presume that building an advanced technology starship is the ultimate goal, and we don't have that technology yet. Let's also presume that no one will repeal the laws of gravity any time soon. The prerequisites to starship construction wouldn't rely upon technology that is currently out of reach. The premise is that building and launching any starship from a low gravity environment is far preferable to launching it from Earth. The first of those "baby steps" towards building starships is developing the technology to perform robotic asteroid mining. Low orbit robotic refining, smelting, and construction would be the next step.
Rather than building a space station / shipyard in Low Earth Orbit, build it closer to the asteroid source of the materials in Low Mars Orbit. That location also puts mankind closer to the water & carbon-based fuel resources we already know exist on the moons of Mars and Saturn. Even supposing that it takes 30 years to get that combined space station & dockyard built, it doesn't preclude parallel scientific discovery of technologies that would make realist travel between the stars possible. But it would give humanity the infrastructure necessary to build such starships, even if we don't know what those technologies will be or what the starship design would ultimately look like. We already have a good idea of what a LEO / LMO space station / dockyard would look like if it is to be human habitable -- a vast spinning wheel, with spaceship docking and construction "dry-dock" near the hub.
The construction of Moon bases and Mars bases for human habitation would go more quickly with a space-based source of materials, rather than fighting Earth's gravity like we are doing now. Extraterrestrial sources of necessary raw materials would break any reliance upon Moon or Mars based resources such as water and carbon-based fuels for anything other than short-term emergency measures would be a good thing. Governments waste far too much money on useless military junk that predisposes those governments to view every problem as a raised nail when their only tool is a hammer. Not surprisingly, most of the USA's Military Industrial Complex has also been involved in space exploration. The money is there for such a vast & bold enterprise -- it's only a matter of political will to refocus our efforts & monies on space exploration & construction rather than destruction.
Let's get it done ... beginning tomorrow morning.
I reckon we should just hollow out the moon and cruise around in that, taking out planets that happen to be in our path.
Why in the world would we do that?
There is only so much room on this rock for humanity to spread out and multiply. Eventually, when resources are too short, wars happen....in this age, on a global scale.
So how does helping more people survive and multiply help? You think these poor peoples from Africa are magically going to discover civilization just because you airlifted pallets of food in? You think that homeless bum on the corner is going to quit being a homeless bum cause you gave him a quarter? No, they are in the situation they are in because of who they are and the choices they made.
If you want to waste a trillion dollars helping the helpless, by all means, do so...but don't spend any of MY money to do it. I have better things to spend it on....like building a bunker so my family will survive the next World War.
Why would you want him to reproduce and spread his insanity?
I say, as someone who didn't grow up masturbating to Uhura or that green alien chick in my formative years that if we somehow ever came up with 1 trillion dollars to do anything in this country that didn't involve bankrolling financial meltdowns or bailing out some industry, we throw half of it at NASA (which is nearly more than they got in the entirety of the program) and give them a goal of getting astronauts on Mars in 10 years, with the promise of the other half once the astronauts return safely.
Then they can start building whatever pie in the sky BS this guy cooked up. Or hopefully come up with something more realistic and less based on watching too many episodes of some 40 year old sci-fi show.
Seeing as how none of this is going to happen, and the above also seems much more realistic to me, this article and idea just seems like mental masturbation.
Quick, post the kickstarter link when it is ready. I have $5 left over from Friday.
Considering possible inflation over 20 years, the pyjamas (pajamas) for the crew alone might cost more than 1 trillion.
(admittedly, that's worst case).
Remember, Enterprise had a crew of 400, although they never bothered to show us more than ten or twelve of them.
If only he could create a website incapable of being slashdotted.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
...in 20 years, an ion drive engine will be as outdated as a steam engine.
Maybe build the ship, but leave the propulsion open...and hope the new propulsion doesn't need some special form factor in ship design.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Borg_sphere
That's going to be one really, really big Kickstarter project.
I shall avenge thee!
Has anyone asked "why" this would be necessary?
There is currently no intra-stellar trade route or threat. Thus, besides a very expensive proof of point, I can't see a practical reason to build such a ship and waste more tax payer money...
-- George Carlin
-- Bill Hicks
Now that is aspiration. But building an ugly spaceship for no purpose, just because it featured in a TV show that didn't even have much to say -- WTF? That is so lame, I actually got dumber just by coming across this story, kthxbye.
Nature does it best. We just need to find some green glowing beans and plant them.
Its great that we can build the star ship enterprise in 20 years, but who's going to pay for it?
What is the whole purpose of building? Visiting Mars ? to do what ? Collecting a bunch of rocks?
Maybe there are oil in Mars ? Gold?
History has shown that as populations become more educated and better nourished that birthrates actually decline. It seems that poverty promotes high birth rates. Maybe it has something to do with there being slim odds to pass ones genes on to the future generations, the more one procreates, the better the chances of that occuring.
How one eliviates poverty and educates the poor is another issue. It has already been shown that drop shipping food doesn't work except in times of extreme famine. It has also been shown that giving financial aid to corrupt governments does not work either. But then again, neither does propping up corrupt regimes corporate and political reasons.
"A systems engineer and electrical engineer with 30 years at a fortune 500 company" that could be a lot of people, but what if it was the Woz? You naysayers wouldn't be saying nay then!
If we start building it the engine to power it will be finished and it can be retrofitted.
not building it will take that much longer.
...if you ain't got that [warp drive].
congress did not spend that money because it was 'cool', they spent it because the soviet union sent up a satellite called 'sputnik' that proved the theory they could rain bombs down on us.
before sputnik, there was essentially no space program. zero, nada, zilch. nobody gave a shit except a few dreamers and engineers who were discredit for wanting to waste taxpayers money on pipe dreams - we didnt need space, we needed bombers and nukes to kill the 'commies' in the korean war and elsewhere.
(of course, the soviet chief designer Korolev, was actually a starry eyed dreamer, who managed to fool the generals into building the space missiles... and Kruschev agreed because there was no way they could compete in conventional warfare due to cost... but thats another story)
The biggest reason this will never happen is that the builders spend 19.5 years and trillion(s) of dollars on it, and then one of the literally millions of components fails and the whole thing blows up. Or an opposing nation "accidentally" fires a missile at it, or terrorists blow it up. It would just be such a massive waste. Of course, nobody would be financing the project without massive insurance, and the reinsurers would charge through the roof. This is nothing like the space shuttle development where we have a few of them, or if one blows up we can build another one .
That would be a stupid waste. Not building a vessel capable of traveling to the stars, but doing it right now, at this point in history.
We still have slavery, (in many forms,) racism, sexism, classism... we have a world in which the majority of allegedly intelligent human beings still believe in the existence of imaginary creatures, magic, etc.
If there is no life on any planet we could ever reach, (to say nothing of intelligent life), then all you'd do is waste a lot of resources to go from a planet that supports life, to a planet (or planets) that maybe do, but probably don't. Waste of time and energy.
If there is life, great... but it will almost certainly be so different from Earth life that you won't be able to eat it, or fuck it. Having a conversation with it would almost certainly seem to be out of the question, which means you spent trillions to do what, exactly? Find plants you can't eat, animals you can't eat, no one to talk to, and a planet that is unlikely to be friendly to you. If Earth plants and animals could survive there, they would immediately be in competition with local flora and fauna, (for limited resources) in which case we will be invading an occupied world.
Now let's say there is not only life, but intelligent life on this/these other planet/s. I, for one, don't want to have to be the one to explain human history and behavior to them. I find I can't really turn on and watch the news without a twinge of embarrassment for my species, from news of racism, politics, homophobia, morons wasting money on lotteries, etc. etc. ad nauseam... with almost every story seeming to be about people being stupid.
If, we build this thing, find another world with life on it, and find that it harbors intelligent life, and that we can talk to it, and we don't have to feel ashamed of our history because their history is just as brutal, stupid, and filled with evil, bigotry, racism, sexism, classism, etc., etc., ad nauseam... then what we will have found is ourselves, and we can talk to stupid, brutal, racist, bigoted morons right here without spending trillions of dollars to go say hi to E.T.
Inasmuch as life is unlikely to form where energy is so abundant that no competition would arise, (very close to a star) it seems likely life will form where there is enough energy (heat, light, etc.), but not too much to support the chemical reactions necessary for life, whatever the specifics of that biochemistry turn out to be, which means given the unidirectionality of the direction-arrow of time, and limited resources, that life will probably take a similar developmental path as it took on Earth, at least as far as competition and predation goes. The competitive and predatory nature of animal life I assert is universal, since it's a response to the realities of the environment. We compete because resources are finite. We predate because, again, resources are finite. and someone else has taken some resource (energy in the form of food) and used it, but some is still available in the form of that user's flesh.
All animals are predators, even herbivores. They just predate on plants. Animals that only eat microbes, algae, etc., are still killing other forms of life to survive. Predation is universal throughout the animal kingdom, and as much as some people love plants (botanists) and find them fascinating, no one is going to build a "Starship" just to go look at plants. Any intelligent life you're going to find is going to resemble us enough to make us wish we'd never found it, which I think is a great argument for stopping all radio transmissions from Earth now, perhaps even staging a sort of 3rd world war (only using radio and TV) to convince anyone who might want to come here that we've destroyed the Earth and ourselves, and then make sure no one sends out any more radio signals, because the last thing you'd want, as a human being, is for a species anything like us to come here for a "visit".
There is no real reason to go visit them, either, since if they're any
Although Scotty once say he bought a boat.. the future... at least star trek future is not "still using money".
If you really want to build a starship it can't just be about construction it has to be about helping people and society want to assist you and gain something practical and earthly from their efforts.
Where these projects fail they focus on building the thing they want to build rather than focusing ENTIRELY on infustructure and underlying technology as an enabler of construction.
Don't just plan to build one enterprise... Plan it as if you need to build millions of them. When this becomes reasonable you can easily build as many of your "starships" as you want.
The first order of business should be to build a network of educators and a practical way of interfacing with the worlds reserve labor force and industry to help you get the shit that needs done done.
Compartmentalize specific problems and teach hundreds to thousands what they need to know in order to reason about and push technology in each domain. (Los Alamos primer)
Use fruits to develop an IP portfolio industry can benefit from but also provides for financial or material feedback into your cause. (GPL) Transparent aluminum for example could be worth salaries of hundreds of full time educators.
Be creative...if you need a fusion reactor then design a plasma stability game or some fun way to enable others to simulate and contribute to problems without having to be a PhD. (Foldit)
Prioritize where secondary effects will help you the most. For example making energy cheap here on earth with practical fusion reactors instantly reduces all material costs for anything you will do in the future.
Everytime you yourself get the urge to design or describe any component or feature of your starship you are well on your way to failure.
Too late, spent em on beer.
... because without warp drive, there is no need to have warp pistons, so why should one build them? Just a massive waste of material.
One could as well go for a more Galactica-based design, it's quite more compact and not less intriguing.
Or, just start with solving earths problems first, as it was done in Star Trek, too. No need to travel to Mars when two or three or four stupid guys are clutching to the triggers to blow all of the civilized world into oblivion.
Oh yeah and, sure, nobody will ever try to use the laser for anything but digging into moons surface ;)
Still, I somehow like the idea, but we should really wait for Zefram Cochrane, will just make a lot more sense, and 2063 not that far ahead anyway. Heck that's only 51 years and one world war, should be OK right?
Seeing the energy involved to accelerate such a ship with such a size at something even like 1/4 c, which would make the nearest star only "16+" years away (actually counting the acceleration it would be more like 20 years), i doubt tech matters. I had made a calculation one time and for a 100 tons ship it was something like the energy equivalent of 200 tons of anti matter and 200 tons of matter anihilating. And if you have something less efficient , like say fusion, it would be even worst by many order of magnitude. Sure I can imagine we could spend an innordinate amount of time to put around the sun a lot of particle accelerator powered by solar energy and extract/generate anti matter , but 200 tons , 200 000 kg is a lot of it. And that ain't even counting the bombardement of aprticle and small rock against such a ship at 1/4 of c would be more than deadly. The only good news is that no matter how much *DISTANCE* there is to a star, you only need to pay the energy to accelerate and to decelerate, so our 100 tons ship can spend the same amount to reach alpha centauri or M59.
Why do we all need jobs if it's possible to make all the shit we need with fewer people? Maybe what the world needs is not more jobs but equitable distribution of corporate ownership. If you have everything you need, maybe you shouldn't work all the time. Maybe you should read a book or write one, or work on your own non-profitable projects?
Play Command HQ online
Stop signing your posts. Thanks.
Banks need that trillion to "get saved", you insensitive clod.
It will be much easier to gene-engineer humans to better fit into specifications of space and spaceships than to create spaceships for the current form of human being for interstellar travel:
1) too high mass/much smaller size
2) need for oxygen and food (direct use of electricity/solar power as energy source?)
3) need to move? (just brains connected to spaceship computers?)
4) ability live in zero g, recover from radiation, handle low temperatures, ability to hibernate etc
OUTSTANDING!!!
Right now the U.S. national debt is almost 16 trillion dollars, which comes to about $50,000 for every man, woman, and child. .
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA......Your....Kidding Right? You really believe this shit? I mean really? Do you really think that anyone on here or in the USA is really going to EVER pay any of this back? Where exactly is this money coming from? Taxes, over time right? Holy crap I have never laughed so hard IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!! The Gubment is doing what it wants PERIOD. The presses at the FED are rolling!! If they were carrying out the will of us as it were, there would be no debt. The presses at the FED would be shut down and those bastards would be in JAIL. Can you or anyone on here run a trillion dollars in the red? Let alone what the debt TRULY is? Say closer to 60 TRILLION?
And to think that most of the slashdot community think building a starship is a fantasy....
Can you smell the crowdfunding? Jabroney! Not sure about that spelling.
And teleportation technology is basically non existent.
We have no artificial gravity tech.
A ship that blows through the light barrier like a supercar through speed limits, has inertial dampers and some kind of non-centrifuge-based artificial gravity so that your tea won't be spilled in the process, carries enough fuel to do it for months on end...and that's not even getting into the transporters, replicators, holodecks and energy weapons on board.
If we could build anything from near-future hard sci-fi in 20 years I'd be amazed.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
And airliners have been around for 50 years.
But he can design and build a space ship in 20. Right.
What ever happened to being enthusiastic about a dream realized, one that dares to push the boundaries of what is current? Most posts here seem to be very much against this, and some with reasonable arguments as to why, but I applaud this engineer for trying to do something creative that could prove to be a test bed for technologies that we don't today have. He's combining his love of a forward-thinking creative mind's output (Roddenberry's) with his own can-do attitude. I think it would be a wonderful achievement.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
Like a cube.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
What's with all this work on an "artificial womb"??? Shouldn't an "artificial vagina" be much more important? (Especially to slashdot readers!)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Any first-generation starship will inevitably arrive at it's destination hundreds of year later only to discover that people that left later but with a faster drive are already there, waiting for them! (Can anybody name the science fiction stories where exactly this happened?)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.