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Bill Clinton Backs 100 Year Starship
astroengine writes "The light-years between the stars is vast — a seemingly insurmountable quarantine that cuts our solar system off from the rest of the galaxy. But to a growing number of interstellar enthusiasts who will meet in Houston, Texas, for the 100YSS Public Symposium next week, interstellar distances may not be as insurmountable as they seem. What's more, they even have the support of former U.S. President Bill Clinton."
The scales you're talking about with interstellar travel are almost humanly unimaginable. The fastest probe we've ever launched would take over 100,000 years to reach even the closest solar system (and that's a *MERE* 4.2 light years away). We'll be lucky to get a man on Mars in the next 100 years, much less a vehicle that could travel at a significant percentage of the speed of light (an absolute "must have" for an interstellar probe).
And even if you could reach Einstein's speed limit (and you would probably have to consume most of Earth's energy resources to do it), all you've got in the end is a ship that would still be laughably slow in the big scheme of things. Puttering along at near-light-speed in a universe 14 billion light years across would only remind you of how isolated we really are.
Shit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances. The accuracy and tolerances for a trajectory that could get anywhere close to another body over light-year scale distances are all-but-impossible. It would be harder than throwing a dart in the U.S. and hitting a bullseye on a dartboard in China.
Anyone selling interstellar travel is selling snake oil...period. For all intents and purposes, and barring someone radically overturning Einstein, we're all alone.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
As long as Bill is on this ship it would be fine.
Still, a horrible thing to inflict upon whatever world it lands on.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
At realistically attainable speeds, 100 years isn't going to cut it.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Yes, but Bill Clinton supports it!
Bill Clinton supports it
I stand corrected.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Also, we do not even have the experience of building something that can stay 10 years in space without constant support from Earth...
It just makes for some headlines, for a long time.
Why can't
Yeah, how do people get from a building in one city to a building in another? The precision required for this trajectory is well beyond what most could do . . . unless they had some kind of mysterious mechanism to continually alter their course during their travels. But such is obviously beyond our best engineers.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
The guidance programs arent far off, with the system in Cassini you could shoot a gun in NY and hit a dime in LA. and that was built 6 years ago.
unless they had some kind of mysterious mechanism to continually alter their course during their travels.
And with enough fuel to last 100,000 years.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
In fact, that's what we should. We should launch something in to orbit for 100 years, with no support, and see how it does. Can they make it 100 years? Will the kids born there be able to return to Earth?
Also, we do not even have the experience of building something that can stay 10 years in space without constant support from Earth...
It just makes for some headlines, for a long time.
Voyager one and two would like to say hello.
"[It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system." George W. Bush
you don't have to be insanely accurate if you can correct your course enroute
I agree completely with your overall point, but with constant 1g acceleration, the passengers in a ship could arrive somewhere within 100 years due to time dilation,
Of course, the energy required and the engineering challenges are immese, but theoritically the nearest star could be reached in less than 40 years (passenger time).
Voyager I. Thirty-five years and you know how far it is from earth? Seventeen light *hours*. And it's about to run out of juice at even that paltry distance.
Now go build something to travel at least 4.2 light *years*.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Former President Bill Clinton has even stepped in to serve as the symposium's Honorary Chair. In a statement, Clinton said: "This important effort helps advance the knowledge and technologies required to explore space, all while generating the necessary tools that enhance our quality of life on earth."
- now there is a bunch of political nonsense, if you want to add some to your collection. Who exactly is going to benefit from this and how is this going to be paid for? Certainly if you spend billions or trillions you can 'invent' things, you can come up with certain technologies, but that's a side show, the main point is to send a hunk of metal out of this solar system somewhere else.
If somebody wanted to spend a bunch of money researching materials and technologies actually to 'enhance our quality of life on earth', they don't need to have it wrapped in an ultra-expensive 'send a tube to another star' project. It sounds wonderful and it may be a great project to work on for people who'll get those jobs, but unless this is done privately (and it's not, it's DARPA), then it's more taxes, borrowing and inflation.
Ok, if you want to spend a bunch of money employing a bunch of scientists just for the shit of it, hoping for some return on that investment, at least have them do something that is useful in THIS freaking solar system. How about mining asteroids? Mining the Solar system for fresh water? For whatever. Sending a tube into space so that 100 years later (hundred years) it can enter a foreign star system. If you want that as a goal, first stop all other government spending. Stop the wars, stop the retirement and health care ponzi scams (which they are, all the money is spent and bonds have to be sold, which means they have to be bought back with interest, which means taxes have to be collected again to pay back for the bonds, which means it's double taxation for the purposes of paying out the later entries into the pyramid scams, because the first batch of taxes was stolen already), stop all the other nonsense spending, then you can pretend that you can 'enhance our quality of life on earth' by sending a tube into another star system.
By the way, balls on that guy and stupidity of people who listen to him, pay him to listen to him. The guy put USA on a short term adjustable rate mortgage and thus allowed the deficits and debts to be so much bigger. The guy had the Fed chairman who was known for his 'Greenspan put', that's how much money they printed. Presided over the huge stock market bubble, which was created with all that cheap, fake money. Now most people think he was the best president, what a joke.
You can't handle the truth.
From the Soviet space program to empty skyscrapers in Pyongyang, politicians love high-visibility mega-projects that make for good propaganda - even if the populace is starving. Only free market capitalism, which includes both for-profit and voluntarily-funded non-profit ventures, can remain rooted in economic reality and allocate a civilization's resources wisely.
Space efforts should probably focus on near-term economic needs like: asteroid mining, space-based solar energy, and eventually space-based manufacturing. Those are the things that will solve all our environmental problems, provide cheap energy, revolutionize agriculture, lower living costs, and lift billions out of poverty! But other star systems are not realistic for the time being...
(Signed: Alex Libman's sockpuppet.)
Someone missed a few fine points when the read the Cliffs Notes for Greek Myth.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
Also, we do not even have the experience of building something that can stay 10 years in space without constant support from Earth...
True. But hasn't the biosphere project helped move us in the right direction to make this plausible?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
...barring someone radically overturning Einstein...
The idea of FTL is not 'out for the count' by a long shot, despite Einstein... In the same fashion we pressurize our airplanes and remain quite oblivious to the outside conditions, we have to find a way to encapsulate a piece of space time in our little ship while it zips along at warp 9... Now cue the naysayers to tell me how crazy I am for even thinking it. Radical, yes, but no crazier than the idea of man on the moon, or human flight. Faster than sound? I should be locked up for thinking up such insanity!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Ships with life support. And, IIRC, even using just a minuscule power, soon the power source will be unable to provide it.
Why can't
I don't know about interstellar travel just yet, but I would support deep space probes on multi decade robotic missions to other stars, using every angle they can in order to reach as high a velocity as possible, which is pretty fast, even today.
Does that take into account the time required to decelerate at say 1G?
The scales you're talking about with interstellar travel are almost humanly unimaginable. The fastest probe we've ever launched would take over 100,000 years to reach even the closest solar system
Eh who cares. The proper model isn't a moon landing visit and return stunt but more like the national highway and railway network. It would take 100 years for me to visit every road in the US road network but I really don't care, as long as I can travel around my local area. So the proper solution is to take 10 million years to set up 10 million space stations each about a year apart. Much like the original ancient silk road, no one would ever travel the length of it, but you'd live along it and adsorb the benefits of it.
Its like arguing its stupid for boats and sea travel to exist because no human being or individual boat could possibly last long enough to sail every route on the map or visit every port... "eh". None the less, sailing is fun.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If we could travel at 25% of light speed we could do it in about 17 years, and I didn't even have to invent any math to figure that out! That alone proves that speed of light travel is not a must have.
I know that we currently launch airplanes on a trajectory with the accuracy needed to arrive at an exact runway thousands of miles away, but I concede that we tax our current knowledge of mathematics to achieve that goal. Still, given a hundred years to work on it, maybe they could come up with some kind of method of in flight course correction! It is a crazy idea, I know.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The one nice shortcut with the math is that most of the things humans are interested in are (comparatively) large gravity wells.
That still leaves you with the somewhat hairy problem of not falling in to the biggest star in the area when your millenia ship fires up its ancient engines as it approaches the target; but at least the dartboard in China is a powerful magnet, so there is a small envelope for near misses.
Personally, I'd be worried about the limits(both in terms of 'with our present technology' and in terms of fundamental thermodynamics) of materials science.
Even if kept very cold, complex chemical structures degrade over time(with a little help from any radiation zipping around in the endless void, naturally). Building machines, or preserving biological samples, such that they will be viable in 100,000 years or more, when the ship finally drifts to its target, could be a bit tricky...
Uh... the entire point is to improve our technology and find workarounds, so mentioning current technology is useless. It may well be impossible, but no one can say what the future holds, and we won't accomplish anything unless we try. It may not even be necessary to 'overturn Einstein'; as I said, we can't predict the future.
Puttering along at near-light-speed in a universe 14 billion light years across would only remind you of how isolated we really are.
The closer you travel to light speed, the more that distance will shrink for you, so that given sufficient energy you will be able to make the trip in an arbitrarily small amount of time as viewed by yourself.
This message brought to you by special relativity. It's the LAW
I bet this is what people said 100 years ago about putting a man on the moon. Think of all the incredible things that have been done or discovered in the last century. Or, would you rather we not put the time and resources into an idea this grand and incredible, and say to hell with all the amazing things we may discover along the way, regardless of its outcome? My country's successes weren't accomplished by the naysayers; step aside, sir.
Here's a crazy idea instead of trying to spend a hundred years going to another solar system, how about we just spend the next hundred years actually getting our asses off the couch and explore our solar system?
Because Voyager 1 & 2 are somewhat old technology. If we built two new spacecraft they would have better propulsion systems and more efficient energy sources. Just read about the Martian Rovers, they are some impressive machines.
I can't complain that you are on board with science.... But you did the world a horrible disservice by cancelling the Texas Super Collider... You spent like 6 billion, then spent 3 billion to scrap it, when the total cost for construction was 12 billion.
God spoke to me
The problem is we still think technology as a whole is advancing at the same rate it did in the 20th century where we went from the first powered flight to landing men on the moon in under 70 years, and today we have the U.S. Air Force still flying planes that first flew 60 years ago (B-52's) . The truth of the matter is some fields like computers and even microscale engineering do continue to advance, but many important fields for such a project have barely changed in the last half century.
How much food do they eat each day?
No sooner do I get over one, then you put a better one right next to me. Bastards.
"I thought you were asking if I approved Star's back end. I do by the way." -Bill Clinton
Now cue the naysayers to tell me how crazy I am for even thinking it.
So, do you know how to make negative mass or negative energy? Is there something you want to tell us? Perhaps you have a magnetic monopole tucked away somewhere for a rainy day as well.
Stick Men
Because of the time scales mentioned above, space ship capable traveling to nearest start would be incapable of supporting life. That is it will have to reconstruct life on the arrival and travel completely dormant.
As a civilization we do have enough time before estimated heat death of our universe to visit even most distant corner of the galaxy. With that said, every trip will be one-way, by the time "we" (whatever form it takes) arrive anywhere original civilization will be long since gone.
As a result multi-star civilization is extremely unlikely, you could have a civilization existing on multiple stars, just not at the same time. With this realization humanity's energy should be directed toward a) fully utilizing our system b) fully utilizing energy of the sun c) fully utilizing matter in our system. Only after all of this is achieved does it make sense to fire one-way, never-heard-back-from seeds at the stars.
To construct a starship over the next 100 years? Or to build a starship that will travel (to another star system) over a period of 100 years?
I think that we (terran civilisation) could construct a multigenerational; slow starship in about a century - but it would take millenea to get anywhere.
If we work on things a bit longer we might come up with a bussard ramjet that could get pretty close to the speed of light, and get some relativity advantage
But for usable interstellar travel we need some way of going faster than light (warp drive,or hyperspace or warp points/jump gates)
Who knows how long that will take to invent/find
Send frozen eggs, sperm and a robotic womb into space....
love is just extroverted narcissism
I've even got a list of people you can put on it...
The reason it is about to run out of juce as you put it, is that the material in the thermocouples have degraded, the Plutonium in the RTG's is still very hot, it is just the part that converts this heat to electricity is breaking down. In a manned ship it would be a relatively simple matter of pulling out the worn out thermocouple and inserting a fresh one. (of course a manned ship would likely need a much larger power source than an RTG could ever provide) This of course brings up the point of limited space for spare parts and needing to design everything with universal plug in modules and have onboard micro fabrication facilities.
> The fastest probe we've ever launched would take over 100,000 years to reach even the closest solar
> system (and that's a *MERE* 4.2 light years away).
> And even if you could reach Einstein's speed limit, all you've got in the end is a ship that would still be laughably
> slow in the big scheme of things. Puttering along at near-light-speed in a universe 14 billion light years across
> would only remind you of how isolated we really are.
No, it would NOT be laughably slow if you were aboard the ship making the journey at near light speed. That 4.2 light year distance would be greatly reduced by length contraction in your new reference frame. You could make the journey as "fast" as you wanted if you had enough energy to approach light speed. With your new velocity, you'd no longer be in Earth's inertial reference frame. E.g., you could travel that 4.2 light years in, say, a month, but unfortunately the people left on Earth would still see you taking over 4.2 light years to reach your destination.
Length contraction and time dilation must be considered as you approach light speed. The "distances" to various objects in the universe are relative to our present inertial reference frame. Changing your frame of reference (by speeding up) would change all the distances.
That's why people who don't understand Physics look dumb when they talk about going "faster" than light. Light speed effectively is an infinite velocity and traveling near light speed takes you (personally) anywhere in the universe as quickly as you want. But it also means never going home to the "time" you left.
this could be like a modern day cathedral, or a pyramid type project.
something that takes generations to build....
why not start
Voyager wasn't built for the same purpose. Thus it will perform differently. Learn a bit about engineering. Or at least pull your head from your ass.
Assuming technology were still accelerating at the same pace it did in the 20th century, it's probably less likely that we'll travel to the stars. If the human race ultimately merges with machines, we may decided to move into a virtual reality, with the infrastructure located deep underground where nothing will bother us for many millions of years. See Vernor Vinge's classic novel Marooned in Realtime for some musings on this possibility.
And even if we did launch such a mission to the stars, that first mission would likely be overtaken by missions that, while launched much later, are capable of travelling faster. Vast spaces missions are not worth bothering with in the short term.
Current models indicates that the universe defies terminology like "across", being more of a big "loop" much like the globe is "big loop", that if you traveled in a straight line, you'd eventually end up right where you started. Time/Space is bendy, and any hope of interstellar travel will require our ability to "fold" it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Not to mention appreciating the scale of behavior that has "Backing" on one end with actual MONEY and volunteering to "chair" a high profile position in order to prostitute ones cult of personality.
fig A.
$BACKING...|...Attention whoring
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Diminishing returns.
Technology is actually advancing at the accelerated rate, but to advance any given established area would take exponentially more effort, with each consecutive breakthrough taking more time. On top of that many innovations are limited by available energy sources, that is with denser and more available energy we will be able to do more at the existing level of technology. Unfortunately we are nowhere near close to matching, less beating, energy density of oil-derived products.
Some fields will appear to advance more quickly, but that is because they are newer fields with still enough low-hanging fruit.
If I've read this article correctly, the math shows that it's possible. The downside being the energy required to generate the field in the first place.
- No Bounce, No Play -
You're thinking of Valley Forge
http://www.starshipmodeler.com/tech/valleyforge/17_double.jpg
From the film Silent Running - the /. audience is getting younger and I'm not
Um, no, there are problems, perhaps insurmountable, but navigation isn't one of them, and the vastness of the universe also isn't one of them, depending on one's goals.
Yes, "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." Got it.
But we're not talking about sending a colony to Messier 82, or even the large megellanic cloud. Wiki shows 12 stars within 10 light years of Earth. 10 light years is still a mind boggling distance, but it's a whole bunch of orders of magnitude less than the current width of the universe.
It's always possible to set a goal so high that it could never be attained. I don't think that was the intention.
As to navigation, there is probably some distortion of constellations in 4 to 10 light years, but not so much that they, or the location of known pulsars, couldn't still be used for navigation. Launching a spacecraft is not like "from the earth to the moon", where there's a big BOOM at the start and then the projectile glides millions of miles to a precise destination. All spacecraft require mid-voyage corrections. Interstellar craft as well. It's a known science.
How to keep people alive for 100 years, (use unmanned probes?) practical long-haul propulsion systems, longevity issues, those are all valid concerns. But we've got the navigation thing down, and the nearest stars aren't *that* far away.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The problem is that 0.25c is unimaginably fast by human standards, and would require a truly mind boggling amount of energy to achieve for any vessel with enough mass to support people onboard. Even 0.025c is insanely fast (27 million kph), and would require a generational ship or some sort of stasis (and rotating crew) to make the journey. This assumes you solve the problem of what to do about invisible space junk (micrometeorites for instance) colliding with your ship at an equivalent energy much larger than the largest nuclear explosion ever detonated by man.
We're not traveling between the stars without a major revolution in physics.
I read the internet for the articles.
I thought you just said "Warp Factor 9, Engage, Make it so, Earl Grey Tea, Hot, etc." and it worked.
Or Georgi had to modulate the frequency of the phase array of the trans warp coil tachyon pulse... technobabble... problem solved.
It should be that easy, right?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
My country's successes weren't accomplished by the naysayers; step aside, sir.
I would love to step aside, but people keep trying to forcibly involve my money in such projects. I will gladly step aside, and to you I say, Go For It! Just do it on the dimes of people like you, and be principled and leave the naysayers out of it. Then you won't have to hear from us so much.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Such a ship can be loaded with politicians and lawyers and send to colonize the cold, hard vacuum.
Hopefully a post-singularity entity will lob a black hole after the ship. Or two, just to be sure.
(Let's Hope..) he and his wife get on it.
Amen to that.
And let's hope they invite Pelosi, Schumer, Reid, Boxer and Feinstein too.
Also just for giggles, Al Franken.
"The light-years between the stars is vast..."
Yes, they certainly is.
No, but God help anything that lives on that planet when we impact it at .99c.
The fastest probe we've ever launched would take over 100,000 years to reach even the closest solar system (and that's a *MERE* 4.2 light years away).
Totally irrelevant. The fastest probe we've ever launched was slow as shit because it doesn't have any decent engines, and IIRC doesn't have any engines at all, it's just carried by momentum from its initial launch and from some hydrazine thrusters to make small course corrections and take advantage of gravitational slingshots around the planets.
If we build a starship, it'd have to have real engines, using nuclear power, something like NERVA or Project Orion. It'd still be slow, so it'd have to be a generation ship or use cryogenics or something to achieve suspended animation, but the idea that we're limited to the speed of some slow-ass probes made in the 70s and powered with RTGs is just ridiculous.
One interesting idea of long term interstellar travel was envisioned in an old video game Phantasy Star III, which had an interesting setting. Perhaps due to constant warfare, society had regressed to a feudal system where the idea of space travel was all but unknown. The player travels between villages battling bio-engineered monsters and robots which hint at advanced technology, and gradually explores the lands. Eventually, the game reveals that the lands they live in are all inside a huge (country sized?) spaceship that has been traveling through space for thousands of years. With many generations of humans passing, they've forgotten that they were on a spaceship.
Probably unrealistic, but it's interesting to think of how society will evolve aboard a spaceship over thousands of years.
Clean coal, man. People keep telling me it's the right stuff.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The idea of FTL is not 'out for the count' by a long shot, despite Einstein...
Er, well, to be clear... FTL is out for the count because of Einstein, so for FTL to be possible means a up-ending of one of the fundamental assumptions of Relativity. It is hypothetically possible that this is the case, but it is not to be presumed lightly (unless you're writing a sci-fi story.)
We would all like for it to be true. Believe me, a huge number of people were hoping that despite the odds the "FTL neutrinos" would turn out to be real rather than an equipment failure.
In the same fashion we pressurize our airplanes and remain quite oblivious to the outside conditions, we have to find a way to encapsulate a piece of space time in our little ship while it zips along at warp 9...
But in the same fashion where, despite your comfort within, the airplane itself still must obey the rules of aerodynamics so too must this hypothetical spacecraft deal with the rest of the universe while violating the rules of said universe. And it's not the environment of space that prevents FTL, it's causality. The only way to "encapsulate" something against causality is for it to never interact with the rest of the universe again.
Now cue the naysayers to tell me how crazy I am for even thinking it. Radical, yes, but no crazier than the idea of man on the moon, or human flight. Faster than sound? I should be locked up for thinking up such insanity!
It's not crazy to think of it. It is crazy to act like it's a realistic possibility based on what we know of the universe, or that it is any way comparable to the other things you mention. The physical principles that would allow flight, supersonic flight, or traveling to the moon were well-known for a long, long time. It was, in essence, an engineering problem of how to work the well-known laws of nature such that you could fly, or rocket off the face of the earth.
Whereas FTL violates the known physical principles of nature.
So, once again, it could be possible, and damn I hope it is, but it's not at all like those other things.
The enemies of Democracy are
Don't be stupid. They haven't traveled far because they have no engines, and are powered with crappy little RTGs. Nuclear engines would change things completely.
Just need to discover starburst technology & then later wormholes. Although the ancients don't want people to have wormhole technology as it could be weaponized to destroy entire systems.
We can't even get back to the moon, but Whoopee! Let's build a starship.
People have been thinking about it for a long time now, and they even know the distances involved to some very accurate numbers, even though they keep changing. (The entire universe is in motion all the time.) It's not even close to unimaginable, unless you are lacking in imagination, or want to bicycle there or something equally absurd.
The politics and economics is a much greater barrier than the engineering. They have several ideas for ships that will be accelerated to speeds far far greater than anything we've launched up to now. The budget of an interstellar mission would be something that would make the Voyager budget look like a broken shoestring.
Sure, those systems they are talking about won't travel at a large percentage of C, but it would be enough to make it within a human lifetime, after all, you'd be target the nearby stars, not another galaxy. Also, there is no need to worry about Einstein or timewarps or anything else from a sci-fi movie of the week.
The math? We've had that for a long time. Besides that, an interstellar vessel would have to be able to respond to local navigational issues, so it can do course corrections. Nothing more embarrassing than sending a ship several light years only to have it crash into a previously undetected dwarf planet or asteroid because you forgot a maneuvering system. So it's not so much like throwing a dart at China as it is launching a cruise missile with a navigation upgrade.
Interstellar travel is possible, but we don't have it yet. If the investment was made, you could probably watch the launch of one with your grandchildren. As to overturning Einstein, this has nothing to do with that, unless you want a convenient FTL. Of course, science is full of overturned paradigms, and nobody is immune to having their pet theories revised, invalidated, or replaced, not even good old one-mug himself.
Of course, if someone is trying to sell you tickets for a flight to Beta Centauri, they are either delusional, or a rather unskilled con-artist.
Yes. A ship accelerating at 1g and then decelerating at 1g halfway there, could reach the Andromeda galaxy in less than 50 years (passenger time). The nearest star could be reached in less than 5 years.
Again, the engery and engineering requirements for this is way beyond anything we have today, but it is theoretically possible.
If short term space missions are not worth bothering, the question becomes, when have we reached the long term? If we don't try anything new now, then there might not be any significantly different technology in a hundred years. I agree that this particular project sounds a bit too grand for our current level of technology, but I hope that doesn't stop us from continuing to travel further and further from home (Mars, Titan, etc.).
Well, if someone on slashdot says it can't be done, then that's enough for me...
Call it off, boys!
Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
This is why we need to focus all our efforts on stabilizing the Earth and forget about the space traveling for a while. We ain't gonna reach the stars unless someone stops by and gives us a lift. Unless of course we are already there right now. (Ancient astronaut theory)
>I bet this is what people said 100 years ago about putting a man on the moon.
Educated people said 100 years ago that squaring the circle was impossible too. Guess what? It's still impossible today. Reality has nothing to do with popular opinion.
As intelligent arguments go, yours falls on the same level as plugging your ears and shouting "I can't hear you!"
In space, nobody can hear you @#%& interns ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
Well, I'd love to be false prophet, but with interstellar travel I don't see the future very bright. There are physical boundaries that almost disallow such things. If we even forget about theory of relativity, we know that e = mv^2/2 and e=mc^2. So we know that to be able to make something move fast enough to reach any star in our neighbourhood and return, we need to provide it with energy, which is roughly to energy stored in matter and antimatter of the same mass (or one order down) as the vehicle. Production of such fuel doesn't seem to be conceivable with the resources we have even in the foreseeable future.
Um, a constant 1G accelleration would get you there in about two years subjective, a bit over 5 actual. You accellerate for a year at 1G, you're almost at lightspeed. You're half a lightyear out. Coast 3.5 light-years, 3.5 years actual (about 12 days subjective), decellerate for a year at 1G, you're there. The formula are simple. d=(1/2)*a*t*t for the runup distance (d equals one-half a-t-squared), time dialation factor is your tau, 1 - (% of c divided by 100)
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
It's apparently hard enough that you couldn't spell Geordi's name correctly
The light-years between the stars is vast.
Yes, it spans light-years! The life-years of humans is too small for this light-years.
Pioneer 6 which was transmitting signal for 35 years (until 2000)
Pioneer 7 last known contact 29 years from launch (until 1995)
Pioneer 8 last known contact 29 years after launch (until 1996)
Pioneer 9 lasted 15 years
Pioneer 10 1972-2002 (although a weak signal was received in 2003)
Pioneer 11 1973-1995
Einstein gets overturned about every other month or so. Nobody said accelerating to close the speed of light is the way to go, most likely this will require a "hack" like warping space, moving through other dimensions and the like. Some fish jump out of their aquarium. Try to think beyond the fishbowl.
Er, well, to be clear... FTL is out for the count because of Einstein, so for FTL to be possible means a up-ending of one of the fundamental assumptions of Relativity. It is hypothetically possible that this is the case, but it is not to be presumed lightly (unless you're writing a sci-fi story.)
We would all like for it to be true. Believe me, a huge number of people were hoping that despite the odds the "FTL neutrinos" would turn out to be real rather than an equipment failure.
The faster than light neutrinos wouldn't have overturned relativity though - it would have mostly just redifined the value of c. The calculations that were previously working despite using an incorrect value of c would need to be looked at, but it would be similar to what happened to Newtonian calculations after relativity.
Only because the prototype looks like a cigar.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Using 1 G acceleration, it would take about 90 days to reach 25% of C, which is a whole lot of energy. .5 G acceleration would require 180 days to reach that speed. And at .25 G, it would take a year. And that basically adds between 1 and two years to the journey (you have to turn around and slow down).
Basically, we are not going out of our solar system anytime soon.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Skip the humans and then we can send it even faster and not bust the bank. Target a known extra-solar planet within 10 LY that looks interesting, design a relatively simple, light probe, and have it do a flyby. If we can get it to about 0.25c average, then it could get there in about 40 years, and the signal would take 10 years to arrive back to Earth.
Table-ized A.I.
Bill was referring that he hoped Starship and Grace Slick will continue to tour.
I'm pretty sure they know that too.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
As I understand thermodynamics once up to speed you don't slow down in space there being little to no resistance, so once you reach cruising speed you simply need fuel for maneuvering and stopping. Now the life support and on board systems would also need fuel, but much of that could be minimized if we perfect cryogenics, once your frozen it doesn't matter how cold you get.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Agreed - I was significantly rounding up to try to account for difficulties of maintaining a 1G acceleration when approaching higher percentages of c.
The trip would really only take you 3.6 (passenger time) if the 1G acceleration could be maintained for 50% of the distance.
Yes, we put a man on the moon. A couple times. For a few days. A long time ago.
There is a huge Difference between that, and going to Mars, or Interstellar. Let me know when we land on the moon, build a station there, and have permanent residents. Or when we start mining Asteroids, or similarly useful to 7 Billion people back on 3rd Rock.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I'm with Clinton Earth is so screwed that the only option is to get some people out of here.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
The B52s of today are NOT the same as those flown 60 years ago. Engines, Airframes, Electronics. I think even the bolts that hold it together are not the same. It resembles the plane from 60 years ago, that is about all.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
OMFG!!! If it was 17 years we could do it, but if it is 19 years we should just forget it! Also, I'm pretty sure the 100 year timeframe is a direct acknowledgement that we won't be doing it soon, or in the lifetime of anyone who starts on the project for that matter.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
IANAPhysicist, but I have a wild and crazy idea simply based on what I have read in various books and wikipedia pages. I would love if someone with actual theoretical physics chops would tell me exactly why this won't work.
According to the wikipedia page on the Alcubierre drive, phenomena such as the Casimir effect constitute negative energy simply by having a lower amount of vacuum energy virtual particles between the plates. Stephen Hawking's theory of Hawking radiation suggests that macroscopic phenomena (in his case black holes) can interact with such virtual particles turning them into 'real' particles. Perhaps a mechanism more practical than Casimir, yet less severe than a black hole could be found that would either reduce or "actualize" the virtual particles which could then be transported elsewhere resulting in a localized area of negative energy.
So a 100 year ship to Alpha Centauri requires a top speed of 0.08c. 0.08c is within the reach of the giant version of Orion. Snake oil defies natural law. Orion defies SPACE treaty only. Your assertion is without merit.
"We'll be lucky to get a man on Mars in the next 100 years, much less a vehicle that could travel at a significant percentage of the speed of light (an absolute "must have" for an interstellar probe). The fastest probe we've ever launched would take over 100,000 years to reach even the closest solar system (and that's a *MERE* 4.2 light years away)."
If we could travel at 25% of light speed we could do it in about 17 years, and I didn't even have to invent any math to figure that out! That alone proves that speed of light travel is not a must have.
He didn't say "speed of light travel," he said "significant percentage of the speed of light." 25% of the speed of light is certainly a significant percentage.
According to what I can find online, the fastest man-made vehicle so far has been Pioneer 11, which reached a max speed of about 170000 kph. That works out to about 0.016% of the speed of light -- and that was achieved mostly by utilizing Jupiter's gravity. Getting up to 25% is a difference of three orders of magnitude.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Hell, at 1g acceleration, you could get literally anywhere in the reachable universe in a typical lifetime.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I would love to step aside, but people keep trying to forcibly involve my money in such projects.
When you pay taxes, it becomes 'our' money. You have no say in where it goes, so why do you assume 'your' money only goes to fund things you don't like? It's people like you that loudly protest something like this, but then happily and quietly reap the rewards that result from it. Do you have any idea the amazing things that were discovered via the space program over the last 50+ years? How about the incredible advances in technology that WWII brought us? Neither of those things were cheap or easy, but society has greatly benefited from their discoveries. Plus, spending resources on science and adventure is a hell of a lot more palatable than blowing it on corporate bailouts and foreign conflicts, yes?
I'll donate to his ticket fund.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
There are many interesting scientific discoveries to be made by visiting other solar systems, other than pursuing the scifi dream of intelligent life. Even visiting Alpha Centauri could provide us with lots of information. Only by observing other systems can we determine what features of our system are general and what are unique. Yes, the distances between stars are huge, which is why we have to learn to be patient and launch probes that only future generations will see the results of.
As for calculating the orbits, you are right, we are far from being able to hit a star. Which is why the first priority should be improving both our observation accuracies and our models. It will take some time, but it's definitely possible given the will.
Another approach could be the use of laser-driven light sails, that could alter their tajectory midflight.
It's nice to have the math on your side, but that's not sufficient. You also need to have physics on your side. Based on Newton's equations the math showed it was possible to go faster then the speed of light if we just kept adding more energy to a particle. Turns out the physics was incomplete and now we know we can't do that.
As far as we currently know, there is no exotic matter with negative mass in existence and there is no evidence that it could ever be created. Maybe it can, but at this point there's no reason to believe it's anything but fantasy.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Don't be such a dick. Not everything in the various space programs is strictly for the various space programs.
"This important effort helps advance the knowledge and technologies required to explore space, all while generating the necessary tools that enhance our quality of life on earth."
You're falling into one of the pitfalls of religion/faith: it is not possible for us to comprehend/achieve such lofty goals, therefore don't attempt to. New technologies and science breakthroughs will not only enlighten our lives on Earth but also have potential to greatly expand our travel potential if ideas like quantum entanglement can prove fruitful.
But you're right... its snake oil... fuck all scientists and the human spirit of curiosity and breaking barriers... except Tang, that shit is good.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
I'm sorry, but most of the difference between Voyagers and modern space probes is electronics - a technology that was just beginning to be developed in the 60s and 70s, and is only just now reaching maturity. They use pretty much the same propulsion sources and power sources. There might be a 20% difference, or even a factor of two or three, but that won't make a dent in the problems that need addressed. The energy sources in both are pretty much exactly the same, and the plutonium energy source used in both is very short-lived (40 years or so) on the order of interstellar travel. If you like, compare New Horizons with Voyager. Voyager still has the upper hand in velocity leaving the solar system - although most of that was aquired through interation with large planets.
The technology of chemical propulsion and RTG power sources has pretty much played out, so don't expect much improvement in these areas. The only reasonable power source for an interstellar trip is fission or fusion, and space portable units that can do this is the only thing on the map that has any hope of revolutionizing space travel to beyond the solar system. The multiple order of magnitude changes we see in the development of electronics is the exception with regards to technology. We don't see jet engines a million times more powerful than the first generation jet engines, nor do we see internal combustion engines a million times more powerful than the first generation. Using the technological development rate in electronics to justify that newer propulsion or more efficient energy sources will solve all of our interstellar travel problems at some future date is rather proposterous.
And if we never think about those problems, and try to push the engineering in those areas, then it will stay that way forever. Interstellar travel has a number of sub-problems for which there aren't good Earth research motivations or sources. Until you try to push those boundaries and fail, you'll never make it anywhere.
It's nice to have the math on your side, but that's not sufficient. You also need to have physics on your side. Based on Newton's equations the math showed it was possible to go faster then the speed of light if we just kept adding more energy to a particle. Turns out the physics was incomplete and now we know we can't do that.
The hope for those that desire FTL travel is that Relativity is incomplete as well.
Relevant XKCD - http://xkcd.com/893/ "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."
What are you talking about? It looks to me like it's just another "you don't know what the future holds for technology" argument. It seems true, too.
Reality has nothing to do with popular opinion.
And?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
This need be the only post required for this article.
Thank you.
Well, after about 400 years (~4 half-lives) that plutonium power source is going to be a completely cold and useless lump of U-234, regardless of thermocouples. That, coupled with the meager source of power the RTG represents, makes RTGs pretty much completely useless for interstellar travel. Portable fission / fusion units are pretty much the only hope, and even then, carrying enough nuclear fuel for an interstellar trip will be no easy task.
Darts don't have attitude adjustment.
The faster than light neutrinos wouldn't have overturned relativity though - it would have mostly just redifined the value of c.
We have the value of c pegged with very high precision through a variety of measurements -- both direct measurements, and measurement of the physical constants which are directly related to it via Maxwell's equations -- conducted by a multitude of experiments and apparatuses.
The lowest value for the measured velocity of the neutrinos within the presumed error bars was significantly outside the error bars of the measurements of c.
it would be similar to what happened to Newtonian calculations after relativity.
Newtonian calculations are still used where either the correction for relativity is so small it is smaller than our ability to measure, or where it is larger than that but we simply don't care because we don't need that much precision.
This would be a case where the correction for c was significantly larger than our precision, would matter a great deal for a large number of experiments not to mention being of significant interest in and of itself, and yet had never been observed in many thousands of experiments.
So, no, not really the same at all.
If the result had panned out, it would have been exceedingly difficult to conclude anything but that the neutrinos were traveling FTL.
The enemies of Democracy are
would make more sense and would need to happen first anyways.
I don't think we tax our mathematics to do it at all. The Russian Space Shuttle clone (Buran), short lived as it was, was launched only once. It was unmanned, reached orbit and performed an automated landing in a 50kt crosswind, 3m by 10m away from its designated landing point. That was 20 years ago and things are significantly advanced since then.
Optimisation has only become more robust over the years and the venerable linear/non-linear least squares is still pretty good for many situations.
If the result had panned out, it would have been exceedingly difficult to conclude anything but that the neutrinos were traveling FTL.
The point being that Relativity woudln't be overturned, only the value of c. Relativity would be deemed incomplete and we would need to discover why our previous calculations seemed to work so well using the highly precise but incorrect value of c.
Sean Carrol discussed this in depth on a recent episode of This Week in Science.
We're not going to get by fundamental physics with improved engineering.
I like 'Trek and SF as much as the next Slashdotter, but certain facts remain facts, and must be faced.
Ok, it's impossible for the next hundred years, but you gotta dream big.
You need the energy to grow plants for food and possibly air, for light (people don't like being in the dark for millenia, I'd guess), and that sort of thing. And if you want to get there in any semi-decent time at all, you'll keep accelerating until you get halfway, and then start decellerating. Something like it. So yeah. LOTS of fuel.
Really. Do you want to re-read his post and rethink your position? From the OP:
It is true that he uses the weasel phrase "significant percentage" earlier in the post, but if you were paying attention then this statement makes it clear that he means 99.9% not 25%.
So you're saying it is very doable then ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
"We have failed to uphold Brannigan's Law. However I did make it with a hot alien babe. And in the end, is that not what man has dreamt of since first he looked up at the stars?"
-Zapp Brannigan
but I bet his reasoning has something to do with the idea of female crew members in short skirts
I agree that they're putting the cart before the horse. We shouldn't worry much about interstellar travel until we've colonized the solar system. Besides, our own solar system is pretty interesting and surprisingly unknown.
That said, relativity isn't a concept that comes readily to most people. Interstellar distances are quite vast, but not insurmountable. If we had the technology, one could travel to the Andromeda Galaxy in a mere 28 years. There's no reason to return either, unless you want to be a Cro-Magnon and live in a zoo, so it's a one-way trip to start a colony.
And you will have to. because your target will change in 1000s of years that you take to get there.
He just wants to get all the geniuses with the foresight to plan properly off of the planet. That way when Lord Xeno from Omicron III arrives there will be little resistance both now and in the future.
(sarcasm)
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
If you want to stabilize the earth you need to reduce the population to something under 1 billion.
But we could take a nice tour of our own solar system in that time. Although something like a 30 year mission might be more practical.
Speaking of interstellar travel, the more I learn about space, the more I want to take care of this blue marble we're living on. It's basically the only thing keeping us alive while we float through space.
...nor do we see internal combustion engines a million times more powerful than the first generation. Using the technological development rate in electronics to justify that newer propulsion or more efficient energy sources will solve all of our interstellar travel problems at some future date is rather proposterous.
Best damn explanation of the commonly used bankrupted "Electronics Analogy" applied everywhere. I will send your paragraphs to the next person that says, "my iphone is zillion more powerful than the Apollo spacecraft computer." Bzzt, Apollo CSM and LM went to the moon, iPhone only went to your pocket.
mfwright@batnet.com
Part of the reason for the loss of energy is damage to the thermocouples. The rest is the loss of activity in the nuclear fuel. (Something a manned mission can't fix either, because a manned mission won't be carrying the nuclear reactor needed to create fresh fuel.) Even with "perfect" thermocouples, the Voyager probes would still be almost out of power.
This was one of panel discussions at SETIcon II earlier this year. This DARPA study also funds people doing research to ask what kinds of people need to be selected for the trip? How will they get along? What is the minimum number? They will have to breed, researchers looking into how many people did it take to originally populate north american continent (answer was about 70). What kind of culture(s) of people, other studies show people will bring their own culture with them. Also have to grown own food, how much top soil needs to be packed? Other ways to grow food? how do you keep the soil healthy? It seems when we research and plan for a 100 year starship, we are actually looking back at ourselves. How do we keep our current "spaceship" functional. Really, a common expression of earth itself in the early 1970s per the new ecology movement.
There was a lot of other subjects raised in this discussion, go buy the video of what was presented at http://seticon.com/products/#category=saturday
All Aboard the 100 Year Starship (Panel Discussion) Price: $10.00 Featuring Mae Jemison, Richard Rhodes, Dana Backman, Bill Nye. Moderated by Adrian Brown.
mfwright@batnet.com
No, you're not crazy. Just ill educated and stupid.
We just need to get to Tau Alpha C. I've heard the aliens there like to hitch-hike on star ships and can help us jump across galaxies with merely thought alone.
New York Times, October 9, 1903:
"The ridiculous fiasco which attended the attempt at aerial navigation in the Langley flying machine was not unexpected⦠it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years"
Orville Wright's diary, October 9, 1903:
"We began assembly today."
Your perspective is limited.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
How cares what Bill Clinton thinks. He has no experience in space travel. George Clinton on the other hand...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-Funk_Mothership
Shit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances. The accuracy and tolerances for a trajectory that could get anywhere close to another body over light-year scale distances are all-but-impossible. It would be harder than throwing a dart in the U.S. and hitting a bullseye on a dartboard in China.
Here is where you go off the tracks. Of course we have the *math* to do it; we don't have the *lifespan* or the *energy*. As for hitting a bullseye in China, of course you won't use a dart -- that's what ballistic missiles are for, and while they can't quite get a bullseye they can get within 200m so, which is close enough. The reason they can do this is that the reentry vehicles aren't ballistic -- they make course corrections. Likewise in any trip to a nearby star, you wouldn't send the vehicle on a completely ballistic trajectory, you'd correct the trajectory periodically. If you solved the lifetime problem but not the energy problem, you'd still have to correct the spacecraft's trajectory, but it wouldn't be the energy budget-buster that constant acceleration would be. A little course correction applied early goes a long way.
Of course based on what we know, any kind of interstellar mission is completely impractical. *That's why it's worth thinking about*. If people looked at a problem, said, "I don't know how to solve that," and just threw up their hands, progress of all kinds would grind to a halt.
Now I don't think we'll see a practical design for an interstellar craft in my lifetime, so I wouldn't throw in Apollo program sized chunks of the GDP at the project. But having people with spaceflight expertise sit down from time to time and noodle about it isn't very expensive, and might turn up a few useful ideas. Arthur C. Clarke came up with the idea of geostationary communication satellites -- something which is almost inconceivably valuable to us -- because he was thinking of spaceflight, something no sensible person in 1945 would have considered a practical use of time, unless raining death down on another country was somehow involved.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not if you were on the ship. There's this fancy thing called "relativity" that would make time fly by if you were traveling at 0.999999999c. If you can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light, you can get anywhere in the universe in seconds.
Relativity would be deemed incomplete and we would need to discover why our previous calculations seemed to work so well using the highly precise but incorrect value of c.
Maybe incomplete in the same sense as Newtonian physics -- which is to say wrong in one of its basic assumptions.
And since so many calculations depend on the speed of light, and so many different experiments measure the same value, and the fact that it is always the same is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for SR, measuring a different speed would suggest that the assumption that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames is wrong. Because here we have one where it was measured differently.
Sean Carrol discussed this in depth on a recent episode of This Week in Science.
Is that online, and if so do you have a link? It sounds like it would be immensely interesting. All I could find was the podcast by that name that interviewed him in 2009, and his Cosmic Variance blog entry about the experiment. In which he says that his favorite theoretical explanation for the result is violating Lorentz Invariance, i.e. the speed of light being the same for all observers and one of the fundamental assumptions of Relativity.
The enemies of Democracy are
"...nor do we see internal combustion engines a million times more powerful than the first generation."
That's not exactly accurate.
The first ICEs - in the early 19th century - were sub-1hp engines. Some got down to hp ratings best expressed in tenths of a hp. It wasn't until the 1860's that Lenoir got his carriage engine all the way up to 1.5hp.
Today, the most powerful ICE is this monster:
http://www.gizmag.com/go/3263/ ...at well over 100,00hp.
Feel free to do the math...
When you pay taxes, it becomes 'our' money
When people take money from others, it's stealing, and doesn't become something else by calling it "taxing."
Neither of those things were cheap or easy, but society has greatly benefited from their discoveries
Still, that's my decision to make with my money, not yours or "society's." "Society" might benefit from me not taking marijuana, but that still should be my decision to make. "Society" might benefit from the increased birth rate of forcing me to have children, but that still should be my decision to make.
What if I decide that society benefits from forcing everybody to go to church? What if a majority of people agree with me and force everybody to go? Booze is damaging to society, so maybe those blue laws here in Texas that keep me from buying wine before noon on Sunday are good laws after all.
Plus, spending resources on science and adventure is a hell of a lot more palatable than blowing it on corporate bailouts and foreign conflicts, yes?
That's like asking if I'd prefer to be forced to pay child support for the children of my neighbor on the east as opposed to the children of my neighbor on the west. What I would prefer is to not be subject to forced servitude, rather than being given a choice of which kind I would like.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
You have no say in where it goes, so why do you assume 'your' money only goes to fund things you don't like?
If only we could all individually choose where our tax monies are spent. I certainly (as an American) wouldn't have funded the Iraq war, and I would continue to not fund farm subsidies paid out to corporations or the so-called drug war (which is basically corporate subsidies of a different nature). I would probably pay most of it to NASA and the (now-defunct) Superconducting Super Collider because they're cool. <sigh>
As the parent said, "When you pay taxes, it becomes 'our' money." Democratic government operates on the concept of shared sacrifice - you pay into the coffers and trust that your leaders spend it wisely. You don't get to choose the definition of "wisely" by yourself.
As far as we currently know, there is no exotic matter with negative mass in existence and there is no evidence that it could ever be created. Maybe it can, but at this point there's no reason to believe it's anything but fantasy.
Bring on Element Zero!
There is a war going on for your mind.
(Alpha Centauri) 2.1 lightyears: 6.3654 x 10^7 seconds x 2 = 4.03 years
(Gliese 581 g) 11 lightyears: 1.457 x 10^8 seconds x 2 = 9.24 years
(HD 85512 b) 18 lightyears: 1.864 x 10^8 seconds x 2 = 11.82 years
(Kepler 22-b) 300 lightyears: 7.608 x 10^8 seconds x 2 = 48.25 years
(Andromeda Galaxy) 1250000 lightyears: 4.911 x 10^10 seconds x 2 = 3115 years
(Calculated using "x lightyears at 1g acceleration", followed by "(x.xxx x x^x seconds in years)*2")
Sorry - 100,000hp, not 100,00hp.
Is that online, and if so do you have a link? It sounds like it would be immensely interesting. All I could find was the podcast by that name that interviewed him in 2009, and his Cosmic Variance blog entry about the experiment. In which he says that his favorite theoretical explanation for the result is violating Lorentz Invariance, i.e. the speed of light being the same for all observers and one of the fundamental assumptions of Relativity.
It was really interesting. Here is link. The whole first half hour is devoted to the topic but the real meat is around the 20:30 mark.
The really interesting part (paraphrasing) was "Relativity doesn't say that particles can't go faster than light. Relativity says that particles either (1) go faster than light, (2) slower than light or (3) at the speed of light and they never change what they do. We've never found particles that go faster than light and we don't think that they exist. We use particles that travel slower than light to help explain causality."
I've never really heard it put that way before. He didn't explain himself so I'm thinking he is referring to the infinite energy that is required to traverse the speed of light.
Check out the 2nd half hour too where the pauli exclusion principle is discussed. It's not in relation to the FTL discussion, but is still really interesting.
I was mistaken on the Sean Carroll being the one that made the point about the value of c being redefined. It was one of the other the other This Week in Science podcasts - I think with it was either Lawrence Krause or Brian Greene.
Laser-launched solar sails have an old history. While Robert Forward probably explored the concept more deeply than anyone, he wasn't the first. I'm pretty sure I remember a Niven story in the 70s (perhaps one of the Draco's Tavern stories in Convergent Series?) where alien traders drop by our solar system, trade lots of science, technology, and art with humans in exchange for us building laser launchers to send them on their way to their next stop. Now powering those laser launchers would be a big challenge. You can't put it on Mercury because it's not tidally locked to the sun after all. However if you do use a fission reactor to power the lasers, then at least you don't have to accelerate a big heavy fission reactor to a significant fraction of the speed of light, only the crew craft.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
This would mean we would not start gathering data for centuries, and only if the probe have enough energy left then AND can aim to the earth with sufficient precision... let's start by mapping our close neighbourhood first and let technology evolve more before we do such adventure.
Tomorrow is another day...
Your math proves your right, for all instances where "anytime soon" is less than 90 days.
Gravity and magnetic fields will affect your speed. Apollo, ignoring mid-course corrections, slowed down for the 2 or so days until it got to the point of the Moons gravity being stronger then Earths, then picked up speed again until arrival at the Moon. Magnetic effects are small but might make a difference on a 100 year trip and gravity will mostly affect the start and end of the trip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Remember that on a free space trajectory, the only way to maneuver is to generate enough thrust to change your momentum vector to point in a new direction. To change the vector appreciably, you need an amount of force over time comparable to what you've put into the craft so far, minus the small amount burnt to escape your origin's gravity.
It's not like driving a car and changing course to avoid a stray dog or to get around a traffic jam. It's like driving a car with bald tires across an ice rink and trying to steer by blowing out the window.
Still, that's my decision to make with my money, not yours or "society's." "Society" might benefit from me not taking marijuana, but that still should be my decision to make. "Society" might benefit from the increased birth rate of forcing me to have children, but that still should be my decision to make.
I think "Society" might benefit if they forced you not to have children.
He didn't say "speed of light travel," he said "significant percentage of the speed of light." 25% of the speed of light is certainly a significant percentage.
Not really. Remember that c is an asymptotic barrier. Much like 2.5 on the Richter scale is dead calm compared to 10 on the Richter scale, 0.25 c is close to standstill compared to c.
One problem is that you don't get any huge benefits from time dilation at a mere 0.25 c. The Lorenz boost is only around 3%.
You have to get up to close to 0.9 c before relativistic benefits starts weighing in significantly.
At that point you have a rapidity of close to 1.5, and eat up the distance significantly faster than your speed.
(For an observer back on earth, though, you would only seem to reach ~0.8c and your trip thus takes longer for those who wait in a different time frame.)
The problem with constant acceleration is energy. It doesn't really matter how long or how hard you're accelerating, with 100% matter to energy conversion and a photon drive (100% energy to thrust), you would only be able to reach 0.6c by converting half your ship's mass. A constant 1g trip to anywhere interesting would take unimaginable amounts of energy.
This requirement can be slightly reduced via external acceleration (eg. laser boosting), but then you're talking planetary-scale focusing mirrors if you want to beam power out of your local Oort cloud. That would only get you a moderate gain, though: 0.7c for a ship-mass of beamed power at 100% efficiencies. All this is of course ignoring the interstellar medium, as well.
... willing women.
Or at least ones willing to "put some ice on it" and keep their mouths shut.
www.backwoodsengineer.com
In the past I've submitted my ideas to both Mae Jemison and and also to The Lunar and Planetary Institute who were both at the time seeking ideas for long term space travel. Both have rejected my ideas, so maybe I'll just paste it here so the concept is not lost forever. At least there might be some debate about whether I'm being so unreasonable or inhumane that it doesn't warrant consideration. I suspect that these are the reasons my idea is being ignored by the establishment. You can go ahead and use these ideas for your own, I don't need an attribution. I just want there to be some debate over whether this is feasible to do and whether we should do it.
I'd like to point out that attempts at this mission should be practiced here at home instead of Mars or a distant star for a number of years prior to ever sending out the mission. It would have to work here first before it could work anywhere else. That is, an attempt to create a) a successful secluded self-sustaining biodome on Earth, b) a gestation unit capable of birthing humans without outside assistance and training them in our sciences and culture, c) sending these parentless individuals in a simulated secluded mission without outside contact for a long period of time in a simulated "ship" that would never leave the planet, d) ending in an arrival at a simulated planet and habitat to live in. I understand that there are a lot of ethical boundaries being broken in my idea that may prevent this idea from ever being attempted. However, I strongly believe that any attempt to exit our solar system and populate the universe would require we open our minds to these possibilities. One of these days Earth as we know it will be gone, it is just a matter of time. Here is the original email:
"I'm not sure if you're accepting ideas for how to make it across the universe but I have a few that I've been pondering over the years. We could potentially create a ship filled with human DNA and send it to a distant star we suspect might harbor life with a decent probability. When the ship is within a certain distance a gestation machine kicks in and clones a small group of humans in the DNA database, of which there would be hundreds of thousands more genetic samples for further cloned individuals (each with redundant backups), and then raises them like children with an AI. This would include some educational and fictional written, video and auditory programs. And, later in life instruction videos on more advanced subjects. It would probably be a good idea to also include historical and editorial videos that explain why we sent them, what Earth and society here is like both the good and the bad, and what we expect of them.
If they manage to survive, and land on a habitable planet safely. They could use the ship's gestation unit to clone more individuals to help reconstruct a civilization from the DNA database. We should also send along any available source material for producing medications and analyzing the human body and include equipment and instructions on how to create thousands of devices (radios, computers, industrial machines, argicultural, financial sciences, etc). And, enough sustainable food production, oxygen, clean water, music, movies, books, etc. to get them through the hardest parts of the mission.
Worth noting we shouldn't send just one mission like this, we should send many to many different locations. Most of them are going to fail, if not all. But, we may get lucky at least once, which means we would have succeeded in extending human life beyond just our own planet. Obviously this means that those humans we would clone in this way would have had to agree to using their genetic material for this purpose beforehand.
It would also be interesting to provide them with end-game instructions that specify that if they succeed in finding a habitable planet, to send a signal (machine design blueprints included) to Earth coordinates which will activate one of many dormant space capsules which will fire up and fly to their location with further
You should really kneel corrected in front of President Clinton.
"No, Bill, the spaceship is not going to be cigar shaped..."
If you built a spaceship that accelerated at 1G constantly then in 100 years it would be going the speed of light. After that distance get pretty short. And no don't tell me I can't accelerate faster than the speed of light. You can. in your own frame. If you experience 1G of acceleration for 100 years, you know you have changed your speed by about 3E10M/sec. Now an outside observer might not see it that way of course. But who cares. It's me that's going somewhere not them.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Put him on one and send him to Proxima Centauri.
George Clinton supported this in the 1970s
No, we just need to stop the top rich nations and its citizens that the world resources are not their personal toys.
Tomorrow is another day...
The problem with constant acceleration is energy. It doesn't really matter how long or how hard you're accelerating, with 100% matter to energy conversion and a photon drive (100% energy to thrust), you would only be able to reach 0.6c by converting half your ship's mass. A constant 1g trip to anywhere interesting would take unimaginable amounts of energy.
Why ignore interstellar space? It's not empty by far. Use a ram-scoop and feed the hydrogen into your (fusion) reactor. At 0.9x c your ram-scoop will collect quite a lot of hydrogen.
Best damn explanation of the commonly used bankrupted "Electronics Analogy" applied everywhere. I will send your paragraphs to the next person that says, "my iphone is zillion more powerful than the Apollo spacecraft computer." Bzzt, Apollo CSM and LM went to the moon, iPhone only went to your pocket.
A slashdotter's pocket is way more hostile an environment than the moon. Think of the acidity of the BO!!!
Going to space now is similar to alchemists trying to find the cure for cancer. It's a waste of time for everyone involved. Maybe one day, but we do not have the tech, better to focus on the science instead of wasting billions in blowing up rockets. That isn't to say sats or probes shouldn't be sent up, but anything too big isn't worth it.
The chance of us being destroyed by external forces is minimal, the last time Earth's life got screwed was quite a few years ago. In less than a millenia we should be able to leave to somewhere more deadly, and chances are good the sky won't fall before then.
You forgot about ion drives, which for long distances would work very well, as long as the electricity holds out.
We'll be lucky to get a man on Mars in the next 100 years,
Stopped reading
Again, you aren't understanding the problem.
This is like going to Hawaii in a rowboat. Make a 1 degree miscalculation in San Francisco, and you run out of food 20 miles north of the Big Island.
Make enough corrections for the miscalculation, and your journey takes long enough that you run out of food 5 miles short of the destination.
The problem is not having a big enough ship to have buffer for a big error, and the distances are just mind-bogglingly far.
If the Sun was a basketball, Saturn would be 1,000 meters away (over half a mile), and Pluto is 3 times farther out. We have one spaceship (Voyager) that just covered that distance in 45 years.
There are designs for spacecraft that are not presently used due to a treaty against nuclear arms in space that would decrease the travel time significantly. I'm not saying it can even come remotely close to the speed of light, but generation ships could get there pretty reasonably. The design gets it's thrust by detonating small nuclear blasts behind the vessel, and harnessing the force with a large 'pusher plate' and a series of shock absorbers. It is currently the fastest form of travel known to man.
I bet he can't wait to see sexy centaurian look like :p
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Hey a good scientific breakthrough, and you can convert matter to energy. Then you could accelerate enough for time-dilation to cut in, and get back in in just a few years of ship time. Of course, you'll come back to an Earth inhabited by talking apes...
Seriously though, I wonder at the people who keep talking about the Moon and Mars and interstellar travel when we don't even have a reliable LEO delivery system and no serious plans to build one. We're like the hero in that stupid TLJ movie all big plans, and no sane way to implement them.
This is exactly why they have replicators on the Starship Enterprise...
The actual name of the program (originally funded by DARPA) was 100 Year Starship Study (100YSS). It is a study of what would be necessary to actually have such a ship. There are LOTS of issues, time and distance being big ones, along with propulsion and power, and a whole lotta cultural ones.
I do wonder about the speakers and some of the format of this symposium. They are charging significant extra fees to see Nichelle Nichols and others talk at the various dinner events. That comes off more as fundraising than science symposium.
I will be attending the symposium, as a representative of a group that made a proposal to DARPA (SpaceGAMBIT) , but will not be at the extra cost events.
bad methodology you don't want to use pure photons, that is a waste of energy. it takes 300MW to produce a newton of thrust! your car produces a newton of thrust with half a watt! you can have stages to a starship and "burn" more than half the mass, there are tricks for deacceleration that don't require the same amount of fuel as starting by use of external forces. you should read some physicists ideas on the subject.
Isn't that cute, the Democrats are trying to get the computer geeks and nerds onside by supporting the 100 year starship. Less talk more action. Halve the US military budget and spend it on NASA and then computer geeks and nerds the world over will sing your praises.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
A ruse from the 'dirty tricks team' at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte North Carolina as coordinate by White House Staff in Washington D.C.
The Soviet has landed, in the United States of America ... Red Dawn!
Um Pray Tell ... Why Charlotte North Carolina? It the is closest spot 'they could engineer' to Charleston South Carolina since Charleston SC refused their presence in the state of South Carolina!
Well well well.
So much for 'Democratic Peoples' of the Deamon-cratic National Convention.
Zombis! Don't u just lov killing zombis. :)
Shit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances.
"Shit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances." Sure we do: "thirty-nine digits are sufficient to perform most cosmological calculations, because that is the accuracy necessary to calculate the volume of the known universe with a precision of one atom." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi#Motivations_for_computing_.CF.80 Humans know over a trillion digit.
"...carrying enough nuclear fuel for an interstellar trip will be no easy task."
Sure it would. Breeder reactors could do the job - we've been messing with them since the early 1950s, and it's pretty solid tech.
And the nice thing about breeder reactors in spacecraft is the ease and safety of nuclear waste disposal.
I'm confused. From the perspective of the people watching from Earth, of course the 1g acceleration would have to fall off eventually. But aren't we really concerned about the 1g acceleration from the perspective of the people on the ship? Why would there be any difficulty in maintaining that acceleration "when approaching higher percentages of c"? Wouldn't they, from their own perspective, always be traveling at 0% of c? So there would never be a need for additional force - they would just need to have enough fuel and maintain the equipment.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Hell, at 1g acceleration, you could get literally anywhere in the reachable universe in a typical lifetime.
How are you defining "reachable universe"?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
It's not that serious an obstacle, if you're willing and able to take the time. For example, 0.1% of the speed of light means that 4.2 light year trip takes 4200 years. Not good for short-lived us and our societies (which often don't live any longer than we do), but feasible for those who live much longer than we do.
And sometimes the destination is moving in a different direction. So you can add some distance while you build up a society or whatever.
That's kind of a poor analogy.
Going to Hawaii in a rowboat would be navigationally trivial, if the ocean was transparent and you could see the island for the course of your entire journey; no?
And that's really the nice thing about long-distance (i.e., interstellar) space travel: you can ALWAYS see your destination.
Shit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances. TShit, I don't even think we have the MATH to travel those kind of distances.
That's pretty lame bullshit right there. Just simply correct the course every so often as you get better data on your trajectory. And one doesn't need to thread a needle on the other side, just get close enough that one can maneuver to the desired trajectory. There are many hard problems, but this isn't one of them.
Check out Pandorum , seems to be similar story line. http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi354026009/
alve the US military budget and spend it on NASA and then computer geeks and nerds the world over will sing your praises.
I hope that's not what the computer geeks and nerds want, but then, going by the evidence of slashdot, maybe they really are that stupid after all.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Maybe one day, but we do not have the tech
Except that we do have that tech and have been going to space for half a century. I really don't understand how one can simply deny what has been going on for a long time now.
Plus, spending resources on science and adventure is a hell of a lot more palatable than blowing it on corporate bailouts and foreign conflicts, yes?
In other words, because someone forces me to squander money on rat holes, then I should also squander money on their preferred rat hole? I don't think it should work that way.
You don't get to choose the definition of "wisely" by yourself.
Frequently, you don't get to choose at all.
So I guess it's ok to compare the computational power of a single logic circuit to that of today's most powerful computer. Feel free to do the math. It will be a factor larger than a million. Do you really not see the point I'm making?
Lol, even at 1cm/s you could "literally anywhere in the reachable universe in a typical lifetime"
I'm nominating my neighbor to be on that ship.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I completely agree with the idea that manned interstellar travel isn't happening in the next 100 years. However, unmanned travel could, and as for getting a man on Mars within the next century? It'd be pretty surprising if we didn't. Getting to Mars is just money, will, and some engineering. (OK, a whole lot of engineering, but still).
For interstellar travel you need an efficient, long-burning, nuclear engine. If you can maintain ~1 G for six months you're going about half the speed of light so I don't think a probe is at all out of the question in the next 100 years. And if you can burn it for a year, you're around 90% of the speed of light with about 10% time dilation. (Btw, this is from memory and the last time I looked at the numbers was about 10 years ago so feel free to correct). If you can get even closer to light speed the resulting time dilation might make manned interstellar travel possible, assuming they didn't mind being leaving behind their loved ones, etc. Of course, when you go from a simple probe to a manned craft that's a huge jump and I'm not looking for that to happen in this time frame.
First off, for the record I'm a presenting author at this year's 100YSS. I don't handle the tough stuff (quantum mechanics, warp drives, particle shielding) but I'm versed in it. In other words, I'm no rocket scientist. My focus is on encouraging pre-teens and students to pursue careers in astronautics and outreach.
That said, it's the very first thing you say that I have to take to task, "The scales you're talking about with interstellar travel are almost humanly unimaginable."
I do not speak for anyone besides myself when I say, bunk. The scales we are talking is the nearest star to earth, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away. That's traveling at approximately 186,000 per second for 4.2 years. That's imaginable. It's difficult (and arguably impossible) but it is not anywhere near unimaginable.
So maybe you meant that the means to achieve such speed over such a length of time is unimaginable. I'm here to say, again, no. There's a popular joke around theorists of interstellar travel, "Physicists have no problem with getting us to another star system. The hang-up is with the mechanical engineers." (Which is actually pretty funny.) The point is it's easy to conceive of ways to manage interstellar travel. The challenge is it's (presently) impossible to build them. But the ideas, plans, and models are there, for sure.
So with all that in mind, 100 Year Starship-as-a-program has set up to get something to another star system. We just don't know what or how. But the beauty of the concept is that Jules Verne wrote and published From Earth To The Moon in 1865; roughly 100 years later we went to the moon. Vis-à-vis this model, 100 Year Starship has begun as a thinking consortium or brain trust to engage some of the best minds in their respective fields with the challenge of reaching a nearby star 100 years from now.
(Incidentally, last year I believe Dave Neyland made a comment the "laughably slow" comment brought. Referencing the fact that technological breakthrough continues happening even after you set a plan in motion—ie old tech on spacecraft compared to what is currently available, it's what we had when said spacecraft's program was started and outlined—another joke, "If you leave on a starship and the starship that leaves after you passes you, you're on the wrong ship". Another techy joke. But an eyebrow-raiser also.)
Lastly, "barring someone radically overturning Einstein", heck, even I can imagine that. And we don't have to overturn Einstein, just pass him on the outside. I say this to kids I work with all the time, "You can never prepare to be surprised." We don't know how we are doing what we are talking about doing but not talking about it is sure to not get us anywhere.
Remember, a talent is someone who hits a target no one else can. A genius is someone who hits a target no one else sees.
Which naturally explains what I am doing being an astronaut teacher
"We're millions of miles from earth, inside a giant white face, what's impossible?"
That is a myth. Technological advancement is accelerating. Entire new branches of technology are being born. Comparing a decade to a century (with hindsight) is hindering your vision.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Nice trolling you've got going on here. Seriously, why do you feel that diverting funds from war making to science and progress is a bad idea?
My country's successes weren't accomplished by the naysayers; step aside, sir.
Your (and my) country has been taken over by the naysayers since those days. Today's Americans aren't at all like the Americans of the 60s and 70s and even 80s; they're just a bunch of whiners that complain their taxes are too high, they say that we need to spend insane amounts of borrowed money to pursue wars on the other side of the planet, they say that rich people are special and shouldn't pay taxes at all, they agree with the world's richest woman that people should be happy to work for $2 per day, and they believe all this stuff because this is what their preachers and Fox News tell them.
Or, would you rather we not put the time and resources into an idea this grand and incredible, and say to hell with all the amazing things we may discover along the way, regardless of its outcome?
Yes, that's exactly what most Americans think, that it's all a waste of time and money. Heck, even back during the Apollo days many Americans thought it was a waste, and that it was all filmed in the Nevada desert. I have extended family members that still believe this now (I don't ever visit them...). Americans want to give bailouts to wealthy CEOs who've mismanaged financial companies, they worship these people as "job creators".
That's pretty flamebaity, but let me try a reasonable response anyway.
As I see it, the military budget has two purposes: (1) prolong global US hegemony for as long as reasonably possible, (2) stimulate and maintain strategic domestic industries, both in terms of production facilities and in terms of R&D - basically, the military budget is Keynesianism in a guise that appeals to Republicans.
It seems fairly clear that goal (1) can be achieved on a much smaller budget, if that budget is used more intelligently, i.e. not wasted by getting into unproductive quagmires. We can argue about the exact numbers, but just compare the size of the US military budget to the next runner-up country. It's clear that there is much more than enough of a "safety margin".
Goal (2) can easily be achieved by an ambitious space program. Such a program could require domestic production of parts, as well as pretty advanced domestic R&D.
So, obvious political issues aside, I see no compelling rationally justified reason not to shift a pretty significant piece of the budget from the military to space exploration.
There's also the challenge of working in the tight space of a Jeffries tube.
-- thinkyhead software and media
What you say?
Yeah, selfish.
How exactly did you make "your" money? I assume you've accounted for the value of the nation you live in, right? The infrastructure, education, currency, military protection, local protection, license to do business, etc...
Are those things worth nothing?
Have you considered what making "your" money would actually look like, if people were dumb enough to really buy into the idea that taxing is stealing?
Think margins are thin now, just wait until you need to fund your own protection, figure out currency issues and value exchange, or need to settle differences with weapons instead of courts, or fight of plunderers, thieves, and copy cats.
You have a birthright, and it was established through the collective labor and taxes to add value to our lives over time. Nothing you do, and I mean absolutely nothing is done in isolation.
Yeah, that means you didn't build it yourself and nobody else did either. That also means you've got to pay your share just like everybody else does, because it's a package deal. Nobody gets to just not participate, because it doesn't work that way. It can't work that way.
Early on, the idea of self-governance was justified for these reasons. We need taxes, we need infrastructure, we need government and we need it because eeking it out as hunter gatherers just doesn't get us anywhere, and the quality of life sucks complete ass too.
We are free people in the US. We agree to fund government and submit to it, while preserving our right to challenge it, become part of it, work with it, and deal with it so that we are better able to enjoy our freedom.
A hunter gatherer is very free, but also very poor. That hunter gatherer, operating in isolation, "building it themselves" will invest most of their time getting established, and working to survive, ideally having a small family, not getting killed off by some other person wanting a quick leg up, with the idea of having a little bit of time to simply do what they want to do as opposed to what they need to do.
Wealth is measured in time. When most of our time is "must do" time, we are poor. When most of our time is "want to do" time, we are wealthy.
You are wealthy due to the labor invested in making sure you are born wealthy enough to even contemplate bitching about having to contribute your share needed to keep it all rolling.
Now, if we are to do a proper accounting of "your money" as opposed to the cut you owe the others who busted their ass to hand you a posh birthright, things start to get a little ugly.
Truth is, your taxes are a steal, even with the abuses. Could be better, but you are still getting one hell of a deal.
"your money" equals what you get paid for your labor products, most of which are not even possible to do or profit from without that birthright you ignore and refuse to value properly. Your slice of the education, military, research, police, infrastructure, courts, etc... is directly related to the value you get for all those things. They aren't free. They don't exist in a vacuum, and there isn't some picking and choosing which ones you like and which ones you don't, because the whole thing breaks down without everybody paying in their fair share to get their fair value out, which makes the whole thing work for you like it does.
So that means yeah, you are going to pay for some things you think are shit, and you are going to deal, because the alternative is sucking ass somewhere, living to work, working to live, hoping to god you don't get hurt, or killed before you even turn 30.
What a selfish ass you are. Fuck.
Blogging because I can...
Plus right now the government is finding virtually impossible to recruit the best and brightest because they don't buy into the propaganda and are simply not interested in killing people. Of course a truly ambitious space program is all together especially if tickets to fly are on offer. So more attack carriers or another space station a big space space. Another bunch of nuclear submarines or really pushing the enveloped when it comes to getting out of a gravity well, how close are we to really understanding gravity and how much more really focused effort would it take.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Military is not about war making, it is about protecting our liberty. You can be cynical about it all you want but it is true. Without military to protect us, out interests and our allies around the world, science funding wouldn't matter all that much. You can argue about the appropriate amounts of each but with China already approaching a 3rd of the US spending just in official figures (which is a joke compared to the actual spending), and the fact that the same amount goes a lot further in China than in the US, I can't say with equal confidence as many people do that we spend too much on the military.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Actually just to clear up a small correction, although the universe is 14 Billion years old it is actually 46 Billion light years across due to duper expansion in the few instances after the big bang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size.2C_age.2C_contents.2C_structure.2C_and_laws (please feel free to insert any and all required weasel words to satisfy your pedantic requirements "to the best of our knowledge", "as theorised", +- etc)
That is Dyson's Project Orion , technically you could get something the mass of a Destroyer into space. However pesky things like treaties & fallout killed that dead. However "if" you could get a lot of nukes into space safely you could build something in orbit rather than a ground launch.
"Friends help you move, Real Friends help you move bodies"
What do you exactly call "support from Earth" ? Most of the (commercial) spacecraft build today have an expected life of (at least) 10 or 15 years. And the only support that you have from the ground is modifying the configuration (use backup equipment, change the software, don't use cell number 42 of the battery, ...) You never put a new spare part. If you build a big manned spacecraft, all this could be done from within the spacecraft, if you put the right people inside.
But ok, this type of spacecraft is not for the next decades, but thinking about it is always a good idea.
If we cannot solve our problems here, why do you think running away will solve them? The same problems are bound to pop up again in a couple of generations.
Cf. the USofA. It used to be the place to run away to only a couple of generations ago, but it has many of the same problems the originating countries had.
VASIMR:
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/travelinginspace/future_propulsion.html
Just needs the funding...
And a few MW power supply.
With this realization humanity's energy should be directed toward a) fully utilizing our system b) fully utilizing energy of the sun c) fully utilizing matter in our system. Only after all of this is achieved does it make sense to fire one-way, never-heard-back-from seeds at the stars.
That's what she said. Yeah, she can be poetic.
But send only a single-sex crew. You don't have the right to commit babies' lives to that mission.
Some of the 18-year-olds might just make it to the end.
Well, how the about USA stays inside it's already fucking generous borders and it lives of its more than generous natural resources? China is not going to invade you. And your allies can go screw themselves.
This is like going to Hawaii in a rowboat. Make a 1 degree miscalculation in San Francisco, and you run out of food 20 miles north of the Big Island.
What? How do you think the first people got to all the islands in the Pacific?
Navigation is not shooting a gun. You don't need to aim precisely. In the old days, before GPS and other electronic navigation systems, ships calculated corrections to their route just once a day, and they did fine.
Traveling to a star would be even easier, because you see your destination all the time. Just keep your ship pointed at that bright dot. Trivially simple.
My sailboat *can* get around the world in under a year and visit pretty much every significant port and land mass in about 5 years.
ROFL! This retard is scared of a Chinese invasion.
In 1912 we had primitive versions of everything needed to go to the moon. For a star ship, not so much...................
AFAIK the world's premier builder of space craft - or near space craft - at the time very much WAS into "raining death down on another country ". We let him slide on that, seeing as how we needed our own rockets built and all.
The problem with traveling to another star is that once you get the project past the bubble of SciFi / Engineering / Science fans and start talking about spending real money and building real things you end up in the world of modern politics. A few issues that are almost guaranteed to come up:
* My religious book doesn't mention traveling to another star, so this is a bad idea. (You think I'm kidding?)
* You want *my* country to collect tons of impossible to replace and valuable elements ... and then throw them into space? Why doesn't country Y help more? They have plenty of element foo.
* You want a multi-national government body to control all these resources? Sounds like an affront to my county's sovereignty.
* This is going to cost what? How are we going to do this and afford to [win the war on terror | achieve ecological balance | grow our economies | feed the poor | provide medical care ]
* You are going to launch how much radioactive fuel into Earth orbit?
The reason we haven't heard from other civilizations from other stars?
Politics.
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
Reachable Universe = Distance traveled in a lifetime by accelerating at 1G.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
diverting funds.
what funds?
there's no money for our adventurism, that is why we're 16T in the hole, going for double in under 15 years, with the yearly interest payments on that debt already half of what we borrow each year.
we fix the problem not by diverting, there's nothing to divert. you kill it off.
and if you complain much more, i'll join the growing number of voices to have NASA dissolved period.
It's all about political points. People want to advance in space, so politicians make reassuring statements to make it sound like they want to do that. As a result they get political support and votes.
We have barely begun to explore this solar system, and there is lots of posibility that life exist elsewhere in this solar system., so lets focus some effort on that, and develop our technology and science before we waste time on a project to go to the nearby stars.
We also need to establish a biodome and base on the easy to reach and re-supply moon, before we try to do it on Mars.
Yeah man! We have rechargable lithium-ion batteries now! Voyager, the 3rd will be unstoppable
Yeah cause NASA hasn't accomplished anything worth undertaking.
The truth is, NASA and the DoD (and the intelligence community, and DARPA) are pretty deeply interconnected, and you're naive if you can't believe that. NASA centers do NASA work, but NASA developments have contributed to the NRO, NSA, strategic defense.
The other truth is, NASA is less than a half a percent of the federal budget. Perhaps the Tea Party will have a great laugh after they've disbanded the entire civilian space program, but in the end, it will be an irreplaceable loss (you'd never get all that talent to come back again after you laid them off once - just like in a commercial enterprise) and have negligable impact on the budget.
If you want to fix the deficit, you need to cut all these things; defense, intelligence, and entitlements. AND you need to increase revenues, and not with some kind of Laffer-curve smoke and mirrors. Everything else is kidding yourself.
In some ways solving these problems are a waste of time if the Physics says it will never be feasible. We would be solving a big set of problems that won't be problems once we invent Warp Drive. On the other hand, since we have absolutely no idea how to even get started on a Warp Drive today, we might as well solve the problems that we know about.
I read the internet for the articles.
It is nearly impossible to travel interstellar distances with any foreseeable technology. Very, very nearly impossible. It would be extremely improbable. HEY, that gives me an idea!
Alternatively, there seems to be an abundance of bad news, which does seem to travel ftl, so maybe we could do something with that. Definitely in the next 100 years there will be more bad news than we know what to do with!
Spending more than the next 27 countries together on our Military has absolutely nothing to do with defending our liberty. We're maintaining a global military empire, which is more necessary for others' security (Europe, Japan, etc) than our own. The country would benefit dramatically from this money [a] being spent at home, and [b] our not continuing to borrow money from China to fund these exploits.
-Dave Haynie
George Clinton could get there without the space ship!
-Dave Haynie
We never built anything on the scale needed to go for 10 years without contact with Earth. We pretty much know how.
The big problem is building something that'll last for 100 years in space. Every spaceship we've ever built, together, have barely lasted 50 years. And not in continuous use.
-Dave Haynie
Military is not about war making, it is about protecting our liberty.
Can't we have a discussion without using ridiculous emotionally charged non words like liberty. I think having a strong military is a good thing. But let's be honest...the US military is the world's pitbull. Very wealthy and powerful people lighting cigars with million dollar bills sick that pitbull on anything that threatens their revenue streams. Call that "protecting our interests" if you will, but that's just candy coating what it is: kicking the smaller kid's ass and taking their lunch money
Keep in mind that those RTGs when new provided about as much power as your average desktop computer needs run. Not exactly enough to run life support for a single person in a renewable fashion. Probably not enough to keep it warm enough for you to live even.
Voyager 1 and 2 are fast because of jupiter. If you stacked 5 staturn 5's on top of each other and launched a rocket towards them, you would be dead of old age before you caught up either of them. Do you somehow think the amount of energy in a given amount of mass when its burned suddenly becomes more ten times more efficient?
Voyager 1 and 2 are detecting our solar systems movement through the galaxy. The martian rovers were/are looking for traces of mold or bacteria in soil.
I'm not going to disagree in principle, but we simply don't currently have the ability, as a species, to survive without Earth.
No matter what we do to the planet, it will remain by far the most habitable place in the Solar System. If we can maintain colonies elsewhere, we can maintain them on Earth.
Now, suppose we establish permanent bases on Mars or in the Asteroid Belt, and Earth is then devoured by a giant mutant space goat. Unless the bases are able not only to sustain themselves indefinitely, including finding resources for and making everything they need, and have extra resources for growth, they're going to last a few years or centuries longer and then die.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
They're not talking about sending people to the stars unless you somehow get around the lightspeed barrier; at half light speed it would take eight years to get to Alpha Proxima. Then, you need to find a planet/satellite with the right mass, the right atmosphere, and the right temperature, and there are only a few dozen stars within fifty or so light years. It would be easier to terraform Venus and Mars than to find another planet around another star.
Free Martian Whores!
Taking the mothership to chocolate city!
I got to party on the George Clinton tour bus twice after his shows, and it was quite the outta_this_world experience!
Trust not based on past actions is folly, though.
Support more choices in goverment-Vote 3rd party.
Basically what you are arguing is that people should be forced to live by your moral opinions, and fuck them if they disagree.
Truth is, your taxes are a steal, even with the abuses. Could be better, but you are still getting one hell of a deal.
This is the kind of thing that abusive men say to the women they beat.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I certainly (as an American) wouldn't have funded the Iraq war
That's exactly the kind of thing I am arguing for. Ten years ago I was a conservative idiot who supported that war. I supported it verbally, I supported it by voting for leaders who supported it. Today I realize what a horrible mistake that was. I realize that I literally have blood on my hands, not to mention the (lesser) crime of supporting forcing people like you to do what I thought was right. I realize that it is a mistake to ever give anybody that kind of say in the lives of others.
Democratic government operates on the concept of shared sacrifice
But it's a system where one group of people forces the others to sacrifice. It is legalized infringement of the rights of the minority by the majority.
I'm all for shared sacrifice when all the sacrificing parties agree voluntarily. For example, my wife and I might agree to curb our spending in order to put our kids through college. That's voluntary sacrifice on both our parts.
you pay into the coffers and trust that your leaders spend it wisely. You don't get to choose the definition of "wisely" by yourself.
Nobody should get to choose what is "wise" for other people.
FYI, I'd probably support NASA, too, but it would be far more accountable with what it does with its money if the people supporting it could choose not to support it and let their money go to something else they deem more worthy. Just as the U.S. military operations over the last decade would've had to be a lot more responsible and accountable if they didn't have the power to compel support.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
So that means yeah, you are going to pay for some things you think are shit, and you are going to deal, because the alternative is sucking ass somewhere, living to work, working to live, hoping to god you don't get hurt, or killed before you even turn 30.
Thanks for the lecture, Dad. Now, can I live like a grown up and make my own mistakes? Or do I still need your permission and still need to pay tithes to your institution for the privilege of your guidance and leadership?
You are wealthy due to the labor invested in making sure you are born wealthy enough to even contemplate bitching about having to contribute your share needed to keep it all rolling.
I don't want to keep it rolling, and I would like it to stop, even if you think it is not the best thing for me. How do you justify continuing to force me to support something I do not believe in? It continues to roll over dark people in the Middle East, dark and light people at home, marijuana smokers, tobacco smokers, homosexuals, and lots of other people. I would like to quit fueling it so it will stop rolling. How do you justify continuing to force me to support it?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Thanks for the link. I'll watch it as soon as I get time.
I should mention that the "We use particles that travel slower than light to explain causality" is not a minor issue. It's true that within Special Relativity you can think about particles going faster than light and the math works. But what it tells you is that this particle would be going backward in time relative to other observers, violating causality. SR assumes causality, so we conclude that FTL is impossible. Causality is one of the assumptions that may have been up for grabs if FTL neutrinos panned out.
I still don't see how you can redefine c without also losing Lorenz Invariance, but hey maybe I'll end up watching that podcast too.
The enemies of Democracy are
Don't be silly. It is not only Obama who can perform God like feats.
Considering how much better Clinton is than Obama and yet Obama can slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet, well I don't see why Bill couldn't get us a mere 4.2 light years. It is not asking too much surely, Shirley.
Also, we do not even have the experience of building something that can stay 10 years in space without constant support from Earth...
Christ, I haven't seen such bad moderation as today in a long time. Voyager's 35 year anniversary in space is this week and it's still sending data thirty five years later.
You and whoever modded you informative are quite ignorant. Hell, there's a robot on Mars that was planned to be operational for six months, and it's still sending back data five years later.
Free Martian Whores!
Yes you would need those if people where awake for the trip, but that is why specifically made mention of using cryogenics, (hey if we are accepting space travel at even meaningful fraction of C then cryogenics is on the table too) if you are frozen your not going to be caring about being in the dark, what air would be needed could be stored or instead of using plants you could use algae farms which could be kept frozen for most of the trip and activated on arrival. The algae could also be used as a food for the hypothetical interstellar travelers. so that cuts down of fuel significant.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Nice framing attempt, but not really material.
Blogging because I can...
There is a process on these things. It's not a perfect process. All of us have to deal in some ways so that we may see the greater gains by doing so.
You said this:
Thanks for the lecture, Dad. Now, can I live like a grown up and make my own mistakes? Or do I still need your permission and still need to pay tithes to your institution for the privilege of your guidance and leadership?
LOL!! Bet you are somewhere in your 20's, right where I was when I said similar things. It's a tough gig, but time cures a lot of things. Trust me on that. Yeah, Dad now. Was just starting that gig when I signed up to this site, and the last kid is about to leave the house. Long time.
Here's the hard truth. You won't like it either, but it's fact, absolute. You are accountable to those you need stuff from. That's reality. Now, you say you want to live it on your own totally as an individual? Great! Give it all up. That means you don't get citizenship, that means you don't get infrastructure, that means you don't get courts, police, fire, or any of the other things you found up and running here like everybody else did.
Go off and do it all yourself, ideally somewhere that the rest of the world will just let you have, and then you can do fuck all you want, if you live long enough to actually do it.
Not a pleasant idea is it?
You see, you want shit, but you don't value what you see around you. Somehow, you think that's just a freebie and that you've got some entitlement to declare yourself above it all, that rugged individualist who doesn't need anybody or anything, just keep your hands off my money, blah, blah, blah.
Everything costs something pal. Everything. And the cost of living here is dealing with the process that is up and running here. Don't like how some of the taxes get spent? Great. I suggest you invest some of your time in politics and advocacy and get it changed, just like anyone else can and should be doing. That's how we resolve that stuff.
We don't resolve it by devaluing the society we live in, and declaring taxes as theft is like shitting where you eat. Fucking stupid.
You are lazy as hell, expecting some simplistic market solution to very complex, very old, very human problems. Been reading "those books?" Bet you have, and the attraction there is it's simple. Vote with your feet right? And if we just dismantle it all, the magic market forces will sort the people out.
Doesn't work that way either, and it doesn't work that way because the real money will crush you and me like we don't even exist. The real money, left unchecked would enslave people, kill off the gays, promote smoking tobacco to avoid paying for old people as optimal profit is when the worker dies right after their productive years, etc...
Go and read your history. That's how it has always gone down, and given no checks and balances, that is how it will continue to go down.
So here's the deal on "supporting" stuff. It's a package. You can either leave, or not. If you stay, then you deal. That's it. Assuming you are here, then we have the politics to help shape how things go, and we have the dollars to fund what gets done. Given you leverage all of that stuff no matter what you do, those taxes are no different than cutting me in for my share of a joint project. I don't like war either. But, I do appreciate the New Deal, and many other good thing we do, so I pay my taxes, and I do my politics and advocacy to speak my mind about it, ideally resonating with many others in ways that impacts how things get done and that changes things for the better, or worse...
The worse part?
When you tune out, buy into the idea that the system is fucked, and that somehow you would be better off just on your own with "your money", fuck everybody else style. Nobody gets to do that. Thinking you somehow deserve to be able to do that, or can do that is idealistic and naive frankly.
Again, take it or leave it. You are accountable to those you need st
Blogging because I can...
The article you linked reads like an elementary school book report by a child with a short attention span.
I forced nothing. What I did do was state some realities.
Your expression presents as young and I ran with that. Frankly, I think I'm close and you are just dodging, but that is just me. Feel free to enlighten me otherwise.
Note you have not actually posted a material reply, just cheap shots and chest thumping. That is telling.
I'm quite serious too. You make the claim that sensation is the right of every sentient being. LOL. Seriously. Laughing hard here.
Now if you actually have somewhere to go, please do. While we are constrained to this planet, I suspect you will find the freebies rather unpleasant. Remote islands, polar caps, and such are available for a very modest effort, largely just getting there.
So lets pretend you do that. Now, what do you do? Bust your ass just living. No net, no infrastructure, and only the stuff you brought. Have fun with that.
The selfish claim is related to your failure to recognize the realities in play, and naivete' is linked to shiny ideas that break down completely when real people in the real world doing real stuff are considered.
You want to live as if none of your history exists, yet you clearly benefit from the things, processes, tech, and in general, wealth that same history brought you. Somehow you get to pick and choose, when the reality of things clearly demands otherwise?
No buddy, I'm not forcing jack. Look around. You have a basic reality problem that just might need a few years at the school of hard knocks to resolve. When that bell finally rings, then we might actually have some real discussion.
Don't blame me for that. Plenty of other people can and will tell it to you straight, and attempts to marginalize them like you did me with the Dad thing just makes you look bad and feel better about denial.
Again, that is reality you struggle with, not me. Truth is, I could give two shits, but for the harm you do sucking others in to things that do them more harm than good.
You see you talk up a really sexy game, but when one looks under the hood there isn't much there.
Tell me this, what happens when you and lets say enough people gather and form your own place in the world? Do you think you owe them nothing? Do you believe they will only do things you support? Do you think they will just build for you to live posh for nothing? Would you do the same?
No.
What you will end up with is either some lord of the flies thing, oeco just another little nation with its issues and politics with another person like you raging against it too, like you are right now!
There isn't a thing you have said, nor stand for that hasn't been in play somewhere already. That's right, you aren't shit, neither am I.
Living in a democracy requires that you make trade offs. That is how it is. Your calling for fantasy land isn't helping at all.
What would help is for you to understand the basic realities and invest that time in your civics, finding common ground with others and helping all of us who want it better to move in ways that get it better, and that can't happen unless you value the democracy you live in.
Go ahead though. Rage on. It is really easy to slam home some comments on a site. Quite another thing altogether to actually step up and so some real good. To be perfectly frank, your greed is showing more than your morals are
it means someone's doing something useful
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
IMHO, the our understanding of the physics and technology will change at such a rapid pace that make early exploration unfeasible (sorry Bill). The technological knowledge increases and the RATE at which we increase our technology (including physics) expands so exponentially that current technology is overshadowed every few years. Consequently if we were to send a ship on a 100 year journey, we would probably obtain knowledge during that 100 years that would enable us to have a newer ship there at that destination before it arrived, and possibly a newer one there before that one arrived et cetera. Its like the law of diminishing returns in reverse.
A 100 year interstellar journey with an ensured population survival strategy, reminds me of a Dr. Stranglove quote:
General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
HRH The Duke of Windsor
I am not much of a physicist, but I did study Astro at university (at the same time as Alcubierre solved the GR equations for the warp drive incidentally, so that's how long ago it was) but...
I suggest you forget about black holes. You're never going to get close enough to one to all intents and purposes to do anything useful with it, both because they're all a long way away, and very dangerous.
As for the Casimir effect, yes, technically you're right, but we're talking quantum scales here and I'm not sure how that applies to GR. As far as I know, they're still working on that. If you could show a gravitational wave produced by a Casimir device, I dare say you'd get a Nobel Prize.
But yes, you really do need the wisdom of someone who's more up-to-date.
Stick Men