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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.
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
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.
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?
...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!”
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
How are socialists relevant to the discussion at hand?
Surely you don't think President Clinton is a socialist. Perhaps a corporatist, but if you think he is a socialist you have a lot to learn.
North Korea not run by socialists either, but much of europe is run by democratic socialists.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Clinton has said recently that not finishing the super collider was one of his biggest regrets from his entire presidency. ..and it wasn't even his fault. Congress controls the purse.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/31/us/stating-regret-clinton-signs-bill-that-kills-supercollider.html
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.
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 -
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.
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.
No, but God help anything that lives on that planet when we impact it at .99c.
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
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.
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.
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.
So that's how he made the pie higher and put food on the family.
Table-ized A.I.
Capitalists build them also: they just have slot-machines in them
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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
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.
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."
I agree. Scientists are getting good at keeping a human zygote growing outside of a womb, and we're getting good at designing incubators for very premature babies. At some point, these two technologies will converge and we really will have our artificial womb. I think this is likely to happen before the end of the century, and will have important terrestrial applications as well (like the near obsolescence of abortion). Even more technologically interesting would be to design AI parents that can do a decent job in raising and educating the children thus born, while running and keeping in repair all the essential systems in the spaceship. I think this will happen pretty soon, and it will have very important terrestrial applications as well. Then there are all sorts of very interesting social questions to settle: Since we'd be starting clean, what language should the children speak? English, Mandarin, or something logically "cleaner"? What historical information should they have? Should they be indoctrinated in a religion? If so, which one? Should they be indoctrinated in a system of rituals that includes things like Christmas and Halloween? And if so, what kind of calendar should they use? And whose genetic material will we be sending? That of our smartest people? Our nicest? Our healthiest? Most ambitious?
All of these tools can and probably will be built outside of any space agency budget, and will probably be realized before we get anything like feasible interstellar propulsion. If these things are easier to design than the propulsion system itself, I think we should be planning our interstellar missions to be of the "frozen embryos" variety. I have no idea about the lifespan of frozen embryos under optimal conditions. Online, I've read that "Studies done in the 1970’s, exposing frozen mouse embryos to the equivalent of 2,000 years of background radiation, showed no measurable mutagenic effects in offspring." (link) Granted, despite our best shielding, we probably would expose the embryos to a higher radiation dose than terrestrial background. Still, if the ship can travel intact for centuries, that allows us to launch the mission while the propulsion system is still rather primitive, like H-bombs. If it turns out that such long trips would result in inevitable genetic degradation, we might just ship genetic codes written out in redundant computer memory, and a machine that can construct the DNA sequence from amino acids once the ship arrives.
I have three reasons to like this kind of an interstellar colonization plan. First: It will probably be the first sort of ship that's ready to launch, and so the most likely to beat any possible terrestrial sterilizing catastrophe. It would be slow, and if all goes well, it would be overtaken by later, faster ships. But it's good insurance, in case a catastrophe preempts the later ships. Second: The most interesting aspects of the required technology can be motivated independently. They would serve us well not just for interstellar colonization. If we build an AI that can animate robots good enough to teach kids how to grow up to be good people, we would surely find ways to use it here on Earth as well. Ditto for artificial wombs, autonomous asteroid mining robots, etc. Third: This gives us a chance to really start clean, because no social and historical baggage needs to travel with the colonists. If it were living people that were sent on a space ship, even if they were expected to die en route, it would be these people that inevitably transmit their culture to the next generation, and so on. But if the kids were raised by an AI, we get a chance to think hard about which values we as humanity are most proud of, and what we would most want to transmit to a new, distant human society. And simply the opportunity to have this conversation here on Earth would be incredibly interesting.
"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
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
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
The correct equation is 1.94 arccosh (n/1.94 + 1) apparent years : where n = number of light years to travel. This takes into account 1g acceleration and deceleration. The andromeda galaxy can be reached in 28 years, not 3,115.
Here's a link for the derivations.
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.
Your can't do attitude is why YOU will fail, but thankfully it won't stop humanity as a whole.
No, you won't. You'll be going near the speed of light. Of course, you'll be doing that in ten years.
Note that if you can handwave a constant 1G boost, you can reach anywhere in the galaxy in 20 years, including deceleration time.
No, you can't. In your own frame of reference, you'll still be going sublight, and the Universe will look rather odd (blue shifted in one direction,red-shifted in another, and VERY, VERY FLAT!).
Alas, it doesn't actually work that way....
Not only will an outside observer see that you're not going lightspeed+, he won't see you at all. since it will take you ~3E44 years as the universe measures time for you to accelerate for 100 years at 1G. And you'll be about that many lightyears away by then (note that the universe is only about 1E13 lightyears across, by one estimate).
Note, by the way, that by that time, the Milky Way Galaxy, if it still existed (it won't - the collision with Andromeda in a few billion years will see to that, much less the death of every star in both galaxies long before), would appear (to you, in your speedy little spaceship) to be ~1/1000,000,000,000,000 of a nanometer wide.
Oh, and the entire sidereal universe would by approaching a nanometer in width (to you)....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
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...
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.
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.