Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?
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).
...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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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 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"