centauri-dreams.org — If advanced technolgical civilizations really are out there, maybe they simply can?t afford to build interstellar spacecraft. Myrhaf assumes that the only realistic way to travel between the stars is via a slow generation ship, what Isaac Asimov once called a ?spome? or ?space home.? And he doubts anyone would attempt it
Nov 29, 2006 View in Crawl 4
threemagicNov 29, 2006
Based on what we know and have seen.. yes, I agree...but that's pretty short sighted, don't you think?
vertinoxNov 29, 2006
@"we don't have the wisdom."Well if all those other alien lifeforms are wise, then why don't they have a space program that is capable of visiting us? Could it be they've already blown themselves up?
djfindNov 29, 2006
I wrote up a big post on how life in a binary system is almost impossible and at best would be incredibly uncomfortable, but I realized how stupid debating over it would be.Space travel is always fun to consider. Slow-moving homes are nearly pointless as It makes human life during the travel trivial and once the destination is reached what steps out of the ship will barely be human anymore biologically, and will resemble absolutely nothing as far as our culture and society.On the other hand, near-light travel would still be too slow to reach anywhere outside the solar system. Light-speed is literally impossible, and subdimensional (Hyperspace, warp, whatever you wanna call it) travel is also unconvential because you can't put people in your subdimensional craft, and chances are your unmaned probe won't pop out in the same universe it left.So let's focus more on not #@*$&%ing up Terra, shall we?
chompyNov 29, 2006
We already have the ability to fly an 88,000 ton ship at 1/10th the speed of light, it was called Project Orion and it involved detonatine a series of nukes behind a giant shock plate. <a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29</a>
blahblahNov 29, 2006
Djfind, I don't think you really appreciate the size of space. The two sun-like stars in the alpha centauris system never come closer than 16 AU of each other.. which is somewhere around the orbit of Saturn if I'm not mistaken. At the farthest distance, they are 32 AU apart. An earth-like planet would orbit at around 1 AU give or take. The other star would effectively be another Jupiter, as far as this 'earth' is concerned, since it is orbiting so close to it's parent star. Days would be like earth days. The sky at night would be a very dark blue, unless the other star is on the other side of the parent star, in which case, nights would be black, as on earth.One-g acceleration is not only technologically feasible, it will be what humans use when they go to Alpha Centauri. At 1g, it would take less than a decade, and the speed would exceed 0.5c at the halfway point. Further, the enourmous amount of energy to maintain 1g acceleration is -very- acheivable with matter-to-energy reactions. We have discovered and produced antimatter, and we also have created the fusion reaction. It's just a matter of time before the technology is developed to the point where it can be packaged on a ship.
grok22Nov 30, 2006
the was a theory that said we should use nuclear bombs dropped behind the ship to provide propulsion
Closed AccountNov 30, 2006
or through (the possibility of) faster than light travel: <a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_than_light">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_than_light</a>discount no possibility.
Closed AccountNov 30, 2006
Armbar is sortof right. There's water on mars, but not a whole lot. At best it'd be sufficient for some fair-sized lakes; there is not anywhere near enough to make Mars a water world like Earth is.
skidzillaNov 30, 2006
About 10 Billion to 1. We need more buttered toast, cats and duct tape than will ever exist to build one.
Closed AccountNov 30, 2006
No I didn't forget relativity. It's just that it's hard to accelerate large masses to just 10% of lightspeed - that's something like 10 000 times faster than the fastest present spaceships. And you'd need to get a lot higher to really cut travel time to nearby starsystems with planet.