What is Digg?84 Comments
- blahblah, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20The possibility of an earth-like planet around either or both of the sun-like stars in the alpha centauri system looks favorable, from what we know of the system. The only real obstacle is energy. Any sort of propulsion system that would be able to make a 4 light year trip would have to have a constant acceleration of 1g in order to make the journey in a reasonable amount of time. This of course requires a lot of energy; mass to energy reactions would be necessary, either through hydrogen fusion or antimatter-matter reactions, to keep the ship (or rather, the fuel tank) at an appreciable size.
- the_d, on 10/12/2007, -11/+29One word: Golgafrinchans.
- Zreitan, on 10/12/2007, -3/+22Just think..somewhere in some future someone will be saying.
"I for one welcome out new human overlords" and we'll have a nice chuckle to ourselves, inside our brain jars. - mutatron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Rule onboard a spome would have to be much more tyrannical than any Earth-based government.
- ulyssesyt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15what are the odds of that?
- dmsean, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12And no one would dare attempt to sail around a flat earth....
- Xeth, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11That's no spaceship... it's a space station!
- Persol2point0, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10"The possibility of an earth-like planet around either or both of the sun-like stars in the alpha centauri system looks favorable, from what we know of the system."
That's only half the problem though. Our enviroment relies on a lot of 'building block' resources in the ground and air. While their may be an earth like planet.. it won't have an earth like ecology (if it has an ecology at all). - Tebixan, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12We don't necessarily need to worry about interstellar travel in our lifetimes. However if we can get started on self sustaining martian (or other planetary) colonies, we can die knowing humanity has a future. Supposedly any colonists we send to Mars, Europa, etc to begin terraforming would be among the best humanity has to offer. So if Earth dies along with all the scum of humanity, the colony lives on.
- iFrank, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Remember when we used the moon as a spaceship and the whole Earth got flooded because of the drastic shift in tide?
Good times. - mhockey14221, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Im just waiting for Lord Xenu and his intergallactic DC-9s
- digga, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9I think Asimov should''ve used SPORE instead.... seems appropriate.
- Ramtech, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Build it and they will come...
- Chompy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6We 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29 - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9You should try paragraph breaks. They're great!
Readable Parent:
Humans as you know them are never leaving earth, this is all just scifi. Sure there may be an earth like planet in the local survey of stars, or maybe not. the distance in between these areas is nontrivial, and no, sadly warp drive does not exist.
you have to design a craft that can be subjected to outerspace for perhaps millions of years, all the while sustaining an organic lifeform (humans) that we know is not well suited to space travel. how do you plan to keep a human society functioning for that long in a tin can without war, insanity, etc taking over but with disasterous consequences given the relative fragility of the environment.
this of course completely omits radiation, weightlessness, all the other things that would kill humans eventually, or the unique balance in our ecosystem that we have evolved to exactly comingle with, likely without exception. one day something from earth may land on an earth-like planet, but it will likely look a lot more like r2d2 than luke skywalker.
And don't tell me that at one point crossing the ocean looked impossible too, that is an idiot analogy offered by someone who does not appreciate the fact that scale matters in the universe....going to proxima centauri is sadly not comparable to going to plymouth rock. - Pegritz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Biological humans as we currently know then will never--and I do mean NEVER--settle beyond earth. Why? Because humans such as us are absolutely useless in space. We and all other terrestrial lifeforms evolved specifically to exist within our planetary environment, and the only way biological humans can survive in space is to, quite literally, take little heavily-shielded bubbles of that environment with them in the form of shuttlecraft, stations, and spacesuits. It's bad enough that to keep a human alive in space one must build airtight structures around them just so they can continue to breathe, we must haul up from earth all the necessary volatiles and biomass to keep them going. Let's not forget shielding from radiation, and intensive exercise and medical regimes to keep their bones and immune systems from collapsing in extended periods of microgravity.
The idea of making little warrens in the Moon's surface or terraforming Mars are ludicrous, too: these environments contain tons of resources...just not the kind of resources you can readily and easily use to keep humans going.
And forget about genetically engineering "Space Humans" to deal with micrograv/vacuum interplanetary conditions--meat is meat, and there's no point in wasting R&D funding on kludging together some kind of sealed-up self-contained Space Humanoid who will *still* need to be fed, will still require O2 for respiration, and still suffer from terrestrial biology's simply natural weakness to high-energy radiation?
The answer: Go for silicon.
Meat humans will never leave this planet for any extended period of times...but our machine-based descendants/creations can *easily* do it. Machine do not need air and water. They do not necessarily need to be "fed" when ambient energy can be collected via solar panels to power them, or they could run on simple nuclear batteries--or even portable fusion systems. The Solar System as it now stands contains ALL of the elements necessary to provide for the reproduction and fueling of Von Neumann-like replicating machine systems. To hell with filling the moon up with Moon Colonists: stripmine it to the bedrock for silicon and carbon to build nanotube circuitry and manipulating bodies. Mars is probably barren of life, and is too small to conveniently retain an atmosphere over extended periods of time...so mine it for building materials, too!
Then let's not forget the Asteroid Belt, Venus (what a waste of good realestate *that* caustic ***** is), Mercury, the Jovian moons, and so forth....The Solar System beyond Earth is an *incredibly* harsh place for biological humans--but it's a veritable Paradise for a machine civilization. Plenty of resources, plenty of ambient energy.
Let the meatsicles have Earth--if they rape the environment and render themselves extinct, so be it. Hopefully by then the Robot Overlords will have gotten off that dump and begun to take advantage of the cornucopia that is all our local space-junk.... - sparkie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Golgafrincham
- konspence, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Mars already has water... Why would we need to send it?
- iFrank, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6We can just build a giant super soaker, and just WHAM. Mars = pwned.
- Demagogue, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6We need to develop an improbability drive....
- vertinox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Which you do give a good point... Space travelers will most likely give up the one thing that keeps them from traveling such long distances, which is the human body. You won't really need to breath, grown old, or eat... Just as long as the nanobots rejuvenate your synthetic brain cells in your synthetic robot body while you hibernate for a few thousand years as your galactic battle cruiser drifts through the star systems passively looking for life forms to meet and eat... Err... I mean greet.
- Gustomucho, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4HAL will do the job, forgets human.
I am sure Spomes would lose the race, they would leave earth for thousands of years. Meanwhile, humans will find faster/better way to space travel. After 200 years of Spome travelling, they would see a fast Spacecraft go by : Human's newly constructed fast spaceship.
Sorry spome, we can't stop to help you out, we would lose too much energy, see ya in 600 years! (Imagine how worthless the Spome habitant will feel, devasted, 1000 years down the drain...)
Some ideas are great, but think about the technological advance humans will do during the "spome travel"...
The only reason why we would have Spome is to save human from extinction. - iFrank, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Argh! Duggmirror be too slow, mateys!
- Ramble, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Nah, it'll obviously be by Warp/Hyperdrive/FTL drive/by a TARDIS.
- rocketryguy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3What they've generally done is teleport information, not physical objects. Or, put another way, they've had the state of a very small particle translate through an entanglement to another particle. Distance isn't the issue there, they've done it across large distances. The issue is that an atom is a different sort of animal to manipulate than larger objects, qualitatively as well as quantitatively.
So don't hold your breath on that one. FTL communication, maybe though.
What I'd like to see is development of a system for spin conversion of matter to anti-matter that doesn't take more energy than you get from a subsequent matter/anti-matter conversion to energy, so we can realistically use it for a very compact energy source, with a good matter/energy conversion rate. Then the bussard would be even more useful.
Other more exciting propulsive and power projects include boron-hydrogen fusion (which I note has been somehow "unfunded" by the current administration, gee wonder why...) using collapsing plasma spheres. Not only was it workable now, but it also was brilliant in directly converting to electrical energy, without an intermediate thermal/turbine steam system. Dammed if I can find the original link to the guy who just needed funding for a prototype (and who NASA was funding for advance drive applications), but here's an interesting related google video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606
In a totally different line of plasma related research, this is a really neat idea: plasma injected magnetic bubbles for both shielding and solar sailing. The latter is probably not applicable to really big ships, save possibly as a supplemental propulsion and radiation protection source. But it's a lot more practical for probes, and easier to deploy than a physical sail. Pardon the old article, it's still relevant though.
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/prop19aug99_1.htm - jonj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4dyson sphere!
- moofree, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4The fact is the humanity on Earth is eventually going to be destroyed. Whether it's in a few thousand years from a giant asteroid, or nuclear war, or maybe we even survive long enough till the sun to turn into a red giant in 5 billion years, but the fact is, eventually something is going to happen to all humans, and all life on earth, if we stay here.
Our only chance is to escape into space.
So you can stick around on Earth all you want, but I'd rather not have all our eggs in one basket. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2or through (the possibility of) faster than light travel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_than_light
discount no possibility. - blahblah, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Djfind, 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. - dorion, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6Tebixan the "scum" of Humanity isn't some plague that we can fix, it will pop up where ever we go.
- Hickeroar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Ever read Alastair Reynolds book "Chasm City?" There's a fleet of generation ships in that story.
- techweenie1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3We could always send our Marklar to Marklar...
- moofree, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2We should just turn Mars' moon Deimos into a giant colony ship and send it to Tau Ceti.
- 3leggedHorse, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6Logic says living on planets is a pain in the ass and the pocket due to natural disasters, for example the Asian tsunami or hurricane Katrina.
The best idea is to live in space taking the resources from planets you visit ( a bit like the aliens in independence ) cheesy analogy i know but no different to what we are doing down here, but you get to take in all the planet has to offer your senses before you plunder it of its resources.
Only trouble is what happens when you arrive at a planet with a semi tech civilization on it .Do you kill or do you help. - n00854180t, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2You could use a Bussard ramjet, or a solar sail design.
- Djfind, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5I 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? - threemagic, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3What if they've figured out other ways of travel? Time/worm holes.. etcetera. Not to mention these are only theories we have thought of.. what's to say there aren't things and modes of transports we haven't come close to comprehending yet.
- ScornForSega, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2As per the article:
"Posit this scenario: A culture at the end of its star’s life must make a decision about how to save itself. Its G-type star, much like our Sun, will swell into a red giant, destroying all life on the inner worlds of its system. But in the process, that star becomes the perfect launching pad for solar sail missions of enormous scope, the kind that could get a generation ship on its way."
Great... so when they come to my door looking for donations, I can tell them to come back in 5 billion years? - 3leggedHorse, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3 Clearly with the star trek idea of space travel a quantum leap in physics and tech is needed, so at this point in time spome as Asimov put it is only viable. But bear in mind the cost of building the international space station, to build a self sustaining craft capable of holding enough people to create a viable gene pool is a epic and some what expensive task.
But the way the climate is going and other things like over population it's probably humans last hope of survival. all your eggs in one basket not a good idea.
As for the find a star like ours that's all bollocks, a star could be five times larger than ours so a planet like ours could be the distance from our sun to Pluto from that star still be temperate enough for life to exists, you have also got to take into account thickness of atmosphere and so on. There is so many variables when considering star systems with earth like planets. - skidzilla, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1About 10 Billion to 1. We need more buttered toast, cats and duct tape than will ever exist to build one.
- rheaume, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1yakuzablitz
That's it, I'm taking your name off the Home Owners Association's president ballot. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1No 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.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Why does the article assume that generation ships would be prohibitively expensive?
A generation ship would need to support a minimum population of 500 (that is sufficient to retain 95% of humanitys genetic variation for 100 generations (yes, really)), water and air, food-production sufficient to feed those 500 people, and basic resources for settling on the planet. A hollowed-out smallish asteroid would make a good "spaceship".
The trip would take a couple of tens of thousand years, and that would mean it'd be difficult to keep the human society in the generation ship from at some point erupting in violence and destruction, but technically and financially I'd say it'd be possible to send out a ship like that in the pretty near future.
The weakest link is the human society, which under such a long journey is guaranteed to at some point erupt in violence, and personally I think sending robotic ships with frozen embryos/tissues to raise once at location, is a lot safer than sending generation ships. Cheaper too. - b7j0c, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3you are what happens when someone's understanding of science fiction far exceeds their understanding of science fact.
- justo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1why have humans migrate? why not evolve into another form that would be suitable for migration through space, and then metamorph for the conditions of the planet.
it seems vaguely arrogant that the human form should be used? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Armbar 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.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1True and the energy source used to make such a journey would more than likely be Anti-matter. One dime piece of anti-matter could launch the space shuttle 60 times into space.
- vertinox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@"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? - Wasyu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Well we have over 100 worlds planets,moons, and dwarf planets in this solar system.
So we need to figure out how to use these before going to the stars.
Though on slow ships being the only way he's wrong anti matter is a reality just we can only make very small amounts right now though if we could figure out how to harvest anti particle created in solar flares or trapped in Jupiter's magnetic field we'd have reasonable amounts of the stuff.
2Kg of anti matter could accelerate a 1ton mass to over 80% light speed.
The energy input for relativistic speeds is a log rhythm it takes more energy to go from 99.9%c to 99.999% then it took to go from 0 to 90%c
A bussard ram jet powered by antimatter could travel at a large fraction of c so even though it might take it over 1000 years to reach a star around 1000 light years away only 4 to 6 years of ship time will have passed. - merr, on 10/12/2007, -5/+5hmm... That might be the first time I've ever seen a Hitch Hiker's Guide reference get buried.
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