Aliens! Planets! And something to intrigue Astronomers for the coming years.
- Thread starter Neurotic Void Melody
- Start date
The thing is, it's 39 light years away.
The most powerful and efficient hypothetical rocket engine which we know would work is a thing called a nuclear pulse rocket (basically, a system which uses hydrogen bomb detonations to propel a spaceship). Using such a system, it might be possible to propel a space ship large enough to house human colonists to 5% of the speed of light (while still maintaining enough fuel to slow down).
So, 39/0.05 is.. 780 years. 780 years for a one way trip to our new home. Without some kind of magical ability to preserve humans in stasis for those impossible lengths of time, that's what.. 30-40 human generations living and dying within a space the size of a city block. Imagine the world 800 years ago, and imagine all that time playing out in a single enclosed space housing perhaps a few thousand people. And that's before we even get to the physical hazards which would need to be negotiated. At 5% of the speed of light, objects the size of your fingernail become devastating and the slightest graze or impact could damage or destroy our spaceship. Such hazards would need to be able to be identified and deflected perfectly without fail by a system which wouldn't break down over hundreds of years. Even without such existential hazards, all the complex machinery aboard would need to be maintained and replaced as necessary, and the crew would either need to be protected by heavy radiation shielding, or would suffer the effects of cosmic radiation and space weather.
To send colonists out under these conditions would be one of the most monstrous acts of unspeakable cruelty in human history. You would be condemning generations to life imprisonment on the vague chance that by the time they arrive their distant, distant descendents would even have some memory or half remembered legend what they were actually there to do or how to even begin colonizing an alien planet. All human history would be long gone, any connection to the past or to our lives here on earth would have long since been obliterated by generations of space travel. What exactly would be the point? What would we be preserving, at that point, beyond being able to die with the vague knowledge that beings whose DNA might still be vaguely similar to our own might possibly continue.
The universe is really, really big, and our forms and lifespans are really, really small. Our basic nature defies the possibility of ever truly mastering the stars.
The most powerful and efficient hypothetical rocket engine which we know would work is a thing called a nuclear pulse rocket (basically, a system which uses hydrogen bomb detonations to propel a spaceship). Using such a system, it might be possible to propel a space ship large enough to house human colonists to 5% of the speed of light (while still maintaining enough fuel to slow down).
So, 39/0.05 is.. 780 years. 780 years for a one way trip to our new home. Without some kind of magical ability to preserve humans in stasis for those impossible lengths of time, that's what.. 30-40 human generations living and dying within a space the size of a city block. Imagine the world 800 years ago, and imagine all that time playing out in a single enclosed space housing perhaps a few thousand people. And that's before we even get to the physical hazards which would need to be negotiated. At 5% of the speed of light, objects the size of your fingernail become devastating and the slightest graze or impact could damage or destroy our spaceship. Such hazards would need to be able to be identified and deflected perfectly without fail by a system which wouldn't break down over hundreds of years. Even without such existential hazards, all the complex machinery aboard would need to be maintained and replaced as necessary, and the crew would either need to be protected by heavy radiation shielding, or would suffer the effects of cosmic radiation and space weather.
To send colonists out under these conditions would be one of the most monstrous acts of unspeakable cruelty in human history. You would be condemning generations to life imprisonment on the vague chance that by the time they arrive their distant, distant descendents would even have some memory or half remembered legend what they were actually there to do or how to even begin colonizing an alien planet. All human history would be long gone, any connection to the past or to our lives here on earth would have long since been obliterated by generations of space travel. What exactly would be the point? What would we be preserving, at that point, beyond being able to die with the vague knowledge that beings whose DNA might still be vaguely similar to our own might possibly continue.
The universe is really, really big, and our forms and lifespans are really, really small. Our basic nature defies the possibility of ever truly mastering the stars.
Antimatter rocket has a hypothetical velocity of .7LS and theoretically as fast as up to .9LS where time dilation starts to become a real problem to long or short distance travel. It's just not cooking the crew as if in a microwave means going that fast is out of the question... But these concerns aren't relative to our most likely first arrivals being robots.evilthecat said:
Hypothetically, if you could shield the crew from the radiation and heat ... it's not even a generational ship at that point. Antimatter rockets hold so much potential for colonisation maybe we should seriously consider an internationally funded project to create antimatter factories in space. Sure, horrifically expensive ... but if it's the difference between cutting so much time exploring huge swathes of our galactic arm it might be worth it.
Plus what else are you going to do with that wasted space radiation? That and if we find complex life we might need all that fuel for warhead production...
Aaahrg, I thought this was The Escapist, not "everything is impossible so let's just lie down and die". Jeez!
If you nihilistic brain-boxes can only come up with doom and gloom, then make up something that sounds like science that's positive and heartwarming. I mean, alternative facts, amirite?
EDIT: Didn't see the rest of Addendum's post. It's... well, not as depressing?
By the way, I'm just having a laugh.
If you nihilistic brain-boxes can only come up with doom and gloom, then make up something that sounds like science that's positive and heartwarming. I mean, alternative facts, amirite?
EDIT: Didn't see the rest of Addendum's post. It's... well, not as depressing?
By the way, I'm just having a laugh.
There's only one thing I'm interested in. How big are the alien bugs and how soon can we invade Klendathu to kill them all?
Eh.
They "found" (read: estimated) some "habitable" (read: maybe supposedly habitable) planets that are like Earth..... long time ago.
I don't know why NASA decided to suddenly let it become big news; anyone who's into astronomy knew about such kind of planets already.
Has anyone noticed the race to space is returning, and now it's all about finding other habitable planets?
Doesn't that tell you something about the current situation on Earth?
Out of curiosity, what film is this from?
They "found" (read: estimated) some "habitable" (read: maybe supposedly habitable) planets that are like Earth..... long time ago.
I don't know why NASA decided to suddenly let it become big news; anyone who's into astronomy knew about such kind of planets already.
Has anyone noticed the race to space is returning, and now it's all about finding other habitable planets?
Doesn't that tell you something about the current situation on Earth?
undeadsuitor said:a bunch of habitable planets in one system?
Out of curiosity, what film is this from?
Advancement became much more rapid indeed. Life for most people in the 1500's was far more similar to life in the 10th or even 1st century AD compared to people people born in the 2000's. 'Civilised' human societies have existed for over a 3000 years, but none ever really reached the point of industrialisation until the scientific method was devised and became used as a means to study the natural world. Without it, the kind of technological development we'd have seen over the past 500 years is more comparable to what happened between say 1000AD-1500.Thaluikhain said:
It's a possibility therefore that many intelligent alien species don't technologically advance to the point of industrialisation and achieving space-flight and radio communications before being wiped out by some sort of natural disaster. Modern humans have existed for around 195,000 years. It took 185,000 years for humans to start agriculture, which is a prerequisite to advance beyond a hunter-gatherer existence towards building cities and what what we'd call "Civilisation". Having got to that point, it took a further 9,600 years for human civilisations to start industrialising, it could well have been much, much longer had history gone differently.
Which should count as "in reach"evilthecat said:
ining enough fuel to slow down).
Yes, that is basically how generation ships work. And many people think that it would be worth it.
Of course, the when colonists actually arrive, there should be something inhabitable. Which means that we would say automatons for hundreads of years to do all the preparatory work and basic terraforming before we should even consider building a generation ship. (And if we ever can build robots able to raise children, we don't even need generation ships, we could send embryos instead)
But before we even can send robots to prepare a colony, we need to gather far more information so that we know, how those robots need to do, what they will find when they arrive.