interstellar travel

Probably the best (and possibly only) way for human beings to get from one star to another is to establish a permanent presence on a small body such as a comet or asteroid and, by either using hydrogen separated from the water ice on the comet, or magnetically collecting it from the space environment, accelerating the body (imparting spin, of course to create artificial "gravity"). The business of interstellar travel will be long and dangerous -- remember that at speeds even a tiny percentage of C, a body as small as a speck of dust carries a terrific wallop. Also remember that solar systems are surrounded by various rings and layers of dust and/or bodies -- our own solar system, in addition to the planets, is surrounded by the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. These regions will have to be negotiated with caution.

------------------

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Why trudge through the mud when you can ice-skate?

Just wait until Winter.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Speaking of a readily achievable technology and not things that involve complete paradigm shifts in fundamental physics. Laser powered light sails would be the way to go, even though some may scoff at such a technique. Establishing an array of 20-40 orbital lasers with a total output in the range of 9-15 gigawatts of power could easily push a light sail style craft (mass ~ 100 kilos) to the Alpha Centauri system with 15-20yrs. Although such an endeavor would cost on the order of $20-80 billion (U.S.)

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

With regard to gkooistra's light sail idea ... I dunno. Seems it would be really hard to keep an array of emitters online for such a long period of time; plus, wouldn't that shut off lanes of travel in the solar system? And what if the laser beams were occulted by some object? Also, how do you keep the sail array oriented -- seems like every time they try something like that in orbit they end up wrapping it around the axle so to speak.

Such an array of lasers might be helpful in deflecting asteroids and comets from colliding with the earth. ...

 

does any one have a good guess on how much it would cost to make a space ship that could travel close to the speed of light :m:

 

The traditional sci fi method of cheating general relativity involves "warping space" in front of a travelling starship, collapseing the associated distance between two points. It is theoretically possible, but practically paradoxical.

In order to warp space in front of itself, the starship would have to send a signal to a point in space. That signal is limited to the speed of light, at best. Therefore, you would outrun your own warping signal, expanding your spacial tunnel around your starship. This exercise would be repeated ad infinitum, with very little progress being made, all at great energy cost.

 

I also heard that these microtunules would supposedly prove that there is a life after death.

 

I meant I also heard that these MICROTUBULES would supposedly prove that there is a life after death.

 

My god... what an old thread....!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

So nostalgic....

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Oh no, thread necromancy! Run for cover!!!

 

Maybe by the 25th century we'll finally get to Alpha Centauri if we're lucky.........Real lucky that is. Just jump on a passing asteroid to save some fuel and head West young man.

 

Actually it was theoritical possible to reach alpha centauri afther Pionier 10 back in 1969. With it's speed of 2.6 AU it would have only taken 103 846 years to reach it, the fastests probe ever today was the Helios II from 1966 with 70.2km/s it would have taken him 18000 years if he was on a traject to alpha cen (btw it's not). The engine from the now not so distance futur the VASIMR can make speeds up to 300km/s and could therefore travel the distance in 4200 years. Let's say that it's fully developed and opperational in 2019, then the travel distance earth alpha centauri would have decreased with more then 95% in a 50 years period.

That's not that bad I think besides 2000-2100 is proberly going to be focused on the solar system annyway and a 100 years is a 100 years if you would go back 500 years you would proberly be around the time of leonardo da vinci.
I think we only have to wait a 150-200 years before we can travel to alpha centauri in less then a century

 

I think you might be a little too optimistic. So far we're still having trouble re-inventing the same or similiar rocket technology just to get back to the moon again after 30 years of just talking about it. So much for Alpha Centuari. I think everyone will be happy just to make it to Mars and back in the next 50 years.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus

As certain projects would show, we could have travelled to alpha centauri/barnard star in abouth 50 years (less then a lifetime) in the years of 1978

Yust like we could reach mars with the technology of today or even yesterday (understatement).

So my initial prospect of plus 150 to 200 years could be reduced to minus 20 years or plus 30 years counting in the time to actually travel to there.
then again the math is for barnard star alpha is only 70% as far so it would have arived more like afther 36 years then the 50 for BS

Then again a stellairy flyby of a massive in space build probe that would do yust a fly by. Would have never been economical.

So political will is also going to be verry inportant (mind that no nation could have funded project daedalus)

between 2030-2050 I hope

 

If enough money were alocated toward the effort (in otherwords, if the people and their governments gain more interest in space), I don't see why we couldn't have a nuclear-powered ion-driven probe developed in the next few decades to scream its way to alpha centauri.

But perhaps a more sensible option is to know what's out there without sending shit to meet it. Bigger telescopes. More power telescopes. Telescopes that can not only detect earth-sized planets (a capability we do not quite have yet), but detect continents and land features of such planets, see the moons of the super-giant gas planets we keep finding, and who knows, maybe find a suprisingly earth-like world humanity can dream about for the next few centuries. Better yet, maybe we'll find signs of a technologically advanced race, like a planet's night-side lights or orbital mega-structures.

But the first step is education. People need to want these kinds of projects to happen. Nations need to want to know more about the universe. Someone solve that problem and who knows what we're capable of.

 

If they (the super-advanced aliens) are out there and live on a planet in a nearby star system, then we can look forward to a senario similiar to the 50's sci-fi classic movie 'The Day The Earth Stood Still'. Throwing nuke powered spacecraft there way probably won't work to well for them.

 

lol, true that, but then again if they were so advanced, they would probably not even fear nukes, for they'd have force-fields and photon torpedos and all that la-la-la. but besides, a nuke-powered probe is by no means a nuclear weapon in itself, it is a peaceful use of nuclear power.

if anything, sending a probe like that to such a civilization could be a good thing. if we detect ANYTHING like that, we may consider it an external threat, which ironically could create a better sense of unity amongst humans, and actually decrease the conflict we have. who knows?

 

One way to find out. Jump in your nuke-powered Daedelus spaceship. Explode a few nukes behind you and head to Zeta2 Reticuli. I'm sure 'if' the super-advanced aliens are there, I'm sure they would have a 'blast' meeting you.

 

yeah especially because daedalus didn't have breaks, what happens if you crash a 4000 ton spaceship that travels at 12% of the speed of light into a planet

someone ones made this little program
I entered it would be abouth 5 km long because you can't actualy input the mass angeluar momentum 45 speed 36000km/s

And I got something of a 4000 km crater with 2.13e+09 km3 that's vaporized and released in the atmosphere. (The 5 km may have been a bid to much)

Annyway those aliens better now how to terraform

 

Well corot is launched and will began active duty somewhere in febuary,
The terrestial planet finder/darwin are going to be launched within the next decade who will be capable to detect earth like planets, and the farther future Exo-Earth Imager is already in the making and will probebly be launched somwhere before 2050 and be able to image continent sized features.

Changes are when a ship finaly departes for a nearby star, we will knowalready know all the mayor planets, moons and their conditions