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Bussard ramjets unfortunately don't look viable. The inertia you lose impacting protons can't be made up for by the energy you gain fusing them. At least, that's the way it looks atm. My money is on manufactured antimatter as an energy source if you tried to cross between stars. Maybe just for braking, and rely on external systems to launch you out of the system. My favourite method of power/propulsion was mentioned earlier in the thread, whereby an artificial black hole was build with a spherical array of lasers, and kept at a size where the Hawkin radiation was capable of propelling itself and the spacecraft through a cunning assemblages of mirrors and magnets. It takes a lot to come up with a more  method of propulsion than nuclear pulse, but these two nerds managed it.
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Sep 19, 2019 22:06
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Bug Squash posted:My favourite method of power/propulsion was mentioned earlier in the thread, whereby an artificial black hole was build with a spherical array of lasers, and kept at a size where the Hawkin radiation was capable of propelling itself and the spacecraft through a cunning assemblages of mirrors and magnets. It takes a lot to come up with a more If we can make a Kugelblitz, we're already doing crazy poo poo in other star systems. You need something like the entire output of the sun for an entire year concentrated into something smaller than an atom. Thats enough power to do tons of other crazy stuff propulsion wise. Besides, you still have to drag the mass of your Kugelblitz around. They aren't great for propulsion directly, but could be great for energy production.
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Sep 19, 2019 23:54
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Anti-matter seems entirely unnecessary as well as probably one of the most uncertain and iffy of the less fantastical science fiction technologies that are theoretically possible but oh lord those engineering challenges are a killer.
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Sep 19, 2019 23:58
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If we are going sci-fi propulsion, might as well use the NASA warp drive. It works like the engine on the Planet Express Delivery Ship.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:40
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ashpanash posted:I'm not on some side here arguing that it's not hard. I'm saying the Fermi paradox should be taken seriously if the goal in mind is to communicate with other alien civilizations. If we could - if SETI were likely to work - it probably would have happened already. Per Fermi. I'm not on a side either, but I need to reiterate that you have no idea what you're talking about and no sense of scale when it comes to space. Again, we have looked only at a somewhat narrow band of signal in the very immediate area of a single grain of sand in a beach. This is not me saying 'oh we're definitely gonna find someone' just me saying that you're being way, way premature in declaring that we never will based on the tiny amount that we've examined so far.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:51
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Captain Monkey posted:I'm not on a side either, but I need to reiterate that you have no idea what you're talking about and no sense of scale when it comes to space. Again, we have looked only at a somewhat narrow band of signal in the very immediate area of a single grain of sand in a beach. This is not me saying 'oh we're definitely gonna find someone' just me saying that you're being way, way premature in declaring that we never will based on the tiny amount that we've examined so far. This is both true and not true. It is true that indeed, that it is a little arrogant to presume we have the ability to detect aliens communicating with each other just because we started kinda poking under rocks on a very large beach. On the other hand; the point of the Fermi Paradox is that if we're on a beach, the ocean should be filled with millions of big boats that are loud, very bright and garishly coloured and unmistakable and bellowing out vasts quantities of smoke. Because the energy consumption of a galactic wide alien civilization(s) and their output should be ridiculously bright. We can with our current technology, see very far and ascertain very precise information about stars very very very very very far away because of the nature of energy. It doesn't matter if technically these stars we're seeing are all millions of years in the past; if we can see stars, then on various bandwidths there should be evidence of things with the emissions on par with stars. There is an element of I think truth to the idea that oh, if aliens exist maybe we're not advanced enough, or they're too far for us to see, and so on; but it's not as open and shut as you think depending on which aspect of the fermi paradox you're focusing on.
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Sep 20, 2019 01:09
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Raenir Salazar posted:Because the energy consumption of a galactic wide alien civilization(s) and their output should be ridiculously bright. We can with our current technology, see very far and ascertain very precise information about stars very very very very very far away because of the nature of energy. It doesn't matter if technically these stars we're seeing are all millions of years in the past; if we can see stars, then on various bandwidths there should be evidence of things with the emissions on par with stars. You'd be shocked at how little scanning we actually have done on "various wavelengths", seti is not actually particularly well funded or comprehensive. People always have this idea that we really looked hard and didn't find anything after a real strong good faith effort, where the truth is we have looked very briefly at a particular set of spectrums. aliens could be daily broadcasting in plain text english on a common radio channel and there is still good odds we wouldn't have seen it yet.
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Sep 20, 2019 01:24
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No, the majority of this thread still does not understand the scale. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612232/the-8-dimensional-space-that-must-be-searched-for-alien-life/amp/ quote:The result is a space of truly gargantuan proportions. “This leads to a total 8D haystack volume of 6.4 × 10116 m5Hz2 s/W,” say Wright and co.
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Sep 20, 2019 01:58
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DrSunshine posted:I'm going to interrupt the slapfest a bit with a bit of an aside -- what could a space probe use to power itself for 50,000 years? Let's just indulge our speculative engineering minds for a moment and ponder that. It seems like an interesting thought experiment! Well, ultimately you want an external power source to save on having to carry more fuel than it takes to decelerate at the end of your journey. Light sails are great for that but interstellar distance are huge so you need a huge laser Which is why you should be powering your starship with a Nicoll-Dyson Laser. 
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Sep 20, 2019 02:19
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LtStorm posted:Well, ultimately you want an external power source to save on having to carry more fuel than it takes to decelerate at the end of your journey. Oh, like the spaceship in Avatar? IIRC, that one got from Earth to Alpha Centauri by being accelerated by a huge light sail and then decelerating using a matter-antimatter reaction once it had gotten halfway there. Yep. As an aside, everyone in this thread should take some time, a few hours or so, to peruse some of the concepts on AtomicRockets. It's a total 90s era site that has somehow been preserved, like a mosquito in amber, unchanged up till now, but its sources and concepts are very well researched and authoritative. With my "asteroid of uranium" idea, I was thinking that a sufficiently advanced civilization could, at that point, have telescopes in orbit large enough to observe exoplanets directly, and therefore be able to do something like calculate to such a degree of accuracy that they could generate a trajectory whereby they could do a gravity assist around some gas giants or the parent star, that would fling the probe to the neighboring system in such a way that it could be captured by the other star and gravity assist to decelerate.
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Sep 20, 2019 03:46
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Captain Monkey posted:I'm not on a side either, but I need to reiterate that you have no idea what you're talking about and no sense of scale when it comes to space. You want to argue a point, fine. But I find it loving tedious when someone who has probably never worked with a PDE before or knows what Christoffel symbols are, someone who gets all of their science knowledge from pop-sci TV shows and articles in Scientific American, starts telling me what I know and don't know.
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Sep 20, 2019 07:58
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Wow. You really should understand the scale of the universe better than you do with all that experience. How embarrassing. Ashpanash’s SO: honey, do we have any food in the house? Ashpanash, glancing in the odds and ends draw for 0.5 seconds: No, We are going to starve. Yngwie Mangosteen fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Sep 20, 2019 |
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Sep 20, 2019 09:45
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Captain Monkey posted:Wow. You really should understand the scale of the universe better than you do with all that experience. What you said gets brought up every five pages. The hidden assumptions in the arguement get pointed out, and then there's a big argument about whether interstellar travel is possible.
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Sep 20, 2019 09:51
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Raenir Salazar posted:That's possible but also technological development also isn't a linear tech tree and sometimes you only got what you got. We can only consider the tools and knowledge available to us and make assumptions from that. We don’t have the technology to build O’Neill cylinders or do asteroid mining but based on what we know there’s nothing in particular that would prevent us from developing those technologies. Similarly we have all the tools needed to manipulate the genome and know of the potential just from the species alive and around us today. There’s no reason to think we can’t or won’t.
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Sep 20, 2019 12:32
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Owling Howl posted:We can only consider the tools and knowledge available to us and make assumptions from that. We don’t have the technology to build O’Neill cylinders or do asteroid mining but based on what we know there’s nothing in particular that would prevent us from developing those technologies. Similarly we have all the tools needed to manipulate the genome and know of the potential just from the species alive and around us today. There’s no reason to think we can’t or won’t. I mean insofar as you're saying we should extrapolate advances, I agree. But I'm also not sure its a given that we'd get indefinite lifespans before say fusion power. I also think you're overemphasizing the need to limit mass. An ideal generation ship we would expect to be basically a floating self-propelled semi-self-sufficient city in space. This is going to have a lot of mass regardless even if it is only like 1,000 people (I'd expect 50,000 in self propelled O'Neill Cylinders). Because I think the lower bound of a ship's mass is not going to be its energy requirements, but the crew needed for the mission. For a colony we want to be self sufficient and have a good spread of specialties and trades and their families that is what sets the lower bound. The ability to genetically engineer longer lifespans is helpful in minimizing the need to hope that when your chief engineer dies his son is able to take over just as well because now there's probably at least 100 year lead time on training a replacement; but I wouldn't think it's required or directly helpful in limiting mass. Like for cryogenetics that could also be helpful in minimizing the number of crew that need to be awake and about but you're going to have some minimum and their support structure is going to result in mass regardless. Like in the example of the 50,000 numbers I'd expect 45,000 to be asleep in virtual reality pods but 1,000 to 5,500 to stay awake, just looking at supercarriers as an example and assuming we need like 5x the redundancy. Like maybe by the time the first colony ship reaches its destination the next 10 are steadily launched with massive improvements but I think the first few are going to be quite clunky in comparison. Owling Howl posted:Minimizing mass is a goal in itself to keep costs down, go faster with less energy and limit complexity/risk. When you’re talking about time scales of hundreds or thousands of years, like people do in this thread, you need to take into account advances in genetics and medicine. No particular reason to think we can’t substantially increase lifespans or perhaps outright gain immortality in some form over the next few thousand years. So incentive to limit mass and longer or indefinite lifespans means the most likely interstellar craft is small. Even if someone wanted to build a generation ship it would be far outnumbered by its smaller and faster counterparts.
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Sep 20, 2019 13:56
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I think it's also silly to think of future technology as needing to be built in implemented all at once by one guy. Like look at the world electrical system. Just the power lines. Can you imagine someone in 1850 trying to actually work out the specific details of how to manufacture 5.5 million miles of wire, hundreds of millions of poles, the international treaties, the land right issues the sheer amount of labor and resources to patch and maintain all these lines. It's impossible. It's an impossible problem. No one on earth could ever solve it. it would be impossible for any human that exists to even be able to hold the sheer number of issues in their mind, let alone come up with real solutions to each. Which is why it was not solved as a single step unified plan. And space travel would be that as well. No one is successfully from scratch going to build a colony ship from scratch and hand solve every issue from square one. A colony ship to fly between stars would be designed like asteroid mining city that they had for years, that was modeled from and made from parts made for the individual mining posts, the mining posts would be modifications of the space stations that all followed lineage from earlier space stations, etc etc etc. Like if a problem is big and complex that doesn't mean it's impossible, it means lots of people need to tackle it for a long time in smaller chunks till the final step is a simple modification of what came before. Like the network of technologies it takes to build an iphone 11 is unimaginable. just the engineering issues that needed to be solved just to make the glass for the front is people's whole careers. But it's really basically the same as an iphone 10 and most android phones, we didn't as a society just build the iphone 11 as the first ever cell phone in one step, inventing each part in a vacuum and having that be the first time we ever used glass before.
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Sep 20, 2019 14:16
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I imagine some very important steps is living in space and on other planets for a bit, interplanetary industry and space forging/processing of good; further development in propulsion systems, and further developments in energy production. I think fusion unlocks so much that while it might not be required it probably revolutionizes a lot and helps solve many issues with propulsion.
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Sep 20, 2019 15:13
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Bug Squash posted:a big argument about whether interstellar travel is possible. Isn't that more or less the whole thread?
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Sep 20, 2019 17:14
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Captain Monkey posted:Isn't that more or less the whole thread? We know interstellar travel is possible, we just don't know if it's any fun.
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Sep 20, 2019 20:37
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Cold universe is tantamount to ftl 10^700 is a long wait though
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Sep 20, 2019 22:08
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Captain Monkey posted:Isn't that more or less the whole thread? I mean... of course it is possible. We had evidence that objects from other solar systems have been able to drift into our solar system, like Oumuamua.
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Sep 21, 2019 00:33
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DrSunshine posted:I mean... of course it is possible. We had evidence that objects from other solar systems have been able to drift into our solar system, like Oumuamua. And another may be on its way!
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Sep 21, 2019 00:37
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I read that Russia won’t tell us why the ISS had a puncture in it. What’s the story behind why they won’t?
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Sep 24, 2019 08:23
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Boris Galerkin posted:I read that Russia won’t tell us why the ISS had a puncture in it. What’s the story behind why they won’t? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/someone-drilled-hole-international-space-station-180970208/ They're asserting it was done by a human due to user error.
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Sep 24, 2019 09:53
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Lightning Knight posted:https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/someone-drilled-hole-international-space-station-180970208/ Then what’s this all about? From the 23rd: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiec...s-to-tell-nasa/ quote:Now a row has broken out about the incident, with hints that Russian space agency Roscosmos now knows the cause of the leak, but will keep it secret from NASA, its main partner at the ISS.
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Sep 24, 2019 11:05
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Boris Galerkin posted:Then what’s this all about? From the 23rd: I assume that it was probably a Russian cosmonaut doing something stupid or something otherwise embarrassing, it’s pretty dumb it seems.
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Sep 24, 2019 12:23
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I assumed it was due to petty vandalism from someone being a dick, probably a disgruntled engineer. That or a cosmonaut getting drunk.
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Sep 24, 2019 13:03
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Reminder that Rogozin's main job qualification is being a nazi.
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Sep 24, 2019 13:09
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Yeah I asked because I’m wondering if it’s an embarrassment thing or if it’s some stupid geopolitical bullshit.
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Sep 24, 2019 13:26
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I would think it would be nothing juicy and just Russia not wanting to report to NASA since Russia is supposed to be a top level agency working on the ISS but in practice clearly isn't.
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Sep 24, 2019 13:41
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Raenir Salazar posted:Quibble. The idea is that even with conservative estimates, and even if space faring civilization is exceptionally rare, even if, then given the time scales we're talking about they should have basically filled in the galaxy by now. They wrote the encounter down in genesis book of the bible. We just ignore it cuz its not written in science speak enough
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Sep 28, 2019 01:11
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Raenir Salazar posted:I imagine some very important steps is living in space and on other planets for a bit, interplanetary industry and space forging/processing of good; further development in propulsion systems, and further developments in energy production. I think fusion unlocks so much that while it might not be required it probably revolutionizes a lot and helps solve many issues with propulsion. We are biological von neuman machines. By the time were fully technologically capable well meet our creators when they come to refuel their ships since we were seeded throughout the universe as interstellar gas stations
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Sep 28, 2019 01:20
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Raenir Salazar posted:I mean insofar as you're saying we should extrapolate advances, I agree. But I'm also not sure its a given that we'd get indefinite lifespans before say fusion power. I also think you're overemphasizing the need to limit mass. An ideal generation ship we would expect to be basically a floating self-propelled semi-self-sufficient city in space. This is going to have a lot of mass regardless even if it is only like 1,000 people (I'd expect 50,000 in self propelled O'Neill Cylinders). Because I think the lower bound of a ship's mass is not going to be its energy requirements, but the crew needed for the mission. For a colony we want to be self sufficient and have a good spread of specialties and trades and their families that is what sets the lower bound. A generation ship is gonna be operated by AI Its gonna have our dna in bottles and home grown humans once it arrives. Not to different from how humans started on earth Or the earth is our generational ship. The perfectly self sustaining designed spacefract currently traveling through the galaxy at millions of miles per hour
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Sep 28, 2019 01:30
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Raenir Salazar posted:This is both true and not true. A galactic civilization is using technology we dont understand Were cavemen with a torch in our hand wondering why we dont see more fires while everyones using cellphone data signals. Were not able to read the signs of their existance. Theres stuff all over the universe we dont understand that could be signs of life. Or just natural phenomenon...we cant know which
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Sep 28, 2019 01:37
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The best thing that could ever happen to our species is a discovery of a black hole in our solar system. Preferrably a nom rotating black hole as they are like the house cats of black holes.
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Sep 28, 2019 02:18
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:The best thing that could ever happen to our species is a discovery of a black hole in our solar system. Preferrably a nom rotating black hole as they are like the house cats of black holes. I bet we could do some really good gravitational slingshots with one of those. Not sure you can really get non rotating black holes in the real world, but even a normal spinning black hole would be real handy for hijinks.
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Sep 28, 2019 08:39
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Bug Squash posted:I bet we could do some really good gravitational slingshots with one of those. Not sure you can really get non rotating black holes in the real world, but even a normal spinning black hole would be real handy for hijinks. Or we feed it mass and get energy out capture that energy and Use it for an anti matter spectrometer
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Sep 28, 2019 17:48
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:The best thing that could ever happen to our species is a discovery of a black hole in our solar system. Preferrably a nom rotating black hole as they are like the house cats of black holes. https://www.businessinsider.com/planet-9-ancient-black-hole-orbiting-sun-2019-9 quote:For the new study, researchers looked at data on the six Kuiper Belt objects' bizarre orbits and also incorporated recent observations about how light traveling through the solar system appears to be bending because of an object (or objects) that scientist haven't accounted for.
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Sep 28, 2019 17:52
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:https://www.businessinsider.com/planet-9-ancient-black-hole-orbiting-sun-2019-9 That's cool as hell, they might could even be non-rotating. Not holding my breath this pans out, but an interesting idea. Saw this this diagram on twitter of a five Earth mass black hole.  That's 1:1 scale. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Sep 29, 2019 |
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Sep 28, 2019 18:09
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:The best thing that could ever happen to our species is a discovery of a black hole in our solar system. Preferrably a nom rotating black hole as they are like the house cats of black holes. Why are black holes good for something other than death
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Sep 30, 2019 00:25
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