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A corpse's guide to the Universe

The Grave

Muse
T
Joined
Dec 20, 2006
Messages
647
While preparing someone for his exams, I had a thought...Yes me...

Since the average distance between stars is 8 LY ~ 75 mill.mill km, what chance has the human race got of ever actually Star Trekking?

What's our best so far Apollo? About 60,000 kph [0.06 Mill kph] so that would take us to Proxima Centauri in, what, oh, ~ 76,ooo yrs.

I think we'll need advice from Noah, on things like waste disposal, shrinking animals & plants to femto feet...

And what of us now ...we're shooting for the...Moon; Mars...

Alpha Centauri is promising, yes, good temp/mass range...but there's 2 of the buggers...

Barnard's star next, and Wolf (too cold!)...Procyon looks good, if you've got ~210,ooo yrs spare...

Ok, ok the Sun's here for another 5 Billion [we hope]...

But shouldn't we get our skates on?

Griff...
 
Psychology of human behavior, that is the most important study of and for man.

I have also wondered, that there is so much life on earth and man is wasting it all the time, but man has to occupy his time and labor and intelligence trying to figure out whether there is life outside earth, and how to contact it.


Also we have now known so much about human psychology than ever before in man's history, and yet some people have to search Buddhism and to find the purpose of life in Buddhism, when psychology should have told him all about the purpose of life and how to achieve it.


And the answer is: because man is plagued by the itch for novelty or what he thinks passes for novelty, and also don't forget what is trendy.


What think ye, Buddhists here who insist that Buddhism and skepticism are compatible, because you neither know Buddhism nor skepticism, but you make up both just to be into a novelty or a trend -- and you won't give up one nor the other because both are new and trendy to you; oh the shallowness of man.


Yrreg
 
Sending humans to other star systems is not feasible with current technology. So to imagine it you have to assume some kinds of technical advances.

Assuming "warp drive" remains an impossibility (and I think there is no evidence suggesting it will ever be possible) we must consider other possibilities. For example, sending robots along with a large supply of human sperms and eggs, which would only be turned into humans if the robots could first successfully establish a colony base and all the facilities and resources to raise them. But there was a time when sending a man to the moon seemed impossible, so it wouldn't surprise me if the technology is eventually invented to get us to other stars somehow, even if it takes a long time.
 
Yrreg, you're an obsessed and thread-disrupting jerk.

Thank you for encouraging me to look at Buddhism again - as part of the foundation for a life-embracing philosophy, it shows great promise.

Beats the hell out of Christianity or one of the other religions.

Once you scrape the superstition off of Buddhism, there's still something left - something that I think is of great value.
 
polaristutoring@tisc said:
Proxima Centauri in, what, oh, ~ 76,ooo yrs.
..

Alpha Centauri is promising, yes, good temp/mass range...but there's 2 of the buggers...
Click to expand...

Not to be pedantic, but Proxima, Alpha, and Beta Centauri comprise a trinary system.
Well, upon rereading, you knew that.
(Emily Latilla voice) Never mind (/Emily Latilla voice)
 
A Bussard Ram engine could maybe get us to the nearer stars in a single human lifespan - assuming we could ever figure out how to build one, Solar Sails are another possibility (just barely).
 
One aspect of my original thought was - If we want to leave this star for another, because it's old, then by the time we get around to it, all the others will be older to...

I don't know if a feasibility study has ever been done...some of the nearest stars are too red, too big or triplicates (enhancing the dreaded radiation factor) and so not good places to visit. But then the idea I think most people aspire to is to become travellers in space...self sufficient?

I don't think 'sails' are an option, as anything so flimsy must get damaged.


Griff...
 
Personally, I think we'd have to perfect some form of a suspended animation system for any such plan to be feasible. Barring the possibility (very remote, in my opinion) of some sort of faster-than-light travel, this would seem to me to be just about the only viable option. If this were not the case, and you were actually seeking to colonize a new planet, you'd be looking at a craft capable of supporting hundreds/thousands of people over hundreds/thousands of years.

There was the suggestion of using robots, and frozen sperm/eggs...but even if possible, I cannot see children born to and raised by robots on an entirely new planet as being terribly viable. There would be a million variables, unpredictable problems (such as new diseases, natural disasters, etc.) which I doubt a robot mind would be able to deal with; and even if we could create robots with the capacity for that, what about the emotions necessary for childraising?

And then, of course, you've got everything else you have to bring...all the animals, plants, and everything else you'll have to take along, since it would be rather stupid to assume after a journey of multiple lifetimes that the destination would have viable food ready for you.

Here's my plan (well, one that's been championed by a number of people, actually, but I think it sounds most viable):

First, send a ship with robots, and everything needed for basic terraforming. The robots arrive, then prepare the soil, sow the plants, create animals from frozen embryos, etc. Give them a couple hundred years to do this. Second stage, send a ship with hundreds/thousands of people in suspended animation; when they arrive, they are unfrozen, and ready to jump into the challenges of their new world.

Or, there's always option two...wait for the Great Zenob from [insert planet's name here] to offer us a free ride on his spaceship.
 
Whatever method used must be able to deal with extreme time spans, and multiple unknowns. I mean, you go out there (even if only on a robot mission) and find that the planet you headed for has no potential for colonization, so what now? For such an expedition, you need plans B, C, and D.

Another method, but a more desparate one, would be using small groups of people (a few dozen, possibly backed up by frozen embryos for genetic diversity) in suspended animation, on automatic ships just going into the blue yonder in great numbers hoping that some will strike luck. Technology for that may not be too far away (suspended animation of sufficient effectivity may be the biggest hurdle). On an Earth about to die, for whatever reason, such a scenario might be attractive, and recruits might be readily available (I see SF novel potential here, heheh).

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
Whatever method used must be able to deal with extreme time spans, and multiple unknowns. I mean, you go out there (even if only on a robot mission) and find that the planet you headed for has no potential for colonization, so what now? For such an expedition, you need plans B, C, and D.
Click to expand...
We could always get Sylvia Browne to predict all our problems in advance, so that we know what to do before it happens.
 
Jeff Corey said:
Not to be pedantic, but Proxima, Alpha, and Beta Centauri comprise a trinary system.
Well, upon rereading, you knew that.
(Emily Latilla voice) Never mind (/Emily Latilla voice)
Click to expand...

Not to be pedantic, but Beta Centauri is not associated with Alpha Centauri. Alpha CentauriWP is a trinary system consisting of Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B, and possibly Proxima Centauri. Beta CentauriWP is another star system (possibly a binary) in the same constellation as Alpha Centauri (Centaurus). I believe they are named Alpha and Beta because they are the first and second brightest stars in Centaurus respectively.
 
Taffer said:
Not to be pedantic, but Beta Centauri is not associated with Alpha Centauri. Alpha CentauriWP is a trinary system consisting of Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B, and possibly Proxima Centauri. Beta CentauriWP is another star system (possibly a binary) in the same constellation as Alpha Centauri (Centaurus). I believe they are named Alpha and Beta because they are the first and second brightest stars in Centaurus respectively.
Click to expand...
Right you are!

Isaac Asimov would be proud of you. He wrote a whole book to explain that ;).

Hans
 
Wolfman said:
We could always get Sylvia Browne to predict all our problems in advance, so that we know what to do before it happens.
Click to expand...
I know what you mean: SB says "go that way", so we go somewhere else.

Hans
 
Complexity said:
Yrreg, you're an obsessed and thread-disrupting jerk.

Thank you for encouraging me to look at Buddhism again - as part of the foundation for a life-embracing philosophy, it shows great promise.

Beats the hell out of Christianity or one of the other religions.

Once you scrape the superstition off of Buddhism, there's still something left - something that I think is of great value.
Click to expand...

Agreed Complexity. Buddhism without any of the superstition is worthy as a philosophy I think as well.

Anyway good idea polar, lets ask noah about space travel! Better yet lets just drop science and pray about it. ;)
 
why? Why? WHY?

Simple...

  1. Most people sit about all day moaning they need something in their life.
  2. BECAUSE IT'S OUT THERE....waiting for us...space...
  3. Well I hate Eastenders and Home & away, so the further I can get away from them .....
  4. Because when I was a child I read stories of Neil Armstrong et al and remember watching the first shuttle go up... and that was such a long time ago AND NOTHING'S BEEN DONE SINCE!
  5. Mr Spock was my hero! But now I'm as bald as Capt Jean-Luc!!!
  6. "Time is always against us"...Morpheus {Matrix}.
Griff...That's why...:)
 
Baby steps. We first have to figure out how to get an unmanned probe to other star systems. That's the only way to figure out if there's anything worth visiting in those neighborhoods. Then there is terraforming that may need to be done. These things will take time. They will be multi-generational projects.
 
yrreg said:
Also we have now known so much about human psychology than ever before in man's history, and yet some people have to search Buddhism and to find the purpose of life in Buddhism, when psychology should have told him all about the purpose of life and how to achieve it.
Click to expand...

But...but...L. Ron says that psychology is steer-dung!!

Who do I believe?!?

:(
 
polaristutoring@tisc said:
Simple...

  1. Most people sit about all day moaning they need something in their life.
  2. BECAUSE IT'S OUT THERE....waiting for us...space...
  3. Well I hate Eastenders and Home & away, so the further I can get away from them .....
  4. Because when I was a child I read stories of Neil Armstrong et al and remember watching the first shuttle go up... and that was such a long time ago AND NOTHING'S BEEN DONE SINCE!
  5. Mr Spock was my hero! But now I'm as bald as Capt Jean-Luc!!!
  6. "Time is always against us"...Morpheus {Matrix}.
Griff...That's why...:)
Click to expand...

None of which is any reason for us to "get our skates on". At the moment we can't even manage interplanetary travel reliably, and it will be quite a while before we send people any further than the Moon, if that. Interstellar travel is just not possible with current technology, and there is no reason at all to attempt it when there is so much of our Solar System to explore first.
 
Wolfman said:
Personally, I think we'd have to perfect some form of a suspended animation system for any such plan to be feasible. Barring the possibility (very remote, in my opinion) of some sort of faster-than-light travel, this would seem to me to be just about the only viable option. If this were not the case, and you were actually seeking to colonize a new planet, you'd be looking at a craft capable of supporting hundreds/thousands of people over hundreds/thousands of years.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, the contract is likely to go to the lowest bidder.

Or, there's always option two...wait for the Great Zenob from [insert planet's name here] to offer us a free ride on his spaceship.
Click to expand...

Good plan, unless Zenob employs the same strategy.
 
Right you are Cuddles. We can't get to Mars reliably without loss of equipment, how can we get to another solar system?
 
Puppycow said:
Sending humans to other star systems is not feasible with current technology. So to imagine it you have to assume some kinds of technical advances.

Assuming "warp drive" remains an impossibility (and I think there is no evidence suggesting it will ever be possible) we must consider other possibilities. For example, sending robots along with a large supply of human sperms and eggs, which would only be turned into humans if the robots could first successfully establish a colony base and all the facilities and resources to raise them. But there was a time when sending a man to the moon seemed impossible, so it wouldn't surprise me if the technology is eventually invented to get us to other stars somehow, even if it takes a long time.
Click to expand...

Why bother sending sperm and eggs? Just pile some corpses into a ship and have it crash onto a planet thus polluting it with our DNA. Give it a few million years and life will develop. Civilizations will arise. There will one day be lemon-soaked paper napkins.

But you know, I thought the whole purpose would be to gain knowledge and explore, and what good is knowledge and exploration if you're dead and gone by the time you get it? What good would babies raised by robots do if they never knew the Earth?
 
I don't think we should even bother considering sending humans to other stars. Colonizing our solar system is within the realm of possibility, eventually, but shipping people off on interstellar voyages is never going to happen.

And the reason is simple: meat is an extremely inefficient package in which to ship a person. By the time we have the technology to make an interstellar journey in a practical amount of time (a non-trivial task to say the least), we'll also have the technology to house consciousness in something a lot better than a blob of squishy neurons supported by a couple hundred pounds of haphazard plumbing.

If we absolutely must have human bodies, they'll be grown from scratch on the other end.
 
If there turns out to be some way of "storing" human minds in electronic form, or of convincing a computer it is conscious (two facets of the same thing), we may go starfaring as machines which largely go dormant on the long interstellar runs and wake up on system entry.
Cherryh's "Voyager in Night" describes such an entity. Not her easiest novel for the reader.
Whether the man/machine convergence is pure fantasy, time will tell, but the notion of shooting two meter tubes of water and goop across the galaxy makes little sense any way we look at it. There's science and there's SF. Let's not confuse them.

Looks like Todd beat me to it. Telepathy.
 
Starthinker said:
Why bother sending sperm and eggs? Just pile some corpses into a ship and have it crash onto a planet thus polluting it with our DNA. Give it a few million years and life will develop. Civilizations will arise. There will one day be lemon-soaked paper napkins.
Click to expand...

Bacteria has much better DNA, and can survive in much more hostile conditions. Also, it's much smaller.
 
polaristutoring@tisc said:
One aspect of my original thought was - If we want to leave this star for another, because it's old, then by the time we get around to it, all the others will be older to...
I don't know if a feasibility study has ever been done...some of the nearest stars are too red, too big or triplicates (enhancing the dreaded radiation factor) and so not good places to visit. But then the idea I think most people aspire to is to become travellers in space...self sufficient?
I don't think 'sails' are an option, as anything so flimsy must get damaged.
Griff...
Click to expand...

The technology is not that far fetched even without faster than light BS. If you could maintain about 1 G acceleration you could cross our entire galaxy (100k light years) in around 20 years. Yes much more than 100k years would pass back on earth during your voyage. Time dilation gives us all the suspended animation effects we need. Note that if you traveled 10,000 light years in 20 years the destination would be well more than 10,000 years older than what you observed it to be when you left. The speed of light limitation is only an issue for those waiting for you back home, not the voyagers. Of course this would depend on maintaining a hefty acceleration indefinitely. Even a modest acceleration if maintained can get a ship to nearby stars in a proper lifetime. Any race that survives for truly long periods of galactic time will not be dependent on any particular world anyway. This Earth will not support life forever even without our influence.

I've considered using a sandblaster type setup using metallic powder passed through a Langmuir torch for repair type jobs. It would work a little like the constructors on the computer game Total Annihilation. It should be tunable for various kinds of powdered media.

Starthinker said;
Starthinker said:
What good would babies raised by robots do if they never knew the Earth?
Click to expand...
How many past human civilizations would say that about todays world? How many nationalities would say that about their own nation? How many races would say that about their own race or culture? Isn't this the same bias that inspires the southern redneck hick jokes? In Earths absents it will become a legend. In its' presents those earth bound folks will be the hicks.
 
Space exploration? I'd be happier if we finished properly exploring/understanding this planet first.
 
toddjh said:
Just pull a 180 and keep on doing the same thing. :)
Click to expand...


The problem I have is that we have no way of actually containing a nuclear blast. Steel or aluminum just won't cut it. The whole idea won't get off the theoretical drawing board until there is some manner of containing and directing the explosions.

You know, it's a little depressing reading this thread. I know that at the moment our understanding of physics precludes us travelling to another star system, but I really, really hope that one day we develop some form of faster than light travel.

Cheers,
TGHO
 
Puppycow said:
Sending humans to other star systems is not feasible with current technology. So to imagine it you have to assume some kinds of technical advances.
Click to expand...

Nonsense!

From the surface of the earth to a low earth orbit to a solar escape orbit is 17 kilometers per second delta-V.

Assuming a top of the line hydrogen/oxygen rocket with a specific impulse of 4,500 m/s exhaust velocity, the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation tells us we require a fuel fraction somewhat in excess of 99.99% to fling ye spacefaring gent where no man has ever gone before. Since staging can give us effectively arbitrary fuel fractions, this is quite doable.

Now, as for keeping the poor bloke alive, well, you ever did mandate life support.

The Great Hairy One said:
The problem I have is that we have no way of actually containing a nuclear blast. Steel or aluminum just won't cut it. The whole idea won't get off the theoretical drawing board until there is some manner of containing and directing the explosions.
Click to expand...

Diamonds or graphite. There is no fluid medium with which to transmit a blast wave, so all the pusher plate need to be able to do is survive the incident radiation and impulse of incident vaporized bomb debris. A little active cooling, a little ablation, and you're good. Since all that vaporized junk just did smack into you, you go the other direction (conservation of momentum and all that).

Easy.

Ish.

Now, if you want a little bit more specific impulse, you use a big (several kilometers big) fullerene parachute and detonate the bomb in between you and the canopy. The net force will be away from the open end of the parachute, and you will harvest a higher percentage of the blast energy. Moreover, you're using a tension structure, which should have less mass.
 
Last edited:
The Great Hairy One said:
The problem I have is that we have no way of actually containing a nuclear blast. Steel or aluminum just won't cut it. The whole idea won't get off the theoretical drawing board until there is some manner of containing and directing the explosions.
Click to expand...

The present things on the drawing board include magnetic nozzles and sending tiny nuclear bombs well behind the ship before detonating them. The second setup would use a parabolic shield to for both protection and trapping as much of the blast as possible. Ion drive have very tiny accelerations but applied continuously even they could get us there.

Yes we could go to the nearest stars well within a single lifetime on todays technology if the priority was high enough. There's no reason to set the priority that high yet but the present efforts are definitely warranted.
 
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