Yes I know, There are no Vulcans to come to us and help improve our technology, but we have a bunch of information, why don't we use it? We don't need to wait for WW3 to come to use..
I just want to see a human made spaceship going at warp3 in my life time,
[ February 23, 2002, 16:43: Message edited by: The Apocalypse ]
Posted by USS Vanguard (Member # 130) on :
Why not?
Three words:
Money, Money, and Drugs. uh, I mean Money.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Apocalypse: You bring the exotic matter, and we'll build the warpship...
Posted by akb1979 (Member # 557) on :
Ponders the issue for a while . . .
Reasons why there will be no warpship in our life times;
1) no SIF - Human Soup anyone? ; 2) no IDF (can't remember what these do - too tired); 3) no deflector shields - see the "Enterprise in wind tunnel" thread; 4) no matter; 5) no anti-matter; 6) while we may have the resources, no government will be willing to use so much on such a project; 7) no money; 8) warp drive is still a theory; 9) we lack the technology - I mean come on! We've only managed to get a space station in orbit and; 10) it doesn't even have artificial gravity 11) the crew would die/become infertile from radiation exposure and/or weakening of bones due to lack of gravity 12) no phasers - only an idiot would venture past our solar system without a means of defence.
Wow, a dozen reasons . . . not bad for 1:30 in the morning! Sorry The Apocalypse, as much as I'd also like to see a warpship in my lifetime - sadly it ain't gonna happen. Posted by Jack_Crusher (Member # 696) on :
SIF- Sructural Integrity Field: fields that hold a vessel together against the stresses of sublight/FTL travel. IDF- Inertial Dampening Fields: Counteractive fields that cancel out propulsive momentum and gravitational forces exerted on a vessel during spaceflight. Matter- Hydrogen: We have tons of this fuel and it is replenishable!
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
quote: Ponders the issue for a while . . .
Reasons why there will be no warpship in our life times;
1) no SIF - Human Soup anyone? ; 2) no IDF (can't remember what these do - too tired); 3) no deflector shields - see the "Enterprise in wind tunnel" thread; 4) no matter; 5) no anti-matter; 6) while we may have the resources, no government will be willing to use so much on such a project; 7) no money; 8) warp drive is still a theory; 9) we lack the technology - I mean come on! We've only managed to get a space station in orbit and; 10) it doesn't even have artificial gravity 11) the crew would die/become infertile from radiation exposure and/or weakening of bones due to lack of gravity 12) no phasers - only an idiot would venture past our solar system without a means of defence.
Wow, a dozen reasons . . . not bad for 1:30 in the morning! Sorry The Apocalypse, as much as I'd also like to see a warpship in my lifetime - sadly it ain't gonna happen.
1. Well, if FTL would actually work like that. Which it wouldn't. 2. Ditto. 3. Ditto. 4. Actually, it's all over the place. 5. Not 'no'. Too few, and whether M/AM is a viable power source is still up in the air. 6. Yup. 7. Yup. 8. Less than a theory. There are quite a few theories out there about FTL travel, and even the most similar has some rather noticable differences. 9. We have managed to get to the moon. And we've been putting space stations in orbit for over thirty years now. There's nothing technologically keeping us from Mars, or even further in the solar system. But yes, FTL is still beyond our technology. 10. Again, not for technological reasons. When you think artificial gravity, don't think "Star Trek"; think "2001: A Space Odyssey". Spin the mother and you got AG. Not impossible. 11. No infertility from zero g. From radiation? Not really. Proper shielding isn't that hard. And we already talked about AG. 12. By the time we got out there, we would have a pretty good idea about the population of the immediate vicinity. We already know about the immediate neighborhood, since none of the nearby stars can support Earth like planets. And besides, space is big. Like really fucking big. No, bigger than that.
But hey, it's not even 12 yet here. It won't happen in our lifetimes, unless we live to be 200 or so (not out of the realm of possibility). But it will be because we still lack the sufficient understanding of physics and wield the proper engineering skill.
Posted by The Apocalypse (Member # 633) on :
Um I was reading cnn.com's space section and there was an article saying that NASA or someone found that antimatter mihgt save hundreds of dollars for spacetravel. So I guess, um, the use of antimatter for spacetravel is near?
Posted by Topher (Member # 71) on :
Hundreds of dollars in the space program? That's nothing.
Millions of dollars, now that's something.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Not really...
Mark
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
Well, there are some problems with using AM.
First, with our current level of technology, we can't even generate a gram of that stuff if we just left the particle accelerators on 24/7, much less enough of it for space travel at a economical price.
Second, how would we go about using AM? We could use the steam turbine technique which we currently employ with nuclear reactor for power generation, which seems a waste. We could throw bits of AM behind a spaceship like with an Orion engine for propulsion, but I don't think that'd be very safe or cost effective.
Posted by akb1979 (Member # 557) on :
Well until A/M becomes plausable, how about plasma rockets as the October 2000 edition of Astronomy Now outlines?
Quote: " . . . whereas a chemically-powered Space Shuttle main engine typically develops an exhaust speed of about 5 kilometres per second, a plasma rocket can muster up to 30 kilometres per second. This means that a spacecraft powered by a plasma engine needs to carry much less fuel, leaving more room for payload."
So:
Earth to Mars would take;
Using chemical-based drive - 6 months, 3 weeks, 7 hours and 30 minutes (assuming speed is constant) Using plasma rockets - 1 month, 2 days and 5 hours (again assuming speed is constant).
If the government officials get their fingers out, we might just see this happen within the next 30 years that have been predicted.
Posted by The Apocalypse (Member # 633) on :
quote:Originally posted by Topher: Hundreds of dollars in the space program? That's nothing.
Millions of dollars, now that's something.
It might've been millions, I read it in an december/January article, so I forgot..
Posted by Matrix (Member # 376) on :
Ummm.... no. For NASA it costs them $40 per kg to lift something off the ground with conventional means of space travel. Rockets are just localized explosions beneath the ship, very inefficient and expensive to do.
Nuclear Propulsion? No, again it would be by a means of a localized explosion behind the ship. If we find a efficient way of propelling the ship, then it is still no. While Nuclear Propulsion seems to be practically unlimited on Earth's Oceans, we are talking about about a million miles range. Which is impressive on the ocean but not space. To Mars which is about 260 million miles away, the space ship with Nuclear Propulsion would need to refuel b(if you are good with math) 260 times give or take a few million miles. So no, Nuclear Propulsion is out.
Yes it is very hard to effectively protect a ship from Radiation without being impossibly expensive. (A alloy would have to be a mix of lead and the Space shuttle exterior plus other exotic materials). Remember radiation is culmative, so if we manage to shield the ship from 99.99% of the radiation, that .01% will start to add up from 200+ days travel to Mars.
FTL? The current and most accepted theory is that conventional means of FTL is impossible. What do I mean by coventional? Conventional by a means of a engine setup and a type of fuel. To travel past speed of light we have to be greater than light itself to achieve this and light is at the very end of energy. Thats only if we ignore the time travel theory.
Gravity very easy, because if you spin a a tire and keeps something inside it, that object will stay there. Star Trek type gravity is far from our technology but not impossible. We will see something like that within a few decades.
There is a way of opening a wormhole, by todays technology. All you need to do is heat a specific area trillions and trillions of degrees and produce a massive gravitational spot in that exact spot. And there you go, a wormhole, to where no clue but it is a wormhole. No one has done it yet though.
Posted by First of Two (Member # 16) on :
DS1's Ion propulsion system seems to have a great deal of promise. Starts slow, but constant acceleration lets you get going really fast eventually.
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
quote:Originally posted by First of Two: DS1's Ion propulsion system seems to have a great deal of promise. Starts slow, but constant acceleration lets you get going really fast eventually.
Unforunately, the rate of acceleration is so slow that it's only meaningful for really long trips.
Posted by J (Member # 608) on :
Wouldn't a hybird ion/rocket engine have the advantage of both worlds?
A booster stage, with a rocket firing and getting you up to a certain, fast speed, then the IPS taking over and giving you a constant rate of acceleration from that. You'd probably need rocket stage at the end to stop unless you flip before the half way point...
Oh wait, I didn't mention I'm thinking about the 9.81m/s/s acceleration gravity ship... oh well.
Posted by Matrix (Member # 376) on :
Hyrbid solution? No becuase the ion drive needs to catch up with the booster rocket in order to be effective.
There has to be an exotic material, fuel and propulsion layout to make intersteller travel possible.
Posted by Cpt. Kyle Amasov (Member # 742) on :
Things they probably don't want to do are: lifting anything nuclear into orbit, spending billions of dollars on such a project and doing this without any reason. Jup, you read it right; where's the sense behind all this? The US government didn't fly to the moon to do the next step in human evolution or something, they did it to piss off the sovjets and show them that they were better. We didn't built the ISS to bring the world peace and friendship, we did it because it helps us to develope some nice weaons tech and materials which can be used to make industrieal production cheaper. Or medicine most of us will never get to see. And we wont go to Mars without any reason. The government cuts NASA's budget to buy more weapons, and until there is a good reason to fly to mars, we wont do it. Same for warp. Even if it was possible - flying to the next system takes more than four years at warp 1, flying to the next system that might have colonizable planets could take hundrets of years. For what? It wont solve any problems here on earth and it wont be any kind of advantage sending some scientists to a rock some billions of kilometers away from us.
For the matter/antimatter: We have Deuterium, a bit expensive but we have it. Anti-deuterium OTOH could be a small problem; and finding some Dilithium (or better: creating some dilithium crystal) could be a small problem, too. Furthermore, I don't think you can use any crystal for this. M/A reaction is a critical process and the controlling and emitting of the reaction energy created can only be handeled by a special sort of crystal (think this is from the TNGTM). You can't put matter and antimatter in a bottle, shake it, put it into your drive system and hope the energy exhaust will boost you to the next star system.
So I think maybe we'll see something like that one day, but it wont be a governmental experiment but some privat firm doing it (I do think the same regarding the mars mission: private sponsoring will be the only possibility of getting it done and the money needed.)
Posted by First of Two (Member # 16) on :
Small ion engines might be usable in a long-term program of interstellar exploration.. to chart nearby systems, with small, light, sophisticated unmanned probes. I forget what DS1's speed was when they turned it off. I think they said it was by far the fastest thing ever built by human hands.
Would we get a faster result with other ions? More engines? a more sophisticated drive? I dunno.
The reason to go to space is best seen in the spinoff technology we develop from it. There was a news item recently about a new technology for determining types of cancers. The stuff to do this came from NASA-developed tech.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Well, from NASA-written press releases, anyway.
Posted by Joshua Bell (Member # 327) on :
quote:Originally posted by Matrix: There has to be an exotic material, fuel and propulsion layout to make intersteller travel possible.
Since those involve changing the laws of physics or discovering massive loopholes, I'm all for the alternatives - extending the lifespan of the travellers and/or reducing the mass of the cargo.
Reducing the travellers to a stream of bits (i.e. going digital) addresses both problems; the ship can consist of a processor, memory banks, and an ion drive. It doesn't matter how long it takes, since you just keep the crew "on hold" during the journey. And if you're paranoid, leave a backup copy of yourself at home which is reactivated if the travellers don't send an ACK back in time.
Failing that, simple immortality and a closed ecosystem seems more more plausible (if less dashing) than waiting around for warp drive to show up.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Of course, by the time we could easily reduce ourselves to bits and beam to the next star, we might no longer need or want to.
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
Oh boy I can't wait, I can finally cure my headaches by defragging myself.
Posted by targetemployee (Member # 217) on :
Thirty years later, I am having difficulty in understanding why we made the journey from the 'Earth to the Moon'. I know the political and social reasons. Yet, as I look back, these realities seem foreign, even alien.
I wonder how school children in the mid to late 21st century will view this brief moment in history when humans left the Earth. I think they will have an even more difficult time in understanding the Apollo missions. This is if they are taught this period of US history.
As for going back to the Moon or traveling to points further away, I am of the opinion this will not happen. The Congress has passed legislation which limites the involvement of private companies in the development of space ventures.
What about NASA? NASA is dying. Simple and clear. In the next decade or so, we will hear news of one of the orbiters, most likely Columbia, being retired. There will be reports of astronauts receiving 'pink slips' and NASA's operations reduced. Functions which were associated by NASA will be outsourced to private companies.
Our space program I think will be the following:
1. military applications 2. robotic probes 3. humans doing routine repair of the station and satellites
Before I close, I would like to say one last point. I don't think our democratic-republic is effective when there are long term commitments. Commitments are subjected to the vicissitudes that defined the peaceful changes of regimes which our country experiences every four or eight years. For a successful space program to exist, and one in which humans are actively exploring the solar system, we would need to have the agenda of a former Administration accepted in full by a current Administration. I have rarely seen this in our country's history. Far too often, for reasons only known to politicians it seems, agendas are altered or erased by a new Administration.
[ February 28, 2002, 01:04: Message edited by: targetemployee ]
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
45,000 YA Our species has migrated out of Africa into Asia and Europe. I do believe that we were settling Australia as well.
This is nearly 55,000 years of history when our ancestors for the most part decided to remain in Africa. Why did they elect to migrate from their homeland? The climate was undergoing change.
7,000 YA First civilizations emerge in the 'Old World'.
500 YA The civilizations of the 'Old World' initiate first contact with the natives of the 'New World'.
I think these two examples reflect a commonality in our species. We take our sweet time in leaving a place.
Space exploration is tentative in our current period. It is dependent on the government's good graces. What will change the nature of space exploration?
Climatological or economical changes in the status quo. I am not talking minor changes. I am talking severe ass-whooping changes. I don't forsee either occuring for the short term.
Will humans colonize space? Sure. It just won't be the Americans who will do the colonizing. The political-social entity which will do this act doesn't exist and won't exist for a very long period of time. I am talking hundreds or even thousands of years here.
I tend to view our Moon forays as akin to the Viking explorations of the 'Old World' in the 900's CE. They explored a very small portion of the North American coast and left archaeological records of their forays.
When humans colonize space, the Moon missions will seem as distant to them as the Viking missions were to the Europeans who set sail in the 1500's. (Note the time difference between the 900's and the 1500's.) The astronauts who visited the Moon have left valuable archaeological records of the Apollo era and of American involvement in the first explorations of space.
[ February 28, 2002, 11:15: Message edited by: targetemployee ]
Posted by First of Two (Member # 16) on :
Well, this is just another reason why I should be dictator of the U.S. (NOT the world). If I reigned until, say, I was 70, that'd be 40 years, or 10 administrations worth, of single-minded progress in Space Exploration.
If I passed it along to a handpicked worthy heir, we could double that, and so on. (Because benevolent dictators tend to pick successors as similar to themselves as possible)
That should get us out of this jam within a human lifetime.
First of Two for Dictator: Progress, or else!
[ February 28, 2002, 13:57: Message edited by: First of Two ]
Posted by Grokca (Member # 722) on :
quote:The reason to go to space is best seen in the spinoff technology we develop from it.
quote:Well, from NASA-written press releases, anyway.
Well no money spent on a space programme is ever spent in space, it is spent on the ground. And none of us would be even talking to each other if it weren't for NASA needing compact computers for space travel. The spinoffs from a space programme are defining the next century. Someone once said, JFK, Vietnam will be just footnotes in history but last century will be remembered because we went to the moon.
Posted by targetemployee (Member # 217) on :
IMO, I think historians will write that the 20th Century is when a single nation arose from two terrible wars and the defeat of an empire to lead the world into the 21st century. The space race will be included as, either a footnote or as a chapter, part of that single nation's efforts to defeat an empire.
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
Humanity doesn't have thousands of years left.
That is, if we don't begin to expand to new lands.
The only new lands left are other planets, principally Mars.
It took thousands of years before humanity invented the car. Did it take us another ten thousand to invent the airplane? No.
Human technological progress doubles every ten years. The combined knowledge of the homo sapiens doubles every ten years. Or so I've heard.
Our pace is rapidly expanding on average. In our example, you picked out specific dates where easily distinguishable events have occurred. What you neglected however, was that in those interims, the human race was constantly expanding in the space it had avaliable. Those events happened because a threshold had been reached.
Sorta like these days.
And Grocka's right. What people seem to think is that we are literally building rockets, filling them with money and launching them into the Sun. But in fact, every cent stays on Earth. Unless they the crew takes up a dollar and signs it as a commerorative thing.
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
quote:Humanity doesn't have thousands of years left.
That is, if we don't begin to expand to new lands.
The words "Bull" and "Shit" come to mind, though I can't say in no particular order.
I'm for seeing space exploration as much as the next guy, but let's be realistic here. I'm quite sure humanity won't spontaneously explode unless we start colonizing the moon.
Right now population growth in the developing world is somewhat coming under control (we're not quite applying the brakes yet, though we have eased off the accelerator). The UN now expects that in a century things will stabilize somewhere around the 10 billion ugly bags of mostly water-mark, in other words within the Earth's carrying capacity. There's no innate need to expand bacterially over everywhere and everything for fear that we're going to run out of agar.
While a better space program may well make life easier for humanity through technological kicbacks, it isn't needed to save it.
[ February 28, 2002, 15:52: Message edited by: The_Tom ]
Posted by targetemployee (Member # 217) on :
OntoMars,
Our species will endure for thousands of years to come. Our ancestors were able to adapt to climate changes which doomed many other species, including our closest relatives, on the family tree, the Neanderthals.
Space colonization will occur. Not just now, not just in the immediate future. Just in the distant future.
Posted by Matrix (Member # 376) on :
It is not that earth can carry the human civilization, its whether or not that Earth can provide enough resources to all those 10 billion people will need. Right now, we are depleting many resources, most notably oil. We use billions of gallons a day varying from simply making a T shirt white down to running cars.
Human civilization is alot more detailed then describing 6 events in a million year history.
Humans always are fascinated to explore new lands, and that is why within 500 years of the New World, one of the many countries that have sprung up has become the most powerful country in the world. Also if you remember Americas had far more untapped resources then the Old World Had. Not only that, the Americas is far larger than Europe.
Space is the new land that humans wish to explore. Space is the new land that many wish live in, however problems on Earth itself is causing so mush chaos within space exploration. Though NASA has a budget in the billions, to fund another Earth to Moon tpye project would cost trillions of dollars. If we had the money, humans years ago would have landed on Mars. Then now we would be seeing NASA preparing for the colonization of Mars not theorizing possbile ways of getting there.
Its not the matter of over population, its the matter of cost. For thousands of years, currancy has been a controling factor in human life. Its the dominating feature in human civilization that we need to be conpensated for doing a job no matter how small or important. Unless we eliminate money, it'll be many more years before we will see human life on another planet again.
Star Trek solved this with a World war 3, which eliminated many major governments (Riker said this), so no government, no money being made or used due to value anymore.
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
;
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
If I reigned until, say, I was 70, that'd be 40 years, or 10 administrations worth, of single-minded progress in Space Exploration.