Name earth like planets we could realistically visit!

Originally posted by seagull
reply to post by LightSpeedDriver

 

Thanks.

Interesting result that...

Confounding almost a century of Einsteinian physics, and all before dinner... How cool is that?

So, in theory anyway, FTL is possible if these results stand peer review. Then it becomes a hardware issue. ...and mankind is pretty damned good at building hardware.

That just opens of a whole universe of possibilities, doesn't it?

Maybe not in my lifetime... But barring catastrophe, our time in this nest may be finite... Here's to dreamers.

From my understanding, the title is confusing. The current observation, if true, does not violate relativity and has no implications for superluminal travel.

ATS poster CLPrime explains a bit more here...

Einstein is still safe.

reply to post by admiralmary


Since i like to be the optimist,although i know that with the current technology ,that we are aware of,we won't even see Mars in our life time,i will give you a list of the nearest star systems,some with planets around them.

The universe within 12.5 light years

When our scientists take their heads off their butts and start working on real spac technology instead of weapons,these are the most likely stars/planets that we will first visit.When the greatest minds of all nations start working together,instead of competing with each other,like they are on 5th grade,then we (or our children)will see space.

So my friend keep dreaming of the stars.

reply to post by Phantom traveller

Try this one. Its huge and interesting and a little interactive too.
Scale of the Universe
Needs adobe flash player btw.

reply to post by admiralmary


I would be concerned about going on the first flight to another planet. At current tech it would take a long time, and a massive ship. What if you are on your way there, and half way and MANY years later you get passed by a much better ship from Earth heading to the same planet? Wouldn't that piss you off?

reply to post by Drunkenparrot

Yeah, my take was also that it's not quite redefined physicists complete understanding of the unieverse just yet but tiny steps maybe. From memory it's something like (possibly, if and when verified and not user or sensor error) a 0.002% increase or something of that order. It's all a bit beyond me though. I need the simple explanations and leave the high fallutin' stuff to others

reply to post by admiralmary


No it is not realistically possible. Some of those planets would take over 10,000 generations of living on a ship to reach, there wouldn;t be a big enough population to support genetric drift and humanity would die out from interbred diseases and not enough genetic flow.

An then theres the billions of things out in the void you can't see or detect that could rip you apart, like rogue black holes which are estimated around 10 million in our galaxy that we know of.

Forget going to another world, it aint going to happen outside this solar system. Our little stellar aquarium is as far as were ever going to get. The further you get away from earth your chances of dying increase exponentially. Anyone that even goes to mars runs a 60% chance of dying from cancer on just the trip there alone not counting the trip back and thats if we wait till it's as close to earth as possible before they go.

Originally posted by The Sword
reply to post by gortex

 

You know, it's this kind of negative thinking that ENSURES that we go nowhere as a species.

I like to think in more optimistic terms.

I still think we haven't hit the holy grail of planets just yet. Even so, there's likely plenty of hidden technology that could help us get there. The trick is to figure out how to unearth that technology for everyday use.

With all the positivity in the world we will be lucky to see a man on Mars within our lifetimes , no amount of positivity is going to fill the hole left by the robbery of the banks and change the general unwillingness of world governments to do the hard and costly stuff .

It's the 21st century and were still using rockets , we're going nowhere fast ....sorry if I sound negative but that's where we are and I find it sad .

Not knowing the answer of a question, does not mean there is none. There is always a way, just show me the will.

But how about solving our issues here on earth first before going far far far away. BUT there will be a way, if we push hard enough.

Originally posted by LightSpeedDriver
reply to post by murkraz

 

Not so sure about Mars anymore. Interesting to visit but living? I asked Phage why some planets have an atmosphere and keep it, and others do not. Its not gravity, or at least not totally. He said that there is either little or no magnetosphere on Mars for reasons not yet understood. In my limited understanding, my take on that was that its magnetic field is "broken" which then possibly brings us to the question of its core, which again, in my limited understanding is what is responsible for Earth's magnetic field. We might need to "fix" that first. Just theorising, not a scientist.

edit on 25/12/11 by LightSpeedDriver because: Typo

I believe the simple version of the current theory.

When Mars' liquid metallic core cooled then solidified, the protective magnetosphere generated by the previously dynamic molten core weakened which allowed the solar wind to scourge the bulk of the Martian atmosphere away, into the void over many hundreds of millions of years.

The Earth is expected to suffer a similar fate in the distant future, I guess the slightly greater mass is theorized to have bought us a couple of billion extra years of cosmic ray insurance.

I don't think the possibility to "fix" or "restart" something on the scale of a planetary core will exist outside of a theoretical physics textbook for a few millennia yet, if ever.

Hopefully somebody will come along and post a definitive (i.e. educated ) answer but I don't think I am too far off the mark.

I hope this helps somebody

that is all depanding on the technology we have at this time or that time.
I think if we find proof of an alien civilisation more or less advanced as our own we will
have a manhattan like project and we wil have the money and resources allocated for building a
way for getting there we will get in focus and get all people together and join towards this common goal.

like a news article said ones .. we have the buckhard heim theory and we can test it in the Z machine and if theory is proven sound a prototype could be build within 5 years.

as long we have theory and a purpose to take this theory in to practice we will see thing come to fruitation and we will get there one way are the other in our life time.

now all is depanding on kepler and its succesors for finding a planet and reading out wavelenghts ect to find out what the planet found are made from and if there is biological life there .
seti will aim there telescopes and will transmit and listen for technological broadcast or other signals.

time will learn but 2012 will be the year we find a second earth with oceans with our temps and our climate ect and biological life signals .. not my prognose but scientist of kepler team said so if i am right.

and just like the clip says posted at the end of this post . if life and other earth will be found money will be a thing of the past we will have a new drive force instead of accumulation of wealth,. yes I am a fond star trek addict and i regret we life in 21th century where the world is being over run by religious bigots ect who are in the our way of getting and lifing like in the world of star trek.

There are NO earth like planets we could reach
in a human lifetime using the technology that is available in the public domain.
However,
as it's Christmas,
don't despair,
Ben Rich formerly of Lockheed martin famously said .....
"We already have the technology to travel among the stars".
Who knows,
even though he said it would take an act of God to get it released,
we may just get lucky.
Let's leave 2011 on a positive note.
Merry Christmas.

There is Kepler-22b at 600 light years from Earth

Originally posted by muse7
None

Our nearest galaxy which is Andromeda is 2.2 million light years away. So unless we discover Worm Holes and learn how to use them I don't see any way how we could visit another Galaxy. Even if we could travel at light speed, it would still take 2.2 million years to get there.

Good luck maintaining a speed of 299,000 MPS for 2.2 million years

edit on 12/25/2011 by muse7 because: (no reason given)

So that would mean no Instant-Trasmission? Damn, there went my plans for universal domination....

reply to post by admiralmary


Unfortunately we're limited to our solar system. At our current level of technology, it would take 166,000 years to reach the nearest star traveling at 17,000 miles per hour.

However within our solar system, there are a few candidates. Mars could harbor some forms of bacterial life underneath the surface where the ice/water is at. Europa and quite a few other moons that have liquid oceans could also very likely have life.

But humanity is retarded, and we spend money killing each other and destroying the planet when we could be spending that money exploring the universe and expanding our understanding of it.

you know the question I have is what planet did our ancestors live on before earth?

Uh considering the closest on is like 20 light years away I think, none.
Unless you travel close to the speed of light, good luck.

We would need technology such as wormholes & warping the fabric of space time to realistically be looking at going anywhere out of our solar system, fossil fuels /rockets are just not going to take us anywhere outside of that, generation ships are pointless, because if anything happens to the ship they are all dead, and the chances of the ship failing are pretty good

We are going to have to wait possibly a hundred years or more to get out of our solar system i think, technologies advancing faster and faster these days and we already know how it could possibly be done, so at least thats a start, but then we are going to have to figure out how to use the wormhole to get to where we want to go from A - B etc, that could take even longer, you can't just tell the wormhole were to take you somewhere like a taxi and it will require a incredible amount of energy just to make a worm hole in the first place, you would need to be able to create or harness the energy equivalent of a pulsar, the most powerful thing in space/know to man, because there is just no way you could creat that sort of energy lol, and still on top of all that the closets pulsar to us is many many light years away, funny enough we have one pointing right at our planet that could destroy are planet at any second now, maybe it will go bang in 2012 eh

In 2012 they will prove that those neutrinos did indeed move faster than light. Physics will change but they will realise that nobody can travel at the speed of light only slower or faster !!

Back to 2012 experiment and they ask....OK how did this collection of particles and the acceleration we imparted result in a neutrino crossing the light barrier.

They discover in 2020 how this happened.......then BOOM they can make anything go faster than light.

So by 2030 we have visited the nearest start in a few days and a planet called Vulcan for romantic reasons because the ship will be called Enterprise II (NB Enterprise I is a Museum piece now)

Truth is stranger than fiction and my fiction is based on reality (well step 1 and 2 is ). Step 4 is inevitable if step 3 occurs.

Originally posted by lonewolf19792000
reply to post by admiralmary

 

And then theres the billions of things out in the void you can't see or detect that could rip you apart, like rogue black holes which are estimated around 10 million in our galaxy that we know of.

The further you get away from earth your chances of dying increase exponentially. Anyone that even goes to mars runs a 60% chance of dying from cancer on just the trip there alone not counting the trip back and thats if we wait till it's as close to earth as possible before they go.

You've touched on a couple of the obstacles involved in deep space travel but it won't take a mass like a rouge black hole to rip a spacecraft apart, rouge subatomic particles would be sufficient to rip any compound we can conceive to create as a protective shell for a craft traveling a reasonable speed to get anywhere, like for instance 0.1c 10% light speed so lets direct a bit of what that would entail. But as you say there are very real human factors to overcome first, immediate issue is microgravity deterioration of skeletal structure, radiation deterioration of cellular structure protection, and fuel, self sustaining replenishing life support, and propulsion that doesn't itself rip the ship apart. To even consider a workable model one has to realize the sheer mass of the craft is imperative to house an artificial gravity generation, radiation protection, sustainability resource production areas, fuel storage/production cargo, and of course protection from the power source we can explore below.

Before we theorize plausible propulsion, lets outline time frames, if 10% c is our target speed.

Proxima Centauri, our closest star from Solar System, 4.22 ly distant, could be reached in about 40 years that doesn't account for the length of time one would need to also slow the craft from flinging on past the star at 0.1c, so expect a longer trip than 40 years.

Doesn't sound too bad so far.

Nuclear pulse propulsion is a theoretically possible form of fast space travel. Very early on in the development of the development of the atomic bomb, nuclear pulse propulsion was proposed in 1947 and Project Orion was born in 1958 to investigate interplanetary space travel. In a nutshell, Project Orion hoped to harness the power of pulsed nuclear explosions to provide a huge thrust with very high specific impulse. It is a major advantage to extract maximum energy from a spacecraft’s fuel to minimize cost and maximize range, therefore a high specific impulse creates faster, longer-range spaceflight for minimum investment....

.... it would take a Project Orion-type craft approximately 85 years to travel from the Earth to Proxima Centauri.

Universe Today offers some other time frames involved in getting to our closest neighbor.

Ion drive propulsion, 81,000 years
Gravitational assists, 19,000 years, (Helios 1 and 2 achieved over 158,000 mph using the sun's gravitational assist, slingshot)
Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, 85 years (at 0.05c, half the speed I suggest.

Several obvious issues challenge Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, not blowing apart your craft being the primary, construction of the mass required to fuel and distance the 'propulsion emission area' from the rest of the craft being a very real secondary obstacle, and the rest mentioned above.

There is also achieving the sun's escape velocity, which is 1.3 million miles an hour, but of course the further away from the sun the gravity drop off formula means this is not an issue.

Exploring into what something like Project Orion would require is obviously mind boggling. The idea is to achieve 2-4G acceleration, which our liquid fueled rockets achieve, but are fuel hogs, consuming more than twice the Lindbergh Transatlantic flight's worth of fuel per second, rules this tech out. (Each of the 3 main Space Shuttle engines burn 350 gallons of fuel per second, times 3 is 1,050 gallons per second Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis was loaded with 450 gallons of fuel).

Nuclear Propulsion take an enormous number of nukes. Put it this way, to get to 0.1c at 4 g's takes about 750,000 seconds. If you get this by dropping one bomb per second, well, that's a whole lot of bombs. And having a stockpile of 3/4 of a million nukes in orbit around the earth would seem to suggest all sorts of plot twists. Nukes have big bangs. This in turn means you need big shock absorbers to keep the explosion impulse from crushing the passengers, and there are severe material limits to what you can do.

We need to look for something else, and I'm running out of space, (pun intended).

Project Longshot.

Originally posted by admiralmary

Originally posted by juleol

Originally posted by admiralmary
man i just want to see another planet with life so bad!
even if its a hostile reptile full planet!
(long as i was observing it from afar lol)
its just the most fascinating thing in the world for me, i literally dream of what could be on a planet millions of light years away,
what kind of people.. whats there!

Mars might very well still have life underneath the ground. Doubt it will be more than simple organism or bacterias at best though.

you know i sometimes think mars was left as a warning to earth, you know what may happen to earth if we go down the wrong path

Mars is "dead" now because it cooled faster due to its smaller size, which meant that magnetic field vanished, volcanic activity died down and so on. This led to atmosphere leaking out to space leading to increasingly thinner atmosphere with no volcanic eruptions to replenish atmosphere.

This might happen on earth to sometime in the far future, but that will definitely not be because of us. In fact us releasing co2 and other gases such into atmosphere would maybe keep the planet liveable for a little longer if we were to lose our magnetic field.