Alpha Centauri B may have "superhabitable" worlds

reply to post by Mamatus

Damn, we're going to have to move quickly. Women are alleging he's got kids already: Here.

reply to post by JohnnySasaki

Hrm, would have to look at the last 10-14 years to see if they fit those graphs--especially for computing. Suspect that the mapped curve for it is not what's actually going to happen. Probably closer to some sort of sine curve, or a piecemeal one made of the existing on and a square root x one for the rest when we hit the wall of what is physically possible...

stormbringer1701

JohnnySasaki
Really, the only way we're going to get there is with the warp drive. Space isn't completely empty, and hitting space dust at even a small fraction of the speed of light would be catastrophic. Basically, there would be a lot more space dust, lol. What's more, at that speed, you'd have no way of spotting the obstacle, and even if you did, you'd have no chance of getting out of the way without MASSIVE amounts of G forces. With the warp drive, the space moves, not you. I don't understand the physics of it 100%, obviously, but I believe it means you wouldn't have to worry much about hitting anything on the way. Plus, it allows for much faster than light travel. It would only take a few days or weeks at warp 10 to reach Alpha Centari.

I know warp drives sound like science fiction, and for now it still is, but I'm sure most of you know they're actually working on it as we speak. They believe it is theoretically possible, and at our current rate of technological advancement we should most likely have a working warp drive in the next couple decades. I know that sounds quite soon, but think in terms of exponential growth instead of linear growth. Remember, Ray Kurzweil and other well known futurists predict the technological singularity will occur sometime around 2030-2045. The mean is around 2040.

actually think about it dust motes at relativistic speed are the equivalent of a rifle bullet. dust motes make 99.999999999 percent of all objects in space other than molecules and atoms or ions. a relativistic ship can expect 1 impact per square meter of the front facing portion of the ship per day. 30 meter cross section equals 30 impacts per day. rifle bullets against flesh is pretty catastrophic. but against either a wiffle shield or a block of tungsten or whatever it's no big deal. a wiffle shield is well understood. it is already used to protect the ISS and other space missions.

really the things we need better protective technology for are the much rarer but more problematic larger impactors. actually even grain sized ones can be stopped by the above methods. then you get into trouble. you need more active protection. ablatives like an km long ice column. shear thickening fluid (similar to corn starch) tanks, optronically steered lasers, electrostatic fields, plasma clouds, or just put your molten spray type radiator on the front end of the ship. and for bigger ones you can see coming faster you can divert by pitting them with a laser or making a micro course adjustment. it doesn't take much to avoid something several hundred kilometers away.

and though it has a high giggle factor NASA is actually doing some preliminary grunt work on Warp drive with Dr Harold White.

It doesn't take much to avoid something a couple hundred kilometers away when you're only going like Mach 20, but when you start to get into significant fractions of the speed of light, it takes quite a lot. Think about it, light travels at 186 thousand miles a second. What's more, a spec of dust might only be the equivalent of a bullet impact (that's still quite a lot btw, especially when you have a couple to a couple thousand of them a day), but what about an impact of something the size of a pebble or bigger? How are you going to see a pebble a couple hundred thousand miles away, and even if you did, traveling at 186 thousand miles a second, how are you going to have time to get out of the way? Even if you could, the G forces would rip you and your spaceship apart anyway.

Also, everything get's extremely distorted when traveling at close to or at the speed of light, so I'd doubt you even be able to see where you were going.

you only need to change direction by a fraction of a mil to avoid most objects if your detection range is sufficient. you can see quite a ways with a lidar or radar.

if your lidar is also a weapons strength laser emitter you can fire as fast as the signal processing is done on the incoming lidar return. such lasers have no moving parts and can be instantly aimed. furthermore if you burn a pit in something in space it turns into it's own maneuvering thruster.

plus a wiffle can actually handle bigger debris but it must be "tuned" as to spacing and plate thickness to compensate.

ablative ice columns apply compressed steam or plasma to the incoming object (and refreeze to heal the impact channel.)

shear thickening fluids could probably be designed as a type of shielding it would regenerate other than any that splashed out the entry hole.

and angled armor plates alternated with softer materials would deflect penetrating projectiles off the centerline and away from pressurized crew areas.

for nuclear reactors or fusion reactors you have a huge heat rejection problem which means you need prodigious radiators or cryo-plants. one type of advanced radiator uses a curtain of molten droplets to directly radiate heat into space. the molten coolant is transported along a boom to two arms that dispense drops of molten coolant. the coolant is caught by a second set of arms down stream from the other two arms. when an impactor hit these molten globs it sheds most of it's kinetic energy in the collision then melts whereupon some of it joins the coolant.

CynicalDrivel
reply to post by Mamatus

 

Damn, we're going to have to move quickly. Women are alleging he's got kids already: Here.

reply to post by JohnnySasaki

 

Hrm, would have to look at the last 10-14 years to see if they fit those graphs--especially for computing. Suspect that the mapped curve for it is not what's actually going to happen. Probably closer to some sort of sine curve, or a piecemeal one made of the existing on and a square root x one for the rest when we hit the wall of what is physically possible...

Silicon is at the end of it's life, true. However, something new will fill it's place. Graphene maybe, quantum computing maybe, who knows. What is physically possible is WELL past anything we have now. Eventually we will be designing things at the atomic scale. Essentially placing each atom exactly where we want it. It not even that far off.

Watch this.

stuff approximately grain sized or smaller can be handled electrostatically by using a laser or plasma field to induce a charge on it and a field to push it away. this would be similar to an m2p2, or a bussard ramscoop, magnetic funnel.

or for you old timers; similar to what a CRT screen does to dust but in reverse.

stormbringer1701
stuff approximately grain sized or smaller can be handled electrostatically by using a laser or plasma field to induce a charge on it and a field to push it away. this would be similar to an m2p2, or a bussard ramscoop, magnetic funnel.

or for you old timers; similar to what a CRT screen does to dust but in reverse.

edit on 29-1-2014 by stormbringer1701 because: (no reason given)

Even if it is possible, why? Why would you go through all that trouble (and danger), when you could just devote some more time to developing a warp drive? In addition to actually being able to surpass light speed (some say by even 10 times or more), I believe it also works around the time dilation as well. So if you took a round trip, thousands of years won't have passed here on earth.

Also, I'm pretty sure you could also use it to travel through time.

JohnnySasaki

stormbringer1701
stuff approximately grain sized or smaller can be handled electrostatically by using a laser or plasma field to induce a charge on it and a field to push it away. this would be similar to an m2p2, or a bussard ramscoop, magnetic funnel.

or for you old timers; similar to what a CRT screen does to dust but in reverse.

edit on 29-1-2014 by stormbringer1701 because: (no reason given)

Even if it is possible, why? Why would you go through all that trouble (and danger), when you could just devote some more time to developing a warp drive? In addition to actually being able to surpass light speed (some say by even 10 times or more), I believe it also works around the time dilation as well. So if you took a round trip, thousands of years won't have passed here on earth.

Also, I'm pretty sure you could also use it to travel through time.

edit on 29-1-2014 by JohnnySasaki because: (no reason given)

i am all for warp drive but it may take a century to work out all the details on how to do it if you are talking about an alcubierre derived variant. NASA is doing some stuff but the set up is rather miserly as far as funding and the hardware is rather primitive. the interferometer used is probably more expensive and higher tech than the homemade coil thing White is using. he may find something but with the set up he's got he may not even if there is something to the principles he is investigating.

there are other "warp" technological paths to explore too. like trying to apply the theoretical framework Zvi Bern and Dixon published on a strong force / gravity connection.

JohnnySasaki

stormbringer1701
stuff approximately grain sized or smaller can be handled electrostatically by using a laser or plasma field to induce a charge on it and a field to push it away. this would be similar to an m2p2, or a bussard ramscoop, magnetic funnel.

or for you old timers; similar to what a CRT screen does to dust but in reverse.

edit on 29-1-2014 by stormbringer1701 because: (no reason given)

Even if it is possible, why? Why would you go through all that trouble (and danger), when you could just devote some more time to developing a warp drive? In addition to actually being able to surpass light speed (some say by even 10 times or more), I believe it also works around the time dilation as well. So if you took a round trip, thousands of years won't have passed here on earth.

Also, I'm pretty sure you could also use it to travel through time.

edit on 29-1-2014 by JohnnySasaki because: (no reason given)

the 10 times thing is arbitrary. Dr White says it is derived from the expected warp effect on something travelling at ten percent c before activating the warp. his calculations said he could expect a 100 fold multiplication of the actual speed of the craft in real space. if you accelerated somehow to .99 c prior to engaging the warp drive you would effectively travel at 990 c.

nothing forbids time travel per se but there are some limitations on what you can do according to current theory. you can create a time travel loop from the point a time machine is turned on but not before. that limits its use. also you can time travel into the past so long as the past you travel into is not your universe's past. at first glance that is terrible. but according to the many worlds interpretation most adjacent parallel worlds are not too different from your prime universe. perhaps coming down to something as simple as a dead dandelion in your yard that still lives in the parallel one. thus while you could not alter your past you could learn all about it. or you could grab specimens from a parallel universe and it would be identical to the same specimen from your prime universe.

of course all of this is probably complete B.S.

but it might be true. or it might be that science is all wrong and you can travel to your own past without limits. no one knows.

all the ideas we currently have have to do with relativistic travel and long journeys. there was a man named Dr Reginald or Ronald Mallet that thought he had a mechanism and was prepared to experiment on it but his theory had that limit i talked about where you couldn't go back past the power up of your time machine.

stormbringer1701
and a probe or expedition can do science all the way there. it's not just about the destination. planetary science on the way out of the solar system, characterizing our technological signature from deep space as you go, characterize and survey the Oort cloud. look for rogues and dwarves, James Webbing the stars all the way. hit proxima, AC a and AC b with a fleet of drop off probes. those three are basically in line and roughly .1 ly from each other.

edit on 29-1-2014 by stormbringer1701 because: (no reason given)

And drop off a couple space telescopes (Optical/IR and Radio) as well as a communications relay at the Sun's gravitational lens around 550-1000 AU out.

JohnnySasaki

stormbringer1701

JohnnySasaki
Really, the only way we're going to get there is with the warp drive. Space isn't completely empty, and hitting space dust at even a small fraction of the speed of light would be catastrophic. Basically, there would be a lot more space dust, lol. What's more, at that speed, you'd have no way of spotting the obstacle, and even if you did, you'd have no chance of getting out of the way without MASSIVE amounts of G forces. With the warp drive, the space moves, not you. I don't understand the physics of it 100%, obviously, but I believe it means you wouldn't have to worry much about hitting anything on the way. Plus, it allows for much faster than light travel. It would only take a few days or weeks at warp 10 to reach Alpha Centari.

I know warp drives sound like science fiction, and for now it still is, but I'm sure most of you know they're actually working on it as we speak. They believe it is theoretically possible, and at our current rate of technological advancement we should most likely have a working warp drive in the next couple decades. I know that sounds quite soon, but think in terms of exponential growth instead of linear growth. Remember, Ray Kurzweil and other well known futurists predict the technological singularity will occur sometime around 2030-2045. The mean is around 2040.

actually think about it dust motes at relativistic speed are the equivalent of a rifle bullet. dust motes make 99.999999999 percent of all objects in space other than molecules and atoms or ions. a relativistic ship can expect 1 impact per square meter of the front facing portion of the ship per day. 30 meter cross section equals 30 impacts per day. rifle bullets against flesh is pretty catastrophic. but against either a wiffle shield or a block of tungsten or whatever it's no big deal. a wiffle shield is well understood. it is already used to protect the ISS and other space missions.

really the things we need better protective technology for are the much rarer but more problematic larger impactors. actually even grain sized ones can be stopped by the above methods. then you get into trouble. you need more active protection. ablatives like an km long ice column. shear thickening fluid (similar to corn starch) tanks, optronically steered lasers, electrostatic fields, plasma clouds, or just put your molten spray type radiator on the front end of the ship. and for bigger ones you can see coming faster you can divert by pitting them with a laser or making a micro course adjustment. it doesn't take much to avoid something several hundred kilometers away.

and though it has a high giggle factor NASA is actually doing some preliminary grunt work on Warp drive with Dr Harold White.

It doesn't take much to avoid something a couple hundred kilometers away when you're only going like Mach 20, but when you start to get into significant fractions of the speed of light, it takes quite a lot. Think about it, light travels at 186 thousand miles a second. What's more, a spec of dust might only be the equivalent of a bullet impact (that's still quite a lot btw, especially when you have a couple to a couple thousand of them a day), but what about an impact of something the size of a pebble or bigger?

This is a technological challenge and one that has been thought of in previous interstellar probe ideas/plans. Solutions are either a really big shield, a really big scoop, or a really advanced set of electromagnets/lasers.

How are you going to see a pebble a couple hundred thousand miles away, and even if you did, traveling at 186 thousand miles a second, how are you going to have time to get out of the way?

You don't.

Even if you could, the G forces would rip you and your spaceship apart anyway.

Correct. Any sudden change in acceleration at those speeds would be deadly but like I said a probe or a starship wouldn't necessarily have to get out of the way with proper shielding.

Also, everything get's extremely distorted when traveling at close to or at the speed of light, so I'd doubt you even be able to see where you were going.

Well, maybe, maybe not. That distortion would be predictable and as such could be corrected with a computer to form a normal image.

What might be more concerning is that the faster you go the more light and other electromagnetic radiation is blue shifted. Meaning it goes higher in frequency. This goes for UV light, gamma rays, x-rays, etc.

Interstellar travel is -not- impossible. Just really freaking hard for us right now.

Kinda like going to the moon in the Steam Era.

JadeStar

stormbringer1701
and a probe or expedition can do science all the way there. it's not just about the destination. planetary science on the way out of the solar system, characterizing our technological signature from deep space as you go, characterize and survey the Oort cloud. look for rogues and dwarves, James Webbing the stars all the way. hit proxima, AC a and AC b with a fleet of drop off probes. those three are basically in line and roughly .1 ly from each other.

edit on 29-1-2014 by stormbringer1701 because: (no reason given)

And drop off a couple space telescopes (Optical/IR and Radio) as well as a communications relay at the Sun's gravitational lens around 550-1000 AU out.

yes. with the solar lagrange gravity lense relay you can get away with a 3 MW to 5MW transmitter at the probe area. 5MW would allow broadband transmissions and multi-channels.

eh the light coming off an object coming at you at light speed which we were not talking about btw is turned into gamma rays or x rays. your XNAV recievers will see it like it was an un-cataloged QUASAR coming atcha. remember your own light in the direction of the approaching object is also blue shifted so you're gamma illuminating everything in front of you. the object will be illuminated and that radiation will reflect back to you in addition to it's own signatures. what you will get is not a weak return but a bright flare.

well it won't be gamma shifted exactly because we are not discussing light speed travel here but something less. probably a lot less.

Blue Shift
I'll bet a dollar that we don't make it out of our own Solar System before we either give it all up to the androids or modify ourselves genetically to such an extent that we can no longer consider ourselves human. That gives us about 1,000 years, tops.

You do know nuclear pulse propulsion (which most physicists agree would work) could get us there in 100 years? And that was 60 years ago. Fusion pulse which is a very real possibility could get us there in half that time?

reply to post by JohnnySasaki


Having a warp drive doesn't necessarily make the technology he was considering obsolete. Heck, even in science fiction where they have a warp drive, they see the utility of also having impulse drive and shielding.

crazyewok

Blue Shift
I'll bet a dollar that we don't make it out of our own Solar System before we either give it all up to the androids or modify ourselves genetically to such an extent that we can no longer consider ourselves human. That gives us about 1,000 years, tops.

You do know nuclear pulse propulsion (which most physicists agree would work) could get us there in 100 years? And that was 60 years ago. Fusion pulse which is a very real possibility could get us there in half that time?

Does this include both acceleration and deceleration times?

Acceleration up to cruising speed cannot be done too quickly, because humans would not be able to withstand the g-forces, nor can the ship decelerate quickly (for the same reason). That means a slow-enough acceleration time and a gentle-enough deceleration time would need to be built into any calculation for how long it will take to get there.

...of course, if we had a sci-fi style "inertial damper" or "anti-grav", that would change things...But we don't.

crazyewok

Blue Shift
I'll bet a dollar that we don't make it out of our own Solar System before we either give it all up to the androids or modify ourselves genetically to such an extent that we can no longer consider ourselves human. That gives us about 1,000 years, tops.

You do know nuclear pulse propulsion (which most physicists agree would work) could get us there in 100 years? And that was 60 years ago. Fusion pulse which is a very real possibility could get us there in half that time?

Fusion pulse still suffers from the relativistic mass problem. The faster a ship goes approaching the speed of light, the more massive it becomes, which means its harder to accelerate. Fuel ads mass to this problem.

So the best ideas lately have been to use beamed propulsion so that the fuel is all back at the solar system. Very little fuel on the ship means less rest mass to accelerate.

crazyewok

Blue Shift
I'll bet a dollar that we don't make it out of our own Solar System before we either give it all up to the androids or modify ourselves genetically to such an extent that we can no longer consider ourselves human. That gives us about 1,000 years, tops.

You do know nuclear pulse propulsion (which most physicists agree would work) could get us there in 100 years? And that was 60 years ago. Fusion pulse which is a very real possibility could get us there in half that time?

oh i think you can do better. the study i am about to post is for antimatter drives. but it should be applicable for any drive that turns the working fluid into plasma. so it would be applicable to a VASIMR, Ion Drives, Steady State fusion, maybe even a pulsed system. it would even give a tiny boost to standard chemical drives.

nextbigfuture.com...

final note. there is one type of antimatter drive these guys did not consider: a tethered antimatter drive. the max projected speed for it is .92 c.

it is dangerous to store antimatter but there may be ways to make it safe or avoid it altogether in the future.

and if the monopole stuff works out a monopole drive is every bit as fast as antimatter, perhaps faster, and it is much safer.

Soylent Green Is People

crazyewok

Blue Shift
I'll bet a dollar that we don't make it out of our own Solar System before we either give it all up to the androids or modify ourselves genetically to such an extent that we can no longer consider ourselves human. That gives us about 1,000 years, tops.

You do know nuclear pulse propulsion (which most physicists agree would work) could get us there in 100 years? And that was 60 years ago. Fusion pulse which is a very real possibility could get us there in half that time?

Does this include both acceleration and deceleration times?

Acceleration up to cruising speed cannot be done too quickly, because humans would not be able to withstand the g-forces, nor can the ship decelerate quickly (for the same reason). That means a slow-enough acceleration time and a gentle-enough deceleration time would need to be built into any calculation for how long it will take to get there.

...of course, if we had a sci-fi style "inertial damper" or "anti-grav", that would change things...But we don't.

believe it or not time to accelerate or deaccelerate is plentiful. in fact you may even want to accelerate slower than that for practical reasons.

if you discount acceleration time a trip to Alpha Proxima at .5 c would take 8.5 years. well it takes about 2 months to accelerate at one Gee to .5 c. you can see in the grand scheme of things that does not really detract much from the appeal of the trip.

and you only feel gravity for the acceleration and deacceleration phase. so for 4 months of the trip you have gravity. but when you have spent 8 years in microgravity you are medically screwed when you get there. no away team for you.

oh but if you take your time accelerating you could have gravity for the whole trip.