Alpha Centauri B may have "superhabitable" worlds

ImaFungi

Obviously probes are expensive, but why havent there been more sent on interstellar missions? Of course voyager is debatably just exiting the solar system now after 40 something years, but are there actual plans to get moving on sending probes to check out the nearest star systems?

Good question. There have been several proposed interstellar missions: Project Orion, Project Daedalus, Project Longshot, Project Dragonfly Project Icarus (ongoing under study) as well as an actual interstellar precursor mission called FOCAL which NASA/JPL are looking at which would send a probe to our Sun's gravitational lens around 550 to 1000 AU or 0.015 light years (where telescopes can see things in extraordinary detail like continents and oceans on an earthlike planet or detecting a 1 kilowatt radio transmitter halfway across the Galaxy.)

That's about as far as it goes. The cost of such a probe to a nearby star is not going to be cheap, the energy requirements to get one there in a human lifetime are staggering and thus expensive.

Ideas have been put forward for slower probes but they fail to generate a lot of popular interest because few people are interested in something which may not arrive at its destination for 200-400 years.

There have also been discussions about pointing NASA's New Horizon's Pluto and Kuiper Belt probe, our fastest spacecraft to date (which will flyby Pluto next year and explore the Kuiper belt later) at a nearby star for a journey of several thousand years. But this would largely be symbolic as New Horizons was never designed to survive long enough to do any useful science when and if it arrived millennia from now.

And also is there something to the idea (in regards to doing a little to help the time factor) to sending a probe in the direction of "behind our stars direction of travel"? Meaning if the sun is traveling in a revolution galactically, then if we were to send a probe in the opposite direction of travel, we can assume the stars behind would (obviously not exactly because such different velocities involved) 'meet the probe halfway'? Like the difference between throwing a tennis ball out of a moving car to the car ahead of you as opposed to the car driving behind you, ever towards you.

Right. It would be attractive to send a probe to a star which was moving in our general direction since the two objects would be moving closer to each other. I am not sure of the kinematics of the nearest stars with respect to our Sun's movement through space but it would be worth studying which if any nearby star might have such a motion.

I suspect that most nearby stars share similar kinematics, motion through space around the galaxy, as the Sun (which would make that idea moot) but that's a huge assumption and speculation on my part.

At best you'd only gain perhaps a around million to a couple million of miles an hour. The solar system travels at an average speed of 515,000 miles per hour (828,000 kilometers per hour).

crazyewok

JadeStar

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.

I thought 30% was possible?

I know Daedalus was 12%c and had a 50 year mission time.

0.25-0.30c is reallllllllyyyyy pushing it.

That's still mindblowingly fast. Just not as fast as most of us would like.

reply to post by peck420


You build a self sustaining Colony in an asteroid and fly it to a star. Would take many generations but we can travel out to the closer Stars even now if we chose to do so.

Xeven
reply to post by peck420

 

You build a self sustaining Colony in an asteroid and fly it to a star. Would take many generations but we can travel out to the closer Stars even now if we chose to do so.

Yep. And this would be the likely scenario if for some reason we had to evacuate Earth due to some oncoming catastrophe which we'd be powerless to do anything about.

This scenario (without the ship being a hollowed out asteroid part) and many associated issues were examined in a recent documentary called Evacuate Earth:

I am of the opinion that as soon as we know of an almost 100% habitable planet around a nearby star that we don't wait for doomsday to launch such a colony ship but we do it as soon as possible in the same way that the great cathedrals of Europe weren't built with those present in mind but those yet to come.

JadeStar

crazyewok

JadeStar

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.

I thought 30% was possible?

I know Daedalus was 12%c and had a 50 year mission time.

0.25-0.30c is reallllllllyyyyy pushing it.

That's still mindblowingly fast. Just not as fast as most of us would like.

edit on 31-1-2014 by JadeStar because: (no reason given)

Welp; lots of proposals out there where people have studied the top end of various propulsion schemes. for example fusion *used* to have a pretty well agreed upon top end of about 15 percent C. Antimatter had a pushing it top end of 30 percent or so. Except for one scheme which has always had a top end of .92 c.

but these were based on the maximum efficiency of each propulsion methods ability to translate the power to KE reaction force. and how much energy is typically wasted in unrecoverable energy.

it turns out some folks studied the magnetic nozzle part of an antimatter drive. they used computer modelling to optimize the nozzle design. doing so doubled the recoverable power. so antimatter has a top end of .69 c. (the tethered design that the avatar ship was patterned on actually already a theoretical top end of .92) but the efficiency factor does not apply or was not applied to derive the .92 figure.

magnetic nozzle optimization should work on propulsion schemes other than the ones studied because they are similar in mode of operation. so fusion should top end at 30 percent or so now.

*the avatar's ship was loosely based upon what is called a tethered antimatter scheme. the movie only differs in that the real scheme did not have a ridged frame like in the movie. it has a cable. this save so much weight that the ship get a huge bonus in TWR an thus can go faster than the other antimatter schemes. heck of a way to go to the stars. basically its like a Gigantic pod race from star wars. heres a link to the actual deal's wiki

en.wikipedia.org...

OH; thanks for the welcome to the forum

Addendum: it may be science fictiony but i have read somewhere about a way to take advantage of an effect similar to Dr Whites Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster to grab even more power from the exhaust of fusion or antimatter engines.

reply to post by JadeStar


Nice I feel solar sails/solar panel would be the best, with plenty of room on board to store energy, storing solar energy, months or years prior to the expedition there could be fields of solar panels harvesting and storing solar energy just for the mission. I dont know much about this stuff, but I imagine the biggest hurdle would be storing all of that energy, and the system that can utilize/tap it for propulsion. And then with solar sail on the ship and panels, it can utilize the radiation from the sun to boost it out of the solar system, then if it needed to further accelerate, tap into all the solar reserves harvested from earth. Perhaps this system with normal rocket propulsion techniques just to get it off earth.

JadeStar
I am of the opinion that as soon as we know of an almost 100% habitable planet around a nearby star that we don't wait for doomsday to launch such a colony ship but we do it as soon as possible in the same way that the great cathedrals of Europe weren't built with those present in mind but those yet to come.

I agree yet it is funny we cant even sort ourseleves out on this earth, and to pool so much time and energy and resources into some people going to another one has some kind of humor about it. Perhaps things will be better with our knowledge now, and then, at maintaining a 'more perfect' society/community, certainly helps to have a smaller population. But if I know anything about humans there will still be plenty of conflict and drama to come.

and there are so many "Woo Woo" ideas out there that are getting some preliminary validation by real non "woo woo" research that at least one of them has to work. i am not deriding Woo Woo science. i love it. i keep it compartmentalized away from solid science though so i can speak in both genres: respectable physics and delicious gooey fringe science.

i love reading that at least mathematically a gluon and a graviton are best buddies. or when NASA puts out a little couch change to study a Warp technology or Quantum thruster. or when i read about a synthesized monopole and the hunt to find real monopoles. there is so much stuff that's causing "respectable" skeptics heads to explode like in the (really bad) movie scanners that i am in heaven right now

stormbringer1701
Welp; lots of proposals out there where people have studied the top end of various propulsion schemes. for example fusion *used* to have a pretty well agreed upon top end of about 15 percent C. Antimatter had a pushing it top end of 30 percent or so. Except for one scheme which has always had a top end of .92 c.

but these were based on the maximum efficiency of each propulsion methods ability to translate the power to KE reaction force. and how much energy is typically wasted in unrecoverable energy.

it turns out some folks studied the magnetic nozzle part of an antimatter drive. they used computer modelling to optimize the nozzle design. doing so doubled the recoverable power. so antimatter has a top end of .69 c. (the tethered design that the avatar ship was patterned on actually already a theoretical top end of .92) but the efficiency factor does not apply or was not applied to derive the .92 figure.

magnetic nozzle optimization should work on propulsion schemes other than the ones studied because they are similar in mode of operation. so fusion should top end at 30 percent or so now.


en.wikipedia.org...

Yeah, but have fun trying to get your hands on a couple thousand tons of antimatter. I guess the same applies for the warp drive though...

JohnnySasaki

Yeah, but have fun trying to get your hands on a couple thousand tons of antimatter. I guess the same applies for the warp drive though...

well we really don't have anything that is purpose built for antimatter production yet. at least not for antiprotons. but that is changing. plus more and more natural antimatter sources are being discovered. the radiation belts of the Jovian planets, some of their moons, the heliopause, certain regions around the sun, the earth's own van allen belts and even thunderstorm lightning bolts. we could make a fleet of antimatter grazing harvesters...

there is now a dedicated positron maker the size of half a desktop. the concept could go into a anti-proton maker too but antiprotons are 2000 times more massive (takes that much more energy input to create) than a positron.

furthermore; both production and containment of antimatter appears to be following Moore's law.

storing antimatter may not be as hard as we think. (antihydrogen is a diamagnetic material.)

Monopoles can annihilate matter (without being itself destroyed even) just like antimatter can. if we find monopoles it's on monopoles can be used to construct a marble sized blackhole which could be used as a power source.

oh yeah... there are antimatter fusion hybrid schemes that require nanograms of antimatter to work. and schemes that require micrograms. these are sufficient for in solar system travel. travel to the Oort cloud boundary and if you consider probes then they are suitable for about a a 400 year sortie to alpha proxima. this is pre-optimization i think so you could halve that time potentially even with something like ICAN and AIMSTAR.

most stars are actually red shifting. Barnard's is one of a couple of nearby stars that are blue shifting. if you want to know which stars are coming our way you can look up thier proper motion and radial velocity and dopler shift direction. but on the scale of stellar distances it is not much of a difference because naturally they are also in the same galactic orbital motion as earth. due to the fact of multiple motions and gravity wells working on anything within the galaxy you have to very sophisticated to take advantage of the motion of systems behind you. it's not so simple. probably your path would have to be a natural Einstein Geodesic path to get any short cut out of it. you could do it but it isn't easy.

Ross 248, currently at a distance of 10.3 light-years, has a radial velocity of −81 km/s. In about 31,000 years it may be the closest star to the Sun for several millennia, with a minimum distance of 0.927 parsecs (3.02 light-years) in 36,000 years.[33] Gliese 445, currently at a distance of 17.6 light-years, has a radial velocity of −119 km/s. In about 40,000 years it will be the closest star for a period of several thousand years.[33]

Barnard's Star is approaching the Sun so rapidly that around 11,700 AD, it will be 3.8 light years from the Sun - and thus the closest star to our own.

JadeStar

crazyewok

JadeStar

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.

I thought 30% was possible?

I know Daedalus was 12%c and had a 50 year mission time.

0.25-0.30c is reallllllllyyyyy pushing it.

That's still mindblowingly fast. Just not as fast as most of us would like.

edit on 31-1-2014 by JadeStar because: (no reason given)

Hey that would be fast enough for me!

Cant break the rules of relativity any more than you can break the laws of thermodynamics.

crazyewok



Hey that would be fast enough for me!

Cant break the rules of relativity any more than you can break the laws of thermodynamics.

you can't break the rules of relativity (as far as it goes) but like newton it will be refined in extreme circumstances. Newton is still valid. Relativity merely applies to extreme circumstances where Newton isn't as accurate a model. Not only that but people don't really understand that relativity does not exclude all forms of either FTL or apparent FTL globally nor does it exclude some forms of time travel. it just excludes most forms of those things and people make the blanket statements that it excludes those things. relativity for example does not completely explain extremes or rotation or absolute verses relative motion as one example. Relativity does not require gravitons but QM does.

stormbringer1701

crazyewok



Hey that would be fast enough for me!

Cant break the rules of relativity any more than you can break the laws of thermodynamics.

you can't break the rules of relativity (as far as it goes) but like newton it will be refined in extreme circumstances. Newton is still valid. Relativity merely applies to extreme circumstances where Newton isn't as accurate a model. Not only that but people don't really understand that relativity does not exclude all forms of either FTL or apparent FTL globally nor does it exclude some forms of time travel. it just excludes most forms of those things and people make the blanket statements that it excludes those things. relativity for example does not completely explain extremes or rotation or absolute verses relative motion as one example. Relativity does not require gravitons but QM does.

I said you cant break it, didnt say you couldnt bend it

true.

here is my thread on monopoles:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

the synthetic monopole they created did exactly what the dirac monopole was predicted to do to an electron cloud. it created a big spiral hole through the center of it ( i need to think about what this means...I am sure it has ramifications for quantum tech.) i think that is a pretty good validation of Dirac's hundred year old prediction and that it probably means that Dirac's monopole does exist.

monopoles have fueled many a science fiction book because monopoles of various types and flavors do so much neat stuff that facilitates a space faring civilization. matter conversion drives, super strength materials, artificial black holes even catalytic creation of more monopoles. a monopole drive is an antimatter drive with half the fuel and the antimatter proxy (the monopoles) are never consumed.


EDIT: i bet you could use monopole matter to detect hard to get particles and signatures in miniature form of device. things like gravitons, neutrinos, gamma rays and x rays. i bet you could make telescopes, mega powerful DE weapons, communications equipment and things that are impossible with normal matter.

for instance a graviton detector would have to be the size of jupiter to detect a single graviton. a neutrino detector involved many cubic meters of ice, a gamma ray detecter is pretty bulky... but monopole matter is extremely dense (some varieties) and extremely tiny.

reply to post by stormbringer1701


Monopoles dont seem to be possible. I mean technically if you take a bar magnet and cover one pole with a nonmagnetic material is that a monopole? In essence would that not be what a fundamental monopole would be, a 3d object, where one end has an electric charge (for that is what dictates magnetism) and the other end is...I dont even know?

ImaFungi
reply to post by stormbringer1701

 

Monopoles dont seem to be possible. I mean technically if you take a bar magnet and cover one pole with a nonmagnetic material is that a monopole? In essence would that not be what a fundamental monopole would be, a 3d object, where one end has an electric charge (for that is what dictates magnetism) and the other end is...I dont even know?

and yet if you don't have at least one monopole the universe itself could not exist. the monopole is necessary to fix the value of one of fundamental constants of the universe and standard model. which is why Dirac postulated it's existence in the first place. and the synthetic one behave as Dirac predicted it would. synthetic monopoles have also spontaneously developed as an emergent phenomenon in solidstate physics experiments.

some versions of monopole are the ends of a type of string that froze into the fabric of the universe as it cooled after the big bang. essentially those are not three dimensional because the rest of the string is inaccessible. those are called topological defects and are a kind of particle that is not a particle in the traditional sense.

I'm rooting for the monopole

stormbringer1701

ImaFungi
reply to post by stormbringer1701

 

Monopoles dont seem to be possible. I mean technically if you take a bar magnet and cover one pole with a nonmagnetic material is that a monopole? In essence would that not be what a fundamental monopole would be, a 3d object, where one end has an electric charge (for that is what dictates magnetism) and the other end is...I dont even know?

and yet if you don't have at least one monopole the universe itself could not exist. the monopole is necessary to fix the value of one of fundamental constants of the universe and standard model. which is why Dirac postulated it's existence in the first place. and the synthetic one behave as Dirac predicted it would. synthetic monopoles have also spontaneously developed as an emergent phenomenon in solidstate physics experiments.

I'm rooting forthe monopole

Can you expand on what you mean if there wasnt at least one monopole the universe could not exist, what is the constant it needs to fix? Well if they really made a synthetic monopole I guess that proves that there was at least one monopole in the universe. Can you describe what a monopole would actually be, theoretically how it would exist and physically exist and be, what its nature of charge would be? Because charged particles are 3d, and because they have spin, this implies that they are not isomorphic if that is the proper term. They are not like a perfect marble which can travel through space and interact with things predictably. A charged particle like the electron is a magnet itself because of this, and a magnet itself is only electrons that share a common alignment. So would a monopole be an isomorphic particle of charge that on all surrounding sides of itself would only attract to one pole? I just dont understand how this would be possible, being as most likely the reason electrons have the characteristics they do in terms of magnetism is the mean in which their fundamental nature, charge, and spin, interact with the coupled EM field, which needs to be reacted with the show any signs of magnetism, attraction or repulsion. If a particle was only of 1 charge, it (like all charge and the meaning of charge) would be interacting with the surrounding field in a certain manner, and the nature of this interaction could not be equal on all sides, the reason boles exist is because an object which spins reacts with a medium differently according to the relative views of it. Like how you can look down at a sphere spinning clockwise, and up at the same spinning sphere and claim its spinning counter clockwise.