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bhroomshroom
Shnoob

Registered: 10/16/19
Posts: 10
Loc: Central Florida
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Space travel
#26306475 - 11/08/19 04:07 AM (4 years, 6 months ago) |
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How soon do you think it's gunna take before we can travel to the edge interstellar space?
-------------------- I get lost trying to figure out the meaning of outer existence. To the point that it drives me off the deep end.... into a big puffy cube cap. Jk I'm still trying to find one.
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mAver
The Banished



Registered: 05/25/18
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Well, we already got there with our minds... Now the true challenge is to get there with our bodies.
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Morel Guy
Stranger


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Re: Space travel [Re: mAver]
#26306640 - 11/08/19 07:05 AM (4 years, 6 months ago) |
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Too many problems on Earth for that much investment. It takes over a decade to reach outside the solar system. At that, there is not objective other than to try.
Mars is the next objective. Perhaps after that some of the moons in the solar system.
-------------------- "in sterquiliniis invenitur in stercore invenitur" In filth it will be found in dung it will be found
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Antigov



Registered: 03/17/19
Posts: 792
Loc: Deep within the BibleBelt
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I think you would have to colonize the inner solar system first, then the outer before we could ever think about interstellar travel. Even if we don’t nuke ourselves into oblivion, it’s hundreds of years away at best.
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Morel Guy
Stranger


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Re: Space travel [Re: Antigov] 1
#26306757 - 11/08/19 08:42 AM (4 years, 6 months ago) |
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True. We don't have enough resources in space yet. It would be easier with bases established for docking stations. More missions to put supplies in space.
You don't want to drive cross country with all your supplies. It's nice to have hotels and gas stations.
-------------------- "in sterquiliniis invenitur in stercore invenitur" In filth it will be found in dung it will be found
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nooneman


Registered: 04/24/09
Posts: 14,714
Loc: Utah
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Several thousand years, minimum. Probably more like 10,000 to 100,000 years. Even reaching mars is a colossal undertaking, very risky, costing unbelievable amounts of money and time. Reaching the edge of the solar system in a manned expedition is almost unthinkable.
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LogicaL Chaos
Ascension Energy & Alien UFOs




Registered: 05/12/07
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Re: Space travel [Re: nooneman]
#26313176 - 11/11/19 07:58 AM (4 years, 6 months ago) |
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I would say we are not that far off. Several thousand years but not 10 thousand. Look how far we advanced from just 2,000 years ago? 2,000 years ago, we were basically just getting out of the stone age. The advancements in technology in the last hundred years have been nothing short of incredible.
Theres some really cool theoretical technologies being thought up for the upcoming trip to Mars. One is the VASIMR Drive: https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/travelinginspace/future_propulsion.html
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What should a future spacecraft engine be able to do? Certainly, one major goal would be for it to allow spacecraft to travel through the solar system more quickly than they can now. While a lot of things have changed in over 40 years, today's spacecraft are still traveling at about the same speed that John Glenn did when he became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. One possible way to change that would be the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). Not only would VASIMR allow for faster space travel, it would have some pretty incredible side benefits, as well. For example, NASA researchers believe that VASIMR would be able to travel to Mars much more quickly than a contemporary chemical-powered rocket, and then, once there, to refuel on Mars for the return flight to Earth. The VASIMR engine could also even help protect astronauts from the dangerous effects of radiation during their trip. In the less-distant future, VASIMR could even help keep the International Space Station (ISS) in orbit without requiring extra fuel to be brought up from Earth.
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VASIMR is a plasma-based propulsion system. An electric power source is used to ionize fuel into plasma. Electric fields heat and accelerate the plasma while the magnetic fields direct the plasma in the proper direction as it is ejected from the engine, creating thrust for the spacecraft. The engine can even vary the amount of thrust generated, allowing it to increase or decrease its acceleration. It even features an "afterburner" mode that sacrifices fuel efficiency for additional speed. Possible fuels for the VASIMR engine could include hydrogen, helium, and deuterium.
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Although VASIMR is still years away from being used in space, Chang-Diaz said that it has already shown great promise during tests on Earth. So, it is entirely possible that the engine that will carry the first person to Mars is already running in a laboratory on Earth.
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Morel Guy
Stranger


Registered: 01/23/13
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I was watching Pluto and they said that the visible universe is thought to be only 4% of the Universe. So visible as what we see with Hubble?
Cause if 2 trillion galaxies is only 4% of the Universe.
-------------------- "in sterquiliniis invenitur in stercore invenitur" In filth it will be found in dung it will be found
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Loaded Shaman
Psychophysiologist



Registered: 03/02/15
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Where's the "edge" in the first place? Are we even aware of a physical boundary to space? How could we travel to it, then?
--------------------
  "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance." — Confucius
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StygianKnight
A Mushroom

Registered: 03/12/12
Posts: 2,717
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Interstellar space would most likely mean a full colony type ship and will probably happen only once we’ve gotten rid of this planet bound idea and build floating habitats that mine gravity weak asteroids and moons so that large amounts of dense rocks can be moved with ease. Or unless we have solid confirmation of a habitable world that’s our target.
Quote:
Where’s the edge?
It’s still in question where the exact edge is, but the interstellar edge or the heliopause is generally defined as where the solar winds no longer dominate against the interstellar medium. So the charged particles from the sun create a kind of bubble of outward pressure that runs into the tiny amount of randomly moving gas particles in interstellar space. The exact distance is some 74-121 AU away as the bubble isn’t spherical. (AU being the average distance of the earth to the sun).
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Morel Guy
Stranger


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Right now it cost around $10,000 for every pound of payload put into space.
-------------------- "in sterquiliniis invenitur in stercore invenitur" In filth it will be found in dung it will be found
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FungiMaster
Entrepreneur


Registered: 10/31/19
Posts: 998
Loc: Bay Area, CA, USA
Last seen: 4 years, 5 months
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Humans, thousands of years possibly. Aliens, have that tech maybe or just travel long distances and X speed at put up with the time. I don't think star trek or star wars is possible, light speed and all.
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Morel Guy
Stranger


Registered: 01/23/13
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Who knows. There are 2 trillion estimated galaxies. We have only our imagination to guess.
-------------------- "in sterquiliniis invenitur in stercore invenitur" In filth it will be found in dung it will be found
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LogicaL Chaos
Ascension Energy & Alien UFOs




Registered: 05/12/07
Posts: 70,093
Loc: The Inexpressible...
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Well said. 
Also note that the Universe is estimated to be 13 Billion years old. That's a lot of time to develop some pretty sweet technology
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Heruuka
member

Registered: 10/15/99
Posts: 333
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I don't think we'll ever get more advanced than when our current technological push comes to an end... might even find ourselves in another dark ages in short order. I think the real question is, how much closure to the brink are we going to push the planet before we decide this is unsustainable.
As soon as we started farming wheat (or when wheat domesticated us, depending on how you look at it), we were headed towards our own destruction. This pace of growth is entirely unsustainable and has left us with the idea that we don't need to actually know anything, we just need to be able to look it up. Because of that, we don't. We're not aware of the actual state of the world because we live through the lens of technology almost exclusively, where the means are invisible and the ends are better technology.
We don't know what all of this is costing us and we don't care because we believe our ascendancy into an intergalactic species is part of the plan. We feel entitled to it all and so never ask ourselves whether or not we can afford it, after all The Jetsons, right?
We consume like we're the last generation and burn non-renewable resources without any thought paid to future generations or environmental consequences because we believe in technology like a god; something that will save us from ourselves and whatever ails us. Please watch this trailer, then watch the movie, then watch his other movie on netflix "manufactured landscapes". Ideally you watch Manufactured Landscapes first, so you can get an idea of how much we've turned the knob up on this machine.
I just got back from surveying damage to reefs in the Bahamas and up the east coast. We are in a time of newly destructive weather, where things we could expect once a century are now happening every other year. Much like the organisms in the ocean, we are now in a time where we wont have time to clean up(adapt) before the next one hits(storm, fire...fire storm, etc.). I visited a favorite diving spot to make sure it was ok. It's a little cove that's surrounded by rock cliffs so what could happen? the storm surge was high enough to go OVER the cliffs and pull down TONNES of sand into a thriving reef environment. What was once a 20' deep paradise of biodiversity, like you'd see in your local aquarium, is now 4' deep and virginal sandy bottom. There's no fixing that and thousands of marine creatures in that spot alone were erased from the earth like shaking an etch-a-sketch. I am probably the only living witness to that change and to a casual observer, it looks entirely normal now because you can't see what's buried alive underneath.
We've let this happen because the air is cleaner than its ever been where the money is being spent, and things are cheaper and easier to get than they every have been. The globalized economy has moved our emissions to countries where emissions data isn't public information, and is in the best interest of terrifyingly powerful governments to suppress. We do know from satellite and photos that the Chinese and Indian people are choking on our greed, however, but it's not our problem because they're choosing not to make things with better environmental standards, right? is it the groundskeeper or the homeowner's responsibility for how their lawn is cut? If your only constraint is money, that shit is getting done as cheaply as possible by people that likely don't have the education to understand the harms of their work, both to themselves and the environment. Out of sight, entirely out of mind, but not out of the air or the water, which we all ultimately share.
Think about what oil is. It's time. It's sunlight gathered by little ... mosses, lets say, over hundreds of thousands of years, which then turns to peat, humus, and eventually coal over hundreds of millions. This process is only about 0.0002% efficient, so if you took a square meter of prime agricultural pasture in new Mexico, under perfect conditions, one barrel of oil would take 300,000 years to accumulate enough calories to make one barrel of oil. We're taking this time and burning it to make it feel like we're really advancing the species but we're actually just compressing time so that we're burning 400+ years per year (citation available) to enjoy these fantasies of exploring the cosmos. This is where the idea of a carbon "tax" comes in, for those not in the know. It isn't a tax, it is repricing something that has costs we haven't been factoring into its price. It would be like if you bought something for $15 bucks but found out you had to spend $60 bucks to throw it out because its hazardous, you'd feel like maybe that should be on the label and probably incorporated in the price because otherwise, you're not spending $60, you're throwing it out your window.
I'm concerned that we're even considering space travel right now because it makes people feel like they don't need to worry as much about our planet. NONE of us will ever go to space let alone live on another planet, and if we did, it would be a terrible life. Think living at the bottom of the ocean if you were the only thing in the ocean. Recycling is similarly damaging because it makes people feel fine about creating insane amounts of waste. It's good to separate CLEAN materials that can easily be reused but if there's food contamination, the whole lot goes in the garbage. If you don't wash your recycling, don't recycle. You're making a shitty system entirely pointless. This is our one home and its on fire and we're still burning shit inside because we're not sure if its on fire ENOUGH for us to bother, yet. It's an insane reaction to an existential crisis.
I even wonder if catalytic converters were a good idea. There was a time when sitting in traffic was suffocating and we could see, taste, and smell the emissions we were releasing into the air. I think the invisibility of it is what allows us to litter so blatantly without any concern. Your tailpipe is a CO2 cylinder that you're opening full blast every time you turn on your car. We pull gas from the ground without thinking, and release any invisible waste into the air without thinking. next time you're on the road, imagine trash coming out of the tailpipes rather than little puffs of steam. We're getting better and better at hiding the truth from ourselves and we need to have the courage to stop.
We are the dumbest and most easily mislead batch of humans in a time that needs the most self-sacrificing, brave, and open-minded humans that have ever existed. Our world is on fire and we're talking about space travel, like planning a vacation while your house is on fire.
Time to put the computer to good use and get educated and involved. Here's NASA's take on the state and scale of the problem, since we seem to still trust scientists working in space even if we don't trust any others. The Climate Time Machine I found to be particularly useful at summarizing where we're at.
WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?
You can look at your life and see what you can do to reduce the size of your footprint on the planet. There are people in china that are building entire lives around assembling a couple of your gadgets, so you can manage with a little less. We need to quickly, and hopefully nondestructively, change the goal posts for success and accomplishment from accumulating as much wealth as possible to doing as much as we can with as little as we can. Something we should all think about: how much do you care about your best friends career successes? your spouse or SO? Not enough that we should be making it our primary focus. We need to build smaller spaces that can be heated and cooled using electricity. No more recreational flying, driving, or hobbies that involve massive consumption (summiting Everest needs to have the same social weight as shooting a lion).
Basically, we need to give all this up before the people that make all this cheap shit can afford it and start burning their own gas... if that hasn't already started happening. Either way, it's the only way that we survive this. We can either try to live with less or kill the planet in the next hundred years. It's that simple a choice and we may have already made the wrong one. Even if its too late, it's never too late to make it less worse. Right now we're looking at this stabilizing (if we stopped all emissions today) around 1.5-2 degrees c. That's disastrous, but ultimately survivable. Where we're going, though, is not survivable for anyone or anything. Look at Venus if you need to get properly scared cause that's what we're flirting with.
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Morel Guy
Stranger


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Re: Space Travel [Re: Heruuka]
#26342666 - 11/24/19 02:39 PM (4 years, 5 months ago) |
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It's true that there is not one good escape plan to leave Earth.
Far too many technologies need to progress for there to be viable space travel. It's like comparing Christopher Columbus's ships with today's nuclear submarine. That'd be a start at least.
-------------------- "in sterquiliniis invenitur in stercore invenitur" In filth it will be found in dung it will be found
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JohnRainy
Stranger

Registered: 07/09/19
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Quote:
Far too many technologies need to progress for there to be viable space travel. It's like comparing Christopher Columbus's ships with today's nuclear submarine.
I don't think that analogy is nearly powerful enough.
Christopher Columbus's ships took about 10 weeks to sail the Atlantic Ocean. It takes a nuclear submarine maybe 3 days to do that.
The nearest star to Earth is proxima centari, and the fastest thing humans have ever made that's leaving the solar system, Voyager, is traveling at 17 km/s. It would take 70,000 years to get there at that speed. We can't work with that.
And that's just the nearest star. It only gets crazier and crazier from there. Plus, speed is only one of the myriad of problems to be overcome for manned interstellar travel. Speed itself is a problem too, because, what happens if your spacecraft hits a speck of dust at some percentage of light speed?
We are here and we can't leave. There is nowhere else we can get to. Ever.
I think humans don't like to admit that. We are quarantined by nature. Probably for the best.
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Morel Guy
Stranger


Registered: 01/23/13
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Well I'd like to say it doesn't hurt to dream, but it can. Failed dreams hurt pretty bad.
Who knows what physics will come up with. Fact is we know only about 4% of the Universe.
-------------------- "in sterquiliniis invenitur in stercore invenitur" In filth it will be found in dung it will be found
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chibiabos
Cosmic Pond Scum



Registered: 03/16/17
Posts: 4,180
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Quote:
JohnRainy said:
Quote:
Far too many technologies need to progress for there to be viable space travel. It's like comparing Christopher Columbus's ships with today's nuclear submarine.
I don't think that analogy is nearly powerful enough.
Christopher Columbus's ships took about 10 weeks to sail the Atlantic Ocean. It takes a nuclear submarine maybe 3 days to do that.
Columbus also stopped at Madeira and the Azores along the way. Every expedition back then pretty much counted on being able to land somewhere to take on food and water. The point wasn't really to get to a particular destination as quickly as possible and you had way more than you could bring with you at your disposal, in theory.
If you really want to compare space travel to seafaring then we're more or less at the point where we've discovered that you can lash sticks together and float shit down a river.
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Morel Guy
Stranger


Registered: 01/23/13
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I have hope tech will be discovered. Doubt I'll be around as I am now.
Human history is so skewed, it's easy to lose sight.
-------------------- "in sterquiliniis invenitur in stercore invenitur" In filth it will be found in dung it will be found
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