Amazing Pictures from Hubble
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Dan Neely wrote:
Even at .01c
Even at this speed some of the jumps between habitable worlds where new material could be gathered would be thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. No system in a ship can last this long, things wear out, no life-support system is 100% closed so eventually they would run out of resources (that is, if the enforced confinement hadn't driven them all mad, or to kill each other, or both, long before they got here).
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
Who said the colony ships had to be crewed during the transit. Just include genetic information in a von Nuemann probe's database and have it build uterine replicators and nannybots along with it's own successors. For that matter i lowballed the speed, .1c is probably feasible for laser sails, which would put uninhabited systems that could be mined for supplies a few decades apart. A civilization using space habitats wouldn't need a terrestrial planet in the first place, and the evidence that all non giant stars have planetary systems of some sort is becoming overwhelming. Studies of angular momentum had made it very likely even before the first extra solar planet had been spotted: Smaller stars didn't have enough in their own spin, the sun's spin momentum + orbital momentum of the planets (mostly Jupiter) added up to the expected value.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
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It may just be me, but why is it that the images (stunning as they are) always seem to have at least one star that has a "star" burst filter effect applied to it (compass like light rays emanating from the star)? Is this deliberately applied by Nasa or is this some sort aberration of the equipment they use? To me this effect is very distracting.
Peter Hayward Ngarkat Technologies South Australia,
They're Diffraction Spikes[^]. Any standard configuration reflecting telescope will have them, and none of the variants that don't scale to larger sizes. The correctors that Schmidt and Mastsukov cassegrains use suffer the same problems that limited the size of refractors: the far greater difficulty of creating a volume of perfect glass vs a perfect surface, and that eventually the glass distorts under its own weight and can no longer maintain a proper optical figure. Off Axis designs are either made by making a giant mirror and cutting smaller chunks out of it's side (impractical for bigger scopes) or use rube goldberg optics to try and correct for the astigmatism caused by tilting the primary mirror. These also tend to have much slower focal ratios (~f/10) to aid in that, while the giant research scopes have extremely fast ratios (as low as f/.1) to keep the image scale/field of view reasonable and to reduce weight.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
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Well it's not infinite so the probability matters. Possible and probable aren't the same. It's possible for the chemical reaction in an explosion to reverse but it's so improbable that it has never happened anywhere and never will.
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
You wrote: it's so improbable that it has never happened anywhere and never will. A bit of nit picking: how does "so improbable that ... never will" differ from impossible? Impossible and improbable aren't the same thing either.
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Who said the colony ships had to be crewed during the transit. Just include genetic information in a von Nuemann probe's database and have it build uterine replicators and nannybots along with it's own successors. For that matter i lowballed the speed, .1c is probably feasible for laser sails, which would put uninhabited systems that could be mined for supplies a few decades apart. A civilization using space habitats wouldn't need a terrestrial planet in the first place, and the evidence that all non giant stars have planetary systems of some sort is becoming overwhelming. Studies of angular momentum had made it very likely even before the first extra solar planet had been spotted: Smaller stars didn't have enough in their own spin, the sun's spin momentum + orbital momentum of the planets (mostly Jupiter) added up to the expected value.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
How do you think the vat-born offspring of such a species would feel, being brought up to know that they were cast adrift in space, never to know their parents or home planet, or if they even still existed? How would you protect a "laser sail" and its crew from collisions when running at 0.1c?
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
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I do not totally disagree with your statement, but to discuss this further will result in my having to turn this into a political conversation, which I'd rather not turn this into, however, there is no doubt that politics were a major, driving force behind our going to the moon; and "yes", our differences with Russia played a key role in the decisions made back then. But 'petty differences' are also what keeps us from achieving even greater things, and I firmly believe that those challenges must be met by everyone on this planet, and not just one nation, and until we can put these child like differences aside and work together, we'll never truly accomplish what we could. ... and I seriously hope, for the continued survival of our species, that one day, our children are able to look past all that, and reach out to the stars, before this planet's time is up, because regardless of what you believe, think, say or do ... Earth will eventually die, and all life on it will die with her, and we cannot stop it.
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTLAmém!
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Just wanted to make certain that the space enthusiasts here, saw the latest jaw dropping Hubble images: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0911c.html[^] http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0911b.html[^] Just incredible stuff. (make certain you click on the images to enlarge them)
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTLOh man, I love this stuff as much as the universe is not understood. I wish that when we die, God gives us a free ride through the universe.
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How do you think the vat-born offspring of such a species would feel, being brought up to know that they were cast adrift in space, never to know their parents or home planet, or if they even still existed? How would you protect a "laser sail" and its crew from collisions when running at 0.1c?
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
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low power forward firing lasers to ionize the ISM and a magnetic field to deflect the charged particles.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
Not much help if you meet one of these![^] At 0.1c even a pea-sized rock is going to do serious damage. 10g at 0.1c has a kinetic energy (0.5*m*v*v) of (thanks to Google): 0.5 x 0.01 kg x 0.1 * c x 0.1 * c = 4.49377589 × 1012 joules I wouldn't want to get in the way of it.
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
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Not much help if you meet one of these![^] At 0.1c even a pea-sized rock is going to do serious damage. 10g at 0.1c has a kinetic energy (0.5*m*v*v) of (thanks to Google): 0.5 x 0.01 kg x 0.1 * c x 0.1 * c = 4.49377589 × 1012 joules I wouldn't want to get in the way of it.
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
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Once the lasers convert them to plasma any gravel they run into can be defected as easily as single atoms. Larger objects would need to be dodged, but are correspondingly much easier to detect.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
My mistake, you said "low power lasers", I think you meant "lasers powerful enough to turn stone to plasma". Running those, and the magnetic deflectors, for decades if not millennia isn't going to come cheap...
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
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My mistake, you said "low power lasers", I think you meant "lasers powerful enough to turn stone to plasma". Running those, and the magnetic deflectors, for decades if not millennia isn't going to come cheap...
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
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Everything is relative. They are low power vs the amount of energy needed for the lasers at the launch site pushing the sail itself.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
But not inconsiderable in their own right. If they can turn stone to plasma, how does the craft avoid being vaporised by the much more powerful pushing laser?
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
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You wrote: it's so improbable that it has never happened anywhere and never will. A bit of nit picking: how does "so improbable that ... never will" differ from impossible? Impossible and improbable aren't the same thing either.
One has a finite but vanishingly small probability, one has a probability of zero.
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
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But not inconsiderable in their own right. If they can turn stone to plasma, how does the craft avoid being vaporised by the much more powerful pushing laser?
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
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Just wanted to make certain that the space enthusiasts here, saw the latest jaw dropping Hubble images: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0911c.html[^] http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0911b.html[^] Just incredible stuff. (make certain you click on the images to enlarge them)
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTLDouglas Troy wrote:
latest jaw dropping Hubble images
Possibly not everyone caught the Nova episode "Monster of the Milky Way". Back in my University days Black-Holes were somewhat conjectural. Nova sketches the techniques, including "adaptive optics" by which these astronomers were able to peer through the intervening dust in order to simply plot the orbits of stars circling our galaxy's core. These plots allow the central mass to be inferred, making a very straightforward proof of the Monster Black Hole.
pg--az
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Just wanted to make certain that the space enthusiasts here, saw the latest jaw dropping Hubble images: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0911c.html[^] http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0911b.html[^] Just incredible stuff. (make certain you click on the images to enlarge them)
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTL