Travel to interstellar planets ...

[Jorge]

There is also a theoretically sound warp drive, where the local space would not be moving at all relative to the ship and would eliminate all problems with particle collisions. So it's not quite sci-fi, and not quite reality yet. But it is entirely possible.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
http://members.shaw.ca/mike.anderton/WarpDrive.pdf

*****************************************************

Okay, Sparko ....... book me on the next 'Warp Drive' flight, will ya?

You've been around the Evo-Faithful too long, Sparko .... you're beginning
to sound like them : "Yeah but it's POSSIBLE !!!" Yeah, it's also "possible"
that at this moment there are gremlins on Mars knitting me a sweater.

Jorge

[lilpixieofterror]

Okay, Sparko ....... book me on the next 'Warp Drive' flight, will ya?

You've been around the Evo-Faithful too long, Sparko .... you're beginning
to sound like them : "Yeah but it's POSSIBLE !!!" Yeah, it's also "possible"
that at this moment there are gremlins on Mars knitting me a sweater.

Or you're just a laughing stock and an embarassment to YEC's and Christians alike. Take your pick..

[Jorge]

I can see quite a few challenges from an engineering and technical side point too. You would need a ship that could run and not have any major break downs for hundreds of even thousands of years and you would need to carry plenty of spare parts to keep everything running during the journey. You would need power supplies and life support systems that are capable of running for those extended amounts of times, without the need for a lot of fuel to run. You would also need some sort of shielding to protect everybody inside and you would need some kind of gravity since weightlessness has been shown to have health problems over the long term. Are these difficult and would they require refinement of current technology as well as newer technology?

I have no doubt about that, but I don't think it would be as impossible as Jorge wants to make it sound.

**********************************************************

No problem, I'll be sure to book you on the next flight out.
That's one sure way of disposing of you ... awww, that was mean!

Any one of hundreds of very real possibilities would end this mission
very quickly. They wouldn't be able to call for service or spare parts,
they would have to carry all of the energy that they will need, they
would have to carry everything - one miscue, one vital component missing,
and the game is permanently over. In any reasonable book, that makes
it "impossible". It's a one-way suicide mission.

When hundreds of years ago people set out on the high seas not knowing
what to expect, they had fish in the ocean and they at least hoped to find
new lands. Here, people would KNOW that no 'fish' exist, no supermarkets,
no repair stations ... NOTHING but empty space. And that's before
introducing any catastrophic threats. Sorry, Terror, but you ain't thinking
this thing through. Your anti-Jorge bias is clouding your judgment yet again.

Jorge

[Jorge]

Thank you for that, Leonhard. However, my specific problems cannot be determined with classical physics--you have to delve into the relativistic effects. (I can't speak for Jorge, and certainly would not want to, as he seems to be off on another hissy-fit.)

1. The biggest problem comes in when you start traveling at any considerable fraction of the speed of light--say, .5 c or so. When that happens, and your ship impacts with a hydrogen atom in space, you don't just get the impact--you also get hard radiation from the relativistic effects.
2. It gets worse when you impact with a larger fragment--a speck of dust. At that speed, you may be creating small fusion events--which means you have pinpoint nuclear explosions every time you impact a grain of interstellar dust. These explosions will not be enough to kill your forward velocity (well, they would eventually, I suppose), but they would be enough to heavily erode and irradiate your forward shielding. You might start out with a perfectly good lead shield, but you'll end up with a radioactive sieve.

A problem with your scenario--you have a lot more mass for the fuel you use to have constant acceleration to the midpoint, then deceleration. Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about this ... I don't remember the name, but it's the one where colonists on Mars are facing severe water shortage because Earth elects an isolationist government.

Very good, technomage ... I take back everything bad that I've ever said about you.

[Just kidding .............. ]

Seriously, those are just some of the points that I've been alluding to.
The kinetic energy effects are devastating and unavoidable.
The high velocity coupled with the fact that space is not a perfect
vacuum makes it so.

Good show!

Jorge

[lilpixieofterror]

No problem, I'll be sure to book you on the next flight out.That's one sure way of disposing of you ... awww, that was mean!

Yet again, you choose to respond with mockery and insult rather than dealing with the substance of what I said.

Any one of hundreds of very real possibilities would end this mission
very quickly. They wouldn't be able to call for service or spare parts,
they would have to carry all of the energy that they will need, they
would have to carry everything - one miscue, one vital component missing, and the game is permanently over. In any reasonable book, that makes it "impossible". It's a one-way suicide mission.

Hummm, too bad I specifically mentioned this and noted that we would need ways to solve these problems too. Do you have a hard time with reading what people say or do you just skip though and/or hear what you want to hear? Plus, the same questions were asked centuries ago when wooden ships of the late 15th century crossed the Atlantic Ocean to reach the Americas. Again, you are trying to make this sound like a huge or impossible problem that can never be solved. In this way, you remind me of the people saying heavier then air flight is impossible, that wireless communication is impossible, or that traveling to space is impossible. You rant at the top of your lungs when well… these problems can and were solved.

When hundreds of years ago people set out on the high seas not knowing
what to expect, they had fish in the ocean and they at least hoped to find
new lands. Here, people would KNOW that no 'fish' exist, no supermarkets,
no repair stations ... NOTHING but empty space. And that's before
introducing any catastrophic threats. Sorry, Terror, but you ain't thinking
this thing through. Your anti-Jorge bias is clouding your judgment yet again.

Yet again, you really should improve your reading comprehension since I specifically said this:

You would need a ship that could run and not have any major break downs for hundreds of even thousands of years and you would need to carry plenty of spare parts to keep everything running during the journey.

Supplies and the reliability of all the systems is a huge problem and one that would have to be solved too. Again, do you have problems with reading what people say or do you just hear what you want to hear and that is it? Everybody has already said all of this, so do you not read what people say or are you just here to rant and rave?

[Sparko]

*****************************************************

Okay, Sparko ....... book me on the next 'Warp Drive' flight, will ya?

You've been around the Evo-Faithful too long, Sparko .... you're beginning
to sound like them : "Yeah but it's POSSIBLE !!!" Yeah, it's also "possible"
that at this moment there are gremlins on Mars knitting me a sweater.

Jorge

That's the best response you have?

[phank]

That's the best response you have?

Actually, it's one of his more germane responses. You're lucky.

[RBerman]

Actually, that makes a certain amount of sense. If you have ships capable of hyperspace travel, they don't need to transit "normal" space to get to where they are going. If they're small ships (like the Starfuries) that are incapable of forming their own jumpgate, they don't have sufficient fuel to attain that kind of speed.

What's that? Am I a B5 geek?

Pretty much, yes.

[Cerebrum123]

I am severely disappointed. After so many posts I expected at least one person to have misquoted Her Serene Highness:

Can you do the sums, Fernandez?

But no-one has.

Roy

That must have happened before I got here. (or on a thread I wasn't involved in)

[rogue06]

Yeah, it's also "possible"
that at this moment there are gremlins on Mars knitting me a sweater.

Jorge

00000jor.jpg

[Cerebrum123]

00000jor.jpg

He's not a gremlin.

[rogue06]

He's not a gremlin.

Killjoy

[Cerebrum123]

Killjoy

This guy is a gremlin.

[gallileo]

Ok fellow cosmo - nuts.

Heres an answer I found on radiation from a physics paper I googled at 'instellar ship shielding'. Wow that was tough.

"Shielding seems to be easy for ship’s velocities below 0.3c; a titanium or aluminum hull of 1 to 2 cm in thickness can provide sufficient protection against the oncoming flow of nucleonic radiation. However, when the ship’s speed is close to the relativistic barrier c, say 0.8 – 0.9c, a windward shield of several meters of titanium or,
more practically, tens meters of water will be needed.."

So, looks like the proposed "Hollowed out asteroid with 60 ft thick steel walls is WAAY over designed..but would work at .1-.9c speeds ! Since we have calculated that our Orion engine can power us to Alpha C in 44 yrs..its a go ! *with current technology of course. This is a 3 generation ship if we make a round trip and get back home by looping around the star.

According to the paper, shielding is an engineering problem that is solvable. Lots easier at low speeds.

Compares rad dose to an unshielded nuclear reactor at higher speeds. But, we shield those routinely for 60 years with 5 ft steel and maybe 10- 20 ft of concrete. So we have proof of concept pretty easy there.

=========================

See RADIATION HAZARD OF RELATIVISTIC INTERSTELLAR FLIGHT

[rogue06]

This guy is a gremlin.

I reiterate. Killjoy.


And, for what it's worth, he isn't Martian