51–60 of 70 posts
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We really are on a fragile blue ball doing loop-de-loops through space!
If you shrunk the sun down to the size of a ping-pong ball, earth would be a poppy seed orbiting ten meters away. Pluto would be 100m away. The Voyagers would be 300m away. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be 500 miles away.
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Problem is we don't really know where to go next. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin tried to cook up alternate space travel methods for years and still couldn't come up with anything better than the same basic rocket model that put Gagarin into space. Most theorized "warp drives" either require more energy than humanity is capable of producing or necessitate breaking a law of physics or two just to move anything organic or lar…
I recall the story too: if I recall correctly, it was actually a branch of chemistry we had missed, not a math problem per se. The aliens stormed off the ships with muskets and we slaughtered 'em.
It's also my working theory of why we won in Independence Day the movie :) Aliens were never warring among themselves and/or allowing any kind of a hacking culture, so didn't think to secure their systems!
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There's the EM drive, maybe. Some recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995125 If you can create trust out of electricty (ion drives also come to mind), then if you have nuclear power or fusion, things get interesting again in terms of propulsion. To reach orbit, there are a bunch of interesting proposals: skyhooks (i.e. space elevator light), launch loops, railguns.
The EM drive is reported as producing maybe 1 mN per kW. The largest power plant in the world produces about 22 GW of energy--at that ratio, an EM drive could produce maybe 22 kN. The first stage of the Saturn V rockets produced 35,000 kN of thrust. As a practical engine, EM drives are worse than chemical rockets or even ion thrusters (which produce about 25-250 mN/kW, according to Wikipedia).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you shrunk the sun down to the size of a ping-pong ball, earth would be a poppy seed orbiting ten meters away. Pluto would be 100m away. The Voyagers would be 300m away. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be 500 miles away.
Proxima Centauri is so far away that's depressing...
I wish my code runs without maintenance for so long as these "babies" fly.
Then I read about VxWorks being used for space exploration and was glad they never tried to read data from curiosity through ftp...
This is all very well, but where are they in the night sky is what I would like to know. And no I'm not expecting to see them, just to think about them in the right direction.
Right Ascension: 17h 11m 31.0s Declination: 11° 57' 50.9" (J2000) http://theskylive.com/voyager1-tracker It's in the constellation Ophiucus. It'll be doing a flyby of Gliese 445 in 40,000 years, but it'll be brick'd by then. http://www.space.com/22783-voyager-1-interstellar-space-star...
And since we won't even survive this century due to climate change, it'll be "a relic of a civilization long gone."
As amazing as space technologies are, we are in the stone ages when it comes to spaceflight: > Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 2 is traveling from Earth, the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at certain times of the year. We don't even have the technology to escape the sun's gravity without needing a gravitational slingshot from other planets, and that still leaves us with a…
> we are in the stone ages when it comes to spaceflight Indeed, only 59 years since we first put something into earth orbit. We're just getting warmed up!
Literally, sadly.
This is all very well, but where are they in the night sky is what I would like to know. And no I'm not expecting to see them, just to think about them in the right direction.
This shows their positions on a sky chart: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=voyager+1,+voyager+2+sk...