151–160 of 754 posts
To get a spacecraft there it would take: Accelerating at 1g the 1st half, and decelerating at 1g the 2nd half, the traveler would experience 7.3 years of time. For observers it would take 41.8 years at a max speed of 0.998c If you had a near perfect hydrogen -> helium fusion engine, it'd take about 6 million tons of fuel (about the mass of the Pyramids of Egypt or 2,000 Saturn V rockets)
It would take 37 days at warp 6 (assuming we're using the new warp factors established in The Next Generation). I have no idea how much dilithium crystal would be required though.
Depends on the plot needs for the ~~episode~~ journey.
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So, basically, this is cooler than just about any world that's been depicted in sci-fi.
I guess J.J. Abrams is somewhat forgiven for this, then: http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/startrek/images/2/29/Vul... [edited for direct .jpg]
I was reading up about earth alternatives recently, and upon realizing the distance was always going to limit us, no matter how perfect the planet, I realized we need to travel at the speed of light. I think our "best shot" at that right now, is to digitize humans. If we could store consciousness in binary, we could then transmit it at the speed of light (like we do with data every day!). You'd need a receiver on the…
I think the magic speed is actually 10% the speed of light.
Uh oh. The "great filter" hypothesis is essentially that the rarity of intelligent life has to be explained by some parameter of the Drake equation, and that whatever the "small" parameter is is either in our past or in our future. If the "great filter" is the rarity of habitable worlds, then clearly we don't need to fear it, since we already found one. But if habitable worlds aren't rare, then it's more likely it li…
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> are there...hazards simply due to the proximity of a dim star Tidal locking [1]. Similar to how our moon shines at us ass first all the time, the planets around TRAPIST-1 would be expected to have one face locked to their star. Instead of an equatorial belt bookended with loops of temperate zones, as we have on Earth, we should expect, climatically, an "equatorial" face and a "polar" face separated by a tropic-to-t…
Of course, #askNasa didn't win me a question, but could any astrobiologists comment on this question: Tidal locking means the planets would always have a side facing the star, leading to very different thermodynamics in terms of climate and weather on the planet, not to mention radiation. Doesn't that very much hurt the chances for life on those planets?
1. https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/custom_planets/2
2. https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/resources/149
3. https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/alien-worlds/galaxy-of-horrors
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That actually sounds... more plausible than I would have expected. Like, doable with technology I can imagine being within reach in the next 50 years even if we don't achieve any currently-unforseen breakthroughs.
Is it plausible for anything we'd build to travel .998c and survive the journey?
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Well, it's "at least" 500m, but is probably much more[1]: "Determining the ages of such small stars is difficult because they evolve so slowly over their lifetimes of trillions of years but it is estimated to be in excess of a half a billion years and is probably much more." And abiogenesis occurred on Earth within about 500m years of the Earth's formation, so life can clearly arise pretty quickly. It's complex, mult…
> trillions of years This is off by several orders of magnitude. Like estimating the age of your neighbor to be somewhere around 400,000 years old.
Close orbit around a relatively cold star. Interesting. I wonder what their 'day' vs 'year' looks like. Also their atmosphere and surface pressure. They could be 7 copies of Venus for all we know.
Also, during the live stream they said that the furthest planet does a complete orbit around the star in 20 Earth days.
So there are likely no 'days' on any of these planets and a 'year' goes by in less than a month on Earth.
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Not according to public research on theoretical designs that have been about for decades . Unless you consider them unicorn farts! I'm only a coder though so I have no knowledge of this domain tho. I think the problem is simply it's too expensive to build space ships that probably won't work at all :( wasnt NASAs budget slashed ?
It's not money, it's the basic rocket equation: Newtonian acceleration requires fuel and the mass of fuel makes acceleration more costly. Relativity makes things even worse.