481–490 of 754 posts
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> 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.
Uh? I think it's widely accepted that our best models of small stars are fairly well understood, and predict that they will continue to fuse hydrogen in their cores for more than a trillion years.
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)
> about...2,000 Saturn V rockets Or about 670 BFRs [1]. It would take 6 cycles of tripling size and/or performance to get a single system with enough thrust to meet your 7/42 year schedule. The Saturn V first flew in 1967 [1]; SpaceX plans to launch its Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) in 2022 or 2024 [2]. That's an expected 60 years to triple performance. [1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rock…
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Fascinating! Also – off topic, but – this description reminded me of Twinsun[1], the planet in the game Little Big Adventure. It remains one of my fondest game memories of that era, despite all its weird bugs. I've thought about finding a copy and playing it again at some point, but I fear it might spoil my good memories of it.. [1]: http://lba.wikia.com/wiki/Twinsun
Dammit, why did you have to remind me... Both LBA and LBA2 stand out as extremely memorable from my childhood. It does look like there's a revival of game-styles from that era, given Thimbleweed Park[0], Pathway[1], and apparently 2Dark[2] from (one of?) the authors of LBA. Any more? [0] https://thimbleweedpark.com [1] http://www.pathway-game.com [2] http://www.2dark.cc
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It sounds like you have a startup idea on your hands : )
You've no idea. But for the first step, I need to find one or two very truthful physics grad students / electrical engineers who feel some responsibility for Earth or saving themselves. You wouldn't happen to know someone?
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> about...2,000 Saturn V rockets Or about 670 BFRs [1]. It would take 6 cycles of tripling size and/or performance to get a single system with enough thrust to meet your 7/42 year schedule. The Saturn V first flew in 1967 [1]; SpaceX plans to launch its Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) in 2022 or 2024 [2]. That's an expected 60 years to triple performance. [1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rock…
Though that kind of performance is probably not going to come about from improvements to chemical rockets but moving to fusion. There are some promising developments on fusion reactors (see Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 ) Guess something like that with the 100 million C gas doing the propulsion maybe?
If you have fusion engines, you would just be doing all the construction in orbit anyway, rather than boosting stuff from the surface of the orbit.
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Fascinating! Also – off topic, but – this description reminded me of Twinsun[1], the planet in the game Little Big Adventure. It remains one of my fondest game memories of that era, despite all its weird bugs. I've thought about finding a copy and playing it again at some point, but I fear it might spoil my good memories of it.. [1]: http://lba.wikia.com/wiki/Twinsun
You can pick up Relentless on GOG :] https://www.gog.com/game/little_big_adventure
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Fascinating! Also – off topic, but – this description reminded me of Twinsun[1], the planet in the game Little Big Adventure. It remains one of my fondest game memories of that era, despite all its weird bugs. I've thought about finding a copy and playing it again at some point, but I fear it might spoil my good memories of it.. [1]: http://lba.wikia.com/wiki/Twinsun
For what it's worth I did this a few years ago and was not disappointed - great to hear other people grew up with this game too!
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There may have to be some clever system where you don't take a lot of fuel with you. Imagine a type of particle accumulator and aggregator - call it cosmic flypaper. If you're going say 100 km/s, things seemingly insignificant and rare you may be able to collect a lot of pretty quickly.
It sounds like you're talking about the Bussard Ramjet. It collects interstellar hydrogen gas for use in fusion engines. The problem is that it's unlikely there's enough hydrogen floating around for it to really work.
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…
If you're going to assume heavy equipment on the other end (ours or "someone else's"), it's not ridiculously beyond our current capabilities to simply transmit DNA sequences along with enough digital training material to "grow" and raise a human population from scratch.