Earlier quoted context omitted.
We already have that technology, more or less... A orion type drive is can be built using 1960's technology, the rest is just engineering, not new physics. A orion type drive can take you as close to c as you can afford. At 0.9999999c you can travel to A.Centauri in 1/2 day. Granted getting to 0.9999999 and back again is gonna take a fair pile of h-bombs.
Just to be clear, that would be 1/2 day for the people on the spacecraft. For the people you leave behind on earth you'd still be gone 4 years each way.
Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
101–110 of 161 posts
Re: Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't know all the factors under which life can exist. Even the lifeforms that we do know of, occupy a very broad spectrum in all metrics, existing at all sorts of extremes. We even have evidence of life we have never seen, will never encounter, and may never even have conceived as being possible to exist without that evidence: the enormous dinosaurs.
There's a huge difference between what evolved organisms can adapt to, and the conditions necessary to start life. Look, humans already adapted to being in space for prolonged periods of time. We adapted to every climate. But drop a naked human in a random spot on our planet, and he will die with high degree of probability. And that's after billions of years of evolution.
Re: Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
#103And some people still aren’t sure if there is other life beyond Earth. :) That's entire galaxies. Not just stars, and that's just the observable universe. We are still being surprised by the lifeforms we observe here on Earth, and the environments and conditions they can thrive in (including the outer hulls of our spacecraft), and we still have yet to discover and catalog all the life on our planet. Life may even com…
> How, when given the evidence of practically infinite planets out there [...] can we even consider the possibility that this is the only planet with life? Human minds aren't good with very large numbers. What seems "practically infinite" to us - isn't, really. The number of all planets in the universe is said to be in the ballpark of 10^24. Meaning (obviously) if you keep on dividing it by 10, in just 24 steps you g…
I think it's worth pointing out that there's lot of space between "absolutely sure there is" and "absolutely sure there isn't", and I doubt any fairly intelligent person actually holds either of those absolute positions. Which is to say that really, the arguments are over the degrees to which we think it's likely there is life, or intelligent life, elsewhere.
Re: Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I also doubt humanity will find a way to travel fast enough to get to another solar system within a human lifespan. The next solar system is only four lightyears away. Given the will to break nuclear test ban treaties we think we could develop nuclear pulse propulsion drives that achieve about 10% the speed of light. Even after accounting for acceleration and deceleration that gets us there in a human lifespan. Gran…
>Even after accounting for acceleration and deceleration that gets us there in a human lifespan... It gets _something_ there in a human lifespan. The only really well though out models for that are Daedalus and Icarus, and they would involve flybys only of probes the size of a hockey puck, or a washing machine at most. The cost of which would be civilisation impoverishing. I think it's a very reasonable chance that h…
The basic idea is to combine two kinds of ship, neither of which we know how to make work individually, to form one that we can make work.
The first is the generation ship. The problems with those are that (1) we don't know for sure how to make a completely self-sustaining ecosystem that can keep a large enough population for viable colonization alive for the hundreds of generations it would take to reach their destination, and (2) such a population would require a freaking large ship, raising all kinds of challenges.
The second is the cryogenic suspension ship. The problem there is that we don't know how to unfreeze them without killing them.
Can we address the generation ship problems? Both problems stem from the need to have a large population. If we didn't need a large population, we could use some of the space that would have otherwise been consumed by colonist families to bring food to supplement the food produced by the ship's ecosystem, and eliminate the rest of the space they would have occupied.
Assume we can develop a food that can be stored indefinitely and that has the caloric density of rice (200 calories/cup). There are ~4 200 cups in a cubic meter, which gives 840 000 calories in a cubic meter. At 2000 calories per day, that's 420 days of food. A storage unit 10 meters on a side gives 1150 years worth of food for one person. And this is assuming that the person is getting all their calories out of storage, not depending on the ship's ecosystem.
If the storage food only needs to be a supplement designed to make up for things that we can't figure out how to get from the ship's ecosystem, then the numbers get even better.
This is where the cryogenic suspension comes in. We can't suspend and revive people--but we can do eggs and sperm indefinitely and revive them. Our cryonic generation ship will carry the colonists as frozen eggs and sperm. The only warm people on board would be the crew to operate the ship, and to raise the next generation crew.
Note that the next generation crew could come from the frozen eggs and sperm rather than from mating among the current generation crew, so we don't have to worry about a small crew becoming severely inbred during the trip.
If we can ever develop robots to the point that a robot can raise and educate a human baby without any human supervision, then we can leave out the crew and the food and the ecosystem, and just send robots plus frozen eggs and sperm.
Re: Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Infinity is fun :) It reminds me of that (totally wrong) quote in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy that the population of the universe is mathematically zero. The Universe is a very big thing that contains a great number of planets and a great number of beings. It is Everything. What we live in. All around us. The lot. Not nothing. It is quite difficult to actually define what the Universe means, but fortunately t…
I know this is not meant to be taken seriously, but some claims don't even make sense from a purely mathematical point of view. > Area: The area of the Universe is infinite. Right now there is more evidence for the universe to be finite rather than infinite. But apart from that: Just because it has no borders doesn't mean it is infinite. This is a classic failure in understanding infinity. For example, the area of th…
> A finite universe doesn't import anything as well, and this is no contradiction whatsoever.
It's not far-fetched that a satirical sci-fi series could have multiple universes with travel between them.
The Hitchiker's Guide actually both does and doesn't if you look at the "Whole Sort of General Mish Mash" joke. Though the WSOGMM joke is pretty explicit that it's one infinite mish-mash with infinite perspectives and universes are just an illusion.
> Also, an inifinitely large "part" can still import and export, despite being infinite. For example, take an infinite universe and split it into two halfs. Those "parts" import and export, despite being infinite.
He actually covers this in the quote on WSOGMM.
> The reason they are not universes is that any given universe is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at what is generally known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash doesn't actually exist either, but it is just the sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did.
> The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the sea is not parallel. It doesn't mean anything. You can slice the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will generally come up with something that someone will call home. Please feel free to blither now.
You can split the universe anyway you like, it doesn't make 2 universes, just a divide in the universe. Your 2 divides are exporting/importing but the universe as a sum is not.
Of course, we're just arguing over a joke in a fictional universe now. But if you're going to do that you should get the fictional physics right :P
Re: Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
#106Re: Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
#107And some people still aren’t sure if there is other life beyond Earth. :) That's entire galaxies. Not just stars, and that's just the observable universe. We are still being surprised by the lifeforms we observe here on Earth, and the environments and conditions they can thrive in (including the outer hulls of our spacecraft), and we still have yet to discover and catalog all the life on our planet. Life may even com…
Re: Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this is not meant to be taken seriously, but some claims don't even make sense from a purely mathematical point of view. > Area: The area of the Universe is infinite. Right now there is more evidence for the universe to be finite rather than infinite. But apart from that: Just because it has no borders doesn't mean it is infinite. This is a classic failure in understanding infinity. For example, the area of th…
> Right now there is more evidence for the universe to be finite rather than infinite. There is the observable universe and there are good reasons to believe that there is "some universe" beyond the observable universe. The observable universe is finite, the reason for that is the geometry of spacetime and the consequences of it (cosmological horizon/particle horizon). But I would not make absolute statements about w…
IIUC everything in the observable universe is sufficiently far away from anything else that any causal relationship with anything is either from before inflation or within the universe we can observe.
And given how the existence of matter seems to be rather connected to time, it self a by product of interaction, it seems to follow that there is, relatively speaking, nothing beyond the horizon.
Re: Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
#109And some people still aren’t sure if there is other life beyond Earth. :) That's entire galaxies. Not just stars, and that's just the observable universe. We are still being surprised by the lifeforms we observe here on Earth, and the environments and conditions they can thrive in (including the outer hulls of our spacecraft), and we still have yet to discover and catalog all the life on our planet. Life may even com…
> How, when given the evidence of practically infinite planets out there [...] can we even consider the possibility that this is the only planet with life? Human minds aren't good with very large numbers. What seems "practically infinite" to us - isn't, really. The number of all planets in the universe is said to be in the ballpark of 10^24. Meaning (obviously) if you keep on dividing it by 10, in just 24 steps you g…
Yes, especially if you take into account the speed that entire galaxies travel in space. It's mind boggling high. So the effort for any civilization to build technology that allows them to travel through intergalactic space until they get "hooked" by Milkyway's black hole magnetic field is infinitely complex. That's where the whole idea around worm holes makes sense.
Re: Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
#110And some people still aren’t sure if there is other life beyond Earth. :) That's entire galaxies. Not just stars, and that's just the observable universe. We are still being surprised by the lifeforms we observe here on Earth, and the environments and conditions they can thrive in (including the outer hulls of our spacecraft), and we still have yet to discover and catalog all the life on our planet. Life may even com…
I'm tired of hearing these types of extremely confident lay-assertions about life beyond earth. It's true that the number of planets is incomprehensibly large, but it could also be true that the probability of a particular planet developing life is incomprehensibly small. In physics and chemistry, there are some odds that remain so extremely small even when you roll the dice many many times. Stop using "incomprehensi…
There’s 250 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Our local supercluster has 100,000 galaxies in it. Previous estimates were that there are 100-200 Billion galaxies in the observable universe and this article suggests the figure is 10x as much as that.
The Kepler telescope has been discovering planets around nearby stars for a while now, and the impression we get are that at least half of the stars seem to have planets around them.
With 250 Billion stars in our galaxy and 200 Billion galaxies or more just in the observable universe (also cosmologists believe the actual universe is larger than the observable universe by an unknown amount), that leaves us with somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 Billion trillion (that is, 25 Billion * 1 trillion) planets in the observable universe. 100 Billion + worlds just in our galaxy.
We also believe that the laws of physics are the same across the universe and that water and other basic elements are abundant throughout the universe.
So to me it seems like even with extremely remote probabilities of life existing, to me it seems most likely that there would be lots of planets where life started.