311–320 of 410 posts
All my life I wait for the moment we will find life
I just afraid if it will really happen from everyone reactins
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> when we get faster than light travel FTL requires numerous things to be true about our universe, that all signs say are not.
...crushing all my dreams of being a starship captain, thanks.
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"At some point your planet is massive enough that you can't get into orbit with chemical rockets (even, I think, by flying them up like Burt Rutan?)." Nuclear rockets don't seem to be very hard. They're somewhat dangerous if they explode, but they aren't very hard. Fairly solid prototypes were built decades ago and there's little to suggest they couldn't have been made production-grade [1]. We'd have them now if we d…
Do solids settle out of air on a high gravity environment faster? The air would be thicker. Does gravity or buoyancy win than tug of war? I spent a day once trying to figure out what the Bronze Age would be like for marine creatures. Oxidation is less of a problem but galvanic action is huge. Fire pretty much doesn't work, which blocks a whole bunch of precursors like ceramics.
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It seems like it would be much easier to terraform the real estate around us than try to opt for something 100 light years away. Mars has a leaky atmosphere - sure it's a real fixer upper. But we have a better chance of fixing it, or even correcting the orbit of our planet so that in 500 million years it's still livable.
Or sending a HUGE human civilization spaceship somewhere.. maybe it will outlast the earth?
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You can make the trip arbitrarily small from your perspective (in theory at least :) ). The issue is that by the time you've made it back home, it's 222 years later. Hence "you can't go home anymore". :)
If you put some money in an interest-bearing account you could at least buy a new home when you got back.
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does this take into consideration that you would need to start slowing down halfway there?
It wouldn't need to be halfway. At 3gs acceleration, it would take about 115 days to accelerate up to the speed of light. You'd then travel ballistically for the majority of the journey before having to decelerate for another 115 days. Given the total journey would be ~40,000 days the 230 days of acceleration probably isn't going to impact things too much. Even if you brought it back to 1g acceleration, it's still on…
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...crushing all my dreams of being a starship captain, thanks.
IMHO we will still get a space opera-esque future, just within the Solar system, not outside of it. There is plenty of space, energy and material around for potentially trillions of people on billions of space stations and space ships.
Leaving SciFi aside, our communication technology will be up to the task of relaying information comparatively quickly (light speed or faster), and parallel societies could be built in neighboring solar systems.
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Any book in particular you'd recommend?
Anything in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks; The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey; The Commonwealth and Void trilogies by Peter F. Hamilton, and the Night’s Dawn trilogy also by Peter F. Hamilton; The Dune saga by Frank Herbert.