61–70 of 98 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interstellar ships will be shaped like pencils to deflect rather than impact gasses. They will also have to have consumable nose cone sections with old ones in the front being removed and new ones installed at that back. Like a mechanical pencil.
What happens when the ship has to turn around to decelerate, with its engines facing the front?
So, I have to ask: If Elon Musk is working on propulsion tech to go to Mars, and Bob Lazar claims to have worked on reverse engineering propellentless tech and is one of the single digit number of living people to have encountered it directly, and NASA is slow rolling their own understanding of it, given the limited available expertise in this area how can Musk afford to not hire Lazar? From a due diligence perspecti…
I'd bet the number of such people with unreasonable ideas will go drastically up if you start hiring them too.
Interesting caveat about traveling close to the speed of light...if you run into hydrogen atoms, which is near 100% likely, your ship violently explodes because at very high speeds, there is a huge reaction on tiny matter collisions. I just learned this and it was like learning that sound doesn't travel in space when I was young and ruined many a starwars movie effects. I keep learning how ignorant and dumb I am the…
Interstellar ships will be shaped like pencils to deflect rather than impact gasses. They will also have to have consumable nose cone sections with old ones in the front being removed and new ones installed at that back. Like a mechanical pencil.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a bird. Less high up, nice white tummy, reflects the light.
Do you honestly think that somebody trained in astronomy could mistake a bird for satellite? Have you seen how satellites move? They traverse the sky in a perfectly straight and constant-motion fashion that is utterly unlike any bird. Even a high-altitude plane such as the U-2 would be fairly difficult to misidentify as a satellite. For obvious reasons, U-2s and SR-71s and such didn't employ lights while operating at…
Yes.
> Have you seen how satellites move?
Yes.
> They traverse the sky in a perfectly straight and constant-motion fashion that is utterly unlike any bird.
That's exactly like any migrating bird. Like a goose. Well, until they suddenly switch direction and continue at a constant speed and height till they go over the horizon. Have you ever seen birds migrating?
Also, if lights in the sky that look like meteors but suddenly switch direction are aliens, then I've seen them hundreds of times walking home from the pub (no streetlights here). Never yet been offered a lift!
So, I have to ask: If Elon Musk is working on propulsion tech to go to Mars, and Bob Lazar claims to have worked on reverse engineering propellentless tech and is one of the single digit number of living people to have encountered it directly, and NASA is slow rolling their own understanding of it, given the limited available expertise in this area how can Musk afford to not hire Lazar? From a due diligence perspecti…
There are far more likely ways for SpaceX to fail than that some random professor replaces rockets with a drive using novel physics. And even if said professor does produce that drive, it wouldn't threaten SpaceX's main business unless the drive was able to produce sufficient thrust to escape the Earth's gravity well. (Flash notice, not even the professor in question thinks it will.)
Therefore Musk should continue to be focuses on what he is doing and not even think about this unless there is a working prototype validated by NASA.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you honestly think that somebody trained in astronomy could mistake a bird for satellite? Have you seen how satellites move? They traverse the sky in a perfectly straight and constant-motion fashion that is utterly unlike any bird. Even a high-altitude plane such as the U-2 would be fairly difficult to misidentify as a satellite. For obvious reasons, U-2s and SR-71s and such didn't employ lights while operating at…
That he made a mistake is much more plausible than that it was aliens. That he was hallucinating is much more plausible than that it was aliens. That he was lying or had a false memory is much more plausible than that it was aliens. Pretty much any mundane explanation is much more plausible than that it was aliens. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Not in America these days...
It's worth noting that if a propellentless drive works, it will probably generate free energy . This may adjust your expectations on how likely this idea is. How likely is a free energy device (ie, one that reliably gives you more energy out than you put in)? Well, this thruster can't be any more likely, because it would produce free energy. https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.00494 > the kinetic energy of a mass with a const…
> [..] while the electrical energy input only increases linearly with time. This is the fallacy. In an electric motor the power required to exert a force is proportional to the speed, so if you want to keep the acceleration constant you need to increase the electrical power (i.e. rate of energy use) linearly over time. Hence the total energy input increases with the square of the time, just like the kinetic energy im…
In what reference frame? It's not obvious to me how this works in a space drive. How does it "know" how much speed it gets per unit energy?
I guess if it's a sort of Dean drive that swims through the gravitational field of the visible universe, then that's the reference frame. It's still weird!
A quick google search does not bring back any designs or research papers of such a system, as the results are swamped by the idea of using ground based lasers to push spacecraft instead of the craft itself containing the laser.
Not this shit again... Look closely at the picture of the test chamber in the article. Do you see Helmholtz coils surrounding the entire apparatus? Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_coil It's the same story as the EMdrive: they run something at high current, without cancelling earth's magnetic field. high current + earth magnetic field = force. This method is used to move satellites: https://en.wikipedia.…
Interesting caveat about traveling close to the speed of light...if you run into hydrogen atoms, which is near 100% likely, your ship violently explodes because at very high speeds, there is a huge reaction on tiny matter collisions. I just learned this and it was like learning that sound doesn't travel in space when I was young and ruined many a starwars movie effects. I keep learning how ignorant and dumb I am the…
Interstellar ships will be shaped like pencils to deflect rather than impact gasses. They will also have to have consumable nose cone sections with old ones in the front being removed and new ones installed at that back. Like a mechanical pencil.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth