61–70 of 411 posts
50 years for 1 light day... so to arrive Alpha Centauri that is 4.2 light years far away... 76549 years and 364 days :-)
Less than that is you are constantly accelerating.
Not that we would literally do this with Voyager, but it makes me wonder at the potential utility of a string of probes, one sent every couple of [insert correct time interval, decades, centuries?], to effectively create a communication relay stretching out into deep space somewhere. My understanding with the Voyagers 1 and 2 is (a) they will run out of power before they would ever get far enough to benefit from a re…
Hmm, do you realize, that even if you have 1B probes everywhere. You're still bound by speed of light communication speed, right? It's faster than probe speed in this age, yeah. But still not enough, if we're talking distances to other specific planets, stars, etc. Two possible ways to solve this, humans will become immortal or speed of light bypass method will be discovered.
Wow, this gives a reflection about our future. The nearest potentially habitable planet known is Proxima Centauri b, which orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri about 4 light‑years from Earth (at least it is in a habitable zone of its star) [1]. So we don't have a choice actually except protecting and make sure our planet survives. That's regardless if it really would be able to support life as we know or not (p…
Not that we would literally do this with Voyager, but it makes me wonder at the potential utility of a string of probes, one sent every couple of [insert correct time interval, decades, centuries?], to effectively create a communication relay stretching out into deep space somewhere. My understanding with the Voyagers 1 and 2 is (a) they will run out of power before they would ever get far enough to benefit from a re…
What you are describing has been proposed before, for example within context of projects like Breakthrough Starshot. In that the case the idea is to launch thousands of probes, each weighing only a few grams or less, and accelerating them to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light using solar sails and (powerful) earth-based lasers. The probes could reach alpha centauri within 20-30 years. There seems to be som…
Also once you have created the infrastructure of hundreds or thousands of very powerful lasers to accelerate the tiny probes to incredibel speeds, sending many probes instead of a few doesn't add much to the cost anyway.
50 years for 1 light day... so to arrive Alpha Centauri that is 4.2 light years far away... 76549 years and 364 days :-)
Wow, this gives a reflection about our future. The nearest potentially habitable planet known is Proxima Centauri b, which orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri about 4 light‑years from Earth (at least it is in a habitable zone of its star) [1]. So we don't have a choice actually except protecting and make sure our planet survives. That's regardless if it really would be able to support life as we know or not (p…
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(§) Something like O'Neill cylinders with fusion as energy source could work
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not useful, because the signal are too weak to be picked up probe to probe. On earth, the tiny signal from Voyager at this distance is picked up by dish the size of a football field; same with sending of the signal.
What if the probes carry smaller probes left behind at specific intervals that act as repeaters? These baby probes could unfold a larger spiderweb antenna the size of a tennis court.
Both parties perform weak measurements on their qubits to extract these subtle signals without collapsing the entanglement, preserving high coherence across the stream. A quantum Maxwell's demon (e.g. many experiments but can be done: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30185956/) then adaptively selects the strongest perturbations from the wave, filters out noise, and feeds them into error correction to reliably decode and amplify the full message.
Wow, this gives a reflection about our future. The nearest potentially habitable planet known is Proxima Centauri b, which orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri about 4 light‑years from Earth (at least it is in a habitable zone of its star) [1]. So we don't have a choice actually except protecting and make sure our planet survives. That's regardless if it really would be able to support life as we know or not (p…
In my opinion, if we really want a presence off of earth we'd be better off building larger and larger space habitats and bootstrapping a mining industry in space.
Wow, this gives a reflection about our future. The nearest potentially habitable planet known is Proxima Centauri b, which orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri about 4 light‑years from Earth (at least it is in a habitable zone of its star) [1]. So we don't have a choice actually except protecting and make sure our planet survives. That's regardless if it really would be able to support life as we know or not (p…
In my opinion, if we really want a presence off of earth we'd be better off building larger and larger space habitats and bootstrapping a mining industry in space.
This turns entirely on how human biology works in zero versus low gravity. (Same for spin versus natural, or linear, gravity.)
The experiments we need to be doing is building and launching space stations and planetary bases for mice.