131–140 of 330 posts
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This comment encapsulates how poorly we humans are at accepting unknowns. For me, that explains a lot of our belief systems. The fact we can’t just take the unknown but instead have to fill in the blanks with what ifs. and create a narrative like we know anything about the unknown thing. It helps us feel like we understand it more. That’s literally how religions and a lot of other things get created, it’s a pattern,…
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It’s highly unlikely we’re ever getting FTL. We should become comfortable with that and let go our fantasies. Let theoretical physicists chug away at this, we should get underway with projects that are possible with known science.
Depends on who you mean as "we". The speed of light isn't a speed limit. If you can create a ship that is capable of 1g acceleration, it doesn't just stop accelerating as it reaches the speed of light relative to some stationary object, like Earth. Instead you start getting relativistic effects and things start getting very weird with time and distance doing some funky stuff. You keep zooming along just fine from you…
Even antimatter rockets top out at 50% of light speed. Laser boost like with Dyson Swarm could get similar speeds because time dilation slows down the acceleration.
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There's a project that's going well from NASA for this. Still a moonshot but they've progressed through the early stages well so far. https://www.nasa.gov/general/direct-multipixel-imaging-and-s...
I wonder about all the extraterrestrial AI swarms that have already imaged earth. Surely it has happened. They must have all spotted our planet millions of years ago and must be watching us with a continuous high-resolution feed. They've seen our dinosaurs. Their interest will really be piqued when they finally see us invent electricity, though that might be some time in the future for them. Perhaps even gravitationa…
What technology currently available combined with the best launch window, gravity assist etc exists? Might as well send a probe.
How far will we peer into the unknown? What will we find out there?
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I wonder about all the extraterrestrial AI swarms that have already imaged earth. Surely it has happened. They must have all spotted our planet millions of years ago and must be watching us with a continuous high-resolution feed. They've seen our dinosaurs. Their interest will really be piqued when they finally see us invent electricity, though that might be some time in the future for them. Perhaps even gravitationa…
This comment encapsulates how poorly we humans are at accepting unknowns. For me, that explains a lot of our belief systems. The fact we can’t just take the unknown but instead have to fill in the blanks with what ifs. and create a narrative like we know anything about the unknown thing. It helps us feel like we understand it more. That’s literally how religions and a lot of other things get created, it’s a pattern,…
In fairness, this very often helps us understand the unknown thing more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s highly unlikely we’re ever getting FTL. We should become comfortable with that and let go our fantasies. Let theoretical physicists chug away at this, we should get underway with projects that are possible with known science.
Even if FTL is achievable (which I agree, highly unlikely), it's still extraordinarily slow on cosmic scales. The closest star is a little over 4 ly away! And probing the universe outside the Milky Way? Forget about it.
2. I like to think about the size of the universe by always remembering that with the naked eye, on a good night, there's only a single object in the entire night sky that isn't in our galaxy (M3, the Andromeda Galaxy).
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The orbital velocity at this distance is around 1 km/s, so you can fairly trivially (compared to anything else) zero it out. Then you can just hover in place, the solar gravity acceleration at this range is in _microns_ per second squared. For all intents and purposes, you'll be in the interstellar space.
In order to get something there fast enough it would be traveling out very fast. Getting something there to orbit I think is not realistic for us any time soon.
Of course, the rocket equation often makes "just add a few percent more delta V" pretty hard ;)
What technology currently available combined with the best launch window, gravity assist etc exists? Might as well send a probe.
This planet sits at a distance of 48 light years, so it would 74 832 years to get there. Just for good measure, when it gets there it would also take 48 years for us to know that since radio travels at the speed of light.
Note, that the speed of the spacecraft I mentioned was the peak speed. Space is big, really big.