Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet

Post by jackvalentine » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:04 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #239

jackvalentine wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to form some kind of trust, the "Swizec is in space for 200 years trust" to handle your investments for you with a constitution that lays out how long it is expected for you to be gone. You might come back to discover that after several generations without oversight your trust has invested in bombing children and enriching the fund managers. I dunno.

You still get in trouble I think. Have any political regimes been stable enough in the past 222 yaers for the trust to survive? All of Europe has gone through multiple revolutions, USA was only 30 years old back then so you wouldn’t have considered it ... that leaves what, the UK? Any parts of Asia that survived since 1797?

Post by tunesmith » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:29 AM UTC

temporalparts wrote: post #241

tunesmith wrote: post #204

I got into the Wait Calculation[1] a few weeks back and made a Jupyter notebook out of it. At our current max speed (692,000 km/hr, stated max speed of Parker Space Probe), it would take about 173,000 years to get to that planet. We could instead choose to Wait and grow our tech. By picking a constant annual growth rate and then doing some calculus to find the minimum, we can calculate the shortest possible time it w…

Does this take into consideration that your mass increases as you travel closer to the speed of light?

Post by quickthrower2 » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:37 AM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #264

dylan604 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does this take into consideration that you would need to start slowing down halfway there?

No, it assumes you start and end at whatever that maximum velocity is that we've been able to achieve. That'd be fun to add, though. I'm not really sure what human-safe acceleration is - people here assume it's in the 1g-3g range. (That seems like a lot to me though, particularly for a long period of time - I think anything more than a fraction of g would be wildly uncomfortable.)

Post by skrebbel » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:48 AM UTC

tunesmith wrote: post #204

I got into the Wait Calculation[1] a few weeks back and made a Jupyter notebook out of it. At our current max speed (692,000 km/hr, stated max speed of Parker Space Probe), it would take about 173,000 years to get to that planet. We could instead choose to Wait and grow our tech. By picking a constant annual growth rate and then doing some calculus to find the minimum, we can calculate the shortest possible time it w…

Post by trhway » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:53 AM UTC

0xffff2 wrote: post #146

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #127

Serious question - Do we have the capability to send human life there now? Obviously its going to be a one way trip. And it would require a generational ship. So could we build a ship that held 12 people initially, 6 couples, all who were allowed to have 2 children, so 24 people max, and could we load it with enough supplies to last over 100 years? Even if the group that eventually arrived had no way to sustain life,…

We don't have the capability to send anything there now. Sending even a tiny probe that is capable of communicating back to Earth from our closest stellar neighbor is beyond our current technology. People are actively working on it, but it's unlikely that we will have the technology to even send an unmanned probe to this star within our lifetimes. We might send a probe to Alpha Centauri, but it's even questionable wh…