291–300 of 342 posts
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It's absolutely the latter. Congress has never really cared about spaceflight - to your Congressman it's just an opportunity to bring federal dollars to his district, because that will get him reelected.
But why not make real plans and actually get something accomplished, then you can point to something truly concrete during re-election, and even bump the funding even more.
In many science fiction books we assume that if an alien planet ever got a whiff of us they'd quickly board their space ships and come see us. It's somewhat comforting to think the alien planet could also be in a perpetual bureaucratic budget crisis and they've dismantled their space program to make more room for tax cuts. Politics could save us from an alien invasion!
Science fiction almost universally assumes the speed of light is not a hard limit. At this time we have every reason to believe that it is a limit. Our theories also say that if you were to go faster than light (which you cannot) it implies time dilation and time travel - again science fiction just assumes a loop hole so that doesn't happen. Many talk about travel at 10 times the speed of light (warp-10) as if that i…
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The assumption is that we will somehow "terraform" Mars so that it will be earthlike before Earth is destroyed.
why would martian life survive the destruction of earth from extraplanetary impact, which would affect martian orbit?
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If you're interested in the science behind spinning asteroids, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarkovsky%E2%80%93O%27Keefe%E2...
That has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. In The Expanse, they hollow out and spin up asteroids to use as a space station with centripetal artificial garavity. A typical rubble-pile asteroid would fly apart well before that. Even solid rock couldn't take the forces since they are all tensile.
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Maybe humans are just early in general. Who knows, maybe intelligent life evolution will peak in several billion years and we were just ahead of the curve.
That is incredibly unlikely. Let's assume that aliens had a 1% head start on us. They were 1% faster at evolving. That's not a crazy idea - Earth spent 2 billion years going from photosynthesis to multi-cellular life. The cretaceous extinction could've been a 50 million year setback, how close were Dinosaurs to getting sentience? We're at 13 billion years on the global clock right now, so 1% of that is 130 million ye…
Specifically that the metallicity of stars would need to exceed a minimum in order for civilizations to have the necessary building blocks for technology.
It's hard to build a fusion reactor without the right elements. And it would be impractical to synthesize them in any practical amount. Especially since that would balloon your energy needs drastically.
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Why is it always an alien invasion and not just alien curiosity or scientific interest? I'm sick of this trope that all alien species must be like the worst demographic of humanity.
Reflects on how we see ourselves doesn't it?
The problem is that by placing the origin of evil on the far side of some liminal threshold (species, space, stargates, hell) we generally fail to engage with it and so perpetuate the existence of an epistemological gap.
It's interesting to consider genre tropes as analogues of Kubler-Ross' stages of grief. Viewed in this light, Europa Report gains considerably.
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I don't doubt your dedication.. I just try to imagine a week later after the initial "I'm standing on MARS!!!" wears off... ok... so... there's nothing here...
Ok, fair point. There would obviously need to be a mission plan that involved a bit more than "go to Mars", but I think even thoroughly monitoring my slow death by radiation over the course of a few months would be sufficiently scientifically worthwhile that, along with the sheer fact of going to another planet, for me to volunteer.
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Just an FYI. In Star Trek at least the warp system works like this: warp-1 is the speed of light and it then increases exponentially with warp-10 being infinite velocity. Source: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor
> it then increases exponentially with warp-10 being infinite velocity No, no, no. That was only in the Voyager episode Threshold . It is widely regarded as one of the worst Voyager episodes, and the entire plot of that episode doesn't make any sense. There are questions of if this episode is even canon. In any event, there are other Star Trek episodes where warp 10 is not a hard limit. All Good Things has ships trav…
Presumably in the alternate future in AGT they had recalibrated the scale again (probably as warp 9.975 is a mouthful, 9.9954 would be a right pain)
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Let me anthropomorphically assume there will always be a closer target to spend excess planetary resources on.
Yes, but the closer target doesn't look alien . How often do countries go to war with people who are similar to them? Now how often with people who are the other ? (Whatever definition fits)
Unfortunately we're now at or rapidly approaching the culmination of such a process: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... It's interesting to consider figure 3 as an example of meiosis in a social meta-organism.