Earlier quoted context omitted.
Berenberg Bank founded 1590 (429 years ago)
Monte dei Paschi di Siena 1472 (547 years ago)
So.... All western European then?
Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
351–360 of 410 posts
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. It's mostly a number of Euros away and we haven't been funding it very well.
Could you give some sources for that or explaing where exactly the problems in fusion technology lie and how it could be solved by throwing money at it?
This is already a few years old, but pretty informative:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it always 30 years away?
No. It's mostly a number of Euros away and we haven't been funding it very well.
Why do you think that no state put significant effort into fusion research? You would imagine the first country to figure it out would dominate the world for decades to come.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#354I 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…
Yeah. Well. That's a fun math game and not much more. Other view on "energy growth rate": https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ Energy growth is due to end sooner or later. First, in the real world, any long term exponential growth is actually the upward branch of an S (that plateau at some point) or of a bell curve (that falls down after a peak). Second, with such an energy growth rate we'll boil…
There is also the problem that as you get away from the sun you receive less energy. Making your own portable mini sun with a fusion reactor is essential for interstellar travel.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#355I 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…
Progress in physics was much faster in the early 20th century when it wasn't so fascinated with deep space. Yes, you needed to observe eclipses to verify relativity, but that was a tool, not the end in itself. Cosmology involves distances that are so great that it seems like it's pouring a whole bunch of smart people's efforts down the drain in an ultimately futile waste of brain power that will never amount to anyth…
we might some day discover that we are roughly coaxially located between 2 civilizations exchanging knowledge, and get up to speed with their knowledge.
or observe civilizations broadcasting knowledge in a loop: motivation? perhaps the faster they can get others up to speed, the faster others might contribute knowledge back which may some day save their civilization.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. It's mostly a number of Euros away and we haven't been funding it very well.
Why do you think that no state put significant effort into fusion research? You would imagine the first country to figure it out would dominate the world for decades to come.
I don't think fusion power makes you dominate the world. It's not like building fusion plants is free.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that include slowing down and stopping, or would you be at max speed by the time you got there? I always thought that was a very well thought out aspect of The Expanse: spend half the trip accelerating, then flip the ship around and spend the other half slowing down (aka accelerating in the opposite direction).
Disclaimer: Just an arm-chair Space Engineers player here. > I always thought that was a very well thought out aspect of The Expanse: spend half the trip accelerating, then flip the ship around and spend the other half slowing down (aka accelerating in the opposite direction). With current technology you would not do this, since that means using extra fuel that weighs a lot and thus increases the force required for t…
Any impulse / reaction engine is subject to the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. It's just that with higher specific impulse and reactant velocity the total mass is reduced.
Since the rocket equation is a function of the effective velocity times the natural log of the wet/dry mass ratio, changes in exhaust velocity matter more than changes in propellant mass: you're better off with heavier propellant moving faster, than lighter propellant moving slower.
Ion drive engines tend to use xenon (a heavy nobel gas) for this reason. Unfortunately, xenon is rare even on Earth, and extraordinarily rare in space -- tanking up on a road trip would be difficult.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do solids settle out of air on a high gravity environment faster? The air would be thicker. Does gravity or buoyancy win than tug of war? I spent a day once trying to figure out what the Bronze Age would be like for marine creatures. Oxidation is less of a problem but galvanic action is huge. Fire pretty much doesn't work, which blocks a whole bunch of precursors like ceramics.
Couldn't marine creatures learn to collect air bubbles underwater in order to use fire?
How do they know that will lead to fire?
The big problem with marine technology isn't that it's totally impossible, it's that there's vast gulfs between various achievements and little sign that continued progress on some matter will lead somewhere. You could raise jellyfish to be transparent and lens shaped and build some telescopes, but how do you figure out that's a thing that might be a good idea? You might be able to turn an ocean vent into a forge, but how do you figure out that's a good idea? We had a path where we noticed certain rocks in a fire ooze useful metal, for instance. We didn't deduce from first principles the Periodic Table, guess the properties of metals from logic and maybe our interactions with (very soft!) silver and gold, determine it was likely that some of those colorful rocks are metallic salts, and then determine they might be useful to mine. We found they were useful to mine, then after thousands of years of civilization built on top of the resulting tools, only then figured out the why of a lot of those things.
This is one of those places where it's really a good idea to understand that despite the pretty Just So stories where science pre-dates engineering, in reality, engineering extremely frequently has predated science, at times by centuries. How are water-bound creatures going to figure out enough engineering to even get science going?
Certainly, as I said, they can breed things, but how do they even know where to try to go? How do they maintain the discipline to breed things over hundreds or thousands of generations? How do they get to genetic engineering?
There may be answers to this question but they sure aren't obvious.
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ship will never hit c .
If the ship travels tens of billions of light years will it eventually be traveling away from it's starting point at greater than c due to the dark-energy expansion of space itself? Or will the ship just red-shift more and more but never disappear from an observer with a very good telescope who stayed home? And what if you drove your ship straight into a super-massive black hole?
One theory of the far future (Big Rip) is eventually nearby galaxies will be receeding faster then light, then stars, planets, then even atoms.
There's a short story about the Big Rip
https://web.archive.org/web/20080725045740/http://www.solari...
Re: Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a guy who lives in a finite world where energy comes mainly from fossil fue in a way or another, I do not assume that any constant progress in energy supply is something achievable.
No, and traveling near lightspeed is likely hardly possible. However, fusion will likely become a reality within our lifetimes, and if we can build fusion powered spaceships, we could likely reach a fraction of the speed of light, say, 0.2c. I don't think it's that crazy to think we could do that a few centuries from now. That still means it would take over 1000 years to reach that planet. Personally, I think that if…
Although it seems unlikely now, imagine if we could ever reach 0.9c or maybe even 99.9% of the speed of light.
Perhaps not ships containing humans, but some kind of other tiny ship containing a replicator machine and DNA for humans.
For 0.999c, it would only take around 71 days to reach Alpha Centauri from Earth (as seen from the ship). That's pretty mind boggling.