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Meikle641
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Post by Meikle641 » Tue Oct 06, 2009 6:29 pm

> Heath Robinson wrote:

> > Meikle641 wrote:I can't seem to find the link, but I saw an article the other day talking about a "new" way to propel stuff faster to other planets. Or at least use less fuel.
> > Basically some scientist found old theories about something called (I think) two-stage something or other. Boost the ship to something like the moon, then use orbit to sling shot it further or something. It was written in the 20s, and apparently was forgotten until now.
> > Supposedly it could decrease the time to Mars considerably (or allow for larger payloads for same fuel).

> Orbital slingshots have been used extensively by NASA to send the probes we used to analyse the farther planets, and even for that probe we intentionally sent outside the solar system. They use less fuel, but take far longer, so no human occupied vessel would use them.
> Also, the Inplanetary Transport Network will reduce your fuel expenditure to nearly zero, but it'll take years to get anywhere. It's an envelope where the gravitational pulls of all the planets (and the sun) cancel out to pull you towards another point inside the envelope. Essentially you steal tiny bits of momentum from the entire solar system to get yourself wherever you want.

That's not what I was talking about, and now I found the actual article. It's in my issue of Wired, but I can't find the web version of it. Ah, here we go:
http://www.wired.com/science/space/maga ... st_twoburn
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Tue Oct 06, 2009 6:33 pm

Of course, while those labs do much research, they're mostly paid for by the federal government.
-Crissa
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tzor
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Post by tzor » Tue Oct 06, 2009 7:21 pm

> Crissa wrote:Of course, while those labs do much research, they're mostly paid for by the federal government.

Sort of; as in “almost but not quite.” Without the active support of corporations that are funding their research at the light source (providing enough revenue to expand the project) the entire BNL complex would probably collapse. My friend works for getting grants for the electron microscope there; he’s working on half salary most of the year and when he does get his team a grant it is generally a short term project. Federal dollars for scientific research has trickled to a insufficient stream.
In the hay day, BNL was significantly supported by AUI (Associated Universities Incorporated), which consisted of a string of professors getting government grants. But most universities are run close to the private sector models and their bottom line is getting more students (undergraduate and graduate) to come and pay tuition.
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Heath Robinson
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Post by Heath Robinson » Tue Oct 06, 2009 9:14 pm

> Meikle641 wrote:That's not what I was talking about, and now I found the actual article. It's in my issue of Wired, but I can't find the web version of it. Ah, here we go:
> http://www.wired.com/science/space/maga ... st_twoburn

That's a powered slingshot.
Face it. Today will be as bad a day as any other.
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Nihlin
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Post by Nihlin » Tue Oct 06, 2009 10:46 pm

Tzor:
Neutrinos have an interaction length scale of one light year in lead. You're looking to get eight orders of magnitude of boost. Designing a metamaterial that is opaque to neutrinos* would first require massive investment in fundamental research, in the hopes of advancing the field to the point that you could try finding a weak force analogue of, say, surface-enhanced rahman scattering. We're just now pretty confident about neutrinos having mass, and we don't really know why they do or how it gets there. You're essentially talking about starting up the Manhattan Project immediately after Thomson measures the charge to mass ratio of the electron, and before the nature of alpha radiation is understood and atomic physics is mapped out. We lack the basic physics to even begin to speculate on this.
*on a length scale of ~10 meters, and possibly tuned to a specific frequency.
Last edited by Nihlin on Wed Oct 07, 2009 12:41 am, edited 3 times in total.
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NativeJovian
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Post by NativeJovian » Tue Oct 06, 2009 10:54 pm

The problem with space travel (and particularly manned space travel, which requires a lot more in the way of mass) is that it's hard to get shit into orbit. Really. That's the single biggest problem. If we can solve that problem, space travel of all kinds gets massively, massively cheaper. The problem is that the cheapest ways of getting things into orbit are very, very expensive. That is to say, the infrastructure of cheap Earth-to-orbit travel is a bitch. You have to do things like build mass drivers, or orbital elevators, or nuclear rockets, each of which are hideously expensive to both design and to build, and are currently physically impossible in addition to being economically infeasible.
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shau
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Post by shau » Wed Oct 07, 2009 1:51 am

> Heath Robinson wrote: That's a powered slingshot.

You know, there is a lot of potential in a link labeled powered slingshot, I think you failed to deliver.
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Heath Robinson
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Post by Heath Robinson » Wed Oct 07, 2009 2:01 am

> shau wrote:You know, there is a lot of potential in a link labeled powered slingshot, I think you failed to deliver.

I'll render compensation, then. The physicists who aren't doing orbital transfer mechanics are doing this instead.
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Orca
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Post by Orca » Wed Oct 07, 2009 2:51 am

I think if you ever could design a material opaque to neutrinos, one of the first uses of it would be as a detector to study the structure of the Earth - to find more oil.
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CatharzGodfoot
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Post by CatharzGodfoot » Wed Oct 07, 2009 2:01 pm

> NativeJovian wrote:The problem is that the cheapest ways of getting things into orbit are very, very expensive.

The cheapest ways of getting things into orbit are very, very dirty.
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tzor
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Post by tzor » Wed Oct 07, 2009 2:28 pm

> CatharzGodfoot wrote:

> > NativeJovian wrote:The problem is that the cheapest ways of getting things into orbit are very, very expensive.

> The cheapest ways of getting things into orbit are very, very dirty.

No, the "cheapest" way of getting things into orbit are very silly and probably not all that reliable for anything that is really expensive as there would be high failure rates. MIT students do not fall under that category.
Welcome to space.1337arts.com — Project Icarus, home of the original $150 near-space launch!
Basically you use an old fashioned baloon to do most of the heavy lifting and then blast off from high in the atmosphere.
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Wed Oct 07, 2009 8:27 pm

Unfortunately, that doesn't lift alot of weight, tzor, and we have a limited amount of helium.
But it is awesome.
-Crissa
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NativeJovian
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Post by NativeJovian » Wed Oct 07, 2009 8:40 pm

It doesn't get anywhere near space, either. Depending on who you ask, "space" starts at anywhere between 50 and 75 miles up. That site lists the highest altitude they reached at approximately 17.5 miles. For further comparison, the Space Shuttle usually operates at least 120 miles up.
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tzor
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Post by tzor » Wed Oct 07, 2009 8:51 pm

They also used a really small helium baloon and I've seen bigger rockets with my local LIARS (Long Island Advanced Rocket Scoiety). Plus the fact that they took the rocket beyond their tracking range.
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Wed Oct 07, 2009 9:18 pm

Yes, but NASA is doing something similar, but bigger, and I know of a company that's developing satellite insertion technologies for putting super-light satellites like GPS and phone reflectors in near earth orbit this way.
-Crissa
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Ganbare Gincun
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Post by Ganbare Gincun » Wed Oct 07, 2009 11:05 pm

Meh. We'll all have murdered each other with nuclear weapons before we ever get the opportunity to colonize another planet.
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Parthenon
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Post by Parthenon » Thu Oct 08, 2009 4:45 am

I don't ever see us travelling between stars. Takes too long, can't communicate between stars, too much time and distance over which things can go wrong.
I can only see wormholes or long range teleportation, cutting travel time to weeks rather than years.
And even terraforming in this solar system would take a long, long, long time. Companies would come and go before its done, and several different governments would be in and out of power before it would be done, meaning that noone would ever actually do it. Let alone the cost being probably around the GDP of the Earth.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Thu Oct 08, 2009 5:22 am

> parthenon wrote:can't communicate between stars

I wouldn't say "can't."
I prefer the term "can't yet." As soon as quantum entanglement gets sufficiently stable, we can have regularly scheduled observation/modification of the qubit. And those observations can happen on "both sides" of say, a qubit that is split up by 5 light years or so.
If one side or the other also unscheduledly observes their qubit before the other side observes theirs, the next observation will have been checked twice instead of once since the last inspection. Doing that or not doing that is a binary code that propagates instantly across any distance.
It'll take a while though. Right now we're like "Can we get our qubits stable when we shake the box?" which is a fair bit removed from dragging our qubits on a 14 year journey. I mean, it's not like you can "repair" a quantum entanglement communicator once it breaks - you need to build a new set at one point and drag one side the entire distance by hand.
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Koumei
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Post by Koumei » Thu Oct 08, 2009 5:52 am

I favour 100km long spess ships with fully enclosed cities. And cathedrals built on top. But people wouldn't be allowed any denim clothing, as it'd attract jeanstealers. Not that denim would be an issue with the crew uniforms I have in mind.

> FrankTrollman wrote:I mean, it's not like you can "repair" a quantum entanglement communicator once it breaks

Sure you can - just call some Quantum Mechanics in to do it :D

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tzor
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Post by tzor » Thu Oct 08, 2009 3:03 pm

> Parthenon wrote:I don't ever see us travelling between stars. Takes too long, can't communicate between stars, too much time and distance over which things can go wrong.

Traveling to the stars requires a different mindset. The “distance” to the stars is not the problem, except in an indirect way. The real problem is energy and acceleration. Thanks to relativity, I can travel to Alpha Centuri in less than a minute and return in the same time. (The fact that over eight years passed from my starting point is a minor nit pick.) This is known as the “twins paradox” which is not really a paradox at all; going there and back involves acceleration which means that specific relativity no longer applies; NB any change in the vector of movement is “acceleration.”
The problem is that baring an inertia field of some kind the acceleration would kill you. Then there is the energy problem; most attempts to design star ships (even the ones powered by nuclear explosions) only bring the ship to 10% c (also known as 10 psol) which is far below the level for any reasonable relativity effects. (I remember charting the real “warp” curve in college, IIRC between 50 psol and 60 psol we reach the point where one mapped light year is traveled in one in ship year.)
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Thu Oct 08, 2009 6:31 pm

Also, does anyone remember the communication times of the age of colonization?
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tzor
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Post by tzor » Thu Oct 08, 2009 7:50 pm

> Crissa wrote:Also, does anyone remember the communication times of the age of colonization?
> -Crissa

Not directly off hand, and it’s not something you can easily Google on, but off the top of my head mail times in the 18th century were generally reasonable. Trans-Atlantic mail apparently had a problem (I finally found one web page) because at first the mail ships were sailing headlong into the gulf stream.

> But here he encountered a mystery, one that challenged his scientific curiosity as well as his practical business instincts. Mail sent from England to the American colonies was taking a long time to arrive—two months on average. And yet merchant ships, which were heavier and took a longer route than the mail packet ships, made the same trip from England in just a month and a half on average. It didn’t seem to matter whether the packet ships sailing from England enjoyed good weather or bad, whether the wind was in their sails or not—something still held them back. What, Franklin wondered, was causing the delays?
> Getting a good answer to a question is sometimes a matter of knowing whom to ask. And in 1768, while on a trip to London, Franklin asked the right person: his cousin, Timothy Folger, a whaling captain and merchant from Nantucket, Massachusetts. What was it, Franklin asked Folger, that accounted for the speedy Atlantic crossings achieved by some ships sailing from England? The answer, Folger replied, was simple, at least to those prepared to understand that the shortest distance between two points on a map is not always the fastest. Land travelers going to a distant city know that they might have to make detours to avoid a mountain range or some other physical obstacle. The Atlantic Ocean, too, poses an obstacle that requires a detour in the interest of saving time.
> That obstacle is the Gulf Stream, a pattern of currents carrying a river of warm ocean water in a counterclockwise direction up out of the Gulf of Mexico, along the coast of eastern North America, then eastwards across the chilly waters of the North Atlantic Ocean to the shores of northwestern Europe. The current moves eastwards at a rate of 3–4 miles an hour—a boon to ships traveling eastwards but a hindrance to ships trying to cross westwards. Running against the current could cost a ship as much as 70 miles a day in westward progress. Whalers like Folger knew about the Gulf Stream because its warm waters attracted an abundance of sea life, including plankton and fish and the whales that feed on both. But the packet ship captains carrying the mail from England to America, were ignorant of its existence.

Transatlantic mail took two months (although it should have taken one). Inter-colonial mail clearly took much less time, especially after Franklyn sets up his improvements to the system (one web site says he cut the times in half by the use of both night and day horseback riders).
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Parthenon
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Post by Parthenon » Thu Oct 08, 2009 8:27 pm

Yeah, quantum entanglement is cool and such, but I have two big issues with it:
Firstly it is too easily broken. If the qubit box got damaged there's no way to make new ones.
Secondly the bandwidth is much too small. It would be like surfing the internet with telegraphs. The bandwidth also can't be increased.

Saying that interstellar travel requires a different mindset is understating it just a smidgen. Space is so big, and so harsh that it can't be compared to Earth.
I mean, when comparing it to traveling to and from America there are a number of important differences. Firstly the sailing is a lot less dangerous if something goes wrong: if theres a leak it can be fixed or at least patched, if something goes really wrong there are lifeboats and most ships go along a similar path so there is at least some chance of rescue. If someone does try to rescue you it is easy: the ship can simply be close by and swim up to the rescuing ship.
Whereas in space the trip is a lot longer, it is a lot harder to repair and if you try to have escape pods there is practically zero chance of someone coming within quarter of a light year to you. And even if someone does pass by, you need to piss about with different velocities, orientation and so on and is a lot more dangerous.
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tzor
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Post by tzor » Thu Oct 08, 2009 8:42 pm

> Parthenon wrote:Saying that interstellar travel requires a different mindset is understating it just a smidgen. Space is so big, and so harsh that it can't be compared to Earth.

Yes, but that is true of space travel in general; space is a hostile environment. You almost need to compare like to like, so instead of crossing an ocean think of crossing the Antarctic and even then it’s still not like to like.
You realize how many people died trying to cross the mountains to get to the California gold rushes? And that’s even a milder situation. Explorers in the Antarctic who encounter problems are really in trouble; often the south polar winds and extreme temperatures can delay rescue operations for months.
From space debris to a potentially chaotic sun pushing out a massive solar wind (and solar radiation which bakes one side and freezes the other side) there are so many problems in interplanetary space that interstellar space is mild by comparison. Interstellar space is just a frozen vacuum. (Note also that the ideal star ship would probably be a “white body” in order to preserve internal heat. “Black bodies” absorb all radiation but transmit radiation based on their temperatures. “White bodies” reflect all radiation but do not transmit any radiation. Of course being a perfect white body would make you literally “blind.”)
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bourdain89
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Post by bourdain89 » Thu Oct 08, 2009 10:39 pm

> Ganbare Gincun wrote:Meh. We'll all have murdered each other with nuclear weapons before we ever get the opportunity to colonize another planet.

mutually assured destruction. lrn2 nuclear war
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