Mass ..mass .. where did I leave that mass?

[Plane]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110527/sc_afp/australiaastrophysicsscience

There is a lot of hard to find mass in my household also , I often find it with the help of my wife, this seems to be a distaff talent.

This is long range signifigant, if we ever develop interstellar travel it is very likely to require the presence of mass in dust or gas form along the route.

[Xavier_Onassis]

If we develop intersteller travel, it will depend on exceeding the speed of light, which is most likely impossible.

The universe of sufficiently immense to assume that there are many places with intelligent life.

It is also sufficiently huge as to prevent any major travel.

Warp Drive, the Universal Translator, the Replicator and the Transporter are all wonderful devices, ever so useful to life on Star Trek. But they are also likely impossible. Especially Warp Drive. Perhaps if there were a system of well-placed wormholes scattered about (quite unlikely) , but the problem there is that a wormhole might crush all that enters it into teensy, deceased specks of matter. I would not volunteer to be the first through a wormhole.

[Plane]

With present tecnology , it is possible to build an interstellar explorer robot that would send back data after many years of travel , or a manned craft that would bring colonists after several generations of travel.

What is problimatic about this is how stranded the middle generations would be.

How wouldyou feel if you were scheduled to just mark time for your whole life as the vehicle traversed the middle passage , and learned that faster craft have been invented that will arrive at your destination ahead of you?

[Xavier_Onassis]

How would you feel if you were scheduled to just mark time for your whole life as the vehicle traversed the middle passage , and learned that faster craft have been invented that will arrive at your destination ahead of you?

I had that feeling just the other day when I got on the 77 bus and the 277 MAX Express bus passed us five minutes later,

The big problem is that the destination must be fit for human habitation, and we are too far away to know that for sure where we are.

If Alpha Centauri is uninhabitable, the ship is pretty much doomed. It is too far to go anywhere else.

It is probable that many Polynesians were lost or marooned on islands too small to support them. There is evidence of this, even.

[kimba1]

i think life on it would be harder than that. strict population control to ensure food and air alotment. biosphere 2 proved how extremely hard it is to maintain food and air supply.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Being in Deep Space presents more danger than floating in a canoe in the trackless ocean, but both have plenty enough danger to kill you. There are currents in the ocean, and occasionally one sees a bird one might follow, but it is probable that a lot of  Polynesians drowned or starved before touching land.

There were remains of an extinct culture on Pitcairn Island before the Bounty mutineers arrived.

[Plane]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet


This works in theroy, if it works in reality then how well it works will depend much on the distribution of gas in interstellar space.

Filaments of greater concentration of gas would become the lanes of shipping.

Not real soon , we are still working on interplanetary travel, still impractically expensive.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I am all for interplanetary travel, assuming that survival on the destination planet is possible. The difficulty is getting there, of course.

I think that this is rather like time travel. If time travel will ever be invented, we might see them as they visit us. Since we have not any evidence of visitors from the future, it is likely that no one will ever invent a time machine.

The same may be true of interspace travel: it is possible, then we would get a look at them every so often. Being as it took them so long to get here, we could expect them to hang around. But so far this does not seem to have happened.

There was some nut who claimed that the earth was hollow, with holes at the poles, and aliens, possibly allied with Nazi survivors, lived inside the Earth. But I discredit this, though it is rather imaginitive.

[Plane]

The same may be true of interspace travel: it is possible, then we would get a look at them every so often. Being as it took them so long to get here, we could expect them to hang around. But so far this does not seem to have happened.

We wouldn't see them if they were too small or too fast moving to register, or if they looked a lot like shrimp and were coloniseing the ocean.

Most likely space traveling creatures are rare in the universe , the nearest set of them might be very far off or very old.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I agree that they are likely few or nonexistent.

Space travel has such great fictional possibilities. Too bad there is no warp drive.

[Plane]

  Explanation of Warp Drive sound silly, but it is an end run around the mathmatical certanty that no spacecraft will ever exceed the speed of light.

    I think there will definately be probes sent to nearby stars , but they will take so long to get there with present propulsion systems that later models might pass them as they fly.

  Once a probe arrives we can get close up pictures of the resorces there , there shouldn't be any people traveling that way untill we do know that there is something exploitable for life there.

  But this might not need to be much, a few generations in the future there might be a lot of us liveing in orbital citys assembled from asteroid material, so an exploitable environment might be no more than a set of rocks near a sun.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I am thinking that Earthling colonies on the Moon,  Titan or Ganymede or some asteroid are more likely than expeditions to Alpha Centauri

[Plane]

I am thinking that Earthling colonies on the Moon,  Titan or Ganymede or some asteroid are more likely than expeditions to Alpha Centauri

Each success makes the next step more likely.

So far the biggest space success is near space communication satilites, these actually make money.

If space colonisation becomes profitable it will at the same time become sustainable, by definition.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I think we are likely to take a lot longer than in Star Trek. We make first contact with Vulcans in 2063. Vulcan is only 16 light years away from Earth. How convenient.