OOT: Proposed Interstellar Mission To Alpha Centauri! (Kinda!)
April 13th, 2016 at 12:54 PM ^
Yuri Milner, the Russian, has been boosting physics and fundamental research for a long time. I hope he can make this happen.
As for the weaponization of the laser, without comment on that, I'd point out that one real hope for interplanetary travel (not necessarily interstellar, but maybe so as an Ark ship or something) was the Orion-type nuclear-propulsion vehicles. We stopped testing (and ultimately researching) those because of fears of the nuclear bombs involved. Seems to me that at some point, we have to get over it. Space is worth the risk, in my opinion.
April 13th, 2016 at 12:58 PM ^
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
...and un-purchase all that hideous UM adidas swag?
Well, you'll never see it because it's literally impossible. Changing events in the past is simply fiction and even if time travel were possible, you still could not change past events, otherwise the event you're trying to chance never would have happened in the first place.
If you went on a 5 year trip at 99.5% of the speed of light when you get back, you would have aged 5 years while those on earth have aged 40+ years. The realationship between mass gravity and time have been proven. Right now we can not time travel into the past, but there is no reason we can not with our current understanding of relativity,
and damn do we look good in Nike
-WD September 2016
April 13th, 2016 at 12:58 PM ^
my wife teaches physics. but she is a spartan.
April 13th, 2016 at 12:59 PM ^
REAL SATELLITE CAMPS
I can see the horror movie script, the giant laser is bumped either deliberately or accidentally and points towards Earth and starts zapping us.
their "intercept" strategy to bend this project to their evil will. Is there a James Bond with a space plane out there?
The article I read said that the better proposals would have the laser in space to minimize energy lost in the atmosphere, but no one would allow these guys to basically build the Death Star. I have no idea how science works; just parroting what I read.
and point it towards the moon for testing. Burn a few long stips into the moon for testing. Then of course codename it "Moonraker"
As someone who works with lasers, there are so many things wrong with this idea I don't even know where to begin.
Could you begin somewhere instead of making a blanket statement?
1. tracking a target the size of a postage stamp as you accelerate it away to relativistic speeds would be impossible even with Star Trek level technology.
2. creating a laser with the precision, power, and limited beam divergence (how much the spot size expands the further from the laser you get) to hit a target hundreds of thousands of miles away would be impossible.
3. Creating an electronic device that could handle the proposed acceleration would be impossible with anything near current technology.
4. Creating an electronic device that could withstand the proposed laser energy and be pushed by it rather than obliterated would be impossible with anything near current technology.
5. Creating a device with a powerful enough set of sensors and communication devices to tell us anything by the time it's any appreciable distance away, yet remains the size of a postage stamp, would be impossible with anything near current technology and probably just plain violates the laws of thermodynamics.
And that's just off the top of my head.
That might work, especially if you reconfigured the giant space laser to emit focused unicorn power.
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
Milner addressed some of those concerns (at least number 4) in his interview with the Atlantic. He mentions that we do not currently have even close to the technology needed to do this today. As he says, “[The $100 million is] to do extensive research into all of these challenges, and try to convince ourselves that this is possible in the lifetime of a single generation.”
Will the research pay off? Who knows. My bet is that we will figure out fusion before developing the necessary technology to use this laser method.
That's fair enough, but eventually you run into certain hard limits of physics. I haven't crunched the numbers but I think the super laser would require atomic-scale precision. Which... good luck with that.
Unless you find a way to "cheat" (ie if we figure out a way to make warp drive feasible) there are certain things that can't be avoided just by hand-waving "technology will have to get better".
think Lawrence Fishburne already tried this, and it did not go well IIRC.
You don't need eyes to figure out what could go wrong.
so let's spend 40 years to send a probe somewhere inhabitable? seems legit.
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
Wouldn't it be easier to abduct Bo Ryan and make him take us to his leaders?
Which is why I don't believe this will happen. Space lasers, as cool as that sounds with it's Star Wars-iness, basically sounds far fetched. Now it's a mini Death Star, yeah, that'll be difficult to push forward. All the other issues you note are very real as well, especially the "slowing down" problem that has no obvious solution even with any technology we may develop in the next 20 years. That said, we could still get a ton of data throughout the mission, so it wouldn't be a total waste if it was even feasible.
The bigger issue is that this proposal uses a lot of technology that will not be proven 20 years from now. It will be in its infincy. Spending $100M with so much uncertainty seems like a bad plan. How do you get this laser tested and functional on the ground, much less tested and functional for a deep space environment millions of miles away from earth with no option of correcting issues, and then actually launched, placed, and oriented correctly in that orbit, in 20 years? And the laser itself, there are just so many questions I have with that one.
I love space. I work in the space exploration field. I'm all about wild ideas, because ideas need to be wild before they can be feasible. But this doesn't seem feasible in the next 20 years. I think there are other, just as cool things that could be developed in the next 20 years that could advance our understanding of space and our willingness to discover throughout the universe that would one day make something like this practical. That seems to be the better path forward for now.
All that said, I'm all for this board topic and ones like it.
Will there be a hospital on board? Twenty years is a long time to go without getting a cold.
I heard the upper left quadrant of the postage stamp will be a hospital.
We need a dreamy mission leader for this one.
What part of the post was too much for you? The percents?
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
Per Milner, the proposed laser would be on the ground to avoid this problem (as well as to lower costs).
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
would we all have to wear cups. just too many questions
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
Why you gotta be stealing my avatar, mate?
Say 'hallo' to my leedle friend
- Tony Montana, Cuban-American Entrepreneur