"chances for life on this planet, 100%"

[Linflas]

Not really. If we can make something that can get at say 75% the speed of light a generational ship can get to that planet in 30 years or so. Not unreasonable.

75% speed of light sounds crazy, but 100 years ago so did airplanes.

Actually 100 years ago airplanes were not such a crazy idea.

1910 in aviation

 

[Sea Moose]

100 years ago living like we do now would have sounded crazy.

yes, the apple iphone COULD have been prevented

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

When someone figures out just how much the raw power requirements are to move a spaceship an appreciable percentage of the speed of light and how it could reasonably be generated get back to me.

 

[rudder]

Pretty cool. We need to investigate it as best as we can currently, and if it's plausible that it has life, we should send something to investigate ASAP.

120 trillion miles?

35,000?MPH.. 3428571429 hours.. 525600 hours/year..

6523 years?

Yeh, a little hard to fact check this one. Of course in 500 years... maybe humans will have a device capable of making it in 6.5 days.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Pretty cool. We need to investigate it as best as we can currently, and if it's plausible that it has life, we should send something to investigate ASAP.

120 trillion miles?

35,000?MPH.. 3428571429 hours.. 525600 hours/year..

6523 years?

Could maybe we make something that would go 100,000MPH? That would bring it down to 2,283 years.

On that time-scale, it may as well be on the other side of the universe. On the universal scale, it is a next door neighbor. On the time scale, it's currently much too far away to be of much use.

I read about a new proposed propulsion technology not long ago that would cut a Mars trip from 6 months down to 2 or 3 weeks. This isn't the same article I read but I assume it is speaking about the same thing:

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20010009030842data_trunc_sys.shtml

If my calculations are right, that is about 105,000 miles per hour (assuming Mars is at is closest at 35 million miles away).

Heck, even in the 70s, they had plans on the board for ships that could reach perhaps 10% of light speed, putting something 20 light years away at 200 years away. Many of the plans assumed the existence of fusion reactors (which we still don't have) or the capability of mining certain forms of helium and hydrogren from Jupiter. Project Daedalus was something that might even be technologically feasible today.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

We have proposed blueprints to create a "starship" that could go perhaps 40-50% the speed of light. The problem is the ship would be fatal and break several nuclear treaties, and it would bankrupt the planet. The propulsion involves setting off hydrogen bombs until maximum thrust is achieved. However, the radiation on the back half of the ship would most likely be fatal, and colliding particles on the front of the ship would turn you into swiss cheese. The sheer size of a ship that could carry enough fuel and supplies to make it there would be about 1/2 the size of the moon---which would mean every single resource on the planet would have to be devoted to building it. You get my drift...

You're speaking of Project Daedalus I believe, and the highest speed I saw for that was 12% of light speed. Of course, that was assuming that the trip was to a star within 5 or 6 light years; if you went further, you'd accelerate more and I'd guess you could possibly get into the 25%/35% range. That would require a larger ship or an additional stage, however. I remember reading some stuff from Carl Sagan and I think there were ships that were faster, but the technology to build them was still well in the future and Daedalus was the only one that could be built within the next few decades (he wrote that in the 70s, IIRC).

You make a great point about lifespan as well. There are many scientists who believe that biological immortality is not only possible, but it may happen in our lifetime. When I say biological immortality, that doesn't mean you're immune to diseases or accidents; it just means that you won't age and many "old age" afflictions would be eliminated as a result. You could still contract and die of AIDS, for example.

 

[IceBergSLiM]

yawn

 

[brainhulk]

all they have to do is hitch a ride on some really fast comet

/solved

 

[CycloWizard]

Dr. Vogt fail. His statement is just an attention whorish thing to draw more people into reading his article. Nothing in science is ever 100% certain. In this case, it's a long shot at best. I understand that he's excited and all, but really?

 

[Elias824]

I think by found an inhabitable planet, they really mean they found a planet that they cant say for sure us uninhabitable from here. Id love to send a probe, but I doubt we could even communicate with it over those distances, not to mention the latency at the half way mark it would take 10 years to get a radio signal, and 10 years to send say something like a course correction.

 

[Eli]

wait, wat? 525600 hours in a year? What planet do you live on?

Gah..

That's minutes. Oops.

There are 8760 hours in a year. So yeah, ignore all that math.

Essentially, this planet is far, far, FAR too distant to be of relevance with current technology.

 

[AstroManLuca]

120 trillion miles = about 20 light years

Voyager 2, the most distant space probe we have, is apparently going to take 296,000 years to reach the star Sirius, which is only about 8 light years distant. But Voyager 2 was focused on studying the planets in our solar system, not just traveling to distant stars.

 

[dr150]

I'm in NO RUSH in meeting our alien overloads.....

 

[gar3555]

wait, wat? 525600 hours in a year? What planet do you live on?

Should read minutes/year I believe(non leap year)

 

[Jeff7]

You're speaking of Project Daedalus I believe, and the highest speed I saw for that was 12% of light speed. Of course, that was assuming that the trip was to a star within 5 or 6 light years; if you went further, you'd accelerate more and I'd guess you could possibly get into the 25%/35% range. That would require a larger ship or an additional stage, however. I remember reading some stuff from Carl Sagan and I think there were ships that were faster, but the technology to build them was still well in the future and Daedalus was the only one that could be built within the next few decades (he wrote that in the 70s, IIRC).

You make a great point about lifespan as well. There are many scientists who believe that biological immortality is not only possible, but it may happen in our lifetime. When I say biological immortality, that doesn't mean you're immune to diseases or accidents; it just means that you won't age and many "old age" afflictions would be eliminated as a result. You could still contract and die of AIDS, for example.

Project Longshot was another one, capable of reaching Alpha Centauri in about 100 years.

You'd have to have a good deceleration engine though, or else that'd be one heck of a quick flyby.

 

[MrX8503]

Not really. If we can make something that can get at say 75% the speed of light a generational ship can get to that planet in 30 years or so. Not unreasonable.

75% speed of light sounds crazy, but 100 years ago so did airplanes.

The energy needed to move a large ship at anywhere near the speed of light would be ridiculous, nearly impossible.

Second, if we were able to propel a ship at near light speeds, the ship and everything inside it would break apart down to molecules.

Lets say we still overcome these problems and we are able to travel at the speed of light, it would still take us forever to travel through the Universe. This means that there must be another form of space travel that we haven't discovered.

 

[zsdersw]

I love to see all these armchair physicists and space propulsion experts in this thread talking about how interstellar space travel in human time scales is next to impossible.

There's no reason to doubt that they'll be joining the many hundreds of naysayers and critics throughout history who've asserted the impossibility or near-impossibility of achievement and been proven wrong.

 

[ProfJohn]

If this planet does have life is probably similar to plant life and very unlikely to have any higher forms of intelligence on it.

The fact that the planet is gravitationally locked with its star would make the development of higher forms of life very difficult because there would be such a limited livable zone on the planet.

Finally, read up on chaos theory and how it applies to evolution and think about how such a small livable zone could affect the evolution of life and how limited its evolution might be.

 

[Juddog]

Or alternately the planet may be chock full of life. We originally thought that there couldn't be life deep in the oceans by the trenches but then we found out there was life down there after all.

Life has a way of adapting to it's surroundings; of course from ProfJohn's view God created the life on Earth, so obviously no other planets can sustain sentient life forms, let alone the perfect beings that humans are.

 

[MrX8503]

I guess another thing that throws a monkey wrench into the mix is that it has been speculated that the laws of physics we know today does not apply consistently throughout the universe.

 

[zsdersw]

If this planet does have life is probably similar to plant life and very unlikely to have any higher forms of intelligence on it.

The fact that the planet is gravitationally locked with its star would make the development of higher forms of life very difficult because there would be such a limited livable zone on the planet.

Finally, read up on chaos theory and how it applies to evolution and think about how such a small livable zone could affect the evolution of life and how limited its evolution might be.

Here's a better article:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth-like-exoplanet-possibly-habitable-100929.html

This planet is bigger than the Earth (and 3-4 times more massive), and likely has sufficient gravity to hold on to an atmosphere. Water oceans combined with a decent atmosphere would likely keep the dark side of the planet from being too cold. Extremophiles exist in regions of the Earth that are far colder and far hotter than the temperature swing imposed by tidal lock.

In short, I'm not so sure the livable zone of the planet is as small as you think.

 

[FTM0305]

I think people are failing to realize that this planet ALSO weighs in at 3 times as much as earth.

its too late to look up the math, but the gravity on that planet could be up to 3 times as much as it is here if it has the same radius as earth

F= Gxm1xm2/r^2

G being 6.67x10^-11

if I recall correctly


I am not sure if that is going to be habitable.

plus the fact that we wouldnt be able to get there in with our technology today, and 20.3 years sounds unlikely as well.

unless we discover faster methods of traveling in the universe, such as worm holes (theoretically possible under Einsteins law of special relativity) i think we are going to be stuck with earth/mars until we as a human race extincts

Don't forget most of the mass our planet has is because of the high density of metals such as Iron. Material density would play a big part of calculating the gravity of the planet.


EDIT: ADD ON - Worm Holes

I definitely think that would be the only viable solution to any travel in space.

Imagine an emergenacy on a mars colony. Months before help can arrive people may be dead.

I theorize, which I plan on writing a paper in detail on one day, that black holes suffer from what I call exit ratio. I think a black hole is a worm hole that has a massive entrance that is disproportional to its exit. Because of this mass is compressed in warped space and expelled in the form of pure energy.

If one can create a worm hole throw space they would have to account for a stabilized passage and exit ratio in order to safely cross from one space to another in a short time, but relatively much faster than light if were to cover the natural expanse of space.

 

[FTM0305]

Why isn't this thread in politics and news?

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

I love to see all these armchair physicists and space propulsion experts in this thread talking about how interstellar space travel in human time scales is next to impossible.

There's no reason to doubt that they'll be joining the many hundreds of naysayers and critics throughout history who've asserted the impossibility or near-impossibility of achievement and been proven wrong.

So you don't like religion AND science eh? Have you done any math to figure the energy needed? Figure on propelling a small asteroid to 75% of c.

Your exercise is to figure out the amount of power to move between ten thousand and ten million tons. Of course you know why it would weigh that much, right?

 

[zsdersw]

So you don't like religion AND science eh? Have you done any math to figure the energy needed? Figure on propelling a small asteroid to 75% of c.

Your exercise is to figure out the amount of power to move between ten thousand and ten million tons. Of course you know why it would weigh that much, right?

I have no problem with science. I do, however, have a problem with a vision of the future of space travel so myopic as to assert that interstellar space travel in human time scales is "impossible" or "nearly impossible".. when the people who make those assertions haven't the slightest idea what they're talking about.