Exterminate! Exterminate!!
Posted on 06/21/2018 10:43:19 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The term “moonshot” is sometimes invoked to denote a project so outrageously ambitious that it can only be described by comparing it to the Apollo 11 mission to land the first human on the Moon. The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative transcends the moonshot descriptor because its purpose goes far beyond the Moon. The aptly-named project seeks to travel to the nearest stars.
The brainchild of Russian-born tech entrepreneur billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Starshot was announced in April 2016 at a press conference joined by renowned physicists including Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson. While still early, the current vision is that thousands of wafer-sized chips attached to large, silver lightsails will be placed into Earth orbit and accelerated by the pressure of an intense Earth-based laser hitting the lightsail.
After just two minutes of being driven by the laser, the spacecraft will be traveling at one-fifth the speed of light—a thousand times faster than any macroscopic object has ever achieved.
Each craft will coast for 20 years and collect scientific data about interstellar space. Upon reaching the planets near the Alpha Centauri star system, an the onboard digital camera will take high-resolution pictures and send these back to Earth, providing the first glimpse of our closest planetary neighbors. In addition to scientific knowledge, we may learn whether these planets are suitable for human colonization.
The team behind Breakthrough Starshot is as impressive as the technology. The board of directors includes Milner, Hawking, and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. The executive director is S. Pete Worden, former director of NASA Ames Research Center. A number of prominent scientists, including Nobel and Breakthrough Laureates, are serving as advisors to the project, and Milner has promised $100 million of his own funds to begin work....
(Excerpt) Read more at singularityhub.com ...
Should mount the lasers on the spacecraft itself. Laser light travels at the speed of light for any observer, so where it is sourced is immaterial. Then, braking is a non-issue, with a turning maneuver about half-way.
“If that has any possibility of working, and if there is any other life in the universe, it would already have been done and it would have hit every single star within our galaxy by now.”
That assumes the beings wanted to do as you described. Also who is to say aliens machines have not observed or even visited the Earth at some time in the past? Aliens might have been able to get what they need from their star system or adjacent star systems.
Absolutely!
It's 5:35 AM -- and, Im stilll up, so the old mental cruncher's not working at top efficiency -- but...
Just consider what acceleration from ~zero to .25C in 2 seconds would do to human passengers! (Can you say, "red goo smeared all over the aft bulkheads"?)
You and I have gone back and forth on this.
Money is fungible.
Musk is moving it back and forth from venture to venture—a plate spinning exercise.
Eventually a plate will hit the floor with a loud crash—and the taxpayers will be left footing the bill.
Giving him new federal contracts is like feeding drugs to a junkie—never trust a junkie.
I think you mean mass, but, you know, crap science and all...
Eventually a plate will hit the floor with a loud crash—and the taxpayers will be left footing the bill.
...
You mean like the $475 billion dollar loan that he paid back nine years early? It was paid in 2013. The other car companies haven’t paid theirs back yet.
That could actually happen. Faster interstellar ships will pass by their predecessors from years before. From the perspective of the crews in the slower ships, the crews in the newer and faster ships will be time travellers, visitors from the future.
This has the makings of a good science fiction story.
Accurately speaking, no one has modified physical law, either. All anyone has ever done is to refine theory to better describe the immutable physical reality.
Exterminate! Exterminate!!
The answer is no. There is no physical law preventing computing power from increasing and chipsize decreasing. There are the fundamental laws of the universe that govern how fast you can go. First the universal speed limit - the speed of light. Next Newton's laws: the conservation of momentum and e = 1/2mv2. Next thermodynamics 2 laws: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and the entropy of the universe always increases.
Oddly enough this proposal doesn't violate any of these, so theoretically it might work, buy how you can get enough of a power source into a microsized chip to transmit a detectable signal 24,000,000,000,000 miles remains somewhat of a puzzle and how an ultra low mass object traveling at 1/5 light speed could possible survive its encounters with stray atoms in the interstellar medium I have no idea, and I suspect the proponents of this idea don't either.
In SF author David Weber’s “Honor Harrington” series, this was a problem. A group of colonists would purchase settlement rights to a planet, then set off from Earth in a sub-light cryogenic ship. Decades or centuries later, another group in a hyperspace capable (effectively faster than light) ship would pass them and squat on the same planet.
The first group would arrive and find themselves outgunned and with outdated tech. It usually would not end well.
Ah...no
Last I heard was that F still equals M x A. Shooting photons (tiny M if any at all) at some fairly large craft (M) still equals some minute A, or have photons recently became really massive? Didn’t think so.
The same people who are suppressing the 100 mpg carburetor no doubt.
Search on 'electric universe' to learn more.
Oh well if it's on the internet it has to be true.
“the computer revolution”
I was easy given the millions of engineers brought on board because of huge profits forseen.
Mostly just becoming able to make smaller and smaller circuits, which by their smallness are also faster. Lasers and fiber optic transmission are part of the picture. The ability to build cheap, beautiful, large color displays is in there.
Here’s something that’s hard: making batteries with higher energy per pound.
You are correct.
+1
Well, if its a fact, it can't be debunked. I should have been an English teacher. lol
Just for accuracy, we’re not at the edge. We’re actually about halfway out on the disk, but in a small, not-very dense sub-arm. “Backwater”, I’ll give you.
“And by the way. If we are ever visited by aliens, they will be robots.”
That’s where I heard the name Dyson. He was the one who gave life to the terminators.
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