Posted on 11/24/2012 1:33:34 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but the stars are very far away. Voyager 1 is about 17 light-hours distant from Earth and is traveling with a velocity of 0.006 percent of light speed, meaning it will take about 17,000 years to travel one light-year. Fortunately, the elusive "warp drive" now appears to be evolving past difficulties with new theoretical advances and a NASA test rig under development to measure artificially generated warping of space-time.
The warp drive broke away from being a wholly fictional concept in 1994, when physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested that faster-than-light (FTL) travel was possible if you remained still on a flat piece of spacetime inside a warp bubble that was made to move at superluminal velocity. Rather like a magic carpet. The main idea here is that, although no material objects can travel faster than light, there is no known upper speed to the ability of spacetime itself to expand and contract. The only real hint we have is that the minimum velocity of spacetime expansion during the period of cosmological inflation was about 30 million billion times the speed of light...
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmag.com ...
We'd probably need to screen for colonists ~ the Russians didn't so they're mostly outta' there! But it is livable, and life can be pleasant no matter where you go.
One of the more interesting things I ran into doing my research into the Skolt Sa'ami ~ and talk about some thin stuff ~ was that the 5,000 or so left behind in Russia in the Kola peninsula were usually small enough, and rigorous enough they were great candidates to be fighter pilots in the Russian air force. Even their best planes had a very tight fit and bad heating ~ these guys could survive. With that they became important rather than just Europe's smallest minority. Modern gear has no doubt made them less special, but you'd need folks like that to deal with Siberia and much of Canada. They exist.
Ha, Ha, HA!
He said you don't travel across the paper.
Uh Huh ...
and like the joke about naking your own man from mud, and God said ... "get your own mud" ... who makes the bend in the paper ?
“(I actually wrote a story once where a technology did just that, tear holes in the fabric of space... I lost it a while back though... drat)”
It probably fell through one of those holes.
“Cosmological inflation”? The price of stuff really went up, then. Used to be you could buy a pound of dark matter for ten or twelve parsnips (parsnips are the universal currency). Along comes cosmological inflation, and you couldn’t touch a teaspoon of dark matter for less than a hundred parsnips.
A ringed planet and/or some solar sailing in the inner Solar System would allow us freedom from the damn collectivists for hundreds or even thousands of years.
And don't forget the wonderful business opportunities for retirement homes on the moon. (Help I've fallen....Hey, I'm still falling, here! Somebody help.)
SSSHHHH! Are you nuts? Don’t let Obama know that there are numbers past the trillions.
It’s not a speed limit as such. You don’t go up to it and then find you can’t go any faster. It’s more like a horizon that you can never reach. Even in a flat spacetime model there’s plenty of “warping” in the Lorentz Transformation.
I recall that in FARMER IN THE SKY, I believe it was, the young hero questions the spaceship engineer what happens if you reach “almost” the speed of light and then go full blast. In the story, the engineer has no answer, only proving the author’s limited grasp of this subject.
Duh. Were talking about warping the fabric of time and space here. I'd say that qualifies.
No "unexpected collisions" as this bubble would not move through space as you seem to think, nor would it accelerate or decelerate. To someone in the bubble it would seem as if they were at one moment one place and a moment later at a location light years away.
bump
Watch it there...I resemble that remark!
Q. Interstellar Highway Patrol Officer: Do you know why I stopped you?
A. When?
Just think what we could do with Siberia if we tried applying the cashola and technology being considered for extra-terrestrial habitation. But, apart from some pragmatic reasons not to, the enviro wackos would block it to protect the rare Eagle-sized Siberian Mosquito or some other unique gem of nature.
I will wait for a more concrete proposal than, "It could happen, we have magnets!"
CC
Long after the Earth has been turned into a burnt over cinder or altogether vaporized by the expanding Sun in its giat phase of growth, billions of humans can be thriving in their asteroidal habitats in the outer Solar System. There is more water readily available among just a few asteroids and Dwarf planets in the outer system than there is on the entire earth. Then there is far more water in the Kuiper Belt. Living inside some of the larger asteroids could feel little different than standing outdoors in a sunny day on the Earth.Only a few thousand feet of air above the head can give the impression of a blue sky. Such internal galleries can yield enough arable acreage to inside Ceres to equal the Earths arable land surfaces. Humanity’s future is even more likely to be found in habitats among the asteroids than those to be found upon the planets and planetary sized moons. The energy costs for transportation between the inner Solar System and the Outer solar System can be no more and sometimes less than the transportation costs from the surface of the Earth to the Cis-Lunar orbit or the surface of the Moon/Luna.
The outer Solar System can not only be made livable, it is likely to be Humanity’s only hope for long-term survivaland a very comfortable and thriving survival.
There’s a thought- I need a ponderin’ rock for my backyard. All I have is a pile of old lumber.
“What about “stretch” marks?”
Spaghettification? The “Noodle Effect?”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification
Would make a good “Word for the day!”
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