Posted on 08/13/2016 8:51:10 PM PDT by ckilmer
The hunt for exoplanets has been heating up in recent years. Since it began its mission in 2009, over four thousand exoplanet candidates discovered by the Kepler mission, several hundred of which have been confirmed to be “Earth-like” (i.e. terrestrial). And of these, some 216 planets have been shown to be both terrestrial and located within their parent star’s habitable zone (aka. “Goldilocks zone”).
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Ghost ships in space, run by automated failsafe systems, delivering their empty holds into orbit around distant planets. And mistaken millennia later by the emergent species of those solar systems for moons of mystery.
Yes, that’s what I came up with for a spacecraft moving at 50,000 mph. It would take over 54,000 years to reach the nearest star, Promixa Centauri, which is about 25 trillion miles away. The size of the universe is mind boggling.
If it took our spaceship “Juno” 5 years to reach Jupiter’s orbit, how many years will it take for man made space ships to transverse 4.25 light years?
Distance from earth of Jupiter = 582 million miles
Distance from earth of Proxima Centauri =
186,000 X 60 X 24 X 365 X 4.25 = 186,000 X 2233800
= 415,486 million miles
Therefore time required for our spaceship to reach Proxima Centauri = 5 X (415,486 / 582) = 3570 years!
Assuming each new human generation requires 20-25 years,
to reach Proxima Centauri will require
3570/25 = 143 generations to be reproduced and kept alive in a spaceship!
did you compute that bat warp 10 or take into consideration worm holes? I saw them on star trek and they seem to get around pretty fast
“Sol’s closest stellar neighbor, a trinary that is only 4.3 lightyears away from Earth. One of its components’ habitable planets was alreay colonized by Earth humans in 2154—possibly the planet where warp-drive inventor Zefram Cochrane took up residence later in life.”
See more at: http://www.startrek.com/database_article/alpha-centauri#sthash.CcIBURlA.dpuf
Probably divide that by 20 or so in the next 20 years, not good, but not quite as bad.
While you have your calculator out, what was Juno’s average speed traveling to Jupiter?
Minor quibble: Juno did not go in a straight line from Earth to Jupiter. http://d1jqu7g1y74ds1.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/575571main_Juno20110727-3-43_946-710.jpg
Hahaha...I am just a real world mechanical engineer.
I deal with reality of physics. I do wish I was a science
fiction writer though! Then I can ignore reality.
There ya go. If we’re ever going into interstellar space and even beyond our own solar system and galaxy, it won’t be by conventional chemical type rocket ships. Nope. That just won’t get it.
Yes, I was aware of that, but even if you reduce the 5 years it took to traverse the distance in half, we will still need 72 generations to survive in a space ship.
I will volunteer for the first generation reproduction, if NASA provides me with a mate of my choice hahaha.
...OK... I’m outta here! No liberals allowed!
my guess is that the first space ships that first make the jump will go traveling closer to the speed of light. That technology won’t be available for at least 50 years and maybe 100 years. most of the space travel we’ll see for the next century will be in the solar system.
My calculator can not provide that answer. May be Bing or Google will. I was going by the news item than it took 5 years for spaceship Juno to reach and attain orbit around Jupiter.
I think we need to invent cold fusion and cancer cure first before I can believe our spaceships attaining speed of light.
As already noted, the closest star to our Solar System is Proxima Centauri, which is why it makes the most sense to plot an interstellar mission to this system first. As part of a triple star system called Alpha Centauri, Proxima is about 4.24 light years (or 1.3 parsecs) from Earth. Alpha Centauri is actually the brightest star of the three in the system – part of a closely orbiting binary 4.37 light years from Earth – whereas Proxima Centauri (the dimmest of the three) is an isolated red dwarf about 0.13 light years from the binary.
http://www.universetoday.com/15403/how-long-would-it-take-to-travel-to-the-nearest-star/
Too many things having to work perfectly for too long. Too many failures of enough things that, on board the ship, are not fixable. Loss of expertise along the way do to imperfect passing on of knowledge and differences in ability.
true. so likely the jump won’t be attempted until travel speeds are quite close to the speed of light. So travel times would be 5 years one way—or about like sailing around the world in 1530.
My wag is that the technology for near speed of light travel won’t be available for 50 to 100 years. Hard to say. Real quantum computers look to be only 10-15 years off. They will greatly accelerate developments as faster computers have a way of compressing time.
EM Drive. They are working on that as well as a couple others. Havent been paying much attention to the advances and tests for that drive these past months though.
Last I saw, they claim that they may have broken into a warp speed with the tests on the Em Drive.
Like I said..
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