7 ms·
Sending a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri
- maeon3 15y agoWe need a new method of transportation through space. Could the higgs boson be removed from a neutron so that it would not interact with the higgs field? We could create a tin can sized ship with it and accellerate the near zero mass object close to light speed and decelerate just as easily if zero mass fuel could also be made.
- andrewingram 15y agoThis does assume that the higgs boson is real and we can come up with a way of manipulating it at relatively low power levels. Not much good in the short term if it takes the power output of a star to achieve :) Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series of hard sci-fi has quite a bit about ships called Lighthuggers that basically travel at about 0.95c and exploit relativity to achieve short journeys for crew members when hundreds of years pass in the real world. A more advanced technology in the books is one which reduces the inertia of an object to achieve even higher speeds, the higgs isn't mentioned explicitly IIRC but I think it's what the books are getting at.
- blake8086 15y ago.95c only gives a time dilation factor of ~3x, that's not very much.
- andrewingram 15y agoYeah, they still used sleeper technologies, but were only sleeping for 30 years rather than 100. But the universe takes the view that sleeper technology is dangerous and shouldn't be used heavily, it also only slowed down metabolism rather than freezing it ala stasis.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoIf we can make zero-mass fuel, why bother shrinking the ship?
- Groxx 15y agoIf we have zero mass fuel... what do we use to accelerate?
- kaybe 15y agoAdd the higgs as you go. ;)
- Groxx 15y agoWhich means detaching them and keeping them around. Wouldn't that mean dragging your mass around as you go, letting it decrease as you expend fuel, similar to the current setup? And if you let yourself get too light, you'd be blown along by solar winds, never able to approach a star system. More separately, I've been wondering: once we remove them, what happens at the destination, and we're largely massless? Do we cannibalize some of the planet's? Otherwise we'd float in the atmosphere, probably pretty high up, or get blown away by breezes... In any case, we'd probably be far too distracted by unhigging things and floating around to actually achieve speedy space-flight for quite a while.
- kaybe 15y agoIt won't work either way, my comment was not intented to be serious. According to the theory, the larger part of mass is originated in sea quarks which form and annihilate from the binding energy of the "real" valence quarks in very short time spans - how to approach those? There will be other problems too.. gravity is the weakest force, but it still plays a role. If it is taken away, the chemistry of our ship (and us) could change critically. Additionally, if there is no mass, electron and nucleons will all have the same mass (none), and all elements will have the same mass - uhoh. If you're lucky you might get an entire new set of particles, or maybe try hydrogen plasma.. I agree, we'd be far to busy figuring this out. But imagine, maybe overhigging would be possible as well and we'd have gravity generators! (Low g is one of the big health problems in space.)
- Groxx 15y agoI'm enjoying the mental pictures :) And know little about the details, so I'm finding this fascinating. Now I've got a mental picture of lifting something light, cranking up its higgs-bosonity, and dropping something far heavier. As long as it uses more energy to raise the effective-mass than it can produce, we don't create a perpetual-motion device, but there could be tons of fun to be had :) Winning those hammer-and-bell challenge things at fairs, for instance - crank up the mass, thus inertia, as you swing down. Handy for destruction in general, too.
- rubidium 15y ago"In other words, we could all too easily become lost in the virtual worlds we make for ourselves, and lose interest in the stars. Or, more probably, we could squander our resources and experience profound and irreversible technological regression. Sometimes, I pessimistically hold with some combination of these two extremes." I believe indifference to exploration and learning is the biggest threat. We've shown a remarkable ability to take useless things (buried dead organisms, uranium) and make them useful resources, so I'm not as concerned about that.
- salemh 15y agoI'm always fascinated by the lack of "space" like exploration projects for the ocean. Seemingly closer access, as if not difficult technical problems, but with greater access to actual resources. Thoughts as to why? http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/ http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/ Meh link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-spyros/colbert-report-dr-robert_b_166979.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-spyros/colbert-report-d... One of the biggest issues facing the oceans is a lack of awareness. You can't see what goes on in the ocean the same way you see what happens in a forest or in an African savanna. So people don't know that we waste 54 billion pounds of fish every year while 8 million people die of starvation. They don't know that every single fishery will have entirely collapse by 2048. Or that 90 percent of all large predators in the oceans are gone. And if people could see that. If people could see the amount of waste and destruction in the oceans they wouldn't stand for it for a second. It should be noted however that perviously Dr. Ballard has, in the process of drumming up enthusiasm for increased funding and interest in ocean exploration, touched on the rich bounty of resources yet to be tapped beneath the sea floor. As always, the needs of man and nature are not mutually exclusive should we choose. Balance between the amazing scientific and educational benefits often described by Ballard and the interests of commerce can be achieved if we keep our eye on the prize. http://roastedpinebark.hubpages.com/hub/Ocean-Exploration-Needs-More-Funding http://roastedpinebark.hubpages.com/hub/Ocean-Exploration-Ne... “The ocean is home to the greatest diversity of the planet. It’s still ironic that there are more footprints on the moon than there are on the bottom of the sea, and we’re only 7 miles away,” says biologist Sylvia Earle (Marino). Ocean exploration does not receive the amount of funding that it should, especially compared to the space program. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1202/1 http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1202/1 Answers me a bit: It is common for books on undersea exploration to include a throwaway comment about how we know far more about the surface of the Moon than the bottom of the ocean, or how more people have been into space, or on the Moon, than have reached the bottom of the sea. These comparisons are often not terribly accurate. Every year thousands of sailors travel under the oceans in military submarines, thousands of commercial divers work on pipelines, cables and oil rigs, thousands of hobbyists engage in recreational diving, and hundreds of researchers travel to great depths in the interests of science. Robots regularly venture where humans do not. What is usually fueling these claims is jealousy, or more politely, professional envy: the United States spends billions of dollars exploring space every year, and far less money exploring beneath the sea. There are many similarities between deep sea exploration and space exploration, and also some important differences. Deep sea exploration has existed for nearly twice as long as space exploration, and followed a different path. But the differences are diminishing and the two endeavors are starting to look more and more like each other. More importantly, deep ocean exploration is having a major effect upon space exploration.
- MikeCo 15y agoProbably the most interesting question from the comments: "How important is the time gap of interstellar travel?" The information we gather today about the state of the universe is terribly "out of date" considering we are looking into the past. If we found a pale blue dot, it could be gone by the time we could manage to get there. Alternatively, there may be one in the making that we don't recognize but would be habitable by the time we made it there. We should solve the FTL travel problem first. :)
- maaku 15y agoPlanets don't disappear in a matter of years. Even in the 100,000 to few million years it would take to traverse the entire galaxy they wouldn't disappear (although any life would evolve significantly).
- InclinedPlane 15y agoThere's no guarantee that the "FTL travel problem" is in any way solvable. If we wait to solve and unsolvable problem then we will never go.
- da_dude4242 15y agoTime travel from whose perspective? To you what seems like ten-thousands of years will seem to a traveler going at relativistic speeds like hundreds of years.
- jxcole 15y agoMy opinion is that we have not given anti-matter a serious enough thought. It certainly is expensive to create now, but it seems like the scientists are and were focused on creating antimatter to confirm it's existence and properties. Once they were able to confirm these things, they moved on to trying to use their devices to confirm the existence of other things, like the Higgs Boson (a noble effort). Has there actually been a concerted effort in the physics community to design a more efficient anti-matter creation/storage mechanism?
- rubidium 15y agoThere was anti-hydrogen that was made and trapped for >1000 seconds in Dec 2010 (http://massen.web.cern.ch/massen/physics/andresen2010d.pdf http://massen.web.cern.ch/massen/physics/andresen2010d.pdf). Is that what you mean? There are certainly efforts in this direction.
- wcarss 15y agoThat's storage, which is one possible component of practical anti-matter propulsion. You could generate a lot of it efficiently, store what you made, and send it as lightweight, high yield fuel. The other alternative is to somehow make it as you go: find some way to create pairs and annihilate them in the direction opposite to the direction of thrust you desire. If there were a cost-efficient, energy-efficient, weight-efficient way of generating even very small annihilating pairs, it would be a major propulsion technology. It would also be a major weapons technology, and the fact that we don't know about research being done on such a cool-sounding thing it means that it probably isn't being done, or is being done with surprising secrecy (kind of unlikely). Going out on a limb, I think that means we probably have solid theoretical grounding for believing it's infeasible. (obligatory disclaimer: I am (obviously) not a physicist)
- wcarss 15y agoActually, it may be a feasible driver of mass while not being a feasible weapon. If it takes something the size of 5-6 refrigerators to generate the particles, but they (+fuel) could generate the equivalent of >6ish refrigerators worth of our presently used fuel, it would be feasible for transportation. For weapons (I was thinking grenades and bombs) you would need to have smaller sizes, and it would have to be efficient to make the particle generators themselves. Spacecraft (at present) can be one-off designs. We could conceivably make a very expensive, reasonably lightweight, reasonably energy-efficient, reasonably large antimatter drive once while being unable to use that technology to make a reproducible superweapon.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Apocryphon 15y agoI'd just be happy with a sequel to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, one of those franchises that has languished and whose reappearance, alas, seems as far away as an actual mission to Alpha Centauri.
- zeteo 15y agoThe key to a successful interstellar probe is probably miniaturization. You only need about 5kg of Pu-239 (energy density ~8.8e13 J/kg) to accelerate a 1kg payload to 10% of the speed of light (energy requirement ~4.5e14 J). A single large H bomb (2.1e17 J) could accelerate 100kg to 0.2c.
- Groxx 15y agoAs shrapnel, yeah. Not much can survive those kinds of accelerations. So you'd need to carry a bunch of smaller ones with you, or shoot them at the probe as it accelerates (harder and harder to do), at which point we have the same current problems - large masses, or shooting things at other things to propel them. -- After thinking about it for a bit, I don't think miniaturization for very-long-range probes would work very well anyway. You can't focus signals beyond a certain degree, dictated by your reflector size, so you either need a lot of power to send signals long distances or very large reflectors to compensate for lower power. The reflectors could conceivably be something like a solar sail - huge and light - but you still have to carry it and deploy it and ensure it stays focused as you approach other stars (solar winds). You're stuck with rigid and heavier or flexible and useless, and if it's big enough it'll push you away from the star regardless of its ability to hold a shape. At which point we're pretty much stuck with using, thus carrying, more power beyond the inflection point. No clue where that would be, but I doubt it would bring us past all but the closest stars, if any.
- zeteo 15y agoYes, of course you wouldn't directly use an H bomb, the idea was that the quantities of fissile materials needed to propel a 100kg interstellar probe to 0.2c are easily within reach of several nations. Controlled fusion can be achieved in very confined spaces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohlraum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohlraum I agree that communication equipment is a major problem. The best way to solve it is probably to oversize the local equipment: a dedicated space telescope and a powerful orbital laser. This may let you get away with a very lightweight emitter/receiver pair on the probe itself.
- 15y ago
- duggan 15y agoI always liked the concept I read about in an Asimov short story years ago; the (rough) idea being that you somehow "pin" a ship/probe to the CBR/fabric of the universe and let the solar system / galaxy accelerate away at 2.1 million km/hr. Note: I am obviously not a physicist, so feel free to demolish my fantasy :)
- kristianp 15y agoThis kind of thing would require large scale industrialization of space (in orbit around various places). If we are doing that, why not create a black hole starship? Microscopic black holes have been theorized as power sources for starships. The power source is the Hawking radiation that is intense for microscopic black holes, with a mass of around a million tonnes according to calculations in [1]. Apparently, creating a black hole "would require millions of times less energy than a comparable amount of antimatter" [2]. We would need to learn more about quantum gravity first though. [1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803 http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship
- dmoney 15y agoThere are ways to get from planet to planet with almost no energy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Networ... There must also be ways to get from star to star. If there are Sun-Earth Lagrange points, there must be Galaxy-star Lagrange points, and a way to transfer from the Sun's to Alpha Centauri's. This would probably take a while though.