4 ms·

Everytime I see these pictures I feel a little despaired... Are there people here who believe one day we could travel fast enough to go there ?

by wiz21c 3y ago

irrational 3y ago
[flagged]
- mkoubaa 3y ago
  [flagged]
jl6 3y ago
NASA is planning a robotic mission launching in the 2030s, arriving in the 2040s. Humans? There are probably better destinations in the solar system that we’d go during the period between it becoming technically/economically feasible, and humans being replaced with robots.
Falimonda 3y ago
Go there and do what?
segasaturn 3y ago
Humans won't be landing on the surface of the Gas Giants anytime soon due to their hostile atmospheres, but many of their moons are prime candidates for human settlement!
- mr_toad 3y ago
  Gas giants don’t have surfaces, unless you mean deep in the core where the liquid metallic hydrogen surrounds a small core of molten rock.
_joel 3y ago
I'm sure people said the same thing about being able to travel to the other side of the world in less than a day, when it used to take years. Yet here we are.
digging 3y ago
I'm confused... What's causing your despair? Do you think we'll never be able to visit Uranus in human-compatible travel times? Assuming we (organic humans) survive this century, I'd consider it almost certain we'll find a way to make travel within the solar system a normal thing eventually.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  >travel within the solar system a normal thing eventually. How? Science isn't magic. If you want to get to places in the solar system on human time scales, you have to go FAST. Mars already is about 6 months away in the IDEAL circumstances. We don't have a good idea of how to go faster than we can now without literally blowing up nukes behind our ship, and hoping we can magically ride the waves reliably, and even that is not exactly revolutionary in terms of speed. So now you're literally hoping for some scientific advancement that either bends space so that most things are "closer", allows humans to not die after a significant amount of down time but also makes humans not care about missing out on family and friends and making a brand new life anytime you want to go somewhere else, or a way to magically reach insane speeds. This is ignoring the fact that we don't even think massless propulsion is possible, let alone useful, so we would be stuck with using electricity to accelerate the lightest particles we can manage to as near light speed as physically possible. People keep acting like science is some magic world and it's only a matter of time until science somehow does science fiction, but that's just as absurd as thinking it's only a matter of time until psychologists unlock the secret of telekinesis. It's fantasy. Reality has put very rough boundaries on everything, and while there is some wiggle room for new things to refine our understanding of the universe, any effects and forces we have yet missed would have to be so small or inconsequential as to be meaningless. If you think some future discovery would NOT be inconsequential, now you have to explain how it has hidden from us for all this time. Even "revolutions" in the field of physics that changed how we understand reality itself, like quantum anything, didn't totally change the math. Newton's equations are still mostly valid at human scales! The "wrong" model that caused the very Ultraviolet Catastrophe that lead to the discovery and building of quantum mechanics is still mostly correct for low frequency radiation!
  - 3y ago
claar 3y ago
Absolutely, but we'll need to develop some future technology that allows multiple days of constant acceleration. At 2G constant accel/decel, it'll take ~8.5 days to get to Uranus, reaching a top speed of 2.3% of light speed (14.2 million m/s), and experiencing 17 seconds of time dilation (https://chat.openai.com/share/b93297e1-b089-46d1-8314-a2235b28fce3 https://chat.openai.com/share/b93297e1-b089-46d1-8314-a2235b...). :)
- riversflow 3y ago
  Unless we develop force fields[1] I don’t understand how traveling at such relativistic speeds would work, at .023C a 1 gram micrometeor would have the same potential energy as 25 tons of dynamite (100B Joules) Ice shielding sounds good, but then we are back to the tyranny of the rocket equation. [1] which we don’t even have a path to, afaik. Straight scifi right now.
  - spartanatreyu 3y ago
    > Ice shielding sounds good, but then we are back to the tyranny of the rocket equation. Not really, we don't have to lift up ice from Earth. We can just cook water out of clays in near earth asteroids.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Assuming perfect efficiency in terms of adding energy to the velocity of an 80kg human payload, with zero other power usages, losses, etc, simply accellerating a human up to and back down from that speed takes about 1.6*10^16 joules, or about half of the daily output of the worlds nuclear reactors, or the ENTIRE volume of the Hindenburg as a bladder full of gasoline and a magic machine to extract 100% of the energy.
- 3y ago
z3phyr 3y ago
Of course. Its in our solar system. Although it is very far away, if we get on to it, we can plan it at a huge cost.

Everytime I see these pictures I feel a little despaired... Are there people here who believe one day we could travel fast enough to go there ?

by wiz21c 3y ago

Everytime I see these pictures I feel a little despaired... Are there people here who believe one day we could travel fast enough to go there ?

irrational 3y ago

[flagged]

mkoubaa 3y ago
[flagged]

jl6 3y ago

NASA is planning a robotic mission launching in the 2030s, arriving in the 2040s. Humans? There are probably better destinations in the solar system that we’d go during the period between it becoming technically/economically feasible, and humans being replaced with robots.

Falimonda 3y ago

Go there and do what?

segasaturn 3y ago

Humans won't be landing on the surface of the Gas Giants anytime soon due to their hostile atmospheres, but many of their moons are prime candidates for human settlement!

mr_toad 3y ago
Gas giants don’t have surfaces, unless you mean deep in the core where the liquid metallic hydrogen surrounds a small core of molten rock.

_joel 3y ago

I'm sure people said the same thing about being able to travel to the other side of the world in less than a day, when it used to take years. Yet here we are.

digging 3y ago

I'm confused... What's causing your despair? Do you think we'll never be able to visit Uranus in human-compatible travel times? Assuming we (organic humans) survive this century, I'd consider it almost certain we'll find a way to make travel within the solar system a normal thing eventually.

mrguyorama 3y ago
>travel within the solar system a normal thing eventually. How? Science isn't magic. If you want to get to places in the solar system on human time scales, you have to go FAST. Mars already is about 6 months away in the IDEAL circumstances. We don't have a good idea of how to go faster than we can now without literally blowing up nukes behind our ship, and hoping we can magically ride the waves reliably, and even that is not exactly revolutionary in terms of speed. So now you're literally hoping for some scientific advancement that either bends space so that most things are "closer", allows humans to not die after a significant amount of down time but also makes humans not care about missing out on family and friends and making a brand new life anytime you want to go somewhere else, or a way to magically reach insane speeds. This is ignoring the fact that we don't even think massless propulsion is possible, let alone useful, so we would be stuck with using electricity to accelerate the lightest particles we can manage to as near light speed as physically possible. People keep acting like science is some magic world and it's only a matter of time until science somehow does science fiction, but that's just as absurd as thinking it's only a matter of time until psychologists unlock the secret of telekinesis. It's fantasy. Reality has put very rough boundaries on everything, and while there is some wiggle room for new things to refine our understanding of the universe, any effects and forces we have yet missed would have to be so small or inconsequential as to be meaningless. If you think some future discovery would NOT be inconsequential, now you have to explain how it has hidden from us for all this time. Even "revolutions" in the field of physics that changed how we understand reality itself, like quantum anything, didn't totally change the math. Newton's equations are still mostly valid at human scales! The "wrong" model that caused the very Ultraviolet Catastrophe that lead to the discovery and building of quantum mechanics is still mostly correct for low frequency radiation!
- 3y ago

claar 3y ago

Absolutely, but we'll need to develop some future technology that allows multiple days of constant acceleration. At 2G constant accel/decel, it'll take ~8.5 days to get to Uranus, reaching a top speed of 2.3% of light speed (14.2 million m/s), and experiencing 17 seconds of time dilation (https://chat.openai.com/share/b93297e1-b089-46d1-8314-a2235b28fce3 https://chat.openai.com/share/b93297e1-b089-46d1-8314-a2235b...). :)

riversflow 3y ago
Unless we develop force fields[1] I don’t understand how traveling at such relativistic speeds would work, at .023C a 1 gram micrometeor would have the same potential energy as 25 tons of dynamite (100B Joules) Ice shielding sounds good, but then we are back to the tyranny of the rocket equation. [1] which we don’t even have a path to, afaik. Straight scifi right now.
- spartanatreyu 3y ago
  > Ice shielding sounds good, but then we are back to the tyranny of the rocket equation. Not really, we don't have to lift up ice from Earth. We can just cook water out of clays in near earth asteroids.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
mrguyorama 3y ago
Assuming perfect efficiency in terms of adding energy to the velocity of an 80kg human payload, with zero other power usages, losses, etc, simply accellerating a human up to and back down from that speed takes about 1.6*10^16 joules, or about half of the daily output of the worlds nuclear reactors, or the ENTIRE volume of the Hindenburg as a bladder full of gasoline and a magic machine to extract 100% of the energy.
3y ago

z3phyr 3y ago

Of course. Its in our solar system. Although it is very far away, if we get on to it, we can plan it at a huge cost.