Van Allen Belts here we come!!
Wonder if the shields will take it Captain?
S
With a growing number of Earth-like exoplanets discovered in recent years, it is becoming increasingly frustrating that we can’t visit them. After all, our knowledge of the planets in our own solar system would be pretty limited if it weren’t for the space probes we’d sent to explore them. The problem is that even the nearest …
We've become too shallow to seek the stars any more, it's all about Profit and Self. A project as large as planetary and interstellar exploration requires sacrifice - it takes massive amounts of funding, massive amounts of time for research & development and massive amounts of commitment to get it all done. We are too impatient, too self-centered and too attuned to the Results Now mentality to do this type of hard, grinding, long-term non-immediately-profitable work any more.
Much sadness :(
In a comment below someone mentions asteroid mining. Yes, this and other "enterprises in space!" are indeed the answer. Why? Because no one - well, no majority vote - is going to suggest using 50% or even 10% of your GPP (gross planetary product?) for 'bullshit' like moonshots to exoplanets.
But if you get so much going on at ground-level plus all that's possible out in the home system, that's today's economy on steroids! Once you have even small two digit multipliers in effect, hey, who cares about splurging 1% of so much more than we had before? Catering to a vocal minority (like those durn explorationists) is much easier when it doesn't hurt (the politicians) at all.
The sad reality isn't that "We've become too shallow to seek the stars any more" but that it's just not possible without fusion energy, and although fusion research is still on-going we're still quite some way from a working solution.
Without a high efficiency energy source, where efficiency equates to duration, there's just no way a probe could accelerate for long enough to achieve a high enough % of 'c' to reduce the journey time to less than millennia before it ran out of fuel.
Well, that depends on how you do it...
Personally, I think a dive toward the sun, then use (rather large) magnetic fields to catch a ride on a solar ejection would get rather close to 1%, possibly faster depending on which one and how the energy is used (magnetic fields can act like springs...)
Suitable for probes...
"...a dive toward the sun, then use (rather large) magnetic fields to catch a ride on a solar ejection..."
I think not. Some numbers from Wikipedia: "The Sun has a magnetic field that varies across the surface of the Sun. Its polar field is 1–2 gauss (0.0001–0.0002 T), whereas the field is typically 3,000 gauss (0.3 T) in features on the Sun called sunspots and 10–100 gauss (0.001–0.01 T) in solar prominences."
...and...
"The Sun's dipole magnetic field of 50–400 μT (at the photosphere) reduces with the inverse-cube of the distance to about 0.1 nT at the distance of Earth."
For comparison: the magnetic flux density at the surface of a neodymium magnet is about 1.25 T
So, even discounting the issue of finding the energy to generate a large magnetic field for the probe, it's not going to have much of a field from the Sun against which to operate, even within the Solar System, let alone between the stars. And that's assuming that, instead of using high-mass radiation shielding, you can use the probe's magnetic field to protect it from the intense radiation it'll experience when it passes close to Sol.
You did a fine job in expressing my first two points about the inability of humanity to """think big""", those being
1) Greed (in all of its forms, such as the intense desire to accumulate wealth, essential resources or political domination), and
2) Instant Gratification (patience is NOT a virtue, the I """must have it now""" mentality).
and, then we can include
3) Conflict (and the failure to avoid it),
4) Arrogance (in all of its forms, on a personal, organizational, religious or governmental level),
5) Indifference (to the plight/suffering of others).
If you can espouse others, then please feel free to pile on.
Unless, and until humanity can get these areas of concern resolved, then humanity is doomed.
Until humanity can co-cooperatively work to improve the existence of ALL of us, and learn to co-exist peacefully with one another. we are doomed to continue to repeat the violence and destruction that has plagued humanity since the dawn of recorded history.
One of the most visceral examples of that mentality in the past century. was espoused in the concept of a Master Race, and the evil that resulted from it being unleashed upon the world; and the resulting global conflict to destroy that evil.
The waste in human lives and the destruction of the planet, and the unleashing of new weapons of mass destruction, established a mentality of mutually assured destruction that gripped the world in fear for the last half of the last century.
That fear (of global destruction) has been replaced by a new fear of pointless mass killings by those who would impose their concept of 'tribal God imagery' upon others who do not share their narrow religious views with butchery as punishment for resisting such imposition.
As I have said humanity is doomed. It may be too late.
Has anyone done some calculations on how many people would be needed to maintain an acceptable level of civilization so that, for example, clothing* could be replaced, strange infectious diseases could be treated, dropped mobile phones could be repaired/replaced, trans-new-world transport could be built and run, new generations could be educated and scientific /engineering progress maintained etc etc.
It seems to me that the numbers of people required for a successful autonomous colony would be impracticable, and that those left behind on Earth would be a bit reluctant to finance continuous re-supply missions.
*For example, stone age clothing was very low tech, today's clothing requires advanced agriculture, synthetic materials, specialized machinery, efficient transportation and (I think) specialized retail industries.
We need warp drive and replicator technology before even thinking of space colonization.
300 people are needed for acceptable genetic diversity. Damned near everything else can be done by robots. Most of your colonists would end up biologists/medics or robotics engineers. The rest would be developers. You'd be surprised what you can do with robots when you have the budget. Even with today's technology. We really only use people for anything anymore because they're cheaper, or they have expertise in pattern recognition that is still too difficult to code and execute on silicon.
I am afraid I can't agree. Look at these projects:
1) LHC
2) James Webb Space Telescope
3) ISS
4) Worldwide climate modelling efforts
5) Serious discussions about moving towards a zero carbon world
All of the above are expensive, and the last will be expensive and painful.
Humans are tackling large scale problems, but not starships. Yet.
We've become too shallow ...
The malaise you're lamenting has been around for at least all of the Modern era (so for a few centuries in European and European-derived cultures). There are grounds1 for suggesting it has been the condition of humanity for all of history.
it's all about Profit and Self
Since those motivators are pretty much exclusively responsible for the technology we currently enjoy, it seems a bit rich to blame them for our supposed failure to put it to use.
1Essays from contemporary commentators bemoaning the laxity of present times, in comparison to some prelapsarian past.
Every sub-atomic particle has an antimatter companion that is virtually identical to itself, but with the opposite charge. When a particle and its antiparticle meet, they annihilate each other while releasing a huge amount of energy that could be used for propulsion. However, we currently cannot produce and store enough antimatter for this to work.
What you need are Dilithium crystals, they can contain and control matter / antimatter reactions.
I thought everyone knew this?
Too late, I'm afraid. The cat's eaten them, you see. (3mins 20 secs in)
Isn't one of the main problems with sending a probe out to another star the distance for sending information back to Earth? Sure, it may take 36 years to get to another star system and start orbiting, but then it will take at least 4.3 years for the data to start coming back to Earth.
You not only need a probe which can survive getting to another system, but it would need to have some sort of AI to ensure that if any problems pop up, the probe can fix them itself without any human help, cause lets face it, waiting 8.6 years for a command won't work.
So, we need a probe that can last at least 36 years of interstellar travel. Be able to travel at 10% of the speed of light (avoiding any debris along the way, I figure if you hit even a tiny object at those speeds you're going to need more than a call out to the AA). An AI which can control the probe and react to any issue, including ones that us meat slabs haven't thought about yet. A way to communicate data over 4.3 light years without any loss of signal issues.
Probably not in our life times, but I think that eventually we'll be able to solve the issues, apart from the actual distance for communication from anything we send out there.
> we need a probe that can last at least 36 years of interstellar travel. Be able to travel at 10% of the speed of light (avoiding any debris along the way...)
I wonder just how feasible (and how protective) the Ice Shield which Arthur C Clarke used in The Songs of Distant Earth would be at these speeds.
Anyone know?
@Graham Marsden
Just offhand I would recon an ice shield is a bad idea.
A small projectile at very high speed might punch a hole through a thin hull on entry and exit, perhaps vaporising an area 10 to 20 times larger than its size, so an object roughly the size of a marble would leave entry and exit holes maybe basketball sized.
But hitting a thick surface like an ice shield would absorb much much more of its energy vaporising an area maybe 70 to 80 times its size and also creating a very large explosion from the resulting superheated steam rapidly expanding.
(these numbers are NOT scientific but are guestimates based on watching a nasa/boeing docu about firing hypersonic projectiles from a very big gun in a vacuum into various surfaces/compounds)
> hitting a thick surface like an ice shield would absorb much much more of its energy vaporising an area maybe 70 to 80 times its size and also creating a very large explosion from the resulting superheated steam rapidly expanding.
Ok, but explosions tend to take the path of least resistance, ie I'd think that the steam would expand forwards, rather than backwards and, of course, given the cold of deep space, it would probably then tend to freeze back onto the shield, with only some loss.
Try running the numbers on the power levels required to send a radio signal over interstellar distances - I don't think we will be getting a radio signal from our probes, we will need to wait for them to return with their data.
Hence, its likely that any such endeavour would not get any results in the lifetime of those that sent it. That would make it a fairly hard sell to get funding.
"Hence, its likely that any such endeavour would not get any results in the lifetime of those that sent it. That would make it a fairly hard sell to get funding."
It's already hard enough to get funding for projects that won't be ready until after the next election. Can't have the opposition basking in the glory of a successful project that the current lot started.
I sometimes wonder if this is why so many government projects fail or go over budget or both. The incumbents don't expect to win the next election so deliberately sabotage them.
"Hence, its likely that any such endeavour would not get any results in the lifetime of those that sent it. That would make it a fairly hard sell to get funding".
Not necessarily.
Consider the situation faced by Majikthise and Vroomfondel when Deep Thought tells them how long it would take to calculate the Answer.
Admittedly, it would take a politician more talented than the common variety to properly spin things.
More practically, while the results of the expedition -- if any -- will only be learned by future generations -- if any -- the engineering developed to pull something like this off would be available for use immediately.
If we have the technology to build a probe capable of reaching 0.05 to 0.1c, then it would be no problem a large space based receiving antenna that can pick up the signals from a probe 4 LY away. This would also get it away from all of the earth based interference.
Since the DSN can pick up signals from 100 a.u. with 70m dishes, this implies that 70 km diameter would pick the same signal source from a couple of light years.
We will have to wait 'till we know more, i.e. enough 'bout entangled fundamental particles, using gluons that bind them. Then we will be able to communicate ''instantly'' in ''real time''. It's possible but will take time to develop, and to develop/think of the theory behind it. Perhaps when we've gotten that far we will have solved the problem of ''speed''/acceleration also.
No need to invoke concerns about alien intelligent life as a danger for motivation. The simplest motivation is humanity (or parts thereof) surviving random events. Which can be presumed to occur much more often than "take me to your leader", given the witness of our planet's history. We must diversify!
The trouble is pace of development. Its a common enough science fiction scenario. You send off your slower than light starships, which will take 300 years to reach their destination, and 300 years later they get there, to be greeted by the crews of the FTL starships who had left base 3 months before...
@JimC
That's possible, yes.
But what is probable, given our understanding of the universe, is that if you keep waiting for FTL then you'll never leave.
Besides, if a ship with colonists from any part of the world 300 years ago were to sail into any port on the planet, wouldn't both humanity and the lost colonists be better off for it...?
Sarcasm alert= better check out the TV series "the Expanse" b/f doing anything...
Apparently even nearby space exploration with humans on board is next to impossible...
Traveling anywhere w/ hundreds of tons of nukes on board is even less of a good idea...
IMHO= Launch an "out there" improved robot interstellar probe yearly w/ lessons learned...
Joke Alert= Hope our robot explorers remember us until we develop workable Star Gates...RDS.
Sure it would be great to fire the most sophisticated and technically brilliant probe at the stars and sit back, but odds are it will not survive the journey. No, send the cheapest crap we can get away with to map the treacherous route out, in fact send several. Then send the really expensive kit after them. The lead probes can then report back and thus give the important bit of kit the opportunity to navigate around obstacles.
As a bonus, any lead probes that make it through to the final destination could easily be commandeered by the main probe to scavenge their fuel, or re-purpose to explore further, or even be ordered to "halt" at an optimum point along the way, where they could then act as relay stations for Earth transmissions.
It's very exciting and something we're almost duty bound to carry out, as and when our capabilities make it an obvious no brainer.
The only problem with ALL of these sorts of articles is they wave their hands and say "it's just engineering, we can't do it now, but it'll be a cakewalk in 10 years!"
Well, making a space elevator is known technology too. All we need is some incredibly high tensile-strength substance and we can build one. No problem!
But we don't have that, so we're stuck with rockets.
I also don't see the money being there, as unfortunately we have only one Elon Musk.
One of the strongest and thinnest materials is spider silk. If we got all the geneticists and DNA-tweakers together to develop and breed giant mutant spiders ... Oh wait, where would we get the food necessary to feed them. I know - if we got all the geneticists and DNA-tweakers together to develop and breed giant flies ... (or bugs if preferred).
10% of the speed of light would create difficulties we don't know how to address yet concerning the impact of the interstellar medium with a craft, according to one book on the subject I vaguely remember having read. 1%, however, would be quite doable.
800 years to get to Alpha Centauri (assuming constant acceleration, so the average velocity is half of the maximum) is, I admit, pretty discouraging. And if something that can go at 10% of the speed of light would be just a few years down the road, it wouldn't be worth launching. But that's a modest goal that we can be confident we can attain.
1) Such grand schemes are doomed as long as the world is driven by this thing called "Money". We need to evolve to a post-commerce civilisation before thinking on such a scale has any hope of leading to action.
2) It has to happen at some point otherwise we're all - as a race - doomed. Sol has only a finite life and once it's gone, there goes the neighbourhood.
In the meantime, it's lovely to see all those people in well tailored suits wringing their hands over a meter or two of sea level rise and a degree here or there of global climate change. But their self-righteous preachings and dictats to the world won't do much good when our local star runs out of fuel, at which point all those concerns about local "climate change" and "affordable measures" to mitigate (or, in some Cnutian fantasy, prevent it) without unnecessary "economic pressure" will be seen for the lamentable waste of oxygen and brain-power that they really are.
Not to mention that population pressure - if continuing to increase at current rates - will have killed the planet long before any of that amounts to a hill of beans anyway.
I think volcanic events, giant ones like Yellowstone, will do us in many times before we need worry about Sol.
And I wholeheartedly agree that population pressure is an immediate and serious threat, and one that will overwhelm any thoughts of deep space exploration if we don't deal with it.
Its amazing how we are living in such a well developed society with lots of nice high tech to play with. I wonder what created it? Oh, I know MONEY!
As for population pressure, that's decreasing. Malthusians bleat about the world being filled and it'll be the end of the world. Populations are actually decreasing (except for immigration) in developed countries as the pressure to churn out babies lessens due to the cost of raising children and the lack of a need to replace those children who die young.
>We need to evolve to a post-commerce civilisation
No. All that's needed is to combat the notion that 'we're sending all that money into the void - never to be seen again'. This misunderstanding crops up, every time a space project is proposed.
But, as we all know, none of that money leaves Earth; it's all spent here, paying salaries, expenses, invoices. The senators with constituencies with NASA contracts understand this. We just need to spread the word.
I am really getting tired of that reference. Here we are, in this discussion, talking about our hopes and aspirations over the next few generations, (2-100 maybe) when somebody has to interject about the end of Ol' Sol. Talk about bad vibrations! We might not be around, but Sol is expected to be around for another 200 million human generations, so get with the program... how long can we last, and how far can we go?
I've been saying something similar for decades, except I go back ever further. Knowledge is cumulative. What if warring mankind hadn't made a habit of utterly destroying their vanquished enemy's cities? Think of all the bits of knowledge locked up in all those cities, turned to ash, having to be discovered again. I believe Jesus could have been preaching to Romans on the moon.
I know this comment is late and very few will read it but I just had to link to articles posted on Feb. 28th in Sciencemag http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/math-whizzes-ancient-babylon-figured-out-forerunner-calculus, and Popular Archaeology http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/winter-2015-2016/article/ancient-babylonians-used-geometry-to-track-jupiter revealing advanced Babylonian maths exceeding anything used in Europe preceding the 14th century.
Fair point.
To be fair the Plague didn't help, aka Yersinia pestis.
Killed off many promising young minds, some of which might have prevented the purges and Inquisitions that followed had they lived.
I have some ideas on HTSC that might yet work, including using a modification of intercalated graphene but with heavy metal layers alternating to keep the charge density waves under control.
Its actually based on an earlier idea to do with observations in graphite suggesting under certain conditions that Li ions could possibly act a bit like hydrogen ions under certain valence levels.
I find it interesting no-one ever considers that there is potentially a genetic engineering answer to the problem of getting humans to other stars. Immortality. We've had immortal human cell lines (e.g. HELA cells) for decades. Scaling that to an entire organism doesn't require rewriting the laws of physics just ethics and that's a much more malleable area.
There have been suggestions that asteroids are the way to go; not just to be mined, but because they could also be the basis for a suitable vehicle which would save a certain amount of time and effort in construction.
I have a copy of a book by Bill Shatner; it talks about the various technologies that were predicted within the various Star Trek series. During filming for some episodes of ST:TNG, Professor Stephen Hawking was doing a tour of the USA and was invited to do a cameo appearance on the Enterprise. After filming completed, he was invited to tour the various stage sets and one of these was the "engineering" section with the iconic "warp drive". Apparently, he looked at it very carefully, before announcing that "I'm working on that!".
For anyone that might be interested, he was also the guest speaker at the Reith lectures. I believe that these will be available on the BBC website for the next 3 weeks (a transcript is also available). He has a very dry sense of humour; it's well worth listening to the broadcast.
The FOCAL mission would put a telescope at the Focal point of our Sun's gravitational Lens at 500 AU
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=785
At that distance Stars and Planets light years away would appear close up and in robust detail, best of all however is the Light from all those objects far far away, tens, hundreds and thousands of light years away has already made the trek to us. We will never be able to make a telescope larger than the Sun itself even if we used all of the materials in the solar system in one collosal engineering project.
And we are not able to remotely assemble 3D objects with light beams yet, however every Star has a Focal point just outside its ring of planets. Someday we just might be able to send beams of light across the distance to assemble machines in the distant regions of space just outside other solar systems... without ever launching a space vehicle.
Today we merely think of breaking things down or heating them up with lasers and microwaves, or dream of pulling them around with tractor beams.. but if we ever do get 3D printing on a grand scale.. Focused on another FOCAL lens.. we might just "beam" probes into other planetary systems.
Why all the re-hashed science free/lite stuff from the conversation?
El Reg of old would have discussed things like the recent innovations and discoveries with regards impulse engines - giving us constant acceleration (ok, low acceleration - but still, it adds up pretty quickly) drives without a reaction mass.
Lets have some proper hard science in the science section of El Reg rather than a piece saying, essentially "wouldn't it be nice to go to another world".
"If we ever found evidence suggesting that life might exist on a planet orbiting a nearby star, we would most likely need to go there to get definitive proof and learn more about its underlying biochemistry and evolutionary history."
If we don't want them anally probing us, we shouldn't be thinking about doing the same to them.
Charlie Stross' article on space colonisation The High Frontier, Redux.
TL;DR version: we haven't a clue how to do it, just a load of utopian handwaving hot air, and that's before you consider the economics or the politics.
I remember reading something a long time ago (80s?) that stated to build a starship, like the Enterprise (NCC-1701), would take 30 to 50 years and the combined effort of the entire Human Race to build... provided the tech and materials were already in place to construct it. I doubt very much that'll happen.
That being said, I've read nothing in all this about ion-propulsion drive. I was under the impression that it was the most energy efficient type of propulsion. However I'm not sure what speed it could attain.
If we just want to send a probe to find out what is there, then why not just invest in better telescopes first. We have large telescope arrays already, on Earth. Build them on the moon, on Mars, on asteroids far, far apart and use them collectively to really see these other planets in detail.
The engineering and space technology just to do that alone would greatly improve our future space faring outlook, and we'd have a much better idea of where to send the probes once we can do so.
Maybe, instead of getting a small part of ourselves to another star, we will end up taking all of ourselves to it. I mean our entire solar system. If we can make the sun propel itself somehow, and avoid carnage, we could get closer to other systems whilst in the comfort of our own planet.
Too radical ?