Again, I ask why? What does it matter if the human genome never leaves the solar system?
There is every chance that it will not-
exploration may very well commence without humanity, is artificial intelligence proves to be possible-
the computer minds may replicate themselves rapidly, and set off to the stars with or without us- we are after all heavy baggage to take on such a long voyage…
the scenario I would hope for is one where humanity does manage to sneak out of thw solar system and find an indeterminate number of other world s to live on-
and it is not just for us,
we would no doubt take as much of the Earth’s biosphere with us as we can carry…
I’ve always thought that we will never find any evidence of alien lifeforms, untill the second we leave the solar system. Then the aliens will land and say “Welcome to the Galactic Federation!”
And they’ll be Vulcans greeting Zephram Cochrane, right? 
I’d say NEO deflection/destruction. We develop most of the technology in probes that would roam the solar system, (most likely) pushing comets and meteors around – how many would one need for complete coverage? It would only be a matter of time before you wanted to make a few smaller, faster ships to catch short-notice NEOs, and faster and faster probes are made. It’s not much of a step from there to add people, and send it to the stars.
For the record IANAPhysicist/Astronomer/High School Graduate
Yes, grab the NEOs, they are valuable resources in the sky.
They can become potential solar energy collectors, metal mines, habitats and some may even become interstellar probes.
Don’t forget
The rule is, with interstellar probes, the smaller the payload the better.
Just had a thought tonight, there’s a former NASA engineer who’s trying to develop what would essentially be an artificial gravity drive. If she can get it to work (any day now, just like fusion! ), it would mean an extremely cheap method of getting into space. (It’d take a few kilowatts to get something like the shuttle in orbit.) So, let’s say Bill Gates were to suddenly come to his senses, hand her a few billion dollars and within a year, she produces the first working drive. She’d effectively be giving us the stars at this point. What would we do? Would we set sail on the cosmic ocean immediately? Or would we screw around in Earth orbit for fifty or more years before we set off?
"…an artificial gravity drive. If she can get it to work (any day now, just like fusion! , it would mean an extremely cheap method of getting into space."
That it would. Trouble is, we know fusion works, it lies within our understanding of the laws of physics, and the problems of controlled fusion are technical, not theoretical.
Artificial gravity drives or other reactionless drives contradict the laws of physics as we understand them, or are based on alternate theories that aren’t proven. So you’re going to need some kind of evidence that the thing isn’t a crackpot’s dream before you get any investment (and your Nobel prize!)
As to the last bit, such a drive would make space travel so cheap as to take it out of the hands of governments and into the hands of private enterprise. Someone would strap a big chunk of something for shielding in front of a tug and point it in the direction of Proxima Centauri rather quickly, IMHO.
Well, according to this and this the proposed device doesn’t violate or alter any standing laws of physics. This page might have some more info, but unfortunately, the designer decided to make the text and the background nearly the same color. Not sure if this is a nutjob site or not, but it deals with some of same material. A google search, doesn’t turn up anything else really helpful on the matter. I’d like to find out what the progress of her research is, and if I could kick in a few bucks towards making it happen.
Given the unlikely scenario that there is a relatively painless form of interstellartransport, we would arrive at the stars to find that they are inhospitable places…
plenty of planets like Jupiterand bigger, plenty of icy moons like Europa and Ganymede, plenty of dry little worlds like the Moon and Mars, a few failed earths like Venus, but very very veryfew Earths.
We had better be prepared to do a lot of terraforming, or construction of large scale habitats, when we get there. This will no doubt need nanoreplicators of some sort.
In the decade or so since Podkletnov claimed to see a measurable decrease in the weight of anything placed over his superconducting device, NASA has not been able to duplicate his results…
Still, he is a popular topic…
Presumably such a method of propulsion would be expected to use the same amount of energy to get into orbit as the most efficient method not using antigravity- to wit -
the amount of energy that it would take to get a particular mass into space if a space elevator were available.
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch etc
Nevertheless I have no expectations that it will come to anything.
Space elevators, on the other hand- would be very useful, if not on the Earth, then perhaps on Mars.
IIRC, Dr. Li’s research is only tangetally related to Podkletnov’s work and she’s the first to develop a type of superconducting disk that’s believed necessary to actually succeed in getting “synthetic gravity” (as she terms it) to work. I’d like to know what happened with the research that lead to the “levitating” frog pictures. That certainly appeared promising.
The levitating frogs are only magnetics and thats it. They found that anything that is not attracted to a magnet is repelled by it, even water. Plus the magnetic fields neccesary are VERY strong.
Some of the posters on this topic mentioned space telescopes that will be able to image structures on extra solar planets. This absolutely astounds me, I have a 10" dobsonian scope and love using it, Ive read about the TPF system, but actually imaging a planets continents, if any, and then structures and even inhabitants floors me in the utmost. The photons from an object say 2 square kilometers (about the smallest thing we can see on the moon from an earth based scope loooking through our fuzzy atmosphere) would be so spread out that to collect even a few thousand would take a “collector” of a size Im afraid to imagine. Its seems to be common knowledge that its going to happen and soon from this list (which I have just discovered, cool stuff here) where is the sci. to back it up, Id love to read more about this and the tech that will be used or is it all just based on scaling from what we could see 30 years ago so in 50 years we will see 100x as much as we can now if things keep developing?
As I’m sure you know, being a telescopist yourself, the Keplermission is the most sensitive one planned- to be able to see continents an inerferometer design of multiple linked instruments several tens of AU would probably be required.
It is my wild prediction that such vasrt instuments will be commonplace in the deep future, as the societies in isolated solar systems will want to keep as sharp an eye as possible on each other.
Actually, that won’t be possible for a long time. The goal of the TPF (Terrestrial Planet Finder) is to resolve the planet and the star as separate dots. Right now the glare of the star prevents us from observing the planet directly. But if we can resolve the two as sedparate points, then we can do spectroscopic analysis on just the planet. That will tell us a lot about the planet - atmospheric composition, rotation rate, maybe even surface properties. But to resolve features on those planets require 3 orders of magnitude better resolution than the next generation space telescopes.
In fact, the TPF may not have a particularly high resolution. The main difficulty in resolving a planet is not resolution, but the glare from the star sitting right next to it. The usual analogy is that we’re trying to see a firefly sitting next to a car headlight. One way to solve the problem is by using an interferometer which has much higher resolution than a single telescope. Another way is to do everything you can to reduce scattering and diffraction, so that the glare from the sun doesn’t wash out the light from the planet. A telescope optimized this way is called a stellar coronagraph, and you’d be amazed at the bag of tricks available for optimizing such a telescope. Both approaches have been proposed for the TPF mission.
Thanks guys. As I said Ive read about the TPF and its pretty amazing in itself, but what Im interested in is what are the nuts and bolts of these “super scopes” they are a HUGE step from a TPF which is just a big hubble really with some more instruments on board. I actually dont think any 10 LY distant planet will ever be imaged that intricately by us, just how many photons are available to image with, at that distance.
The Terrestrial Planet Finder is the largest ‘scheduled’ mission, even if that schedule is tentative.
But down the road, there’s the Planet Imager. This is the telescope I was talking about, that would be able to actually image details on the surface of the planet.
From a theoretical standpoint, there’s no reason why you couldn’t make interferometers of almost any size. The engineering problems would become very complex, however. Even the planet imager is beyond our engineering capability today, even if theoretically we know how to build it.
But we’ll figure it out. One day we’ll be looking at planets around other star systems with the kind of resolution we have looking at our moon.
Thats a great link Sam, I like the timeline of the future scopes