Unless you are talking about some Shatner other than the one I think you are that may be the funniest statement I have ever read on the internet.
And, OP, I take it travel to other galaxies is straight out? 
That’s cause it’s a bad neighborhood and they don’t tip!
Unless it’s capable of self repair, which a really advanced spacecraft would almost certainly be.
non-engineers are funny
PS: Let me guess: nanobots will do it, right?
People who think that entropy is some magical force and only humans have some mystical ability to oppose it are funny.
How would I know? However, the world is full of self repairing organisms. And the fact that maintainance is possible at all shows that self repair is possible, you just have to make the machine sophisticated enough to do it itself rather than needing a human to do it.
As others have said, you write off colony ships too quickly. We already have the technology to reach 1% of the speed of light, and at that rate it’s <500 years to Alpha Centauri, and only a few thousand years to get to quite a few more interesting places.
Solving the societal issues will be interesting. We’ll have to breed or genetically engineer people that are resistant to living in a confined space. Though it won’t have to be all that confined–the techniques used for getting up to that speed (Orion project) actually work better the bigger the ship. A million tons is probably doable.
There’s no worry about germs. If there’s life where we land, we won’t even interact with the native life, except mechanically. We can’t even digest left-handed sugar; more complex interactions like bacterial/viral infections (if that even makes sense for alien life) are implausible.
There is more than enough matter and energy in the solar system to send out lots and lots of ships, so each one doesn’t have to be all that reliable.
It’s extremely implausible that we won’t figure out how to build a self sufficient local colony in 100k years time. Personally, I’d put it at 1k years on the outside. It’s just not that hard, and it gets dramatically easier every year.
look, shit like “warp drive” and “transporters” only exist because they were used in old TV shows and movies to move their plots forward. some people have hypothesized how such devices might work, but we’re nowhere close to making them work. The elephant in the room of interstellar travel is fuel. The faster you want to go, the more fuel you need, but the more fuel you need, the more massive your craft is, which means you need more fuel, and more powerful engines, and more fuel, which means your craft is even more massive, and can I introduce you to thermodynamics to tell you you’re playing a losing game? And yeah, I know, solar blah-blah; we’re practically bathed in solar energy on this planet but we’re not all that good at exploiting it. In fact the only solar energy we’re good at exploiting is that which has been way underground for millions of years.
sorry, folks. ain’t gonna happen.
I am not sure, but damned if you don’t keep talking anyway. It’s like listening to a drunk five-year-old trying to explain how babies get made.
An insult post that avoids actually answering anything I said.
What exactly is the theoretical problem with machines that can repair themselves, or each other?
This is stepping over the line for this forum, from now on, use the Pit. The next time won’t be a note for you as you should know this by now.
Hilarious post. Thanks for the laugh.
Actually- if you can solve the interstellar travel problems, it is no longer that much of a leap to go to another galaxy, since there’s at least one galaxy HEADIN RIGHT FOR US
shoots gun
That same technology can theoretically push you further than 1% of light speed.
The issue is that, at nearly 7 million miles per hour, anything you come into contact with including gas and dust will either obliterate your spacecraft or wear it down to nothing.
The front of the craft will be experiencing atomic nucleus smashing against atomic nucleus at very high speeds, resulting in a much higher release of energy than, say, heat from friction would cause, on orders of magnitude difference. This isn’t flying through the air at mach 2, this is flying through something less dense than air, but at speeds that are thousands of times greater.
That’s tough even if it is just thinly dispersed gas. Micro-asteroids and dust would be like an atomic bomb exploding on the nose of your spacecraft. This is how we destroy atoms, not just molecules, or structures. All structure breaks down at those kinds of high-energy collisions. We bust quarks apart that way. I mean seriously, expecting our craft to survive those kinds of speeds is ludicrous.
You obviously have to move slower, as there is no kind of matter let alone element, let alone alloy, let alone construction method, which will survive such speeds moving through a non-vacuum, and space is not a vacuum. Particularly when you play the odds and end up running into a 500-foot wide random asteroid which ***is ***going to happen somewhere along your 41,500,000,000,000 kilometer journey.
But as I said, your craft never made it halfway that far because the gas tore the atoms of your spaceship apart at those speeds.
I have more than just pessimism, by the way. See my next post.
Now that I’ve laid out what I consider to be all the limits, my solution involves much of what was proposed in this thread and I haven’t yet rejected.
What is possible: Moving pretty darn fast by our standards, but not on the order of 1% of light speed.
What else is possible: “Generational” starships. Human stasis. We haven’t perfected it, but the key seems to be dehydrating beforehand, so that your cells do not rupture when frozen. You need to survive the dehydrating process (well, not survive it, per se… but be able to be revived from it) and you need to have the dehydrating/freezing process occur rapidly enough to prevent brain damage.
As long as your cells survive the freezing and thawing, and your brain is not deprived of oxygen for too long, humans could survive stasis.
We can do better than generational ships:
You have one crew capable of maintaining the ship and piloting it and being awake and aware during the journey.
Now, you have 500 more crews, capable of doing the same thing.
One crew not in stasis, per year. The other 500 crews in stasis, waiting for their shift where they watch over the ship.
How it would go: Thaw, and run the ship for a year. Then, return to stasis, after crew number 2 thaws and is prepared to return to duty.
500 years pass outside of the stasis, but for you, you’ve only aged one year.
One year versus 500 years. That means for every year you age on this interstellar journey, you have traveled 500 years toward your destination.
No need for generational ships. One generation. Everyone makes the journey to the nearest star system, even if the trip takes 3,000 years, it would only require six years of your active life. Go 3,000 years into the future in six years.
And, of course, if the trip takes twice that long, 6,000 years, then you take 1,000 crews. All trained to do the task. All available in case of emergency. And in case you have deaths or accidents, you have backup crews.
And when you arrive at your destination, you have an entire viable colony, not just a struggling crew of six or twenty to try to build a civilization.
You have construction crews build living quarters and as they become available, the colony emerges from stasis in a staggered form.
Using this method, you could “shorten” even a much larger trip. It just requires large numbers of people.
A crew of 100, let’s say, times as many crews as you need.
It would be easy to scare up 100,000 people for this voyage. I mean, we have 7 billion people on Earth.
So, say the journey took an *astounding *10,000 years.
You would need two thousand crews, each working for 5 years during the voyage. All perfectly feasible.
Assuming perfect stasis technology, assuming you can survive several revival and hibernation attempts, and assuming you have enough people willing to volunteer and train… and assuming you can store 200,000 people in individual stasis chambers, well then. You have two thousand crews of 100 people, serving aboard the ship for 5 years each, resulting in a fully staffed crew for 100,000 years.
In a single generation. It would make volunteering for the journey much more meaningful to the folks doing it- it means you leave Earth today, and arrive in the next star system 5 years later. You get to see the end of the journey.
And that means you can travel at slow enough speeds to survive the journey, and maneuver out of the way of larger objects or dust clouds, and gas won’t hurt your ship.
Safe, interstellar travel. Within 5 years of your “lifetime”.
Just remember it is a long journey, and it is pretty much a one-way event. You won’t be traveling back to Earth ever. Which is fine, this is what you’d expect.
Then you just plan ahead- make sure you have enough fuel to make the journey many times over, so that way if you get to the next star system and it turns out to be less attractive than we thought, you can go to the next one, and keep going if that one doesn’t seem like the best place to settle.
And if you happened to want to return home, keeping in mind the travel time would make “home” a very different place, you technically could.
Those are the extremely conservative numbers. Add in the proposals for a fleet of ships scanning for debris or danger ahead of your main craft, and some kind of shielding system, and perhaps you can up the speed, and make the journey even more reasonable.
Then go as fast as is actually safe, get there ahead of schedule with reserve power, reserve crew, reserve fuel. Then, you could even make this a twofer.
Settle half your crew in that star system, and the other half keep going to the next one. Makes sense to not waste such an opportunity given the prohibitive costs of building even one interstellar craft.
Building it:
Futuristic magnetic mass ejection system on Earth shoots material and so forth into space more cost efficiently than rocket fuel, using stored solar energy as the source. The energy is limitless, assuming you have time to wait for the energy to be collected and stored. Then you release material into orbit.
This is then assembled into a shipyard/processing center which uses asteroids and so forth as raw materials, which can then be turned into the hull of the spacecraft.
You mine the asteroid belt until you have enough raw materials. You eject people and food and other materials that are easier to assemble on Earth, into orbit, when absolutely necessary. You keep standard chemical rocketships on standby in case they are needed to do an emergency rescue operation that wouldn’t be feasible using the magnetic launching system.
You wouldn’t construct the ship on Earth, and 95% of the matter used for the ship should be found in space to keep the costs economical. You phase out rocket fuels as the main method of getting us up there, use solar power and magnets instead. Or a superior technology if there is one available, but we could build something like this using today’s technology. It would require a dedicated NASA project, but we could do it.
Difficulties:
Become manageable. Economics of rocket fuel go out the window.
Time ceases to be an issue. Speed becomes manageable and no longer dangerous.
You simply have to train the crews, complete research on human stasis technology (there is no law of physics stopping us here, this is entirely realistic) and dedicate time, energy, and funding to the projects of a launching system, an orbital processing facility/construction yard for the interstellar craft, and get decent at mining asteroids.
Once you have time, speed, chemical fuel constraints, and technological requirements all solved as problems, you can then presume that an interstellar journey would be not just possible, but feasible, and an intelligent exercise.
The thing is, the process will still take many thousands of years. If you can handle this, then our fate may not be to be stuck in this star system until we expire.
But it does require looking at things like time and speed realistically. We won’t be traveling at near light speed. And we won’t get there very soon at all.
Now, I’m ready to hear your criticisms. I’ve just spent the whole thread saying this project is ridiculous, in almost every way. However, like most of you, I would like to be able to say it’s possible, realistic, feasible.
This is my proposed solution- it involves not unrealistic technology, not unrealistic logistical requirements, not unrealistic travel time and travel speed.
Hit me with your reasons why it doesn’t work, doesn’t solve enough (or any) problems associated with this voyage, or why your solution was better.
I’m a big boy and I can handle the internet hating on my idea children. Ideas are meant to be criticized, so the bad ones get tossed and the good ones remain.
Kill my bad ideas, and do it heartlessly. Show me why they’re bad.
GO!
Note/ETA: when I refer to dehydration, I don’t mean removal of all water, just a *lessening *of the amount of water, such that the frozen cell membrane does not rupture.
I’ll have to get to your other stuff later, but already it’s clear that you haven’t actually run the numbers.
Suppose all matter in the Milky Way consisted of randomly distributed 500-foot asteroids.
Mmw = 1.5e12 stars * 2e30 kg/star = 3e42 kg
Mast = 1.85e6 m^3/ast * 3.5e3 kg/m^3 = 6.5e9 kg/ast
Nast = 3e42 kg / 6.5e9 kg/ast = 4.6e32 ast
Volume of the Milky Way is approximately:
Vmw = 5e62 m^3
And the volume a 1 km diameter conical ship intersects over a 4.15e16 m path is:
Vpath = 4.15e16 * 7.85e5 m^2= 3.26e22 m^3
So the volume ratio is:
Vpath / Vmw = 6.52e-41
And therefore the likelihood of intersecting an asteroid is:
P = 4.6e32 * 6.52e-41 = 3e-8, or 3 millionths of a percent.
Of course, this is an absurdly conservative estimate, since an infinitesimal fraction of the Milky Way’s matter is in the form of asteroid-sized bodies, and what amount there is is mostly near stars. But even with that, the chances are nil. Space is big.
Now, there is some worry about smaller objects. A 1 cm object would do some damage, though I suspect the odds of hitting even one of those in deep space is close to zero.
Dust won’t cause atomic bomb scale energy releases. Cosmic dust is something like 1e-7 m in diameter, and therefore ~2e-18 kg in mass.
KE = 0.5*mv^2 = 0.5 * 2e-18 kg * (3e6 m/s)^2 = 9e-6 J.
So at 1% of the SoL, a dust particle impacting delivers 9 millionths of a joule of energy. There’s probably a fair amount of dust along the way, and so your shield will experience erosion, but a single impact is still minuscule.
The particle-accelerator-type energies you bring up are irrelevant here. Particle accelerators work at 99.lots-of-nines% of SoL. We’re at 1%. It’s not even close to relativistic.
Yes, this is very clear. My OP stated that I am not a scientist or expert.
I will not attempt to suggest that your math is wrong as I can’t double check it myself. It could be entirely correct arithmetic and it probably is. But it also deals with assumptions and the problem of on average.
Space is big, odds are you won’t hit anything. The solar system is big, odds are you won’t hit anything. On average, the solar system contains no planets. What I mean by that, is that in any planet-sized region of the solar system, odds are extremely, extremely good that there’s no planet there, and that you won’t hit one. That’s all well and good until you do. If you want to make this journey, you should be prepared to do it safely.
There are planets in the solar system, and there are asteroids, and there are comets and dust. If you try to travel through the star system at near light speed, you might hit nothing. The odds might even be very good. I still wouldn’t recommend navigating the star system blindly, because all it takes is one.
One statistical *improbability *can ruin your entire day. And you’re gambling that your luck will be good, and the odds in your favor, for many many years of moving too fast to avoid colliding with things, through unexplored deep space. That’s making some assumptions. We don’t yet fully understand the nature of dark matter, just as one example. Did we factor that into your math?
I didn’t see anywhere where you included it. Given that it is such a large percentage of the total mass of the universe, according to our estimates, that should be included. And we don’t know exactly where it is, or what it does. We could run straight into a filament of dark matter without even knowing we’re about to do so.
And even then, we’re only talking estimates and educated guesses. This is not precise science. This is guessing, plus math.
That’s the problem with the unknown. It’s difficult to precisely calculate your odds since we’re not including all the variables, and all the variables are unknown.
Yes, and smaller objects are small and hard to detect.
Where is your calculation which describes how many dust particles per second you’ll be hitting? There’s obviously a big difference between hitting one dust particle and a dust cloud, just like there’s a difference between traveling through air and traveling through the ocean.
Particle accelerators also deal with trying to force sub-atomic particles to collide with one another. We’re talking about not just atoms or molecules but city-sized spacecraft colliding with objects much larger than single atoms.
The energy involved in such collisions is still orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve ever experienced here on earth in any other craft, and much greater than anything any of our spacecraft have ever had to endure.
I can’t fault you on your math or grasp of the subject matter, obviously much better than my own, and in truth I’m the wrong person to debate you because I cannot bring the best argument to the table, as I’m an amateur. But math is not all we are dealing with.
I thank you for dealing with it in mathematical terms, however.
What kind of turbulence could you expect from plowing through an interstellar dust cloud or molecular cloud? What about the forces exerted on such a craft when attempting to steer? How do you factor in the unknown, such as matter we can’t detect so well at a distance?
And my main criticism still remains:
The odds of hitting the lottery are long, but people still do it every day.
You travel for light years through unexplored deep space at speeds approaching light speed, and expect to be able to accurately calculate the odds of reaching your destination without knowing all of the dangers, and using the odds alone as the ONLY means of survival, since we cannot avoid colliding with things, and I get a weak stomach about it.
I don’t trust in probabilities to win the day, especially when we cannot be very certain of our accuracy when we can’t describe exactly the reason why the universe seems to be much heavier than it looks like it should be.
I want to be able to pilot the craft out of the path of danger, even if we didn’t calculate probability of such a thing existing. I want to play it safe, and be able to navigate through something like the Oort cloud instead of hitting the ion drive and crossing my fingers.
We have yet to detect and identify and path all the objects in the solar system, and it’s difficult to think we could detect and identify and path all the objects between here and Centauri en route. And I don’t want to be playing Russian roulette with a city full of people with an unknown number of bullets in an unknown number of chambers, which is what trying to calculate the odds of surviving such a journey would be, if you don’t know all the variables.
I’ll grant that if I’m just talking out of my ass, and the odds are so stacked against there being a danger, then I’m a worry wart. And then, I’ll say “my bad.”
But when you use terms like “I suspect the odds are close to zero” I don’t feel like trusting your predictions. Your arithmetic could be flawless, but your assumptions could be quite flawed.
PizzaGuy, your premise just doesn’t hold up. We know exactly how much energy interstellar dust grains have at 1-5% SoL, and it just isn’t as dangerous as you insist. You don’t need a magically invulnerable ship, you just need something cheap and expendable to clear a path. It’s been proposed that simply having a cloud of dust precede your ship would do it.