Goldilocks Planet Found

All the more reason to invent FTL Travel. AND INVENT IT THIS CENTURY WAAAARGGARBLLL!!!!!!!!!!

It would probably be smart to design and build a totally self-suficient space station, just to see if we could even build a generation ship.

But yes, a constant acceleration drive would cut back the time needed for that ship. Instead of millenia, it would "only" be a century.

We should invent a perpetual motion machine before FTL.

Anyway, there's also embryo colonization.

^^ Not even that much, pvtnum. I already mentioned that you can accelerate a ship to near lightspeed in 10 years with just 0.1G thrust. It could make the trip to this star system in about 30 years Earth-subjective time. For the colonists it'd be quite a bit less thanks to time dilation.

Wonder what happened to Pioneer 10 and 11...

Voldemort horcruxed one of them that's what!

What kind of thruster are you talking about?

And is it really a "generation ship" if it takes less than a lifetime?

^Antimatter-matter reaction could probably achieve 1g acceleration for a good while.

Heck, some of the ion drives NASA is working on come close to .1g acceleration. Problem is they require solar power, which kind of runs out after you get far enough from the Sun.

edited 30th Sep '10 2:37:13 PM by Bioelectricclam

Voyager has heater elements to ensure the delicate bits will work when asked

Hee hee

...and you wouldn't run out of antimatter in 30 years? The energy required to synthesize more antimatter is pretty enormous, isn't it?

Not if you composed 37.5% of your ship's mass out of the stuff.

^^^ Wait, what? -cheeks turn red-

That's not what I meant...!

Right, anyway - well, i suppose that thirty years is a darn sight better than a hundred (or horrors, a thousand), if we can get a drive big enough to shove all the crap they'll need for the trip and after they land.

I don't imagine that they'll be coming back, though. It woudl be easier to make the ships if they were designed for only a one-way trip - no, scratch that.

I'm assuming that we'll give this ship some really nice telescopes, so they can get some better imaging of the planet as they draw near. Should in-flight readings indicate that the planet is indeed habitable, they can finish their braking maneuver and enter orbit, and set up a colonly.

If they find that it's not suitable, well, they could whip around and head back for Earth.

Comms will be a problem, though.

edited 30th Sep '10 2:49:38 PM by pvtnum11

^^The main idea with antimatter is you can store enormous quantities of energy in an itty bitty space. It's essentially the closest one can get to a near 100% efficient conversion of fuel to impulse. So while you'd still need to bring a lot, once you have it in storage it should last the entire journey.

Well yes. With enough fuel you could use whatever propulsion you liked. What I mean is, I don't think that the cost of making the fuel in the fist place wouldn't be prohibitive.

It says in that article that you'd need about 10 g of antimatter to reach Mars in one month. Do a quick calculation (which I just realized is bad, but it would still take much), and it's 3.6 kg for 30 years. According to something I just Googled:

How much energy is needed to make 1g of antimatter?

You'd have to make 1 gm of matter with that, so 2gm*c² would be 18*10²⁰ ergs, or 1.8*10¹⁴ Joules. In practice, the process wouldn't be very efficient, so more energy would be needed.

So kind of insane.

edited 30th Sep '10 2:57:59 PM by Tzetze

Well, the alternative to a generation ship would be some kind of "frozen sleep" as in lots of sci-fi. A generation ship uses technology we pretty much know we can do, though — it's just a huge task (big enough to be just as hard, perhaps).

Equipping our colony ship with turnaround capability adds tremendously to the mission requirements... and can you imagine the reaction of the colonists? There's a psychological factor to consider.

On the other hand, the idea of sending out a bunch of colony ships on one-way trips to planets that we have no way of knowing in advance are habitable strikes me as a slightly nutty idea, sort of a "spray and pray" means of human expansion.

The need to probe the planets before sending people there would nearly double the net time investment... could we expect the political, social, and economic structures needed to support colonization to still exist that far in the future?

How do you recruit people for such a venture? A one-way trip into the utter unknown is tough enough when trips are measured in months and there's a hope of relief if you get in over your heads.

These are all crucial questions that have to be addressed even if we can manage to develop the necessary technologies.

You could always set up an ad-hoc mobile von Neumann probe network. Have the probes build structures beforehand and stuff. Still slow, sure, but if we nuke ourselves before leaving we'd still have all kinds of aliens praising our galaxy-spanning empire, in the distant future!

edited 30th Sep '10 3:07:30 PM by Tzetze

Send one ship initially, small-ish crew, and have them well-prepared for the possible event that the planet won't be suitable.

They go, then the determine the nature of the planet.

Some handwavium comm system comes into play and they send back information as to the nature of the planet. If it's difficult to colonize, then their data will be a great help to follow on missions.

But yeah, equipping a ship for a two-way trip would greatly add to the complexity of the ship - and, they would have to compute a return trajectory all on their own, no hwlp from ground control.

There might be hope after all...

Someone just has to get a Science Victory.

^ Lol. My favorite kind - Domination was just way too messy.

I think a generation ship is the most practical. We won't get regular trips between the two inhabited worlds for a long time after the planet is settled I think.

@jewelleddragon

I'm like a page behind on this, but on the issue of the probe being subject to near absolute zero temperatures, the problem is actually quite the opposite.

Space isn't really cold OR hot so to speak, since there's no medium for heat there. It all depends on how far away the nearest star is, but with nothing like ice or water or air to conduct the heat from the vessel, the only way to lose heat in space is through radiation, which is a very, VERY slow method. In fact, with the probe having to undergo extremely long periods of constant acceleration and deceleration, and constantly running complex electronics the whole time, the bigger issue will be keeping it from overheating, which is going to require some outrageously huge and fragile radiator panels.

Honestly, the biggest engineering problem here isn't so much building an engine that can accelerate at high rates for years on end (though that's certainly not trivial), it's building one that can do it without melting down, frying its circuits, and overloading its radiators. Anybody who's familiar with mechanics or engineering will tell you that everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) breaks down eventually, and decades (or even centuries) of non-stop operation with the heat of a small sun blowing out your ship's backside would be a maintenance nightmare even if there were a crew aboard, nevermind an automated probe.

And that's before we get into propellent-to-ship mass ratios, which are going to be pretty monstrous.

edited 1st Oct '10 12:49:57 AM by TheBadinator

How do you recruit people for such a venture? A one-way trip into the utter unknown is tough enough when trips are measured in months and there's a hope of relief if you get in over your heads.

Well there are several retired Russian cosmonauts who have gone on record saying that if given the opportunity they would willingly take a one-way trip to Mars. The idea being that since they are so old then they'd just live out the last few years of their life on Mars.

As for the "we would have to wait for a probe to check the planet out" thing, no we wouldn't. The next generation of space telescopes will use inferometers powerful enough to pick out the spectra of these exoplanets, and from the spectra we can learn:

1. If the planet has an atmosphere. 2. If said atmosphere is breathable. 3. The day/night cycle. 4. If there is water on the planet. 5. If the planet has the required nutrients that the human body needs. 6. If the planet has toxins that would kill humans.

The only thing we'd have to worry about is if the planet's life-forms are like, huge dinosaurs, but by the time the colony ships are embarking I'd hope for some serious firepower in a fun-sized pistol. A generation ship would also already have all the crops necessary for humanity, so we wouldn't have to worry about the local flora being inedible (which is likely; the chance that we would share the exact same biochemistry as an alien ecosystem is nil. We could end up on a world where plants use arsenic instead of phosphorous for all we know, though hopefully the spectra analysis will give hints if such toxins are present in large amounts).

Spectra - nicely stated.

So, no real need to even send a manned ship on a long trip just yet.

Personally, I'll start considering trips to other stars once mankind has demonstrated it's capable of building life on other planets within our own solar system.

The spectra is tricker for this one, since it doesn't pass between us and its star.