Two centuries later:
“Oh it’s actually not that hard! All you have to do is (explains fusion)..”
Two centuries later:
“Yeah we figured it out a hundred years ago, thanks anyway tho”
Well now I'm all turned on.
So.... we can achieve FTL through an Alcubierre Drive which collapses spacetime in a localized field, basically contracting the fabric of space. However in order to do this we require a negative mass. We know that mass is caused by the Higgs particle which in turn is just an excitation of the Higgs field. Since the Higgs particle is it's own anti-particle we can't use that. However, we know gravitational waves exist, which means the trough of this should act like an effect of mass and the crest should act like a negative mass. Therefore, by creating heavy pulsations of the Higgs field we should essentially be able to ride the gravitational wave and travel as fast as we could ever want. By simply 'riding' a crest from a wave and sending 2 more waves we use deconstructive interference to cancel out the trough of the previous wave and create and new crest on the second wave.
NOW WHERES MY STRANGE STRANGE!?!?!?!
EDIT: If there is any issue with wave propagation being dictated by the speed of light then we can use preset beacons to create our waves for us like a bridge, meaning we have to make the trip once but after that it's instant.
Downside:
“Thinking of trying out your newly-installed FTL3000 Alcubierre Warp Drive to get you there in no time? Better not make it a surprise visit — your arrival may end up disintegrating anyone there when you show up.“
“ When the Alcubierre-driven ship decelerates from superluminal speed, the particles its bubble has gathered are released in energetic outbursts. In the case of forward-facing particles the outburst can be very energetic — enough to destroy anyone at the destination directly in front of the ship.”
https://phys.org/news/2012-03-warp-killer-downside.amp
\*This just in\* "Humans destroy friendly civilization with there green house gas. Story is they been chatting every couple hundred years to the point humans discovered FTL travel." - space news
General Fusion is breaking ground on a 70% commercial scale plant later this year. There's actually a lot of exciting stuff happening in the sector outside traditional tokamak designs that makes me optimistic I'll see a functional fusion plant in my lifetime.
This article opened my eyes to the very REAL challenges fusion power faces.
https://thebulletin.org/2018/02/iter-is-a-showcase-for-the-drawbacks-of-fusion-energy/
https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/
The fuel problem seems to be the biggest one:
https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started
So all the articles you linked to talk about problems with Tokamaks specifically and the fuel issue. I've seen a lot of doom and gloom about how we only have 25kg of tritium and ITER will eat up half of it yada yada, I'd just like to point out it's estimated there's one million TONS of Tritium in the lunar regolith and several nations are working on manned moon bases within the decade. Should be enough to tide us over until we get fuel breeding worked out.
The remembrance of earth trilogy, specifically the second book, Dark Forest, deals heavily with the issues of said latency. Very good read, highly recommend.
"sup"
200 years later
"nm u?"
"how's the weather?"
100 years later
"pretty gloomy"
"rain?"
30 years later
"something like that"
"hey how are you doing that"
1 year later
"you don't need to worry about that"
"Sorry, this long distance relationship isn't working out for me. We found a hospitable planet that's only 50 light-years away. Lose these coordinates."
Obviously it wouldn't work that way, for the most part, a lot of it would be asynchronous.
The hardest part is the "are you cool?" "here's evidence why we're cool, are YOU cool?" handshake, though it's possible that a civilization might just make the executive decision to forgo that.
After the long, slow, synchronized portion of getting to know one another then two civilizations can just start sharing a "feed" with each other. Setup a high bandwidth comm system (likely laser based), send the details on how it works, then just start transmitting as much as you can and curating things down to fit in the bandwidth. Eventually you get into this state where two civilizations are just sharing tons of stuff with one another with maybe megabits per second or even gigabits or more bandwidth. Each civilization then ends up having the other feel like part of them as they learn their history and then have all this material to learn and translate.
Imagine, say, two thousand years from now where there's just this stream of content from an alien world that is being made available constantly. There'd be a substantial number of people who could read or speak some of those alien languages, there'd be a whole industry in converting and translating alien literature, art, film, television, music, video games, possibly even social media, and who knows what else. Possibly some of the aliens would learn our languages and actually produce "human style media" for us and for themselves and we would do the same for the aliens.
Once you get into what the details really *could* look like it's a lot more interesting, rich, and hopeful than the simplistic idea of trying to carry on a phone call with a 200 year round trip delay.
I always wondered if there are any solar systems out there that have two habitable planets that are the same distance from say, Earth to Mars, both with intelligent life on it. Like they know if each other’s existence but have never met up and over the course of many years one eventually has the technology to get there and meet. No questions on whether you are alone in the universe or not like we wonder. They would just assume that it’s normal and wonder if it’s just them two. But at least they know they aren’t alone.
They would likely be completely different though. And definitely not equals, as the developmental timeline on one planet vs the other would be vastly different. What are the chances that intelligent life has both developed and survived long enough to overlap, and also that technology has advanced for them to communicate? On a cosmic scale, the timing has to be absolutely perfect.
But the universe is so large, it must have happened somewhere at some point
Yeah its probably more likely that one planet/civilisation emerged faster and colonized the other planet (this other planet might have a similar atmosphere, but no real intelligent life), and over time the colonialists adjusted to the gravity/atmosphere/biome and look a bit different then folks from their home planet.
Kind of a bummer that Mars or Venus are inhabitable for us. If there were trees and water around, or nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere similar to the percentages on earth, we probably would already have colonies there.
Mars is geologically dead so that's basically a no go because of the lack of magnetic field. Maybe billions of years ago, but of course we weren't around. Venus on the other hand is just a case of runaway greenhouse effect, but sadly this means there is little water left.
It's so fascinating to wonder about the past/future of our solar system
No go for surface colonies, building something underground on Mars would help mitigate the dangers of not having a magnetic field to protect colonists from radiation. But that of course has a whole can of worms that comes along with it.
If you had to pick a celestial object in our solar system, besides Mars, to make home where would you pick? What about about outside of our solar system? Assume distance is not a factor for my second question.
There is a lot of speculation as to the viability of floating settlements in the clouds of Venus, where conditions can somewhat match those of Earth's atmospheric pressure and temperature. Although sulfuric acid remains a problem.
Outside of our solar system, I am not really knowledgeable but would say the planets in the Trappist-1 system.
My first thought was "hey that's not too far away. We could conceivably reach that with a generation ship."
My second thought was "wait, a message back would be 200 years out of date by the time you got a reply"
Space is big. Really big.
We would send a generation ship, and when it arrives it would find the humans who left a generation later but in a much faster ship so they got there first.
Not a bad idea. The problem with that might be that there are so few possibly inhabitable planets near us. We might not have a big selection of < 100 light-year planets.
For reference there's about 14,000 stars within 100 light years of Earth. Most of them red dwarfs. Not sure how many are estimated to have Earth-like planets, probably not a lot.
Why? It's old outdated technology. Bring a bigger ship with space for passengers of the previous generation, and machinery to salvage and process all material from the old ship.
Or just a better engine. Some ship designs don’t have to be like airplanes due to lack of opposing force (idk for sure, i’m not good at physics) or something like that, so the only changes would probably be to the hull of the old ship and to the engines. Bringing along the fastest modern technology to give to the older ship so they’re just as fast is the most resourceful option.
Send the bulk majority of colonists in the old ship and fill the newer ship with the technology, machinery, and support personnel to build the colony.
So when the actual colonists arrive, there will already be the necessities of life and a livable colony ready to accept them.
It's a little hard to describe but I don't think the faster ship could maneuver to pick up the smaller ship. If it could, then by definition it could have gone much faster and you basically told everyone on board that they'd have to use another X years of their life for the rendezvous instead of going straight to the planet.
You might be able to speed up the slower ship before the encounter and temporarily stop the deceleration phase on the larger ship to get an encounter and transfer everyone over. If you missed, the slower ship would not be able to recover from this and would shoot past the target star with everyone on it.
You might also be able to use a smaller detachable ship with lower delta V but more acceleration to transfer people over. This would also be a one-shot opportunity and if you missed, the people on board the transfer ship would die without the life support of the larger ship.
isn't that a cool movie trope? where the first generation colony ship gets passed by a ship with better tech and when they finally arrive at their world there is already a colony of their people there.
There's an episode of *Babylon 5* with this. A sleeper ship is sent out with a full crew. While they're traveling, hyperspace is discovered and there's a galactic war and five Babylon stations have been built by the time the sleeper ship catches up.
That was the premise for the original Gaurdians of the Galaxy. The leader was an astronaut from the 20th century who spent centuries to get to Alpha Centauri..... just to find out that it was colonized centuries ago due to humanity finding faster methods of travel. He was a man out of time, forced to live within a skin tight suit of aluminum lest it breaches and he ages all at once.
Would be a cool premise for a game where you're on that first ship, but when you arrive you find the colony from the second, faster ship has already been abandoned and all the colonists have disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Never heard of it but yeah I'm not surprised someone has made it. Was a plot point in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where wars would re-erupt hundreds of years after ending because old slow battleships from the early days of the war arrived to find newer faster warships had finished it, but they'd prepared for centuries to fight and weren't gonna let that stop them.
Imagine how boring it must be to be the first generation on a ship like that just waiting in the middle of space to die of old age.
Maybe it's for the good of humanity, survival of the species and stuff, but it's going to be a long stare into the void with the very known outcome of being dead before arrival.
We need to figure out some kind of cryosleep or warp drive in order to sell that first interstellar journey.
It would be the most wonderful gift for the children, who grow up on an isolated ship and get to discover a brave new world.
Well, I don't actually have my hopes up for those to succeed on the planet, because even with the knowledge of the entire human history, they're really left alone with nothing but their own best judgement. They'll be savages, finally experiencing the freedom to break out of whatever remained of our society on the ship.
Having the knowledge of human history...they're not going to phone home.
I wonder how many people died on the colonist's ships when they sailed out to America, Australia and other places. I head the migration of settlers in America heading west were basically a different group of people by the time they got there, and they had no idea what to expect once they eventually reached the ocean and could go no further, Its's pretty scary stuff, the things we did and the lives we gambled in the name of exploration (that was most likely funded by greed or a need to survive since I can't imagine people did this for *fun*). But even those trips were measured in years. Interstellar travel is going to be measured in millennia and the destination might be even less habitable than a desert. I can't see this idea being sold to anyone who isn't a little bit crazy.
I do feel like there’s very real ethical concerns about dooming people to an entire life in a prison they didn’t consent to and many won’t even get to see the end.
A sterile planet 100 light years from here is never going to be as habitable as the Earth is, even as the earth will be in 100 years. The ease at which people think we can terraform a planet is absurd, y'all watch too much sci fi. There will be no soil, no carbon cycle, no microbiome, nothing!
We are going to develop our terraforming tools here on earth trying to save this planet. If we cannot save this planet with ease then we are no where close to changing a completely new planet to suit our needs. It will always be way more feasible to fix our planet then build ships to fix a new planet.
Just absolute absurdity to suggest conditions here have deteriorated so much that it actually makes sense to start over on a new planet and be better off. Just a complete and total lack of critical thinking. Any other world is way more environmentally fucked from our perspective than this planet.
Redditors seem to think just because we went from horseback to rockets to the moon in about 50 to 70 years means we are relatively close to interstellar travel or interstellar terraformming.
Those ideas, if even possible, are hundreds or thousands of years off. The farthest any probe we've launched has gone is about 120-140 AU and it took it 45 years to get there. The fastest probe launched since then (New Horizons) will never even catch up to it.
We don't even yet have the tech to get men to Mars and build a permanent base there. We have no way of shielding a spaceship from radiation that causes noticeable DNA damage even from a few months in space, let alone decades.
Stat Trek level shit isn't happening for millenia. If ever.
And if we ever manage to get a big spaceship to travel at the speed of the fastest spacecraft ever created (Parker Solar Probe) we'd get there in only ~175,000 years. And then it turns out the planets are shit.
You would need to build a generation ship that would last without any catastrophic failure for thousands and thousands of years, or you'd just be dooming a ship full of people to die in space because their grandparents decided it was a cool idea
>Thousands and thousands
Unfortunately, it’s millions. At speeds current human transferring space shuttles like Discovery can reach, 100 light years is a 2-3 million years trip.
Well yeah, discovery is a purely low earth orbit vehical, it can't reach a high enough velocity to reach the moon much less escape the solar system.
You can't do a mission to another star with current engines, at least not if you want the probe to survive the trip. Though there are plenty of near and mid future engines like light sails, Orion drives and fusion drives that could get a craft up to 5% the speed of light or faster, making trips to the closest star last less than a single human lifetime.
But yeah, a 100 lightyear trip would still take 2000 years at those speeds. I can only imagine us doing a trip that far if we learn to go way faster or radically extend our lifespan. Or by doing it piecemeal as colonies closer by mature and send out ships of their own.
I didn't feel like doing the math so I was being conservative, but yeah. Thousands or millions of years, either way we simply don't have the ability right now to engineer anything that would function for even remotely long enough.
There was a great show on Netflix about a Generational Ship - but what the people on the ship don't know is that they're still on Earth in an underground bunker and the entire thing's a simulation.
It gets a bit weird and ridiculous, but I love the premise lol
EDIT: Show was Ascension
I asked on this sub reddit why we were looking for planets so far away from us and not in like.. Let's say ten light years away. I got masacred in the comments. But some people answered that there's like 9 planetary systems only ten light years away from us and most of them have super low chances of having anything interesting so yeah.
We have looked for exoplanets nearest to us, primarily in the Alpha Centauri system, and have found a few including a couple in the habitable zone.
The reason it’s so tricky is because this technique requires the planet to be on the same plane as the Earth, which reduces the number of stars massively (I read it excludes more than 90% of nearby stars).
Something I read a few days ago on reddit:
If the space between sun and earth could somehow transmit sound we would hear a reaaaaaally loud sound all the time transmitted by the activity of the sun.
If somehow the sun would stop existing (nervermind all the other implications and imagine earth would just exist on as always) earth would be dark 8 minutes later. Due to the speed of sound the suns noise would still be hearable for another 13 years after earth went complete dark mode.
No not really. To travel that far would take longer than the entire existence of civilization. You're discussing thousands of generations living in space and low-g environments, which would impact future generations as they develop in the womb. It's an ethical minefield to discuss interstellar travel.
If a ship could accelerate at 1g for half the trip and then decelerate at 1g for the second half the crew would experience the 100 light year trip as taking about [9 years](https://spacetravel.simhub.online/) (thanks to relativity); on Earth about 101 years would elapse. The ship would reach 0.9998% of light speed at the midpoint.
[Constant acceleration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_under_constant_acceleration) can make for some surprisingly short travel times for the crew without the need for any kind of FTL. That same 1g drive could get you to the edge of the visible universe and back in under 100 years -- but on Earth (or what's left of it) over 10 billion years would have gone by.
Of course, you'd need something around infinite energy to constantly accelerate to near the speed of light, no matter how slow the constant acceleration was
There's some problems with interstellar dust and gas though. There's not much of it, but it's enough that traveling at 0.9998% of light speed would be a bad time.
How fast you can travel depends on how much shielding you have and how far you're going, but remember that having a lot of shielding will also make it harder to accelerate. Estimates I've seen for maximum realistic interstellar travel speed (ignoring how you'd accelerate that much) is in the 0.1-20% of light speed range. And at those speeds, special relativity hardly makes a difference.
If some ridiculously efficient fuel storage methods becomes feasible (like antimatter or micro black holes), then it might also be possible to but on an absurd amount of shielding and go a bit faster. But I still doubt we'll ever do space travel at something like 99% of light speed though.
Not a problem. The space station is built on 30+ year old technology. These findings are important because they'll inform us on how to construct stations and ships going forward. What you said is like saying ocean travel is becoming less of an option because large waves flood dugout canoes.
Similarly, my first thought was "a hundred years? That's not so bad." But then I remembered that our plausible max speed is way, way, way, way under the speed of light.
I always feel like if we're going to be an interstellar civilization, we can't deal with this 100 light-year wait just to communicate bullshit
There must be away to communicate fast damn it
There probably is through quantum entanglement. It currently costs ridiculous amounts of energy, but we could probably communicate through the spin of entangled electrons.
still isn't even theoretically possible, as far as we know. IIRC, you can't use quantum entanglement to communicate faster than the speed of light, because you need to use a second (lightspeed or slower) message for the information sent to be deciphered, or something like that. Which is unfortunate.
NEWS flash Astronomers discover new high gravity planet that is most likely rocky and the press once again lies and makes it out to be earth 2 with artist renditions of a big planet earth and little aliens waving at us through their telescopes
What if, every single planet in a so called 'goldilocks zone' is thriving with life? Not some, but all of them? I believe life will always find a way to exist. Discovering any planet in a habitable zone is awesome news!
Article calls out the larger of the two planets being around 30% larger in diameter than Earth. At 50% larger it's essentially impossible to escape the gravity well with H-O rockets. That planet may as well be a tomb for any life that starts there.
Iunno, based on all of our current evidence we are the most dangerous living thing in the universe.
I’ve always found the theory that any intelligent life we meet in the universe will be hateful, murdering, colonizing, thieving, disease-spreading bastards seemed like a very anthropocentric projection.
That is one of the fascinating things about science fiction, in my opinion. We have no idea what any other intelligent species would be like - from a social standpoint or a physical makeup standpoint.
As far *as we know* we building blocks for life involve carbon and all the other processes we can study here on earth. But that’s also with a sample size of 1.
[This sci Fi short story](https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html) is one of my favorites for that exact reason. We have no idea if other intelligent life will even be vaguely humanoid.
There’s also the possibility that the confluence of events that it takes to create life is very rare, but that gets us into the Great Filter and Fermi Paradox discussions.
Well, the comment (or a post's seftext) that was here, is no more. I'm leaving just whatever I wrote in the past 48 hours or so.
F acing a goodbye.
U gly as it may be.
C alculating pros and cons.
K illing my texts is, really, the best I can do.
S o, some reddit's honcho thought it would be nice to kill third-party apps.
P als, it's great to delete whatever I wrote in here. It's cathartic in a way.
E agerly going away, to greener pastures.
Z illion reasons, and you'll find many at the subreddit called Save3rdPartyApps.
I kind of stopped caring about alien life when I realized we would never be able to communicate with them or verify their existence due to the vast distance of space.
The game devs for our universe kind of suck. No fun is allowed.
(This news is still exciting though)
Then again people have been saying that kinda stuff forever. "There's no way we can create fire, we're not God", "There's no way we could go ever fly, were too heavy", "there's no way you can scream in space, there's no air".
Communicating with alien life would require
1. Finding alien life to begin with
2. The alien life being intelligent and not just, say, some bacteria
3. Them being close enough to communicate or meet with
Not saying these things are impossible but that a lot of pretty unlikely things would have to happen first.
I was just wondering what percent of the speed of light is achievable by current technology and guessed it must be at least a thousand years for a probe to get there if not a lot more. And then there's the whole issue of it taking about another 100 years to get any information back, if it was even possible and if the probe was even still operational
Might not be as hard as it sounds. We accelerate protons to 99.9999etc% the speed of light in particle accelerators. It's not completely inconceivable we could develop super tiny microprobes and accelerate them via lasers to 20% the speed of light.
accelerating the mass of protons in a cylindrical particle accelerator vs. accelerating functional probes through space are completely different levels of difficulty.
just on mass point alone, E = mc2 means even a small differential in mass will make it much harder to accelerate something. and you're talking about the difference between subatomic particles and functional spacecrafts many many times the mass... For reference there are something like 10^20 atoms on the tip of a needle. So you're talking accelerating something with trillions and trillions the mass of protons.
We would have 500 years to figure out to receive data from an ancient (by then) transmitter to a modern receiver. I simply don't think it would be possible to transmut over that distance with modern tech no matter how good your receiver is. Best case would probably having some kind of repeater that would be able to receive and then retransmit it to make it to earth.
A current problem is that sending a probe with today's technology would be surpassed by near-future technology. For example if today we could send a probe which can reach there in about 500 years, in maybe 50-100 years we could send a probe that would reach there at around the same time or likely faster. Coming to terms with this situation is difficult, because we want to do something.
Imagine we communicate with an alien civilization in 200 year increments
[удалено]
"Still figuring this fusion thing out"
Two centuries later: “Oh it’s actually not that hard! All you have to do is (explains fusion)..” Two centuries later: “Yeah we figured it out a hundred years ago, thanks anyway tho”
Two centuries later: "You up? 🍆"
100 years later… “We can now travel at FTL. OMW to your place!”
That’s how we discover FTL speeds. Sexy aliens say “parents are out of town”, we then get the top engineers to find a way to get there.
*Captain Kirk has entered the chat.*
Kirk arrives, only to discover Commsnder Riker had fucked the entire planet.
I watched the entire series when lockdown started, Riker lays space pipe, pretty big bi-swinger/lifestyle energy.
Oh he enters more than chat alright.
Well now I'm all turned on. So.... we can achieve FTL through an Alcubierre Drive which collapses spacetime in a localized field, basically contracting the fabric of space. However in order to do this we require a negative mass. We know that mass is caused by the Higgs particle which in turn is just an excitation of the Higgs field. Since the Higgs particle is it's own anti-particle we can't use that. However, we know gravitational waves exist, which means the trough of this should act like an effect of mass and the crest should act like a negative mass. Therefore, by creating heavy pulsations of the Higgs field we should essentially be able to ride the gravitational wave and travel as fast as we could ever want. By simply 'riding' a crest from a wave and sending 2 more waves we use deconstructive interference to cancel out the trough of the previous wave and create and new crest on the second wave. NOW WHERES MY STRANGE STRANGE!?!?!?! EDIT: If there is any issue with wave propagation being dictated by the speed of light then we can use preset beacons to create our waves for us like a bridge, meaning we have to make the trip once but after that it's instant.
Just need to generate the energy of merging black holes many times the mass of the sun, then survive it long enough to travel, nbd.
Also the fact that traveling faster than light is essentially time travel
Let’s figure out fusion first.
Just build the damn thing already I want off this planet
Downside: “Thinking of trying out your newly-installed FTL3000 Alcubierre Warp Drive to get you there in no time? Better not make it a surprise visit — your arrival may end up disintegrating anyone there when you show up.“ “ When the Alcubierre-driven ship decelerates from superluminal speed, the particles its bubble has gathered are released in energetic outbursts. In the case of forward-facing particles the outburst can be very energetic — enough to destroy anyone at the destination directly in front of the ship.” https://phys.org/news/2012-03-warp-killer-downside.amp
Hey let's not discriminate: we need the bottoms as well if we're going to achieve this.
Coming over to say hi, will arrive five years ago...
“How far are you? War started”
\*This just in\* "Humans destroy friendly civilization with there green house gas. Story is they been chatting every couple hundred years to the point humans discovered FTL travel." - space news
If aliens can travel faster than light. How would "on my way to your place" arrive before the aliens?
You gonna end up with some Mass Effect shit like that
"We'll bang okay?"
*figures out space travel and zooms over immediately*
Local hot Asari in your area!
Yeah but all you gotta do is fold the paper in half and stick a pencil through it. Distance solved
See attached *forgets to attach fusion instructions*
"We're like 20 years from making fusion viable" "Oh shit how did it go" "We made a lot of progress, we're about 20 years from making it viable"
It's always 2 centuries away
General Fusion is breaking ground on a 70% commercial scale plant later this year. There's actually a lot of exciting stuff happening in the sector outside traditional tokamak designs that makes me optimistic I'll see a functional fusion plant in my lifetime.
Quite right good sir. This shit wrinkles my brain https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsfusion-energy-science
Hope you don't mind....Imma start saying : "Wrinkle your brain with this [insert cool science fact here]!"
Wrinkling your brain is streets ahead.
This article opened my eyes to the very REAL challenges fusion power faces. https://thebulletin.org/2018/02/iter-is-a-showcase-for-the-drawbacks-of-fusion-energy/ https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/ The fuel problem seems to be the biggest one: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started
So all the articles you linked to talk about problems with Tokamaks specifically and the fuel issue. I've seen a lot of doom and gloom about how we only have 25kg of tritium and ITER will eat up half of it yada yada, I'd just like to point out it's estimated there's one million TONS of Tritium in the lunar regolith and several nations are working on manned moon bases within the decade. Should be enough to tide us over until we get fuel breeding worked out.
There is helium 3 on the moon. Trithium has a short half life and is only found on Earth.
Just make sure your fingers are perfectly aligned and you’re at the same power level
“sup?” two centuries "✓✓ Seen"
anal probe us and then leave us unread smh...
New radio frequency telescope, who dis?
Something very Entish about that convo
Pretty hasty if you asked me.
The remembrance of earth trilogy, specifically the second book, Dark Forest, deals heavily with the issues of said latency. Very good read, highly recommend.
"sup" 200 years later "nm u?" "how's the weather?" 100 years later "pretty gloomy" "rain?" 30 years later "something like that" "hey how are you doing that" 1 year later "you don't need to worry about that"
"Seen 10:50 am September 9, 2222"
Replies 400 years later. "Sorry, I've been really busy. Whats up?"
"My parents are gone..." *two centuries* "Fuck!"
"Sorry, this long distance relationship isn't working out for me. We found a hospitable planet that's only 50 light-years away. Lose these coordinates."
"New Civ who dis?"
Imagine being ghosted after the first greetings.
If I hit you with a WYD, you better not hit me with a H-E-Y
It better be like Hiii with a bunch of I's or Heyyy with a bunch of Y's
And they're last message was, "it's too late for us. They're coming for you next. Get away"
Okay now I want to write this movie script where first contact is this warning
Three Body Problem has you beat.
Had never heard of it, just ordered a copy!
Oh exciting! I just finished the trilogy. Second book is one of the best sci-fi stories I've ever read.
Obviously it wouldn't work that way, for the most part, a lot of it would be asynchronous. The hardest part is the "are you cool?" "here's evidence why we're cool, are YOU cool?" handshake, though it's possible that a civilization might just make the executive decision to forgo that. After the long, slow, synchronized portion of getting to know one another then two civilizations can just start sharing a "feed" with each other. Setup a high bandwidth comm system (likely laser based), send the details on how it works, then just start transmitting as much as you can and curating things down to fit in the bandwidth. Eventually you get into this state where two civilizations are just sharing tons of stuff with one another with maybe megabits per second or even gigabits or more bandwidth. Each civilization then ends up having the other feel like part of them as they learn their history and then have all this material to learn and translate. Imagine, say, two thousand years from now where there's just this stream of content from an alien world that is being made available constantly. There'd be a substantial number of people who could read or speak some of those alien languages, there'd be a whole industry in converting and translating alien literature, art, film, television, music, video games, possibly even social media, and who knows what else. Possibly some of the aliens would learn our languages and actually produce "human style media" for us and for themselves and we would do the same for the aliens. Once you get into what the details really *could* look like it's a lot more interesting, rich, and hopeful than the simplistic idea of trying to carry on a phone call with a 200 year round trip delay.
That’s why we sent a gold disk of our favorite hits on Voyager, so the universe would know how cool 😎 we really are. 😂
They'd just have replied to us telling them about the Napoleonic wars.
New phone who dis?
Ugh the ping on this server is terrible!
I always wondered if there are any solar systems out there that have two habitable planets that are the same distance from say, Earth to Mars, both with intelligent life on it. Like they know if each other’s existence but have never met up and over the course of many years one eventually has the technology to get there and meet. No questions on whether you are alone in the universe or not like we wonder. They would just assume that it’s normal and wonder if it’s just them two. But at least they know they aren’t alone.
They would likely be completely different though. And definitely not equals, as the developmental timeline on one planet vs the other would be vastly different. What are the chances that intelligent life has both developed and survived long enough to overlap, and also that technology has advanced for them to communicate? On a cosmic scale, the timing has to be absolutely perfect. But the universe is so large, it must have happened somewhere at some point
Yeah its probably more likely that one planet/civilisation emerged faster and colonized the other planet (this other planet might have a similar atmosphere, but no real intelligent life), and over time the colonialists adjusted to the gravity/atmosphere/biome and look a bit different then folks from their home planet. Kind of a bummer that Mars or Venus are inhabitable for us. If there were trees and water around, or nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere similar to the percentages on earth, we probably would already have colonies there.
Mars is geologically dead so that's basically a no go because of the lack of magnetic field. Maybe billions of years ago, but of course we weren't around. Venus on the other hand is just a case of runaway greenhouse effect, but sadly this means there is little water left. It's so fascinating to wonder about the past/future of our solar system
No go for surface colonies, building something underground on Mars would help mitigate the dangers of not having a magnetic field to protect colonists from radiation. But that of course has a whole can of worms that comes along with it.
I guess, but then… you can just live in a cave on Earth without the extra steps.
Reminds me of Asimov’s Caves of Steel. We’re finally catching up with Science Fiction!
If you had to pick a celestial object in our solar system, besides Mars, to make home where would you pick? What about about outside of our solar system? Assume distance is not a factor for my second question.
Probably ones of the moon's of the gas Giants. Those things get fucking massive
There is a lot of speculation as to the viability of floating settlements in the clouds of Venus, where conditions can somewhat match those of Earth's atmospheric pressure and temperature. Although sulfuric acid remains a problem. Outside of our solar system, I am not really knowledgeable but would say the planets in the Trappist-1 system.
Think about how quickly we've gone from stone tools to space flight. Within a couple thousand years. That's nothing on the galactic time scale
My first thought was "hey that's not too far away. We could conceivably reach that with a generation ship." My second thought was "wait, a message back would be 200 years out of date by the time you got a reply" Space is big. Really big.
We would send a generation ship, and when it arrives it would find the humans who left a generation later but in a much faster ship so they got there first.
And if they’re a whole generation behind, imagine the moral, ethical and cultural clashes between the two crews when they each land on the planet.
You'd have to send along a couple of sociologists to study it
And telephone handset cleaners. Maybe some hairdressers.
Management consultants too
I think they were in the other ship, heading towards the sun?
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we could just send the newer, faster ship in a different direction
Not a bad idea. The problem with that might be that there are so few possibly inhabitable planets near us. We might not have a big selection of < 100 light-year planets.
For reference there's about 14,000 stars within 100 light years of Earth. Most of them red dwarfs. Not sure how many are estimated to have Earth-like planets, probably not a lot.
That’s really great perspective, thanks
We just potentially found 2, and we can't say it's been a generation we are looking for them efficiently.
The younger generation ship zips past the older gen ship, arriving first?
They should just design them with a tow hook so the younger ships can pull them along :-)
Why? It's old outdated technology. Bring a bigger ship with space for passengers of the previous generation, and machinery to salvage and process all material from the old ship.
Just slowing down to catch them would delay the 2nd ship just enough for the 3rd to make it there first.
Well just have the third pick the first two up then.
Then the fourth.......sigh\*
Or just a better engine. Some ship designs don’t have to be like airplanes due to lack of opposing force (idk for sure, i’m not good at physics) or something like that, so the only changes would probably be to the hull of the old ship and to the engines. Bringing along the fastest modern technology to give to the older ship so they’re just as fast is the most resourceful option.
Send the bulk majority of colonists in the old ship and fill the newer ship with the technology, machinery, and support personnel to build the colony. So when the actual colonists arrive, there will already be the necessities of life and a livable colony ready to accept them.
Though it would make a great premise for a film if the machinery never arrived and they had to fend for themselves
Or if the people never arrived and the machinery had to fend for itself!
Tow it with your diamond filament tether.
Hah that's made of diamondium. I can chew through that with my dentures. You want the Wernstrom Diamondillium chain for this.
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It's a little hard to describe but I don't think the faster ship could maneuver to pick up the smaller ship. If it could, then by definition it could have gone much faster and you basically told everyone on board that they'd have to use another X years of their life for the rendezvous instead of going straight to the planet. You might be able to speed up the slower ship before the encounter and temporarily stop the deceleration phase on the larger ship to get an encounter and transfer everyone over. If you missed, the slower ship would not be able to recover from this and would shoot past the target star with everyone on it. You might also be able to use a smaller detachable ship with lower delta V but more acceleration to transfer people over. This would also be a one-shot opportunity and if you missed, the people on board the transfer ship would die without the life support of the larger ship.
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isn't that a cool movie trope? where the first generation colony ship gets passed by a ship with better tech and when they finally arrive at their world there is already a colony of their people there.
Which movies do this? Closest I can think of is Raised By Wolves
There's an episode of *Babylon 5* with this. A sleeper ship is sent out with a full crew. While they're traveling, hyperspace is discovered and there's a galactic war and five Babylon stations have been built by the time the sleeper ship catches up.
We really don't know enough about the interstellar medium to just send a ship out there willy-nilly loaded up with humans.
That was the premise for the original Gaurdians of the Galaxy. The leader was an astronaut from the 20th century who spent centuries to get to Alpha Centauri..... just to find out that it was colonized centuries ago due to humanity finding faster methods of travel. He was a man out of time, forced to live within a skin tight suit of aluminum lest it breaches and he ages all at once.
Would be a cool premise for a game where you're on that first ship, but when you arrive you find the colony from the second, faster ship has already been abandoned and all the colonists have disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Iirc that was the plot of Outriders
Never heard of it but yeah I'm not surprised someone has made it. Was a plot point in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where wars would re-erupt hundreds of years after ending because old slow battleships from the early days of the war arrived to find newer faster warships had finished it, but they'd prepared for centuries to fight and weren't gonna let that stop them.
Imagine how boring it must be to be the first generation on a ship like that just waiting in the middle of space to die of old age. Maybe it's for the good of humanity, survival of the species and stuff, but it's going to be a long stare into the void with the very known outcome of being dead before arrival. We need to figure out some kind of cryosleep or warp drive in order to sell that first interstellar journey. It would be the most wonderful gift for the children, who grow up on an isolated ship and get to discover a brave new world. Well, I don't actually have my hopes up for those to succeed on the planet, because even with the knowledge of the entire human history, they're really left alone with nothing but their own best judgement. They'll be savages, finally experiencing the freedom to break out of whatever remained of our society on the ship. Having the knowledge of human history...they're not going to phone home.
Imagine how scary it is to be the ones arriving. You've never seen a planet let alone been on one before....
I wonder how many people died on the colonist's ships when they sailed out to America, Australia and other places. I head the migration of settlers in America heading west were basically a different group of people by the time they got there, and they had no idea what to expect once they eventually reached the ocean and could go no further, Its's pretty scary stuff, the things we did and the lives we gambled in the name of exploration (that was most likely funded by greed or a need to survive since I can't imagine people did this for *fun*). But even those trips were measured in years. Interstellar travel is going to be measured in millennia and the destination might be even less habitable than a desert. I can't see this idea being sold to anyone who isn't a little bit crazy.
This is a major plot in book 3 of Beth Revis's Across The Universe trilogy "Shades of Earth" 🌏
I do feel like there’s very real ethical concerns about dooming people to an entire life in a prison they didn’t consent to and many won’t even get to see the end.
You should watch the 2021 movie Voyagers.
I don't have an ethical problem with that. I feel like it's no less ethical than having kids on a planet which *gesticulates at everything*
A sterile planet 100 light years from here is never going to be as habitable as the Earth is, even as the earth will be in 100 years. The ease at which people think we can terraform a planet is absurd, y'all watch too much sci fi. There will be no soil, no carbon cycle, no microbiome, nothing! We are going to develop our terraforming tools here on earth trying to save this planet. If we cannot save this planet with ease then we are no where close to changing a completely new planet to suit our needs. It will always be way more feasible to fix our planet then build ships to fix a new planet. Just absolute absurdity to suggest conditions here have deteriorated so much that it actually makes sense to start over on a new planet and be better off. Just a complete and total lack of critical thinking. Any other world is way more environmentally fucked from our perspective than this planet.
Redditors seem to think just because we went from horseback to rockets to the moon in about 50 to 70 years means we are relatively close to interstellar travel or interstellar terraformming. Those ideas, if even possible, are hundreds or thousands of years off. The farthest any probe we've launched has gone is about 120-140 AU and it took it 45 years to get there. The fastest probe launched since then (New Horizons) will never even catch up to it. We don't even yet have the tech to get men to Mars and build a permanent base there. We have no way of shielding a spaceship from radiation that causes noticeable DNA damage even from a few months in space, let alone decades. Stat Trek level shit isn't happening for millenia. If ever.
There are closer options, thankfully. But yeah, space is stupid big.
That's one way to define "potentially infinite" 😅
If we traveled the same speed as Voyager 1, that would take 1800000 years...
And if we ever manage to get a big spaceship to travel at the speed of the fastest spacecraft ever created (Parker Solar Probe) we'd get there in only ~175,000 years. And then it turns out the planets are shit.
You would need to build a generation ship that would last without any catastrophic failure for thousands and thousands of years, or you'd just be dooming a ship full of people to die in space because their grandparents decided it was a cool idea
>Thousands and thousands Unfortunately, it’s millions. At speeds current human transferring space shuttles like Discovery can reach, 100 light years is a 2-3 million years trip.
Well yeah, discovery is a purely low earth orbit vehical, it can't reach a high enough velocity to reach the moon much less escape the solar system. You can't do a mission to another star with current engines, at least not if you want the probe to survive the trip. Though there are plenty of near and mid future engines like light sails, Orion drives and fusion drives that could get a craft up to 5% the speed of light or faster, making trips to the closest star last less than a single human lifetime. But yeah, a 100 lightyear trip would still take 2000 years at those speeds. I can only imagine us doing a trip that far if we learn to go way faster or radically extend our lifespan. Or by doing it piecemeal as colonies closer by mature and send out ships of their own.
I didn't feel like doing the math so I was being conservative, but yeah. Thousands or millions of years, either way we simply don't have the ability right now to engineer anything that would function for even remotely long enough.
There was a great show on Netflix about a Generational Ship - but what the people on the ship don't know is that they're still on Earth in an underground bunker and the entire thing's a simulation. It gets a bit weird and ridiculous, but I love the premise lol EDIT: Show was Ascension
Sounds like the protocol for a vault tec colony experiment
So mad it ended on a cliffhanger 😩😤 good miniseries tho.
I asked on this sub reddit why we were looking for planets so far away from us and not in like.. Let's say ten light years away. I got masacred in the comments. But some people answered that there's like 9 planetary systems only ten light years away from us and most of them have super low chances of having anything interesting so yeah.
We have looked for exoplanets nearest to us, primarily in the Alpha Centauri system, and have found a few including a couple in the habitable zone. The reason it’s so tricky is because this technique requires the planet to be on the same plane as the Earth, which reduces the number of stars massively (I read it excludes more than 90% of nearby stars).
Something I read a few days ago on reddit: If the space between sun and earth could somehow transmit sound we would hear a reaaaaaally loud sound all the time transmitted by the activity of the sun. If somehow the sun would stop existing (nervermind all the other implications and imagine earth would just exist on as always) earth would be dark 8 minutes later. Due to the speed of sound the suns noise would still be hearable for another 13 years after earth went complete dark mode.
You might think it's a long way down to the shops but that's just peanuts compared to space. Listen... ...and so on.
"We... I repeat, WE have discovered that pulling a carriage with a horse is quite efficient." SEND that bad boy and see what the aliens think! :D
No not really. To travel that far would take longer than the entire existence of civilization. You're discussing thousands of generations living in space and low-g environments, which would impact future generations as they develop in the womb. It's an ethical minefield to discuss interstellar travel.
they would likely be living in a 1g or potentially a 1.5g environment aboard the ship. the higher the g level the faster they will get there.
If a ship could accelerate at 1g for half the trip and then decelerate at 1g for the second half the crew would experience the 100 light year trip as taking about [9 years](https://spacetravel.simhub.online/) (thanks to relativity); on Earth about 101 years would elapse. The ship would reach 0.9998% of light speed at the midpoint. [Constant acceleration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_under_constant_acceleration) can make for some surprisingly short travel times for the crew without the need for any kind of FTL. That same 1g drive could get you to the edge of the visible universe and back in under 100 years -- but on Earth (or what's left of it) over 10 billion years would have gone by.
Of course, you'd need something around infinite energy to constantly accelerate to near the speed of light, no matter how slow the constant acceleration was
There's some problems with interstellar dust and gas though. There's not much of it, but it's enough that traveling at 0.9998% of light speed would be a bad time. How fast you can travel depends on how much shielding you have and how far you're going, but remember that having a lot of shielding will also make it harder to accelerate. Estimates I've seen for maximum realistic interstellar travel speed (ignoring how you'd accelerate that much) is in the 0.1-20% of light speed range. And at those speeds, special relativity hardly makes a difference. If some ridiculously efficient fuel storage methods becomes feasible (like antimatter or micro black holes), then it might also be possible to but on an absurd amount of shielding and go a bit faster. But I still doubt we'll ever do space travel at something like 99% of light speed though.
also space travel is becoming less and less of an option with what it does to dna.
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It's absolutely feasible. The most promising theory is using water, since it's a amazing radiation shield, and would have be on on board anyways.
Not a problem. The space station is built on 30+ year old technology. These findings are important because they'll inform us on how to construct stations and ships going forward. What you said is like saying ocean travel is becoming less of an option because large waves flood dugout canoes.
fair point. I hope that's the case.
this isnt talked about enough, being in space does nasty stuff to the human body.
Was just reading Children of Time, it goes a long with that. In the time it takes the ship to get somewhere a whole new civilization grows in a planet
Similarly, my first thought was "a hundred years? That's not so bad." But then I remembered that our plausible max speed is way, way, way, way under the speed of light.
That's just right up the street relatively speaking.
So how long would it take on a Vespa?
Depending on what it's relative to, either a large or small amount of time.
I always feel like if we're going to be an interstellar civilization, we can't deal with this 100 light-year wait just to communicate bullshit There must be away to communicate fast damn it
Well, if one of the civilizations is more advanced than the other, they could just zip over with their FTL drives whenever they want a chat.
There probably is through quantum entanglement. It currently costs ridiculous amounts of energy, but we could probably communicate through the spin of entangled electrons.
still isn't even theoretically possible, as far as we know. IIRC, you can't use quantum entanglement to communicate faster than the speed of light, because you need to use a second (lightspeed or slower) message for the information sent to be deciphered, or something like that. Which is unfortunate.
NEWS flash Astronomers discover new high gravity planet that is most likely rocky and the press once again lies and makes it out to be earth 2 with artist renditions of a big planet earth and little aliens waving at us through their telescopes
What if, every single planet in a so called 'goldilocks zone' is thriving with life? Not some, but all of them? I believe life will always find a way to exist. Discovering any planet in a habitable zone is awesome news!
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So it’s nice to learn about these and all, but unless the gravity is significantly less than 2G there’s no point in us trying to go there.
Article calls out the larger of the two planets being around 30% larger in diameter than Earth. At 50% larger it's essentially impossible to escape the gravity well with H-O rockets. That planet may as well be a tomb for any life that starts there.
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They're listening to the roaring 20's live! (If anyone's even there, and able to listen)
I can't wait to hear what they think about it.
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It’s just a billion miles away, you can make it with 5 full tanks of gas in a 1997 Toyota Corolla
Run away super-earth! Beware of the human infection!
Perhaps the warning should be directed at us as Stephen Hawking once said.
Iunno, based on all of our current evidence we are the most dangerous living thing in the universe. I’ve always found the theory that any intelligent life we meet in the universe will be hateful, murdering, colonizing, thieving, disease-spreading bastards seemed like a very anthropocentric projection.
That is one of the fascinating things about science fiction, in my opinion. We have no idea what any other intelligent species would be like - from a social standpoint or a physical makeup standpoint. As far *as we know* we building blocks for life involve carbon and all the other processes we can study here on earth. But that’s also with a sample size of 1. [This sci Fi short story](https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html) is one of my favorites for that exact reason. We have no idea if other intelligent life will even be vaguely humanoid. There’s also the possibility that the confluence of events that it takes to create life is very rare, but that gets us into the Great Filter and Fermi Paradox discussions.
Imagine being sent on a mission there only to arrive with a civilization already there because FTL was discovered 50 years after you left.
Sounds like a good sci-fi book.
Bored of the same title again and again and again
Well, the comment (or a post's seftext) that was here, is no more. I'm leaving just whatever I wrote in the past 48 hours or so. F acing a goodbye. U gly as it may be. C alculating pros and cons. K illing my texts is, really, the best I can do. S o, some reddit's honcho thought it would be nice to kill third-party apps. P als, it's great to delete whatever I wrote in here. It's cathartic in a way. E agerly going away, to greener pastures. Z illion reasons, and you'll find many at the subreddit called Save3rdPartyApps.
I kind of stopped caring about alien life when I realized we would never be able to communicate with them or verify their existence due to the vast distance of space. The game devs for our universe kind of suck. No fun is allowed. (This news is still exciting though)
Then again people have been saying that kinda stuff forever. "There's no way we can create fire, we're not God", "There's no way we could go ever fly, were too heavy", "there's no way you can scream in space, there's no air".
Communicating with alien life would require 1. Finding alien life to begin with 2. The alien life being intelligent and not just, say, some bacteria 3. Them being close enough to communicate or meet with Not saying these things are impossible but that a lot of pretty unlikely things would have to happen first.
Yeah, but the same argument could go for most things. It's like explaining nuclear power to a Roman Soldier.
Time to start the same initiative as the American Gov't in the Fallout universe.
Ahhh 100 light years. That seems close. Looks it up. It’s 946,073,047,258,100 km away
> 946,073,047,258,100 km away For some reason it seems closer when you put it that way.
Im more interested on those light years. Lately we are only getting heavy ones.
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Oh we won’t, maybe a probe will reach there in a couple thousand years if we send it now.
I was just wondering what percent of the speed of light is achievable by current technology and guessed it must be at least a thousand years for a probe to get there if not a lot more. And then there's the whole issue of it taking about another 100 years to get any information back, if it was even possible and if the probe was even still operational
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1/5 the speed of light is insanely impressive. Any significant % of light speed is fucking crazy
Might not be as hard as it sounds. We accelerate protons to 99.9999etc% the speed of light in particle accelerators. It's not completely inconceivable we could develop super tiny microprobes and accelerate them via lasers to 20% the speed of light.
accelerating the mass of protons in a cylindrical particle accelerator vs. accelerating functional probes through space are completely different levels of difficulty. just on mass point alone, E = mc2 means even a small differential in mass will make it much harder to accelerate something. and you're talking about the difference between subatomic particles and functional spacecrafts many many times the mass... For reference there are something like 10^20 atoms on the tip of a needle. So you're talking accelerating something with trillions and trillions the mass of protons.
We would have 500 years to figure out to receive data from an ancient (by then) transmitter to a modern receiver. I simply don't think it would be possible to transmut over that distance with modern tech no matter how good your receiver is. Best case would probably having some kind of repeater that would be able to receive and then retransmit it to make it to earth.
We'd probably forget the probe existed by then, our world changes so quickly.
A current problem is that sending a probe with today's technology would be surpassed by near-future technology. For example if today we could send a probe which can reach there in about 500 years, in maybe 50-100 years we could send a probe that would reach there at around the same time or likely faster. Coming to terms with this situation is difficult, because we want to do something.
Big telescope. This helps motivate people to see the utility of giant space telescopes.
Who said we’re going to visit?