Reply With Quoteits all good, the guys on Enterprise are doing a fine job already.
has anyone got any good ideas ?
Just wondering if anyone has thought of any good ideas to better explore space.
As an example a army of robots looking for life never stopping for 100's or thousands of year's on auto pilot running off nuclear and solar energy relaying data back to eath.. I know it will take forever to get the data because the robots will be so deep into space but when we are dead humans will still be going strong (i hope) and maybe it will take 100's or 1000's of years to get data to earth but someone will be still here to receive it.
Think about it if we had the tech 100's or 1000's of years ago and some did send robots out into space to explore and we just got back some data back today we would be very excited.
Anyway I got a bit carried away. It's time for you to tell me you're ideas.
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its all good, the guys on Enterprise are doing a fine job already.
...In Somnis Veritas...
No they're not. All this touchy feely space exploration and being friends with aliens... it sucks.Originally Posted by osiris777
I wanna see more bopping of aliens and scraping of klingon entrails.
Back in reality.... robots it is. And it's a hard job even for them to do.
It takes a very very long time to get anywhere particular in space.
not with plasma rockets
Based on the fastest space probe we have moving to date (Voyager 1) it will take around 715,000 years to get the the next star system where we could assume life, only about 40 light years away.
Anything we make that has moving parts or is under some form of mechanical stress will fail after a few thousand years.
Semi-conductor electronics will deteriorate much earlier due to cosmic radiation.
So we need something faster, much faster and for that we need an immense amount of energy, that we are not capable of producing yet.
First we must master nuclear FUSION at last.
I wish all the money and human resources used to create the LHC would have been invested in developing nuclear fusion instead.
Then we could build a Super-LHC, travel in space and inhabit extra terrestrial bodies, forget about carbon tax and petrol prices, etc and etc... and change the world.
Last edited by Uncle Fester; 21-12-08 at 06:40 PM.
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i heard that if you move fast enough you can time travel e.g. you stay young whilst people on earth get old. This is going to sound crazy but what if we could some how use that to make us last the time needed to wait for these robots to send data back.
We already have something much faster. the New Horizons probe is already traveling faster. It's due for a fly by of Pluto in a few years.
This highlights what I said before about going anywhere in particular. If you want to get there, you have to do it in a reasonable time period and not only do you have to accellerate to get there, you have to decellerate to stop, else like the New Horizons probe, you'll just fly by at high speed and only have a couple of hours to get a mere glimpse of the target.
I'm not sure what fusion has to do with space travel in particular.First we must master nuclear FUSION at last.
I wish all the money and human resources used to create the LHC would have been invested in developing nuclear fusion instead.
You may find that what is learned about subatomic physics from the LHC is used in fusion technology. Previous particle accellerators have not only provided useful information, but fusion reactors ARE particle accellerators.
If you're so concerned about fusion technology, why not give it a go yourself ? Fusion isn't beyond the reach of hobbiests.
Have a look at "the fusor".
By far the biggest problem is as mentioned, cosmic radiation deteriorating the electronics of the probe. There are methods of minimising the effects of this damage, but everything comes at a price.
lets just pretend money is no object, trash
im thinking of a big space ship with a hanger for the robots that explore so that repairs can be done on them via another robot. Maybe even mining can be done for materials lol
How else are you going to carry the energy required to accelerate near light speed (or even a tenth of it) and decelerate again?
That link reminds me of the infamous cold fusion, not exactly what I meantbut I will have a closer look.
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just bring a shit loads of nukes and use that as rockets and fuel
Don't really have to go that far or that fast for that.
Check out Saturn's moon Titan, a really interesting place.
Start here:
)
I have a vision that when we run out of oil in a 100years or so that we could be actually getting it from Titan using robots.
Even if we have replaced oil with alternative energy sources we still need the hydrocarbons for so many products and now that oil is so cheap again no one will bother about alternatives until the next oil crisis that might be actually real next time.
Who knows, that place could be loaded with diamonds as well.
So start designing those space travelling robot-miners before somebody else does
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how about that space elevator the asians want to build
Well by far the best way to explore space is to make contact with alien civilisations.
This might sound silly, but the information that is shared produces more than the sum of it's parts.
Imagine a civilisation somewhere like Tau Ceti. About 7 light years away.
Combining information from telescopes in both locations might be slow, but imagine how useful a pair of binoculars would be if they were 7 light years across.
Sharing other domestic information has its uses to. This is another form of exploration. It doesn't take a lot of thought to realise how much a science like biology could broaden its knowledge even with just one alien picture.
Interstellar exploration is easiest achieved this way.
Second is sending probes to get a closer look at other star systems.
It still takes a very long time to accomplish results and even then it's got a lot of hit and miss.
Intrastellar is already within out grasp. We are capable of sending probes to any part of our solar system. So the information gathered is only limited by what our probes can capture.
Hands on human missions are the ideal situation. But the expense and complexity of just keeping the humans alive is difficult and that's not even bringing them back alive when you've finished with them.
Exploring the atmosphere of Jupiter. That's not a task for humans if you want to keep them alive.
Sending probes is a little more practical, even if we ignore cost.
Just sending a probe is ok, but retrieving material and bringing it back to Earth. It's tempting even just for a mars mission. Even if robots couldn't retrieve rock samples we wanted, just returning random samples would still be very exciting.
Not only the Asians, could even be a race one day who gets it up first
Probably the most promising space project in the next 10-20 years.
There is generally a strong commercial demand for high tensile strength nano tubes, so I reckon we should see feasible strengths almost as a spin off from the industry in a few years.
I have read a cable long enough (150,000km) should be enough to catapult anything to Jupiter and beyond.
A shame Arthur C. Clark could not see his vision turn to reality.
Yes interstellar direct contacts would be more exciting than anything else I can think of but I am certain I will not experience any, so I have given up my childhood dreams long ago.
Building a super high resolution telescope array outside in space (with help of the space elevator) might be an approach one day to actually "see" what is on the surface of extrasolar planets.
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To get alien images.. i thought of this a long time ago. What if we set up mass amounts of computer monitors and run every single pixel combination. We should then in theory get every possible image that excists, correct ?
I'm not saying it wont take an extremely long time and monitoring to see if it's a picture or just jumbled pixels but do you think it is possible ?
Last edited by cobra679; 22-12-08 at 01:06 AM.
No, what your suggesting relies on there actually being something in the noise and that something carrying video information.
What is more likely is that we will see alien radar first.
Since we have nothing else to base theory upon but our own development, we could expect large VHF signals to be the first to be seen. Think WW2 radar. The signals need to be sufficently high power. Radar is generally transmits the biggest signals. High power UHF and later SHF.
What we're hopping for is a chance that the radar's antenna will point at earth long enough for us to notice.
Reversing the role, 9GHz weather and aircraft radar is common. Lots of ships and aircraft have them and they leak a lot of signal into space.
From a nearby star, Sol would appear to have some strange random pulses in the 9GHz band. SETI software would soon pick up on antenna sweep times
High power VHF/UHF TV transmitters tend to be omni directional and don't radiate much power up into space.
Satellite communications are a good candidate signal too. The uplinks are deliberately pointed into space and they use high gain antennas.
Down side is that they typically run QRP. (lowest power possible).
There is an exception to that, signals like foxtel run their amplifiers into saturation at high power. So the chances of actually finding a video based signal in that case are probably quite good.
Once you've actually identified a candidate star system, you then have to get their attention. The movie "Contact" kind of portrays this. A very obvious signal is beamed at earth. The closer one looks at the signal, the more information they find. Though that signal had a purpose and a goal.
Our real world SETI communications would be more about telling our neighbours about ourselves and sending a request for specific information about them. Communications would be simple at first setting ground rules of logic for more complex communications.
Language itself would not be direct at first, rather an intermediate transport language would be used. Lets call our new friends planet "Ork".
When communication information to Ork, we translate the English idea into the transport language and at the other end the transport language is translated into Orkish. The reverse is true when sending signals the other way.
Pictures will come before direct language. The mathematical rules for creating pictures are easy. Any hacker can reconstruct a picture from a file very quickly if he knows the data is a picture and nothing else.
Think of a data stream which is a million bits. Imgaine it's a simple black and white two tone picture. First choice is going to be a square 1000x1000 pixels.
Even at this stage if the picture is something else, the structure is going to have some sort of obvious pattern and the receiver can quickly adapt it.
Remember that this sort of communication isn't designed to be complex, it's targeted to be very simple and obvious.
i dont mean looking for images in space. i mean just running every possible pixel combo on a computer screen.
no matter how you arrange white noise, it is still white noise.
im not talking about white noise. I mean just run a script on a computer running every possible pixel combonation, think about it........ like bruteforcing
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