NASA Televised News Conference, Alert

[Keepleft]

MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-157 NASA Announces Televised Chandra News Conference WASHINGTON --

NASA will hold a news conference at 12:30 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 15, to discuss the Chandra X-ray Observatory's discovery of an exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood.

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[LeroyPatrol]

That's about Tues 4:30am for us! Might be on the APT feed on Asiasat5 so if anyone is up......

Leroy

[trash]

bitchin, I'm on holidays !

[Learjet]

Wait, NASA is holding a press conference? Considering this is not a space mission, it must be big. When is the last time they held a news conference for something in astronomy?

I wonder what it is! Have they found life on Mars? An Earth destroying asteroid? The lost Star Trek Voyager in the Delta Quadrant?

Oh wait, this is related to an Xray observatory. Have they found proof of wormholes? Have they found God?

It's so exciting, I can hardly contain myself.

[Onefella]

Maybe they've spotted Vyger coming in fast.

Damn it's too early! We haven't even discovered dilithium crystals yet.

[Learjet]

It's Nibiru! The Earth really will end in 2012!

LOL the conspiracy theory forums are buzzing.

[Learjet]

So it's a baby black hole. Or a nebula. 50 million light years away.

I'm going back to sleep.

[Onefella]

Wow, you can see why they can 'see' it so clearly. Galaxy M100 is almost perfectly side-on to us, and the black hole is way out on the edge of the spiral between dust lanes.

Pity the 'observation' is probably just a series of spikes on a graph over 30 years. It would be awesome to actually see it optically. I suppose even if you could see it, you would really only be able to see the accretion disc around it, not the tiny dot of nothingness in the middle.

[trash]

So what was the announcement ?
Yes, Chandra is an X-ray observatory so it would be a good guess that a black hole or something similar would be the subject.

[Onefella]

Learjet took the graveyard shift to find out. (now that's dedication)

See three posts up.

[Learjet]

Learjet took the graveyard shift to find out. (now that's dedication)

Lol it's not quite like that. More like in the loo all night from a flare up. Again tonight too by the look of it. And the next and the next.....

[skozzy]

If the world thought the milky way was going to be sucked into oblivion in a few years maybe the price of PC parts and Electricity might go down. Something that might making buying a rocket and lotsa tin food more affordable to escape.

[trash]

50 million LY is a long long way away. Not in this galaxy, not even in a neighbouring galaxy. That's disappointing. It's down the other end of of our galactic cluster.

[Onefella]

Trash, it seems to me that the only thing stopping us from ftl travel is mass. If we could somehow remove the mass of ourselves and the 'ship' we're in, we might have a hope of 'wormhole' travel.

Any ideas on how we can remove mass from the equation?

[trash]

This is a trick question right ?
I may be god, but even that one is a little beyond me.
There are some nice people down at CERN working on smashing shit together looking for 'mass' particles. My personal feeling is that they're not going to find the one particle their looking for.

Personally when it comes to space travel, more mass or the simulation of it would be more useful than less. Since even relatively massless particles all obey the cosmic speed limit, I would think this isn't the answer.

What would be useful is simulating more mass. Or more correctly creating gravity.
Imagine that we could "turn on" gravity at will. Actually controlling gravity in ANY way would produce endless combinations of applications.

An example. A gravitational unipolar piece of (Star Trek DS9) deck plating.
Magic stuff. Connect a 1.5V AA battery to the terminals of this square metre flat plate and the top side simulates 1G (10ms^-2). What could you do with this one piece of technology.

Just putting it in an ordinary spacecraft like a shuttle would make deep space missions possible overnight. Most of our problems about travelling in space are not getting there, it's just staying alive. Artificial gravity would make a Mars mission simple.
An interstellar mission while being a one way trip across several generations would not need to worry about the health effects. Rather their fuel, energy, space, food water and oxygen become an issue.
Sublight colonisation of the Galaxy is a realistic possibility. It is possible with current technology but the expense and effort required would be massive. And this is no guarantee that such a large project would ever be successful. It would be a one way ticket to nowhere and nothing.

Even if we had a relativistic starship capable of easily travelling at 0.8C, where would you go ? The Centauri star system ? You get there an find that each of the three stars has some small rocky planets around them with a couple of gas giants orbiting common to the binary. No life, no habitable or useful planets, what now ? There goes 7 years of your earth life. You would have aged only a few months on the ship.
Off to Tau Ceti, another 8 light years from Centauri. You find an Earth like planet, no intelligent life, just a wild planet with strange forests and animals. Descending to the planet, it's not like you will have another Rocket waiting there to get you back into orbit to the mothership.
Worse might be if the planet is inhabited. Lets say the Tau Ceti equivalent of the Roman Empire and Ancient China. Oh, this could get messy.

Oh, I could play this game all night. There are so many possibilities.

The question is as Stephen Hawking has mentioned is how long before Humans leave this planet and solar system. If we do not do it within a specific window, that window of opportunity may close and we may never be able to leave the planet even if we want to because we have wasted the resources and knowledge to achieve it.
Of course it is always possible that in another 100 million years this planet may spawn another big brained species and have regenerated enough fossil fuel sources to give them a chance.

[Onefella]

Presumably if they did make something that would do close to the speed of light they might send a drone first. Even a 20-year round trip might be feasible just to have a squiz first, then send the humans. I suppose that's what we're doing now with Mars.

I've often wondered if you could create a very small, contained black hole in space, then built a structure around it, you would then have a 'mobile' gravity well. Then maybe if you made a little tiny hole in the field that was holding the black hole steady, it might 'suck' you to your destination as opposed to 'pushing' you there.

I've heard people ask "why build the LHC, what good will it do?" I say it's a bit like saying to Christopher Columbus "Why sail West, how is that going to help us?" - You never know 'till you suck it, and see.

[trash]

0.8C is a very unrealistic speed for a spacecraft.
The problems with accelerating it are difficult enough, slowing it down even more of an issue. And at those speeds, the vaccuum of space starts behave like the atmosphere.
It not only causes friction, but the atoms act more like a sand blaster eroding the spacecraft. Nasty.

A more realistic speed is 0.1C. At this speed it's less than 100 years to our nearest neighbours. Return missions aren't an option. Generational crews are more likely.
The children or the grandchildren of the original crews will be the colonists when or if a ship arrives at a destination.
Bootstrapping planets and colonising them is the ultimate goal.

[LeroyPatrol]

something else to keep an eye on



Leroy

[Learjet]

They're not gonna trick me again! I'm sleeping through this PC.

[Learjet]

NASA discovers life on Earth! Hahahahahaha!

Okay I shouldn't mock, this means life may be in diverse toxic atmospheres of other planets, but still....