Would you sacrifice almost 15 years of your life to be the first human to venture to another star system?
Assuming a starship is built that uses an antimatter beam core engine or black body photon thruster which can reach speeds of up to 99% the speed of light (theoretically) it would still take years to get to Alpha Centauri, a couple years there, then the trip back.
Lets assume the ship has artificial gravity in the form of a rotating wheel section, and uses human hibernation during the trip there and back so you are only awake during your stay in the star system. The ship reaches 70% the speed of light, takes 6 years Earth time (roughly 5 year ship time due to time dilation) to reach Alpha centauri, you spend 3 years in the system doing science and exploring, then 6 years to get back.
when you return to Earth it will have been 15 years after you left, 2 way communication will have been impractical as it would take 4 years for radio signals to travel 1 way to or from Alpha centauri. You will he behind on pop culture, world events, basically everything and will have to catch up.
>Would you sacrifice almost 15 years of your life to be the first human to venture to another star system?
FOR THE GLORY OF THE GOD EMPEROR I WOULD GIVE MY LIFE
>Assuming a starship is built that uses an antimatter beam core engine or black body photon thruster which...
Lay off the Kerbal Space Program & Star Trek, retard
>You will he behind on pop culture, world events, basically everything and will have to catch up.
Said the Sup Forumstard so behind on current events he doesn't realise everything he's already said is already in the fucking pipeline.
Daniel Jackson
>Lay off the Kerbal Space Program & Star Trek, retard
Antimatter beam core or black body photon thrusters are real concepts bruv, in fact the photon thruster can be built with modern technology the only issue is power required.
Michael Morris
also unless you talk to Icarus Interstellar a manned interstellar trip is not in the works.
laser driven chipsats yes but not a manned starship, and they don't use beam core antimatter or blackbody thrusters.
Landon Flores
stay off elon musk's koolaid, kid... no-one's going anywhere
Lincoln Lee
Elon Musk only really cares about Mars, he probably dosn't care about anything beyond that.
Yea its a concept bruv But then again taking acid and attempting to fly off a roof is also a concept Antimatter engines will be a huge boo boo They are working on the "bending space" method From what i remember a while ago scientists have been able to bend space about the size of a golfball only They got some time to go to where they will be able to bend space in a size big enough in front of a space craft. So essentially its like a mobile wormhole that deploys in front of your ship which = hella speed and hella less resources used I could be innacurate, its early And yes to your question, i would without a doubt
Nolan Thompson
>in fact the photon thruster can be built with modern technology the only issue is power required.
you could say the same thing about laser rifles, fag
Samuel Morales
>speeds of up to 99% the speed of light If you collide with so much as a speck of dust at relativistic speeds, there will be nothing left of you but other specks of dust.
Interstellar travel is bullshit. It cannot and will not ever happen. Stop watching Star Drek and get a girlfriend FFS.
Michael Moore
This
Jeremiah Peterson
>They are working on the "bending space" method
are you retarded?
an antimatter beam core engine is just a normal rocket that uses matter antimatter to produce thrust.
you are thinking of war drives or the alcubierre
Owen Sanders
> It cannot and will not ever happen
kind of like how trans Atlantic flights or going to the moon are never going to happen?
Fuck yes, being one of the first humans to visit another star system would be fucking monumental, what's 15 years in the face of going down in history forever
Nicholas Hughes
depends what you mean by interstellar travel
Voyager 1 is already in interstellar space and is traveling. if you send something to say Barnards star and it takes thousands of years to get there it's still interstellar travel.
That asteroid that flew through our solar system came from another star system, that's technically interstellar travel.
Dylan Johnson
Nothing is impossible my friend
Anthony Cruz
Im not fucking retarded as i said its early I can't recall what they called it, yea possibly those 2 warp drives or alcubierre
All i know is i know the result of antimatter when it goes wrong, i don't think nasa would risk that possibility with that voyage. Idk i could be wrong.
I think the math on that voyage with modern nuclear powered engines was 40 years atm. Which is cool to think about. You leave on a ship to a new world at age 10 and end up on the new earth at age 50
Brody Cox
But we've never been to the moon.
Robert Richardson
>depends what you mean by interstellar travel > the first human to venture to another star system
Apart from literally an infinite number of things that you forgot to mention.
Camden Miller
>confuses antimatter rockets with warp drives you really need to fact check next time. Antimatter engines don't bend space at all or use that at all, they just using matter antimatter as fuel to produce thrust the same as a normal rocket just with magnetic nozzles and faster reaction mass.
Alternatively an Orion drive can reach like 5 - 10% the speed of light, but that involves exploding nuclear bombs over and over again behind a pusher plate, not a fun idea, also illegal currently.
could use pulse fusion engines, a pellet of deuterium tritium is injected into a reaction chamber and compressed with lasers to fuse. same principal as Orion but more efficient, not illegal, and could go faster. however it's a bit off, and the concept thought up for project Daedalus is ludicrous in size.
laser rifles don't exist and are also technically illegal according to the Geneva convention as they can blind a person without killing them resulting in disfiguring. Anti personnel laser weapons fall into his category along with landmines and that's one of the reasons no one is working on them. However anti missile and anti vehicle lasers are fine and exist. chemical lasers already exist that can shoot down missiles and drones form afar.
no shit, you can prevent this by using a number of methods, an ablation shield, a magnetic shield, or multiple layers of Mylar a few km out in front. derbies hit and are converted into plasma that the other layers absorb. would also like to point out the chances of hitting anything larger than a hydrogen atom in interstellar space is very very very very low so atomic ablation is the bigger threat. what lack of vision you have.
Jaxson Foster
B-but muh deflector shields ...
Eli Turner
fuck off to /x/
Nolan Collins
>Apart from literally an infinite number of things that you forgot to mention. Like what?
Adam Brooks
Yes. I would kill myself once we landed on what ever planet we we're going to.
Adam Sanders
I would.
Camden Gonzalez
>an ablation shield Which would be vapourised with the first hit.
>a magnetic shield LOL. Increase power to forward shields, Mr Chekov, and don't hit anything that isn't magnetised ...
>or multiple layers of Mylar a few km out in front Do you have the faintest fucking idea how inertia works? Show me a structure that would make that possible.
You will never see a naked woman.
Cooper Flores
Yeah gladly
Landon Fisher
Touch your ear with your elbow and get back to us.
Show us the way, user.
Carter Peterson
oh yeah if things go wrong with antimatter you're fucked. luckily NASA is only 1 of hundred of other space agencies and it isn't even the best funded it's just the most well know in the western world.
China India and Japan have checked with their own lunar orbiters, for never happening it's strange that the Apollo 11 12 14 15 16 and 17 landing sites are on the moon.
must be a coincidence
you better tell JAXA (the Japanese space agency) they fucked up
but that's irreverent, you believe whatever youtube tell you to believe and I won't judge, also watch out for those fluoride chemetrail GMO vaccines used by the lizard people to fake the second coming of jesus and hide the flat earth.
if you mean human interstellar trips you also need to be more specific, Clyde Tombaugh's ashes are on the New Horizon spacecraft so hes technically on an interstellar trip.
if you mean living humans it will happen eventually, how or why or when I dunno.
Gabriel Morris
the fuck is this autism
Jack Torres
>cut off my arm >touch ear with elbow
Dylan Stewart
>the chances of hitting anything larger than a hydrogen atom in interstellar space is very very very very low Do let us have your map of the interstellar medium, user. I know some astrophysics PhD students who would kill to get hold of it.
Dominic Gray
he's not nerdy enough to see a woman ? WTF IS GOING ON HERE
Matthew Hernandez
>laser rifles don't exist and are also technically illegal according to the Geneva convention as they can blind a person without killing them resulting in disfiguring Like a solid shot weapon or a pointed stick.
Daniel Russell
it's pretty sad to see you attempt to grasp the topic but you fail, it's not your fault you're probably 15 but lets explain shall we.
the largest object you are likely to encounter in interstellar space is dust the size of a human hair and smaller, space is very very very empty. all the above ideas would only work for objects that small, if you hit a pebble, well sucks to be you but since that's statistically unlikely it's not really a problem.
Anyway you are thinking in ballistic terms, like a bullet hitting something, at relativistic speeds the amount of energy a grain of dust would produce upon hitting a thin material would atomize it, if it hits a solid front of your ship it would cause tons of damage but if it hits a thin material and atomizes to plasma that plasma could be stopped by consecutive layers scattering it so any material that gets to you would be no issue. This isn't even my idea this is an idea that's been tossed around by tons of people in aerospace and physics circles. But I assume you know more than PHD level scientists right?
As for the naked woman, I dunno I can ask my wife if shes a woman, only been 12 years I may have missed something.
Jordan Mitchell
The trip there are back would be awesome but arriving back to earth and being hundreds of years in the future due to near light speed time dilation would be a mind fuck.
Michael Johnson
a mixer of a degree and boredom at 6AM and a bit of curiosity to see how the average Sup Forums user responds to topics other than porn.
It's not going well. I could write a paper about this place by psychology isn't my field and anime image boards arn't all that interesting. I have a friend who studies sexual dysfunction however i'm sure he would have a heyday here.
Nathaniel Watson
Do it. We need proof.
Jayden Bell
We won't go there physically with ships. We will eventually reach there in another way which is still to find out. My bet is around a kind of partial materialization of our own imagination in a given space. We are far, but near
James Gray
yes
Ryan Rodriguez
depends, a laser weapon shoots a beam of light, the sci-fi pulse thingy is not a laser weapon, more a particle weapon or plasma weapon (also been looked into but right now sucks ass when compared to a ballistic weapon)
Wyatt Johnson
>if you mean human interstellar trips you also need to be more specific try reading at least the op before shitposting
Eli Lee
how about Robots? we could send robots.
Ethan King
naw i'm just fucking with you because it's funny, I know full well he ment "sending live people to and back from another star" but I wanted to slip Clyde Tombaugh into a post because I know the semantics would make someone mad.
Joseph Kelly
If you send them physically, they will take the same insane amount of time to get there than we would. There is no point doing that. We need to reach there by other means.
Matthew Nguyen
get really high off acid until it feels like you went.
Austin Edwards
No real sense of human achievement if we send robots and not able to experience it for ourselves
Landon Bennett
>but right now sucks ass when compared to a ballistic weapon Not sure if the same autism the rest of this thread has or if you're talking about the flashlights the IG get.
Robert Bennett
Ignoring risk. Maintaining of the shipeople to reach both beginning and end. No possible danger during travel. Obvious yes. If danger is present or need of repairs situation action still yes but I would like training gear the sort and the freEdom to do as I please before I leave
Michael Parker
I'm the last fucker you'd want to put in a submarine or space capsule
Juan Mitchell
i'm referring to a more sci-fi looking weapon, there's this toroidal plasma gun idea that shoots a small vortex of plasma, but it only works against electronics really, it's really shitty when compared to a good old fashion bullet.
If you want a laser weapon that can melt rockets and aircraft they are usually truck or plane mounted as they need a massive power supply.
how is a university education autism?
Jordan Baker
I now want to have you as a shipmate on a submarine just to experience this.
Eli Gray
>i'm referring to a more sci-fi looking weapon >replies to a comment about 40k >more sci-fi than 40k wew lad
Zachary Adams
why do you think we send so many robot missions to mars, you dumb motherfuckers?
Kayden Carter
Yes, I will
Wyatt Sanders
Fuck yeah, I'm not doing anything consequential with my life anyway. I'll need to bring about 500 petabytes of porn tho, and about 20 megs of books.
Hudson Turner
>the largest object you are likely to encounter in interstellar space is dust the size of a human hair Which will end you in a split second at the .99c posited by OP.
>since that's statistically unlikely [citation needed] The shortest interstellar journey is 4.2 light years. Show your working (or if you're serious, the results of your survey) that indicate an encounter with any mass along that path is "statistically unlikely." Star Trek doesn't count. I'll wait.
Blake Powell
OK. You won.
Isaac Evans
exact
Sebastian Jenkins
>a short but eventful life vs >a long mediocre one of course i’d do it, anyone with any sense would
Luke Hernandez
because it’s a hell of a lot cheaper
Luis Rodriguez
YES
Especially because I'll be a hero to the scientific community. Would being behind the current pop culture really that much of a downside? Who would seriously say:...? >Look guys, it's the first dude who ever explored another solar system and made us an officially interstellar-level society! HE DOESN'T KNOW THE LATEST MEMES AND TOP CHARTS! HAHAHAHAHAHA! People would feel honored to enlighten you about the things you missed. And it's not like you wasted your time on some pretentious african/south-american tribe joining to get in touch with your nature, you didn't waste that time for yourself, you spent it bringing mankind to the next level.
You'd be the bext Neill Armstrong. Hell, people would buy you a beer for saying "The moon? Cute. I can point at that shit from here. I WENT ACROSS THE VAST EMPTINESS OF SPACE, TO A NEW STAR, MOTHAFUCKA!"
Julian Adams
More to the point, why even bother investing so much time, money and human life on a crapshoot mission to a barren star system? You'd probably have to travel 100s of light years to reach anywhere we could survive and prosper.
Seriously, what's the fucking point? To make a few sci-fi fans feel good about themselves? They could do that if they just got laid.
Jose Mitchell
You keep bringing up Star Trek but you have sci-fi idea that space is somehow packed with derbies.
You can fly through the asteroid belt 100 times and never even see a rock bigger than a softball, interstellar space is very empty and very big.
Literally ask any astronomer (like myself) and you will get the same answer
Tell me what degree do you have? what university do you work at?
Adrian Taylor
You're forgetting about time dilation at relativistic speeds, which at 0.99c would be massive, something around 7:1 when compared to a stationary observer.
So thinking about that, how much time would have passed on Earth again?
Landon Wilson
Might very well be the beginning of a way to get there.
Ryder Garcia
I would do it. Honestly though, any interstellar exploration would be a one way trip.
>Send probes to determine if AC has a habitable planet >If yes, then seed the system with drone cargo capsules full of essentials and machinery in the decade running up to colonization. >Ship a crew of colonists out there, one way trip >Build a new life
Nicholas Phillips
a lot, that's why I just used 70% so the effect is less pronounced and you only have a little over a year difference between Earth and ship.
Hudson Campbell
I would just use the stargate. Things been around for 1400 years. All this rocket crap is just a big waste.
Christian Stewart
Not him. Pls tell me again if we reduced our sun to the size of a grain of sand, how far would be the nearest star?
Jose Powell
Right now all the eggs (humans) are in one bowl (earth). If we spread the eggs (our species) into more bowls (colonizable planets), then we won't be as screwed if someone eats a whole bowl full of eggs (nuclear war).
Chase Evans
as in compress it? if you did that you would get a blackhole, so it would stop being a star, and in that case Proxima centauri would be the closest at 4.25 light-years.
if you just mean shrink like some kind of impossible ant man bullshit the sun would remain the closest star just tiny.
Robert Bennett
It depends on how long, and If I would be expierimented on, etc. I would also need space training, and depending on the gravity, temperature, or common gas, fluid that is on the planet for breathing I would need a form of exoskeleton and possibly extra organs. Assuming that you already have the technology of a Starship you will most likely have these things as well, I would love to go to the other planets, but I would miss my family also, I will think it over for a while
-38B SGCP
Jaxson Nguyen
And yet, given the immense age of the galaxy, and the widely-accepted premise that life is relatively common, there is no evidence that this has ever been achieved.
Ever wonder why, user?
Ryan Perez
He's talking about an analogy. If the sun were a grain if sand it would be X kilometers to the next nearest grain of sand.
Scientists are cool but you all need to be less literal.
Gavin Martinez
oooooooh shit it's very early
I had to think about that one because I don't know it off the top of my head, but if the sun was the size of an average sand grain Alpha centauri would be a little over 3 km away from it.
Oliver Foster
Ignoring the fact that you didn't laugh at my finely crafted egg meme joke, the notion that something can't be done because we have no evidence it's been done before is kind of narrow minded.
If we find a habitable planet, then it's only a matter of overcoming the technical problem of getting humans to it. Once there, we do what we do best, make babies and make a society.
We need to get off this planet before we destroy it entirely.
Ian Butler
You're all idiots.
Two others factors come into play here, time dilation and length contraction, both of which affect how far the distance appears to be to the non-stationary observer and how long the journey takes.
If we assume that the spaceship heads towards Alpha Centauri at 90% of the speed of light, then according to the Earth-bound observer, the trip should take 4.86 years. For the person on the spaceship, the trip takes only 2.12 years
What in fact happens is that the distance to Alpha Centauri becomes shorter for the person in the spacecraft.
Christopher Myers
3 km between two grains of sand ... it's far but not as far as I would've guessed
Jose Brooks
...
Zachary Morris
yeah, OP mentions time dilatation, and it's mentioned a few time in the thread. I'm just having fun here.
Alexander Peterson
it's more. 8 km if I remember correctly. Please do the math if you are what you say you are.
Christopher Richardson
if the Sun was a grain of sand the galaxy would still be in the ball park of 80,500 km across.
Shits big.
Jace Cooper
>-38B SGCP
Nothing at Mless
Angel Lee
dubbed checked because it's very possible I fucked up the math
this says 2 miles which converts to a little over 3 km
Mason Ortiz
>We need to get off this planet before we destroy it entirely. And yet nobody ever has in 13 billion years. Prove me wrong.
Gavin Sanchez
It's narrow minded not to consider the lessons of supposed history and why they don't correlate and why no one talks about them not correlating.
Brody Ramirez
Starship troopers was so good tho right?
Jonathan Evans
In my professional opinion Starship Troopers was and still is a work of art.
Easton Anderson
>distractions intensify
Nathan Brooks
...
Austin Cooper
A question for all you hypothetical pseudo-scientists out there: Assuming we had the tech to get to another solar system in 20 years or so, how do we travel at those speeds and not hit debris? We've got ourselves an oort cloud and a kuiper belt out there obviously chock full o' undetected random debris, large and small - and probably the same type of stuff when we arrive at the next solar system, even less detectable. Do we just put a snow plow on the front of it?
Logan Allen
are you feeling alright?
Caleb Reed
you just bend a piece a paper and put a hole on it. no debris. thats it.
Adam Hall
I don't think I'd want to sleep throughout the journey, but I'd still do it.. HEAVILY depending on the point of mission.
Brody Taylor
Probably by minimizing our profile aka the things we have already introduced as science fiction, which always become future technologies.
Also a hull cooled to near absolute zero would nullify most object collisons at an atomic level by redirecting the energy in different directions vs "against" the ship.
Tyler Smith
no
as mentioned here Space is way more empty than sci-fi depicts it, even flying through the steroid belt you would be very very lucky to see anything larger than sand. the oort cloud is very huge and as such it's debris are very very widely dispersed, the chances if hitting any of those is pretty fucking low unless you aimed for it.
beyond that in interstellar space the chances of hitting anything larger than hydrogen drops even more, if you are just going 4 light years you are not liable to hit anything. best bet is an impact shield or some other type thing to deflect gas and maybe the occasional dust particle the side of a blood cell.
Luke Torres
Both of these technologies already exist. The first one for almost 100 years now and the second one about 15 years ago
Michael Long
Shit I would be the first to go to mars right now and be condemned to die there
Only problem is I'm grossly underqualified. But if the question is would you go off to space and die, leave everything behind (family, friends, pets, hobbies, job, posessions etc) to further the exploration of space. Why the fuck not If you look at everything that way you're condemned to die on earth why not do it somewhere noone's been before
