once the race to mine asteroids begin, advances in space travel will proceed at neck break speeds again.
http://www.planetaryresources.com/
IDK, its quiet an expensive entry fee, a very large barrier to entry (designing the propulsion system). Imagine the paperwork for obtaining the fussile materials and testing the propulsion systems. I don't think you would get permission to do that sort of thing. Actually propulsion and compact efficent reactor designs (like small LFTRs) is the most important thing IMHO to local space development.
Followed secondly by a strong infrastructure to get people and materials into a large scale LEO port.
IMHO I think they will just try to use chemical propulsion, and retrieve small amounts of very valuable substances. You could IMO maybe do minning on the moon profitably, maybe with chemical propulsion...
IDK, hopefully we can find some usefull sub-atomic features that can be used to break open the black holes, or get them to eject more harnesable matter and energy than it takes to get them to do this. The amount of mass these things hold is enormous, just imagine the possibilities if we could harness the mass of blackholes.
there will def be helium mining on the moon as the reserves here on earth are painfully finite.
reminds me of the movie "Moon"
You need to position it at a level where the emissions from the sun, and gravity are roughly at equilibrium.
So a balloon made of solar sails, Sorry you can forget about finding a sun that has the Goldilocks-zone & the radiation-gravity-equilibrium overlap. For all the Star type that I know you'd end up maing this thing so big that you had to make it paper-thin for a lack of mass making it useless, because you couldn't possibly defend a sphere that large against asteroids if you basically have to start shooting at evething bigger than a fist. That thing would be swiss cheese in matter centuries. Not to mention that gravity waves would start to cause ripples in your giant balloon, causing in-homogeneous stress-patterns.
solar flares
actually there's a hypothesis that you can relieve coronal-mass-ejections by reflecting & focusing solar-radiation back into the star to keep it from belching.
They can't make a structure that is solid, the actual dyson sphere proposals are a collection of little solar receivers, primarily designed to harvest the output of a star (not necessarily all of it, but that is a possibility. and turn it into something materially useful.
Ok true, but all the ideas of building large structures around a star are mostly to get more living area out of the amount of matter you have inside a solar system if you a) can't build FTL ships or b) can't find other habitable/terraformable planets to expand to.Having a gigantic power-plant is kinda useless if you have nothing to spend all that energy on.
Anyway if you just want a cosmic power-plant you'll probably be better off with a slow-spinning neutron-star (radio-wave-power-generator at each end of the beam) or a black-hole that is spinning up a dust-cloud spewing out most of the gas in a fountain like fashion & all you have to do is put a ram-scoop-fusion-generator inside the blast zone.
Yes I think so too, they could also use sollar collectors to get the energy needed to compress matter into exotic forms which can be used as batteries to store energy. The future however is nuclear,
With sufficent nuclear propulsion and electrical production you could:
- Travel to a nearbye asteroid
- Induce a spin (centrifugal force)
- Enclose it within a thermally insulating container/bag
- Heat it untill it melts
- Lett it cool into layers of materials based upon density
- And accelerate it back so that it would reach earth (or anywhere else) within a few years or months (where it would be slowed by a reciever) for processing (laser cutting into standard several tonne blocks).
The factory ship would then move onto the next asteroid, so on and so forward, therefore gaining maximum use out of the minning ship, whilst expending the least energy. It doesn't so much matter if it takes an extra little bit of time to get the material, if you are processing much more. So I think the idea that you would have ships to transport this material is silly. Considering that any energy used to accelerate these large objects will also be required to slow it down.
We could foreseeable have say a half dozen or quarter dozen such ships at first of the first itteration, each being capable of processing maybe 1-3 asteroids a year, possibly more. With construction of less complex reciever ships (to intercept and decelerate/guide the objects into orbit) to be built afterwards. We could also have say two or three large freight ships built to ferry people and materials to say mars and the moon to establish colonies and build orbital transfer stations. And afterwards when things become less critical, rely more on Transciever Ships (to accelerate and decelerate freight containers.
The scale would be enormous, the first asteroid alone would have enough valuable materials to more than pay off the entire program, with most of the materials being used in space industry for further development. Requiring only more valuable things like fuels being shipped to orbit.
I have experimented a bit with astrophotography. The math of the universe is so pretty. I do not understand it as well as I should because my head is filled with far too much crap.
What discussion of the heavens is complete without this. It'll really cook your noodle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant
Known as Alpha. Feynman said it best:
There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e – the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
Alpha is a constant. Except it's not constant -- it's varied. The variation has been observed in distant Quasars AND locally, here on earth, in radioactive decay of uranium at a (naturally occuring) nuclear reactor at Oklo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
The decay there is slightly different than it should be.. attributable to a change in alpha.
I don't know if I believe it, though. I have my own theory. Alpha is a constant, but the flux of neutrinos in the area affects the rate of radioactive decay. This undergraduate (?) paper explains reasonably well
http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V08NO2PDF/V08N2FAL.pdf
In physics circles, though, this is heresy and they will say you're a witch and they will burn you if you spout such nonsense. I'm not sure why. It would be neat if neutrino flux is related to radioactive beta decay. I should have been an astrophysicist so I could understand better. Also, our galaxy is the prettiest galaxy.
We should work together on contacting an intelligent extraterrestrial species. Let us assume that they communicate in some kind of causality-preserving but super-luminal way. Ideas? Go.
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I'm saving up for an A7s, this camera seems perfect for Astrophotography. Take a look at this stunning VIDEO that was shot entirely under the illumination of the moon.
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Its not a balloon >.<, think of it as a platform orbiting the sun, with retractable solar sails that can be used to change the surface area and the orientation of it to assist in maintaining orbit and course corrections, as the amount of solar radiation fluctuates, and also as the earth does not orbit in a perfect circle. Ideally you get as close as possible to the sun, as the energy diffuses the further out you get.
The rearside of it could be shielded and slightly curved so that it could be orientated towards the sun in the event of a solar flare, to provide some protection. I believe the dyson spheres in particular were not planned as a habitat just as a means of collecting energy to use for other purposes. Dyson did propose space habitats though. Your not going to be able to stabilize the sun with just one solar array, and they will still need some method of propulsion. Building one that collects as much power as sunlight hits the surface of the planet would be a good start.
The super-large sci-fi habitats(orbitals in particular) are beyond our ability due to the tensile strength of our materials. We can still build very large space habitats though capable of housing tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people. And it is a good idea to do something like that, to establish self-sufficent colonies as that is going to lead to alot of advancement getting to that point, and create motivations and incentives and profit motives afterwards.
Frontier exploration is always a state/government type endeavour because the risks cannot be defined economically. once you have the first exploration of a frontier, you can then introduce markets to commercialise the technology and make it more efficient.
e.g. NASA has no business doing low earth orbit type transport. Leave that to spaceX and a few competitors as the risks are known. the basic science/technology exists and they can figure out how to make it cheaper and innovate (reusable rockets, etc...)
The reason the US stopped going to space was the end of the cold war. There was no military motive, which was the original motive behind everything from government investment in particle physics (the bomb from WWII onwards) to space travel (response to sputnik and ICBMs). When it ended, the private sector didn't suddenly fill that gap, because you cannot put a market valuation on something with undefined risk parameters.
I think we underestimate the economic benefit from having a well funded government space programme somewhere in the world. It means you'll have investment in science and technology education, mass science literacy, basic science research that is uneconomic for the private sector, but which will result in patents that they can use to commercialise and make new industries, etc... It could be an engine of economic growth rather than the finacialisation and de-industrialistion in the West.
I mean, even Kennedy wanted to internationalise the space race late in this administration and find a better equilibrium with the soviets.
But this is all just socialism... sigh... at least the large hadron collider is a thing.
That is what I am saying, we cant make a structure that large, the tensile stresses are too large for our materials. We could build a ring of reciever stations. Or a bunch of rotating space habitats like the stanford toruses, Space island 1, 2, 3 etc..etc.. Even just one station, or a hanfull of stations that collect as much power as sunlight hits the planet, and some way of moving that would be insane. Imagine the possibilities.
There are however proposals to build dyson spheres. I think they are worth more of a look at, but according to government buercrats, nuclear propulsion isn't even worth looking at with the space buget money...
Not just that, people will grow up and have something to aspire towards, an exciting new frontier! There will be a reason for them to study the sciences. And those that don't make it into the highly competitive industry will overflow and flood other areas. The wave of innovation will be enormous. And all the technology generated will greatly enhance every other part of the economy.
From more efficent ways of growing food (plants, and algaes and in-vitro meats), to algaes and stuff that produces complex plastics, lubricants, too advancements in fabrication, 3d printing. Improvements in transportation, in electricity production. Pills and medication to improve peoples wellbeing in space. The list goes on, and on and on, all these things are necessary. We need to do things very efficently in space because of transport costs, and this will translate back into the real world economy.
Also FYI they need to make programs like nasa more performance orientated, with performance based renumeration for things like innovations. Programs like Nasa should focus more on the science required to do these things and leave these expensive space experiments alone.
Can you guys recommend a reading list for me? Was thinking of getting:
- Feynman Lectures: that should sort out the academic side
- A brief history of time, by Hawking I read this years ago
What else? More geared to the popular stuff, as I didn't do physics at university. Only high school.
some sort of time traveling signal? maybe even going backwards in time to those distant aliens to make up for time dilation.
Interesting article from phys.org
http://phys.org/news/2014-09-black-holes.html#firstCmt
Researcher shows that black holes do not exist
If the big bang didn't happen then we're going to need a new explanation as to the expansion of the universe, and entropy, and everything ever.
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Brane theory
No, keep in mind worm holes are perfectly allowable in the current understanding of things. Perhaps Quantum Teleportation (if it's actually super luminal) will prove to actually be space compression/expansion on a quantum level (so not technically super luminal, but effectively so)
Nice post.
/agree
