Human extinction.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Christ, some thread this! Great reading.

 

[Challenger1978]

Mincemeat? Cheeky so and so.

I concede that I used the wrong word in terms of evolution.

I appoint Damocles as Chief Engineer, SWP's back as Vehicle Systems Engineer and NF as Mission Systems Engineer.

If I told you I've been tinkering with a design for a nuclear powered electro magnetic inertia drive over the last decade can I have a job ;-) .

Absolutely. Take your pick. Propulsion or Fuel System? ;)

It involves the ship looking something like a star destroyer or a giant three dimensional plus sign (for manoeuvrability).

or

Which would contain many many rail gun type sort of devices inside the hull itself along the 3d plus axis. Firing I'm not sure what yet at electro magnetic shock absorbers to catch the projectile/plasma/??????.

Basically I want to build a prototype star destroyer but with out the guns or the thruster on the back. As the manoeuvring capability could be provided by the railtype gun devices along the y & z axis with the ones along the x axis being the main drive forward.

 

[Skashion]

Its a fair point. I chose the centre as an approximation because a planet capable of sustaining life is relatively rare.

I wouldn't like to play chicken with a black hole which poses another challenge of a navigation system.

Dr Fetlocks is on the case. [cheesy grin]

This approximation is flatly wrong: <a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_667C_c#Planetary_system" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_667 ... ary_system</a> and also disregards terraforming.

No it doesn't.

 

[samharris]

Thats quite something. But with the 150 quadrillion miles to cover to the nearest star, I ask how long would this take? Also how many lifetimes? Children would be born on such a craft, live, produce more children who then like themselves die on this journey.

Actually, PD said the centre of the galaxy rather than the nearest star. Proxima Centauri is about 1.3 parsecs or 24 trillion miles. At current speeds, it would take around 70,000 years to reach it. However, if we travelled at even 10% of the speed of light, it would take only 40 years. 99% of the speed of light would be around 4.5 years.

This is only talking about speed as we see it today. Technologies that create wormholes, or bend spacetime to shorten distances are theoretically possible with enough energy on board. If we combine a high lightspeed velocity and technologies that warp space, the possibilities are obviously greater but far too hard currently to speculate on.

This will pretty much all happen when somebody finds a way to create nuclear fusion in an energy efficient manner.

At the minute, we can create nuclear fission. This is the thing that powers the atom bomb. It's where we take a single Hydrogen atom and rip it apart which causes a huge release of energy hence the bomb.
We need to create nuclear fusion, which is where two Hydrogen atoms are sped up to an enormous speed that when they collide they actually merge into each other, and without boring you with the physics, releases a huge amount of energy. This is the thing that powers the Sun. That's the magnitude of difference in energy released

We can already produce nuclear fusion on Earth in labs but the technology is such that getting the atoms to speed up to the velocity needed to merge into each other is costing us more energy than the reaction is producing. However, we're getting better at it and the project is that within a decade or two we will have the first ever self-sustaining nuclear fusion reactor. It will barely produce any power surplus of course, but it will produce a tiny amount. Nuclear fusion is essentially the thing that will provide every person on the planet with pretty much free and unlimited energy for the rest of time. My personal opinion is that this is the thing that will forever kill the use of fossil fuels for energy, if we can develop it fast enough. It's literally harnessing the power of a Sun.

If we built this into an engine, 5% would be piss easy. Space warping technologies may become more scientific reality than science fiction. I don't envy the guy who has to pilot through space at close to lightspeed though!

This type of energy available would also make supercolliders like CERN about 5 billion quid cheaper. ITER is the major hope for this. They think they can start producing reactions in 2026.

The one problem with light speed would that said occupants would be travelling at about 186,000 miles per second.. An asteroid/meteorite the size of an orange if hit would obliterate the craft on impact..
Say you needed 10 seconds to avoid the impact then you would need sensors that could detect orange sized objects at almost a million miles away and act accordingly....

 

[BulgarianPride]

Thats quite something. But with the 150 quadrillion miles to cover to the nearest star, I ask how long would this take? Also how many lifetimes? Children would be born on such a craft, live, produce more children who then like themselves die on this journey.

Actually, PD said the centre of the galaxy rather than the nearest star. Proxima Centauri is about 1.3 parsecs or 24 trillion miles. At current speeds, it would take around 70,000 years to reach it. However, if we travelled at even 10% of the speed of light, it would take only 40 years. 99% of the speed of light would be around 4.5 years.

This is only talking about speed as we see it today. Technologies that create wormholes, or bend spacetime to shorten distances are theoretically possible with enough energy on board. If we combine a high lightspeed velocity and technologies that warp space, the possibilities are obviously greater but far too hard currently to speculate on.

This will pretty much all happen when somebody finds a way to create nuclear fusion in an energy efficient manner.

At the minute, we can create nuclear fission. This is the thing that powers the atom bomb. It's where we take a single Hydrogen atom and rip it apart which causes a huge release of energy hence the bomb.
We need to create nuclear fusion, which is where two Hydrogen atoms are sped up to an enormous speed that when they collide they actually merge into each other, and without boring you with the physics, releases a huge amount of energy. This is the thing that powers the Sun. That's the magnitude of difference in energy released

We can already produce nuclear fusion on Earth in labs but the technology is such that getting the atoms to speed up to the velocity needed to merge into each other is costing us more energy than the reaction is producing. However, we're getting better at it and the project is that within a decade or two we will have the first ever self-sustaining nuclear fusion reactor. It will barely produce any power surplus of course, but it will produce a tiny amount. Nuclear fusion is essentially the thing that will provide every person on the planet with pretty much free and unlimited energy for the rest of time. My personal opinion is that this is the thing that will forever kill the use of fossil fuels for energy, if we can develop it fast enough. It's literally harnessing the power of a Sun.

If we built this into an engine, 5% would be piss easy. Space warping technologies may become more scientific reality than science fiction. I don't envy the guy who has to pilot through space at close to lightspeed though!

This type of energy available would also make supercolliders like CERN about 5 billion quid cheaper. ITER is the major hope for this. They think they can start producing reactions in 2026.

The one problem with light speed would that said occupants would be travelling at about 186,000 miles per second.. An asteroid/meteorite the size of an orange if hit would obliterate the craft on impact..
Say you needed 10 seconds to avoid the impact then you would need sensors that could detect orange sized objects at almost a million miles away and act accordingly....

Just sense the gravitational field around the craft. If it chances we known a object is near by. Get the vector of the field and we'd know in what direction it would be. Of course we would need a very precise way to measure the gravitational forces acting on our craft but in theory it just might work.

 

[samharris]

Actually, PD said the centre of the galaxy rather than the nearest star. Proxima Centauri is about 1.3 parsecs or 24 trillion miles. At current speeds, it would take around 70,000 years to reach it. However, if we travelled at even 10% of the speed of light, it would take only 40 years. 99% of the speed of light would be around 4.5 years.

This is only talking about speed as we see it today. Technologies that create wormholes, or bend spacetime to shorten distances are theoretically possible with enough energy on board. If we combine a high lightspeed velocity and technologies that warp space, the possibilities are obviously greater but far too hard currently to speculate on.

This will pretty much all happen when somebody finds a way to create nuclear fusion in an energy efficient manner.

At the minute, we can create nuclear fission. This is the thing that powers the atom bomb. It's where we take a single Hydrogen atom and rip it apart which causes a huge release of energy hence the bomb.
We need to create nuclear fusion, which is where two Hydrogen atoms are sped up to an enormous speed that when they collide they actually merge into each other, and without boring you with the physics, releases a huge amount of energy. This is the thing that powers the Sun. That's the magnitude of difference in energy released

We can already produce nuclear fusion on Earth in labs but the technology is such that getting the atoms to speed up to the velocity needed to merge into each other is costing us more energy than the reaction is producing. However, we're getting better at it and the project is that within a decade or two we will have the first ever self-sustaining nuclear fusion reactor. It will barely produce any power surplus of course, but it will produce a tiny amount. Nuclear fusion is essentially the thing that will provide every person on the planet with pretty much free and unlimited energy for the rest of time. My personal opinion is that this is the thing that will forever kill the use of fossil fuels for energy, if we can develop it fast enough. It's literally harnessing the power of a Sun.

If we built this into an engine, 5% would be piss easy. Space warping technologies may become more scientific reality than science fiction. I don't envy the guy who has to pilot through space at close to lightspeed though!

This type of energy available would also make supercolliders like CERN about 5 billion quid cheaper. ITER is the major hope for this. They think they can start producing reactions in 2026.

The one problem with light speed would that said occupants would be travelling at about 186,000 miles per second.. An asteroid/meteorite the size of an orange if hit would obliterate the craft on impact..
Say you needed 10 seconds to avoid the impact then you would need sensors that could detect orange sized objects at almost a million miles away and act accordingly....

Just sense the gravitational field around the craft. If it chances we known a object is near by. Get the vector of the field and we'd know in what direction it would be. Of course we would need a very precise way to measure the gravitational forces acting on our craft but in theory it just might work.

It would have to mate..at those speeds it would have to be very precise..

 

[Challenger1978]

The one problem with light speed would that said occupants would be travelling at about 186,000 miles per second.. An asteroid/meteorite the size of an orange if hit would obliterate the craft on impact..
Say you needed 10 seconds to avoid the impact then you would need sensors that could detect orange sized objects at almost a million miles away and act accordingly....

That's one of the reasons why you build a star destroyer. It will be at least a couple of kilometer in lenght, so bloody massive, also it will be built like a double sided snow plough.

 

[pauldominic]

Four billion years is a very long time. Inevitable that we'll be twatted by a huge asteroid well before that. The poles flipping is an interesting one - seems that it happens pretty frequently relatively speaking.

Forgive the bump, but there are scientists in the MoD who study these security issues and a ton more.

If this is my last post, its because I contravened the official secrets act.

 

[samharris]

The one problem with light speed would that said occupants would be travelling at about 186,000 miles per second.. An asteroid/meteorite the size of an orange if hit would obliterate the craft on impact..
Say you needed 10 seconds to avoid the impact then you would need sensors that could detect orange sized objects at almost a million miles away and act accordingly....

That's one of the reasons why you build a star destroyer. It will be at least a couple of kilometer in lenght, so bloody massive, also it will be built like a double sided snow plough.

Star destroyers are cool..their laser weapons even make sound in space....
which of course is impossible.:)

 

[BulgarianPride]

The one problem with light speed would that said occupants would be travelling at about 186,000 miles per second.. An asteroid/meteorite the size of an orange if hit would obliterate the craft on impact..
Say you needed 10 seconds to avoid the impact then you would need sensors that could detect orange sized objects at almost a million miles away and act accordingly....

Just sense the gravitational field around the craft. If it chances we known a object is near by. Get the vector of the field and we'd know in what direction it would be. Of course we would need a very precise way to measure the gravitational forces acting on our craft but in theory it just might work.

It would have to mate..at those speeds it would have to be very precise..

Yes it would :), but how many small object are there in free space ( out side of the Kuiper belt)?<br /><br />-- Fri Sep 07, 2012 10:30 am --<br /><br />

The one problem with light speed would that said occupants would be travelling at about 186,000 miles per second.. An asteroid/meteorite the size of an orange if hit would obliterate the craft on impact..
Say you needed 10 seconds to avoid the impact then you would need sensors that could detect orange sized objects at almost a million miles away and act accordingly....

That's one of the reasons why you build a star destroyer. It will be at least a couple of kilometer in lenght, so bloody massive, also it will be built like a double sided snow plough.

Star destroyers are cool..their laser weapons even make sound in space....
which of course is impossible.:)

It's electromagnetic waves picked up and converted to audible sound by the cameras. I thought this was in the credits.