Greetings and Felicitations,
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Originally Posted by Imperator
1. okay like the star trek prime directive, just forget about adding libs to the crew, I am sure they will have better ways for Tralfamadore to manage their economy and social circumstances
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I am not sure what to make of that. In most things I am a liberal. Personally, I don't think that the people who make it into space will be anything recognizable by our standards of today. Especially after the long journeys.
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Originally Posted by Imperator
2. I disagree, from where we are now money or profit may be the prime motivator or block. The cash prize for a space shuttle seems to have done well, yet the space station is lagging.......but I agree an altruistic concept is necessary, but it takes gobs of money from a movement to make it efficacious to carry on
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That is why I posed the question in the way I did. What are the changes in humanity for space travel. The current way of motivating people to move into space is counter-productive because the response is often but that is expensive and not profitable.
I think the problems with the space station stems from the problems that NASA has. NASA tends to let the managers make the decisions and ignore the engineers and scientist that have the actual knowledge. It is a widespread problem in human society.
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Originally Posted by Imperator
3. I’d say cooperative efforts as to the materials and money to make it happen.
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I wonder if cooperative efforts in materials will spread into cooperative efforts in other areas.
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Originally Posted by Imperator
Overall, I think we have reached a dead end for now. Time, must be mastered, be it by wormhole exploitation or a new drive that will propel us. The speed of light supposedly being 186.000 a second is a hard stop right now.
The nearest star, Alpha Centauri C ( proxima) of the Centauri system is 4.2 light years…..and may have planets but the time it takes to get there presently would preclude such.
A Light year is a measurement of distance not time, so- one light year is 186000 X 60 X 60 X 24 X 365 miles there -ore, Proxima is 23,462,748,000,000 miles away.....if say we have a rocket that can travel at 1000 miles per hour, thats 3.6 million miles per hour....we can I think be reasonably sure of a speed right now of 30,000mps...so you can extrapolate from there if you wish as to relative times in transit.
We need a breakthrough.
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I agree that we are at a roadblock in engine development. However, that would be alleviated in some ways by development of nuclear engines. One of my favorite sci-fi story lines is the one where the generation space ship finally makes its way to the planet of destination after a couple of thousand years to find a thriving colony because the made a breakthrough after the ship left.
There is a great deal of interest in wormholes as a means of transportation. They tend to miss the problems with gravitation stresses inherent in close proximation to wormholes. The only wormholes we have any knowledge of surround black holes. Black holes are not good for transportation because you couldn't survive getting close enough. I don't think that most people realize that the wormhole shown surrounding black holes is a mathematical construct and not an expression of actual black holes.
There is an excellent discussion about such things at:
It is part of the
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics Public Lecture Series. It is a great resource with files available in multiple formats. I like to download them as MP3's to listen to while I do other things.
BTW: I am well aware that this places me firmly in the realm of geek but I am proud of my geekiness.
Sincerely Yours,
C. David Neely