SPACE

[axel000]

And that's still not a wacky belief, right?

Over hundreds of years from now ? not at all. The world being round was considered wacky a few hundred years back too...

[teamonkey]

I think some people here are underestimating just how vast and inhospitable interstellar space really is.

It's darker and colder than stellar space, but that's about it.

In general the space between stars is full of gas, dust and particles. The area around our star, however, has been somehow swept clean of all that crap and is indeed quite cold and empty. I can't remember how big the swept-out area is, probably a few tens of parsecs. Big rocks might be problem when leaving Sol and approaching the other system, but particulates in between shouldn't be.

[funkstar]

Oh come on now, use some imagination. The speed issue - well the voyager craft are rocket based and stopped accelerating back in the 1970s. As I mentioned, ion based propulsion could give you constant acceleration for decades, increasing your maximum speed exponentially.

Linearly, surely not exponentially (and that's ignoring relativity which actually makes it sub-linear). In any case, to accelerate things up to the (relativistic) speeds necessary for interstellar travel to be even remotely interesting, requires energy that has to come from somewhere, and that power source you have to bring with you throughout the acceleration. Doesn't really matter if you use ion propulsion or something else.

Second, the collission with particles issue is easily rectified by putting a shield up front. There is one good example right now, the latest Solar probe...The spacecraft’s most prominent feature is the Thermal Protection System (TPS), comprising a large 2.7-m diameter carbon–carbon conical primary shield with a low-conductivity, low-density secondary shield attached to its base. The TPS protects the spacecraft bus and instruments within its umbra during the solar encounter

But that probe is operating on a much smaller timescale than anything going across interstellar space, not to mention that it will actually fall towards the sun in deployment, not escape the solar system. How large does your shield need to be to hold up for the millenia you'll be travelling? Whatever you send is going to be pretty vulnerable over a very long timespan...

Of course we will never succeed if we keep telling ourselves we can't. Thankfully there are visionaries that believe we can.

Commiting the space program to doing science that "enables" interstellar travel seems a little too much like growing tomatoes with a view to terraforming. While not completely orthogonal, it's extremely unlikely to pay off in the way you imagine.

I want this to be feasible as much as the next space buff. But it isn't. And it's not worth using the precious few resources we have for space exploration on developing it.

[Dio]

And that's still not a wacky belief, right?

Over hundreds of years from now ? not at all. The world being round was considered wacky a few hundred years back too...

Actually, they didn't - it's a complete myth. The Greeks, Romans - and, yes, Columbus - all knew the world was round. Very roughly, as soon as people started thinking about the earth they found out it was round, so it's never really been believed to be flat by anyone at all.

[axel000]

And that's still not a wacky belief, right?

Over hundreds of years from now ? not at all. The world being round was considered wacky a few hundred years back too...

Actually, they didn't - it's a complete myth. The Greeks, Romans - and, yes, Columbus - all knew the world was round. Very roughly, as soon as people started thinking about the earth they found out it was round, so it's never really been believed to be flat by anyone at all.

Go back further though, from Wiki :

Antiquity

Belief in a flat Earth is found in mankind's oldest writings. In early Mesopotamian thought, the world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean, and this forms the premise for early Greek maps such as those of Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus.

Some theologians and biblical researchers maintain that writers of the Bible had a Babylonian world view, according to which Earth is flat[5] and stands on pillars, and is covered by a solid sky-dome[6][7] (the Firmament). The firmament was the heaven in which God set the sun (Psalm 19:5) and the stars (Gen 1:14). [8] The Sun and Moon were thought to move in and out of the Firmament dome through a series of openings (reflecting the apparent movement of their rising and setting points throughout the year). This is explained in considerable detail in the non-canonical Book of Enoch


But I stand corrected, its not a couple of hundred years ago..but still....

[axel000]

Aaannyyywwaaayyysss....should get this thread back on track with some real space news

STS-124 (Discovery) is counting down to launch tomorrow at 5:02pm EST with the Japanese built KIBO lab, the largest lab space component going up to the ISS. Should be a nice addition. Also included in the flight is a new robotic arm to be attached to the lab and a pump for the malfunctioning ISS toilet.

Currently weather is looking very clear for launch, so fingers crossed

[Wumpus4x4]

If you can't wait until the Shuttle launch then you can watch another Ariane 5 launch tonight.

http://www.arianespace.com and http://www.videocorner.tv/index.php?langue=en

[GeeZa]

Well I totally fucked up didn't I. My wife's in Orlando at the moment at a conference and I was gonna fly out to meet her for a long weekend but yesterday decided against it. Of course now I realise there's a fucking shuttle launch and it would of course have been amazing to see that. Damn.

[axel000]

She'll have a good view from Orlando even, provided she looks northeasterly at around 5pmish tomorrow.

[axel000]

I was just browsing the Seti@home forums (slow day at work) and noticed the project team at UC Berkeley are looking for a PS3 programmer to port Seti@home and the BOINC distributed computing client to the PS3. Apparently there is a hack out there right now but it only uses the PowerPC core, not the cell SPEs.

Anyone up to it ? The request is here.

We are looking for a volunteer to port SETI@home to the Playstation 3/Cell Broadband Engine architecture. Current PS3 ports exists, but to our knowledge all run on using only the PowerPC portions of the Cell processor rather than on the SPEs.

The final goal of this task will be to have a PS3 SETI@home application that can be downloaded from the SETI@home server and a live-drive Linux+BOINC distribution that can be installed on a pen drive in the same manner as is done for PS3GRID.

If you are interested in working on the PS3 port send me a private message or email korpela at ssl.berkeley.edu. (Waning: I have a fairly difficult spam filter.)

[Flabio]

The thing that gets me is: 'who caresd if it's mental or crazy that we're going out into the void'. I've been a fan of space and all that it entails since I was 6 years old.

I remember being stuck in the office late one night working on some pointless piece of videogame entertainment around the time that the Huygens lander dropped onto Titan.

I cried. Colleagues laughed at me, but I didn't care.

Here was us, as a species, putting a small piece of ourselves at a point further than we'd ever been before. Further than it's possible for our everyday thinking to comprenhend.

Who the hell cares if this leads to off-planet colonies, we are humanity and space matters.

I don't look up at the night sky and think 'we are so small, and space is so vast, so who cares?'. I think 'how cool is that? I wonder what's out there?'

[Darkflame]

Who the hell cares if this leads to off-planet colonies, we are humanity and space matters.

Yes, but have you asked yourself why it matters?
Why we have this need to explore, investigate and expand?
Why we have this strong instinct.
Why some of us shead tears at this stuff, tears of pride in our species or joy in whats been done.
Its because we evolved it imo. Its a survival trait.
These emotions I feel seeing phoenix I think has its routes in learning how to bang rocks together in clever ways.

I dont know if humanity has a hope in hell of surviving*, but I know we stand no chance if we dont try.
The more we try (and fail) the more we learn.
If we dont, well..I'm sure we will get nicer tv's before our species die.

*and if we will even be recognisable as humans if we do.

And then there's problem that quite probably everything (as is every thing) we send into the interstellar medium will probably be an irrecognizable lump by the time it gets anywhere (if it gets anywhere), due to collisions with high-energy particles.

One preposal was a ciger-shaped ship which I believe used some sort of gas or gel around it.
The idea being it sucks in stuff at the back and puts it out the front...effectively making a kinda "bumper".
Dunno how physable it is, but I'm also pretty sure we dont have a good grasp of the problem yet either.
Maybe one day we can use the interstellar medium as a fuel source.
It might be a blessing rather then a curse.

[Dio]

Maybe one day we can use the interstellar medium as a fuel source.

Well, you can pretty easily work out if that's feasible or not now (assuming our figures for the density are right)...

[zip accident]

Maybe one day we can use the interstellar medium as a fuel source.

Well, you can pretty easily work out if that's feasible or not now (assuming our figures for the density are right)...

Well, I don't really believe in it myself, generating the magnetic fields may be forever beyond practicality, but:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet

[Dio]

Hmmm. Actually I wonder if I shouldn't have said that, since I don't believe any form of sub-c travel is really feasible for interstellar flight - I mean, even assuming a pretty unlikely 0.1c, we're into transit times measured in thousands of years (using my previous guess of two to three orders of magnitude closer than the nearest star for habitability).