Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has released this picture of a fossil of a life form that came to Earth on a meteorite — as opposed to Sigourney Weaver’s stomach.
In the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology, Hoover says that these fossils appear in CI1 carbonaceous chondrites — a rare type of meteorite. If true, they are a life form confirmed from outside our planet.
Source: Yahoo
The Physics/mathematical discussion on this thread just lets me know that i’m not as smart as I think I am. It is fun trying to follow along, but I fear I’m falling back, rather than catching up.
Now I know where the far right-wing crazies came from!
rafflaw,
“George W. wouldn’t recognize an intelligent life form if it bit him in the foot.”
I think an intelligent life form would want to do more than bite him on the foot.
😉
Mike S,
I’m not holding my breath on FTL travel, but I believe that we can get out there without it – we’re just going to need to take a long view of things (which we’ll need anyway to survive long enough to escape the planet…).
“Lord, love a duck.”
Patric,
One of my favorite all-time movies. The magnificent Tuesday Weld and equally sparkling Roddy McDowell.
Soundtrack by Jordan Christopher, soon to be ex-husband of Sybil Burton, Richard’s ex-wife.
James,
Satire it may be, but you are actually correct, it is scary that a large part of the population believes formulations like that.
To All Those Science Heads on the Impossibility of significant space travel. As a lifelong Sci-Fi reader, I do believe technology and science will advance to the point where interstellar travel will be feasible, practicable and common. During my lifetime enough scientific “miracles” have occured to make me believe we ain’t seen nothin yet. However, many of our fellow humans, enrapt in their desire for an eternal reward, know this is crazy, because after all it is all God’s illusion to separate those of faith, from those doomed to eternal fire.
James M,
I was booking my ticket on the new prairie schooners until you mentioned ‘years of Facebookery’ – now I’m not so sure… I don’t think that the cost, time, and mass restrictions would ever allow physical interstellar trade – the real trade will be in information (which can be cheaply moved at the speed of light).
JoshOnPC,
You are assuming that duration is an objective quantity – it’s not. Different observers at different locations experience duration differently – it’s all relative. 😉
JoshOnPC,
You can indeed ‘travel faster than light’ if you are referring to your perceived speed – according to the theory, something traveling at the speed of light wouldn’t experience duration (they would essentially be in stasis with regard to other frames of reference until they reduced relative velocities) – of course this statement is abusing the theory (which also says nothing goes the speed of light except light – so just consider the following thought experiment: does a photon experience duration?
Since I’m not sure whether that illuminated or obfuscated, here’s a (slightly modified) classic bit of verse:
There was a young fencer named Fisk
Whose swordplay was agile and brisk.
So fast was his action,
The Lorentz contraction
Reduced his epee to a disk.
and an original Haiku:
Strangely relative
Time dilation seems like
fast things go slowly…
Are you thoroughly confused yet? 😉
(Seriously, if you are confused, check out time dilation – that should either assuage your confusion or escalate it to the point where you don’t care anymore…)
Still don’t believe me? Ponder the following: You are an observer on Earth with a telescope which you have aimed at the ship’s clock in the trans-galaxy space flight I described above. What does the clock read throughout the voyage? What are the corresponding readings of the clock on your wall? I maintain that when the ship reaches it’s destination you will see that 3.72 years have elapsed on board ship while something like 100,003 years have passed for you (and you will see this in something like 200,007 years (by your wall clock) when the light reaches Earth).
James M,
Acceleration isn’t much of an issue – even instantaneous acceleration to the maximum velocity only shaves 0.003% off of the objective travel time for a 100,000 light-year trip. The 1000 light year trip only took a little over a year more than the minimum objective time – there just isn’t really anything to be gained from accelerating a robot quickly and since we are talking a roughly 3 year burn time per trip, anything over 1.0 G is likely to have deleterious effects on any human passengers.
It’s Not Important, it’s the No Going Back part that emphasizes your quite necessary solution as a step on the pathway. In parallel with this research is the notion of extending human experience increasingly into cyberspace. Such could be crammed into a tiny space, heavily shielded, and sent anywhere at arbitrary acceleration, assuming you can stand years of non-stop Facebookery with your e-companions. Doubtless you have also seen plans for seeder ramships that carry fertilized eggs in such vehicles for spreading unto planets deemed habitable.
But I think, at some point, we’d want to come back, and establish long-haul trade routes. By then, radiation and acceleration concerns may well find themselves solved, or made irrelevant.
Nal,
Time dilation is the percieved difference in time between two observers. It does not explain how from a single observers perspective, you could never attain the speed of light, but cover a greater distance than light does itself with respect to time. That is the impossible scenario IDM proposes.
James in LA,
Nothing in particular happens to matter at any speed – it’s all relative. Problems arise when things moving a vastly different velocities interact with each other (say, spaceships and dust). The energy required is an issue – fusion ramjets with an electromagnetic scoop and a solar sail for deceleration/in system maneuvering as well as launching lasers are the best bet – but I believe that your fuel consumption is in subjective time, so it’s not really a big deal to blast all the way there and decelerate at the end (see below).
As for your referential problems, I can’t really answer because we don’t share the same frame, so I’ll go with the words of Doc Brown:
“You’re not thinking four dimensionally…”
I’m assuming that you would know the ephemeris of any planets in the habitable band before you sent a scout ship there so in system maneuvering wouldn’t be a big deal (especially if you had a sail – the sun is always shining in system…)
I’ve done some more thinking and some more calculations and I’ve come up with a much better astrogation flight plan (I’m no Kevin Renner, but, again, this should be in the ballpark for what is possible).
We leave Earth at 10.0 m/s^2 of thrust (a majority of which should be provided by the launching lasers for as long as possible) until we attain 0.99999 c, at which point we coast until we get as close to our destination as we were to Earth when we stopped accelerating. Then we decelerate at 10.0 m/s^2 until we arrive (getting increasing free braking from our destination sun).
If we take a 100 light-year trip in this manner then the passengers would spend the first year and a half at one G, less than 5 months in free fall, and the final year and five months at one G – total duration 3.3 years. The ship could be inserted into essentially any desired orbit of the destination star. From Earth’s perspective the engine burns would have lasted 5.8 years and 5.7 years respectively with a total trip time of 101.25 years.
For a 1000 light-year trip, the duration increases to 1001.32 years objective and 7.38 years subjective (with similar acceleration/deceleration times). But if we increase our coasting speed to 0.999999 c the trip only takes 4.32 years and another couple of nines shaves the time to 3.6 years – still without appreciably increasing the burn duration (at least from the ship’s point of view – the launching lasers probably get turned off in a couple of years… a decade, tops). If you leave your engines on until you get as close to lightspeed as my computer can get, then the whole trip takes about 2.56 years (that’s counting only 11 years of acceleration – still 1.5 subjective). If we up that to the 100,000 light-year diameter of the Milky Way, you can cross it in under 3.72 years if you put the hammer down. Any way you cut it, it seems like enough fuel for 1 G of thrust for about 3 years will get you just about anywhere you want to go in the galaxy… unless, of course, I’m wrong in my assumption that fuel is used in subjective time (or any of the other things that I failed to consider invalidates my calculations…). We can colonize the galaxy, but we have to be sure that the destination is a planet capable of supporting a colony, because there’s no going back…
It’s not Important…,
That’s very much what I was thinking. However, if we wanted to use something like Project Orion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29 (nuclear pulse propulsion), acceleration would indeed be a big factor.
JoshOnPC:
Time dilation.
It’s Not Important said,
“The trip is 4.37 light years and to an observer on Earth the ship takes almost 5 years and 8 months to reach it’s destination and has a top speed of 0.994930179576667 c. The duration of the journey from the passengers’ point of view is only a little over 2 years and 9 months.”
I think your Maths is broken. Relativity would tell us that the observer on the ship would never observe the destination approach him/her at faster than the speed of light, hence how could they observe a shorter travel time (2y 9m) than it would take light to travel the same distance (4.37y). In point of fact, they couldn’t.
Nal, ah, that pesky peer-review tradition…OUCH indeed!
NASA Statement on Astrobiology Paper by Richard Hoover
“NASA is a scientific and technical agency committed to a culture of openness with the media and public. While we value the free exchange of ideas, data, and information as part of scientific and technical inquiry, NASA cannot stand behind or support a scientific claim unless it has been peer-reviewed or thoroughly examined by other qualified experts.
OUCH!
And the Lord Jesus said:
“A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master.” (Matt. 10:24)
And,
“Who then is the faithful and wise slave, whom his master has put in charge of his household, to give the other slaves their allowance of food at the proper time? Blessed is that slave whom his master will find at work when he arrives.” (Matt. 24:45-46)
Yeah, that’s the invisible man in the sky I choose to
worship.
I mean, Him being so human-centric and all.
Lord, love a duck.
Mike Spindell, what is most alarming about the your statement is that I am convinced that such ignorance as you satire is quite deliberate, intended to be clumsily wielded by a stiff arm, as it always has, from Calvin to Beck. Such intentional stupidity and obfuscation is absolutely necessary if the goal is to disassemble our democratic institutions, and replace them with a theocratic oligarchy. Private sector unions number under 10% of the workforce, and given the waning of the middle class, such a choke-hold assures we are simply unable to rise up. As laws become increasingly optional, there is no back-stop against it.
Unless one is packing heat, and otherwise intellectually disarmed.
It’s Not Important, can one assume one of the things you are leaving out is what happens to matter at 0.994930179576667 c, to say nothing of the mind-boggling energy needed to actually get up to that speed?
As for frame of reference problems, it always leaves me asking, to what extent is my addiction to cause and effect a distraction from what I am actually experiencing? Such maladjustments seem to lead to creation deities, luminiferous aether, and dark .
As for acceleration, after a decades-long journey, one would like to perform a system tour on arrival in something less than years, and 1G is not going to cut it. Robotics solve so many problems of space.