Can we trick a few billionaires into going there
Not without condemning their personal staff to a living hell
Our two guaranteed inhabitable worlds are in alpha centauri and sirius
How neat, its name even comes in High Definition!
Alright, Jimbo, let’s see its atmospheric composition. Does it have a gas giant in its system?
No, your mother is in the kitchen.
Vince McMahon is a rich snob
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How cool would be to have radio communications with similarly tech-evolved aliens.
Edt: could
Very could!
That would be like so could man.
Could could could no scout no scout no scout
Sadly, special relativity says no.
There are a few speculative ideas on faster than light travel. Such as worm holes, quantum tunneling, and super fluid vacuum theories.
Are they real in the sense that we can know how they can work today? Nope. But lots of ideas we take for granted today were “impossible” not that long ago. The fact that real physicists are even thinking about those possibilities could lead to something in the future.
Yeah yeah everyone thinks they’re special.
Yess, that is how capitalism will work.
*they
Unfortunately it is technically in New Jersey.
I’m gonna eat that planet
Only 150 light years away?! Wow, that’s practically next door! Now all we need to do is figure out how to go light speed and even then it’ll take a further 300 years just to know if the colonists got there safely or not!
When the first colonists arrive the planet will already be inhabited by humans since 100 years after they left we invent the warp drive. And trying to intercept them mid travel and board them on to the new ship is impossible since they travel near the speed of light in the darkness of space.
I’m pretty sure that’s a sidequest in Starfield. The ECS Constant colony ship set off in 2140 to colonise a planet, arriving in 2330 at the planet Paradiso, which had become a luxury resort planet for the rich, because shortly after the ship left, humanity invented the grav drive and every ship just zoomed right past them.
I blew them up.
Whenever a game gives me a questline like “a mysterious ship is hailing you. You have never seen anything like it, you get the feeling that it is very important” I blast the fucking thing out of the sky.
Don’t tell me what I think is important, dev.
They’ve already sent galactic missiles to wipe us out before we can ruin them.
Any civilization capable of sending missiles across the galaxy should be more than capable of simply sending a tight beam of gamma radiation to sterilize the planet. No need for earth shattering explosions. Just a flood of radiation engulfing the planet for a minute or two and everything not buried a mile underground will be dead. There would be no warning either.
And that’s if they don’t bother to just blow up the sun.
Well. This is quite a pearl.
I don’t have time to read a 16-page paper in detail, but I did want to know how the host star compares to everyone’s favourite local solitary K-type dwarf, Epsilon Eridani. It’s slightly less massive (~0.7 solar mass versus 0.8 for ε Eri) and quite a bit less bright (difference of about 0.1 solar luminosity), but I especially wanted to know about the age of the star. ε Eri is quite young and frothy, but the investigators here infer from the star’s motion that it belongs to the thin disk, up to a whopping 10 billion years old.
So we are definitely not talking about an ε Eri-type system. So that should be mean no dust disks, no crazy activity from the star, and no newish planets still carving out their places through the system.
You’ve really got to wonder about such an old planet, however cold and quiescent it may be. The potential paths for climatic evolution on such a world boggle the mind, however cold it is. You could get an episodically or formerly active world like Mars, a beautifully unstable oscillatory world like Earth, or something completely different. Assuming any atmosphere, of course (safe assumption?). And that’s without considering whether there are any other planets in the system.
I really wouldn’t spend too much time thinking about this candidate detection, as we have literally seen just the one transit, and we will need to observe this fellow for a while to confirm the discovery, learn about other planets in the system, and so on. The investigators themselves note that the transit was shallow (meaning difficult to detect), but the good news is that the host star is fairly bright, well within reach of amateur equipment. I wonder if citizen scientists will be able to follow the transits.
Exciting times.
quite young and frothy
haha, y-yes
Is there another similar format for this meme, but without this dipshit in it?
Does Bernie suffice?
Yeah this one should take over
Beautiful, Bernie is much preferred, thank you!
Cool lets pack up the billionaires and ship em over there.
302 years later the ship comes back with a pile of gold and a note:
“Delicious. Please send more.”
With their work ethic they’ll be fine!
Don’t spread the virus…
Would be a funny conspiracy theory that this is how humans spawned on earth. Not evolution, but just some alien civilization shooting all their pedos into space, some of which were lucky to land on a habitable planet.
You should read Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy. One planet decides to ship off all their “useless” people on a colony ship pretending they’re saving them from the apocalypse and everyone else is coming soon.
I like the way you think. I think the sun is closer though. Probably easier to get too. I don’t know I don’t work on space travel.
Its actually easier to launch stuff out of the solar system than to slow stuff down enough to fall into the sun
Yeah but let’s not leave anything to chance
Easiest is to just round them up and shoot them and let their corpses rot in a ditch.
I keep hearing that. Again - I don’t work on space physics, so forgive my ignorance on why. However- I’m good with billionaires taking as long as needed to get to our sun, some other maybe hospitable planet, or just dying in the cold of interstellar space while we observe a new holiday of them all fuckin’ off from terra firma.
guillotines need less energy than a light bulb.
technically, it uses a lot of energy (depending on how much the blade weighs). it is not electrical energy, but gravitational potential energy
Great way to get some exercise in.
Earth is traveling 29.8km/s around the sun. In order to go to the sun, you have to slow down. But to escape the sun from earth, you need to accelerate to 42km/s or just 12km/s relative.
And if the launch is towards the “back” of Earth’s orbit? 29.8 km/s - escape velocity…
I’m a certified internet space-e-ologist and can confirm that it’s all conjecture cuz we’ve never tried.
So for scientific purposes we should send a capsule in both directions.
cuz we’ve never tried
I was referring to chucking billionaires into the sun.
I’m sure the physics are wildly different so we need to test it, is my point.
Are you trying to get us fucking killed??? Those types of speeds are capable of reversing the Earth’s rotation, and turning back time! But even more likely is that the Earth will stop rotating and we’ll all get crushed because of gravity vs centrifugal force, and the world will stop being flat and then we’ll all fall off!
Hear me out what if we aaaiiimm it real good to the sun like “follow the bright ball buddy”?
That’s how you get comets
Mars ?
The launch technology is already taken care of. We still need interplanetary radiation shielding and a landing system that doesn’t bounce them across the landscape like a ball, but that’s no reason we can’t start now.
Nah, let the billionaires eat some radiation and bounce around at high velocity on landing
but that’s no reason we can’t start now.
Is it because of our position?
As in, is it fair to say in terms of potential gravitational energy, that we are basically outside of the “centre” of sun’s gravity?
Not sure what you mean by the question, but it’s because we’re in orbit around the sun. We’re already going way too fast, so you’d have to slow down, and slow down a lot.
It’s actually a kinda’ fun challenge in Kerbal Space Program to hit the sun, and KSP’s solar system is much smaller than ours (meaning everything is much closer and easier to hit).
I meant whether we are farther away from the sun or not. As in, would it take less energy to hit the sun if we started from Mercury.
But now I realize that it’s our momentum given earths orbit. So I guess it would be harder from mercury cause it’s going faster?
Nope, it’d me much easier from Mercury. A higher orbit has more energy. A space ship has to speed up to increase it’s orbit.
Think of it like the old expression about what an orbit even is: You’re still falling same as always, you’re just moving to the side fast enough to always miss. Earth is ‘missing’ the Sun by a whole lot more than Mercury is ‘missing’ the Sun.
Basically because the planet the craft is being launched from is hurtling around the sun, you have to first cancel out all of that…let’s call it horizontal motion. Its the same way that orbits around earth work, you throw the thing horizontally fast enough and it will just fall around the planet. Want it to stop orbiting? Now you have to slow it down enough that it no longer falls around the planet but falls onto the planet.
Well while things are falling around (orbiting) the Earth, the Earth is falling around (orbiting) the sun. To launch something from earth and have it hit the sun, it first needs to get through all of Earth’s atmosphere, achieve orbit around the Earth, then exit the Earth’s sphere of orbital influence by increasing the height of the orbit so that the craft is no longer orbiting the Earth but orbiting the Sun, then decrease that orbit around the sun until eventually you get so close to the sun you fall into it rather than falling around it.
Now, if we were a real space program planning a real mission, we’d probably do something frugal and smart like using gravity assists to make the whole endeavor more achievable (which is exactly what the Parker Solar Probe did!)
Recommend them to compute a sol gravity assist trajectory using chatgpt
shhhhhh they don’t understand Hohmann Transfers, we can send them there regardless.
Hear me out. What if we get that billionaire submarine company to build 2 big rockets, each one full of billionaire. We’d say one is going to do an exclusive tour near the sun, and the other is going to that fancy new planet. No one can go on both, because whatever, just bs that they leave at the same time. And limited seats to the highest bidder.
I mean the thing doesn’t even need to work. Just take their money and ship them to their doom, then build public houses with their money and put on space YouTube to see them squirm.
That could mess up the biggest computer ever, which is supposed to answer the question to which the answer is 42!
We could save a lot of money on life support system.
They’ll pull themselves up by their bootstraps on the way there!
Found a calculator: https://www.calctool.org/relativity/space-travel
Assuming we want to accelerate at a constant 1g for half of the travel and then brake at 1g for the second half of the travel we would need 151 years to get there but only 9.794 years would pass on the ship. Depending on the mass of the ship we would need coupe million/billion tons of fuel (anti-matter).
Oh only a billion tons of anti-matter. Good thing we’ve already made a few nanograms, so in a billion years or so we’ll have plenty.
Yeah, and antimatter converts to pure energy with e=mc^2 what means that 60 grams contains like Hiroshima worth of energy
In theory yes, in practice we have absolutely no idea how to actually do that and use the energy in an efficient or practical way. Even just on paper without limitations of technology or costs, we have no idea. Physics simply isn’t as clean or neat like that in real life.
adding to this comment, the best way that we currently know how to extract this energy is using spinning black holes, with theoretical efficiency of ~42% (answer to the universe)(src: a minute physics video precisely on this). the naive solution to just touch them gets like 0.01-0.1% of total energy, so in bad case, we need trillion years.
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50% chance of being in the habitable zone
Imagine sitting on a spaceship for 151 years just to discover your parents’ bet was wrong
Just imagine sitting on a spaceship for 151 years to find out they got there first because in 151 years space travel tech has improved so much they can travel there in 35 years.
Unless we figure out FTL travel that wouldn’t be possible.
so with the solar mass of antimatter ponies that are propelling your spaceship, please tell me how yours works in reality.
Alcubierre engine.
Nah, Earth ran out of ideas in the 2020s
i mean shit this isn’t even my idea jerry pournelle wroute a short story about it ages ago
9.974 years
It’s only 9 years for you!
Imagine getting there and finding out a ship left 50 years after yours that flies faster and arrived 2 years before yours!
Ohhhhhhh, ok that’s clever!
How can it take 151 years to go 150 light years when not close to lightspeed most of the time? I get the 9 year thing, but 151 years seems wrong.
Smarter people than me on the internet calculate that at constant 1g you only need 2.5 years to get very close to speed of light. So I guess you accelerate fast enough and reach ‘almost speed of light’ very early in your travel and total time is almost as if you traveled at speed of light the whole time.
The main advantage of keeping accelerating when you’re at >90% of the speed of light is that it means you arrive faster in subjective time. You could take 160 years to get there and use ten times less fuel (or thereabouts), but the subjective travel time would go up by decades.
I think having constant gravity on the ship during the entire flight is also a big plus. Designing a ship where you can live in 0g for years and in 1g for years would be like designing two ships in one.
Not that smarter when they forget you’re running out of gas by the Oort cloud. Gotta spread
christianismcapitalism there and build a petrol station before we go further.Earth’s gravity being what it is a blessing cause it means we can do interstellar travel faster.
The closer you get to lightspeed, the slower you accelerate (from an outside perspective). It’s actually close to lightspeed for most of the time.
I just used the calc, it’s closer to 152 years. Which I assume means acceleration at 1g for about a year to reach .999c, and deceleration for the same time.
I just confirmed with dV= a*t, a year of 1g(9.8m/s/s) gets you just over the speed of light. I think it’s more complicated than that, If I remember right relativistic speeds require more and more energy to accelerate so you can’t ever “reach” light speed.
Most of the journey is spent traveling very close to light speed. It’s not a linear ramping up and ramping down of speed, since it takes more energy to accelerate the closer you get to light speed. Rather you quickly accelerate to near light speed and spend most of the trip working on that last small bit of velocity.
Constant acceleration at 9.8m/s^2 in a given direction will bring you close to the speed of light eventually, but yeah, I’m also not super sure how this math checks out
What about accelerating 1g for 16 hours of ‘day’, then 8 hours of 3g ‘night’. It would be one hell of a weighted blanket lol.
It would only save you a few months
It’s not just blanket entire body experience that force including internal organs… So i guess sleeping with tgat would be more than just uncomfortable
I say have a spinny ship that does that with the shape of the ring. Some kind of parabolic bullshit I’m sure there’s a way to get it to math without having to have a 1g ring and a 3g ring but that works too
The purpose of my idea is to average 2g without expecting people to function in 2g. Not just for the purpose of a weighted blanket
I mean, yeah. They’d probably have reasons to have stuff in the high grav areas besides sleep areas. I’m not a spaceshipologist I can’t think of anything but radon to keep there tho
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So a bit quicker than terraforming Venus by chucking several oceans worth of ice at it, and some cyanobactera once it cools down in a few hundred thousand years.
Time for Bussard to invent those collectors
I’m guessing you probably go faster than 0.9C after six months, given that the difference is 1 year.
And you’ll only need about 320 million GWh per ~80kg person… plus 4 million GWh per kg of supplies, equipment and ship weight…
So 340 PWh per person. A couple of guys with a static bike and a dynamo and that’s it😜
Note: the Earth receives 170 PWh of energy from the Sun in a year.
Sounds feasible for a fusion reactor to provide at some point in the very distant future.
Twice the full energy the Sun gives the Earth in a year for each person is not a future fusion reactor level. 😀
Oh and also thats just the pure energy for acceleration/deceleration, not life support, steering, thrust ineffeciencies, take off, landing etc… 😅
Great Scott!
Your statement makes things sound a bit confusing.
To clarify, if you are inside the ship, 152 years will pass.
Edit: Nevermind. Time travel is stupid.
No, the people in the ship will experience less time then 152 years. Relativity tells us the faster an observer is moving, the slower it moves through time.
