What if?

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chrisaljar

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Message 723457 - Posted: 8 Mar 2008, 17:39:54 UTC
Last modified: 8 Mar 2008, 17:52:14 UTC

Hi board

Not sure where I should be posting this but anyway...

If we succeed in proving another life form sustainable object (planet) exists apart from planet earth - How would we travel to it if it were say 20 light years from our own planet using existing technology?

Or using technology potentially available in future years?
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Message 723529 - Posted: 8 Mar 2008, 23:34:56 UTC - in response to Message 723457.  

Hi board

Not sure where I should be posting this but anyway...

If we succeed in proving another life form sustainable object (planet) exists apart from planet earth - How would we travel to it if it were say 20 light years from our own planet using existing technology?

Or using technology potentially available in future years?

Welcome to SETI@Home, and this is the right board to post this, I think that with the technology today, we would need to build what is called a generation ship, where you would send a XX person crew, equal male and female, and they would reproduce many times, until you reached the objective 1000 to 5000 years later. Future tech may take only months or weeks to complete the same journey.
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Message 723555 - Posted: 9 Mar 2008, 0:54:29 UTC

If we could build an engine that was capable of providing one-gee thrust indefinitely, as in the Relativistic Rocket (Usenet Physics FAQ), from the crew’s POV a mission to a star 20 LY away and back would take ‘only’ about twelve or thirteen years. Meanwhile some 45 or 50 years would pass on Earth.
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Message 723630 - Posted: 9 Mar 2008, 6:03:40 UTC - in response to Message 723529.  

Hi board

Not sure where I should be posting this but anyway...

If we succeed in proving another life form sustainable object (planet) exists apart from planet earth - How would we travel to it if it were say 20 light years from our own planet using existing technology?

Or using technology potentially available in future years?

Welcome to SETI@Home, and this is the right board to post this, I think that with the technology today, we would need to build what is called a generation ship, where you would send a XX person crew, equal male and female, and they would reproduce many times, until you reached the objective 1000 to 5000 years later. Future tech may take only months or weeks to complete the same journey.

I agree with you except for it will never be able to take a few weeks or months to reach a planet 20 light years away. Traveling the speed of light it would take 20 years to reach this planet. Thanks to our friend Albert Einstein we know that nothing can travel faster or at the speed of light, if it could it would have an infinite mass and would thus take an infinite amount of energy to move the space craft.

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Message 723638 - Posted: 9 Mar 2008, 6:31:35 UTC - in response to Message 723630.  

Hi board

Not sure where I should be posting this but anyway...

If we succeed in proving another life form sustainable object (planet) exists apart from planet earth - How would we travel to it if it were say 20 light years from our own planet using existing technology?

Or using technology potentially available in future years?

Welcome to SETI@Home, and this is the right board to post this, I think that with the technology today, we would need to build what is called a generation ship, where you would send a XX person crew, equal male and female, and they would reproduce many times, until you reached the objective 1000 to 5000 years later. Future tech may take only months or weeks to complete the same journey.

I agree with you except for it will never be able to take a few weeks or months to reach a planet 20 light years away. Traveling the speed of light it would take 20 years to reach this planet. Thanks to our friend Albert Einstein we know that nothing can travel faster or at the speed of light, if it could it would have an infinite mass and would thus take an infinite amount of energy to move the space craft.

What I meant was exetremely advanced spacecraft that can bend time and space, thus breaking the law of the speed of light, which may and probably will never happen.
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Message 723640 - Posted: 9 Mar 2008, 6:38:57 UTC - in response to Message 723638.  

Hi board

Not sure where I should be posting this but anyway...

If we succeed in proving another life form sustainable object (planet) exists apart from planet earth - How would we travel to it if it were say 20 light years from our own planet using existing technology?

Or using technology potentially available in future years?

Welcome to SETI@Home, and this is the right board to post this, I think that with the technology today, we would need to build what is called a generation ship, where you would send a XX person crew, equal male and female, and they would reproduce many times, until you reached the objective 1000 to 5000 years later. Future tech may take only months or weeks to complete the same journey.

I agree with you except for it will never be able to take a few weeks or months to reach a planet 20 light years away. Traveling the speed of light it would take 20 years to reach this planet. Thanks to our friend Albert Einstein we know that nothing can travel faster or at the speed of light, if it could it would have an infinite mass and would thus take an infinite amount of energy to move the space craft.

What I meant was exetremely advanced spacecraft that can bend time and space, thus breaking the law of the speed of light, which may and probably will never happen.

You never know what we may be able to come up with in the future, I mean just think, at one time they would have said that the computer would never work and look how far computers have advanced today.

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Message 724479 - Posted: 11 Mar 2008, 3:31:38 UTC - in response to Message 723630.  
Last modified: 11 Mar 2008, 3:31:50 UTC

I agree with you except for it will never be able to take a few weeks or months to reach a planet 20 light years away. Traveling the speed of light it would take 20 years to reach this planet.

As measured back on Earth, yes. But travelling at nearly the speed of light, the astronauts would experience a much shorter trip. At a constant speed of 0.99 c, about 297,000 km/s, it would take about 20√(1-.99²) = 2.8 years, according to a chronometer on board, to cover 20 LY. At 0.999 c it would take less than eleven months.
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Message 725436 - Posted: 13 Mar 2008, 5:48:54 UTC - in response to Message 724479.  

I agree with you except for it will never be able to take a few weeks or months to reach a planet 20 light years away. Traveling the speed of light it would take 20 years to reach this planet.

As measured back on Earth, yes. But travelling at nearly the speed of light, the astronauts would experience a much shorter trip. At a constant speed of 0.99 c, about 297,000 km/s, it would take about 20√(1-.99²) = 2.8 years, according to a chronometer on board, to cover 20 LY. At 0.999 c it would take less than eleven months.


If one credits that intelligent life exists on other planets, and that a percentage of UFO sightings are more credible than the birds video on U-Tube, then would it be reasonable to expect alien scientists to spend (half?) a lifetime travelling to observe a neighbouring lifeform?
Half the motivation to create a faster than light space vehicle must come from the suspicion it has been done before, elsewhere.

The other great premiss of sci-fi writers is the hoped for ability to dispers excess human population acoss the galaxy. Clearly this is out of reach so far.


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Message 726091 - Posted: 14 Mar 2008, 17:26:29 UTC - in response to Message 723529.  

Hi board

Not sure where I should be posting this but anyway...

If we succeed in proving another life form sustainable object (planet) exists apart from planet earth - How would we travel to it if it were say 20 light years from our own planet using existing technology?

Or using technology potentially available in future years?




Hello everbody.

Well,I think we aren´t able to go to even the moon,if we and I mean with that the most states of the world,do not cooperate in these questions !

The whole world has to work together and not alone,for example because of the money.No land,even not the USA,can take the costs alone.
But I miss in the USA the will to expand into space. The european Space Center Columbus,which was sendt up not long ago,how many years did we have to wait for the transport???
The station has a lifetime of maybe 12 to 15 years,this time is nealy passed and it is not build up until now !
For me as a german citizen,it looks like that Bush has other things in mind than the space,even he tells other things.






...., I think that with the technology today, we would need to build what is called a generation ship, where you would send a XX person crew, equal male and female, and they would reproduce many times, until you reached the objective 1000 to 5000 years later. Future tech may take only months or weeks to complete the same journey.


How will you manage,who will get the right to travel with the generationship and who will not???
How will you do it to make the chance of travelling with that ship becomes equal,so everybody of the citizens in the world has the chance to get on board???



We do not have the power and the technical things to travel far away now.

We should go step by step.

Conquer the moon,even building up at first a space building center first - a place to put the rockets together - conquer then later the Mars and then ask in about 200 years once again the question,if we have the technicial things to go deep into space.


says Tommy the Wetterman
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Message boards : Science (non-SETI) : What if?


 
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