Mining an Asteroid

Brandon9000 wrote:

Well, in fairness, you could turn yourself around, and break with the same engine.

True. I guess my main point was the number of Nukes necessary for fuel, and the fact that you have to decelerate as well as accelerate. Turning the ship around is probably easy, but the logistics of storing that many nukes could be problematic.

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Tobruk wrote:

40 years now but how long in say a few decades. Change is speeding up as I've already stated.

Believe me, I'm an admirer of human advancement as well, and I believe we'll accomplish amazing things in the centuries to come, but there are certain things which we are not currently making much progress with, and stretching the bounds of acceleration is one of them.

We know how to push things, but we don't know how to make it cost effective in all cases.

And the light speed barrier is truely a barrier to us at this point. We don't have a clue yet how to get around it. We don't even have a hint of a methodology within physics for doing it, even on the drawing board.

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rosborne979 wrote:

...And the light speed barrier is truely a barrier to us at this point. We don't have a clue yet how to get around it. We don't even have a hint of a methodology within physics for doing it, even on the drawing board.

Forget the light barrier. We can't even get near a tenth of a percent of it.

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Brandon9000 wrote:

Forget the light barrier. We can't even get near a tenth of a percent of it.

Well, I don't want to forget about it, it may be the most interesting and meaningful problem ever faced in human history. The ability to solve this problem would change the nature of reality for us.

Right now the Universe appears empty (of other technically intelligent life), but the Fermi Paradox tells us that's unlikely. So the other possibility is that it's full of technical intelligence, and that we don't see it for some reason. And that reason may be that there is another threshold of knowledge with is reached quickly in the technological realm whereby the manipulation of space and energy are not done the way we do it any more. (just speculation of course).

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rosborne979 wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
Forget the light barrier. We can't even get near a tenth of a percent of it.

Well, I don't want to forget about it, it may be the most interesting and meaningful problem ever faced in human history. The ability to solve this problem would change the nature of reality for us.

Right now the Universe appears empty (of other technically intelligent life), but the Fermi Paradox tells us that's unlikely. So the other possibility is that it's full of technical intelligence, and that we don't see it for some reason. And that reason may be that there is another threshold of knowledge with is reached quickly in the technological realm whereby the manipulation of space and energy are not done the way we do it any more. (just speculation of course).

Why do you say that the Universe appears empty of "other" technically intelligent life? I would say that we have little information on the subject. First of all, regarding the word, "other," bear in mind that we're not visiting them, because we can't even put a man on the planets within our own solar system, much less someone else's. If you base this statement on the fact that we haven't been visited within reliably recorded history, you'd probably need to postulate a certain density of starfaring civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, and then use that density to calculate the mean time between visits to a particular solar system, assuming a random uniform distribution.

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Hi Brandon,

Brandon9000 wrote:

If you base this statement on the fact that we haven't been visited within reliably recorded history, you'd probably need to postulate a certain density of starfaring civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, and then use that density to calculate the mean time between visits to a particular solar system, assuming a random uniform distribution.

Yes, this has been done. Please allow me to introduce you to Fermi's Paradox: http://seti.astrobio.net/news/article105.html

I think you'll like it. It's a doozy Smile

Check it out and let me know what you think. I did a thread on it back on afuzz a couple of years ago. Maybe we should start another one here on A2K.

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Here is Fermi's Paradox in a mathematic form: http://xray.sai.msu.ru/%7Elipunov/text/ashkl/node3.html

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rosborne979 wrote:

Hi Brandon,

Brandon9000 wrote:
If you base this statement on the fact that we haven't been visited within reliably recorded history, you'd probably need to postulate a certain density of starfaring civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy, and then use that density to calculate the mean time between visits to a particular solar system, assuming a random uniform distribution.

Yes, this has been done. Please allow me to introduce you to Fermi's Paradox: http://seti.astrobio.net/news/article105.html

I think you'll like it. It's a doozy

Check it out and let me know what you think. I did a thread on it back on afuzz a couple of years ago. Maybe we should start another one here on A2K.

I'd like to see some of the technical papers that this gave rise to. I seem to recall that there are about 200 billion stars in this galaxy, and that about 2/3 of the planets (take that with a grain of salt, because I read it 35 years ago) are thought to have planets. Even given enough time to colonize a hundred billion worlds, would a society? This paradox could be answered by assuming, for instance, that there are 197 starfaring civilizations in the galaxy, and that none of them has yet reached a state of technology that makes colonization of more than a thousand worlds practical and desirable, even over millions of years. Maybe no society has retained the required level of technology for longer than 10 million years. It seems to me that there is a tremendous amount that could be said about Fermi's idea.

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rosborne979 wrote:

Here is Fermi's Paradox in a mathematic form: http://xray.sai.msu.ru/%7Elipunov/text/ashkl/node3.html

I don't understand how this is derived.

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An interesting discussion from some of the experts in the field: http://www.astrobio.net/news/article242.html

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Brandon9000 wrote:

It seems to me that there is a tremendous amount that could be said about Fermi's idea.

There is. And it has been said. And still the paradox remains. Smile

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Before I confuse my thinking with facts from your link, let me say, Fermi perhaps did not imply that there are no advanced technical civilizations within a few light years: He challenged us to consider why we don't know about them. Consider the movie "Men in black" In this hypothesis the ET of a hundred different races are sharing our cities and culture but few humans are aware, as a skillful government agency is hiding the evidence and erasing our memories. Admittedly not highly probable, but dozens of other hypothesis are possible to explain away the Fermi paradox. Neil

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neil wrote:

Before I confuse my thinking with facts from your link, let me say, Fermi perhaps did not imply that there are no advanced technical civilizations within a few light years: He challenged us to consider why we don't know about them. Consider the movie "Men in black" In this hypothesis the ET of a hundred different races are sharing our cities and culture but few humans are aware, as a skillful government agency is hiding the evidence and erasing our memories. Admittedly not highly probable, but dozens of other hypothesis are possible to explain away the Fermi paradox. Neil

Yes, it's hardly as simple as the way it's being presented, although the basic idea is intriguing. We need a mathematical model of the process.

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I should probably also say that it might be a terrible mistake to bring ourselves the attention of a starfaring civilization.

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rosborne979 wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
It seems to me that there is a tremendous amount that could be said about Fermi's idea.

There is. And it has been said. And still the paradox remains.

I doubt that it's all been said.

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Brandon9000 wrote:

I doubt that it's all been said.

I know. I didn't mean to imply that it's "all" been said. My point was there there is a lot of conjecture already written on this subject, and that if anyone is not already familiar with it, a bit of reading will be required to catch up.

I find the paradox very compelling. It has been called "The Great Silence", and I think it's telling us something profound, but I don't know what it is.

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rosborne979 wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
I doubt that it's all been said.

I know. I didn't mean to imply that it's "all" been said. My point was there there is a lot of conjecture already written on this subject, and that if anyone is not already familiar with it, a bit of reading will be required to catch up.

I find the paradox very compelling. It has been called "The Great Silence", and I think it's telling us something profound, but I don't know what it is.

Maybe it's just telling us that at this moment in the history of the Milky Way galaxy, only one in 20,000 solar systems has a starfaring civilization, and none of them has had the technology longer than 2 million years, not counting any who may have had it before but eventually become extinct or lost their technology.

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All the theory on the Orion was done over a few decades and many scientists think it's feasible for the last couple of decades and probably would've been attempted if the nuclear test ban treaty wasn't signed.

The next step in testing would've been to build one but that'd be illegal so we'll probably never know if they were right on whether or not we can build one.

As soon as we can figure out wtf gravity is we'll be a step closer to interstellar travel. Warp drive anyone. Everyone I know always laughs when I say that but there are many scientists working on warp drive now. They're just stuck at trying to work out what gravity is so they can then try and work out how to produce it in a machine.

And yep, it's better to be the discoverer of another civilisation and go to them first rather than the other way around as the Europeans proved over the last few hundred years. Discovered people get fucked in the arse I'm sorry to admit.

One theory as to why we've never encountered a spacefaring race is that you get wiped out before you can do much. One thoery on this is gamma ray bursts. Every 10 000 years in this galaxy (and we see them all the time in other galaxies) there is a huge gamma ray burst. They release the same amount of energy as you would get if you converted the entire mass of the sun into energy in a fraction of a second. This is enough energy that if a gamma ray burst went off a few hundred light years away it would kill all of us here.

Basically, if a civ can't get off their butts and colonise space fast then one's gonna go off in their neighbourhood one day and then they're never gonna get the chance. Sad

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I personally like the concept of the plasma impulse engine. hOW ABOUT if we fax ourselves and send this information to a cooperating civilization translator for reassembly?

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Naw . . . pretty soon, the spam faxes would clog their receiving stations, and in righteous indignation, they'd use their superior technological sophistication to turn Earth into a ball of burnt toast . . .

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Mining an Asteroid

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