[HN Gopher] Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun's closest star
___________________________________________________________________
Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun's closest star
Author : rntn
Score : 210 points
Date : 2022-02-11 08:04 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| lbriner wrote:
| We can't even work out how to run our own planet in a consistent
| and consensual way, I say leave it to the other more civil aliens
| to inhabit, otherwise we'll end up with another broken planet.
| NittLion78 wrote:
| This is basically the entire plot of Sid Meier's Alpha
| Centauri.
| sva_ wrote:
| I don't think space is so crowded and we got enough empty rocks
| up there.
| WithinReason wrote:
| What is there to break on a lifeless planet?
| brabel wrote:
| Whether there's life on this planet is not known, it's in the
| inhabitable zone so that possibility cannot be discarded.
| lbriner wrote:
| Clearly the implication is that it is another habitable
| planet and the other comments talking about going there etc.
| It isn't the rock I am worried about, it would be community
| that decides to move there and then starts exploiting each
| other leaving a planet depleted of resources and a rather
| long journey home!
| raxxorrax wrote:
| That is pretty exciting. Some say life would be difficult because
| Proxima Centauri is a flare star, which has violent outbursts of
| radiation. Not more than the sun though, even if it is so much
| smaller. But the habitable zone would also be much closer to the
| star.
|
| It has a significant life span of about 4 trillion years and
| could easily outlive the present universe several times.
| j0057 wrote:
| If there are three known planets in the Proxima Centauri, why are
| they called b, c and d -- why is there no Proxima Centauri a?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Hey, we also got a weird signal from this area not too long ago!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLC1
| T-A wrote:
| There seems to be some confusion about the meaning of "within the
| habitable zone".
|
| From the paper (Introduction and Conclusions, respectively) [1]:
|
| _The habitability conditions of Proxima b, which orbits within
| the HZ of the star, have been extensively studied (e.g. Barnes et
| al. 2017; Ribas et al. 2016; Turbet et al. 2016; Meadows & Barnes
| 2018). On the other hand, the candidate Proxima d orbits much
| closer to the star and outside the HZ range._
|
| _In particular, the discovery of an Earth-mass planet orbiting
| Proxima Centauri (Anglada-Escude et al. 2016), our closest
| stellar neighbour, was one of the most significant results in the
| field, in part because the planet orbits inside the habitable
| zone (HZ) of the star (e.g. Kopparapu et al. 2013)._
|
| So, Proxima d is too close to the star to be _inside_ the HZ; it
| 's _within_ the HZ in the sense that the HZ is further out from
| the star.
|
| The author of the Nature commentary, which claims that "it could
| have oceans of liquid water that can potentially harbour life",
| apparently didn't read the paper.
|
| [1]
| https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/e...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Here's a good collection of details about the entire star
| system of Proxima Centauri, including its planets.
|
| https://www.star-facts.com/proxima-centauri/
|
| Also fascinating, a relative distance vs time graph of close
| stars. It turns out we'll have closer distances for 6 in the
| next 10,000 - 50,000 years.
|
| https://www.star-facts.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Neares...
|
| Somehow I feel like Elon Musk has a print out of that graph on
| his office wall.
| akamoonknight wrote:
| Making an assumption here about Proxima Centauri's own Oort
| Cloud, but seems like if it's the same size as ours, they'd
| overlap? Seems like a potentially interesting way for "stuff"
| to get transferred from one solar system to another.
| jl6 wrote:
| I believe we are discovering that space isn't as empty as
| we once imagined. Rock-hopping could be a viable method of
| (slow) interstellar travel.
| oAlbe wrote:
| Isn't that how you end up in an endless Solar System war?
|
| _Belta-lowda! Belta-lowda! Belta-lowda!_
| ncmncm wrote:
| If you take long enough at it, you get comfortable out
| there and don't need stars anymore.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Eh, we're talking about a section of an arm on a galaxy
| that we're in. I'm pretty sure there's _nothing_ in
| between most galaxies.
| floxy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_star#Mass
| irrational wrote:
| I only counted 5 (including Proxima Centauri). What are the
| six that you see?
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Barnards Star, Lalande 21185, then Alpha Centauri, then
| Proxima Centauri, then Ross 248, then Gliese 445 makes 6.
|
| There are 6 if you count Proxima Centauri and Alpha
| Centauri separately; 7 if you count both stars in the Alpha
| Centauri pair separately, and 5 if you count Alpha and
| Proxima Centauri separately.
|
| Alpha Centauri is the binary system of Alpha Centauri A and
| Alpha Centauri B, which are separated by about 10-30 AU.
| It's very, very close in terms of interstellar distances to
| Proxima Centauri, which is a red dwarf that orbits Alpha
| Centauri A and B at a distance of 13000 AU, or 0.2 LY - a
| remote enough orbit that it makes sense to keep track of
| whether it's on the near side or far side of the triple-
| star system.
| ruffrey wrote:
| For reference, Saturn is about 9-10 AU from the Sun.
| [deleted]
| kibwen wrote:
| _" Unlike the Sun, which will evolve into a red giant in 6.5
| billion years and reach the end of its life at an age of
| about 10 billion years, Proxima will stay on the main
| sequence for another four trillion years due to its low mass
| and low energy production."_
|
| They laughed at me when I bought investment property on
| Proxima Centauri b, but who'll be the one laughing in
| 10.000000001 billion years?
| divbzero wrote:
| _"Stars with a mass of less than 0.25 solar masses do not
| evolve into red giants.... Toward the end of the blue dwarf
| phase, Proxima will become considerably more luminous,
| reaching up to 2.5% of the Sun's luminosity. Once it runs
| out of hydrogen fuel, it will evolve into a white dwarf,
| skipping the red giant phase, and gradually lose all its
| heat energy."_
|
| So we just need to tackle climate change and learn to live
| sustainably on Earth, then we'll have a few billion years
| to figure out how to get to Proxima Centauri.
| prox wrote:
| A good place to learn how to reverse entropy.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I thought that was interesting. Especially when the next
| news article I read called it a "dying star" (presumably
| their literary license on red dwarf). Everything's
| relative!
| BeefWellington wrote:
| There's also the consideration of the host star to take into
| account.
|
| I dislike the term "Earth-like" in these publications because
| it conjures images of a strange alien world able to support
| (human) life. Even assuming there were life capable of
| withstanding the constant flares from the host star, I suspect
| it would have to look very different in color and likely
| composition to the plant life here due to needing to capture a
| different part of the spectrum.
| samatman wrote:
| My education was in chemistry, I've wondered about this topic
| before. Visible light is actually special after removing the
| happenstance of DNA-based visual systems from the picture: IR
| tends to twist or translate bonds (warming) and UV tends to
| ionize.
|
| Visible light being right in the middle is the trick which
| gives us photosynthesis, and sight, because in both cases a
| photon can be captured by a photosensitive bond. It's harder
| to come up with plausible photosensitive bonds for IR light,
| and most anything is photosensitive once you get far enough
| into UV.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is a strong selection bias at work: molecules made
| and operated on by living systems are chosen according to
| available energy.
|
| A world evolved under lower energies and temperatures would
| select chemicals with weaker bonds. Other worlds evolved
| under higher energies and temperatures would select
| chemicals with stronger bonds.
|
| Visible light is visible to us because it is important for
| molecules we use.
|
| This is not to say that all points on the energy continuum
| are equally favorable to potential metabolic processes, but
| life adapts to conditions, even where they are not optimal.
| I don't know of any reason to assume the regime where Earth
| life has landed is optimal, but it has proven more than
| adequate.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _IR tends to twist or translate bonds (warming)_
|
| Is this unique to IR?
| samatman wrote:
| It's almost definitional of IR in fact, but not quite.
|
| Waves which are relaxed enough to pass through ordinary
| matter, but interact in interesting ways with metals and
| other electron clouds, we call radio. Microwaves start
| out doing this: usefully, they spin water molecules
| around, hence microwave ovens. What we call microwaves
| 'bottom out' on not doing so, it's a useful but somewhat
| artificial category which I would split between radio and
| IR if you gave me the gavel.
|
| Unlike visible, which is 'visible' because it has
| distinct properties.
| avsteele wrote:
| Good catch
|
| "With the small stellar radius, Proxima d ... equilibrium
| temperature may reach 360K,"
|
| NB: Earth's is 255K. Venus 260K, Mars 215K. So this doesn't
| tell the whole story, but is probably quite hot.
| ncmncm wrote:
| It is certainly tidally locked.
|
| So it has a hot side, a cold side, and an intermediate ring
| at the terminator.
|
| Probably not very comfortable.
| slim wrote:
| hmm seems like a good candidate for paradise/hell /s
| ErikCorry wrote:
| Why is it certainly tidally locked when Mercury is not?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Mercury orbits in 88 days. This other place orbits in 5
| days.
|
| And Mercury is _almost_ tidally locked. Venus will be,
| before long.
| ErikCorry wrote:
| Thx
| jrumbut wrote:
| For us kids at the back of the class, how are those two
| facts related?
|
| Why couldn't something orbit the star fast without being
| tidally locked?
| [deleted]
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
|
| Quite a nice concept - accelerate the probe with lasers- no plans
| for deceleration though
| parksy wrote:
| Sweet let's crank up the generation ships. Of course picking a
| suitably inspiring name should be the first priority. Unity?
| Terra Nova? Gaia?
|
| On a more serious note is this a good candidate for JWST, would
| it be able to infer chemical composition from the planet's
| spectrum or something?
|
| Awesome though we went from (in my lifetime) learning at school
| that other planets have never been observed, to finding them
| sprinkled around basically every star just like our own. I feel
| like it won't be long before we detect the first potential
| chemical markers of alien life, if it's out there. Keep doing
| your thing space science folk!
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Generation ships will take some time to get ready. We can
| railgun tardigrades and aphanizomenon flos-aquae there this
| year and let evolution do the rest. By the time we (or, more
| likely, the descendants of cockroaches) get there, it will be
| teeming with DNA-based life.
| mrweasel wrote:
| We should perhaps be extra sure that there isn't life there
| already, before starting to attack a distant planet with
| terraforming weaponry.
| bluGill wrote:
| Why bother, even if there is no life there now that doesn't
| mean their won't be when we finally arrive. Or contrary if
| there is life there now that doesn't mean it will survive
| until we get there.
|
| The odds that there is life on our generational ship when
| we arrive are not that great either.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I seem to remember in an Iain M. Banks novel that there
| was some controversy about terraforming, like there was
| an other civilisation that considered it an atrocity and
| hated The Culture fot that?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Of course picking a suitably inspiring name should be the
| first priority. Unity? Terra Nova? Gaia?
|
| It'll be Spacey McSpaceface if we put it to a vote.
| EarlKing wrote:
| Before anyone gets too excited I'd just point out that all they
| have found is a rocky world within Proxima's habitable zone.
| That doesn't mean that world necessarily has a breathable
| atmosphere, water, sufficient gravity, a geomagnetic field,
| rotation sufficient to distribute heat equitably across its
| surface (as opposed to it being tidally locked facing Proxima),
| or any of a dozen other features requisite to support life.
|
| Oh... and did I mention that Proxima is a known flare star?
|
| Wake me up when they find a terrestrial world in the habitable
| zone of Alpha Centauri instead.
| parksy wrote:
| Yeah I was being a little tongue in cheek with the
| excitement, still it's pretty crazy we're actually seeing and
| cataloguing exoplanets now which was still in the realms of
| science fiction less than half a century ago.
|
| Anyway if Stellaris has taught me anything it's that the
| flares will add additional energy credits to the system...
| what's not to like?
| bbarnett wrote:
| Easier to add water to Mars, or fix Venus, all possible to
| have well underway by end of century.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Sweet let's crank up the generation ships. Of course picking
| a suitably inspiring name should be the first priority. Unity?
| Terra Nova? Gaia?
|
| Titanic. Moribund. Lethe. Purgatory I-X. etc.
| udbhavs wrote:
| Unrelated but I keep reading that abbreviation as Json Web
| Space Token
| parksy wrote:
| Now the seed is planted, one of us is going to talk about
| JSON Webb Telescopes in a development meeting.
| echelon wrote:
| It would be even more exciting if we detect _industrial
| processes_.
| paunthony wrote:
| Now, we need to have some advanced technologies to have a shot at
| going there.
| irrational wrote:
| > Unlike the Sun, which will evolve into a red giant in 6.5
| billion years and reach the end of its life at an age of about 10
| billion years, Proxima will stay on the main sequence for another
| four trillion years due to its low mass and low energy
| production.
|
| 4 trillion years. Wow. If there was life on one of the planets,
| it would have a long time to evolve.
| jmartrican wrote:
| ROAD TRIP!!!
| cletus wrote:
| Other commenters (rightly) pointed out this is a stretch to the
| term "habitable".
|
| What's becoming clear though is the only thing stopping us from
| lots of Earth-mass planets is the abilities of our detectors to
| detect ever-smaller gravitational wobbles and ever-smaller
| transits. Bear in mind we only tend to find planets around stars
| where we're on their ecliptic planes.
|
| So planets seem to be really common. If they weren't the odds of
| finding planetary systems on our nearest stellar neighbour would
| be quite low.
|
| But the distances are still so vast that the energy expenditure
| and timelines are completely impractical (if you assume the speed
| of light of a hard cosmic limit, which I do).
|
| So if planets are common and interstellar travel is impractical,
| the only way to expand really is around your own star. This is
| the Dyson Swarm. This would actually solve the energy issue of
| interstellar travel (ie"stellar highways") so it's almost a
| prerequisite. Thing is, Dyson Swarms are likely detectable from
| vast distances due to their IR emissions (ie the only way to get
| rid of heat is to radiate it into space and that has a specific
| frequency depending on the temperature of the radiating object).
|
| But if planets are really common and we don't see any Dyson
| Swarms it seems that spacefaring life is extremely rare and the
| most likely number of such civilizations in the Milky Way is 1
| including us.
| koheripbal wrote:
| There is a major logical flaw in your argument.
|
| Space travel is only considered to be impractical _for humans_
| , or similarly large organic entities within their limited
| lifespan.
|
| The time constraint and the mass constraint may not be
| particularly relevant to intelligence that no longer has
| organic form.
|
| An artificial lifeform may not have a defined life span and
| thus taking 100,000 years to travel the stars may be
| acceptable.
|
| Additionally, they may only need to make the trip once to
| establish the receiving antenna, in order to transmit their
| "progeny" around the galaxy.
|
| Tldr; We are like ants thinking that we need to figure out how
| to make really long tunnels to cross the Atlantic, instead of
| focusing on the limitations of our physical bodies.
| bgroat wrote:
| I'm reminded of the wonderful book "Blindsight" which
| features vampire astronauts because they can put themselves
| into states of suspended animation
| bluGill wrote:
| Time is still a problem because how do you keep such a
| spacecraft in good repair?. If anything breaks it needs a
| fair amount of intelligence to fix. same for parts that wear
| out.
|
| Rocks though space, but that doesn't help learn much. Rocks
| bring up the other issue is we don't know how many high
| velocity things might be between starts, numbers below the
| noise limits of our current sensors is enough to destroy
| anything we could send out.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Your body breaks constantly in minor ways, yet it's
| automagically repaired to a degree. This evolved naturally,
| but after sufficient breakthroughs in material sciences we
| could evolve/design materials that are indestructible.
|
| If you haven't already, give Rendezvous with Rama a read.
| adflux wrote:
| I will start off by saying I have very little knowledge of
| physics or astronomy, but reading comments like these feels
| like I'm watching a 13th century British sailor confidently
| state what's on the other side of the Atlantic ocean...
|
| Do we really know enough to be able to say if a planet is
| habitable? Or could there be other forms of life that we don't
| know of yet... We have only recently put a man on the moon, and
| now we're saying we would be able to detect dyson spheres...?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _We have only recently put a man on the moon, and now we
| 're saying we would be able to detect dyson spheres...?_
|
| A moth doesn't even have electricity, but it can detect a
| lampshade. A Dyson sphere is basically a stellar lampshade;
| we can detect it if the laws of thermodynamics hold, and
| we're pretty sure they do. (A Dyson swarm is similar, though
| a bit harder to detect.)
| mcbits wrote:
| Maybe stars _are_ the Dyson spheres, and their emissions
| are the waste energy that wasn 't worth harvesting.
| cletus wrote:
| People bring this up a lot. It's fair to ask. I do often find
| it comes from a place of wishful thinking. I mean I'd like to
| have FTL at my disposal true. But what we're dealing with now
| _seem_ to be either hard physical limits or such close
| approximations to be effectively the same. The key two are:
|
| 1. The speed of light is a hard limit; and
|
| 2. Thermodynamics (particularly the Second Law) applies.
| Specifically, you can't get energy from nothing.
|
| From this you can draw a few conclusions:
|
| 1. The likely sources of future energy are solar (most likely
| IMHO) and nuclear fusion. I hope fusion is viable. I'm not
| yet convinced it is. More exotic far-future options include
| antimatter and black holes. Antimatter is something you'd
| make. Think of it like a battery. So you still need the
| energy to make it. Black holes as propulsion are the same
| way. Generating power around a large black hole is
| theoretically possible but has a bunch of issues;
|
| 2. Reaction mass is a huge problem for traveling large
| distances, so much so that using photos to impart momentum
| _seems_ the most practical. Fusion could be viable here.
| Antimatter and black hole propulsion are theoretically
| possible;
|
| 3. Because of energy demands, capturing the Sun's energy
| makes the most sense and doesn't require any "magical" or
| exotic science or technology;
|
| 4. Because of thermodynamics, eventually heat will radiate
| into space. It's really the only way of dissipating heat,
| ultimately.
|
| 5. Like I said, the IR signature is purely a function of
| temperature; and
|
| 6. A star with a Dyson Swarm will have a very strange (to us)
| spectrum. Very little visible light. High amounts of IR.
| There is really no hiding such a megastructure.
|
| So this is essentially a natural conclusion based on physical
| laws we have no evidence for that they're false or
| meaningfully incomplete. Thing is, if the speed of light
| isn't a hard limit that actually makes it _more_ likely we 'd
| find spacefaring life not less because the reach of such a
| civilization would be so much farther.
| Loughla wrote:
| And it's also assuming that any life is like us, with no
| other technology or way to cycle/recycle heat other than to
| radiate it into space.
|
| I mean, I know the proof of life is us, but the human-
| centered view of the universe does reek of prior historical
| "knowledge" that the earth was the center of the universe. I
| understand searching for life like us, as that is what we can
| extrapolate from current data. But to use that to infer that
| we're it, it's just too much for me.
| cletus wrote:
| This is the realm of the Fermi Paradox (which is a misnomer
| because it's not really a paradox at all).
|
| The key question is that if planets are so common and space
| is so big, why does it seem to be so empty of life? You
| bring up an argument that maybe life is so different as to
| be undetectable. It's a fair question to ask but the beauty
| of the Fermi Paradox is that you don't need to argue about
| what's most likely. You simply have to be concerned with
| what's possible.
|
| Let me put it this way. let's say that there is 1 other
| spacefaring civilization in the Milky Way and they've
| evolved like you said in a way completely alien to us and
| as such don't follow a path we can easily detect or at
| least we don't think to look for it. I can buy that as
| entirely possible.
|
| But now let's assume there are 1,000 spacefaring
| civilizations in the Milky Way. What are the odds that
| every one them falls in this category? What are the odds
| that _none_ of them follow a similar evolutionary path to
| us and what we consider highly likely? It becomes
| increasingly incredulous as you scale up the number of
| civilizations.
|
| So what's more likely? 1,000 civilizations followed a path
| alien to us independently? Or that there are few to no
| other civilizations out there to detect?
|
| To say we're the only 1 of 1,000 to follow this path is
| really a different kind of human-centric hubris.
|
| Extracting energy from a star is so low-tech it defies
| logic to think we're the only ones who will (likely) do it.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Has it been spotted though? Indirect evidence shows something is
| there. But no one has seen it, not any image has been produced.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 'detected' would be more accurate, but this is a pop sci take
| on a press release that says "New planet detected around star
| closest to the Sun" [1] of a paper called "A candidate short-
| period sub-Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri" [2]. That's often
| how it goes, each new medium picking it up adding more and more
| embellishment, graphics of green-and-blue planets, and
| breathless fantasizing about one day colonizing the stars.
|
| "Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun's closest star" is a
| lot sexier than "We detect a signal at 5.12 +- 0.04 days with a
| semi-amplitude of 39 +- 7 cm s-1. The analysis of subsets of
| the ESPRESSO data, the activity indicators, and chromatic RVs
| suggest that this signal is not caused by stellar variability
| but instead by a planetary companion with a minimum mass of
| 0.26 +- 0.05 M[?] (about twice the mass of Mars) orbiting at
| 0.029 au from the star. The orbital eccentricity is well
| constrained and compatible with a circular orbit."
|
| [1] https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2202/
|
| [2] https://www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202142337
| ck2 wrote:
| I found this little ditty in a linked article way way way more
| fascinating:
|
| > _Humanity's first chance to explore this nearby world may come
| from the recently announced Breakthrough Starshot initiative,
| which plans to build fleets of tiny laser-propelled interstellar
| probes in the coming decades. Travelling at 20% of the speed of
| light, they would take about 20 years to cover the 1.3 parsecs
| from Earth to Proxima Centauri._
| rntn wrote:
| Sadly, as discussed here, the technical problems with propulsion
| systems for interstellar travel are non-trivial:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29638529
|
| Of course that doesn't necessarily preclude a nearby higher level
| Kardashev Civilization becoming interested in all the noise we're
| making and heading over.
|
| As we put up systems beyond Webb, it may be possible to observe a
| hypothetical inbound craft / fleet some years off, which would
| have interesting effects on our current human society, once it
| became generally known..
|
| My suspicion is that the social media generation would react a
| lot worse than the radio generation did to the 1938 broadcast of
| H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds:
|
| https://www.space.com/40435-finding-aliens-humanity-reaction...
| tokai wrote:
| I thought the nuclear propulsion options were viable and
| relative simple.
| natechols wrote:
| All of the descriptions I've seen were "viable" in the sense
| of "we could hypothetically accomplish this in a few decades
| a for around $100 trillion". At least that was the estimate
| for Project Daedalus, which designed a nuclear pulse
| propulsion probe to do a 50-year flyby of Barnard's Star. Fun
| to think about but it's going to be a while before even the
| largest governments can afford to fund a project that most of
| its creators will never see completed.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Even if you get a very high specific impulse, you still need
| to pack a lot of reaction mass. You'll also need a lot of
| supplies (or a biome) because even if you get to 0.1 c, it's
| still 40 years to get there.
| grishka wrote:
| I'm not losing hope that there are ways to travel faster
| than the speed of light that we haven't yet discovered,
| like bending the spacetime around the spacecraft, or
| wormholes, or something else of that kind. If various forms
| of rapidly ejecting matter out of a nozzle really are the
| only physically viable option for spaceflight, it would be
| an extremely disappointing universe.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > If various forms of rapidly ejecting matter out of a
| nozzle really are the only physically viable option for
| spaceflight, it would be an extremely disappointing
| universe.
|
| Indeed. If that's the case, the universe is an infinitely
| big and infinitely boring place.
|
| OTOH, our future uploaded selves may be able to slow down
| their clock rates and make the trip so much shorter.
|
| And you don't need to leave your dear ones on Earth -
| just bring forks of them along you (chances are a fork of
| you will remain on Earth anyway).
| aerique wrote:
| What would that fork think of it?
| rbanffy wrote:
| If I were to fork myself in this situation, I'd make one
| fork who thinks that making the trip will be awesome and
| another that will think that staying home is the coolest
| thing.
|
| If we can, from time to time, merge our memories and
| refork, this wouldn't be a big issue, as both forks would
| experience both lives.
|
| I think that, at this point, we wouldn't be that much
| human anymore.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| You don't even have to modify it. If you are a person
| that thinks going and leaving a fork would be cool, and
| also thinks staying and sending a fork would be cool, the
| job is done.
| grishka wrote:
| Frankly, I believe that any form of mind upload or
| consciousness transfer is a much harder problem than both
| rejuvenation and interstellar spaceflight.
|
| Looking at current aging research, there's a good
| possibility we'll see rejuvenation in the next decade or
| two and it'll profoundly change our society. In 20 years,
| everyone will be looking 25 years old and pointing at
| frail people with wrinkly faces and laughing, same way we
| do today with antivaxxers.
|
| Once that's out of the way, we'll eventually get
| comfortable with building arbitrarily large objects on
| orbit, and we could as well build a huge spaceship with
| an onboard self-sustaining ecosystem and fly _that_ to
| other stars, the boring way. Yes, it will be a very long
| journey, but it 's possible without the reliance on yet
| to be discovered new physics.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > pointing at frail people with wrinkly faces and
| laughing, same way we do today with antivaxxers.
|
| Except those people are more likely to be too poor to
| afford it instead of unwilling to take it.
| psd1 wrote:
| Or, worse, the young will never get any power because the
| old will not relinquish control.
|
| Then you have the "surfeit of princes" problem.
|
| This isn't just grand political power: imagine being
| unable to progress in your career because geriatrics
| above you aren't retiring.
|
| That's just one possible secondary effect. We could
| enumerate many others.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Oh yes. That's a very clear concern. I'm reacting to the
| "people who decline will he like antivaxers" comment. But
| it seems far more likely people will be priced out as
| opposed to voluntarily refuse treatment.
| grishka wrote:
| This logic is flawed. It would be much more economically
| sensible to just rejuvenate everyone regularly instead of
| doing what we do today -- try, and eventually fail, to
| manage all the conditions related to old age. Since aging
| affects literally everyone, this huge scale would drive
| the cost of that intervention down to pennies.
|
| Just to be clear: I'm not from the US, we do have not a
| very good but nevertheless somewhat working public health
| system over here.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > It would be much more economically sensible to just
| rejuvenate everyone regularly instead of doing what we do
| today -- try, and eventually fail, to manage all the
| conditions related to old age.
|
| In the US, we just will do neither for the majority of
| Americans. If you're too poor to afford rejuvenation,
| you'll be too poor to afford other treatments. And you'll
| just die.
|
| Sure the _cost_ of each treatment might be pennies
| (although it probably will cost a lot and not have those
| economies of scale) but total profit is not maximized by
| a smaller markup. Better to get Gates /Bezos/Musk/other
| billionaires to give you 90% of their fortunes.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| That's insane optimism to me. We don't even know how to
| get a nail to re-attach to a nail bed. We can't put some
| crystals on a tooth. We can't create a single hair
| follicle. We have zero non-surgical ways to repair
| arteries. Etc, etc, etc. We have made zero progress in
| anti-aging other than controlling blood pressure and
| identifying harmful chemicals in an environment.
|
| We ARE good at extreme, surgical and or heavy medicating
| intervention. Doesn't go hand-in-hand with life extension
| at all.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| At least there is such a thing as growing tissues from
| stem cells. Nothing at all in the category of "uploading"
| one's consciousness anywhere exists. Not "uploading a
| memory", not "uploading a thought process", those are
| abstract concepts we've made to describe what the
| extremely strange organs that brains are do, anyway, and
| we're nowhere near close to understanding its biology
| much less replicating what it actually does with a
| machine.
| grishka wrote:
| We're now capable of programming cells to produce
| arbitrary proteins at will, how cool is that?
|
| Also please do look through the playlist in a sibling
| comment. Michael Levin's research is truly badass. He has
| grown tadpoles with an extra working eye on the back, and
| recently he has regrown an amputated leg on a frog.
|
| There's an astonishing amount of untapped possibilities
| in biology that are opening up only now as we finally
| have the right tools.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Right, CRISPR is ok, but they haven't figured out that
| many real applications. This approach to vaccines has
| actually been around forever.
|
| I bookmarked this thread specifically to watch your links
| later. I appreciate them and will watch, as I am really
| interested in the topic.
|
| My _hope_ is that biotech is the next step, but as I
| mentioned, for now I am highly pessimistic. We can 't
| seem to treat virtually anything in any real sense,
| despite the experiments you mention. If anything, the
| progress in prosthetics (including the spinal bypass) has
| been great, but nothing to do with life extension or
| genuine recovery of lost functionality without surgical
| intervention.
|
| Personally, it seems to be me that the closest thing we
| can do so far as individuals is reduce risk factors and
| try to stay high on Death Clocks:
| https://www.lifespan.io/news/grimage-is-the-best-clock-
| for-p...
|
| Completely unrelated, but this reminded me that we can't
| seem to regrow cartilage either. This is a huge issue
| after cancers and cardiac deaths. Any falls, excessive
| wear and tear, etc all destroy quality of life with the
| joints. Latest efforts here:
| https://www.studyfinds.org/arthritis-pain-regrowing-
| cartilag...
| grishka wrote:
| We can now treat a lot of conditions we couldn't before.
| People used to die all the time of infections or any
| number of other conditions we now consider fully curable.
| Medicine as we know it is a relatively young science
| compared to physics or mathematics for example. We can
| treat most bacterial infections. We can manage most virus
| infections. We can perform life-saving, high-precision
| surgeries. We couldn't do any of these things just 100
| years ago -- that's nothing on a historical timescale.
|
| Thing is, medicine/biology is a unique field because it
| relies quite a lot on advancements in other fields for
| its tools. You couldn't research cells before microscope
| was invented. You can't begin figuring out what each part
| of a genome does before you've sequenced it. You can't
| begin to research functions of specific proteins before
| you've solved their structures and got the ability to
| manipulate their production and/or attach markers to
| them. And so on, and so forth. Not so long ago the main
| approach in medical research was basically "try stuff
| randomly on lab animals and see what has a beneficial
| effect". Now that we can peek into the internal workings
| of biological systems we can use a more direct, more
| engineering-like approach.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Any chance you could link to some stuff that's making you
| so optimistic about rejuvenation on that timeline?
| grishka wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/longevity has a lot of links to
| various articles and papers, and I also collect relevant
| videos and talks into a playlist: https://www.youtube.com
| /playlist?list=PLLvA7pB41pDk27XOjqbXi...
| roveo wrote:
| Look up the stuff David Sinclair is doing with his team.
| They are already rejuvenating and regrowing severed optic
| nerves with Yamanaka factors in mice and are preparing to
| start human trials.
|
| It's not rock-solid that this is going to happen for the
| whole body soon, but some truly breakthrough things are
| happening right now in this field, nothing like the
| previous decades.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| At the moment I have more faith that our AI overlords -
| or, future self-replicating robots, insert various levels
| of intelligence and self-reliance here - will be the ones
| going interstellar, not so much us unless we
| revolutionize spaceflight. That said, the picture of the
| future that The Expanse investigates seems to be the most
| realistic, just minus the somewhat magic propulsion
| system.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Not a huge problem if, after the robots terraform the
| planet and build our settlements, I can opt to be printed
| into a new organic body.
|
| We'll still need some form of magical propulsion or,
| worse, some magical power source. There aren't many
| things that can keep providing energy for thousands of
| years. I'm pretty sure fission is a non-starter here and
| even nuclear fusion designs would need a source of
| tritium because, after a couple thousand years, there
| won't be much left of the initial fuel.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I don't think we will or should be trying for interstellar at
| this time; but something being non-trivial doesn't mean we
| shouldn't do it.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| With all the messages we're sending I'm sure a curvature
| propulsion drive is just around the corner ;)
| tjpnz wrote:
| If Breakthrough Starshot happens some of us may get to at least
| see it in our lifetimes.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| "The team used a state-of-the art spectrograph called ESPRESSO"
|
| And suddenly i am imagining lots of very smart people drinking
| lots of caffeine.
|
| "To find the wobble.."
|
| this is not helping :)
|
| "ESPRESSO is kept in a special room at the observatory, inside a
| tank "
|
| oh come on ..
| enkrs wrote:
| Astronomers go to great lengths to name their stuff for good
| abbreviations. ESPRESSO is actually "Echelle Spectrograph for
| Rocky Exoplanet- and Stable Spectroscopic Observations"
| strogonoff wrote:
| Astronomers are known to backronymise:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STEVE
| vegai_ wrote:
| Perhaps it's too soon after reading The Dark Forest, but uh oh.
| andrew_eit wrote:
| I bet the sophons are already on their way
| e40 wrote:
| I just finished the book yesterday. I rank it #1 on my all-time
| SciFi list. I would say _A Fire Upon the Deep_ is #2 and _Dune_
| #3.
| carapace wrote:
| Really? _A Fire Upon the Deep_ and _Dune_ are masterpieces,
| yes, but _The Dark Forest_ although good isn 't in the same
| league IMO.
|
| - - - -
|
| Tangent: Have you read Gene Wolfe's _Book of the New Sun_? It
| 's less famous than the books above, but (IMO) it's in the
| same rarefied company as _Dune_ and J.R.R. Tolkien 's work.
| minism wrote:
| I had the same exact thought the moment I finished it.
|
| After a week of reflection, I think it was a slight
| overreaction -- the book is still very very good but i dont
| think #1 for me.
|
| But something about the way the story took shape and
| culminated in the final third of the book was so engaging,
| and so satisfying. I think I stayed up until 4 or 5AM the
| night I finished the last 200 pages.
| Karsteski wrote:
| Fantastic Sci-Fi book series, btw.
|
| Full name is A Remembrance of Earth's Past.
| eloeffler wrote:
| Let's send them a ping. What could go wrong?
| ilija139 wrote:
| Just for reference, the planet is 4.0x10^13 kilometres away, if
| we send our fastest ever probe, and assume it averages the top
| speed of 586,800 km/h all the way there, it will still take 7,781
| years to reach the planet.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Under 1g acceleration about 3.5 years
|
| https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/space-travel
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| 1) you also need time decelerate
|
| 2) speed of light is a hard limit, you cannot keep
| accelerating and you need more energy the closer you get to
| that limit
| tokai wrote:
| > 1) you also need time decelerate
|
| No that would be a waste of effort. A flyby mission
| definitely makes the most sense. The 3.5 years are with
| deceleration though.
| empiricus wrote:
| You mean flyby at almost the speed of light? For
| interstellar travel, I think usable flyby speed is almost
| the same as stop and look around speed.
| NeoTar wrote:
| Another point for anyone considering whether we should send a
| space-probe there...
|
| The current fastest man-man object is the Helios 2 space-probe,
| reaching something like 25 000 kilometres per hour. Proxima
| Centauri is 1.3020 parsecs away from Earth.
|
| So, just diving one by the other, we'd looking at something like
| 18 000 years as a rough order of magnitude for sending something
| from Earth to Proxima Centauri.
|
| You'd be much better off waiting, well, even a thousand years for
| technology to improve rather than sending something now.
|
| Note: this is a _very_ dodgy line of reasoning. The Helios probe
| got a massive speed boost from a close encounter with the sun.
| But even if the speed is wrong by a factor of ten, we 're still
| looking at somewhere between a thousand and a hundred-thousand
| years.
| mouzogu wrote:
| >something like 18 000 years
|
| this is why we don't see any signs of life out there. there
| really isn't any point in trying to venture beyond your home.
| universe is just too big even at the speed of light when you
| start venturing beyond your local group.
| yitchelle wrote:
| I guess the assumption is their life span is similar to that
| on our planet. If the life span measured in thousand of
| years, it will be a different story.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Lifespan is one thing, but also the "cadence" of life. For
| a mammal, spending a year in a spaceship is hard. For a
| brick, spending a thousand years as part of a wall is the
| natural order of things.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > even at the speed of light
|
| If you get really close to the speed of light (which is not
| really practical from a materials engineering standpoint)
| your time of transit is significantly shorter.
|
| Once these (extremely hard) engineering problems are solved,
| a trip to the next star can be a week-long affair from your
| point of view, but your friends back on Earth won't see you
| for about a decade.
| anders_p wrote:
| You'd have to get very close to the speed of light, before
| you'd see any really significant relativistic effects.
|
| That just isn't practically doable with any technology
| within humanity's reach, probably for centuries. If it ever
| will be at all.
|
| The amount of energy needed to propel anything at that
| speed is enormous.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Unless my math is very wrong, at 0.9c the passenger
| perceived time is more or less half the perceived time
| from the departure point. That's already quite
| significant, although not something I could do over a
| vacation ;-)
|
| In order to spend a leisurely "cruise-ship" week to
| Proxima you'd need to go very close to c. At that speed,
| even friction with a non-ideal vacuum is a problem :-D.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > a trip to the next star can be a week-long affair from
| your point of view
|
| You'd need to travel at around 233x the speed of light to
| make getting to the _nearest_ star be a week trip, no?
| _Microft wrote:
| The effect is called time dilation. The section of
| interest here is ,,Time dilation caused by a relative
| velocity":
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
| jsjohnst wrote:
| I'm aware of time dilation, my point was that a "week
| vacation" to something "over 4 light years" away is just
| hyperbolic.
| rbanffy wrote:
| From the passenger's point of view, yes. For everyone
| else you'd be veeeery close to c, but not quite there.
| samatman wrote:
| Nope! If you obtain the full speed of light then a)
| you're not made of baryons anymore so congratulations on
| that and b) no time passes whatsoever between your being
| emitted in some tight laser beam on planet A, and being
| transcribed on planet B, from your perspective.
|
| None. Photons don't experience time, they are time.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Not exactly. For you to think you are traveling 20x
| faster than light, your friends that stayed at home would
| have to see you traveling at 0.99995c. For 233x faster
| than light, that's a lot of 9's in that number.
| [deleted]
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There is no faster than light, I can't parse this
| statement.
| psyc wrote:
| Distance divided by [time experienced by traveler]. GP is
| not saying that traveler went faster than light.
| [deleted]
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I get 0.999c for 20x and 0.99999c for 220+
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'll trust your numbers more than mine.
|
| But, for all intents and purposes, this is impossibly
| fast ;-)
|
| Unless you are on the Bistromath, that is.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| That is assuming that the speed of light truly is the end-
| all-be-all. It is quite possible there are other ways of
| travel that we've yet to discover. I have no idea what they'd
| be but humans have really only been doing this space /
| astronomy thing for a few hundred years at most.
|
| We have barely scratched the surface of what is truly going
| on out there. It would be incredibly "human centric" to think
| our current understanding of the universe is "it", in my
| opinion.
| narag wrote:
| _Another point for anyone considering whether we should send a
| space-probe there..._
|
| We should and do send probes anywhere that's practical. The
| question is more like when it will be practical to build star
| probes.
|
| _The current fastest man-man object is the..._
|
| The current fastest man-made object wasn't intended to reach
| the stars.
|
| On the other hand, there are many challenges that make more
| sense to undertake as previous steps to develop the needed
| technology.
| netcraft wrote:
| The formal name for this is the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
| _blu wrote:
| we need to send out a probe now before it's too late
| [deleted]
| xdennis wrote:
| > 25 000 kilometres per hour
|
| 252 792 km/h
| Udo wrote:
| I find it enjoyable to think about the technologies that might
| just be in the cards further into the future.
|
| If we ever figure out light-weight fusion drives, we could
| build _light hugger_ space ships that accelerate to a decent
| fraction of the speed of light. At 1g acceleration it takes
| about one year to get to 0.9c, which would make the Proxima
| system accessible with a travel time of about 6 years. Or 8
| years at 0.5g. Or 9 years if we 'only' get to 0.5c.
|
| The same goes for laser-driven light sails if we just wanted to
| send a probe, although deceleration would be an issue. (There
| is currently an aspirational research project for this called
| Breakthrough Starshot)
|
| The exciting thing about these technologies is that they don't
| require new physics in principle, just a lot of engineering. Of
| course, uploaded minds would probably always be better suited
| for space travel, but it's neat to know that even biological
| people could in theory make these trips.
| withinboredom wrote:
| IIRC, the limit with humans on-board is like .3c due to the
| red/blue shifting of the background radiation of the
| universe. At about .3c, it turns into microwaves/radar/x-rays
| and such, becoming quite bad for humans. There's so much
| background radiation, there may be no way to adequately
| shield from it and/or travel may be limited only in the
| direction of less background radiation.
|
| Maybe someone has a link to more information, that's just
| what I remember from years ago.
| ffhhj wrote:
| Right, also the hull must resist the impact against
| hidrogen atoms at near the speed of light, which would
| apply tremendous forces. Dust will be like exploding nukes.
| Udo wrote:
| That's a good point. I have no idea actually where the
| practical limits would be, especially considering options
| that arise if the ship has access to a lot of electrical
| power to generate a protective magnetic field. But even at
| 0.3c, the trip to Proxima could still be worthwhile for an
| unmodified human.
| anders_p wrote:
| You still have the deceleration issue.
|
| You need to use the same amount of energy and time to
| decelerate, as you did to accelerate.
|
| So you'd only be able to sustain constant acceleration
| for half the distance. Then deceleration for the second
| half of the journey.
|
| That would make the travel time much, much longer than
| your calculations, since you'd be traveling at relatively
| slow speed for both the first & last 20-25% of the
| distance.
| [deleted]
| IHLayman wrote:
| Here's a link to a Gizmodo article talking about the
| study... unfortunately I can't get the original study to
| load: https://gizmodo.com/this-is-what-it-would-really-
| look-like-t...
| iam-TJ wrote:
| Whenever I read discussions about space travel and trying to
| approach the speed of light for human travel I have the
| feeling there's a lot of tunnel vision (excuse the pun). It
| always seems to assume travelling along a linear path through
| space.
|
| In my mind, using the admittedly poor analogy of space-time
| as a membrane that is distorted by gravity, my thinking is
| we'll find some way to effectively bring two points in space-
| time adjacent to each other and 'step' between them.
| Wormholes, Warp, or whatever you want to call it.
|
| Think of a flexible membrane 10 meters long and we are going
| to travel from one end to the other. We can either travel in
| a linear fashion over its surface for 10 meters or we can
| wrap the membrane so both ends are next to each other and
| travel 0.01m across the gap between them.
|
| Yes, I know there are all sorts of obstacles and arguments
| against this simplistic visualisation but this is how I've
| always imagined the physics of any science fiction faster-
| than-light travel - worm-holes, warp drives, etc.
|
| If you want an actual, real, possible-right-now analogy,
| think of our current situation where the fastest way to
| travel from London, UK to Sydney, Australia (1/2 way around
| the world) is through the atmosphere in an aeroplane
| travelling ~17000 kilometers and taking at best 19.5 hours.
|
| SpaceX (Musk) Virgin Galactic (Branson), other companies [0],
| and space agencies [1] have talked about, and are actively
| working toward, stepping outside the atmosphere into space to
| reduce the time element to around an hour.
|
| So just like with supposedly faster-than-light travel, by
| 'stepping outside' the linear/conventional thinking/physics
| we reduce the time of travel element dramatically. The start
| and end points don't move but the distance travelled by the
| transport vehicle itself changes in order to enable the
| reduction in time.
|
| [0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/new-flights-
| space-lo...
|
| [1] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/hypersonic-flight-
| air...
| [deleted]
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I've never bought it. It will still involve being able to
| transfer information FTL, and then you're on to the
| Grandfather Paradox.
|
| On top of it, let's handwave all of this away, poof. Any
| aliens anywhere in the Universe would also be using it once
| their technology got to that level. Just from the lack of
| visitors, we have three possibilities that are immediately
| evident:
|
| 1) Humans are among the first intelligent species to get to
| this technology in _the entire Universe_.
|
| 2) Other species have it, _but_ all of them, every last
| far-flung one of them, even the renegade civilizations or
| the mad scientists at the individual level, abide by not
| using it around humans. Despite all of their numerous
| reasoning capacities and utterly inhuman motivations, every
| last sophont with access to the tech has agreed upon this,
| and has for thousands of years.
|
| 3) That tech can't exist.
|
| The first and second are _unlikely_ , statistically.
| messe wrote:
| > If we ever figure out light-weight fusion drives, we could
| build light hugger space ships that accelerate to a decent
| fraction of the speed of light. At 1g acceleration it takes
| about one year to get to 0.9c, which would make the Proxima
| system accessible with a travel time of about 6 years. Or 8
| years at 0.5g. Or 9 years if we 'only' get to 0.5c.
|
| No, we couldn't. The energy density of fusion isn't anywhere
| near close enough to make a lighthugger, you'd need insane
| mass ratios[1] and ramjets are probably unfeasible (as in,
| even-if-your-a-Kardeshev-II-civilization-unfeasible[2]).
|
| [1]: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight
| 3.ph...
|
| [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S00945
| 7652...
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Another atomic rockets enjoyer. I've killed so much time on
| that site. I don't agree with every one of Winchell's
| conclusions. But they are small things. And I don't know of
| a more comprehensive and grounded take on future
| spaceflight technologies.
| messe wrote:
| I was saddened to hear about Winchell's cancer diagnosis
| last year[1]. I've wasted a ton of time there too, it's
| an oddity compared to the rest of the modern internet. I
| know very few other useful sites like it, and I love it
| all the more for its strange aesthetic.
|
| I don't agree with everything there either, but usually
| it's only very minor gripes. In this case though, it's
| hard to argue with the reality of the rocket equation.
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/nyrath/status/143601098708628685
| 3?s=20
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Oh man, I hadn't heard about that. Best of luck to him
| but he's right prostate cancer is a pretty bad one.
|
| What are the other few sites you do know of?
|
| And you are absolutely right about the rocket equation.
| You can't really get around it.
| messe wrote:
| I'm sure there's more but the first few that come to mind
| are Greg Egan's homepage[1], Xenology[2], and on a
| completely different topic "Gramadach na Gaeilge"[3]
| (Irish Grammar).
|
| [1]: https://gregegan.net
|
| [2]: https://xenology.info
|
| [3]: http://nualeargais.ie/gnag/gram.htm
| treeman79 wrote:
| Bits of dust or a pebble hitting ship at 0.5c would make for
| a bad day.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| This is exciting stuff indeed. Imagine a year-4,000 spaceship
| reaching Centauri before another spaceship dispatched 1,000
| years before it?
|
| For the cynical or pessimists: I'm not _optimistic_ about
| humanity reaching year-4,000, I 'm just _possibilistic_ about
| it (as in the philosophical meaning [1]).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actualism#:~:text=possibili
| sm,...
| rbanffy wrote:
| This is more or less the plot of a story by Brazilian
| science fiction writer Roberto Luiz Calife.
| natechols wrote:
| And the story "Far Centaurus" by A.E. Van Vogt.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| This is literally the plot of a very old computer game
| Alien Legacy. [0]
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Legacy
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I can't imagine humanity not making it to 4000. There are
| very few true existential threats.
| michaelerule wrote:
| Is the 6 years measured in the time-frame of a passenger on
| the spacecraft, or as observed from Earth?
| Udo wrote:
| At 0.9c the relativistic time dilation is such that 2.3
| days on Earth pass for every day shipboard time, meaning
| the crew would experience less than 4 years of travel in
| total: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/timedial.html
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Since we aren't too fast yet, it would basically be the
| same.
| 74B5 wrote:
| Thank you for your optimism, now let me balance that out a
| little.
|
| Propulsion maybe the easier part of engineering. Afaik we are
| nowhere near to life support and environment control that
| could be considered stable for a time period of maybe 10
| years or more.
|
| The biggest biological advantage, adaptation is meaningless
| for large organism on such a timescale and maybe dangerous on
| a microbial level.
| Udo wrote:
| You are correct that we are nowhere near that in life
| support technology, however, there don't seem to be an
| _fundamental_ hurdles there. If we end up opting for a
| biological life support system, adaptation would not even
| enter the equation - it 'd be a matter of genetic
| engineering. An obvious danger would always be onboard
| ecosystem collapse, of course.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| with how small you can make a probe today there isn't any
| barrier to making something 100x faster or more. throw up a
| small camera and transmitter with a huge ion thruster thank on
| top of a saturn v sized rocket of your choice and you will get
| going very fast
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| The other problem with sending a space probe is that the devs
| will have to actually deliver the Proxima Centauri mod on time
| and on budget, which, let's be honest, probably isn't going to
| happen for another few years. Think about it, you have to skin
| the whole planet, make sure the AI isn't weird, make sure it
| doesn't conflict with the existing storyline or retcon all the
| earth NPC memories. It's a HUGE project. Right now we just
| literally return a light curve from the function when someone
| looks at it.
|
| And even if we could get the adversial networks to model all
| this garbage, etc it needs to line up with the plan of the rest
| of the Universe from the franchise and the managers can't even
| decide whether the photon is going to be a wave or a particle.
| Jeez. Vaporware like HL2.
| [deleted]
| dmarchuk wrote:
| Isn't Parker Solar Probe much faster than that? It's supposed
| to be going hundreds of thousands of km/h. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Solar_Probe
| galacticaactual wrote:
| It achieved those speeds by falling into a gravity well.
| Reaching Alpha Centauri requires escaping one.
| netcraft wrote:
| I very well may be wrong about this, but I believe thats
| not exactly true. Parker required the fasted launch as of
| its time because it had to shed the momentum of the earth
| that it started with to be able to fall into that gravity
| well.
|
| quoting from reddit:
|
| > You may be thinking of the Sun as a big gravity well and
| how you can just drop things in a well. But orbits don't
| work anything like that at all. Sure if you are stationary
| relative to the Sun then you'll fall right into it. But
| anything that leaves Earth is very far from stationary.
| You're going at 30 km/s 90 degrees off your target.
| Possibly the first idea many people think of if they want
| to hit the Sun is to cancel that 30 km/s of speed, and sure
| it'll work. But you need 30 km/s of delta-v. On the other
| hand, to escape the solar system from Earth you only need a
| velocity of 42 km/s relative to the Sun, of which you
| already have 30 km/s. So you only need to increase your
| speed by about 12 km/s. (And for both cases add one or two
| km/s to counter Earth's gravity.)
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/wjv87/comment/
| c...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/09/20/thi
| s...
| [deleted]
| Fatnino wrote:
| Yes, Parker breaks the 40+ year old record set by Helios. OP
| is using stale data.
|
| The fastest crewed spaceship was Apollo 10 at 39,705km/h
| before reentry. After orbiting the moon they had lots of fuel
| left over so they just floored the engine on the way home.
| Not just falling back towards the planet but actively flying
| towards the ground for longer than any other Apollo mission.
|
| This record can be broken with current technology, we just
| have to go back to the moon.
| uwuemu wrote:
| A probe based on nuclear pulse propulsion could do it in around
| 50 years, with today's technology. It's not that we can't do it
| fast (within one average human lifespan), it's that the project
| would be very expensive and something like Nasa has a
| relatively tight budget.
|
| I mean we, as humanity, have to have an eccentric billionaire
| start a Martian fire (SpaceX Starship) under our lazy asses to
| even start to think about getting to Mars in a reasonable
| timeframe and in reasonable numbers (to start a colony). We are
| not funding making our species multiplanetary for the last few
| decades because we were too lazy, how can anyone expect us
| sending anything to the closest star (other than the sun)...
| You can't.
| Tepix wrote:
| We do in fact have another billionaire, Yuri Millner, to push
| humanity towards the goal of reaching other stars with his
| "Breakthrough Starshot" initiative.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Maybe an unpopular opinion, but Musk is just plain wrong when
| he thinks there is any urgency to Mars exploration (or it's
| just vicarious arguments because rockets are cool).
|
| Basically, the tech you need to make a Mars colony truly self
| sufficient is something like a compact fusion powerplant.
|
| Before we have that, no point in worrying about using Mars as
| a "backup plan", because if Earth was screwed, Mars would
| have a couple of years to live at most.
|
| And obviously it would be vastly better for humanity if Musk
| spent money on zero-emission large scale energy production,
| than on rockets.
| mavhc wrote:
| He should really thing about making a company to do solar,
| and maybe an Electric Car company that outsells every other
| USA EV company 10:1
| moffkalast wrote:
| There is an inherent urgency in all of his plans, mainly
| because he wants to see it done within his lifetime. He's
| got 40 years left tops, but more like 20 during which he
| could still theoretically do anything significant in.
| Rockets take decades to develop.
| alsaaro wrote:
| One conceivable reason to colonize Mars is real estate.
|
| Perhaps in the near future life extension technology will
| become common place, people may continue to have kids, but
| natural deaths may be rare; the human population will
| increase exponentially and need somewhere to live and
| something to do -- terraforming Mars in exchange for
| property may be reasonable.
| brimble wrote:
| The Mars backup plan seems kinda dumb to me because Mars is
| worse _as is_ than all but the very worst post-apocalyptic
| Earth scenarios.
|
| Just build bunkers here and staff them in shifts. Much
| cheaper.
|
| Your remaining threats for which Mars would be better than
| "ruined" Earth are something like a grey goo event, or an
| asteroid so large that it liquefies much of the crust
| (killing everyone in all your bunkers). So, a fair bit
| bigger than the one that killed the Dinosaurs.
|
| I am very interested in watching people try to colonize
| Mars, but find the "backup for Earth" argument ridiculous,
| especially if presented as something urgent.
| politician wrote:
| This is hopeful negativism.
|
| - They don't need fusion. A StarShip can deposit hundreds
| of solar panels and put them on the ground. No, dust isn't
| an issue because they'll bring a roomba. No, this isn't a
| joke, NASA martian probes' solar panels were cleaned by a
| light Martian breeze.
|
| - They will be able to become self-sufficient rapidly.
| They're not going to send 1M tons of cargo to Mars without
| a deployment plan. SpaceX and Tesla have already
| demonstrated effective vertically integrated supply chains
| and manufacturing. They have the institutional knowledge to
| mine raw materials and build factories that build complex
| parts.
|
| - There are plenty of other Earth-bound governments and
| billionaires that could devote funds to zero-emission large
| scale energy production projects. Musk, his companies and
| assets amount to a very small fraction of the global
| economy. Your ire is misdirected: your anger about the
| situation is properly directed at the rule of corrupt
| imbeciles and their questionable resource allocation
| decisions (Netflix, coal, etc.) here on Earth rather than
| one team of folks who seem extraordinarily mission driven
| and effective.
| samatman wrote:
| Mars has dust storms which last months or years, it has
| no ionosphere, and that dust contains enough perchlorates
| to poison anything we could eat, including us. Ok, that
| sentence went somewhere odd at the end but, it's true.
|
| A large asteroid has only one of these problems, by
| virtue of not coming with any atmosphere, ionic or
| otherwise.
|
| I kinda hope Elon is bluffing and actually plans to head
| to the Belt. I've penciled it out and and he'd have to be
| insane not to. Surely he has pencils as well.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Isn't long term zero-g pretty hostile to our biology?
| lanstin wrote:
| Hollow out the asteroid and spin it.
| Tepix wrote:
| That tech is decades in the future.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Is it? Assuming an asteroid of appropriate structural
| strength, it's just a question of time + propulsion. And
| acceleration adds up pretty quickly when you're in a
| vacuum and have all the time you want.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This wouldn't work, asteroids are like gravel there isn't
| really anything to hollow out and even if you did when
| you spun it the asteroid would just shoot these rocks out
| in all directions.
| kibwen wrote:
| Mars is 0.3 G, which is just as hostile for long-term
| habitation. No human child conceived, born, and raised in
| that environment would have the ability to stand on Earth
| without an Aliens-style rigid exosuit. Their heart might
| not even be capable of pumping blood to their head.
| ErikCorry wrote:
| Nobody knows what 0.3 g does to the body because we've
| spent 20 years on the ISS doing zero-g "science" even
| after the most important question was answered:
|
| Q: What does zero-g do to the human body?
|
| A: It's really really unhealthy.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| The Martian dust storms are pretty tame. Nothing like
| portrayed in the movies. The atmosphere is 1% of what it
| is here on earth.
|
| So while it is a "storm" it isn't like a tropical force
| hurricane or anything. More like a very minor annoyance
| that deposits a bit more Martian dust on your stuff over
| time.
| eternalban wrote:
| What's the story on navigating in the belt? Approach
| specific target from above or reasonably safe to traverse
| it and explore?
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| >They're not going to send 1M tons of cargo to Mars
| without a deployment plan.
|
| Can this happen? I imagine before we can settle on Mars
| we first should be comfortable flying there, and the
| latter should be sufficient for asteroid mining. But,
| right, our technology is just not at a comfortable level
| yet.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >And obviously it would be vastly better for humanity if
| Musk spent money on zero-emission large scale energy
| production, than on rockets.
|
| Classic zero sum thinking. Spacex doesn't cost money, it
| makes it. How much money do you think Musk put into it? The
| answer is ~100 million seed. It is now worth 35,000
| million.
|
| How far do you think that 100m would go to develop fusion.
| The ITER project alone costs 65,000 million.
| ufmace wrote:
| I don't think that a compact fusion powerplant specifically
| is needed. But I do agree that a truly self-sufficient
| Martian colony (I.E. able to exist for more than a few
| years without ships coming from Earth) would need a
| gargantuan level of infrastructure to have even a small
| chance of being viable.
|
| From a standpoint of reducing emissions on Earth, it would
| be cool to see Elon Musk's best take on how to build a
| practical fusion generator though. I've heard of a few
| potential paths that could lead to net power much faster
| and cheaper than ITER. Supposedly superconducting magnets
| have gotten considerably better since ITER was proposed,
| and since power output in a tokamak reactor is something
| like the third or fourth power of the magnet strength IIRC,
| there's potential for a newer and smaller reactor design to
| outdo it in both timeline and cost.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > Musk is just plain wrong when he thinks there is any
| urgency to Mars exploration (or it's just vicarious
| arguments because rockets are cool).
|
| Mars might not be sustainable in our lifetime but in a
| century or two? I think it's within the realm of
| possibility.
|
| As for the urgency, the last two years has demonstrated the
| exact opposite to me. Modern civilization is a hop, skip,
| and a jump away from instability and disaster. When you say
| that we should instead spend resources on large zero-
| emissions energy production, well, we've had Nuclear
| Fission for half a century. The reason we didn't use it to
| prevent Climate Change is 90% political, not technical,
| another problem that having a self-sustaining colony,
| outside the sphere of Earth's influence, would solve.
| ako wrote:
| Even if we completely screw up liveability on earth, it's
| probably still going to be way more hospitable then most
| planets we can reach.
| kibwen wrote:
| In addition to the fact that there's almost nothing you
| could do to Earth that would make it less liveable than
| Mars, any political problem that plagues the Earth is
| going to plague Mars just as easily. Earth didn't create
| human political problems, humans did. The only way to
| keep political problems from plaguing Mars would be to
| keep humans off of it.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > As for the urgency, the last two years has demonstrated
| the exact opposite to me. Modern civilization is a hop,
| skip, and a jump away from instability and disaster.
|
| I mean, you would somehow have to make Earth less
| hospitable than Mars to make the effort worth it.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _The reason we didn 't use [Nuclear Fission] to prevent
| Climate Change is 90% political, not technical_
|
| Eh. The physics and proliferation risk are pretty
| intertwined.
|
| Who's to say we would have been better off with greater
| historical nuclear weapon proliferation risk but lower
| climate risk?
|
| We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission
| power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and
| did avoid nuclear exchanges. So it's provably a
| successful (or probably successful) path. Whether an
| alternative would have gotten the same outcome?
| monkeywork wrote:
| >We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission
| power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and
| did avoid nuclear exchanges. So it's provably a
| successful (or probably successful) path.
|
| Only if you value the lack of nuclear exchanges over the
| impacts of climate change. Which one of the two is more
| likely to cause a mass extinction type issue on the
| planet, one puts the control in the hands of people and
| the other the forces of nature.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'd say I do. Climate change is colossal in problem
| magnitude, but temporally slow and distributed in impact.
| Nuclear weapons are terrifying fast and centralized in
| impact.
|
| Unfortunately, our civilization is also mostly
| centralized. Cities, ports, highly productive land :
| total land area.
|
| If you're talking persistent radioactive effects for a
| decade+, it doesn't take many to severely cripple the
| world.
|
| As an example, a 100kt weapon (or smaller dirty) could
| knock a port out of action. Now look at a list of ports
| [0] and imagine what would happen if one or more of them
| dropped off the global trade grid for multiple years.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_conta
| iner_po...
| qwytw wrote:
| How would the increase in the number of nuclear power
| plants lead to more nuclear weapons? There is no direct
| connection besides edge cases like Iran using it as a
| cover to develop nuclear weapons.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Someone please correct me if I'm speaking inaccurately,
| but early reactor design (1950s/60s/70s) focused on light
| water reactors, which meant enriched U-235 fuel (@ ~3%?).
| By design, these reactors also convert a portion of their
| U-238 to P-239, only some of which is then consumed in
| the reactor.
|
| Consequently, for widespread nuclear reactors (read: in
| many countries), you also had widespread proliferation of
| lightly enriched uranium (in the fuel) and proliferation
| of plutonium (produced in the fuel as the reactor runs).
|
| Both of these remove the most time and energy consuming
| step (low level enrichment) as an obstacle to state
| nuclear weapons development.
|
| And they're fundamental to the way light water reactor
| technology works, especially with the limitations of the
| period. So the only way you could have had proliferation-
| resistance would have been to have some sort of global
| fuel-control and -custody agreement (presumably run by
| the United States, USSR, and maybe France, depending on
| the time period). Which sovereign countries would have
| likely felt some kind of way about.
| qwytw wrote:
| The number of new nuclear reactors only stopped growing
| in the 80's. In any case I don't think access to material
| is the limiting factor in nuclear proliferation. If we're
| talking about the US and USSR, it's completely
| irrelevant, even if they had 100x more reactors since
| they already have more than enough bombs to more or less
| to blow up the entire world. Other western countries
| either have enough nukes already or don't need or want
| them and I don't see why would they export technology or
| material to countries which are hostile to them.
|
| It's not obvious to me that having more nuclear reactors
| in the US, Britain or Germany would had made it
| significantly easier for rogue states like Iraq, Iran or
| North Korea to developed nuclear weapons.
| monkeywork wrote:
| Do you have any suggested reading about:
|
| "A probe based on nuclear pulse propulsion could do it in
| around 50 years, with today's technology."
|
| I was always under the impression that these vast distances
| were basically entire unreachable in several human lifetimes.
| T-A wrote:
| The canonical reference is Project Daedalus:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus
| ncmncm wrote:
| Is talking about detonating nukes behind a ship with a big
| shield behind it.
| politician wrote:
| The only humans who will be utilizing space in earnest are
| the Martians. Terrans will be confined to their local space
| with overwatch on the Moon.
| dsign wrote:
| > ... overwatch on the Moon.
|
| I'm pretty sure not even that.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Why is it weird that a private corporation is doing space
| exploration & technology? Most of the biggest sailing
| expeditions were undertaken by private individuals and
| companies (although often under the funding of a royal
| family). Locomotives and airplanes were also created and
| perfected by private individuals / companies.
|
| The 1950s-2000s NASA model for space exploration was unusual
| in its centralized approach.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| There's an argument to be made that some of the current
| largest market cap companies in the world are analogous to
| royal families, in terms of centralization of capital vs
| freedom of decision making.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The notable difference is that they don't have a monopoly
| on violence
| qwytw wrote:
| Most premodern states (at least) in Europe didn't really
| have a monopoly on violence in the strict sense either.
| Kings were constrained by a variety of laws and customs
| which they couldn't easily change without triggering
| violent opposition and had to co-opt the local elites
| (who usually acted as independent actors) whenever they
| wanted to impose their will outside of the area they
| directly controlled. Even an 'absolute' ruler like Louis
| XVI had very limited direct power compared to many modern
| governments.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Fair enough, it seems that you are primarily attacking
| the word Monopoly. What if we were to soften the claim to
| dominance. Rulers always maintained power based on their
| ability to resist violence from within and without.
| Economic leverage only existed as long as one could
| protect themselves from violent opposition. A trade
| embargo meant nothing if the opposition can seize your
| assets and production by force.
|
| In today's world, mega corporations have no defense if a
| government actor decides to use force against them.
|
| This utter defenselessness against violence is the main
| difference between a modern corporation and a feudal
| actor.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Good point. See: ARM China
| qwytw wrote:
| Most of those private expeditions were seeking short term
| profit (of course there exceptions like the
| Arctic/Antarctic expeditions but their budgets were
| relatively insignificant compared to the resources required
| to send several ships to India or the Americas in the 15th
| century or a spaceship to Mars. Even if colonizing and
| exploiting the mineral resources on Mars could be
| profitable in the longterm being the first on Mars (unlike
| being the first to sail to India) is definitely going to
| cost more than it's worth (in financial terms) so no
| rational private company would do this.
| ziggus wrote:
| "...with today's technology..."
|
| So we have the ability today to move 50K tons of parts into
| orbit, and come up with vast quantities of helium-3?
| seventytwo wrote:
| The best thing we could do for space exploration is to figure
| out terrestrial fusion.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Going to Mars seems pretty useless to me at this time. It's a
| super hostile environment and we don't have the technology
| yet to have a self sustaining base there. Give it a few
| decades and progress in robotics will make a Mars base much
| easier. There is plenty of work to be done on Earth. We have
| to solve clean energy production and in general reduce
| pollution. These are massive technological challenges that
| deserve massive funding.
| gibolt wrote:
| Do you expect traveling multiple light years to an alien
| world to be easier or less hostile? You have to start
| somewhere, and the selection is pretty thin.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Traveling multiple light years is out of the question.
| You can think about some concepts but it's simple not
| doable at this point no matter the budget.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Tbf, it'll also take us a few decades to get human Mars
| transit figured out so sounds like we're on schedule.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| It sounds like a very chicken or egg problem to me, who's
| to say that progress in robotics doesn't come from trying
| to establish a base on Mars? Progress is often times non-
| linear, I mean here we using computers and communication
| technology based on Integrated Circuits technology
| furthered by the Apollo program; say we never went to the
| moon, computing technology and Moore's law might have been
| set back a decade or two.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I am not against Mars but I just think it's premature.
| Build up robotics for a while and Mars will be much
| easier. There is no rush to become a multi planetary
| species. There is no credible threat of a big asteroid or
| volcano in the next decades. All threats we may be facing
| are self made.
|
| My favorite moonshot project would be to create robotics
| that can clean up the environment and handle recycling.
| Having the technology to pick up dog poop and plastic
| bags in an efficient and affordable manner or separating
| recycling items would be a huge technological challenge
| that would create a ton of spin-off opportunities
| including a base on Mars. Or clean up the pacific garbage
| patch with robots.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| I think all of this is premature. Focusing on life
| extension technology and life science would see a lot of
| other technological benefit, and in the worst case just
| mean we can wait it out.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If you think going to Mars is useless, don't go.
|
| Just don't stand in the way of those who chose to go.
| cduzz wrote:
| Totally agree!
|
| However, it's likely that one task (going to Mars, even
| sending a couple rich bozos there) is small enough that you
| can probably do that and work on fixing things "at home".
|
| In fact, one could argue that one set of big companies that
| exist this decade that didn't exist last decade is just a
| shopping list of "Crap I'll need for my martian condo"
| Drainik wrote:
| Did you know NASA only get 0.36% of the US Federal budget?
| Everything else gets "massive funding".
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Makes sense though because earth is a dump and extremely
| corrupt. Even if you were able to substantially decrease
| military funding (the usual scapegoat) without massively
| changing the world order we still probably wouldn't spend
| more on nasa, we would spend it on healthcare,
| infrastructure, economic bailouts, education, green tech,
| etc.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| _Because it 's there_
|
| https://blog.theclymb.com/out-there/because-its-there-the-
| qu...
| mannerheim wrote:
| Mars can already be useful as a springboard for space
| exploration. It's a literal stepping stone, both closer to
| the belt and outer planets in terms of distance, but also
| in terms of delta-v, since both the gravity well on Mars is
| smaller, and it's higher up in the Sun's gravity well, too.
| Any future space exploration and exploitation will be made
| tremendously easier if you can launch from Mars instead of
| Earth.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Mars is, even at absolute best, a dump: dry, cold,
| airless, at the bottom of a gravity well, and subject to
| dust storms besides.
|
| We can build _much better_ outside of gravity wells.
| Whatever you would land on Mars is more useful in solar
| orbit, parked next to any convenient asteroid.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| _Going to {the Middle East, Europe / Asia, Australia, the
| New World, interior South America, the North American West)
| seems pretty useless to me at this time. It's a super
| hostile environment and we don't have the technology yet to
| have a self sustaining base there. Give it a few decades
| and progress in {insert technology} will make a base much
| easier. There is plenty of work to be done on {current
| place}. We have to solve {current problems}. These are
| massive technological challenges that deserve massive
| funding._
|
| ... has been said for the entirety of human history. And in
| all that time, they've only ever been right about
| Australia. (J/k Aussies!)
|
| Only one technology matters: that which enables
| transportation.
|
| Animal husbandry. Sailing. Railroads.
|
| In the end, humans are plentiful. As long as it's done in
| full disclosure and as an uncoerced individual choice, who
| the hell are we to stand in the way of adventurers taking a
| chance on a better life?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Nobody ever believed that America is a super-hostile
| environment.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Roanoke, Ajacan, Fort Caroline, Sable Island,
| Charlesfort, Pensacola, San Miguel de Gualdape,
| Charlesbourg-Royal, France-Roy, Pensacola?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This is absolutely, objectively, incorrect.
|
| You might as well argue that you can build a self-
| sustaining base on Antarctica.
|
| Of course you can't, because Antarctica can't support
| life. No amount of shouting into a bullhorn about
| adventure will change that.
|
| It _might_ be possible with an absolutely epic effort to
| airlift soil, nuclear reactors, nuclear and other fuels,
| machinery for every eventually (including chip fabs), raw
| materials that aren 't locally available (which means
| almost all of them), and habitable structures.
|
| At the end of that epic effort you'll have something that
| will barely have a toe-hold on long-term survivability.
| Possibly. If you're lucky.
|
| Not only is Mars far colder, it also doesn't have air. Or
| surface water. So all the challenges are at least an
| order of magnitude harder.
|
| And it's much _much_ further away.
|
| Rhetoric and wishful thinking are not going to give you a
| better life if you can't deal with the reality of the
| challenges.
| Tepix wrote:
| If we really wanted to, i don't see why we couldn't
| establish a self-sustaining base in Antarctica. Of
| course, it's forbidden.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Then create one in the Sahara or the Atacana desert at
| 5000m elevation. Still way easier than Mars.
| mannerheim wrote:
| They are certainly easier, but how useful are they? A
| base on Mars will bring down the fuel requirements to
| exploring and exploiting the belt and outer planets
| tremendously. Missions that are impossible or
| uneconomical to do from Earth could be made possible and
| cheap if launched from Mars.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Anything that seems easier from Mars is overwhelmingly
| easier without stopping at Mars first. Even Phobos would
| be a better choice.
|
| The only thing Mars has going for it is hype.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| If you are concerned about a launchpad for other missions
| the moon is much better. Lower gravity, easy to reach.
| mannerheim wrote:
| How would you produce fuel and propellant on the Moon?
| SpaceX plans on producing methane and lox from water and
| CO2 on Mars.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| At the end of the day, profit determines reality. And
| that's where futurists have always screwed up, because
| profit funds solutions.
|
| Nobody has colonized Antarctica not because it's
| impossible, but because it's difficult enough and useless
| enough that we all agreed on a treaty prohibiting it.
|
| In contrast, we constructed the 63 radars (some with
| bases) of the DEW line in the late 1950s in under 3
| years, with part of the Air Force's budget. Because it
| was useful.
|
| Establishing a Mars colony is not impossible, it's just
| extremely hard. Which means expensive. Which means it
| needs a justification. Which is what I think the knee-
| jerk is really about.
|
| And is a fair _opinion_. You may think interplanetary
| colonization should not be a priority. I think it should.
| pharke wrote:
| > soil
|
| Both aquaponics and aeroponics provide ways to grow
| plants without soil. Breeding insects or algae may
| provide nutrition with very small amounts of mass needing
| to be transported.
|
| > nuclear reactors
|
| Yes, these are a necessity but we've sent one to
| Antarctica before and we could send a more modern one to
| Mars.
|
| > nuclear and other fuels
|
| The good thing about nuclear fuel is that you need a very
| small amount of it to produce a lot of energy for a long
| time.
|
| > machinery for every eventuality (including chip fabs)
|
| Colonists by necessity must make do with less and that
| does mean a lower standard of living and higher mortality
| but you know what they do it anyways because some things
| are worth trading comfort and a decade or two of life
| for. English colonists didn't bring the entire industrial
| infrastructure with them to the New World. They brought
| what would fit on the boats and had to make do with what
| they could create from local resources or do without.
| They had the benefit of subsequent voyages but I don't
| think anyone here is imagining colonizing Mars or
| Antarctica with a single expedition.
|
| > raw materials
|
| Mars (and Antarctica for the most part) do lack anything
| biological in origin, no oil or wood or crops as
| feedstock for chemical reactions but there are always
| alternatives. We usually don't use those alternate
| sources here because they are too labour or energetically
| or materially expensive but when they are your only
| option price and effort become less of a concern.
|
| > all the challenges are at least an order of magnitude
| harder
|
| No one who is attempting to work towards this is doing it
| because it is easy. I remember there being a speech about
| that which ended up with some pretty spectacular results.
| hedora wrote:
| > _Mars (and Antarctica for the most part) do lack
| anything biological in origin, no oil or wood or crops as
| feedstock for chemical reactions but there are always
| alternatives._
|
| Ignoring energy sources (solvable using by a fission
| reactor), the entire Earth has a similar feedstock
| problem as Antarctica. There's plenty of hydrogen and
| oxygen there. CO2 can be mined from the atmosphere by
| plants. Nitrogen is the remaining building block of life.
| At this point, most of the nitrogen in human tissue was
| extracted from the atmosphere using the Haber-Bosch
| method (which, roughly speaking, converts atmospheric
| Nitrogen and energy to fertilizer).
|
| I agree that Antarctica would be an easier (and safer)
| place to build the first self-sustained "moon base"
| AitchEmArsey wrote:
| "We go to the moon not because it is easy, but because if
| we don't then some commie bastards will get there first."
|
| I am all for exploration and science for the sake of
| science, but any talk of colonies is just wasted breath
| at this stage. We need to first explore how to live
| within our means on earth.
| shswkna wrote:
| Linear Reasoning
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Mars is multiple orders of magnitude more difficult to
| survive on than the Middle East. Its not really
| comparable at all.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I like to think we've improved our technology a few
| orders of magnitude in the last 1.8 million years.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| And so you think you can just mush those two claims
| together and come to the conclusion that sustaining life
| on mars must be achievable?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Not must be. Is probably achievable, and is worth
| attempting, even at the cost of lives.
|
| You can argue from either the perspective of futility of
| attempt (no chance of success) or futility of outcome
| (success wouldn't be worth it), but I'm pretty convinced
| both would be weak arguments, both logically and
| historically.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I'm probably an optimist on Mars travel. I think, with a
| fuck ton of starships, you could get people living on
| Mars. But there's some big asterisks on that. You'd more
| or less have to live in the starships, dependent on
| shipments from earth, with self sufficiency failing on
| pretty much every category. Over a very long period, most
| people would probably die a bit earlier from radiation
| and dust. Not much would be produced of value. It would
| cost hundreds of billions of dollars, at least. And
| interest in it would rapidly decline.
| hedora wrote:
| Sounds like the early days of Australia. Maybe build a
| new Botany Bay? (Only half joking.)
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The suspicion I have about self sufficiency pessimism is
| that it's an apples to oranges comparison. Are there any
| modern analogies? As near as I can tell, it hasn't been
| required after the 16th century, due to access to
| relatively timely transportation.
|
| And if it hasn't been required, then how are we to look
| at existing practice and say we're bad at or incapable of
| it?
| wcarron wrote:
| > Only one technology matters: that which enables
| transportation.
|
| Is this tongue-in-cheek? I genuinely hope so.
| subsubzero wrote:
| agree, extreme temp variations and a toxic atmosphere would
| make living there very difficult(not to mention the
| journey!). Much better to try a moon station first as its a
| few days travel and then compare what went right/wrong and
| then think about replicating that for mars. Having water on
| mars does help its case though..
| [deleted]
| darepublic wrote:
| I feel like there is definitely a trend of astronomy articles low
| key alluding to or hinting at life on other planets in their
| titles. Presumably to garner clicks and be bait, but when you
| read the article invariably it's good old science and no life to
| be found yet.
| excalibur wrote:
| If it's the third planet why are they calling it Proxima Centauri
| d?
| mjh2539 wrote:
| Maybe 'Proxima Centauri a' refers to the star itself? I'm not
| sure.
| djokkataja wrote:
| Yep
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet#Nomenclature
| denton-scratch wrote:
| "Earth-like planet"?
|
| It orbits the star every 5 days; it's a quarter of the earth's
| mass. It's also a tenth the distance from its star that Mercury
| is from the Sun. It's earth-like only in that its temperature is
| consistent with there being liquid water.
| mortehu wrote:
| "Earth-like" just means terrestrial, as opposed to jovian. It
| means it has a rocky surface.
| zardo wrote:
| Terrestrial and rocky are both far better choices to
| communicate the concept.
| once_inc wrote:
| Then they should have just called it a rocky planet. Earth-
| like is a massive misnomer/clickbait here.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It is the term used in planetary science. Not understanding
| something doesn't mean clickbait
| zardo wrote:
| Being the accepted term in the field doesn't it make it
| _not_ click-bait. That just comes down to whether or not
| using the term in the headline baits people to click.
|
| The abstract refers to it as "sub-Earth", and a "Earth-
| mass".
| rbanffy wrote:
| Venus is also classified as Earth like, but it's rocky
| surface looks more like hell than the mythological
| descriptions of it. ;-)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Since we're being a bit pedantic in this thread, the
| biblical descriptions of hell are limited to darkness and
| gnashing of teeth.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I think that the fire and sulphur part is mostly from
| Muslim tradition. They kind of got close to what Venus
| is.
| rob74 wrote:
| Well, Proxima Centauri isn't really "Sun-like" either, so what
| constitutes an "Earth-like" planet for a different type of star
| is debatable...
| mcv wrote:
| Could you please stop ruining cool science journalism headlines
| with your facts?
| rbanffy wrote:
| IIRC from other publications, they expect something between .26
| and 1.1 Earth masses, so it may well be a reasonably big rock.
| Surface gravity, composition and atmosphere are also big
| factors in being Earth like - Titan has a lower gravity, but a
| much thicker atmosphere than Earth.
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