APP - Awesome interstellar travel

Should we do it?

  • OF COURSE! That's fuckin' awesome!

    Votes: 9 75.0%

  • No, cancer research blah blah blah blah plus I have a vagina

    Votes: 1 8.3%

  • Not sure + I have a vagina

    Votes: 2 16.7%
  • Total voters
    12
ib1yysguy said:
Damo would need to make the argument that private industry would be better suited for it in order to avoid contradicting himself. I'm pretty sure he or Dano (I can never remember the difference) was arguing that the private industry should have sent a man to the moon. This was back on fP.com
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Where have I made any such argument? When you can't tell the difference between me and Dano, then you haven't been paying attention.
 
Damocles said:
Where have I made any such argument? When you can't tell the difference between me and Dano, then you haven't been paying attention.
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One of my biggest beefs with Libertarians is how they do their best to avoid consistency. A serious Libertarian would obviously not support NASA because it represents everything they hate about government.
 
ib1yysguy said:
One of my biggest beefs with Libertarians is how they do their best to avoid consistency. A serious Libertarian would obviously not support NASA because it represents everything they hate about government.
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As opposed to being a mindless drone?

Neolib: Government is God, No Program is Too Big/Expensive
Neocon: Government is Evil, Every Program is Creeping Socialism/Communism
 
Threedee said:
As opposed to being a mindless drone?

Neolib: Government is God, No Program is Too Big/Expensive
Neocon: Government is Evil, Every Program is Creeping Socialism/Communism
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Neoliberal is an extremely conservative school of economics. Neoconservative refers primarily to your foreign policy prospective.
 
Watermark said:
Neoliberal is an extremely conservative school of economics. Neoconservative refers primarily to your foreign policy prospective.
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Neoliberal, in politics, refers to the New Left. Neocon's have other dumb ideas besides foreign policy perspectives. As a political isolationist, I am not a neocon, although they do seem to be economic globalists like me...
 
Threedee said:
Neoliberal, in politics, refers to the New Left. Neocon's have other dumb ideas besides foreign policy perspectives. As a political isolationist, I am not a neocon, although they do seem to be economic globalists like me...
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I've heard a few people use the word "neoliberal" to mean an extreme leftist, and it's always annoyed me to no end, because it's basically just taking the extreme right wing connotations of "neoconservative" and reversing it for no reason at all, obliterating the meaning it's held for decades.

Like I was referencing how stupid neoliberal economics was, and then USC comes up and says "Neoliberal? Did Billo come up with that one?" (except without the good grammar).

And I'm a globalist too. :clink:
 
Watermark said:
I've heard a few people use the word "neoliberal" to mean an extreme leftist, and it's always annoyed me to no end, because it's basically just taking the extreme right wing connotations of "neoconservative" and reversing it for no reason at all, obliterating the meaning it's held for decades.

Like I was referencing how stupid neoliberal economics was, and then USC comes up and says "Neoliberal? Did Billo come up with that one?" (except without the good grammar).

And I'm a globalist too. :clink:
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Cheers to economic globalism :clink:

But no, it should seem obvious that neoconservatism was in large part a reaction to neoliberalism (New Left). Many of them were from the old New Deal Left. Neocons also have a history of shaping their foreign policy around the formation of Israel. Many of the early thinkers in the movement were Jews, which is where SM comes in and starts throwing the anti-semite label around every time someone says neocon.

If you'd like, actually, I have a copy of a senior thesis written about Neoconservatism and Iraq by a fellow alumnus and war vet, which gives a bit of history of the movement. Just PM me your email address and I can send you the paper. 41 pages with a bunch of typos, but otherwise very good.
 
ib1yysguy said:
One of my biggest beefs with Libertarians is how they do their best to avoid consistency. A serious Libertarian would obviously not support NASA because it represents everything they hate about government.
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Whoever said I was a "serious" libertarian? The largest idiocy on the board is the assumption that everybody who even leans libertarian believes that we should all live in anarchy and that there is no place at all for the government. Shoot, even Libertarians believe that there is a place for government.
 
Watermark said:
Light sails, therefore, might be a much better idea. We'd need to launch a sheet of mylar 1 km thick into space, though. It would take a km wide laser pouring 10 gigawatts a year into it, but it could make it to the nearest star in 10 years. Which, honestly, doesn't seem all that unreasonable. It could happen in our lifetime. And we'd only be able to send probes, since the shielding required to send a crew would simply put far too much weight into it. Also, we could up the wattage of our laser in the future as our technology becomes better, which would provide some degree of built in advancement (although it doesn't rule out the possibility of us making some massive breakthrough in other kinds of rockets).
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The problem is there's no way to stop them and now way to bring them home. They can't exactly just open their airbrakes and slow down from friction. Unless they can figure out some ingenious way to apply and equal and opposite force to slow them down from nearly the speed of light, they'll continue flying through the universe until they impact a star or something. And even if they could stop, they'd never be able to come home.

Edit: I just realized you were only talking about sending probes. Still, I hope they can take pictures while flying by something at nearly the speed of light or it's all pretty useless.
 
Why do all that? We have the Stargate in Cheyene mountain.
I have a cousin that worked there and one door said SGC on it and had a keypad.

For true.

Of course it appeared to be a plain janitors closet if you opened up the door.
Clever these government types.
 
ib1yysguy said:
The problem is there's no way to stop them and now way to bring them home. They can't exactly just open their airbrakes and slow down from friction. Unless they can figure out some ingenious way to apply and equal and opposite force to slow them down from nearly the speed of light, they'll continue flying through the universe until they impact a star or something. And even if they could stop, they'd never be able to come home.

Edit: I just realized you were only talking about sending probes. Still, I hope they can take pictures while flying by something at nearly the speed of light or it's all pretty useless.
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Actually they could turn it around halfway, using rockets mounted on the sides. There are also a few other methods, and a solar sail could actually sail into the wind back home if that's what you want to design it for. But if you want to send a 1000 ton spacecraft with humans in it, that's 10 million gigawatts, rather than 10 gigawatts of laser power. Which is clearly impractical.

Another problem is: what do you think's going to happen to a mile wide mylar shield travelling at the speed of light when it's hit by space debris? Hopefully it just doesn't hit any asteroids, in which case the mission would be over. Once we're out of the oort cloud we should be find, but we don't know if there are any astroid or kuiper belts, or oort clouds around the next star system.

And hopefully by this time we'll have some pretty advanced AI, so it'll know what we'd like to explore. Obviously, communicating with a four year lag isn't going to be practical.
 
The problem with sending a probe is mainly that it doesn't have that "wow" factor. We could've done everything we needed to do on the moon by sending a probe, but we were able to wow the public (and produce a lot of useful techonology in the process) by accomplishing an amazing feat like putting a man on the moon. When we put someone on Mars, I bet people will all of the sudden like NASA again and stop calling for it to be shutdown. A probe just doesn't do that for people.

If we were able to put people on another star, sure it's overshooting by a tiny bit, since we can't get any DIRECT economic benefit out of that for a while and we have plenty of room within the solar system to colonize. But it will be amazing. It will be the greatest technological achievement humans possibly ever make.

How are we going to justify the hundreds of billions of dollar (this is a wild guesttimation, but I think it will be around that) price tag... to send a probe to another star? Even a probe with roughly human level AI? It's amazing, but it's not that amazing. We'd probably have to wait until like 2200 or so before prices were decent enough, unless the singularity happens.
 
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Watermark said:
Actually they could turn it around halfway, using rockets mounted on the sides. There are also a few other methods, and a solar sail could actually sail into the wind back home if that's what you want to design it for. But if you want to send a 1000 ton spacecraft with humans in it, that's 10 million gigawatts, rather than 10 gigawatts of laser power. Which is clearly impractical.

Another problem is: what do you think's going to happen to a mile wide mylar shield travelling at the speed of light when it's hit by space debris? Hopefully it just doesn't hit any asteroids, in which case the mission would be over. Once we're out of the oort cloud we should be find, but we don't know if there are any astroid or kuiper belts, or oort clouds around the next star system.

And hopefully by this time we'll have some pretty advanced AI, so it'll know what we'd like to explore. Obviously, communicating with a four year lag isn't going to be practical.
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No, the rockets mounted on the sides would have to put out thrust equal to what it would take to accelerate it to it's present speed just to decelerate it. Then it has to power back up to speed to turn around entirely. Turning around the ship while traveling nearly the speed of light would mean you're traveling away from the earth at nearly the speed of light while looking backwards instead of forward. It would not turn you around and return you home.
 
ib1yysguy said:
No, the rockets mounted on the sides would have to put out thrust equal to what it would take to accelerate it to it's present speed just to decelerate it. Then it has to power back up to speed to turn around entirely. Turning around the ship while traveling nearly the speed of light would mean you're traveling away from the earth at nearly the speed of light while looking backwards instead of forward. It would not turn you around and return you home.
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What was I thinking?

Yeah, you'd need a special kind of sail.
 
I wonder how fast a solar sail could accelerate too by rocketing near the sun and flying around it for a few years? Surely the sun's light up-close would be much more powerful than any human laser. You could decelerate by doing a simialar process around the other star, although obviously this would require some crazily accurate computers to do this maneuver starting out at half the speed of light.
 
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Grind said:
actually it comes into play when you drive your car down the street. It's just so small and minute it would be impossible to notice. It does happen though.
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I know that. But you have to go to pretty signifigant speeds to make it useful - and twice the speed of light is still useful, but half of 200 years of travel is still a ridiculous amount of time. When it will truly become useful is when - and if - we can accelerate to large 9.9999...%'s of the speed of light.
 
Grind said:
actually it comes into play when you drive your car down the street. It's just so small and minute it would be impossible to notice. It does happen though.
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And what % of the speed of light are we travelling thru the universe while sitting and typing?
 
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