MagnaCool--Habitable Exoplanet!

[Ned]

Dar, big ships with a lot of people might be the way to go in the end, but what about the problabilities of an accident on the way that destroys the ship? Very high, I think.

[DRoseDARs]

I'm too lazy to dig up the thread we had on this a while back, but my position was that the ship-in-question be a hollowed-out asteroid. Its survivability is much higher than that of a manufactured ship's hull.

[Harovan]

A comment from one German forum: "It doesn't pay off to fly there. The women there certainly have fat legs and saggy asses and tits."

[Eli]

I with DRoseDARs on this. Asteroids are the way to go, and not only in interstellar travel.

Forget about Mars and the Moon. Start mining asteroids for resources, eventually leaving a sort of a hollow shell with room enough for tens of thousands of people(multiple levels of habitation). The shell serves as protection from radiation.

This gives us a body big enough to have a rudimentary ecosystem and with a potential to become close to self-sustainable.

500 years from now, Earth will be Europe, Mars will be Australia, the Moon New Zealand and the asteroid belt will be the USA, dominating them all.

[Ned]

The shear weight of the asteroid is daunting.

I think rather 100-1000 smaller ships, each carrying pieces of machines and equipment needed at the other end with enough radomization and redundancy of cargo that guarantees to a very high probablity that all necessary machines/cargo will reach their destination.

If humans were to go, spread them out as well. Diverse populations will meet and mate at the other end.

[DRoseDARs]

But that just brings us back to HOW do we get Humans there? Unless you know something about cryogenics that the rest of Humanity doesn't. Stop holding out on us, Ned! Short of FTL which can get us from here to there in times comparable to at least ocean voyages of old (think in terms of months at sea), the only other way is to send large groups of people together so they can interact, keep each other from going crazy, and raise families prepared from what lies ahead.

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Last Conformist
Even if the engine could achieve that (which I'm fairly positive it cannot) you'd be history as soon as you hit the tiniest grain of dust.

Deflectors to maximum!

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Ned
KH, is there anyway to "probe" the planet with a signal from earth?

With a decent array of interferometric satellites you could check out the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Look for chemical byproducts of life for example.

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Dauphin
Deflectors to maximum!

Dauphin, you're not far off the mark. Scientists are actually working on a tech that works somewhat like that. I'll see if I can remember where I say the article; it was this month, possibly in the past week even.

[Eli]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
But that just brings us back to HOW do we get Humans there? Unless you know something about cryogenics that the rest of Humanity doesn't. Stop holding out on us, Ned! Short of FTL which can get us from here to there in times comparable to at least ocean voyages of old (think in terms of months at sea), the only other way is to send large groups of people together so they can interact, keep each other from going crazy, and raise families prepared from what lies ahead.

That's why you use slow moving asteroids. Even constellations of asteroids which together will hold a community of 50-500k people - enough diversity for people to not go bat**** crazy after a few years, and big enough to maintain good contact with earth, thus not being completely isolated from the human race.

[DRoseDARs]

Ugh, and that just brings us back to the voyage taking centuries plural. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not take 500 years to get half way there...

[Harovan]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
Dauphin, you're not far off the mark. Scientists are actually working on a tech that works somewhat like that. I'll see if I can remember where I say the article; it was this month, possibly in the past week even.

I read that too, it was about creating an artifical magnetosphere around space ships to better protect them from sun radiation, e.g. during eruptions.

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by Ned


Which argues for a "spread spectrum" approach to spacetravel, does it not? Divide whatever you want delivered into numbers of smaller packages and reassemble them at the end with errors and ommissions (caused by space dust) filled in using error correction techniques.

Not really - there's too much dust.

Basically, you have to go really slow, or build a ship tough enough to take the equivalent of having a hydrogen bomb go off at the prow every now and then. That in turn means huge mass (the hollow asteroid solution) with attendant humongous fuel requirements, or some exotic shielding technology.

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs


Dauphin, you're not far off the mark. Scientists are actually working on a tech that works somewhat like that. I'll see if I can remember where I say the article; it was this month, possibly in the past week even.

I recall that in reality it would be half-funnelling through a central empty shaft in the craft rather than entirely deflecting, due to the nature that the induced charges/magnetics that would be used would be aligned on any craft.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Last Conformist
Not really - there's too much dust.

Basically, you have to go really slow, or build a ship tough enough to take the equivalent of having a hydrogen bomb go off at the prow every now and then. That in turn means huge mass (the hollow asteroid solution) with attendant humongous fuel requirements, or some exotic shielding technology.

Sounds like some kind of probabilty problem. How fast can you go and not be hit at all, or, if you are hit, survive? It just seems to me that if you divide up the population into numbers of craft that have some redundancy, you can go faster as a whole because you expect hits and damage and still expect to get enough of your expedition there in one piece to be meaningful.

Dividing the humans up is also a good thing from a genetics point of view.

My god, with such diversity, you really would get an Alpha Centauri game scenario at the other end.