Interplanetary Superhighway

rotenberry writes "The current issue of Caltech's Engineering and Science magizine contains the article "Next Exit 0.5 Million Kilometers - A Caltech/JPL collaboration explores the 'Interplanetary Superhighway.'" which describes "...the Interplanetary Superhighway - 'a vast network of winding tunnels in space' that connects the sun, the planets, their moons, and a host of other destinations as well. But unlike the wormholes beloved of science-fiction writers, these things are real. In fact, they are already being used." However, it takes a very long time to get there."

Gravity drive

[gmuslera]

Is like driving a ballon, wasting a very little energy to go to up or down the next "wind" that goes in the rigth direction. With gravity forces, inertia, and a bit of calculus to find where is the best moment to start the ride, you can go very far without wasting combustible or whatever you use to move, just letting gravity to do their job.

Bus, as far I understand, that "highway" must be very dinamic, is like saying that in a year, 6 months and 3 days there should be a "road" to Pluton, but if you try this every other moment it will be very costly or the trip will last 4 months more.

And, well, this "highway" is beloved as well for good hard sci fi writers, taking advantage of gravity to do "impossible" tricks is very used, and is funny to see everyone surprised in the story of that kind of tricks

for those who didn't understand the article ...

[Heisenbug]

I am not a rocket scientist, but I think this article uses flashy language because it's talking about something way more complicated than using the moon along the way. They mention, for example, that the Earth to Mars path is much harder to figure out than Jupiter to Saturn (and I got the impression that it would take thousands of years).

This isn't just a way to get from planet to planet using less fuel -- it's a way to get around using no more than a shove in the right direction, starting from between the Earth and Moon and ending up anywhere you want. That's not your father's rocket science, and it's bloody cool -- flashy language or not.

Some day...

[DoraLives]

Some day, somebody is going to grapple a surprisingly large freely-orbiting body of mostly nickel-iron, with perhaps some very valuable other transition metals in there too.

It'll get nudged this way and land in the back yard of the lucky (corporation, government, fill in the blank) via these EXACT orbital pathways.

When it does, you can tell the grandchildren, "Bah, that's OLD news. We were talking about it on slashdot before your PARENTS were even born."

The problem with nerds...

[ehudokai]

... is that for the most part we have too much information in our heads, but no common sense to use it. This article does a wonderful job of illustrating, in a relitively reasonable manner, how we can do a lot of work traveling between planets without expending much energy!

BRAVO!!!

They have managed to move beyond their meager geekness and actually apply concepts that come from Lagrange, chaos theory, etc... and use them to better mankind and also explain previously unexplained phenomena.

I know way too many nerds who cannot do this for the life of them. They have lots of knowledge, but they are useless!!!

A bit of a rant... I know, but it's frustrating to read all the comments by idiots who can't even read the article before they reply...

Re:Any distributed computing people listening?

[La Temperanza]

Have you taken a look at DistribFold [distributedfolding.org]? I mean, these things and SETI@home are cool, but folding proteins actually helps people now.