Telepresence — Our Best Bet For Exploring Space 309
Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute recently wrote an opinion piece for the NY Times discussing the limitations of our space technology. He makes the harsh point that transporting human beings to other star systems isn't a reasonable goal even on a multi-generational time frame. However, advances in robotics and data gathering could instead bring the planets and stars to us, and do it far sooner. Quoting:
"Sending humans to the stars is simply not in the offing. But this is how we could survey other worlds, around other suns. We fling data-collecting, robotic craft to the stars. These proxy explorers can be very small, and consequently can be shot spaceward at tremendous speed even with the types of rockets now available. Robot probes don't require life support systems, don't get sick or claustrophobic and don't insist on round-trip tickets. ... These microbots would supply the information that, fed to computers, would allow us to explore alien planets in the same way that we navigate the virtual spaces of video games or wander through online environments like Second Life. High-tech masks and data gloves, sartorial accessories considerably more comfortable than a spacesuit, would permit you to see the landscape, touch objects and even smell the air."
Latency (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless they solve the FTL comms problem it takes seconds even for a short distance like Earth to Moon.
So if you are going to explore some far away place, telepresence will still require you to ship some human to the general vicinity.
Re:Latency (Score:4, Funny)
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The ansible only provides faster than light communication.
True, but an AI on the ansible network can provide FTL travel.
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Uh... Aren't they forgetting the inconvenient slowness of the speed of light?
Unless they solve the FTL comms problem it takes seconds even for a short distance like Earth to Moon.
Yep. I guess this would be very useful for experiencing an alien place in a holodeck-like way, but it'll be all cached up. It's inevitable that to explore deep space we'll need autonomous robots, the 8.5 year round trip to the nearest star is a bit long to be waiting around...
Re:Latency (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh... Aren't they forgetting the inconvenient slowness of the speed of light?
Yes, because a member of the SETI institute never thought of that.
Honestly, Slashdotters really think *way* too highly of themselves... or way too little of the average scientist.
So if you are going to explore some far away place, telepresence will still require you to ship some human to the general vicinity.
No, because the idea isn't interactive exploration, in the sense that you remotely control the robotic probe in real time. The idea is that you collect massive amounts of data about a world, transmit it back, and then use that data to build a virtual model that you can then explore at your leisure.
Of course, such an approach will have limitations (if you decide you want to see what's under a rock, unless you knew ahead of time to turn it over, you'd have to then send instructions to a probe and then wait for the new data to come back). But its certainly an interesting idea, IMHO.
Re:Latency (Score:5, Insightful)
The nearest star is 4 light years away.
If we really want to explore space we should seriously figure out plans and methods to construct space colonies that can build space colonies - and maybe one day, ones that can survive interstellar journeys.
Then it doesn't matter so much how long we take to get to various places in the solar system or even the galaxy.
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Our probe farthest from earth(voyager 1) is a puny 14-15 lightours away from the sun. And it's been at it for 32 years. If my mathemagics are right that means those puny 4 lightyears will take roughly 75000 years to travel.
That's definitely not
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Our probe farthest from earth(voyager 1) is a puny 14-15 lightours away from the sun. And it's been at it for 32 years. If my mathemagics are right that means those puny 4 lightyears will take roughly 75000 years to travel.
I doubt speed was high on the list of Voyager 1's priorities.
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The furthest traveled object (Voyager 1) has gone for over 30 years with very high speed and has not even left the planetary system yet (it is around the distance of Eris, ~110AU), not to mention Heliopause [1,2].
Here is your flight map though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solarmap.png [wikipedia.org] (note: logarithmic)
Can we ever overtake this? Good luck getting a object faster than Voyager 1.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_1_entering_heliosheath_region.jpg [wikipedia.org]
[2] http://heavens-above.com/solar-escape.asp? [heavens-above.com]
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The author would have a much easier time making his case if he called it computer simulation instead of telepresence (which sort of implies a near real time experience) and referred to experiencing other worlds, rather than exploring them.
I would say blame the journalist, but the author of the Op-ed works at the Seti Institute, so he probably knew exactly what he was doing.
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I don't really agree. I'm not an astronomer or anything, but I would think that most of the interesting science that is done using interstellar probes will end up being done via data analysis, not utilizing systems that simulate environmental engagement (if that doesn't describe the essence of telepresence, then the word doesn't mean anything anyway).
So interstellar probes probably will be used to explore the universe, but describing something where input and feedback takes years as telepresence doesn't add
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Honestly, Slashdotters really think *way* too highly of themselves... or way too little of the average scientist.
I believe the question was about whether this plan takes into account that there's a speed limit. Realistically, the best idea within our present technological imagination is either solar wind sails or ion drive. With either of those, the further you go, the faster you'll go. But at the halfway point of either of those technologies so far, you reverse the craft (drive) because it takes as long to decelerate that accelerate. Now, doing an rough order of magnitude calculation where you achieve half of the
virtual astronauts .. (Score:3, Funny)
Send a craft with a virtual reality simulation of a crew running on board. On the journey have the VR simulation recreate contemporary earth culture. The VR program fabricates various crises for the 'crew' so as to keep them occupied and to distract them from the knowledge that they are in a simulation.
When the craft arrives at the destination connect the VR simulation to robots through short-range-high-bandwidth radio conn
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Yeah. It won't be remote controlled robots, that's for sure.
In general, we have a defeatist attitude regarding space exploration. I want to see people on the moon before I die. Even if it's only a VERY small colony with a dozen scientists and techs, with support personnel, it's a start. I want to hear plans for a Mars colony. Putting colonies in space will help to prevent the extermination of mankind due to a single cataclysmic event.
A few people have died exploring space, and we whine and cower, afrai
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Errr, wait. You seem to miss the point. No matter how efficient or inefficient the launch systems are, we need people off planet. Every single human female capable of bearing a child residing off earth represents a small victory. (feminazi's protests to that statement are duly noted - no need to waste bandwidth on them)
Damn rocket technology, I was addressing the survival of the human species. You want to wait til it's "economically feasible"?
We have the ABILITY to put dozens of people on the moon toda
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No, what we lack is the ability to build a self-sustaining sealed colony. Without that, those dozens of people will simply die a bit later than the rest of us in case of an apocalypse, making putting them there a waste of resources. And of course a dozen people is much too little genetic variance for a viable population anyway, even ignoring the high death rate due to the extremely hazardous and hostile enviro
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If we CAN come up with self-contained colonies, why not install a few on Earth? In the event of catastrophe, send
Re:Latency (Score:4, Insightful)
A large enough asteroid impact could cause the earth to look like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt [wikipedia.org]
I doubt that mankind would survive such an impact today.
The purpose of a lunar colony, in and of itself, is NOT to ensure the survival of such an impact. In all likelihood, the same impact would make the moon uninhabitable, sooner or later. (without the earth, the moon will probably not maintain a stable orbit around the sun, not to mention the debris raining down on the moon)
Rather, the lunar colony provides experience and knowledge applicable to building more colonies further out in the solar system, which will help to ensure mankind's survival.
Ulimately, the goal is to put man onto planets outside the solar system. Today, THAT is a near impossibility. But, if we are afraid to tackle the difficult project of colonizing the moon, we will certainly never achieve the near impossible.
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Uh... Aren't they forgetting the inconvenient slowness of the speed of light? Unless they solve the FTL comms problem...
Using quantum entanglement, that may not be so far off. If it turns out information can be transmitted near-instantaneously, telepresence could become a reality. Available bandwidth would only be limited by our capacity to create and address these particles and how fast we can read and write to them.
Of course, that's a big "if"...
Re:Latency (Score:5, Funny)
... followed by a big "else" and a big "end if".
There's still hope... (Score:2)
True, for our current knowledge of relativity and quantum physics.
According to the special theory of relativity (SR), instantaneous communications would violate causality because it would allow one to transmit information backwards in time under some circumstances. Special relativity has been *very* well tested, so scientists are pretty much sure that FTL communications is impossible.
OK, let's see how they tested SR. They did measurements here on
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Communication would be a logistical nightmare as the radio waves need to be aimed at a tiny speck once the space craft wanted to relay information.
On the other hand, photon entanglement (or similar quantum-level entanglement <hand wave>) is (theoretically) unaffected by distance and does not have "aiming problems." This was SciFi when Ender's Game (1985) [wikipedia.org] was written, but it has now been used at distances > 140km and rising [quantum.at]. Give them a few more years and I'll bet we will see intra-solar system
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0.25 second lag, I can tolerate it especially for RPGs and RTS, etc.
But at 8 seconds, forget it. I'm not playing online with your Sunian friends.
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Re:Latency (Score:4, Interesting)
Which speed of light are you using? The moon is about 385,000 km from Earth.
Re:Latency (Score:5, Funny)
Good news. Every number is a sum of powers of two.
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Earth-Moon on average is 1.25 seconds. So round trip time is 2.5 seconds.
Even earth-geostationary takes 0.12 seconds (round trip is about 0.25 seconds).
Maybe the universe has changed since I last checked.
My ping still sucks, I guess I should tell my ISP they should stop giving lame excuses and the speed of light has increased.
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Not if you live in the same solar system as the rest of us... lost, eh?
Re:Latency (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, I can't believe you've been moderated "Informative" with completely wrong information. Light travels from the Sun to the Earth in a little over 8 minutes, not 8 seconds. You are a little closer on the delay between the Earth and the Moon, but it is about 1.25 seconds, not .25.
Also, anything interactive requires a round trip, so for practical purposes, the delay is double that (about 16.5 minutes for the Sun and 2.5 seconds for the Moon).
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Speed of light: 300,000 km/s.
Earth to Moon: 384,000 km. I fail to see how we can manage a 0.25 second delay when we're more than 1.25 seconds away at lightspeed. 2.6 seconds turn-around for input-response.
Earth to Sun: 149,600,000 km. Looks a bit more than 8 light seconds. More like 8 light minutes. So nearly 16 minute turn-around for input-response.
Earth to Mars: varies from 90,000,000 k
Re:Latency (Score:4, Insightful)
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I've got just word for you, son: teledildonics.
Re:Latency (Score:5, Insightful)
Robotic exploration already accounts for 100% of our success in visiting other planets.
Hardly. 100%? A dozen people made it to the Moon (arguably a dwarf planet... and called such by the astronauts who went there) and performed more and better science than all other exploration of the Moon by all previous and subsequent robotic explorations of that body. An additional dozen people... mostly aircraft test pilots... got to at least see the Moon close up.
There are a whole lot of reasons to send actual people to these places... and information that comes from somebody who is there sensing the environment with their own nervous system and capable of seeing, feeling, and otherwise sensing things that simply aren't or can't be identified remotely.
Futhermore, simply being in a different environment and having to face new challenges that other people haven't coped with before creates new thought processes (new neural pathways) and forces you to think in ways that creates additional knowledge.... and often those new ways of thinking can be applied to existing problems in a new context. Getting other people to other planets... and yes, even other star systems (eventually... as technology and space technologies permit) can do nothing but help improve nearly everything that we hold dear to ourselves as human.
BTW, I sure hope that at least some exploration of space is for personal gratification. Hell, I know it is.... that is why they put up with the bureaucratic bullshit, red tape, government committee meetings, press conferences, doctors probing in places you never knew existed in the first place, and all of the other headaches to spaceflight.
One shuttle astronaut that I read about had the experience of being able to face away from the Earth, the Shuttle, and all of the equipment he had for about 10 minutes during an EVA while the rest of the crew was putting away some equipment and dealing with some other tasks. The view of the heavens he was able to experience for that brief moment of time with nothing between him and starlight but a think piece of Lexan (and an inch or so of air) was a breathtaking experience this astronaut claimed made the whole experience of becoming an astronaut worth the effort. Other astronauts have said the same thing during their "break" times where a common privilege is to simply gaze at the Earth during one complete orbit. We need more people to enjoy these simple pleasures that come from spaceflight.... and I hope that poets, writers, and artists of all other types can experience something of that nature eventually and be able to give the rest of us a glimpse of what that sort of experience is like.
You could even argue that the modern environmental movement; global warming concerns, oceanic pollution, nuclear winter, ozone depletion, and much more; was initiated because a few astronauts had the privilege of being able to see the Earth rise up over the horizon while orbiting the Moon. NASA gave them instructions to take pictures... as many as they could click with their cameras (including cameras mounted remotely on their vehicle) of the surface of the Moon. But when these guys saw the Earth come up... they realized on the spot with no other instructions that they had to get some photos of the Earth as well. Even today, these are some of the most heavily requested photos from NASA and are arguably the most duplicated images in the history of mankind. These images would not have been made if it weren't for a person in orbit around the Moon to make them.... the bureaucrats planning the mission on the ground never thought of making them.
Don't even get me started on how limited the robotic missions have really been... even though what has been accomplished with the robotic missions has been incredible. There is a role for robotic exploration, but there is a role for a physical presence of human being in space as well.... and not just in low-earth orbit.
We need a warp drive... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, but until then, lets just try another star trek approach [wikipedia.org].
Advances (Score:2)
This planet is entirely populated by lag monsters!
'Human' (Score:4, Interesting)
The real first step in exploring the stars will be re-evaluating what it means to be human. This article assumes that our descendants will be flesh-and-blood, with all of the weaknesses that that entails. But why should we bind our offspring to the ancient, easily-corrupted, and not so easily amended DNA that we ourselves use, when we could give them minds of silicon and arms of steel which fold up in an instant to sleep for the journey from star to star? Or better still, why not send a simple automaton, and transmit its brain at the speed of light? Human is as human does, I suppose, and the human era will quickly draw to a close if we decide that human must mean flesh and blood.
Re:'Human' (Score:5, Funny)
I find your idea fascinating, may I subscribe to your newsletter?
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But why limit them to exploration? They could also work in our factories, mines, and
Why does this all sound familiar suddenly?
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For an interesting and entertaining take on this concept (and other singularity-related ideas) check out the novel Accelerando [accelerando.org] by Charles Stross [antipope.org].
It's a great book by a fellow Slashdot user [slashdot.org], and you can download it free!
(Then go buy some of his other
Human exploration IS worthwhile IF... (Score:5, Insightful)
If your society can't be bothered, you're damned to spend more willingly on the NFL each year than you begrudge the entire space program.
Enjoy your cell phone.
kulakovich
Re:Human exploration IS worthwhile IF... (Score:5, Interesting)
The long term goal of all space exploration should be a permenant human presence on another planet, Mars most likely. All the science is great, but I want the human race to survive if the Earth takes a big hit.
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Earth already survived a Big Hit [imdb.com]. What makes you so sure we can't handle another one?
IF?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
I want the human race to survive if the Earth takes a big hit.
Did you mean to write "when" instead of "if" here?
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Eh, we're at the level of technology where we can stop a wide variety of Earth impactors, and where we're pretty good at tracking them now. Given another 20 years of development, I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes routine to move potential impactors into non-threatening orbits.
So as long as we maintain this level of technology, an assumption I'd say this whole argument hinges on, "if" is a more appropriate word. Of course, in the long-term, it's not hard to imagine a situation where we do lose that cap
Re:Human exploration IS worthwhile IF... (Score:4, Insightful)
Simple. If it takes longer than ~8 years to get benefits from an expensive project, it becomes much harder to get funding, at least in the US. Also, if development takes more than 8 years on something high-profile and expensive, there's a good chance you lose funding at the start of a new administration. Doing this would take longer to even get going. I'd venture a guess that in other countries there are similar election-cycle limited periods for project funding. In other words, we'd need a completely new structure for the way we conduct this kind of business, something thats better able to (forgive the phrase) stay the course as well as better able to see and understand very long term benefits.
Also, we have no data on maintaining systems that would last that long autonomously, so while you could theoretically make something capable of getting there and braking into orbit, its unlikely you could build it to have a reasonable expectation of success. That of course is a technical problem, so solutions are out there; the political problems are the ones that'll kill you.
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I agree, we need to focus more on space exploration. There are some locations on Mars that would be kick-ass locations for Starbucks.
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...you are interested in something other than sports, iPods, and Coach bags.
Personally, I'm a big supporter of the space program, but it's totally unrealistic and, I'd argue, immoral, to ask individuals to disregard their own interests for benefits that almost certainly won't be realized in their lifetimes and may very well never be realized at all.
If your society can't be bothered, you're damned to spend more willingly on the NFL each year than you begrudge the entire space program.
NASA's budget is approximately $18B/year [nasa.gov]. The NFL's revenue is approximately $6B/year [plunkettresearch.com].
Enjoy your cell phone.
Thanks, I do. I consider it to be a technological marvel, and a great example of how dedication to scientific research and technological achievement c
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Personally, I'm a big supporter of the space program, but it's totally unrealistic and, I'd argue, immoral, to ask individuals to disregard their own interests for benefits that almost certainly won't be realized in their lifetimes and may very well never be realized at all.
I completely agree. This is completely analogous to Social Security and the Federal Deficit. We should look out only for ourselves. It is totally immoral to care about the interests of our grandchildren after we are gone
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I completely agree. This is completely analogous to Social Security and the Federal Deficit. We should look out only for ourselves. It is totally immoral to care about the interests of our grandchildren after we are gone
I never suggested that it was immoral for you to care about your grandchildren.
It's immoral for me to force you to care about your grandchildren.
There's a big difference.
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I completely agree. This is completely analogous to Social Security and the Federal Deficit. We should look out only for ourselves. It is totally immoral to care about the interests of our grandchildren after we are gone
Addendum to my previous post:
Your confusing me for an Objectivist got me a little off topic.
What if you believe a better, more immediately productive way to insure the security of future generations is to spend money on new energy technologies, or even Social Security, here on Earth rather on manned space exploration?
We live in a society with enough different and creative ideas and wealth that all of these choices can get a chance to prove themselves.
As I mentioned previously, I support the space progra
Round trick tickets? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sending "watchers" first, robots, AIs, telepresence, e
What risk? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sending "watchers" first, robots, AIs, telepresence, etc, could avoid some of the risks, but will we have enough time?
If there is one resource we have a shitload more than we need or know how to handle its - people. Should we really care for their safety back on Earth?
1.8 people die every second. 106 every minute. Do we hold a minute of silence for those 106 every other minute? People are highly expendable.
Safety is not a problem. If you send colony ships time is also not a problem. Even technology is not really a problem - even now.
Problem is in the liftoff price per kilogram.
Once we get it down to around the price of an
Inflatable space ships (Score:2)
We need modern dirigibles. They would be lighter than air. The launched ship wouldn't even need to be very big. If it is to be hone of a colony, it can be enlarged as the population increases. All you would need is a source of materials for enlarging the skeleton and generating more gas. If not carried on board, we can use robotic scout vehicles to search among the asteroids. Once, in space, the actual gas isn't very important, I would recommend that it be something breathable by humans, animals, and o
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About the liftoff cost, if we have ever an space elevator costs them could go a bit down. Till them, sending anything far is so expensive that any kind of fail is a big risk.
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You or any other individual doesn't need to live that long. All you need is to create a vehicle that can be a comfortable home to a group of people who can live together and reproduce without killing each other off. They can work at maintaining the vehicle, producting food, and use simulations for entertainment and exercise. If the group doesn't contain pairs that can breed safely, even that can be acomplished with in vitro fertilization, using simulations of better than the real thing to make it more fu
Wow (Score:2)
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GoLive will probably get the juicy contract for setting up the data networks for any far reaching space exploration.
With their new, proprietary FTL compression algorithms, they have the technology to render HD quality video in the cloud and transmit it to end users in better than real-time.
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Yes, thanks.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm ready. Hell, I'm 52 (errrr, uhhhhm, 53 tomorrow) and I'm ready to go. What's wrong with the younger generation? For that matter, what's wrong with MY GENERATION?!?!?!
Build that big assed Roman Candle, give me some room and some food, and light that bastard off!!
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Is that what the NASCAR people are trying to do?
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Build that big assed Roman Candle, give me some room and some food, and light that bastard off!!
Wow - you really know how to party for your birthday!
I'm hoping we can use this upcoming SETI tech so you can invite me to the next one!
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The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time goes (relative to home).
Only at significant fractions of c. Accelerating and decelerating people to those speeds will take many years.
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Re:Ignores time dilation (Score:5, Informative)
Who cares, we're not going to be accelerating at much more than 1g in any case, and probably a great deal less.
(B) At that acceleration, how long does it take to reach a significant fraction of c?
0.95c is about turnover speed for a 1g trip to Alpha Centauri. It'll take about 21 months to reach that speed, and another 21 months to stop. So Alpha Centauri at 1g is about 3.5 years away.
Everything else is farther, of course. But not a lot farther, since you've done the slow part already. Twenty years can get you anywhere in the galaxy at one g.
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Huh? The galaxy is 100,000 light years across. Even at .95c, that's a lot longer than twenty years... or were you planning to accelerate past c?
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You are missing how time dilation works, it's not linear.
If the distance is greater than a few lightyears then you are going to be moving faster than .95c, say perhaps .98. At that speed the effects of time dilation are going to be even greater.
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Ah, okay-- I misunderstood. I didn't realize he was talking about 20 years in the traveler's frame of reference.
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Twenty years can get you anywhere in the galaxy at one g.
Try 74,000 years. Our Milky Way galaxy is approx. 100,000 light-years in diameter. We are about 26,000 light-years from the center. Even at the speed of light, it would still take us 74,000 years to reach the far side of the Milky Way galaxy.
Twenty years would only get us, well, about 20 light years away from our Solar System which is drop in the bucket compared to the size of our galaxy.
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A: For extremely short durations, a small sample size of humans have survived 150G. However, the green 50G shock stickers are commonly used on dummies to equate to major injury. 9G is about the most anyone can take without blacking out, even lying down. I suspect for long-term endurance you may be limited to 2 or 3G and even that would require extreme physical training.
B: Google calculator can easily answer this one: http://www.google.com/search?q=c%2F(9.8m%2Fs^2*3) [google.com]. Replace the 3 with whatever acceleratio
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Humans can sustain an acceleration of 10m/s^2 (a little more than 1g). One day (86,400s) would lead to a speed of 864,00m/s. To reach a speed of .9c (270,000,000m/s) would require about a year. It would require the same amount of time to decelerate. The problem is that even a speed of .9c does not give you much time dilation. We have gamma=1/sqrt(1-.9^2), which is 1/sqrt(1-.81) or 1/sqrt(.19), which is 1/.44, or about 2.3. Hence, one would age 44 years on a 100-light-year voyage.
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In order to get really really fast ships, with some kind of propulsion that could get you up to 0.9 c. Typical rocket propulsion hits a law of diminishing returns limit at around 0.35 c... based on that, I tend to see very high subluminal speeds as not much different on the technological scale as the various types of superluminal travel. That is we can see ways where you can do it without breaking the laws of physics, but any actual, practical technology to do it is as yet unimaginable.
Actually, as I'm wr
Sooner or later (Score:5, Interesting)
Saying that even multi-generational ships are not "a reasonable goal" begs the question (and is debatable... after all, this is an "opinion piece").
Reasonable or not, eventually it will be done. I have nothing against robotic explorers, but only as precursors to something better.
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we are going to have to put some human beings somewhere else besides this one ball of rock.
That's not true. We could let the human race go extinct instead. Much cheaper. The true economist's choice.
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Whether it is settlement OR just resource mining, it will happen, eventually. I understand his opinion, but that is all it is, and I do not agree with it.
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I think that if life from Earth reaches the stars then the creatures that do it will have the same similarity to Homo Sapiens as Homo Sapiens has to the first creatures to crawl out of the oceans...
Idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
Not the proposal exactly (well with latency actually yes), but...
Robot probes don't require life support systems, don't get sick or claustrophobic and don't insist on round-trip tickets.
They also can't use intuition and years of training and curiosity combined to go, "hey what's that" as they glance over to the side at something a rover would have just rolled past.
We could learn more in a day of manned exploration of Mars for example than we have with the entire exploration effort to date.
Humans are too flexible not to send out for exploration, and I hate to say it but far cheaper to build (though again you have the issue of latency).
I also refuse to believe we'll never be able to freeze and re-animate a living person hundreds of years later, though that will take a good long while to get right.
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Futurama did it!
Erm (Score:2, Insightful)
The humans on earth can only "experience" what has been observed by the remote observer. If the remote observer passes by a planet and scans it at a great distance, the human explorer will be placed into a distorted bizarro world with poor resolution, and lifting a rock cannot be done because the remote explorer could not check to see what was under the rock.
Alternatively, you can have an AI "fill in the gaps" and assume what was under the rock. In that case you might as well play a video game.
Misleading article (Score:5, Insightful)
For telepresence ("feeling being present in a remote place") you need to be able to have real-time response to your actions, not only watching what essentially amounts to a souped up QuicktimeVR. The interactivity is not optional and that doesn't come from VR goggles and gloves but from the realtime feedback look. Which is obviously missing, unless your want to do something like use alien planet data for playing CounterStrike or be happy with 6.47*10^11 ms ping ... (that is the roundtrip time to Epsilon Eridani mentioned in the article - 10.5 light years away).
It is a pity that people talk about virtual reality and related fields without even understanding the basics - but that is the consequence of media hype surrounding this field, together with people calling non-immersive, often even non-interactive applications "virtual reality". Computer games, SecondLife, QuicktimeVR are not VR, period - you cannot really achieve meaningful feeling of presence there. Of course, it sounds and sells better if you stick a gee-whizz sticker on the box ...
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, it sounds and sells better if you stick a gee-whizz sticker on the box ...
"Windows Vista Capable" ?
Don't let second lifers at the data (Score:2, Funny)
My God ... It's full of flying phalluses
Wait (Score:2)
A.I. (Score:2)
Telepresence will enable us to see what happened a lot of time ago, but takes out human choices for all practical reasons for interesting enough distances.
When the robots land, what they'll find is... (Score:5, Interesting)
More advanced robots, that we developed (along with much faster propulsion systems) in the decades since the originals were launched.
Hat tip: Carl Sagan, I think. Or maybe Azimov.
- Alaska Jack
The problem with robotic exploration is..... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sort of like where we are right now with explorations of Mars; the first Mars Rover searched for life and didn't find any. Now the Mars polar probe has discovered what may be anomalous methane readings - but we can't remotely reconfigure the probe to figure out what we
Silly argument (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's an idea... we can do what we've always done which is BOTH. We were putting men on the moon and planning men on mars whilst sending 'telepresence' probes to Saturn and Jupiter. We can put men on mars and plan to orbit further out whilst out 'telepresence' maps out Pluto and beyond. And we continue to push outwards with the probes paving the way with their data and humans following up and doing what we do best.
Phillip.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
Ob: (Score:2)
I, for one, would welcome them !