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Science

Interstellar Travel 67

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
Danse writes "Steven Kilston, a staff consultant at Ball Aerospace & Technologies, has drawn up a design for an interstellar spaceship. Interesting read, even if it will never happen in our lifetime, or our kids.. or their kids.. or.. etc. Here's the article. " This amuses me. And at only $20 Trillion, it seems like a bargain. Kinda odd that someone has thought this through this far. I thought I needed a life.
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Interstellar Travel

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  • I was even more surprised at his estimate of 200 years to design the thing. I mean, it's big, but it's only about the size of Manhattan. Manhattan as we know it was both "designed" and built in about two hundred years, and that was being lazy about it. I think, given current design and management techniques, once the appropriate technology is available, NASA could do the formal design within 20 years. If you include developing and testing the appropriate technology into the estimate, than we are probably looking at 100 years today, or 40 if it starts after we have a few major orbital construction projects under our belt.

  • yeah.. I think we all probably dreamed up alot of things when we were kids that are just now being developed or are still being researched. I remember back in third grade, drawing jets that used thrust vectoring (not for vtol like the harrier, I mean in-flight). Granted, I didn't have a clue how it would work, but I thought it would be cool if they could use flaps or movable nozzles to allow the thrust to push them in different directions. Maybe this is why we should find better ways to educate people while allowing them to pursue their interests to the fullest extent possible.

  • Shouldn't we point Hubble at Alpha Centari/Beta Centari/Proxima Centari and see if there are any decent looking planets there?
  • Yes! Let's just provide everybody with video games so they can rot their brains even further than they would if they just sat around for 10,000 years!

    Besides, even Zelda 64 doesn't take THAT long to beat.
  • They may be using UNICODE characters not present in some of the more primitive fonts, but they are adhering to the HTML spec.

    Either upgrade your fonts/system to support the latest (ISO standard!) character sets and/or continue your e-mail writing campaign. If they discover that a great portion of their target audience isn't capable of seeing the special characters they're using, perhaps they'll re-evalulate their use of such characters.
  • I think he knew that. Hence the ";)".

    Stop being one of those flaming, unthinking AC's.
  • It isn't particularly practical, though. While the idea of a huge starship taking 10,000 years to travel to a new planet appleas to the romantic inside us all, it wouldn't work out. Someone mentioned the idea of war; this could possibly be avoided by carefully screening the original passengers to make sure that they would be friendly with everyone and instill the same values in their children. But first you have the financial cost (no one's got enough money to build the thing), construction considerations (you'd have to build it in orbit), and the fact that it's too darn slow.

    I think we should wait for a couple of technological breakthroughs, chiefest among them force fields (that way the ship could go much faster, using the force fields to sweep debris harmlessly out of the way before it ever reached the ship) before we try this thing.
  • Anyone ever read Larry Niven's book Ringworld?

    This reminds me of it in some ways. The ringworld was an artificially constructed ring around a star that held a living population.

    Except it died (the population, that is). No new materials. Which meant no new construction and only limited advances in technology. And, as someone mentioned above, what civilization can go even 500 years, let alone 10,000, without running into wars, religious fanaticism, et al. ?

    Sorry... not feasable. Not with that timeline.

    - Sean

    - FiReStOrM
  • Superluminal travel (faster than light) has not been disproven, in fact wormhole theory allows for it, if only in an unpredictable manner.

    Anyways, superluminal vessals are our only hope for meaningful exploration of the galaxy. You'll never talk enough stable, intelligent folks into a giant tin can to spend their lives with no hope of obtaining their goal.
    --
    Aaron Gaudio
    "The fool finds ignorance all around him.
  • More on interstellar travel... Go read that book. It's about Freeman Dyson and his son George, and interstellar travel, and all kinds of nifty stuff. By Kenneth Brower.
  • What did Azimov write in Rama? I didn't realize Arthur Clarke got his help. :)
    ---
  • "Aww fuck.. the atmosphere is mainly ammonia. Okay guys, back in the ship..."
  • Actually it's not so bad. The drag comes from the same material as the fuel you're collecting -- probably by a magnetic field system of kinds. It would have to be ionized (UV source?) to be effectively collected.

    The energy that hydrogen fuel can release is of order 0.1% of rest mass. This means

    v^2 / 2c^2 = 0.001 ==> v = 0.04 c or 4% of the speed of light. Alpha Centauri in 100 years. No relativistic time dilatation yet to speak of... probably a job for robots. Which will be culturally indistinguishable from biological humans by the time this becomes actual :-)

    (A little practical problem is that ordinary hydrogen fusion is a weak interaction, not like the deuterium fusion in our test installations here on Earth. Hopefully they'll find some suitable catalytic process :-)

  • Imagine if you were born on this thing!
    and you had to live the rest of your life on it!
    I may go mental and toast the whole dam place...

    But then again, i won't know what i would be missing, unless they bring videos and books and stuff like that. So, lets get this straight.
    A flying dictatorship prison heading off to the wide blu yonder with just enough energy to get where its going and no way to get back...

    Where do i sign up?
  • I think it would be kind of neat to live on a large rotating civilization traveling at 1.3 million mph. I only wonder if we could advance technology during the trip.
  • Let's take all of the money Microsoft has, invest it in Yahoo, and then build a space ship in a few years. :-)

    Ben
  • It seems kind of odd that that kind of investment would be made when in all of recorded history (about [46]000 years of it) we have wars and famines and many numbers of unknown and uncontrollable factors, including hostile leaders and hostile people along with diseases, etc... I really don't think that humans as a race could survive for 10000 years in only a space the size of Manhattan.
  • What civilization can go 500 years without war, overpopulation, religious fanaticism, or the hope that they could ever take advantage of 300 generations of technical advantages to make the trip shorter?

  • This type of design is called a generation ship. I think the reason it is called that should be pretty obvious. While the design and concept as far as starships go is pretty simple. On paper the concept will work, but reallity is much more complex.

    The first thing that makes this ship inpracticle is speed. Anything going less than 10% the speed of light is a waist of time. It would be better to stay home and develop faster engines than leave at anything less. At 10% light speed you could reach the nearest start in about 40 years. One lifetime, not many. Anything less and you might just find people there waiting for you.

    The next thing is life spans. Like was pointed out, someone in that 299 generations is going to get piss or just flip out and toast the place. Even at 10% light speed it would still take generations to get to stars many light years away.

    There are several ways aound this. One being faster ships could take advantage of time dilation and make the trip seem shorter. Another is sleeper ships. Instead of generation ship, you send one generation in hybernation. And there is one more answer people seem to keep missing, longer life spans.

    People seem to keep pointing out when it comes to ship design there is no telling where we will be in 100 years much less 500. Well the same holds for medical technology too. Where the lifespan of a human in the middle ages was 40 years, now it's 70 years, and the next generation it will be 120 years. Where will it be in the year 2600? Say by that time aging has been elimiated and people stay young forever. What is 500 years to someone who is going to live forever?

  • I came across this many years ago and was impressed by the thought in it. Sorry, the only copy I have is in postscript. I esp. like the ideal of sending out pellets of fuel a head of the ship in a "accelleration track."

    Heavy Explorer [wbs.net]

  • In the 70's the British Interplanetary Society tried to design a hypothetical interstellar space probe.

    This was going to travel at about 10% of the spped of light, but the neat idea they had to deal with the possibility of colliding with small fragments was to use a dustcloud travelling in front of the probe.

    Any small fragemtns which were in the probe's path would encounter the cloud first, and would burn up into a coud of plasma which the probe would handle more easily. There would be a number of maintenance robots which would maintain the cloud at a sufficient density over the entire (60 year) trip.

    Interestingly enough the BIS also published a mission design to put man on the moon, in the 1930's - but that used the technology of the day. Solid fuel rocket clusters, sextants, and lots of coffee to keep the navigator awake - no computers existed.

  • Who would go on this mission?
    a) Why convicts, of course. They have no choice, and we outfit each with an exploding collar from "The Running Man."
    b) People that hate Sol system politics/society/yellow suns/bread from earth grains/mayonaise/luffa sponges/etc.
    c) Scientologists
    d) Dumb people we can trick onto it with a trail of Recee's Pieces.
    e) Microsoft Tech Help, all six of them.

    Well, maybe not all six of the Microsoft tech help. We need to save 2 as breeding pairs.

    As for a y2k society (1) you would look to SF for the answers. Presently unable to remember the title or author. The plot is: Aztec society on inside of cylinder believes that gods are angry over past indescretion and sealed people into valley, will release when they are no longer angry. Also, gods decree that you will only marry people from your side of the river. Christian Flaguelent (sp?) group lives inside hull and is in charge of wathcing over Aztec to keep population within correct bounds, keep them from becoming to curious, and keep the 2 sides of the river from interbreeding. Thus we have to societies traveling to some habital planet over very long time. When they get there, supposedly intermarriage between the Aztec from different sides of the river will release the recessive SuperGenius contained within. Thus, hunky-dory, they will arrive at planet without wiping out eachother and by starting in savagery, end in wisdom...blah,blah,blah... anyone know the name of this???

    And what ever happened to smaller, faster, cheaper??? It would be much more intelligent to send out 1,000 ships of 1,000 people at 1/50th the speed of light. Smaller. Faster. Cheaper. And why the hell does he not use a ion drive. We're talkin some huge distances which are perfect for this technology.



    PK-Cola, obey my greed, buy my poduct.


    (1) (hey, wouldn't it be a funny think if all of them died due to a bug with y2k,y3k,or y4k; just within the new solar system)
  • Hi Rob, hi all,
    we *need* visionaries that dream up these plans, and we need new frontiers. It's in our collective genes to want to keep going on (I hope!). Even if this project turns out impractical to put into action, there will be other possibilities, and I'm absolutely certain that man will some day leave the cradle of his home planet. With technological progress still showing an ever accelerating growth rate, I don't even think it will be as long and as costly as in this example. As for the sociological problems mentioned in some replies, well, call me naive, but isn't this also a chance that a model society could find ways around extinction by self-destruct if they are forced to find them (or perish)?

  • Why not simulate the society development in such a ship with a live-action role playing game? Approximate the development between and play a campaign of games simulating some subsociety every few generations. Would take some years and be fun.

    Anyone willing to participate a writing team (we've not quite activated the project yet)?
  • It's pretty slow, at only 130 million mph. That's only a small fraction of the speed of light! It will take approximately 21 years to reach even Alpha Centauri! And never mind more distant star systems... Think of it, someone who was born when the ship leaves Earth will be a grown person by the time the ship gets to Alpha Centauri. (Actually, time dilation means that a 20-year mission appears to be only 19.6 years from the POV of someone aboard the ship; they've lost a whole 138 days traveling at that speed...). It would really be practical only for manned interplanetary travel, because a journey to Pluto would only be about two days at such a high speed. I'm gonna go out on a limb for a moment... Now unless the US Government has found a warp drive in the alien spacecraft they are said to have recovered, our chances of interstellar travel are real slim. Some guy who claims to have been in the Groom Lake ("Area 51") base's inner sanctum says that there was some kind of graviton generating device which was the basis for the alien propulsion systems. That allowed them to get to distant places while hardly moving at all... On a skeptical note, actually proving that such a thing is even possible will probably require a quantum theory of gravity, which is something we probably won't have for a long time (good luck, Professor Hawking!).
    --
  • Nobody knows for sure what technology will look like a few years down the road.
    Perhaps someone will invent a new hull material that can withstand high energy collisions, thus enabling a ship travel at a higher velocity more safely.
    I am still waiting for transporter technology to be perfected. :)
  • my lynx asked me if I wanted to accept an invalid cookie (something like one for the whole domain when it's coming out of just one machine), and I said 'no'. no problemo.
  • We should send all hairdressers, fashion designers, PR people, management consultants, advertising staff, insurance salespeople, art, film and literary critics, the staff at Ziff Davis, a certain company from Redmond, country and western musicians, Celine Dion, the US Republican Party, the UK Tories, the Australian Liberal Party, Deng Xiaoping, Pinochet, Boris Yeltsin, the Spice Girls, the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Oliver North, Jerry Fallwell, fundamentalists, the NSA, the CIA, Saddam Hussein, Jacques Chirac, Leonardo di Caprio...


    I think I can come up with a million if need be.
  • I have seen many designs for this idea and the one I find the most compelling is the following:

    100 gram computer with attached ultralite solar sails (roughly 10 km surface area) with mirrors opposing (light has been found to extert pressure upon materials with different pressure exterted upon different materials, hence it would be able to start and stop). Assemble a pseudo-lens with a radius being the orbital distance Jupiter is from the Sun. Calculations show that this object will travel at 90% the speed of light if powered sufficiently. Once the object lands (perhaps somewhat like Pathfinder landed) the computer has programmed nano-bots following a Von Neumann engine algorithm. Have this program set up to create a livable place for a group of humans. Also have this program start to create and launch similar craft expanding the landings exponentially. Finally have the program clone humans and assimilate them into their new environment.

    This seems very plausible within 500 years and would cost about $200 billion to build. In 600,000 years the entire galaxy would be colonized and the universe would be colonized at roughly 90% its speed of expansion (the speed of light). The only thing that might not be plausible is educating a cloned human...

  • Yawn (Score:1)

    by K. ( 10774 )
    Orion (reactive nuclear drive) - ~10% c - could be built tomorrow.

    Daedalus (mother of all particle accelerators) - ~90%c - could be built in the next couple of hundred years

    The Big Space Can - ~0.2c - could be built over the next 500 years if we start now?

    I know which I'd choose.

    K.
    -
  • I'm upset now that I missed Steve Kilston's presentation here at Ball Aerospace. Hopefully they taped it. Just wish we could get a contract for something like this. :)

    afniv

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
    "We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"


  • As painful as the truth is, there may be no way to travel faster than the speed of light, and traveling colonies like this may not be socially feasible. The harsh reality is, we may very well be stuck here on planet earth. After we get done shedding tears over that revelation, let's consider something else: what would we do with other planets if we were able to colonize them?


    For goodness' sake, we can't even take care of the one planet we have, and people want to go out and colonize more! I think that the energy put into fantasies of escaping our planet would be better harnessed by actually trying to make the one we have livable. If we succeeded in this, perhaps we would find that there is no reason for wanting to leave, and that the planet we have here is plenty enough.


    Lao Tzu though so, and wrote about just this in the Tao te Ching:


    If a country is governed wisely,
    its inhabitants will be content.
    They enjoy the labor of their hands
    and don't waste time inventing
    labor-saving machines.
    Since they dearly love their homes,
    they aren't interested in travel.
    There may be a few wagons and boats,
    but these don't go anywhere.
    They may be an arsenal of weapons,
    but nobody ever uses them.
    People enjoy their food,
    take pleasure in being with their families,
    spend weekends working in their gardens,
    delight in the doings of the neighborhood.
    And even though the next country is so close
    that people can hear its roosters crowning and its
    dogs barking,
    they are content to die of old age
    without ever having gone to see it.

  • That would be the fairly recently late Isaac Asimov, not the really late Sir Isaac Newton.

    Also, this whole spacecraft/colony concept reminds me a lot more of an earlier Asimov novel ``Children of the Stars''. I hope I didn;t butcher the title too badly; I read it nearly thirty years ago. It was about a spaceship, not too unlike the one described by the Bell researcher, with a colony onboard. After several dozen generations, the onboard society loses sight of the fact that they on a ship, their society breaks down, no one fixes the machines, etc. etc. until the hero discovers the truth.

    Great book if you can find it. Most bookstores nowadays carry the Foundation trilogy and not much else of the Master.

  • Of decendants of these brave pioneers who spend 2100 years getting to Alpha Centauri only to discover that it's a long-settled backwater with a bunch of hick cyborgs running antimatter fuel depot.

    Or worse. At 500 years per light year, Alpha Centuri is going to take a little over 2000 years to reach. But in that time progress on Earth won't stand still. Imagine if ~ 500 years after launching it some form of 'warp' travel becomes possible. Your generation ship is still plodding along, and will arrive at AC only to discover that it's already been colonised by people from Earth, and that they are probably viewed as historical relics.

    There's a good SF short story that has this as a plot, but I forget the title and author :-(

    N

  • Not to flame you, but:
    Interstellar space is mostly empty. What would cause the drag?

    Trying to learn sumthin...
  • Even better, they would find out that the humans who spent an extra 500 years developing better engines have been there for 1000 years and trashed the place. Ha ha.
  • Actually, IIRC, the population was "attacked" by another species that wanted to take over the Ringworld. I won't give any details for people who might want to read the book, but basically someone attacked their technology and caused the civilation to fall.
  • Back in the seventies, no one thought that computers would take off like they have. For those of you that don't know, computers started off as something that would take up the size of a room and use huge vacum tubes and could do little more than a modern day 10 cent calculator.

    Likewise, I think a similar boom willhappen in the manufactoring industry, accelerating the timetable for this project.

    The creation of a new propulsion system would go a long way in creating a viable traveling system. Say we figure out how to harness the power of gravity and be able to project a black hole by use of energy fields. Imagine the SPEEDS we would be able to hit. Black holes absorb even light!

    Any advancements in the field would do a similar change in the way this is constructed, possibly driving down the price, and affecting the design, big time.

    I look for this in the middle of the 21st Century.
  • This guy's apparently given more thought to dominating the universe than Gates...
    I guess the big question is: If the Earth is supposed to be held in a delicate balance of gravitational forces, then couldn't the loss of enough mass to construct and launch such a vessel, propel it continuously, and support its inhabitants throw the earth out of orbit, hurtling it through the solar system at about the same speed as the ship itself? I guess it's an all-or-nothing travel package...
  • The idea is very very grand. Do we have alternatives to this plan. I don't think it is very vice to send a human colony for 7500 years(300 generations) floating in the space looking for a place to live(We are just 5000 years now). This colony will advance knowledge, technology etc and grow during the journy. Can we predetermine evolution of this colony over 7500 years. As an alternative, attempting superluminous travel is much more appealing than the space cylinder.
  • I'll bet that the passengers would have a hard time remembering for 10000 years how to live on a planet. There ship would be home, and they would probably decide that it would be a better idea to stay on the ship when they got there. They would probably not be the same type of people that we sent, maybe even evolving to their environment on the ship to a degree. A few of the brave may decide to try to land and give life on the planet a shot, but I doubt people would be itching to leave the ship. There culture would be very interesting, having more history on the ship than we have clearly documented now, or when they were sent (26th century + 100 century's) They would be sent as 26th century earthlings and arrive as 100th century shiplings. I wonder that if about say 1/3000th of the population of Earth were sent would only 1/3000th decide to leave the ship? That would be 334 people. Not a large colony. That's assuming that they had to scrounge and maybe force the original colonists off the Earth. The people that would want to get off the ship probably would be higher. Anyway what about Advancement? These people would effectivly have no resources to build advancements with. They could retro-fit or use their ship as a resource (as we use the earth) but that is not alot of material to work with. I wonder how the waste would be recycled? You can't make something of nothing so it probably would be a good idea to hang onto all waste in case it could be used again (limited material). If anyone knows how much trash or waste 1 million people produce a year that would be an indication of how much material they would use, even say reclaiming 60% that would probably be significant. Oh well it won't happen that way so thinking about it is just harmless speculation(?!?) Maybe.
  • Talk about a ridiculous waste of time for completely idle and useless speculation.
    Big Flaw #1: In the development time frame for this "Project", the government will change substantially about 75 times, undermineing constant funding and support. Currently governments have trouble with static funding over decade time scales.
    Big Flaw #2: Even assuming it gets built, the creating a system which guarantees a stable, focused society for 300 generations seems to me to be impossible. In just one generation with such a limited population there would be a major shift in interests and abilities. In 30, I imagine they could compound enough to undermine the operation of the colony at all. Lack of technicians and such because little Johnny would rather be a slacker. Or went to jail.

    Sorry. Pie in the sky. I almost regret wasting this much time on it...
  • why not be transformed into the space baby like in 2001?
    Arthur C Clarke roughly said this in his book 2001 : first people will transfer their brains to machines, then take out their brain completely and be completely electronic, then they will be totally immortal when they are transformed into pure enery, like the star child.
  • Why is it people seem to be so cynical? What are we on earth right now but 'stuck in a tin can for your entire life'? How would someone born on a generation ship have any reason to complain? What would they be comparing to? Pictures of mother Earth? Really, how many people have tried to destroy the world? Why would anyone do that on a spaceship if not on Earth? We're not any less trapped or isolated or stuck right now! A generation ship would need its own aritificial climates in order to scrub the air, clean the water, grow the food, and provide respite for the populace; if we can solve the artificial gravity problem, I would imagine snow, rain, floods, sunshine, and all other manner of weather for variety.
    Likewise landscapes would be varied among scrublands, mountains, fields, marshes, etc for all their various technical and psychological uses. I dunno, I think it would work!

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