The Space Thread

[Splish]

Originally Posted by mic of Orion

70-80 years from working starship antimatter drive.

I thought Cochrane discovered Warp drive in 2063



Still, it's starting to sound more and more like Star Trek

[mic of Orion]

Originally Posted by Splish

I thought Cochrane discovered Warp drive in 2063



Still, it's starting to sound more and more like Star Trek

I am more realistic, 70-80 years first antimatter drive, 140-150 first warp drive

actually more, 250 is more likely. Warp drive requires a lot more power than 3rd generation fusion reactor could provide. Antimatter as energy source is only twice as efficient as fusion, and I think fusion as a result of that could be preferred choice for large starships, fusion can be made abundant, and reactors by than (2250-2270) could be made as large as they need to be, generating 500 petawatts would be a child's game

First generation fusion reactor - 500megawats (current test reactors)
2nd generation - 5 gigawatts (2040-2050)
3rd generation - 50 gigawatts (2070-2080)
4th generation - 500 gigawatts (2120-2150)
5th generation - 5-25 exawats(2180-2200_

and so on...

[Newcastle Guy]

I'm about to watch "Who Is Afraid Of A Big Black Hole?" on I player:

LINK

Hopefully it'll be good, and explain more about what caused the Big Bang.

[Newcastle Guy]

Very interesting, it's just so irritating that we don't have an answer yet I hope I'm around for the day when we finally figure out quantum gravity. Or whatever the hell it turns out to be

[The Sage]

Originally Posted by wjfox

I've created a Flash animation of Mars being terraformed. See the latest update on my site.

Great work Will, but do you truly believe it will be a mere 100 years before we are in the position to initiate a project that will require worldwide co-operation, and more money, long term commitment & planning, effort and technology than the world has ever seen? Perhaps you are a little more optimistic towards humanity than I...

[Newcastle Guy]

Compare to how far we've come in the last 100 years. If you were to transport a middle-aged person from 1900 to the year 2009 they'd probably die of shock...

[The Sage]

Yes but also look at what most science fiction writers a mere 40-50 years ago thought we'd have by the year 2009...

[Newcastle Guy]

Originally Posted by The Sage

Yes but also look at what most science fiction writers a mere 40-50 years ago thought we'd have by the year 2009...

In some regards they were too optimistic, in some too pessimistic. I mean look at the internet and home computers. People practically live their lives around them now, and I doubt their importance was considered by many even when Bill Gates whipped his first version of Microsoft up

We don't know for sure what the world will be like in 100 years, the only thing we do know for sure is that it will be a very different place. Making predictions doesn't do any harm, but frankly I can't comprehend what the world will be like in 2100. I just hope I'm around to find out.

[Octoman]

Originally Posted by Newcastle Guy

I'm about to watch "Who Is Afraid Of A Big Black Hole?" on I player:

LINK

Hopefully it'll be good, and explain more about what caused the Big Bang.

Thanks for flagging that. I watched it myself last night too. I dont think there was a great deal of new stuff there but the way they presented it helped clarify a lot of things for me. Especially how understanding the singularity at the heart of a Black Hole could be a window on understanding the big bang.

[mic of Orion]

Wild Solar System Spotted Around Distant Star


NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured this infrared image of a giant halo of very fine dust around the young star HR 8799, located 129 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. The brightest parts of this dust cloud (yellow-white) likely come from the outer cold disk similar to our own Kuiper belt (beyond Neptune's orbit). The huge extended dust halo is seen as orange-red. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Ariz.


A young star observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope appears to be home to a wild – and young – planetary system that shares some of the frenetic dynamics thought to have shaped the early years of our own solar system.

The Spitzer observations suggest young planets circling the star are disturbing smaller comet-like bodies, causing them to collide and kick up a huge halo of dust.

The star, called HR 8799, became one of the first of two stars with planets that were directly imaged from Earth in November 2008. Ground-based telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory, both in Hawaii, took images of three planets orbiting in the far reaches of the system. Each of the three distant worlds is roughly 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

HR 8799 is younger and more massive than our sun, which is more than 4.5 billion years old and more than 300,000 times the mass of Earth. It is about 129 light-years from Earth, so scientists weren't sure if Spitzer would be able to snap a picture of its debris disk. But to their amazement, it succeeded.

The Spitzer team, led by Kate Su of the University of Arizona, Tucson, says the giant cloud of fine dust around the disk is very unusual. The researchers say this dust must be coming from collisions among small bodies similar to the comets or icy bodies that make up today's Kuiper Belt objects in our solar system.

"The system is very chaotic and collisions are spraying up a huge cloud of fine dust," Su said.

The gravity of the three large planets is throwing the smaller bodies off course, causing them to migrate around and collide with each other. Astronomers think the planets may have yet to reach their final stable orbits, so more violence could be in store.

A similar setup has also been seen by Spitzer and the Hubble Space Telescope around the star Fomalhaut, which sits about 25 light-years from Earth.

"What's exciting is that we have a direct link between a planetary disk and imaged planets," Su said. "We've been studying disks for a long time, but this star and Fomalhaut are the only two examples of systems where we can study the relationships between the locations of planets and the disks."

When our solar system was young, astronomers think it went through similar planet migrations. Jupiter and Saturn moved around quite a bit, throwing comets around, sometimes into Earth.

Some say the most extreme part of this phase, called the late heavy bombardment, explains how our planet got water. Wet, snowball-like comets are thought to have crashed into Earth, delivering life's favorite liquid.

The Spitzer results are detailed in the Nov. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal.

[wjfox]

Martian landscapes

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/200...andscapes.html

[SkyscraperSuperman]

Why didn't I notice this thread before...
Must not have been looking properly.

It's just such a fascinating topic, for example we have black holes which have always been one of the more interesting aspects for me, and all the talk about white holes that are said to do the reverse of black holes - does anyone here think they could possibly exist? I'd be interested to hear your views.

And thanks for the link, Will, some cracking pictures there.

[Steel City Suburb]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8359744.stm

[The Sage]

Big news...but now what?

[Marathaman]

Grow moon crops.

[Erebus555]

We have a 3 day piss up on the way to the Moon and then sober up when we get there.

[SkyscraperSuperman]

Build a massive reservoir and hydroelectric dam, and make the Moon the Earth's primary energy source.

[VaastuShastra]

NASA and ESA sign Mars agreement

[larven]

Good stuff. But when are we going to see a manned mission to Mars? That would probably be the greatest human achievement in my lifetime.

We could probably be well on our way to putting a man on the surface of Mars by now with all the money we've spent on the Iraq war and the bank bailouts.

[VaastuShastra]

Heh, for the amount of money spent on the Iraq war, we could have build a permenant settlement on Mars.