/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.8638051]

We need to produce a way to travel through the vastness of space. This is our collective duty. We need to spark ideas that will lead to this because this is the most important thing we may ever hope to achieve. Post your theories on warp drives or other FTL drives, wormholes and so on. Citations welcome. Whining is disallowed, ideas and constructive discussion only.

[Anonymous No.8638098]

>>8638051
Lots of energy. Either to bridge space/time or travel near light speed (which doesn't help us much if they come back in a thousand years).

[Anonymous No.8638123]

>>8638098
If we managed a way to produce a lot of negative matter that might be our best bet.

[Anonymous No.8638164]

i might be a retard but here it goes

i think we need some kind of solar energy to power a rocket or something. telescopes already can maginify starlight and moonlight (any reflected light) should be bright as hell in space. we should find a way to turn light into energy because light is always around us.

there should also be a way to harness planetary rotational energy, i mean planets have so much and they will be spinning for a long time...its like free energy just sitting right there under our feet and all around the galaxy. it would take a long time before we rob planets of all their rotational velocity.

[Anonymous No.8639414]

>>8638164
what if instead of converting light into energy we converted it into momentum? like if you had a high amp battery and a high watt converter, could you make it produce ejected virtual particles using just energy?

[Anonymous No.8639463]

>>8638051
Mirrors pointed towards a single core. Expanding of the material because of heat should be turned into movement

[Anonymous No.8639490]

>>8638051
>it's our duty
Why?

[Anonymous No.8639545]

So if you could get a ship going at speeds even somewhat close to light speed wouldn't hitting even a pebble sized object at that speed fuck up the ship horribly?

[Anonymous No.8639583]

>>8639545
If

>a spaceship somehow did not have a shadow, is it affected by light?

[Anonymous No.8639611]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket

[Anonymous No.8639634]

Why don't we make a hadron collider in space and put a manned probe in it. Like a railgun, but we'll be launching the mass by the very atoms it's made of.

[Anonymous No.8639639]

just use magnets

[Anonymous No.8639772]

>>8638051
We makea dyson swarm around the sun and focus the energy inside a huge particle accelerator built either in space or mars or something convenable to become a space port, from there we make lots of antimatter and we just ave to develop antimatter reactors to use it for space travel.

At 100 TeV or above maybe we even get some dark matter.

[Anonymous No.8639787]

>>8639611
good shit, but good luck getting a politician to approve that

[Anonymous No.8639820]

"The design and calculations discussed above are using 20 percent enriched Uranium salts, however, it would be plausible to use another design which would be capable of achieving much higher exhaust velocities (4,700 km/s) and use 2,700 tonnes of highly enriched uranium salts in water to propel a 300 tonne spacecraft up to 3.6% of the speed of light."

That's pretty damn good, always liked Zubrin.

[Anonymous No.8639857]

But guys these are all methods that would get us within x% of c. How about something like the Alcubierre drive? Or is that a meme?

[Anonymous No.8639996]

>>8639545
Yes, and you would also be experiencing some real funky time effects.

[Anonymous No.8640013]

>>8639857
Not only is it not a meme, it's pretty much the only thing that solves the problem of time. The problem is enormous energy requirements and the fact that we haven't tested it full scale yet. If you want to learn more about it google Harold White, he's a guy from NASA actually working on this theory.

[Anonymous No.8640290]

Nuke or preferably antimatter fueled von neumann probes. Each seedship will start human society adapted for the local star resources, and overseen so as to prevent excessive mutation and warping of the goal of space colonization either by abandoning it or by turning against it. There must also be safety checks to prevent newly produced probes from assaulting existing known or unknown colonies. The simplest would be "don't touch - taken" signal from close around the star which if detected by approaching probe will cause it to pass by.
This of course opens the door for problems but I have no idea how to deal with berzerkers cannibalizing each other otherwise. It will also require rigid pre-planned social structures that must be very carefully thought out from the start, otherwise the probes will have to be completely self-learning which risk anomalous behavior.

I don't think that's as hard as say, FTL though. Not even sure if FTL will solve anything unless it's instantaneous.

[Anonymous No.8640291]

>>8638051
Pointing out the infeasability of an idea actually is constructive as it saves the time and energy of chasing a pipe dream.
FTL is impossible because Einstein. Warp drive is impossible because no negative energy. Generation ships are impossible because technical things don't last that long. And traveling at relativistic speeds is impossible due to the huge energy demands.
So there's also the solution to the Fermi paradox. Say goodbye to the galaxy, because the solar system is as far as we'll get.

[Anonymous No.8640292]

>>8638051
Use food, they contain enough energy in compact form to power us to the next star

[Anonymous No.8640303]

>>8640290
>seedship
How do you plan on surviving a trip taking possibly thousands of years?

[Anonymous No.8640311]

>>8640303
Some kind of perfected cold storage of embryos, the probe will have to basically take care of toddlers and educate them after gestation at their destination.

[Anonymous No.8640315]

>>8640311
Cum into bags and throw them into a cooler

[Anonymous No.8640316]

>>8640303

The ship will produce people and what else is required at the end of it's journey, it won't carry them from the start. Reaction mass, self-fab, and data. If it proves impossible to manufacture biological things from zero then probably a storage of material will have to be carried as well - "seeds".

[Anonymous No.8640323]

>>8638051
>hey guys tell me your ideas on FTL travel so i can sprint to the patent office and become the richest man in the galaxy

No thanks. The funny part is ive had a pretty good idea on how to achieve this since i was 19. The problem is you need retarded amounts of energy from a portable power source. Maybe if fusion ever gets off the ground i will start working on a prototype, but i am pretty sure we are doomed to never leave the solar system. The fermi paradox is indicative that other intelligent species get to a point of technological advancement where it is much easier to simulate their own universe to explore, rather than waste the time (more importantly energy) to explore the one they are in.

[Anonymous No.8640327]

>>8640311
>>8640316
You really think humans can survive like that? I see no way in hell they could find food, gather other resources, create a society, avoid disasters and so on. Unless we're talking some seriously advanced technology with incredibly sophisticated AI and human-like robots assisting the colonies.

[Anonymous No.8640331]

>>8638051
FTL is time travel if relativity holds. This requires the violation of causality to work.

Not to mention warp drives also require negative mass to bend space the right way. Barring new physics there is no way around this.

[Anonymous No.8640481]

We'll need to stick to sublight speeds senpai. But if we say we could reach 10% of light speed then it's just 40 years to the closest star. Totally doable without scifi drives.

[Anonymous No.8641273]

>>8640013
Didn't they test it by aiming a lazer through it and recording that it traveled faster than light? I remember reading one anon writing about it.

[Anonymous No.8641309]

>>8638051

[Anonymous No.8641353]

>>8639611
Holy shit

[Anonymous No.8641378]

>>8640481
>10% of light speed

That is 67,061,662.93 miles per hour. The fastest man mad object thus far (Juno Satellite) traveled at 164,700 mph.

That's a difference of 66,896,962.93 mph.

Alpha Centauri is 4.367 light years from Earth. That's 25,672,000,000,000 miles (25.672 trillion miles). At instant full speed and full stop, that is 382811.86 hours travel time at 10% of C. Or, 15950.49 days. Or, 43.69 years.

Simply speeding up to 67,061,662.93mph then decelerating without killing humans inside the ship will take far longer than 43.69 years.

To reach 10% of C you'd need 2gs of acceleration thrust (44mph) for 17.65 days and an equal amount of thrust and days on the other end of the journey to slow down. Thus 43.79 years total travel time.

That is a lot of thrust for a long long time. Most long term experiments are at 1.5g for 7 days without adverse health problems, but extrapolation suggests that longer times or higher Gs will bring up health problems. You'd need to spend those 35.3 days starting and stopping in some sort of acceleration tank.

Can you image the size of the fuel tanks on something required to maintain 35.3 days of 2g thrust? It'd need to move itself and 43.79 years of life support for x amount of humans.

[Anonymous No.8641392]

>>8639611
I remember reading a Heinlein book where some kids in a rocket club join a scientist who create a rocket powered by that. They go to the moon and fight moon-Nazis.

[Anonymous No.8641398]

>>8638164
solar sails exist, too fkin slow tho
I propose the Shkadov thruster

[Anonymous No.8641427]

Gravity wave array. Using lasers in an array to accelerate photons of harmonic wavelengths that cancel each other create ripples of gravity waves that coalesce into a predetermined pattern that warps spacetime into the ideal donut shaped long cylinder to grow like a wormhole that can then be traversed. As gravity waves move at light speed the array would allow travel at lights speed without acceleration adding to mass increase as the vessel could sit inside the growing array virtually still while spacetime is moved around it. The harmonics of the lasers should be a simple thing to work out. One would need be a negative refraction using a nanotechnology lens the other a normal laser tuned to the right wavelength to cancel out the first. The array should be mapped using fluid dynamics and sound acoustic principles to create a spiral from centre. Powerplant is your choice. Needs be powerful enough to power a laser grid array that has millions of intersections. Could this work?

[Anonymous No.8641431]

>>8638051
Make AI smart enough to be considered our successors. Robots don't need life support in space and can last there for a lot longer than humans. For them a few million years of travelling through relatively safe environment isn't that much.

[Anonymous No.8641433]

We merge with machines and become immortal, then it doesn't matter how long the trip takes.

[Anonymous No.8641440]

>>8641427

I like the cut of your jib!

[Anonymous No.8641463]

>>8638051
The only realistic way to do this is to put a lot of people (like 100 or so) into a large space ship that is self sufficient. As in interstellar space there is practically no light, you need an energy source that is very compact and reliable. Nuclear stuff is pretty much the only thing possible here, possibly fusion. So you take enough fuel with you to power your space ship for say 500 years or whatever it takes to reach your destination. As you travel, the passengers will eventually die, but they will have children who will be taught everything they need to know about their mission etc.

The human factor is the most obvious source of failure for a mission like that. You can't really project what's going to happen when the people who are going to reach their destination are not even born yet.

[Anonymous No.8642269]

>>8641378
>miles

[Anonymous No.8642276]

FTL isn't possible with theory of relativity. You're better off trying to find a way to warp somewhere.

[Anonymous No.8642483]

"einstein said so" is not a force that exists in the universe. Stop acting like it's fundamentally impossible with how little we know about the actual fundamental workings of the universe. we just invented time crystals for fucks sake

[Anonymous No.8642490]

>>8642276
that's typically what people mean when they say FTL

[Anonymous No.8642665]

>>8640481
>40 years in a space tin can
Radiation would kill you in first 10 years

[Anonymous No.8643558]

>>8642269
Terrorist countries use metric.

[Anonymous No.8643561]

>>8642665
You'd start going blind after a year if there's no artificial gravity.

[Anonymous No.8643587]

>>8638051

Advances in cyrogenics and biotech make this a nonissue, all that is needed is a way to keep people in a suspended hibernative state. In which case the trip's length is only determined by the materials which comprise the ship (and it's subsystems) itself.

[Anonymous No.8643591]

>>8638164

Solar energy wouldn't be very good considering that most of space travel is done far away from light sources. Panels would work, just not nearly as effectively as they would do inside a solar system. Nuclear fission based power is the only proven technology that would fill the gap.

[Anonymous No.8643601]

>>8641378

>Can you image the size of the fuel tanks on something required to maintain 35.3 days of 2g thrust?

It wouldn't be a tank, but a stack of nuclear bombs.

[Anonymous No.8643628]

>>8640327
?
We're talking centuries from now, all resource gathering and manufacturing would be automated

[Anonymous No.8643642]

>>8641378
I don't believe that any stellar mission to date has actually been intentionally built for speed. Scientists are perfectly happy letting probes scutter around circuitous meandering routes for years on end.

[Anonymous No.8643660]

>>8643561
Not to mention reductions in bone density and other unexplored effects.

[Anonymous No.8643662]

Protip: you're not going to get between star systems using a heat engine

[Anonymous No.8643681]

>>8643561
What if you supplied 1g of thrust throughout the entire period of travel and used it as "gravity"?

[Anonymous No.8643697]

>>8643662
Would a cold engine work?

[Anonymous No.8643734]

>>8643697
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_engine

[Anonymous No.8643737]

>>8643734
Ok but would a cold engine work?

[Anonymous No.8643744]

>>8639490
Us that want to advance humanity into the stars. As virus-like as ours species is tho, probly backfire.

[Anonymous No.8643801]

>>8639611
>hey this looks pretty alright
>In a "nuclear thrust rocket" (NTR), thrust is created by...
>NTR
>thrust

Pick something else.

[Anonymous No.8643815]

>>8642483
>einstein said so doesn't mean something is fact

why tho lol

[Anonymous No.8643819]

>>8643662
>all launching at the same time right next to each other

yeah ok

[Anonymous No.8643834]

Geospatial Teleportation

[Anonymous No.8643860]

>>8638051
>We need to produce a way to travel through the vastness of space. This is our collective duty.
>we
>our
>collective

Nice try, you transhumanist commie.

There's plenty of room on Earth and plenty of exploitable resources in our solar system. In all likelihood, we will never exhaust it.

There is no reason to venture into the cosmos on a rickety rowboat powered by friendship.

[Anonymous No.8643877]

>>8638051
>this is the most important thing we may ever hope to achieve.

To do what exactly? So we can watch hentai and fap on other planets?
All the billions of liveable planets that exist in space are just basic floating rocks like Earth.
Some would be bigger, some smaller.
Some would be warmer, some colder.
Some would be wetter, some more dry.

I think the most important thing to do is to make peace on Earth, before even thinking about other planets. Otherwise those colonies would just repeat the same mistakes we did.

[Anonymous No.8643893]

>>8638164
Inverse square law. Light is only a good idea because we live on earth which is really close to its host star.

Juno has major power issues on solar out at Jupiter and solar just straight up wasn't an option for something like the voyagers who leave the host star behind

[Anonymous No.8643935]

>>8638051
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

Watch this guy, very relevant for this sort of stuff

[Anonymous No.8643960]

What necessitates this need?

[Anonymous No.8643977]

>>8643744
That makes sense. If there's any stellar overwatch, our behavior wouldn't be tolerated for very long

[Anonymous No.8644007]

>>8643681
That would work but what would be the source of such force?
Even with nuclear propulsion you can't produce 1g for long, it would require more mass than it can accelerate.
Theoretically with laser induced propulsion you could, but good luck at making a laser that powerful and align it at light years of distance.

[Anonymous No.8644227]

>>8643601
>nuclear bombs

That's not how it works.

[Anonymous No.8644240]

>>8643877
>I think the most important thing to do is to make peace on Earth, before even thinking about other planets. Otherwise those colonies would just repeat the same mistakes we did.
It'd actually be easier to start over with a subset of 1,000 to 10,000 idealized people than try to sort out the seven billion fucking jerks we're stuck with here.

[Anonymous No.8644497]

>>8643960
Instinct for survival

[Anonymous No.8644536]

>>8640291
this.. also, isn't this as uncientific as afterlife? it sounds so vane and presumptuous

[Anonymous No.8644671]

>>8644497
at this point, it is dum to assume that we are super addaptable and it would take a major event to wipe us? I mean, at least we went tru one glacial age, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_period#Last_glacial_period

[Anonymous No.8644726]

>>8638098
travel at .9c and you get their nearly as fast with effectively no adverse time effects

[Anonymous No.8644911]

Cymatic Drive

Essentially just the Alcubierre Drive but with a way to actually make it work without killing everything in a 100 au radius. Basically it would work by disrupting matter in front of the ship using cymatic frequencies allowing a funnel that the ship could "fall" into to be created. The funnel would become a tunnel essentially devoid of matter that the ship would travel through until it reached a chosen destination, at which point the drive would bring the frequency of matter in front of the ship back to its normal state.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3oItpVa9fs

[Anonymous No.8644927]

>>8641427
I read that in Jeff Goldblum's voice.

[Anonymous No.8644970]

>>8643877
>I think the most important thing to do is to make peace on Earth, before even thinking about other planets. Otherwise those colonies would just repeat the same mistakes we did.
Not necessarily. Even today astronauts' personalities are studied and ones with proper attitude and likability are selected. This standard would have to be maintained in those initial years of construction in order to succeed in adverse conditions. Later it would become culture. You can't on the other hand select people on earth without everyone screaming "hitler" and gene selection is generally frowned upon. Someday though, maybe...

[Anonymous No.8645090]

>>8638051
Larry Niven had a fine idea, in his essay "Theory and Practice of Teleportation -- the End-teleport Drive.

At the base of your ship is n attached teleportation pad, the receiver is attached to your ship at the top.

Push the button, your ship teleports on top of itself. Hold the button down, and you are off to the edge of the universe, depending on how much lag there is between teleportations and how long your ship is.

Various issues arise -- if you teleport fast enough, light does not have time to cross from the wall of the ship to your eye (unless light gets teleported too) so the ship becomes transparent -- and of course somebody needs to invent a teleportation device, but you can't use that as a critique because OP said no whining allowed.

[Anonymous No.8645092]

The trick is to be able to turn the mass of a particle on and off at will. Particles without mass must move at c, and do not experience the passage of time.

If we were able to turn decouple mass at will and steer and all that shit, you would leave where you are and arrive at your destination instantly in your frame of reference.

The only caveat being that any outside frame or reference would age at a normal rate, so that even though your trip is instantaneous, everyone/everything else would have aged as normal. Perhaps in the Wheeler-Everett many-worlds hypothesis this wouldn't be an issue, as you may effectively be on another timeline/universe.

Regardless, the trick is turning mass off and on at will. The Higgs field apparently is what couples mass to matter, so we would have to figure out how to manipulate this accordingly.

[Anonymous No.8645098]

>>8638051
There seems to be an assumption that we need to go fast enough to get somewhere. Why? Maye a planet, anchored to a sun that will eventually act up, subject to weather and predators/diseases (if there is life) and earthquakes and shit, with asteroid bombardments... why do you want to be there. Out safely away from all that shit is where you need to be, ion a habitat that meanders along, passing close enough to stars so you can send adventurous prospectors out to pick up needed elements every few centuries.

[Anonymous No.8645100]

>>8640291
That ain't how you brainstorm, though.

[Anonymous No.8645106]

>>8643561
>no artificial gravity.

Try spinning! That's a good trick!

[Anonymous No.8645112]

>>8643744
Isn't "advancing to the stars" spreading like a virus?

[Anonymous No.8645118]

>>8645112
But unless somebody else lives out there, it doesn't hurt anything.

[Anonymous No.8645132]

>>8645112

Yes. And?

[Anonymous No.8645179]

>>8640327
Why not? We've already done it once.

[Anonymous No.8645236]

>>8640303
not.. 'you' perse, but if the ship is selfsustaining with the exception of information then you could have it float through space generation after generation.


>>8640316
since chance for failure is high, considering the duration of the journey, it would only make sense to have multiple of them that are in contact with eachother and the motherbase.

>>8641378
if you travel at 10Thousand m/s, you need 133.333 years roughly.
With crew procreating at age 25, assuming an infinite amount of sperm it would take about 5300 generations to reach proxima centauri, (not taking in actual orbital maneuvering)

And that's only for proxima centauri!

Traveling across the universe within a lifetime sounds inreal to me.

>>8640327
it would require the very best in terms of self-sustainability. As far as the resources go:
>food
food can be grown,

information can the gathered from a base (though with ever increasing delay) which would also help with avoiding desasters.

>society
yes the "vessel" needs its own society, which can be achieved with enough crew though.

The likelyhood of having a crewmate sabotage the whole thing within a couple generations calls for there to be multiple of those vessels to increase the chance of one of them making the trip.

If a bunch of those start going though, they could go way past alpha-centauriAB

[Anonymous No.8645237]

whatever happened to the EM drive?
Elektricity would be a handy propellant, because you could always aquire it from solar

[Anonymous No.8645255]

>>8645112
except that viruses require living hosts, which planets are not. so no worries!

[Anonymous No.8645260]

>>8639414
this was the original idea behind the EM-drive

[Anonymous No.8645310]

>>8640323
Use a stepdown transformer and a well directed dump. Take in ambient light and other shortwave EMR and step it down to longwave? Something on the bandwidth of km not cm or mm.
Basically a massive coil coupled with a stepdown circuit driven from something similar to a solar panel.
Seriously, why do we fuck around with fuel sources when all the energy we could ever use is already radiating around us

[Anonymous No.8645316]

>>8645255
Sure about that? Go live on mars and see how long you last without artificial biodomes or something to that effect.
We require a living planet, or more so a planet with an ecosystem, comprised of living things

[Anonymous No.8645466]

>>8645316
Not even talking about true planet engineering, if there's enough resources on Mars that people living in a biodome can build a second identical biodome using in situ materials, the planet can be "soft terraformed" in just a few generations.

You bring the first habitat from Earth, but you make the second one from martian hematite-forged steel, martian silicate glass, water and oxygen extracted from martian soil, etc.

Maybe even reach a point where madmen in big trucks like Jawa crawlers CAN get fed up with the crowding and authoritarian politics so they just roll out into the desert to build their own dome with blackjack and hookers.

[Anonymous No.8645529]

>>8645310
Interestingly, a well directed dump would make for a space drive, if you are not in any hurry.

[Anonymous No.8646056]

>>8645236
>if you travel at 10Thousand m/s,

That's only 36,000,000mph. I wonder how long a human can live in 3g thrust. That would be far better for travel time than 1g or 2g. Starting and breaking will be a bitch, but I'm sure there's some sort of acceleration tank + drug induced coma + artificial heart type of procedure (like a dialysis machine) that would allow for that. I think 3g thrust would allow 23.52 days instead of 35.3 days of thrust at 2g. It'd also be .... 29.19 years total travel time?

We really need to learn how to negate & create gravity and inertia.

[Anonymous No.8646094]

>>8640291
>generation ships
>generations of serfs performing constant maintenance to keep the 1% alive so they can populate the next planet

[Anonymous No.8646115]

>>8646094
Not seeing a problem here.

[Anonymous No.8646146]

>>8646115
Oh i don't either. Lots of work will create lots of job opportunities

[Anonymous No.8646238]

>>8643893
How about an array of solar panels around earth distance to transform the light into a concentrated beam? It seems like you would have a smaller problem with distance then.

[Anonymous No.8646243]

>>8641273
If you're talking about neutrinos, they were recently proposed to travel faster than light but it turned out to be a measurement error.

[Anonymous No.8646427]

>muh faster than light travel
That's all fine and dandy but how the fuck are you planning on slowing down your ship again when reaching the destination?

[Anonymous No.8646430]

>>8646115
>what are robot workers
Come on now.

[Anonymous No.8646434]

>>8646056
what about the fuel mass though? the more you accelerate, the more you have to decelerate.

>>8645529
how much thrust are we talking?

another thing: if you could make atoms at will from other atoms, we could create fuel.

[Anonymous No.8646463]

>>8646427
FTL in the other direction for a sec

[Anonymous No.8646576]

>>8638164
>solar energy to power a rocket or something
what is it living in 70s?

[Anonymous No.8647399]

>>8646434
>what about the fuel mass though? the more you accelerate, the more you have to decelerate.

What about it? It is just ballistics and fuel economy. That's done already.