Interstellar Travel is Impossible

Pardon me whilst I stir this pot a bit......

very interesting discussion...but why do we simply focus on the "it used to be impossible, but wow! now it isn't" aspect.

Certainly technology advances, and various shielding ideas have merit.

But if you want to preserve humanity, do you really think that a few (or even a few thousand) ships would do it? Quite a gamble.

Obviously, humans need an ecosystem almost as much as it needs them. So why not take the one that we have and transport it? Yes..much slower, but then, also much more spacious (pardon the pun!).

All we'd really need to do is:

a). construct a suitably sized planet. (Mars makes for a nice starter, and all those asteroids are SO handily nearby.)
b). terraform it. (this is a long range project by definition)
c). find a suitable companion to provide heat / light / energy. Fusion might work. For that matter, there's some evidence that Venus is a young, hot body (like producing more heat than the Sun provides to it. The runaway greenhouse effect doesn't really hold water...very high albedo, mind you...not much of anything going very deep.) You could maybe lock the two planets into orbit around each other.
d). accelerate, accelerate, accelerate...slingshot method maybe around the Sun a few times.
e). populate. Then the ships would not have to travel so quickly, and could make many round-trips.

er...so ok...it's just an idea.

RealObject

 

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I wonder if slingshotting around the sun might be such a good idea? Especially if we upset some of the orbits.

 

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well, yeah. I agree. Perhaps running the gauntlet of gas giants will work better. less heat and all.

As for changing orbits, we'll need to move the earth farther from the sun during this timeframe anyway (what with the sun expanding as it gets older and all). Might as well combine the efforts. In a recent article (I can't find that darn link) some guy calculates that we'll actually need to move the earth beyond the orbit of mars. Hm....coincidence ?

After all, once you get used to the idea of planet sized projects, the rest is just engineering (doncha love it when people say "just"?).

RealObject

 

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Think of the size of the tow truck you'd need to move a planet. wow!

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Tow truck?

I guess that gives a new defination to the towing mode.
I wonder how close the planet would have to revolve to stay warm in interstellar space? And how fast it would need to revolve around it's primary?

 

Excelent question. Surely we can find those numbers...


Anybody here work for JPL? They should have that info.

As for the tow truck - according to an article that I read recently, if you orbit an asteroid so that it passes just ahead of the Earth, it can tow the Earth to a "higher" orbit around the Sun, over time.

 

To provide a little life into a thread that has not had much responce in a while look to this link that provides some discussion on Faster Than Light travel and Relativity...

http://www.physics.purdue.edu/~hinson/ftl/html/ftl_intro.html

I would think with such a subject there would be a lot of miles left in it. After all if this was a solved theory (in otherwords not theory anymore) then we would open the doors to the Universe.