Interstellar colonization

In that case it could be used. I just dont want to relly too much on untested tech. Dont want to risk having no farming animals on the colony on a failing printer after all.

BTW, does make any sense? Did I do stuff right?

Take your f/a/ntasies back to pedophile.

..?

>Takes 19600 joules to lift [ 2000kg] up 1 meter
Only on Earth's surface. g isn't 9.8m/s/s the whole way up to geosynchronous orbit.

True. But its just an oversimplification. I decided to round up that number by assuming constant gravitational force to make it easier. It helped calculate the value of the whole thing. After all, some pieces of the ship will be lieteraly as simple as aluminium sheets that can be bought by the bulk while others are complicated delicate rquipament.

You build the ship in space from things already in space.

the only thing you bring up earth, after you get the space economy going, is people.

Im curious whats the speed this ship could reach?

>102500000000
102.5 billion
Not an impossible amount of money. Bill Gates has 80 Billion and Zuckerberg has 35. They could team up and pay for it.

I mean how much time would it take to get to a planet 15 light years away

The idea is to use a magnetic fusion drive (pretty much an open fusion reactor) to accelerate the ship to somewhere along the lines of 0.20c. I would say from 80 to 60 years to get to.

Indeed. The problem here is the R&D as I said. We need to develop suspended animation, the space elevator, the drive and more.

Anti matter is better than fusion (fusion is still not feasible because of the technology of keeping a reaction). If you're going to throw some random technological advancement into the equation, might as well go with the best somewhat-feasible subluminal drive.

But antimater spooks me. I dont want the ship to blow up. Fusion may be a bit slower but its way safer.

True, but assume technological advancements keep up with fusion research (anti-matter can be produced but not a lot), and fusion can be produced but not contained long enough. Scale it up in years of advancement, I'd believe a problem could be solved on both spectrums.

What about starting with good earth, so we will have many spacemans...

Interesting idea. Are you proposing using antimatter as just a sort of "firestarter" for the engine? In that case I would be more open to the idea. It would require less antimater and as such it would be easier and safer to store.

There comes a point where you can't really put a price tag on it. Because it'd be like putting a price tag on say the Russian Federation. The support structure and logistics you need for the end result to succeed will be so vast that it won't be properly calculable. The project will be its own government. None of which even remotely exist.

The key point here is, "success". Not just mathing it out for cost.

All the tech you are talking about R&Ding isn't going to work for something like this. You can't just cryo things. Instead, you'll need to do the long haul, no cryo, generation ships. Basically, fully functional ecosystems as space ships housing more compartmentalized and redundant systems than you can shake a stick at.

You're talking space mining, no space elevator, massive space shipyard. The entire endeavor will be its own economy.

You will need many ships, not just one. You'll need ones that are completely robotic/automated that can help bring supplies to the new location. The tech involved and the ships being built will space multiple generations of builders. This isn't some NASA-tier program you wrap up in 25-50 years.

Unless of course you don't really care about actual "success".

>All the tech you are talking about R&Ding isn't going to work for something like this. You can't just cryo things.

...why? Why wouldnt it work? I kmow anout O'Neil cylinders and such, but there is no reason to belive a concept like the one I am proposing cant work. Plenty of animals hibernate or downright freeze and they thaw out of the ice. It just a matter of figuring out a way to make it work with humans.

There is no real need for so many ships or people. A population of 25000-30000 well trained people from diverse eduational background can make it work, and the ship can be quiped with robot builders to set up the first city.

First the engineers and farmers are thawed out. We put the farmers to work on setting up a steady food supply and the engineers use the robots to build the city. Once both things are done its just a matter of allowing it to grow and explore the new world for the resoures needed to go further.

It wont be easy, sure, but it doesnt need to be that hard.

How do you slow it down?

Simple, turn around and thrust backwards. given the scales we are worning with here an acceleration of 1g for 70 days and we get to the speed needed. We can accelerate slower to make it safer and less stressfull on the structural integrity of the ship, so I think I would go for some 0.75g wich would mean about 90 days to accelerate and then 90 days to slow down.

>A few weeks ago I was thinking about the idea when I decided to calculate how much money would be needed to make such huge endeavor work.
Pointless exercise. Just calculate the energy demands under the most favorable assumptions (direct matter to energy conversion with 100% efficiency) to see that interstellar travel will remain a dream forever.

Look. These ships already exist. They utilize antigravity to manoeuver and protect against dust. Their crew are vastly more intelligent and logical than us. They are aliens. Their mother ships are miles long and they exist in our solar system, have done so for eons. They monitor and create hybrid races using talents we possess.

Stop being a Bill Nye and accept that this is a very real possibility. Nobody likes Bill Nye.

Are you ok? It is perfectly possible. It doesnt take that much energy to get to 20% of C and back. Unless you didnt even bother to read and tought I was suggesting some FTL drive.

le meme
nice response *snaps camera*

>It wont be easy, sure, but it doesnt need to be that hard.

Dude, it will be extremely fucking hard and there will be a massive amount of failure.

On a 1 to 100 scale of Murphy's Law this rates a 200 in things that can go wrong.

I know that, but I think you are both underestimating mankind's stuburness and feasability of the ideas.

what about global extinction (and we gotta go to space) event and $$$ is no object?

How would we do then?
With current tech, but limitless resources, could we do it?

>There is no real need for so many ships or people. A population of 25000-30000 well trained people from diverse eduational background can make it work
Don't you need ~65,000 to make a safe gene pool?

Granted, if your first group is just building facilities for subsequent groups, you don't need nearly so many.

But you'd need a major cultural shift to make people think further ahead than their own lifetimes, and be willing into invest in shit they'll never see. Granted, in the past, this was more common, or we wouldn't be where we are today, so it may not be too far fetched - but if anything, under the current trend, our attention span and vision has been getting shorter, rather than longer.

Impending planetary doom (be it real or imagined), would help, of course, but obviously it'd have to be something more spectacularly obvious than, for instance, "climate change".

Sure. The ship would need to be a generational ship of the kind talks about, and it would be a little slower since the only propulsion system we currently have suitable for this is the Orion Drive which has a mazimum speed of around 0.1c, but it could be done.
Just bloody expensive.

According to research I look at, if you carefully pick the subjects and control the breeding you can have genetically stable populations with as little as 100 couples.
Of course, that implies a lot of eugenics and population control which isnt popular and would make it has, but since we are talking about 30000 people it would be a guaranteed succes. Hell, mankind was once as little as 15000 people and we survived! ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory )

I think you are underestimating both stupidity and motivation.

no thats their net worth not their wealth in the traditional sense. if they tried to liquidize all their assets for this endeavor they would have 10% of the cash value of their assets

How about we just not kill ourselves and populate our own solar system a bit before making long jumps to other solar systems that MAY hold hospitable planets.

There are a fuckton of resources in our own galaxy that we can exploit.

Obviously that'd be the first step - in addition to probing the ever-living-fuck out of the planet you're heading towards. I don't think anyone is suggesting we just plop 30,000 people on a multi-trillion dollar ship to some random planet and hope for the best, just for lolz. (Though yeah, it would be a lotta lolz.)

True. The planet would be scanned by long range telescopes and such, and then a smaller vessel would be sent as fast as possible full of equipament and sut to both scan the planet fully and set up a rudimentary satelite network around it. Price of said probe alreqady included in the 2 triion price tag in the R&D section.

>what about global extinction (and we gotta go to space) event and $$$ is no object?

I would just give up and die holding loved ones. I don't want to live without the world I know and grew up with.

>Not wanting to give your children a living chance

Wow u degenerate son

I think, while the most of the engineering technology is theoretically there, or close to (save for the space elevator, which, from what I've read, is probably impossible), where we're really lacking, and what you need first, is the bio-tech.

I suspect, first, you'd need mass genetic engineering sufficient to radically change the population's basic instincts, regarding tribalism and long term outlooks. You need a species more widely capable of seeing the big and long term pictures for such projects to happen to begin with, and capable of unprecedented cooperation towards such end, all while maintaining individual excellence. Such a modified population may, psychologically at least, be barely recognizable as human.

Then, you'd probably require a series of explorers gene-tailored for their destination environment as well as for the trip. That'll likely involve virtual biological immortality, and the ability to survive long term in zero, or next to zero, gravity environments for years at a time, all while consuming far less resources than their terrestrially bound counterparts.

Between CRISPR and various existing genetic technologies that may one day be possible, but not under the current technology (never mind the socio-political pushback and potential pitfalls).

Granted, as you colonize more and more of the solar system, all these technologies and capabilities will likely surface, though, at the rate we're going, I often wonder if we can even get started on that first step, without a radical change to the global cultural outlook. (Though, I suppose, if we had a cosmological disaster large enough to wipe out a major city or two, without outright ending us, that might be enough of a spark to get us off the ground.)

Can't hardly see an earth-sized planet at 15ly with a ground telescope. You'd need some in orbit and you'd need to get detailed spectrocity off it, then you'd need to send probes there, providing at least as much data as all the mars landings combined, all with ridiculous turn around times. By the time you got sufficient data back to know whether it was worth going, assuming there wasn't a technological dark age or global extinction in the meantime, your available tech would be so unimaginable as to render most of this speculation moot.

we don't belong out there, so i doubt my kids will
plus we've already messed up one planet already

See what I mean about the need for some mass genetic engineering first? This this self destructive attitude, and varieties there of, is more prevalent in the species than one would like to think already, and is only growing.

On the plus side, his kids will probably rebel against his defeatist extinction bound philosophy by the time they're teenagers, so maybe its cyclical.

whatever you need chill the fuck outs ounds you have some issues you need to work out here on earth first

...Not that it wasn't kinda the point.

I think user meant, let's work on making drives and space travel safe enough to traverse our own solar system before we start spending too much time speculating interstellar travel.

I don't think anyone would disagree that throwing the thought around is fun to talk about.

>Are you ok?
Are you?

>It is perfectly possible.
It's impossible.

>It doesnt take that much energy to get to 20% of C and back.
Found a way to put the energy of the sun into your spaceship's glove compartment yet?

>I was suggesting some FTL drive.
Ah, so you're making up your own rules. Well that's not Veeky Forumsence, but science fi.

>mazimum speed of around 0.1c

lol No. 10% the speed of light is 67,061,662 MPH. The fastest man made object is currently the satellite Juno that was going about 90,000 MPH. This is about 0.013% of the speed of light.

What magic are you going to power your Orion Drive with?