| Author |
Potentially Habitable World Discovered! (NOT FanFic) |
Kanman
Grand Admiral
Pitch Black
Joined: August 26, 2005
Posts: 1017
From: Virginia, United States
|  Posted: 2007-04-25 08:53
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/04/25/habitable.planet.ap/index.html
Check that sweet stuff out!
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Eledore Massis [R33]
Grand Admiral
Templar Knights
Joined: May 26, 2002
Posts: 2694
From: tsohlacoLocalhost
| Posted: 2007-04-25 08:57
cool.
but instaid of discovering new planets and stuff.
why not use all our brainmasses to build our self a FTL so we can actualy use out discovery's
becous maby non of you actualy listen to greanpeace most of the time.
but we do got a little overpopulation here.
either get us a FTL or get us orbital space colonies.
[/pshyco]
so whats the weather out there.
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Kanman
Grand Admiral
Pitch Black
Joined: August 26, 2005
Posts: 1017
From: Virginia, United States
| Posted: 2007-04-25 09:05
Screw a Space Colony. I wanna live on THAT planet (assuming it is reasonably habitable. The temp range seems right. The gravity will make buildings tough to make tall and walking a bit difficult. The air may well be toxic anyway. But, if it all works out, you can bet there will be FTL research with a vengence!
People got to the moon because they could see it and knew where to go and what they needed to do to get there. Exploration of space has slowed due to the lack of good places to go. Now that we know of a good place to target, there will be less funding for searching and more funding for going there. Think of it like the New World a few hundred years ago. First no one cared about exploring the oceans, but when they found America, suddenly and everyone and their brother was building fleets to go there. Same thing here.
I'm currently studying Electrical Engineering at University. When i graduate (and while I am studying for that matter) I promise to put in some good amount of time and thought towards how to get me a nice FTL drive design, or at least something faster than the 40,000 mph chemical rockets we have now. Ion Drive looks good for high speed travel but still runs out of fuel long before light speed. Nuclear engines would be VERY fast, we are talking 10% light speed here, but due to treaties regarding nuke tech in space we will run into some troubles. Give me 10 years. I will think of something, or tap Stephen Hawking's phone and steal his ideas.
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Light-of-Aurora
Grand Admiral
Joined: December 01, 2003
Posts: 602
From: NJ, USA
| Posted: 2007-04-25 10:16
Wouldn't relativistic effects cause you to be chronologically stranded with your 'shipmates?' Hell, your a devoted person if you actually want to go to that planet. :/
I think we should make a moon-base first. 
The ISS is kind of... lame. Sorry NASA 
I really don't know much about this, but isn't FTL supposed to be impossible or something...? b/c mass > infinity etc.
Unless you're thinking about Casimir vacuums or something...
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Kanman
Grand Admiral
Pitch Black
Joined: August 26, 2005
Posts: 1017
From: Virginia, United States
| Posted: 2007-04-25 10:34
Yeah. FTL is physically impossible by today's understanding of the universe.
The ISS was supposed to be great! It was going to have a space dock for building large-scale interplanetary ships and stuff. Then between the Iraq war and the shuttle burning up on re-entry, the funding has been shot to crap. It was supposed to be completed several YEARS ago, but it is still years from completion even today! The new shuttle designs keep getting scrapped because the technology growth keeps making them obsolete before they can even manage enough funding for a prototype. Then when things go wrong with any part of the prototype, they haven't the funding to research how to fix it.
I had high hopes for NASA when I was a kid. I thought they would be simply the foremost authority on space and advanced technology. Now they are little more than a money pit that spends most of its funding launching cell-phone satelites and resupply cargo to the space station.
*slight topic change* If you were to design a ship you would LIVE in for 30-40 years, or even just 10 years, how would you lay out the hull and why? Would you go with a more ICC design or a more UGTO looking design?
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Ramius
Fleet Admiral
Agents
Joined: January 12, 2002
Posts: 894
From: Ramius
| Posted: 2007-04-25 11:27
Gliese 581 is 20.4 lightyears away. Have fun with that.
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Sanity Assassin (K'Luth propaganda)
Grand Admiral
Sanity Assassins
Joined: February 19, 2006
Posts: 919
From: Pittsburgh PA, USA
| Posted: 2007-04-25 11:41
Fantastic, lets take a road trip....wait....we cant get there no matter how much beer we bring in the trunk. So why make a big deal or even a post when it's "fifty billion who knows what away".
[ This Message was edited by: SANITY ASSASSIN on 2007-04-25 11:42 ]
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Coeus
Grand Admiral
Sundered Weimeriners
Joined: March 22, 2006
Posts: 2815
From: Philly
| Posted: 2007-04-25 13:02
Dibbs on a beach house!
Thats really really close in the grand scheme of things... according to reletivity theory as I understand it then it shouldn't take more than few years for a ship traveling near the speed of light to get there. Granted we can't go that fast yet, but when we can it will take 20+ years for the ship to get there according to us, but it should pass quickly for those onboard.
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Kanman
Grand Admiral
Pitch Black
Joined: August 26, 2005
Posts: 1017
From: Virginia, United States
| Posted: 2007-04-25 15:03
To make the trip even shorter for me, I will sit in a chair that starts at the back of the ship and over the course of the trip the chair moves forward until it arrives at the front of the ship right as we arrive. I will have been travelling just a little faster than everyone else on board and so have aged less when we arrive. Oh yeah! Man with the Plan, Right Here!
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Borgie
Chief Marshal
Pitch Black
Joined: August 15, 2005
Posts: 2256
From: close by
| Posted: 2007-04-26 02:33
ooh.. i call dibs on a nice peice of land away from everyone else 
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Ramius
Fleet Admiral
Agents
Joined: January 12, 2002
Posts: 894
From: Ramius
| Posted: 2007-04-26 02:34
Quote:
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On 2007-04-25 13:02, Coeus wrote:
Dibbs on a beach house!
Thats really really close in the grand scheme of things... according to reletivity theory as I understand it then it shouldn't take more than few years for a ship traveling near the speed of light to get there. Granted we can't go that fast yet, but when we can it will take 20+ years for the ship to get there according to us, but it should pass quickly for those onboard.
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Hence "lightyear" meaning: a ship would have to travel for 20 years at the speed of light to reach the destination. However, profound psychological consequences would occur to those on board. Moreover, as someone else pointed out, the only way to get close to the speed of light, or to pass it, is to build a slipstream device which doesn't actually break any rules of relativity. Either that or build a wormhole. Either way, the technology is pretty far out of the way.
And I hate to be the Debbie Downer here, but just because we have observed a planet seemingly like Earth, doesn't mean it is. Granted, the first step is having an exoplanet in the habitable zone, but that is no means the single defining variable towards the creation of life or a second Earth.
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GothThug {C?}
Fleet Admiral
Joined: June 29, 2005
Posts: 2932
| Posted: 2007-04-26 10:39
Nothings impossible, if we achieved breaking the soundbarrier, built luxery cruise liners, built Computers and Hot cars well....then research and development of a Slipstream or warpdrive isnt impossible just not realistically true at the moment but its there now if theirs such a person as Dr. zephrem cochran i hope he builds that warp ship lol and we'll be at that planet in 50 years 
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icansee
Cadet
Joined: August 02, 2006
Posts: 327
| Posted: 2007-04-26 12:22
people said WHAT U CANT FLY IN THE SKY? a jet engine was like a warp drive to them, one day we will be taking space travel for granted itll become another anoyance.
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Eledore Massis [R33]
Grand Admiral
Templar Knights
Joined: May 26, 2002
Posts: 2694
From: tsohlacoLocalhost
| Posted: 2007-04-26 13:09
Some one build 100 tsars and drop them.
than that plant won't look like earth anny more.
stil. dibs on the biggest hot spring over there.
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BackSlash
Marshal
Galactic Navy
Joined: March 23, 2003
Posts: 11183
From: Bristol, England
| Posted: 2007-04-26 13:17
Quote:
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On 2007-04-26 10:39, Fatal GothThug *Ens* wrote:
Nothings impossible, if we achieved breaking the soundbarrier, built luxery cruise liners, built Computers and Hot cars well....then research and development of a Slipstream or warpdrive isnt impossible just not realistically true at the moment but its there now if theirs such a person as Dr. zephrem cochran i hope he builds that warp ship lol and we'll be at that planet in 50 years
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Just going fast won't solve anything.
Bare in mind edventualy we're going to reach a theoretical maximum speed in space, and when that happens, no-one actually knows what will happen (or even if we can go faster than the speed of light).
Hell, we're just now seeing people like Nasa trying to impliment Ion drivers (drivers, not drives), and even they rely on other propulsion techniques to work, so if anything, it's a hybrid.
We're so, so far away from something like this. Hell, we're just now trying to reach fusion power - in 2014, when they run the first trial of the new fusion facility in France, they'll know if it works or not. If we can turn a multi-complex spanning fusion reactor down to a few square meters, then bingo, we might be able to go a bit faster than we are now in space.
Slipstreaming is dangerous, but not as much as artificial wormhole generation, which will probably be banned. Slipstream gates, are possible, but even then...
I read up on something a while ago about multi-bubble-streaming, which involves opening flaps in space (or bubbles), which the ship can remain in normal space, but a thin film of space around the bubble flies faster than light, leaving the crew and normal space in-tact. What they want to do is open a bubble, within a bubble, within a bubble, to make it go even faster.
Ofcourse this is all theory, and we're probably centuries away from even developing an inter-solor system drive.
Ah well, go science!
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