It's easy to dismiss my skepticism, because I have only gotten started on the long list of logistical problems we would have to overcome to pull this off. For the sake of those for whom it would be a burden to read such long dissertations from me, I beg you to hit the delete button and move along. These aren't the droids you are looking for. :-)
So then, another distinction needs to be made between "presently impossible" (given the time, resources and technology available) and "practically or intrinsically impossible" at ANY time. We really have to avoid getting those two things confused in order to get on. We have to know if any of the logistical problems fall into the second category. If they do, there is no hope of success. There are things that are intrinsically impossible, containing the impossibility within their own nature. Can God make a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it? That sort of thing. Then there are the practically impossible things, where the time and resources necessary are beyond what is available. Then there is the presently impossible, where the possibility is theoretically defined, but the resources are not yet available. People believe space travel of the kind we are talking about is possible, because they believe that all impossibilities are of the third kind. That is why nothing can ever convince them a thing cannot be done. To those kind I have nothing more to say. You can hang up now. :-) Now then to those that remain, consider that it's not just a matter of having the technology. We also have to have the resources, the time to build such a machine (it's going to be breaking and deteriorating all the time it's being built you know, if it takes very long), and at least an almost certain knowledge that when we get to where we want to go there will be something for us that makes the whole trip worth the trouble. A planet so like ours that we can survive there, eat the plant life and not die, defend ourselves against the creatures that inhabit the place, survive the diseases that may be present, etc. And who knows if, when we run into the local indigenous intelligent species we hope to find, that they will be all that happy and accommodating to us? Maybe they had a bad experience just last century, with another species who tried to take over the planet, fought a horrible war, only just won, and decided that from now on any more of these space travelers will be met with their doomsday weapon before they even get close to the place. Or maybe they thrive off interstellar travels? Maybe we are but a tasty morsel drifting by their little anemone of a planet? Maybe they will herd us like cattle? It doesn't help to say that intelligent species do not act so. We are pretty intelligent, and we aren't giving up our burgers anytime soon. Dolphins are pretty intelligent and they will eat up entire schools of herring. I mentioned before the severe time dilation of near light speed travel, so that even if we could get a manned ship there and send signals back, it would take longer for the signals to get here and back again for a confirmation that earth heard us, than anyone had time to live. And what would we say then? Howz the weather these days? Wait another few thousand years? Who would be listening after the tens of thousands of elapsed time dilated years? Has anything man made lasted 10,000 years here on earth? Think about all the debris we are finding in our own solar system, and then only just, because we have improved the telescopy to the point that we can see the dimly lit debris. Out in space, far from any sun, it would be totally invisible. Do we know for certain there is absolutely empty space between here and our destination? Care to encounter a pebble of space debris at near the speed of light? Has anyone invented or even theorized a device to keep us from becoming a new coat of paint on the bulkheads during acceleration and deceleration? Gravity generators? A perpetual fuel source? Maybe we can detect and avoid debris, oh but wait! What detection device could we bring to bear that could detect anything far out enough to avoid it at those speeds? what would be the consequence of changing direction at near the speed of light even a minutiae and the ship would disintegrate. There wouldn't be time enough for the passengers to become bug squat against the bulkheads before the whole ship were merely random molecules, and that is only *IF* traveling near the speed of light wouldn't do that anyway. But what about our space age radar? Einstein tells us that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, so whatever energy we are transmitting could never exceed our own speed by very much. Our radar energy would probably look like pea soup squirted out of the antennae just in front of the ship. If Einstein was wrong, then the doppler effect would render the reflected energy indistinguishable on the way back, and that is only if the doppler effect did not render the transmitted energy useless on the way out, passing through the object we were trying to detect at twice the speed of light. No, we would be absolutely blind either way. Looks like wormholes are the only way. Seen anyone bend space-time recently? And how do you control where (and very likely when) the wormhole appears? Everything we know about a wormhole indicates it would stretch, disassemble and scatter matter, turning it into just a bit more energy. How do you keep it all together? How are you going to generate the kind of energy that would shield you from the magnetic poo storm that would be trying to tear everything apart? The only thing we know that *might* form a wormhole is the massive singularities at the center of a great many (if not all) galaxies. Even our own sun does not have the energy to pull it off, even if we harnessed all of it, and then Earth would die. Where will we make one far enough away from the earth so that it would no swallow it up, but close enough to an energy source to harness it, and who wants to be the first to volunteer to be flung into the thing? How will you tell if something came out the other side or where it came out? How are we going to get to the massive singularity and work on the wormhole generator? Everything we know about a singularity tells us that nothing escapes the event horizon, not even light! How are you going to get close enough to harness it without becoming wormhole fodder?? Okay so wormholes are a bust, so back to the ship idea. Where are you going to get spare parts for the things that break down? Manufacture them I suppose, but from what raw materials? Otherwise you will need massively redundant systems, and they will need an incredible amount of maintenance to continue to function for the hundreds of years it will take to build, not to mention to arrive at it's destination. You will have to create what amounts to a small earth, self powered, incredibly redundant, massively powerful (and yet wonderfully easy to steer and control at light speeds!). The environment you build it in will have to be immaculate, making today's clean rooms look like pig sties. Maybe space, but space is full of debris. Look at the moon. Look at mars. Nothing very big can avoid getting hit out there for long. What we need is force fields! (Seen one lately?) And we imagine a force field reflecting an object while the thing generating the field remains stationary and unmoved in space. Really? Ever heard of a guy called Newton? The Wrights had merely to see flight already occurring in nature, and then make a machine that vaguely approximated it, and a way to control it. None of those problems were insurmountable, either conceptually or practically. Sure we have planes today that are astounding in their technologies and scope, but not without a huge cost in money and materials, some quite rare. How much titanium do you think we actually have here on this planet? How much gold? How much refined plutonium? How expensive and plentiful are materials that will virtually screen out solar radiation? One solar storm while the ship is anywhere near our solar system (or any other) and everyone on board dies. Horribly. The ship will likely need a magnetic field much like the earths. How big a magnet can we make that can ward off solar radiation? How do you keep people sane on such a trip? What if something goes wrong, but the captain will not turn around? I suspect a mutiny. A complete collapse of discipline is sure to ensue. Also we just learned that our bones deteriorate, along with our eyesight in space, nobody quite knows why yet. They think it has something to do with the absence of gravity, and gravity is more than centrifugal force. In fact gravity is in constant opposition to centrifugal force. We don't even know what gravity IS exactly, never mind being able to artificially generate it. Maybe we will someday, but I am going to say it's going to take a helluvalot of energy to do it, and energy is going to be at a premium way out there. Likely it will require a hyper dense mass along the core of the ship. Anyone thought of a way to make matter so dense it can generate the gravity of earth? And speaking of gravity, where we go better have almost the exact gravity of earth or our physiology will not bear it, and who knows what shape we will be in when we get there? I am just citing a very few things off the top of my head. I could go on and on. People just do not think through all the logistics of such things. They imagine all the problems can be overcome, simply because we have overcome what seem to them to be problems of much the same nature before. I contend they are problems of a wholly different nature, and no amount of imagination will solve them. People can call me short sighted and any number of things, but they rarely suggest a way to overcome any one of these issues, which if not all overcome will spoil the whole thing. A great man once said that only a fool begins to build without first counting the cost. I am not going to convince anyone otherwise who chooses to believe that such a thing is possible. It makes them feel good about themselves to think we can pull it off. Anyone serious about the tackling the real problems should immediately make a list of all the hurdles that must be overcome, and then begin sorting out all the ways it might be possible to overcome them, all the while understanding that to fail to overcome even one of them, and yet go ahead with the thing will mean almost certain failure and lost lives, and a great many of them too on that huge mini-earth we plan on tossing out into the cold death of space. Bob On Mar 27, 2012, at 12:22 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote: > Bob Sneidar wrote: > > > It's sobering to think someone so smart as Orville Wright could > > get the two confused. Is it theoretically possible to travel > > to another planet? Sure! Is it practically possible? Not a chance. > > The difference between what is true and what is possible. > > Respectfully, Bob, your post surprises me, coming from someone as technically > savvy as yourself. > > After all, your words came to me through a set of technologies that were > impossible in Wright's time, and save for a small handful of sci-fi writers > of the day, entirely inconceivable. Heck, not even Xanadu would be dreamed > of until decades later, and it took decades more to begin the baby steps > toward our Internet, which is even now in its infancy. _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
