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Posted on 10/19/2009 7:11:29 AM PDT by Dallas59
Edited on 10/19/2009 7:14:06 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
WASHINGTON
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
You could use gravitaion from variois bodies to slow down, but it would be complicated.
Only 32? Not having much success, eh?
Get real. There are far more planets than that in the universe. There is no guarantee that there is intelligent life anywhere in the universe, no guarantee that there isn’t. If aliens are looking at Washington DC, they will be sure there is no intelligent life on earth either.
We really do live in a very narrow band of environmental requirements. Something as small as a couple percent more x-rays reaching a planet’s surface would render it uninhabitable for us. The same can be said about the balance of gasses in an atmosphere.
In reality, finding life would actually complicate things for us in the sense that it would likely render a planet useless to us even if we couldn’t live there ourselves.
Robert Forward’s “Saturn Rukh” lays out a pretty likely scenario of what would happen if we found even primitive life. In the book the crew goes to Saturn to test the viability of mining helium as a fuel source. They find that it’s viable but impossible due to the fact that there is primitive but intelligent life.
Lifeless rocks really are the most usefull things for us out there right now.
In Forward’s “Saturn Rukh” they used cables made of carbon fiber nanotubes fired into the moons to asist climbing into and out of Saturn’s gravity well.
Forward was a physisist so his science fiction got pretty technical and was well beyond my understanding with a lot of it.
Yes, but can you predict where those bodies are going to be?
You have an inbound traveling and near light speed, in interstellar space, its coming up on a solar system, with your goal of landing on the 3rd planet from that star, you have say 6 planets outside your goal, in various places of orbit around that star..etc etc etc. And perhaps even other bodies you don’t know about because your observations of the system are from light years away.
I am not saying the math couldn’t be done to figure out a way of doing it, but remember, this all has to happen automatically.
The fastest spaceship we’ve had to navigate to date hit a top speed of 3.3AU per year, or approx 500,000,000 KM per year, and that was around a solar system we know pretty well. Light speed is 220,000 KM PER SECOND!...
To give you an ideaof the speed differencials here, our fastest spacecraft to date that we have dealt with is moving at little more than 15KM/second.. a craft traveling at the speed of light is traveling at 14667 times that speed. And it took us slingshotting that craft around several gas giants to accomplish that great speed of 15KPS. To slow a craft from light speed to an orbital velocity of say an earth like planet 27 KPH or .0075 KM per Second.
So, we need to bleed off 220,000 KPS to .0075 KPS just to achieve orbit around an earth like planet if we are travelling near the speed of light. Now, could we get there by repeated flybys of palnets using gravitational wells to slow down etc, certainly.. but you’ll been orbiting that destination sun a LONG LONG time, assuming you don’t collide into anything unexpected in the process to bleed off all that speed.
I am not saying it isn’t theorhetically possible, I’m saying its a very very difficult problem. When you have knowns like our own solar system, its difficult enough, to say, go do this all on your own without help.. its a wholey different story.
Lets just conjecture that we have a HUGE gas giant we can use the gravity of in our destination to slow down, and lets say we can bleed off 10KPS every time we pass it, and lets say we can pass it an average of once a year, that’s still a 22 year slow down wait once the vehicle gets there.
Its as if God has placed very deliberate speedbumps along our path to the stars. None of them are impossible in the long run but it’s pretty clear that we need to become comfortable with living and travelling within our own solar system for the next few centuries.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be interested in the rest of the universe, in fact the thirst for knowledge should drive us onward.
Bring back Pluto! No more wanna-bes till Pluto is reinstated.
Towards Other Earths: 32 New Exoplanets Found
Science Daily | 10/19/2009 | staff
Posted on 10/19/2009 11:08:33 AM PDT by xcamel
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2365894/posts
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Stand outside at night(if there are no street lights it works better)look up at the stars. Every star you see, with a few exceptions, is a sun, every sun has planets orbiting around it. The odds that there isn’t another intelligent life form out there some where is astronomical. Anyone who thinks we are the only intelligent life in the Universe is just beyond stupid.
This is good news. How many are terrstial planets?
That explains the StarGate
They did find one with 2 worlds in the “habitable” zone but neither would be suitable. One was on the inner edge and one was on the outer edge.
That is a good book. Take out the sex and make it a big screen animated film.
Yes....we are....it would be cool.
but not to prove anything..as we already have proven it.
Its reached the top of my bathroom reading list again so I’ve been rereading it a few pages at a time.
Forward had a firm grasp of the physics involved and a firm grasp of the social issues involved.
What does this have to do with Darwin??? Do you hate Science???
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