Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
Ok lets see, to get to the nearest star in a lifetime you need a megawatt per pound:
http://www.time.com/time/reports/v21/science/stars.html
So the question is how big a ship do you need? I guess that depends on what you are going there for... To explore? Or to colonize?
Colonize is what I had in mind, exploring would be a lot smaller.
A fully loaded 747 weighs almost a million pounds, fully assembled shuttle stack 4.5 million pounds (though most of that is fuel). If we're going to explore, could we get away with a ship between 10 and 100 times that size? We're taking all the fuel we need, all the food, everything. Recycling will be critical.
A colonization ship would be orders of magnitude higher again.
So lets say we're super efficient and it's a only 50 million pounds. That's 50 million megawatts. A nuclear reactor produces what, 500 megawatts? Wikipedia says all the earth's nuclear reactors produce 370,000 MW, so we'd need 135 times that.
And I think my weight estimate is probably really really low, if it was a generational ship or colonization ship it'd be maybe billions of pounds.
And that's just to the nearest star, if the nearest earth like planet is 10 times further...
So just one ship could eat up a significant amount of the earth's energy reserves.
The only way it's even plausible is gaining the ability to harvest energy from the sun in large amounts, or other stuff like ram jets etc.. |
I did read your post after this but what if I told you in 200 years mankind could travel 100 million miles in a second..would you think i'm crazy?
Like in about as crazy as telling someone 200 years ago that man could fly from NY to LA in an hour?
200 years is not even a nanosecond in time but us humans have done incredible things in this short time.
Some things we didn't have up to 200 years ago that make me laugh:
1800 - the battery
1804 - stream powered train
1814 - the camera
1824 - cement
1827 - the match
1829 - typewriter
1839 - bicycle
1858 - washing machine
1866 - dynomite
1876 - telephone
1885 - automobile
1893 - zipper
1898 - diesel engine
1901 - the radio
1903 - the airplane
1904 - the tractor
1908 - first comercial automobile
1910 - talking movies
1922 - insulin
1933 - drive in movie theater
1937 - jet engine
1939 - helicopter
1945 - atomic bomb
1950 - the credit card
1954 - the pill (may have been the single most changing invention for man)
1957 - computer language
1965 - contact lenses
1967 - calculator
1971 - the VCR
1979 - cellular phone
1985 - windows
...list getting to much now...