Aliens, Area 51 and the Unknown...

[troutman]

Originally Posted by flameswin

haha, from reading some of Photon's posts, he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would stop looking at things scientifically and "use his imagination".

Not cool.

Scientists are among our most imaginative people.

[T@T]

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...

[Thor]

The problem isn't just achieving that speed to travel vast distances, its the problem of time slowing as you reach such ludicrous speeds (Spaceballs joke insert)..

As you travel that distance at great speeds, the people you left behind continue to experience time differently than you, a light speed trip to our nearest solar system would mean roughly 80-100 yrs (not positive on the exact number) have passed for those on earth, while you only experience a few years off your lifetime.

Ultimately the only hope is wormholes, folding space, or something we can't imagine. Its not about speed, as much as it is about traveling vast distances without really traveling much at all.

Of course Science can conceivably invent or discover something to trump all this, we never know, thats the fun of science.

[photon]

Originally Posted by T@T

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:

Ah but flight wasn't something that was viewed as impossible, birds did it all the time.

I understand your point, but you are missing mine.

At this time the stars are beyond us, and unless we make a huge leap in our understanding of reality they will continue to be.

Is that leap in understanding possible? I think so, the quantum world is full of strangeness that demonstrates our universe is far far different than we see with our senses. If we can understand and use that who knows what might be possible.

I just want to make the point that people often vastly underestimate the magnitude of the problem.

Personally I think it's the wrong question.. why go to the stars when we can bring the stars to us? Model the universe in a computer and everyone lives there. Turn Earth into a large computer and we could house trillions of lives, and moving all of us in a computer is far easier than biological bodies, much easier to go to a new star when ours dies out.

Anyway, yes who knows what's possible, but speculation about what may be possible isn't evidence of aliens any more than it's evidence of astral unicorns that can take us to the stars.

[Daradon]

Originally Posted by photon

why go to the stars when we can bring the stars to us? Model the universe in a computer and everyone lives there. Turn Earth into a large computer and we could house trillions of lives, and moving all of us in a computer is far easier than biological bodies, much easier to go to a new star when ours dies out.

Count me out.

Far too many people know martial arts when you live in a computer. Plus I'm told everything tastes like chicken.

[Bobblehead]

Originally Posted by photon

Personally I think it's the wrong question.. why go to the stars when we can bring the stars to us? Model the universe in a computer and everyone lives there. Turn Earth into a large computer and we could house trillions of lives, and moving all of us in a computer is far easier than biological bodies, much easier to go to a new star when ours dies out.

It would be some sort of matrix type thingy! Oh, wait.....