Nathan

Interstellar Travel

It is the ultimate goal of every space travel enthusiast, aeronautic scientist, and astrophysicist to create the legendary "warp drive", allowing interstellar travel to be viable. The speed of light, as fast as it is, would take years to get to even the closest stars, and millions of years to cross the galaxy. Humans simply do not have that kind of time on their hands; we need fast, and we need it now.

However, the most probable form of interstellar travel would, ironically, not rely on speed. "Most probable" does not in any sense mean that it is probable at all, unfortunately. The other ones were just impossible.

Why attempt to move through space-time when you can manipulate it? That is to say, based on a plan developed recently, if space-time itself is moving relative to nothing, then it isn't really moving at all. But it still is moving. If, and this is extremely iffy, the following conundrums could be solved, then we might actually have an extremely remote shot at this.

The process for interstellar travel:

Quoting Popsci.com:

1. Fuel Up: Start beyond Earth’s immediate gravitational pull. Convert matter into negative energy (particles with negative mass that are repelled by gravity rather than attracted to it).
2. Curve Spacetime: Emit pulses of negative energy to curve spacetime. Form a sphere around the ship with the energy, insulating passengers in their own private spacetime bubble.
3. Drop Out: The bubble warps spacetime so drastically that it actually slips out of the visible universe. Only a narrow tube of negative energy keeps it tied to our world.
4. Expand Space: Now that the craft is protected in its spacetime bubble, the real work can begin: Expand space behind the bubble at faster-than-light speed, and shrink the space in front.

End quote.

The problems with this are numerous, unfortunately, but they are not too unbelieveable.

Quoting Popsci.com again:

The Warp Drive To-Do List
A few not-so-minor challenges you’ll need to tackle before takeoff:

• Discover Negative Energy: There are no known particles with negative mass. The closest scientists have come is a phenomenon called the Casimir effect, wherein empty space between two conducting plates behaves as if it contains negative energy.
• Devise a Way To Manipulate It: Even if scientists could transform matter into negative energy, they would still have to find a way to focus it and create an infinitesimally thin, yet extraordinarily stable, bubble of the stuff around the spaceship.
• Harness Dark Energy: In recent years, cosmologists have been studying a mysterious force called dark energy that they think is accelerating the expansion of the universe. If scientists could generate it at the back of the bubble, it might move, or expand, space.
• Build Bubble Brakes: Because the spacetime carrying the ship would be completely cut off from the outside of the bubble, there would be no way to send a signal to turn off the warp drive. The signal would never get there, and the ship would never stop.

End quote.

Since this is rather hard to explain on my own anyway, at this point, I'm just going to provide a link to the Popsci.com article.

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviationspace/d1e527098dcda010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

Elephants in Space

13 days ago from this post, on January 10th, India launched a rocket containing four payloads from close to the city of Chennai. One of these payloads was the capsule, the country's first reusable spacecraft. 11 days later, it was fished out of the Bay of Bengal. This puts India in the elite spacefaring circle of countries (and company), previously including only the USA, France, China, Russia, Japan, and, ironically, the company Virgin Galactic.

The Indian Space Agency is eager to make an unmanned moon mission in 2008 and send an astronaut up in 2014. The country is growing incredibly fast, perhaps not so much population-wise as technologically and politically. In fact...this would be a great time to draw on my old essay, long lost in the archives. Plus, I'll quote the part about India right here:

 

Summary division 2: Developing India and the World

 For so many years, India has been a backwater, rice farming, sad country, where you lived and died of minor diseases alongside your livestock, existing for Vishnu, and contributing nothing to the booming economies of America, Japan, and Western Europe. Because of this history, when India was introduced to the developed world, there were a large amounts of workers who were ready and eager to participate. The wages they get are minuscule compared to what even McDonalds workers in America demand, but to the Indians, they are quite fat and juicy compared to what they were stuck in only a few decades ago.

Unfortunately, that entire segment of the population, that segment that computes and answers customer service phone calls and serves America and its companies, makes up only one five-hundredth of the population; The other four-hundred and ninety-nine parts of India still exist in the conditions that they have for the last few millennia.

    India may have a huge pool of workers for introduction, but it has an even huger pool of workers still untapped, many of which do not have an inkling of what is going on in the world around them. When you visit Bangalore, the true hub of Indian revival, it may seem that you have just stumbled upon any good-sized American city. Towers rising dozens of stories high preside over lush, green grounds, with golf courses and lakes and parks, even complete with their own McDonalds.

But to erase all this, all you have to do is look behind you. You drive up to the buildings on a dirt road, passing through villages of mud huts and shacks, where farmers and poor beggars reside, having no part in all this. But as soon as you pass through the gate, the dirt track immediately resolves itself into a freshly paved, cleaned, well-lit road.

    India benefited greatly from the fiber-optic boom, utilizing the tens of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables laid down across the ocean floor. But what many people don’t realize is how much India benefited from the fiber-optic bust. As companies and investors lost vast quantities of poorly placed money, they realized in their moments of financial desperation that India, being a previously undiscovered mine of cheap technical labor, was their only alternative. Despite the risks that they believed were involved with such an act, they sent their back room jobs over to India. Then, watching the cheap success that India produced, they decided to keep the Indian workers permanently. Nowadays, most companies would not exist, or would exist drastically differently if not for India.

Thanks, Nathan. Now, for a picture of India's recent launch.

Edit: Sorry for any weirdness with the formatting of the above paragraphs, typepad is having some *severe* problems with pasting things out of word documents. The fact that I got it back into paragraph form is a miracle in itself.

New Earth

Robert Zubrin, the founder of the Mars Society, a society unofficially responsible for colonizing Mars,  has an ambitious plan for terraforming Mars. Supposedly beginning about 150 years from now, the red planet will be turned into shades of blue and green and white. His terraforming plan has several steps.

1: Get to the position of being economically, geographically, and willingly ready to begin terraforming. This involves exploring the planet, establishing bases, and eventually independent colonies.

2. Warm it up: Mars has to be made, on average, a dozen dozen degrees warmer, and this can be accomplished in several ways. Two more impractical ideas involve giant mirrors and crashing asteroids full of ammonia, but the most controlled, efficient idea is to build plants to release greenhouse gas. There will be five nuclear plants devoted to the powering of these factories, which themselves will run on solar power. Over 30 years, at the rate of producing 1,000 tons of gas every hour, the planet will warm by 50 degrees.

3. Release gas trapped in the soil: The cold temperatures on Mars as of now make gas settle and be absorbed into the ground, but should it be warmed, the gas would be released, and the atmosphere would warm to Earth temperatures. Ice would begin to melt, creating the environment for oceans to form. After 100 years of step two and step three, you will be able walk on Mars without a space suit, though you will need an artificial air system.

4. Planting: Now that the conditions are ripe for bubble cities, massive farms of plants will also become integral parts of the terraforming process. This will create the setting for a human-suitable atmosphere. All the plants would have to be harvested and only allowed to decompose in controlled settings, though, because more carbon dioxide would only slow down the process of generating oxygen.

5. After waiting 1,000 years, continuing the farming process, the planet is ready to walk on!

Visit the Mars society website. 

My head hurts.

               
 

Oh my. This is an amazing illustration of the sheer scale of the universe...our human affairs pale in comparison. Oh my.

The Next Hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope will soon have another upgrade for many of its components including the camera, allowing the old (by space technology standards) telescope to manage to survive until its replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, is finished and sent into orbit in 2013.

A major upgrade to the Hubble is the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or the COS project. This is a complex computer system designed to calculate and enhance photos of dark matter, which is the 95% of the matter in the universe which does not glow. The COS will look at where light and energy from distant quasars is being absorbed, and based on the light distribution will simulate what the dark matter must look like.

The James Webb Space Telescope is taking a new approach. This telescope will have an open-space reflecting dish and a massive, tennis-court sized sunsheild sitting below it. The JWST mission is designed to only last from 5-10 years; the telescope is to be placed 1.5 million kilometers from Earth at the second Earth-Sun Larange point. This will significantly improve the telescope's performance, but there will be no hope of servicing it.

This new telescope will have a huge reflecting mirror, over 20 feet in diameter. The mirror itself is made of pure beryllium, designed to be light yet sturdy. One of the most major innovations in this new telescope will be the incredibly tiny micro shutters, a series of photographic cells only 200 microns wide.

Taken from the recent Popsci.com article, "Hubble, New and Improved" and from general information on the official James Webb Space Telescope website.

Not so distant anymore

"Mommy, I want to be an astronaut!" Most children have said this phrase at least once in their lives, but their mothers knew that their toddlers would probably never go higher than the Stratosphere...or did they?

The Virgin Empire, with Richard Branson at it's head, recently won the 10 Million dollar Ansari X-prize, for making the first commercial reusable space vehicle, known as Space Ship One. Three times the little rocket plane was sent up into space, defined as some 60 miles above the earth, and three times Space Ship One landed without a catch. This was the first commercial space flight in history, and it certainly outlined Virgin as a powerful entity. It had done what only three of the world's greatest countries had before.

Now, Virgin has created Virgin Galactic, the first commercial space tourism company ever. In fact, the company has already made the first civilian space flight, sending over half a dozen customers into the Wild Black Yonder. Virgin Galactic is currently constructing several more space ships for this purpose, including Space Ship Two.

Tickets to go into space come in three groups: Founders, Pioneers, and Voyagers. Founders pay 200,000 US dollars to make their trip, because they are all rich people who are ready to go into space RIGHT NOW. This group is already booked, them being the first 100 people to go into space.

The second group, the Pioneers, will launch soon after the last of the Founder flights. They pay only $175,000, but they will still be among the first 1,000 people to go into space.

The last group, the Voyagers, will go into space directly after the Pioneers. Sure, they are last, but they pay only $20,000. This is a great thing for high schoolers to save up for, because they have jobs but do not pay expenses, and by the time their flight is ready, they'll be veteran adults.

In conclusion, who ever said that very few people go into space? By the time I'm an adult, I'll buy a week-long stay at the Virgin Galactic Space Hotel for less than a week-long stay at some hotels in New York or Las Vegas...or, I might even get a job as a Zero-G bellboy.

See the Virgin Galactic website. See the promotional movie. Book your ticket into the void today.

See the simulated Space Ship Two movie, which doesn't look simulated. This is what your trip will be like, only it will take longer than 13 minutes.