The Realism of Space Travel

Discussion in 'The Lounge' started by Xeno, Jul 20, 2009.

  1. Ragnar

    Ragnar Member

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    Dude, plants split the h2o molecules and use the hydrogen to produce glucose of some sort. At least that's what I was taught. Now I don't know how much of the water they use for this, but I'm pretty sure that at least some of it "disappears". That's also how we get oxygen from them. The splitting of h2o molecules. I think.

    What's more practical, bringing water and plants or recycling the water from the humans and bringing supplies and oxygen tanks? Perhaps a combination of the two? :confused:
     
  2. LordKyleOfEarth

    LordKyleOfEarth Contributor Contributor

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    Ok lets pretend that the ship contians no plants, animlas, water, or air. Only a collection of atoms. We can rearrange these atoms however we want (plant photosynthesis, animal resperation, etc). In the end, we have the same number of each type of atoms right?

    Earth is a closed system, and we have yet to run 'out' of air or water.

    More practical is recycling the air/water from plant and animal life.
     
  3. LordKyleOfEarth

    LordKyleOfEarth Contributor Contributor

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    This is, of course, horribly over simplified.
     
  4. Xeno

    Xeno Mad and Bitey Contributor

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    I'm gonna agree with Kyle here. You can't destroy an Atom, only change it (I think) but even so, you'll still have water as water vapour, which can be collected easily, unless there's somewhere else for the water to go.


    This thread is actually getting interesting! :D
     
  5. UnknownBearing

    UnknownBearing New Member

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    aww.... but carbon nanotubes are so much cooler. :(
     
  6. Shadow Dragon

    Shadow Dragon Contributor Contributor

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    Also, it could be possible to build a machine to combine hydrogen and oxygen to create more water. In which case, the ship could also collect oxygen and hydrogen while traveling through space.
     
  7. CDRW

    CDRW Contributor Contributor

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    A closed system doesn't necessarily mean that it's infinitely reusable. A good chunk of chemical reactions are irreversible without introducing outside influences to the system. When was the last time you saw a diamond biodegrade or plastic? Biological systems are good, but not good enough to reverse chemical reactions for an infinite amount of time, and no man-made system can even approach the efficiency of a biological one.

    That said, I think we actually have the capacity to construct a generation ship right now if we don't mind buggering everyone left behind.
     
  8. Etan Isar

    Etan Isar Contributor Contributor

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    I think we are forgetting what happens when a plant breaks down that glucose.
     
  9. Skwerly

    Skwerly New Member

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    My argument on this has always been that for thousands of years, folks didn't even know the planet was round, or how ANYthing worked in the solar system. Then, in the span of just around 100 years, we went from horse-drawn carriages to autos and to the Moon - and more!

    Therefore, it is horribly difficult to predict what the next hundred will bring. I'm sure we'll be out there, dabbling. :)
     
  10. LordKyleOfEarth

    LordKyleOfEarth Contributor Contributor

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    Ok I am going to create a serious proposal to an oil sheik in Dubai, to build the space elevator. The Dubai space port. We can do it.
     
  11. CDRW

    CDRW Contributor Contributor

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    Go for it, but you might want to find another person to propose to. Last I heard, Dubai's economy was going down the toilet.
     
  12. HeinleinFan

    HeinleinFan Banned

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    Ah, the unrealistic nature of mankind traveling to other continents. I mean, look at the danger -- and the cost! Criminy, it takes months to go from England to the New World, in tiny unhealthy stagnant uncomfortable cabins, filled with lice and grime, eating a ridiculously plain diet day-in and day-out, dealing with unending noise and dim light and general tedium. We haven't had people go there regularly for hundreds of years, since Erik the Red went and did his bit three hundred years ago. Any storm could come along and sink your ship despite your best efforts. Then when you get there, it's all wilderness and savages. Are you suggesting you want to colonize the place? No mines -- no worked resources -- completely unknown dangers like animals, plus known dangers like bears and cougars and disease and starvation. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to put up a permanent settlement there?

    Go, away, you damn fool. No sane man would want to go there.

    -- The first through twentieth person Christopher Columbus talked to. The twenty-first funded him. See where we are now?

    In 1961, Gagarin went into outer space. By 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin had stepped onto the surface of the moon. From the 70s to the 1990s, we learned how to build ships in outer space, maintain human life for months in the International Space Station, and how to deal with minor emergencies such as minor meteor strikes.

    We lost some people -- some good men and women. We lost Grissom, Chaffee and Edward White in the Apollo 1 disaster. We lost more people in Columbia and Challenger. We will continue to lose people.

    But we won't lose the technology -- or, rather, we won't if we are careful. NASA's purpose was to pull shiny stunts, and they did that rather successfully, and as long as we preserve the knowledge and information they gathered, the price we paid will be worth what we got. The main barrier to colonizing Mars is radiation, and has been for a while. But colonizing the moon?

    The Lunar Society, back in the 1980s, started a registry of couples willing to emigrate to a moon colony. It was a charter-type venture -- the couples would invest $100,000 dollars in the Lunar Society colony, and would receive shares in return. At least one of the people in each married couple had to have a PhD or similarly advanced degree in a technical field. The Society eventually discontinued the registry because they couldn't keep up with the number of volunteers. You can find out more on Dr. Jerry Pournelle's website -- he was involved in the Lunar Society, and supports space technology even today. (The website I'm referring to is here: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q3/view580.html#Monday)

    What is the purpose of starting a colony on the Moon? Severalfold, actually. For one thing, the Moon has a fair number of resources. The trip there doesn't take very long, and the odds of a solar flare occurring and killing emigrants is relatively low. If people need to come back in a (relative) hurry, they can. The lag time for information transfer and communication is relatively short. But the main one is this -- the Moon's gravity well is easier to get out of than that of the Earth. It makes a lot of sense to build our ships on the Moon so that we need less fuel to make the next leg of the journey -- whether our destination is Mars, or the asteroid belt, or to some other place.

    I've heard it said that 90% of the resources easily available to humankind are not located on earth. And it's true. Tin and copper, nickel and iron, helium-3 and uranium can be found elsewhere. It is not terribly difficult to make a large solar array and beam down electrical power to the Earth; we haven't done it yet because there appears to be little interest in such an endeavor among politicians, and because we are still working on the practical aspects of reusable ground-to-orbit spacecraft. But we're getting there.

    As for the stars -- who knows? It'll take us a while to get there, certainly; a back-of-the-envelope calculation I made in 7th grade gave me an estimated 2600 years of travel time between Sol and the nearest yellow dwarf star. We can't do large fractions of light speed because of the energy cost and because space is not totally empty; a hydrogen atom hitting your ship at one-tenth lightspeed will seriously mess you over. But we can travel more slowly, and get there later; people are already working on ways to slow down your metabolism without killing you (this sort of thing is useful for treating a number of diseases and emergency situations). We might ship to the stars in cold sleep, or maybe we'll go there in multi-generational ships, knowing that our great-great-grandkids will one day set foot on a planet with a sun a bit older than our own.

    "Not plausible for the forseeable future?" Please, spare me. In the past 20 years we've gone to micro-surgery, nanotech, DVDs, personal computers more powerful than any single computer as of 1955, genetically engineered corn, and advanced robotics.

    You want "Realism in a Science Fictional Setting?" Try cloning. Viruses that attack cancer. Chimpanzees who can communicate with people (via sign language, sure, but still impressive). The communicators that they had in Star Trek the Original Series? We have 'em -- they're called Cell Phones. We use satellites to pass information around and to take pictures for us.

    What mankind has done, mankind can aspire to. We put two men on the moon, forty years ago, and it took nine years and thousands of people and a ton of computing capability and several false starts. Now we have computing power that would have made the NASA Apollo team green with envy, and we already have the information those false starts generated.

    I wonder what information your friend supplied to back up his argument. Maybe "oh, there's no interest", or "oh, there's no funding". And he'd have a point -- the government has other fish to fry, and you can't count on a term-limited politician to plan for the future of the entire human race. (He'd probably argue that it was out of his jurisdiction, anyway.) But there are X Prizes and private enterprize, and meanwhile a there are some billions of people on this globe who are trying to get up to the tech level of the Developed World, and one easy way to get the metals that will take is to go out to the asteroid field and claim one. "This one's for Zimbabwe, and that one's for Kenya, and that one's for India, and -- hey, China's got seven of them!"

    This isn't to say that it is all smiles and sugar. As the song 'Memorial' tells us, "The star road's paved with the lives of men." Some people will die out there. Some people will invest in a space-tech company, it will fail, and they'll go bankrupt. But you know? Life goes on, and I find it awfully hard to believe that I will have lived and died and not seen anyone step onto the moon during my own lifetime.


    *** The above essay written by Susan Shepherd, in response to: *******

    Here's the thing, for the past three or four hours I've been having an arguement on MySpace with one of my friends, who claims that my decision to study "The Development of Realism in a Science Fiction Space Settting" is fundamentally flawed due to the unrealistic nature of Space Travel.


    Quote:
    Originally Posted by My Friend
    "Anything past that like Mars or mega spaceships in space is totally unrealistic because although it might happen one day in the future, in 100 years, that's not the foreseeable future and therefore not realistic now"

    Now, we've been debating this for a long time now, and I wondered what your thoughts on the matter were?

    Is manned space travel beyond our solar system (practical or non-practical) or even just existence outside of Earth, based on current technology, achievements and/or possible developments of said technology realistic? Can space travel ever be 'realistic' without being foreseeable? Are we setting our sights too high?

    For the record, 'foreseeable' as in 'the forseeable future'.
    I may even use replies from this thread in my research project, if my lecturers give me permission.
     
  13. CDRW

    CDRW Contributor Contributor

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    No idea if this is true or not, but it got me thinking on possible space mining techniques. Obviously the hardest part is getting to the material at all, and then transporting it back. Say you wanted to mine an astroid, give or take your odd wanderer, they're all in the astroid belt. What if we altered the orbits of some of them to bring them out to just the other side of the moon? That would be a lot easier and cheaper to get to, and the amount of energy required to shift an asteroid's orbit isn't a big deal if you give yourself enough time and just make small alterations. We could do that right now and spend the next decade or so developing the technology to mine them. Start-up costs would be huge, and there's a huge lag between that and profits, but once it gets going it would be enormously profitable and open up all sorts of possibilities. It sounds to me like a perfect direction for the automotive industry to head in. :D

    Of course, there's probably going to be some opposition to directing asteroids towards the earth. ;)
     
  14. AliasXNeo

    AliasXNeo New Member

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    The answer is quite simple to me: Physics does not state that space travel is unrealistic. However, we've yet to develop the proper technology to truly harvest the information physics gives us, so at this time it's clearly not possible.

    I most certainly don't think your studies are a waste of time. Plenty of theoretical physicists study topics of the same genre. It was the innovation of NASA engineers that has resulted in numerous technological advances that will help setup the first colony on the moon in the upcoming mission.
     
  15. Hsnodgrass

    Hsnodgrass New Member

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    There is always the possibility that our understanding of physics is flawed...
     
  16. Etan Isar

    Etan Isar Contributor Contributor

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    Understatement of the month. :D
     
  17. Gigi_GNR

    Gigi_GNR Guys, come on. WAFFLE-O. Contributor

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    I definitely believe that we can travel in space, just not very long distances. I support the Mars man mission, but having no knowledge of exactly how complicated everything is, can only state a simple opinion. I don't believe that we'll be going all Star Trek anytime soon, able to zoom around different galaxies and beam down to different planets, but who knows, that might one day be as common as driving down the road.
     

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