First Habitable Planet Confirmed.

"Doost" and "Soon?" If I remember off hand...

Which dialect of UK English is that? Any UK users here to lend a hand?

Hes from Manchester if that helps

Dark Matter and Dark Energy is the only thing I have trouble understanding.

but its a relatively new concept and I bet im not the only one.

I'd be lying if I said I understood it completely, but I have a good grasp on the concept..

I've been a fan of Michio Kaku for a while. I want to take a look at one of his books sometime. Should be an interesting read, even if a lot of it goes over my head, or gives me a headache.

"Physics of the Impossible" is the one I wanted to read.

For the time when blaming one guy or another starts generating tax revenue or magically creating responsible governments, I thank you in advance.

Because you know - both/either/neither of them single-handedly destroyed/resurrected NASA. What's more, we (if you're in the US) are on the very verge of insanity, so... yeah, whatevs I guess.

I'm not much of a reader, but I love it when I see him in documentaries and such, I'm not entirely sure what the book is about, but he has a show called Physics of the Impossible, and it's a pretty good series.. He's covered everything from (as in how you could actually make them..) warp capable ships and personal invisibility cloaks to light sabers and transporters like you see in Star Trek..

He has this amazing ability to explain science in terms anyone could understand, but he also includes plenty of the more technical stuff for the people who already have a grasp on the basics and are wanting more.

If we move away from "conventional" considerations such as String Theory and view the world from a sum-over-paths perspective we get rid of uncertainty and it enables this "viewing of the past" that you're talking about.

The nature of path integrals also allows us to perfectly predict any future event, provided ALL past information is known (yeah, like that's gonna happen...) - Then we could zip around really fast for a while and pop out in the future and watch our predictions in reality.

Interestingly, there're developments in the Path Integral Formulation that lead to potential space-displacement[1], however, so there's a possibility that rather than this distant image of the past, we could appear within it too - all without the need for the moronic "Holographic Principle"... -.-

(1) - Feynman, R.P., Hibbs, A.R., Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals. (New York: Dover. 2010)

[Edit - reference and clarification]

Epic thread is epic.

I'm just gonna chuck in my totally random 2 cents, since that's what I do.

I think launching anything into space aside from satellites is a complete waste of money until we can figure out a mode of travel. However, unless we can also work out a method to make it possible for a ship (whether or not it's manned) to get somewhere significant and send data back within a couple of decades, it's still a waste of time.

Assuming we had the technology to make a probe travel at light speed (or near light speed, whatever), it'd take 20 years (our time) for it to reach this new planet, yet we assuming it sent information back the moment it got there, also at the speed of light, it'd be another 20 years before we got it. ie. 40 years after we launched it.

Any information we get from a new planet isn't going to tell us a damn thing that will help us get there any faster, so at the very least, it'll be 60 years our time before anyone sets foot on the planet to begin colonising it. Keeping in mind that this is a ridiculously close planet on the grand scale of things, like visiting your next door neighbour compared to an overseas friend.

So basically, unless we can figure out how to incorporate time travel (travelling backwards in time*) into our space travel, I just don't see the point. Without time travel, the only reason we could ever have for going to another planet would be the continuation of the species... yay? I dunno, I just kinda think that if we *** up this planet to the point that it can no longer sustain our life, then we should accept it and die.

Due to that whole stretchy time thing you guys have been discussing, it's quite likely that you could leave Earth, and reach another planet without dying of old age on the trip, but everyone you ever knew would have died hundreds or thousands of years ago by the time you get there.

Because of that fact, it makes me wonder where the money for such a voyage is going to come from. Considering the fact that nothing will get back to Earth from any planet outside our solar system within probably thousands of years, I don't see where the profit could be. Would people pay to leave Earth behind forever? One way holiday to a new planet? What would the price have to be in order to fund it? I just feel like even if technology advances to the point where interplanetary travel is possible, it will still be held back by the impracticality or infeasibility (how are infeasible and feasibility both word according to spellcheck, yet infeasibility is not?) of it.

No organisation with anything like the money required for this sort of thing would ever take it on unless it was profitable to them or the human civilization in the foreseeable future.

*I don't really see travelling at the speed of light as time travel. It's kinda more like a Futurama thing, cryogenically freezing yourself and letting time pass around you. I guess, technically speaking, it would be travelling through time, but unless you can travel back again it's just pointless and doesn't count in my book :p

</rant>

The world is going to dramatically change as soon as fusion energy controls the world.

Do you know that every single technological thing in this age is all because of oil?

Oil driven technological advances have only been around for about 150 years.

We are going to see some incredible things in our lifetime.


Also as far as new advances in high speed travel (engines). The Plasma thruster is being build currently and in 3 Years it going to be hooked up to the space station. If tests go according to plans the technology of it could advance us in a whole new era in space exploration. 5 Month mission to mars vs. two and a half years.

So if I am reading this stuff right, any travel to distant planets would be a complete waste of time because anyone they ever knew on earth would be dead by the time they landed? So it would basically be a one-way colonization trip.

I definitely agree that we'll see incredible things in our lifetime, we already have seen incredible things, they're just a lot more credible now that we've seen them ;)

Your oil comment is a little too conspiracy theorist for my likings though. It's true to an extent, but I'd say it's a very small extent. I honestly can't fathom how anything within the science, medical or IT industries are due to oil. However, I'm pretty certain that some technology that would have had massive impact on our lives has been repressed because of oil.

Anyway, isn't a 5 month mission to mars still ridiculously meh on the broad scale of things? Mars is ~55-400 million km away, this other planet is about 200 trillion km away (20 light years). Maybe I have my math wrong, but with that technology you're still looking at about a 500 thousand year one way trip.

My post was rather vague I agree.

More-so its consumable energies which have given us all of our modern technologies. You cannot make things without electricity and all significant power sources in this day in age are all consumables.
Coal (Consumable, or Limited resource)
Natural Gas (Consumable, or limited resource)
Oil (Consumable, or limited resource)

and the mars thing was just an example of how fast progress is still moving, regardless of the current budget.

Solar, Hydro and Wind say hi.

There's an extremely good documentary (however fairly controversial) about peak oil that I have seen which explains it more or less. The guy behind it is about 50% nut-job and 50% not insane. If you can sift through the nut-job portion its very much worth watching.

"Significant sources"

Its a simple fact Oil changed our world

Solar Water and Wind energy did not (yet?)

Plastics say hi.

We depend on petroleum products for way more than just a fuel source. It's just the most popular target of our lust.

I dunno really, you just made it sound like there's no such thing as renewable energy. I don't know how viable it actually is (like, how many wind turbine things would you actually need to power all of the US?), but I know that my home state (Tasmania) has been 100% hydro powered for years. I believe Canada relies pretty heavily on hydro too.

For the most part, I think we continue to use nonrenewable energy because it's cheaper than installing new solar/wind/hydro/whatever power stations, even though these will save us money in the long run. Eventually there'll be no fossil fuels left and we'll be forced to switch to renewable (or atomic) energy anyway, but until then, we're still paying money for the oil/coal/gas that fuels our power stations.

It wouldn't be a complete waste of time considering depleted resources here on Earth.

Like others have stated, there would be breeding, so you would just get to know other people on the way there. LOL!

I'm thinking of this as one nutty experiment in eugenics. The best and brightest creating generations completely untouched by the lunacy that goes on here. I imagine that would be the closest to a utopia that humans would ever reach.

I wonder what people from the second or third generation would think knowing just the flight out, the initial technology their parents/grandparents left with, basically only minimal knowledge of Earth.

You're correct.

Upkeep and installation is what makes a good portion of these energy sources unreasonable.

Also think about how the majority of people on the planet get to work. Your tires are made of oil. The paint on the car from oil. The fuel from oil. The metal transported to the facility to the build the automobile, by oil.

We live in the age of oil.

Oh damn, you're totally right. It still kinda boggles my mind that plastic is made from the same stuff as petrol... or something?

My understanding of the concept discussed was that while 40 years would have passed for the probe's information that it sent back, thousands would have passed for us.

In fact... If we sent a probe via near-light speed travel, we may have developed faster than light travel and already colonized the planet for hundreds of years by the time it got there...

What I wonder is, is that if it's impractical for us, then that means until we develop a way around the time required and all the problems that we will never meet another race of beings that is at the same level of technology as us until then. Meaning, in order to find real extraterrestrials(barring microbes and animal/plant life) they'll have to come to us. It's quite fascinating.

The solution to all this is just unlock the Charon Mass relay orbiting Pluto, and explore the Martian ruins for some refined Element Zero.

On a more serious note 300,000 Years isn't even that long. I mean sure, the Homo Sapiens species has existed for about that time, but even on a geologic time scale, it's a mere blink. Considering how much emphasis is (usually, damn Republicans) put on the progeny of our species, even assuming the 300,000 year time frame, and assuming the planet is suitable for colonization, it's something we can't dismiss simply because "All the people you cared about are lolded". If that was the mindset of the human race, all the European/Urasian people's would have commited ritualistic mass suicide after the Bubonic plague swept away 1/3 of the continent's population.

Wow there are so many scientists and smart people here, i wonder why you guys got stucked playing an online game? serious question !!! I quitted a few months ago to be able to focus on my civil engineering degree and i realised i could read something that makes me smart instead of wasting my freetime playing game ...

Lol, real life card.