Gravitational slingshots & Einsteins theory of relativity

[Muay Thai]

What is interesting is that what scientists once thought up until the 1990s about exoplanets within our galaxy regarding the time it would take to travel to them could be millions of years, they have since discovered could possibly only take minutes. We are a microcosm within a macrocosm. There are about 400 billion planets scientists estimate within our milky way galaxy. Most were difficult to discover for many years because the sunlight is reflected at millions of times their brightness thus inferring it "cloaked" them. Giordano Bruno was burned alive at the stake by the catholic church in Rome for writing about similar beliefs go figure.


"In orbital mechanics and aerospace engineering, a gravitational slingshot, gravity assist maneuver, or swing-by is the use of the relative movement and gravity of a planet or other celestial body to alter the path and speed of a spacecraft, typically in order to save propellant, time, and expense."

this makes me think of Mario kart video game when you would drive on the arrows and accelerate at 10x speed

"Antimatter also has the highest energy density of any known substance. And if used as fuel, it could provide by far the most efficient propulsion system, with up to 40% of the fuel's mass-energy being converted directly into thrust (compared with 1% for fusion, the next most efficient)."

anyone who can shed light on this please do, any corrections are also welcome. fascinating stuff

 

[Virtuous]

This is all pretty correct, but the larger issue with space travel is relativity. I know that Intersteller used it as a neat plot twist, but it’s actually rather accurate - time warps a bit in space, and if you managed to travel to (and return from) the far reaches of space, you’d come back to a wildly different time.

 

[heavyhitter]

This is all pretty correct, but the larger issue with space travel is relativity. I know that Intersteller used it as a neat plot twist, but it’s actually rather accurate - time warps a bit in space, and if you managed to travel to (and return from) the far reaches of space, you’d come back to a wildly different time.

It doesn’t just warp, it folds back over onto itself. So if you were right at the center, you’d be in all times at once. Omnipresent. Like god

 

[Orville Shreddenbacher]

I ve read a ton on space and astrophysics . its almost all theoretical , constantly being proven and disproven . its funny to see this thread on a bodybuilding forum because its so similar in that you have to pick a theory that you believe in and that makes sense to you . if it were possible to travel a couple million light years of distance in a short amount of time , there s no guarantee that where you re going is even there anymore. If someone about 80 light years away could see us now they would be watching world war 2 happening .

 

[Ruhlfreak55]

Uhm what? You can't use a gravitational assist to achieve a speed that's a significant percentage of C...

We definitely are not capable AT THE MOMENT of reaching a distant planet in minutes. When we are I suspect that mode of achieving that will be somewhere along the lines of wormholes or perhaps a Warp drive (basically bending / warping space time in a bubble around the ship in question), not a simple trick of gravitic mechanics.

 

[Ruhlfreak55]

As far as anti-matter.....I'm not even aware of anyone stabilizing that enough to play with it very much, even in the lab.

 

[graybass]

It will be warp drive. They already proved in theory that you can warp (bend) space. The only way to visit other solar systems will be to travel faster the speed of light. This is not possible in our normal 3D space.
We might see warp drive in our lifetimes. I hope so.

 

[BJJisLIFE]

We might see warp drive in our lifetimes. I hope so.

This made me lol. Gotta love your optimism though.

Like all new revolutionary technology. Once they make it work, they patent it then put it on the shelf and find ways to slowly implement it over as long of a time frame as possible. I remember seeing video 20+ years ago of a scientist giving a demonstration of a car that he rigged to run on water. He could get like 400 miles in a gallon of water. Apparently Honda bought the technology, and hasn't done anything with it.

 

[OuchThatHurts]

There are too many problems. As you approach C your mass would become so great that it would crush you into subatomic partices. The speed at which time would be passing around your "craft" would be incredible. Then there's the problem with deceleration.

'Interstellar' the movie, although pure fiction, did do one thing well which is to allow people to understand that the speed at which time passes is different for every particle in the universe.

If you were to gain momentum with a gravity assist from an object, that object's gravity would distort time to a spectacular degree just being in it's gravity. This plays out even now. Since GPS satellites are in such a high geostationary orbit, they are far outside of Earth's gravity. So time is moving slower for us down here closer to the surface. GPS clocks appear to run about 45 microseconds per day faster than our clocks on Earth. This adjustment is factored in every day so that after some length of time, the satellite doesn't tell your car's GPS "turn left now" an hour before the turn! LOL!

The final issue I'll bring up is practicality. Simply this: look, we can't even go from one continent to another without infecting entire populations with deadly microbes. Can you imagine the microbes from another living world? It may not even be DNA-based life. My guess is you'd be stone dead within minutes. Or worse, you'd kill the other planet's life forms. That would be unconscionable.

 

[hawkmoon]

There are too many problems. As you approach C your mass would become so great that it would crush you into subatomic partices. The speed at which time would be passing around your "craft" would be incredible. Then there's the problem with deceleration.

'Interstellar' the movie, although pure fiction, did do one thing well which is to allow people to understand that the speed at which time passes is different for every particle in the universe.

If you were to gain momentum with a gravity assist from an object, that object's gravity would distort time to a spectacular degree just being in it's gravity. This plays out even now. Since GPS satellites are in such a high geostationary orbit, they are far outside of Earth's gravity. So time is moving slower for us down here closer to the surface. GPS clocks appear to run about 45 microseconds per day faster than our clocks on Earth. This adjustment is factored in every day so that after some length of time, the satellite doesn't tell your car's GPS "turn left now" an hour before the turn! LOL!

The final issue I'll bring up is practicality. Simply this: look, we can't even go from one continent to another without infecting entire populations with deadly microbes. Can you imagine the microbes from another living world? It may not even be DNA-based life. My guess is you'd be stone dead within minutes. Or worse, you'd kill the other planet's life forms. That would be unconscionable.

Never mind the alien microbes...

Our own microbes will be dead soon enough from cosmic radiation and SEPs, right after our DNA gets blown to hell.

As the Mars expedition researchers tackle this issue their current solution is "get there as fast as possible".

And then you'd have to burrrow deep underground.

 

[OuchThatHurts]

Never mind the alien microbes...

Our own microbes will be dead soon enough from cosmic radiation and SEPs, right after our DNA gets blown to hell.

As the Mars expedition researchers tackle this issue their current solution is "get there as fast as possible".

And then you'd have to burrrow deep underground.

True. From a planet like Mars with no shielding atmosphere or magnetic field to getting there in a craft that were shielded from solar and cosmic radiation. All of this is a game of "What if..." Radiation is another good issue of practicality. Mars is a dead planet. We would need a world with similar mass of Earth, a liquid core of iron spinning enough to form a protective magnetosphere, a thick atmosphere of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, etc.

It's incredible whatever insane odds that all things would align as perfectly as Earth for our habitation. You could go through a billion planets and not find even one that is close enough to Earth for us to live on. Of all the millions of components that make up our ecosphere, if you were to take away even one component, we all die. That's why Biospere I and II failed miserably.

Plus every living thing on Earth contains and has one thing in common - water. All Earth life is water-based. So the planet would have to be abundant with water. The soil would have to be just right that our plants would grow in it.

Another thing to consider is at what stage of life is the planet. Even Earth at most times in history would be completely uninhabitable to human life. I'm thinking what might happen if a team of astronauts were to land on Earth during the Cretaceous Period. They would all eventually be eaten!

But you are correct. Radiation would have to be almost identical. And terraforming is out. Even if we built a thousand generators the size of New York City on a planet, it would still take thousands of years until we created the 100's of billions of tons of atmosphere we would need.

We would do much better to redirect our efforts toward keeping our own planet capable of supporting the thousands of generations that are to follow us. Because quite frankly, I'm just going to say it, at our current pace, our species will be gone in a few hundred years at best (or at least a high percentage).

 

[Ruhlfreak55]

There are too many problems. As you approach C your mass would become so great that it would crush you into subatomic partices. The speed at which time would be passing around your "craft" would be incredible. Then there's the problem with deceleration.

'Interstellar' the movie, although pure fiction, did do one thing well which is to allow people to understand that the speed at which time passes is different for every particle in the universe.

If you were to gain momentum with a gravity assist from an object, that object's gravity would distort time to a spectacular degree just being in it's gravity. This plays out even now. Since GPS satellites are in such a high geostationary orbit, they are far outside of Earth's gravity. So time is moving slower for us down here closer to the surface. GPS clocks appear to run about 45 microseconds per day faster than our clocks on Earth. This adjustment is factored in every day so that after some length of time, the satellite doesn't tell your car's GPS "turn left now" an hour before the turn! LOL!

The final issue I'll bring up is practicality. Simply this: look, we can't even go from one continent to another without infecting entire populations with deadly microbes. Can you imagine the microbes from another living world? It may not even be DNA-based life. My guess is you'd be stone dead within minutes. Or worse, you'd kill the other planet's life forms. That would be unconscionable.

You're right about the mass increase of course, but you also don't have to achieve .99C for it to be useful (and to be WAY faster than we're currently capable of). According to the equation if I recall right, if you achieve C in normal space your mass literally becomes infinite and you kind of sort of are everywhere at once.

I forgot about that little time lensing point. It's a good one, in order for something to actually help catapault you to speeds that are a significant percentage of C you'd have to be using something like a black hole and you'd end up damn near stuck in time completing the maneuver.

 

[OuchThatHurts]

You're right about the mass increase of course, but you also don't have to achieve .99C for it to be useful (and to be WAY faster than we're currently capable of). According to the equation if I recall right, if you achieve C in normal space your mass literally becomes infinite and you kind of sort of are everywhere at once.

I forgot about that little time lensing point. It's a good one, in order for something to actually help catapault you to speeds that are a significant percentage of C you'd have to be using something like a black hole and you'd end up damn near stuck in time completing the maneuver.

All true. To accelerate to the speed of light, mass becomes infinite. But we'd be crushed long before that. Even at a fraction of C, the few thousand planets that we may reach in say a few hundred years, the spacecraft would have to be of multi-generational design. And to find a planet that has everything Earth does, the odds of that happening would be quite a stroke of luck.

If space is infinite or still expanding faster than C as only spacetime itself can, then there is likely life out there. But for us to reach it, would require we find a way to travel somehow outside of spacetime. The way quantumly-entangled particles behave at great distances apart (instantaneously).

Gravity can't be the way. We can see how gravity behaves but we're not even sure how or why it exists at all. Is it particle (gravitons) or wave? Same with dark matter and dark energy. We see its effects but it's not visible by any instrument we can design. Maybe AI will figure these things out thousands of years after we'e all gone or somehow transplanted into an artificial medium and we become self-aware robots ourselves (see: 'Spritual Machines' by Ray Kurzwell)

 

[pickapeck]

Next topic: The Alcubierre drive

 

[buck]

Until some one actually can prove and do something with it, it is a theory at best.

Warp Bubble Found? Scientists Explain How This Works

It's possible that a group of scientists by chance found how to manufacture a warp drive engine.

www.sciencetimes.com

 

[pickapeck]

Until some one actually can prove and do something with it, it is a theory at best.

Warp Bubble Found? Scientists Explain How This Works

It's possible that a group of scientists by chance found how to manufacture a warp drive engine.

www.sciencetimes.com

I looked into it about 5 years ago. There were some improvements of orders of magnitude less energy required but when we are talking about the amount of energy of a sun needed a few orders of magnitude isn't going to do it. But then again, neither is traveling a small fraction of the speed of light either. Anyways, we have enough problems to deal with on this little blue marble without worrying about finding some other marble in a Goldilocks zone at the precise moment in it's time that a habitable environment exists. It's a fun topic but I'm more concerned about another kind of singularity, one envisioned by the WEF psychopaths.. but that's just me and my maniacal fascinations.

 

[NorwegianMuscle]

ummm I pick things up and put them down

 

[Gunsmith]

As a NASA contractor now , you should all be happy that these fucking clowns can get the satellites into space to keep the internet going.
Maybe some private company might get us to the moon in the next 10 years but we are CENTURIES away from putting a human on Mars.
Actual space exploration beyond the moon is so many lifetimes away from where we are now it's unthinkable.

 

[buck]

As a NASA contractor now , you should all be happy that these fucking clowns can get the satellites into space to keep the internet going.
Maybe some private company might get us to the moon in the next 10 years but we are CENTURIES away from putting a human on Mars.
Actual space exploration beyond the moon is so many lifetimes away from where we are now it's unthinkable.

I was part of the manufacturing process for some of the stuff that flew into space from space stations, shuttles , satellites etc. I knew many involved from engineers, inspectors on down the ladder, that i wouldn't let walk my dog. Of course these are also the same people that are building commercial planes that people fly on every day. People wonder why i don't like to fly.

 

[maldorf]

As a NASA contractor now , you should all be happy that these fucking clowns can get the satellites into space to keep the internet going.
Maybe some private company might get us to the moon in the next 10 years but we are CENTURIES away from putting a human on Mars.
Actual space exploration beyond the moon is so many lifetimes away from where we are now it's unthinkable.

Right now I think it only takes about 10 months to reach Mars. I believe we will have the first person on Mars within the next 10 years. We plan on having a woman on the moon within the next 5 years. Its great that we have so many private companies basically doing a space race now. Now as far as a livable colony of Mars, I think that is probably at least 25 years away. Who knows though. I think their plans are for sooner than that. Reaching Mars isnt a big deal and we have already landed on the moon, so landing on Mars shouldnt be a problem. Its the surviving there that has me worried. Getting supplies there is going to have a 10 month lag.