Well, at least photos of one closeup.
Let’s hear it for good navigation…time was we were just puzzling out how to rendezvous with the moon and get back.
Now we play tag with comets.
http://www.nasa.gov/
Rosetta has caught us a comet!
by CJ | Aug 6, 2014 | Journal | 52 comments
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Isn’t the basic problem with Venus also that it’s so close to the Sun that temperature would have to be drastically lowereed and constantly kept low? Aside from the super-greenhouse effect and the acid rains and heat/pressure that bends and melts darn near anything we’re comfortable with? So wouldn’t it be a lot of work to get Venus terraformed? Though I suppose if you’re at the tech level to do that to real effect, you’d have solved many problems that might make that more practicable.
Or what I suppose I’m really asking is: If you have the tech level to do that on a planetary scale, the interplanetary travel to move supplies and equipment and personnel and/or robots/droids there to do it, then would it be more worthwhile to (wow) move Venus into a stable position in the same orbit (at a LaGrange point) as Earth? Put it in the Goldilocks Zone somewhere, and that extra heat closer to the Sun is no longer a problem to, uh, “air condition” or “refrigerate” an entire planet to Earth-like temperatures.
—–
Isn’t one of the basic problems with Mars that it somehow lost its magnetosphere when it lost most of its atmosphere and water? So that we’d need to re-establish water in all phases, especially liquid; re-establish the atmosphere, making it thicker and higher in oxygen; regenerate a magnetosphere (in part, to shield against radiation getting to our colonists and other introduced lifeforms; introduce those Terrestrial lifeforms to start the greenhouse process and start a biosphere; (and be very careful how Terrestrail life might mutate or interact with whatever might be on Mars); compensate for mass and gravity, though those are close enough we could make do, though lower mass means Mars would be more prone to lose atmosphere; warm up the planet so it’s not so far beyond polar Arctic/Antarctic freezing that even penguins, polar bears, and near-polar adapted people would say it’s too danged cold; and…that just may be the longest run-on I’ve ever not edited down into something sensible.
However, as I understand it, Mars is a pretty fair candidate right where it is, without moving it to a new orbit, say. My understanding is, there’s just enough heat and atmosphere, that we could go out in very good polar / ski gear, with oxygen masks (scuba gear) and have a pretty good chance. But that habitats, colonies, would be better off to start with pressure domes.
I would think, though, that we need to assume there could be micro-life (at least) still somewhere on Mars, so we’d need to be cautious about both human and other Terran lifeforms we put on Mars. Our Earth life will likely start adapting into new forms to survive and thrive on Mars. But it might have to compete with, stave off, or put up with, cohabit with, anything that might still be left on Mars, micro-life being the most likely, but maybe more complex organisms found a way to survive somewhere. Maybe.
Ceres, Vesta, and a few others: Good for study of the early solar system. — But also good candidates to move and use as ready-made space station foundations.
Phobos and Deimos? Small enough to use as raw materials or as the bedrock to build out a space station or two around Mars. Or for building a spaceship to use later for a future return trip. (Though clearly not for the first few missions.)
Very, very neat stuff.
Anybody want a Mars bike? Cheap? 😀 I hear there’s a ship that’s got a whole passel of ’em for sale….
First of all, even if you could magically pluck Venus out of its orbit and put it at L4/L5, it might be in a stable point vis-a-vis the Earth/Sun gravitational field, but its mass is so large it changes the dynamic, not to mention the orbits of the other planets. Note the word “small”:
In other words, there’d be such problems with it, you’d have to redesign multiple orbits, move everything in the star system around.
But then, if you can move one planet into a different orbit or terraform something like Venus, I suppose it might not be such a feat to rearrange the whole star system.
Much past that, and it gets into a ringworld or a Dyson sphere that puts the entire system into an eggshell around the star.
Presumably not a weekned DIY project.
As long as we’re on Solar System colonization (and why not? it’d sure relieve population pressure) I ran across a brief mention of a really interesting aside, regarding the Alcubierre warp drive idea that Dr. White and others are working on.
The article (sorry, I don’t recall the link) mentioned in passing the idea of a “sub-warp” Alcubierre drive. The idea that we might not initially get an Alcubierre drive up to interstellar speeds, but that anywhere sub-light might be more readily attainable, and a vast improvement. So if a sub-warp (sub-light) interplanetary drive can be achieved, before a later version makes interstellar travel possible, then wow, it’s still a big leap forward in progress.
This, I think, was both in a video piece on YouTube, and elsewhere in a text article on the web. They were making the point that C-plus FTL is a fine thing for the Alcubierre drive idea, but hey, let’s not ignore the possibility of a below-C STL drive using the same principles. They were also making the case that it might be a big step along the way to reach a working starship FTL drive, a warp drive.
Just the idea that there’s something that might be reachable, not merely theory or fanciful, and might be sooner than later, is still soaking in.
I tend to think now that we’ll have a phase of globalization, orbital tech, and a long-ish phase of interplanetary expansion, before we get to the “giant leap” of faster than light, interstellar starships. Say even a hundred or two hundred years? But if a workable warp drive or other way of getting FTL turns up, it would sure compress things from, “just on this one, little planet” to “stepping out into the galaxy to expand” in a big hurry. An exponential expansion. Then whoever might be out there…there goes the neighborhood.
We always assume that if there’s anybody out there, we’ll be able to understand each other, to get along at some level, even if there’s conflict. We don’t often see cases where whoever/whatever’s out there is so far ahead or so far behind that it’s no contest. Or cases where there’s life out there, but whether it’s intelligent and whether there can be any mutual understanding are really hard questions to answer, because it might be that they are too different from us, and vice versa.
The knnn and other methane-breathers come very close to that. There are examples in CJC’s books and throughout SF. But more often, it’s the case where there are humanoids or non-humanoids, but they are close to us in technology and psychology, so much so that there may be conflict or there may be cooperation, but that it is possible to reach some understanding, rather than wiping each other out.
I’m not particuarly going anywhere with that tangent I wandered off onto, but it seems oftne the case.
That is not, by the way, to complain or fault anyone. After all, I *like* those stories. A lot. Why else would I read SF a lot, or like particular writers’ work so much? 🙂
What if the challenge to communications was such a great leap in psychology that it’s a very tough problem for both sides, or neither side even recognizes it yet?
What if the way another species communicates is so unlike the other’s (ours, say) that it requires a translator device? (A vocoder or universal translator, or translator microbes or Babelfish, being a few SF examples) ? What if it’s a question of the speaking and hearing organs and ranges of sight and hearing being different enough that mimicking each other’s speech is nearly impossible, and some technology has to be used to solve it? That would still work, but not nearly as well. On the other hand, if the two methods of communication are really drastically different, there’s a real issue of how to translate the two.
Yeah, I’m in the mood to blather on about it. 😀
We can just barely communicate with our closest relatives, but are at a dead loss with other arguably intelligent, at least brainy, species that evolved in the same environment from the same origins. Given all the evidence we have here and now, I’d say the chances of communicating with ETs is a decent approximation of zero.
But, hey, without a translator designed for Compact species that happens to work for Humans up through abstracts in just several days, we’d have no entertainment! Right? 😉 🙂
Yup, that’s another piece of the puzzle, for sure.
Other animals here on Earth might be sentient, but not in our mode of tool-using. Dolphins and whales sure do a lot of complex singing and behavior, but without hands or thumbs or other prehensile limbs, their brand of inelligence would have to be radically different from ours. And yet, hmm, why should we have the sole monopoly on being smart mammals?
Octopi? Hmm. More capable than we thought, but not necessarily sentient and not necessarily non-sentient.
Other apes? Tehy are more like us, we are more like then, than initially thought. but other than some really tantalizing lab and field experiments, they have not made it too far up the ladder. But they’re not much above or below a hominid like Lucy. Say pro to-sentient, quasi-sentient.
And those, except the octopi, are all mammals.
Birds? Hard for me to tell. I haven’t seen enough. But several bird species can mimic human words or phrases, a few.
Several higher mammals are more than we’d otherwise give them credit for. But not what we’d call sentient, exactly. Proto- or below, I suppose. There are times, though, I wonder how chauvinist or self-serving that is. They’re pretty smart, sensitive in ways we’re not. So…well, I’d say still, not quite there. Or a different set of criteria, in ways we don’t think of as our definition of what a sentient / sapeint life form is.
We haven’t found out how to translate whatever it is dolphins and whales might be saying, singing.
Ape research in a lab or enclosed field setting isn’t the same as wild groups, but does raise some very fuzzy questions about the differences and similarities, the definitions.
So…. Those are just some of the species here on Earth, let alone anything / anyone that might be out there among the stars.
Any aliens that do run into our radio and TV signals, I sure hope they take those with a very large margin for what’s real or best about us.
But then, if we ever run into signals from aliens, we might need to remember just how strange our radio and TV is, versus real life. Or how truthful it is about how we’re not as advanced as we like to think.
The Alcubierre drive is very similar to what my ships have always done. My own description is what happens if you squish a watermelon seed–it flies. In the case of the ship, it creates a phase shift that the universe itself ‘doesn’t like’, and the universe-inertia tries to straighten out space-time, thus propelling the ship—conserving, conveniently, vector, as the most convenient direction for the motion, which is why the ships gather considerable speed before they jump. The reason my ships come in at solar zenith and exit at solar nadir rather than ploughing their way through the ecliptic is simply that there’s no sense ploughing through all the junk in the ecliptic. They aim at jump points, or brown dwarf stars, to make infall into a near gravity ‘pit’, because it takes a stellar mass to pull a ship ‘down’ from the energy state they’ve reached….
I was smug for at least a week when astronomers actually found brown dwarfs, a decade or so after I reasoned they ought to exist.
Maybe I’ll get another reason to be smug if the Alcubierre drive actually works..
I’ve never been satisfied with the zenith/nadir thing. There’s pretty good astronomical reason to assume the orientation of solar spins to be random. So what does one do if one’s destination is “up” or you’re arriving from “down there”?
I think your idea of using distance more tenable. One jumps out at the Inner Range Buoy, when space first gets flat enough. One drops out of the interface at the Outer Range Buoy when space first starts to wrinkle, and gets a lane assignment that doesn’t “run up the backside” of other arrivals. (Though at near-C one’s mass is high enough that changing one’s current vector is more than any engine can manage.)
I tried to figure out the order of curvature with distance. It’s something I’d’ve been better at doing when I was a lot younger, but I think it’s a direct, first order. So space isn’t curving very fast with distance.
One must “suspend disbelief” to some extent in any event–the distances are enormous. I recall The Pride once dropped in and it would be an hour before their presence would have been noticed at the station. Earth-Sun, 1AU, is 8.3 minutes IIRC. An hour is over 7AU out–farther than Jupiter’s aphelion, 5.4AU! Getting in from there, without having a decelleration greater than a couple G’s, takes an amazingly long time, unless one doesn’t dump energy back into the interface until very late.
But that’s what makes SciFi fun! “How can I make this work, without violating all the Laws of Physics we already know would apply?”
The planets around the Sun are pretty much in the same plane. The stars orbiting the galactic core are pretty much in the same plane. So….
@Walt: Indeed, but the two are not comparable. Star formation is localized to clouds of gas that gravitationally condense. So matter, i.e. stars, will impart forces on the gas. Likewise, novae and supernovae (which are more common in “stellar nurseries” as big blue “live fast, die young, spew your guts into interstellar space” stars “go bump in the night”) will push interstellar gas around. These forces are stronger because they are more localized than the galactic rotation.
Here is M33 recently in the news. Note the blue clusters in the arms. The color comes from ionized oxygen cooked by those supernovae in their last moments of life. These are the stellar nurseries.
Also, the galactic arms aren’t rigid, they don’t rotate the way one would think. They are a “pressure wave”, something like the molecules of water in non-breaking ocean waves not “moving with the wave”. An individual star is certainly in orbit around the galactic center, but it relatively “holds it’s position” as the arm sweeps past. Sol currently is not in an arm. It has been and will be again. On the other hand, planets are rigid bodies.
Guess I didn’t finish my thought…
The point of gravitational attraction from nearby stars and the kinetic energy of supernovae is that by pushing or pulling the gas around they impart an angular momentum to various parts of the gas clouds. As skaters know ;), angular momentum is conserved. Pull the gas into star formation and the star gets a spin. The axis is determined by the sum total of all the angular momenta of all the gas that made it. It’s a local phenomenon.
The galactic plane, however, is quite thick, and if you look at it from within the disc, it looks pretty much like the night sky. There’s plenty of ‘up’ and ‘down’ within the disk. I did a detail 3-d map on glass of the stellar neighborhood up to 30 light years, and because it was on plates, I had to approximate the up-down axis with a sequence of glass plates and gaps, with dots on either side of a given plate. That was for the immediate neighborhood, the ‘homeboys’. The entire disk varies from a few hundred light years thick at the edges and a thousand lights at the center.
The description they give for the Alcubierre drive, from the POV of the crew and passengers, seems more like Star Trek’s version of warp travel.
The surreal, dream-like state in jumpspace, for A/U and Compact space, and the need for humans to trank down to avoid problems with that other space, has always seemed like a very different but dramatic take on it. The use of jump vanes is a difference in how they worked out the tech in the story-universe, which is fine. Then the fact some humans and hank can develop the ability to function in jump, at first, almost sleepwalking, then fully aware, while kif and methane’s don’t have such restrictions, I thought was a great way to keep everyone from being too powerful or too advantaged. IIRC, the stsho have to trank too, as it’s worse for them than for humans. I’ve always liked that the descriptions of jump were so very different from Trek or most other SF. I even liked the surreal happenings in Voyager in Night and Port Eternity. It fit the stories’ other-ness.
One thing, though, has grown to puzzle me about the jump vane arrangement. Though it’s a silly quibble. The jump vanes are set perpendicular to the ship’s axis, as though they more “push away” than form a field bubble. If their job were to form a field bubble around the ship, which it seems they do, then wouldn’t it make sense for them to be parallel to the ship’s axis? Not that it couldn’t make sense as they are, since (hah) they clearly do work the way they do, and not oriented parallel. I’d assume ship designers might experiment with different vane arrangements, sizes, and so on, to come up with something better.
I suppose one other question on Cherryh-style starships, though: The crew rotation cylinders. (This could also apply to the rotation we saw on the Leonov in 2010, though it’s not in-universe.) The ship’s spine and drive unit and most of the cargo holds are stationary, as is the docking cone and forward sensor platform, and presumably the ship’s armaments. The crew totation cylinder then roatates around the axis, and seems to be inside a cage or shell-like arrangement that’s stationary. The core of the rotation cylinder is at zero g, and the centrifugal force increases with the radius, so as we move out from the core to the outer perimeter, the centrifugal gravity increases toward one gee or more.
My question is, somehow, the cylinder rotation and the stationary portions of the ship balance the forces so that the rest of the ship doesn’t tend to precess, to rotate along with the cylinder. I had wondered, seeing another couple of arrangements, where there were two “barrels” or spheres, or another arrangement that had more than one rotation cylinder — Would it be simpler to have two rotation cylinders rotating in the opposite direction, so that they’d cancel out the tendency to precess or wobble? I’d think that if the two were placed one behind the other, like train cars, it might tend to spin head-over-tail, while if they’re side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, the two cylinders rotating would even out. … Hmm, on reflection, I suppose either way, there’d still be some tendency to spin in some direction or other, if everything in the ship’s system is not balanced precisely just so. Or does adding that second rotation, attempting to cancel the first, simply mean you have an overly complicated system, where you still have to compensate between the rotation cylinders and the non-rotating base, making it more trouble than it’s worth, too complex, when it’s simpler with one?
So then, what was your reasoning for a single cylinder? Simplicity? I’d guess there are good reasons not to have two counter-balanced rotating cyinders.
One problem that’s basic is, if you have two cylinders, you have to go through a section, maybe a bottleneck, on either end to get to the other cylinder, and if you’re in the “wrong” cylinder, and need to be in the other one, well, that could be a pain, in an emergency. There’d have to be a way to get between them, probably without running to either end to get to the middle. Heh.
Juat curious, is all. — Now back to what I’m actually supposed to be doing. But brunch first. 😀
I’m confused by “Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Coming to Linux”. Apparently it’s some computer game, but what’s a “pre-sequel”? The thing itself? “Brothers and sisters I have none, but that man’s father is my father’s son.”
And what does this say of a city planner who just left. Clearly his command of correct English isn’t what it ought to be, it’s “I” not “Myself”. But is this one of those valedictory praisings that isn’t? “‘There isn’t a high enough praise,’ he said. ‘Myself and everyone here can’t wish her more than the best of luck.’”
I thought my command of English, even as a Chemistry major, was good enough to get me up to 97K words into my own SciFi novel and still going, but perhaps not. 🙁
Recently, I saw an ad for something or other that was trying to be very macho, gung-ho, very much in your face and in the game.
The ad headline? “NEVER WAIVER!”
Clearly, someone did not check spelling and meaning for homonyms and homophones.
Unless they really were trying to say one should never accept waivers.
Either way, the lack of willingness to modify one’s behavior to suit a given situation does not seem overly conducive to wimming a game or a battle or whatever else they were trying to suggest in their ad campaign.
I wonder if their people will ever realize the spelling gaffe? Heh. Not likely.
Put it this way: similar function, similar body shapes, similar dwelling/habitat means you have something to discuss. That’s been our conceptual problem with other primates and cetaceans, etc. That and the fact that contact is limited to a few individuals who are trained, and who may be biased by that training into a wrong direction and wrong concepts, and thereby be blinded by that training.
Given a technological species coping with the same physics (as outside of a universal singularity re-do we would be using the same physics) —we WOULD have something to discuss. Want to talk with a chimp? Food and poo and dominance, play and food and poo. When a chimp invents the wheel, we’ll start to talk…because ultimately, unless we choose to live in a chimp’s world, the conversation’s irrelevant to most of us; and a chimp isn’t going to be psychologically healthy growing up in our world…since researchers come in for four years, and then vanish, and a chimp has a humanlike lifespan.
Yes, I agree on the very basics. The speculation that there could be ET’s with radically different chemistries than our carbon, ATP, DNA, hemoglobin, based form just betrays an ignorance of Chemistry. It’s very reasonable to presume form would continue to follow function.
AMESLAN has been taught to chimps (Washoe first), gorillas (Koko), even an orangutan. “Yerkish” has also been taught, but it’s not a human language.
Octopi are amazingly clever! The only reason they don’t rule the Earth is most only live a couple years, reproduce once, then die. (So much for “baser animal instincts”!)
A book plug: Octopus!: the most mysterious creature in the sea /by Katherine Harmon Courage (2013) has some great descriptions of the problems of doing octopus research. Among other factors they are smart enough to recognize people they don’t like, and they are impossible to attach/implant probes or tracking devices to.
And Stardust caught 7 grains of presumed interstellar dust. Story here.