What shape would actual spaceships of the future have?
- Thread starter T & P
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Long and pointy could be handy as the designers could armour the spikey bit at the front in order to protect the craft from lighter impacts.
No navigational shields just yet
No navigational shields just yet
just like powered flight was impossible?
No like some other things are impossible or just too impractical. Flight. Things fly you can see them flying you can work out how they fly. I think we will have uploading consciousness to Machines before we have generation ships. I think that is also extremely unlikely by the way.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
Below relativistic speeds, the shape isn't really important. You might want some extra whipple shielding welded onto the front of your ship, and you'll definitely want your ship to be either durable enough to last the journey (which will take a long time because you're going slowly) or have some kind of self-repairing capability. Sea Star mentioned hollowing out an asteroid. If you're taking the scenic route, then doing that is actually a good option. Hollow out part of the asteroid, and build a rotating habitat section inside the hollow. But don't spin the asteroid itself, because even if it isn't just a gravitationally bound pile of rubble, there will be enough weak points for it to simply fly apart. The bulk of the rest of the asteroid will not only protect against radiation and impacts, but by selecting the right asteroid can also serve as a useful reservoir of raw materials from which to draw on during the journey. Asteroids can have water, other volatiles, carbon compounds, silicates and metals, all useful materials on a journey that could decades or centuries.
For anything travelling at relativistic speeds? The best shape is a long thin cylinder, like an unsharpened pencil. The idea is to put as much of your mass behind as small of a cross-section that you can get away with. That means less area to protect from the intense radiation that is the result of all those interstellar hydrogen atoms slamming into you, and the less likely that your ship will encounter a dust mote or anything larger. When you do encounter a dust mote or, Einstein help you, a tiny piece of grit or anything larger, you'd better have some powerful radar systems and a battery of lasers so that you can detect and deflect such objects before they hit your ship. It would also be a good idea to space out a bunch of foil shields in front of you as you go, just outside the effective range of your lasers, as an extra layer of insurance. Basically a big whipple shield that you don't mind if it gets trashed, it's just a set of foil sheets that can be replaced. Place them into position by pushing with the lasers.
Faster than light? If that's even possible (Einstein doesn't think so), then nobody knows yet.
For anything travelling at relativistic speeds? The best shape is a long thin cylinder, like an unsharpened pencil. The idea is to put as much of your mass behind as small of a cross-section that you can get away with. That means less area to protect from the intense radiation that is the result of all those interstellar hydrogen atoms slamming into you, and the less likely that your ship will encounter a dust mote or anything larger. When you do encounter a dust mote or, Einstein help you, a tiny piece of grit or anything larger, you'd better have some powerful radar systems and a battery of lasers so that you can detect and deflect such objects before they hit your ship. It would also be a good idea to space out a bunch of foil shields in front of you as you go, just outside the effective range of your lasers, as an extra layer of insurance. Basically a big whipple shield that you don't mind if it gets trashed, it's just a set of foil sheets that can be replaced. Place them into position by pushing with the lasers.
Faster than light? If that's even possible (Einstein doesn't think so), then nobody knows yet.
Nothing is impossible - only impossible at the moment
ska invita
back on the other side
I don’t think this is true.
ska invita
back on the other side
As Scotty once said, You Cannae Break The Laws Of Physics Jim
Supine
Newt Member
That'll apply when they are all actually known.
It’s still true even if you don’t know what they are.
Still travelling by horse?
planetgeli
There's no future in England's dreaming
Cigar-shaped, obvs, but there will be no such thing as smoking by then so people will be at a complete loss to describe them.
Occasionally.
But what’s that got to do with your claim that literally nothing is impossible? You think it’s proved by the fact that A Thing is possible?
maomao
普費斯
Wouldn't bother. He's genuinely thick.
Many things have been declared impossible, only to happen some time later.
It would be foolish to claim something is impossible when we have no clue what will be possible in years to come.
'Thick' is dismissing possibilities just because your lack of imagination excludes the genius of others.
I don't claim any such genius, just I'm not stupid enough to assume no one is capable of great things.
Your troll attempt was fun.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
I reckon generation ships could still be made to work, but I do think that it would be much easier to if we had:
A) Some form of biological immortality. It's much harder for the generation ship to forget its original mission if the original crew are still alive and kicking, as well as those who were subsequently born on board. Since scientists already working on the problem of ageing, I expect this to be achieved first.
B) Sleeper ship technology would also enable original crew members to be revived on a regular basis and provide guidance. Although given the kind of biomedical hurdles involved in reviving people, if you have the ability to freeze and thaw sapient beings, then you have the knowledge required to make humans live indefinitely without ageing. But still, building sleeper ships, or having cryo pods on board, might still be useful depending on your design goals.
Of course one might argue that there is no need for generation ships if you have an immortal crew and/or sleeper tech. But I would argue that if for whatever reason you are taking a sub-relativistic interstellar journey, where time dilation doesn't shorten the crew's journey all that much, then having people be born on board gives an immortal crew something fun and useful to do on the way. People tend to enjoy raising families, and as social creatures such activities do us a world of good in terms of mental and physical health. Making sure the crew has lots of good experience at raising families would seem to be a sensible design choice for a colony ship, no?
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
The problem with FTL technology is that under our current understanding, its existence would break one of two things:
1) Relativity. Given that it's one of the best tested physical theories we have to date, this is vanishingly unlikely.
2) Causality. An FTL ship would be able to return home before setting off. Physicists tend to cling even more tightly to this one, and for good reasons.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
That and his Rockhopper from Pushing Ice (which funnily enough describes the 'fuck off shield of ice' idea)
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
You're actually kind of onto something here:
To summarise the video briefly, it discusses the idea of using chains of relays firing immensely powerful lasers or streams of particles to move spaceships between neighboring stars at near-light velocities. By having the power provided externally to the ship, you can circumvent many of the problems posed by the rocket equation.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
Why FTL implies time travel
Basically, relativity means that there is no absolute frame of reference with regards to the passage of events in space-time. Normally the lightspeed limit would ensure for all observers that effects follow causes and not vice-versa, but the presence of FTL mucks that up something rotten.
FTL might be possible if it turns out that causality is merely a condition imposed by physics on objects with non-imaginary rest mass moving at sublight speeds, but as far as I know we have absolutely nothing to indicate that.
Or perhaps FTL paths in space-time that create closed time-like curves (i.e. looping back on themselves) are physically impossible due to the aforementioned causality violations. Maybe trying to take your ship on a vector that travels to its own past means your warp drive just plain won't work or would require infinite energy, much like how a rocket or reaction engine might approach the speed of light but never reach it.
I wouldn't hold out much hope for FTL any time soon, i.e. I don't think that even if it is possible, that it will happen within the next thousand years or so. The best proposals examined by actual physicists, such as wormholes or the Alcubierre warp drive, require things such as exotic matter or negative energy, stuff that we have absolutely no idea of how to even begin synthesising, and that may only ever be mathematical constructs that make the sums work, not even being physical in any meaningful sense.
At least with antimatter we know that it can exist and how to make it, even if it is currently the single most expensive substance that human beings can produce. Getting better at making antimatter is a problem for the engineers to solve. For FTL, we need at least one more revolution in our understanding of physics.
If we do go to the stars, we won't be breaking relativity or causality. At least at first.
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ferrelhadley
There is no love between us anymore.
Since we had a huge number of examples of powered flight all round us, birds, insects etc, I am not sure there was ever anything like a scientific consensus on powered flight being impossible. Whats more when Lord Kelvin, who was elderly and speaking way out of his realm of experiance, made his famous pronouncement on heavier than air flight not being possible, humans had been producing heavier than air rocket powered vehicles for about 600 years.
While in the physical universe we currently observe nothing with mass travelling faster than light. In spite of the huge number of tiny particles with incredibly small mass that have been produced by processes on the scale of the big bang, quasars and supernova... nothing that looks like breaking our current physics.
In the spirit that we do not know everything about the universe there is a small possibility there are some unknown conditions to allow a massed particle to move faster than light.... it is currently at the far fringes of credibility and would have little application when talking about what shape a space craft might have. Its not far from trying to discuss the future of rail travel and someone piping up we do not need to think about future trains because we might invent teleportation.
a_chap
When the world came apart, where were you?
Arthur C. Clarke's three laws:
- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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