If we found another living planet

Maximus Alexander

Mick55 wrote: »

Bit of a tangent here but your post got me pondering... Say for example Person A is travelling at 0.99 C like you said above. Time for person A slows down and they transverse 20 light years in one earth year.

Meanwhile back on Earth modern technology breaks the faster than light travel problem and faster than light travel is readily available, say for example the Alcubierre drive.

Someone in a FTL craft ( Craft B ) sets off on exactly the same path as our earlier 0.99 C craft which is in a state of experiencing time going slow.

Craft B is travelling so fast they catch up on Craft A. Craft B is experiencing time normally where Craft A is experiencing time going much more slowly. When the two crafts come within view of each other what do they see? ( Say Craft B adjusts it's speed so as not to fly by too fast ).

Honestly, I have no idea. I know the Alcubierre drive involves compressing spacetime, but I don't know what would happen to a beam of light reflecting off Craft A when it reached your 'warp bubble'. What would anything outside the bubble look like to you, is an equally interesting question, but I suspect there'd be some pretty involved maths required in figuring it out.

As a pure guess, I'd say the people on Craft A would look like they were moving really, really slowly.

ScumLord

If the warp drive is creating a bubble of normal space and are warping the space in front and behind to move that bit of normal space to where you want it I would suppose you can't see what's inside the bubble and at most you'd see some weird space compression effects as it passed by. Maybe you'd see nothing as the ship isn't really moving in normal space.

Maximus Alexander

ScumLord wrote: »

If the warp drive is creating a bubble of normal space and are warping the space in front and behind to move that bit of normal space to where you want it I would suppose you can't see what's inside the bubble and at most you'd see some weird space compression effects as it passed by. Maybe you'd see nothing as the ship isn't really moving in normal space.

That's another possibility. We need to summon an actual theoretical physicist to confirm for us!

ScumLord

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

That's another possibility. We need to summon an actual theoretical physicist to confirm for us!

Problem is even the smartest people can only make a guess. Hopefully we'll be able to create an AI that's smart enough to design these things. That may actually happen in our lifetime, even if we don't get to see the ships.

seamus

It's a strange question because saying that someone is travelling at 0.99c doesn't mean the same thing it does when we say someone is travelling at 20km/h. Classical mechanics breaks down, so you can't really use classical mechanics to describe what would happen when the two modes of transportation are used side-by-side.

The guy with the warp drive isn't actually travelling at 0.99c and from his perspective the guy travelling at 0.99c is not moving alongside him. It's a all a bit mental and difficult to conceptualise because it falls outside what we intuitively understand about motion.

The most interesting advance in theoretical flight at the moment is this thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_vacuum_plasma_thruster

It's being continually confirmed that it "works", they're close enough to a full confirmation that once they publish something that can be peer-reviewed, they can begin looking at how to develop propulsion from it.

In layman's terms, the device is capable of producing measurable thrust within a vacuum using nothing more than (lots of) electrical energy. What this means is that a spacecraft would not have to carry millions of tonnes of fuel and instead could rely on a couple of lightweight nuclear reactors.

Capt'n Midnight

sheesh wrote: »

they have grown plants in powdered moon rock afaik ok maybe moon rock analogue

Hydroponics shows that you don't need soil to grow plants.

ScumLord

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Hydroponics shows that you don't need soil to grow plants.

Space weed, we now have a reason to go there. I'll pop an email of too Musk.

eoinp11

ScumLord wrote: »

Space weed, we now have a reason to go there. I'll pop an email of too Musk.

As aqua teen says best.. moonajuana.

Look up the dificulties of growing plants on planets with lower gravity.

Interesting to see what difficulties have to be overcome and the fact that people have some reasonable solutions offered up already.

ScumLord

Scientists now think life supporting solar systems are probably going to be multi-planet solar systems a lot like our own. Many solar systems seem to have one or two planets with high eccentricity orbits, elliptical paths which would bring the planet close to it's sun and then far away, so extremes of hot and cold.

The planets in our solar system have low eccentricity so more circular orbits, where we don't get extreme temperature differences over the course of a year, which allows for the conditions were life can evolve.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/1/20.abstract?sid=3aa94fe6-6060-473d-8156-91567afceabd