(fwd) Where Do We Go From Here?

Unless you believed we have some but just dont understand them and besides our power production skills are rudimentary, else, all electricity would be free.

Jerry

We live with a chemical mindset. Shift.

I told you I surrender, Ray. You are about as bad as that guy who was trying to convince me that Savannah was in north Georgia (and, IMHO, just as wrong).

I thought it was a geographical feature found in Africa.

tah

It goes beyond that, really. Physics shows that it's simply impossible for things to travel faster than C, period. It's not like the mythical "sound barrier", which was only ever considered an engineering barrier, and not a physical one. It's just that our universe is built on a foundation of physical laws, one of which is that as speed increases to "C", mass increases to infinity. This, and the time dilation which occurs as well, has been proven and supported by nearly a century of direct observation and supported by every experiment which man has come up with to test it against.

So how can one collect the energy from items of nearly infinite mass traveling at C, by slowing therm down with a HUGE number of flywheels?

Jerry

Welcome to rmr.

Jerry

I thought they proved that witches were made of wood... and that swallows brought coconuts to England. :-)

We know that a strong enough magnetic field can provide propulsion by interacting with local, natural fields. The only drawback is that an intense-enough magnetic field is rather detrimental to human health. :-(

There's research going on right now that makes laser-boosted lightsails sound likely. We'd need a BIG laser to launch a manned craft, but the concept is a sound one.

African or European vareity?

"BB" wrote in news:zcgjb.15628$ snipped-for-privacy@nwrddc03.gnilink.net:

I did fail to mention the rapidly rotating pattern of lights equatorially around the y-z axis. The red/blue shift was on the x axis with the brightness centered on the polar ends. My first thought was of a pull string gyroscope.

This was seen in a very sleepy little town called Clarksville in North- East Iowa in late 1994.

Yes, my sig does point in that direction doesn't it? Incorrectly I might add.

There was another witness who is schizophrenic and most defiantly not drug free. I was not under the influence, nor have I ever been under any influence of any hallucinogenic substance. This admittedly doesn't rule out mass or projected hallucination but I have seen little evidence that this could be a possibility.

I took the last train there... ;)

Now that is speculative fiction, and probably not the way engineers would have designed the autopilot to land an unmanned LM.

Alan

Don't you start, Hilty. You know you take a left at the "fruited plain" to get to Savannah.

I bet you already have enough money to die trying. Can I watch?

Being an old fart, I recall that in pre-calculator days taking square roots was also beyond the capabilities of most people.

I resemble that remark.

Just like every other day :-)]

Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

It took mankind 66 years to progress from a powered flight of just over a hundred feet, to one of 243,000 miles. While one might wonder what the next

Although in a way, it is interesting to see what major goals in "simple" aviation didn't happen until after we landed a man on the moon: human powered flight, non stop around the world flights by an airplane and a balloon among them.

Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

Clint Eastwood says there are only 2 kinds. "Them with guns and them that digs" from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Randy

Close, but not quite. Einstein's _theories_ show that nothing with significant mass can travel AT C. If you look in depth at his equations, and work done by others, the graph has a symmetry line/asymptote at C, with things at greater speeds than C not able to slow down to C. So this means that slower than C is OK, faster than C is OK, velocity = C is a no-no for anything with significant mass. More recently, physics doesn't assign the term "Law" until it can be determined that it works for all (or almost all) cases. Newton's Laws were shown to have a high degree of error in high gravity environments, or when travelling close to the speed of light. It is somewhat difficult to directly test Einstein's Theories at this time, but from observations the theory seems sound.

At this time, we can only consider travel within the solar system. As far as in-solar system travel, light sails would work, but only after getting off the Earth's surface (even if using Lasers). Getting off the Earth has been the biggest problem, now if we were to develop some type of Electrodynamic Tether, getting to LEO would be simple. The Ion drive used on Deep Space 1 has an ISP of ~3100. Pretty darn good. Even better is Project Orion, a concept project thought of in the '50s and '60s. Orion had a theoretical ISP approaching 10,000. The only drawback...the concept used explosions from nuclear bombs that were dropped off the back of the ship. Not exactly something you would want to use near an inhabited, technological planet.

This is not to say that we won't find some way to other stars. It probably won't happen within my lifetime, but look at what has happened in the last century. From the time of the first human flight, we have split the atom, made destructive devices powerful enough to annihilate technological life on the planet, developed ICBMs to deploy those wepons, used those ICBMs (and their descendants) to mount several trips to orbit and the Moon (mostly because Kennedy needed some PR fodder to point the public away from the non-existant missile gap he ran on, and as a Prestige thing...beat the "commies"). We also developed the Internet to organize the developemnt of such projects (Thank you ARPA, not Gore), and stealth technology, GPS, smart bombs, etc. We have even approached the verge of quantum computers and scientists have taken particles of light, destroyed them and then resurrected copies more than a mile away.

I have learned, in my 1/4 century on this planet, not to underestimate the drive of the human spirit. I can't say for certain that we will or will not ever leave our solar system. I can only hope that we learn how to do so before we either destroy ourselves or before this planet becomes uninhabitable because of some natural phenomenon. I would expect any solution to look like something impossible to us at our current technological level, but look like child's play to our descendants. Just like Einstein's peers scoffed at the Patent officer's ideas, until they saw the light from a star bent around the Sun during a solar eclipse.

Mike Gerszewski Univ of North Dakota Space Studies Graduate Assistant NAR #80579