Space Travel

>>8003251
>> ion propulsion
works today
>> solar sails
Nips did it.
>>quantum teleportation play a role
a very very iffy maybe and not in the way you'd think. There is a hypothesis that it is possible to quantum teleport energy, but you have to use classical communication to do it. And if you have classical communication, then you might as well just use it directly. IE instead of using lasers to perform some weird quantum voodoo, just go laser --> ion engine power.


Barring fucking antimatter, fusion propulsion is probably the best way to get around the solar system.

>>8003251
Meme drive

>>8003251
There is no future in space travel if you mean sending live humans to other star systems

If it was possible to send biological organisms faster than light to other systems we would have been visited dozens of times by now
There would be at least some evidence

>>8003405
>If it was possible to send biological organisms faster than light to other systems we would have been visited dozens of times by now
Lol, you're very stupid

>>8003405
This.

>>8003423
No hes right. The universe is around 13 billion years old. If in that time no other lifeform has managed FTL travel it means its simply not possible or before they discover the secret they get BTFO by nature by an asteroid impact or some other extinction disaster

>>8003251
>Will quantum teleportation play a role?
No. Quantum physics does not allow in any way to send a message from point A to point B in a way that is faster than the speed of light. Protip: Sending a person from A to B counts as "sending a message".

>>8003251
>Will quantum teleportation play a role?
I don't think that word means what you think it means.

>>8003251
antigravity
re:UFOs
serious answer

>>8003405
>at least some evidence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNkmhY_ju8o
NASA=Never a straight answer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcIn9-iPb8Y

Probably fusion engines,this company has a pretty interesting idea

http://msnwllc.com/space-propulsion

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/pnwmsnw/NIAC_PhaseII_FDR.pdf

Nuclear pulse propulsion could be done today
Single stage to anywhere in the solar system, any size of payload you want

>>8003544
It would be very expensive and you know the libshits would get all hot and bothered about using nukes like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j9Fo7XayCg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67IhEBWCW5c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PprOGyJPzA0

Wormholes.

>>8003553
Not really man, nukes are cheap as shit
I'm not sure how small a nuke you can build either, what minimum quantity of plutonium would work.

No energy source gets cheaper than fission bombs

All fusion engines have the same political issues anyways

>ion propulsion
Future and present. It werks. That said, they're not ideal everywhere, so chemical rockets still have their place.
>solar sails
Possible future. They certainly seem appealing for exploring the inner solar system where radiation pressure is nice and high. Again, not ideal everywhere.
>quantum teleportation
If ion propulsion and solar sails are at Technology Readiness Levels of 8-9, "quantum teleportation" doesn't even show up on the scale. You're basically lumping scifi-tier applied Phlebotinum in with two very real and viable technologies, which makes it rather hard to take you seriously.

>>8003564
>nukes are cheap as shit

I don't buy that, you need some serious infrastructure to build these all new little travel nukes, which you'd have ot do in an atmosphere of paranoia about weaponization and terrorism, and then you are going to need quite a good number of them to go zipping around with. Even if they're only half a million each, that's going to add up quick, and you're constantly vulnerable to an increase in the cost of the nuclear materials and to the political implications of building a shitload of nuclear bombs.

A fusion rocket uses shit like deuterium, which we have about 100,000 cubic miles of in our oceans, and helium-3, which you can make with good ol' lithium if you have the right know-how, and you can actually run your rocket near earth without pissing off a bunch of nutters who think a nuke going off in orbit will give their cat cancer.

Project Orion was fucking amazing, and iy should have been done, but I think that newer technologies can do the same sort of job better.

Project Orion estimated a payload of about 1000 bomblets for its more serious variations. Assuming you could build each bomb for about half a million dollars, that's 540,000,000 just for the fuel for one journey. That's not counting the spacecraft or the systems you'd need to lift it up into orbit with conventional rockets,which would be a challenge considering how heavy the thing needs to be (and yes I know it could actually take off from the surface, but can you imagine trying to get ANY politician to agree to that?)

That's pretty steep. It's not impossible, but it's certainly a barrier to its development.

>>8003492
Incorrect. Tachyons provide a mode for data transportation faster than the speed of light, but there is still the problem of slowing down the information at its destination without causing damage to the meta-entropy data carrier.

>>8003635
Oh come now,no one is silly enough to buy into tachyons these days.

>>8003590
Fusion is still a hypothetical form of propulsion
and will suffer the same political problems

Hard to find any real cost numbers, but there is more than sufficient excess plutonium sitting around for a few large launches.

I doubt it'll ever happen but, if we absolutely had to get a large manned spaceship to the outer system in the next 10 years, NPP would be the way to go.

>>8003618
Don't need anywhere near that many if the craft is already in orbit.

I don't think any of this will happen because there is a perpetual scarcity of money for the west nowadays, due to mass immigration & socialism.

That'll never end, we will never go back to days of surplus while there is huge non-white underclasses to be provided for.

>>8003639
Ok brainlet. You will want to die when CERN finds them and you're proven wrong. Screencap this.

>>8003646
>I don't think any of this will happen because there is a perpetual scarcity of money for the west nowadays, due to mass immigration & socialism.
Lols, you silly self-destructive idiot.

>>8003635
>Tachyons provide a mode for data transportation faster than the speed of light
no it doesn't, tachyon condensation causes tachyons to only send signals slower than light. Example the Higgs field is tachyonic and cant go FTL

>>8003405
>live humans to other star systems
If it's not possible to do in one lifetime, we just have to extend lifetimes.

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>>8003405
>If it was possible to send biological organisms faster than light to other systems we would have been visited dozens of times by now
The Earth has been here for 4,600,000,000 years.
Dozen's of visits? Let's say a hundred alien expeditions have reached Earth.
That's an average of one visit every 46 million years.

'tard

further proof that sci is full of pseudo intellectuals

>>8003405

What about that idea that popped up recently that our civilization was relatively early in its emergence?

>>8003405
>If it was possible to send biological organisms faster than light to other systems we would have been visited dozens of times by now
Unless we're alone in the universe, which is actually a possibility when you look at the kind of conditions required for life to evolve, never mind the fact that we still don't understand how the first organism came to exist.

If time travel were possible then we would already know because millions of people from all future ages would eventually try to visit multiple periods of the past and there would be evidence.

>>8003916
your a geniious!!!!

>>8003911
>Unless we're alone in the universe,
You don't need to go to "the whole universe".
The hear number of stars in this galaxy alone makes it unrealistic to consider the whole galaxy our "neighborhood".

>>8003911

Not enough data to really say if it's difficult for life to form or not, though.

>>8003918
Ok, mock me if you will, but any attempt to reason around it always ends in retarded conspiracy theories.
I'm just using Occam's Razor.

So are you all city people who have never been watching the sky at the right time?
Some of their ships don't obey physics the way we understand it.

YOU can travel to any position in space and time instantaneously, at will

the only problem is that your body can't

>>8003993

I've seen UFOs before but they're not aliens man.

>>8003860

We had evidence of the Earth being 4,600,000,000 years old

We have no evidence of aliums

>>8003251

We'll use different ways for different things.
Solar sails for the star chips of Hawking but probably something like a nuclear bomb propulsion system for space colonies

>>8003405

Adding to this time travel is also not possible for similar reasons

>>8003938

No signs of life on Mars (which is actually much more earth like and all those exo earths disvovered by Kepler) gives us a bleak outlook on how probable life is.
All other planets of the Solar System seems to be devoid of life too. Same with the moons.
And earth is a pretty atypical planet anyway that you can't really count as a "normal" planet (just if you look at our weird oversized moon alone)

Every planet we find with no life on it just adds to the probability of there being no life.
Right now earth is 1 out of 9 or 1 out of several hundred if you count the moons.
It's not that farfetched that earth may very well be 1 out of 1000, 10000 or even 1 out of a trillion

>>8004267
>(which is actually much more earth like and all those exo earths disvovered by Kepler)

Actually a lot of them are much more similar to Earth than Mars is.

>>8003702
The governments of the west have no budgets for anything

It's all pre-spent on socialism, and theres no way to cut spending.

>>8004274

Oh yeah? Name them. Because as far as I know "earthlike" is anything that's made out of rocks and all "earthlikes" can be counted on 10 hands

>>8004282
http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/results

AIs in cryo ships.

Make an Oneil Cylinder. Pack it up with everything you need to make a colony inside the cylinder and later on another planet. Man it with AIs. Add tens of thousands of embryos, eggs, and spearm. Preserved in a way that will allow them to be viable at the end of a several thousand year journey.

Send the colony ship on its journey to the target star system. when it arrives, the AIs grow and raise humans. Who then grow and raise more humans and so on. Living in the colony now in orbit around another planet. They will then terraform the new world.

you just keep doing this. you'll never know if the ships ever established new colonies on planet surfaces. Unless a colony sends a colony ship back to earth in a few tens of thousands of years.

>>8003405
Take a look at the alcubierre drive is a theoretical faster than light drive that bends space. Overall the math works and a few initial experiments show some promise.

>>8004347
popsci faggot

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>>8004347
>Overall the math works
>confirmed for not understanding the math

>>8004347
except the radiation it generates, incinerates the ship.

>>8003907
Yeah this is a good explanation in general

>>8003907

This is my favourite tbqh, somebody has to be first

>>8003907
>that idea that popped up recently
The "somebody has to come first" hypothesis for the Fermi Paradox is approximately as old as the Fermi Paradox.

>>8003251
>What is the future of space travel?

Both conventional chemical reaction-based fuels (rocket fuel) and mass driving fuels (gas/liquid jetting/railgun/Gauss) are the only logical and proper thing to be using. If in some way, we are able to build a space elevator (highly doubtful) then we'd at least have that too.

Everything else is just a neat pipe dream or useless within the solar system. Humans will not be attempting to venture between solar systems if they are still sane and not desperate.

Anyone mentioning FTL is just an /x/tard along with those mentioning Fermi paradox shit.

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>>8004763
>>Anyone mentioning FTL is just a retard
>>we are able to build a space elevator

>>8003916
err, wouldn't time travel allow to remove any problematic evidence? as often as required?

just sayin...

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>>8004769
>(highly doubtful)
>frogposts anyway

Or, you could just build a space mountain, right /sci/?

>>8003483
what if we're the first life form to advance to this era in the milky way?

what if another advanced species rose and fell a billion years ago?

just because we haven't been visited doesn't mean that things that are on the edge of theoretical possibility are impossible. it's extremely anthropocentric and unintelligent to think we're the only or first life, but it's also stupid to imagine we've come up with all possible solutions to the problems of interstellar travel. i mean shit with our current level of technology we could start an ambitious project towards solar system colonization via O'Neil Cylinders or even domed cities on the moon or mars, but we don't because we choose to spend resources elsewhere.

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>>8004907
>what if we're the first life form to advance
>it's extremely anthropocentric and unintelligent to think we're the first life

You just completely fucking contradicted yourself in the span of two sentences

>>8004909
>propose a hypothetical solution to the issue presented by the previous poster while acknowledging the problems with said solution

yeah and? I doubt that in the entirety of the universe (or even the milky way) we're the first advanced life to form and reach a stage of society that could be considered spacefaring, but at the same time it is possible and would answer the question of where everyone else is. I think it's more likely that there have been advanced species before us who collapsed before we reached the evolutionary stage we're at now. whether or not they were ever advanced enough to visit us or if they did but it was too long ago for us to have evidence remaining is another question.

of course, that's just as big an asspull, but we know that species on earth evolve and go extinct, presumably at least that much would hold true on some other planet where life evolved.

i'm just trying to say that the absence of extraterrestrial visitors doesn't mean that a.) advanced species don't or haven't ever existed, and b.) methods for traversing the vast distances between stars in a reasonable time frame don't exist

>>8003405
>scientists say that statistically there are so many potential habitable worlds out there existing for so many billions of years that it's astronomically likely that aliens must visit us
>plebs keep talking about UFOs
>Scientists say it's impossible, aliens visiting us is astronomically unlikely
make your fucking minds up

>>8003483
>No hes right. The universe is around 13 billion years old. If in that time no other lifeform has managed FTL travel it means its simply not possible or before they discover the secret they get BTFO by nature by an asteroid impact or some other extinction disaster

What kind of shit logic is that. Really. Do you even read what you say?

"IT NEVER HAPPENED, SO IT'LL NEVER HAPPEN"

>>8003563
/x/ plz

>>8005304

You got a better idea for FTL nigga

>>8005307
>FTL of anykind

This is worse than child porn, you ought to be banned retard.