Will we ever built spaceships to help us explore the universe?

>>8617140
Is it even possible?

>>8617157
yes

We could do it now if NASA and others would stop wasting time and money on meme ISS and instead began retrieving asteroids.

Trump will

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>>8617133
yes
but only when we download our copy in spaceships with the size of a tin can

>>8617167
Then how come we haven't done it yet?

>>8617133
>>8617133
Even if the spaceship could travel at the speed of light, it would still be way too slow for any meaningful exploration. We would have to learn how to teleport things that are larger than elementary particles.

>>8617242
This. We will never get off our fucking neighborhood.

>>8617133
Not you, because you're retarded. Other people might.

>>8617231
Because the universe is fucking boring. Just a whole lot of empty space with some stars and rocks in it. Our chances of ever encountering alien life don't look good either.

>>8617355
What about all the billions of moons and planets we haven't seen yet?

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>>8617133
We already did, pic related

>>8617133
We can worry about the universe after we get good at getting to orbit.

>>8617157
I think it'll be less like individual ships, and more of a transportation system like a railroad. For instance, although it's technically challenging to implement, you can have an extremely efficient system with throw-and-catch guided pellets, and you can source the energy from the stars at each end rather than having to store it in any way. You're also recycling your reaction mass, so there's no need to provide huge amounts of that (although small amounts are necessary for course correction of the pellets), and potentially even the kinetic energy of the transport system can be recycled.

Ideally, we'd want to travel at continuous 1g acceleration. This is safe and comfortable for humans, and provides reasonably rapid transit (hopping to one of our neighboring stars would only take a few years). To do this for any significant number of people, we need efficient methods, which implies recycling.

To establish the station at the other end, there's a case to be made for either slower or faster methods. An unmanned system could take higher accelerations, but stopping would be much more costly without an established throw-catch station at the receiving end.

>>8617242
>Even if the spaceship could travel at the speed of light, it would still be way too slow for any meaningful exploration.
I think this attitude is childish. Humans can live nearly 100 years, and there are a dozen stars less than 10 light years away. The human species has been around for perhaps 100,000 years, and our galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter. It's five billion years until our sun starts to expand into a red giant, and our nearest neighboring galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away.

Having spread around the Earth over the last few tens of thousands of years, the means to expand into our solar system are within our reach. That will give us the means to reach other stars, until the galaxy is ours. That will give us the resources to build world-ships that can travel to other galaxies without the inhabitants feeling deprived.

>>8617200
What the fuck does the ISS actually do?

>>8617488
Employ workers.

(In principle, it's for research into how people can live in space, it's just very inefficient at it. For instance, the money would be much better spent doing experiments on centrifugal gravity.)

>>8617488
The six people inside shitpost all day long.

>>8617242
>what is lorentz contraction

>>8617133
The primary goal is to expand and colonise - that's what life does in general and we owe this much to all our predecessors who colonised and procreated for several billions of years so that we their offspring could shitpost here.

We could expand over the course of hundreds of millions of years - you don't have to travel faster or close to the speed of light. Life has spread across the whole planet but individual organisms (with several exceptions) don't travel all over the globe during their lifespan.

>>8617491
>better spent doing experiments on centrifugal gravity
Isn't a spaceship, utilizing centrifugal gravity comfortably for humans, be much too large (the donut doing the spinning) to be built? Not to mention an efficient drive to actually get anywhere that isn't the moon in a "timely" fashion not existing yet.

>>8617242
Even if we could travel at the speed of light, in our frame of reference we would have arrived instantaneously from leaving, having not experienced any elapse in time. The rest of the universe would have aged but we wouldn't.

Assuming you are mass-less of course, in which case you could only move at c. The trick seems to be turning mass on and off at will.

>>8617133
God I fucking hate the fixation on space exploration

How do so many seemingly intelligent people get sucked into this nonsense? It's like solar.

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>>8617133
We already did, but they are kind of slow. Just like you, OP-san.

>>8617133
>Will we ever built spaceships to help us explore the universe?

no. we can do it all by ourselves. we don't need their help.

>>8618085
>Isn't a spaceship, utilizing centrifugal gravity comfortably for humans, be much too large (the donut doing the spinning) to be built?
It doesn't have to be a donut, it can be a set of bolas: a habitation unit and a counterweight unit with a tether in between.

Is there any truth to the notion if the planet was much heavier we couldn't get to orbit with rockets?
In effect, are we really the Krogans?

>>8620537
>Is there any truth to the notion if the planet was much heavier we couldn't get to orbit with rockets?
I guess it depends on what you mean by "much heavier".

>>8618335
"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

>>8620558
/thread

>>8620523
But centrifugal gravity creates a gradient of force across your body and causes blood to drain from the brain and pool in the feet.

Graviton generating floor panels when?

>>8620558
>But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
Those things didn't cost billions of dollars of taxpayer money. Fuck off.

>>8620615
But flight was militarized and taxpayer money spent developing it.

>>8620605
>But centrifugal gravity creates a gradient of force across your body and causes blood to drain from the brain and pool in the feet.
This is one of the dumbest posts I've seen on /sci/.

First of all, the strength of gravity in general, not the gradient, is what will cause "blood to drain from the brain and pool in the feet", which is *highly desirable* compared to the blood rushing to your head and staying there in zero-g.

Secondly, the gradient is small unless the radius is too small so you're rotating at an uncomfortable RPM. You wouldn't really notice it in just the distance from your feet to your head unless you're getting constant motion sickness from being spun around too fast.

>>8617133
yes
http://c3media.vsos.ethz.ch/congress/2016/h264-hd/33c3-8245-eng-deu-fra-Eavesdropping_on_the_Dark_Cosmos_hd.mp4

>>8620558
You're quoting a man who didn't actually give a shit about space exploration, and looked for a way to cancel the program he was talking about long before it achieved its goal.

He was just making a pretty speech to cover up the fact that ignorant people had overreacted to the USSR putting the first satellite and then man in orbit, and believed it meant they had a military or economic advantage, so the American government felt obliged to make a clear demonstration of superiority in this field.

The reality was, the USSR had started experimenting with orbital flights because they didn't have a working guidance system or a place to put medium-range missiles, when the USA had a real nuclear-armed medium-range ballistic missile arsenal in early stages of production and deployment.

So the whole thing was a big stupid put-on. That's why it stopped dead and NASA turned into a pork program when they got ahead of the Soviets. He didn't mean any of it.

>>8617133
If things continue to degrade for the masses and somehow climate change does not provide the catalyst for a catastrophic system failure, then yes, sooner or later society will spend resources to travel to close star systems. And there would be people who wouldn't mind being away for a hundred or thousand years and aging only a dozen. It'd probably begin with space mining within our own solar system.

>>8620615
Space is the manifestation of a future where manifest destiny is open to all humans through the intersection of all sciences, both soft and not. It is the future where humans can cooperate as one and find survival after our time here has run out. I think that's worth more than outdated farming subsidies, millimeter wave machines, and funding foreign rebellions.
>>8621448
Motive doesn't disprove central point. Just because Machiavelli was kissing ass doesn't mean The Prince isn't worth debating.

>>8621809
>Motive doesn't disprove central point.
It was empty rhetoric. "not because they are easy, but because they are hard" Why not castrate yourself with a cheese grater then? That's hard.

>they must be won and used for the progress of all people
Fuck "all people". "All people" are mostly garbage. When you build something good, the last thing you should do is open the door to all the riff-raff.

>Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?
Because the cost and danger were reasonable and it had obvious potential for near-term practicality.

>Why does Rice play Texas?
It's a game. People play it for fun. People watch it for fun, and reward the players for providing entertainment.

>I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war
It was, in fact, mostly about proving the feasibility of transporting city-killer bombs to their targets, no matter how distant, and secondarily about surveillance of enemies to plan and prepare for violence against them.

Besides that, expansion is a provocation to enter conflict over who should claim the new territory. That's one of the main reasons we haven't done much in space: the same reason we haven't done much with Antarctica. If we didn't designate it neutral ground for science only, we'd start fighting over it.

>>8620605
so does actual gravity.
If you can keep the difference in force small enough it doesn't really matter

>>8617133
As soon as we kill all jews on earth.

>>8617133
you need dimensional wave superstring degeneracy radius jumping gravitational wave engine for that shit dude

>>8617133
But telescopes are probably superior in almost every way.
The likely reason we haven't met aliens is because they too have realized this. They asked themselves "What's the point?" and concluded that there is none.

If they wanted to colonize the galaxy they could send Self-Replicating Automatons with their genetic information aboard and on top a solar sail.
But again.

What's the point?
If light is the ultimate barrier then you receive no benefit to colonizing a world light years away. Nor would there be any benefit to waging war against another civilization. Again- you won't be able to exploit their resources.

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but we already have spaceships to explore the universe, pic related

Why is everyone so quick to give up on space exploration because of the "the speed of light is the speed limit of the universe" meme? Of course we'll eventually travel faster than light someday. With the recent breakthroughs in detecting waves in spacetime, who's to say we can't warp it to travel FTL? Obviously it would take years to utilize, but the point is that its plausible with a theoretical means of travel thats been contemplated for years, and still not thrown out the window. Who's to say we won't find other ways to travel FTL if warping spacetime does end up being impossible anyway?

>>8622405
I don't believe it to be possible. Or I hope its impossible.

Like I said- Where the fuck are the ayylmaos if its possible to travel FTL?
Every other good answer to the Fermi paradox is really depressing.

I swear the morons in Sci aren't even STEM. The limit on the speed of light was never an issue due to lorentz contraction. Just watch out for the blue shifted cmb and interstellar dust.

>>8622526
>The limit on the speed of light was never an issue due to lorentz contraction.
It's not very satisfying to say you can theoretically make a trip to another galaxy and be home before you're hungry for supper, if everyone you know is a million years dead when you arrive.

The energies and accelerations required are also quite outlandish.

When the dumbasses at NASA actually figure out the Sonic Drive then yeah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3oItpVa9fs

>>8621941
This is a person that aspires to be nothing more than a fossil

>>8622557
Yeah but compared to the alcubierre drive...

>>8622455
I agree its discouraging, but keep in mind we aren't very advanced yet. There's still hope.

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>>8621448
it didn;t quite stop dead
but manned exploration is pointless and costly when robots can do it for a fraction of the price and much more reliably since they can stay up there for years at a time.

I highly doubt there will be significant manned exploration ever so long as robots are simply better.

sending expensive ships and skilled people out into the void isn't a good idea.

I like star trek too, doesn't mean its realistic at all.

>>8622589
This is a monkey who thinks every reason to do something he wants to do is a good one.

>>8622960
Manned exploration will be more practical as launch costs get lower.

Robotic exploration only makes sense when the cost to send mass to the destination is extremely high, because these "robots" are actually remote-control devices that require large teams of workers to barely-sort-of work.

The problem for manned spaceflight is that we gave up on reducing launch costs. There got to be a cozy established bureaucracy that didn't want any big changes. They could just go on building their expendable rockets and their satellites or satellite-like probes in their same big teams of highly-paid experts for their whole careers, so they did. There wasn't a free market to compete with, so the only problem was convincing top levels of government to let it carry on that way, when that's exactly the sort of thing top-level government likes to do.

>>8617133
No.