@jj-adams saidI have no idea what you are thinking. My posts speak for themselves. I think you have confused one post for another that is completely unrelated. All I did was point out that the moons craters were likely caused by asteroids because someone didn't want to believe the obvious.
You were responding to a reply about using asteroids as space vehicles because of the protection they would give, saying that they didn't have to be a mile wide and that there were plenty of them under the moon's craters, what were we supposed to think?
There are asteroids under the craters on the moon. If not, what caused them?
If you want to get an asteroid you get it as close to home as possible. Common sense. I already pointed out the value of using it for a space ship. My posts speak for themselves. Try reading what I wrote.
@Metal-Brain
So what did you mean when you said asteroids were on the moon? Were we supposed to think there were rocks a mile across littering the moonscape that used to be asteroids? Of course asteroids hit the moon, that is not exactly rocket science. They would be totally pulverized so what is your point.
@Metal-Brain
You have a seriously defective education. You don't understand the slightest bit about kinetic energy of an asteroid hitting the moon at 20,000 miles per hour or more.
For instance, just for starters, why do you think there is so much dust on the moon?
Think about how that stuff would have gotten there.
Did you see the results of the space probe deliberately crashing into an asteroid a few months ago?
It was maybe one ton or so coming in at about 10,000 mph and it left a hole big enough to see with the mother probe and the ejecta cloud was a LOT bigger than they first thought it would be and it altered the orbit of that asteroid more than they thought it would, it was an experiment on asteroid deflection if one came close enough to crash into Earth.
You really need to take physics 101 and learn about kinetic energy. I bet you don't even know the formula to calculate that energy. But of course since you don't know it, you will google it and present it to me as if you knew all along.
@sonhouse saidDoes it matter? Pulverized or not it is still there.
@Metal-Brain
You have a seriously defective education. You don't understand the slightest bit about kinetic energy of an asteroid hitting the moon at 20,000 miles per hour or more.
For instance, just for starters, why do you think there is so much dust on the moon?
Think about how that stuff would have gotten there.
Did you see the results of the space probe deliberate ...[text shortened]... of course since you don't know it, you will google it and present it to me as if you knew all along.
Nice of it to be in small chunks so it is easily gathered once it is found.
@Metal-Brain
Yeah, you only have to dig about ten miles deep to get to the stuff. Anyway, the moon is made of asteroid stuff and the planet that plowed into Earth a few billion years ago so there is metal there to add to regular rocks.
@JJ-Adams
Do you read sci fi? there are stories of generational ships, where they go maybe 1/10th c so a journey to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would take about 40 years and they have to have births onboard, life support for several generations so it is not out of the question impossible, just very difficult. 100 ly, still pretty close cosmologically speaking would take a thousand years.
But future propulsion systems based on antimatter or fusion may get a lot closer to c at least, like if we get to 99.9% of c, trip time for the travelers would be equivalent for them to be say ten times the speed of light because of time dilation so for them going to Alpha Centauri would only be a couple of months, but in OUR time flow we see it still taking near 4 years to get there so they go there, say spend ten years mucking about and come back home they will be about 10 years older because the ten years they are there at local time flow,
On Earth 18 years would pass and the journey to AC would seem to the crew to take a couple of months but 4 years goes by on Earth so they would be 4 years younger than say an identical twin who stayed back on Earth. If you get to 99.999% of c, it gets even more extreme, say you think you are going 100X the speed of light because time has dilated so much so you go to some star 100 light years away.I
It only takes a year of ship time so you do the same thing, spend 10 years there doing science, setting up colonies, whatever, and go back they are 12 years older but when they get back to Earth 210 years has passed on Earth and of course all their friends and loved ones are long dead and the civilization they left would not even be close to what it was when they left, you can see the difference between even US in 1923 V today in 2023, those folks back then could not even imagine people walking around on the moon or cell phones or telescopes in space a million miles from earth and all that stuff, including WW2 and Korea and Vietnam, etc.
Imagine the time in 1823 V 2023, a LOT harder for those folks to get their minds wrapped around today's world so the space travelers leave say 2120 and they come back 12 years older but the date they come back to is 2330, assume we haven't offed ourselves in nuclear or bio wars, the change would be incomprehensible for those folks on a one way trip to the future.
That said, if such vehicles would come about, they could go in a giant circle around the solar system like 20 billion miles out in space but just cycling around and around unnoticed and come back to where our time here 1000 years has passed and they aged say 20 years or so, with the express purpose of the trip being to see the world of 1000 years in the future, so they leave in 2200 and come back in 3200, you can imagine not many of present countries would even be there any more, no more Russia, or Poland, instead, maybe some kind of world government, who knows.
That said, all that stuff just got us out to 100 light years from home, the milky way is some 100,000 light years across so we are still just going to local stars from that perspective, you can imagine if you go what, 99.99999999% of c maybe you can get to somewhere finding a nice habitable planet and such, but going back would put you 200,000 years in Earth's future no matter it only seems to the crew it only took a year or some such so that trip would be with the mind of never coming back but starting a new civilization completely on Earth 2.
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Yes I read scifi, generational ships taking hundreds of years are simply not practicable and pretty much pointless.
Travelling at near light speed, while possible with future propulsion, would still take hundreds of years to all but the closest stars. They would also end in disaster after travelling huge distances. Hitting a particle the size of a grain of sand would eventually happen, and at light speed it'd be like an atomic bomb hitting the ship.
@JJ-Adams
Nevertheless they will try.....One thing, if we do manage to start a civilization on another star, even if it is only 20 lightyears away, it means if an asteroid slams into Earth like it did 66 million years ago, it won't cause humans to go extinct.
Space is pretty empty and I don't think they will worry much about an ice chip hitting the ship, they will have ways to detect and deflect or some such tech, maybe an umbrella out in front of the ship to let THAT get holes in it.
@divegeester
Total darkness from radiation coming from Earth, not total darkness like zero light, of course it has light from the sun and if I wrote it was the darkside, I mistyped.
@Metal-Brain
Two probes have already left the solar system, they are in interstellar space and that with 50 year old technology.
We don't know what propulsion technology will exist in another 100 or 200 years, so saying it is impossible just puts those dudes in the same category as those who said it would be impossible for men to fly or it was against laws of physics proving bees can't fly.
We already have electric plasma propulsion systems that can get us to Mars faster than chemical rockets and all it needs is a massive improvement in available power, right now they are talking a few kilowatts of energy available to power the rocket but when it gets to megawatt level, it will be a different story.
We already know anti matter rockets are way ahead of fusion rockets as far as engineering studies go, the main thing we would need there would be a reliable source of anti matter and there is quite a bit of the stuff floating around our solar system and there are designs afoot to capture and store those atoms.
But these technologies will not be seen in our lifetimes but our grandkids may see them.
If we can get to 20% of c, then Alpha Centauri is about 20 years away and we may do better than that velocity wise in a hundred years of development.
@sonhouse saidNot people. Robots. Voyager 1 and 2 are automated space craft to a large extent.
@Metal-Brain
Two probes have already left the solar system, they are in interstellar space and that with 50 year old technology.
We don't know what propulsion technology will exist in another 100 or 200 years, so saying it is impossible just puts those dudes in the same category as those who said it would be impossible for men to fly or it was against laws of physics provi ...[text shortened]... about 20 years away and we may do better than that velocity wise in a hundred years of development.
That is consistent with what I have been saying all along. Leaving the solar system is a job for robots, not people.
People will never leave the solar system. It is too dangerous. Robots will do that.
@Metal-Brain
They used to say man would never fly but the Wright brothers proved them wrong.
You see today's technology with zero amount of curiosity or imagination to see that future tech will be WAY further ahead than we can think of today.
The first thing we will do is the micron thick chips in a huge matrix accelerated by powerful laser beams and sending them at half the speed of light or so to Alpha Centuari, three stars for the price of one and they can together take high res images back to Earth and if something interesting is found like a planet with life, that will be a beacon like the moon was for space travel on Earth. Finding a habitable planet would spur the development of near light speed technology. So don't prognosticate when you live with no imagination.