Timeline for An Earth-like planet is found in another solar system. What are the top priorities after landing in order to create a self-sustaining colony?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
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| Jan 18, 2020 at 1:04 | comment | added | user71509 | @Loduwijk nice, so you have about a year to start dropping drones, assuming you don't launch any beforehand. | |
| Jan 17, 2020 at 22:08 | comment | added | Loduwijk | @jgn You could decelerate from c in less than a year with a thrust that simply creates a pleasant artificial gravity and makes people feel like they're on Earth again. In fact, that's a great side effect, allowing people to acclimate to planet gravity for the last leg of the trip. | |
| Jan 17, 2020 at 12:54 | comment | added | NegativeFriction | Fair enough. Those are all valid considerations that I didn't make. I was gonna suggest aerobraking, but at relativistic speeds, you'd shred pretty much any known material. You'd absolutely need to decelerate to non-relativistic speeds before aerobraking a ship full of human beings. | |
| Jan 17, 2020 at 9:36 | comment | added | Luaan | @jmarina Even better, once you reach top speed, drop an advance automated probe and have it accelerate a tiny bit. It will reach the target planet a few decades in advance, and provide you with long term climate data almost for free :) it only needs to carry the fuel needed for deceleration, so it's trivial compared to having the ship do the same kind of maneuver. | |
| Jan 17, 2020 at 2:02 | comment | added | user71509 | @NegativeFriction How many months, years, or decades, does a ship need to decelerate from relativistic speed without turning the humans inside into mush? How many tons of drones could be released at speed for free before deceleration, and how much time/fuel would that save the ship? Seems like a good idea to me. | |
| Jan 17, 2020 at 2:00 | comment | added | user71509 | @NegativeFriction There are two things that come to mind. Firstly, probes can accelerate faster since they are smaller and don't have sensitive humans inside them. It is reasonable to assume that for any human bearing ship there is a faster drone that can be made. Secondly, eventually the human bearing ship has to slow down, this means a long slow deceleration. Why not harness that deceleration to release probes? If you release your probes before deceleration then you need less power to slow down, and your drones get there long before you do. | |
| Jan 16, 2020 at 16:19 | comment | added | NegativeFriction | @jmarina is that necessarily feasible on such a long voyage? Per my understanding of inter-planetary travel, something like this would typically involve a small amount of thrust over a very long (in this case, 500 years) period of time. You'd need to have the tech to make an unmanned probe that could shoot even farther and faster than the human probe to make that work. At that point, you either A) frontload the heck out of that thrust and get this thing booking it at something faster than the speed of the ship or B) put an identical-but-better constant thrust engine on the probe. | |
| Jan 16, 2020 at 16:03 | comment | added | user54989 | @jgn good idea observing the planet while en-route; in fact, before entering orbit and sending probes to check for microbes, viruses, airborne/waterborne parasites and anything else that might result in a really bad day, it would actually be a good idea to park the ship outside the solar system behind a large asteroid/minor planet, and send probes from there; just in case there are unfriendly hi-tech inhabitants, or just automated solar system or planetary defenses left around from ages past | |
| Jan 16, 2020 at 4:09 | comment | added | user71509 | I think one of the bare minimum requirements for a ship going that far is having sensors pointed at the destination. You should already know about any changes long before you arrive, but there may be new information that changes things. | |
| Jan 15, 2020 at 20:13 | history | edited | NegativeFriction | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 15, 2020 at 12:37 | comment | added | NegativeFriction | I'm gonna be honest, I thought I got it wrong after reading the first comment, then @James convinced me that past me is cleverer than present me. | |
| Jan 15, 2020 at 11:20 | comment | added | Tofandel | Hmm didn't think about it this way, that's right indeed | |
| Jan 15, 2020 at 10:44 | comment | added | James | @Tofandel I think they were right? Sure if they travel speed of light it would mean it had been 500 light-years away, but if they travel 1% speed of light for 500 years it was only 5 light-years away to begin with, which placed our latest data when leaving at 505 years from time arrival. So the range is indeed 500 - 1000 light years. | |
| Jan 15, 2020 at 9:59 | comment | added | Tofandel | You made a mistake regarding the "500 to 1000 years ago" It would be double the time of the trip if travelling at speed of light, so minimum 1000 years ago (because it takes 500 years for the light to reach us and 500 years to go there) So more like 1000 years to 2000 years | |
| Jan 14, 2020 at 13:11 | history | answered | NegativeFriction | CC BY-SA 4.0 |