Timeline for What are the consequences of literal interstellar travel?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
28 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 16, 2020 at 22:57 | comment | added | Keith Morrison | Minor note about The Mote in God's Eye: the humans are able to get to the jump point within the star because the star is a red supergiant and the Alderson Point is located in the outermost layers. The material there is hot, enough to destroy an unshielded ship instantly, but it's not very dense so the human ships don't have to deal with significant pressure, and they don't have to travel far to get to it. | |
| Jul 12, 2016 at 7:53 | comment | added | Rigop | I think going through stars is so difficult that the classic FTL theory look easy. | |
| Jul 12, 2016 at 5:27 | comment | added | a4android | @MichaelKjorling That was my first thought too. But actually it's "Interstellar intrastellar travel" and over time it will probably be shortened to "stellar travel". | |
| Jul 12, 2016 at 5:17 | answer | added | a4android | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jun 14, 2016 at 12:28 | vote | accept | Nzall | ||
| Mar 10, 2016 at 3:19 | comment | added | Jim2B | Silly me, I recalled it as 3 g. Whereas, it is actually 28 g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… | |
| Mar 9, 2016 at 23:36 | comment | added | user3652621 | @Jim2B, re surface gravity, methinks your sun surface gravity may be too low by a factor of 10 or so... | |
| Mar 9, 2016 at 20:37 | comment | added | user | Wouldn't this be "intrastellar" travel? | |
| Mar 9, 2016 at 14:45 | answer | added | Sherwood Botsford | timeline score: 1 | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 23:05 | comment | added | SethWhite | Something to consider: If your ships can survive stars, is there any weapon capable of damaging them? | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 22:19 | review | Close votes | |||
| Mar 7, 2016 at 22:23 | |||||
| Mar 7, 2016 at 21:56 | comment | added | Ben | If the gravitational well isn't any "deeper" at the core than at the surface of the star (as suggested by Ryan); then perhaps a much more plausible idea (while still cool factor) is that you just need to get very very close to the star (perhaps even inside its outer layers) and then open the wormhole momentarily to "jump" to another star (presumably calibrated so as to have your momentum directed away from the destination star). So intersteller travel procedure becomes "dive into the sun, and if something messes up the nanosecond timing of the jump we actually enter the star and all die". | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 21:19 | comment | added | Nzall | @Hackworth The issue isn't as much "creating a wormhole" as it is "knowing where the wormhole appears". The wormhole would in this universe always appear at the center of a star. However, a wormhole in our universe wouldn't be as predictable. You also know that you won't end up somewhere in the middle of uncharted space with no nearby stars or planets. | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 18:43 | comment | added | Hackworth | Your civilization can create wormholes inside stars but you worry about the plausibility of getting inside said star? If you want scientific plausibility at all, you may want to look at current theories on how to create wormholes, I think you're better off sticking to those instead. | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 17:20 | history | edited | Nzall | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 525 characters in body
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| Mar 7, 2016 at 16:29 | comment | added | Jim2B | Putting this another way, the Sun's core is the most hazardous place in the Solar System by many orders of magnitude. | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 16:25 | answer | added | Lacklub | timeline score: 16 | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 16:25 | comment | added | Jim2B | Gravity isn't the issue (the surface of the Sun has, roughly, the same gravitational acceleration as Jupiter). It is the densities, pressures, and temperatures involved. The Sun's core is denser than any terrestrial solid. At ~340 billion times ($3.4 \cdot 10^{11} \times$) the pressure of Earth's atmosphere, the core will have pressed electrons almost into the nucleus of each atom. At $10 \cdot 10^6$ Kelvin, atoms colliding with each other hit with so much energy that they fuse into a single nucleus - this is what releases energy at our Sun's core. | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 16:16 | comment | added | Ryan | I must ask, is the gravity of a star really greater at the center compared to like the surface? As i recall, the center of earth has almost no "gravity" (in terms of ability to fall), you are pulled roughly equally in all other directions because all of earths mass is equally spread in all directions around you. | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 15:54 | comment | added | Michael Seifert | There was a similar plot point in the Niven/Pournelle novel The Mote in God's Eye. Technology allows FTL travel between a network of special points in space ("Alderson points"), and an alien civilization is isolated from the rest of the galaxy because the only Alderson point in their system leads to a point inside the nearest star beyond their own. Humans are able to enter the star and use the Alderson point because they have shielding technology. | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 14:44 | comment | added | Cyrus | Sorry for the previous comment, I can't edit it anymore but regret it. Much more relevant: How do you imagine this journey goes? How long does it take to travel through a star? How big (or tiny) are the ships? How does a ship aim a wormhole at the correct destination? | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 14:43 | comment | added | Duncan Urquhart | would the stars interacting really have that much of an impact on either? even if you have a very large starship, the wormhole would be on such a tiny scale compared to the star itself that it wouldnt even notice. | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 14:34 | comment | added | Separatrix | Linking the heart of every star in the universe? Sounds a lot like the ultimate weapon | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 14:22 | comment | added | Cyrus | I can't even begin to imagine the issues with surviving or navigating in the core of a star. Your best bet is an improbabilty drive. At high enough improbability, all of the steps will happen successfully, bringing you to your destination unharmed. Second best is to have your ship converted to dark energy, so the universe itself keeps expanding around you fast enough to not get crushed. | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 14:20 | comment | added | Nzall | @ErikvanDoren That's one of the things that are worth considering. One idea I have is that the wormhole is opened in such a way that it just eats the ship and nothing else. | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 13:47 | comment | added | Erik vanDoren | how do you prevent the two stars to interact through the wormhole? | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 13:47 | comment | added | Nzall | Note: I can't shake the impression that I somehow already asked this question somewhere, but I don't think it was here. I can't find any trace of it anywhere online, so I might be mistaken. | |
| Mar 7, 2016 at 13:43 | history | asked | Nzall | CC BY-SA 3.0 |