New answers tagged space
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Frame Challenge - Go Nuts and Fire Away
Space ships and stations will need to be built pretty tough to survive. Micrometeorite impacts are a serious problem. Radiation shielding (for vessels outside LEO) would require even bulkier amounts of armor.
And assuming you're constructing your ships / stations in orbit, the cost penalty for being heavy goes WAY ...
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Sound is remarkable, diverse and may be what you're after
There is some evidence that bee swarms communicate information between individuals and the collective via sound as well as dancing. It is long known that drones that explore come back to the hive and dance to communicate the whereabouts of food or new colony locations (which earned Karl von Frisch a ...
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this is very intriguing and it seems you have thought through a lot here - very cool to see where this will go :)
Some thoughts:
1. As for the means of interconnection within and across swarms, if you want to refrain from electromagnetic transmissions, you can use the surrounding particles in the atmosphere (think nitrogen molecules) or special nano-bodies ...
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10,000 years. Just like it did last time...
The stone age ended approximately 10,700 years ago and since then, humanity has slowly mastered the skills necessary to reach space. So, as a base line, the journey can be completed in about 10,000 years.
You have added one new factor to this proven base line and that is that the first generation of stone aged ...
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They flicker with light.
Each of your swarm units flickers with light. By light I mean an enormous range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Just as a laser in an optic cable can transmit enormous amounts of information by flickering, so too your creatures. Different wavelengths are reserved for different types of information. Your creatures are able to ...
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Directly? No. Indirectly? Yes.
As Renan indicated in their answer, material that enters a black hole cannot leave; the only way around this is through evaporation. Even then, the Hawking radiation emitted is largely in the form of photons, gravitons and neutrinos. Even neutrinos require a black hole of mass $M\sim10^{19}\text{ kg}$, which is unreasonably ...
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They could in the form of ejected matter from a quasar.
As the blackhole draws in matter to the accretion disk as it feeds, matter is forced up to the poles and fired off in powerful jets, it is believed these jets can create stars and form new galaxies.
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No.
The only way black holes lose mass is by evaporating. Yes, that's a technical term. They shed mass by emitting Hawking radiation. This radiation is made of particles that simply get lost to space. Such particles are too fast and too light to coalesce into large bodies. They are also subatomic particles, which would have to go through extreme processes ...
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Not really
One of the key observations Einstein made when developing Special Relativity is that electromagnetism and Newtonian mechanics are invariant under the action of different transformations. Individually, each theory lets you run through your lab at whatever (constant) speed you like and still produces results that are consistent with those you'd get ...
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Let me try and answer this question from a very theoretical point of view. But first, we need to set up some assumptions. The principle of relativity is a good assumption to start with.
Now, as the OP mentions, the aliens have set up devices just outside the solar system to jam us and prevent us from leaving. Fair enough. But can we sit inside our solar ...
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A moon whose orbital period is half a day would appear to observers on the ground to go around in a day, rising in the west.
Phobos is a more extreme example: its period is less than a third of a day, so it rises in the west twice a day.
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Not plausible at all, unless everything we see out there is faked.
The aliens would have built a "bubble" all around the Solar System (or a good part thereof - there is something like that in Giant's Star by James P. Hogan, and in The Crystal Spheres as well), and the inner wall of the bubble is a sophisticated "screen". Appropriate emitters simulate a ...
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The Copernican principle
As L.Dutch pointed out, this would violate the Copernican principle, which essentially states that there's nothing special about observing the universe from any one place. Granted, this is not easy to test, as we humans only sit in one tiny portion of the cosmos. However, it's possible that the Copernican principle is incorrect, and ...
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Without jamming, in normal conditions, light speed is instantaneous
The universe outside of the illusion would be unrecognizable to us. Time and space in it would not exist as we know them, if they even existed.
Tachyons are hypothetical particles that travel faster than light. A few excerpts from the wiki:
As noted by Albert Einstein, Tolman, and ...
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And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness
Our keepers have produced a habitat for us where physics works in a way that keeps things running and keeps us alive. Things we perceive as coming from outside our bubble must be simulations of some sort, like the distant ocean background pasted up against the back wall of ...
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Refraction
Refraction is based on light moving at different speeds through different materials. As soon as light travels everywhere instantaneously, all of optics goes out the window. Lenses, prisms, filters, lasers - it all doesn't work or is radically different. Which means that the aliens outside our system are operating under a completely different ...
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The basic assumption behind our constant effort in producing physics theories is that they are valid in every place of the universe.
This assumption has never been disproved so far, and if it was as you say, we would observe some hint of this jamming.
For example we would observe a discrepancy between the distance of galaxies estimated via the Cepheid ...
answered May 27 at 6:04
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Why actually bother going in person?
Use remote controlled drones/robots or other type of machines that can collect samples, interact with the locals, make field tests and repairs to the machinery, build stuff for the locals...etc until you get all the relevant information you want.
All that is controlled from the safety of your ship in orbit. No need to ...
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It will be necessary to ware a protective suit and filter the atmosphere to remove chemical and physical contaminants, however it is unlikely in the extreme that there would be a serious biological risk as the planet would have had an entirely different biogenesis and presumably billions of years of evolution that would produce a very alien biochemistry.
It ...
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If you wanna be smart, you do it like we do in real life: send a probe instead of a person.
Probes are more resistant than humans to:
Radiation
Dehydration
Extreme temperatures
Extreme G forces
Hard vacuum, or even mere oxygen deprivation
Tide pods
Concussion
Starvation
Loneliness
Infectious diseases, such as salmonella, COVID-19 and syphilis [citation ...
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Full body suit with filters or canisters for respiration
While filters that can science-finction-nally detect any and all pathogens and immediately remove them from the body might sound cooler, a more practical, cheaper and less risky (preventing rather than trearing) would be to invest in less bulky protective suits, which can create a flexible, yet ...
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Standard pre-first contact protocols require that sterilized flying saucers containing equally sterile biological clones (with gray-skin, thin arms and big black eyes) isolate and kidnap a sample of the indigenous life of any early space flight capable species, for the purpose of taking a full biological inventory of the target biosphere.
This is done so ...
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Sensing light from an object is passive sensing. Using Radar is active sensing. Passive sensing does not make you more visible. Active sensing means you are transmitting which makes your location easy to detect.
Passive sensors can be fooled or spoofed more easily. in space a dark hull that reflects little light would be hard to see, but it might be easier ...
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Radar has some advantages...
Earth-based visible light telescopes can typically see approaching asteroids like this:
http://atlante.org.es/asteroides/53319_1999_JM8.htm
...while the earth-based radar can sometimes give these images: (of the same asteroid)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(53319)_1999_JM8#/media/File:...
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Short Answer:
That project was technically feasible. An atomic warhead could have been detonated on the Moon by the USA as earlier as 1959. The risk of failure would have been great in those days, including the risk of a launch failure and atmospheric contamination. The danger of launch failure caused by the USSR and the USA to cancel projects to ...
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Nothing
@AlexP has a good point. It's a human failing to assume all of the resources of "now" were or could have been available "then." There were no observational satellites (Sputnik 1 was only 1957), few observatories, and NASA was only one year old. The first ICBM was 1957 and the first lunar probe to touch the moon (curiously, the Soviet Luna 2) was in ...
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Public displays of outrage
Whatever else, Soviet spokespeople would decry the wanton destruction on an extraplanetary body by the 'capitalist warmongers.'
No OST?
The Outer Space Treaty was still a decade in the future, but the precedent might scuttle all attempts in that regard.
Militarization of space
Imagine it is the Cuban Missile Crisis and the ...
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Given the vast distances between luminescent objects in space, visible light is merely an illusion. When you the sun in the sky it's an 8 minute old image. Stars in the sky at night are hundreds, thousands of years old.
Be it radar or light, All electromagnetic signals travel at light speed.
Radar in space already exists. Radar based weather and observation ...
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The best detection of another ship in space is HEAT. A vessel must radiate heat, lest it cooked its crew. All that sunshine's energy has to go somewhere, and no conduction to carry the heat away, nor convection. The only way to get rid of excess heat is to RADIATE HEAT. You may think it's easy to do so in space, but it's not.
For example, ISS has two ...
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There are several nice things about light compared to radar. Maybe the most important for this question is that you can have a diffraction limited beam. This is because the wavelength of light is much smaller than that of radio waves.
The formula for $\theta$, the half angle of how the beam is expanding, is
$$\theta=\frac{\lambda}{\pi w}$$
where $w$ is ...
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The short and sweet answer is 'no'. The reason, however, may not be what you want. Neither would be very good in deep space as active sensor systems. That is, radar would have no advantages over light, because neither would be particularly effective.
If radar were the preferred method of sensing things in space, we would have scanned Mars with very high ...
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Some of the answers to this question:
Spacewalking in 0.3c - is it feasible? [Generations novel]1
describe the dangers of travelling fast, even in interstellar space where the density of particles is much less than in interplanetary space.
If the "interstellar ship" is travelling fast in interstellar space, at a significant fraction of the speed of ...
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It's not realistic to build a large spaceship in that timeframe. The only planet we have any serious consideration of getting to is Mars, and that would involve a handful of astronauts. We do not have the framework in place to get humans to Mars by 2024.
Realistically, getting to another habitable planet will take centuries and we will have to find it ...
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Go with what you know.
Cruise ships are the largest passenger vehicles that currently exist. Here is Symphony of the Seas - 361 meters long, capable of carrying 5518 passengers and 2200 crew. Everything they need is aboard, plus extra space for recreation.
In your world, spacecraft are made of retrofitted cruise ships. The ships have the infrastructure ...
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The big problem with using radar in outer space is simply range. The received flux of a radar signal falls off as $1/r^4$ instead of the $1/r^2$dependence we're used to getting for signals emitted by a source far away. The $1/r^4$ arises from the fact that the signal has to travel from the transmitter to the object (a factor of $1/r^2$) and then back to the ...
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