New answers tagged space
1
You can see fires from space, but even really, really big fires are usually kinda small by the standards of a planet.
Moreover, blobs of fire like that won't last very long because the fuel in them will be exausted and what you'll get instead is a wall or front of fire that is blown downwind until it reaches somewhere that's too damp (like the sea) or has ...
-2
I would swear that I saw a documentary saying that as soon as a start begins to produce iron, in that cascade of fusing heavier and heavier elements beginning with hydrogen to helium, it immediately goes nova. It also said that authors in Science Fiction have gone through so much trouble to explain killing a star with invented exotic devices, when all they ...
5
Strange matter
One single strangelet will do. It could weight as little as a light nucleus (such as that of an carbon or oxygen atom).
The thing about strangelets is that everything they interact with also becomes strangelets. This means the sun would be completely converted into strangelets in finite time.
For more information, see this video by ...
3
Gamma ray burst: a typical GRB lasts less than a second - a 'long' one lasts several seconds. You can learn more about it here. They're caused by exploding stars, so given that two stars are travelling in exactly the same trajectory to one another - effectively in parallel in 3 dimensional space - a long lasting, focused GRB on your star could kill it - the ...
8
One possibility is called a "Q-ball". A Q-ball is a finite-volume mass of bosons (net-zero-spin particles) theorized to exist by many flavors of string and quantum field theory. The bosons are not bonded to each other by traditional observations of the four fundamental forces, like gravity or electromagnetism, but instead due to a local attractive force ...
3
Drop anti-uranium into it. Assuming that:
Antimatter can occur naturally,
Matter-antimatter reactions actually do result in complete mass-to-energy conversion (to my knowledge nobody has ever proved this), and
The antimatter can get from point A (somewhere outside the solar system) to point B (the sun) without being completely annihilated,
then the result ...
5
Assuming neutronium is stable in sub-stellar masses (impossible to verify at this time), a chunk of that material, introduced with enough velocity to promptly penetrate to near the core of the star, then capture into an orbit (via gas drag), would have some significant effects on its hydrogen fusion process and the convection that delivers that energy to the ...
0
#1 Top Priority? Family
I sincerely hope the colonists were informed of just how many babies they are going to need to make...
And babies require a lot of resources, not just because they need somewhere to live, but they will also need training, work, and the encouragement to have big families themselves.
That means your colonists have Zero time for ...
0
Originally posted as a comment to IndigoFenix's answer, but it was moved from this page.
@IndigoFenix's "Hide The Moon" option might be improved with this:
If the self-replicating nanobots were built with cameras & projection screens. During construction, each nanobot would display what its own camera showed behind it, rendering them invisible to @...
0
Why not start by taking over some plants and basic life forms a la panspermia.
See if these actually survive, and thrive on the planet. Is it actually habitable?
This could be done by robots or other autonomous machines, and then the same robots could run general data collection on the planet once they are there.
To take humans over before anything else ...
0
The first steps really depend on what challenges the specific planet has in store. Unless something totally unexpected about the environment is discovered upon arriving, the first step would probably be to place and ship in orbit. Wake up Generation 0 from sleep and starting sending landing parties and drones to explore and perform tests on the environment. ...
2
In my post number 8 in https://historum.com/threads/generation-or-sleeper-ships-which-would-be-the-better-more-realistic-option-for-space-travel.181701/1 I state that with slower than light speed travel the main method of settlement in our solar system would be via many artificial space habitats, and the main method of interstellar colonization would be by ...
0
According to this question, the first priority would be to sterilize the entire planet. There is basically zero chance that there would be any biocompatibility at all between alien life and Earth life.
0
The posed question is about after landing on the new planet.
In the given scenario, we're limited by "current technology" and we need to travel by 500 years. Even if the ship's crew is safe, the Earth will have changed, so going back to Earth is worthless.
And it was said that all needed resources are supplied by the ship.
So, the next steps:
Mix up (...
2
Researchers would first have to send probes to the planet to determine the likelihood of ELE (Extinction Level Event).
You can ship 500 people to a planet, but if they don't predict a massive electrical storm coming along, or fire rain or whatever, the entire population could get wiped.
Others have mentioned food, water, etc.. pathogens would be a major ...
2
Don’t Land
The only ways that only way it is remotely plausible that a colony ship could travel in space for 500 years and still be intact are either:
A) You have Star Trek esque matter replicators on board, on which case you have absolutely no reason to go down to a planet (or to worry about resources once you get there), or
B) You have a colony ship ...
2
How good are their robots? 500 people can’t sustain a modern technological base.
Without robots you are doomed to a pre-industrial civilization. Therefore your first priority will be to get robot production up and running while keeping most of your population in cryogenic sleep. Once you can manufacture robots, you can manufacture everything else: ...
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Good answers from a lot of people, but I can see one flaw: The premise that only one ship will be sent.
What civilization will only send one ship on a one-way 500-year journey? Surely in 500 years other ships would also be sent to the same destination. Some of these might well be faster and could therefore arrive before the original vessel even gets there....
5
The top priority will be fertility. They will need 3-5 children per couple, perhaps more if the planet is dangerous (native life, environment, whatever). With only 500 people, that's not nearly enough to bring along all the specialties required for a modern civilization... Charles Stross has speculated on his blog that that's north of 100,000 distinct, ...
2
The top priority would be determining if life is present. If life is not present or at least not extensive, but the planet is habitable then they can land and set up home. The top priority would be shelter, but I assume they would have some form of basic shelter with them so the next priority would be food and water production.
If the planet is home to ...
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I think that the number one priority is actually going to be confirming that the planet is, in fact, as habitable as previously anticipated. Previous information on the planet took 500 years to get here; we don't know how fast we were traveling, but I assume it was a relativistic speed (IE a significant percentage of the speed of light). As such, all data ...
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Firstly, if you don't have the capabilities to construct a closed life support system, then you have no business trying to construct a colony many light years away, with no support and no backup and no actual certainty that the world is safe or habitable ahead of time. Your colony ship either needs to be a habitat suitable for a decent number of people to ...
3
Without communication back it's just simple stranded island scenario.
1: Steady water supply
2: Steady food supply
3: Shelter (Assuming your ships won't be available as long term housing)
4: Elimination/Subjugation of local hostiles. (This can be anything from animals to humanoids)
But seeing it is long term and 500 people isn't extremely much you ...
10
I believe the top priorities, in order, will be:
Food and water. Once stored victuals run out, there will have to be local sources for food and water. Food might be adapted from local lifeforms, or the colonists can begin growing crops from seeds, etc., brought from home.
Shelter. Shelter from wind, rain, and cold will be the second priority, once the ...
3
How and When?
The answers to this question rely heavily on exactly how and how quickly you intend to remove all that water and ice. For the purposes of conversation and simplicity, I will consider the removal to be complete extraction without replacement of any kind, and two possible time scales, those being geological and sub-geological.
Geological
...
0
The information security(hacking) side has been addressed by others, so I'm going to focus on the more traditional side of electronic warfare, radar jamming and it's cousin electronic information gathering. In modern warfare, especially air warfare, electronic warfare is as effective as it is because of the reliance on active sensors that send out and ...
1
Unlikely
Cyberwarfare would be an important part of any space navy. However, you will still need conventional weapons of some kind. Cyberwarfare as a ship to ship weapon is going to be unlikely. However in space combat and scifi it will remain important. Even the star wars original films it shows up. "it's an older code but it checks out," The rebels ...
2
I would distiguish electronic warfare to
Hard or physical - e.g. EMP weapons which roughly speaking burn your circuits
Soft or physical - e.g. Hacking, Viruses which does not destroy the hardware, but does something more delicate on software level.
Hard
It is actually very easy to protect almost anything from time-varying electromagnetic field by Faraday ...
1
Nobody seems to be mentioning the one planet we know of that definitely does have a liquid core:
The Earth's inner core is solid iron, but it's surrounded by an outer core of liquid iron.
It's almost certain that earlier in the planet's history the entire core was liquid. The inner core only formed once the inside of the planet cooled down enough for the ...
4
TL:DR; you won't, because it won't be worth the effort. As soon as asteroid mining becomes a practical way of providing resources for Earth, the value of metals will plummet.
Someone else will do the mining, and will probably sell you the raw metals on the cheap.
So, this is probably part economics, part safety and part orbital mechanics, and these things ...
2
I would say the best option to go with is the Take your refinery with you and refine the asteroid as it you mine it, approach. A lot of asteroid mining in artworks and media depict asteroid mining as something like this.
Finding a rock, digging a hole, working your way out and possibly building a nice habitat inside while you work. Now, this may work ...
2
I think the answer is a mixture of your first two options. The decision being made by economics
For asteroids with low but sufficient economic value, and low mass, the solution would be to alter the rock's velocity, and therefore orbital path, so it rendezvoused with the refinery. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Mars and the Moon had major ...
1
How about you play a snooker/pool trick shot instead of doing anything directly?
That is, you alter the orbit of something else to collide with the moon, thus altering its orbit (presumably making it wider, so the moon ultimately moves away from and escapes Earths gravity).
Finding an object large enough is possible challenging. The asteroid belt has lots ...
0
Stirling engines are heat engines, they require a temeprature difference (for example betwwen something heated by the sun and a large radiator in the space ships' shadow).
At large scales, a solar concentrator + heat engine + generator could be a more efficient way to turn sunlight into electricity. Efficient here meaning useful energy harvested per capture ...
9
Lets consider how hard it would be to spot this object with visible light astronomy. This isn't quite the right way to go about things, but it is a start. Most things are easier to see in IR than than visible light, so my final detection distance may be out be an order of magnitude (or a bit more). Note though that whilst your rogue Jupiter might be warmer ...
2
Hmm, everyone's thinking far too hard...
This is inspired by an event mentioned in the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
Simply (well...) disassemble the moon and ship it off to somewhere else.
Of course you're going to need a fleet of cargo spacecraft, and some serious amount of diggers to break up the moon and load it onto those spacecraft, bucketload ...
0
I expect we could see it from along way away. If we look at brown dwarfs, which have higher masses than Jupiter but cruically will have about the same temperature, then looking in the infra red we have seen brown dwarfs out to a few tens of light years (restricting ourselfs to the t dwarfs which are the closest match to a Jupiter) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...
17
You can't move the Moon, it just requires too much energy. But maybe we can deny everyone else the Moon... and ALL OF SPACE!!!
Energy Required To Move the Moon out of the Earth's Orbit
Let's say "stealing the Moon" means to move it out of Earth's orbit and refusing to put it back until you're paid a ransom. How hard is it to move the Moon out of Earth's ...
56
Plans for stealing the moon.
Shrink it
Well, this seems like the obvious solution. Just invent a shrink ray, zap the moon so it becomes the size of a basketball, then carry it home with you and mount it as a decoration in your home, a testament to your genius.
Problems: Inventing a shrink ray. No science exists that could possibly turn the moon into ...
0
A huge, solar-powered rail- or coil-gun which fires projectiles faster than lunar escape velocity would probably work. Of course this requires that it’s allowed to use the Moon itself for fuel/material. I’m too lazy to look up how much power and material you’d need and how long it would take. Probably a lot. The Moon’s mass is $7.34767309 × 10^{22}$ ...
5
Drill holes in Callisto.
Build giant rockets through those holes. If possible, use Callisto's water and pressure to help optimize exhaust.
Build a giant laser, powered by Jupiter and/or its moons.
Use these to propel Callisto toward the Earth. If fine-tuning this for the desired effect is impossible, throw in another Jovian moon, or just borrow Jupiter via ...
1
Using the orbital mechanics knowledge I acquired from playing kerbal space program, I believe that it is possible to move the moon away using ordinary rocket engines, the problem becomes how to get enough/big enough engines and how to fuel them. I don't know the exact math but the amount of fuel would be astronomical and you wouldn't burn constantly. you ...
0
Scratch using the heat radiating for the station having the "hot" plate directly in the sun would be much more efficient considering the skin of the ISS can reach temps of 250 F° which is almost definitely more energy then any other source. The largest problems I can see is removing the energy from other side to produce the thermal difference. The second ...
7
Harnessing gravitational slingshots (and maybe using lasers to not only deflect, but redirect and control, asteroids) might be a possible solution. If you directed a large enough and fast-moving enough asteroid at the moon, its momentum might make up for its smaller size and knock the moon out of orbit. Given enough asteroids and enough control over them, ...
16
Not enough money, not enough means.
To 'steal' the moon you need to disturb its orbit.
To disturb its orbit you need a heavy enough mass, at a trajectory and timing precisely to go past the moon to veer it off its orbit. The only kind of mass to pull it off in that time frame is another moon, perhaps one of Jupiters. But then you have the problem of ...
34
It's perfectly easy to steal the moon.
Just register a claim on it in every country and start issuing legal notices. It's been done before: Spanish woman claims ownership of the sun
9
It is not feasible to steal the Moon within the next 40 years even with 1 billion dollars+ because we know of no practical means to do such a thing.
Removing the Moon from Earth would require astronomical amounts of force and the only way of applying that force would be via an astronomical body such as a large rogue planet or star passing near to the Earth ...
2
The easiest and simplest route of communication is radio
Barring that, any form of fluctuation / pattern in the EM spectrum (which includes radio, but also other wavelengths of light such as microwaves). Communication via this means is a simple rod with a current running through it, picked up by an antenna being another rod that you could measure current ...
-2
Quantum entanglement.
Assuming radio is not good enough for these impatient people, quantum entanglement is a fun idea. Two quantum particles that are created together become entangled, and any change in spin to one of them changes the spin in the other, instantaneously, at any distance across the universe. This has been real world tested even across two ...
2
My main concern is that the synchronous point and counterweight (which you haven't considered, but will be even further out) of your elevator cable is not going to be within Europa's Hill sphere or its gravitational Sphere of Influence. That means it will be orbiting Jupiter, and anything that orbits Jupiter further away than Europa does (or closer, for that ...
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