DescentBB

Cool space trivia

I got 8/10.

I missed #2 and #10.

9/10. Missed # 4

10/10

I got 7 or 8

7/10

<the ones i got wrong>:
- 2 i've never heard that space-microbe story before, it's neat to know it now though.
- 6 i didn't know that neptune had rings.
- 10 they discover so many planets all the time, and since i never heard of planets on binary systems before i guessed "no". i guessed "wrong, ★■◆●".
</wrong answer ★■◆●>

gotta say that 5, 8 and 9 were open to speculation.

5 - we have the technology, but it's untested and therefore unproven. if some catastrophe came up and for some reason we HAD TO send a manned mission to alpha centauri (closest star 'cept for our local star: SOL) and earth worked together and therefore we had all the money and resourses in the world. we could easily do it. lightspeed is your only limit.
i still have to do some calulations on fuel weight required, but traveling at a constant comfortable mach 1, if lightspeed wasn't a limit, then we'd get there in under 1 year. nice eh?
you'd want your rocket exhaust to be traveling near lightspeed though, for peak efficiency. as i said, i have yet to calculate the required fuel weight (energy required to accelerate that fuel to lightspeed is a non-issue with Fusion).
all up, we could do it, we'd be really pushing the boundaries though .
what would considered "a reasonable time span" though? 5 years perhaps? i'd do that.

8 - eysyes technically there is gravity everywhere in space, but what's the definition of deep space? how about somewhere far away from galaxys, where all you can see in the nightsky is other galaxys (ie: no stars, since stars are only in galaxys). i doubt you could measure the amount of gravity out there in the space inbetween galaxys, it'd be 0.

9 - "The basic premise of teleportation -- made famous in TV's "Star Trek" -- is theoretically sound" well actually NO, the premice PUT FORWARD BY STARTREK has hardly been proven to be sound at all. sure we have teleported photons, and quantum states (this one isn't even telleportation, no "matter" was involved. if i smile, then you smile, does that mean i telleported my smile onto you? no).
telleporting photons is very far from telleporting huge matricies of matter, we may NEVER be able to do it. there's nothing proving that we ever will be able to, it may be forever scientifically impossible to do telleportation AS IS DONE IN STARTREK.

9/10

I missed #5. But that's only because I believe that we could almost do it now.

5. We currently have the technology necessary to send astronauts to another star system within a reasonable time span. The only problem is that such a mission would be overwhelmingly expensive.

FICTION

Even the unmanned Voyager spacecraft, which left our solar system years ago at a breathtaking 37,000 miles per hour, would take 76,000 years to reach the nearest star. Because the distances involved are so vast, interstellar travel to another star within a practical time scale would require, among other things, the ability the move a vehicle at or near the speed of light. This is beyond the reach of today's spacecraft -- regardless of funding, according to. Even so, the space agency is looking into the possibilities.

Tomorrow's space craft are another story. It is possible to theorize on a spaceship designed to accelerate indefinately, using nuclear propulsion systems, and shield the front of the space craft, the "habitat" zone where you had a crew of humans living in a biodome of self sustaining life.

The ship would constantly accelerate at 1G for half the mission, and then turn around during a brief maneuver, and then decelerate for the second half of the mission at 1G, and thus get to the nearest star in a reasonable time span, less than one human lifetime.

Do you even need to ask? o_O

10/10, but you knew that already!

Well, you're wrong about everything else, I just figured...

9/10....missed #9. I never heard of it being done.

Bettina

roid wrote:telleporting photons is very far from telleporting huge matricies of matter, we may NEVER be able to do it. there's nothing proving that we ever will be able to, it may be forever scientifically impossible to do telleportation AS IS DONE IN STARTREK.

Actually, again this depends on the definition of "teleportation". In this case, information is teleported. By teleported, we mean it moves faster than the speed of light, or in another interpretation, it leaves the lightcone of an event. In many theories, matter is equivalent to energy so physically moving a particle is not even required to "teleport" something from one place to another. You think too much in terms of "I dissapear here and I appear there instantly".

Lobber wrote:9/10

I missed #5. But that's only because I believe that we could almost do it now.

5. We currently have the technology necessary to send astronauts to another star system within a reasonable time span. The only problem is that such a mission would be overwhelmingly expensive.

FICTION

Even the unmanned Voyager spacecraft, which left our solar system years ago at a breathtaking 37,000 miles per hour, would take 76,000 years to reach the nearest star. Because the distances involved are so vast, interstellar travel to another star within a practical time scale would require, among other things, the ability the move a vehicle at or near the speed of light. This is beyond the reach of today's spacecraft -- regardless of funding, according to. Even so, the space agency is looking into the possibilities.

Tomorrow's space craft are another story. It is possible to theorize on a spaceship designed to accelerate indefinately, using nuclear propulsion systems, and shield the front of the space craft, the "habitat" zone where you had a crew of humans living in a biodome of self sustaining life.

The ship would constantly accelerate at 1G for half the mission, and then turn around during a brief maneuver, and then decelerate for the second half of the mission at 1G, and thus get to the nearest star in a reasonable time span, less than one human lifetime.

I wonder what was meant by a reasonable time span. Alpha Centauri is 4.5 light years away, and calculating the distance, energy expended, speed, and stress would put it far far more than a human lifetime which was why I chose false.. So far, Einstein was right when he quoted "We are prisoners of our own environment"

I have a couple issues with the questions-

gravity isn't technically a "thing" to exist, it's an influence between things. So, the influence always exists between everything, the question is if it is neglegable or not. (I'm sure you all knwo that already, though.)

As for the getting to Alpha Centari, well, it's certainly possible. It all depends on one's definition of resonable. We don't have the technology to get there in under 4.5 years. According to my calculations, if we could produce 1 g of acceleration, and accelerate to .95 of the speed of light (1 g all the way till you turn off the engine) it would take about 5.7 years to get to alpha centari- that's reasonable if you ask me.

(If you're curious about my math, PM me and I can send you the spreadsheet- input distance, acceleration, and how fast to get to, and it'll calculate the time, as long as it reaches the max speed and has an "engines off" period.)

snoopy, I think the question was written that way on purpose to separate the people who think that gravity only applies to bodies within the atmosphere from people who know that's it's simply neglibible once you get far enough away.

Yeah I don't really consider between the moon and Earth "deep space", like they defined it.

But I always thought that would be interesting... create a "radio" using quantumly entangled atoms. Actually, I'm gonna make a new post on it.