For God Sakes We Finally Have It!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[K.I.L.E.R]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Space-agency-to-do-more-Aussie-tests/2005/12/28/1135732626542.html

Deep space exploration is going to occur very soon.
Can someone please go over the benefits of deep space exploration?
Will this give us a chance to improve our physics formulae?
More accurate analysis?

 

[SugarCoat]

strip mine, pollute, over populate other plants and assimilate/annhiliate any intelligent life of a foreign origon we find

would you expect anything less from the human species?

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Chalnoth, can you please come here and give me a serious answer?
I want a serious discussion on this.

 

[AlNom]

DSE... well... I suppose we would get more detailed views of interstellar bodies; perhaps being better able to determine a planet's surface/atmosphere type. As for equations, it would be nice to verify them from outside of our defined Solar System's boundaries.

 

[epicstruggle]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Space-agency-to-do-more-Aussie-tests/2005/12/28/1135732626542.html

Deep space exploration is going to occur very soon.

Im curious as to what you consider deep space exploration. We already can go with robots to mars, not deep enough? Im looking forward to the asteroid belt (name escapes me) exploration.

Can someone please go over the benefits of deep space exploration?

It further increases our knowledge, mining rare minerals/metals, its cool.

Will this give us a chance to improve our physics formulae?

I would imagine there are very few physics formulas/theories that require us to be very far from earth/sun.

More accurate analysis?

Possibly, i think nasa is launching a satelite to do some weird gravity test, to prove parts of einsteins theory. It might have been more accurate from further out in space.

epic

 

[idiom]

The amount of resources from big floating rocks in space is truly awesome. If we could get access to that cheaply and find a way to process it all, private spaceflight would become a real probability.

 

[nutball]

Deep space exploration is going to occur very soon.

Depends what you mean by "deep". Ion drives are fun and all, but interstellar travel is going to be a PITA until someone can prove that that nice Mr Einstein got it wrong about a universal speed limit.

For your lifetime, and possibly beyond, we're going to be limited to exploring our own Solar system. That's not really deep space (not in my book anyway).

Can someone please go over the benefits of deep space exploration?

It creates jobs, and the technology required to build space probes has spin-offs into non-space-related fields. Errr... you get some nice pretty pictures. Fundamentally the knowledge gained is pretty esoteric but also pretty interesting (how did the Solar system form -> where did we come from, etc.). But it's not going to rock the world.

Commercial exploitation of space-flight for resource gathering ... it's tough to buy that that will happen any time soon. Shifting large chunks of rock around is much cheaper on Earth than in space. The resources you're after would have to be pretty scarce on Earth (ie. expensive) to justify it.

Space tourism might take off in a limited way over the next decade, but once a few dozen people get killed I reckon it's going to be a tough sell for the marketing people.

Will this give us a chance to improve our physics formulae?

Only in a very roundabout way. There's some evidence from deep space probes that the 1/r^2 law of gravity might not be precisely correct, an effect which some have attributed to a negative component to gravity (ie. anti-gravity), though there could be other explanations I suppose. Effects like that sometimes crop up when you're doing deep space stuff, things that you might not notice otherwise.

 

[bouy]

Can someone please go over the benefits of deep space exploration?

Well for one thing it would make space travel a lot cheaper. It would be great if we can decrease the cost per pound we send into space. I think something like a Space elevator would work.

Also if we as a species want to survive, we're going to have to eventually expand out and first step is probably the moon, then Mars, then the outer planets, and finally one day to another star system, etc.

Mining in space would probably really beneficial for industry in space. I think one of the plans NASA has before going to Mars is to see if we can efficiently mine/extract fuels and oxygen from the moon or other sources in space to reduce the cost of sending it up into space or to make more room for other supplies.

I wonder if work into the new theories in physics like superstring and stuff could yield possibilities for FTL travel or something along the lines of that.

Here's a link to NASA about Warp Drives, etc.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/warp.html
Also a cool link about solar cell tech:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/science/FTSCE_MiSSE_feature.html

 

[bloodbob]

Depends what you mean by "deep". Ion drives are fun and all, but interstellar travel is going to be a PITA until someone can prove that that nice Mr Einstein got it wrong about a universal speed limit.

4 Years isn't that long of a journy of course infinite acceleration ain't gonna work for various reasons ( such as squished pliots if we are talking about manned mission ). But we really could make an unmanned mission to the star(s).

 

[nutball]

Well for one thing it would make space travel a lot cheaper. It would be great if we can decrease the cost per pound we send into space. I think something like a Space elevator would work.

That's back-to-front IMO. Deep space exploration won't reduce the cost of putting mass into orbit, just the opposite... it won't even happen on a large scale until the cost of launching hunks of metal drops dramatically. You have to look to other economic drivers to deliver reduced cost to orbit, and currently that's commercial satellite payloads (generally communications).

Also if we as a species want to survive, we're going to have to eventually expand out and first step is probably the moon, then Mars, then the outer planets, and finally one day to another star system, etc.

At the risk of getting dragged into politics, there are no real natural threats to mankind's existence on a meaningful timescale that would require us to expand off the planet in order to survive. The biggest threats are man-made, and therefore can be readily solved by change of behaviour. We're our own worst enemy. If the death of the Sun is what you're getting at ... well let's survive the next billion years first, then worry about that shall we?

Mining in space would probably really beneficial for industry in space. I think one of the plans NASA has before going to Mars is to see if we can efficiently mine/extract fuels and oxygen from the moon or other sources in space to reduce the cost of sending it up into space or to make more room for other supplies.

I'm still curious to know what it is that's out there that's economically worthwhile mining. (That's a geniune question, I'm not being facetious).

I wonder if work into the new theories in physics like superstring and stuff could yield possibilities for FTL travel or something along the lines of that.

Those are science-ficition. One thing that people don't seem to get straight in their heads is that FTL isn't a technology as such. It's not like ... it's not possible now because Einstein says it isn't, but if we come up with a different theory then suddenly FTL becomes possible. FTL is either possible, or it isn't, according to the laws of physics that the Universe obeys (as distinct, *very* distinct from the laws of physics as we see them). If FTL isn't possible, no amount of messing about with maths is going to magically make it so.

From a practical perspective it's best to ignore FTL I think.

 

[nutball]

4 Years isn't that long of a journy of course infinite acceleration ain't gonna work for various reasons ( such as squished pliots if we are talking about manned mission ). But we really could make an unmanned mission to the star(s).

No, but in practical terms it'd be more like a thirty year one way trip. Unmanned missions, sure, though they'd have to be highly independent as remote control wouldn't be practical with a 8 year signal round-trip time (ie. they'd have to rely heavily on artificial intelligence, which is as much a pipe-dream as FTL travel IMO ).

 

[London Geezer]

(ie. they'd have to rely heavily on artificial intelligence, which is as much a pipe-dream as FTL travel IMO ).

Heh, even natural intelligence is a pipe-dream these days

 

[idiom]

As I understand it there's vast amount of things like iron and water out there as well as I think organic compounds or something. Water is great for surviving and you don't have to spend lots to get it out of the Earth's gravity well and with the help of the organic compounds it might be possible to create a self sustainable environment.

This is billions of tons per rock we're talking about, and it's already outside Earth's gravity well so hauling it down to Earth won't be nearly as hard as bringing it up and if we build a space elevator that's free gravitational potential energy just waiting to be used

The initial investment would be huge but the economic impact would be even larger, by magnitudes. It's really a matter of technology and willpower.

Get some self-replicating robot mining factories and just place them on the space rocks and wait for the money to roll in

 

[idiom]

Btw, I just saw you lived in a place called Long Dong london-boy. That's gotta be.... awesome

 

[Fred]

Superluminal propagation is interesting to theorists b/c its sort of a test bed to falsify your theories with (a gedanken to disprove yourself). If your theory outputs superluminal propagation in a bad enough way (yes there are different extents by what I mean 'bad') its sort of nice b/c you can just throw out the hypothesis entirely or at least constrain your theory.

B/c in general, and especially in GR it means cause and effect are no longer good concepts. And well we live in a world where cause and effect are meaningful, ergo that doesn't take place.

But it is interesting b/c sometimes these sorts of things do crop up in various theoretical contexts and are usually accompanied by various 'exotic' phenomenon. For instance in one scenario you might be able to make a 'warp drive' but then the entire energy of the available universe is spent in the process, and such a process would crumple up pretty much everything *else*..

I can get into more technical and less sci fi reasons (eg allowable vacuum instabilities and ways to define global concepts of ADM energy in GR) but well, its still kinda a cool topic every physicist mulls over from time to time if for no other reason than the geek factor.

 

[Schuey]

I beleive both Voyager probes are about 1/2 way to the theortical Oort cloud, which is supposed to be the "edge" of our solar system. Since we've never been out of our Solar System I guess we could consider deep space anything beyond that, at least for now.

Regarding physics, almost everything is theory right now as we've had no way to prove things. First, we don't have an explanation for what 90%+ of the Universe is composed of so I'd consider any theory where you have that much of an unknown involved pretty much a wild guess. The theories on how solar systems and planets formed are being rethought everyday as we continue to discover exosolar planets and additional objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Until we get out of our Solar System we won't be able to know for sure how our solar system is affected by other planetary systems (relatively) close to us. Next would be how the proposed black holes in the center of galaxies affect all the stars in that given galaxy. And how about the fact that our galaxy is blazing thru space? Is that space completely void or are there things which can affect our galaxy or perhaps on a smaller scale, a planetery system or individual star in said galaxy. Considering the fact that there is at least 6 billion galaxies in the known universe and that each galaxy has several billions stars of its own, I don't think we understand didly squat about physics other than the basic Earth stuff we now know.

Keep in mind that more than half of the probes that have been sent to Mars have been lost. Our grip on astrophysics can't be too good if we can't get to the next planet more than half the times we try.

Unless there's an absolutely immense breakthrough in science or Aliens come down and show us how, I'm afraid we won't know much about how things work outside our solar system during our lifetimes.

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

probably should learn how to be civilized and at least balance a budget before we go out and get laughed at by the neighbors. you just know, our patheticness is all over the cosmos.

 

[nutball]

Keep in mind that more than half of the probes that have been sent to Mars have been lost. Our grip on astrophysics can't be too good if we can't get to the next planet more than half the times we try.

The amount of astrophysics involved in sending a probe to Mars is close to zero, and that which is involved (erm... Newtonian gravity, and, erm...) is pretty well understood. The losses of Mars missions are generally explainable as failures of engineering or of human procedures.

 

[boltneck]

strip mine, pollute, over populate other plants and assimilate/annhiliate any intelligent life of a foreign origon we find

would you expect anything less from the human species?

Thats a pretty good Q impersonation

 

[Frank]

For science, having a huge baseline to do observations (which requires at least three probes -for reducing the errors-, that have lots of energy for high-res communication), is very interesting. Not only can we do much more meaningful observations, but the discrepancies in the synchronizing can help to fine-tune (or disprove) current theories. Think of it as a Global Positioning System on steroids, that also does video and helps science.

Then again, we would need a real space station to be able to do that as well.

On the other hand, while ion drives are pretty neat, you want lots of energy and thruster mass as well. The more, the better. And even so, they will be extremely slow, even compared to the size of our Solar system. Let alone the nearest stars.

If Einstein is right, just about the only way to go to other stars within a reasonable short time, is the brute force method: take a fairly sized moon, drill a hole through the center, install a lineair accelerator throughout that, and fire all of it's mass away as fast as possible.

When done right (think: in about a thousand years from now or such), you can go anywhere in the galaxy in about two years time, subjective, that way. And you need to find another moon if you want to come back, as it will be spend.


So, don't hold your breath!