That "Earth-like" planet 490 light years away. SO WHAT?

On Friday, May 9, 2014 12:11:23 AM UTC-7, RichA wrote:
What good is it? With current Apollo-derived rocket technology, it would take what, 3.5 MILLION years to get to it? IF they'd kept Project Orion going and kept up development, they could get there in about 600 years.

Better yet is an entire solar system that's likely similar to that of our solar system.

http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/n...other%E2%80%99

"The solar sibling his team identified is called HD 162826, a star 15 percent more massive than the sun, located 110 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. The star is not visible to the unaided eye but easily can be seen with low-power binoculars, not far from the bright star Vega."

However, for every solar system planet, planetoid and/or moon, there's likely at least ten rogue, and/or another thousandfold if you'd care to include what brown dwarfs have associated with their much smaller and cooler type of low-mass star or super-gas giants that can be found just about everywhere, including a few million and assorted planets headed our way at 300+ km/sec.

So what if we can't go really fast. Last time I'd checked, our moon and Venus were each really nearby.

"Chris L Peterson" wrote in message
...

On Fri, 9 May 2014 19:13:07 +0100, "Lord Androcles"
wrote:

It's early days.

For us.
==================
No, just you, Snell, Quadiblockhead and palsing. "Us" means intelligent
people that can reply to more than one sentence without snipping, not
bigots.

On Friday, May 9, 2014 9:46:33 AM UTC-4, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Fri, 9 May 2014 00:11:23 -0700 (PDT), RichA

wrote:



What good is it? With current Apollo-derived rocket technology, it would take what, 3.5 MILLION years to get to it? IF they'd kept Project Orion going and kept up development, they could get there in about 600 years.



Humans will never leave the Solar System. It's not going to happen.

How depressing. I remember all the proposed propulsion methods, from Orion to "solar sails" and nothing came from any of them.

On Fri, 9 May 2014 20:24:37 -0700 (PDT), RichA
wrote:

Humans will never leave the Solar System. It's not going to happen.

How depressing. I remember all the proposed propulsion methods, from Orion to "solar sails" and nothing came from any of them.

What's depressing about it?

Nobody has proposed anything that would be suitable for interstellar
travel. If we were more politically stable, and could plan for
missions lasting decades or centuries, we might send probes to a few
near stars. That's about it. No technology is ever going to make it
practical to send people to other stars, and frankly, why would we
really want to?

"Chris L Peterson" wrote in message
...

On Fri, 9 May 2014 20:24:37 -0700 (PDT), RichA
wrote:

Humans will never leave the Solar System. It's not going to happen.

How depressing. I remember all the proposed propulsion methods, from Orion
to "solar sails" and nothing came from any of them.

What's depressing about it?

Nobody has proposed anything that would be suitable for interstellar
travel. If we were more politically stable, and could plan for
missions lasting decades or centuries, we might send probes to a few
near stars. That's about it. No technology is ever going to make it
practical to send people to other stars, and frankly, why would we
really want to?
========================================
Same reasons some climb Everest, same reason we sent a man to the Moon.
Because it is a challenge. Because it is there. Because we are naturally
more curious than cats. This does not apply to you as you are a pessimist.
No telescope is ever going to shows diamonds or snow on the Moon, so why
bother looking through one? Why would we really want to?

-- Lord Androcles, Zeroth Earl of Medway

On Friday, May 9, 2014 3:51:22 PM UTC+1, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Fri, 9 May 2014 07:24:42 -0700 (PDT), oriel36

wrote:



Listen to yourself for goodness sake, the possibility that certain supernova are not the death stars but the birth of solar systems was first presented in this forum. Evolutionary stellar processes and subsequently solar system evolutionary processes have a geometry to it, I saw it 4 years before the images emerged and had a single copyright on that issue back in 1990 -



http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/sins/pict...ringcircus.gif



There are now only getting around to the idea that stars survive a supernova event but have still to adjust to the idea that the event is a transitional phase in stellar evolution and not the demise of a star.



As usual, I really have little idea what you're talking about.


Like everything else you didn't hear what I said as you need to be nimble enough to take a wider view and move information around to arrive at more productive possibilities. As an empiricist everything is either exploding or dying despite the fact that creation presents transition phases,everything from child to adult to the seasonal cyclical growth and dormancy .

I would say that people find the idea of a certain supernova event as a transition phase to be attractive in creating a solar system rather than the death of a star. I was working on two large external rings and one smaller intersecting internal ring long before they were observed twenty years ago this month ,this structure is an integral part of stellar evolution and a transition phase so before you or others go down the dreary part of a stellar remnant I suggest you take notice that transition events occur everywhere in creation with this one particularly interesting if speculative.





Whether you want to say a star survives a supernova just depends on

whether you want to label the stellar remnant as another phase in the

"life" of a star. Most consider it quite different because it's no

longer fusing.


You are reaching Peterson, I can't even begin to tell you why the rings are there and how they factor into stellar evolutionary processes however the transition of a huge star to a smaller compact one like our Sun allows researchers to consider the origin of elements in the solar system components without looking elsewhere while maintaining the distance between our solar system and the rest within the galaxy during that evolutionary process.





That said, the Sun will not produce a supernova. It will continue to

evolve, such that life is no longer sustainable on Earth in a few

billion years. There will be no humans then, of course. There will be

no humans in just a few million years. Our own deep future isn't very

deep compared with the deep future of the Solar System.

You are missing the point as usual, there is a possibility,using physical considerations, to assume our parent star was much larger during a period of its evolution and minus the rest of the solar system. Indications are that stellar evolution displays a geometry of natural efficiency seen throughout all terrestrial sciences where growth is involved ,although scaling natural efficiency up to a stellar scale is complex it is there prior to stars going supernova -

http://harunyahya.com/image/timeless...ta-carinae.jpg

So you lesson today Peterson is that while galactic nebulae may create a star,the development of a solar system may be a creation of a supernova event hence the transition phase. If you want a stellar remnant after certain supernovae then so be it but it looks quite dull and in line with all the other pronouncements of impending doom,destruction and death you all thrive off so much.

On 09/05/2014 08:11, RichA wrote:
What good is it? With current Apollo-derived rocket technology, it would take what, 3.5 MILLION years to get to it? IF they'd kept Project Orion going and kept up development, they could get there in about 600 years.


That is still nothing like fast enough to be worth doing.

Imagine the provisions needed to explode a nuclear weapon out the back
every minute for 600 years.

If we ever learn to warp spacetime then interstellar travel becomes a
possibility but until then anyone who goes off on a conventional space
trip can comfortably expect to be overtaken pretty quickly by a later
traveller with more nearly relativistic speed.

Same issue applies to certain difficult computational problems as a
result of Moore's law the fastest way to get an answer is to sit on a
beach for 18 months until the hardware is up to the task in hand!

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On Saturday, May 10, 2014 8:25:42 AM UTC+1, Martin Brown wrote:

If we ever learn to warp spacetime then interstellar travel becomes a

possibility but until then anyone who goes off on a conventional space

trip can comfortably expect to be overtaken pretty quickly by a later

traveller with more nearly relativistic speed.

Spacetime indeed !, do you want a lesson on Newton's absolute/relative time,space and motion as he intended as opposed to those sorry guys a century ago who tried to escape the clockwork solar system of Sir Isaac by conjuring up their own 'spacetime' story.

"Absolute time, in astronomy, is distinguished from relative, by the equation or correlation of the vulgar time. For the natural days are truly unequal, though they are commonly considered as equal and used for a measure of time; astronomers correct this inequality for their more accurate deducing of the celestial motions.... The necessity of which equation, for determining the times of a phænomenon, is evinced as well from the experiments of the pendulum clock, as by eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter." Principia

None of you feel privileged to actually see the details of what Newton was trying to do but would rather lounge around with a half-baked 'spacetime' story that is going nowhere apart from the imaginations of mathematicians who are lost anyway.

When I saw Albert's description of astronomy in 1920 I thought it so hilarious that I left sci.relativity apart from brief visits,after all when you reject the conception of stellar islands like galaxies and then go on to describe the reason for 'warping' space you are entering a cartoon world -

"As regards space (and time) the universe is infinite. There are stars everywhere, so that the density of matter, although very variable in detail, is nevertheless on the average everywhere the same. In other words: However far we might travel through space, we should find everywhere an attenuated swarm of fixed stars of approximately the same kind and density.

This view is not in harmony with the theory of Newton. The latter theory rather requires that the universe should have a kind of centre in which the density of the stars is a maximum, and that as we proceed outwards from this centre the group-density of the stars should diminish, until finally, at great distances, it is succeeded by an infinite region of emptiness. The stellar universe ought to be a finite island in the infinite ocean of space.

This conception is in itself not very satisfactory. It is still less satisfactory because it leads to the result that the light emitted by the stars and also individual stars of the stellar system are perpetually passing out into infinite space, never to return, and without ever again coming into interaction with other objects of nature. Such a finite material universe would be destined to become gradually but systematically impoverished." Einstein

http://www.bartleby.com/173/30.html



You have to have a sense of humor reading that rubbish because it ain't astronomy whereas Sir Isaac's mangling of astronomical principles is more geometrically,historically and technically precise.

The empiricists/relativists sometimes work off the principle that as long as a topic is being discussed,however ridiculous it is, that a theory has validity however in this case 'spacetime' and its reason for existence is pure comedy. The problem is that this junk is dumped into the celestial arena as astronomy.

Martin Brown wrote:
On 09/05/2014 08:11, RichA wrote:
What good is it? With current Apollo-derived rocket technology, it
would take what, 3.5 MILLION years to get to it? IF they'd kept Project
Orion going and kept up development, they could get there in about 600 years.


That is still nothing like fast enough to be worth doing.

Imagine the provisions needed to explode a nuclear weapon out the back
every minute for 600 years.

If we ever learn to warp spacetime then interstellar travel becomes a
possibility but until then anyone who goes off on a conventional space
trip can comfortably expect to be overtaken pretty quickly by a later
traveller with more nearly relativistic speed.

Same issue applies to certain difficult computational problems as a
result of Moore's law the fastest way to get an answer is to sit on a
beach for 18 months until the hardware is up to the task in hand!


You're exaggerating the difficulties of the Orion. There wouldn't be 3
centuries of acceleration followed by three centuries of deceleration. Most
of the trip would be cruising.
Project Orion in its reduced phase to use from Earth orbit and beyond could
still work for solar system travel but the concept of ground launch with
atomic bombs would never have been used in a democracy because of the
radiation damage to the population.

On Sat, 10 May 2014 14:28:50 +0000 (UTC), Mike Collins
wrote:

You're exaggerating the difficulties of the Orion. There wouldn't be 3
centuries of acceleration followed by three centuries of deceleration. Most
of the trip would be cruising.
Project Orion in its reduced phase to use from Earth orbit and beyond could
still work for solar system travel but the concept of ground launch with
atomic bombs would never have been used in a democracy because of the
radiation damage to the population.

In either case, it's not really a question of technology, but of costs
and benefits. The costs are astronomical, the benefits hard to define.