Astronomy & Space Exploration

Question: Using our current technology and whatever else would be necessary, per say a human offered to spend the rest of his/her life exploring the cosmos with likely no return possible, exactly how far could one go into space?
 
MrMarcello said:
Question: Using our current technology and whatever else would be necessary, per say a human offered to spend the rest of his/her life exploring the cosmos with likely no return possible, exactly how far could one go into space?
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Impossible to tell. The longer you're in space the more your body deteriorates so it depends what the breaking point is, which is something we don't know yet.
 
Valeri Polyakov spent ~14 months in space in a single flight - that's the current verified limit:
On January 8, 1994, as a doctor-cosmonaut on the Soyuz TM -18 flight, he returned to Mir. Polyakov spent the next 437.7 consecutive days in space, a world record that still stands. He orbited the earth 7,075 times and traveled 186,887,000 miles before landing safely on March 22, 1995. During his stay on the Mir, Polyakov conducted medical, physiological and sanitary-hygienic researches, some of which were components of international space medicine projects.
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Based on that figure, that human should be able to reach Jupiter (approx. 590 to 960 million km) using ExoMars TGO figures. Anything beyond that in terms of reaching planetary landmarks will be speculative at best because as @Silva pointed out, we dunno what the breaking point for humans is. We are incredibly fragile in the sense with strict operational and kinematic limits when taken out of our comfort zones, so we won't get far until we build spaceships with a consistent source for artificial gravity, better radiation protection, and so forth. And even that will have an upper ceiling, whence the body unravels completely. Cyborgization where a lot of vital organs and stress joints are replaced by mechanized parts, and you're powered by some sort of micro fusion reactor (to eliminate the need for breathing and eating and defecating) is likely to be our best bet for interstellar travel - just out of sheer evolutionary necessity.
 
El General 1994 said:
As interested in the Universe as I am, my pea brain really can't get round the sheer scale and multi variables regarding Cosmology.
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To be fair, it's an incomprehensible mystery for everyone - even the greatest and most curious minds of humanity, let alone plebs like us. We just aren't evolved enough as a species to deconstruct the neverending existential horrors of the cosmos. I guess that's the most disappointing thing about dying - you never truly get a chance to understand the true nature of things, and there's nothing you can do about it. Every little detail that we have observed or known is like a sliver on this infinitesimally small time-frame of a few millennia on an unremarkable and isolated speck in space since the advent of the modern civilization and the agricultural revolution - in a universe that is ~14 billion years old and might go on for an infinite amount of time till we reach the final energy state, so dying now (when we might be on the cusp of some ground-breaking advancements in terms of scratching the surface and trying to peer through) is like failing to get around the first Koopa in Super Mario - faaaaaaaaaar away from Princess Toadstool. It's just seems so unjust! Then again, we can take a bit of comfort in the fact that some of our more inquisitive modern ancestors probably felt the same way. :lol:
 
Invictus said:
To be fair, it's an incomprehensible mystery for everyone - even the greatest and most curious minds of humanity, let alone plebs like us. We just aren't evolved enough as a species to deconstruct the neverending existential horrors of the cosmos. I guess that's the most disappointing thing about dying - you never truly get a chance to understand the true nature of things, and there's nothing you can do about it. Every little detail that we have observed or known is like a sliver on this infinitesimally small time-frame of a few millennia on an unremarkable and isolated speck in space since the advent of the modern civilization and the agricultural revolution - in a universe that is ~14 billion years old and might go on for an infinite amount of time till we reach the final energy state, so dying now (when we might be on the cusp of some ground-breaking advancements in terms of scratching the surface and trying to peer through) is like failing to get around the first Koopa in Super Mario - faaaaaaaaaar away from Princess Toadstool. It's just seems so unjust! Then again, we can take a bit of comfort in the fact that some of our more inquisitive modern ancestors probably felt the same way. :lol:
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I've honestly thought to myself that the most annoying thing about dying will be to never know whether we make first contact with some other species out there.
 
Maagge said:
I've honestly thought to myself that the most annoying thing about dying will be to never know whether we make first contact with some other species out there.
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You guys reckon that's annoying?

David Attenborough is going to die soon. Who the feck is going to commentate on finding these new species?
 

Explanation for the elements in brown:
 
PedroMendez said:
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I feel like a superconducting orbital ring in low Martian orbit would be slightly more useful. For a start, it would be much easier to build a tower from the ground to Low Martian Orbit (essentially a space elevator) than it is on Earth, allowing the ring to be connected to the Martian electric grid.

That in turn allows the orbital ring to act as a Martian electrical energy store, so the Martian fusion plants can put their spare energy into good use creating a magnetosphere, whilst also borrowing it's electrical energy during peak times. It also allows the super conductor to be the start of an orbital ring where ships can dock.

Or you can do the same thing on the ground

But then I guess there is no reason they can't have both

Also - the red lines under the spelling "errors"... infuriating!
 
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I like the out of the box futuristic sci fi thinking of this.

Now can we just hurry up and get there. I want to be alive when we set foot on another planet.
 
Robbo's Shoulder said:
Can anyone explain this in layman's terms please? I subject which interests me greatly but i'm often put off with language which completely bamboozle's me.
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Robbo's Shoulder said:
Can anyone explain this in layman's terms please? I subject which interests me greatly but i'm often put off with language which completely bamboozle's me.
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Some scientists are beginning to think dark energy is not needed to explain the expansion of the universe and other related things. The original theory of general relativity can actually explain everything if you tweak the calculations. Really at this level of physics it's all pretty much guesswork at the moment.
 


fecking hell. That is beautiful.
If people didnt know what it was, a religion would be born.
 
Nikhil said:
Will NASA use SpaceX's Falcon 9 reusable launch system to launch payloads? And what about missions to the ISS? Soyuz capsules for astronauts?
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SpaceX will being taking up NASA astronauts starting later this year, along with Boeing's Starliner.
 
True exploration of the universe will not begin until we create a form of artificial gravity for space travel (like in Star Trek/Star Wars).

The shit will get real once that happens.
 
Garethw said:
True exploration of the universe will not begin until we create a form of artificial gravity for space travel (like in Star Trek/Star Wars).

The shit will get real once that happens.
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Still the issue of effective enough propulsion and space radiation though.
 
Another moonwalker passes on :(

 
Garethw said:
True exploration of the universe will not begin until we create a form of artificial gravity for space travel (like in Star Trek/Star Wars).

The shit will get real once that happens.
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SwansonsTache said:
Still the issue of effective enough propulsion and space radiation though.
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Artificial gravity is playground stuff. Literally, you just spin the habitat to create a force, like you spin a kids roundabout.

A habitat with a 1 km radius would rotate once a minute to create 1g of gravity https://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/. Of course, building a 2 km wide space ship is a little difficult... but once you've got a permanent Mars/Lunar colony, it's a hell of a lot easier because it takes a fraction of the energy to get the thing into space.

Solar Radiation is also very solvable when talking about our 2 km wide ship. Solar radiation is primarily alpha and beta particles, aka protons and electrons, which interact readily with substances that contain lots of single protons and electrons, i.e. with water. We dump nuclear fuel rods into water for precisely this reason. 7 cm of water blocks approximately half the solar radiations from passing through, so 14 cm blocks approximately 75% and so on. Using that calculation, 1 m of water would block 99.993% of particles, making it a trivial problem for a 2 km wide ship.

And we would by no means actually use water, because that would be pretty silly. We'd probably use a strong plastic with a lot of hydrogen and free electrons to shield the ship (although you do need to bring a lot of water, so you can use that too).

Some potential ships then
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Hermes - the Martian

Elysium-Space-Station1.png


Elysium - Elysium (ignore the open to space bit, it needs a roof)

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Some random ship from a game probably
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I agree propulsion is a far bigger problem, but not difficult.

If we had easy access to space, we'd have solved all of this by now. The only major problem in my book is getting big objects out of Earth's atmosphere and gravity well, and as a far second, the EDL on bodies like Mars
 
Here is my theory that has no science behind it, but I think just makes "sense". This might already be a theory, I don't know.

Dark matter is the accumulation of matter in all the dimensions we cannot perceive. Anyone else ever thought that?!
 
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