How a nanoprobe (required by the propulsion solution) can send data back to us from >10 ly away?
Readit NewsAlessandroF6587 commented on Interstellar Mission to a Black Hole centauri-dreams.org/2025/... · Posted by u/JPLeRouzic
> There are many nuclear powered ships
What's the ratio of nuclear-powered big ships vs non-nuclear-powered big ships?
> If you have enough electricity
We're talking about moving our current electricity production entirely out of fossil fuels (because we produce a lot of electricity with them), then multiplying that production by 5, and at this point we're only producing the same amount of energy as today. But of course that's not enough, because we then need to use a lot of that energy to produce what's needed to replace oil, e.g. hydrogen.
We currently need what... 10-15 years to build a nuclear power plant? We're talking about building multiple orders of magnitudes more of them in a few decades, together with the electrical network and of course everything that needs to be re-engineered now that they can't run with oil anymore. And we're currently using oil for a reason: it's super dense, there is nothing more convenient.
And what value does it add? Nothing. It's just for replacing what currently works. Who will pay for that? Where will the money come from?
And this has to be done in a context where geopolitical instability will grow every year (because it is a fact: our access to abundant fossil fuel is coming to an end; Europe has seen it since 2007). And of course in a context where we are not remotely thinking about doing it. In the last decades, we as a society have actually kept accelerating in the opposite direction.
How realistic do you think your scenario is, really?
Some reference material that can be helpful
https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-3
The baton is passed forward, not backward.
Prove that they were right by making the same attitude yours.
That's the best gratitude to be received. Especially when you are not young anymore. Proving that what you did was not in vain but it had a good impact on people and it will outlast you.
Glad you liked it, thanks for playing!
Fair point on the scoring, seems like a lot of people feel that way. Right now, half your points come from distance in km, and half come from distance in years. So you probably got 5000 points for location, and lost points on the year. But it's probably a bit too harsh right now.
And thanks for pointing out the Vatican City nit.
What about going logarithmic with time?
The more it's in the past the more errors are forgiven.
Explained in another way use the relative time difference (diff/(now-value)) to compute the score and not the absolute time difference
AlessandroF6587 commented on NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deploying nasa.gov/missions/europa-... · Posted by u/rbanffy
Starship lets you trade money and mission complexity for time. A fully refueled Starship in LEO should have around 5km/s in an expendable configuration. A gravity assist from Earth or Mars typically provides 2-5km/s. Looking at the https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of... 5km/s from LEO is barely enough to reach Jupiter. Looking at the mission trajectory direct launch would shave off roughly 2 years from 5 year mission - https://europa.nasa.gov/mission/timeline/
You could also launch much-much heavier probe with a dedicated boost stage and / or electric propulsion...
Starship can be used to release a probe with gigantic fuel reserve and a bigger than usual energy source (solar or nuclear).
Then the probe can use a VASMIR or other electric propulsion to gradually accumulate a vast amount of delta-v
I don't believe this is quite correct. The last few trips are actually orbital, just not of the correct elliptical shape to do more than a half orbit as the perigee is less than the radius of earth. If earth was a point mass, it would have orbited.
This means you don't have to do anything to deorbit while proving you could have made a full orbit if you wanted to.
That's an orbital-velocity ballistic trajectory.
And that's sub-orbital. Barely
Well looks like you imposed a qualification on these types of flights and now by definition they cannot deliver payload.
The flights could deliver cheap payload for example.
"The payload is data." Elon
The data they get from the test and they focus on getting the most and most valuable data.
This is an explicit choice.
A physical payload at this stage would reduce the overall value that they are able to get from a flight.
AlessandroF6587 commented on The Race to Colonize Mars Perpetuates a Dangerous Religion nautil.us/the-race-to-col... · Posted by u/rbanffy
I'm sorry. We know physics very well. There's no "unimaginable technologies" that are going to be developed that gets us around the fact that we're not going to travel much faster than 20% of the speed of light - and that doesn't change the fact that the average star you see with your own eyes is 60-100 lightyears away and will by dying at roughly the same time as our sun.
The most important point to realize about science fiction is that it is fiction.
> We know physics very well.
We should tell it to physicists ;-)
That was the same in 1700s. Laws of mechanics were well known and they were convinced that it was just about getting better in using math with it.
Then electricity and magnetism emerged.
Then nuclear physics and quantum theories and relativity.
And we know very well that they don't match up.
And we have anomalies all over in our measurements and no good theory to explain them.
But just using "known" physics theories we have warp drives and warmholes and quantum teleportation.
Going to the moon was something impossible and we accomplished it.
Before the same was for flying or going deep underwater.
Do you need more examples to get some fate?
AlessandroF6587 commented on The Race to Colonize Mars Perpetuates a Dangerous Religion nautil.us/the-race-to-col... · Posted by u/rbanffy
What problems do you think living on Mars solves?
You’ll never have the environment we have here (even in its currently declining state).
Do you think society will be better on Mars living in indentured servitude for generations?
As Lennon said, “war is over, if you want it”. It’s the same with the problems we have down here.
- Circular economy.
- Food production with low resources consumption.
- Distributed, low-scale production with high efficiency. So no need for high consumes to keep high production efficiency.
- Implementing renewable energy and the concepts listed above from the ground up in every aspect of life. That's scarcity, harsh environments and need for you together with bright minds.
- And many many things that we can't even imagine from here.
> “war is over, if you want it”
The problem is the "if you want it". That's for most of the unsolved problem we have on earth.
If you keep failing generation after generation maybe you need to change your point of view to understand how small we are and as we are not much different each other and from other living things.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Unfortunately you can't transmit information this way, even in theory. The polarizer has a 50-50 chance of testing one way or another, and the other beam will has the opposite polarization.
That's not it if you discriminate between linear and circular polarization. You can use a phase inversion mirror to do it.
That's the point of the experiment.