Killstream Post-Mortem w. The Boys

submitted by EthnocratArcheofuturist from (self.debatealtright)

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]literalotherkinNorm MacDonald Nationalism 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

How do Newton's laws of motion preclude space travel and colonization?

[–]casparvoneverecBig tiddy respecter 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (7 children)

Inertia. If you were going at 10% of the speed of light you would need 600 years to reach a star system 40 light-years away. 200 years of acceleration, 200 years of cruise speed, and 200 years of deceleration.

Contrary to what you see in movies, in real life, you can't accelerate from rest to near light speed in a matter of minutes. Even if the propulsion system was capable of that, no pilot would do it because the G force would crush him to paste.

Whenever you accelerate, decelerate or seek to turn the trajectory of a moving object, you need to apply force. And there's a sharp limit to how much force a human body can take. You can go to the wiki pages of any modern fighter aircraft and you'll find that the maximum g-limit is 9g.

Because over 9g the pilot tends to blackout. The maximum g a human body can take is 30g. A US Lt. Colonel in the air force volunteered for the experiment and he could take 30g at max. Even then it caused his eardrums to burst and he suffered internal bleeding and organ damage.

And even a sustained force of 8g would kill the crew overtime. Many pilots get stiff necks and other muscle problems despite rarely ever hitting 9g and only flying for 150 hours a year.

And the real problem in space comes from debris. At .1c, even a small pebble-sized object would hit you with the force of a mini nuclear bomb. Imagine it this way: If you were walking slowly and bumped into a wall, you wouldn't get hurt. If you were running and hit the wall, you will be bleeding. If you crashed into the wall at 1000 km/hr, you'd be reduced to paste.

And space is littered with such debris and there are asteroid fields always lying about. A spaceship would need to maneuver around these things. It can't ram into them at .1c speed. The problem is that due to the law of inertia, it would take enormous amounts of force to decelerate or change trajectory.

Even if your radars picked up the asteroid belt 100,000 km away, at .1C, you'd only have 3.33 seconds of warning. At half the speed, it would only be 6.66 seconds. In 6.66 seconds, if you were to decelerate from .1c to a ''mere'' match 1 at 352 m/s, you'd need to apply a 459,637 g force.

Forget your body, your ship would be torn to bits. And due to the law of angular momentum, the faster your speed, the longer your turn radius is. You'd notice this with your car. The faster it is, the longer it takes to turn around.

So for these reasons, it's completely impractical to try to build a space empire or for humans to try to reach potentially habitable worlds outside the solar system. If humans ever set foot on a habitable world outside the Sol system, it will most likely be due to a fleet of generation ships run by an AI that travels over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Upon reaching the planet, the ships would then terraform the planet and once it was suitable, then culture live humans from embryos.

But all that is pointless from the perspective of Earth humans. Why would you spend tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars on a project that has a minuscule chance of success and brings you zero benefits? European countries for example colonized the new world because it allowed them to jettison excess population, extract resources for trade, and trade with new outposts of their nations.

No such benefit awaits space colonization. And as far as settling mars, I've written an extensive article here before.

[–]literalotherkinNorm MacDonald Nationalism 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

All of this stuff can be overcome with technology. Your comment is like some person at the turn of the 20th century talking about how impossible it is with the current technology for man to ever cross the ocean in a jet. The G thing is bizarre. You accelerate slowly enough and you avoid the problem. You're not still experiencing high G loads when you reach high speeds in space.

Not saying that we'll be living in Star Trek tomorrow but to analyze these issues merely from through the prism of our present technological situation is short sighted.

I've also posted here about the Alcubierre warp drive which renders many of the problems you cite redundant. Who knows how many amazing inventions people can come up with to get around these problems. Also the cost benefits of space travel are limitless. The idea that there's no profit motive for space travel though an ugly and misguided take I expect from lolberts mainly is ridiculous.

[–]casparvoneverecBig tiddy respecter 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

You accelerate slowly enough

You can't decelerate fast enough or turn fast enough to avoid obstacles. The best radar on a moving object ever made is probably the AGP-81 radar on the F-35. It can only see 550 km ahead. Even if you built a miracle radar that could see 100,000 km ahead, at .1c you could not slow down or evade it in time.

You'd only have 3.33 seconds. If you go at lower speeds, if you go "only" at 1% of the speed of light, you'd still only have just 33 seconds. And at that speed, it would probably take you 6000 years to reach a planet that's 40 light-years away. And even then you have complications. Planets and even solar systems are not stationary objects. They are constantly orbiting and thus mobile. You essentially have to achieve pinpoint accuracy in your calculations from 40 light-years away where information is 40 years out of date.

Based on that data, you'd have to set up an interception point. Maneuvering could set you off course and then you'd have to waste even more fuel and time trying to catch up.

At a "slow'' speed of 1% of c, you'd probably require 6000 years to reach the planet. That's not feasible in the slightest economically and it's debatable if the crew of a ship could keep their shit together that long. Or even if a ship could possibly maintain supplies that long.

Your comment is like some person at the turn of the 20th century talking about how impossible it is with the current technology for man to ever cross the ocean in a jet

This mentality assumes that technology can be advanced infinitely. There are natural limits that might not be surpassed. There's no law in the sky that says that because you did air travel, you can also do space travel or break the law of momentum or inertia.

For example, Einstein(or Poincare perhaps) invented the theory of relativity in 1905. Quantum mechanics came into being by the 30s and 40s. There are four fundamental forces of nature: Gravitation, Electromagnetism, Nuclear strong force, and Nuclear weak force.

The latter three can be explained by quantum mechanics, the first can be explained by relativity. One of the greatest goals of physics is to develop a unified field theory that can explain all four and reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics. Einstein tried for the last 30 years of his life and failed.

Richard Feinman, John von Neuman, Edward Teller, Stephen Hawking, and countless other physicists and mathematicians of near superhuman intelligence have tried for over 70 years and failed. 160+ IQ geniuses from all over the globe have tried and failed to break this nut. Same with questions like why does time run forward or what form does matter take inside a black hole.

There are laws in the universe that simply can't be broken. Such is the sentence of God.

You can't break the speed of light while having rest mass. You can't travel back in time(in a sense you can travel forward) and you can't know if there's life after death.

The 19th and 20th centuries saw rapid technological advances because the low-hanging fruit had not been picked. It was not that difficult to discover the laws of magnetism or relativity. It's vastly harder in comparison to finding the secret of eternal youth or creating life from inanimate objects.

Science is not like the tech tree on a video game where if you invest money, train scholars and give them raw materials, it will continuously keep advancing.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

relativity is obviously fake, you can't have speed of light being the same in all reference frames. Quantum mechanics also makes no sense. You can't figurte out a particles position and momentum? Yes you can just get back to the drawing board and figure it out. They basically said something is hard so it can't be figured out as an excuse for they couldn't figure it out. Imagine if I put that on my math test in school, I'd get an F for sure.

[–]AidsVictim69 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

relativity is obviously fake, you can't have speed of light being the same in all reference frames.

Why not?

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

thats just retarded, makes no sense

[–]AidsVictim69 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Makes perfect sense to me. The speed of light just tells you the maximum/nearest coordinate you can reach from whatever given point. That coordinate system is not frame dependent.

Relativity has plenty of direct experimental/observational evidence it's not simply abstract untested theory.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

it's not a cosmic speed limit either just need more force to go faster and faster