Killstream Post-Mortem w. The Boys

submitted by EthnocratArcheofuturist from self.debatealtright

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[–]casparvoneverecBig tiddy respecter 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

If National Socialism was tried out by America instead of Germany we would be having this discussion on a terraformed Mars.

No. Mars can't be terraformed and even it could be, it would be pointless. Newton's laws of motion and human biology preclude space travel and colonization. Space exploration is Reddit shit. The final frontier is earth and money shouldn't be wasted on such foolish ventures.

The most that could ever come out of space is mining asteroids for metals, ammonia, or natural gas.

[–]literalotherkinNorm MacDonald Nationalism 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 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 -  (2 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.

[–]TheJamesRocket 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

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.

The effect of acceleration does impose some constraints on the design of a starship and what kindof missions it can handle, but not to the extent to which you imply. If a starship accelerated at a constant rate of 1 G (or 9.82 mt/s), then it would reach a velocity of 1 km/s in 102 seconds. If it maintained this rate of acceleration, it would reach a velocity of 30,000 km/s in 3,055,000 seconds (or 35.3 days). So clearly, it does not represent an insurmountable problem for a starship.

A more serious problem is the aspect of waste heat. An engine that is able to accelerate a (presumably) huge spacecraft at 1 G for over a month will release enormous amounts of waste heat. Once a vessel exceeds a certain tonnage, the amount of energy released from the engines will exceed what is released from a nuclear bomb. Safely radiating this heat away from the starship is not a trivial problem. It would grow more serious if the vessel is using its engines continuously for a long burn.

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.

This is true. Space debris is a problem even for spacecraft in an Earth orbit. At the much higher speeds required for interstellar travel, it would become a very serious problem. The only real way to deal with it is by pre-planning a voyage through parts of space where they will not go through any asteroid belts or meteor fields, and by equipping the starship with a very heavy shield. (Depending on the size of the vessel and the speed it will travel at, these shields can weigh in at hundreds of tons)

[–]casparvoneverecBig tiddy respecter 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

voyage through parts of space where they will not go through any asteroid belts or meteor fields, and by equipping the starship with a very heavy shield. (Depending on the size of the vessel and the speed it will travel at, these shields can weigh in at hundreds of tons)

Yes, but you can only plan so far ahead. You can't scan for pebbles or smaller debris and there is no radar that can accurately map out asteroid belts millions of kilometers away. Even if it could, the turn radius would be too high and it would require to great a force to decelerate or turn in the first place.