Wonder what the aliens will think of 10 million Earth ships crowding the spacelanes
Lost In Space.... Robinsons and breeding.
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
It's about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometres) to Alpha Centauri so 10 million ships spaced evenly is about one every 2.5 million miles (4 million km) - about 10 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. So not that crowded - space is big, really big etc...
Yeah I know..... I was just wondering what they'd make of all the humans "aliens first" and all.
If there are aliens, it has all happened before and it will all happen again. There'll either be a protocol or no aliens. The protocol might be harsh or it might be beneficent to unknowing transgressors - who can tell? 
I think the intent of that line was probably that colonizing Alpha Centauri would just be the beginning of a wider expansion into space, with humans settling dozens of star systems. Alpha Cen would just be the first target because it's the closest.
So even less "congestion" in space then. Proxima Centauri is slightly closer, of course.
Proxima Centauri is an alternate name for Alpha Centauri C, the outlying member of the overall ternary system. Pasadena is slightly closer to where I live than Los Angeles, but it's still a suburb of LA. So it's a nitpicky distinction. Besides, as a red-dwarf flare star, Proxima is unlikely to support a habitable planet.
Yes, we're now pretty sure Proxima is a distant companion to Alpha Centauri A and B. It was debatable for a while. It's unlikely but perhaps not impossible that the confirmed planet Alpha Centauri Cb is habitable. It might support life as it's in the habitable zone. It's probably going to be tidally locked, of course, which would also make things difficult for any colonising venture. Stephen Baxter's Proxima was an interesting novel set on that planet although it's largely informed speculation. I certainly won't live to see the results from any exploratory probes sent there if that ever happens.
But this was 60s Lost In Space the same show where comets can give off heat even in the high atmosphere or in open space. Or where a ring of beach balls can explode with the force of a hand grenade.
How is that remotely relevant? We're not talking about the show at this point, we're talking about the real Alpha Centauri system, which includes Proxima Centauri. My point is that when I talk about colonizing the Alpha Centauri system, that implicitly already includes Proxima, so saying "Well, Proxima is closer" is a specious critique.
Referring to the Alpha Centauri system is a bit loose usage anyway - A and B are separated by between 11.2 and 35.6 AU while C is between 13,000 AU from the A-B pair or about 0.2 light years at apastron - as it is now - and 4,300 AU at periastron. The orbital period is a whopping 547,000 years. It wasn't until 2017 that we were fairly certain that it is part of a trinary. Don't want to be heading for the wrong one now and have the angry carrots get medieval on your ass.
Lots of multiple star systems have wide separations like that. It's still the "suburbs" compared to interstellar distances.
I mean Dark Star was a documentary, wasn't it?
I was thinking that the "as many as ten million families per year" might be headed in different directions. But listening to the opening narration in the first episode, the planet at Alpha Centauri was the only one known to have ideal conditions for human life. So that means everybody would be headed there as their original destination. Though in the context of sixties TV which had a significant western presence, I could picture the Robinsons ending up settling down on some other previously-unknown frontier planet all by themselves as homesteaders.
Kor
Kor
Not quite. The exact line was that Alpha Centauri was "the only one within range of our technology able to furnish ideal conditions for human existence." Presumably that technology would improve and expand its range over time, enabling it to reach more distant worlds that were known to be suitable for human existence. So "what may be as many as ten million families" was projecting a best-case future on the assumption that the current technological limitations would be surpassed. This was written and released during the Space Race, when American and Soviet space technology were expanding and achieving new milestones on a regular basis with the intention of expanding the range of our technology to reach the Moon and beyond. So nobody at the time would have expected humanity's space technology to remain at a fixed level indefinitely.
After all, the only worlds closer to us than Alpha Centauri are the planets of our own system. That line was probably written for the benefit of 1960s audiences who were used to sci-fi stories about alien civilizations or human colonies on Mars, Venus, Jupiter, etc. and were wondering why the Robinsons didn't just go to one of them.
Dark Star one of the true scifi classics. Love that
The attempt to teach phenomenology to the bomb was exquisite.
We could do with more SF like that.
We could do with more SF like that.
When John Dies, all three Robinson women are going to share Don.
They get him on different days, like in Big Love.
Big Space Love.
They get him on different days, like in Big Love.
Big Space Love.
It's a scene that has been parodied but not many movies have ever tried to rip off such a scene. It's fantastic
Oh man.. Poor Penny
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