What could a future earth space ship look like.

[Crazy Eddie]

1) I said nothing about acceleration too severe for the crew to endure.

Neither did I. Only that it is mindlessly inefficient to have artificial gravity pulling in one direction and then having to use that system to cancel accelerative forces at right angles to the gravity pull. If they're both along the same axis of motion, artificial gravity can simply be adjusted to maintain a constant pull regardless of what the ship is doing. Having the gravity pull at right angles to the direction of acceleration makes no sense.

2) Sure, we don't have this kind of artificial gravity

And we never will, because gravity doesn't work that way. Realistically, a space craft using artificial gravity would be built like a giant onion, with spherical layers stacked on top of each other with a gravity source in the center of it. To produce a gravitational attraction of that strength that ONLY PULLS IN ONE DIRECTION is contrary to the nature of gravity itself. To wit, if you have a gravity plate that pulls you down when standing above it, there's nothing to prevent it from attracting things that are off to the side at an angle from it, or beneath it, or--for that matter--fifty miles above it. You're simply not going to have a gravity device that produces 1G at a range of exactly three meters and only in perfectly right angles to the device itself.

And if you're only thinking of plain rocketry, then sure, 1 g of acceleration could substitute for locating the habitable space a big centrifuge, although you've have to turn that backward when decelerating.

Or just turn the entire ship around and decelerate.

But assuming artificial gravity, I say statistically you can deflect more impact from space pebbles by using the classic Trek configuration with the saucer parallel to the general orbital plane of the planets

No you can't, because most planets aren't in the same orbital plane, and the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of space debris aren't either. More to the point, most of the time your SPACE CRAFT won't be accelerating along the plane either, especially of its in orbit about a planetary body.

All your doing is reducing the surface area along a single plane of what you imagine to be the spacecraft's "normal" flight orientation. Space craft don't work that way, and neither does space debris; if your ship departs from a prograde angle of attack at any time--which it will, inevitably, for a variety of reasons--then it has defeated the entire purpose of designing a saucer shaped hull in the first place.

3) Most of the gamma radiation is actually to be utilized, but the nacelles would be shielded, and the least shielded part would presumably be far aft, away from the habitable space.

Which would neccesitate moving the NACELLES farther aft than they have ever appeared on a star trek ship.

How useful would positrons be for interplanetary flight?

Not at all, basically. Gamma rays could be used as a dirty type of weapon, and in high enough concentrations they could ionize a chunk of reactant mass for propulsion. But the kinds of concentrations you would need for either application would be produced more efficiently from an ordinary nuclear device; positrons are too hard to store in large quantities to make that feasible.

What it doesn't mention is that positrons could be produced in quantity in space, using Mylar balloons transparent on one side with opposing reflective inner surface to concentrate sunlight and power a laser to zap 1-mm gold plate, which produces a shower of positrons ripe for gathering and magnetic storage. That's antimatter without waiting centuries for antiproton fuel.

True as that is, it would still TAKE centuries to gather enough positrons to use as a fuel source. You're basically describing a glorified solar panel with a more direct conversion from electricity to thrust. That is NOT alot of energy in a short amount of time; it's a little energy in a long amount of time.

 

[Bill Morris]

You mentioned velocities that would tear the ship apart. That's breakneck acceleration, not something anybody is advocating here.

You keep saying that positrons are useless, yet the NASA article about positrons to fuel a rocket for a Mars mission mentions that a positron rocket could achieve tens of thousand of times the specific impulse of our best chemical rockets and that the 10 milligrams or so of positrons needed for a Mars mission would be expected to cost $250 million if produced on Earth. I shouldn't have to mention that with chemical rockets most of the fuel is used up moving fuel, as opposed to 10 milligrams of antimatter (positron) fuel plus the mass of the magnetic bottles to store it.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2006/antimatter_spaceship.html

In contrast, the NASA article about antiprotons as a rocket fuel puts the current cost at $62.5 trillion a gram and mentions that antiprotons are even messier than positrons with the gamma radiation. But it explains how that gamma radiation could be used in rocketry.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/prop12apr99_1/

Either type of antimatter could be stored in magnetic bottles, and I don't see either as useful in achieving orbit from the ground, only for interplanetary flight. But positron rocket fuel is within our reach in the short term and may well be better than antiprotons for that purpose anyway.

About the balloons to gather sunlight, the whole idea of using half transparent, half reflective balloons is the how cheap it is to cover a wide area. I'm proposing an array of many balloons, each of which acts as a low-cost 100-meter-diameter reflector dish, to gather a huge about of sunlight to power a laser to produce antielectrons to be stored in magnetic bottles to be picked up by spaceships to use as their fuel source, not just for a Mars mission for but shuttles that go back and forth between Earth orbit and the moon, as well as any other space vehicles. That has to be much cheaper and safer than lifting chemical fuel into low Earth orbit. I don't have an article to post on that, since it's just my own harebrained scheme. But scientists have already said that developing magnetic bottles to store positrons in quantity is doable. And rather than taking years to fill one bottle, there would be enough balloons to meet the demand.

About artificial gravity, it's artificial, not gravity itself. A centrifuge or rocket sled can simulate gravity, but the Casimir effect is interesting. The basic concept, though exotic, seems like no big deal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

But here's a taste of what's being done already:

http://scienceblog.com/cms/scientists-reverse-casimir-effect-13866.html

 

[Deckerd]

2) Even assuming trek-style artificial gravity--which is a technical absurdity in the first place--it really isn't. Since your gravity field is attracting everything in a uniform direction, the ideal solution is to build the ship around its normal axis of acceleration so that the field pulls everything "down" towards the engines on the rear of the ship. This allows the ship's natural acceleration to provide some of the gravity, and also prevents the crew from being disoriented and/or tossed around every time the engines fire.

This was one of the things I wondered about alongside spinners. If you assume that a journey will be half accelerating and half decelerating then all you would need to do is turn the ship around half -way. There would be a period of 'weightlessness' as the ship turns to point the other way.

 

[SilentP]

^ I guess at the time period leading up to the flip, everything that needs to be strapped down will be strabbed down in preparation for the flip.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

You mentioned velocities that would tear the ship apart. That's breakneck acceleration, not something anybody is advocating here.

Velocity and acceleration are two different things. Your ship doesn't have to be ACCELERATING to collide head-on with a desk-sized rock at 10km/s; at those velocities it really doesn't matter what the shape is, the object will the kinetic energy of a battleship gun.

You keep saying that positrons are useless, yet the NASA article about positrons to fuel a rocket for a Mars mission mentions that a positron rocket could achieve tens of thousand of times the specific impulse of our best chemical rockets and that the 10 milligrams or so of positrons needed for a Mars mission would be expected to cost $250 million if produced on Earth.

As a purely theoretical exercise, yes; that's speaking in terms of energy densities (I've been reading articles like this for years). When you add to that equation the fact that there is no practical means of converting gamma radiation directly to thrust, let alone the fact that there is no practical means of annihilating positrons and electrons in densities high enough to ATTEMPT it, the issue becomes less clear.

Really, it's not unlike those articles that describe how, say, an Alcubierre Drive could easily propel starships to Alpha Centuari, or how a space elevator could make interplanetary flights totally affordable. These remain entirely hypothetical because there is not even the beginnings of a proof-of-concept design in place. They made similarly optimistic predictions about the space shuttle, actually, until the 1980s when all of the lofty predictions of astronomers totally fell through.

positron rocket fuel is within our reach in the short term and may well be better than antiprotons for that purpose anyway.

Hypothetically, yes. Again, the $250 million you mention as a possible cost for fuel is based on LABORATORY production rates. There have been no studies or research to suggest it would cost anything of the kind, or that that quantity of antimatter would even be storable (no one has ever attempted to do either).

About artificial gravity, it's artificial, not gravity itself. A centrifuge or rocket sled can simulate gravity, but the Casimir effect is interesting.

It's also not gravity, and doesn't work like gravity.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ I guess at the time period leading up to the flip, everything that needs to be strapped down will be strabbed down in preparation for the flip.

Assuming, of course, your ship is some kind of passenger liner where the comfort of the crew is so important that the ship will eat through its fuel at a fantastic rate just to keep them in gravity. I don't imagine many "working" craft like scientific or military vessels would have that problem; they'd enjoy gravity doing boost phases, but would otherwise be well practiced in the art of securing things that need securing in freefall.

 

[Bill Morris]

Just about plain positron rocketry, if there were development funds available, I'm sure there would be no shortage of ideas, but I imagine one would be something like a combustion chamber where the gamma radiation is used to simply superheat propellant, which might be hydrogen but also might be the tip of Teflon rod. But what I see as the biggest issue is funding, which I'd actually rather see go to polywell fusion first. An ion drive running on positron-electron annihilation sounds intriguing, but I don't have any particular design in mind for that.

 

[Deckerd]

^ I guess at the time period leading up to the flip, everything that needs to be strapped down will be strabbed down in preparation for the flip.

Assuming, of course, your ship is some kind of passenger liner where the comfort of the crew is so important that the ship will eat through its fuel at a fantastic rate just to keep them in gravity. I don't imagine many "working" craft like scientific or military vessels would have that problem; they'd enjoy gravity doing boost phases, but would otherwise be well practiced in the art of securing things that need securing in freefall.

I realise the idea of accelerating non-stop and then decelrating non-stop is impractical but it is a way of mimicking gravity, which is one of the topics on this thread. Supposing there were a way to 'harvest' the energy used to drive the ship as it travels along, then who knows? It could happen.

 

[SilentP]

^ I guess at the time period leading up to the flip, everything that needs to be strapped down will be strabbed down in preparation for the flip.

Assuming, of course, your ship is some kind of passenger liner where the comfort of the crew is so important that the ship will eat through its fuel at a fantastic rate just to keep them in gravity. I don't imagine many "working" craft like scientific or military vessels would have that problem; they'd enjoy gravity doing boost phases, but would otherwise be well practiced in the art of securing things that need securing in freefall.

I realise the idea of accelerating non-stop and then decelrating non-stop is impractical but it is a way of mimicking gravity, which is one of the topics on this thread. Supposing there were a way to 'harvest' the energy used to drive the ship as it travels along, then who knows? It could happen.

Is that not how most long distance interstellar travels are speculated to operate? Or am I operating under false assumptions?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I believe you are, considering anything that requires acceleration is probably using a reaction-based drive and the usual relativistic limits apply (thus making interstellar voyages impossible in the first place). Nearly all such depictions in science fiction require--almost by definition--some sort of unobtanium device that allows one to bypass the normal laws of physics, particularly the relativity and acceleration.

Interplanetary spacecraft is another matter entirely. The thing is, if you're laboring under the assumption that your fanciful interstellar drive is either too large for mounting on most ships or too complicated to take over as THE main drive system, you're basically attaching a star drive to what would otherwise be a conventional interplanetary space craft.

 

[trekkiedane]

I dont think Space Ships build to support Human Bodys is the future of Space travel. If it were we wouldnt abandon Moonwalks 38 years ago.

Bingo!

The future is in None-organic Artificial bodies.

Yes, yes, yes!

Which would replace our current body, and will be the next stage in Human Techno Evolution.

Wut?


I don't think so: The AIs we are about to be able to construct will be our ticket to the stars.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I dont think Space Ships build to support Human Bodys is the future of Space travel. If it were we wouldnt abandon Moonwalks 38 years ago.

The future is in None-organic Artificial bodies. Which would replace our current body, and will be the next stage in Human Techno Evolution. Prolonged life and Space Colonization.

Untill we achived that, i dont think there is much point in waisting Earth resources on pointless Orbital Travels.

Human body needs alote resources to survive on Earth as it is. In Space? Its impossible( in terms of efficiency ).

If you have the technology to produce an artificial body, you've pretty much created a space-faring race of robots to conquer space anyway... what's the point of sending humans into space AT ALL? Space exploration is a means to an end, not an end in itself; if you're not going to do it for your own species, then you're just not going to do it.

Anyway, we're talking about the relatively near future, not thousands of years down the line in the time it would take to "evolve" into anything else. In terms of colonization, on account of the low gravity and high-radiation flux of pretty much every other planetary body in the solar system, you would see a differentiation of the species VERY quickly, within one or two generations at most. "Spacenoids" would rapidly develop low-density, elongated physiques resulting from birth and childhood in low gravity; they'd be incapable of surviving on Earth for any amount of time, but would by virtue of lower muscle and bone density have much lower nutritional requirements for their survival (some theories also hold a slightly longer lifespan due to lower dynamic stress on skeleton and organs).

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

I think the most realistic depictions of future spacecraft were seen in (going from most advanced to least advanced):

- Babylon 5 (most Earth ships, from the Starfury to the Omega-class destroyers)
- Avatar (ISV Venture Star, the Valkyrie shuttle)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010 (Discovery One, Alexei Leonov, the spaceplane and the moonbus)
- Sunshine (Icarus I & II)
- Red Planet (Mars I)
- Mission to Mars (Mars I & II)

They all looked like ships that will actually be built some day.

 

[trekkiedane]

Why creat AI when you can do it your self? The point of Artificial bodys is to give an option for All Humans to explore vast reachers of Space, but not send more probs in to space.

With AIs doing the dangerous (and tedious) job of physically travelling through space and on-site exploration, the rest of humanity (see what I did there!) can then sit back, relax and experience it all in simulations (~virtual realities). Instead of making the species into mechanoids we merely have to master the art of artificial telepathy (or whatever you'd choose to call the link between machine and man).

 

[KJbushway]

The internet.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Human body is just a shell for our mind. It doesnt define "who we are".

Indeed... and yet the mind is also merely a means to an end for the basic natural drives of survival and reproduction. Put that another way: we developed the mind and its associated intelligence because intelligent self-aware organisms survive better than stupid reflexive ones. We have sophisticated minds because they help us to survive.

Robots do not need sophisticated minds, and they sure as hell don't need them for space exploration. The nature of space is so vastly different that a different type of intelligence will be optimized for it and it will have little or nothing in common with the human mind. More to the point: a human mind emulated on artificial hardware would initially exist for a variety of purposes (mostly the utility of natural humans) but would, eventually, take on a life of its own and become a separate class of organism in and of itself.

In a nutshell, the transition to artificial life doesn't transform humans into a new type of organism. It merely produces the organisms that REPLACE us in the cosmic order. The best case scenario is that either of those replacements--or both--are willing to tolerate our existence, but in that case we still remain human and we still have to explore the universe in human terms.

By changing from organic in to none-organic Artificial body we would still be same Humans just with far greater potential.

That's just it: artificial bodies aren't humans. If anything they would be a new class of artificial life forms DERIVED from humans, but lacking a human origin and background the closest they would be is copies of human forms.

In a nutshell: artificial life forms are not our future. They are our successors. If we are fortunate, they will tolerate our continued existence as they strike out on their own to pursue their own goals (their survival drive will send them in different directions than ours). If we're not lucky, they will burn their bridges behind them, and us along with them.

I havent thought much about breeding in Space. The first question comes in to mind: Why do it there?

Same reason you would eat, sleep, live and work there: because you ARE there, and it makes no sense to go all the way back to Earth to do any of those things. Humans are colonial, not migratory: we breed where we live, and if we live in space, that's where we get funky.

 

[Deckerd]

Reproduction is going to be critical to interstellar travel, if that ever comes about. The only populated vessels that ever leave this solar system will be generational ships, with an Earth-like environment, including a biological ecosystem and an economic state, since everyone will have to be productively employed to make it remotely attractive for participants. It would probably be a perfect communist state, mind. Marx would be proud. However the idea that people would happily live and die in any of the sterile environments depicted in sci fi, aside from Babylon 5 (which was static as regards space travel), is true fantasy. I'm not including sci fi literature here because I don't know anything about it and this board is primarily video orientated.

 

[trekkiedane]

^I would!

Would you really like to spend all of your life in the same city

I've been living in the same town all of my life (with the exception of a couple of years studying in Copenhagen) - it's a nice life

with limited choices for work and advancement?

You mean: like everyone else?
I have no ambition about conquering the world of banking, business, sports, television, music, ... in fact, I'd love to get away from all those ambitious people, they tend to think of the rest of us as steps on their ladder to the top.
I'd actually prefer to be a few light-years away from the lot of them.

Knowing that you will never see or feel the real Earth under your feet, breath the real air, experience the real weather,

Dirt is dirt, whether it's in the back yard of a house or in the 'green house' of a space ship - same with air, although I seriously believe it'll be cleaner in the ship.

miss out on all the advancements that Humanity will achieve /.../

Having to buy a new phone every year or two, a new TV every eight years and a new White Album every ten years... I'd prefer living without those so-called advancements anyway.

Sure, during the time it takes to get anywhere in space some serious advancements might be achieved on Earth, but as the tech on board such a vessel is bound to be state of the art when it leaves Earth I don't think those aboard will be missing anything, They'll be better cared for than the vast majority of people on Earth anyway.
(And the ship will by necessity have some sort of industrial capacity and be able to manufacture a great percentage of the new things bulletins from Earth describe.)

 

[Deckerd]

Reproduction is going to be critical to interstellar travel, if that ever comes about. The only populated vessels that ever leave this solar system will be generational ships, with an Earth-like environment, including a biological ecosystem and an economic state, since everyone will have to be productively employed to make it remotely attractive for participants. It would probably be a perfect communist state, mind. Marx would be proud. However the idea that people would happily live and die in any of the sterile environments depicted in sci fi, aside from Babylon 5 (which was static as regards space travel), is true fantasy. I'm not including sci fi literature here because I don't know anything about it and this board is primarily video orientated.

Would you really like to spend all of your life in the same city with limited choices for work and advancement? Knowing that you will never see or feel the real Earth under your feet, breath the real air, experience the real weather, miss out on all the advancements that Humanity will achieve while you were stuck in a Space between 2 Stars?

I don't know why you think I'm in favour but my position on this has always been the same. I don't think there will be interstellar travel for a very long time and perhaps never, for this very reason. People would not readily commit not only themselves to live and die in the void but their future families for generations. It would take a massive inducement for this to happen. I believe habitable planets will be discovered but getting there would only come about if there were a real imperative for it to be so. Far more likely that habitats will evolve in this solar system, whether on other planets or in orbit, since we are already here and there are plentiful resources.

 

[SilentP]

I reckon on a planet of 7 billion people you could find enough people willing to give it a try.