Fastest Possible Interstellar Ship Construction and Launch

[Rtyh-12]

How am I misquoting? Your previous post said 0.5c - go back and read it.

I mostly agree with everything else you said, but he posted the following:

Your speed would need to be... 0.5% of C.

Just pointing this out

 

[kamaz]

And how do you accelerate a 'dirty ice ball' to 0.5c?

Accelerating is actually doable. Just use all of Earth's power plants to power a laser array illuminating a solar sail.

On the other hand, decelerating is where the real challenge is, because the ship has to do it all by itself.

---------- Post added at 01:44 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:27 AM ----------

Staying in the solar system or on Earth is a non-starter.
As the black hole shreds the sun, intense X-rays and Gamma rays would bathe all bodies near-by. Unless you make a base deep under the oceans, but wait.....geologic disturbances will crush your base
due to techtonic activity.

Quite the contrary. Staying on Earth is actually your best bet, because you have most resources to work with. If you shot yourself into to space, you only have what you have taken with you.

The amount of supplies and equipment you can stockpile on Earth in 10 years is thousands of times more than what you could shot into space. Even if 90% of it gets destroyed -- so what? The remaining 10% should be enough for the survivors.

As for geologic disturbances, not so fast. Unless the planet is turned inside-out, placing multiple shelters far away from the fault lines, and burying them underground is probably the most cost-effective measure. A shelter drilled in a rock can be crushed, but a shelter buried under the sands of Sahara will not. Even if Earth's crust fractures due to tidal forces, the probablity of a fracture encountering a shelter is nil. Someone, somewhere, will survive.

Even if the event bathes the planet in hard radiation and boils the oceans, Earth's water will still be bound by the planet's gravity, so it will rain down in a few years.

The planet may be uninhabitable in the classic sense, but it will still have a lot of water, iron and uranium.

 

[Ghostrider]

I don't see how you would survive milenia on a makeshift spacecraft bolted together in a ridiculous timeframe using untested technology.

Oh, quite well. Of course there will be a mutiny attempt on board which will kill a lot of the crew, the survivors over time will forget they're actually on a starship, they'll come to believe the world is actually the interior of the ship and they'll have to contend with two-headed mutants and so on. I think Orphans of the Sky by RAH would make a nice handbook.

 

[Urwumpe]

What about doing a slingshot around the black hole? Not going to get into the spacecraft debate, but if you were to launch something, couldn't you do a slingshot?

Remember, gravity assist means, that some proportion of the velocity vector of the planet that you use for your gravity assist is added to your velocity vector. Thus, using the black hole that is approaching the solar system for a gravity assist could only help accelerating you back towards Earth.

But you could use gravity assists the other way around... you could fire asteroids towards the black hole to use them as gravity tractor and cause a tiny change in the velocity vector of the black hole. If you have enough time, even the smallest change in velocity can be enough. A single mm/s change in velocity for ten years sums up to 315 km distance. Might not sound much, but it increases easy.

Problem there: We have also no knowledge of the gravity field outside the solar system to the accuracy needed to predict that not other masses will maybe even deflect the black hole already and that our actions could even direct it to Earth.

Since a black hole is much heavier than the sun, there is of course also another possibility... turning the solar system into a spacecraft. Ejecting mass from the gravity well of the solar system means also that Newtons third law applies. You could also use light. The sun ejects a few thousand tons of particles every second at high speeds. If you form a thrust chamber around the sun, you can get a pretty decent thruster. Just at a pretty large size and very low T/W.

Oh, Megaengineering can be so much fun. :rofl:

 

[Screamer7]

I think that a slingshot will occur naturally. The changes are slim that the black hole will collide with the sun.
The sun (and it's planets) will pick up tremendous speeds by the approaching black hole, to such a point that it will not be captured by the black hole.
But the planet orbits will be changed forever.
But that is my thought.

 

[Ghostrider]

Oh, Megaengineering can be so much fun. :rofl:

Yeah. It's carrying around the required set of screwdrivers that crushes you.:lol:

 

[Admiral_Ritt]

Societal Stabilty/Continuity is the challenge.

All else is details.

I think you have to make couple of guilds to divide power and knowledge.
It's too easy in a closed enviroment to find youself living in a tyrany.

Governmental challenge is keep people cooperating but retaining a measure
of freedom, while maintaining critical knowledge

Guilds should have active roles, you can't have sporadic guilds, their role
and knowledge will fade away. Theguilds should have knowledge to
build their hardware as well as operate it.

Nuclear Guild.
Industrial Guild
Medical Guild
Agronomy Guild
Structures Guild (diggers & Prospecting Miming & space hardware)
Robotics/automation Guild
Cultural Guild

This last guild does/maintains Entertainment/Common Law/History guild.

(This guild cannot make any laws, they can mererly administer the law.

These folks would also carry along alot of the historical knowledge as part of their duties.

Can anyone tell me which would be the 1st guild to mission creep to get
more power.

The point is that every GUILD is dependent on the other.

 

[Urwumpe]

What a nonsense... Guilds had been a pretty trouble spot for long in European history, and you want to recreate the concept? Societies, that keep technological secrets closely sealed away from outsiders? That operate by politics and corruption, instead of demand and supply?

 

[Admiral_Ritt]

You are thinking too conventionally, the point is to keep knowledge
alive. There needs to be a huge incentive to pass the knowledge
down intact. Voluntary, humanitarian apeals arren't going to
work for 4,000 years. you need GUILDS

 

[Urwumpe]

Voluntary, humanitarian apeals arren't going to
work for 4,000 years. you need GUILDS

We invented schools and universities for that. Guilds ceased to exist when the first universities had been founded, simply because they did something that Guilds never did: They wrote down what they had, developed processes to ensure what they write down can be reproduced and improved, and developed teaching standards that had been used in public schools to transport the latest knowledge from universities to people from youngest age on.

Guilds are actually the best way to ensure that knowledge will get lost. We still have a lot of trouble researching how the gothic cathedrals had been build. Not because we can't do better, but because nobody wrote down how it actually was done.

 

[Admiral_Ritt]

Candidates to create rougue stars One class of candidate double star systems.
One star becomes a black hole and the other,
well, the other goes nova. that would
send the black hole streaking thru interstellar space.


Urwumpe
You would entrust the future of humanity to a university faculty?

Maybe I was scarred by the headed Marxists apologists that
were part of my university's faculty, but those are not people I would
trust with preservation of knowledge which in this voyage is a matter
of life or death. More likely they'd be the cause of total breakdown.

There must be a third way, and speaking of knowledge.
What about required readings by all citizens of this Iceball ship.
what books should they have on their shelves and be part of basic education

Themes that books should cover.

Classical Literature,
Scientific Method
Basic chemistry, Physics
Astronomy
Mathematics-Algebra & trigonometry
Anatomy and physiology, Including animals that part of the mission.
Biology of plants.
Wear and Tear, This last one let me explain....

Inculcate the idea that everything on board the iceball
will have to be replaced/repaired many times before journeys's end.
I remember a story by an author about a well that was at
the botom of a basement, a score of steps had to be
decended to reach the well. after a few centuries the stair
eroded, just from the shuffling of feet over time, new stairs had
to be carved.



That's a good foundation for someone in their 18 years of life should have
mastery of.

 

[Urwumpe]

Urwumpe
You would entrust the future of humanity to a university faculty?

Judging the alternatives: Hell, yeah!

(Also: you can already fit the contents of my universities library on a single mass storage, including backups)

 

[fsci123]

Themes that books should cover.

Classical Literature,
Scientific Method
Basic chemistry, Physics
Astronomy
Mathematics-Algebra & trigonometry
Anatomy and physiology, Including animals that part of the mission.
Biology of plants.

To be honest i wouldn't want a few thousand colonists on an ice ship to have the knowledge of how to make explosives or nuclear reactors. Especially since some individuals will be tempted to test them sometime during the journey. It would be best to give them books on how to grow food and breed animals and how to open the ship once it arrives just to minimize the risk of the colony destroying itself. I would expect that colonists living on a generation ship would have a quality of life similar to that of the average Somalian.

 

[Sky Captain]

10 years of warning - no way to escape from Earth. Even if we manage to kludge together some sort of spacecraft capable of supporting few thousand people chances are such untested piece of hardware would sooner or later malfunction and kill the crew. Much better chances of surviving would be to build shelters on Earth. Build hundreds of them all over the Earth and some should survive unless Earth is torn apart by black hole, thrown on collison course with sun or another planet.

If at least 50 years of warning were available then building some sort of O Neil cylinder in space might be feasible. However leaving solar system would be foolish unless there are confirmed exoplanet capable of supporting Earth type life. Even if solar system is torn apart there would still be plenty of planetary debris, asteorids and comets all over the place to provide raw materials for space civilization living in O Neil habitats. Another solar system without habitable planets would provide the same thing so why leave and spend thousands of years in interstellar void without any way to replenish resources?

 

[Hlynkacg]

To be honest i wouldn't want a few thousand colonists on an ice ship to have the knowledge of how to make explosives or nuclear reactors. Especially since some individuals will be tempted to test them sometime during the journey. It would be best to give them books on how to grow food and breed animals and how to open the ship once it arrives just to minimize the risk of the colony destroying itself. I would expect that colonists living on a generation ship would have a quality of life similar to that of the average Somalian.

In my opinion, this this is incredibly foolish and short-sighted viewpoint.

I mean seriously? With all the distopian Sci-Fi stories about "lost-tech", "lost colonies", and generation ship inhabitants that do not understand how to fix or pilot their ship (or that they are on a ship at all) and you want to create this sort of enviroment/culture on purpose?

10 years of warning - no way to escape from Earth. Even if we manage to kludge together some sort of spacecraft capable of supporting few thousand people chances are such untested piece of hardware would sooner or later malfunction and kill the crew. Much better chances of surviving would be to build shelters on Earth. Build hundreds of them all over the Earth and some should survive unless Earth is torn apart by black hole, thrown on collison course with sun or another planet.

If at least 50 years of warning were available then building some sort of O Neil cylinder might be feasible. However leaving solar system would be foolish unless there are confirmed exoplanet capable of supporting Earth type life. Even if solar system is torn apart there would still be plenty of planetary debris, asteorids and comets all over the place to provide raw materials for space civilization living in O Neil habitats. Another solar system without habitable planets would provide the same thing so why leave and spend thousands of years in interstellar void without any way to replenish resources?

This is pretty much the same conclusion that I reached within seconds of reading the OP.

 

[Linguofreak]

Maybe I was scarred by the headed Marxists apologists that were part of my university's faculty, but those are not people I would trust with preservation of knowledge which in this voyage is a matter of life or death. More likely they'd be the cause of total breakdown.

As far as scientific and technical knowledge, heck yes I'd trust them. I'd trust them more than anybody else.

As far as philosophy, literature, history, political science, economics, etc, are concerned, I can't say I disagree with you.

That said, we're probably at least 500 years off from being able launch such a mission on a century's notice, let alone a decade. In that time, the world political landscape would be as unrecognizable to us as the current situation would be to someone is 1512, so whether my second statement would still apply then is a total coin-toss.

 

[Arturo]

What's with all the "In-The-Box thinking guys? Surely the imagination can handle more than launching the Queen Mary equipped with Dean Drives?

1. Spend a couple of years building a big 'ol laser for communication (assuming the ten years is before effects start destroying everything vs. ten years before C.P.A.). While you are at it, dig up a nice "Fifth Element" quality human genome, along with all the biomechanical data on the life processes of humans, the genomes of our incredible list of internal and external biota/flora and their environment we can dredge up. Pop it all into a file, and attach it to a text message to send on every possible vector we can while there is time: "Dere spaze aliyunz, Puhleez phynd attacheded a phyle. Puhleez build 2 uv theze."

2. Start building a really big rocket, and tell ourselves we are going to launch it in a slingshot trajectory around the black hole to get it really whizzing. Why? 'cause rockets are fun to build dummy!

3. Surround and picket a certain computer aided tomography researcher's house until he releases the source code to a certain program.

4. Start settling some disputes for keeps. We have been messing around with vengeance for tens of thousands of years, and no-one has really won yet. Do we really wanna go out as a bunch of losers?

5. Get ready for the orbital high-jump contest.

 

[Admiral_Ritt]

Actually, a crash R&D on hibernation bio-chemistry is
the one technology that would enourmously increase the chances of
survival.

If you could figure out how to make humans hibernate 40% of their
waking yearly life that would be a big bene.

You could in paralell, experiment with deeper sleep, more akin to
suspended animation. You could test two cycles of it.
2 years sleep 1 year awake, 2 Year Sleep, 1 awake. And if no degradation
is seen, you can prepare the infrastructure and send it to
the ICE BALL.

I think there is a limit to how fast you can set your ice ball moving
before the kinetic energy on small grains collided with enroute will be
excessibly violent, so using any kind of slingshot effect would have to stay
away from higher speeds, even if you could attain them.

At a speed 1/2 of 1% of C
some kind of shielding or deflecting device for larger grains you might
encounter would have to be part of the infrastructure.

 

[Hlynkacg]

Actually, a crash R&D on hibernation bio-chemistry is
the one technology that would enourmously increase the chances of
survival.

If you could figure out how to make humans hibernate 40% of their
waking yearly life that would be a big bene.

You could in paralell, experiment with deeper sleep, more akin to
suspended animation. You could test two cycles of it.
2 years sleep 1 year awake, 2 Year Sleep, 1 awake. And if no degradation
is seen, you can prepare the infrastructure and send it to
the ICE BALL.

I think there is a limit to how fast you can set your ice ball moving
before the kinetic energy on small grains collided with enroute will be
excessibly violent, so using any kind of slingshot effect would have to stay
away from higher speeds, even if you could attain them.

At a speed 1/2 of 1% of C
some kind of shielding or deflecting device for larger grains you might
encounter would have to be part of the infrastructure.

Are we still talking about the same scenario because what you're describe is going to take way more than 10 years.

Also you've still failed to explain why leaving the solar system is even a good idea in the first place.

 

[Admiral_Ritt]

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/55954main_rxj1242_comp_250.jpg

This is why, assuming the earth survives even as a boiling cauldron due
to tidal disrupion and rotation momentum transfer, it would be stuck
in orbit around this black hole, receiving X-ray Gamma Rays enough
to disrupt your innards. Esp even the earth cools and frezes the
atmosphere would freeze, even less protection to any suvivors.


If mars were to be cast out (I doubt it) and cast out alone you could
certainly try to settle there, but since you have no way to
steer a planet let alone Slow it when a suitable suns is closeby,
I don't see a future there, esp at 1/3 G.

Unforutunately Jupiters Moons are not quite large enough
to have suitable gravity. And it's a ways off and expensive Delta
Vee wise to maneuver and land on the moons. On top of which
there have no aero braking to be had.