Scientists discover *life* on another galaxy. - Page 5

On March 14 2010 13:40 r4j2ill wrote:
space travel is a joke...dont expect anything close to it until 200 years so who cares

On March 14 2010 13:56 VorcePA wrote:


[1960s]Handheld, portable phones are a joke and "personal" computers are a joke... don't expect anything close to it until 200 years, so who cares[/1960s]

See what I did there? The corollary is that they expected us to have flying cars by now, so optimism can be just as fantastically speculative as your statement is.

On March 14 2010 10:34 aqui wrote:

I assume by infinitely you mean 'large' but finite. Also i dont like the argument "small chance, large sample size, sure thing". I supspect most people have no clue of any concrete scales(neither do i altough i study physics for 5 years now and heard courses on protein physics) and just assume the one balances the other somehow.

On March 14 2010 14:56 Wr3k wrote:
For all intensive purposes it might as well be infinite.

On March 14 2010 13:58 Freyr wrote:


Also, weren't we already traveling in space by the end of the 60s?

On March 14 2010 15:04 Wr3k wrote:


On the topic of not looking forward to space travel in 200 years. I'm looking forward to nano-technology making me live for 200 years longer than I am supposed to sometime in the next 50 years

Seriously though... whats the point of space travel when even if you figure out how to go the speed of light it takes fucking forever to get anywhere, and then the whole theory of relativity fucks you in the ass anyways.

On March 14 2010 16:28 starfries wrote:
Sorry but human colonization of other stars is a LONG way off. The kind you might be thinking of (like star trek) will probably NEVER happen. Time dilation will help, but it's not the only obstacle. Getting a starship up to near light speed is not a piece of cake. If you want time dilation factor of 10 (so a 10 ly voyage takes 1 year) you need to get your ship to around .95c which is a lot of energy. Even at those speeds it will take a long time to get there since you need to spend a lot of time accelerating and decelerating. Plus traveling at those speeds presents its own challenges, you need shielding - even bits of dust will leave craters in most materials. And you'll need colonization supplies, life support, etc. If humans are still similar to how we are now they will be way too fragile to really pull this off. It's like playing football with an egg; you'll almost certainly break the egg unless you put a shitload of stuff to protect it.

I think the only way we'll ever colonize space is with robotic probes. You can send thousands of them, because most of them WILL get destroyed, and thousands of years is not a problem for them. If something goes wrong on the way (planet gets hit by an asteroid while ship is traveling) there isn't a bunch of colonists stuck there. And they'll be able to withstand acceleration forces far greater than people, won't suffer from cabin fever, and can handle harsher environments. They could bring along fertilized eggs so that after the robots make the planet inhabitable, it could be populated with people. But the real work will be done by robots, and filling the planet with humans is just like a bonus round. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if humans never ended up leaving the solar system.

On March 14 2010 04:35 SpiritoftheTunA wrote:

That's not true either. Stop making things up. I'll go statement by statement.

"The only way to travel farther than our solar system is through time travel."

First off, the nearest star other than the sun is 4.24 light years away. That means if you travelled at 99% the speed of light, it wouldn't take that long. DEBUNKED. I'll go on though. Even if something were 150 light years away, if you traveled at a sufficient speed, time dilation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation) would make it so time goes slower in your reference frame, so you could pull it off in 80 years if you're fast enough.

"Therefore, we need the technology to "grab" light and pull it back."

You mean like a black hole? What are you talking about? The speed of light is the same constant in all reference frames, you can't change a fundamental constant of the universe with something inside the universe. DEBUNKED.

"The speed of light is what limits our ability of time-travelling."

Okay so if the speed of light were faster, then it would still be the fastest possible speed. The speed of light is a fundamental constant that's a property of the universe, and one important property of that speed is that nothing can travel faster. (except the spacetime fabric itself and entanglement-related information, apparently)

Where did you learn all this? I'm interested to hear what you think of as a credible source.

"However, more speculative approaches to interstellar travel offer the possibility of circumventing these difficulties. Special relativity offers the possibility of shortening the travel time: if a starship with sufficiently advanced engines could reach velocities approaching the speed of light, relativistic time dilation would make the voyage much shorter for the traveler. However, it would still take many years of elapsed time as viewed by the people remaining on Earth, and upon returning to Earth, the travelers would find that far more time had elapsed on Earth than had for them. (For more on this effect, see twin paradox.)"

"General relativity offers the theoretical possibility that faster than light travel may be possible without violating fundamental laws of physics, for example, through wormholes, although it is still debated whether this is possible, in part, because of causality concerns. Proposed mechanisms for faster than light travel within the theory of General Relativity require the existence of exotic matter."

On March 14 2010 03:57 Zurles wrote:
when can we live on the moon damn it!

On March 14 2010 13:15 Freyr wrote:

I understand that this is the case, but it is irrelevant in the context of the post to which I was responding, which made no attempt to qualify the statement in question.

I haven't seen any claims anywhere that methane is absolutely a sign of biological activity - only speculation that some methane may be biogenic. Speculation, so long as it's qualified, is perfectly acceptable.

Also - as far as organics go methane can exist for quite a long time even in Earth's atmosphere. I don't think anyone has claimed that exobiological activity is the most likely source of methane on any body in our solar system.