Would we ever be able to leave this planet?

[Eagle Prince]

I'm not toally sure what you mean by the ameba theory, but short of an exploding, reforming black hole you'd never make enough power to do something like move a star or get a shapeship up to light speed.  At any rate, you have two ways of reaching another solar system.  First is if you managed to get a ship to light speed or neary so then time would slow down enough that you would manage to live through the million year-long journey or however far away the closest solar system is.  That one is a lot easier said than done, and of course its not positive it would work until someone tried it.  The second would be to make a mobile space station and however many thousands of generations later of people living on it, the space station would reach another solar system.  Since odds are it might be more possible to make a high enough powered telescope to just see that far, it might not even be worth it.

It would be nice to have a second inhabitable planet, but it would be a lot easier to just make a bunch of city-sized space stations and live on those, gathering new materials as needed from space and meteors and such.  Unless something totally sci-fi was discovered, like teleportation or worm holes you could fly through, roaming the galaxy in space ships just won't happen.  The only reason to even attempt it would be like if the sun was going to explode or something.  And even that is such far-off technology that by then people could easily know how to simply refuel the sun to keep it going indefinatily.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I think you don't realize yet that you don't take Gemm's posts seriously. He doesn't even try.

However, I also think you over-rate the tech required to fly to another solar system when you compare it to refueling a star.

However, I don't think a ship CAPABLE of flying to another planet is all that distant. A nuclear power plant woulc give it a lot of capability. you just accelerate till you're halfway there, then decelerate the rest of the way.
Now that talks an AWFULLY long time, so yeah, it needs to be big to accomodate multiple generations, or have some sort of hibernation rotation for there to be anyone alive when the ship reaches it's destination, but we're not talking millions of years for this tech. At most we're talking hundreds, and I'm not sure I'm so pessimistic it will even take that long.

Essentially the REAL problems are these:
1) because it would take so long to get anywhere, the annoying thing is that by the time it DID arrive, the people who sent the craft will probably have advanced their science and tech enough that they could have prepared and launched a vessel that could arrive before the first one. So this is where we get into the waiting game. At what point to we have a vessel fast enough to get us to another solar system before the original society creates a new vessel that can get there first?
2) knowing that there's a habitable planet at the destination. Right now it's really hard to find systems that have planets at all: and most of the ones we find are ones that have planets with a gravitational pull strong enough to "wiggle" the position of their sun. These planets are big like Jupiter and Saturn, and are probably all gas giants like J and S too, and therefore are probably not habitable. This is the problem with SETI too: finding a planet that's earthlike is hard. Darn hard. Then we have to discover if there's life, and intelligent life at that.

[Eagle Prince]

The closest star is 40 trillion km away, or 4.24 light years.  The closest galaxy is 2.3 million light years.  If I sound pessimistic, its mostly because of the massive distances we're talking about.  Its not that I don't want to dream about it happening, but if nobody argues for the other side we don't really have a conversation.  So for example, how exactly is our spaceship going to survive the actual flight.  You could start small, like how is it going to survive micro-meteors.  Nanotubing or electric shielding might do it, but that technology is very far off.  Cryotechnology is another huge invention, so the only real option you have in the near-future (near future being like the next 1000 years) would be for it to hold multiple generations of people.  And that might end up being just as hard as freezing people, not sure since I've never even heard of a ship capible of sustaining multiple generations.  I only said that cause it sounded smart.

At any rate, I think flying to another star is probably a lot easier than getting off the planet and into space to begin with.  But nothing is ever as simple as it seems.  The first people who went into space discovered problems nobody had ever thought of, it would be the same traveling to another planet like Mars let alone another star.  Once people are living on Mars and mining the asteroid belt, then it might be time to start thinking about going to another star.  Until then its easier to simply observe from afar.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I wish people would stop talking about travelling to other galaxies. No one here has EVER said that was reasonable, and even if it is just a question of time, well... we're talking about such massive amounts of time that it would take longer to GET there than to invent the tech, so galaxies out of it.

cryogenics aren't so far off. Like I said, we won't see them tomorrow, but looking ahead thousands of years is a bit exaggerated. Multi-generational vessels don't have to be that big either if you have small crews and have a breeding rotation to prevent the genetic problems of inbreeding. No, most people wouldn't go for it, but you could find 8-12 who would. Then it's just population control.
The only problem then, with what you say, is protecting the ship. i don't think we have to go so far as you say and invent entirely new fields of study for this either. A couple hundred years of engineering could probably find a solution.

[Eagle Prince]

I was assuming there would be population control on the multi-generation ship, its basically a flying biodome so you have to keep everything balanced all the time.  You'd even want to have backup seeds, water, and all that in case something went wrong.  And you'd need more people than that.  You'll need enough that at least one person can specialize in medicine, phsycology, engineering, etc.  You can't just rely on grabbing the brightest minds of the world because their children and children's children will need to be able to become just as masterful if not moreso.  Maybe their children will become really good at space travel and all that, but maybe they will just go insane too.  That's the biggest problem, you just never know until its been tried, so something that seems simple like a flying biodome that people grow up and die on might not be as good of an idea as it sounds.

I don't think cryogenics will happen anytime soon, but I guess you never know.  It might get invented tomarrow, but it could go the other way just as easy IMO and figure out its not even possible to do with a human without genetic engineering.

heh, I just though of a wierd idea for a spaceship.  Instead of it spinning around for artificial gravity, you could fill it up with that breathable water.  I'm not sure how hard or easy it is to keep oxigen in that type of water, but assuming you could make some type of plant to do it.  You might even have to make the water thicker for it to build up as much resistence as gravity, but it was just an idea.

[Entsuropi]

Sorry, i thought we wanted the colonists to remain, you know, human.

I say we wait until the peacekeepers invade and steal their ships.

[Eagle Prince]

Heh, they would be human.  Haven't you ever saw the Abyss?  Its just a type of liquid you can breathe, its also about twice as thick as water.  You see, the resistance from having to swim through it would keep your body from turning into goo from the zero-g of space.  You can make artificial gravity by having a big ring that spins around, but that can lead to medical problems.  I wasn't that serious about it anyway, I just thought it was an interesting way to get around the gravity thing, instead of trying to make artifical gravity tackle the same problem in a completely backwords way.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

a ship filled with liquid would have a LOT of mass....

[Eagle Prince]

I don't know if that matters at this point since we are talking about ships the size of space stations.  Besides, its outer space, not all that hard to move something.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

True. mostly it was just an observation. If you built the thing in space, it wouldn't matter so much. Tho there's the problem of getting all that liquid to the construction  site....

[Lieutenant Kije]

This month's issue of The Atlantic Monthly runs a lead editorial by William Langewiesche.  Langewiesche had written a feature article on what went wrong with the Columbia an issue or two before, and this editorial suggests some rethinking of the U.S. space program.  Langewiesche argues that the shuttle should be permanently grounded, and that the current program should be scrapped.

I'll quote the last paragraph, which I like very much:

This would not mean, however, that the opponents of human space flight had won.  Indeed, it may be that a pause to regroup is precisely what a vigorous human-space-flight program now needs.  One thing for sure is that the American public is more sophisticated than the space community has given it credit for.  In the event of a grounding the public might well be presented with a question now asked only of insiders - not whether there are immediate benefits to be gleaned from a human presence in space but, more fundamentally, whether we are to be a two-planet species.  If upon due consideration the public's answer is "yes," as it probably should be, the solutions will be centuries in coming.  Compared with the scale of such an ambition, a pause of a few decades now to rethink and rebuild will seem like nothing at all.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I think entirely scrapping the space program, or even just the shuttle program, is a tad over reactive. We gain a lot of benefits from it. However, I think we need to recognize that the shuttle program is not a long range program for more than what we're doing right now.

[stacer]

And here's something I read the other day, which eventually when I'm not so lazy and sick, I'll find you a link for--there's talk that Bush wants to not only beef up the space program, but to send a mission to Mars to create a space station. I don't know if anything official has come out yet since I saw that headline. Does this sound like overspending to anyone else but me? I feel like that's something that's pretty far off, not going to happen in his presidency (or shouldn't).

[Lieutenant Kije]

It's an election year.  He wants to generate positive buzz, but he means to do nothing about it, I'm sure.  

I'm just a liberal cynic, though.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

In this case, your cynicism is probably realism. I can see him giving the order to NASA to do some research, but not expand their budget or anything.