The Future of NASA Programs

Off Topic Politics and World Issues
21

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Ok, you space cadets…no one has figured out how to combat the effects of lack of gravity on the human body. I mean how many Iron Woody Bands would someone have to use in order to keep his body from completely atrophying?

How long can a human live in space before his bones become so brittle that they will snap at the slightest increase in gravity – or even acceleration and deceleration of moving vehicles?

Have fun in living in your tiny space bubbles.

Morans!

There is the most hilarious bit of physics completely lost on you, but since BackInAction else has already pointed it out I won’t say it. (Hint: gravitational and inertial mass (read acceleration) are the same thing!).[/quote]

I understand the equivalence principle, Einstein – and what is “inertial mass” exactly???

Sit down and don’t make me swat you with my ruler.

Listen up class!

Man is not going to “outer space” to live. EVER. There are too many technological limitations – the limits of the human body, notwithstanding.

22

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:

I understand the equivalence principle, Einstein – and what is “inertial mass” exactly???

Sit down and don’t make me swat you with my ruler.

Listen up class!

Man is not going to “outer space” to live. EVER. There are too many technological limitations – the limits of the human body, notwithstanding.[/quote]

I don’t know why I’m humoring you…

The humor in your original post (that I said I wouldn’t bother explaining, but I guess I must) was that you solved your own problem. Thanks to the equivalence between inertial and gravitational mass, the effects of the earth’s gravitational force can be duplicated in space by none other then acceleration. So your remark that a lack of gravitational effects on the body will lead to bones so brittle that even slight accelerations in space could break them is humorous indeed!

23

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
stokedporcupine8 wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Ok, you space cadets…no one has figured out how to combat the effects of lack of gravity on the human body. I mean how many Iron Woody Bands would someone have to use in order to keep his body from completely atrophying?

How long can a human live in space before his bones become so brittle that they will snap at the slightest increase in gravity – or even acceleration and deceleration of moving vehicles?

Have fun in living in your tiny space bubbles.

Morans!

There is the most hilarious bit of physics completely lost on you, but since BackInAction else has already pointed it out I won’t say it. (Hint: gravitational and inertial mass (read acceleration) are the same thing!).

I understand the equivalence principle, Einstein – and what is “inertial mass” exactly???

Sit down and don’t make me swat you with my ruler.

Listen up class!

Man is not going to “outer space” to live. EVER. There are too many technological limitations – the limits of the human body, notwithstanding.[/quote]

I respectfully disagree with you. The problem is there are only finite resources here on earth and a constantly growing human population. There are too many threats to life on this world and, eventually, technology will allow life to expand elsewhere. While their most certainly are/will be limitations and obstacles, these will be overcome just like all other things we have faced.

24

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:

Sit down and don’t make me swat you with my ruler.

Listen up class!

Man is not going to “outer space” to live. EVER. There are too many technological limitations – the limits of the human body, notwithstanding.[/quote]

Please. We’re not going to live in space, or conduct any sort of large scale space exploration, any time soon. But, that doesn’t mean we never will do either. Given limitations of relativity it would be responsible to doubt whether man could ever travel further then our nearest stars, but surely it’s reasonable to expect the next few hundred years to make large scale and long term operations in our solar system feasible.

25

[quote]I respectfully disagree with you. The problem is there are only finite resources here on earth and a constantly growing human population. There are too many threats to life on this world and, eventually, technology will allow life to expand elsewhere. While their most certainly are/will be limitations and obstacles, these will be overcome just like all other things we have faced.

[/quote]

Exactly:

"In the 2,900 cubic kms of Eros, there is more aluminium, gold, silver, zinc and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth’s crust.

That is just in one asteroid and not a very large one at that. There are thousands of asteroids out there."

We have already figured out how to land on an asteroid and this is with the limited budget in place for space exploration… imagine what will be done in the future with better technology, more of a budget, and the idea that whatever country first mines an asteroid succesfully will be richer than anyone else in the world. Also with the completion of the space elevator, they are essentially cutting out the most expensive part of spaceflight, getting into earth orbit.

26

We don’t need renewable resources. What we need is other planets :stuck_out_tongue:
We all know that the human population is like a virus. We multiply exponentially. There’s going to come a point where there will be no more room, no resources, etc.

Regardless, most do not realize the incredible feats of engineering that have been brought forth by NASA. Alot of that information and breakthroughs is applied in every day life.

Can a person survive in space? The answer is no. Why not? Because of cosmic rays, no air, no pressure, lack of oxygen and so forth.
How can we make someone in space survive? From there you brainstorm. He can wear a suit, but what material will it be made of, can he move in this suit, how will he be able to breathe, etc?
How will he eat? What will he eat? How do we preserve the food for indefinite periods of time?
How or who controls the space craft? What if something goes wrong that we couldn’t account for? If something goes wrong, how do we get in touch with astronauts or how do they get in touch with us?
You can go on forever.

Go on google and look up all the different things that exist today thanks to that period where space was a priority.
NASA is composed of some of the smartest men on the planet trying to create and do incredible things. Incredible things that you will benefit from. Why would you limit their budget?

Here are a list of things NASA has invented or helped create.
It is not the complete list. It concerns the more common items. The entire list has over 1000 items:

Kidney dialysis machines
Scratch free lenses
CAT scan
LED
Infrared ear thermometer
Invisible braces (the clear ones, as opposed to the grey/gray metallic ones)
Memory foam
Shoe insoles and athletic shoes
Smoke detectors
Water purification technology
Safety grooving (carving grooves on concrete so that wheels have more friction and won’t slide as badly when concrete is wet)
Cordless tools
Satellites
Rockets
Fire resistant equipment
Firefighter suit
Land mine removal
Video enhancing and video analysis software
Aircraft (super and sub sonic)
Artificial limbs
Robotics
Anti icing systems for aircraft
Chemical detectors (concerning corrosion of aircraft - it’s a safety measure)
Enriched baby food
Solar energy
Ventricular Assist Device (for heart transplants)
Petroleum Remediation Product (“which safely cleans petroleum-based pollutants from water” - think oil spills)
Virtual reality
Structural analysis programs for computer (used in the design of today’s buildings, roads, bridges, aircraft, Automobiles, railroads, roller coasters, etc)
Remote control
Vacuums
Cochlear implant (“Unlike hearing aids, the cochlear implant does not amplify sound, but works by directly Stimulating any functioning auditory nerves inside the cochlea with an electric field”)
Powder and solid lubricants
Food safety
First aid blankets
Thermal, infrared, xray and ultra violet detection and viewing systems

Check out this website. Tells you everything that is commonly used in everyday life that was brought forth by nasa.

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/nasacity/index2.htm

27

[quote]orion wrote:
Ghost22 wrote:
Why go to the moon anyway? There’s not shit up there.

That is actually wrong.

It is full of Helium3 which could be used to run fusion reactors.

If we ever should get Helium fusion reactors it would actually make sense to fly to the moon right now.

[/quote]

I was about to say the same thing.

Once the FFC titanium production process takes over the current method, I think we’ll see a moon facility specifically for mining tritium. There are some major politics involved since tritium is used in fusion weapons, but we can cross that bridge later.

28

Does anyone know how long it would take to get to the next closest star with current technology? Hint: Humans will never, ever get there – and even if one manged to do that their would be no point because you’d never get home.

Who ever thinks the earth is going to ever run out of resources it dumb. Where could the earth’s resources possibly go?

29

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Does anyone know how long it would take to get to the next closest star with current technology? Hint: Humans will never, ever get there – and even if one manged to do that their would be no point because you’d never get home.[/quote]

I’m really quite confused. If debating whether or not we’ll ever get to the nearest star, why conceive of the problem only in terms of technology we have today? Obviously our prospects depend on what sort of future technology we develop. Clearly the question is then not “how long will it take to get to the next closest star with current technology”, but rather “how long until we develop better technology”.

Really I’m a bit stunned by your limited thinking on this matter.

[quote]
Who ever thinks the earth is going to ever run out of resources it dumb. Where could the earth’s resources possibly go?[/quote]

Really? Where would they go? Ah, we’d use them?

For example, there is only a finite amount of coal and oil on the planet. Once we have burned it all there will be no more. The left over by-products of this burning will no longer be a usable form of energy.

Certainly the Earth has a finite amount of usable resources. Thanks to the good old second law of thermodynamics, no matter how inventive we are at developing methods to use by-products of our processing of these goods, these finite resources will only represent a finite source of fuel or material. Eventually we will use up this finite source of fuel and material.

…

In any event these are some pretty lame comments regarding our future in space.

30

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:
Really I’m a bit stunned by your limited thinking on this matter. [/quote]

Well, I really don’t care if you want to fund it but don’t ask me to. There is no point.[/quote]

How long do you think it will be until we can travel at a speed fast enough to make it worthwhile? Never.

31

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
stokedporcupine8 wrote:

Well, I really don’t care if you want to fund it but don’t ask me to. There is no point.[/quote]

No point? I guess you would have said that there was “no point” to studying quantum mechanics back in the 1930’s, huh? Never mind the fact that such a study eventually ushered in the modern age of electronics and nuclear energy.

Who knows what will come of the space program and what we find in space. Surely the prospects are great. History has shown us that whenever we devote reasons to studying esoteric or theoretical things that great practical advances come of it.

[quote]
How long do you think it will be until we can travel at a speed fast enough to make it worthwhile? Never.[/quote]

Considering that you didn’t even know what inertial mass was, I highly doubt your opinion on this counts for anything at all.

But in case you are well versed in physics and understand our current research in space propulsion systems, please elaborate and justify your opinion. I am neither well versed in physics nor do I understand our current research in propulsion systems, but my naive opinion is that one should never say never. If a “reasonable” travel time to the nearest star is 20 years (Get’s a 20 year old astronaut there and back by the time she’s 60), then we “only” need to build a ship that can go 20% of the speed of light. While that’s certainly well beyond anything we can do today (I spare you calculations, but from some quick google searches it appears that our fastest spacecraft today go about 0.1% of the speed of light), there’s certainly no reason it’s impossible.

32

Ha! All we need is a warp drive and we’re set!

Traveling at 0.2c is not enough. Heck, 1c isn’t.

33

[quote]asusvenus wrote:
Ha! All we need is a warp drive and we’re set!

Traveling at 0.2c is not enough. Heck, 1c isn’t.[/quote]

The nearest star is 4 light years away. Hence at 0.2c, we’d get to the nearest star in 20 years.

Was this a joke?

34

[quote]stokedporcupine8 wrote:
asusvenus wrote:
Ha! All we need is a warp drive and we’re set!

Traveling at 0.2c is not enough. Heck, 1c isn’t.

The nearest star is 4 light years away. Hence at 0.2c, we’d get to the nearest star in 20 years.

Was this a joke?[/quote]

I’m of the impatient type. I don’t know bout you, but, traveling for 20years, just to get to the destination to the nearest star isn’t fast enough.

Maybe it’s because I’m 18, and 20 years exceeds the period of time I’ve actually existed, making it seem so much worse.

Don’t get me wrong, I support spacetravel, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t be frustrated by the laws of physics.

Another posible way of approaching space exploration, would be generation ships. But that’s waaaaaaaaay out of our league.

The part about warp drives, was said jokingly of course.

35

Whether or not we are traveling to other stars, if we find the ability to travel at the speed of light, or even at 20%, it will completely unlock our own solar system. Trips to the moon would be incredibly short, same with mars, or any other planet. Terraforming mars’ atmosphere would become a very viable solution.

36

[quote]asusvenus wrote:
stokedporcupine8 wrote:
asusvenus wrote:
Ha! All we need is a warp drive and we’re set!

Traveling at 0.2c is not enough. Heck, 1c isn’t.

The nearest star is 4 light years away. Hence at 0.2c, we’d get to the nearest star in 20 years.

Was this a joke?

I’m of the impatient type. I don’t know bout you, but, traveling for 20years, just to get to the destination to the nearest star isn’t fast enough.

Maybe it’s because I’m 18, and 20 years exceeds the period of time I’ve actually existed, making it seem so much worse.

Don’t get me wrong, I support spacetravel, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t be frustrated by the laws of physics.

Another posible way of approaching space exploration, would be generation ships. But that’s waaaaaaaaay out of our league.

The part about warp drives, was said jokingly of course.[/quote]

Actually because of time dilation, even if we never break the speed of light, interstellar travel would be efficient enough for the travelers, but of course everyone you know would be long dead before a trip back.

I’m not going to do the math, but the faster the traveler goes the less perceived time passes, for instance if you are going close to the speed of light, a 20 light year journey would only seem like 1 year for the traveler. Of course there are all sorts of acceleration issues we’d need to get around (it would take a LOOOONG time at low accelaration speeds to reach near the speed of light, however high acceleration speeds crush humans).

Plus we have a finite amount of time before our own sun expires, so we will have to get on this eventually.

37

[quote]MikeyKBiatch wrote:
If we find the ability to travel at the speed of light. [/quote]

We won’t.

38

[quote]asusvenus wrote:
MikeyKBiatch wrote:
If we find the ability to travel at the speed of light.

We won’t.[/quote]

You’re 18 and already know enough about physics to say we won’t travel at the speed of light? Humility isn’t a virtue around here, is it?

The complexities of near and at light speed travel are great, but general relativity certainly allows a few ways around special relativity’s apparent “speed limit” of light.

The fact is that even light-speed travel isn’t theoretically impossible, but we wouldn’t need to hit that speed anyway to make interstellar travel feasible.

39

[quote]TBT4ver wrote:

Actually because of time dilation, even if we never break the speed of light, interstellar travel would be efficient enough for the travelers, but of course everyone you know would be long dead before a trip back.

I’m not going to do the math, but the faster the traveler goes the less perceived time passes, for instance if you are going close to the speed of light, a 20 light year journey would only seem like 1 year for the traveler. Of course there are all sorts of acceleration issues we’d need to get around (it would take a LOOOONG time at low accelaration speeds to reach near the speed of light, however high acceleration speeds crush humans).
[/quote]

This is an interesting point. I only point out that it’s not that traveler going near the speed of light would perceive that less time had actually passed, but that in fact less time actually passes. So it’s not that a 20 light year journey (in our reference frame) may only seem like a 1 year journey for the travelers, but that it would actually only be a one year journey for the travelers.

A more intuitive way to think of time dilation is actually in terms of length contraction. If some star is 20 light years away from earth as measured from here on earth, that star may only be 1 light year away from earth as measure from someone on a ship traveling at a speed suitably close to the speed of light.

Hence the cool thing is that the faster we go, the shorter the distances actually become.

40

[quote]MikeyKBiatch wrote:
Whether or not we are traveling to other stars, if we find the ability to travel at the speed of light, or even at 20%, it will completely unlock our own solar system. Trips to the moon would be incredibly short, same with mars, or any other planet. Terraforming mars’ atmosphere would become a very viable solution. [/quote]

Oh of course. I only brought up interstellar travel because LIFTICVSMAXIMVS did.