MrZayas1

I really am loving this conversation. I personally think that people wouldn't be so welcome to an alien race, and knowing our scientists, they would probably probe their spaceship looking for the technologies that got them here in the first place, so we could advance our own space program. And then we would probably prejudice them and, insult them, as we did the Indians. Now one of three things can happen: #1 On into the future they would be perfectly equal, nothing special about them, and nothing special about us. They would rent and buy property, own companies, start families, live similar human lives. The space program would be forwarded by the technology they brought to Earth with them. They would venture out into the solar system, like their race did all those centuries ago, and we would progress into exploring solar systems differing from ours. Once this technology is possible, some aliens will eventually (maybe with some humans) go and see their home planet after all that had happened. They will return to a planet where there is life flourishing again, after the years of radioactivity broke down. Or their planet will have turned into a radioactive wasteland and become inhabitable with ancient high-tech debris, marked with long-melted down nuclear reactors, and cities abandoned and coated with ash. #2 The aliens will land, make contact with us and we will prejudice them, making them the smallest viable thing in our social systems, develop hatred for their race, and they will be wiped out by us and forgotten as a human triumph over invaders or runts. #3 Now going back into the early stages of #1, we could probably offer them the technology to colonize a planet like the moon, and Mars (probably not mars because we really want to colonize it) and allow them to flourish on the very resource plentiful moon. At which point they might break away from being tied to humanity after being so reliant on us, and create their own republic on the moon, which could also end up in one way or another, either they break away by revolution, or by peaceful receit. I would personally like this one because it's like a child, walking to an adult for help, getting the help they need, and growing up to be a strong adult. At which point we could collaborate with them as a human race, and continue into the future! Obviously I would much rather have #1 or 3 happen, because I always imagine that something amazing like that will happen, and we will eventually become partners in life, and we would make our world a better place, and explore our solar system together, like brothers in arms. Maybe eventually we would merge races, which i would prefer to avoid so that their heritage would always be remembered. But I never thought about something like this and it really got me thinking how awesome it would be! Thanks for making such an astounding story, i really enjoyed replying to it!

I like your description "No flying apartment blocks!" It made me laugh!

Well what I would love is a much better ion engine* because it's isp is very high and it's delta V is in massive amounts. If somehow we could make a more efficient ion engine, or one with better thrust, i would much rather use that but since we don't have those, it would probably be NERVA.

Rockets i don't think will be ever so big that they are impossible to control. You see, unlike kerbal space program, scientists can pack as much as they want inside the fueslage of the missile. That makes the possibilities endless and i honestly think that you really can't put limits on what we can achieve, i mean we know so much about our solar system (and those around us) and we haven't really even left Earth yet! So i am confident that we will eventually build stuctures like the halo Infinity just for fun, but i guess we will see!

The reason why we cannot get rovers on venus right now is like you said, extreme temperatures, and a crushing atmosphere. Now this may seem like of course people would be able to come up with something, but it isn't possible, right now. The first and main reason is that the atmosphere would crush any bit of fragile equipment. Second, the heat on the planet would melt all the electrical equipment, as most are made out of copper, gold, and tin. Two, the solar panels would get very little sunlight due to the amount of cloud cover the atmosphere has, and would run out of electricity (if you hadn't melted already) So really a lander or rover on venus would be very impractical, and we can gather alot of evidence from earth about venus, and it really doesn't interest us as human beings because it would cost more to put things on venus than would grant scientific value. Hope this answers your question! Have an awesome weekend!

Hey guys just wanted to have a little chat, I wanted to ask something to you guys. What, if anything, really dissapoints you about the space programs, or finances that all of our space programs have, or problems in life in terms of space? If i had to say something, it would probably be that if we started colonizing mars in 2 years, i would only regret not being able to live to see our civilization conquering such a beautiful planet. Tell me what you have to say in the replies I have to go and i am in class right now! Cya!

There are a few problems with anti-matter as we know today, and let me expound on this if you will! Anti-matter is known of and derived from magnetic and gravitational fields. A really cool thing is that scientists have created it before! But the problem is they used so much energy (A LOT) that it would be literally impractical at this time, considering the fact that we are barely able to send sattelites to jupiter, let alone send an antimatter collector. Even after the scientific experiment, they could produce less than a gram of antimatter! Crazy right? Right now we are pretty good on propulsion systems, but finances are low. Honestly i would think that in efforts such as space programs, that our world would be able to put aside petty disagreements, and financial cost, for the gain of humanity, honestly i would do it! But guess what, no one will because they have deep pockets and want to keep it that way!

Well if i understand you right, you wish to push venus' orbit farther out to make most of it's bad qualities condense into the ground, here's my input. I'm going to start off by stating that since we know that venus is like living hell, than we need to consider how in the world we would terraform venus in the first place. Venus's atmosphere is made up of sulphiric acid (commonly found in batteries) so just putting something on venus would be extremely difficult as all machinery made out of metal would corrode very quickly, and be extremely inneficient. We would have to do the opposite of mars, and cool the atmosphere, we definitely know how to do this, but it takes an extremely inefficient amount of trouble to do so and would mean we would have to lessen it's already thick atmosphere. With your idea, it would probably make sense but i highly doubt that it's atmosphere would change except for the elements in it that are already close to solidification or sublimation. Even then we would have a massive amount of work to do. There is no oxygen on venus, if so, miniscule amounts, but the amount of carbon dioxide in venus would pretty much kill plants because there is so much. The sunlight on venus is very dangerous. And the atmospheric pressure is equivalent to that 3,000 feet beneath the ocean, so any structures built on it's surface would have to be incredibly strong. Although this is a great idea, it just ins't practical in science, unless you know I get frozen in cryonics and wake up 1,000 years from now to our superiority of space elements. But like I said this is an extremely expoundable subject and keep up the great thinking! Hope your day goes well!

Interesting question, and plus my family works with cars a bunch but i don't really think that is true. If i am not mistaken, your engine uses more fuel the faster you go i am sure. I believe that in this case Isp is kind of the same thing so i will use it in this example. Although there are definitely some minor things (fuel entry to combustion chamber) but the more you apply the gas pedal, the more gas you use, so going uphill slowly would consume less fuel! The isp of a car is actually variant because when you travel slower your car uses less gas and more efficiently, and when you go faster you use it faster and less efficiently, if you wanted to compare this to a rocket, then you could show how you would try to stay at about 200m/s velocity upwards when you are going through the atmosphere so you use most of your fuel in the less dense part of the atmosphere rather than using all the energy to get through the thick part. In a car, aerodynamics doesn't really make any sense (like quantum mechanics and gravity) so think about how the engine works. An engine uses the combustion of the fuel to provide the energy needed to push your wheels. So when you do this it is slower at slower speeds, and you get the most out of your fuel because your engine is being more concerned on fuel economy. When your engine is at full throttle it is more focused on getting fuel in the chamber and giving you speed rather than being efficient, so this is why most people drive uphill slowly. I hope this kind of helps answer your question, if you find anything wrong with it feel free to correct me, i am pretty smart for a 15 year old but everyone makes mistakes! Hope you have a great day!

I don't think that kerbal space program should be entirely realistic, because if it was then it would probably take alot of system power when it is completed, but if you really wanted to make an extremely realistic game then you could probably install a lot of mods! In actuality, I am sure if NASA really wanted to make a power providing option for engines they could, but doing so would be kind of expensive for a lot of power, for only about 3 minutes maximum of burn time. (for example i know that some engines burn for longer) See the world is all about finances, and creating an energy harvester for engines is pointless since we have solar panels that we can use, to power batteries for absent-lighting travel. But like i said i'm sure we could definitely do it! And for the technicalities to answer your question on how they would do it, scientists have came up with many different ways to harvest almost any type of energy whether it be radioactive energy, vibration atoms, heat, or even solar power. So i am sure that they could develop a way to take the radiation from the NERVA engine and harvest it's energy if you really wanted to. But like I said, you will only be burning for a few seconds at a time, and very rarely in inter-planetary travel so you would still have to have a backup power system such as solar panels, which makes it kind of pointless to have another energy input because once you leave earth the sun is always shining. I hope this helps you out a bit i enjoyed writing this as i do all of my posts! Hope you have a great day!

I think i may have replied to this thread earlier but i will again just in case. With the latest and greatest ion and propulsion technology, we could have theoretically have made it to mars 20 years ago. Sadly, due to financial restraints, this is not true. Foods and supplies are likely easy to carry, but once we are on mars this all becomes mostly irrelavent. Reason being that all parts of your life will be controlled, your oxygen, your food supply, your sleeping patterns, and your daily routine will have to be productive. I will go off topic and explain how we would progress on mars. Using the current rule: you cannot return to earth; then you would basically have to adapt to mars right? Well this isn't true, because we make Earth adapt to us all the time. The best thing we could do on mars is what we do on earth. Global warming. There are gasses out there that give off extreme greenhouse affects that are far superior to carbon dioxide. And if we were to produce enough "pollutants" into the air of mars, we would be able to create enough climatical heat that the ice in martian soil would melt, and form rivers and oceans on mars that look similar to our on earth. This method is called terraforming. Now, even though this will take about 200-300 years, mars could become an earth within such time period. Back to the actual question. The amount of food you would need would be mostly for the trip to mars, rather than actually for when you are ON mars. The martian soil composition maybe different than that of earth's, but the minerals under the surface are similar so we can build systems and even rocket fuel on mars. This allows us to create strong (and hopefully durable) structures to protect us from the atmosphere and winds. Once that is finished, the soil from earth would be used to farm Earthen crops in the carbon dioxide rich air. So theoretically you would only need food for the trip to mars, not once you get there. I hope this sort of nerdilly answers your question! Glad i could help if it does!

Relativity does say so but realize that a black hole has a singularity that makes all theories of relativity break down, this might also be the case for traveling light speed, as light does not escape (or in this case encounter) your vessel, so we might see this as another possible way to create an almost imaginary state of physics, but hey, we are still on earth what do we know? (alot)

I was more talking about the Delta V required for this amount of speed, whatever the amount of energy that you use to transform it into that amount of DeltaV is really irrelavent in relative speaking, i was using an example.

Let's be honest that shouldn't be very hard considering the amount of space there is in space

This sounds like an interesting concept but it might be kind of improbable due to the lack of helium. I honestly believe that we have Alvin and the Chipmunks to blame for our shortage on helium...

You know, I am just making this post to make some non-scientific assumptions, and to blow off some nerdy steam i guess. The first thing I kind of want to discuss, Light speed travel. This idea has been in our minds for a while, and I wanted to propose a few things on this subject. First off, the improbabilities of the theory. Light speed in many concepts seems possible, maybe not right now, but certainly it is possible. One of the main problems of this is that the energy required to produce this much thrust is equal to over 299,792,458 m/s. This is the minimal speed that light travels, and to achieve it would require astronomical amounts of energy, more energy than a red giant can produce in it's lifetime. So let's talk about this. Although no one really knows how much energy a red giant burns, let us imagine that it could propel us to the speed of light, unless we find some other scientific geeky way to do this. So we have the technology to harvest a red giant, and use it's energy to produce light speed. The next problem is this. Currently, even travelling over 50km/s (50000 m/s) is extremely dangerous, even a dust particle could rip microscopic holes in a spaceship doing this speed. Now multiply that by 5000 and you will get a number around 200,000,000 m/s. (Supposing that this speed is enough) At that speed, either you will break basic physics, and be able to go so fast to go through objects, or logically, atoms that are distributed throughout space would rip your spaceship apart into trillions of atoms per millisecond. That would mean that you would be ripped up almost instantly at the time you hit warp speed. So, some people may think that there are better ways to do this and there are obviously are. Such as energetic shielding. If you were to blast through space faster than light with a big energy shield around you, you would be fine right? Well not exactly. First off, the amount of energy needed to counter the particles would also be astronomical, since this is indeed an energy shield using electrified/magnetic particles to protect a vessel. Or second, you would have to have such a dense amount of energy that it would be infeasible to be able to wedge any atoms inbetween the particles and reach the hull of your spaceship. Another theory is to put a big hunk of metal on the front of your vessel as a interstellar heat shield and you might as well discard this idea immediately because it just isn't feasible and should not even be considered. (End of discussion and yes i have breathed in this writing) If you would like to leave some suggestions (or correct my math) please do so in the comments below, and I do also enjoy crazy theories and discussions/debates as these so please leave your rants on this page so that I can read them! P.S I realize that this post is using just basic knowledge that I had at the time, and a few days after writing this i did indeed watch a few videos on quantum mechanics and physics! Please do not hate for misinformation as this was just a thread to see how logical a topic was! Thanks!

Instead of just blowing off this question as impossible, i am going to ponder it's meaning. Outside of the universe for me I would guess would be extremely different than what we consider normal. A place where it is infinitely cold, and no energy exists, and where no light is visible. The most paradoxal form of our universe. Even in space we believe that it is an inhospitable place where nothing exists. But energy and light are all around us, even in space. We can see things, feel things, and see the passing of time right before our eyes. In the omniverse (what i will call the paradoxal form of the universe) everything is nonexistant and cold. No life, no planets, no energy, not even the ability to see the passing of time in the most miniscule amount. It's probably like being in pitch black. If you were to trap an animal or a person in a completely black universe for 5 years. The human would not know how much time has passed. The brain cannot know about such things if there is no stimuli to respond to. So I honestly believe that we cannot fully comprehend an omniverse, and we never will, because the omniverse is what "supposedly" was the only void definition of space before the also supposed big bang.

If we wanted to use this in a smaller scale, yesterday using the mods DeadlyReentry, and TAC life support mod i ran into a problem transferring inbetween Minmus and Mun. What happened was i was low in the tech tree, only batteries. So i ran out of electric charge about halfway to Minmus, and had plenty of delta V so this is what i did. I cancelled my orbital velocity to about 0 m/s, and then I burned straight towards Earth. What happened was i had the pod left, but the kerbal experienced so much g-force that he died in reentry. So i reverted and here was my solution. I had to burn in such a way that i enter the atmosphere at a shallower angle so that I spread out the g-forces into the reentry and i received a slower entry so that I could actually survive the fall. So luckily i got back to kerbin in time. The practical use for this thread is that you could, potentially do this to achieve interplanetary travel, but one problem is that you would have to aerobrake into an extremely dense atmosphere in order to save the delta V that you would use to slow your velocity into an orbit around a planet. The same problem is that you would experience the g-forces associated with entering the atmosphere of said planet (Jool for example) and travelling at over 4 km/s would most likely kill you. So yes, it is probably possible, but your reentry would have to be extremely shallow to do this from interplanetary speed, and would require a pretty dense atmosphere. For instance, if I were to reenter kerbin at around 4 km/s the reentry (shallow) would probably only slow me down to 1200-2000 m/s and that is alot for a parachute to handle before it lands. Hopefully this gives a little insight on how that would work in real life, or at least KSP!

The treaty against space weapons doesn't stand for crap. If any country really wanted to send weapons up into space, then they would. Granted, they would tick off a lot of nations in the process, they could definitely do it. Sending weapons to the moon is extremely inefficient. The most efficient thing for extra-planetary weapons would probably be in the range of Low Earth Orbit, because it can visually see a lot of different target sites, and the missile could travel at extremely high speeds due to the lack of air resistance. The main problem associated with this is that the reentry of the projectile would be extremely hot and they would have to place huge countermeasures because missiles are extremely fragile. Other than that it would be extremely difficult to launch a space station with the tools necessary to conduct un-manned missile launches, unless you wanted to go manned which is extremely hard to keep a secret. But other than that to Militarize the moon would undoubtedly be extremely difficult due to the face that the target windows, and the moons rotation would have to be aligned in order to launch a missile to the target. And the 3-4 day travel time would off-set that chance even more. The cost of getting a missile launching station to the moon would be extremely expensive and people would definitely notice with all the scientists that study the lunar surface with telescopes and equipment. But a good idea never the less!

You know what, I hate people like you who only complain in your lives, but just remember ITS A WORK IN PROGRESS. My phrase is, if you can't make the game yourself, then don't tell other people to hurry up cuz you don't know what goes into the game. Stop demanding things that have been thought of already, just get Deadly Reentry and MechJeb.

You know you have been playing KSP too much when you are tired at night and you try to dock a ship, realize that there is no RCS on it, and keep trying. Funny story actually i did do that, and i decoupled the nuclear engine and used an ion thruster to serve as RCS. I could turn fast because the probe by then was so small that i could just twist it instantly, at which point i realized that i didn't have any solar panels... I made it dock but man did i really forget alot of things that day Other than that i actually have extremely hallucinating dreams where i am building a rocket, or playing a video game, and strangely, they make me kinda go crazy cuz of annoydness.

You know you have been playing KSP too much when you are tired at night and you try to dock a ship, realize that there is no RCS on it, and keep trying. Funny story actually i did do that, and i decoupled the nuclear engine and used an ion thruster to serve as RCS. I could turn fast because the probe by then was so small that i could just twist it instantly, at which point i realized that i didn't have any solar panels... I made it dock but man did i really forget alot of things that day

I have noticed that it is much better to worry about delta V unless you are making a landing with a stage and cannot afford a slow acceleration rate. I only really worry if the burn is over 8 mins long, even if the delta V is 3000, hope it helps a bit but thats my suggestion.

All of these are great suggestions, I will definitely look at them, thanks guys for all of your opinions!

I tend to use liquid boosters more than anything because instead of mostly using solid boosters, I prefer to actually use something that I can control where it lands rather than missing the moon by a couple astronomical units other that I would probably use solid boosters to get me out of the atmosphere because that tends to be what they are used for in real life