PB666

Ooh, smart dung beetles, just what you need on a space station, they give you the separation you need.

Yes but two genders generally afford specialization of labor, in birds it works to the advantages because it allows very fast griwth rates needed for flight animals that are nearly grown with the first few weeks of life. In humans it means there is a domestic/hunter division, which allows the expansion from a settlement tongather widely high energy resources.. In the case of some species the female eats the male gathering his resources.

Well if you are solely interested in time, its a suicide mission, uless there is a return vehicle already on Mars waiting to take you into orbit.

The article sounds a bit fluffy. The issue here is that the flatness properties of graphene like substances can reduce one dimension a little. This material if useful would take 10 to 20 years to be commercially viable, and reality is, that in space flight semiconductor weight is not that much of a problem, its the conductors that are really need to become more efficient.

Why waste the time, the entire nervous system of lower insects will be known in a few years, plus the stimuli that alter their behavior, you can simply copy them into replicators (automatrons that can build a machine that replicates themselves, from the SG1) and simply avoid the biology issues altogether. This is particularly useful in space, since you can use objects in the vacuum of space as fuel for these things. THey could even have their own cluster of nanobots that isolate minerals in roids (separating out useful metals, making stocks and jettisoning the rest into the vacuum of space). Dolphins . . .No. Dogs . . . . No. Such in zero g - they have no hands Insects .. . . .No, to easy to copy as automatrons and program to suit needs. Birds, your average crow: - can fly and manuever in space craft better than humans. - more intelligent than your average dog. - canary in the mineshaft, sensitive respiratory systems alerts at environment failure. - on planets can conduct long range aerial survelance. - Are hatched from eggs, eggs can (with adequate technology) be frozen and stored for generations, millions of years, removed and incubated autonomously from any other life form, except presumbably phototrophs. Imagine the following, 200 years from now we finally discover that it is appreciably difficult to send humans to planets, and everything we find needs to be terraformed. After initially bombarding a planet with microbes and basal oceanic phototrophs its not time to seed the planet, but the problem is, the transfer expense for humans is too great, takes to long. With oxygen levels rising you have a small ship arrive on the planets surface, it is stocked with food and seeds, and various small creatures as cryogenic eggs. The eggs are then incubated the crow is fed but within a training simulation that focuses reward, the crows fly out and plant tree seeds for seed trees, fertilized both fresh and salt water with packets that autorelease eggs, etc. Each ship has a different crow, some male some female, after successfully seeding their territory they are alerted where the opposite sex is, and they mate. More ships arrive with more packets, the crows distribute more ecosystem stuff until its sufficient to support the crows and they no longer return to the ship. Once the crows are autonomous, the signal is sent back to send humans to the planet.

In trying to brake on the surface, it creates a big bounce into a highly eccentric orbit that, unfortunately, that intercepts Eve. Did you put a heat-shield on your rover? thought not. I divert your rover before it crashes and send it into circumsolar orbit.

I thought it was a game, like how to get people to have freaky reactions about a completely insignificant planetoid. Y'know like they have with Pluto . . . [ducking and running into the darkness of interstellar space]

Banned for slobbering on my knee.

http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-developed-solar-cells-100-times-thinner-than-a-human-hair 100 times Thinner than a human hair panels. OK so lets do the math. lets say they are 2 micrometers thick, and lets say the density is 3000 kg per meter cubed. So 1m x 1m x 0.000002 m = 0.000002 cu. meters. That times 3000 equals 0.006kg or 6 grams. Lets say you had this on a roll. At one end you attached a pole and the other is rolled up into a long column, say a couple hundred meters and you simply roll out several 100 meters of panels in space, pushing the pole away from the ship, in theory you have a really great thing. OK, so then lets talk about problems. 1. Efficiency, we can't let efficiency fall off. 2. Lifespan, falling lifespan not so cool either, but for some deep space craft may be ok 3. Heat tolerance. 4. How to push the pole out, there are locking chains that can do this be at certain length segmental flexibility kicks in and these lack structural rigidity. You would need to engineer some sort of system of locking chains that roll out and then hold the distal pole in reference to the ship this adds weight 5. So in space, because of the stability of ions high voltages create problems, you can only step the voltage up so high before you have to carry the current back to the ship. You could have several columns each column attached to the end of the previous roll. as the current goes back to the roll it is transferred axially to a bus that then conducts the power back to the core. OK, lets speculate on weight, lets say we can get the weight down to 12g per meter square. I think this is highly unlikely but for the sake of arguement lets just say that this is the minimum weight per panel. Lets say the panel+structure+wiring = 1/2 the weight of a vessel and less say the collection efficiency is 25% of surface area. If we then take these numbers we can estimate how useful this might be as a space tug. Our ISP is set at 100,000 (ISP = 10,200), thruster efficiency is set at 80%. Since our power is tied to weight we can estimate power production per kg of ship mass. 25% * 1300 w/sq. meter * 1000/24 sq.meter/kg = 13.4 kw per kilogram. Not bad. how much ion drive thrust can we produce. 2 * 0.8 * 13,400 / 100,000 = 0.0214 N per kilogram or a = 0.002 gs of thrust. Now lets suppose that 10% of our crafts weight is fuel. X 10% 10500 m/s = 100,000 * ln(1.0/0.9) 20% 22300 m/s = 100,000 * ln(1.0/0.8) 30% 35700 m/s = 100,000 * ln(1.0/0.7) 40% 51100 m/s = 100,000 * ln(1.0/0.6) 45% 59788 m/s = 100,000 * ln(1.0/0.55) In each of the above the payload could be no more than 40%, 30%, 20%, 10% and 5% of the weight of the vessel. To achieve a higher payload ratio the amount of panel would still need to be reduced, and therefore the amount of acceleration reduced. But lets say that we desperately needed the acceleration, and lest say that in order to leave earths LEO we kicked for a period of 36 degrees. So thats 8.8 minute burn per kick. 8.8 x 60 = 528 seconds, 528 seconds x 0.0214 meters per second is 11.28 m/s per kick. The orbital periods will shrink as the orbit become more eccentric, starting at 7800 meters per second we need double the energy to exit, so that represents 11030 m/s on the perigee velocity (although practically speaking reaching about 10030 m/s will provide sufficient quantity of momementum to push out with ION drive and lose some efficiency. That's about 200 kicks. less because we would gradually begin raising perigee and increasing the allowable burn time, but orbits become considerably longer, the time to push out would be more than 12 days. However 3300 spent to enter circumsolar orbit. In the several days required to reach apogee the craft can burn toward a radius that intercepts mars, taking an additional 260 days to reach mars so at maximum efficiency it would take 280 days to reach mars, again the revers process would have to occur, another 20 days or so spend neutralizing that velocity in a counterclockwise orbit about mars. So that makes 300 days. Because of the high dV we have other options for shrinking the time, but not down to 39 days. This is because the insolance is lower as we approach mars, and the ion drives are starting to degrade with constant use (but if this were a manned vessel astronauts could replace the gratings), and because you really have about a 50 day transfer window to play with before dV cost get really high. So at least we could consider a transfer time of 250 days or so using ION drives. Some things that could make the process cheaper, booster vehicle on earths orbit that is all drive and thruster that double or triples thrust at the expense of ISP, but since you are LEO and you have a very cheap gas (argon) and a very inexpensive source (SpaceX delivery services) you don't mind and inefficient system just to trim a few days off. Alternatively you could opt for a hydrolox driven system, or even methane drive LEO booster (these would have to be expendible because of LOX).

Banned for feophobia.

The flux of solar wind and photon pressure would drive it to the dark edge of the system.

http://digital.rdmag.com/researchanddevelopment/june_2016/MobilePagedReplica.action?pg=20#pg20 Basically a graphene-like material made of boron, nitrogen and silicon. Analogs could make semiconductors a few atoms wide and three atoms thick.

Did i do that?

There strategy is to send 1000 probes to centari-a, you don't have to be very far from something tondetect it with 1000 ships. Kerbaloid is being argumentative because he thinks direct confontation is the best way.

To the two orher threads on exactly the same topic.

You trip over your shoelaces and fall out of your capsule, bloody nose. I salvage your capsule.

-82 (-)

Are we now promoting drugs to snails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenethylamine

Banned for something equally random.

Search function is in the top right corner of your screen, use it.

Cause his rockets don't launch on solar power.

Merge.

Dres is a quantum reality in a fictitous universe.

its not.

-80 (-)