PB666

Is a new planet possible, nope, newly discovered, not yet? Is a 5 billion year old ice wanderer possible?, sure. Can ther be even larger wanderers futher out?, sure. Relevance at some point becomes the issue. At its apogee this think would be traveling at residential speeds, which in the grand scheme of the galaxy is one close approach away from being extrasolar planet. "Does" correlates with making, its the action of something. "Is" or "being" correlates with existance, placement or state. For example ...... I am excited there might be a new planet. It is in the kuiper belt, but Mercury is a planet. For example you could say "Does the possiblility exist that we might discover a new planet" (the editor of some journal would be cringing at the unnecessay verbosity). The action is existance. "It exists", but becareful not to canonize it, as past attempts have resulted in many imposters, wars, etc.

There are not many referees out there capable of a proper critique of their logic, models and the algorithym that could solve the long term dynamics. This is going to be critqued in the literature by someone else who either uses a different approach.

Nemesis, of course, simply because of the hideous preposterousness of the name. Eeloo, no i think of igloos, its prolly a gas liquid semi giant. Nemesis is name that would perplex people to investigate and explore, if we call it eeloo theyvwill simply play ksp and get bored and forget about it. BTW, in the words of the latest published proponent, we have to observe it first, don't put vulcan before the theory of relativity.

Im not going to waste my time replying to fantasies. What hollywood creates for drive physics is all fantasy. They have a plot, they need humans (or star warsians, or battlestar galactians, whatever) to go from point x to point y.......so they look at all the known physics and then they say if we bend the energy equation say 1000, 1000000, or is some cases like star trek, infinity, and they come up with drive system. Just remember sci fantasy is about action and plot, its not about physics reality, never was meant to be. If there is physics reality in science fantasy there is no genre. If you want to get a good perspective on the field see hhgttg. The whole infinity improbability drive is a play on all the crap the entertainment industry sell.

There are several issues here to start with sweep the garbage off the kitchen table alcubierre drivevis a fantasy, it is based on physics that does not exist and particles that have never been observed. Given this we revert to known physics which has an upper limit on the conversion of mass to energy of about 10% even if we could say package anti-matter. On any trip you have to speed up and slow down, which means you are limited to about 5%. This places the ceiling about 0.2c, This has implications, at 1 g it woukd take a 4/10ths of a year to accelerate, to decelerate, and 19.8 years to travel so just over 20 years. The speed of AC is immaterial. Time dilation is trivial. However AC is a non prime target, all of those are located more than 20ly from Earth, which means you have at least 100 years of non-dilating travel. Realistic 0.2c might be achieved with a highly efficient space probe, not with living sentients on board. For a colony ship 0.02c or less is more practical for several reasons. 1st for a ship the size capable of sustaining a single human for 20 years at 0.2c is somewhere close to the energy output of our sun. At 0.2 c its basically a radioactive bath, every molecule in the ships path ........Extensive amount of weight would need to be devoted to shielding and exterior seals and such would degrade. The problem is still pretty bad at 0.01c but you could potential use laser and rf generators to nudge atoms out of the path, of course grains of sand ..... think of as nuclear bombs, you average piece of space dust, a bunker buster bomb. From my point of view the game is really to be played at 0.001c or about 1 million km/h, you still have lots of time to get to AC and stop before it reaches its closest approach and moves on. AC is a galactic wanderer, once it departs you wont be seeing those folks again, once their radio signal fades they will be a separate species.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35365323 Just in case you missed this link. IMO, planets beyond pluto (stretches arms out wide), sure, but they state a probability of something of a certain size range and set a maximum likelihood, it could easily be at the low end of their range. How seriously do we take this, its not a giant, 10x larger than earth, more or less a ball of ice with some latent heat production at its core, and a highly ellipictical orbit that circulates 45 time the distance from neptune.

I have been workimg lately on building aluminum struting for things like gear and cages. I have a craft i made which has 9 ion thrusters and can land on mun or less size celestials and has a lko of about 12000 m/s dv. The craft itself is going to have fixed landing gear, and so i was testing it on the launch pad, i set the qualification at 20 m/s, and withba considerable work on making new parts i have gotten it there, a craft that can repeated land with a 20 m/s downward velocity, at least, to the test limit. The problem is the lander blows up the launch pad, i hit f3 but the danage report gives no damage to the lander.

Sulferic acid is extremely hydroscopic

A couple of news feed today are chattering about a amourphous sulfer compound that can be made on mars that can concretize within 2 hours, strength is not the issue however, its not resilient to heat much above the boiling point of water. we could see future martains out pouring red mud into rectangular forms and then assembling what look to be brick houses. I dont see the utility here because if you want to really build you need to reinforce with tensil strength bar of some sort, and you also cant use this stuff as a pressure hull, so ........... http://www.cnet.com/news/concrete-for-mars-shelters-made-from-martian-materials/ Two reasons for shelter, live and grow stuff. One minimally needs to be a pressure hull, the other the same but would preferably have a translucent ceiling.

First you create a heavily insulated shell with windows made of diamond glass, you fill the shell with water, inside the water shell you fill with liquid nitrogen, then you place some heavy electronic equipment and some broad spectrum antenna capable of several bands of 4g communication with your high atmosphere probe that will collect and send. Drop this shell down using vanes that use venus high atmospheric density to slow it down. The diamond window points to the ground, around the window are lasers and hf generators that repel the atmosphere off the window, behind the window is a high resolution camera. As you reach the surface you find red-out conditions, the atmosphere and ground are glowing red, visibility is a few cm, the hf generator is boosted to purge that gas momentarily from around the camera to the ground, the camera takes a picture of the ground, the shell of the craft and the released Steam and the high pressure is causing sulfur oxide gases to condense as sulferic acid on the cools sides of the craft, as it hits the ground it explodes and now the ground in 'boiling chalk', metal aggregates, the craft starts to lean over and begins to sink into the venutian surface and eventually it dissappears. Signal lost, and you thank your favorite deity that you did not send a manned mission down to the surface. What are the tags on this threads - No mars discussion, no politics .. . . somewhere along the way we should have had a discussion on what are appropriate tags, if someone want to search for this thread say in the future, those tags sure are not going to help. Failure to get the point.

Even in a quantum singularity this cannot happen. Something could have a trivial velocity in comoving spacetime but that still does have motion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%E2%80%93Boltzmann_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate In the condensate that particles are not moving relative to each other, but the condensate itself is moving. BTW, you don't have to know everything about physics to know 100-200 year old hypothesis about thermal motion, and 100 year old hypothesis about what constitutes a fermion and a boson. Pretty much QM guarantees motion, if not unpredictable at some scales.

The problem is that all structures are built with nominal densities of 1 or higher, and gases, even the heaviest hardly compress as much, So buy definition you are reliant on a buoyancy component. Venus has no hydrogen or helium to speak of, which means for Venus such items would need to be imported. There is alot of hydrogen in space, relatively speaking and spread at densities it would take a 100 million years to collect a a kilo accross a square meter at the orbit of mercury, so space collection of hydrogen is not viable either. This leaves what, hauling hydrogen from far off places, like asteroids. Which to the point, why would you colonize Venus that whose useful atmosphere has sulfur, carbon and oxygen. If you drag a comet and an asteroid together you have basically all the soft and hard resource you need. Everything except solar power. As far as jumping off a cloud city on Venus, you would be dead before you hit the ground, imagine a 500'C wind blowing up your shorts at 25 km per hour, the word blow torch rings on that one. The second element, cloud cities are about as easy to defend as the hindenberg, there are no reprocussions like blasting something in space, you pop the bouyant bubble and it just crashes. Terrorist, whatever, they are soft targets.

More nonsense, GEO would be killed, below geo would be killed, You would get to the point you would need a hubble telescope for earth observation and spy satellites. It all would get incredibly expensive fast. Imagine it like a domino effect, you blast several major something into a billion pieces, those pieces dont have flat orbits so they start slamming into pieces in higher orbit, they hit the iss, its now in several billion pieces, then you have debris slow climbing to geo, then these pieces are scatterred finally you have junkyard orbit hit eventually some of the stuff will collide with the moon. Since many of our satellites are in inclined orbit the debris field covers all latitudes. Instead of these repeatedly pedantic discussions of how to ruin space lets have five active threads going on how to clean the present junk out of space, much more scientific discussion.

Average Venusian surface temperature is above the decomposition point of most organics including the latex protein. It would simply turn brown and crumble choking the astronaut in about 20 seconds. The Venusian atmosphere is around 90 times more pressurized than that of earths; for surface density at that pressure and heat the oxygen inside the space suit would instantly begin burning the skin. 160 feet is the practical diving limit which is about 6 atm of pressure, So no, humans would never be walking around on Venus. The best that might be obtained is a heavily fortified rover with an unknown type of air conditioning system, that can leave the surface within a few hours. Phobos-Deimos is an achievable land and return by standards in which Mars is too difficult for re-ascent. If you can imagine that the CO2 that is trapped in limestone formations on earth suddenly became vapor, along with alot of the sulfate in seawater, becoming sulfer dioxide, and imagine anything that is volatile at 1000F is suddenly now in the atmosphere, imagine what sulfate alone would do. 0.2% of sea water, at roughly 2 miles deep, that is 21.12 feet of sulfate at a density about 3 times that of water. That alone would 2 atm of pressure, then factor all the carbon locked up in soil and oxidize it with the oxygen in sea water and blow off the hydrogen in space. Thats a good start, then drive the sulfate and carbon out of the earths crust, the crust becomes extremely basic and the atmosphere vaporous acid, whenever the surface cools sufficiently the gases react violently with the surface heating it up again, the turbulation eventually flattens the terrain. Dropping hardened criminals through Venuses atmosphere with a latex mask would be an unmatched form of capital punishment.

Putin has a Venusian obsession? Venus is really hot, you need mechanical devices, electronics would largely fail you. Other than that, you can get away with low tech panels, less worry about electronics freezing up in route, landings might be hard but major equipment failure and your craft might still land. On mars if you mess up your reentry or retro, your craft is just a bunch of pieces scattered over miles of martian surface. Basically you can land on venus with some good spoilers and good landing gear. (something capable of taking a 20 m/s impact speed). On mars you will hit the surface at a couple 1000 miles per hour.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35267571 You might have to wait a few minutes for the legend to show up, there is no sound with the video. Blue is new, Red is old - Sun is green, not to much green on the map.

plasma glows and reactions are not anywhere near complete conversion, somewhere out there gas will be ionized and cool leaving a afterglow. There will be more than just a flash of light.

55m is chicken scratch. The only reason it would be cut if it gets a political vendetta against it.

Seriously, this cr@p again. There are over 100 million pieces of craft kilker space junk out there; just one marginally successful space battle would increase this by a magnitude and end just about every space program. Space is not the place for GI joe, get it into your blinking noggin.

Johnson was from the hill country (the place people go to retire), the space center overlooks clear lake, a side bay on galveston bay, very coastal and east Texas. There are good reasons for this choice, Houston is located near a ship channel and a new one was recently built near bayport. The chemical industry is very strong between Texas city and Baytown. You have in Houston: Rice university, University of Houston, couple of other private universities, Texas Medical Center, UTMB in galveston, Texas A&M moody campus down in Galveston ....so there are lots of local nearby universities to collaborate with. Housing was relatively cheap in the area, though many of the houses built around NASA at that time have foundation problems and are basically worthless now. There is still space to expand housing around NASA. Recreational activities are water sports and fishing on Galveston bay, the Island(cough). 8 hours travel time to New Orleans, 4 hours to San Antonio, 3.5 to Austin, 5 hours to Corpus, 7 hours to Mexico, South Padre Island . . Right next to NASA is the Kemah boardwalk. There is also Ellington field, about 7 miles away hobby airport, and another 30 miles to IAH.

Just about all astronauts eventually live near the Clear lake Texas. Just say'in. Come to think about it almost all astronauts like to make trips to Kazakstan, hmmm. When it rains it rains, but when it really rains, its el Nino . . . . . . coming to a cali near you. In hollywood they call it a cliff hanger, during el Nino what do the cliffs hold onto?

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35248043 I had another thread on a similar topic, could not find it with the seach engine . . . . . .Basically they are saying that the quaint little places of the universe have an environment where stars can both grow old peacefully and have the types of stars that are capable of supporting life. I don't know but I would think that galaxies like the milky way would produce the higher atomic number elements faster because the ratio of condensed matter relative to hydrogen would be greater.

successfully, take off two i believe

By defintion if its a human spevies level extinction then no one survived, what a waste of time.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35205810 The article is pretty self-descriptive, though I am not convinced about the certainty of what they say. How in fact do they know that they are right, its not like you can go to a star 10000 ly away and measure the mass of a star.