Aethon

Welcome Thoendi! Efficiency, scmeficiency. If you want to tour the system- Apollo style, you go right ahead. Do what you like and have fun. This is a very helpful and kind community. Don't be afraid to ask for suggestions.

Whack, that is one magnificent erection. :^) Glad to see you in a more chipper mood. Yer 'What's it mean to be the Whack with the ARM pack' post 'bout broke my heart! Rest assured we all know what 'it' means. Just do what you do mate. You'll be fine. Rep given!

Inside the bubble yes, but along the edge of the bubble there would be huge tidal forces that would tear apart most matter entering and leaving the bubble. Look, aren't we flushing Einstein down the toilet here ( maybe a good thing )??? Tachyons and Naked singularities- I mean, with this I can go back in time and kill my own grandfather ( but then I would never do that 'cause he was a truly wonderful human being... so maybe causality is preserved). I'm gonna be sick.... Edit- Just found this. Remember, just 'cause your English isn't great doesn't mean you're not brilliant. http://ccrg.rit.edu/files/FasterThanLight.pdf There once was a young lady named Bright, who could travel much faster than light. She departed one day, in a relative way, and returned on the previous night!

I imagine that you would accelerate by varying the strength of the warp field. Your 'speed' limited only by the amount of energy you could supply to the dern thing. Another thing that makes me hazy ( is it them or me that's crazy - Einstein ) what happens when you turn the headlights on in the warp bubble?

K. My brain's starting to hurt. I can see it two ways. There is an elastic property to space time, and this causes the 'pile' behind the ship to spring back to it's previous shape, in a sense pushing the ship forward, while a 'vacuum' ahead pulls the ship along, like surfing a wave. This however would seem to imply a Luminiferous Ether... The other way I see it is that the 'stretching' of space time shortens the distance ahead creating sort of a downhill run... which also seems to imply a Luminiferous Ether. I'll stop speculating... beginning to feel dirty... going for a shower...

Yeaaaaahhh. That's what stopped me in my tracks there. Can that be right?? Will the ship shoot off into.... wherever 'cause of the residual motions of any one of many different quantities? The expansion of space-time and the initial motion of the big bang blast foremost amongst them.

K. Remember, all motion is relative to something. There is no 'center of the universe' (probably) to judge motion relative to. When the drive comes on, you have the motion of the solar system, the galaxies motion all built in.... Whoa having a logic problem here that may change all this... must be dividing by zero in my brain. Lemme think brb.

A couple of things I'd like to point out. IRL Earth's 'sphere of influence' is infinite and can never really be escaped. Relativity says nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and the AD won't violate that. Think of a submarine, which doesn't carry a substance to 'exhaust' out the back. It is embedded in its propellant and uses the fluid around it (water) to move through space. In my visualization of this, the AD uses space and time as a sort of propulsive fluid. The AD latches on to space/time, 'piling' (expanding) it up behind the ship ( while stretching [contracting] space out in front, in a sense, shortening the distance traveled through space and time ). The ship then 'surfs' along on this wave. I don't think it matters which way you 'point' the ship, what's important is the velocity vector of the craft when the AD is engaged ( tee hee. I can't believe we're far enough into the future to seriously discuss this.... Make it so! :^) Basically we're talking about an inertia-less (space) time machine.

This is a fun topic. It's so hypothetical, no question is stupid and no answer is wrong. :^) I'm not that guy, but I would guess this: you would wait until your tangential velocity vector aimed towards Mars and then engage your drive. Basically point and shoot. I suppose I'll mention the elephant in the room, this 'ring of negative energy density'. Dr. White in the vid., mentions something about using air(?) on his test table. As I understand it we're talking about using unobtanium here. Warp drive requires a ring of matter, the mass of which would be repulsive, as opposed to the attractive mass of 'normal matter'. Now I did a quick E bay search and found nothing like this. Any ideas on this magic stuff and how to get it? "3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke

Welcome Eoal! Here's a post which'll give you some new ideas. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/58260-Tips-and-tricks-you-found-out-yourself.

Here's an hour long video, unfortunately with some really... really poor production values, but It features (former?) NASA employee Howard White explaining the warp concept. Pro tip : No headphones and turn down your volume for the first min.

Welcome bdito. Feel free to ask any questions you might have, and keep your arms inside the space craft at all times .

Radar images of asteroid 2014 HQ124 during it's recent pass (June 8) Some of the most detailed radar images of a near earth asteroid ever. Edit- Back story I just found. http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/asteroid/giant-telescopes-pair-up-to-image-near-earth-asteroid/index.html#.U5pBwPldUTo

Ooops sorry. New to the space lounge. Is it real though?

Wow. Just read the dev.notes and kinda feel like anything anybody says right now is anticlimactic ( if you haven't read HarvesteRs' article, go there now ), but 20 min. ago I thought this was pretty amazing. 7 Min. http://blog.petflow.com/this-invention/#UOl9CsSFBS4iDTqC.01

I'll send a .... what??? Back atcha.

The arrival of Cristobol Columbus in the Americas can be used as an analogy of a landing by extraterrestrials. In fact the native Americans hadn't seen a man on horseback, and didn't think the Spaniard were even human. I'm saying that if you went to the place where Columbus first landed in 1560 (60ish years after the arrival) the natives would show you Spanish weapons, and armor, and horses and other hundreds of conquistadors that were waging a genocidal campaign against the populace. You would be convinced by the evidence that the Spaniards were indeed real. Visiting Roswell however will give no such assurance about the existence of extraterrestrials.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised we haven't had anyone post about 'UFO's' and modern visitation. While I won't discount the possibility that the Earth has been visited over it's history, we certainly see no evidence of it today. Probably the most famous 'visitation' was the crash at Roswell, New Mexico, USA 60 years ago. I don't know if you've ever been to the Roswell museum, but if you went to the village where Columbus landed in the Americas 60 years after the fact, the people there would be able to produce some pretty convincing evidence that the Spaniards were real.

We may want to ask ourselves what kind of "life" can we expect to find out there. Our intelligence allows us to make predictions about the future, based on an initial set of conditions. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil theorize that we may be approaching a technological singularity beyond which the future of human life on Earth is difficult to predict. Moore's law observes that the number of processors in a dense integrated circuit, doubles every two years. What happens when machine intelligence approaches, or surpasses that of humanity? Kurzweil postulates that about the year 2045 a man will invent a machine, that can invent machines, that far surpass all the intellectual activities of any human, no matter how clever. This will be the last invention that humanity will ever make, and the end of our culture as it is today. These machines, with their super intelligence will extrapolate sets of initial conditions further and more accurately into the future than humans ever could ( unless we begin to 'augment' own brains with implants ). We will then join the chimpanzee JV team on the bench of also rans. If we can imagine this happening to us, perhaps we can imagine this happening to biologic life on a universal scale. Maybe we should look for 'post biologic' entities- but where (in what way) would super intelligent, highly powerful machines choose to live. Certainly not in the gravity well of an Earth like planet around a hot sun. My intelligence tells me that heat is the enemy of computation so I imagine they would migrate to the outer galactic reaches and perhaps bury themselves in cold dark molecular clouds, storing, crunching, processing, and sharing information with their peers through sophisticated, efficient (non leaky) comm links, but completely invisible to us. It's easy (but fruitless) to speculate about infinity, but if intelligent life quickly evolves to a post biologic form, we're certainly not looking in the right places for it now. The discovery of 'other' intelligent life would be the greatest, most important discovery in human history, and while the search for intelligent life in the universe may seem silly to some, if we don't search, the chances of success are exactly zero.

Ok, My design skills, while improving still leave a lot to be desired, and I had a hell of a time in the VAB getting the wings to click on further back. Five hours later I decided to modify my first craft. I think it retains a JWSTy feel while looking pretty kerbal. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=268848668 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=268848938 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=268849069 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=268849182 The OOGLE Space Telescope ( [O]n [O]rbit [G]reat [L]ooking [E]xperiment. Also the name of a famous Kerbal astronomer, Sir Oogley Kerman. ), on its way to HKO for some quick SCIENCE, then off to high solar orbit, for stability purposes.

Well said, however if the universe is truly infinite we could never "destroy" its ecology or even make a noticeable mark on it, and no matter how many billions of animals Earth pumps into it, the population of an infinite universe will always remain zero. Rather than spend the time nipping aggressive, potentially competitive species in the bud, better to just build a giant holographic "planetarium" ( although this would be a universe-atarium, ) around their system, essentially hanging a mobile over a baby's crib. I can see the infomercial on intergalactic CCTV now... " It dices. It slices. Guaranteed not to rust, crumble or smell bad in water. Watch as the amazing Universe Replacer slices through this Baelezian Mega freighter, and is still able to nip potentially competitive species in your quadrant right in the bud. Keeping them occupied and confused about the nature of reality for 20 galactic rotations or your money back! " ... "big bad wolf intergalactic wolf." Yes this. We may not hear alien chatter from space simply because those that chatter carelessly are promptly (cosmically speaking) tracked down and eliminated. Our military early warning radars (much more powerful than our tv signals) have been screeching obviously non natural signals out into space like a hungry baby bird for fifty years. I agree. It is not wise to shout into the jungle.

Not to bash the folks at SETI but I wish they had a more modern approach to their search. Bean counting our way through individual stars in our tiny (relatively speaking) Milky Way Galaxy, straining to hear a weak whisper from someone like us may indeed meet with success, but we should devote some time to searching for evidence of massive technological erections (tee hee) in other galaxies. If a super society (Kardeshev type II or III) exists in a distant galaxy their actions could be visible to us (If we know what to look for) over intergalactic distances, and by looking at other galaxies we dramatically increase our sample size.

Well, the op asked for an argument. Apparently there are no skeptics here. K I'll take it. This. Yes. Many filters. The leap from unicellular to multi-cellular life was a big one, oppose able thumbs were big- but a filter could be something 'simple' that we take for granted every day, like the invention of glass. Glass is pretty amazing ( thanks to NPR science Friday). A durable material that light passes through?? Amazing! We know of very few elements in nature like this. Most of an atom is empty space, and you would think that light would just pass through most things and they would be transparent. What happens is that a photon of light approaches most surfaces and electromagnetically interacts with an electron in the substance, usually the photon is absorbed- changing the energy state of an electron and creating some heat- but not our friend glass. Light goes right through it. Imagine what our society would be like without glass. It's a durable storage device. It brought religion and thus science out of the dank caves in which it used to dwell before the stained glass windows of the middle ages ( "The night is far spent- the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light."). In fact it's almost impossible to imagine that the car would have taken off without glass, and for that matter, aircraft or even spacecraft. AND if you take a piece of glass, you can grind it and polish it and make a lens, and now you've got eye glasses... and telescopes... and you can take a smaller piece of that same glass- grind and polish it and you've got a microscope. The enormity of it all. It boggles the mind.

LoLd. The same could be said if you'd had bees.

Oh man Kerik. You're just the guy I'm looking for. :^) Pressed for time.. gotta work, so scrambling here. I'm glad somebody said this. I was being super conservative so as to not scare off the skeptics. You know these summer rabbits. You don't hardly have to set on them before they squeeeeeal. Edit-"The total mass of probes needed to explore even the entire Galaxy is astonishingly small. If each self-replicating probe, mass fully-fueled about 1010 kg, makes 10 replicas during each of 11 generations, enough to span the entire Galaxy, that is 1011x 1010 kg = 1021 kg or about the mass of Ceres, the largest known asteroid. If the Solar System carried the burden of manufacturing all 1011 probes to explore the entire Galaxy, how could we know if one Ceres-size asteroid had ever been removed from the Asteroid Belt? And take the argument one step further. Assume that one million extraterrestrial civilisations each pillage the Solar System for materials to build and launch their own million independent probe networks, each covering every star in the Galaxy. The total requirement is still only 106 x 1021 kg = 1027 kg, about the mass of Jupiter. It is doubtful we could say for certain if even this much matter had been stolen away sometime in the remote past." Robert A Frietas Jr. Image of the asteroid Vesta showing an unusual series of concentric troughs: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/595406main_pia14894-full_full.jpg "Red dwarfs have many problems:" Agreed, but so do we! And one of them is this: "(assuming water based life, and thus the compounds that are gaseous at those temperatures)." Did you see the cartoon in my above post. Much like the ants there, we are stuck in the 'life as we know it box'. Can we see the forest through the trees? I suppose that convergent evolution and inter-cluster litho-panspermia could allow similar organisms to employ similar mechanisms to solve some universal problems confronting intelligent life in the universe, but I see no reason to confine our thinking to life as we know it. "This is a problem when it comes to heavier elements." Another fine example of a possible- DUN Dun dun- Great filter. We don't see alien evidence because until very recently (cosmically speaking) and for many reasons the universe may have been incapable of supporting, and even hostile to, life in any form. Which begs the terrifying question. Is the Great Filter behind us... or is it yet to come? Supernovae, Gamma ray bursts. Perhaps life has begun uncountable times in the past only to be coldly obliterated- vaporized by light, or torn apart by magical forces in a more chaotic young universe. Will our precocious selves, all our knowledge, triumphs, loves and hopes, everyone we've ever known or heard of, be obliterated by an unknown disaster somewhere in the future, before we can leave a lasting mark?? To paraphrase a famous quote : ..what rude beast lurches toward Bethlehem, yet to be born. ( Another reason for those in the US to jump down your representatives throat about the poor state of funding given the space program. We've got to get some of our eggs out of this basket. Remember, the dinosaurs went extinct because they failed to appropriately fund a capable space program). "where is the evidence of life on mars" K really running short on time. sorry about lack of editing. How well have we looked? Sure, we can see Mars pretty well from space and have fine orbital maps, but you can't find evidence of past life like that. Mars is indeed smaller than Earth. I've probably looked at Mars surface more than 99 percent of all the humans that have ever lived, ( I take a short stroll there every day, and you can too. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/ ) but I've only seen a fraction of a millionth percent of it's surface. Until we get a geologist and a biologist on the surface we won't know. Manned spaceflight plug : All of the amazing things accomplished by the fabulous MSL (Curiosity) in it's almost two years on the surface, could have been done by a human geologist in less than a Martian day. More later.