Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for July 07, 2011

Subtle, ain’t he? (sarcasm intended)

JEFFREY FOR THE WIN!

At the moment (and foreseeable future) interstellar travel will only be attractive to explorers who don’t care if they never see their friends, family or even neighbours ever again. Frozen for the trip and probably get there to find out that, 3000 years after they left, the human race developed a faster than light drive and has been settled on the nearest inhabitable planet for 1000 years. That’ll ruin your day!

A few writers have dealt with newer, faster ships overtaking pioneer ships. I think Heinlein had more advanced ships overtaking older torch ships. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise encountered a sleeper ship still on its way to its destination.

I was reading an article on quantum physics and the Hadron Collider. One of the things scientists are looking for is a particle that is supposed to travel through interdimensional space.

It take way too long. You wouldn’t be able to reach your destination in your life time.

Mars is within our solar system. He’s talking 4,000 years to another solar system. That’s past Pluto and a lot more.

Attack the biology instead of the physics – If you are immortal it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Given enough good books and Cheetos…

Come on, Danae, you’re smarter than that. You want that half million dollars? Go ask Lars for help.

I heard it would take more like 370,000 years to go 4 light years with today’s technology.

@Coyoty…sleeper ship…sounds like a dream vacation!

Oooooo! Burn!

People used to leave their homes in Europe to relocate to one of the New Worlds with no expectation of ever returning to Europe, or seeing their parents or other relatives, or even communicating with them (assuming they couldn’t read or write) ever again. Space pioneers had better plan on taking a one-way trip too! Even the moons of Jupiter are too far to expect to make a round trip any time soon.

There’s a song about some guys who set out on one of those long-haul space missions but planned ahead: their pay went into a tax-free trust set up with compound interest that “doubles our net worth each seven years.” AND they set up a corporation to develop hyperdrive … as THEIR property. When they were awakened from frozen sleep, they were the richest people in the universe. “For we control all commerce / Any trade must be our trust / And every ship that moves must lease the hyperdrive from us!”

Convert mass to pure energy, speed of light isn’t a limit, the trick is to reconstruct the energy back to mass on the other end. Star Trek “transporter” without the Heisenberg compensator to “re-assmble” molecules, more complex.

Do the talking heads at the Pentagon realize the limits of speed? The Law of Relativity states you can’t go faster than the speed of light. Theoretically you can go around it by creating a link between to distant points in space-time (a warp in space-time, hence the term “warp travel”) but the energy needed would be more than every power plant on Earth combined could produce. If the Pentagon believes they could achieve this within their lifetimes, that’s the real comedy. We don’t have the technology or the practical understanding of the nature of space-time to even attempt it.

@John Pike -The masons weren’t slaves, or doing it from the dedication to their guild. They did it from dedication/devotion/fear of the Catholic Church.

I read a story long ago with one of those sleeper ships arriving at it’s destination, only to be greeted by cheering crowds of people whose ancestors left Earth centuries after the sleepers, using faster ships.

You just need to build your spaceship out of tachyons (theoretical particles whose minimum speed is the speed of light). Get there before you know it.

JOE HALDEMAN THE FOREVER WAR. Soldiers dedicated to fighting an alien enemy but never going to see their families again. Any of you ever read any of the older stories all your ideas are stolen from…Here; we send just one couple, We call them Adam and Eve and they call their new home…Earth. Sorry to be the grumpy version of coy’s comment, but if you ever tried to publish in SF, and succeeded, you’d be touchy about folks foisting off old scraps as their own. Last I knew, Space ship accelerating at 1 g, for 20 years than turned and decelerating at 1 g for about the same relative time span would reach the nearest star. The problem is never getting there. it’s dealing with what is already there when you get there since the light from that object on which you’ve based your travels has been traveling millennia before you saw it, an pleasant, earth-like place could well be a burnt out cinder.

Pike: grow up. When asked why the worked so hard by one of the English architects of Many responded that they did it from dedication to God. Free masonry borrowed enough from early Christianity and Islam to be ashamed of it’s notions of a “special club.”

Why not just ask Lars?

There’s no evidence that Lars’ people have achieved interstellar travel. They might even be backing the competition so they can benefit also.

Robert Heinlein 1956 Young Adult book “Time for the Stars.” In that story some twins could telepathically communicate with each other, so they left one twin on earth and sent out one in a torch ship.

summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars

Send Twinkies. Twinkees shelf life is out of this world. Some say at the end of the world there will only be cockroaches eating Twinkees.

Great vacation till you get there and find out the lost your reservation, the water isn’t water, and all the boats are made of stickers….. lol

Not sure. Sounds right. It’s been years since I read it last.