Newtonian ships or not?.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
It is in fact known that most of the astronauts had psychiatric problems after their missions. There was even some speculation that John Glenn would have had his past problems used against him if he had been successful in his run for the presidential nomination. No need for 'conspiracy theories' about this when it's public information.

Ok, so does this psychiatric issue now affect all astronauts, and not merely the lunar astronauts as you said before? Because John Glenn was not part of the Appolo program. He never left low earth orbit and the saftey of the magnetosphere.

Except for that secret mission that I'm not allowed to say anything about.

How is speculation that John Glenn had a speculative mental condition that a speculative political operative might have speculativly used to damage him politically realate to anything? And we aren't talking conspiracy theories? Riiiigght.

It is NOT in fact "known" that "most" astronauts have had psyciatric problems upon returning to earth. It IS of course rumored to be true by people that have no way of knowing one way or the other. And that rumor takes on life over the internet becasue otherwise intelligent people such as yourself give it more weight that it deserves.

Buzz Aldrin had some well publicized isssues. By his account it was a sudden lack of any goals to work towards in his life. It's a common malady suffered by may people who reach retiement age and no longer feel a purpose. After all, when your life long goal as a pilot and astronaut has been to push the envelope farther and faster, what do you do when you've walked on the moon? There is litereally nowhere to go but down from there.

Who else? Can you name one, give a link, anything? If it's well known you should be able to very easily. Shouldn't take much research at all.

There were less then 27 astronauts that ever orbited or landed on the moon. Maybe a couple hundred that have ever made it as far as orbit. So if only a few had mental problems it would be a significant percentage of the overall total. But the numbers would be too small to have any real meaning as a statistical sample. And considering the intense nature of their occupation it's highly explainable for other reasons.

All that said, there is definetly stuff out there that's bad for us. Recent studies of radiation levels on Mars have put the possibility of any manned missions to mars in doubt for the near term, even if we decided to do it. I don't disagree with you there at all.

But it's not neccesary to buy into any conspiracy theories about it. Nasa will tell you all about it if you ask. What possible reason would they have for classifying the end of the Moon missions? Is there some reason they need to keep us in the dark about what they know and understand about the dangers of long term and deep space travel? If so they have a funny way of keeping secrets, cause they admit that stuff all the time.

They are always telling us that they don't stuff. Their whole reason for exsistance is to find out stuff, so telling us they don't know stuff is job security.

The kind of stuff Nasa covers up is engineering screw ups. If it will get someone fired, I could see them trying to cover it up. I see no incentive to them in covering up the fact that there are things about space they don't quite understand yet.

[ March 28, 2004, 13:31: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by JurijD:
but anyway you tweek the numbers...any race that is acpable of developing some sort of anti-matter driven space ships (for the low mass/fuel ratios) and genetically modify its population so it can travle in space for several decades would be able to colonize the galaxy in roughly 1.000.000 to 10.000.000 years... which is still nothing to the WAST eones passed.

Right. That's what I was trying to say in my Last post. I am in no way trying to say we will colonize the galaxy in 4,000, 15,000 or even a million years. I was just trying to put into numbers that even at sublight speeds it should be possible in an extremely short amount of time as compared to the life of the galaxy. The fact that despite this teh galaxy is not colonized doesn't prove anything, but it certainly gives weight to the probability that there are huge factors making interstellar travel hard. Factors beyond just needing some faster propulsion system.

[JurijD]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Maybe life here on Earth has some important relationship with the magnetic field and leaving the earth's magnetic field unbalances something in our biology? Changing your home might not be as simple as jumping from one rock to another in space. Life processes could be dependent on other factors that we haven't figured out yet. We may be part of this planet in a way that we cannot change.

Well I cannot speak about the conspiracy part of this issue. But I can speak about the medical/physiological part. And I can assure you (P less than 0.01%) that weak constant/changing EM fields have NO impact whatsoever on human life/physiological processes. All the research was done by the WHO, and a great number of leading world heath institutions and for the time being this is the accepted fact.

Think of it this way: the earth magnetic field is something like 10^-4 Tesla, right? Well I´m not sure but our cell phones give out a GREAT deal more than that... and if you think that the distance from that 10^-4 T can harm you I´m sure the cell phones would screw us up completely by now... heck just having someone bring a magnet to your head and wave it around would would prolly have you confined to a mental institution if weak EM fields would have any impact on the human mind.

I dare not think what a MRI would do to you

In conclusion:
The Earth´s magnetic field (or the absence of it) did not affect the state of mind of those Lunar astronauts (if there even were any affects we can speak of). If there are the reason has to be something else.

[JurijD]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Right. That's what I was trying to say in my Last post. I am in no way trying to say we will colonize the galaxy in 4,000, 15,000 or even a million years. I was just trying to put into numbers that even at sublight speeds it should be possible in an extremely short amount of time as compared to the life of the galaxy. The fact that despite this teh galaxy is not colonized doesn't prove anything, but it certainly gives weight to the probability that there are huge factors making interstellar travel hard. Factors beyond just needing some faster propulsion system.

Yes yes, I agree. It is VERY curious that we have not been overrun by aliens by now. I´ve been wondering about this simple fact for some time now.

I don´t think that we can explain it away with "technical problems" because one way or the other we can colonize other worlds its just a matter of time for the right tech to develop.

To be honest I really cannot think of a good reason why we haven´t been visited by aliens before... EXCEPT if I dip into the border-line things some others have come up with:

Maybe we were visited eons ago but our planet was already populated so they moved on... say they have a sort of "prime directive": don´t mess with other life forms until they develop warp drive or a VCR that lets you set the clock easily or whatever..

In any case I wouldn´t be at all surprised if we find out the galaxy is full of colonized worlds... and in reverse I wouldn´t be surprised if we find is scaresly populated.

[Baron Munchausen]

Geo:

Yes, now that you have rammed it into the thread we are talking conspiracy theories. I however did not intend to referance any conspiracy theories or any political subjects at all. I am talking about the problem of why we aren't over-run with aliens if intelligent life is possible on other planets. The publicly know facts of science plus the rumor that the Moon missions were cancelled for more than budgetary reasons allow for a speculation about space flight being more difficult than we currently believe. Not about political conspiracies. You had to find political conspiracy theories in it. If you are obsessed with conspiracy theories (and insisting on debunking them is just another way of being obsessed with them) that is your problem, not mine.

[ March 28, 2004, 18:29: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[PvK]

Roughly 100,000 light years to travel across, colonizing (actually we're about 30,000 LY inside, but there will be slowing factors such as having to branch the colonizers to multiple planets, regions where there are directions with no direct hop of sufficient shortness, systems without usable planets, etc.), so say 100,000 LY to cross. With the assumption we can achieve 10% the speed of light effective travel speed, eventually, and with the IMO huge assumption that we can set off for a system and expect to find a planet which we'll be able to land on, survive there, settle, build a usable infrastructure on, and be ready to send out another identical ship within 100 years...

200 years per 10 LY covered. 100,000 LY / 10 LY / 200 Years = 10,000 * 200 years = 2 million years.

So, yes not a lot in astronomical time. I just wanted to clear up the idea from a human perspective, that we could wrap this puppy up in 4000 years. Note too it'll take another 70,000 years to send the virtual postcard back to Earth with the words "game over". Also, expect lots of break-away republics, lack of willing volunteers, and so on to put some cramps on steady adherence to the master plan for 2 million years straight.

Continue that line of thought, and notice that the more difficult assumption is probably that people really want to go trying to set up another planet in every system in the galaxy. What is the chance that a planet full of humans with space flight tech might get envious or mean and stop playing nice, and/or even become hostile? After some thousands of years at least, colonies which actually found useful planets (part of the assumptions above) would develop their own cultural identity, and not just be possessions of Earth.

So even if we manage to colonize the whole galaxy in 2 million years, the result is a populated galaxy with perhaps billions of potentially independent self-interested governments in it.

In SE4, it usually makes perfect sense to colonize absolutely everything. In the real universe, perhaps not everyone wants to do that.

Therefore, aliens advanced enough to be able to travel around the galaxy, may also be advanced enough to have no desire to go conquering and disturbing natives everywhere. Some kids and entomologists like to play with ant hives they discover, but most ant hives get ignored by humans unless they happen to be in an inconvenient place.

If an alien race were based on my own personality, and had existed for a few million years, I think I'd send exploration ships out to see what's in the quadrant, carefully and humbly at first in case there was something dangerous or more advanced out there. First we'd focus on sustaining and making nice the homeworld, and then play on the home system planets a bit, and perhaps eventually set up communities on some planets that were empty but very similar and pleasant compared to the homeworld, if any. But probably they'd be limited to a very manageable number, rather than spreading like an inconsiderate plague everywhere. An exploration/science process might involve spreading out over the galaxy over the course of a few million years, but it would be done cautiously and without colonizing everywhere. Knowledge of the galaxy is perhaps desirable, but I wouldn't want to over-procreate and thus create a huge number of communities with the potential for lots of unhappiness. Discovering a planet like Earth with 21st Century humans on it, I'd be inclined to allow scholars to study them but wouldn't make contact, since a preliminary psych study would no doubt show that humans are still very uncouth, selfish, violent, and probably wouldn't react in a desirable way to news that they were way behind the science of an alien race. It might depend though on the number of such planets in the galaxy. Some or all would probably eventually be talked to and helped out, once it was certain they had achieved a place where they wouldn't be harmed or otherwise act negatively.

PvK

[geoschmo]

That's a very positive scenario Pvk. There is no reason not to believe it, and I do hope for it to be true.

My own suspicions are a little more pessimistic. Not quite as negative as Atrocities though.

I think we are going to find it's exceedingly difficult to travel between the stars. I do have some hope that we will someday make contact with other intelligent races by radio, or some similer means of long distance communication. I could easily see a vast communication network of intelligent races sharing information about themselves. Of course even at light speed it would be slow, but the mere fact someone is out there talking to you would be fascinating.

Over time you could get enough information about one another to take "virtual" trips to one anothers planets.