Edit0:typo
Man - why go there? What are we looking to learn?
Do they have the kilometer Gw phased array yet?
The meterwide/gram weight sails?
The chips that weight one gram with comms and cameras and all that?
And just to clarify, they can't flip and slow down, so it's a 0.15c flyby of alphacentauri, entirely automated. So hopefully the code does't fuck up in this alien environnement without human help.
What do they expect to learn at that speed and with such small sensors? Like a picture of the planet, like we get telescopes? I sure wonder the speed at which that's going to transmit data.
I'm just seeing "proof or concept" but this is mostly concept and no proof.
And if this is "step one" of interstellar travel, what's step two?
Edit0: Just reading the wiki this is so absurd -atmospheric turbulence is a challenge to deliver te GW laserb- so were planning on building a km phased array in space to accelerate the swarm. Just this itself is way way beyond realistic. Doesn't this breakdown at napkin math levels?
Construct a stack of starships in orbit and you would be able to get a probe there. It’s never about the technology, it’s about whether someone cares enough to spend the resources.
For Voyager, I'll argue that it's mission is much simpler (doesn't need to aim forthe position of something 30 years in the future) and that we keep transmitting to it (the sheer distance will limit our involvement as the delays between transmissions grows). It's also not going at 0.15c, where it needs to do the calcs very quickly.
I'm not sure how easy it would be to make a km wide Gw array on Earth, but building and powering it in space seems much, much harder. Just harvesting the GW takes 3 million solar panels. Just getting that to orbit seems unlikely. Even with very generous 1kg per panel we get 3 million kg to put in orbit, or 21 Falcon Heavy at max payload, or two years of putting nothing but solar panels up. It's so much.
And then how much money is going to make the gram scale probe appear?
Edit0: to clarify, the probe will have less time than the duration of the blink of an eye to take measurements. That's limiting what you can learn AND makes it very hard to aim correctly.
Betting against humans making breakthroughs is usually a bad bet. As the saying goes: "You can say 'it can't be done' all you want, but please stay out of the way of those who are doing it."!
Because we can.
The how is a much bigger problem than the why. It would be great to have some closer sampling of Proxima b, such as images, spectroscopy, etc. You won't get much on a 0.15c flyby, but you'd get something, hopefully. No room for error of course, with a several year round trip for commands.
Having some sense of the planet could inform a colonization plan that's likely to have even bigger problems with the hows rather than the whys.
But the whys are clear. Even if it's not actually feasible.
Only in terms of cost; there's nothing that seems to be fundamentally unobtanium here. The question is whether it can be come cheap enough to be viable.
Don't you think this is begging the question? The entire history of humanity is a lengthy series of discoveries that people of times past would have little reason to think possible, and in some cases are revolutionary enough that it would likely have been all but impossible for people of times past to even think of them.
Then there's just the boring things, like aspirin. If not for the willow tree, it would not exist today. Ancient medicine dating back 2400+ years recommended chewing on willow bark to treat fever or pain, and indeed they were right. Of course we can now easily synthesize it, but that's not always a given for every compound or 'thing' imaginable, to say the least. For an obvious example, see: uranium.
And now factor in how extremely negligible our knowledge of anything outside of our own planet is. We've been sending probes and rovers to Mars since 1962. We only discovered the soil on Mars was relatively moist (2% water by weight) in 2013! 50+ years to figure out there's water in the soil. And the latest drills can only go a couple of inches deep and are scarcely used in any case, because they tend to break. It's impossible to know what you don't know, but I see every reason to think that it's probably quite extensive.
[1] - https://www.space.com/22949-mars-water-discovery-curiosity-r...
I'm saying that the fundamental things required in order to launch gram-scale interstellar probes don't seem out of reach; that largely something close to the requirements could be made at great cost today, and making a mission practical is mostly about cost optimization and economies of scale.
I think largely whether we do it in 50 years comes down to whether we've wiped out a lot of our economic output by then with strife, and whether we still consider exploration worthwhile to spend a lot of money and reources on.
A one-kg nanoprobe attaining 0.001 c would be perfectly feasible with today’s tech and would overtake Voyager 1 within a decade. Breakthrough Starshot proposes laser sail acceleration of gram-scale probes to > 0.1 c, a thousand times faster than V1, and nothing in the design requires fundamentally new tech. Such probes would claim the distance record in a few weeks of travel, no matter whether they’re launched twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now.
Also, at this scale, not much can be done by hand, so you can make hundreds of them for not much more cost than doing one.
e.g. you would need too much shielding and would go over the 1 gram restriction.
In short, it’s a swarm of gram-scale probes and they work together to transmit.
that comes after 'someone out there' misinterprets our super fast gram probes as weaponry and conquers our world for the sake of their own spacecraft safety.
it's ingenious really, let's antagonize a greater power into wormhole-bridge hopping over here so we can reverse engineer their tech.
/s , hopefully.
The real reason there isn’t a moon colony? Person gets fired and loses their shit, starts tossing 1-2 km sized rocks down the gravity well and … we all die.
Throwing shit in space is a sure fire way to piss off any species.
So, I guess it depends on what you want to accomplish, whether they see it coming or not.
Doubly so if they can now become “the furthest man made object”. That’s massive free marketing.
It may also be exponentially easier to do so in the future, lowering the expenditure needed to make it happen.
It might not be reasonable right now, but, once again, the bar was set at always. That is an exceptionally high bar with very little reasoning behind it.
I'm just thinking about my old roommate, a space science postdoc, who told me about all these cool propulsion projects that sounded very feasible. That was—sheesh—20 years ago, and I keep waiting for any of them to be real.
And nobody talked about the next ten years. The GP said "fifty years", which is way too long a time span to have any certainty whatsoever as to what will happen. GP's assertion was 100% ludicrously overconfident.
That is a bit pessimistic. There is this paper [1] by JPL and Nasa folks discussing the possibilites of sun-diving solar small satelites. They think that speeds of around 7 AU/year are possible. Voyager 1 is escaping the solar system at 3.6 AU/year. With those speeds catching up to Voyager 1 withing 50 year would be doable. Realistically since we are not quite ready to launch it just yet it is more likely we would miss that 50 year window but I feel better about our odds in the window beyond 50 but within “several hundred years”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_IV:_The_Voyage_Home
But if we are warp capable, then we can definitely catch up with V’Ger, I mean Voyager.
Also it got most of its speed from Jupiter, and we can do a gravity assist with Jupiter any year.
And check out this plan for a double Jupiter gravity assist. https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2020/eposter/1110.pdf
The main issue seems to be lack of resistors in some devices, which leads to USB C not seeing the device to be charged as such, as it isn't negotiating the USB-PD part. USB A doesn’t officially implement a power delivery negotiation spec, it’s just always on at the charger end, with more amps possibly being negotiated if I’m reading properly.
People seem to be able to resolve this issue with a daisy chain. Devices that usually only work with A to C cables might be able to use a C charger connected to a C to A (female) cord or A to C adapter, which is then connected with a standard A to C cable to the device to be charged.
It’s probably easier to keep a USB A charger and A to C cable, but hopefully this helps put your mind at ease that there is a rational explanation.
https://acroname.com/blog/why-usb-c-connections-sometimes-do...
https://plugable.com/blogs/news/understanding-usb-c-charging...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
The Reddit post below actually explains how to work around the problem as I mentioned above:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/w1ismo/how_co...
You still see those adapters frequently because this stupid decision would hobble usb C adoption (since it would prevent you from making a usb C peripheral with backwards compatibility for usb A using an adapter) so manufacturers have largely ignored that part of the spec
I sometimes see nonstandard A to A cables, however, possibly for the same reasons you’ve mentioned above, but I think it’s usually a cost-saving measure and perhaps easier to implement type A female connectors rather than mini/micro type B, but I have no experience with designing devices, only operating and repairing them.
What is your experience with devices that are backwards compatible with an adapter like you describe? Do you have an example of one, because I can’t think of any, not that I doubt they exist.
If it has usb A male, it can connect to a large number of computers, but nothing from Apple recently. If it has a usb c male, it can connect to recent Apple computers but has limited ports on other computers and can't connect to older computers.
If it has a usb-c and a usb-a male to usb-c female dongle (often attached to the little bit of cable between the device and the plug), then it will work with everything.
If you clip off the dongle, then you can use it to connect usb c male devices to usb-a female ports in lots of useful applications. It violates the spec, but it's super handy. If you have a usb a male to usb c male cable, you can use the forbidden dongle and the allowed cable to make a forbidden usb a male to usb a male cable which is probably not useful for much.
One of my favorite YouTube creators, DIY Perks, made a video about converting USB connectors to USB C which is very well done, as is their usual standard of quality.
Things expecting to be charged/powered by usb tend to have female ports --- phones, rechargable video game controllers, espX boards, that sort of thing.
The use case I mean is the same as the other commenter mentioned, devices with a captive male USB c cable, the notable example for me personally is docking hubs, two of the three brands my work recently procured have got one of the other IT teams in a tizzy, because the procuring team didn't realize that the included c to a adapters were problematic. For one brand the adapter was permanently attached to the cable too, I wonder if as a mitigation for the chance of misuse?
But the general case is devices with an integrated male USB c cable
Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, but the next ~100 years we'll be bothered trying to have enough food and water and killing ~80% (or more) of humans of the planet who want our food, water, and shelter from the extreme weather that we won't be sending anything to chase the Voyagers...
IPCC is sorely outdated by this point.
TL;DW (poorly): Even IPCC scientists are sort of refusing to believe pessimistic data.
If humanity doesn’t rise to the challenge (degrowth) this could happen.
Fortunately there are smart people all over the world solving problems everyday and that is likely to continue.
1. Technological advancement
2. ?
3. Climate change fixed
The power of procrastination is great.
For those who may not know, the speed of light isn't really a speed limit per se. If you have a button that gives you an acceleration of 1km/s, nothing stops you from hitting it 300,000 times in a row (with the speed of light being ~300,000km/s), or even a billion. Instead the entire universe begins to distort with distances becoming literally physically closer, and with rate of time itself also changing (length contraction + time dilation are the terms).
It has the interesting implication that if we could ever create a ship that "just" accelerates at 1g, you could travel essentially anywhere in the universe, even if it's billions of light years away, in a single human lifespan! [1] So for instance the distance to the closest galaxy, Canis Major, is about 25,000 light years. You could get there in our 1g ship in less than 20 years. Of course, 25,000 years would genuinely have passed in the interim, so you get all sorts of fun paradoxes and oddities. And the oddities are exponential, so you could travel a billion light years in 40 years.
And this isn't just hypothetical or whatever. Time dilation plays a major role in many things, like particle accelerators. Unstable emergent particles end up 'living' for far longer than they should thanks to the fact they're moving at near light speed relative to us, which means that time is [relatively] passing for it more slowly than for us.
[1] - http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.htm...
I think the whole point of this whole relativity thing is that there are no genuine years :P
Light speed is the limit. You cannot exceed it and you reach it time stop to you … but still you move on in the speed of light.
Another issue you have thought of is the real space “dilution” or that bloody constant Einstein mistake originally. The so called dark energy describe it. We are not sure as it depends upon the model. But it is very unlikely you can reach everywhere you like unless the universe loop around itself (so like on a Sphere you can cover the whole surface of the sphere if you travel with unlimited time … except it expand as we think it is and you cannot).
One possibility though is the universe contract. Then no need to travel la. The whole universe collapse on you.
What happen when we reach the point our laws of physics as we know it no longer held … no human knows. May be …
Let there be light. As God in bible does not make this world out of nothing it seems. Or if you not God person then the empty vacuum field has possible enough to produce the universe (and destroyed it in 10^-32 second.
Anyway all amazing stuff. Just as a hacker really really want an emulator and look around this human artifice that is our gift to the universe. (Just hope the tv serial of hitter in Germany olpymic does not hurt our images).
I always find it fascinating to think that this manifests in GPS that everyone casually uses: the timings have to account for the fact that time on the constellation’s satellites passes a little bit faster than on earth and corrected to get accurate positioning on earth.
Couldn’t an ion engine with a nuclear reactor providing the electricity accelerate more over that period? I’m genuinely curious, I don’t know the answer.
There has been the talk of solar sails as well, but gravity assist propulsion is already so much easier to achieve for satellites.