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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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I am dismissing a prediction (as pure conjecture) that interstellar space travel is impossible.
I didn't say that - I said that interstellar travel is highly improbable from multiple perspectives. It's improbable from the perspective of a civilization acquiring the knowledge, technology and energy required. It's improbable from the perspective of a civilization surviving geological and biological events with the knowledge, technology and energy necessary for it. It's improbably from the perspective of an advanced civilization agreeing on investing the requisite resources for essentially no forseeable gain.
I said the material and energy demands necessary to source, build, and propel a craft the size of the one conjectured in the original post makes it a ludicrous proposition. I said there would be no motivation or rationale for it that even vaguely approaches a basic commonsense test. What's the payback devoting what would essentially be all of a civilization's resources over milleniums to produce a craft of that size and send it on such a journey? What sort of society could hold such a focus and get the type of agreement necessary? A doomsday scenario is the only one that makes any sense at all. Play that out, though - if we knew for sure our world would end in 3010 would we all buckle down, cooperate, and start dedicating all our resources and energy to build such a thing? Right.
And think about project management on such a gig - by the time you got a couple of generations into it would the challenges of continuity of knowledge / design / fab, qa/qc, maintaining and integrating generations old technology simply sink the whole effort?
Yeah, we built pyramids, but no one but Klimmer is suggesting anyone was talking about taking a lap around the local galaxy cluster in one.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Clearly, Klimmer's like a modern day astrologer or National Enquirer contributor and you guys like this stuff. Entertainment value. Via Buck Rogers and Left Behind fantasy, I get it now.
P.S. To the naysayers, this photo was analyzed by Special Offices at NASA and was PROVED to be authentic in 2006. Only because of ONE courageous whistleblower of conscience does the public NOW have this photo as proof.
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Flashy P
climber
Sparks, NV
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I checked with a friend during my left hand specific crimp lock off strength training last night and donini is from Montanegro. He realized his full potential by dedicating himself to a strict diet and arms only regimine on his home made woody, he actually has some home made holds on it. He moved on to deep water soloing in Thailand where he mastered climbs up to 5.14c using no footholds, utilizing the arm skills he practiced in Montanegro. He is 31 years old, not bad for an old guy! Thankfully he doesn't comp much- he'd take a lot of podiums from me and mt friends!
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Phantom X
Trad climber
Honeycomb Hideout
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Was Donini on the Donner Party?
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Flashy P
climber
Sparks, NV
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Yes those are impressive numbers, I was told last night that he frequently pulls 5.14d with ver little work, under two weeks. He is very dedicated to echievinf his personal best and realizing his full potential. I heard he will even camp out at a crag overnight in order to spend the maximum daylight hours memorizing the holds. At 31 he doesn't have much longer as a good climber, maybe of I train hard and dedicate myself I will surpass him someday! I know im better than him probably on my woody, but he is an outdoor climber, so that is trad, carrying more than 6 draws can really bring your numbers down at least a letter grade, he must train with draws weighting him down, maybe a pound or two of draws.
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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Topic Author's Reply - May 5, 2010 - 05:04pm PT
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I knew it!
Ann Coulter is really kinky.
She is definately bizarre. But enough about her politics.
Man, has this thread gone wild at times. Eyes rolling . . .
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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And get rid of their original bodies too, partly as a consequence of living longer.
Sigh...
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Phantom X
Trad climber
Honeycomb Hideout
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Count me out of this expedition I have to bake a spacepie.
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Flashy P
climber
Sparks, NV
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RokJox, I just saw your post, thanks for talking with me! I can help with training if you want, weight loss is easy once you dedicate yourself! I once had a friend who was dabbing on Comme La Vache at Verdun. It has a 500 yard approach from the cars, so in order to keep his calf weight down he hired a coue of local guys to carry him in a beach chair! La Sportiva took care of the bill, it was a really impressive send, he downrated the climb to 5.14b. That isn't quite his full potential, but it still was a product of his determination and dedication, along with some crafty thinking too! He probably would not have crushed it if he had not been carried for the 3 weeks he worked the route.
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James Doty
Trad climber
Idyllwild, Ca.
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The stuff from those other guys is pretty dumb but weld it is funny.
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edejom
Boulder climber
Butte, America
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"Such a fine line between clever...and stupid"--Spinal Tap
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James Doty
Trad climber
Idyllwild, Ca.
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Stupid can be funny.
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Flashy P
climber
Sparks, NV
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One thing my dad taught me about climbing is that you have to have a really positive attitude about life and people in order to achieve your goals and realize your full potential. I know Tommy because he comes to some comps to be supportive and to give tips. He is very serious about his diet and training. He has achieved his fullest potential, and ge started out as a kid like me, dedicated to the sport of climbing. Maybe one day when I am old I will move on to climbing the lower grades like 5.12 and 5.13, but for now whe I am young I an dedicated to achieving my personal best. Part of that is staying positive in the face of life and training difficulties. I have read sone books that are great, I could give some titles to you, they will imefiately make you strive to shed any kind of bad feelings and help you realize your full potential.
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drljefe
climber
Old Pueblo, AZ
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sumthin don't match up roun here.
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Waah!
climber
Idaho falls
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Awwww Rok-ee, crying again?
Just like you to start beating up on some kid who probably takes climbing more seriously than you ever did BITD, when you were wandering around the Valley with tears in your eyes.
Who cares about your bullshit stories? Just shut up and have a glass of warm milk, cry baby.
This baby is saying: "I'm RokJox and I'm a cry-baby!"
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Jennie
Trad climber
Elk Creek, Idaho
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“So Wahh, you clearly have created a special avatar just to hound me as its only purpose.”
What was the name of that nasty sock puppet that stalked Dirtineye for years? Curt didn’t know him….. but he claimed to live and climb in Curt’s area… knew all about Curt’s routes…everything about Curt’s social life…home life…his foibles …seemed only to exist to harass Curt…
…always showing up when folks were buckling Dirt into the ST dunking stool.
Wahh! is from Idaho Falls and Meatbomb lives in Boise?
Uh-huh
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Waah!
climber
Idaho falls
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RokJox, the self proclaimed expert on all things scientific, furiously writing illiterate tomes, utilizing his weak high school education to try to come across as intelligent in intra-net land because in real life you're just an average everyday ignoramus as#@&%e. And we all knew it. And we still do.
But all I hear is crying.
Jennie- you're such a little do-gooder, standing up for your pal RokJox, the vessel of stupidity, ignorance and hate. Don't wear out your pretty little head thinking too hard.
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Waah!
climber
Idaho falls
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It's your party, cry if you want to- you big bad bully.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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what do we know about space?
well for one thing, it's filled with radiations... the sun produces a huge flux of ionizing radiation, and x-rays which are effectively attenuated in the Earth's atmosphere. Though we still are irradiated, it is not a problem living here.
NASA has an ongoing program to calculate the effects of radiation on crews operating in space, locally: in Earth orbit, on the Moon and for the flight to Mars. You can read about this online in a National Academy of Sciences report: Managing Space Radiation Risk in the New Era of Space Exploration.
But let's stretch a bit... say we can get to some velocity close to the speed of light. We know that the relatively low energy Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR), the light freed by the recombination of protons and electrons and currently at 2.725 K fills all of space, about 400 photons per cubic centimeter. The energy of this light is something like 234 micro-eV
We also know it creates a reference frame, we see it doppler shifted because our local galactic cluster is moving 600 km/s with respect to the CMBR... it takes on a dipole distribution, with the place we are headed being "blue" or high frequency and the place we are coming from is shifted "red." See this link: http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/cosmology/cbr.html
We can calculate the effect, the temperature is just the Boltzmann constant times the Planck constant times the frequency... to find the shift this is divided by (1 - v/c) where v is our 6E5 m/s and c is the velocity of light, 3e8 m/s... it's a tiny shift since 6e5/3e8 = 2e-3, the temperature appears to go up by roughly 2 parts in a thousand.
If you were going at a speed of .9 c, then the shift is a factor of 10... still not much of a concern in terms of radiation, the energy has gone up to 2 meV.
However, the closer you get to c the higher the doppler shift... if you were at 0.999999 these photons would be hard x-rays at 234 eV energy.... and go up some more, say 0.999999999 then we've got 234 keV photons....
Your cross sectional area is something like 1 m^2 = 1e4 cm^2, the density of photons is going up tremendously because of the length contraction of your relativistic speed, something like 22,000 times.... that is, the cubic centimeter of photons for your observation is more like 22,000 * 400 = 900,000 photons per cubic centimeter... and you're going 3e10 cm/s... the total flux of photons on you and your space craft is 2.7E17 per second.
This is quite corrosive, effectively 7 MCi (mega curies) of radiation. Nuclear reactors are designed to withstand 5 killoCi, about 3 orders of magnitude less than our space traveler going close to the speed of light.
This also produces a tremendous drag on the space craft...
...so it would appear that one cannot transition through the velocity regimes near the speed of light while executing superluminal space flight.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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how do you shield a computer?
this is really difficult, the computers are in this radiation field too, and if you try to put more shielding you can make even more radiation... one limit to high performance computing on the surface of the earth is the radiation produced by cosmic rays interacting with the material in the package around the integrated circuits. Single Event Upsets can latchup some logic circuits in the very benign environment that we live in....
...the computers would not survive the radiation field at high speed either.
more on SEUs here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_event_upset
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