3blake7

So, updated my render which is attached and here is an update on my progress for a plausible interstellar spacecraft. After, being told that the particle accelerator thrusters would require too much energy and being told about the relativistic kinematics equations, I did the calculation and came to the same conclusion. I just read that the Large Hadron Collider could accelerate particles to 99.9999999% the speed of light and made the erroneous assumption that it wouldn't require that much additional energy to accelerate a propellant to that high of an exhaust velocity. My search for a thruster design with the highest possible exhaust velocity lead me to this site: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#ambeam Which has a Beamed Core Anti-Mater Rocket with an exhaust velocity of 100,000,000 m/s, the highest on the site. However, with more research I found a research paper that did new simulations with the better Geant4 software and came to the conclusion the exhaust velocity would actually be higher: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.2281.pdf So the exhaust velocity for the Beamed Core Anti-Matter Rockets is 206,856,796 m/s and actually requires a magnetic field much less than originally predicted, only 12 Tesla, which is doable with current technology. For a large interstellar colony ship to make the trip to the nearest star in a reasonable amount of time, I need A LOT of anti-matter. So, I did some research and there is only one structure that can produce enough energy to mass produce enough anti-matter in a reasonable amount of time and that is a Dyson Swarm. I created a spreadsheet for Anti-Matter Production, which builds a Dyson Swarm around the Sun, to collect solar power, to mass produce anti-matter for interstellar colonization: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v2HqosYMZbY_RM7DjeIxC-m0qEo0lsC08b7RhSKzds8/edit?usp=sharing The satellites in the Dyson Swarm only block 5% of the Sun and can produce 1200 megagrams of anti-matter a day. I included solar cell efficiency at 68% which is higher than what is currently possible but is considered possible with more advance multi-junction solar cells. I also included the energy to anti-matter conversion efficiency at 0.01%, which is higher than what we currently have but I read a NASA paper that said it's possible with a purpose built anti-matter production facility using known technology. I also updated my Interstellar Trip Calculator to not do Constant Acceleration because that wastes anti-matter. It now accelerates up to speed, cruises for decades, flips around and then accelerates in the opposite direction to slow down. I also updated my calculator to have more realistic masses, such as the mass for the radiator, mass of the atmosphere, mass of food and water, nutrients for hydroponics, etc. It's still not NASA quality but it's closer than what I had before. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12VQXeNwbLyUAzzwgPj4Qman6c0pUwHcGeE51MLeg5fw/edit?usp=sharing So, my conclusion I guess is that interstellar colonization is possible with a Dyson Swarm covering 5% of the Sun, converting solar energy into anti-matter and using the anti-matter in Beamed Core Anti-Matter Rockets to propel spacecraft to other stars. Based on my rough calculations, you can send a 1 million person space stations to Alpha Centauri in 75 years, with only 30 years of anti-matter production. Oh, I also wanted to add that I stole the ideas from Project Daedalus to handle interstellar dust. There are "dust bugs", autonomous spacecraft that fly 200 km ahead of the main spacecraft, releasing particle clouds to "clear the path". There is also erosion shield made from Beryllium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus I could use some engineering advice. The previous picture, I was thinking it would be too much stress on the support beams, so I broke up the thrusters/fuselage into 8 smaller ones and moved them to the inside of the ring. Based on my currant calculations, the thrusters would collectively do 5.4 m/s^2. I was thinking I could do 16, 8 on the inside of the ring and 8 on the outside. I am not sure if I even need the support beams, or if the ring would be structurally sound without them. This is entering the realms of materials physics and engineering so I don't know.

I am having difficulty finding the efficiency of a Beamed Core Anti-Matter Rocket. I know that some energy from the input fuel mass is converted into neutral pions which decay into gamma rays. Only negatively and positively charged pions are used to generate thrust. What percentage of the hydrogen + antihydrogen's mass is negative and positive pions? Updated my render:

I did some research on interstellar dust, for the Daedalus project they used Beryllium erosion shield and autonomous space craft that would fly ahead of the spacecraft and release dust clouds to clear the path. Also, I found this article on Beamed Core Anti-Matter Thrusters and they did new simulations showing the exhaust velocity could actually be double of what the site I previously posted claims. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.2281.pdf

I was using the information on this site: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#ambeam Assuming those are correct, with a constant acceleration approach, my top velocity is 23,000 km/s which means interstellar dust might rip my ship to pieces before I get there.

Well the particle accelerate idea was a bust. I switched to Beamed Core Anti-Matter Rockets but they need a TON of anti-matter. To produce enough I had to say there was an Dyson sphere like ring around the Sun collecting several Exawatts of power. Even then I only produce enough anti-matter to send a 10 million person interstellar craft once every 100 years. AND that's assuming a 20% efficiency on anti-matter production, currently technology can only do 0.01% (theoretical maximum is 50%, so I read). Height refers to the shortest side in the picture, I just called it that because that's what that side is called on a cylinder.

Thanks for your help. I played around with the calculations and realized you are right, it requires an unreasonable amount of power, even for a civilization with trillions living in space on space stations.

I read that the 200 kW VASIMR has an exhaust velocity of 300,000 m/s. Couldn't you just stack the effect and make a 5 kilometer long VASIMR with 200 megawatts and achieve 99.9999999% the speed of light exhaust velocities? Am I missing something?

I read that the particle accelerator can have a smaller diameter if more power is used in the electromagnets. In the pictures the radius of the largest particle accelerator is 3 kilometers with a circumference of 18.85 kilometers. It's smaller than the LHC but I am saying I used more power and stronger electromagnets. On the spreadsheet I just guessed how much power I would need, I would rather calculate it with a new spreadsheet. How do you calculate it?

This is a plausible interstellar spacecraft I am working on. I have a spreadsheet for calculating the trip and another for calculating the space station that attaches to the top. What I need help with is creating another spreadsheet for calculating the particle accelerator based thrusters. The space station has a 1 million person capacity, 61 floors, gravity ranging from 10 to 9 m/s^2, has a 3 kilometer radius and a height of 50 meters. Here is my space station calculator: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mFxDcOCeMIcSz0SkMcrBNviBcmjU_Ru80dd7iFF_Vn8/edit?usp=sharing Here is my trip calculator: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12VQXeNwbLyUAzzwgPj4Qman6c0pUwHcGeE51MLeg5fw/edit?usp=sharing It's using a constant acceleration approach and the spacecraft in the image can do 4.2 lightyears in 20.8 years. I had to guess the mass of everything but I think it's close enough for my science fiction purposes. For the particle accelerator thrusters, I have 8 sections, each with 11 rings and I am claiming that it can accelerate Argon up to 99.9999999% the speed of light. If you look at the trip calculator it has the performance of the particle accelerator thrusters. I was wondering if what I have is plausible.

You are giving me grief over decimals places? I wish more people were paying that much attentions, I'd have higher standards of my posts. I haven't seen the Lead article yet. I'll check it out. I started off with Hydrogen originally but I switched to Argon to make the propellant storage tank smaller.

I've been wondering what THAT point would be. When a world government forms? When the entire planet unites in priorities, solving all the problems that can be solved instead of allowing problems that we created prevent us from solving them. The truth is, all the problems we have are problems we created from our ignorance of economic and governing truths and in our attempt to create a system to solve those problems we created new problems which prevented them from being solved. I think THE point would be, when we stop making more work for ourselves, lol, when we have a system that can solve a problem without creating new problems. To borrow a concept from physics: POWER, WORK and ENERGY. Maybe the point is when we maximize the WORK done with the ENERGY available and achieve the most POWER we are capable of. Then again, we could be the first, and maybe we will be the ones expanding exponentially and stumbling upon a planet with life, watching it develop on reality TV for millions of years. lol

In this speculative but plausible scenario, the aliens may have stumbled upon this planet and just have decided to allow us to develop. They would watch us out of curiosity, to study the evolution of civilization, perhaps even as a form of entertainment. They may also manipulate us to a degree to ensure that we develop into a compatible civilization. The planet itself would not have much value to an intelligent species that mostly lives in space, mines asteroid belts and can terraform worlds.

Hollywood hinders scientific progress more often than not.

Why the personal insults? This is The Lounge afterall. Also, what's so ridiculous about aliens having occupied the entire galaxy already? What research have YOU done? Scientists haven't been able to create a model of star system formation that is 100% accurate and precise so they can't say with certainty how many Earth-like planets exist in our galaxy. Some put the estimate as high as 1 million while others put the estimate as low as 1 thousand. We know Life began to evolve on Earth 3.4 billion years ago. It took THAT long for the components of a cell, plant or animal, to evolve into a self-contained system and then into multi-cellular systems. Neanderthals have existed for 400 thousand years and scientists actually obtained Neanderthal DNA and did a genetic comparison to the modern homo-sapiens and determined that they are technically homo-sapien too. Dinosaurs exists 100s of millions of years ago. In the grand scheme of things it, intelligent life evolving on a planets is a blip in the radar of evolution. Most of the time was spent just getting the building blocks of life right. It is not unreasonable to assume that if there is another intelligent species in the galaxy that they could have evolved, lets say 8 million years before us. With immotality, which scientists are predicting we will have within the next 30-60 years and can already be done to a degree with the telomerase enzyme, and exponential population growth. An alien civilization, with a 8 million year head start, could have quadrillions in every star system. As far as space propulsion goes, we already have existing technology, like the Large Hadron Collider, which is capable of accelerating particles to 99.9% the speed of light. With a thruster, with an exhaust velocity 99% the speed of light and a tank about 10 times the size of the Empire State Building, they could reach a nearby star in as little as 32 years (4 lightyears). They could have expanded to every star within 8 million years. They would mostly live in space, on space stations and mine asteroid belts for raw materials to build more space stations to support their exponentially growing population. They would terraform worlds too, but only a small percentage of their population would live on planets. This is plausible and I think most people have just been stigmatized. With a 8 million year head start (I switched the thruster to 10kg/s at 99.9% exhaust velocity, a little more conservative), they could have nanotechnology capable of visual spectrum cloaking. We are already able to cloak objects in a single frequency. They would also have very advance nanomachines, capable of altering their appearance or just create a modified version of their own genome with a human-like appearance. There are a lot of plausible explanations even when you consider our current level of technology and what is currently being developed in universities around the world. I don't think it would be that difficult to go undetected. About the only thing we can detect in other star systems is the dimming of a star when a planetary body passes in front of it. Even so, we can only detect very large planetary bodies, such as three times the mass of Earth. Within our own star system, we still have a lot of blind spots. We have asteroids and comets we don't even know about. We have a dismal awareness of our own star system. Aliens could have come and gone, and we would have never noticed, even if they did so within the last 100 years. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12VQXeNwbLyUAzzwgPj4Qman6c0pUwHcGeE51MLeg5fw/edit?usp=sharing

Write a list of everything you would need to do. There is lots of free code out there so I would focus on which language offers the most pieces to your puzzle. I personally think Python will win. Scientists love Python. Python and PHP are neck and neck in popularity, with Python moving to take the lead. PHP has advantages in free web software and the fact that more free or cheap hosting options are available. Python is a server-side geared language, which means you usually want command line access so you can install modules (free code). If you really, really need to scale and plan on putting your simulation or whatever on a supercomputer, you probably want to go with a compiled language like C++. Python does have other binary options like PyPy which does JIT just-in-time compiling for better scalability. The really powerful Python modules are actually binaries written in like C++ with a Python wrapper, so you really just use Python to tie all the pieces together and most of the work is being done by binaries anyways. You may also want to look into Node.js I've been playing around with DLib a C++ binary that does object detection within Python. There is something called StochPy

As a patient of the Psychology business model for the last 4 years, I have some serious criticisms for the whole industry. I will first give you an outline of my experiences and then follow up with my criticisms. Psychology seems to be made up of two business models, the in-patient model and the out-patient model. The in-patient model: I have experienced two different locations, one was a not-for-profit hospital and the other was a for-profit mental health facility. Both locations had identical business models with one very subtle difference. I will go into the subtle difference last. At the beginning you filled out some forms and had an interview with a psychologist, which lasted anywhere between 5 to 10 minutes. Once admitted, you were given a room, usually with another patient. You were told when to sleep and when to wake up. You were served breakfast in a room with other patients. After breakfast there was a group meeting where a nurse or social worker would attempt to lead the discussion. However most patients were not enthusiastic and participation was at a minimum. After the group meeting people would watch TV or something for a few hours. A single psychiatrist would see patients individually for only about 5 minutes each in order to prescribe them a medication, about 3 times a week. You would line up at the pharmacy window to take your medication a couple times a day. There was also like an art therapy session, where people would draw or paint for an hour or so. Sometimes there was music. You were pretty much required to spend a week in-patient once you were admitted. They would not let you leave, which I don't even understand how that is legal, especially when you were self-admitted. I personally did not see anything in the contract saying that I had to stay for a minimum of one week. They claimed that I had to have an interview with someone who would decide whether I can leave or not. They were apparently so understaffed that I was held hostage by bureaucracy. I don't understand why my insurance company would pay for this. I was there for auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions must likely the result of social anxiety going haywire from too much stress from my first attempt at an intimate relationship. The entire time I was there, I did not see a psychologist. There was only group therapy sessions hosted by someone not technically qualified, like a nurse or social worker. My issues were too personal to be broadcasted in front of a group of complete strangers and considering the most common ailment was Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I find they whole business model counter-productive. It seems to me they were unwilling to invest the money on one-on-one therapy because that would make their business model less profitable so they came up with a high volume model which just doesn't work. All they did in the end, was medicate everyone based on a 5 minute interview and make them wait a week before they can regret asking for help. The for-profit health facility had one other element that I found distasteful and that was the nurses attempting to manipulate people, like setting up little challenges, like you have to ask for help, you have to ask for a blanket. It's like they were trying this one-size-fits-all mass therapy, like everyone was there for the same reason. I found it very annoying that I was there for one reason and had to jump through hoops for some mass therapy I didn't even need. The not-for-profit did not do this, but was otherwise exactly the same. Out-patient was actually a little better because the patients in the self-group-therapy were actually there voluntarily. You actually got one-on-one appointments with a psychologist. I have had three psychologists. One was good, the other two I don't know if it's just the industry norm or they were particularly lazy. My first psychologist, when I had depression, not for auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions, was INVESTIGATIVE. He asked questions, about my past, when the symptoms first occurred, what their triggers were, how I felt about past experiences, helped me look at those past experiences in new ways, etc. He was pro-active, personally curious, and was like excited to find something and go "ah HA!". Then again he was a university professor practicing on the side. The other two psychologists, just sit there, "how was your day", "what would you like to talk about". It's more like small talk with someone you are paying $200 an hour to. I didn't pay you $200 an hour to have a pleasant conversation! I want answers! I want you to INVESTIGATE! Ugh. I feel like therapy is going down the drain and businesses discovered it's more profitable just to feed everyone pills. Speaking of pills, I've tried all kinds and NOTHING works. If I want to try something new, I just switch psychiatrists. In my personal opinion, Cannabis is still the best anti-depressant and anti-anxiety on the market. Sometimes I think I am just being fed placebos and they want me to believe that it will work so it will work. I personally think the best business model would be a psychologist that does INVESTIGATIVE THERAPY and then works with his personal staff of LIFE COACHES who do GRADUATED EXPOSURE THERAPY in the field. My general criticism of the field of Psychology is that they need to get rid of these stereotypes, these labels with bundled up symptoms and just look at each patient as a unique individual with unique past experiences and unique defense mechanisms. They just need to have a huge list of defense mechanisms, let the patient go down the list, read the descriptions and rate them 1 through 5 then go down the list with the patient and ask them about each one, the experiences they had, identify triggers, etc. Then hand them off to a life coach. Forget the pills, they really don't seem to do anything and at worst should only be used temporarily as a way to facilitate the life coach and graduated exposure therapy.

I like the Ranked Voting System aka Preferential Voting. Europe has adopted it over Popular Vote. Some districts in the US also use Ranked Voting. Other than that I think what needs to be Nerfed is the Lobbyists and Special Interests. It's too easy just to get money from them and go with a marketing campaign, like Sex Sells, and win when the majority of the population does not invest much effort into researching candidates or issues. I think the best way would be with Cellular Democracy. Cellular Democracy makes it a bottom-up representative democracy, like citizens elect a mayor or county executive, mayors and county executives elect a governor and the governors elect a president. The city and county councils would elect representatives for the state congress and the state congresses would elect representatives for the US Congress. It reduces the cost of an election and spreads lobbying out more. Fred E. Foldvary was suggesting to make the districts as small as a community, with community executives electing a mayor or county executive. That would create more relativity between constituent and representative and reduce the cost of campaigning even more, making it more accessible to potential candidates. Like Mayor Mike Dunafon of Glendale, Colorado, he got elected by going door to door with strippers and beer, lol.

I didn't realize the difference was that small. Do you know of a good lamest terms description of the ice age cycle? Did I leave out that light goes through more atmosphere since it's at an angle??

In competitive video games, there is a system, things you can and can not do, there is an objective, something you must do to win, there are other players competing against you within that system, attempting to win. There are winners and losers. In that system there are many combinations of moves, each better or worse under different circumstances than other combinations of moves. Through competition the players, through trial and error, discover the most effective combinations of moves. Other players, players who lost against these combinations, adopt them until another player comes up with a combination that beats that move. Sometimes one combination is more powerful than all other combinations and a player becomes unstoppable. Other players adopt that particular combination until eventually all the players are using the same combination. When this happens, the game loses it’s value, it stops being interesting, it’s entertainment value diminishes and players stop playing. Game developers will do something called a Nerf, which is to take one of the moves in the overpowering combination and make it weaker in some way to make the combination overall weaker. This restored balance to the game, opens the door back up, for competition and creativity. The problem with our current system of elections, is that there is a single overpowering combination of moves, that any player with any hope in winning, MUST use or surely suffer defeat. This overpowering combination isn’t being Nerfed by the Game Developers of our government, because our Game Developers are players too. Our elected players won using that overpowering combination so why would they want to change it? What we need to ask ourselves is, does this combination have the best emergent properties for our country? How does this combination vet potential leaders? Are there people who would never consider being a politician because they are unwilling to use the overpowering combination? Does this hurt our country? Are there better people out there who aren’t running for positions in the government? We need to think of this as Game Developers do and create a game balance that attracts the right people.

I know the poles are cold because they are further from the sun and the tilt creates the seasons. That's not what I'm talking about. What I was talking about is the Earth isn't perfectly spherical. It's wider around the belt, the equator, so the poles are like a lower elevation. Including the oceans because of the spin, which sort of creates a dam between the two hemispheres. I was thinking of it like, the Southern Hemisphere filling up, until it spills over the equator and rolls down to the North Pole. I read that the Arctic was warming while Antarctica is staying cold, I was imagining what would happen if the North and South Pole temperature differential became more extreme. I was imagining the Northern Hemisphere currents switching directions.

I made a spread sheet for calculating how much we need to reduce emissions and how much carbon dioxide removal we need to do. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fPTV2WrWN0E-k2UvePvz2wddjDWPsFmgGUxLeUgCkXQ/edit?usp=sharing Here are some graphs I generated based on the plan currently set on the spreadsheet. I did have a question for any experts out there. What is the leading theory for the ice age event? Based on my limited knowledge, I am guessing that the Artic warming up and the Antarctica staying cold will create some warm front - cold front scenario, which may cause air currents to shift once reaching some hypothetical tipping point, then the Arctic will get cold again. From my understanding, since the Earth spins around the equator and it is wider around the equator, the North and South Poles are like the bottom and the cold air will try to sink to the bottom.

If we sent it to the moon.. We produce 33 petagrams a year. That is like 32 thousand Empire State buildings worth of liquid CO2. If we had 400 StarTrams capable of 400 megagrams each, that's only 1.4 petagrams a year. Moving it into space is a problem. Even sequestering it on Earth is a problem. We could use the CO2 for other things. Like polycarbonate. We produce 0.245 petagrams of plastic per year. Not enough CO2 would be used. Like Urea. We currently produce 0.190 petagrams of Nitrogen fertilizer per year. Not enough CO2 would be used.. What do we do with it all? Some are suggesting pumping it underground into like empty natural gas and oil tables. We produce 80 million barrels of oil a day, each barrel is 185 liters. That is 5.4 trillion liters a year or 5400 gigaliters. We produce 3479 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year. That is 3.4 million gigaliters.. Now that could work.

I don't know if you saw this post. I've updated it since originally posting and now terraform the Moon as well just for the heck of it. I used the Haber process to make Urea and kept the Schreibersite I got from mining M-Type asteroids for iron and nickel for steel. That allows me to fertilize the planets I terraformed. Also, being a hydroponic grower. Plants will do really weird things if they don't have exactly the right range of frequencies and strengths of those frequencies. I've recently switched to a 10-band LED grow light and my lettuce was SO WEIRD! It grew branches and wasn't like a head of lettuce at all. The rest of the plants, are growing EXTREMELY thick, like a hundred leaves per branch where there would have only been like 20. They get so heavy with leaves the branches snap. It's like the frequency of light that regulates how tall and how many leaves they get is more intense, causing them to grow all weird. On another note, most plants can grow 3 times as fast with 3 times current carbon dioxide concentrations. With hydroponics you can increase the growing seasons from 1 a year to like 3 or 4. LED grow lights are being perfected and power will probably be cheaper. I think your best bet would be to do just that. The raw materials exist on the moon to produce lots of solar panels.

This is a graph generated from ice core samples from Lake Vostok, Antarctica. They were able to determine temperature data based on the way the ice crystallized, extrapolate CO2 and Methane concentrations of the time when the ice formed and dust concentrations. This data goes back 400,000 years (actually I think they have up to 800,000 years now). It tells a simple story. Ice ages happen approximately every 90,000 years. After the ice age, there is a subtle global warming which takes about 90,000 years, until it becomes a more aggressive global warming, which somehow results in an ice age. Why do we care about all the other stuff? Who cares about some cities showing lower average temperature increases and other cities showing higher average temperature increases. Who cares about urbanization and the urban heat island. Why does it matter? The bottom line. Global warmings and ice ages happen and they would happen even if we turned off all the machines and held our breath. Now what are we going to do about it? If we are going to stop it, we need to be carbon NEGATIVE. We need carbon dioxide air filtering stations. Why do it? For one, we can stop sea level rise, which is predicted to cost 10s of trillions in damages to coastal cities. Business district New York City would eventually become below sea level, along with New Orleans being totally screwed and not to mention half of Florida. There would eventually be places on this Earth too hot for life, millions of climate change refugees knocking on the doors of countries below or above the hot zone. The coral reefs would eventually die, causing a whole hierarchy of ocean species to have a huge population drop, which could cause food shortages and starvation in countries highly dependent on fish. To ice age or to not ice age, that is the question. In my humble opinion, it's better to have a planetary thermostat than not to have one. We can then ice age whenever we feel like it. Doesn't it make sense to actually get the job done and build the carbon dioxide air filtering stations and become -100% carbon emissions, Carbon Negative? We need to not only stop emissions entirely, we need to be negative emissions to take everything out that we already put in. We have to keep going to push Carbon Dioxide concentrations back down to like 10,000 BC. We could do it for less than like 10% of the military budget.

Eat spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12VQXeNwbLyUAzzwgPj4Qman6c0pUwHcGeE51MLeg5fw/edit?usp=sharing It uses a constant acceleration drive, which accelerates towards a star until the half-way point, then flips around and accelerates in the opposite direction the second half of the trip, to slow down just as it reaches the destination star. The propellant is Argon. The thruster is a particle accelerator and uses an exhaust velocity that the LHC is able to do. It uses a liquid fluoride thorium reactor. The weights might be a little off (hard to be exact without being an engineer and going into tons of detail) but you'll get the idea. With the really high exhaust velocity, you reduce the propellant weight ALOT and make it scalable. It has two donut-shaped habitats which rotate to create artificial gravity. They are 500000 people each. There should be enough room for self-sustaining hydroponics, they will just need to take with them big tanks of fertilizer. There IS NOT enough to recycle CO2, that's just ridiculous so some other means has to be used, like artificial scrubbers, possibly those bionic leaves that were recently invented. I think the scariest thing is running into a piece of sand at 150,000 km/s