finster

Btw, this is not a competition for me. I'm not fighting your idea. Of course, you bring enough supplies with you for the whole journey. Maybe you bring enough supplies for TRIPLE the journey. What I am fighting for is the principle of redundancy in space exploration. You try to minimize the risks as much as possible. A lot can go wrong over a 19,000 year journey. Supplies can be mismanaged, angry rogue captains could attempt to undermine the whole mission, etc. We don't know. 19,000 years is a long time.

With all due respect to someone who arrived at the same idea independently, I think you may be missing the point. There WILL be supplies with you. As much as you can possibly take with you. The point of the pre-positioned way-station supplies is a redundancy. Redundancies are crucial in space exploration when you are dealing with people's lives. A star is a serious source of life and you don't cut ties with one for 19,000 years lightly. Think of it this way: would you rather have stars within close proximity for the duration of the trip or just empty space? The pre-positioned supplies are like little stars, supplying energy. The whole reason the journey is dangerous and why you have to bring supplies is because we will be out of range of stars. If there is a trail of supplies throughout the journey, it's like having a safety net of stars the whole way. Another way of looking at it is this: you could run out of supplies along the way with either plan. Given that you already will be leaving stocked with massive supplies calculated to support the whole trip, if by some fluke those supplies run out or become compromised and you can't reach the next pre-positioned way-station in time, at least those way-stations would give you a fighting chance, at least they would be there. With your plan, if you run out of supplies, that's it. End of game. Even the first men to reach the south pole knew enough to lay down supply stations behind them for the return trip. They did both. Took supplies with them and left positioned some for later. Squirrels do it too to get themselves through winter. Just to add one more thing: Not only would it be advisable to send supplies out ahead. I would advocate pre-positioning whole unmanned mother biosphere ships out there. Hardware like ships, support craft, computers, bunk beds, tooth brushes, everything we need to survive on earth are also prone to breaking down or wearing out in space over a 19,000 year journey and should be sent out ahead of us. Wouldn't that be a relief to be able to step onto an unused mother ship at a mid-point along the journey between stars?

The unmanned supply ships will not be moving at the same speed as the manned ships, therefore there will be a difference between fuel consumption of unmanned ships sent out ahead and unmanned ships that have to keep pace with the populated ships. The reason you want the populated ships to move faster is twofold and obvious...Also, it is doubtful you could stockpile such a vast amount of resources on or near Earth without socio-economic grumblings from its inhabitants eventually causing them to lay claim to them for more immediate needs. If you launch the supplies into space, it's a real commitment. Also, you must consider you will be taking vast supplies with you for the journey. But those supplies will be more likely to be consumed on the journey between stars because you will be separated from the stars, the source of all energy. If the journey gets sidetracked or takes longer than expected or consumes resources faster than expected while at a dangerous mid-point between stars, you are going to be looking forward to those extra supplies waiting for you at certain points. If you put all your eggs in one basket and miscalculate or get slowed in your progress or multiple life support systems fail without any pre-positioned supply points to rescue you, you're dead before you even get there. It's like swimming from America to Japan. You may make it, you may not, but it sure would make you feel better if there were islands along the way.

For one it saves fuel. If unmanned supply ships leave 10, 20, 30, 40, 50-100 years before you they won't have to use fuel to keep pace with the main fleet. They will already be off headed in the direction of the nearest star drifting by inertia. Plus you have 19,000 years for life support systems to fail, to breakdown, to degrade, to run out. It's not that I am merely suggesting you send supply ship ahead of you, it's that you have to. You'd never be able to compile enough supplies at once without starving the existing population on earth to destruction. You can't just take all those resources at once. You're talking 19,000 years of resource production. You'll have to send out supply ships hundreds, possibly even thousands of years in advance because, once you leave, you're not going to double back for the supply ships behind you and they are not going to catch up to you unless you're abandoning the quest. The supply ships behind you would be for the bioships behind them. Sending supply ships out years and years ahead of the actual manned missions has to be looked at as an investment in the future survival of humanity. We have to start sending them out now, let them accumulate, and forget about them until we're ready to go ourselves. The point is, since you can't leave with all the resources for the entire trip at once, you have to have resources ahead of you.

There certainly should be more than one biosphere. The more there are, the more it increase the odds for the survival of humanity.

Well, for one, how are you going to assemble 19,000 years worth of fuel and supplies to be ready to leave all at once? The truth is, the journey is so vast you would need fuel and supplies ahead of you, with you, and following up behind you on a delivery and rendezvous time scale spanning decades, even centuries long. You ain't bringing everything with you at once. You're going to need a trail so later ships can travel in your wake. It's going to be like one long space road, with pits stops all along the way.

Let's compromise. Since the key to successful space exploration is redundancy, why not do both? Hydrophonic farming. You only need water. Also, you forget, our space travelers will pooping the whole trip. That's fertilizer.

I knew I shouldn't have used the term "Battlestar Galactica". I knew you guys would see only that. Did you even read the rest? Let me ask you a question: If a biosphere is possible. And plant growth by artificial light is possible. Then why is such a concept as floating space biospheres such an impossible concept to you? I really hope this place isn't competitive to the point that people just pan other people's ideas just because they are not their own. That would be really sad. It's 12:12am here. Off to sleep.

I think I've figured out how we can explore space. We don't need speed, we need smarts. Here's how we do it: Large floating biospheres. Fleets of them. Instead of thinking about speed. We think about survival. If we can survive in space in floating self-sufficient biospheres, we can take all the time we want in getting from star to star. We build several fleets of ships. Each fleet headed by a few Battlestar Galactica sized mother ships carrying thousands of people each. Plus other smaller support craft. We build the large ships in near earth orbit, populated them with crew and provisions and test their livability and onboard life and bio-life support systems while in earth orbit. These ships will be floating self contained biospheres that orbit around stars for solar energy at just the right distance and collect sunlight through massive windows for their on board farms. Food could not only be grown on them but cloned as a second food production option to increase output. The plants on board, in turn produce oxygen for the ship's crew. These ships are designed as biospheres because their purpose is to be the home of generation after generation of crew. They are artificial Earths. A fleet of these ships not only increases our survival chances but if a ship in the fleet fails people can be shuffled onto other ships. Once we are satisfied the systems work, that the onboard bio-spheres are self supporting and humans can survive on them indefinitely, the question is, how do these ships that depend on solar energy to run their systems get to the next nearest star? The distances are too far. We'll never reach the speeds required before the ships run out of energy to power the artificial lights the Hydroponic gardens need to survive. So here's my solution: We plot our route long before we leave and we send out ahead unmanned support ships, stocked with the future supplies and energy we will need. We send many of them out ahead of us but moving at a much slower speeds than we will be going so that we will eventually overtake them at calculated points along the trip. When enough of these unmanned support ships are on course toward the destination star, our biosphere ships leave for the same star, following the course of the unmanned ships. Basically, our support ships are a 19,000 year supply chain all the way to the next closest star. As our biosphere ships progress over the generations towards the destination stars, the moments we overtake and reach the support ships will be closely timed to the energy demands and supply needs of our crewed ships over the 19,000 year, multigenerational journey. And that's how we do it. Ok, you may now worship me. Of course, we better make sure we have a lot of vitamin D on board because we're going to be without natural sunlight for a long, long time. Oh, I should have read the whole thread before I posted. I see I hit on the same idea.

You might be right but that's not the point. If (IF!) the spool can be unwound using a Neodymium permanent magnet, it can be rewound using another magnet in the opposite direction. So your point wouldn't matter, would it? (It takes energy to process, refine and deliver gasoline. It's takes energy to build hydro electric plants to harness hydro power.) So? The string would unwind into a special box or enclosure with the magnet on the outside but its force of attraction reaching into the box to pull the string. Once the string is fully unwound in one direction, a shield is introduced between the magnet and the box and the magnet is retracted. A second magnet on the other side of the device is then deployed and the whole process starts over in the opposite direction. Now! The challenge is to find a material for the string light enough, thin enough and simultaneously strong enough to fit miles of it on the smallest spools possible. We want the magnet to pull the string with as much force as possible but we want to be able to load so much string on the spool it will take hours, hopefully days to fully unwind in one direction before the polarity has to be manually changed like filling up a "gas tank". It works on the same principle as solar energy or hydro energy except we don't have to wait for a sunny day or depend on the rain to fill up the reservoir. We control the "fuel" because the "fuel" is entirely man-made and also clean. It works on a cloudy day. It works during a drought. It's like a kinetic battery. But no chemicals. No pollutants.

I recently tested what I call a "string motor" I thought of myself. It consisted of a spool of fishing wire with short ferromagnetic beads of string (like those in dog tags) attached at 1" to 1/2" inch intervals along the string...I placed a strong group of magnets on the floor and fed the string into the magnets standing above it...It pulled the string to it's "end" (not the whole reel yet) with no difficulty thus spinning the reel and theoretically generating electricity. Questions: Can a spool of string be made simultaneously small (compact, light) enough but the string long enough to produce a usable output of energy generation? How strong does a magnet need to be to pull a reel miles long?

Wait, if we are looking back in time 10-11 billions light years at galaxies that are 12 billion years old then, doesn't that make our galaxy 10-11 billion light years AHEAD in time than those galaxies? Thus, making our galaxy around 23 billion years old?

This YouTube channel seems to have several Feynman lectures in parts:

Ah, this makes more sense. Yes, I guess it would be directional in that case. I read somewhere we know what gravity is but we have yet to ascertain why anything is attracted to anything else. But the book might have just been discussing attraction at the quantum level.

No, you're trying to destroy us all and I'm going to stop you. Just kidding. Please resume your discussion.

Well, actually what I was leaning toward was the idea of a "super vacuum" caused by mass vacating a position in space as a explanation of what causes gravity. Thus objects are not drawn to the actual object but forever trying to occupy the immediate empty space trailing behind the larger object. Wild speculation based on not enough training on my part but I figured I'd run it by the experts on here just in case they spot any value in it.

So if I may summarize: Whether something is something or nothing is dependent on what is interacting with it and perceiving it? In other words, Existence is relative to what you are or relativity applied to existence. This is very close to something I have been working on diagrams for recently. Mine is a little different in that I'm leaning toward things, ultimately and in actuality, don't exist whereas you seem to still maintain that things exist. I will post my diagrams in a new thread when I have finished them.

By position does that include mass? Because I thought mass was the major factor in determining the force of gravity. Also, perhaps I'm using the wrong term. If I said speed instead of velocity would that change your answer?

Not to veer off the thread but my own theory is very similar to this and yours make a lot of sense to me. I'm new to these forums but hopefully we'll have a lot to discuss and expand upon.

Who me? I don't remember what it's called but I've heard of that before.

I guess in respect to the object the planet is attracting. And by more gravity I mean the strength of gravitational pull.

I think he's trying to suck the oxygen out of our atmosphere. Lol. No. Actually, reminds me of the force you get in the beaker experiment where you light a fire in a beaker and a squishy ball gets pulled through neck by the vacuum created when the air is used up by the fire. How about we just harnass the rotational energy of our own planet with a giant low orbit atmosphere skipping turbine gear and beam the energy back down to earth?

if a moving object, such as a planet, has more gravity than an object not moving? Or, since isnt everything supposed to be moving??, does an object like a planet with more velocity?? have more gravitational attraction than an object the same size with less velocity? I'm trying to develop an explanation on what is causing gravity and the answer to this question may help me depending on what it is. Thank you. You guys are great!

Is this video online, 36grit? If it is, would you mind providing a link? Thanks.