Moontanman

I knew there was a reason I liked Phi for All, he's my hero...

No not easy peasy, in a voyage like this, the mothership would be going so fast the possibility of the supply ships being useful is nil. Think of it this way, you have a huge airliner, it's massive, taking off requires a huge amount fuel so to lighten the load you fly smaller support craft up to refuel the plane, food, water, what ever it needs. You even off load passengers like this the plane must fly as much as possible, it's always going faster and faster, each hook up very expensive in terms of energy expended. Can you imaging the failure rate of the off loads of "supplies" would be? The utter devastation if even one messed up? But the most important part is the deta V of the mothership and supply ship, any going ahead, coming back or catching up, would require huge amounts of energy, far more than would be gained by the effort.

Boys boys boys, sadly you are all wrong... Just kidding but i would like to point out a couple things on this. First why do you think sending supplies out ahead will help anyone? If the mother ship is traveling faster than the supply ships then you have that nasty delta vee to worry about. No matter if the supply ships could accelerate to catch up to the speed of the mothership, if they could so that they will take exactly, more or less, the same amount of energy launch as simply storing the supplies in the mother ship. Why not let them go along side the mother ship if they don't fit inside? Another thing, if you are going to be gone 19,000 years you need a enclosed ecosystem, whether you created a near natural biosphere, or a completely artificial one involving genetically engineered organisms to compact the system. You would want a self contained ecosystem nothing else will do. so why not just take extra water located in mega gallon tanks (very useful as heat sinks) along the rim of the torus. extra CO2, extra CH4 and let the chemistry of life do the dirty work? When you get to the other solar system you can "refuel" at any ice moon. I realized I had not mentioned the added mass to accelerate, the hulls of the supply ships, storing the needed chemicals inside the mothership would take less energy to launch them.

I figured you'd like that one, it's been along time since I heard the old shit from shinola thing but to be honest my grandpa actually said shit from apple butter...

A biosphere recycles nutrients using various natural chemical processes, the energy to create an object like this could come from solar or nuclear power. The materials it would be made of are already in space, the Lagrange points of Jupiter contain enough material to make millions of torus habitats. As I said the main problem I can see is how to provide enough light in the interior to allow significant photosynthesis. Yes, a full blown biosphere but in the book the torus was in of it's self a living creature, it absorbed the energy of light and other particle energies that exist around Saturn to power it's biosphere. it was at best a fanciful rendition of what i am talking about. but there is no reason why a large enough torus couldn't be a reasonably stable environment. It wouldn't be entirely self contained and would require inputs of both mass and energy but that is not beyond possible technologies.

here ya go rigney, just like my grandpa used to say....

Nutrients would be recycled just like they are on earth. The biggest obstacle I can see is lighting the interior, over large periods of time mass would be lost to space so it would have to be replaced but this could be slowed to time frames of hundreds of thousands of years if you were careful and the habitat was large. John Varley wrote a science fiction book with the premise of a huge rotating torus found in orbit of Saturn, it was 1300 kilometers in diameter, and was a an artificial life form engineered to spread it's creators to the stars. The torus would release small eggs from it's rim that had velocity enough to escape the solar system and find small moons or Kuiper belt type objects around other stars to use to grow on and become another torus. The eggs held the genetic information to built the torus and the life forms that lived inside. The books are named Titan, Wizard, and Demon... It was fiction but it was also quite eye opening...

Athena, i wish i could understand what you are saying, or asserting, but in all honesty i have tried now for several years and I am no closer to understanding this X-factor you keep talking about. In fact your ideas seem, to me at least, to be under mining the very concept of liberty. I don't mind admitting I would be very hesitant to move to a society where your ideas were expressed as law. For me the idea of some mysterious something that rules everyone but is unfathomable could be used to justify anything, pretty much the same way god has been used through out history to justify anything the ruling class deemed as correct in the eyes of god...

I'm not sure why you would postulate an atmosphere of pure helium, any planet large enough or massive enough to hold onto helium would almost certainly have lots of neon, hydrogen, methane, CO and CO2, nitrogen and or nitrogen compounds as well, oxygen if it has life that is photosynthetic.

I would answer yes to that, anyone who becomes obsessed with believing something that is demonstrably not true is off his mark i would suggest... I have to agree with you questionposter, the idea that a scientist or anyone who ascribes to the methods and conclusions of science is an atheist is very dishonest and a ruse often used by creationists to discredit anyone who does follow the findings of science in their world view. As I have pointed out many times on this forum i am not saying that god did not create the universe. A Creationist is someone who believes the biblical account is absolutely true as opposed to any science that disagrees with it. To suggest that god could not have created the universe is the stance of science is a strawman and is completely dishonest.

The idea of slow boats to the stars can be justified and even built with technology not very far above what we now use. The entire problem , or almost all of it, can be solved by a rotating torus. A torus made of carbon nano tubes, much like an endless suspension bridge anchored at the center, would be the ideal shape for a biosphere. Rotate it to produce artificial gravity at the rim (inside) fill it with air and rocks and life and you get a freely orbiting biosphere. The problem with rotation can be at least partially solved by making it big, the inside of the rim, under the layer of rocks and soil, can be used to hide the machinery that makes it work and used as a space for storage of much need raw materials on the long jump between stars. A magnetic field can even be used as a sail to slow down and accelerate. Yes there are still technological hurdles to over come, lighting the interior seems to be a huge one for a really large torus, but none of hurdles are quite as difficult or as iffy as FTL, worm holes or folding space. I'd love to see the Enterprise in orbit but it seems a less than reasonable goal at this time.

I would like to say that this is probably the most likely scenario, while star treky stuff would be nice so far it seems unlikely but this, as described by the asinine cretin, would require no Super Science, no colonization of alien planets and some estimates say the entire galaxy could be colonized in just a few million years. A blink in the eye of cosmic time.

Is, as this video asserts, legalizing cannabis really a Conservative position?

In my life I've been through more than a dozen natural disasters, one year two within two months of each other, I am always prepared... Hurricanes happen...

You misunderstood the premise, all or very nearly all scientists were at one time theists, all early scientists were theists mainly because that was the only option allowed, they were creationists only because it was the only thing they had been taught. Early scientists actually started out expecting to see the bible as a guide to the natural world. it soon became obvious it was not and the deeper they went into finding out the way the world really worked the more obvious it became that the bible was not a guide to the natural world. Even then some of them began to lie to support the bible over reality, but most went on to show that creationism was wrong. Science does not say that there is no god, it does not dictate you cannot believe in god but you cannot do real science with creationism, you cannot use the bible as a source of knowledge about the natural world. God Did It is not how you add to the store of human knowledge... No one says you have to be an atheist to be a scientist or to understand science but Creationism is a lie, it is built on a foundation of lies by people who must lie to support their dishonest world view. Creationists now are not part of science, they are anti science, they lie and deceive in an attempt to support something that is demonstrably not true. Creationism cannot and does not contribute to our world of knowledge, individuals who believe in creationism can discover new things but not with in the context of creationism. Creation Science is an oxymoron.... Yes, it's science for the win...

Good point, then there is the issue of pressure under water, could a city really be under water?

Or who you desperately need to do it to... Stress is such a mild word compared to the reality of it...

I can honestly say that my tolerance has been tested to the max in recent weeks and so far no one has... been... hurt... it's a lot more difficult than it's possible to describe to allow some things to pass...

Indeed, obvious hoax, great description...

I think it's Sweden that has some amazing submarines that are powered by fuel cells, very very quiet, and of reasonable range...

I agree, if I had daughters and someone said they should be raped it would be self controlled, if someone was going around posting pictures of me or mine with cross hairs over their face it would be self controlled but I don't think that's what you have in mind is it?

I think Krishna healed him... show how I am wrong...

Just goes to show that anyone can claim to believe anything, your atheism churches are just scams looking to do the same thing religion does, i am sure they don't do as well but who knows i am sure there are atheist dumbasses as well as theist dumbasses...

A completely new wrinkle in trickle down economics? http://www.skepdic.com/urine.html Also it has been suggested that spaces inside deep caves can cause some of the same effects on humans due to the sonic qualities of the caverns. All of these things were considered holy to these people, plants that contain natural DMT can evidently bring upon a perceived close encounter with god or gods. It is suggested that the rituals performed deep inside caves by early man were religious in nature and fueled by hallucinogens and the caves themselves. Behaviors like fasting and chanting mantras or prayers over periods of time while depriving the body of food and water can have similar effects as well. It's rather unsettling to think that our first ideas about god could have come from these practices. it is also true that some animals will consume some of these plants and fungi and then retreat to a safe place and go into a deep slumber, the desire for intoxication is not limited to humans and it makes you wonder what animals get from these experiences...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottia_gigantea You thought that was a limpet? Limpets don't scramble up cliff faces faster than a man can walk on level ground. limpets don't have suckers or a body cavity opening in the center of the foot, limpets have shells, it was a fake, a made up creature, a prop to hoax you tube viewers... Ummmm...it was not a real animal and it was faked?