| Author |
Message |
Dreamer
Guest
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 Posted:
Tue Jan 04, 2005 4:10 am Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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| Quote: | If you manage to get up the massive speeds, you can't just slow down
for a
bit of mining like you were a truck.
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"Wouldn't it cost an enormous amount of fuel to slow right down to
rendezvous with comets/planetoids?
Remember, comparatively speaking, this is a very "slow" mode of
interstellar travel and the ship never attains speeds much greater than
those of the Voyager spacecraft presently leaving our solar system (at
less than 40,000 km/hour). The mining is going to be very infrequently
needed, and in most cases the comets are going to be disintegrated in
front of the ship and their icy fragments scooped up by funnels
extended around the ship's outer bodywork in-flight. This is
demonstrated in Chapter 5 in the story.
Above all, as *factual* as it all may sound, people should remember
this is still only a "fantasy" concept, as we just do not know how much
material is likely to be found in the Oort cloud circling all the way
around our Sun at those enormous distances, impenetrable by even the
most sensitive telescopes of our present era. In the real world, it is
likely that many high speed robotic missions will have been launched
for reconnaisance well before a human mission is launched. "-
| Quote: | From the FAQ page
Humans can't seem to go one lifetime without having at least one major
conflict over.
Most wars are over limited resources, and they're going to be pretty
damn
limited there.
|
Anyone causing trouble will be thrown out, as simple as that!
"How are law and order enforced on this ship?
The MMC has a small force of police officers who patrol the streets of
Utopia, and law and order are legislated the same way as in a small
state here on Earth. There is a court building in Utopia with a couple
of MMC appointed judges, who exercise judicial duties in conformance to
the starship's statute books. "
and
"What happens when there are cultural/religious conflicts?
"You don't make enemies on a small boat!". This line is more true here
than anywhere else. People go through life knowing their
vulnerabilitities if they rock the boat in the middle of nowhere...
thousands of years and trillions of miles from the nearest planetary
shores. From an early age through school, college and university
children are brought up in a culture of understanding and mutual
respect for one another and the community is very cohesive as a result
of their complete isolation. There are strict surveillance and
monitoring methods in place along with robust security systems enforced
by the MMC throughout the ship."
The ship computer and central nervous system is wired up to monitor
every square inch of its biosphere with CCTV and such like. You don't
mess about on Ahad's starship!
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Rich Grise
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Jan 04, 2005 4:14 am Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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On Mon, 03 Jan 2005 14:04:00 -0800, Dreamer wrote:
| Quote: | Earl wrote:
"Dreamer" <javidhussain@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:1104767710.113105.102830@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
So after accelerating to a decent velocity they divert to the
Oort Cloud, slow down to add more reaction mass?
The Oort cloud is circling in a belt all the way round the sun, you
encounter it when travelling out in all directions from our solar
system.
|
His point was, it's a pretty crappy choice for a refueling stop, "Stop"
being the operative word here.
Cheers!
Rich |
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Rich Grise
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Jan 04, 2005 4:18 am Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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On Mon, 03 Jan 2005 19:27:49 +0000, Kryten wrote:
| Quote: |
"Dreamer" <javidhussain@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1104767710.113105.102830@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
No, no. There's some comet and Oort cloud icy resource mining going on.
Read Chapter 6. Mining on an ice world by the illumination of pure
"star light"
The "tank" needs replenishing along the way. Also, its a _huge_ tank,
six miles in radius and nine miles in length, enough to have a
minitaure ecosystem and a small town inside with river, lakes and
forests. More on AA's FAQs:-
This Ahad guy is just jerking off, IMHO.
Even for a sci fi movie it is pretty lame.
If you manage to get up the massive speeds, you can't just slow down for a
bit of mining like you were a truck.
And what about human nature?
Humans can't seem to go one lifetime without having at least one major
conflict over.
Most wars are over limited resources, and they're going to be pretty damn
limited there.
Not to mention inbreeding.
Better take a big fridge of sperm and egg samples,
or start playing those banjos now...
Ah, but even though all spaceflight in our solar system is exciting,
there is no life anywhere except on earth. All the NASA probe looking
on Mars, Cassini mission to Titan, future Europa probes, etc. to what
end? All lifeless chemical worlds.
That's only looking at one system though.
If the colonists head somewhere that might suit them,
chances are it already suits beings who won't be fobbed off
with a few beads and a dose of smallpox.
The nearest habitable place is "New Earth"
in the Alpha Cen system as in this story.
Erm, what makes you think that?
We strain to detect massive gas giants around relatively near stars.
Earth masses are tiny in comparison.
Ahad's spirit is already gone there.
Along with his common sense?
|
It's just Sci-Fi, as opposed to actual Science Fiction. They used to call
it "Space Opera." I think maybe in Ahad's country they've just now got
around to translating '50's pulps.
And don't forget such classics as "Lost in Space" and "Space 1949^H^H99".
;-)
Cheers!
Rich
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Mark Fergerson
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Jan 04, 2005 4:26 am Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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JeffM wrote:
| Quote: | if humanity did [make] an ark with 100% recycling
and 45,000 years of fuel and life support,
then do they really even need to launch it?
Kryten
IIRC, Tucson's Biosphere 2 Human Greenhouse was a flop.
Jim Thompson
They underestimated how much land and biomass it took to support a
human.
The residents were soon on partial rations.
Heh. If it wasn't for water imports,
the L.A. Basin would be nothing more than a few scattered villages.
http://www.google.com/search?&q=los-angeles-basin+could-naturally-support-*-people
|
I kept trying to point that out to RSW but he just won't
accept it.
| Quote: | photosynthesis is very inefficient (c. 0.02%?)
so they'd have to be replaced by a more efficient CO2 to O2 processor.
Biosphere II pointed out their lousy calculations on that too
--they had to "open the windows".
Cornwall is right; failed experiments can be important too.
|
If the planners had said "We expect to fail", would they
have gotten funding?
Mark L. Fergerson |
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Earl
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Jan 04, 2005 4:29 am Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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"Dreamer" <javidhussain@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:1104789840.581265.197870@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
| Quote: | Earl wrote:
"Dreamer" <javidhussain@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:1104767710.113105.102830@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
So after accelerating to a decent velocity they divert to
the Oort Cloud, slow down to add more reaction mass?
The Oort cloud is circling in a belt all the way round the
sun, you encounter it when travelling out in all directions
from our solar system.
|
Right, you encounter it as you pass through it.
To mine an object in the Oort Cloud you have to kill all the
velocity you worked so hard to acquire, then match course with
the rock.
So basicly you are building up to 1000+ kps, them decelerate to
around 10 kps and load up the ice. Then accelerate back up to
1000 kps.
The best way to describe this is; DUMB!!!
To say nothing about the density of objects. Asteroids are about
250,000 miles apart. In the Oort and Kuyper Belts you are
working at multi millions of miles between objects. |
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Kryten
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Jan 04, 2005 5:26 am Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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"Dreamer" <javidhussain@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1104790242.158886.230240@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
| Quote: | Remember, comparatively speaking, this is a very "slow" mode of
interstellar travel and the ship never attains speeds much greater than
those of the Voyager spacecraft presently leaving our solar system (at
less than 40,000 km/hour). The mining is going to be very infrequently
needed, and in most cases the comets are going to be disintegrated in
front of the ship and their icy fragments scooped up by funnels
extended around the ship's outer bodywork in-flight. This is
demonstrated in Chapter 5 in the story.
|
You are still travelling many times faster than a rifle bullet.
Do the math: Kinetic energy = half the mass times the square of the
velocity.
40x10^3 km/hr = 11,111 m/s
therefore each kilo of mass hitting your funnels releases
61,728,395 J of energy
which would be the equivalent of
14.75 kilos of TNT (4.184 MJ/kg)!
That's a decent size bomb!
What are you going to make the funnels out of?!
| Quote: | Anyone causing trouble will be thrown out, as simple as that!
|
Violence is seldom that simple.
Threat of lethal force isn't working in today's conflicts is it?
| Quote: | The MMC has a small force of police officers who patrol the streets of
Utopia, and law and order are legislated the same way as in a small
state here on Earth. There is a court building in Utopia with a couple
of MMC appointed judges, who exercise judicial duties in conformance to
the starship's statute books. "
|
We have legal systems here too. They cope with small numbers, not with civil
warfare.
| Quote: | "You don't make enemies on a small boat!".
|
They shouldn't, but they will.
I find the smaller the boat, the sooner people get on each other's tits.
I bet the day people get on, there will be a fight over who gets a window
seat.
| Quote: | From an early age through school, college and university
children are brought up in a culture of understanding and mutual
respect for one another and the community is very cohesive as a result
of their complete isolation.
|
ROTFLMAO. Have you met any real humans?
| Quote: | There are strict surveillance and
monitoring methods in place along with robust security systems enforced
by the MMC throughout the ship."
|
A police state?
| Quote: | The ship computer and central nervous system is wired up to monitor
every square inch of its biosphere with CCTV and such like. You don't
mess about on Ahad's starship!
|
Are you by any chance Ahad under a fake name? |
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Rich Grise
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Jan 04, 2005 12:14 pm Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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On Mon, 03 Jan 2005 15:26:05 -0700, Mark Fergerson wrote:
| Quote: | JeffM wrote:
if humanity did [make] an ark with 100% recycling
and 45,000 years of fuel and life support,
then do they really even need to launch it?
Kryten
IIRC, Tucson's Biosphere 2 Human Greenhouse was a flop.
Jim Thompson
They underestimated how much land and biomass it took to support a
human.
The residents were soon on partial rations.
Heh. If it wasn't for water imports,
the L.A. Basin would be nothing more than a few scattered villages.
http://www.google.com/search?&q=los-angeles-basin+could-naturally-support-*-people
I kept trying to point that out to RSW but he just won't
accept it.
photosynthesis is very inefficient (c. 0.02%?)
so they'd have to be replaced by a more efficient CO2 to O2 processor.
Biosphere II pointed out their lousy calculations on that too
--they had to "open the windows".
Cornwall is right; failed experiments can be important too.
If the planners had said "We expect to fail", would they
have gotten funding?
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Yeah, well, I think that's the point of the discussion - define "fail".
Cheers!
Rich |
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John Savard
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Jan 04, 2005 12:51 pm Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 21:43:39 GMT, "Kryten"
<kryten_droid_obfusticator@ntlworld.com> wrote, in part:
| Quote: | I mean, you could just park it somewhere and get in it.
|
Unfortunately, you would also have to find a way to uninvent the can
opener.
John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html |
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John Savard
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Jan 04, 2005 12:54 pm Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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On Tue, 04 Jan 2005 06:14:36 GMT, Rich Grise <richgrise@example.net>
wrote, in part:
| Quote: | Yeah, well, I think that's the point of the discussion - define "fail".
|
If they had made a more accurate calculation of how much supporting
plant life a human population requires, then considerably more
information would have been obtained from whether the experimental area
could remain isolated indefinitely.
Proving a ridiculously low estimate wrong isn't really something we
learn much from.
So it failed in the other sense too.
John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html |
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John Savard
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Jan 04, 2005 12:57 pm Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 07:34:11 +0000, John Woodgate
<jmw@jmwa.demon.contraspam.yuk> wrote, in part:
| Quote: | Even more. Positive results are just confirmation. Negative results are
doorways to new knowledge.
|
But if their numbers were very badly off in terms of what we already
knew, then the experiment was a waste of time and money.
Given the state of the Earth with *its* current population, we have an
example of an overstressed ecosystem close at hand.
Even a replicated Earth in miniature might fail over time if things are
left out. We learn from experiments whose results, positive or negative,
cannot be anticipated in advance.
John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html |
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Starlight-Starbright
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Jan 04, 2005 7:18 pm Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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Excuse the french... but when was "Ahad" alive? Is he a UK person?
cheers!!!
S-S |
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Mark Fergerson
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Jan 05, 2005 1:40 am Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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Rich Grise wrote:
| Quote: | On Mon, 03 Jan 2005 15:26:05 -0700, Mark Fergerson wrote:
JeffM wrote:
|
<snip>
| Quote: | Biosphere II pointed out their lousy calculations on that too
--they had to "open the windows".
Cornwall is right; failed experiments can be important too.
If the planners had said "We expect to fail", would they
have gotten funding?
Yeah, well, I think that's the point of the discussion - define "fail".
|
In your usual scientific experiment, error bars are
pre-defined in terms of the precision of the hardware and
methodology used to test the theory, and the data examined
afterward to see if it fits within the predicted error bars.
If so, the theory is presumed to have passed, but some
refining is indicated if frinst the data is within the error
bars but all to one side of them. If not, the theory is
shown to have failed (barring equipment screwups etc).
Either case is a "failure", but they're not the same
_kind_ of failure, and it's important to know which
occurred; the theory may be completely wrong, or it may just
need some tweaking. But how to know without predicting its
range of utility?
Personally I think it was a failure of the second kind;
they were basically building a terrarium big enough for
people to live in and assuming that it'd be stable over
short and long terms. Now your average terrarium is a World
In Miniature; a minimalized steady-state self-sustaining
ecology (with adequate energy input) that models essential
aspects of the entire planetary ecology of the Earth. But
the Earth is _not_ a steady-state ecology; frinst it
experiences long-term swings in energy input that drive
climatic changes that change the depth and breadth of plant
and animal niches, subsequently driving the appearance and
extinction of entire species without human "help". FTM it's
not short-term stable either due to vulcanism, weather
quirks, and direct biological interactions that produce
population explosions and like that again without human
"help", but some people don't want to hear that. ISTM the
"essential aspects" weren't well-defined, guaranteeing failure.
Were _any_ error bars defined for either Bio(must...
resist... temptation... to type "Dome") project, or was it
simply assumed that because it was based on "Green"
philosophical premises it _must_ work thus predicting error
bars at all would be tantamount to dissing the premises?
If the latter, somebody needs to look a little closer at
how actual ecologies work instead of requiring Nature to
follow their particular naive philosophy.
I'm guessing that the funders had a "Green" agenda which
had to be appealed to (that didn't allow for either kind of
failure mentioned above), so nobody mentioned the possible
failure modes.
To wander back to the topic, I wonder what aspects Ahad
considers "essential".
Mark L. Fergerson |
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Ben Bradley
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Jan 05, 2005 10:48 am Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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In a crosspost to the newsgroups:
sci.electronics.equipment,
sci.electronics.design and
rec.arts.sf.science,
on 3 Jan 2005 14:10:42 -0800, "Dreamer" <javidhussain@hotmail.com>
wrote:
| Quote: | Humans can't seem to go one lifetime without having at least one major
conflict over.
Most wars are over limited resources, and they're going to be pretty
damn
limited there.
Anyone causing trouble will be thrown out, as simple as that!
|
"Open the pod bay door, Hal."
| Quote: | "How are law and order enforced on this ship?
The MMC has a small force of police officers who patrol the streets of
Utopia, and law and order are legislated the same way as in a small
state here on Earth. There is a court building in Utopia with a couple
of MMC appointed judges, who exercise judicial duties in conformance to
the starship's statute books. "
and
"What happens when there are cultural/religious conflicts?
"You don't make enemies on a small boat!". This line is more true here
...
The ship computer and central nervous system is wired up to monitor
every square inch of its biosphere with CCTV and such like. You don't
mess about on Ahad's starship!
|
"OPEN THE POD BAY DOOR, HAL."
-----
http://mindspring.com/~benbradley |
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John Woodgate
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Jan 05, 2005 1:39 pm Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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I read in sci.electronics.design that Ben Bradley <ben_nospam_bradley@mi
ndspring.com> wrote (in <esrmt05jm26gh3vnpvp35rjn586mdcvv1q@4ax.com>)
about 'Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Concept by A.
Ahad', on Wed, 5 Jan 2005:
| Quote: | "OPEN THE POD BAY DOOR, HAL."
|
"Say 'please'!"
--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
The good news is that nothing is compulsory.
The bad news is that everything is prohibited.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk |
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Dreamer
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Jan 05, 2005 4:33 pm Post subject:
Re: Colony ship to Alpha Centauri - The Motion Picture Conce |
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Starlight-Starbright wrote:
| Quote: | Excuse the french... but when was "Ahad" alive? Is he a UK person?
cheers!!!
|
Your the third one to ask me this. If its not a wind up, yes his a UK
person (born in Bangladesh though). He wants to make a $100 million
hollywood film "First Ark to Alpha Centuri" (very ambitious). I have
done a 6 page biography on the boy here--
http://www.geocities.com/javid_hssn/science/astronomy/ahad.html
Whatever the story line you should see the exotic weather on this ship.
"Since the gravity vectors are constantly changing in the "Centauri
Princess" artificial gravity spin, the rainfall and winds will be sure
to cause some exotic weather phenomena throughout this ingeniously
designed starship of the future...!"
His FAQ page has all the detail---
http://uk.geocities.com/aa_spaceagent/fiction/FAQ.html
JH |
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