3. Atmospheric studies of potentially habitable exoplanets (colonization)
— Agent Smith
Easy there, conquistador. :sweat: — 180 Proof


:lol:

Enthusiastic as ever! — Hillary

Smith is quite the optimist. I wonder if he's anticipating warp drive, suspended animation, teleportation - or something else.

Smith is quite the optimist. I wonder if he's anticipating warp drive, suspended animation, teleportation - or something else. — Relativist

Haha! Who knows. If you go fast enough you can reach billions of lightyears in 80 years. Only the CMBR poses a velocity limit.

Interesting that the first fire up of James Webb for observing the biggest objects in reality, coincides with the startup of the improved CERN Large Hydron Collider to observe the smallest objects in reality.

Indeed! Another strange coincidence today. Two large gas explosions, one in Cuba and one in Spain.

When are new experiments at CERN to be expected? I would advise them to smash electrons.

If you go fast enough you can reach billions of lightyears in 80 years. Only the CMBR poses a velocity limit. — Hillary

Even removing the speed of light limitation, you still need to accelerate to some maximum velocity halfway there, and then decelerate for the second half. Acceleration potential would be limited by the amount of G force humans can sustain for a long period. Need a large (or renewable) energy source. Dillithium crystals are in short supply. I wish you luck on your journey!

I’ve read that it would take 33 years to accelerate a vehicle containing humans to as near as you get to the speed of light - although being in a ship accelerating continuously for that long would present many challenges. It would also require more energy than that produced by the whole of industrial civilization so far. So, ain’t going to happen,

Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Starshot will attempt to send craft accelerated by lasers focused on sails to Alpha Centauri, 4.37 lya. But each ‘vehicle’ is a microchip weighing but a few grams. Nothing like big meaty air-breathing primate body.

Antimatter could do the trick. It's a bit expensive though: about $62.5 trillion a gram. And you need a few ounces...

It's hard to be green. The Celestial Handbook says that there is only one green star. Others have denied even this one instance. But that can't be so, can it?

It would actually make more sense to say that the Sun is a typical green star once we get to know it.

The problem is that the wise explanations for the lack of greenness contradict each other so they can't all be right. But fortunately we now have both the Hubble and the JWST to search the skies for the right answer.

The Sun emits most power in green. Green power!

It's hard to be green. — magritte

:lol:

Smith is quite the optimist. I wonder if he's anticipating warp drive, suspended animation, teleportation - or something else. — Relativist

I'm not an optimist. I'm just tired of being a Gloomy Gus! I thought I might try on some optimism; you know, a test-drive of sorts! No untoward events to report till date. :grin:

It's full of stars? Is that what Webb has shown? Great discovery!

But one thing these images have in common is that they're all what's called diffraction limited and that means they can't get any sharper because of the effects of light diffracting off of the telescope hardware and the internal optics of the instrument. So really these images are as sharp and as best focused as the laws of physics and optics allow. — Christian Ready (Content Creator)

A good template for an argument that this world is the best of all possible worlds (re Leibniz).

MIRI arsenic-doped Silicon (Si:As) Detector.

Arsenic?! Was that the best material for the job?

MIRI arsenic-doped Silicon (Si:As) Detector.

Arsenic?! Was that the best material for the job? — Agent Smith

:lol:

Arsenic is dope for life!

It's full of stars!!! — JWST

Olber's Paradox

What's the latest on the JWST? Did we find ET?

A tiny meteoroid struck the newly deployed James Webb Space Telescope in May, knocking one of its gold-plated mirrors out of alignment but not changing the orbiting observatory's schedule to become fully operational shortly, NASA said on Wednesday.

Engineers believe it can be rectified.

Story here https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-09/meteorite-strikes-james-webb-telescope/101137762

A tiny meteoroid struck the newly deployed James Webb Space Telescope in May, knocking one of its gold-plated mirrors out of alignment but not changing the orbiting observatory's schedule to become fully operational shortly, NASA said on Wednesday.

Most unfortunate! :groan:

I hope the JWST team had anticipated such eventualities i.e. the gold mirrors can self-correct and restore the proper alignment.

That's a good idea. Daily scrapes and cuts on my hands heal due to inherited self-correcting mechanisms that regenerate my skin automatically. Perhaps some future space telescope will grow new golden skin as needed.

:up: Keep dreaming!

God put a bullet through our 10 billion dollar toy.

Cosmic censorship! What does the damaged section of the mirror prevent us from seeing? I'm sure we can virtually reconstruct the image just like how AI can subtract out atmospheric aberration in terrestrial telescopic images.

Coming from JWST,

“My hope is that JWST will provide firm detections of numerous terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres along with a census of a few key molecules,” — Planetary Society

and

whether the planets TRAPPIST-1b, c, g, and h have an atmosphere or not, and to do that, we will try to detect features of molecules such as carbon dioxide, water, and ozone in the transit spectra of those planets.” — Planetary Society

What if, just what if, the US has developed warp drives for FTL interstellar travel? The JWST is simply scouring the heavens for habitable exoplanets to explore colonize.

Why colonize exoplanets?

Why colonize exoplanets? — 180 Proof

It's a basic biological drive?

It's an even more "basic biological drive" to remain in one's ecological niche.

I'm utterly sceptical about the prospects for interstellar travel. The distances involved are simply too vast to be contemplated, outside of science fiction anyway. Have a read of the logistics of Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Starshot. The aim is to send microchip-based sensors to Alpha Centauri, propelled by laser beams focused on 'lightsails'.

Light propulsion requires enormous power: a laser with a gigawatt of power (approximately the output of a large nuclear plant) would provide only a few newtons of thrust. The spaceship will compensate for the low thrust by having a mass of only a few grams. The camera, computer, communications laser, a nuclear power source, and the solar sail must be miniaturized to fit within a mass limit. All components must be engineered to endure extreme acceleration, cold, vacuum, and protons. The spacecraft will have to survive collisions with space dust; Starshot expects each square centimeter of frontal cross-section to collide at high speed with about a thousand particles of size at least 0.1 μm. Focusing a set of lasers totaling one hundred gigawatts onto the solar sail will be difficult due to atmospheric turbulence, so there is the suggestion to use space-based laser infrastructure. According to The Economist, at least a dozen off-the-shelf technologies will need to improve by orders of magnitude.

And that's sending for sending microchips about the size of your thumbnail. Note the craft are accelerated at 10,000g - which raises another point. If you put humans in a vehicle it would take > 30 years simply to accelerate to a feasible sub-light-speed velocity, and even moving at that speed, the journey to the nearest interstellar objects would be thousands of years in duration. Longer than the elapse of time between today and the construction of the pyramids.

Frankly, I believe the science-fiction longing for interstellar travel is actually a sublimated desire for heaven, which is deemed to no longer exist by our materialist culture.

It's an even more "basic biological drive" to remain in one's ecological niche. — 180 Proof

Good one! Nonetheless expansionism - the bane of humanity! The world is not enough! Too many mouths to feed, oui monsieur?

Much obliged for the reply - you're up to speed with the latest on interstellar travel. Michio Kaku has a book that has a chapter in using lasers for space travel and as you so rightly pointed out, miniaturization is the key. We should invest in nanotech, I hope some countries/companies are! Fingers crossed.

You might be interested in knowing that Michio Kaku explores the possibility of encoding our consciousness in light and then using lasers to carry it across the universe!