Anything about extraterrestrial life

[H2Oxide]

You guys won't like my answer. Not sure if I should post it.

This is a mature board. If we disagree with what you have to say, we'll discuss it. That's what the thread is for.

 

[Alaskan]

Meh.... posts are sometimes made just to poke people in the eye, for one reason or another. I don't know where a guy could be coming from with that kind of remark and not adding more.

 

[H2Oxide]

Meh.... posts are sometimes made just to poke people in the eye, for one reason or another. I don't know where a guy could be coming from with that kind of remark and not adding more.

He could also just be attention whoring, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. Either way, unless he has an actual opinion or theory (even if it's unpopular), making such a post won't be positive for his rep count.

 

[Alaskan]

Well I wear a tin hat myself, but not to shield myself from them, as an antenna so they can beam me up easier.

 

[Jhop]

Well I wear a tin hat myself, but not to shield myself from them, as an antenna so they can beam me up easier.

:crackup: or so they can read your mind easier? :tinfoil:

 

[Alaskan]

But, of course.... Might frighten them away for all I know.

 

[Razako]

You guys won't like my answer. Not sure if I should post it.

Necroing a 6 month old thread to post this? Honestly I'm tempted to -rep for this.

 

[Alaskan]

Personally, from my perspective, this one is necro posting when he added a silly little remark and didn't really add to the thread. I don't mind posting to very old threads, even years old, if someone is sincerely interested in the thread, but this one doesn't show that, so you are right.

 

[Benm]

New evidence would be welcome indeed

I personally believe that there is life in the universe in other places that earth or even our solar system. What capabilities such life may have is a big unknown, and perhaps the speed of light is a hard limitation so we may never know even if it's intelligent and just 1000 lightyears away from us.

There are so many options for it that it's hard to imagine what it would look like. For example, alien intelligent life could be entirely aquatic if developed on a planet without land. It might be more intelligent than we are, but have no means of space travel if their world is covered in water and they need to be in water to survive, especially if their world has a bit more surface gravity than ours.

These things are fairly critical: if earth was 10% larger we could not go to the moon, let alone outer space, using chemical rockets.

 

[Alaskan]

I keep seeing highly educated people in documentaries and videos who talk about the dream to know if there is other life in the universe, yet if you search with your eyes wide open there is evidence that they do exist and have been interacting with humanity for a very long time. There are photo's and movies of such craft from years ago before we had software to easily fake them. And the individuals who claim to have seen silently hovering craft which can zip away at speeds beyond what our own technology cannot be denied so easily, airline pilots have been fired for reporting seeing huge craft which dwarf the size of anything we have. Because of this I do not understand the disparity we have between our so called educated leaders and real world observation from credible individuals. I've been a pilot since I was in my teens and I too can be counted among those who have seen these advanced craft. Seeing is more than believing, seeing is knowing.

Must suck to live on a planet where you can't get to space using chemical rockets, or maybe it is the other way around, we suck using them as they are too expensive, requiring huge amounts of effort compared to more advanced technologies which can be used, if we were bright enough to figure it out.

 

[Razako]

I keep seeing highly educated people in documentaries and videos who talk about the dream to know if there is other life in the universe, yet if you search with your eyes wide open there is evidence that they do exist and have been interacting with humanity for a very long time. There are photo's and movies of such craft from years ago before we had software to easily fake them. And the individuals who claim to have seen silently hovering craft which can zip away at speeds beyond what our own technology cannot be denied so easily, airline pilots have been fired for reporting seeing huge craft which dwarf the size of anything we have. Because of this I do not understand the disparity we have between our so called educated leaders and real world observation from credible individuals. I've been a pilot since I was in my teens and I too can be counted among those who have seen these advanced craft. Seeing is more than believing, seeing is knowing.

Must suck to live on a planet where you can't get to space using chemical rockets, or maybe it is the other way around, we suck using them as they are too expensive, requiring huge amounts of effort compared to more advanced technologies which can be used, if we were bright enough to figure it out.

Perhaps if Chemical rockets weren't viable we would be motivated to find actual GOOD ways of putting things in orbit. Instead we've simply grown complacent, and depend too heavily on this dead-end technology.

Chemical rockets are sort of like coal for power generation. They had an important role, but they really do suck, and if we cannot kind find something better we're gonna have issues accomplishing meaningful things out in space.

 

[H2Oxide]

Perhaps if Chemical rockets weren't viable we would be motivated to find actual GOOD ways of putting things in orbit. Instead we've simply grown complacent, and depend too heavily on this dead-end technology.

Chemical rockets are sort of like coal for power generation. They had an important role, but they really do suck, and if we cannot kind find something better we're gonna have issues accomplishing meaningful things out in space.

While there are lots of propulsion technologies that provide a higher specific impulse than chemical rockets (liquid rockets have something like 4000 m/s effective exhaust velocity while ion thrusters have something around 20,000 m/s IIRC), chemical rockets are the only thing with a high enough thrust-to-weight ratio.

So while it's far better to use things like ion thrusters in space, they just don't have the power to initially get off the ground. Other proposed launch methods such as the space gun or space elevator, while they might work, would be incredibly dangerous and/or prohibitively expensive. So, for the time being I think we're stuck with chemical propulsion.

 

[Razako]

While there are lots of propulsion technologies that provide a higher specific impulse than chemical rockets (liquid rockets have something like 4000 m/s effective exhaust velocity while ion thrusters have something around 20,000 m/s IIRC), chemical rockets are the only thing with a high enough thrust-to-weight ratio.

So while it's far better to use things like ion thrusters in space, they just don't have the power to initially get off the ground. Other proposed launch methods such as the space gun or space elevator, while they might work, would be incredibly dangerous and/or prohibitively expensive. So, for the time being I think we're stuck with chemical propulsion.

Well that's why I've said we would probably be better off just shelving ideas of manned space exploration until we can figure out some new techs. If chemical rockets are truly the best we can do, then we can forget about colonizing space/other worlds. It just costs too much to get stuff up there. The only way around this problem would be to manufacture stuff directly in space by harvesting asteroids or something, and we're nowhere near technologically advanced enough to do that.

As for alternate launch technologies:
-The main problem with an electromagnetic space gun as I understand is the extreme G forces the payload would be subjected to. This makes it an unworkable solution for launching humans or delicate components into orbit. Theoretically it COULD be used to launch raw materials into space where they could then be processed into things.
-The Space Elevator is like the "Fusion Power" of payload launching. A scientific holy grail which would make it relatively cheap and practical to lift things into orbit. It's amazing to dream about, however it's unlikely to become reality without some crazy advances in material science.

Other than those two 'future tech options', I cannot think of many other ways to launch stuff into orbit without bringing up 'sci-fi' stuff which has no basis in known science. I mean if we find some kind of anti-gravity drive that would be great, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

 

[Benm]

It's an interesting idea at least. If the earth were a fair bit heavier and using chemical rockets was not a viable method of getting something into orbit, we would have to go -some- other way around that.

One option would be to actually use nuclear rockets which are theoretically sound, but obviously -very- dangerous when they were to explode or otherwise fail.

IF we would have this gravity problem and discarded nuclear rockets due to the danger, the question would be if we would have developed some alternative method by now, or still be earth-bound and just live with the lack of things like satellites.

Satellites are very useful for all kinds of things, but not absolutely essential for our way of life in a broad sense. We are used to things like sat tv and gps, but the tv thing is really about to be phased out and most data connections are done with cables, even to the other side of the planet.

You could probably do a very decent location finding system using only radio towers on earth as well, it's not that all planes and ships got hopelessly lost before the introduction of gps, let alone that people had no clue on how to drive from a to b.

The most important thing we would lack from having to access to space is knowledge about space.

 

[basshed]

Seems like space travel won't get serious investment for R&D until space resources are economically viable for commercial exploitation.

 

[Benm]

Getting this like satellites into space is a feasible business. Things like GPS are government funded project to a large degree, but much of satellite tv around the world is a commerical endeavour paid for with private investment.

If you mean things like mining that may take a while. A primary required would be something that is hardly or not available on earth, is availble on for example the moon, mars, asteroids and has commerical applications. There currently aren't many substances that meet those criteral, perhaps lithium from the moon once we get fusion reactors to work.