7 Earth-Size Planets Found by NASA

[Smitty-48]

Also bear in mind, the energy is just one problem, even if you had some sort of limitless transdimensional energy being drawn through quantum mechanics, I mean, forget uranium fission, transdimensional quantum energy sources is what you would have to be accessing, but even if you could obtain this unobtainium, that's still doesn't get you to 99% the speed of light, because as you accelerate further and further into high sub luminal speeds, you would be generating a bow wave, a sub atomic particle storm, which would act as a brake to cap your acceleration, long before you ever got close to 99% of the speed of light.

Then there's just plain old collision, at relativistic speeds, you have no way of detecting debris in your path in time to turn, and no time to get out its way, so if you run into anything with more mass than a subatomic particle, it's going to be a massive release of energy, which would destroy your ship in a fraction of the blink of an eye.

If you impact with a tiny speck which weighs only a tenth of a gram, that impact is still 180 million megajoules of kinetic energy, which is 45 kilotons of explosive power, hitting one speck of dust, is three Hiroshima bombs worth of energy, at 297,000 kilometres per second.

You don't have any way of detecting things in front of you, because you're at 99% the speed of radar, infrared, whatever EM you can think of, so even if you could detect a speck of debris the size of a grain of rice, you won't have time to do anything about it, before it plows into you with the force equivalent of an atomic bomb.

There's no way to navigate at 297,000 kilometres per second, your perception would be limited to a circular disk of blue light to your front in a sea of darkness all around, it would provide no information, and everything on your trajectory would be coming at you at near the speed of light, and when you ran into anything, no matter how small, anywhere along your 400 trillion kilometre journey, it would be boom, and buh-bye.

There's not a whole lot of debris in interstellar space, unless you're talking crossing 400 trillion kilometres of it, at which point the odds of impacting something of significant mass exceeds 100%, you're talking many thousands of such impacts, over 400 trillion kilometres and 41 years of objective time, any one of which, would anihilate your ship at faster than the speed of thought.

[C-Mag]

Well finding these planets is just perfect.

The establishment is pushing into a cold war with Russia, we just as well be in a space race with them too.

Make the Space Race Great Again !

[Smitty-48]

That's all these space programs really are, political cover for the Military Industrial Congressional Complex for the purposes of weaponizing space, they talk about Alpha Centauri, but what you're really funding is the development of technology for Ballistic Missile Defense, Prompt Global Strike, Anti-Sattelite, etcetera, ultimately, in pursuit of preemptive counterforce first strike enablers in a nuclear war.

As with all Cold War Legacy Projects; it's all about the nukes, and of course, the associated pork in the districts. You might get some commercial spin offs out of it, but it ain't spinning off to Alpha Centauri, I mean, get real.

[C-Mag]

I don't know how much of space has been weaponized but you get little clues now and then. Like we just had an Air Force drone come back after something like 2 years in space.

IMO, if we got to Mars in my lifetime it would be a miracle and that miracle couldn't even take place with out exponentially aggressive advancement in technology and commitment of resources.

We went to the moon a couple times and then nothing for coming on 50 years. We have a hell of a time keeping and international space station going, as far as I know haven't really gotten anywhere on a Lunar space station. Don't we have to have a space station on the moon, with essentially NASAs space garage in place, with enough workers there to prepare a ship for a long mission, plus a launch facility, plus support facilities and staff. How in the hell are we going to do that ?

I feel about this like I do AGW/Climate change. We can't keep a spillway at a dam in California in good repair, we've got an entire region of the planet in chaos, and we've manage to fuck up professional football. If we can't get that shit straightened out, how we even going to take the steps to be prepared for some kind of deep space mission.

[Smitty-48]

Just because weapons are not in orbit at any particular moment, does not mean that space is not being weaponized, ICBM's are space weapons, they've only had one mission so far, to deliver a payload on a parabolic trajectory, generally nuclear, but Prompt Global Strike is really just a euphemism for widely expanding the mission of the ICBM.

It's all in the payload, the payload could be a maneuving hypersonic vehicle which appears to launch in one direction through space, but then ducks back down into the atmophere to strike a land target without telegraphing where it is going, so you could launch an ICBM on what appears to be a benign trajectory, but once the payload is deployed in space, there's no telling it where it could go and what it could do, could come back down in a unexpected place without warning, or it could go up and hunt things in orbit, could be nuclear, could be conventional, could be ASAT, could be EMP, PGS is a whole new horizon of space based weaponry, even when it's just sitting in a silo on alert.

Space weapons may not be up at all times in peacetime, but you can extrapolate based on what capabilities are being developed, for if/when the gloves come off. If/when the gloves come off is when all the birds will go up, you just have to look at what flocks are gathering, to figure out how weaponized it would get and how quickly, if/when the jockeying commenced to contest the high ground.

Once all these weapons are on alert, they can be five minutes notice to launch, five minutes from space, so ever ten minutes away, from a full on space battle, they don't have to stay in orbit, although, no doubt some are being snuck up there covertly even as we speak, dual use clandestine weapons, seeded into space to get the jump.

The Air Force is taking the next logical step, trending towards an Aerospace Force, wherein it's like a space navy, where it can go up and down, above and below the surface, up above the atmosphere to go far and fast, then back down into the atmoshere to hide behind the horizon, and vice versa, when you're up in orbit it's like being a surface combatant, when you duck into the atmosphere it's like being a submarine, except its all moving at hypersonic speeds.

When you're in orbit, they can see you, but you're going very fast, in any direction and to anyplace, and they don't know where and when you're going to make your move, when you duck back into the atmosphere behind the horizon, whoops, you just went into stealth mode, made your move, but to where and to do what? Can go the other way as well, could be bopping along in stealth mode behind the horizon, can't see you coming, then suddenly boost up into orbit sharply to engage something in space.

Prompt Global Strike; ICBM's for any mission, anytime, anywhere, without warning, nor any way to defend against it.

[ssu]

Tells a lot of debates around here this debate, we got to nukes after was it 7 pages.

Anyway, great find the planets. Have to say it's nice to live now, when we genuinely are at a starting point at finding and study of exoplanets. Hence there it at least one thing that is in infancy in astronomy.

[SuburbanFarmer]

We will get there, sooner or later, if we don't destroy ourselves first. Don't mistake Einstein's theories for some kind of Final Understanding of physics, or current propulsion technologies for the 'best we can come up with'. There are many mysteries left to uncover.

[Montegriffo]

This is the part of the debate where I usually ask, why bother? What's the point of travelling huge distances to find some slime on the underneath of a rock? Are there not plenty of more pressing issues to expend our brain power and resources on?

[SuburbanFarmer]

This is the part of the debate where I usually ask, why bother? What's the point of travelling huge distances to find some slime on the underneath of a rock? Are there not plenty of more pressing issues to expend our brain power and resources on?

...and this is the part where I post an inspirational treatise on the potential for radical societal changes, once we realize that we're not some 'anointed species', and just another bit of slime on a rock, and the possibility of expanding our species' survival throughout eons, rather than a few short millenia on a forgotten dust mote.

Which then gets ignored and forgotten the next time this topic comes up.

[apeman]

. Have to say it's nice to live now, when we genuinely are at a starting point at finding and study of exoplanets. Hence there it at least one thing that is in infancy in astronomy.

That's a nice perspective that inspires me to at least give a minor fuck about this. Thanks