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#26 2014-04-17 21:56:46

Tom Kalbfus
Banned
Registered: 2006-08-16
Posts: 4,401

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Terraformer wrote:

However, Person A never gets to go, so there isn't really any point.

You may well be able to grow the economy by creating more people, but *that's not important*. What's important is how much each individual has. It's no use being twice as wealthy if your population is doubled in the process, because you don't get any richer.

Ignoring, of course, the fact that you want to enslave trillions of AI persons...

that's not slavery, its merely taxation and redistribution. Lets say you have one trillion electronic people with a per capita income of $50,000 each and one billion flesh and blood humans that want to go to Alpha Centauri, if each electronic person pays $500 in taxes, that is $500,000 that can be spent on an interstellar ticket per year, so if the journey takes 13 years, that means $6,500,000 can be spent for each person on a one way ticket to Alpha Centauri, then all we got to do is get the travel cost down to $6,500,000 per person and have each electronic person pay 1% of their income in taxes to pay for the trip for each flesh and blood.

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#27 2014-04-18 00:38:30

JoshNH4H
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From: Pullman, WA
Registered: 2007-07-15
Posts: 2,538
Website

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

I thought you were opposed to redistribution


-Josh

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#28 2014-04-18 20:49:27

Tom Kalbfus
Banned
Registered: 2006-08-16
Posts: 4,401

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

If we are going to create people in electronic form, we need a reason to do so. The problem that needs to be solved is that we need to expand the economy tremendously in order to have interstellar colonization, all those people we create would be a means to an end, so in order to accomplish that end, a small portion of those created people's income needs to be redirected to finance the expensive interstellar voyages for flesh and bloods, consider it a debt they owe us for being created. 1% is an acceptable redistribution, what contemporary socialists want to do is redistribute in excess of 50% of a rich person's income to the poor for social programs. There is a big difference between 1% and 50%! I don't think we can create real people a fast as we could electronic people, and also flesh and blood humans would consume a lot more resources than the electronic equivalent of them, so we need a means of getting them off the Earth and transporting them to distance planets, including perhaps that Earth like planet orbiting a distant red dwarf 490 light years away. http://news.yahoo.com/found-first-earth … 57158.html
There probably are other Earthlike planets that are more Earthlike than this one, and transporting humans across a distance like 490 light years would be incredibly expensive, so we need a large enough economy to finance it. Today if people want more money they raise taxes, but in the future, we could just create more people paying the same 1% and can raise revenue that way.

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#29 2014-04-19 11:46:47

Terraformer
Member
From: Ceres
Registered: 2007-08-27
Posts: 3,800
Website

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

But why should they be made to pay for you to go to another star system?

You seem to have this idea that it's acceptable to enslave people as long as they aren't organic...


"I'm gonna die surrounded by the biggest idiots in the galaxy." - If this forum was a Mars Colony

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#30 2014-04-19 12:55:52

Tom Kalbfus
Banned
Registered: 2006-08-16
Posts: 4,401

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

So we don't get overcrowding on Earth. Electronic people don't make much of a crowd as they exist in cyberspace and can travel much more easily than physical objects, they are just information after all.

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#31 2014-04-19 16:20:32

Terraformer
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From: Ceres
Registered: 2007-08-27
Posts: 3,800
Website

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

They still need something to run on, and that thing still needs to move if they want to. I wouldn't expect that they would tolerate being killed and copied so that some meatbag can go to another planet.

Of course, this is predicated on the idea of sentient electronic people - not only on the idea that we can create them, but that we would choose to make them sentient. Non-sentient AI is much better, since there are no moral problems with making them work entirely for our benefit, there being no person to be enslaved.

It's also predicated on the idea that our economy will fundamentally remain the same, even through a technological singularity...


"I'm gonna die surrounded by the biggest idiots in the galaxy." - If this forum was a Mars Colony

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#32 2014-04-19 20:33:18

Tom Kalbfus
Banned
Registered: 2006-08-16
Posts: 4,401

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Terraformer wrote:

They still need something to run on, and that thing still needs to move if they want to. I wouldn't expect that they would tolerate being killed and copied so that some meatbag can go to another planet.

Of course, this is predicated on the idea of sentient electronic people - not only on the idea that we can create them, but that we would choose to make them sentient. Non-sentient AI is much better, since there are no moral problems with making them work entirely for our benefit, there being no person to be enslaved.

It's also predicated on the idea that our economy will fundamentally remain the same, even through a technological singularity...

For the electronic people their would be no singularity as they are the singularity and amongst themselves the same laws of economics would apply as they would keep on improving themselves so they have marketable skills. The more electronic people, the larger the economy and the more things it can afford to do One trillion people still would not fill the Solar System. Ultimately the population which this Solar System could hold in physical beings could be from one million to one billion times Earth's current population given the amount of material in the Solar System and the amount of energy the Sun radiates. We could arrive at a very large population of electronic people. I think their is an advantage to sentient beings in that the more of them there are, the faster technology will advance, they can figure out a way to get human to distant star systems.

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#33 2014-05-16 23:46:02

clark
Member
Registered: 2001-09-20
Posts: 6,362

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Make believe people do not a future make.

Oh, the irony.

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#34 2015-10-12 05:23:29

Tom Kalbfus
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Registered: 2006-08-16
Posts: 4,401

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

What makes a person is the mind, not the body.

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#35 2021-11-29 03:22:08

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

A Space Telescope With one job: Find Habitable Planets at Alpha Centauri
https://www.universetoday.com/153377/a- … -centauri/

Alpha Centauri is an unknown at the edge of human scifi imagination, it has also heavily featured in scifi and speculative fictional games like Lost in Space, Star Trek, James Cameron's Avatar, Buck Rogers, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, novels by Larry Niven.

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#36 2022-03-07 16:47:40

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Light sail could reach Proxima Centauri in 20 years
https://thedebrief.org/light-sail-could … -20-years/

Tiny laser-propelled spaceships could travel to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond
https://www.space.com/laser-propelled-s … xploration

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#37 2022-03-08 08:41:40

Calliban
Member
From: Northern England, UK
Registered: 2019-08-18
Posts: 3,352

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

'Is Alpha Centauri the new Mars'

No.  So many numbers get thrown around here, that it is easy to lose sight of how far away the stars are.  Simple distance comparison.  If the Earth were the size of a grape, the moon would be a pea about 12" away.  Mars would be a ball 0.5" wide, some 120-1000' away.  Somewhere between crossing your house and walking down the street.  Alpha Centauri would be like walking all the way around the world.  Think about that.  Going to Mars is a technical stretch for any nation; sending people and large payloads, is possible but is a challenge to the resources of the worlds leading institutions.  Musk, the richest man on Earth, is developing the transportation system.  But colonisation may be beyond his resources.  And this a planet that is a walk across the street on a cosmic scale.  The nearest star is all the way round the world.

It is interesting to talk about exoplanets, within the limits of what we even know about them.  But these are not realistic destinations for human beings any time soon.  By soon, I mean within the next several centuries or even millenia.  Forget about warp drives.  To bend the fabric of space by any measurable amount, the energy requirements compare to the power outputs of entire stars.  Harnessing that power would be a god-like achievement, far beyond near term human capability.  Deploying it any real space drive, is impossible by any physics we understand.  Materials would turn to superheated plasma when exposed to those energy fluxes.  So we are stuck with where we can get in human lifetimes, at realistic speeds only a small fraction of C.  Keep in mind most people are not willing to spend a large chunk of their life travelling in tin can.  Realistically, most of what we do in the next few centuries, will be inner solar system, with some much smaller presence extending into the outer planets.  There is no 'new Mars'.  No one has even set foot of the old one yet.  Ganymede and Callisto may qualify as realistic destinations in the centuries ahead.  But living in these places requires an abundance of energy that is beyond what we can achieve using nuclear fission.  Only full control of nuclear fusion, in power-dense devices, will get us beyond the asteroid belt.

Last edited by Calliban (2022-03-08 08:58:44)


"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."

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#38 2022-03-09 02:10:12

clark
Member
Registered: 2001-09-20
Posts: 6,362

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

You are not wrong. But. I'm mid stream in life. How i grew up is radically different than how my kids are growing up. The world is the same but changes at a cadence that I didn't see when i was a kid. Dreaming of mars as a teenager was radical, now it is a forgone conclusion.

There is a speed occurring. Our biggest dreams today may be the smallest imagination tomorrow.

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#39 2022-05-07 07:45:44

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Does the Centauri system, a mostly unknown now spark tales of imagination as Mars once did?


Italian word canale (plural canali) can mean "canal", "channel", "duct" or "gully"?

https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclope … anals.html

https://www.britannica.com/place/canals-of-Mars

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstuden … tians.html

https://scienceblogs.com/universe/2012/ … ls-of-mars


Free-Floating Planets as Interstellar Arks
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2022/05 … llar-arks/

Which Habitable Zone Planets Are the Best Candidates for Detecting Life?
https://aasnova.org/2022/05/03/which-ha … ting-life/

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-05-07 07:46:52)

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#40 2022-06-01 10:21:07

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Interstellar Travel Could Be Possible Even Without Spaceships, Scientist Says

https://www.thesciverse.com/2022/06/int … sible.html

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#41 2022-06-01 16:03:54

Calliban
Member
From: Northern England, UK
Registered: 2019-08-18
Posts: 3,352

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Mars_B4_Moon wrote:

Interstellar Travel Could Be Possible Even Without Spaceships, Scientist Says

https://www.thesciverse.com/2022/06/int … sible.html

Interesting topic.  The idea of using rogue planets or Oort cloud bodies as slow interstellar spacecraft has come up before.  Such strategies wouod only be attractive if the travellers (1) Are content to wait tens or hundreds of millenia before arriving; (2) It only really works if the humans do not need to change the velocity of the body substantially.  Otherwise you need gargantuin quantities of energy to move what is essentially an inert and useless icy mass.

In our solar system, if a robotic mission were to cancel the forward momentum of an Oort cloud object using timed thermonuclear detonations, it would fall towards the inner solar system.  This would require only a few hundred m/s delta-V.  A gravity assist with Jupiter, coukd boost its velocity by several km/s.  This would be sufficient additional KE to allow it to achieve solar escape velocity.

The red dwarf 2MASS J2146+3813 will pass within 1.56LY of the sun in approximately 72,000 years time.  Let us assume we were to use a gravity assist to launch an object onto a rendezvous course at the time of closest approach.  To rendezvous with the star, the body would need to leave the solar system with a velocity of 6.5 km/s relative to the sun.  This is somewhat less than the velocity of Voyager 2 (15.341 km/s) and is therefore well within the achievable velocity boost provided by a Jupiter gravity assist.  2MASS J2146+3813 is presently over 23LY from Earth and is moving towards us at about 85km/s.  When the rendezvous takes place, the residents of the Oort cloud body will need to leave in ships capable of accelerating to 85km/s to match velocity with the star.  All of this assumes, of course, that 2MASS J2146+3813 has a family of planets and orbiting bodies that are worthy of colonisation.  We would need to determine that before launching such a mission.

Last edited by Calliban (2022-06-01 16:44:03)


"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."

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#42 2022-08-01 12:52:14

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

MASS 4 Earths
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-super-ear … table.html
An exoplanet has been discovered by Subaru Telescope. The planet, Ross 508b, is a super-Earth and is located near the habitable zone.

Ross 508 distance from Earth is 36.58 light years.

Perhaps 2 , 312 , 212 point. 37 Astronomical Units from the Earth/Sun give or take, a lot of km or miles from Earth.


If they sent a Earth style technology spacecraft to use they would need to have already launched it during the Calabrian is a subdivision of the Pleistocene Epoch of the geologic time, before the Quaternary extinction events, a type of Platygonus "flat head" Boar roamed the Earth and there was a Brunhes–Matuyama magnetic reversal, during the Glacial miniums Japan was linked to Korea, Russia and China, Australia and Indonesia were one, Florida was huge and almost touched Cuba and the Caribbean islands, if you were a time machine astronaut you could have walked from France to England walked from Scotland to Norway, Russia, Sweden and walked Bear Island is the southernmost island of the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago, the Red Sea was a Red Lake as Africa and Arabia were one, the Sub Continent of India and Sri Lanka was the same place, if New Horizons were to go visit them it would get there in another 743,370 years.

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-08-01 13:14:06)

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#43 2022-10-20 07:04:47

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Even though Alpha Centauri is relatively near we know more about other more distant systems, the lack of knowledge might even compare to  Earth trojans asteroids that orbits the Sun in the vicinity of the Earth–Sun Lagrangian points

A little more distant than Alpha Centauri, Distance 640 ± 20 ly and another star.

WASP-121 a magnitude 10.4 star located approximately 850 light-years away in the constellation Puppis. WASP-121 has a mass and radius similar to the Sun's. Wasp-76b orbits its parent star at a distance of 0.033 AU with a period of 1.8 days. Its mass is 0.92 times that of Jupiter.

The "hot Jupiter" class planet WASP-76b discovered

Now there is WASP-76 b and WASP-121 b.

WASP-121b is the first exoplanet found to contain water in an extrasolar planetary stratosphere

planetary system included among 20 systems to be named by the third NameExoWorlds project
https://www.nameexoworlds.iau.org/2022exoworlds

The Heaviest Element Ever Seen in an Exoplanet’s Atmosphere: Barium
https://www.universetoday.com/158137/th … re-barium/

Proxima Centauri b or Proxima b sometimes referred to as Alpha Centauri Cb, is an exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160902073 … eddot.org/
,
http://www.proximacentauri.info/

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-10-20 07:07:36)

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#44 2023-02-18 09:38:09

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Alpha Centauri is still part of human imagination, nobody really knows what is there.

One day we might know those stars and planets but for now it is a mystery sometimes studied by experience of science and sometimes filled by human imagination.

For now there is another Sun measured.

The Mass of a Single Star (other than the Sun) has Been Directly Measured for the First Time
https://www.universetoday.com/160154/th … irst-time/

Planets in Alpha Centauri could be carbon-rich – if they exist
https://physicsworld.com/a/planets-in-a … hey-exist/

'War of the Worlds': Behind the 1938 Radio Show Panic
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie … -the-panic

Forget UFOs and aliens, here is the close encounter America needs to worry about
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/forget- … orry-about

Orson Welles and his troupe of radio actors interrupted the Columbia Broadcasting System's programming to "report" that our planet had been invaded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTvU9j3og5k

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#45 2023-03-22 04:58:39

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

A New Mission Will Search for Habitable Planets at Alpha Centauri

https://www.universetoday.com/160625/a- … -centauri/

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#46 2023-05-13 07:54:06

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

2 'super-Earth' exoplanets spotted in habitable zone of nearby star

https://www.space.com/super-earth-exopl … dwarf-tess



Astronomers have spotted two "super-Earth" exoplanets orbiting within the habitable zone of a nearby star.

    Each of the newfound exoplanets is slightly larger than our planet, and both circle the same red dwarf star.

The exoplanets were spotted by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) as they crossed, or "transited," the face of their parent star, TOI-2095, which lies around 137 light-years from our solar system. This transit caused dips in the light from the star, and analyzing those dips revealed the presence, as well as some characteristics, of the two planets.

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#47 2023-06-09 16:30:27

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Is it Time for a New Definition of “Habitable?”

https://www.universetoday.com/161164/is … habitable/

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#48 2023-08-09 13:59:30

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Astronomers discovered an exoplanet 31 light years away from Earth that could be habitable

https://www.mesonstars.com/space/astron … habitable/

There’s an Earth-like planet which humans could live on just 31 light-years away

https://www.joe.co.uk/science/theres-an … way-401076

Wolf 1069 b is perhaps the sixth-closest known Earth-mass planet within the conservatively-defined habitable zone, after Proxima Centauri b, Gliese 1061 d, Teegarden's Star c, and Gliese 1002 b & c.


Orson Welles: Warrior of the Worlds
https://forbiddenplanet.com/subscriptio … he-worlds/

Schiaparelli in high resolution
https://www.dlr.de/mars-express/en/desk … 16_read-1/

initial observations, he named the "seas" and "continents" of Mars during the planet's "great opposition" of 1877.  Before Chatbots we needed people who spoke Italian, from the incorrect translation into the term "canals", various assumptions were made about life on Mars

In fiction we have Avatar a film written and directed by James Cameron set in 2154, when Earth's RDA Corporation is mining a precious mineral called unobtanium on a lush habitable moon of the gas giant Polyphemus in the Alpha Centauri system.

GJ 1253, Wolf 1069, 2MASS J20260528+5834224
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-b … =Wolf+1069

Scientists believe that the planet sits within the habitable zone of its solar system - a sweet spot in a sun's orbit where water can exist in liquid form. Too far away and it'll freeze, too close and it will boil off.

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2023-08-09 14:07:59)

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#49 2023-08-20 16:38:00

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Is Alpha Centauri the new "Mars"?

Universe Today Interviews NASA’s Les Johnson About the 8th Interstellar Symposium

https://www.universetoday.com/162787/un … symposium/

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