Leaving The Solar System

[lpetrich]

Booster rockets:

Spacecraft family	Launch thrust	Booster rocket
Pioneer 10, 11	8.4 MN	Atlas SLV-3	Centaur (rocket stage) D	Star (rocket stage) 37E
Voyager 1, 2	13 MN	Titan IIIE	Star (rocket stage) 37E
New Horizons	12.3 MN	Atlas 5	Star 48B

MN = meganewtons. The Space Shuttle had a launch thrust of 30.25 MN, and the Saturn V 35.1 MN.

So it's hard to do much better than what we've done so far.

 

[lpetrich]

I'll now estimate spacecraft mass / booster thrust ratios. Pioneer: 31 kg/MN, Voyager 64 kg/MN, New Horizons 39 kg/MN.

More large rocket thrusts: Soviet N1: 45.4 MN, Energia: 35 MN - American Saturn V 35.1 MN, Space Shuttle 30.25 MN, Falcon Heavy 19 MN - several similar-performance ones in development

A revived Saturn V could send about 2.2 metric tons into interstellar space, and that's a little more massive than the Mercury spacecraft, which the first American astronauts traveled in.

 

[Swammerdami]

I've been reading this thread, because I need the answers to complete my sci-fi epic involving an intergalactic civilization.

I think that for acceleration from a star's planet I will use huge power generators that somehow project onto a departing star-ship's receptors. Assuming 1g acceleration we should get up to about 0.01 c by the distance of Saturn. (We won't need the power transmission too finely aimed; we'll build multiple power stations along the trajectory.)

Deceleration at destination will be easy with some sort of "magnetic parachute" or whatever it's called.

With 0.01 c we should be able to travel from one end of the Milky Way to the other in just several million years. And thoroughly explore the galaxy in about twice that time, assuming it takes 1000 years or so to set up a system's power stations.

Since the high-tech may require rare earths or uranium to "prime the pump," exploration convoys will maintain some radio contact and the ability to route some materials from one system to another as needed.

 

[steve_bank]

I've been reading this thread, because I need the answers to complete my sci-fi epic involving an intergalactic civilization.

I think that for acceleration from a star's planet I will use huge power generators that somehow project onto a departing star-ship's receptors. Assuming 1g acceleration we should get up to about 0.01 c by the distance of Saturn. (We won't need the power transmission too finely aimed; we'll build multiple power stations along the trajectory.)

Deceleration at destination will be easy with some sort of "magnetic parachute" or whatever it's called.

With 0.01 c we should be able to travel from one end of the Milky Way to the other in just several million years. And thoroughly explore the galaxy in about twice that time, assuming it takes 1000 years or so to set up a system's power stations.

Since the high-tech may require rare earths or uranium to "prime the pump," exploration convoys will maintain some radio contact and the ability to route some materials from one system to another as needed.

Nah. I like Herbert's Dune. After years of using a drug derived from the waste of giant sand tunneling worms people mutate to be able to mentally fold space between two points transporting ships quickly.

Or the Stargate TV showan intergalactic artificial star gate worm hole network. Togo to another galaxy quickly they used an FTL ship to place a chain of gates.

Heinlein used magnetic rail guns to launch back to Earth from the moon in Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, circa 1950s. How about a huge recoiless rail gun in space? I will license the idea to you for a percentage.

 

[steve_bank]

F = m*a

Acceleration in gs = (F/m)/9.8

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Humans already have remote outposts such as Amundsen-Scott base, and long duration submarine deployments, where small groups of selected and trained people live for months in isolation from the rest of humanity without psychological issues.

Humans have nothing like a generation ship set up on Earth. There is no control for future problems in the upcoming generations on a ship to be weeded out because they can't handle life in a capsule.

Regarding someone else's "baby steps", I think the biggest problem is money. There needs to be a return for this. While localized asteroids can be made profitable in one's imagination, the amount of money required to make an asteroid redundantly "habitable" enough for mining just seems "out of this world" high and unrecoverable. The only way to actually do it would be automated systems, which would be extravagantly expensive in its own right. So we wouldn't take baby steps to asteroids, robots would do it for us.

 

[bilby]

Humans have nothing like a generation ship set up on Earth

I disagree. The Austronesian people colonised the Pacific Ocean by this means and handled it just fine for three thousand years before the arrival of fast steamships and radio put a close to their isolated lifestyle.

There are still some small, isolated human groups with only a couple of hundred individuals.

The Sentinelese people of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean are completely isolated from the rest of humanity, and some estimates put their population as low as fifty. They still retain sufficient sanity to understand that missionaries are best killed on sight.

Routine, rapid and efficient communications between tribes is a fairly recent phenomenon, and we have been doing it only for five or six millennia. before that, small isolated groups with infrequent contact with outsiders was the norm. It's what humans evolved with, so it's unlikely to be fatal to us in its own right.

 

[skepticalbip]

I've been reading this thread, because I need the answers to complete my sci-fi epic involving an intergalactic civilization.

I think that for acceleration from a star's planet I will use huge power generators that somehow project onto a departing star-ship's receptors. Assuming 1g acceleration we should get up to about 0.01 c by the distance of Saturn. (We won't need the power transmission too finely aimed; we'll build multiple power stations along the trajectory.)

Deceleration at destination will be easy with some sort of "magnetic parachute" or whatever it's called.

With 0.01 c we should be able to travel from one end of the Milky Way to the other in just several million years. And thoroughly explore the galaxy in about twice that time, assuming it takes 1000 years or so to set up a system's power stations.

Since the high-tech may require rare earths or uranium to "prime the pump," exploration convoys will maintain some radio contact and the ability to route some materials from one system to another as needed.

You may be overthinking the "problem". There is no need to spell out details of how something works in a good sci-fi story. In fact, too many details can detract from the story. Just giving the ship's drive system a name should be quite sufficient... just call it the "Swammer drive" and move on with the important part of the story, the plot and character development. Let the reader imagine how that amazing Swammer Drive works.

For example, Arthur Clarke in his "foundation" series never bothered to explain how people got around the galaxy other than using 'atomics' in their ships. Roddenberry in his "Star Trek" series never explains how a transporter, food replicator, or warp drive works, what a phaser or photon torpedo was and how they worked, etc. and it didn't detract from the story line. We only know that "dilithium crystals" were needed for 'warp drive' to work likely because it was a plot device needed for one of the stories but what the 'dilithium crystals' do and how is never explained.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Humans have nothing like a generation ship set up on Earth

I disagree. The Austronesian people colonised the Pacific Ocean by this means and handled it just fine for three thousand years before the arrival of fast steamships and radio put a close to their isolated lifestyle.

An island isn't outer space.

There are still some small, isolated human groups with only a couple of hundred individuals.

The Sentinelese people of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean are completely isolated from the rest of humanity, and some estimates put their population as low as fifty. They still retain sufficient sanity to understand that missionaries are best killed on sight.

Isolation from people isn't as much the issue as isolation from the environment itself. Living in a tin can forever, we aren't exactly wired for that. And while we can choose who starts that process, the generations afterwards might not be able to handle it as well. Granted, it would be all they know, so possibly could work.

 

[bilby]

Humans have nothing like a generation ship set up on Earth

I disagree. The Austronesian people colonised the Pacific Ocean by this means and handled it just fine for three thousand years before the arrival of fast steamships and radio put a close to their isolated lifestyle.

An island isn't outer space.

There are still some small, isolated human groups with only a couple of hundred individuals.

The Sentinelese people of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean are completely isolated from the rest of humanity, and some estimates put their population as low as fifty. They still retain sufficient sanity to understand that missionaries are best killed on sight.

Isolation from people isn't as much the issue as isolation from the environment itself. Living in a tin can forever, we aren't exactly wired for that. And while we can choose who starts that process, the generations afterwards might not be able to handle it as well. Granted, it would be all they know, so possibly could work.

Just because currently spacecraft are all 'tin cans' with no life other than the astronauts and perhaps a couple of experimental plants or animals, and no room to swing a cat even if one was brought along, doesn't mean that it will always be thus.

A generation ship would likely need an ecosystem, rather than a mere life support system - after all, that's how spaceship Earth has managed to support life for thousands of millions of years without a service call to the maintenance department.

A generation ship would have to have more in common with a remote island than with the International Space Station.

 

[steve_bank]

After many generations who knows what they would be like. Language woud chnage and probly loose a lot of words with nothing to reference outside the group and ship.

Earth would become a myth. New creation myth and religion would probably emerge. Without stimulus in a broader world I'd think overall intelligence woud decline. Limited life experiences and challenges.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I've been reading this thread, because I need the answers to complete my sci-fi epic involving an intergalactic civilization.

I think that for acceleration from a star's planet I will use huge power generators that somehow project onto a departing star-ship's receptors. Assuming 1g acceleration we should get up to about 0.01 c by the distance of Saturn. (We won't need the power transmission too finely aimed; we'll build multiple power stations along the trajectory.)

Deceleration at destination will be easy with some sort of "magnetic parachute" or whatever it's called.

With 0.01 c we should be able to travel from one end of the Milky Way to the other in just several million years. And thoroughly explore the galaxy in about twice that time, assuming it takes 1000 years or so to set up a system's power stations.

Since the high-tech may require rare earths or uranium to "prime the pump," exploration convoys will maintain some radio contact and the ability to route some materials from one system to another as needed.

Unless there's something seriously range limiting about your power transmitters I wouldn't use that kind of acceleration--that's an awful lot of power to handle.

.01c is within what lightsails can do. Laser-pump the launch so they're down to .01c on arrival. (Although the exact amount a lightsail can slow down depends on the star. The bigger the star the more speed you can shed on the approach.) In theory you can go much faster, jettison most of your sail on approach and use it to bounce the beam back at what's left. However, that's something that requires incredible precision and has no room for error. (Read Rocheworld for some numbers. He was a hard sci-fi author, he took the time to get the numbers right. Interesting aliens but I can't imagine any of them actually evolving.) Note that if the destination already has a base you can go considerably faster with laser-pumped sails, you stop with a laser from the destination.

Note that there's nothing but information (note that people are basically bags of information) worth shipping across the stars. Interstellar trade will be only in information in any universe that must obey Newton and Einstein. Anything other than the equipment needed to bootstrap a new base is cheaper produced in situ. (With the exception of a situation where there is no in situ--for some reason you want to establish a base in the middle of nowhere.)

 

[bilby]

After many generations who knows what they would be like. Language woud chnage and probly loose a lot of words with nothing to reference outside the group and ship.

Earth would become a myth. New creation myth and religion would probably emerge. Without stimulus in a broader world I'd think overall intelligence woud decline. Limited life experiences and challenges.

Languages always change. You would barely understand Shakespeare (who spoke Early Modern English) if you went to visit him in your time machine; You would find Chaucer completely unintelligible unless you are a student of Middle English, and Old English has more in common with Modern Icelandic than it does with Modern English. Changing language is not to be feared, nor can it be stopped - and only an insanely conservative control freak would want it to stop.

Earth wouldn't become a myth unless your generation ship lacked a library, and an education system, or unless those things were manipulated to deliberately change the crew's perceptions.

Human knowledge tends to increase over time in all settings where records are easy to keep, and where scientific enquiry isn't deliberately suppressed.

Your opinions are apparently based on SciFi tales that were set on generation ships, but which you apparently didn't notice were actually cautionary tales of the danger of forgetting history. This is not something that's likely to occur due to isolation, it's something that needs to be guarded against politically regardless of how isolated a society might become.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Humans have nothing like a generation ship set up on Earth

I disagree. The Austronesian people colonised the Pacific Ocean by this means and handled it just fine for three thousand years before the arrival of fast steamships and radio put a close to their isolated lifestyle.

An island isn't outer space.

There are still some small, isolated human groups with only a couple of hundred individuals.

The Sentinelese people of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean are completely isolated from the rest of humanity, and some estimates put their population as low as fifty. They still retain sufficient sanity to understand that missionaries are best killed on sight.

Isolation from people isn't as much the issue as isolation from the environment itself. Living in a tin can forever, we aren't exactly wired for that. And while we can choose who starts that process, the generations afterwards might not be able to handle it as well. Granted, it would be all they know, so possibly could work.

Just because currently spacecraft are all 'tin cans' with no life other than the astronauts and perhaps a couple of experimental plants or animals, and no room to swing a cat even if one was brought along, doesn't mean that it will always be thus.

Which then leads to the next issue.

"Why are we doing this?! If we turn around now, we can get back to Earth quicker. We're so sick of eating sausage."

A generation ship would likely need an ecosystem, rather than a mere life support system - after all, that's how spaceship Earth has managed to support life for thousands of millions of years without a service call to the maintenance department.

My gawd... hogweed eventually becomes the sustainer of human life in space. The irony.

A generation ship would have to have more in common with a remote island than with the International Space Station.

I can't imagine how many generations we'll need to create a generation ship. In the end, a generation ship's benefit is limited. I mean, other than in the Wall-E sense of things. The commitment to the mission is tenable with each following generation. And I ponder just how large a crew is needed to make it work. The redundancy for the ship equipment would also be needed for the crew, engineers, doctors, mid-level accountants, justice, sanitation engineers, people that know why that blue button keeps blinking all the damn time, botanists, biologists, physicists, chemists, computer experts, someone that can fix musical instruments, educators, and one libertarian to fuck it all up. In general, novels and shows usually have one or two people do all of that stuff, but it isn't really possible.

 

[bilby]

Humans have nothing like a generation ship set up on Earth

I disagree. The Austronesian people colonised the Pacific Ocean by this means and handled it just fine for three thousand years before the arrival of fast steamships and radio put a close to their isolated lifestyle.

An island isn't outer space.

There are still some small, isolated human groups with only a couple of hundred individuals.

The Sentinelese people of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean are completely isolated from the rest of humanity, and some estimates put their population as low as fifty. They still retain sufficient sanity to understand that missionaries are best killed on sight.

Isolation from people isn't as much the issue as isolation from the environment itself. Living in a tin can forever, we aren't exactly wired for that. And while we can choose who starts that process, the generations afterwards might not be able to handle it as well. Granted, it would be all they know, so possibly could work.

Just because currently spacecraft are all 'tin cans' with no life other than the astronauts and perhaps a couple of experimental plants or animals, and no room to swing a cat even if one was brought along, doesn't mean that it will always be thus.

Which then leads to the next issue.

"Why are we doing this?! If we turn around now, we can get back to Earth quicker. We're so sick of eating sausage."

A generation ship would likely need an ecosystem, rather than a mere life support system - after all, that's how spaceship Earth has managed to support life for thousands of millions of years without a service call to the maintenance department.

My gawd... hogweed eventually becomes the sustainer of human life in space. The irony.

A generation ship would have to have more in common with a remote island than with the International Space Station.

I can't imagine how many generations we'll need to create a generation ship. In the end, a generation ship's benefit is limited. I mean, other than in the Wall-E sense of things. The commitment to the mission is tenable with each following generation. And I ponder just how large a crew is needed to make it work. The redundancy for the ship equipment would also be needed for the crew, engineers, doctors, mid-level accountants, justice, sanitation engineers, people that know why that blue button keeps blinking all the damn time, botanists, biologists, physicists, chemists, computer experts, someone that can fix musical instruments, educators, and one libertarian to fuck it all up. In general, novels and shows usually have one or two people do all of that stuff, but it isn't really possible.

The minimum size of a generation ship is a function of how much of it can be made self regulating. It's clearly quite a lot larger than any current spacecraft, or even any current self contained but not self sufficient artificial environments, such as aircraft carriers; And it's demonstrably smaller than the planet Earth.

That's a pretty broad bracket.

I am not aware of any good reasons to narrow this guesstimate any further at this time.

As to why we would do it, the answer is the same as to the question of why the Polynesians went looking for more Pacific Islands to settle. Because they could.

Every human society in history has contained a small minority of misfits who wanted to risk it all to go see what's over the horizon - no matter how comfortable they were at home.

 

[lpetrich]

I've been reading this thread, because I need the answers to complete my sci-fi epic involving an intergalactic civilization.

You may be overthinking the "problem". There is no need to spell out details of how something works in a good sci-fi story. In fact, too many details can detract from the story. Just giving the ship's drive system a name should be quite sufficient... just call it the "Swammer drive" and move on with the important part of the story, the plot and character development. Let the reader imagine how that amazing Swammer Drive works.

For example, Arthur Clarke in his "foundation" series never bothered to explain how people got around the galaxy other than using 'atomics' in their ships. Roddenberry in his "Star Trek" series never explains how a transporter, food replicator, or warp drive works, what a phaser or photon torpedo was and how they worked, etc. and it didn't detract from the story line. We only know that "dilithium crystals" were needed for 'warp drive' to work likely because it was a plot device needed for one of the stories but what the 'dilithium crystals' do and how is never explained.

That's Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

Star Trek Writers' Guide - for TOS

1. Build your episode on an action-adventure framework. We must reach out, hold and entertaina mass audience of some 20.,000,000 people or we simply don't stay on the air.
2. Tell your story about people, not about science and gadgetry. Joe Friday doesn't stop to explain the mechanics of his .38 before he uses it; Kildare never did a monologue about the theory of anesthetics; Matt Dillon never identifies and discusses the breed of his horse before he rides off on it.
3. Keep in mind that science fiction is not a separate field of literature with rules of its own, but, indeed, needs the same ingredients as any story -- including a jeopardy of some type to someone we learn to care about, climactic build, sound motivitation, you know the list.
4. Then, with that firm foundation established, interweave in it any statement to be made about man, society and so on. Yes, we want you to have something to say, but say it entertainingly as you do on any other show. We don't need essays, however brilliant.
5. Remember always that STAR TREK is never fantasy; whatever happens, no matter how unusual or bizarre, must have some basis in either fact or theory and stay true to that premise (don't give the enemy Starflight capability and then have them engage our vessel with grappling hooks and drawn swords.)
6. Don't try to tell a story about whole civilizations. We've never yet been able to get a usable story from a writer who began... "I see the strange civilization which...".
7. Stop worrying about not being a scientist. How many cowboys, police officers and doctors wrote westerns, detective and hospital shows?

TNG-WritersDirectorsGuide.pdf For ST:TNG -- it isn't OCRed, unlike the TOS one.

BELIEVABILITY IS EVERYTHING. IT IS THE MOST ESSENTIAL ELEMENT OF ANY STAR TREK STORY.

If you're in doubt about a scene, you can apply this simple test: "Would I believe this if it was occurring today on the bridge of the battleship Missouri?" Technology aside, if you wouldn't believe the essential story happening in the Twentieth Century, then our audience probably won't believe it in the Twenty-Fourth.

 

[skepticalbip]

I've been reading this thread, because I need the answers to complete my sci-fi epic involving an intergalactic civilization.

You may be overthinking the "problem". There is no need to spell out details of how something works in a good sci-fi story. In fact, too many details can detract from the story. Just giving the ship's drive system a name should be quite sufficient... just call it the "Swammer drive" and move on with the important part of the story, the plot and character development. Let the reader imagine how that amazing Swammer Drive works.

For example, Arthur Clarke in his "foundation" series never bothered to explain how people got around the galaxy other than using 'atomics' in their ships. Roddenberry in his "Star Trek" series never explains how a transporter, food replicator, or warp drive works, what a phaser or photon torpedo was and how they worked, etc. and it didn't detract from the story line. We only know that "dilithium crystals" were needed for 'warp drive' to work likely because it was a plot device needed for one of the stories but what the 'dilithium crystals' do and how is never explained.

That's Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

A bit of a brain fart on my part.... My error.

 

[steve_bank]

All you have to do is put a light on the back of the ship behind a dfuuser. Turn on the light and the ship moves.

 

[lpetrich]

Writer's Guidelines - Contact Us | Analog Science Fiction - "We publish science fiction stories in which some aspect of future science or technology is so integral to the plot that, if that aspect were removed, the story would collapse. Try to picture Mary Shelley's Frankenstein without the science and you'll see what I mean. No story!"

It Is Easy To Predict an Automobile in 1880; It Is Very Hard To Predict a Traffic Problem – Quote Investigator -- looks for which SF author first stated something like that.

Prediction or influence? Sci-fi books that predicted the future | Internet Infidels Discussion Board - a thread on SF as predictive literature.

 

[lpetrich]

All you have to do is put a light on the back of the ship behind a dfuuser. Turn on the light and the ship moves.

Yes, but try calculating how much thrust that you'll be able to get.

Hint: it's teeny teeny teeny teeny tiny.