By Otto
I Just recently saw some news of a Fusion Driven Rocket. This new form of space travel could
make the trip to Mars take only 30 days rather than the six month trip it is
today. I like the idea of space travel and I would love to see people go to
Mars and find out if there really is life there. According to The
Register:
“This new engine is a 150-ton
system that uses magnetism to compress lithium or aluminum metal bands around a
deuterium-tritium fuel pellet to initiate fusion. The resultant microsecond
reaction forces the propellant mass out at 30 kilometers per second, and would
be able to pulse every minute or so and not cause g-force damage to the
spacecraft's occupants.”
While we never got a man on Mars by the end of the 20th
century we did send space probes to all eight planets and some many times more
than once. We now have close up pictures of all the major planets and their
moons. We have way more information that we every had when I was still a growing
up. I believe we will see space probes sent to nearby stars by the end of the
century.
Not people though. We have sent people to the moon, but we
are still having trouble with the trip to Mars. Sending people to space is a
good idea, but it lags way behind sending probes. The reasons for that are
simple. Probes are much safer. They are more efficient since they don’t require
food or other necessities for humans. Probes don’t get bored spending years at
a time locked up in a space ship with nothing to really do. Also probes can go
one way and not have to return. That is why probes have made it tall all the
planets, some of the moons and yet humans have only been to our own moon.
Likewise the first trip to our nearest stars will be probes. They can be exhilarated
from their launch point and not have to be re-launched to get back to earth. A one-way
trip is perfect. Traveling at near the speed of light is dangerous. Hitting a
grain of sand could be catastrophic for the probe. But no loss of life will
take place.
Just as this new form of engine can make a rocket faster, it
is likely we will discover even faster forms of transportation. According to
the law of physics we can’t move faster than light. But at near the speed of
light we could send probes that might get to nearby stars within 20 years and
then we would need about 4.5 to 6 or 8 light years to get the messages sent
back to us. It is a long time, but not the thousands of years as our present
space travel would take us.
ROSS
ANDERSEN recently wrote about Bernard’s Star, a small red dwarf that is
only 6 light years away. It is one of the closest stars to our solar system.
Andersen wrote:
“Adam Frank, professor of
physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester argued, in an op-ed for The New York Times, that interstellar travel would likely be beyond the
reach of humanity for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Frank pointed out
that the Voyager space probe, the most distant manmade object from Earth,
would, at its current velocity, take more than 700 centuries to reach another
star.”
Technology is moving very fast. We have particle
accelerators that can push a sub-atomic particle to almost the speed of
light. Some people believe we can move mass through such a machine by magnets
to almost reach the speed of light. We already found a way to trim a six month
trip down to 30 days. We will probably find way faster ways of moving objects
in space by the end of the century.
Consider the jump in technology in the 20th century. In 1903
the Wright brothers fly an airplane and take credit for the first successful
flying machine. The plane was made of string and other flimsy materials. It looked
like a kite. In 1969, almost 65 years later we flew a flying machine to the
moon and a man stood on that moon for the first time in human history. In my
opinion that is a lot of progress for a short amount of time. From the
beginning of human civilization to the 19 century, people either used horses
for travel or traveled by foot. Then suddenly in the 1800s the steam engine is
invented and from the beginning of the 20th century to its end, cars have completely
replaced horses. In one jump our technology and its uses have changed dramatically
and fast. The first cars were not that impressive. They were slow, unreliable,
and there were no decent roads for them. Today cars are a major part of life
for anyone living in a modern industrial society. In places where they don’t
use cars people use busses.
So it is not inconceivable that we will find dramatically
new technology in this coming 21st Century. There are always the
draw backs of too much war, global warming and peak oil as possible calamities
which could push technology back and divert our attentions elsewhere. That
happened in the 1970s
when world oil reserves began to shrink and NASA ambitions were scaled
back. Interest in going to Mars or back to the Moon faded.
Something like that could happen again. If our society
learns to manage resources we may learn a lot about the space neighborhood we
live in by the end of this century. Scientists are already predicting they will
find alien life
forms in our own solar system in the next 10 years.
Pix by www.bbc.co.uk.
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