http://www.bautforum.com/ Living critters anywhere but Earth. en Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:52:50 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.bautforum.com/images/misc/rss.jpg http://www.bautforum.com/ http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96976-supplying-retrograde-colony-cluster.html Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:26:11 GMT I now think that the ideal candidates for interstellar colonization are stars with close orbiting companions--either a warm Jupiter or close orbiting star. The basic requirement is that the companion's escape velocity must be comparable to its orbital velocity. Ideally, this escape velocity should be at least twice its orbital velocity.

I'll use Gliese 876 b as an example. Its orbital speed is around 35km/s; its escape velocity greater than 70km/s.

The Retrograde Colony Cluster orbits at the same 0.2AU radius as Gliese 876 b, but in a retrograde direction. From there, the Cluster may launch a massive missile bus with minimal delta-v to slingshot around the planet.

The bus encounters the planet at a relative velocity of 70km/s. After the slingshot, the bus has a velocity of 105km/s--zooming on a hyperbolic trajectory to beyond the snow line. Its going so fast that its final escape velocity would still be a whopping 93km/s!

The bus splits up into smaller impactor missiles as it cruises toward the target--an iceball rich in CHON, with an orbital speed of perhaps 5km/s or less. The impactors slam into the "front" of the target at 90+km/s, causing debris to be ejected at ~10km/s or so. This slows down the iceball, sending it inward toward the Planet.

Assuming an efficiency of about 20%, the mass of the returning iceball is 65x the mass of the impactor missiles. In other words, you get an incredible "bang for your buck".

As the iceball gets closer, the Cluster sends more missile impactors to refine its aim.

The iceball is aimed to encounter the Planet at a roughly 70 degree angle. While its heliocentric speed is about 50km/s, the 70 degree approach angle gives it a Planet-centric speed of 70km/s. (If it approached head-on, then it would have a relative speed of 85km/s--too high for our purposes.)

The iceball swings by the Planet in a gravity assist slingshot into the same retrograde orbit as the Retrograde Colony Cluster.

Thus, the Cluster gains more CHON rich resources, with which to build habitats, spacecraft, and more missiles.

Note that none of this requires high delta-v rocket drives. Low performance chemical rockets are good enough. The incredible 100km/s class speeds are provided by unpowered gravity assist slingshots.

Now, I have described how the Retrograde Colony Cluster mines the outer system and oort cloud for resources, but I haven't described how the Cluster gets started in the first place. Assuming we're the ones doing it, we'd need to first seed the colony with a 5 parsec capable starship. Needless to say, this is a challenge on many levels. I have in mind some particular solutions, but they are beyond the scope of this example.

My point in this example is to show how a Retrograde Colony Cluster could thrive and grow thanks to the orbital mechanics of a warm Jupiter or other massive companion. If we're going to do interstellar colonization, we might as well colonize promising star systems.

Interestingly, our own solar system does not qualify as such a promising star system. The inner system planets fail to meet the escape velocity vs orbital speed criterion, and the outer system planets have inadequate orbital speeds. You wouldn't get much "oomph" from a retrograde slingshot around Jupiter, and a Retrograde Colony Cluster at Jupiter's distance wouldn't have much solar power anyway. ]]> Life in Space IsaacKuo http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96976-supplying-retrograde-colony-cluster.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96805-life-earth-universe.html Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:51:18 GMT No one knows how life started on earth. No one has seen how life is created from nothing. You cannot have a sterile environment add some ingredients and make life. The building blocks for life exist but still life cannot be made. Can we assume that the creation of life was just a single event in our planets history? Never to be repeated. What could of created life? what makes something life? If life is just a single event what is the chance of it ever occurring on other planets if we never seen it happen on our planet which is the perfect environment for life to start? No one knows how life started on earth. No one has seen how life is created from nothing.

You cannot have a sterile environment add some ingredients and make life. The building blocks for life exist but still life cannot be made.

Can we assume that the creation of life was just a single event in our planets history? Never to be repeated. What could of created life? what makes something life?

If life is just a single event what is the chance of it ever occurring on other planets if we never seen it happen on our planet which is the perfect environment for life to start? ]]> Life in Space Ammonia http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96805-life-earth-universe.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96751-updating-drake-equation.html Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:33:33 GMT I was playing around with a Drake equation calculator the other day. I entered the values that I thought were plausible and to my dismay, the number of communicating civilizations at any given time were in the low teens, not the hundreds or thousands that I had hoped for. Then I began to ponder other variables that weren't part of Drake's equation. If the large object that eventually became the moon hadn't slammed into the earth, many of the metals and other heavy elements might have sunk towards the center of the earth instead of being distributed throughout the crust. In this world, even if we evolved the same, metals would be so rare that we could never have an industrialize civilization and communication with other planets would have been impossible. I would think that if somebody ever updated the Drake equation, the number of planets that experienced a very large collision in their early history to distribute metals to the surface would have to be included. Are there any other factors that have to be met for intelligent, communicating life to evolve? What other variable would you add to the equation? ]]> Life in Space jogleby http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96751-updating-drake-equation.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96715-whose-rock-anyway.html Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:54:45 GMT a lot of old sci-fi gave us a very easy time because while empires and conquest where all around, it was always obvious that the "true right of sovereignty" should belong to the inhabitants...

i don't think we can wait this long: AI & robotics are improving much faster then our air-to-space payloads capacities and thus our capacities to exploit the resources and real estate of heavenly bodies seems to show no intentions of waiting for anyone to built a few space huts & declare independence.

so space industries are going to show up before space cities...
but not just space industries: if my enthusiasm about nanotech isn't misplaced, "space startups" based on nothing but sanding a blueprint and paying a little to an already existing factory/general-assembler could become plausible in a world where nobody argues whose rock is it anyways...

but how long can that last, and which court the hell do you go to when you have a dispute? ]]> Life in Space traceur http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96715-whose-rock-anyway.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96475-vatican-aliens.html Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:29:46 GMT http://news.aol.com/article/vatican-weighs-possibility-implications/761942 Too bad an alien space ship did not land in the Vatican 400 years ago when Galileo was branded a heretic, or when Bruno was burned at the stake. In fact, aliens have NEVER visited Earth in its 4Billion years of existence. Hmmm, strange, considering it is full of water, oxygen, plants, sentient life, etc. Kind of proves either a)there are NO aliens anywhere in the Cosmos, or b)there are aliens but they are just too far from us to visit us or communicate. SETI is a waste of time folks. No signal has ever been detected, and most likely wont be. Had there been super-intelligent aliens in the Galaxy millions of years ahead of us, then we would have seen artificial structures or re-arrangements of the stars. Even if there are hundreds or even thousands of planets in our Galaxy which have life, NONE of them possess any technology advanced enough to reveal themselves(radio, space travel). There might be microbes, plants, fish, etc. somewhere out there, but no intelligence ...end of story... http://news.aol.com/article/vatican-...cations/761942

Too bad an alien space ship did not land in the Vatican 400 years ago when Galileo was branded a heretic, or when Bruno was burned at the stake.

In fact, aliens have NEVER visited Earth in its 4Billion years of existence. Hmmm, strange, considering it is full of water, oxygen, plants, sentient life, etc. Kind of proves either a)there are NO aliens anywhere in the Cosmos,
or b)there are aliens but they are just too far from us to visit us or communicate.
SETI is a waste of time folks. No signal has ever been detected, and most likely wont be.

Had there been super-intelligent aliens in the Galaxy millions of years ahead of us, then we would have seen artificial structures or re-arrangements of the stars. Even if there are hundreds or even thousands of planets in our Galaxy which have life, NONE of them possess any technology advanced enough to reveal themselves(radio, space travel). There might be microbes, plants, fish, etc. somewhere out there, but no intelligence ...end of story... ]]> Life in Space Gomar http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96475-vatican-aliens.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96260-ceti-question.html Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:44:52 GMT This may be a silly question, and with respect to the scientists involved, but does anyone know if the different CETI messages took account of the motion of the stars they were targeting? It's clear that Arecibo missed its "target" but were the other messages aimed with regards to the stars' motion? And if so, does the precision of the message match the precision of what we think the stars' vectors are? ]]> Life in Space evilbill http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96260-ceti-question.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96259-re-methods-finding-life-solar-system.html Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:39:37 GMT Hello folks, I am curious of your thoughts regarding finding simple life in the solar neighborhood. I am sure that the majority of individuals, here, believe that there is most probably some type of simple life in the solar system (--Earth excluded). If anyone has a better method--please state? Hello folks,

I am curious of your thoughts regarding finding simple life in the solar neighborhood. I am sure that the majority of individuals, here, believe that there is most probably some type of simple life in the solar system (--Earth excluded).

If anyone has a better method--please state? ]]> Life in Space jaksichj http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96259-re-methods-finding-life-solar-system.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96199-life-space.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:15:15 GMT Does anyone here, for starters, even know first hand what "Life in Space" is really like?

You fantasize and romanticize about what life in space would be like. But do you even begin to comprehend what life in space really is? I very much doubt it. In fact, I know it!

Sincerely,

Eric F. Diaz ]]> Life in Space EricFD http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96199-life-space.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96165-wow-message.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:30:14 GMT I'm sure anyone with even a passing interest in SETI is familiar with the WOW message. This post isn't specifically about the message itself, but I was reading a bit about it again and it brought up some thoughts.

In particular, IF our radio SETI programs detected a genuine signal from an ET civilization, would our standards of proof permit us to acknowledge it as such?

We would want independent confirmation of the signal, from geographically distant observatories, and probably over some span of time.

Yet, the most famous of the CETI signals that we have intentionally broadcast, the Arecibo message, was less than 3 minutes in duration. One wonders, if it were to be received by a technological civilization, would they even acknowledge such a message as having come from an intelligent species? If we were to receive a similar message from an alien civilization, would we acknowledge it as such, or just write it off as a computer glitch (or whatever mundane reason you choose)?

Our standards of proof would be quite high, and rightfully so. Yet, our own efforts at transmitting messages would quite likely not meet those standards.

This seems to be a problem. ]]> Life in Space coreybv http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96165-wow-message.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96154-could-waterborne-intelligences-spacefaring.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:06:52 GMT While nitpicking in the Fermi's Paradox thread, I was thinking about the different types of intelligences that could be out in space, and what would preclude an intelligent civilization from being able to acheive spaceflight technology.

Man has always wondered about the stars and it has been an unarguable force in our culture since recorded time. We have always looked up and wondered about space, and our natural curiosity has pushed us to try to learn more and make sense of what we are seeing. But what if we had never seen the stars, or only had brief , blurry glimpses? How would that affect our level of technology? Our progress? Our evolution?

Consider the dolphin or octopus, both highly intelligent creatures. Dolphins would lack the ability to use tools, but could see the sky (enough to peak interest in space); octopus do (by some accounts) use tools and perform other sophisticated behavior (such as gardening) but can't really see the sky. (I could be wrong about this, they might get glimpses from shallow water, but dont know how well they's be able to see the stars and moon, etc.

Both of these species, being waterborne, would have a much more difficult time in making it to space because of the water environment.

1. They cant see the sky, or only get brief glimpses, so the effect of seeing space constantly and wondering about it would not be a big factor in their culture.

2. Scientific development would be limited - electricity would be near impossible to develop in a water environment.

3. Lack of need for complex tools - Man's intelligence was fostered by our continuing struggle for survival, and inventions such as fire, the wheel, the axe, the bow, etc. all played a part in our technological progress. But most of these things wouldn't be possible or useful underwater.

4. Environmental - its easier for a land animal such as man to explore the ocean than it would be for a waterborne creature to explore the land; the tools to do so would likely never develop in the water, and this would have to be a first step (IMHO) for a waterborne intelligence to acheive space.

What are your thoughts? Are water based intelligences planet bound? ]]> Life in Space iquestor http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96154-could-waterborne-intelligences-spacefaring.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96127-origins.html Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:14:26 GMT How do you think life on earth started? A. We originated here. I.e. through the normal process of evolution or intelligent design. (Whatever is your fancy.) B. We were “seeded “on this planet by a more advance alien race. C. We migrated here from another star system forgetting through the millennia how and where we came from. Any variation on these ideas are welcome... How do you think life on earth started?

A. We originated here. I.e. through the normal process of evolution or intelligent design. (Whatever is your fancy.)

B. We were “seeded “on this planet by a more advance alien race.

C. We migrated here from another star system forgetting through the millennia how and where we came from.

Any variation on these ideas are welcome... ]]> Life in Space PMette http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96127-origins.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96083-interstellar-propulsion.html Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:43:28 GMT Which form of Interstellar propulsion seems most viable and why do you feel this way? Which form of Interstellar propulsion seems most viable and why do you feel this way? ]]> Life in Space PMette http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96083-interstellar-propulsion.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96001-space-hotel-expected-2012-a.html Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:33:02 GMT BARCELONA (Reuters) – A company behind plans to open the first hotel in space says it is on target to accept its first paying guests in 2012 despite critics questioning the investment and time frame for the multi-billion dollar project. The Barcelona-based architects of The Galactic Suite Space Resort say it will cost 3 million euro ($4.4 million) for a three-night stay at the hotel, with this price including an eight-week training course on a tropical island. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091102/od_nm/us_hotel BARCELONA (Reuters) – A company behind plans to open the first hotel in space says it is on target to accept its first paying guests in 2012 despite critics questioning the investment and time frame for the multi-billion dollar project.

The Barcelona-based architects of The Galactic Suite Space Resort say it will cost 3 million euro ($4.4 million) for a three-night stay at the hotel, with this price including an eight-week training course on a tropical island.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091102/od_nm/us_hotel ]]> Life in Space doar http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/96001-space-hotel-expected-2012-a.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/95622-dusty-mars-stuff.html Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:12:23 GMT The authors find that terrestrial bacteria survive Martian-like conditions better if covered with dust, so the frigid arid Martian surface still looks promising on a few notes.SEE:http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0910/0910.4830v1.pdf The authors find that terrestrial bacteria survive Martian-like conditions better if covered with dust, so the frigid arid Martian surface still looks promising on a few notes.SEE:http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...910.4830v1.pdf ]]> Life in Space trinitree88 http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/95622-dusty-mars-stuff.html http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/95463-how-far-will-we-come-next-decade.html Sat, 24 Oct 2009 08:39:26 GMT Towards understanding "extraterrestrial" life - and intelligence? At least we should expect the observation of a "population" of earth size and even smaller objects, and perhaps be able to say something about what "typical planet systems" and "typical conditions" are like?
And perhaps gain some information about surface conditions, different stages in development etcetera. Is it not so, that the search for extrasolar planets and for organic chemistry in space untill now have been the two succesfull paths towards understasnding life in other places, compared with other ways? ]]> Life in Space jhwegener http://www.bautforum.com/life-space/95463-how-far-will-we-come-next-decade.html