However, unlike Alcubierre's work, there are strong indications on other planets of their being liquid water, which is essential for life as we know it. Comparing Alcubierre's work to the evidence of liquid water on other planets, is like comparing Giordano's ideas of the universe to modern science. He got things right, not because of actual science, but because he made some good guesses. If you asked me to put money down on their being life on places like Europa, or Alcubierre's work being right, I'd put my money on Europa. I'd much rather Alcubierre's work was right, but the amount of evidence for life being on Europa is far greater than that of Alcubierre. We shall see. Things like the James Webb Telescope should enable us to say for certain that life exists elsewhere, even if we have no idea of what it looks like, or what form it might take. Proving Alcubierre's work would require us to be able (under the most optimistic circumstances) to convert the entire mass of Jupiter into energy. I don't see that happening any time soon, while the James Webb Telescope is presently scheduled to launch near the end of 2018, and we can expect data from that to start pouring in within a year after it's launched. If it discovers a planet with an atmosphere that contains free oxygen, that will almost certainly mean that there is life as we know it on that planet.
Let's assume, for the moment, that there's a catastrophic failure and the JWST is destroyed before it can be deployed, this is a minor setback. The hard parts of designing the telescope have already been done, so building a replacement is a trivial matter (and the Europeans are planning on launching a telescope of similar capabilities shortly after the JWST goes up, so we may get the necessary information before we can replace the JWST). If Congress is willing (and they probably will be, as we'll have nothing to replace the Hubble if we lose the JWST), we can have a replacement up in orbit sending back data before 2030. That's assuming that one of our other telescopes doesn't make a discovery first, or that we don't land a probe on Europa that finds life. In a less-than-worse-case scenario, where the JWST launches, but can't perform all of it's original functions, that doesn't mean it won't be able to find life. Kepler had a couple of critical failures, yet still managed to return a wealth of data about planetary systems after the failure. It is entirely possible that the JWST could still yield positive results about life on other worlds, even if it has problems. As of yet, we've not managed to figure out a way to get Alcubierre's drive working (if it does) without using the mass of Jupiter (and even that is dubious).. So, the smart money would be on hard evidence of non-Earth based life being found before we get warp drive going. And unlike warp drive, we've found life in places that almost identical to places we've been to in the solar system.
^Hey I'm all for finding water and/or free oxygen on an extrasolar planet. That might give the popular boost to finally develop warp drive.
Some Europa lander plans involve it being the first space probe to have a built in self destruct. Before launch, the outer shell of the craft is super-heated to kill anything on it. Then it lands on Europa and pulls in some samples to do analysis. At the end of it's life the self destruct super-heats the probes instruments to ensure anything that has hitched a ride from Earth is destroyed.
Hmmm, well let's hope it really is hot enough to kill everything. And this will require massive insulation to protect those instruments during the process of heating the outer shell. And that insulation will increase the payload. And let's hope the self-destruct mechanism doesn't inadvertently go off 10 minutes after launch. For some reason all this reminds me of astronaut John Young smuggling a corned beef sandwich onto an early Gemini mission. There was trouble for Young back on Earth and trouble for NASA in congress.
NASA always gets wound up over something brought along that isn't strictly in the mission plan. IIRC, they got really worked up over the head of a 9 iron and the golf balls taken to the moon on Apollo 14.
IF any of the microbes that were aboard the Venera that Russia sent to Venus survived, they are extremely extreme for extremophile microbes.
First, one has to prove that warp drive is possible, something that nobody's done. If you could come up with proof that a warp drive would work, I can guarantee you that even if Congress wasn't throwing money at you, guys like Elon Musk would.
Well a warp drive that was possible but cost two trillion dollars to build still would not be practical no matter how many billionaires signed on.
You think they wouldn't be smart enough to be able to raise the money? Just them pledging to pick up part of the tab would encourage governments to put money towards such a drive.
There are limits. Remember free market entrepreneurs haven't even managed to get us close to a manned Mars mission, and that is several orders of magnitude cheaper and well within known technology.
I know that. 13 years isn't even close. 13 years before Apollo 11, the first artificial satellite had not even been launched into orbit.
Not really. You're thinking that distance and time exponentially ramp up the complexity. It doesn't. Mars has resources the moon does not have (like an atmosphere) that can be easily utilized.
You really don't have an understanding of this at all. First of all, SpaceX hasn't sent a single human into space, so they're on par with where NASA was prior to Alan Shepard's first launch. Scratch that, they're before the Soviets sent up Latka. They've managed to put some satellites in orbit, but that's it. Next, every mission to space has had some kind of 'glitch' during the mission, that if it had gone slightly different, could have been fatal. Had NASA abandoned the idea of a "free-return" launch before Apollo 13 (as some astronauts wanted them to), the Apollo 13 crew would have wound up dead. Any mission to Mars is going to have to be certain that nothing fatal can go wrong. That's a tough nut to crack. You're expecting SpaceX to go from Sputnik to beyond what NASA has done in far less time. The issue is not the resources that might be available to people once they get to Mars, but what happens on the way to and from Mars.
That is ridiculously unrealistic and completely unreasonable. A 10% chance of at least one of the crew dying during the mission and a 30% chance of nonlethal mission failure is far, far more reasonable.
I don't see why people on both sides feel the need to drive a wedge between science and God. Science is just another tool that helps us understand the meaning of God's universe. That's my take. But I'm just a Christian with a Star Trek bathroom so...
And? A commercial venture like SpaceX is going to have to worry about lawsuits if something goes wrong. Even if the toilet fails, like has happened on the ISS a couple of times, somebody will sue them over it.
A passenger, member of the passenger's family if the passenger dies. If something goes wrong on a trip and someone is killed, the contractors who made part of the equipment can expect to be sued, and will probably sue SpaceX or one of the other contractors. The list goes on and on.
Wouldn't any person flying to Mars be considered crew and thus have far less standing to sue? And I'm assuming would waive all sorts of legal rights to litigate in the the first place.
People sue their employers all the time. Waiver, schmaver, they'll sue. Ever read the fine print on a cellphone contract? Technically, they don't have to do anything other than try to provide you service, they still get sued, and they don't always win.
Whatever. I seriously doubt the possibility of being sued is one of the major impediments to a manned Mars Mission.
Ever read Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon? Even in that, which was written when our society was far less litigious, the characters have to worry about lawsuits. (That's supposedly Peter Diamandis', of X-Prize fame, favorite book.) Zubrin knows both Diamandis and Musk, and Musk has said that he's going to send people to Mars. Musk knows, however, you have to crawl before you can walk, and he wants to get the price of sending someone to Mars down to $50K, that ain't going to be easy (if at all possible), and you're not going to be able to do it if you're constantly fighting battles in court.
Nitpick, contra the movie, NASA did switch to a lunar orbital insertion trajectory for Apollo 13. One of the corrective burns the LM descent engine had to make was to put the ship onto a free return trajectory.
Even linearly increasing complexity with distance (let alone time) puts a Mars mission at, what 10000x harder than the moon?
except complexity doesn't increase linearly with distance. Is it 1,000 times more complex and expensive for you to drive 1,000 miles than it is to drive 1 mile?
Do you not use ~1000x as much fuel going 1000x farther? Teach me your fuel-saving ways, master! Probably even more because odds are you're going at higher speeds for those 1000 miles, which means more wind resistance and even higher fuel consumption. So yes, it is at least 1000x more expensive to go 1000 miles than 1.
