Osprey
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 3694
Registered: 5-23-2004
Location: Baja Ca. Sur
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Cosmic Billboard
Some of my Nomad readers like an occasional essay. If you'll permit, here's a short one I wrote about a year ago and I'll then I'll get back to Baja
stuff.
Space Travel and Cosmic Billboards
I had a dream. I was a grade school or high school teacher holding class with a bunch of fresh faced students. Someone mentioned aliens from space and
the kids wanted to know more about that. I walked to the chalk board and began to tell them what I know about the cosmos and space travel. I scribbled
and mumbled and made a fool of myself in front of my own students.
The dream was so real that when I awoke I felt myself a little flushed and flustered. I’ve never been a teacher and most of the time I was a poor
student so I wasn’t sure where the discomfort was coming from. After a big breakfast I turned on my old clunker computer to see if I could learn a
little about what had me red faced and wanting.
I don’t know what I thought was waiting for me out there in cyber-library land but what I found kept me glued to the monitor and keyboard all day
and into the night. The next day I dug deeper and every little info rabbit hole took me deeper into scores of other related subjects that bore on the
shoulda, woulda, coulda of space travel.
Not long into the exercise I began to realize most of the learning/teaching problems were coming from perspectives unfamiliar to humans on a visual
basis. Had to keep reminding myself that we are used to looking at T.V. screens, computer monitors, handheld gadgets and a lot of things about aliens
and space don’t fit those things. To make comparisons of objects, we are fond of using the Empire State Building, the Washington Monument, the
pyramids at Giza. With travel, distance, speed: we use MPH, NASCAR racers, rockets and football fields.
To illustrate, if my goal is to show the difference between an African elephant and an almost microscopic midge or mite, they both won’t show up
properly on the same screen. It gets a lot worse with our solar system, galaxies and the near universe --- one would need a cosmic size billboard
indeed. Our best cosmic billboard is not visual but informational --- calculus, space physics and geometry explain rather than display the light
years, parsecs, Astronomical Units, Radiation Tables and so much more.
The kids in my dream will probably never go there and with my little computer I am only able to understand the very top layer of things about how we
might travel in space and how others might come to visit us.
Here’s what I learned.
The big hurtle is time and distance --- works both ways, for us to transport people to outer space and for aliens to visit our solar system. No need
here to talk about who or what the visitor have to be to be able to come all that way --- the one big thing they need (or us) for space travel would
be figured in horse power. That’s the measure of energy necessary to reach escape velocity from Earth or their home planet. Civilizations must rise
to the ingenuity and will and knowledge to make X horsepower available as a product of production and use of space capable vehicles.
We’ve done that and NASA’s latest and fastest space vehicle that could carry people beyond our solar system has attained speeds of 58,000 miles
per hour. Astrophysicists have identified likely neighbor planets for exploration and some are relatively close but, at that speed it would take
112,000 years for us to reach them.
Others are completely out of reach when we consider that at 7,000,000 MPH, just one percent of the speed of light, it would still take 15,000 years to
make the voyage to seek out others. Cryogenics could keep man alive but frozen for probably 1,000 years and I can’t quite get my mind around 5,000
generations of people all living and dying on such voyages of live colony pilgrims.
Aliens and Earthlings share another problem with time; at what stage will they/we find the planet we set out to explore? How old is it and in what
stage of planetary evolution are we landing on it? Kepler 186f is the one humans have been keying on since it was discovered in the constellation
Cygnus and we know a lot about it, its distance to its star, its size relative to our Earth, its atmosphere, core composition but we can’t tell if
we would be landing a million or two years before it can support carbon based life or if it once did and is now a dead planet.
Cygnus and Kepler are 500 light years from Earth so if we fall back on our familiar speed thing, using our closest billboard thinking, the most likely
place in near space where we could land and survive is 2,939,312,686,591,803 miles from Barstow, California. Most people in Barstow don’t care and
neither do I.
I don’t want anybody to think I don’t respect those who imagine Star Trek worlds and spaceships and alien monsters. It was man’s gift of
imagination that brought us to these glorious heights of knowledge about our system and the universe. To cross a river one must first imagine a
bridge, then a design, ideas for material and finally, construction. Before the laws of physics were known to man, there were men whose failures and
victories showed us where and how to find them.
The point is, there are many places we can’t go. We are not going to Kepler 186f, ever. I’m comfortable with that thought as I learn about some
other places very close by. We are not going to visit the empty spaces between atoms that make up our world --- that is our other space frontier. It
has been theorized that if one could eliminate all the empty space between the particles of atoms which make up all 9 billion humans on earth, one
could fit the remaining matter into a thimble. To lay people like me that’s chalkboard stuff along with Quantum Mechanics, String Theory and Worm
Holes.
Bless the dreamers. Isn’t that where all my curiosity began?
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woody with a view
PITA Nomad
Posts: 15937
Registered: 11-8-2004
Location: Looking at the Coronado Islands
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Mood: Everchangin'
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" It has been theorized that if one could eliminate all the empty space between the particles of atoms which make up all 9 billion humans on earth,
one could fit the remaining matter into a thimble. To lay people like me that’s chalkboard stuff along with Quantum Mechanics, String Theory and
Worm Holes."
This should keep me awake all night trying to decipher the possibilities!
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GypsyJan
Nomad
Posts: 489
Registered: 10-29-2013
Location: Baja Coast
Member Is Offline
Mood: "If a dog will not come to you after looking you in the face, examine your conscience." Woodrow W
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Yet We Can Always Dream
Faraway places
With strange soundin' names
Faraway over the sea
Those faraway places
With the strange soundin' names
Are callin', callin' me
Goin' to China
Or maybe Siam
I want to see for myself
Those faraway places
I've been readin' about
In a book that I took from a shelf
I start getting restless
Whenever I hear
The whistle of a train
I pray for the day
I can get underway
And look for those castles in Spain
They call me a dreamer
Well, maybe I am
But I know that I'm burnin' to see
Those faraway places
With the strange soundin' names
Callin', callin' me
Songwriters
ALEX KRAMER, JOAN WHITNEY
Published by
Lyrics © BOURNE CO.
Read more: Vera Lynn - Faraway Places Lyrics | MetroLyrics
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