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comment by BurnTheBarricade
BurnTheBarricade  ·  2531 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: There might not be a ‘Planet Nine’ after all

I know space is incredibly empty and these new small planets and planetoids don't even register on the scale, so to speak, but it seems to me that every new discovery here makes the prospect of leaving the solar system more difficult. Am i just being defeatist about this?





kleinbl00  ·  2530 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The problem is not that you'll hit something. The problem is you never will.

We use scientific notation to eliminate orders of magnitude and converse and operate knowledgeably about concepts that are beyond human scale in one direction or another. We do this because we are irrevocably tied to human scale whether we like it or not. It's hard to wrap your head around the forces and energy necessary to get out of the gravity well - but we burned up an office building worth of explosives to get three guys to the moon and back. And yeah - orbit is 90% of the way to anywhere in the universe but you have to get everything up there.

And then you wait.

It's easy to point out that Voyager 1 is past the heliopause but it's just as easy to point out that it took 25 years to make it 125 AU. IF Voyager were steaming to Proxima Centauri it'd get there around 4000 AD. And sure. lightsails, VASIMR rockets, Project Orion and on and on and on. But it took us eight or nine tries before we successfully got a rover on Mars so we're a long goddamn way from needing to worry about deep space objects.

Personally? I rather like it here. And I know it's a long damn way to anywhere else. I don't particularly like the climate of Nevada let alone Mars and Mars is the best second-place contender we know of.

goobster  ·  2530 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    The problem is not that you'll hit something. The problem is you never will.

This is the primary Cosmic Problem, in the smallest possible nutshell.

am_Unition  ·  2530 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The human experience and spacetime: too much space, not enough time.

Devac  ·  2530 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
Dala  ·  2530 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Depends on what you're trying to fly out of the solar system. A space probe? No problem, been there, done that, gonna do it again in a few years. A space ship? Again, not an issue because even the biggest ship we could build would still be tiny on the scale of the solar system. Now, if you've decided that you're taking Jupiter to go hang out in the TRAPPIST-1 system, you might have to brace for impact with a few little rocks on the way out. Of course, Jupiter can and has probably withstood worse.

BurnTheBarricade  ·  2530 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah I thought as much. Thanks for clearing that up

user-inactivated  ·  2530 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Leaving the solar system isn't difficult. One of the Voyager Probes has already left the solar system and Dala says the other one is pushing at the fringes as we speak but the situation is "confusing, so don't ask." The real challenge would be getting to anywhere else outside of our solar system and sheer distance is the challenge in every way. That said, in the lifespan of a single man we went from heavier than air flight to the moon landing. The history of travel, all the way back to prehistoric man, is chock full of people trekking inconceivably long distances with the technology they had at the time. Will you see a probe land on a planet outside our solar system in your lifetime? Probably not. Will it happen sooner than any of us expect? Probably.

kleinbl00  ·  2530 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Leaving the solar system isn't difficult

Let's see you do it. ;-)

It's 1300 miles from Midway to Hawaii. You can breathe the air the whole way. Yeah, I'm not too eager to point my dugout at the horizon and go but the fact of the matter is, the environment is substantially similar from the minute you get in the canoe until the minute you get out. Deep space? We don't even know if a Bussard ramjet will work out there because we have no idea what the interstellar hydrogen distribution is.

I get the spirit of what you're saying but it's the equivalent of "the bumblebee flies anyway" which is only used by people who want to dismiss the expertise of people in fields they don't understand.

Space is fuckin' far. Full stop. And I want to believe but as soon as you dip your toe into the physics of what's being suggested things start to get discouraging.

user-inactivated  ·  2530 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I don't know much about how this stuff works, so I'll defer to the realism of others. That said, I'm banking all my hopes on humanity's ingenuity and sense of adventure. Space is just the next ocean to cross.

BurnTheBarricade  ·  2530 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks, that's what I figured. Exciting times we live in.