That's the neighborhood. Maybe two stars might have planets that could support life. Maybe.
arkaic · 1h ago
For getting the feel of the milky way, I think there's nothing that is better able to simulate it than a video game, ala Elite Dangerous. I loved to navigate its galaxy map. The size of the Milky Way, the numbers of stars and distances between them are of scale in there if I recall correctly.
noosphr · 1h ago
I found a neat little artist page where they have the local star map, the milky way, the local super cluster and a bunch of other neat laser crystal stuff: https://www.bathsheba.com/crystal/#astro
I'd get one, or for that shipping cost make a better one and send them the data, but current shipping in and out of the US is ... interesting.
A quick google on openscad shows how someone build a model of the solar system: https://www.chrisfinke.com/2016/03/08/animating-the-solar-sy... if anyone else wants to have a go this would be a good place to start generating a model to send to the artist.
stephc_int13 · 2h ago
When the Fermi Paradox was first posited, scientists and engineers seemed to believe that interstellar travel was soon to be technologically achievable, a few decades, maybe centuries for the less optimistic. Progress around space propulsion has kind of stalled since then and we should maybe question the possibility of interstellar travel as this would give an easy but unpleasant answer to the famous paradox.
shireboy · 1h ago
Right- “where are all the aliens?” is answered by either “they don’t exist” or “they do but physics of the universe prevent them from moving between solar systems.”
VladVladikoff · 1h ago
This feels very defeatist to me. Technology continues to advance, exponentially. And there are hypothetical ultra fast space travel technologies that we haven’t yet been able to fabricate but could theoretically in the future. e.g. Alcubierre warp drive.
losteric · 1m ago
> Technology continues to advance, exponentially
Why should we believe it will continue to advance exponentially? And even if it does, we many find none of the hypotheticals pans out - perhaps we advance exponentially and there is nothing feasible to reach even 0.01c
treyd · 1h ago
We do know how to build interstellar-capable propulsion. It'd still be a generational ship but we know how we could do it within the span of a few human lifetimes. Building them is a matter of organizing the resources to actually make it happen, and we haven't had the collective will for anything like that yet.
SoftTalker · 53m ago
I’d be pretty pissed at my parents if I was born on a Starship and condemned to die on it too. Imagine living your entire life in a Winnebago and you can’t even go outside.
papascrubs · 41m ago
I follow what you're saying, but many folks on this planet have far less opportunities than such a trip might provide. Guaranteed food, housing, access to cutting edge healthcare, a likely united community. I'm assuming these ships would be fairly big. It would definitely be different but-- would it be as bad as we think?
BobbyTables2 · 1h ago
I’ve always wondered — magnetism seems kinda crazy — how are two objects not touching but exerting a force(?). Practically witchcraft…
Without electricity, how well would we understand it? Just that some mysterious rocks that stick?
Wonder if one day in the distant future we’ll discover a new force we never imagined.
infradig · 1h ago
How is two objects not touching but feeling a force crazy? Isn't that what gravity does but everyone's ok with that
ljlolel · 24m ago
Gravity is crazy
shireboy · 1h ago
This is interesting to me because somehow I’ve had in my head that if we develop the ability in the next couple centuries to send probes interstellar it would be a longer list of possible targets. What this makes me realize is the list of places we visit even in the next thousands of years - even with incredible leaps in propulsion - is very finite. Space may be really really big but the part physically accessible even in long timescales is limited.
jader201 · 1h ago
Tangential comment, but it’s crazy to think about how, when we look up at the stars in the sky, we’re seeing light in wildly varying degrees of age.
For example, when we look at the sun, that’s 8-minutes-old light. When we look at Polaris (the North Star), that light is 447 years old.
When we look at Andromeda?
Yeah, that light is 2.5 million years old.
SoftTalker · 50m ago
Light doesn’t age. From its perspective it hit your retina the moment it left the star.
jb1991 · 20m ago
You are saying, from the perspective of light, whether it travels 1 mile or a trillion miles, that journey takes the same amount of time?
thisoneisreal · 1h ago
That thought randomly hits me all the time when I'm taking out the trash or whatever and just happen to look up. That and the fact that the Bootes Void and Phoenix A* exist out there.
HardCodedBias · 1h ago
Nit: I think that the light from the sun is about 100k years old. Wild.
aplummer · 1h ago
How can that make sense, the photons are emitted and fly straight at us
siavosh · 1h ago
The photons were created a long time ago in the core. It takes thousand of years for it to reach the surface, and THEN it takes 8 minutes to get to us.
stevenwoo · 1h ago
Photons are not created on the surface but in the core where the environment has the higher pressure needed for the physical creation of the photon and the photon takes about that long to work its way out.
drob518 · 3h ago
We live in a great neighborhood, but we’re behind on our HOA fees.
ghssds · 3h ago
It should be a goal for Earth to send a probe to one of those stars. As the probe will be unmaned, a mission taking a hundred years or more is not out of question.
asdff · 2h ago
There are already plans to reach alpha centauri in about 20 years with unmanned probes (1). There still remain some technical hurdles in terms of the laser design to propel these probes afaik but it seems like this could be solved with more funding.
Too bad we are in the current era of eschewing scientific research in favor of crony politics.
Something like Starshot seems like it could benefit from future developments without holding back a launch today. Something with a sail can always have a laser aimed at it; maybe we launch it today with a tiny laser we fire from orbit, and in 50 years, we accelerate them to a significantly better cruising speed by firing from a laser array on the moon.
dyauspitr · 2h ago
Yeah given the current situation I bet China or India might end up sending those out before us.
pavel_lishin · 2h ago
Which, to be fair, is embarrassing for the US, but is just fine as far as species achievement is concerned.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Absolutely. At the same, I would love for U.S. embarrassment to spawn another "space race".
layer8 · 2h ago
One issue with the latter is that tech is likely to advance fast enough that a subsequent probe launched a couple of decades later would overtake the first probe.
I’d still settle for getting the probes out the door because no matter what advancement happens if you can’t get them into space it’s a moot point. I’d simply take something we can reasonably launch into space for research at this point.
Also, I would love to see a lunar base happen in my lifetime
layer8 · 2h ago
Yeah, I don’t think it will happen that fast. There are a lot of hard problems to solve, and you have to make a case for the expected scientific (or other) benefits to be worth the costs. Look at how long the JWST took from initial planning to launch, that was about twenty years, despite clear and specific objectives.
jsjddnnsndn · 1h ago
That's not an issue. Thats a good thing!
lovelearning · 48m ago
As someone who has been fascinated by the universe and galaxies from a young age, I too thought interstellar was the way to go. Nowadays, however, I've started to feel that we've been wrongly conditioned by science fiction to see interstellar exploration as the next logical step for humanity.
Our species is still very immature ethically, socially, and politically. We haven't even learned to accept each other and co-exist happily on Earth. Our distant hominin ancestors crossed entire continents but today we set up physical borders and cultural barriers to prevent even neighborly visits. We certainly won't become the broad-minded united ethical species that Star Trek TOS/TNG portrayed within the next 2-3 centuries.
Gradual spatial expansion, and through that, gradual cognitive and worldview expansion, has been our track record. Whenever things got hairy for someone in our hominin tree at any time, they moved just a little bit more to survive.
So, I feel exploring and settling other solar system bodies should be our next logical step. There are 4 solid planets, 5 dwarf planets, and as per Gemini, ~40 moons, ~3000 asteroid belt objects, and 200000+ Kuiper belt objects, all above 10 km radius. That's a lot of nearby space to explore and more practical than interstellar. Some of them will become the solutions or refuges from our current social and political problems on Earth.
It'll take us 1000s of years more, maybe even 100s of 1000s, to do all this. Including a lot of violence, conflicts and injustice. But eventually, we will learn to develop the cooperative institutions and cognitive/ethical frameworks we currently lack to become a multi-planet species. Interplanetary cooperative institutions and technologies will emerge eventually, just like today we have airplanes, the Internet, UN, WHO, EU - institutions and technologies that, while far from perfect, seemed downright unlikely for 100s of 1000s of years of our hominin history.
BobbyTables2 · 1h ago
Sadly if an alien civilization sent a probe to the Sun, would we even know?
blacksmith_tb · 35m ago
Unlikely, but possible (if the probe was really big or really chatty in parts of the spectrum we pay attention to). Tiny probes could pass by us without us noticing them I'd think, though if they needed to send transmissions back toward their origin we might pick that up.
pkaye · 3h ago
How would it be powered?
mattnewton · 3h ago
some combination of nuclear radiation and/or solar seems like it would fit the bill? 100 years is within the useful range of a large radioisotope generator.
Solar would not work when you're out past Uranus or so, and the Sun is just a bright star with barely a visible disk. There's simply not enough sunlight out there, and you won't get enough light from your destination(s) star until you're similarly close to it.
lazide · 2h ago
RTGs lose power rapidly as the isotopes decay, and any sort of communication over those distances requires massive power. The Voyagers are essentially dead due to this issue, and they haven’t been out there nearly that long.
no_wizard · 2h ago
What about a fission reactor?
lazide · 41m ago
It would likely need a standalone fission reactor that only ‘goes hot’ when it arrives.
I’m not sure that we have the engineering ability to actually do that with any real chance of success after a 100 year deep space flight, or the willingness to wait that long to find out.
ekianjo · 2h ago
That runs for dozens of years without maintenance? And how do you dissipate the heat?
AtlasBarfed · 4h ago
I swear there used to be a 3d map that you could navigate, rotate zoom in zoom out of local space, but I can't find it anymore.
Does anyone else remember that or am I imagining it? I think it was like 10 years ago
There are attempts, but they all suck IMHO :( Someday I'll get around to doing this in Three.js for real, if no one beats me to it. It's shocking that we have a million 3D sites to visualize LEO satellites and plenty to visualize the solar system, but our stellar (much less galactic!) neighborhood is all super outdated stuff only.
I guess the sad reality is that these tools aren't that useful for anything but diagramming the odd interstellar rock.
I'd get one, or for that shipping cost make a better one and send them the data, but current shipping in and out of the US is ... interesting.
A quick google on openscad shows how someone build a model of the solar system: https://www.chrisfinke.com/2016/03/08/animating-the-solar-sy... if anyone else wants to have a go this would be a good place to start generating a model to send to the artist.
Why should we believe it will continue to advance exponentially? And even if it does, we many find none of the hypotheticals pans out - perhaps we advance exponentially and there is nothing feasible to reach even 0.01c
Without electricity, how well would we understand it? Just that some mysterious rocks that stick?
Wonder if one day in the distant future we’ll discover a new force we never imagined.
For example, when we look at the sun, that’s 8-minutes-old light. When we look at Polaris (the North Star), that light is 447 years old.
When we look at Andromeda?
Yeah, that light is 2.5 million years old.
Too bad we are in the current era of eschewing scientific research in favor of crony politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/starshot-not-get-a-re...
Regarding the former, various studies have been made and will certainly continue to be made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Designs_an...
Exploration of the Very Local Interstellar Medium (VLISM) will likely come first: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-022-00943-x
Also, I would love to see a lunar base happen in my lifetime
Our species is still very immature ethically, socially, and politically. We haven't even learned to accept each other and co-exist happily on Earth. Our distant hominin ancestors crossed entire continents but today we set up physical borders and cultural barriers to prevent even neighborly visits. We certainly won't become the broad-minded united ethical species that Star Trek TOS/TNG portrayed within the next 2-3 centuries.
Gradual spatial expansion, and through that, gradual cognitive and worldview expansion, has been our track record. Whenever things got hairy for someone in our hominin tree at any time, they moved just a little bit more to survive.
So, I feel exploring and settling other solar system bodies should be our next logical step. There are 4 solid planets, 5 dwarf planets, and as per Gemini, ~40 moons, ~3000 asteroid belt objects, and 200000+ Kuiper belt objects, all above 10 km radius. That's a lot of nearby space to explore and more practical than interstellar. Some of them will become the solutions or refuges from our current social and political problems on Earth.
It'll take us 1000s of years more, maybe even 100s of 1000s, to do all this. Including a lot of violence, conflicts and injustice. But eventually, we will learn to develop the cooperative institutions and cognitive/ethical frameworks we currently lack to become a multi-planet species. Interplanetary cooperative institutions and technologies will emerge eventually, just like today we have airplanes, the Internet, UN, WHO, EU - institutions and technologies that, while far from perfect, seemed downright unlikely for 100s of 1000s of years of our hominin history.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_...
I’m not sure that we have the engineering ability to actually do that with any real chance of success after a 100 year deep space flight, or the willingness to wait that long to find out.
Does anyone else remember that or am I imagining it? I think it was like 10 years ago
I guess the sad reality is that these tools aren't that useful for anything but diagramming the odd interstellar rock.
https://chview.nova.org/solcom/index.html
edit: crossreference with https://gruze.org/galaxymap/map_2020/