Science Chic, Thought you would enjoy this, it's an interesting read. :thumbsup:
A NASA official may have made a 35-million-mile slip of the tongue.
The director of NASA's Ames Research Center in California casually let slip mention of the 100-Year Starship recently, a new program funded by the super-secret government agency, DARPA. In a talk at San Francisco's Long Conversation conference, Simon “Pete” Worden said DARPA has $1M to spend, plus another $100,000 from NASA itself, for the program, which will initially develop a new kind of propulsion engine that will take us to Mars or beyond.
There's only one problem: The astronauts won't come back.
The 100-year ship would leave Earth with the intention of colonizing a planet, but it would likely be a one-way trip because of the time it takes to travel 35 million miles. That’s a daunting prospect, partly because of the ethical dilemma, and partly because it may be the only recourse.
outdoor338 wrote: Science Chic, Thought you would enjoy this, it's an interesting read. :thumbsup:
A NASA official may have made a 35-million-mile slip of the tongue.
The director of NASA's Ames Research Center in California casually let slip mention of the 100-Year Starship recently, a new program funded by the super-secret government agency, DARPA. In a talk at San Francisco's Long Conversation conference, Simon “Pete” Worden said DARPA has $1M to spend, plus another $100,000 from NASA itself, for the program, which will initially develop a new kind of propulsion engine that will take us to Mars or beyond.
There's only one problem: The astronauts won't come back.
The 100-year ship would leave Earth with the intention of colonizing a planet, but it would likely be a one-way trip because of the time it takes to travel 35 million miles. That’s a daunting prospect, partly because of the ethical dilemma, and partly because it may be the only recourse.
I wonder how they'll decide to chose the participants? They'd have to be married, I would suppose, and would have to teach their children to operate the ship. Their grandchildren would be the ones who finally make it there. There's also kinds of ethical questions about religion, politics etc to be considered when choosing the crew. I would think you'd want a communal-type crew willing to share equally among everyone, so that leaves out any conservatives for the crew.
Suspended animation would be the only answer for the bulk of the crew, in order to cut down on consumables during the trip (ala 2001 A Space Odyssey).
I read a story many years ago about this exact topic. The crew were actually put into suspended animation for the journey and after all the decades of space travel they were automatically awakened before the landing. They made preparations after the landing to disembark from the ship, opened the sealed hatchway, climbed out of the spaceship, looked up to see a column of vehicles approaching them. They were shocked to see that they were humans. The greeters told them in English that while they were sleeping for over 100 years, space travel had greatly improved from Earth and for over 50 years the planet had been colonized by Earthmen. All those decades wasted sleeping.
Hola, Gringo! Mi Planet es Su, Planet! Uno momento, let me first see your immigration status papers.
