The correct vector for the development of space
I want to tell Geektimes readers about why all existing space programs need to be closed and where all the freed up resources should be put.
Suppose we have an engine that can accelerate us to the speed of light, ignoring the problems of relativism. Let's estimate how long it will take to reach such a speed with a small but unpleasant acceleration of 1g:
t = c / g = (300000000 / 9.8) / (60 * 60 * 24) = 354 days
A whole year of acceleration and overload. For the body, it will be a disaster and, probably, no one can stand it. What is it - you can easily check. Try to make something simple, such as drinking or eating while riding an attraction that is related to overload. Now let's try for the sake of interest to increase the acceleration to the maximum acceptable on rockets. Now it is 3g:
(300000000 / (9.8 * 3)) / (60 * 60 * 24) = 118 days
4 months of horror. Nobody can stand it, even nothing to discuss. Those. without even taking into account the relativistic effects, acceleration alone under conditions of terrible 1g overload will take 1 year. Not to mention the fact that the flight to the nearest star itself will take 4 years at best. And relativistic effects generally make this all unattainable (if they really have a place to be). I also remembered the price of delivering a kilogram of cargo into orbit; and how much will it be on the moon? In general, you see that the development of space on today's technologies is four times pointless.
What fundamental conclusion should we draw from this? Obvious - for a qualitative leap in space exploration, we must abandon any type of inertial movement.
What is it like?
We need “movement” without traditional movement: teleportation, distortion of space, holes in space, etc. Yes, yes, exactly what you thought, what science fiction writers wrote about, what even UFO contactees show in science fiction films and what the “correct” movement between the planets is not accompanied by any inertial effects and takes a moment. Therefore, it doesn’t matter how we can develop chemical / nuclear / ion engines, it’s all a dead end, because it is based on mass ejection, i.e. on inertial motion.
It is not clear to us how to obtain such a technology, although NASA already has someone who is officially engaged in research in the field of WARP. And I also have no solution, but this is not the most important; it is important to understand that everything that modern cosmonautics is occupied with - it all has no prospects. This is a dead end and SpaceX and the like do not change anything here.
But the lack of technology does not mean that it is unattainable. Everything that we are surrounded by now - it seemed all 200 years ago unrealistic, but already commonplace for us. In general, the space industry needs to close everything that it is doing now and completely focus on a non-inertial type engine. Dig in all areas and check any, even crazy ideas, in fact, it is crazy ideas that are needed here. Everything else for space is secondary. And all these games with layouts, improvements to existing technologies are a dead end, futile business and a waste of money. The point of the article is not to show how good it would be to have a stargate, but to show that it is an urgent need and we either find a solution or we are at an impasse. And we have just a dead end, because for 50 years space technology, in fact, has stood still.
You can, of course, say that with existing technologies you can try to explore Mars, for example, say, the year of flight is not a problem and in the Middle Ages there were also many months of sailing, but in the Middle Ages usually successfully reaching the destination meant saving at least, and often - It also allowed everyone to overstock and generally live better than where they came from. So a normal base with such delivery vehicles as we have will not work even on Mars. At best, we can get a suicidal mission without any prospects for improvement.
If you have a base on Mars, the radio signal goes there for 20 minutes, it’s still something you can survive. Nevertheless, in the Middle Ages and the new time, the metropolis somehow managed to maintain contact with its colonies. True, there will be no Internet and live broadcasts. But if we need to keep in touch with at least the nearest star, a 4-year delay makes any use of electromagnetic waves as a medium for transmitting information pointless. Here we make the same conclusion as with engines - electromagnetic waves are exhausted. We need to transmit signals at a speed of billions and trillions of times faster than the speed of light, and ideally - without any delay at all.
How? I don’t know either, but I clearly understand that either we are developing such a technology, or we will fall into a terrible, possibly centuries-old stagnation in the field of development of other planets.
In fact, the first is more important to us than the second. As practice has shown, weightlessness is not the best condition for human life. A person is not only physiologically not adapted to weightlessness, it is also impractical and dangerous, for example, there are no convection processes, garbage does not fall to the floor, but flies and can fly into where it is not needed, for example, into the lungs when you sleep. Therefore, at orbital stations, air is constantly chased by fans and constantly filtered. On the other hand, our native gravity is also not so good, thanks to it we have a lot of problems with the musculoskeletal system, especially with the spine; also it creates the main burden on the heart. Therefore, in colonies and at stations, it would be best to have reduced gravity, for example, 0.5 from Earth. Fortunately, at a space station, this can more or less be achieved even now by rotation. At the same time, if you want a colony on the planet where the attraction is, for example, 10 Earth, then you need an anti-gravity. In general, this technology is also necessary and important, but not as critical as the engine and communications.
It is sad to see how billions go to all sorts of nonsense such as landing a bucket of manipulators on the surface of Mars or an asteroid. For in fact it does not give us anything, and even if there was paradise, we could not establish an effective communication with it. Instead of these stupid undertakings, everything should have been directed to the development, first of all, of a fundamentally new way of moving. Only a new engine will give a leap in space exploration and nothing else. It is so obvious to me that my text sometimes seems banal, but I just do not understand these fresh joyful hysteria with the landings that were made 50 years ago using technologies 50 years ago and were repeated many times in the past.
Maybe such an engine already exists, but someone decided that his time had not yet come. But this is exactly the area where a breakthrough would make Russia a country that all other countries would look with awe and nothing else would give us the same effect as opening to humanity a real path to other planets and stars. So I hope that Roskosmos will read this and close all those meaningless programs that they have now in work and will do really important things.
Update:
for example, people get to the point where it’s impossible and unrealistic for you:
Delivery vehicles
Suppose we have an engine that can accelerate us to the speed of light, ignoring the problems of relativism. Let's estimate how long it will take to reach such a speed with a small but unpleasant acceleration of 1g:
t = c / g = (300000000 / 9.8) / (60 * 60 * 24) = 354 days
A whole year of acceleration and overload. For the body, it will be a disaster and, probably, no one can stand it. What is it - you can easily check. Try to make something simple, such as drinking or eating while riding an attraction that is related to overload. Now let's try for the sake of interest to increase the acceleration to the maximum acceptable on rockets. Now it is 3g:
(300000000 / (9.8 * 3)) / (60 * 60 * 24) = 118 days
4 months of horror. Nobody can stand it, even nothing to discuss. Those. without even taking into account the relativistic effects, acceleration alone under conditions of terrible 1g overload will take 1 year. Not to mention the fact that the flight to the nearest star itself will take 4 years at best. And relativistic effects generally make this all unattainable (if they really have a place to be). I also remembered the price of delivering a kilogram of cargo into orbit; and how much will it be on the moon? In general, you see that the development of space on today's technologies is four times pointless.
What fundamental conclusion should we draw from this? Obvious - for a qualitative leap in space exploration, we must abandon any type of inertial movement.
What is it like?
We need “movement” without traditional movement: teleportation, distortion of space, holes in space, etc. Yes, yes, exactly what you thought, what science fiction writers wrote about, what even UFO contactees show in science fiction films and what the “correct” movement between the planets is not accompanied by any inertial effects and takes a moment. Therefore, it doesn’t matter how we can develop chemical / nuclear / ion engines, it’s all a dead end, because it is based on mass ejection, i.e. on inertial motion.
It is not clear to us how to obtain such a technology, although NASA already has someone who is officially engaged in research in the field of WARP. And I also have no solution, but this is not the most important; it is important to understand that everything that modern cosmonautics is occupied with - it all has no prospects. This is a dead end and SpaceX and the like do not change anything here.
But the lack of technology does not mean that it is unattainable. Everything that we are surrounded by now - it seemed all 200 years ago unrealistic, but already commonplace for us. In general, the space industry needs to close everything that it is doing now and completely focus on a non-inertial type engine. Dig in all areas and check any, even crazy ideas, in fact, it is crazy ideas that are needed here. Everything else for space is secondary. And all these games with layouts, improvements to existing technologies are a dead end, futile business and a waste of money. The point of the article is not to show how good it would be to have a stargate, but to show that it is an urgent need and we either find a solution or we are at an impasse. And we have just a dead end, because for 50 years space technology, in fact, has stood still.
You can, of course, say that with existing technologies you can try to explore Mars, for example, say, the year of flight is not a problem and in the Middle Ages there were also many months of sailing, but in the Middle Ages usually successfully reaching the destination meant saving at least, and often - It also allowed everyone to overstock and generally live better than where they came from. So a normal base with such delivery vehicles as we have will not work even on Mars. At best, we can get a suicidal mission without any prospects for improvement.
Communication
If you have a base on Mars, the radio signal goes there for 20 minutes, it’s still something you can survive. Nevertheless, in the Middle Ages and the new time, the metropolis somehow managed to maintain contact with its colonies. True, there will be no Internet and live broadcasts. But if we need to keep in touch with at least the nearest star, a 4-year delay makes any use of electromagnetic waves as a medium for transmitting information pointless. Here we make the same conclusion as with engines - electromagnetic waves are exhausted. We need to transmit signals at a speed of billions and trillions of times faster than the speed of light, and ideally - without any delay at all.
How? I don’t know either, but I clearly understand that either we are developing such a technology, or we will fall into a terrible, possibly centuries-old stagnation in the field of development of other planets.
Gravity and anti-gravity
In fact, the first is more important to us than the second. As practice has shown, weightlessness is not the best condition for human life. A person is not only physiologically not adapted to weightlessness, it is also impractical and dangerous, for example, there are no convection processes, garbage does not fall to the floor, but flies and can fly into where it is not needed, for example, into the lungs when you sleep. Therefore, at orbital stations, air is constantly chased by fans and constantly filtered. On the other hand, our native gravity is also not so good, thanks to it we have a lot of problems with the musculoskeletal system, especially with the spine; also it creates the main burden on the heart. Therefore, in colonies and at stations, it would be best to have reduced gravity, for example, 0.5 from Earth. Fortunately, at a space station, this can more or less be achieved even now by rotation. At the same time, if you want a colony on the planet where the attraction is, for example, 10 Earth, then you need an anti-gravity. In general, this technology is also necessary and important, but not as critical as the engine and communications.
Conclusion
It is sad to see how billions go to all sorts of nonsense such as landing a bucket of manipulators on the surface of Mars or an asteroid. For in fact it does not give us anything, and even if there was paradise, we could not establish an effective communication with it. Instead of these stupid undertakings, everything should have been directed to the development, first of all, of a fundamentally new way of moving. Only a new engine will give a leap in space exploration and nothing else. It is so obvious to me that my text sometimes seems banal, but I just do not understand these fresh joyful hysteria with the landings that were made 50 years ago using technologies 50 years ago and were repeated many times in the past.
Maybe such an engine already exists, but someone decided that his time had not yet come. But this is exactly the area where a breakthrough would make Russia a country that all other countries would look with awe and nothing else would give us the same effect as opening to humanity a real path to other planets and stars. So I hope that Roskosmos will read this and close all those meaningless programs that they have now in work and will do really important things.
Update:
for example, people get to the point where it’s impossible and unrealistic for you:
