a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  2775 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: There might not be a ‘Planet Nine’ after all

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  ·  2774 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  ·  2774 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  ·  2774 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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