Hawking says Browncoats are right! by PaganPaul

GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

Hawking says Browncoats are right!

POSTED BY: PAGANPAUL
UPDATED: Wednesday, June 14, 2006 21:45
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Tuesday, June 13, 2006 5:30 AM

Stephen Hawking says humans must go into space.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060613/ap_on_sc/stephen_hawking

HONG KONG - The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

We Browncoats have been saying it all along...

Comments?

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流口水的婊子和猴子的笨儿子。
Liou coe shway duh biao-tze huh hoe-tze duh bun ur-tze.
"Stupid son of a drooling whore and a monkey."

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Tuesday, June 13, 2006 10:43 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC

Quote:
Originally posted by PaganPaul:
"Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

Via the power of links I bring you
...
The end of the world:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm

Several actually.

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Tuesday, June 13, 2006 5:52 PM

FLORALBUNNY

Of course he's right.

"Why are we still talking about this?"

bun
~6/23~Serenity/Firefly Summer~9/30~
----- why's the rum gone? 7706 -----

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Tuesday, June 13, 2006 6:00 PM

KAIN

LET'S GO!

Kain

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Tuesday, June 13, 2006 6:08 PM

BELOWZERO

Quote:
Originally posted by Kain:
LET'S GO!

Kain

I'm with Kain!!! Let me load up the dog team....

"Do not go gentle into that good night....
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. . ."
--Dylan Thomas

Though my soul may set in darkness
It will rise in perfect light.
I have loved the stars too fondly
To be fearful of the night.

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Tuesday, June 13, 2006 6:23 PM

KHYRON

Why did you start this thread twice?

Other people can occasionally be useful, especially as minions. I want lots of minions.

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Tuesday, June 13, 2006 6:38 PM

CHRISMOORHEAD

Whoa, I've been looking for this site for like 6 years. Saw it once a long time ago, never could find it again. Thanks!

By the by, as cool as it would be to live in a FireFly Verse', let's not forget that from the time they began their great exodus to the time when the system was like it is on the show took hundreds of years. Y'know what life's like until then? Cramped conditions with thousands of other people on a space ship, like some 1700 poor Chinese town square EVERY DAY of your life.

Thanks, but I'll just wait here for the meteor.

-----------------------------------------------
They say I am a sinner and seducer, they try to put the blame on me, but I don't give a fuck for the way they see.
Stand up and you'll win, surrender and you'll lose, it's heads or tails, you have to choose.

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Wednesday, June 14, 2006 1:27 AM

FLATTOP

Quote:
Y'know what life's like until then? Cramped conditions with thousands of other people on a space ship, like some 1700 poor Chinese town square EVERY DAY of your life.

Not likely. Way too expensive to lift/feed/provide air for so much meat. Much more likely to be a colony ship with LOTS of already fertilized eggs and an ex-utero way to incubate them. Lower tech way would be to have an all female crew (at least the generation before planet-fall would need to be mostly/all female), impregnate them (repeatedly) with widely varied, already fertilized eggs (instant gene-pool diversity) upon arrival at destination.
If it's a generational ship (very likely unless we make some huge leaps in engine technology), the crew will have to have children en-route(recommend pre-fertilized eggs) and train them with the help of the ships libraries in how to operate/maintain the ship.

Do you know what your sin is Captain?
Aww Hell. I'm a big fan of all seven.

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Wednesday, June 14, 2006 1:34 AM

AGATSU

What's the progress on cryo-technology, btw?

Proud Member of the FFF.net Event Team
Department of All Things Insane
Serenity Now/Equality Now screenings / Serenity Day (unrelated):
June 23rd www.cantstoptheserenity.com www.serenityday.org
Serenity Summer Campaign:
June 23rd - Sept 30th www.FireFlyFans.net
Serenity 'Versary:
September 30th www.FireFlyFans.net
Be there or be a purple-belted poop head. (<- not the official slogan)

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Wednesday, June 14, 2006 1:58 AM

PINBALLWIZARD

Steven Hawking is about the coolest guy ever to be almost completely immoble. Has anyone seen the movie "A Brief History of Time"? Both facinating and heart wrenching.

No, I am not insane, I am crazy. Thank you for asking.

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Wednesday, June 14, 2006 2:20 AM

CAUSAL

Orson Scott Card's been saying that (in his work) for years. Hawking: what a copy-cat.

________________________________________________________________________
I wish I had a magical wish-granting plank.

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Wednesday, June 14, 2006 2:29 AM

ALCON

It doesn't have to be an interstellar colony ship just yet. There are plenty of places in system we could colonize first. More than enough places with enough resources so that when we do go interstellar the ship we go on could be quite spacious. And we don't all need to get off Earth, just enough to have sustainable colonies (and there's certainly enough people willing to go for that).

We could start with Mars. The tech to not only colonize Mars, but to terraform it is there already. Getting it to Earthlike state would probably take 1000s of years, but giving it an atmosphere capable of supporting plantlife and human life add breath masks would probably only take about 50 (really not that long). Many scientists think that there is enough water and CO2 frozen in the form of a Martian permafrost that all we'd have to do is get it started and it'd terraform itself into a wet, warm, protoEarth state. From there we just begin planting.

Meanwhile there are enough resources in the asteriod belt to keep us going for a long long time. A single medium sized metalic asteriod contains literally trillions of dollars worth of metals. And there are thousands of those things just floating around out there.

Jupiter, Saturn and the other gas giants contain craploads of hydrogen which could be used for nuclear fusion (last I checked the latest round of reactors had come very near to breakeven and they were expecting next generation to hit or pass it). There's water aplenty in the universe, which, add electricy which can be generated from hydrogen retrieved from the water, is all you need to sustain a small in craft biosphere.

There's work at NASA on prototype (as in, they have a mostly working prototype on the ground) plasma electric spacecraft engines that would use hydrogen as fuel (read, really fracking light fuel) and would have specific impulses between 30,000 and 100,000 seconds (for those of you who don't know, specific impulse is a measure of engine efficiency. Chemical engines like the shuttle's have Isp's of around 400 - 500. Nuclear rockets range in the 900 - 1000. The ion drive they tested had about 10,000 Isp, but not a whole lot of trust.) What's more is that it would be throttleable. Allowing you to switch between using more fuel for more thrust (read: acceleration) and less fuel for more distance. Right now they're working the bugs out of it (it's called the VASIMR), and one of the primary problems with it is that it requires a frackload of power to operate. The kind of power you'd need a submarine sized nuclear reactor for, which, unfortunately, are currently banned in space. No one wants to risk launching one with its fuel up there in case we have a Challenger/Columbia type disaster and spreading its radioactive fuel into the stratosphere. They rather forget that those were 2 launches out of over a hundred, but so it goes. But the technology to power it, is there and workable. The last estimates of the VASIMR's capabilities I saw suggested it would cut travel time to Mars to a month or two one way. Which isn't bad at all.

In short, not only do we need to. Doing so is well with in our abilities.

And I've clearly started rambling. Yeah, see this is something I've been researching since I was a little kid... and kinda care way too much about. Carry on

The road goes ever on and on,
down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the road has gone,
and I must follow if I can.
- Bilbo Baggins (AKA JRR Tolkien)

RealMUD: http://www.me-mud.org/realmud
Middle Earth Mud: http://www.me-mud.org/

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Wednesday, June 14, 2006 4:26 AM

CHRISTHECYNIC

Quote:
Originally posted by Alcon:
We could start with Mars.

I say start small, the moon is right there waiting for us.

-

By the way, for those who like to look back and say, "The world didn't end," here is a site for that:
http://www.geocities.com/athens/oracle/9941/

It has such fun as:
1998 CE - Proving that there are few things in this world more intolerable than a reformed fill in the blank, ex-gambling addict R. Henry Hall replaced his old jones with a long-term Jesus bender and announced it was a sure bet that Earth would be cashing in its chips by 1998. Determined to prove the odds were in his favor, R. cranked out a series of nutty little tomes hailing the saintliness and wisdom of Ronald Reagan and the evil, Satanic badness of atheists, communists, liberals, the US Senate and rock music... not necessarily in that order. Too bad for R., 1998 uneventfully rolled over and his whole theory crapped out.

and:
January 20 CE - February 4, 1999 CE - A "Dr." Morris Plammer had so little to do with his idle hours that he spread the news about how some NASA "inside source" had leaked word to him of a 20 mile-wide killer asteroid heading our way. Not only was the nasty thing supposed to smack right into us before Valentine's Day, but to add a bit of Biblical spice, he claimed the rock bore the face of Satan. Personally, I think it looked more like Elvis. The older, fat Elvis.

and also ones that have yet to come:
April 29, 2007 CE - With New World Order nonsense running like a tape loop through his tiny mind, Pat Robertson once again prophesies a "collapse of the Gentile powers" and the rise of a millennial Christ-o-thon for this date. Using the literary works of loony-toon white supremacist writers Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullins as his inspiration, Patsy concocts another paranoid End Time scenario in his tread-worn tome "The New Millennium". Any bets on what date he'll be pointing to by April 30?

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