Exoplanets
by Jeff
Image text: I'm just worried that we'll all leave and you won't get to come along!
In this comic, our friend Beret run to wake up Cueball with his potentially middle of the night revelation that Humankind is discovering "Exoplanets" or planets that exist outside of our solar system. The indication is that these planets are habitable enough for humans, even if just for a visit.
Then Beret takes it a bit further thinking that one of the countries on Earth could restart Project Orion. As Beret suggests, Project Orion was an early study that pushed for nuclear powered rockets for space travel. However, the one major downside of Project Orion was the fallout zone that the nuclear launch would present on Earth. But a nuclear launch in space on an asteroid or space station would not present those same problems. Then Beret references Stargate:Atlantis when he mentions "City-Ships" as the city-ship Atlantis was the basis for the show. The city-ships on Stargate:Atlantis are about the size of Manhattan.
So, to sum up the comic. Beret is very excited that we can see (with the Hubble telescope and other earth-bound telescopes) and find exoplanets. Then with some advances in space technology we can create nuclear propulsion in space to reach these planets. Have to admit, it is very exciting.
And Cueball would just rather snooze.
August 30th, 2010
Is the Image text probably referring to Elves leaving Middle earth and Arwen getting left behind?
August 30th, 2010
If you’d like the explanation to explain the joke, than you need to change the last line to:
“And cueball, instead of losing sleep over discoveries that will take merely couple of generations to achieve, prefer to go back to sleep”.
August 30th, 2010
The City Ship concept predates Stargate:Atlantis by a few decades. In fact one of the original concepts for interstellar travel involved building a whole civilization that would live on a ship as it slowly made its way across the cosmos, completely self sufficient.
Usually they’ll plan on accelerating at 1G for the first half of the trip, then turning around and decelerating at 1G for the second half. An advantage of this is that relativistic effects would greatly reduce the amount of time the passengers on the ship needed to survive before getting to the destination, perhaps even just a few generations for close stars. The downside is that it requires a nearly limitless yet massless fuel supply. Ramscoops are really the only feasible “realistic” option, and we have no idea if they would work.
August 30th, 2010
They could always stop somewhere along the trip for supplies and refueling…
August 31st, 2010
Cities in flight dates back to at least 1956, in a book by that name by James Blish.
The Orion project involved not nuclear rockets, but instead multiple nuclear bombs exploding to provide the push. You would need a very large (city-size) mass to absorb the impact safely. More details on Wikopedia
May 9th, 2011
I’m pretty sure the exo-planets being referred to here were found with the Kepler mission. The Hubble was mostly responsible for contributing data to justify the Kepler mission.