Sunday, February 16, 2014

The "Grand Challenge" of the 100 Year Starship

I picked up a little book my folks gave me back in 1950, "Things A Boy Can Do with Electricity"by Alfred Morgan. It is copyright 1938 and my copy was printed in 1949.
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Chapter 2, Contents: A Curious Mineral which Leads to Adventures in Magnetism – An Experiment Hundreds of Years Old ; Magnetic Substances ; What is Magnetism? ; We Live on a Magnet ; Making a Compass ; Making a Magnet ; An Adventure ; An Experiment Showing Something Which Appears to Exist but Does Not Exist. 
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One probably doesn't have a Model T spark coil to play with today but it was fun making a Jacob's Ladder with sparks climbing up between two coat hangar wires, that is until dad called me up on the intercom to tell me I was messing up our black and white TV. :-)  Today there are more safety rules and my high voltage neon sign transformer would probably be frowned upon. :-)

All of this started me thinking, what would a young experimenting teenager do on an Interstellar Starship?  
Would some nuclear physicist provide me with a 256GB flash drive with the technical manual "Things A Boy Can Do with Nuclear Energy"? :-)

Science fiction has us riding on many starships with many exotic propulsion systems, the cost of which makes you think twice about why we should even think about the challenge of a 100 Year Starship, but there are a lot of things that would need to be considered and that is what makes it great.  How would you prepare to go on a trip of many life times?. And then stop and think how would you better prepare for many life times on Starship Earth.
- LRK -

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Meet the 100-Year Starship project, which aims to propel humanity to the stars. It won't be easy, but getting there could help solve this world's problems along the way.

Mark Hachman March 11, 2013

A voyage to the stars: Science fiction authors typically just assume we can do it. The awesomely ambitious 100-Year Starship project, however, was formed, quite literally, to help perform the heavy lifting.

Project members spoke in a session at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conferenceon Monday in Austin, where they laid out some of the problems humanity will have to overcome for humans to leave the planet. The issues range from simply finding a planet that could support human life to constructing a spacecraft that could get us there to developing some form of propulsion that would enable a manageable trip length. Then there are more prosaic concerns, like creating a self-sustaining food source and even a social structure that would preserve society over a voyage that would likely take decades, or even longer.
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A very dynamic presentation.
- LRK -

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It’s a dynamic star map that shows the closest star to you directly overhead when you look up. And since the Earth is constantly moving, our logo features different stars based on where you are and what time it is. For example, the sky will look different to someone in Turkey at 6 pm than it would to someone looking up in Brazil at 6 am.

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Back in 2011 a SPACE.com notice.
- LRK -

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NASA's 100-Year Starship Project Sets Sights on Interstellar Travel

Shooting for the stars will first require a lot of down-to-Earth elbow grease, as NASA's new 100-Year Starship project illustrates. The effort, to journey between stars in the 2100s, began with a workshop and now is in the study phase.

NASA's Ames Research Center and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are collaborating on the $1 million 100-Year Starship Study, an effort to take the first step in the next era of space exploration.

The study will scrutinize the business model needed to develop and mature technologies needed to enable long-haul human space treks a century from now. Kick-started by a strategic planning workshop in January, the project has brought together more than two dozen farsighted futurists, NASA specialists, science fiction writers, foundation aficionados and educators.
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And the Wikipedia article.
- LRK -

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The 100 Year Starship (100YSS) is a joint U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) grant project to a private entity in order to work toward achieving interstellar travel.[1] The aim of the project, announced in January 2012, is to work toward achieving interstellar travel within the next 100 years.
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Thanks for looking up with me. 
- LRK -
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -

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