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From: Loy Pressley <lpressle@webwide.net>
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 1997 13:22:49 -0700
Fwd Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 00:29:18 -0400
Subject: Re: Zeta Notso Ridiculouso

> This is a response to many of the posts on this thread. The main
> thread seems to have been lost. The point was, is it possible for
> someone over there to get over here, when 'there' is a very long
> way away.

> The answer is yes.

Sure it is possible...you just have to take most the mass in the
universe and use it to accelerate yourself to some reasonable
percentage of the speed of light and then use the remaining mass
to shield yourself from the atoms in space that become deadly
missiles at that speed.

You know one tenth of the speed of light in a vacuum is 18,600
miles per second.  So far we've got up to about 10 or 15 miles
per second.
Looks like we have a long way to go to me...

What's the time dilation effect of moving at 1/10th the speed of
light anyway?  Is it enough to make it practical for a race that
lives, say, a thousand years.

> We as society are already technologically
> cabable of building interstellar craft. And in fact have already
> done so, both of the voyager probes and the one that came before
> them(can't remember the name) (??? Pioneer ???)are going
> interstellar within our lifetimes.

Yep, in seventy five thousand years or something they will reach the
vicinity of the nearest star.

> We can build much faster
> propulsion systems than are already in use. Only logistics and
> the chance to experiment have prevented us from doing so
> already.

I'll wager that what we say we can do and what we finally
determine to be possible to do are entirely different things.
And we aren't even proceeding in the directions it takes to make
it possible for us to develop drives powerful enough to make any
semblance of practical interstellar travel possible.  We are so
terrified of anything nuclear that we can't even launch a very
slow probe to Saturn without worldwide protests.

> As to speed, well yes at present such missions would be slow.

So slow as to make it impractical, I'll wager.

> Project Daedalus, which was once a front runner, had projected
> speeds of up to 25% SPEOL, Stellar Ram Jets could possibly travel
> faster still.

Let's see; 25% of the speed of light in a vacuum is approximately
46,500 miles per second.  That's moving on out...  Since the
nearest star is approximately 4 light years away (and a light
year is approximately 6 trillion miles; a number I can't even
imagine) it would take 16 years to get there assuming (not
likely) instant acceleration and deceleration.  And 16 years to
get back to report. Or, 20 years to receive a report about what
was found there.

Doesn't sound very practical to me...

> All without resorting to Warp Engines. Okay so you
> probably would not want to send people at first, but where
> machines lead people shortly follow.

That doesn't seem to be the case at the moment.  In fact, it looks
like everyone wants to just stick to sending machines if anything is
sent at all.

> The speed of light in a vacuum is seen to be a universal speed
> limit. There are certain quantum events to which this limitation
> does not apply.

I don't understand...which quantum events?  I thought all these
'events' were thought to aberrations of observation.

> The Quantum Tunneling effect is one of these. This
> is okay, its accepted.

Please explain.

> Nothing gets violated unless information
> can be transmitted from one point to another. As I understand it,
> Mozart (thats his music not the composer) has already been
> transmitted at 3.7 c i.e. 3.7 times faster than the supposed
> speed limit.

If Mozart's music has been transmitted then information has been
transmitted from one point to another.  Unless Mozart's music isn't
considered to be information.

> This may however be down to experimental errors and
> work is going on at present to show that information can be
> coherently transmited at faster than c.

Could you expand on the above.

> If this continues to be the case, we may well have to ask a lot
> of new questions that science, at present, is ill equipped to
> answer. You should never rest on your proverbial scientific
> laurels as you can never tell when someone will come along and
> pull them from under you.

Agree 100%!

> So there we go, sermon over. It's possible we can do it so why
> can't they. Don't get me wrong I'm still a sceptic, but I won't
> dismiss an idea out of hand just because I'm Sceptical.

I'm not even skeptical.  I think that they are doing it right
now.  If flying saucer's do, in fact, shield themselves and their
occupants from the effects of gravity, then they have a practical
means to exceed the speed of light by just about as much as they
want too.  It doesn't take much to accelerate zero mass.

It may not sound like it from my comments above but I do think
that interstellar travel at less than light speed is possible. I
just don't think it will ever, under normal circumstances, be
practical for a species like us with a life span of three score
and ten.  Americans couldn't even maintain focus for ten years
for the Viet Nam war much less over the several decades it would
take to complete an interstellar mission.  And most countries are
less favorable to space exploration than America.  Even with the
time dilation effect, the crew of an interstellar spacecraft is
likely to return to earth and find that no one cares or everyone
moved to Mars to protest that we're polluting interstellar space
or something even more exotic.

Loy