If I wanted to build a spaceship that can travel faster then (or close too)the speed of light, had life sustaining abilities for 5-20 people, a Fully automatic Cryogenic Chamber for all the Passagners, an Auto-Pilot, the Ability to land on a planet, the Ability to take scans of Planets and Stars to gather data, the ability to Make a Map of a planet from the planets orbit, the Ability to travel long distances without using much fuel, and any other needed thing for an advanced, self-functioning space ship?
How long would it take to research and build?
What would be the cost?
Would you want to go on the journey if, theoretically, I had all this stuff and I offered it to you?
What amount of Computers would be able to sustain all these functions?
If research were to start 2011, when would it be done, and would I be still alive to see it take off/be able to be on the maiden voyage?
Because I would much rather spend my life trying to get off this planet rather then giving in to idiots who lack basic logic.
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Oh, People and their Heroine Herobrine Addictions..
1: Hundreds/thousands of years of research, development, effective production of said technologies, and endless variables accounted for.
2: Trillions of dollars.
3: **** yeah
4: I don't think it would ever be finished lolno
If we were ever to travel to another planet I would go the recently discovered one 20ly away. . . And were still like a hundred or two hundred years out in developing viable means that are economical to the benefits of reaching it.
1: Hundreds of years of research, development, effective production of said technologies, and endless variables accounted for.
2: Trillions of dollars.
3: **** yeah
4: lolno
****. I really hate this damn planet. Most people are stupid, yet never try to be; mainly the damned Republicans and people who don't support looking into the stars to solve problems.
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Oh, People and their Heroine Herobrine Addictions..
This is a pretty ridiculous set of questions. You're asking for an estimate on how long it'd take to create something with features that are vague or meaningless.
Self-functioning? What does this mean? Self-sufficient? If so, any spacecraft capable of interstellar would have to be self-sufficient.
Scans of planets? What is this? What kind of scans? And don't give me Star Trek ********, because that isn't real or representative of anything that's actually physically possible.
the ability to Make a Map of a planet from the planets orbit
What makes you think we can't already do this or that we don't?
Autopilots already exist; practically every spacecraft ever developed is flown by computer, humans simply don't have the accuracy or computation prowess to do it.
Faster than the speed of light? Never going to happen.
Travelling long distances without using much fuel is easy if you don't mind waiting many years for your spacecraft to accelerate.
You're asking for the impossible. Worse yet, you're asking for a time frame and cost on the impossible. As an engineer and a scientist I have very serious doubts that humans will ever go out beyond the solar system. I'm even more certain that we'll be pretty well trapped in our corner of the galaxy.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
I agree this is a ridiculous set of questions this is almost impossible. The closest planet we can get to that we could POSSIBLY have life on is Mars that is if we had enough money and time to build enough rocket ships to get a decent amount of people over to there and food. Right now I believe it takes 3 months for our fastest rocket to get to Mars, however the big issue is the fuel to get there and back and considering how much supplies that would haft to be taken I assume whoever went would be lucky enough just to get there less likely haft to get back.
But if we do find a way to use nuclear energy to make a thrust then we can possibly send humans to other planets but with our current technology and the amount of the cost it is highly unlikely.
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Gerrard Winstanley
"All men have stood for freedom... For freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down."
But if we do find a way to use nuclear energy to make a thrust then we can possibly send humans to other planets but with our current technology and the amount of the cost it is highly unlikely.
Unless, of course, they figure out how to make Nuclear Fusion, then it will seem much more likely.
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Oh, People and their Heroine Herobrine Addictions..
Right now I believe it takes 3 months for our fastest rocket to get to Mars
It's closer to 9 months. Doing it in 3 would require a ridiculous amount of fuel and be prohibitively expensive. 9 months is close to the minimum fuel transfer orbit to Mars (ignoring the possibility of gravitational assists which can reduce fuel costs but increase travel times).
But if we do find a way to use nuclear energy to make a thrust
There are a plethora of ways to do this. It's just that none of them have actually been engineered and used. It's also especially unlikely that they'd be used to significantly reduce travel time to Mars. At best they'd probably just be used to reduce the mass of propellant needed to get there. The amount of propellant required to get there grows very rapidly as you reduce travel time.
We have the technology to do it, it's just hard to find an economic incentive to do it. There's really nothing humans could be doing on Mars that robots couldn't. In fact the only economical approach I've heard of involving sending humans is sending humans who wouldn't mind not ever coming back. Not having to worry about a return trip makes the whole thing a lot cheaper, though then you have to figure out what to do when the people on Mars start dying. Most of the problem isn't technology, it's in finding humans that could physically and psychologically handle the trip and the prospect of spending the rest of your life on an inhospitable planet away from everything you've ever known.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
We have the technology to do it, it's just hard to find an economic incentive to do it. There's really nothing humans could be doing on Mars that robots couldn't. In fact the only economical approach I've heard of involving sending humans is sending humans who wouldn't mind not ever coming back. Not having to worry about a return trip makes the whole thing a lot cheaper, though then you have to figure out what to do when the people on Mars start dying. Most of the problem isn't technology, it's in finding humans that could physically and psychologically handle the trip and the prospect of spending the rest of your life on an inhospitable planet away from everything you've ever known.
I would love to spend my Life on a Hell-hole, as long as their are no, god forbid, Closed Minded Idoits in the crew.
Of course, it would be nice to, you know, live on another planet.
There could be rare material their too, if life ever existed there, that means there would be crude oil under the ground, correct?
I would like a Bio-Sphere Bubble thing to live in, maybe some animals for food, energy, and something to entertain me.
Because earth is crowded with Close-Minded Idiots who don't think completely before they act. And there is too much fighting on earth.
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Oh, People and their Heroine Herobrine Addictions..
Which is OK. All I'mma say though, is that maybe you should just find some new friends.
Also, Yourself is right about the animals. Animals are a hideously inefficient food source.
No. I choose my Friends Wisely. They are at the Same position, I just hate people around me who think Obama can fix Everything while Republicans hold him back from doing what he said, or how people are Sterotypical and hate others just because they were born different,
I hate everyone who hates others for no reason.
I'm quickly beginning to think that this isn't a thread about space travel at all, but rather OP rejecting humanity.
Not really, I was actually referring to space travel on that one, I enjoy Space. Its a huge vast open space in which there is so much to build, so much to see, and so much to earn.
I would love to go on a space ship travel to Gliese 581 g. I would love to go to ANY planet and just make maps of them, that would be the funnest thing I would ever do. Ever.
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Oh, People and their Heroine Herobrine Addictions..
Right now I believe it takes 3 months for our fastest rocket to get to Mars
It's closer to 9 months. Doing it in 3 would require a ridiculous amount of fuel and be prohibitively expensive. 9 months is close to the minimum fuel transfer orbit to Mars (ignoring the possibility of gravitational assists which can reduce fuel costs but increase travel times).
But if we do find a way to use nuclear energy to make a thrust
There are a plethora of ways to do this. It's just that none of them have actually been engineered and used. It's also especially unlikely that they'd be used to significantly reduce travel time to Mars. At best they'd probably just be used to reduce the mass of propellant needed to get there. The amount of propellant required to get there grows very rapidly as you reduce travel time.
We have the technology to do it, it's just hard to find an economic incentive to do it. There's really nothing humans could be doing on Mars that robots couldn't. In fact the only economical approach I've heard of involving sending humans is sending humans who wouldn't mind not ever coming back. Not having to worry about a return trip makes the whole thing a lot cheaper, though then you have to figure out what to do when the people on Mars start dying. Most of the problem isn't technology, it's in finding humans that could physically and psychologically handle the trip and the prospect of spending the rest of your life on an inhospitable planet away from everything you've ever known.
I somewhat disagree if there was a way to use Nuclear Energy to do that then it would of been done by now and NASA wouldn't be spending millions of dollars on rocket fuel.
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Gerrard Winstanley
"All men have stood for freedom... For freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down."
We have most of the tech to build a spaceship and travel interplanetary distances, cost is the main problem for this.
The main problems of yours is going even close to the speed of light, and landing on a planet (which depends on whether you mean the WHOLE spaceship or just the ability for someone to land on it which could then be solved with drop pods)
We can make a pulsed fission engine or, even better, a plasma engine which, with some more research, can probably reach 10% the speed of light.
We have most of the tech to build a spaceship and travel interplanetary distances, cost is the main problem for this.
The main problems of yours is going even close to the speed of light, and landing on a planet (which depends on whether you mean the WHOLE spaceship or just the ability for someone to land on it which could then be solved with drop pods)
We can make a pulsed fission engine or, even better, a plasma engine which, with some more research, can probably reach 10% the speed of light.
You haft to put a lot of things into consideration all of what you said is impossible at the moment. First off the supplies and people who would haft to carry would put A LOT of weight on the spaceship and right now we can't get near the speed of light because consider this. The fastest thing we have is the Helios 2 Space Probe it travels 250,000 km/hr and also think of this that thing weighs A LOT less then a spaceship and it doesn't haft to carry people or supplies. Yes we somewhat do have the tech to go interplanetary distances but you haft to put weight into consideration and the gravitational pull of the planet and other things.
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Gerrard Winstanley
"All men have stood for freedom... For freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down."
I somewhat disagree if there was a way to use Nuclear Energy to do that then it would of been done by now and NASA wouldn't be spending millions of dollars on rocket fuel.
Nuclear energy isn't a magic bullet, it doesn't just replace conventional chemical rockets. Usually nuclear propulsion systems produce significantly lower thrust than chemical rockets, so would only be worthwhile for longer missions where there's enough time to use them. What makes you think that nuclear energy could just be a drop-in replacement for chemical rockets? Moreover what makes you think that it'd actually be cheaper? Chemical propellants are typically pretty cheap. The expense comes from how much is needed and that's for surface to orbit applications. It's unlikely that other methods of propulsion could be used to get to orbit. Nuclear propulsion just doesn't provide comparable thrust. NASA has known about nuclear propulsion methods since the Apollo program.
You haft to put a lot of things into consideration all of what you said is impossible at the moment
What he seemed to have focused on were propulsion methods. Pulsed nuclear and ion propulsion systems do exist, so they're far from impossible.
First off the supplies and people who would haft to carry would put A LOT of weight on the spaceship and right now we can't get near the speed of light because consider this.
The weight of the spacecraft determines the weight of the propellant required. Fundamentally you just scale everything up. This is expensive, but not impossible.
The fastest thing we have is the Helios 2 Space Probe it travels 250,000 km/hr and also think of this that thing weighs A LOT less then a spaceship and it doesn't haft to carry people or supplies.
It also achieved that speed by having a ridiculously low perihelion, so it's not at all representative of what we're capable of in terms of propulsion. Getting that close to the sun is actually quite difficult and not because of heat or anything like that, but because it requires a significant change in orbital velocity to lower your perihelion that much. In fact, no spacecraft is representative of the kind of thing that would be used for interstellar travel because no spacecraft has been designed for interstellar travel.
Also, it's "have to", not "haft to".
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
First off Nuclear Energy is cheaper considering it can be re used. Also I didn't state Nuclear Energy was a magic bullet I said it is possible that if you were to be able to make it into a thrust then it could be used. And huh? Since when were we talking about the sun? This is about planets?
And btw you can only have so much propellant that also adds weight.
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Gerrard Winstanley
"All men have stood for freedom... For freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down."
First off Nuclear Energy is cheaper considering it can be re used.
No, it can't. Nuclear energy is fusion or fission. The only way to get the reactants back from the products is to spend at least as much energy as you got out of them in the first place to revert them. Nuclear energy is not reusable or renewable. Nuclear energy is useful because of the energy density of its fuels. You can extract a relatively large quantity of energy from a relatively small quantity of mass. It's not particularly cheap.
And huh? Since when were we talking about the sun?
Since you brought up the Helios 2 as an example of the fastest spacecraft. I pointed out that the reason it's fast really has nothing to do with its propulsion system and everything to do with the shape of its orbit. Its orbit brings it very close to the sun, which means that its orbital velocity gets quite large.
And btw you can only have so much propellant that also adds weight.
All that matters for velocity is the ratio of the mass of the propellant to the mass of the rest of the spacecraft. For a spacecraft of a given mass, there is no upper bound on its maximum speed. If you want more speed, all you need to do is add more propellant. And since the weight of fuel tanks generally scales with the square of their size and the weight of the contained propellant scales with the cube, there's no theoretical limit on how much propellant you can use. The other approach is to have a propulsion system and propellant with a large specific impulse. If you double the specific impulse, you double the maximum speed.
Also I didn't state Nuclear Energy was a magic bullet
No, but the way you're talking about it makes it seem like you don't know anything about nuclear energy. You're making far out claims about nuclear energy that just aren't true and don't make sense.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
I can't wait till we finally build a space elevator/orbital lifter/whatever, It will make space construction ten to a hundred times cheaper than it is now. And we are so close, we are already testing small scale ones of up to 2km (or miles I cant remember)
I can't wait till we finally build a space elevator/orbital lifter/whatever, It will make space construction ten to a hundred times cheaper than it is now. And we are so close, we are already testing small scale ones of up to 2km (or miles I cant remember)
I very much doubt anyone is testing anything. A space elevator will have to extend out to at least geostationary orbit, so I can't imagine what kind of test you'd perform on something smaller.
I also doubt a space elevator will ever be practical on Earth. There's far too much stuff in LEO that poses a collision hazard. And I'm not talking just garbage. Even satellites pose a hazard. We're not at all close to anything resembling a space elevator. We have no mechanism which has been demonstrated to efficiently transmit power to climbers and no known material with the necessary strength (carbon nanotubes are the closest, but their strength is being extrapolated from their microscopic properties, there's no guarantee that that strength will carry over to macro scale objects and we have no way of manufacturing them in sufficient quantities).
Certainly it would make launching cargo into space immediately "cheap" but the cost of constructing such a system would be enormous, since we'd have to use conventional rockets to lift all of the mass of the entire cable (and its manufacturing system) into GEO. So after building it you'd have to have the thing lift at least its own mass before it's paid for itself.
It's not impossible, just impractical.
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Then you should just close your eyes and ignore us all or outright kill yourself :smile.gif: Since you're the principle of ignorance and elitism with the holier than thou attitude.
And its not Republicans alone, its all the political parties and people of this planet, we as apex species are doomed to have trouble coexisting its the nature of life. So man the **** up and deal with this world we live on.
And hell I don't think we'll ever be able to reach Gliese before we blow ourselves up and if we do thats a miracle in its own right.
How long would it take to research and build?
What would be the cost?
Would you want to go on the journey if, theoretically, I had all this stuff and I offered it to you?
What amount of Computers would be able to sustain all these functions?
If research were to start 2011, when would it be done, and would I be still alive to see it take off/be able to be on the maiden voyage?
Because I would much rather spend my life trying to get off this planet rather then giving in to idiots who lack basic logic.
HeroineHerobrine Addictions..2: Trillions of dollars.
3: **** yeah
4: I don't think it would ever be finished lolno
If we were ever to travel to another planet I would go the recently discovered one 20ly away. . . And were still like a hundred or two hundred years out in developing viable means that are economical to the benefits of reaching it.
****. I really hate this damn planet. Most people are stupid, yet never try to be; mainly the damned Republicans and people who don't support looking into the stars to solve problems.
HeroineHerobrine Addictions..Self-functioning? What does this mean? Self-sufficient? If so, any spacecraft capable of interstellar would have to be self-sufficient.
Scans of planets? What is this? What kind of scans? And don't give me Star Trek ********, because that isn't real or representative of anything that's actually physically possible.
What makes you think we can't already do this or that we don't?
Autopilots already exist; practically every spacecraft ever developed is flown by computer, humans simply don't have the accuracy or computation prowess to do it.
Faster than the speed of light? Never going to happen.
Travelling long distances without using much fuel is easy if you don't mind waiting many years for your spacecraft to accelerate.
You're asking for the impossible. Worse yet, you're asking for a time frame and cost on the impossible. As an engineer and a scientist I have very serious doubts that humans will ever go out beyond the solar system. I'm even more certain that we'll be pretty well trapped in our corner of the galaxy.
But if we do find a way to use nuclear energy to make a thrust then we can possibly send humans to other planets but with our current technology and the amount of the cost it is highly unlikely.
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Unless, of course, they figure out how to make Nuclear Fusion, then it will seem much more likely.
HeroineHerobrine Addictions..It's closer to 9 months. Doing it in 3 would require a ridiculous amount of fuel and be prohibitively expensive. 9 months is close to the minimum fuel transfer orbit to Mars (ignoring the possibility of gravitational assists which can reduce fuel costs but increase travel times).
There are a plethora of ways to do this. It's just that none of them have actually been engineered and used. It's also especially unlikely that they'd be used to significantly reduce travel time to Mars. At best they'd probably just be used to reduce the mass of propellant needed to get there. The amount of propellant required to get there grows very rapidly as you reduce travel time.
We have the technology to do it, it's just hard to find an economic incentive to do it. There's really nothing humans could be doing on Mars that robots couldn't. In fact the only economical approach I've heard of involving sending humans is sending humans who wouldn't mind not ever coming back. Not having to worry about a return trip makes the whole thing a lot cheaper, though then you have to figure out what to do when the people on Mars start dying. Most of the problem isn't technology, it's in finding humans that could physically and psychologically handle the trip and the prospect of spending the rest of your life on an inhospitable planet away from everything you've ever known.
I would love to spend my Life on a Hell-hole, as long as their are no, god forbid, Closed Minded Idoits in the crew.
Of course, it would be nice to, you know, live on another planet.
There could be rare material their too, if life ever existed there, that means there would be crude oil under the ground, correct?
I would like a Bio-Sphere Bubble thing to live in, maybe some animals for food, energy, and something to entertain me.
Because earth is crowded with Close-Minded Idiots who don't think completely before they act. And there is too much fighting on earth.
HeroineHerobrine Addictions..No, you won't find crude oil on Mars.
You won't have animals, they're too expensive to maintain, you will have to be vegetarian.
Hideously inefficient, but wonderfully delicious.
No. I choose my Friends Wisely. They are at the Same position, I just hate people around me who think Obama can fix Everything while Republicans hold him back from doing what he said, or how people are Sterotypical and hate others just because they were born different,
I hate everyone who hates others for no reason.
Not really, I was actually referring to space travel on that one, I enjoy Space. Its a huge vast open space in which there is so much to build, so much to see, and so much to earn.
I would love to go on a space ship travel to Gliese 581 g. I would love to go to ANY planet and just make maps of them, that would be the funnest thing I would ever do. Ever.
HeroineHerobrine Addictions..I somewhat disagree if there was a way to use Nuclear Energy to do that then it would of been done by now and NASA wouldn't be spending millions of dollars on rocket fuel.
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The main problems of yours is going even close to the speed of light, and landing on a planet (which depends on whether you mean the WHOLE spaceship or just the ability for someone to land on it which could then be solved with drop pods)
We can make a pulsed fission engine or, even better, a plasma engine which, with some more research, can probably reach 10% the speed of light.
You haft to put a lot of things into consideration all of what you said is impossible at the moment. First off the supplies and people who would haft to carry would put A LOT of weight on the spaceship and right now we can't get near the speed of light because consider this. The fastest thing we have is the Helios 2 Space Probe it travels 250,000 km/hr and also think of this that thing weighs A LOT less then a spaceship and it doesn't haft to carry people or supplies. Yes we somewhat do have the tech to go interplanetary distances but you haft to put weight into consideration and the gravitational pull of the planet and other things.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_propulsion
Nuclear energy isn't a magic bullet, it doesn't just replace conventional chemical rockets. Usually nuclear propulsion systems produce significantly lower thrust than chemical rockets, so would only be worthwhile for longer missions where there's enough time to use them. What makes you think that nuclear energy could just be a drop-in replacement for chemical rockets? Moreover what makes you think that it'd actually be cheaper? Chemical propellants are typically pretty cheap. The expense comes from how much is needed and that's for surface to orbit applications. It's unlikely that other methods of propulsion could be used to get to orbit. Nuclear propulsion just doesn't provide comparable thrust. NASA has known about nuclear propulsion methods since the Apollo program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket
What he seemed to have focused on were propulsion methods. Pulsed nuclear and ion propulsion systems do exist, so they're far from impossible.
The weight of the spacecraft determines the weight of the propellant required. Fundamentally you just scale everything up. This is expensive, but not impossible.
It also achieved that speed by having a ridiculously low perihelion, so it's not at all representative of what we're capable of in terms of propulsion. Getting that close to the sun is actually quite difficult and not because of heat or anything like that, but because it requires a significant change in orbital velocity to lower your perihelion that much. In fact, no spacecraft is representative of the kind of thing that would be used for interstellar travel because no spacecraft has been designed for interstellar travel.
Also, it's "have to", not "haft to".
And btw you can only have so much propellant that also adds weight.
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No, it can't. Nuclear energy is fusion or fission. The only way to get the reactants back from the products is to spend at least as much energy as you got out of them in the first place to revert them. Nuclear energy is not reusable or renewable. Nuclear energy is useful because of the energy density of its fuels. You can extract a relatively large quantity of energy from a relatively small quantity of mass. It's not particularly cheap.
Since you brought up the Helios 2 as an example of the fastest spacecraft. I pointed out that the reason it's fast really has nothing to do with its propulsion system and everything to do with the shape of its orbit. Its orbit brings it very close to the sun, which means that its orbital velocity gets quite large.
All that matters for velocity is the ratio of the mass of the propellant to the mass of the rest of the spacecraft. For a spacecraft of a given mass, there is no upper bound on its maximum speed. If you want more speed, all you need to do is add more propellant. And since the weight of fuel tanks generally scales with the square of their size and the weight of the contained propellant scales with the cube, there's no theoretical limit on how much propellant you can use. The other approach is to have a propulsion system and propellant with a large specific impulse. If you double the specific impulse, you double the maximum speed.
No, but the way you're talking about it makes it seem like you don't know anything about nuclear energy. You're making far out claims about nuclear energy that just aren't true and don't make sense.
I very much doubt anyone is testing anything. A space elevator will have to extend out to at least geostationary orbit, so I can't imagine what kind of test you'd perform on something smaller.
I also doubt a space elevator will ever be practical on Earth. There's far too much stuff in LEO that poses a collision hazard. And I'm not talking just garbage. Even satellites pose a hazard. We're not at all close to anything resembling a space elevator. We have no mechanism which has been demonstrated to efficiently transmit power to climbers and no known material with the necessary strength (carbon nanotubes are the closest, but their strength is being extrapolated from their microscopic properties, there's no guarantee that that strength will carry over to macro scale objects and we have no way of manufacturing them in sufficient quantities).
Certainly it would make launching cargo into space immediately "cheap" but the cost of constructing such a system would be enormous, since we'd have to use conventional rockets to lift all of the mass of the entire cable (and its manufacturing system) into GEO. So after building it you'd have to have the thing lift at least its own mass before it's paid for itself.
It's not impossible, just impractical.
Then you should just close your eyes and ignore us all or outright kill yourself :smile.gif: Since you're the principle of ignorance and elitism with the holier than thou attitude.
And its not Republicans alone, its all the political parties and people of this planet, we as apex species are doomed to have trouble coexisting its the nature of life. So man the **** up and deal with this world we live on.
And hell I don't think we'll ever be able to reach Gliese before we blow ourselves up and if we do thats a miracle in its own right.