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Get the Colony Ships ready!
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http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/22/world/new ... very-nasa/]NASA announces the discovery of seven earthlike worlds, all orbiting a single star. At least seven. And they're all "temperate", whatever that means given only three are supposed to be in the Goldilocks zone.
-- Bob --------- Then the horns kicked in... ...and my shoes began to squeak. 
According to the CBC's copy of the story, they're " the right size, mass and distance from the sun to hold water".
I'm thinking that it's a nice little system for Firefly fen - if it's actually as described. -- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012 
Interesting, but with the tiny amount of visible light insolation actually making a colony happen will be difficult. All food will need to be imported, designed for the extremely red hue of the light (so bring out the gengineering for deep water seaweed's chloroplasts) or you need a hell of a lot of sunlamps and the energy systems to power them.
I'm just impressed that that system is even remotely stable: it's seven Earth-sized planets jammed into a space only slightly larger than the distance from Jupiter to Callisto.
But the view would be pretty as all hell... Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information "I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
Yeah, the way I just described it to Helen is "a system designed by a hack SF writer".
-- Bob --------- Then the horns kicked in... ...and my shoes began to squeak. Quote:Bob Schroeck wrote:Sometimes life is just as strange as fiction. __________________ Into terror!, Into valour! Charge ahead! No! Never turn Yes, it's into the fire we fly And the devil will burn! - Scarlett Pimpernell 
Yes, surprisingly stable. Quoth wikipedia: "The orbits of planets b-g are nearly in resonance, having relative periods of approximately 24/24, 24/15, 24/9, 24/6, 24/4 and 24/3." They're all supposedly Earth-sized, meaning .76-1.13 R?, or "more Earth-sized than Mars is." The downside of all this stability and closeness to the star is that they're very likely tidally locked. Which should help your hack SF writers even more by making single biome planets!
-- ∇×V
So at build up speed to 0.5C at midpoint and decelerate back down, how long a travel time are we looking at? Too bad, it's at Proxima Centauri. We can be there in a 100 years tops with current technology.
__________________ Into terror!, Into valour! Charge ahead! No! Never turn Yes, it's into the fire we fly And the devil will burn! - Scarlett Pimpernell vorticity Wrote:Yes, surprisingly stable. Quoth wikipedia: "The orbits of planets b-g are nearly in resonance, having relative periods of approximately 24/24, 24/15, 24/9, 24/6, 24/4 and 24/3." They're all supposedly Earth-sized, meaning .76-1.13 R?, or "more Earth-sized than Mars is." The downside of all this stability and closeness to the star is that they're very likely tidally locked. Which should help your hack SF writers even more by making single biome planets!There's a slim chance that one of them could be in a higher-order resonance with the star, such as 3:2 - which would give it a day/night cycle. (There's an even slimmer chance that more than one of them could be in a higher-order resonance.) Oh, and the system would be 28 days away at 500c (the FTL speed used by writers' fiat in Fenspace). -- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012 ordnance11 Wrote:So at build up speed to 0.5C at midpoint and decelerate back down, how long a travel time are we looking at? Too bad, it's at Proxima Centauri. We can be there in a 100 years tops with current technology.I'm sure http://www.wolframalpha.com/ can help here, but I don't have the time to define the acceleration formulas right now. -- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012 Quote:ordnance11 wrote:Presuming instant acceleration/deceleration? 80 years or so. Presuming 1G acceleration? Actually, about as long, taking half a year or so to accelerate to the required speed. If we presume a constant acceleration to the midpoint it'd be 160 or so years.
80 years for a round-trip at constant 1-g acceleration, assuming such a thing is possible.
And you don't even need to do constant 1g thrust for all that time. After one year of it, you're at about 75+% C, so that's 54 years to get there if you take it the slow way. -- Sucrose Octanitrate. Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
Meanwhile... Have a Google Doodle
http://www.google.com/logos/doodles/20 ... 2-hp2x.gif -- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012 Þorkell, on the Steve Jackson Games forums Wrote:Am I the only one here that keeps thinking of beer when he sees Trappist?-- Rob Kelk "Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of the same sovereign, servants of the same law." - Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012 |
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