vehicle of the future

[uzayaa]

Do you think what does the vehicle of the future (23th or 24th century) look like depending on your strong examinations, and physical reality?

 

[drwayne]

Space vehicle?<br /><br />Wayne <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>"1) Give no quarter; 2) Take no prisoners; 3) Sink everything."  Admiral Jackie Fisher</p> </div>

 

[nexium]

Two spheres tethered together by a mile or two of ribbon. The spheres rotate about each other to produce artificial gravity. Spheres provide maximum volume at least surface area, and are also very strong with a minimum of material. Neil

 

[scottb50]

I really liked the 1959 Cadillac. Put a flux capacitor and a Mister Fusion@ in one and you could go anywhere. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[nyarlathotep]

<font color="yellow">Do you think what does the vehicle of the future (23th or 24th century) look like depending on your strong examinations, and physical reality?</font><br /><br />Given the last year in the Middle East, I'm thinking a 21st century vehicle will be MIRVed, and a 24th century vehicle will use wooden axels.

 

[qso1]

Welcome to SDC and good first post here.<br /><br />I'll assume space vehicle here but its possible that vehicle purposes may merge just as computers, cameras, and TV are on the verge of a merge if companies allow it.<br /><br />Space vehicles of the period you mention will probably come in just about all shapes and sizes up to a mile or more in length. Starships could be quite huge if technology advances to the point of being practical enough to allow for really huge vehicles.<br /><br />Hopefully, the starships will be powered by propulsion systems we have yet to imagine. This so the journeys have some hope of being practical, even if it turns out the trips are one way colonization missions.<br /><br />Space elevators may be operational by this time.<br /><br />Bottom line however, as I'm sure you probably already know...we really don't know how vehicles of the 23rd 24th century are going to look. This despite my strong examinations and physical reality. Physical reality today may be radically altered by the 23rd C. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[uzayaa]

thanks qso1 for welcoming you mean that physics laws could change such as Newton's laws might be converted.Yes this is considerable too but i m curious of does it possible to travel with lightspeed before becoming energy?

 

[qso1]

Not so much changing the laws of physics, but being able to build something that utilizes those laws far more effectively. As for going to or past lightspeed without becoming energy, nobody really knows as yet if this is possible. An unmanned demonstrator or proof of concept vehicle would have to prove that out one way or the other. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>

 

[spacefire]

depends. if you assume UFO sightings represent alien starships, it will be shaped like a disk hovering over trailer parks and occcasionaly international airports where nobody has a camera. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>http://asteroid-invasion.blogspot.com</p><p>http://www.solvengineer.com/asteroid-invasion.html </p><p> </p> </div>

 

[nyarlathotep]

<font color="yellow">thanks qso1 for welcoming you mean that physics laws could change such as Newton's laws might be converted.Yes this is considerable too but i m curious of does it possible to travel with lightspeed before becoming energy?</font><br /><br />You're forgetting that scientists are going to increase the speed of light in 2208.

 

[mikeemmert]

Probably in that time frame transportation will be magnetic monorails powered by the electrical power source du jour. Fossil fuels will be a thing of the past, of course. There might be solar power satellites but I doubt it. Fusion looks like a better prospect, but it just might be possible that you can't beat nuclear fission.<br /><br />With monorails taking up much less space than roads, there will be more grass and other greenery in our scenery. You would not have to drive the monorail cars, just get in and dial your destination. You could send it to the grocery store without you and it would be loaded up automatically.<br /><br />An alternative to that is that we do not prepare for the future of no fossil fuels, in which case the transportation system will be based on horses.

 

[propforce]

<font color="yellow">Bottom line however, as I'm sure you probably already know...we really don't know how vehicles of the 23rd 24th century are going to look. This despite my strong examinations and physical reality. Physical reality today may be radically altered by the 23rd C. </font><br /><br />True. We don't know the specific vehicle configurations or concepts, but we can extrapolate based on our advances in the last 200 years.<br /><br />Take computer for example, who would've imagine that just 20 years ago, the computer and the "internet" would have this far-reaching impact to our society as a whole? <br /><br />Today, we use computers to do precision machining, build composite materials, run complex simulation before we even cut a piece of hardware.<br /><br />Tomorrow, we might be able to manipulate molecular engineering on metals, plastics, composites just like we manipulate animal & plant genes today.<br /><br />The computer of tomorrow may NOT be silicon based -- it may be BIO-based using our DNA as CPU. <br /><br />Since we only use 5% of our brain capacity (less for products of public educational system), we may be a part of "distributed computing system" for a giant network. Humans maybe reproduced just for their computing power alone. <br /><br />Instead of a flat screen, we will be in a 3-dimensional virtual simulation with the computer. We can actually feel and touch the object generated by computer (okay guys --- NO virtual sex talk now).<br /><br />Who knows if the current law of physics will still hold? Afterall, how long has it been since we developed Newtonian law of physics? <br /><br />One thing is for certain, the future will be an exciting place. <br /><br />Resistance may be futile and we will ALL be assimilated <img src="/images/icons/cool.gif" /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[docm]

Molecular engineering is much closer than you may think. Same for bioengineering.<br /><br />The computer of tomorrow will likely have the ability to be implanted using a BMI (brain-machine interface, which is in prototype now) but the processor will likely be photonic using laser busses. That or they'll use quantum processing. Or both.<br /><br />We actually use much more than 5% of our brains. That number is an urban legend. In his book "The Synaptic Self" neurologist Joseph LeDoux puts it thusly;<br /><br />"Everyone has heard a few things about the wrinkled blob in the noggin; for instance, that we use only 10 percent of it. But who came up with this number? It's hard to imagine how 90 percent of the brain, lacking in value for most of us most of the time, could ever have come into existence. Researchers have been looking into what the brain does for many years now, and from what they have discovered, it doesn't seem that most of it is, in fact, resting idly."' <br /><br />In point of fact just the autonomic, visual and auditory regions and their wiring/preprocessing neurons (the grey matter) amount to much more than 5%. Add the frontal & prefrontal lobes (personality, attention & behavior) and their gray matter and you're talking half the brain, and we haven't touched the motor cortex (movement) yet. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[vogelbek]

Asuming a bunch of crackpots in a nevada basement discover anti-gravity and cosmic bio-energy and zero-point telepathy (and are subsequently ignored), I think the basic principles of space travel will remain largely the same.<br /><br />I do think that the minaturization of technology will make interstellar space probes possible. Picture a 100 gram nano-probe, complete with a microscopic energy source, a laser-based communication array, and every component engineered on the molecular level for peak efficiency. Now mount the whole thing on a few stages of fusion rocket engines, and you have the space vehcile of the future.<br /><br />As for manned interstellar travel, I suspect it would be easier to send a larger probe with the machinery to breed humans at the destination than have all the provisions to carry live (multi-generational) passengers allong the trip.

 

[nexium]

Let's assume one subatomic (or bigger) particle per cubic meter over the portion of the path that we are traveling about 1/10 th the speed of light, and the probe has a cross sectional area of one square meter. We collide with 30,000,000 particles per second, each of which have more kentic energy than 99.9% of the particles we encounter moving at low speed. This is because the probe passes though 30,000,000 cubic meters per second. Large amounts of secondary radiation will be produced inside the radiation shielding. 1/2 meter of shielding is likely not enough to insure the survial of any of the nano-components for the 42 years the fast part of the trip to the Centarii system will take. The kinetic collision energy increases as the square of the velocity except at speeds below about 1% of c (relative to Earth).<br />Is it ok if the intersellar probes take 420 years to reach Centarri Proxima? Almost perfect shielding will be required for that long. Neil

 

[oscar1]

The future is hopefully going to be a long period. If so, I can see before me a [world embracing sub-terrain] tunnel/tube system powered by tidal-gravity, whereby the stations accelerate to the speed of the transport vehicle in order to get on and get off. This system would run mainly on Moon-power so to speak.

 

[publiusr]

Some concepts.<br /><br />An asteroid bola dragging a tether tail, to snag Orion (put-put) payloads at speed off the sea surface. Uber-heavy lift. They reel the payload by wrapping action.<br /><br />Rotating cyllinder paylod orbiting around sun. (SPS)<br /><br />fluid filled sphere orbiting around sun--artificial convection cells persuade flows channeled through turbines.<br /><br />Molten nickel iron asteroids with a big bomb surrounded by shuttle tiles (meters thick).<br /><br />Explosion causes metal bubble to form. Rotate and hit center--you get a torus. Hit a molten blob with cone shaped impactor--and you form a huge cone...<br /><br />Cut asteroids with cables tethers like Kursk was cut up. Rotate bola, where one half of the asteroid descents at slow velocity to Earth Surface--other balluted/chutes into ocean--and towed to base...eliminating mining in space.<br />