Interesting idea!! If it's going to take over 100 years (which is WAY faster than we can achieve with current ideas) there would have to be that many years of food water and oxygen, plus enough people to procreate a few times!
The answer is right there, as many species of tardigrades are cannibals. Once they are past useful age, they go from diner to dinner.
That isn't the full answer, though, as you would still need to bring bio for them to eat. I suppose you could feed them human poop(?!) But, that isn't a perpetual energy solution.
I wonder if we would do better with dehydrated food, packaged food , growing food? How much O2 could we make with greenery? And water? Water is heavy.
Sure. But, the reason they are along is to produce energy, and they don't do that while in that suspended state.
I know that was the point you’re making, and it is completely wrong. But you don’t seem to be able to accept evidence or even scientific explanations by physicists. The trip would take 8 years for the person on earth, watching. But it would take a fraction of that time for the traveler.
Time dilation involves the comparison of two clocks that take different paths through space-time. The traveler in your scenario has only one clock and the task of reaching an object at a known distance. It becomes a simple time and distance problem for that traveler. In the case of Alpha Centauri, that distance is 4.4 light years, or ~40 trillion kilometers. And, the spaceship can not exceed the cosmic speed limit that we call light speed. So, if the ship travels at 1/10th the speed of light, that means it would take 4.4/.1 = 44 years according to the clock on board. The congressional "Breakthrough Starshot" directive to NASA boils down to trying to send a sensor that has some sort of scientific value to an objective outside our solar system. So, there is a lot of attention to the mass of the object and the possible means of acceleration. "The fastest spacecraft so far launched into space, the NASA-Germany Helios probes, traveled at 250,000 kilometers per hour. At that speed, it would take the probes 18,000 years to reach the nearest star to the sun." (Alpha Centauri) https://www.science.org/content/art...Centauri is 4.4 light,nearest star to the sun. They talk about attempting to reach 1/10th the speed of light, but there isn't a real world solution for that.
Tardigrades are a complete system, not an organism that has resiliency tacked on as a separate feature.
If they were traveling in a current technology space craft, the trip to the nearest star would take around 30,000 years. They wouldn't return alive. In fact they would die well before arriving there in the first place.
There is such a solution, and for a long time, since the 60s of the 20th century. There was a project of a spaceship with an unusual engine. It was called the "explosion ship". A massive shield with a small hole through which small atomic bombs were fired was placed on its stern. They exploded giving the ship a boost. According to calculations, such a spaceship could reach Alpha Centauri in a thousand years. And less powerful ships could fly through the solar system reaching Jupiter and Saturn in a few months.
There's one thing I don't understand about the theory of time dilation. After all, all reference frames are equivalent. So from the point of view of a person flying on a spaceship at near-light speed, the Earth is moving at near-light speed, and he is standing still. And this means that time must be slowing down on Earth in comparison with it. What is this strange paradox?
Yes - that is definitely exciting! I hope they get that up to functioning with real payloads. It could be especially important for inside the solar system. Plus, there are always the dreams of a telescope that uses our sun's gravity as a lens - requiring a huge distance, but nowhere near the distance to Alpha Centauri.
This is one of the problems. The acceleration will be pulsed. - at the moment of the explosion. It was assumed that a system of shock absorbers was needed to make the flight more comfortable. The second problem is that the shield needs to be very thick, firstly to protect against radiation, and secondly because it will gradually burn out from explosions.
I'm not a fan of humans in space. We've clearly demonstrated incredible capability in exploring moons and planets and the universe with ground travel, helicopters, and incredible instrumentation. We have telescopes such as Hubble and JWST. Our advancements in robotics are simply astounding, especially as we move forward with AI. Human space travel is exponentially more expensive, as the full focus is on attempting to keep humans alive - NOT on scientific discovery. This form of propulsion can most likely be engineered to be within the tolerances of the hardware that will do the science.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/sc...rdigrade-dna-human-stem-cells-super-soldiers/ Well I'll be. Imagine this. I was half joking when I suggested Tartigrade DNA to be used in humans
Radiation is one important issue, obviously. But, radiation is a fact that would reduce human life. So, even perfect radiation protection doesn't allow someone to live longer. Today, the stated NASA direction on radiation is literally to "go faster to make exposure shorter". Humans still face the facts of the stupendous distances of space and the engineering realities of how fast we can propel an object that contains a human and all the support mechanisms required - even if you ignore radiation. One direction is to create the tiniest, lightest weight spacecraft that has meaningful function. These are getting down to the level. This is where we get Breakthrough Starshot - an effort to create a "StarChip" that could be propelled to 20% of the speed of light, meaning that it could reach Alpha Centauri in 20 to 30 years and send a message back (which would take 4 years as Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away). It has to be exceptionally light in order to be accelerated to that speed - so they need StarChip to be limited to a few grams. It will then be powered by a collection of incredibly powerful lasers from Earth, reaching a speed that is then not changed throughout the trip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
To the person traveling at near light speed, life on earth would be moving very fast. -Not slow. To the person in the space ship everything is normal. To the person on the ground everything is normal. But viewing each other reveals the differences, -IF- viewing were possible. How would that be accomplished? Radio/video signals? They travel at the speed of light so to the space cadet, the signal is altered by speed, too.
I think that in order to travel to such distant planets it will be necessary to master gravity. Anti-gravity technology will be needed I think. And that would seem to be related to technology that eliminates mass. Mass has to be managed and anti-mass technology is necessary for there to be instant acceleration. And that will change everything because, remember, general relativity says that anything with zero mass instantly accelerates to light speed. If a vehicle is surrounded by an envelope in which everything in it has zero mass, that has huge implications for particles, radiation, and all space technology I’ll bet.
I would suggest that altering the fundamental physics of our universe has to start off in the realm of physics, not engineering. That is, eliminating mass, changing gravity, contracting space-time, etc., require answers from physics. There would need to be physics that would give engineers a direction to attempt. Maybe one can get a general view of some of the problems encountered by reading about Alcubierre drive proposals - a relatively active field that have been interesting to actual physicists - perhaps mostly as entertainment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive# I'll add that space isn't actually empty. If traveling near (or above?) light speed, collision with dust would be catastrophic. Plus, at those speeds one could not detect anything that is in front of the space ship such that avoidance would be possible.
