Lifeboat Foundation

New technology could take us to Mars in as fast as 3 days.

Interstellar space travel is still a matter of science fiction. With our current propulsion systems, it would take millennia to really travel on an interstellar level. However, science is now looking towards new propulsion systems to make interstellar reach possible in significantly less time.

One such system is called Photonic Propulsion, and it’s an insanely interesting idea. The video you see above is a quick summary of a talk given by Philip Lubin of University of California Santa Barbara. It’s a two minute selected sampling of a much larger talk, which you can watch in the source link below.

Continue reading “Could we get to Mars in 3 days? Nasa’s considering Photonic Propulsion tech” »

The art gallary of space.

Are you tired looking for a gallery space to exhibit your artwork? Well, now you have a chance to show off your work in an asteroid art gallery, thanks to NASA.

According to CNN, the space agency is inviting people to send their artworks to an asteroid on its new spacecraft: the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx. The mission, led by the University of Arizona, will also collect a sample of the asteroid Bennu and return it to Earth for study for the first time in history.

Continue reading “Asteroid Art Gallery: NASA To Open Art Gallery On The Asteroid Bennu” »

Love on a Subatomic Scale.

When talking about love and romance, people often bring up unseen and mystical connections. Such connections exist in the subatomic world as well, thanks to a bizarre and counterintuitive phenomenon called quantum entanglement. The basic idea of quantum entanglement is that two particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space; a change induced in one will affect the other. In 1964, physicist John Bell posited that such changes can occur instantaneously, even if the particles are very far apart. Bell’s Theorem is regarded as an important idea in modern physics, but it seems to make little sense. After all, Albert Einstein had proven years before that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Indeed, Einstein famously described the entanglement phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.” In the last half-century, many researchers have run experiments that aimed to test Bell’s Theorem. But they have tended to come up short because it’s tough to design and build equipment with the needed sensitivity and performance, NASA officials said. Last year, however, three different research groups were able to perform substantive tests of Bell’s Theorem, and all of them found support for the basic idea. One of those studies was led by Krister Shalm, a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. Shalm and his colleagues used special metal strips cooled to cryogenic temperatures, which makes them superconducting — they have no electrical resistance. A photon hits the metal and turns it back into a normal electrical conductor for a split second, and scientists can see that happen. This technique allowed the researchers to see how, if at all, their measurements of one photon affected the other photon in an entangled pair. The results, which were published in the journal Physical Review Letters, strongly backed Bell’s Theorem. “Our paper and the other two published last year show that Bell was right: any model of the world that contains hidden variables must also allow for entangled particles to influence one another at a distance,” co-author Francesco Marsili, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. There are practical applications to this work as well. The “superconducting nanowire single photon detectors” (SNSPDs) used in the Shalm group’s experiment, which were built at NIST and JPL, could be used in cryptography and in deep-space communications, NASA officials said. NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere Dust and Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission, which orbited the moon from October 2013 to April 2014, helped demonstrate some of this communications potential. LADEE’s Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration used components on the spacecraft and a ground-based receiver similar to SNSPDs. The experiment showed that it might be possible to build sensitive laser communications arrays that would enable much more data to be up- and downloaded to faraway space probes, NASA officials said.

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The first serious attempt to design a ship capable of travelling to the nearest stars. Weighing 50,000 tonnes, powered by nuclear fusion, travelling at 12% of the speed of light, the journey time would be close to 50 years.

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Philip Lubin describes his appraoch to achieving laser driving spacecraft propulsion in the near term.

100kg robotic craft could be sent to Mars in 3 days.
1kg could go overnight to Mars.
50–100 GW could send a wafercraft to 30% of the speed of light and i would involve 10 minutes.

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Yes.

A new video released by the space agency discusses the possibility of speeding up our missions to other worlds by harnessing the power of lasers.

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Researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara are aiming to use photonic propulsion technology to get aircraft to relativistic speeds, or more than one tenth of the speed of light.

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ABSTRACT

While General Relativity (GR) ranks undoubtedly among the best physics theories ever developed, it is also among those with the most striking implications. In particular, GR admits solutions which allow faster than light motion and consequently time travel. Here we shall consider a “pre-emptive” chronology protection mechanism that destabilises superluminal warp drives via quantum matter back-reaction and hence forbids even the conceptual possibility to use these solutions for building a time machine. This result will be considered both in standard quantum field theory in curved spacetime as well as in the case of a quantum field theory with Lorentz invariance breakdown at high energies. Some lessons and future perspectives will be finally discussed.

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