A real Starship Enterprise in 20 years?

It will be Chinese, not US. China has the most ambitious space program now, they are going to the moon.

 

While I don't doubt that someone with unlimited money could build such a ship, I am skeptical about the 90-day trip time to Mars, and I don't believe the money is there today to build it in 20 years. While technologically possible, this would be a very expensive. The guy claims that $50 billion per year (for 20 years) would be sufficient. Good luck convincing anyone to write a check for that. And in a cursory look at his web site I saw no explanation of how he arrived at that figure. I think he pulled that number out of his hat.

And what would they do when they got to Mars? Take a lander to the surface and bring back samples? Presumably asking astronauts to take an untested lander to the surface of a planet without a breathable atmosphere and back up. And spend a trillion dollars over 20 years to bring back samples of Mars? And then what? Maybe a two-year trip to Jupiter to visit Europa? A five-year trip to Saturn to visit Callisto? And all these optimistic travel times assume the ideal planetary orientations, which for any given pair of planets only occur at rare intervals. Maybe you'd make a trip to Mars and back, and then wait a decade for a chance to go to Europa.

Meanwhile, Space X will be able to send people to Mars in a much more modest space ship for much less money.

Bottom line: There are too few places you can actually visit in this ship to justify the cost, when much cheaper crafts will be able to visit the same places. The fictional Enterprise had the entire galaxy within its reach. This one will have only our solar system, and beyond Mars, distances and travel times become geometrically greater and travel windows less and less frequent.

Remember that in the Star Trek world there are thousands of planets with civilizations and oxygen atmospheres, all within a few days "warp" flying time and the surface easily accessible with the magical transporter beam. In the real world, with this space ship, there's one planet other than Earth, and a few moons a human could actually land on. None of them has an oxygen atmosphere, and all require chemical rockets to get to and from the surface. Double the entire project cost if you want to get that chemical fuel by mining an asteroid.

In addition, there are technical matters still to be figured out, such as how to shield the crew from cosmic rays. (I believe the ISS is within the protection of the Earth's magnetosphere, but creating an artificial magnetosphere around a space ship is not a trivial matter.)

It ain't gonna happen within the next 20 years. Space X might get to Mars in that time, though.

 

20 years... it ain't gonna happen.

 

I wanted to know who voted yes?

 

if we do go to mars on an away mission, I'm not going if I'm going to be an Ensign with a red shirt.

 

Nope.

We'll be lucky if we're still not bumming rides off of the Russians in twenty years!

As far as the CHICOMS going to the Moon?
I don't see how you can do that with all the money that you're giving us (you don't really think it's a loan---do you??? ) but hey.....whatever floats your boat. One of the nicer advantages that China has over us is that they won't have hordes of bed-wetting liberals screaming and crying about wasteful military spending.

Good luck! Have a nice flight!
Bring one of our flags back.
They're like.....40 years old but should still be in good shape.

 

Well in the world of Star Trek, that would be the easy part. I'm a fan of Star Trek, and I remember that in next gen, they did mention shield technologies used for different types of cosmic rays. I would think the hardest technology would be a transporter. OK, I can understand having a device that *dissasembles* you in one place, has a temporary supercomputer that can record your whole atomic structure, but then how would you get re-assembled on a planet's surface (without another transporter pad present)?? Warp technology is still theoritically feasible, even though I think we're a long way off from developing anything like that.

It is kind of funny that producers of the show first came up with these concepts to have fast plot developments (the Enterprise could show up at a different planet each week, and they didn't have to keep showing people taking a shuttle down). The questions of how feasible these technologies were came later. Besides the transporter problem, I think it's interesting that there is some belief that alien civilizations might not be that different. Star Trek had a small budget, and back before CG, the best they could do was dress an actor in a fur costume. Statistically, I believe that our first alien encounter will be much different then Vulcans taking notice of Earth. How two different alien species could mate, how Klingons and Romulans could develop brow ridges after TOS, or how no one noticed City Alpha 6 exploding in Star Trek II seem like some of the biggest suspensions of disbelief...I chop all that up to keeping with fiction.

So, I think what made Star Trek popular was its fictional world where they could utilize different elements from any genre (and could break taboos like inter-racial kissing). Proposing spending billions of dollars on a conventional "Enterprise" that can't possibly be the Enterprise....well that does seem like a pretty extreme fantasy.

 

Shielding from cosmic rays is NOT easy. It may be possible, but not by any means easy.

"Transporters" are not sci-fi. They are fantasy. As in, complete make-believe with no scientific basis.

Faster-than-light travel is not possible for the simple reason that as anything is accelerated, some of the energy goes into velocity, and some goes into mass. At "ordinary" speeds, the added mass is undetectable. As the velocity approaches the speed of light, the mass approches infinity. Very near the speed of light, additional energy just makes the object heavier, as a vanishingly small part of the energy goes into increased velocity.

"Warp" drive is not possible because to accelerate anything that has non-zero rest mass to the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy.

The idea that we're going to go to a planet in another solar system and find English-speaking aliens who look almost like us, but with slight differences, such as pointy ears, or wrinkled foreheads, is just plain STUPID!!!

At least the guy whose idea inspired this thread understood that the "real" starship Enterprise won't have warp drive or transporters, and won't be able to reach another solar system within a human lifetime.

 

I think you missed my initial premise of "in the world of Star Trek". Having "shields" may be hard now, but it should be very plausable if we had the technologies for interstellar space travel.

With special theory of relativity, that would be true about reaching the speed of light. The concept of warp, though, is that it's not linear acceleration: but a folding of space-time.

Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light : Discovery News

OK, (now please read the premise this time), in the world of Star Trek, I would say that having half breed Vulcan/Humans or Klingon/Humans would be the most ridiculous. In Enterprise, since its premise was mankind discovering new species, they did try making up a back story about there being universal translators. How Spock could come to existance...since Vulcans may look humanoid but obviously have different metabolisms and internal anatomy, they obviously would have different genetics. Of course with evolution, an extraterrestrial would have a different anatomy (both internal and external) from us. Due to no CGI effects in 1966, I give Gene Roddenberry slack for letting aliens look humanoid. Letting them mate and have mixed species is extremely ridiculous, but I suspect that since Roddenberry was also using sci-fi as a way to portray our taboos, he was really exploring interracial relationships.

One of my favorite Carl Sagan quotes was debunking pseudoscience of humans being alien byproducts (IE the cult of von Daniken or there being alien abduction babies): That humans would have better luck mating with a petunia than an alien.

 

We need to make sure Picard travels back in time to prevent the Borg from destroying the first warp ship.

 

That was cancelled out with the JJ Abrams reboot Where now the Star Trek mythos is aparently *new*. Even though the original crew magically finds themselves in an earlier timeline and all together again, we've got to assume the Star Trek universe won't "magically" have the same timeline.

Argh...I'm now catching up on the latest episodes of Fringe. I thought the first season was really good...now it really seems to be getting the full JJ Abrams treatment. Lets not develop characters, lets just have totally different plot lines because we're now having alternate realities. I'm starting to have absolutely no interest in anything by Abrams.

I'm enough of a Star Trek fan, though, that I'll probably watch the next movie. I'm not expecting much from it, but if it has less freaking lens flares...it will be a big improvement!

 

I just watched the second part of the season finale of fringe. I agree with you, I am starting to get "lost".

 

Good grief. Claire Booth Luce and 50's McCarthyism is long dead as is the term "Chicoms". China, the world's second largest economy, home of near Darwinian state of government by and for corporations long ago gave up the "Com" (ie communist) economic model. It's your basic corporate state now with Chinese robber barons lamenting lazy workers who can't put in a good 12 hour day in an unsafe polluting factory building Prius parts.

It is this 19th century capitalism model that is spending heavy on the manned space program and who have met their development goals for the last 10 years. The next 10 years they plan to land on the moon and their track record says they will do it.



The first spacecraft of the program, the unmanned lunar orbiter Chang'e 1, was successfully launched from Xichang Satellite Launch Center on October 24, 2007,[3] having been delayed from the initial planned date of 17–19 April 2007. A second unmanned orbiter, Chang'e 2, was launched successfully on October 1, 2010. Chang'e 3, China's first lunar rover, is expected to launch in 2013. A manned expedition may occur in 2025-2030.

That will certainly give China preeminence in space.

To the topic, if there is a Starship Enterprise in 20 years, it will be a Chinese Capt Kirk.

 

Agreed! It was kind of cute when the credits would start off blue or red or old early 80s graphics depending on time or reality. I was thinking season 3 was getting pretty weak...now season 4 just seems so bad (there's no coherent development at all). I lost interest in Lost towards season 3. I wound up switching to the series finale just to see if it would be worth it to try getting back to watching more episodes. It didn't seem like I was missing much since the characters still didn't have any more development from season 3, they just had more alternate realities. I think I stuck with Fringe a bit more because the premise at least was more interesting...and John Noble/Walter Bishop definitely is more entertaining then any of the Lost characters.

 

Yeah I hear ya. Although any show that can incorporate sleigh bells in its main theme scores brownie points with me.

 

You're talking fantasy and make-believe. The subject of this thread is the idea of building a REAL spaceship, resembling in size and shape the fictional one. In the real world, transporters and warp drive do not exist and never will because they violate the most basic laws of physics.

Your premise that shields "should be plausible if we had the technologies for interstellar space travel" is as silly a statement as "If cheese had lips, the ocean would be made of beer." The distances involved and the energy required mean that nobody who set out on an interstellar trip would ever come back, or be able to communicate with the people who sent them.

Travel to other planets within our solar system is possible, and will probably happen, and the site linked in the OP suggests a particular project for doing so, in the world we actually live in. I happen to think it is unrealistically ambitious, and I pointed out one area (shielding) where there is still a technological problem.

Discussion of the fantasy world of Star Trek and interstellar travel is entirely off topic, even though the fictional ship inspired the guy to make his overly-ambitious, but still real-world proposal.

 

I fully believe that there will be some sort of manned ship that is able to travel not just to the moon but on to Mars and back repeatedly. Sadly, I don't believe that the USA will be the ones that build it. I'd say it will be China or maybe a collection of foreign states.

Warp speed? Probably not.