Culture&Entertainment

This time i think we are going to be talking about Culture. This isn't something a lot of people would think about but it is important, but think about it this way, you are going to have many people in space for a long time, and if they are going on a trip that will take more than a single generation they are going to develop their own kind of culture. The popular art will be different than that on earth. This goes along with entertainment, music and games and movies and technology will advance individually to this group in space.

     In order to explain this situation better lets come up with a hypothetical situation. Or rather we will be creating two hypothetical situations. One where we just go to the closest star (Alpha Centauri) and use a fusion core. and the other where we go to the closest planet that is assumed to be capable to host life(Gliese 581c). The difference is not that one has a planet, they both do, but Alpha Centauri's planet is really hot. Like its surface is 1200°c. To put in comparison the hottest planet in our solar system is Venus and is only a mere 462°c.

For our Ship going to Alpha Centauri, it must travel 4.37 light years. With our current space traveling methods it would take thousands of years, you could use a fusion core but that would also take a long time. With traditional rockets it would take about 79000 years, but with a fusion core it would cut that time in roughly half. still a very long time. Just under 4000 years. On earth we went from building the pyramid in Egypt to going to the moon, that's twice the time that Christianity had been around. Anything could happen and no one would ever know.

To get to Star Gliese 581 and furthermore to the planet Gliese 581c, they will have to go 20.3 light years away from earth. by our math from the last situation, it would take only 20000 years to get to.  We would need a faster drive.

But as you can see if a self containing part of a civilization were to go into space it would result in them creating and maintaining their own culture, and if their group and ours were to meet up anywhere from 200 years to 2000 years it would have unpredictable results. Think about the difference between Chinese culture and Mexican, or Canadian and Saudi Arabian culture, though this would be on  much larger scale.

Energy

 Because its fun to talk about energy this is what I am going to go over.

So, in the media star ships always have like a core thing. The great thing about this subject is that this is kinda true, but only in the sense that in the center (kinda) of the ship is where the energy will be produced. Now when we talk about a ship that can exist in the next 100 to 150 years this core will either use fusion. Either way it will need to produce massive amounts of energy and radiation. This star ship could also use solar energy but that wouldn't have a core and would not produce nearly as much energy. Now if you are reading this keep in mind that nuclear power is currently the cleanest form of energy, it does produce radioactive waist but we would have ways to to deal with that.

Hopefully we will have Fusion as a source of energy and we could then use that. Hypothetically there is Antimatter, and if we could make large amounts of this substance (grams at a time) we could have a much larger and cleaner form of energy.  But as far as i know the only way to create Antimatter is by speeding matter up to near the speed of light and then slamming it into equivalent mass traveling at the same speed. Unfortunately I must say we cant count on rotating crystal pyramids to get energy from so for this example we will be hopeful and say that we have Fusion unlocked and ready to be used in this sort of situation.

This core would have to be placed in the center or the center back bottom. I give two options because the center would allow for the most protection, where as the center back bottom would give less radiation to the rest of the ship.

Because Fusion runs on Hydrogen you never have to worry about running out of fuel. This might sound absurd but if we used hydrogen as fuel your exhaust would be helium. If you did enough reactions to produce enough helium to fill a normal balloon, it would be enough power to light an average light bulb for 300 years. And because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe its something you don't have to worry about.  Large gas giants like Jupiter are made mostly out of hydrogen and helium so any ship with the tech could stop by one of these as a refueling station.

With this form of energy as a fuel we would be able to move with relative speed throughout the galaxy.

The Next Step, What it Would Take: Part One, Navigation

 As the title suggests i am going to talk about all of the things that would be needed in a ship that was going to be leaving the planet earth for a longer period of time. By that i mean longer than a year with no contact with our planet, an example of this would be a large ship going to a new planet.
The first thing that this ship would need would be a navigation system, this is to even arrive there. Remember that moving through space is unlike anything on earth. One way you could navigate through space would be to use the sun and known orbits of the planets. This way you would have an item that doesn't move (it does but not relative to this said ship), the only problem with this method is that you wouldn't be able to use it if you left this solar system. Another method you could use is to use the center of our galaxy as a replacement for our sun and use photos as a map.
 But a more likely and more effective method would to use a form of the Doppler Effect called Redshift/Blueshift. Redshift and Blueshift work by our current understanding of light, that being that light is a wave (and a particle but ignore this for now) and it has a specific wave length. In Redshift or Blueshift, if you move toward an item that is producing light than its light turns a shade of blue, if you are moving away from an item that is emitting light, it would turn more red. To use this idea than you could use a picture taken from your location (floating in space where ever), from here you would compare it to other photos to locate the place you want to go to. After you locate what direction your destination is in you would accelerate towards it. At this point two new things are needed, one you would need to be going really fast, and second, you would need something to monitor the 'color' (frequency) of this stars light. This way as you approach this star your computer will inform you when you need to slow. But just like everything this only works if you are Not using a FLT (faster than light) mode of transportation, so it is not a permanent method of navigation. My money would be on the mapping of this galaxy and then pre-programming that into on board spaceship computers.

(this is Redshift and Blueshift examples if you didn't get it)

 When humans first took to the seas we didn't know about the shorelines. We will just have to learn all over again, and i hope and believe that our future generations push through this challenge.
(maybe we will find a Nice extraterrestrial species and they can help us, but i doubt it)

Next we are going to go over either Water or Energy, i dont know yet.

what we should have done already

Alright, lets start this off with a number. 3.539.000.000.000.
That is the amount of money the united states spent last year (2012). That year we spent a total of 1.030 to 1.415 trillion of it on defense. That said, the united states gave 16.014 billion dollars on NASA. We spent 88 times more money on rockets and guns than we did on advancing human kind and getting to learn more about the Universe. I hate (i don't hate to say it) say it but what the hell. I mean I am someone that thinks that world peace will never happen, and i actually think that war is a good thing, in the sense that most of all good and important advances in technology come from war. But we don't need to almost a trillion and a half dollars on that stuff. So what i am going to theorize in the following is what i think we could do with that money with out leaving us defenseless and still letting us move forward. Not only that but also Actually let us jump ahead of all other countries and become stronger and more advanced than any other country on earth.
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First lets take a look at our currant space station shall we?
It orbits earth at 230 miles above earth.
Its approximate speed is 4.791 miles a second.
We put it into orbit on November 20. 1998.
 And finally it cost a total of 150 billion us dollars to make.

This is all easy stuff to know, i mean hell you can just look it up. What a lot of people don't know is that it can only hold at most 6 people. I don't know about you but when i think of a Space Station its a place where more than 50 people can live. Its Not a place where there are only a few places where a person can stand fully upright. Now this thing we call a space station cost a total of 150 billion dollars, and we paid for more than half of the full thing. If we took just 25% of what we spent on all of defense we have almost two and a half more money than we spent on the current space station. With this money and the amount in advancement in technology we could make something so much greater for something near the same price.

So lets imagine that we build a larger space station that is large enough to host up to 50 adults. This ship is also able to reduce the amount of radiation absorbed by the astronauts to only increase their chance of getting cancer down to 0.5% from 3% which it is right now.
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In this situation the next step humans or this nation could do would be to make some other ships that would be capable of going to the Asteroid belt. or just past Mars. If thought out it would be capable to have rotating 'crews' of men, some would stay at the space station while others are out at the Asteroid Belt Mining.
The importance in mining this belt is that one of the reasons we don't have more things in space is that it is super expensive to send things into space in the first place. So if we can get the materials we need to build things already in space than we don't have to pay that expense. this would let us build Bigger and better things making in natural to more forward.
Not only that but the Asteroid Belt is filled with elements that are semi-rare. If a country was able to do this than they would suddenly become much more powerful than all other countries.
If started now you could have this sort of thing just finished by the year 2025, only 5 years after when the current space station is going to be ordered down.

Next post i am going to move on from here in the suggested human advancement, or rather where i think we should go.

Space

So like just after the united states and the USSR 'finished' their space race, the result being that the US made it to the moon before the Russians did, we sent out a spacecraft that was going to go and take pictures of Saturn. This ship was only supposed to go on a five year trip and then after it they would send it into the planet where it would be crushed after falling miles into the planet. They decided to just send it away from the sun.
First I should say that this Ships name was Voyager 1, and it competed its Saturn mission with fantastic results.

From this Mission we learned that Saturn, just like Earth, has an Aurora that happens at its polls.

But what i want to get to is that after this mission we just sent this ship out and pointed it away from the sun, and just recently NASA made an announcement that as of August 2012 this ship has left the heliosphere.
The heliosphere is the electromagnetic sphere the sun creates. It is just like the one that our earth makes, and because of our stars heliosphere the planets don't get bombarded with interstellar radiation. And now that this ship has left our Solar System it can be argued that our race(humans) have become interstellar beings, though we did it kinda by cheating as this ship took around 36 years to do it. Anyway (did you know anyways is not a 'real' word as its slang) this ship is going to keep going and at its current speed it will reach the next star in 44,000 years. so just have to wait a bit longer.

The History of Human Data Storage

One thing that makes humans so different from the other beings on this earth is that we have a sense of history. By that I mean we record what has happen, we create data, or information.

 Originally humans created information and passed it along to others through verbal communication. In a way this is the most basic form or data storage. This is still present today in the forms of myths, or stories. Anything you heard that someone else hear that someone else heard is a form or verbal recording. I won't get to into this as it is a simple concept and not that exciting, in this light.

 A second form of Data recording is through the use of pictures or drawings. The most notable of the older drawings are cave drawings. The oldest cave drawings is approximately 40,000 years old and is located in northern Spain. Some debate if this is drawn by humans as at that time there were many more Neanderthals in Europe at the time making it much more likely that a member of that species. That said the average human is about 4% Neanderthal.

 Moving on, the next form or information storage is through writing. Again this is something else that only humans have managed to do, as far as we know. Writing is interesting in the sense that as it formed all over the world sometimes without relation to the other forms, we end up with radically different forms of it all over the world, from Sumerian to ancient Egyptian to Old Chinese. Now, with the invention of writing there is the ability of accuracy that can't be held with verbal remembrance can't have do to the inability of humans to remember thing clearly. I doubt that this is a coincidence that this is the edge of our knowledge of human history. I think that this is the reason that religion is so prominent. After the creation of writing things didn't progress in this area for a long time, due to religion and the dark ages.

 The next development occurred in the 20th century with the invention of virtual storage. Computers in this day and age use things called Bits to record information.  A bit can be one of two things, either a one or a zero. This works by telling the computer to either do something or not, it works like a yes or a no. Because of this the number of bits that have to be used is incredibly large. because of that there are different terms for larger amounts of bits. Above bit is a byte, which is eight bits. above a byte is a kilobyte. here is a list of terms and the number of bits.

Byte = 8 bits
Kilobyte = 1024 Bytes
Megabyte = 1024^2 bytes
Gigabyte = 1024^3 bytes
Terabyte = 1024^4 bytes
Petabyte =1024^5 bytes
Exabyte = 1024^6 bytes
Zetabyte = 1024^7 bytes
Yottabyte = 1024^8 bytes

 Right now the largest hard drive on earth is at IBM's research lab in California. It is an insane 120 petabytes. I know i punt the numbers up there but I want to write it out to show the size of it.
That's 1 160 568 786 830 044 007 717 928 960 bits. That's a little more than one Octillon bits.

Now bits are good but they are getting outdated. In the near (within the next hundred years) future computers will switch from using bits to using Qubits. The difference between the two is that a qubit is that rather then being either a one or a zero it can be both at the same time. Not that it now has three forms, one zero and both, but that it can tell the computer to do both at the same time. An easier way of thinking about it is if you think of how a computer would solve a puzzle. Right now a computer would go till it reaches a T section, at that moment it would take one turn and continue to make that one turn until it reaches a dead end. Then it would go back to the last turn and take the other rout. If it reaches a second dead end. It will do this over and over till it reaches a solution. But with a quontum computer (a computer using qubits rather than bits) would take all possible routs at the same time. This lets it reach a solution in a single 'move'.

Out side of the computer world some scientists have found a way to code information into DNA which would allow us to create biological safes of information. This is still in the developmental stage but it could help somehow in the future.

Where or how do you think we will store information in the future?

Immortality?

Immortality, Something that many people have tried to gain and so far all have failed. But outside of the Human species there may be some that have reached a form of immortality.
First lets talk about what immortality is and the different forms of it.
This is the scientific version. From the scientific side it is when an organism no longer can be killed by time. when it comes to humans there are several ideas as to how we could extend our lives, rejuvenation and mind uploading. But when it comes to things that happen in nature there are different answers. If a species mortality rate doesn't increase after maturity then it is considered biologically immortal. an example of this would be coral colonies and aspen trees. The older either of those is then the harder it is for it to die, that means that its mortality rate is higher the younger it is.
     The Hydras, a species of really small fresh-water animal, scientists have recently become interested in them do to their regenerative ability. the odd thing about the Hydras is that they have the ability to to stop their aging. And while in captivity we have never seen one die from age. Many scientists think that they could open the doors to the extension of human life. Another example of something like this in nature is the Turritopsis Nutricula, also called the Immortal Jellyfish. This jellyfish has the strange ability to revert back to its infant stage after becoming sexually mature. And from what scientists can tell this action can be repeated forever thus letting it be considered immortal. Just like the Hydra people are looking into seeing if it can help people live longer.
     On a new hand there are some bacteria that have been able to come out of a form of 'stasis' after millions of years.
     When i mentioned Aspen colonies above, the oldest one that we know of is named Pando. Latin for "I Spread", this 'trees' age is around 80,000 years old. at this age its mortality rate is so low that many thing that a natural death for it is incredibly unlikely. This tree no longer needs to reproduce, it simply clones itself to add a new tree. The way these trees work if you dont know is the Tree is really the root system. The parts that people see are only the sprouts.  Thats why if it needs to make a new 'tree' then it just clones itself and the roots sprout a new tree.
    One of the oldest individual Living things we know of is a member of Pinus Logaeva, or the Great Basin Bristlecone Pine. The member is 5,063 years old. It is able to achieve this incredible age by  letting the out side of the tree die to protect it from the dangers of the world. Whats more the environment in which it lives is very dry and has near no extreme weather that could damage the tree.

So is immortality real or possible or is it something that only some "Chosen" species can achieve. That said there is a chance that humans have not finished evolving, or Science will one day understand the ways that they do it and manage to imitate it. But that's for another discussion.