Different Situation for life.

 So when someone thinks of a planet most people would think of the kinds of planets in our own solar system but in reality there are so many different kinds of planets and not only that but even some of the planets in our own solar system are not what they seem. For example, Mercury seems like a normal planet yeah? Well the thing is that even though it is only a little larger than the moon it has more than twice the  gravity of the moon.

This means that the components of mercury are not what they seem. Our moon is made up things you would assume that it has, it is like a small planet, it has a molten core, a mantel and a crust, this is the same as our earth only on a much larger scale. Mercury on the other hand has such a huge gravity and yet is so small which can only mean on thing, it has to be dense. And what is the most dense part of a planet? The core, which for rocky planets like ours and Mercury is made out of iron. If Mercury is just a core that means at some point it used to be a much larger planet. Something on the same size as earth or Venus. There are is only one thing that comes to mind that could do something like rip off something like 60% of a planet, and that is another planet.
But that goes into a different subject i might talk about later (wandering planets) for now i am going to talk about my favorite kind of exo-planet that we know can exist.
Binary planet systems. This is where there are two planets orbit each other and are relatively large. Sometimes the earth and the moon are considered binary planets but what i am talking about is when something like Venus and Earth orbiting together.

Now should we take this to the next level on thinking?
Sure, lets say that there were to planets rotating around each other, and they were in the Goldilocks zone (when the planet is far enough from the sun that there its water is not frozen but not so close that it evaporates) than life could occur on on these planets as we know it (carbon based), if this happened than when they looked up at night or during the day in some cases they would be able to see the life there. This could Even go as far as to prevent something like the dark ages or even religion in an extreme case from happening. I am willing to say this much because one thing about our own sky and what you can see with the naked eye, is that it all looks the same in a sense. For example when you look up in the sky, you really only see three things, and two of those look the same for the most part. The sun is a super bright light, nothing is like it here on earth, and the moon and the stars look the same in color and also look like nothing here on earth. So the sky becomes distant, detached from here, it becomes the heavens, but if they looked up there and something that did look like things down here than that would force them to think about things in a different manner. And as soon as they get the hang of map making than they would start to realize that like on their own planet this other planet has continents, oceans, forests and life. Not only this but if one of the planets life developed electricity than the other planet would be able to see the planet when its in the dark.
For us here on earth the space race happened because two nations were trying to show off their power, but in this situation they would race to get to the other planet. One would hope that they had something similar to the UN that would keep them from directly contacting this other life to let them have natural evolution and development.
This is what i like thinking about. I wish I could talk to people that could help me think more about this in a better light and understanding.
Oh well. someday there will be a chance for me.
Till next time.

Space.... Nope VIDEOGAMES

So as I'm sure you all know, I love space, but something else I love is videogames.
 But the thing about games is that they are expensive for the most part and you have to pay for them (not really at all but it is good to if you like the people that make them). So a lot of people either dont have a lot of games or have to wait for sales. This is both good and bad because its really a pain if you see a game come out or you find a game that you really want bu you dont have the money. But I have found an amazing site here on the web that can help any one that plays games on say steam.

Now I have actually known about this site for a year or two now, but it recently has come out with a new feature and it is really cool so I thought i would use this chance to introduce it here so all of you (the what, three of you? thank you by the way) that like videogames.

Anyways the site is called The Humble Bundle and like I said it is super super cool.

Here are all the super great things about this site, first off its pay what you want, and pay more than the average to get special games. Second the bundle has anything from 5 to 9 games in it.
Normally the average only gets to about $5 so you pay $6 and get all those games.

 AND even better is that you can give the money to charity if you want. But if you dont want to do that you can pick how much goes to where, the humble bundle, the game creators, or the charity.

And about every 10 days or so the main Bundle changes to something different. But there is also the Weekly sale, that as the name implies it changes every week.

But the New thing that has Just come out is the Humble Store. This new feature allows you to buy just a single game, and it doesn't have that huge price discount, but the store has a Huge veriety of games and the these games change every 24 hours so if there is nothing that looks good to you just wait a day and there are all these new games.

As for myself i have yet to use the store but i have used the others, The Humble Bundle and the Humble Weekly Sale and every time i have used it i came out happy with the over all experience. But soon i am guessing there will be a game in the store that i might buy. I highly suggest to anyone that plays games that they should check out this site, even for just a quick look.

HAHAHA GOING ON FOREVER

so i told my english teacher(the one that is making me do this) that i would let him pick what i would talk about in this, but im not going to do that because yeah.

Infinity.

So what do you think of when you talk about infinity.
0,1,2,3,4,5,6... all the way to the end?
that works.
But what about the numbers in-between 1 and 2?
1.1, 1.2... wait, that would come to an end, what about 1.1, 1.11, 1.111, going on forever. That would be infinity as well.
 So does that mean that there are infinite numbers between numbers in an infinite count.
But than again there number going back, so 0,-1,-2,-3,-4,-5,-6... again going back forever.
And this number count also have numbers between them.
So there are numbers going on forever in bot directions from 0. And between each number in that infinity has an infinity between it. So an infinity inside infinity.
Pretty awesome i think. But here is another cool thing. As i am surrounded by hippies that dont actually know what they are talking about, i tend to end up looking up a lot.
There are these things called fractals in math, the hippies seem to have a weird understanding of this. What they are is a pattern that goes on forever, and as you zoom in it again goes on forever just getting smaller. ill stop here before i start to talk math.
A great youtube channel to learn more cool stuff like this is http://www.youtube.com/vihart.
Super good.
Ciao.

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.
~

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.
~
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.