Podcast: Big Things Have Weird Beginnings
Posted by Justin on June 20th, 2012
The three amigos are reunited yet again in this thrilling episode of the podcast. Justin is rightly ridiculed for refusing to lower his expectations for the already far overachieving Voyager probe. Andrew and Brian debate the feasibility of searching for Dyson Spheres. AND FINALLY all three really hash out their feeling on Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Tears are shed. Blood is spilled. Things get weird.
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June 20th, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Andrew Mayne has brought up the idea of hollowing out asteroids to create artificial worlds a few times. The website ‘Icarus Interstellar’ recently had a post on this idea. They claim Larry Niven was one of the first to discuss it:
article:
“Project Hyperion: The Hollow Asteroid Starship – Dissemination of an
Idea”
http://goo.gl/gvlgu
the article links to this picture:
http://thewesternlines.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/page883.jpg
June 20th, 2012 at 11:22 pm
The trio discussed Voyager 1. A comment, on a recent Daily Galaxy story on the probe, said to remember that Voyager 1’s computers (there are three of them) only have a total memory of 69 KB.
June 21st, 2012 at 12:07 am
someone linked to this story in reddit awhile ago (either it was in subreddit “space” or “science”, I forget) about Dyson spheres. It Discusses who conceived of the idea, what it would take to make one, energy produced, etc. The original sphere wasn’t to be a closed shell.
website: Institute for Emerging Ethics and Technologies
article: “How to build a Tyson sphere in five (relatively) easy steps”
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/dvorsky20120329
June 21st, 2012 at 12:34 am
On the topic of ‘Prometheus.’ After noting Phil Plait saying the ship went 35 light years in about 2 years means faster-than-light travel, wouldn’t you think humans would have a handle on the ageing process? In this movie humans have conquered FTL (seems it took 1 trillion dollars), AI (albeit murderous AI) and yet cant hack the genome to slow down ageing? The ship must have super advanced materials, so assume superior meta-materials. Nanotechnology? I assume experiments on people at the cellular level and still cant keep people alive longer?
In all these Aliens movies they break the simple rule, don’t let contaminated persons inside.
June 21st, 2012 at 4:14 am
I just noticed some critics of George Dvorsky’s Dyson sphere article in IEET. A writer at Forbes talked to Phil Plait in April and both dismissed it. They think would take too long, cost too much to capture the energy. What to do with 50% of Mercury gone, debris problems, transmitting energy back to Earth, robot AI, mining operations, etc. But George said maybe this could be done in stages over 50 years. Popular Science also jumped on the idea as being bad.
But there one fan of the Dyson sphere idea…The Granular Mechanics and Regolith Operations Laboratory at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre.