Aside from digging up prior art on such a thing, how is this idea patentable in any way, other than a very specific implementation? I.e., using certain technologies for range finding to ground, picture display, and umm... reasons?
You have absolutely no idea on how patent law is applied.
So what happens when the first plane has a power blip, or an engine failure? How can you land with no view?
Airline pilots have what is known as an Instrument Flight Rating for a reason. They don't depend on looking out the window to fly.
I wanted to know why we're wasting money on this type of thing now, when we should be investing in FTL research. Once we perfect that, it will make any money we've spent exploring in the conventional way wasted money. We would be able to go out and retrieve the Voyager probes and bring them back into a museum and say 'job well done, boys, but we don't need you anymore.' Ultimately all these conventional missions will turn out to be a waste of resources, pushing back the time until we can get the FTL drive operational.
Because when it comes to FTL, there is no practical science to throw money at. (quantum models which require the bulk of the universes matter converted to energy to test are a bit far from "practical engineering".) And what good is FTL drive when you still need large rockets to get off of 1G gravity wells? Which you'd realize if your scientific knowledge extended something beyond LeVar Burton would be reading off a Star Trek shooting script. We are still in the evolving stage of enabling humans to live in space for long durations without making cripples or cancer patients out of them. We still have a large solar system to explore that we've only started scratching the surface of. Let's not jump the gun of our expectations.
....they should remove bubbles.
His grandpa did that decades ago. How is that today we can't do it?
Cousteau's deep divers DID have exhalation bubbles. rebreathers simply will not function beyond very shallow dives. Because you must balance your own internal pressure against that of the sea, and the human lung wasn't evolved for doing much more than 1 bar. You may be thinking of Conshelf Three which was an extended habitat some 328 feet below the surface. There were no exhalation bubbles because it was necessary to tether the aquanauts to the habitat with hoses delivering fresh helix (an air mix of about 98 percent helium and 2 percent oxygen) and retrieving it from the user's lungs. As they were breathing over 10 x surface pressure this was necessary to prevent the habitat from losing it's air and consequently being flooded. The triple tank backpacks they wore were only for emergency use and would have provided at most about 10 minutes of breathing. For a shallow lab like this one, there is no need to tether the divers in this fashion.
Mars doesn't have internal dynamo because it it tiny, it cooled off already. Earth sized rocky planets with similar composition take billions of years to cool, and so will have magnetic field.
Why does Venus then, which is about the size of Earth and fairly similar in composition so lack a magnetic field?
I currently subscribe to a variant of this climate change theory. (Natural, not anthropogenic.)
My variant is that all, or almost all the civilizations the aliens know about formed around red dwarf stars. It's nice and stable there for very long periods of time. We're only stable here by luck - and our big moon helps some.
It shows how little you know about red dwarfs. There are some big problems with life on a red dwarf. 1. The damm things are rather cold as stars go. So to get the kind of heat that's needed for liquid water, you've got to be pretty close to the parent star... and that has two major consequences. The first is tidal locking which means the same face is facing the start constantly. The more serious problem is proximity.... At that distance the solar wind is so dense it would overwhelm what would be a nearly non existent magnetic field. (because of the slow rotation from part 1). The planet's atmosphere would literally be blown away by the highly ionized solar wind.
We are kinda in the middle of the sticks in our galaxy. We are a good bit out in one of the arms.
Actually as life goes in the Galaxy, we're in prime real estate. We're far enough in for the metal density to be reasonably high enough to form nice rocky worlds. We are however not so close to be irradiated by the higher density of active stars in the Galactic Core. Gamma Ray Bursters and other nasty effects are far more common there. No to mention the occasional jet that would be emitted by the central black hole. I expect the Core to be pretty much a sterile place.
There are 88 objects (known) in our solar system larger than 200 miles in diameter. We know one has life, we believe 3 others have a promising chance to have life (Enceladus, Titan. Europa), as well as the possibility of subterranean life on Mars (methane venting).
There's a world of difference between the promise of microbial life, (which seems the best that they're hoping for) and the star-spanning kind of life this thread is interested in. For a long time the dominant species on this planet, were trilobites whose nearest present descendant are sand crabs.
...or how about that space faring races would tend to travel towards the center of the galaxy, instead of way out here in a spiral arm?
Because they enjoy higher levels of X Rays and radioactivity that much? The Center is a hostile place for living things.
- Finally, IIRC there's the matter of the Oort cloud to consider - I believe I heard somewhere that it is expected to cause attenuation and scattering of low-intensity radio signals. I suppose we'll know more about that if Voyager is still transmitting when it reaches it in a few (hundred?) centuries.
Voyager's plutonium battery is good for at most, another couple of decades.
Or maybe the universe is so competitive that anyone who announces their presence eats the bad end of a relativistic weapon...
But why? That's the question you need to answer. Why would any civilization advanced enough for true interstellar travel even be slightly interested in smashing the Earth with a relativistic weapon, or any other kind of weapon?
Because the only motives we can ascribe to alien species are our own.
R is the one I understand the least so you could be right. In my view star formation on its own is not enough as it doesn't take the star lifecycle into account. In all there are 10 types of star, of which it might be reasonable to assume F/G/K can support planets with life, in which case it would be (R * 0.227 or R=1.589). (22.7% of main-sequence stars are F/G/K type)
F stars are comparatively short lived on the order of 100 million years or so... K stars are so dim that the theoretical "life belt" is so close that the solar winds would overwhelm the magnetosphere and blow away the planet's atmosphere.
You are ignoring the fact that it seems like one highly intelligent and technology-developing species could probably not evolve in coexistence with another one on the same planet, at some point one would win and kill off the other one.
I'm sure it's been proposed/discussed many times before, but I don't know if this concept has an "official" name or not.
it does... It's called natural selection. A niche can only be occupied by one species at a time. If there is competition, the species that outbreeds the other will drive the loser to extinction.
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!
