Add some more useful real estate to the empire!

http://www.space.com/33387-dwarf-pla...015-rr245.html



"Astronomers have discovered another dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy objects beyond Neptune. But this newfound world, dubbed 2015 RR245, is much more distant than Pluto, orbiting the sun once every 700 Earth years, scientists said."

Something like 700km diameter or probably ~5*10^20 kgr of valuable resources eventually.

http://cfht.hawaii.edu/en/news/NewDwarfPlanet/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_RR245



(yellow orbit)

This is just the beginning. Given how significant the minimum distances from sun and eccentricity of these Kuiper belt objects are it is standard assumption that we usually detect first the ones that happened in our era to be closer to their perihelion so the door is open for many more out there that are now far away in regions in particular that they spend the vast majority of time of their eccentric orbits.

And still this is less than 1 light day distance away at worse times. Puts the distances of the closer stars/solar systems with interesting planets still thousands of times further out.

The sun light in that distant world is probably from 20 to 300 times as bright as the full moon depending on position. The apprent size of the solar disk out there is 1000-15000 times smaller than the full moon though, so it looks only a very bright dot really.


Maybe it would look like that if observed from a tiny irregular size companion; (it is like 2-3 times larger in volume than Enceladus)

cool!

Let's have an RR245 party!

PTB

Here's to a future where we can have a party there actually! Like take a date or friends there for a weekend (far future) or a year lol (next century). Well we will be gone but the others like us will do it if they get scientific society going finally. We can live through them now.

Lets go! First of all without new technology that can overcome current paradigms the faster one can go there and not suffer is with an acceleration 1g. So lets say we go 100 au out. Light takes ~14 h say.

At 1g we can do it in 2*(100*150*10^9/9.8)^(1/2) sec =28.6 days reaching 4% of the speed of light at highest speed point midway there.

We would have to use a lot of high technology fuel to do it like antimatter propulsion. Fuel would be 9% of payload+ship structure etc mass in antimatter/matter mix.


(using one way trip acceleration and deceleration sequence mass ratio of initial to final after fuel used Mi/Mf=((1+v/c)/(1-v/c))^(c/v_exhaust))


We do not have a way to store antimatter or produce it in large quantities yet but we will eventually.


If we used current technology with say fission and ions to 0.05c speed released we would need fuel 120% of payload+ship but would require enormous power hence mass infrastructure so we can forget it also at such fast flight timeframes. It's possible in trips lasting >1 year though (still very large ships needed)

What we could do is go there within 1 year using smaller acceleration and have also rotation for gravity.

We could use acceleration of 0.1m/sec^2 and rotation for artificial gravity and design living spaces in some proper slight angle to not feel it (basically the feeling of gravity is not towards the center of rotation but a point on the axis of rotation a bit lower than the center of the rotating ring- ie behind the direction of motion). It is not significant only 1% inclination or so.

That would take 400 days and reach only 0.6% of speed of light at most.

We could have fusion technology used that delivers 0.5% of mc^2 say. This suggests speeds of 7% of the speed of light for ejected ions is possible with 50% process efficiency etc.

In that sense the above rocket equation gives (1.006/0.994)^(1/0.07)~ 1.19

So 19% of final mass is fuel.

That is doable in a very extravagant culture that can place a few GW fusion power engines in a ship of a few hundred people not reaching more than 1000 tons say.

So basically we cant get there faster than 400 days with near future (this century say) technology.

But it is doable with fusion eventually in 100 years (the extra time is for power processing and thermal issues in a more compact than current manner - technology not yet available - not so much for fusion that will be doable soon). It is even more doable if the trip was 2 years say.

So you cant just go there for vacation, its the entire trip that is the vacation and the experience. 2-3 years say is possible this century because the power requirements drop sharply with time. For example with 0.03m/sec^2 over 2 years we have maximum speed 0.3%c and some 20 GW power could deliver it. Proper fusion technology this century can get there it seems using less than 1000 tons infrastructure to deliver it but we would need to develop methods to manipulate fast such power in terms of thermal issues etc to avoid having to reduce the power substantially further and make it more doable with still large enough ship and larger trip time.


In any case it seems that in the next century we will be able to go to anywhere in the solar system regularly (because we can go to Mars in less than 4 months trip, within 10y plan to deliver the mission technology, if we wanted with what we can do today via ion propulsion and chemical propulsion combinations) if we want anyway within 1-2 years (certainly anywhere within the main planets in weeks-months) bringing a lot of technology along to render the living there possible from local assets/resources and fuel. We could then resupply these places with far slower ships traveling for years in advance clockwork that do not have humans in them.

Being able to create and store that antimatter of course is the ultimate way to go. The process itself is not very efficient at all (to generate it) but you cannot beat the final advantages of compact acceleration this provides because you do not need to carry with you all the huge processing systems and cooling as the fuel itself is photons released right away at reaction place.

Still to be very fair here think it that way. A ship that delivers 20 GW power starts comparing with a system that detonates nuclear bombs all the time behind it. For example a typical 1 Mton bomb is 4*10^9 (1ton TNT equivalent)*10^6 Joules = 4*10^15J. To release one every day (or much smaller ones every hour say) would deliver a power of 50 GW. You see how ridiculous (but not far out yet) the entire problem becomes that way requiring hundreds of bombs but its possible actually eventually to design in a much smarter way to do something like that which would be the the equivalent of micro detonations every second.