1. Subscribersonhouse
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    21 May '17 15:16
    https://phys.org/news/2017-05-zealand-space-nation-stars.html
  2. Cape Town
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    21 May '17 17:36
    Great news. The more the better. However someone in the article says:
    ""So far, it's only superpowers that have gone into space," said Simon Bridges, New Zealand's economic development minister. "For us to do it, and be in the first couple of handfuls of countries in the world, is pretty impressive."
    Then later in the article it points out its a private company with plenty of US funding?
    But worse is his ignorance of who has been to space:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacefaring

    Unless he thinks North Korea is a 'super power'?
  3. Subscribersonhouse
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    21 May '17 18:09
    Originally posted by twhitehead
    Great news. The more the better. However someone in the article says:
    ""So far, it's only superpowers that have gone into space," said Simon Bridges, New Zealand's economic development minister. "For us to do it, and be in the first couple of handfuls of countries in the world, is pretty impressive."
    Then later in the article it points out its a private ...[text shortened]... :
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacefaring

    Unless he thinks North Korea is a 'super power'?
    Well, compared to New Zealand.....
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    21 May '17 21:40

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  5. Cape Town
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    22 May '17 07:37
    The post that was quoted here has been removed
    And that would make sense if the new New Zealand program were manned. It isn't.
  6. Subscribersonhouse
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    22 May '17 14:12
    Originally posted by twhitehead
    And that would make sense if the new New Zealand program were manned. It isn't.
    Well maybe very tiny men.....
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    22 May '17 17:51
    Originally posted by sonhouse
    Well maybe very tiny men.....
    Next, they're going to want their own bobsled team at the Olympics.
  8. Subscribersonhouse
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    23 May '17 16:32
    Originally posted by wildgrass
    Next, they're going to want their own bobsled team at the Olympics.
    Nah, it's been done🙂 No surpise value.
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    23 May '17 23:29

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    24 May '17 11:44
    Quite a lot of governments with space programs:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_space_agencies
  11. Subscribersonhouse
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    24 May '17 11:51
    The post that was quoted here has been removed
    That idea is really on the table. If we want to go into interstellar space, intelligent robots could theoretically handle the job of decanting newly grown human infants and animals too, then educate the children when on course for some sun with a known set of habitable planets, perhaps a thousand year long trip. So you freeze the fertilized eggs and you don't need a near infinite amount of food stores, just enough for the children to grow up and take over the job of starting a civilization on the new world. So the robots would have all the history of Earth to teach the young ones who the first generation would grow up without the benefit of humans but the second gen would have humans to teach them. A lot of room for stories in that situation, eh.
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    24 May '17 20:451 edit

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  13. Subscribersonhouse
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    24 May '17 21:001 edit
    The post that was quoted here has been removed
    I am just projecting possibilites. You are bringing up subject about engineering problems that need to be solved before any kind of undertaking like that could be done. There are not only fertilized eggs needing to be frozen but seeds and literally millions of those and thousands of species and fish and land animals too.

    There is the barest possibility ALL of that DNA stuff could be just computer code to be decanted somehow by AI in a generation ship like that. That would be an engineering feat of yet a higher order to turn the code back into life forms.

    The whole thing may be a pipe dream if you can't even go ten percent of c without running into major issues with tiny specks of dust slamming into the vehicle at 18,000 miles per second. The amount of kinetic energy of just one such piece would be of monsterous proportions.

    The whole thing is just a sci fi plot line for now but who knows what will happen if we can continue developing science for the next 400 years like the last 400 years.

    Scientific knowledge is growing exponentially right now. It seems to me sometime in the future someone will try to go interstellar the best way they can.

    Right now Hawking talks about microchips being propelled by lasers or microwaves to a good portion of c to go to Alpha Centauri which makes sense to me for the simple reason it is a three for one trip, three very close stars and their associated planetary systems to explore even if it is for now thousands of micro probes doing a quick and done visit, they will teach us a lot before we actually can send humans there.

    All of that is science fiction for now. Just a story line.
  14. Subscribersonhouse
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    25 May '17 01:15
    Something that might have a tiny better chance, a story line I made up:

    Some time in the near future, say 100 years from now, information technology has reached astounding peaks and 2 brilliant brothers cogitate on how to use that tech.

    They think, well in a billion years or so the sun will run out of H2 and expand to the size of Earth's orbit and that will be that for humans.

    So they design a series of nanobots able to survive billions of years in a dry cold climate, say on a moon of Saturn, one with ice on the surface.

    So they make these nanobots that have stored all the knowledge of mankind and some of them have DNA encoded of most life forms on Earth, including of course, humans.

    So they seed moons like Callisto with billions of such seedbots and human history goes by unnoticed by the seeds and humans never learned of them. Millions of years go by and humans eventually become extinct, perhaps some left in ships to other worlds but Earth has no more humans. Then a couple billion years goes by and the sun does it's predictable thing, expanding to a red giant phase for a few million years but putting out a lot more energy for that time.

    Meanwhile the seedbots are built to react to liquid water, the brothers reasoned when the sun got that big, the water on the outer ice covered moons would start to liquify and that activated the bots now able to move on their own by collecting the solar energy reaching them then collecting in large quanties together to start building from local materials the buildings and shelters needed by life forms. Then when they are ready for life, they start decanting the DNA into remade eggs and sperm and with newly manufactured mechanical wombs, humans and food supplies are born, the AI's also reborn with intellegence able to educate the newly decanted children as to the history of the now long dead Earth.

    So humanity gets a second chance, the first generations of course have no human contact except for their own kind but when they turn teenagers they start to mate and those children now have human parents to rebuild human civilization with a lot of knowledge we don't have here in century 21.

    A kind of future Ark story.
  15. Cape Town
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    26 May '17 14:55
    http://www.space.com/37003-rocket-lab-electron-booster-debut-launch-falls-short.html
    First launch not entirely successful, but not bad for a first attempt.
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