I saw my first Cybertruck in the wild today. It was even uglier than I expected it to be, and I expected it to be really, really ugly.
Or an idiot bought an EV company and forced this on his team.
@Lulz4l1f3 @JeffreyMHebert 😡😤 MELON HUSK IS NOT ... ummm ... not ... 😶
Aww, fuck it! He's a flaming moron. 😑
Did anybody explain the distances involved to him?
The closest star system to ours is alpha centauri, and it takes light (186, 282 mps) 4.25 years to get here.
So assuming you could go in a straight line (you cannot, it's moving) and assuming you could go 1/10th the speed of light (you can't because space dust would rip your spacecraft apart), it would take 40 years to travel the 40, 000 billion kilometers.
@Lulz4l1f3 @JeffreyMHebert Getting a ship to 10-20% light speed is within the limits of our foreseeable technology - say, within the next 100 years or so. Several proposals were made in the 1960s & '70s. Getting a CREWED ship to go that fast is a different matter. And then there's the issue of keeping everyone alive for a trip to the nearest habitable exoplanet, wherever that turns out to be. If Der Muskenführer thinks SpaceX can manage this in the coming decades, he's severely deluded.
I read a lot of science-fiction, but, unlike Musk, i don't confuse fiction with reality.
I think I disabused myself of that by Jr High, but if there was any doubt in my mind, engineering classes and listening to folks with various expertise level-set my expectations.
Accelerating one ton to one-tenth of the speed of light requires at least 450 petajoules or 4.50×1017 joules or 125 terawatt-hours (world energy consumption 2008 was 143,851 terawatt-hours), without factoring in efficiency of the propulsion mechanism.
And then there's the problem of "what if you hit something tiny that you don't pick up on radar (etc) at those speeds.
@Lulz4l1f3 Approximately the same relationship applies to relativistic mass increase as to time dilation; at 0.8c, effective mass is about double, but the momentum is so high, that even a pea-sized pebble would have the approximate equivalent energy of a small nuclear weapon, so serious shielding is in order, which increases weight, requiring more energy, blah, blah, blah.
@Lulz4l1f3 @JeffreyMHebert To get to any star in a human lifespan, the ship will need to travel at a significant fraction of light speed to bring relativistic time dilation into play. At 0.8c, ship time is about half what an outside observer would experience; at 0.9c, it's 1/4. If they hope to return home alive, they'd need to add a few more 9's after that decimal.
You'd need a crap-ton of energy to achieve .8c.
Get back to me when something achieves .01c.
@Lulz4l1f3 @JeffreyMHebert See: "Breakthrough Starshot," a project to accelerate postage stamp sized space probes to 0.1 to 0.2c using lasers and light sails. So far, no result, but work is underway to launch hundreds or thousands of the tiny probes in the coming decade.
"So far, no result,".
Get back to me when you postal stamp achieves .01c, or about 7 million miles an hour.
It's like if someone took a "car" an eight-year-old had made in wood shop and made a real car out of it.
@JeffreyMHebert You’d vomit too if you felt Elon fingering your chassis.
@sfleetucker you never fail to make me laugh!
@sfleetucker @JeffreyMHebert I vomited a little just reading that
My work here is done.
@JeffreyMHebert Somehow, I just KNEW that was what you were talking about. LMAO! 🤣👍