What I think, by 2050 or even a bit before that time we could have a successful space tourism industry in which thousands of tourists a year will stay in giant orbiting structures and possibly resorts on the moon. Now giant space elevators are one way to get off the ground. You can just send a punch of pods full of people and their luggage to a floating hotel waiting to greet them or a pod that’ll take them to the hotel. Another way would be to have a magnetic propulsion system on various places on the earth that will allow space bound vehicles to rocket into the air and thus use less fuel to get to space. Large structures like this could be used to carry heavy loads providing the magnets are powerful enough.
You could also always do what the people with space ship one does, strap it on an airplane and take off from it.
Then there’s a final way of getting things up into space that science fiction buffs would love, a material or a way that repels the force of gravity, the stronger the gravity the stronger it repels.
But of course unless antigravity is really invented then space elevators may have to do the work as they may be the best option, you can have a big collection of space elevators bringing up people and luggage to the waiting craft docked in orbit.
What would your ideas be for future space travel and how to get from down here to up there?
If you mean literal slingshot just think of how high the G-forces would be.
I once heard that in the past an old science fiction writer envisioned a giant gun that would shoot people into space, but the G-forces would be too high.
What anyone who’s interested in getting things in space would want to do is minimize the G-forces, if you have a giant slingshot that propelled you upward so it reaches escape velocity you would have high G’s that could kill the crew. Slingshots do tend to give an object full velocity rather quickly. Though if you graduated it using machines to slow the acceleration you would need a massive slingshot but then it can start propelling you and then you use fuel to make the rest of the trip. Though then again slingshots do have most tension near the bottom so the speed ends up being a fraction of what it could be. But then if it was a narrow slingshot with the bands tensioned near the top of the towers it could work with controlled acceleration.
by 2050, I don,t really expect the humanity to have giant orbiting station for tourist or stuff. It sure would be cool…but how much would it cost? hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions in research and development and building.
As for exploration of other planet, I expect a few expedition on Mars (at least 1 with human). and I expect even more exploration on Jupiter’s moon (europa I think) that have water under it’s ice surface.
except if there is some genius breakthrought in space shuttle enginering/propulsion system VS cost of all that stuff…I doubt our situation as “human-based-on-earth” will change in this century.
but then again, I’m no expert…and I sure hope I’m totally wrong
quite honestly i believe that by then we would have some major events such as war, natural disaster, catastrophy caused by neglect of environment and such. Those event would probably push back the plan for things like that elevator and stuffs. Only in the perfect world would we get what we even vaguely guess for when we had guess it. Just think about what people had claimed what we would have by year 2000. flying car, robot maid, and suchs. the best length of time to guess the potential of technology would probably be 20 year in the future and not based on sci-fi movies. There are a numbers of new technologies that most people don’t even seems aware that we have. such as a flexible display (look up OLED Organic Light Emitting Diode) that could possibly be used to creates an continiously moving images on a t-shirt and such in 20 years. this same technology can be used right now to create an see through display (look up TOLED Transparent OLED) right on a car windshield (at least once someone figure out how to protect it from prolonged exposure to sun) think about this technology for a sec, coupled with a qps and 2 camera, the driver could see the display superimpose an yellow and red strip along the road that the driver want to go to and the 2 cam would keep track of where the driver head is so the display would be properly aligned to the line of view from the driver’s eye to the road. there are many others technology that with only a little research could be realized that with the right support, it may be the next light bulb as i believe the OLED could be.
Space elevators built with nanowires are on the drawing boards, they have one HUGE drawback: you can see them from halfway around the Earth. and when I say "see"I mean like "60W flashlite in your face at night"seeing.
The elevator shaft just bounces off too much light, there’s been one project, I think it was in the US that got cancelled because of the effect it has on the horizon.
Antigrav is unfortunatly not doable from our current knowledge (producing gravity fields is a possibility, but the science behind it does not make it possible to create antigravity)
The writer mentioned with the canon happens to be Jules Vernes.
And going into space presents some real advantages, imagine flawless computer chips thanks to zero gravity, supersteel made in magnetic force chambers (again the absence of gravity is a big plus), power stations on the moon beaming limitless, almost free, energyy back to the earth.
And the best place to retire once your boddy starts kiking out: the moon, or zero gravity where having arthritis and problems moving around get waaaay better (of course once you go up, you can’t come down, but that won’t matter).
Really space is the way to go.
And I’m not just saying that because I’m stuk on earth and my mothership is the at moon’s core. (bleah)
Here in the US greed is stifling advances hand over fist. There’s paint, (yes paint), made in France that absorbs noise pollution, but no one here can turn a buck on it quickly enough. There’s been incredible advances in housing materials, but we crank out houses assembly line style with the same crap because the turnover is faster. The electric car has been perfected for 20 years now, but big oil won’t allow it. Neither will they allow alternative fuels.
We recently had a group of C to D high school students in a low grade West Philadelphia high school make a car that goes 0 to 60mph in 4 seconds, gets 50 miles to the gallon and runs on soybeans… no lie.
But nothing big gets done here unless someone can be an overnight billionaire doing it and doesn’t take money from our existing oligarchs.
Almost nothing will change. Just like almost nothing changed since 1980.
Maybe by then they’ll have a better replacement for foam.
I think that the public won’t accept a price tag of billions of dollars to send one single individual to Mars, where else with that money you can solve poverty in the USA self, or clean up the enviroment etc.
Perhaps im the only person who has noticed this but… Our space program has never really lived up to expectations… much like every other aspect of our government, its all wishful thinking. Odds are, we will still be “on the verge of life in space” the same as we are now. Travel to and from space will be EXPENSIVE and as such a viable tourism business could not survive easily. wait… wait for it… ‘POP’ there goes the bubble! lol
I think organizations like NASA have already been starting to hold contests for space elevators so they’re still going for such a project. Still, it is probable they may solve the reflecting light problem and space elevators will still be widely accepted and thus eventually cargo will just shimmy up to space. According to a space.com article (which may be the one I posted) the prospect of using carbon nanotubes gets rid of all the serious stumbling blocks that stand in the way of a space elevator and thus makes it feasible.
We recently had a group of C to D high school students in a low grade West Philadelphia high school make a car that goes 0 to 60mph in 4 seconds, gets 50 miles to the gallon and runs on soybeans… no lie.
Have they notified president Bush about this, he’s recently made a call for alternatives for oil.
Even the movie A space oddesey 2001 was overly cautious technology wise, and even so, we didn’t make any of those accomplishment you could see in the movie. People back then thaught that the year 2006 would be like the Jetsons or something.
The more modern science fiction movies do a better job of speculating about the future. No real advances, no rocket shoes or floating cars or a jetson house, no, just a lot of gadgets.
The problem of space travel is also that at high speeds, stationairy particles becomes like bullets penetrating the hull of the space ship.
The Lab in Colorado Bush went to make his alternative fuel speech had actually just layed off some 30 workers because of budget cuts. They re-hired them immediately before the speech.
No doubt they’ll still say that alternative fuels will need 20 more years to ‘perfect’ even though they could implement them in 2 years if they really wanted. Nothing’s going off oil until either the oil dries up or there’s revolution.
I’ll bet thery’ll be a revoloution, and I’ll be leading the charge. I liked Bush during his first term, but now he’s becoming a dictator! Let’s see, FBI monitaring every major ISP email service, Monitoring every phone line, Every stoplight, The TV gadget that watches what you watch (No not TiVo) You know he is irritating me to death now. But as far as space travel, the bike off ET is the best to expect :).
I think it’s up to England now to save us. Looks like they’re on the ball!
LONDON, England (AP) – Margaret Atwood has had enough of long journeys, late nights and writer’s cramp.
Tired of grueling book tours, the Booker Prize-winning Canadian author on Sunday unveiled her new invention: a remote-controlled pen that allows writers to sign books for fans from thousands of miles away.
“I think of this as a democratizing device,” said Atwood, whose appearances draw hundreds of fans willing to stand in long lines for a word and an autograph.
“You cannot be in five countries at the same time. But you can be in five countries at the same time with the LongPen.”
that is just an extremely simplified version of those long range remote control surgical machine that doctors can use in england to operate on a patient in new york. that surgical machines have been around for a few years so it is not that big of a deal.
