How long would a global effort by all of Humanity to build a spaceship like ENTERPRISE take?

Well, i say, it didnt take long..

Is there a "Zephram Cochrane" in the house?

Err wait a sec, he will not be born until 2032... hmm thats only 22 years from now. and another 30 for him to invent warp drive.

No I am not a Star Trek fanatic, I just looked that up....



There is no telling what the human race could accomplish, if we were of one mind, one heart and one soul.

I am sure we could eliminate alot of things, like world hunger for instance.
And of course to the OP, I think pooling resources would certainly bring about countless new discoveries, inventions and raise our knowledge as a species considerably.


Building a space arc....... probably in time for Zephram to invent its warp engines. 50 years and we are cruising.

Maybe that is the ultimate agenda of the NWO......

If the work of DeMatos has any merit, then in 50 years time we can roam the universe in Galaxy class starships.

Originally posted by Phlegmi
with current technology it will take about a 1000 years to produce 1oz of anti-matter.

And how exactly, do we go about producing a theoretical product we are yet to discover and/or confirm the existence of?

Never mind anti matter-there are technologies that we have now which would at least get us started-

By using a combination of "project orion" nuke pulse tech:

Russia’s Federal Space Agency has a new design for a manned spacecraft powered by a nuclear engine. Anatoly Perminov, the head of the agency, told reporters yesterday the goal of the Megawatt-class spaceship was “implementing large-scale space exploration programs.”

www.wired.com...

"solar sail" tech:

Space yacht will be first craft to travel on 'solar waves' as it sets sail for Venus:
A 'space yacht' propelled only by sunlight particles bouncing off its kite-shaped sails is to launch next month.
A rocket carrying the Japanese craft will blast off from Tanegashima Space Center on May 18.

www.dailymail.co.uk...

And Mag sail tech:

MAGNETIC SAILS Unlike well-known solar sails, magnetic sails are completely invisible. Much like the Earth's protective magnetic field, an artificial magnetic field around a spacecraft would deflect the solar wind. This would be used to provide thrust; acceleration would start slowly, but NASA says that after three months a magnetic sail-powered spacecraft could be zipping along at more than 280,000 km/h.

www.cosmosmagazine.com...

And lets not forget a decent Mag field/sheild outside your ship,to prevent rad sickness,and deflect particles:

The idea for the shields draws on technology pioneered in experimental nuclear fusion reactors.
Nuclear fusion is not yet a mature technology. It works on the principle that energy can be released by forcing together atomic nuclei rather than by splitting them, as in the case of the fission reactions that drive existing nuclear power stations.
At the Jet experimental fusion facility at Culham in the UK, magnetic fields were used to keep plasma away from the interior wall of the reactor.
This represents a reversal of that technology:
"We want to use the same technique to keep an object in the middle away from plasma that's on the outside," said Dr Bamford.
But the plasma needed to protect against particles from the solar wind and elsewhere would actually be weaker than that generated in experimental fusion reactors like Jet.

news.bbc.co.uk...

You bring all of these technologies and companies/researchers together.
You build all this tech into some seriously massive craft(a cluster of submarine shaped/sized craft,with state of the art factory,mining,hydoponics,and hospital capabilities),
Then you populate it,(I volunteer,many others will too)and send it off to the stars.

Learning as you go.

The reasons we are given for not doing this type mission are:

"Too expensive"-Utter crap,stop warring for a week or two and no problemo.

"Too much risk to life on the ship"-again utter crap,many would volunteer,its the pioneer spirit of humans which has driven our knowledge and civilization-people on such a ship may die,but it would be for a cause bigger than the individual.

And they may survive to become the pioneers of interstellar human space travel .

No one got anywhere saying "too risky,too expensive."

The giant leaps are taken when our "100th monkey" steps out of the box,and goes against the consensus of what humanity is capable of.

IMO-thats where we go wrong,by actually saying "we can't do this or that"

What we should be syaing is "We ARE going to do this and that."

Because we really are.Fact.

Originally posted by hippomchippo
It's currently impossible.
We would need dozens of new technologies, so until those are developed, it would be impossible to get to other star systems, for example, we're going to need to develop some sort of shielding for cosmic dust and particles that would otherwise rip through the ship, and that's just cosmic dust, but if you just want a ship that is very large that would orbit around the earth, it would be relatively cheap, probably in the range of a few billion or so I think, alot less than banker bailouts anyway

[edit on 3-4-2010 by hippomchippo]

It could be possible with a little help from alien beings. You know kind of like how Vulcans helped out the humans.

*EDIT*

I posted this in the wrong thread, sorry OP first time that's happened.



[edit on 8-5-2010 by SmokeJaguar67]

[edit on 8-5-2010 by SmokeJaguar67]

[edit on 8-5-2010 by SmokeJaguar67]

Originally posted by tinfoil asshat

Originally posted by Phlegmi
with current technology it will take about a 1000 years to produce 1oz of anti-matter.

And how exactly, do we go about producing a theoretical product we are yet to discover and/or confirm the existence of?

The big problem here is that anti-matter isn't theoretical.

It was discovered well over half a century ago & has been physically produced by multiple labs around the world (albeit in miniscule amounts).

I'll pass on the Enterprise arc. I'm waiting for the Jupiter-2, using: Burkhard Heim's hyperspace drive.

"Welcome to Mars express: only a three hour trip"
news.scotsman.com...
and
"Heim theory"
en.wikipedia.org...

But I guess it's necessary to wait for CERN LHC to prove 11 dimensions exist, before engineers have the cahoonas to build and spin superconductor magnets or mercury plasmas.


[edit on 5/8/2010 by Larryman]

space elevator to get stuff into space?

or is that idea dead as a dodo now?

How about build a mountain going straight up as far as physics allows us to,then launching or slingshotting materials from there?How high could we build,does anyone have a reasonable guess?Would it be high enough to be worth the effort long term?

To the OP,.
That would be a fantastic Idea,. Just imagine what we could do if the world actually united in something like this

How many kilometers up do we need to be to make a definable difference.

Six--ten?

Where do we defeat gravity?What height?

Imagine how big a ship we could build if the largest part was weightless but still connected to the earth?And how fast we could build and deploy it.

[edit on 30-7-2010 by one4all]

Thats not a simple question to answer. You have to achieve escape velocity, but thats not constant. It reduces the further you get from the centre of the planet. So if you can get height for free it does help.

Whether you could build something high enough to make a difference I doubt. Even at altitude the energy required to get something that big to go fast enough is enormous.

If we ever have a pressing need to put something enterprise sized into orbit with current tech we'd probably have to try the 'Project Orion' approach.

en.wikipedia.org...(nuclear_propulsion)

I think we'd need to be desperate. I would have to be an averting extinction type deal...

Of course we could discover something that allows us to manipulate and reduce an objects mass. That would allow all sorts of fun. :-)

this is off topic but i always wondered if aliens brought weed to the earth, since it is so drastically different from all other plants. it is also a lot more useful and fun than other plants. maybe we got aliens all wrong, maybe they just want to party.

I cannot comment on the propulsion aspect of the ship as i have no idea when warping ie negative vacuum wave in front and positive pressure wave at the rear will be fully realised, according to Michio Kaku it is viable but would need a manhattan style project of it's own so i would say that warp tech alone would take twenty years.
Given that we would now have twenty years to do the building of the ships then the obvious place to do that is the moon.
The Moon will provide the Titanium and the Aluminium as well as many other metals and minerals.
The Shipyard would be built in a large crater on the north or south polar regions, along with the shipyard would be ore milling/refining/forging facilities.
This would provide the facilities to manufacture several large hulls, why have one when for the same cost you can have plenty? to build an orbiting shipyard is a complete waste of money when the greater prospect, the moon, exists.
So i guess in short my answer to your question is..
If it is done on the moon, then twenty years.

Just to add,
The proper name for the Warp drive that maybe possible to engineer is..
The Alcubierre Drive.
This proposes to create a vacuum field in front and a pressure field at the rear or to put it another way a contraction of space at the front and an expansion of space at the rear without any time dilation or inertial effect.

Seems to me we're looking at two questions from the OP: building a starship, and not keeping all of humanity's "eggs" in one basket - in case of extinction event threatening Earth.

A starship would definitely answer both issues.

But a colony on mars or one of Jupiter's moons could be done with only moderate developments in technology. I wouldn't depend on our moon surviving if a planetoid sized body was making a bee line for Earth.

Building a colony would certainly be easier to achieve when compared to the power requirements for a ship capable of effectively FTL travel of any distance.

I would imagine coming up the actual FTL drive itself - if it's even possible - would be a long-term project on the order of hundreds of years, confining us to local spaceflight within our solar system for a long time.

Heilein's "Torchships" or plasma drives could make Mars a 2 - 3 week trip at 1 g, I believe. These would be the pioneers.

I would think of the colony at first being-subsurface, to protect against radiation and such. Local materials mined from our moon or the asteroids or Mars itself could be brought in to expand the colony later.

Larger ships (still not FTL though) could be constructed to move the settlers in and bring live stock and plants, and more sophisticated manufacturing tech, so that the colony could grow and become totally self-supporting.

No idea how long this would take, but given the leaps in technology needed for interstellar flight, I believe the colony would be self-supporting a lost sooner than a starship could be built.

[edit on 7-8-2010 by mydarkpassenger]

reply to post by hippomchippo


Well, I dont think it impossible. Just a lot of work.

If we get our human race on board i dont see anything that we cant do

reply to post by cosmo740


You would have to first find a way to get past the deadly fields of the Van Allen radiation belt. Large objects are quiet fragile to it. Deflector shields would be a must.

as spock would say,"live long and prosper".