Science. Freaking awesome science.

[MadMax]

Yeah and I’m not in the country. Gutted

[DrTiTus]

Why Interstellar Expansion won't happen

Not actually the title of the video (Interstellar Expansion WITHOUT Faster Than Light Travel), but pretty much the same thing.

Number crunching on what it would take to send humans out into space to Promixa Centauri - and the results seem implausible. Extinction seems far more likely than exploration.

[Ab]

Boom!

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/...o-instruments/

[Lightspeed]

Project Hephaistos – II. Dyson sphere candidates from Gaia DR3, 2MASS, and WISE

After analysing the optical/NIR/MIR photometry of ∼5 × 106 sources, we found seven apparent M dwarfs exhibiting an infrared excess of unclear nature that is compatible with our DS models. We modelled DSs with temperatures ranging from 100 to 700 K and covering factors from 0.1 to 0.9. There are several natural explanations for the infrared excess in literature, but none of them clearly explains such a phenomenon in the candidates, especially given that all are M dwarfs.

[Cyberbob]

I think it's so arrogant to think that we have a shot in hell of extrapolating technology like this, like this concept of a Dyson Sphere that we've thought of in the last 100 years, is something worth looking for on an interstellar scale.

We're so crazily limited by present day concepts that our best predictions of technology don't survive the smallest of technological breakthroughs, and yet there's still resources put into these efforts anyway, despite the overwhelming naivety that it represents.

[_indigo1]

I hear that CB, but history is also littered with revolutionary thinkers imagining things that in their times seem totally outlandish and unreasonable to the wider population, for which they lacked even the proper words to explain the concepts of - using the lexicon available to them in their present time - but then it turns out centuries or decades later they are bang on.

Leo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Arthur C Clarke

Even HG Wells predicted nukes in 1914, Jules Verne in 1865 basically predicted the Apollo missions to the moon, and not to mention old Albert and his gravitational waves and black holes.

I don't think it's totally out of reality that we could use basic reason and physics to come up with something that could have some basis in fact in some far advanced society. It's not like it's totally imagined. It's based in real understanding of reality.

[StN]

Wow. One engine failed just after launch, and another didn't restart on boost-back but built in redundancy sorted that out. One also disintegrated on the landing burn (might have been one of the previous failed ones).

As for Starship, it got through re-entry but had some tile loss issues (Hey - so did Columbia back in the day!) most graphically around the forward right fin.

Here it is as expected, pootling along in space:



Then things get hot when it makes plasma:



And then it gets to the point where the melting stainless steel splatters all over the camera portal:



But after actuating and doing it's belly flip manouver, it still managed to guide the vessel to a soft splashdown off the coast of NW Oz (In the dark):



...albeit missing a fair chunk of the subframe and tiles up one edge.

Scott Manley does a nice review of the flight - chopped down to the 20 exciting minutes.