Comments

Mr. Cook I have to say your plan is pretty far-fetched. Number one, carrying fuel for constant ignition would be stupidly heavy, and would never even get off the ground just from the shear weight of it. Also, Phobos is a horribly irregularly shaped moon, and is more of a large asteroid than a moon, and hooking some lasso catcher's mitt to it is pretty out there. Let's say we could ship out some robots to phobos that could hook it up. Let's even say that it works, and that it could catch a spacecraft, that has been constantly accelerating in a frictionless environment for three months, the force behind this craft would be so immense, one of three things would happen: 1. the tension on the high tech rubber band would snap, flinging the spacecraft and crew off at a completely unpredictable trajectory, pretty much ensuring their death. 2. the band would hold, but the elasticity of it after extreme tension would just hurl it back the way it came, ensuring their death as well. 3. the band would hold, but the G forces behind so much acceleration would smash the craft like a soda can with a sledgehammer. Not to mention how small phobos really is, at only 22.2km in diameter (a 15 minute drive) such a tug from something traveling so fast would throw off ITS trajectory as well, potentially causing the moon's destruction into Mars or just really screwing with its orbit, which is something its handling just fine on its own. We're already destroying most of our planet, i don't want to start solar system exploration with such irresponsibility as well.

That's completely ridiculous to say that a large system 163kly away is a valid choice for colonization, even in the distant future. Not only is there closer, and more applicable systems, this is a dying star! Being that the image we receive is 163,000 years old, the star may very well be dead already. And when it DOES die, if it hasn't already, it will burst into supernova, and then form a black hole. How could this be a system for our descendants? This star has depleted its hydrogen core and is rapidly fusing any elements available to it, and once it starts to try and have an iron based core, poof. Goodbye everything even remotely close. Moving on, its incredibly cold for a star, and not exceptionally bright either. Its not even a main sequence star. Its huge, yeah, but even our sun a mere class M, is more massive. It'd be nearly impossible to sustain life in with this environment. This star is constantly ejected clouds of dust and gas into the nebula around it, so even if there was a planet near it, it would be a gas giant, pulling in all that excess material to develop an excessively dense atmosphere. Oh and as for "excitement" about plasma propulsion, while they can rocket along for much longer than conventional chemical rockets, they have much less thrust. So it's not like we've developed a warp engine or anything, we can go farther than before but we still do not have interstellar capabilities, especially not someplace 163kly away. For example, the only celestial body we've sent humankind to is the moon. The moon is only 384,403km away, or 1.2 lightseconds. One lightyear is 9,460,730,472,580.8km. So if you pull out your calculator that's just under 2.5 million travels to our moon. So 163,000 lightyears is 1,542,099,067,030,670,400km, or 4,011,672,820,010.9 trips to the moon. So unless we develop the technology to create and stabilize wormholes, its not going to happen for millenia. One trip to the moon is 1.2 lightseconds. There are over 31.5 million seconds in a year. So I ask again, how is this system even a thought for colonization? And even setting aside the just ridiculous distance to get there, considering we're still having problems deciding how to send someone to mars safely, this place is a wasteland. Its incredibly interesting and awe-inspiring how huge it is, but just because its big does not mean we should pack some bags for fresh real estate. Mars has for more capabilities to sustain life than that.