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Ficticious wrote:Be sure to freeze yourself first. It'll be a long 10,000 years.

everything2 wrote:In William Gibson's Neuromancer, Zion is a earth-orbiting space colony founded by workers who, after having built Freeside decided not to return to earth via the gravity well and stayed in orbit to found their own colony. The original founders, old Rastafaris founded the colony using the Rastafarian religion as a basis for their society and as they say they have "no respect for Babylon law." As such, the colony grows a lot of marijuana, which is part of the Rastafarian religion, and sells it with no regard for the laws of the rest of the world. Throughout the entire colony, the sounds of dub, a musical style which is a mix of reggae beats sans lyrics, can be heard constantly.

The colony has its own tug for transporting goods and personnel, freeing it from the costly service of the JAL shuttles. The tug is named after Marcus Garvey, a leader of early pushes for black civil rights reform who advocated that all African-Americans should return to Ethiopia, or as it is known in the Rastafarian relgion, Zion. Thus, the tug serves the same purpose as the man, removing the chosen from the evil of Babylon and delivering them onto the promised land, Zion.

Ficticious wrote:Be sure to freeze yourself first. It'll be a long 10,000 years.

LACE wrote:

Ficticious wrote:Be sure to freeze yourself first. It'll be a long 10,000 years.

no ten's of thousands. the planet is 4 light years away

..so it would take 40,000 years at best for us to get there with current tech

maybe an incentive to advance our propulsion technology?

alphacat wrote:

LACE wrote:

Ficticious wrote:Be sure to freeze yourself first. It'll be a long 10,000 years.

no ten's of thousands. the planet is 4 light years away

..so it would take 40,000 years at best for us to get there with current tech

maybe an incentive to advance our propulsion technology?

Lots of money is being dumped into Alcubierre drive research by China, the US, and others.

A bubble macroscopically large enough to enclose a ship 200 meters across would require a total amount of exotic matter equal to 10 billion times the mass of the observable universe.

garethom wrote:

alphacat wrote:

LACE wrote:

Ficticious wrote:Be sure to freeze yourself first. It'll be a long 10,000 years.

no ten's of thousands. the planet is 4 light years away

..so it would take 40,000 years at best for us to get there with current tech

maybe an incentive to advance our propulsion technology?

Lots of money is being dumped into Alcubierre drive research by China, the US, and others.

From the wiki about Alcubierre Drive.

A bubble macroscopically large enough to enclose a ship 200 meters across would require a total amount of exotic matter equal to 10 billion times the mass of the observable universe.

Might be a couple of years then.

frank grimes jr. wrote:Why not just become parson and fuck off to some distant hologram?

alphacat wrote:I like the idea in the novel 'Neuromancer' of an Rastafari Orbital Colony (called Zion.)

everything2 wrote:In William Gibson's Neuromancer, Zion is a earth-orbiting space colony founded by workers who, after having built Freeside decided not to return to earth via the gravity well and stayed in orbit to found their own colony. The original founders, old Rastafaris founded the colony using the Rastafarian religion as a basis for their society and as they say they have "no respect for Babylon law." As such, the colony grows a lot of marijuana, which is part of the Rastafarian religion, and sells it with no regard for the laws of the rest of the world. Throughout the entire colony, the sounds of dub, a musical style which is a mix of reggae beats sans lyrics, can be heard constantly.

The colony has its own tug for transporting goods and personnel, freeing it from the costly service of the JAL shuttles. The tug is named after Marcus Garvey, a leader of early pushes for black civil rights reform who advocated that all African-Americans should return to Ethiopia, or as it is known in the Rastafarian relgion, Zion. Thus, the tug serves the same purpose as the man, removing the chosen from the evil of Babylon and delivering them onto the promised land, Zion.

Except without any explicit religious allegiance...

Hircine wrote:

alphacat wrote:I like the idea in the novel 'Neuromancer' of an Rastafari Orbital Colony (called Zion.)

everything2 wrote:In William Gibson's Neuromancer, Zion is a earth-orbiting space colony founded by workers who, after having built Freeside decided not to return to earth via the gravity well and stayed in orbit to found their own colony. The original founders, old Rastafaris founded the colony using the Rastafarian religion as a basis for their society and as they say they have "no respect for Babylon law." As such, the colony grows a lot of marijuana, which is part of the Rastafarian religion, and sells it with no regard for the laws of the rest of the world. Throughout the entire colony, the sounds of dub, a musical style which is a mix of reggae beats sans lyrics, can be heard constantly.

The colony has its own tug for transporting goods and personnel, freeing it from the costly service of the JAL shuttles. The tug is named after Marcus Garvey, a leader of early pushes for black civil rights reform who advocated that all African-Americans should return to Ethiopia, or as it is known in the Rastafarian relgion, Zion. Thus, the tug serves the same purpose as the man, removing the chosen from the evil of Babylon and delivering them onto the promised land, Zion.

Except without any explicit religious allegiance...

sounds like a good place to live.

alphacat wrote:
Interestingly enough, just read yet another article about possible Alcubierre drive configurations and this guy is saying it could be done using only the combined power usage of the entire US in a year. Wow, Is that all?

alphacat wrote: Another take on the idea is that you don't need to create a full energy "bubble" as described in the original proposal and instead only need a torus (donut) shape to achieve relativistic space-time contraction/expansion, and which would require a fraction of the energy. (A fraction of 10 billion times the observable mass of the universe, anyway.)

But honestly, I'm no physicist. I just like piquant ideas.