Space Travel and Space One of the really big problems for manned flight besides speed is the fact anyone on a spaceship traveling anywhere is going to get irradiated. The longer they are on the ship the more radiation they receive. The more powerful the radiation coming from an object, the less time you can receive it without dying. All sorts of solutions have been put forth about this problem starting with installing thick lead all around the ship, which turns out to be impractical for several reasons. The first reason is it is far too heavy for the ship to take off and the second is lead is poisonous. Would anybody want to surround themselves with a highly toxic material for who knows how long, I doubt it. It turns out there may be a real solution after all which will be one of the least expected. If I was to ask someone what is the last type of material they would expect to be able to protect them from radiation, what would they say? It is also some of the cheapest material on earth. If you said plastic you would be correct. As unlikely as this seems scientists have found out if they cure plastic in a certain way it can protect us from radiation. Who would’ve thought? Our planet is swimming in it. Before you get too excited however, something has to be added to the plastic for this to work and that has to be a bismuth trioxide compound. A new method for curing the plastic would be by ultraviolet light. This would be cheaper than traditional methods and a lot faster as it can cure the material in only a few minutes as compared to a couple of days using the traditional method that uses high temperatures. The plastic it would be mixed with his standard acrylic plastic which would create a sort of sandwich with the plastic on the outside and the compounds between the layers of plastic. This also may be a great help not only for space travel but for space colonies and space stations as they also receive radiation. This stuff actually shields against gamma rays which are extremely deadly. The scientists are now working with the material to see how it stands under the different temperatures. It could turn out this might even have a use in spacesuits if it can be made flexible enough. Scientists would love to be able to create a rocket powered by nuclear fusion. The problem is we have been working on fusion techniques for decades and we have yet been able to build one that puts out more energy than it needs to run. All of the fusion reactors that have been experimented with so far are impractical. An announcement has just come out from a team of physicists at Princeton University and they believe they may have found a new way to control a fusion reactor. One of the reasons fusion reactors are so hard to handle is the fact they use plasma which is as hot as the sun’s plasma. Can you imagine trying to keep plasma this hot under control? Not only that, the fusion reactor would have to be extremely large. Years ago, an aerospace company made a claim they had developed a fusion reactor small enough to fit into a fighter plane. If it exists it must’ve been tied up in secret projects because it has never come to the forefront. One of the things which we have been taught is the universe is expanding. It has also been said it expands at the same rate everywhere, but I have never believed that. The reason I say this is the method which is used to measure the expansion is what is known as the red shift and the more a body shifts to the red the further away it is. The problem with this is we have found stars which are said to be near the edge of the visible universe which are not shifted to the red and others which are shifted but not as much as the stars around them. Now some scientists have finally come to the realization everything may not be expanding as fast everywhere. I was wondering how long this assumption would take. I believe sometimes even though scientists know what is really happening they are afraid to go against the majority opinion for many different reasons and I think in the past this is one of those cases. It sort of similar to other scientists who are afraid to show anything they find which deviates from the accepted theory of evolution. There is a new theory out there which concerns holes in space time. Currently theoretical physicists are saying there are extra dimensional holes they call bubbles of nothing and these holes could cause the universe to disappear. I guess there wasn’t enough to worry about with all the claims of gloom and doom because they didn’t concern the entire universe and they usually only concerned entire star systems or planets. Scientists have upped the ante. If there are such things as bubbles of nothing how would we even know there is nothing inside of them? They might contain universes which could be like ours or completely alien. On the other hand, they may not even exist since none have ever been seen. I guess worrying about black holes wasn’t enough. The scientists who claim this say the universe is still working out what state it will finally end up in and what is now may only be an intermediate matter state. An article has appeared saying scientists are building a quantum teleporter and its basis is a black hole. The scientists want to use it to create a wormhole. We have been told for decades a wormhole is a connection between two points which is a shortcut. It is like folding a piece of paper which has dots at each end, when folded the dots are joint making the distance between them almost zero. If this procedure could work, it would mean we could reach distant worlds in a flash if we could develop a vehicle which could travel through the wormhole while protecting us inside of it. This is one of the greatest wishes of space oriented scientists, because it would mean the entire universe might be accessible. The distance between two points would not depend on how fast the ship we had could travel and maybe even a conventional rocket would be able to travel to the far reaches of space.
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