Related papers: World ships: Feasibility and Rationale
Stellar engines are hypothesized megastructures that extract energy from the host star, typically with the purpose of generating thrust and accelerating the stellar system. We explore the maximum potential speeds that could be realizable by…
This work presents a model for the Tramp Ship Scheduling problem including berth allocation considerations, motivated by a real case of a shipping company. The aim is to determine the travel schedule for each vessel considering multiple…
The transit time of mean-median orbits ---the time it takes for an orbit to become stationary--- has been conjectured to be finite but unbounded over the rationals. Through a study of some near-regular structures in these orbits, we…
The current debate about a possible change of paradigm from a single universe to a multiverse scenario could have deep implications on our view of cosmology and of science in general. These implications therefore deserve to be analyzed from…
I review the basis and limitations of plausible inference in cosmology, in particular the limitation that it can only provide fundamentally true inferences when the hypotheses under consideration form a set that is exhaustive. They never…
A foundational model has been developed based on trends built from empirical data of space exploration and computing power through the first six plus decades of the Space Age which projects earliest possible launch dates for human-crewed…
As new concepts of sending interstellar spacecraft to the nearest stars are now being investigated by various research teams, crucial questions about the timing of such a vast financial and labor investment arise. If humanity could build…
Descriptions of phenomena, events, or processes made on the basis of problematic paradigms can be unreasonably complex (e.g. epicycles) or simply wrong (e.g. ultraviolet catastrophe). Supercontinent cycles, also called Wilson cycles, are, I…
The exploration of small bodies in the Solar System is a high priority planetary science. Asteroids, comets, and planetary moons yield important information about the evolution of the Solar System. Additionally, they could provide resources…
Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such…
The goal of planet formation as a field of study is not only to provide the understanding of how planets come into existence. It is also an interdisciplinary bridge which links astronomy to geology and mineralogy. Recent observations of…
Globular clusters are ancient stellar populations with no star formation or core-collapse supernovae. Several lines of evidence suggest that globular clusters are rich in planets. If so, and if advanced civilizations can develop there, then…
Vessels cybersecurity is recently gaining momentum, as a result of a few recent attacks to vessels at sea. These recent attacks have shacked the maritime domain, which was thought to be relatively immune to cyber threats. The cited belief…
With more than 260 extrasolar planetary systems discovered to-date, the search for habitable planets has found new grounds. Unlike our solar system, the stars of many of these planets are hosts to eccentric or close-in giant bodies. Several…
We give a popular account of the present state of the research in the field of extra-solar planetary systems, popularly termed as exoplanets, with a brief overview of the techniques employed. We also discuss the question of habitability and…
Motion planning methods like navigation functions and harmonic potential fields provide (almost) global convergence and are suitable for obstacle avoidance in dynamically changing environments due to their reactive nature. A common…
Dismantling aircrafts reaching their end of life is a complex endeavour that is necessary in terms of sustainability but yields small income margins for air transport companies. An efficient scheduling of the disassembly procedure is thus…
We investigate obstacles of superluminal "warp drive" travels from interactions with interstellar matter and from curvature effects. The effect of collision of interstellar dust particles and photons with the spacecraft will all lead to a…
In a recent paper by Umrigar and Anderson, the authors make an important statement: it is possible to misunderstand the behavior of physical objects (parts of a spacecraft) if that object has reached a velocity comparable to the speed of…
Are there other planetary systems in our Universe? Indirect evidence has been found for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy: the gravity of orbiting planets makes the star wobble, and the resulting periodic Doppler shifts have been…