Related papers: World ships: Feasibility and Rationale
Sustainable road freight transport becomes indispensable in the field of transportation and logistics. The new technological change, the environmental impacts, and social responsibility laid freight road transport in front of various…
"Warp drive" spacetimes and wormhole geometries are useful as "gedanken-experiments" that force us to confront the foundations of general relativity, and among other issues, to precisely formulate the notion of "superluminal" travel and…
Significant advances in the discovery and characterization of the planetary systems of nearby stars can be accomplished with a moderate aperture high performance coronagraphic space mission that could be started in the next decade. Its…
We consider a new control strategy for marine navigation, equipped with finite-time convergence characteristics. We provide mathematical guarantees for waypoint reaching and obstacle avoidance for different encounter scenarios, by deriving…
In this paper we discuss an alternative track for migration that can explain the existence of Hot Jupiters observed in close orbits around their stars based on a novel interpretation of established work. We also discuss the population of…
Wormholes are hypothetical topologically-non-trivial structures of the spacetime. From the theoretical point of view, the possibility of their existence is challenging but cannot be ruled out. This article is a compact and non-exhaustive…
Following on from ideas presented in a recent paper by Schneider et al. (2010) on "The Far Future of Exoplanet Direct Characterization", I argue that they have exaggerated the technical obstacles to performing such 'direct characterization'…
Exoplanet discoveries have motivated numerous efforts to find unseen populations of exomoons, yet they have been unsuccessful. A plausible explanation is that most discovered planets are located on close-in orbits, which would make their…
In the shipping digitalisation process, the peak will be reached with the advent of a wholly autonomous and at the same time safe and reliable ship. Full autonomy could be obtained by two linked Artificial-Intelligence systems representing…
Building software-driven systems that are easily understood becomes a challenge, with their ever-increasing complexity and autonomy. Accordingly, recent research efforts strive to aid in designing explainable systems. Nevertheless, a common…
To extend the limited scope of autonomy used in prior missions for operation in distant and complex environments, there is a need to further develop and mature autonomy that jointly reasons over multiple subsystems, which we term…
We investigate looking for black hole starships using very high energy gamma ray telescopes. We find they would be above the threshhold of visibility although there are many unknown factors.
Container shipping drives the global economy and is an eco-friendly mode of transportation. A key objective is to maximize the utilization of vessels, which is challenging due to the NP-hardness of stowage planning. This article surveys the…
Our ability to explore the cosmos by direct contact has been limited to a small number of lunar and interplanetary missions. However, the NASA Starlight program points a path forward to send small, relativistic spacecraft far outside our…
Issues for transport facilities on the lunar surface related to science, engineering, architecture, and human-factors are discussed. Logistic decisions made in the next decade may be crucial to financial success. In addition to outlining…
The idea of a Mutiverse is controversial, although it is a natural possible solution to particle physics and cosmological fine-tuning problems (FTPs). Here I explore the analogy between the Multiverse proposal and the proposal that there…
Among other things, studies of the formation and evolution of planetary systems currently draw on two important observational resources: the precise characterization available for planets that transit their parent stars and the frequency…
Over the past two decades, large strides have been made in the field of planet formation. Yet fundamental questions remain. Here we review our state of understanding of five fundamental bottlenecks in planet formation. These are: 1) the…
After decades of uninterrupted progress and growth, information technology has so evolved that it can be said we are entering the age of autonomous machines, but there exist many roadblocks in the way of making this a reality. In this…
The design of interplanetary trajectories often involves a preliminary search for options later refined/assembled into one final trajectory. It is this broad search that, often being intractable, inspires the international event called…