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yongedevil t1_j6r2d67 wrote

Reply to comment by dirtballmagnet in NASA is funding ideas for a Titan seaplane and faster deep space travel by fchung

>Nor do I know what SGL is, or why you'd want to floor it to get there.

Solar Gravitational Lens. We can use the sun's gravity to focus light like a telescope. However the sun doesn't bend light much so the focal point is something around 500 AU out. For reference, the Voyager probes are only around 150 AU out.

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_WardenoftheWest_ t1_j6rp6ah wrote

It takes a comment like this to make me realise there are people somewhere who understand this, and then I can extrapolate just how fucking dumb I am

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1992PlymouthAcclaim t1_j6sceys wrote

A couple years ago, I used parallax to triangulate the absolute depths of my own fucking ignorance. I don't recommend it.

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Bipogram t1_j6sm777 wrote

I'm a chartered physicist, and that just means that I can plot my ignorance on a chart with fancy-pants axes, such as log-linear space.

And it's still a straight line vs. time.

The older I get, the less I know as a fraction of all that is knowable.

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SimbaOnSteroids t1_j6scasn wrote

Well that’s still pretty good then. Remember there are only two groups of people.

Those that can extrapolate from incomplete data

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NecroAssssin t1_j6uv0hw wrote

But binary teaches us there are actually 10 people. Those who understand binary.

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Warrior_and_reader t1_j6snpwp wrote

It’s great to discover things we don’t know; it gives us the opportunity to learn more.

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TheLemmonade t1_j6twj9i wrote

Using an observatory at the SGL, we could potentially resolve 100x100px images of exoplanets

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yongedevil t1_j6v0p8d wrote

And then there are the people who come up with these ideas. Ideas like this, that could be dismissed out of hand as being impractical for any number of reasons. But thanks to people like Von Eshleman who sat down and did the math we know roughly what we need to achieve to make these crazy ideas real.

A solar gravitational lens is still in impractical territory, but pieces like blocking out the sun's light, precise spacecraft positioning, and now high performance engines are developing. Who knows, if one of our other telescopes finds a planet that we really really want a closer look at maybe we'll get an actual image of it showing continents and oceans in our lifetimes.

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ackermann t1_j6uwotz wrote

Could we use Jupiter instead, or, is its focal point even farther away, since it bends light even less? Not sure how that works.

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