SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
"Super-Earth" planets are giant-size versions of Earth, and some research has suggested that they're more likely to be habitable than Earth-size worlds. But a new study reveals how difficult it would be for any aliens on these exoplanets to explore space.
To launch the equivalent of an Apollo moon mission, a rocket on a super-Earth would need to have a mass of about 440,000 tons (400,000 metric tons), due to fuel requirements, the study said. That's on the order of the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.
"On more-massive planets, spaceflight would be exponentially more expensive," said study author Michael Hippke, an independent researcher affiliated with the Sonneberg Observatory in Germany. "Such civilizations would not have satellite TV, a moon mission or a Hubble Space Telescope."
https://www.space.com/40375-super-earth-exoplanets-hard-aliens-launch.html
[Also Covered By]: GIZMODO
[Paper]: Spaceflight from Super-Earths is difficult
[Related]: 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life
(Score: 5, Touché) by qzm on Tuesday April 24 2018, @10:05AM (2 children)
Nuclear rockets.
We developed them, but not to use due to primarily to politics (not sure to radiation, investigateme designs are very clean, and most are cleaner than true open air testing we did do).
This appears to be yet more 'science' since by people with no ability to investigate or research outside their starting assumptions.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Tuesday April 24 2018, @04:44PM
> This appears to be yet more 'science' since by people with no ability to investigate or research outside their starting assumptions.
Silly humans. One day you might understand how to properly use a Higgs Field Crawler and stop letting gravity keep you down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @08:17PM
You build a plain old fission reactor, fueled with uranium or plutonium. The cooling system is open; the goal is in fact to boil the coolant at minimum. The coolant is chosen to produce exhaust containing simple molecules (few degrees of freedom to steal energy) that have low molecular mass.
Hydrogen is great. The mass is 2, or 1 if you heat it enough to make it monoatomic.
Helium is great. The mass is 4. It is already monoatomic, which reduces degrees of freedom.
Helium-3 is as above, but a mass of 3.
Methane, nitrogen, water, cyanide, hydrogen fluoride, lithium, carbon monoxide, and ammonia are other choices. Some of them would be made monoatomic. The seemingly toxic ones might be perfectly fine for alien life forms, not that you can be fussy when trying to launch a rocket.