ok, crap joke

But will such a system send hordes of unwary space-travellers down dead-ends, careening into black holes, even though the darn hardware used swaers blind it's safe to proceed?

On the way there, the only space a human would need to take up is about three liters. The ship could be the size of current day space probes. Life support and radiation protection are highly simplified, and there is no danger of going crazy because of the nearly unbounded virtual worlds that the crew would "live" in.

On arrival, use robotic bodies that have been stored along with the ship (again, very little space needed to do that).

A human body IS fragile, so it would a lot easier if we got rid of it.

All I am saying we should all keep an open mind of what is to come.

I understand your point of view, but all the relative facts will change in the future, that is what science is all about.

Further more its pointless arguing about this as nether of us will live to see who will be correct.

To give an example closer to home, sailors (before GPS) could navigate using the stars and other far away signposts, but those more local lighthouses were still the best protection against hitting the rocks.

Thanks for the angular momentum lesson. I never got much past the figure skater analogy.

However, it still boggles that something even that size could spin hundreds of times a second.

But what if they are warning signs, to keep travelers away from very small specific regions? Kinda tough to use other galaxies for that, I would think.

It's almost like 1969 again, America is at a war ,nobody likes it, people are unhappy with political leadership, but throught out all this paul we still can move our, this human foot print, futher into the heavens for all mankind.

It it you that needs a reality check on what Humanity can do, its only a matter of time before we reach the stars. History is repeat with nay-sayers of one type or another, you and your kind will be laughed at in years to come.

"man is extremely fragile both mentally and physically"

This is of topic but I am so sick of this crap. I have no idea what your definition of a Human is, but it seems to me to be a definition of some pathetic backward scared creature.

Don't base a definition of a Human on yourself Chuck.

If you have ever read even once in your life about what Humans have done and overcome to do in many situations throughout recorded history you find out we are NOT fragile both mentally and physically but are one of the toughest, adaptable creatures and are up for the challenge of space exploration.

Just as a figure-skater spins more quickly as they tuck their arms in close, so must a star spin more quickly as it collapses, in order to conserve angular momentum.

In the case of something like a pulsar, you have a spinning object more massive than our Sun collapsing into an object just 20km in diameter. That's a lot of angular momentum in an awful tiny package.

Star Trek: The Next Generation
Transfiguration. Episode 25
First Aired 6/4/1990.

Anybody know of an earlier reference to a pulsar based navigation system in Sci-Fi?

- If these are only visible to us if we happen to be in the direct line of fire of the "beacons" then there must be a heck of a lot more of them than we have catalogued so far. If they do point in random directions, only a very tiny fraction would be aimed at us, given all the other directions they could point in.

- I have always found it a bit difficult to picture a natural event that would result in something that big rotating that fast without flying apart. So to get a little woo-woo, tin-foil hat-like here: what if these actually ARE artificial beacons, similar to our own lighthouses or warning signs?

Perhaps we are looking for the wrong thing with SETI. Wouldn't intelligent species advanced enough for interstellar travel have progressed to communicating with vastly different technologies then primitive EM waves? Perhaps they even send their email equivalents through the same channels as they travel, none of which we could detect at present with our relatively stone-age tools.

Maybe we should think a little bigger here. It might be child's play for an advanced civilization to set up a traffic system on an interstellar scale.

Just askin'…

voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html

and Pioneer plaque

apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap960630.html

is a map: Earth is at the center. Each line coming from the center points to a particular pulsar. Along each line (though it's hard to see) are a pattern of dots that encode the period of the pulsar.

The idea is, when an alien civilization finds Voyager or Pioneer, there's a chance they, too, will have discovered the same pulsar (the periods are unique, given enough precision on the measurement.) The map will allow the alien civilization to triangulate back to Earth.

Sounds just like GPS to me!

Peter