It is also the plot of the 1969 UK film Doppelganger (called Journey to the far side of the sun in the US). The opposite earth in the film is also opposite in everything being a mirror image of our earth. The film is watchable, but it is certainly no 2001 and the plot is very pedestrian.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064519/

​

The idea is a weird one it would be extraordinarily coincidental for two planets to be locked in the exact same orbit path in different phases.

Well it looks pretty uniform from what we can see (and we can see a lot of it - the observable universe is huge). There is no good reason to assume there is anything particularly atypical about 'our bit' of the universe and the unobservable universe would be any different).

No. Expansion is uniform everywhere. There is no centre of the universe, nor an edge.

Is there a way to deal with that - surely if you average over time then you can pick up even a very weak signal if it is repeated often enough. If we had a constant brief repeated signal at regular intervals over, say, the course of a year - wouldn't that be enough to be detected among noise if averaging was used?

Ah okay. I understand your confusion now.

Nobody is disputing that. We are talking about the Soviet shuttle programme. That is the question on this thread. It never flew. Gargarin went up to space on a Vostock, not a knock-off space shuttle, had it been the latter he would likely have never made it.

Its called the Buran. ANother ripoff - just like concordski and would likely have been about as safe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)

No. Anything that travels at the speed of light would have an infinite mass; to move something with infinite mass would require infinite energy. It isn't just an issue of technology, it is a fundamental limit of physics for anything with a non-zero mass.

>>That's not true. A human can do lots of things a robot can't.

I don't think we are saying different things. I wasn't talking about current technology. Robotics is accelerating at a faster development rate than space travel. Ditto for autonomous AI. In 20 years time we won't be much closer to sending a human to Mars, but we will have some serious bit of robot hardware to send. It will be machines that colonise mars not humans.

Zero chance in 10 years. It may be that the decision on a man made mission is considered not worth the cost. There is nothing to be gained from sending a human that can't be done with a decent robot.

It would take 3-4 hours, say, to reach Neptune at near light speed - but that would be in time measured on earth. From the perspective of someone actually on the rocket the journey would be near instant due to time dilation effects.

And how many people are not alive because of Hiroshima? Did it 'work' for them? This is a disgusting take, and defies taste as much as it does logic and evidence.

Well its orbit is 88 days. So subtract 88 days from Oct the 9th and there is your answer (if I understand you correctly)

Edit: I work out as - July 13th

Eh? Mercury is always in its orbit. It doesn't take breaks from going around the sun.