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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 05 2017, @07:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the in-flight-movie-is-Pandorum dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Anyone interested in hitching a ride on a laser to the next solar system?

Interstellar travel, a timeworn staple of science fiction, can already be science fact if one has cash to spare. For just $100 million or so, a customer could actually purchase a top-of-the-line commercial rocket and ride right out of the solar system. But patience would be key. If launched tomorrow toward the nearest port of call—Proxima b, a potentially habitable Earth-mass planet recently discovered in the triple star system of Alpha Centauri about four light-years away—that rocket would take 80,000 years to arrive.

Instead of spending $100 million on a slow boat to the stars, in April of last year the billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced he would use that same sum to forge a new path to Alpha Centauri within a human lifetime. Called Breakthrough Starshot, the initiative calls for largely abandoning rockets in favor of "light sails"—gossamer-thin reflective sheets that, once unfolded in space, could be propelled to very high speeds by laser beams. Starshot's tentative plans involve using conventional rockets to place thousands of one-gram, four-meter-wide light sails in Earth orbit as early as the 2040s. Each sail would be embedded with a one-centimeter-wide chip containing cameras, sensors, thrusters and a battery. From Earth orbit, each featherweight spacecraft would be boosted toward Alpha Centauri at 20 percent light-speed by a minutes-long pulse from a ground-based, 100-gigawatt laser array. The interstellar crossing would take just a little over 20 years, so the probes could reach Alpha Centauri in the 2060s.

But such high speeds come at a high price. Even the most conservative cost estimates for Starshot far exceed Milner's initial $100-million investment—the multi-decadal project could easily consume $10 billion, and perhaps much more, largely due to the enormous expense of building the ground-based laser array. Government assistance and international collaboration would likely be required. Moreover, the light sails that survive the 20-year voyage would pass through the Centauri system in a flash, moving so fast they would have only seconds to capture high-quality close-up images and other data from Proxima b and any neighboring planets that may be there. As they fall deeper into the dark between the stars, the light sails would attempt to transmit their precious findings back to Earth using laser beams no more powerful than the signal from a typical cell phone.


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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday February 05 2017, @01:51PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Sunday February 05 2017, @01:51PM (#463108) Journal

    I'd fire the lasers at the sun, to boost Earth into a higher orbit and solve the global warming problem. Would need a lot of lasers of course. Has to be done eventually, because the sun puts out more energy as it ages. If Earth is still in its current orbit a billion years from now the oceans will boil away.

    Is Jupiter blocking our view of Saturn? Nuking Jupiter a few times sounds fun and all, but Saturn is definitely the more aesthetic planet with those beautiful big rings. If you're going to nuke Jupiter, finish the job and destroy the useless planet. Think big!

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  • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Sunday February 05 2017, @02:01PM

    by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Sunday February 05 2017, @02:01PM (#463110)

    iteresting idea, though your orbital mechanics are a little off. to increase orbital distance, it would be far more effective to increase orbital speed (ie. point the laser out the back, rather than to the sun). dropping some mass would help too, i propose we start with all the nuclear weapons (although the next orbit around may get a bit messy).

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Monday February 06 2017, @03:18AM

    by dry (223) on Monday February 06 2017, @03:18AM (#463273) Journal

    Better to adjust the orbit by close flybys of an asteroid or more. They can use the lasers for propulsion. Take the Earth to Mars, replace the Moon with Mars and if done right, the tides can counteract the cooling core, hopefully keeping the magnetic field going and volcanism happening so we have enough CO2 to keep the plants alive.
    A few more billion years and we can move the Earth to Saturn and survive the red giant phase. After that, cuddle close to the white dwarf that our Sun has become and use the latent heat for a few 10's of billion years.
    Might be simpler to just become a space inhabiting species long term.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @02:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @02:43PM (#463433)

    If Jupiter is blocking the view of Saturn, why nuke it when you just need to use an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator?

  • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday February 07 2017, @03:27PM

    by jdavidb (5690) on Tuesday February 07 2017, @03:27PM (#464087) Homepage Journal
    I'd strip the atmosphere from Uranus and then bring the rocky core closer to the inner solar system, warm it up, and terraform it to serve as a second earth.
    --
    ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
    • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday February 07 2017, @03:28PM

      by jdavidb (5690) on Tuesday February 07 2017, @03:28PM (#464090) Homepage Journal
      But before that I'd defeat cancer and aging and develop workable reversible cryonic preservation. Why waste time with fun solar system modifications when I might not live long enough to see the finished product? :)
      --
      ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
      • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday February 07 2017, @08:52PM

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday February 07 2017, @08:52PM (#464280) Journal

        Take a fast trip in a ramship, make use of time dilation so you can see how the solar system mods turned out. No need for cryogenic preservation if the ship is fast enough and the trip short enough, don't go all the way to the galactic center. Take your family too, maybe you can reboot humanity if you discover everyone is dead when you get back. On the other hand, maybe they'll have figured out how to reverse aging by the time you return. Or both.