It's a cool theoretical concept, but as cool as it is, you still need that black hole (which is not that easy to come by), a powerful enough photon source (which is hard to power), the ability to project a very precise cone with that photon source (which is nigh impossible thanks to diffraction), and the ability to catch the refracted photons once they went around your handy singularity and re-use them in your source with very high efficiency.@Shadowdancer, i think the point is that unlike Dyson's original idea, by using small binary black holes you don't have to create anything, they already exist all around the galaxy, you just harness their 'free' energy with the laser.
Given that we don't have access to any of the major functional parts (not that we could conceivably even build a vessel to carry them) and the United Federation of Hold My Beer I Got This is yet to be founded, it's about as good as the Alcubierre Memedrive.Still i think of all the near-workable concepts we currently have, this might be the 'easiest' to work towards?
Well no-one said interstellar travel would be easy
Still i think of all the near-workable concepts we currently have, this might be the 'easiest' to work towards?
Given that we don't have access to any of the major functional parts (not that we could conceivably even build a vessel to carry them) and the United Federation of Hold My Beer I Got This is yet to be founded, it's about as good as the Alcubierre Memedrive.
Given that we don't have access to any of the major functional parts (not that we could conceivably even build a vessel to carry them) and the United Federation of Hold My Beer I Got This is yet to be founded, it's about as good as the Alcubierre Memedrive.
This seems more like "poor mans travel" once actual warp drives have been invented.
And from all that experience, then i'd expect us to be in a better place to seriously consider manned travel to the Alpha Centuri system, using something like this method (which is really just a fancy bigger version of the Breakthrough Starshot project).
"Mature interstellar travel" is impossible to current science. It is virtually impossible to build anything of significant scale that would even leave the solar system (much less with live people on board, but that's a stupid idea anyway).Yes, we'd need mature interstellar travel before we could even use a 'halo drive', but it wouldn't require anything fundamentally impossible to current science, like the exotic matter or energy densities proposed for most Alcubierre drive proposals.
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This will work without 'actual warp drive', and since actual warp drive is impossible as far as we know, this is one of the most efficient means of interstellar travel we can conceive of that doesn't need to break the laws of physics somewhere.
Personally, I think we should expect interstellar travel to be done at a fraction of the speed of light, not a multiple of it, until we have some reason to suspect the latter is possible.
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"Mature interstellar travel" is impossible to current science. It is virtually impossible to build anything of significant scale that would even leave the solar system (much less with live people on board, but that's a stupid idea anyway).
Once we get to the point that we can trivially travel to the next singularity, the drive concept is already obsolete because we have moved to a post-scarcity era that allows us to build all the stupid stuff our ancestors dreamed of, like Dyson Spheres (no, those don't work…) or the Hyperloop.
Again, it's a nice little theoretical idea, but it has so many obvious holes that it can never be useful.
You're missing the point.... The nearest binary black hole - just to test the theory - is so far away that you NEED a warp drive to get there in a reasonable amount of time.
No. Again, when you're at the point that you can summon black holes at will, you're master of mass, energy, and its conversion to a degree that makes you completely independent of anything else. By the time you squished half the mass of the solar system into a hot mess of radiation and death (the entire system combined wouldn't provide enough mass to create a stable neutron star, much less a black hole, and let's face it, y'all's mommas couldn't even de-orbit Ceres) you'd have built an Orion and blissfully bombed your way to the Pleiades.'create' the mini black holes
You're missing the point.... The nearest binary black hole - just to test the theory - is so far away that you NEED a warp drive to get there in a reasonable amount of time. If not, you need *something* to get your there in reasonable time to begin with - which will render this drive obsolete before it's even tested. Otherwise, hello thousands of years of space travel to get to the nearest binary black hole, and if you think we won't have figured out better methods by then, I'd tell you you're mad.
Remember, the speed of sound was impossible once...
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