[extropy-chat] FW: The Drake Equation and Spatial Proximity

Robert Bradbury robert.bradbury at gmail.com
Tue Oct 24 15:08:39 UTC 2006


On 10/24/06, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> Relativistic travel is easy, when you're sending small craft
> (a kg-ton is a small craft) and leave the drive (a star, for
> instance) at home. Braking is more tricky, especially over
> large distances, where sacrificial sails won't work.


We solved this problem during the debate about the dumb flyby probe being
sent to Pluto.

You have nested mass drivers (or nested guns) -- anything such that
something larger can launch something smaller which can launch something
smaller ...  Oriented such that each nested launching is in the direction
opposite to that of the direction of travel.  An alternate approach would be
a relatively large ablative heat shield targeted through the upper
atmosphere of the star.  The problem gets much smaller when you remove weak
human bodies from the equation and only have to produce a few mg of
nano-seeds as the final "package".

It also true that because we will have *much* better observational data
regarding target systems that you could do things like targeted landings --
things like flying into the tail of a comet in the target system and using
that material to help with the deceleration.

Robert
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