[ExI] Send in the dwarfs, part 2

[Jeff Davis]

My finger slipped and off went the post, scarce half made up and that
so lame and unfashionable that dogs do bark at it...

Anyway,...to continue...

The rest would probably just resupply and refuel and head out again.
Then I checked out the inventory of nearby stars --  Blessed be
Google, the font of all knowledge:

www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/nearest.html

In the end, I settled on the notion that some millions of earth folks,
from a diversity of cultures, would decide to get the hell out.  Leave
the bullshit -- a world of criminal sociopath leaders and manipulated
lynch-mob followers -- behind, in favor of a more rational social
order (not that it would necessarily BE more rational, but that could
well be the justifying narrative.)

And finally, it seemed logical that the asteroid belt would provide
the building material for very large ships, perhaps hundreds of miles
long, and that the "icy" material in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud
would provide the fuel for fusion reactors.

None of these ruminations is the least bit original of course.

Then today, I come upon the article the link to which --

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/will-nasa-wise-space-telescope-find.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2Fadvancednano+(nextbigfuture)&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail

-- heads up part one of this post.

And there, some distance in, I read the following:

"Part of the WISE mission is to search for brown dwarfs, and NASA
expects it could find one thousand of the dim stellar objects within
25 light years of our solar system."

Holy cow! A thousand brown dwarfs within 25 light years. Nearby is
very good.   Also as anyone whose been around this list knows, small
stars are good for lotsa things.  Like "chewy chewy tootsie rolls",
they last a loooong time.  As Robert Bradbury might testify, they're
good for your m-brains.  And now that their may be a swarm of them,
perhaps they can be used to provide a repeated "slingshot effect" on
the way to,...well,... further out.

So let's see,...what is the spacing?

Total volume = 4/3 x pi x (25 light years)e3 =  6.5e4 cubic lt-yrs, or
65 cubic lt-yrs per dwarf.

That's about 4.5 light years -- on average -- between dwarfs.  (Not
counting Sedna, a mere 1.5 light years away!, if it exists).  Okay.
So maybe now I'm not quite so excited.  But it's still good.  Abundant
brown dwarfs is good.  I'll be looking forward to the WISE results.

Best, Jeff Davis

 "Everything's hard till you know how to do it."
                         Ray Charles