[ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 12:13:40PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote:

> That's clear. And energy being mass, you may want to bring along as little
> of it as possible...

A gray sail probe will need circumstellar cloud of
hardware to create the beam (whether by individual
lasers targeting, or the cloud collectively acting
as a phased array microwave radiator). So if your
sail e.g. does double duty as a rectenna, you're
awash in power during the entire journey.
 
> Certainly I will and do contribute :-), but we were discussing here of what
> we could in principle do ourselves...

Obviously AI research is substrate constrained, and
machine-phase or at least molecular circuitry fabrication
would be synergistic, since more powerful hardware
feeds back into development of more powerful hardware.

So you can push (real) AI research and/or molecular electronics
manufacturing research. Both are difficult and very 
expensive.

Meanwhile, to get there we need to convert from fossil
resource and energy base to fully renewable energy and
resource base similarly as we did about a century ago,
when we moved from biofuels to fossils, only on an order
of magnitude larger scale.

So in order to get out into space we must prevent collapse.
This should be our first and foremost priority as a species.