[ExI] More Tabby's Star news

[Robert G Kennedy III, PE]

On 2016-08-06 16:20, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Interesting thoughts. I kind of suspect that nobody can ever do FTL
> spaceflight. It?s a big universe, but if someone had that, they would
> be all over. _

There's a paper coming out in JBIS about that very idea.

> PS. This idea came up back in the late 70s or early 80s when Eric
> Drexler proposed to use a hemesphere of light sails to turn a star
> into a fusion-photon drive.

A Russian named Shkadov proposed a "stellar engine" to do that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine

"Stellar engine
 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
   (Redirected from Shkadov thruster)

"Stellar engines are a class of hypothetical megastructures which use a 
star's radiation to create usable energy. Some variants use this energy 
to produce thrust, and thus accelerate a star, and anything orbiting it, 
in a given direction. The creation of such a system would make its 
builders a Type-II civilization on the Kardashev scale.

"There are three variant classes of this idea.

"Class A (Shkadov thruster)
"One of the simplest examples of stellar engine is the Shkadov thruster 
(named after Dr. Leonid Mikhailovich Shkadov who first proposed it), or 
a Class A stellar engine.[1, from 1987] Such an engine is a stellar 
propulsion system, consisting of an enormous mirror/light sail—actually 
a massive type of solar statite large enough to classify as a 
megastructure, probably by an order of magnitude—which would balance 
gravitational attraction towards and radiation pressure away from the 
star. "

Some stuff further down in the art about similar concepts in Olaf 
Stapledon's fiction from the 1930s.

-- 
Robert G Kennedy III, PE
www.ultimax.com
1994 AAAS/ASME Congressional Fellow
U.S. House Subcommittee on Space