[ExI] Moving Stars

[Aleksei Riikonen]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 7:54 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/combat-expanding-universe-aliens-could-hoard-stars?tgt=nr
>
> What's a bit strange about this is that the way to move stars is
> obvious.  Eric Drexler and I discussed it way back in the 1970s.
> There is even a nice painting of a star fixed up this way somewhere.
> (The artwork even had a slice out of the light sails to keep planets
> illuminated.)
>
> For those who have not heard about it, you hover actively controlled
> solar sails over one hemisphere of a star.  This makes the star into a
> fusion/photon drive.  The acceleration isn't much, but a G type star
> looked like it could cross the average distance between galaxies
> before it burned out.

Yeah, I thought this is commonly called a "Shkadov Thruster". Googling
this term leads to plenty of pages that discuss it.

(Apparently Shkadov shouldn't have been considered the first to
analyze it, though, since it was as late as 1987 when he put out a
paper on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Shkadov )

-- 
Aleksei Riikonen - http://www.iki.fi/aleksei