New Propulsion, the "EM Drive"

@BillRM,

That went totally over my head. What do you mean?

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@farmerman,

Quote:

meant to deploy, absorb an convert (via a "bubble reaction), then be destroyed.

Pity, staying intact would make it easier for the little green men to detect visually, via radar, whatever they use.

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@Leadfoot,

remember its neh the size of any astronomical entity that defines its importance.

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@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

Love the idea of using large lasers to drive small/tiny probes to a large part of C but my question is how are they going to power the return radio transmissions with the information the probes would picked up.

Another problem is, how are such small probes going to adequately observe the star system in the brief time that they are zooming by?

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

With Moores law being as dead on as its been, weve already got the capability to develop a postage stamp sized gizmo that can act as a machine and a robot and a tv camera . Hawking was speculating on a physical limit of "shrinkage" of the crafts electronics. Is it even a limit.

Moore's Law is not likely to continue much longer. How are we doing with Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography? IF we master that, what do we do once we reach the limits of what that can do?

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I can think of no better example of hubris than Billy claiming he understands the math better than Stephen Hawking.

BillRM's math was 100% accurate. It is not clear to me that Stephen Hawking differs with the math that BillRM presented.

Setanta wrote:

However, i've always found Billy to be short of sources for his claims, and long on arrogance.

BillRM was not making a claim. He was expressing doubt that we can make a microchip that can withstand an acceleration of 62,000 G's for 20 minutes.

And also expressing doubt that such a small device could handle a laser capable of carrying data back to earth.

These problems may or may not be surmountable, but it is reasonable for him to ask questions.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

The rest of the mindless squabbling on this thread is meaningless.

Not necessarily. I think that proposal for high-speed interstellar microchip probes is interesting enough to hash over.

The EM drive, on the other hand, seems to be well-debunked already.

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@oralloy,

Quote:

Another problem is, how are such small probes going to adequately observe the star system in the brief time that they are zooming by?

They are talking about using an evolutionary strategy that frogs and salmon use use. "If you arent going to nurture your young and invest in their futures , just have a LOT of young"

So the "Breakthrough Starshot" as its called, will utilize lots of probes, all pre progrmmed to take their shots at different delta times . Its an engineering solution, not a scientific one. I go for the engineering shot.
Whatever the math says, multiply it by 10.

As far as the return messages. THEY ARE GOING TO A STAR like our sun (not proxima centauri which is red brown). Stars are known to give off solar energy which , Im sure that the technology will be there to exploit the miniml energy the nanochip can collect

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@farmerman,

Quote:

Stars are known to give off solar energy which , Im sure that the technology will be there to exploit the miniml energy the nanochip can collect

The question is not if there is enough energy to meet the power needs of the probes electronic but the far greater power requirement to send the information back to earth over light years distant.

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@BillRM,

The Deep Spce Network of JPL uses three rdio telescopes to track Voyager 1 and 2 at radio signal strengths equivalent to a refrigerator light. Imagine what a focused array of thousands of radio tellescopes in aone kilometer square can do.( RT interferometry is a trick borrowed from oil field geophywic) where signals are enhanced by two or more recievers. Interferometry is a mature technology and getting more powerful each year.
(I think the real problem here will be to have at least 3 such arrays all over the earth so that the signal is never "dropped" by earths rotation. Unless of cpurse the km array is in a large earth orbit

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@farmerman,

You are in one case talking about a little over a 100 AUs not over 4 light years and you do not have a near by star directly in line with the voyagers signals.

Deep space as far as the voyager probes are concern is not all that deep as in 0.00173938 light years or so.

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@BillRM,

what makes you such a negative noonie? Ill bet youve never spent time in research have you? Is it your way of acquiring attention?
Never make conclusions without fully understanding the situation.

I think Ill stick with Drs Hawking an Loeb.

SO you apparently would NOT undertake the research? IZZAT your point?

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@oralloy,

Quote:

How are we doing with Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography? IF we master that, what do we do once we reach the limits of what that can do?

This was all the rqge ten years ago. Ive gotta look for a time line for Moores law and see whats come down the pike in minaturization and Quantum applications based on molecular and multiple "state" circuitry

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@farmerman,

That fine however what engineering projects had Hawking seen to it end point of working hardware?

As far as I know the correct answer to that question is zero as he create theories not try to turn theories into hardware using current technology.

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

This was all the rqge ten years ago.

As the situation currently stands, Intel is building on a 14 nanometer process.

They think they can build an affordable 10 nanometer process without Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography.

They think they can build an expensive 7 nanometer process without Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography.

They think they can build an affordable 7 nanometer process with Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography.

They think they can build an expensive 5 nanometer process with Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography.

It does not appear that there are any realistic hopes for mass-produced CPUs with transistors smaller than 5 nanometers.

Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography still isn't ready for primetime, but they are still making good progress on developing it, so it'll probably be ready someday.

Intel just formally abandoned the Tick-Tock release process that they came up with when Dennard scaling collapsed, and they now plan to start producing multiple generations of CPUs using the 14nm process, then multiple generations of CPUs using the 10nm process, etc.

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I don't oppose the efforts to find ET life, but I do think it is a substitute for finding God for atheists both declared and otherwise. It is a way to validate their faith. It certainly serves no other 'useful' purpose.

But it would crack me up if the first message we got from an ET civilization was "Do you seek God too?"

Not likely though. It would probably be something like "3 1 4 1 5 9". sent as simple pulses. That would be enough to prove there was intelligent life out there.

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@Leadfoot,

Quote:

It certainly serves no other 'useful' purpose.

You got to be kidding me another whole set of beings with differences outlook on life raises under the rays of another sun only useful reasons to communicate with is to talked about our ideas of a god????

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@Leadfoot,

Leadfoot wrote:

I don't oppose the efforts to find ET life, but I do think it is a substitute for finding God for atheists both declared and otherwise. It is a way to validate their faith. It certainly serves no other 'useful' purpose.

The first step in hiding ourselves from a vastly more powerful alien civilization is knowing that they are out there.

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

They are talking about using an evolutionary strategy that frogs and salmon use use. "If you arent going to nurture your young and invest in their futures , just have a LOT of young"

So the "Breakthrough Starshot" as its called, will utilize lots of probes, all pre progrmmed to take their shots at different delta times . Its an engineering solution, not a scientific one. I go for the engineering shot.
Whatever the math says, multiply it by 10.

I can picture firing a million of these things through our own solar system and not even noticing Jupiter or Saturn.

How good are their optical abilities going to be? When it comes to optics, size matters. A microscopic telescope isn't going to have very significant magnification ability.

That's why, presuming adequate atmospheric seeing, bigger telescopes show vastly more detail on the planets than small telescopes do.

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@oralloy,

actually pinhole optics are some of the best. I was thinking that itd be a pinhole style aperture with a teeny 3 layer (RBG) atomic matrix array of cells. We can see how damned complicated these things are going to be. they will need some way of determining celestial azimuth and trhen acting on it (all the while going 0.2(c).
I wonder whether they would pre program the nanoships to decelerate (another problem) t some place on the trip , the action to which , would have to be trnsmitted out to the chip some three yeqrs in advance.

Its an entirely new way of thinking , as Hawking "said" (something like)

"Sooner or later humankind is going to have to recognize that this solar system will go through several stages as it begins to expire. We will either have to move to an outer planet while the sun energy field expands, or move out of the neighborhood entirely"
It would be prudent to begin thinking about this sooner than later"

Or something similar
.. Screwing around with sub (c) velocities that can convert a star trip to 0.1 of its length travelling only by rocket power is something that is far down the road in time but (I dont think) it will be unattainable at some point in our development

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New Propulsion, the "EM Drive"

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