New Propulsion, the "EM Drive"

Lord the sun aging out of the main-sequence is a few billions years in the future so there is no reason to assume that we or anything that had descent from us will be around at that point in time.

Mars will be far enough. That is where I plan for my descendants to be.

What happens to the people on Mars when the sun enters its white dwarf phase? At some point it will make sense to travel to a different star.

Also, if our sun gets ejected into deep intergalactic space when the Andromeda galaxy collides with us, it will be good to abandon the solar system right then, even if the solar system remains habitable for the time being. Otherwise it will be a long trip back once we decide we need to find a new sun.

It goes without saying that if our sun gets tossed into the soon-to-be-exploding galactic core when the galaxies merge, we'll want to find a different residence in that case too.

I said my descendants. I didn't say anything about people.

There will be no way to decelerate them. There would have to be a second laser already in place to push on them in the opposite direction.

I presume that our descendants will be around for as long as matter continues to exist in the universe.

I presume we'll eventually exist on some sort of Dyson swarm surrounding a star, moving to a new star every billion years or so as our current star leaves the main sequence.

Eventually there won't be any more hot stars and we'll have to settle for longer-lived cool stars (less favorable because they produce less energy to power society).

After all the stars burn out, we'll have to mine asteroids and gas giants for fuel to run fission and fusion reactors.

But as long as there is matter in the universe, there is no reason why our species cannot continue to survive.

Whatever they are, they're going to find it rather cold on Mars once the sun cools to a white dwarf. I hope they'll have the sense to leave the solar system when the time is right.

You know with the probes going 1/4 C maybe repeat maybe there would be some way to used the star solar winds and going very near the outer solar layers to do some meaningful braking.

Way beyond my abilities to set up the equations for such braking maneuvers to see if it is possible or not.

hmmm. Is it possible to decelerate from behind the nanoship?
The Japnese IKAROS deployed a sail nd was able to decelerate from behind. Can tht be affected on something 10000 times smaller in area??

If we had better "spce maps" we could use the grqvity of whatever objects or lnets lie on the roaad to AC. Or, as Bill says, use the solar wind FROM Alpha Centauri.

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Whats wrong with just doing our best to AIM right at Alpha Centauri and come riding in and thered be several hours of good pictures possible.
Phoning em home, we will give that to Bill to solve One cosmic unit is 8 minutes of picture taking time

No, I know about ours, I'd want to know Theirs.

Are you saying you would'nt find that mind blowingly interesting if they had some?

How close would we have to get to Alpha Centauri to make it a worthwhile trip? At the distances involved, that might make an awfully small target.

I think the firt thing the ET's would ask is,
"do you have a foodtsuff called bacon"?

Oh, so you're saying you don't WANT them to notice our micro-probes to be noticed.
We should immediately start a mission to find Voyager and blow it up if that's your concern.

A hostile spacefaring alien race is a possibility but inter solar system warfare is so impracticle that I doubt it's a danger. And if it WAS practical for them, there's nothing we could do to hide ourselves. Might as well say 'Hi, here we are and we're friendly' and hope they believe us.

Your dietary restrictions are affecting your thinking. And I understand.

BTW, how's that Hotrod truck you were work'n on going?

I think that thats one of the real engineering problems. The proper "aiming" of the nanoship will be based upon some lucky shote. I guess much work on determining the flight paths of these chips will need some doing.

If they are oming in to a star at 0.2 (c) that will give us 5 times as much "hang time" around the suns neighborhood. Between eart and our sun, we have 8.5 minutes of observation time at light speed. The nanochip will have almost an hour. Thats adequate to get some pix in a fly by.

The thousand probes are, i think, intended to assure that some useful information is retrieved from such a mission.

It seems to me that this is wasted effort, though. Of course, people can spend their money however they choose, but i hope the public dime is not involved. An English astronomer brought the existence of the Alpha Centauri "cluster" to other astronomers in 1592. As most dedicated astronomers were in the northern hemisphere, this is no surprise. But Alpha Centauri C, or A. C. Proxima was not discovered until 1915, by a Scottish astronomer in South Africa. (You'd need to be in the southern hemisphere to look at that one from the planet's surface.)

But the orbital period of Proxima (in reference to A. C. A & B) is thought to be 500,000 years. Would it be worth while colonizing a planet of any of these stars with the risk of gravitational tidal forces ripping your planet apart in under 500,000 years? Not only that, but A. Centauri A & B oscillate between two and twenty-too seconds of arc in distance between one another. It may very well be that tidal forces are even more powerful between those two. It doesn't seem to me to be a good candidate for any colonies.

To go look at it is fine, so long as someone is paying for it and not expecting anyone's government to foot the bill.

I think this is mire a "proof of concept" rther than a pre-colonizing mission. Its all being privately crowd source funnded.
Selecting Alpha Centauri was just convenience to the first neighborhood exo-star.
If we were looking at pre colonization, I guess Hawking would hve chosen Barnards Star because it has several known earth sized planets (maybe some goldilocks ones)
But Barnards would take another 30 to 40 years back and forth.

Having proof of concept for sub light travel is just another barrier to break.
Itll be a neat trick to get this done and then we would worry about scaling UP.

Usually scaling up provides a logarithmic increase in energy and complexity not an arithmetic one. SO I think we have to be able to talk from some experience. Even the first moon shot was done in relative (albeit easier) baby steps .

When the sun dies, its gonna first begin burning Helium inan ascending energy budget. The inner planets (ll the way to Mars, will be engulfed in rather warm weather). That fact is what these guys are working from. Their work is just a first step in developing an intergalactic moving van

I don't know of any definitive evidence of any planets around Barnard's star. Believe it or not, i do keep track of these things. Someone had said several decades ago that there was a gas giant there, but that was not only allegedly debunked, but debunked by that astronomer's working partner. If we did find a suitable planet there, it's only real purpose, vis-à-vis the long-term survival of the human race would be as a base for further missions. Barnard's star is thought to be a very old star, to the extent that astronomers were surprised when it appeared to emit a stellar flare in 1998. Here's a link to an article about it from Astronomy magazine's online version. You will note in that article that Barnard's star is though to be 11 or 12 billion years old. I don't like it, but i have come to suspect that it may be thousands of years before we are in a position to colonize other planets of other stars--and most of the reasons for that will be social resistance.