The only way humans "explore" is when they are refugees or invaders. The US went to the moon to show a big totem to the Soviets: We Are Strong! Don't Invade! Exploring is evolutionary dangerous, so it is only done out of greed or necessity.
Best way to get the most high quality info is to tell everybody they have no clue and tell your theories with absolute conviction. Sit back and wait for quality responses. Then tell everyone they are wrong and tell them why. Humans love to prove others wrong and do their best work to spite you.
Why has no one told the medical researchers they can´t cure cancer yet? I can´t believe how much time iv wasted running marathons, wearing ribbons and making donations. I could have just wrote the doctors a mocking letter.
Hmmm, as a physicist a lot of this seems quite impossible to build. one kg of antimatter... we cant't even create a few micrograms, et alone keep it contained in a space capsule
@@SwissPGO the fact we can produce it is important. The rest seems to be a matter of having lots of energy available (and the ability to keep it flowing) for the capture/containment step. the ability to store it will be a game changer.
Andrew Higgins seems a really down-to-earth guy for wanting to go interstellar. Good to see that someone like Andrew Higgins is running the Interstellar Symposium.
@@xeniyal7454 well, one can also tweak the passage of time, it's as simple as adding mass. then, once you pass through the Kerr's blackhole singularity you can probably be anywhere.
@@milanstevic8424 still not good enough. If we achieve biological immortality soon, me and you have pretty good chances to step on Proxima Centaurus B. Without it, we die before even probe achieve it.
@@ModestestRUST buddy, Kerr's blackhole singularity is a scientific name and stuff, it's not a belief system. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity#:~:text=While%20in%20a%20non%2Drotating,as%20a%20%22ring%20singularity%22. Share the news anyway, but keep in mind that no one has yet proved singularities to not exist, it's completely untestable at this point.
This guy is so endearing and honest. I'v paraphrased but - "what a beautiful thought to tread lightly on Earth, industry doesnt happen here any more " "Yeah we COULD do it that way but we must think of this, this and this" Really easy to understand, thoroughly enjoyed this video, gonna go check your other stuff now, subscribed!
These are awesome ideas for steampunk sci-fi! Ships whizzing around the solar system, gathering speed for a journey and doing the opposite in the destination. Relativistic weaponry firing shots that seem absolutely ridiculous but catching the enemy on its next turn around a planet. I absolutely love how that kind of space travel resembles sailing more than modern rocketry.
I was supposed to be falling asleep to the sweet sounds of science, and when this talk got going I bolted wide awake and my imagination just went wild. What a gorgeous idea!! This is the most exciting thing I’ve heard since I first learned about the solar gravitational lens about a year ago. I cannot wait to see where this goes!!
Glad I'm not the only one that plays science videos to fall asleep to, LOL! I have a few playlists of things like year one university-level geology lectures and such, with people with a pleasant voice that are nice to nod off to! I strongly suggest you find Journey To the Microcosmos, which is a fantastic channel with Hank Green using his soft voice; especially around 1-2 years ago his voice was top-calm - I LOVE falling asleep to that voice! (Edited to correct the channel name)
@@MaryAnnNytowlI do the same. I love when I’m in the right sleep stage and the volume is just right and I literally begin to dream what’s being said on the video.
Hilarious that you mention it when the practical engineering is entirely glossed over and taken as a given both by the interviewee and the guy presenting the video. And let's not forget the financials of such a venture. These things aren't built free of charge, you know.
practical and realistic here meaning building a thousand kilometers long tube filled with tons of ice. Sorry if I'm not waiting for this to be a thing in our lifetime or our kids lifetimes. Perhaps eventually once there's an actual space-building industry mostly automated by bots and large scale 3D printing in a few centuries. But to get there we certainly need the dreamers and the pioneers with much smaller scales...
Nah, don't need 'em. Give me a garage full of decent tools, a roast beef and pickle sandwich, and I'll get you and your kids to Tau Ceti. My latent gravitational bridge drives are all the talk around Epsilon Eridani.
@@crustyoldfart I think you missed the point of "practical engineering." Practical engineering takes into account cost, especially whether or not the cost of building an apparatus is feasible based on what it needs to do. If it's difficult, expensive, and time consuming, then it's not practical.
This interview was speechless this man has so much information that he just threw on to all of us that it just blows my mind. I had no idea that birds can sense that in the wind and there was an actual application for using it with a glider. This changes everything and I really hope that the people that are in this field working on this live a long life so they can give us as much knowledge as possible for us to go into interstellar space. Thank you so much for this interview
How birds can sense these conditions.... just recalled an article describing how birds use a quantum physics effect to percieve magnetic fields. I wonder what else they can see?
Andrew Higgins needs to write a book for the general public. This is a really fascinating topic. I'd read it and it would likely inspire many people to pursue this goal.
really? so you are applauding someone who says it aint possible and is proud that his mind is limited by science dogma? well you guys aint scientists so it makes sense. like science fanboys. like the guy who couldnt play in a team but is an armchair coach. i salute your belief in the system. youtubers like this lower iq points. unless you are researching something you dont get to say its possible... i mean imagine a world where no one can lift over 100kg because everyone believed it to be impossible. in that world these guys would be talking about how no human has done it. this aint science. its a new form of religion. before we had electricity no one would have believed it. they are indoctrinated. anyone can recite doctrine.you only need memory and a belief that its true. true intelligence is discovering OR understanding a concept before its mainstream. why? because when its mainstream you just need to memorize. so please wake up science is just as sickening as religion was in the 90s. covid jabs was the best example. here is a prophecy this year its gonna be tried again in the winter. and the jab was doctrine. funny how 60-70 percent of white people took it out of fear. so many died. about 40 people died a week straight after that i know..... so please stop looking for someone with all the answers. every single human is a scientist. the so called scientists havent cured cancer or aids. havent found sustainable energy. and seem to be purely rhetoric based or making viruses that accidentally escape from a lab. so in a nutshell beat your fear of death and you see through their lies. stay afraid and they can make you change your gender or hate foreigners. the only time we can think like this is if we really understood everything. we dont. especially not a greed based culture. if you want some food for thought: biology chemistry physics ?????? - there is a fourth branch of science that no one knows about. however think about what these three study. if you get it it should be obvious what the fourth one does. however if you only have doctrine instead of critical thinking in you it shall never make sense. to those who get it... your welcome i dont think it has a name yet but that just means its brand new. however i strongly believe only those with a soul will see it. good luck. live strong namaste
The goal of space travel is not far off. String theory states particles communicate at very far distances. That communication can be the start to jump points. Going from one particle in space to another same like partical. Then, energy conversion with quantum physics. Converting matter to energy, and back to matter. This, I am sure, would be sub quantum level reverse engineering. Then splitting atoms safely can be the power necessary to manipulate weak and strong forces. Implementing what we already know from the information available.
In all the years I’ve been watching science content on TH-cam this is by far the most exciting one ever. I was glued to this interview from start to finish and am now trying to figure out if I can get to Montreal for the symposium. Thank you so much!
A what!? Holy crap, take my money. That would be so freakin' cute! We could dress 'em up in little tuxedos and bowties and put a little cummerbund on the conductor. We're doin' it, dude. We're doin' it.
That was a fun interview. It makes me wish I were immortal to see what kind of technologies and discoveries are going to happen long after I would've died.
Don't worry, humans won't make it to be interstellar species. The proof is the universe, if it was possible, the billion, trillions of stars would have coughed up at least one civilization.
Testing those technologies in the solar system is very important in my opinion. The jump from chemical rockets to interstelar travel is huge. It would also be important to draw attention and funding to those projects.
@@Radrook353 We are going to have to create a new species that can survive zero Gs and high Gs but also able to have the thinking capacity of a human. Or just use robots.
I remember as a kid, I used to think stars were just little specs of light that you could touch in outer-space lol I remember the day in school that I found out that those specs were actually distant sun’s just like our sun but super far away & you could never touch them! I was mind blown 🤯 Even today when I explain to other people that don’t know about space that those specs of light you see in the sky are actually distant sun’s just like our sun! it’s always fun to see them be mind blown just as I was all those years ago ☀️💫🚀🌎
Every time I hear about using the solar winds for interstellar travel I think about that Deep Space 9 episode (Explorers, Season 3, Ep. 22). Commander Sisko built a sailing ship based off of an ancient Bajoran design and achieved warp speed. I loved that show!
...I couldn't get over how over-the-top steampunk he made that ship. 😄 the hand crabks and manual tiller were too silly for me. If this concept pans out, the power is not going to be on the order of a small sailboat ffs.
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 he was way over the top...I agree. He insinuated as much when he gave Jake a tour of the craft if memory serves me correctly lol...
I’m about a year late watching this. I’m really liking this guest. Explanations about the solar winds were easier to understand than I had previously thought. Thank you. Also I’d like to hear more about the coils that were mentioned.
This is the opposite of click bait. Thiskept appearing on my feed, I clicked on it, and really enjoyed it. I'm now going to get a lot of magnets from hard drives, a really strong motorcycle helmet and a very long snorkel and aim for Alpha C. I might need a really big mobile phone to let you all know what I find.
This was the video that ultimately urged me to pursue my dream of studying physics, now I start my journey next week. It was content like Fraser's that has kept my flame stoked through the rain. Thank you for this great interview and the months of inspiration I've received from your many videos.
Fascinating interview, thanks Frasier! Imagine getting up to 20 - 30% without a Jupiter massed quantity of negative energy! Didn't think I was going to watch the entire thing when I started it due to the length, but once he started talking I was hooked.
Wow, what a great interview with so many great ideas! I feel like a kid or teenager reading Carl Sagan's book "Our Universe" and finding all those great ideas in there, for propulsion for space exploration (and also the ideas about more or less balloons to explore gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn). But now here are fresh ideas, on some orders of magnitude even better... Wow! How could I have missed this for a year, but finally TH-cam is persistently showing me the thumbnail of this interview in the recent days.. And it's worth every minute of watching it!
OMG! I know Joe Jackson! I used to work in the residential A/V feild out of a suite RIGHT NEXT DOOR to H-Bar Technologies, and actually got to tour their facility after asking him "Doesn't it require 'dammit' magnetic containment to store antimatter?", to which he responded "No, nothing nearly as extreme as you might imagine." He then showed me around and even showed me the containment vessels (two DIFFERENT types) which were only approximately the size of a large home deep freezer. Just thouht I'd share...
You are a dream killer Fraser, but you're also a dream creator because when you put down a person that is really driven to get something to work, they will someday get it done, one way or another.
Catching up on all the space news and stories. Loved this interview...even though most of it blasted over my head at 10% the speed of light. Thanks Fraser for another great interview
Actually, all the Planets spiral away from the Sun over long periods of time like the Moon Spirals away from the Earth. This is a change in the magnitudes of each of the pair of forces since the larger orb always gains mass faster than the smaller orb of any of the orb pairs. The Sun Gains mass far faster than it looses mass converting Hydrogen to Helium, and getting rid of solar energy. The Sun spirals inward toward its Sun-Planet Barycenter, and the planets spiral away from the Sun-Planets Barycenter. The same is true of the Earth-Moon Barycenter. The Earth spirals inward toward the barycenter, while the Moon spirals away from the pair's barycenter. Currently the mass ratio is very close to 81.3 to 1.0 This number will gradually increase at an ever increasing rate. The Earth accelerates the moon to an ever higher orbit due to its increasing mass, and decelerates itself to a lower orbit. The Moon tries to do the same but looses the battle at a mass rate of 81.3 to 1.0 . The Earth wins at 81.3 / 82.3 ratio and the moon looses at a rate of 1 .0 / 82.3. The Earth spirals inward at an ever slower rate, while the Moon spirals away at an ever increasing rate. The absolute value of the distance between the two Orbs will continue to increase. The time for the Moon to complete one orbit around the Earth tends to increase. Since 1965, they people with powerful telescopes have been bouncing laser beams off the Moon, and one of the Apollo Missions put a corner reflector on the Moon so more of the Laser light gets back to the source telescopes. The out and back time keeps increasing by milliseconds per years, so the distance keeps increasing by around 38.1 mm per year ( If I remember correctly ), questionable. The Change in the distance, divided by the distance, is proportional to the change in the mass of the system divided by the summation of the mass of the system which is also proportion to the change in the time divide by 2 times the elapsed time of the oldest and biggest orb in the system. The change in distance is one part in 9.0888 E 9, so the age of the oldest member ( Earth ) is 4544.4 million years. Two partner systems are easy to calculate, but multiple partner systems are very difficult to calculate, and any change in any of the ratios, like mass, distances, ages, external material supplies changes everything else, and the results will never be the same. In short Chaos.
If antimatter is central to the space propulsion, lots of applications are now attractive, even if Proxima ends up not viable. 1. Get out there a ways, with a quantum entanglement component. Still simultaneity a light week out? A light month out? 2. Further inspection of a dismissed anomaly--to make sure it should stay dismissed--the Pioneer effect. With antimatter-level thrust, we might be able to get much bigger scope of inspection, within only a decade. (The wider question: Are we seeing things through any type of gradual-onset filter? One only detectable if we get far enough out, and send signal back, to double-check.) 3. Chase down Oumuamua and inspect it. 4. Get out to our own solar gravitational lens, and have a look around--within a generation. 5. Lots of non-exotic app, involving the human component: opening up the outer solar system--without huge accumulation of radiation, shrunken-to-feasibility life support systems, etc. 6. Thorough clarification of Kuiper Belt reality. 7. Does the Oort Cloud exist? (NOT proven yet.)
I would *love* it if we went back to Neptune in my lifetime! I've loved Neptune since I was a kid - a long time ago - and even wrote a short sci-fi story about Neptune in middle school. Really enjoyed this conversation!
What's stopping you? Oh ----you mean you want ME to send you. Don't hold your breath. Scientists have thousands of bright ideas that they yearn to have taxpayers pay for their fantasies.
Agreed. Although, I would add that it is helpful if your dreams are consistent with the laws of the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum.
@@A_J_Higgins I'd say it's helpful to know the difference between fiction and reality. They are very different, but both have their part to play. Staying within the realm of the possible is eminently practical. But dreaming the impossible can be fun, and provides us with mental energy. And sometimes, just sometimes, imagining the impossible may lead to breakthroughs. That being said, I also don't think anyone will break the laws you just mentioned. Some pursuits are foolhardy. Unfortunately, we don't know beforehand how fruitful an approach may be.
I must be about your age Andrew, cos I was too young for Jupiter, but I remember Saturn, and then remember thinking of the eternity that would have to pass until Uranus. That eternity did, of course, pass (in only 5 years!!). Then Neptune came around. I haven't thought of those events in the way you just made me think of them since they happened. Thanks for that, thank you sincerely.
On many stages of human development people were convinced that this or that was impossible. And it wasn’t that they did know nothing about the world. They had science and technology on some level. But then after some time it turned out that people discovered the whole level of rules of the world and suddenly everybody can fly - just the way our ancestors couldn’t imagine. Today we know it’s impossible to travel to other stars or galaxies in human lifespan but who knows what we discover in the future? Maybe it becomes possible in ways we can’t even comprehend.
I believe its fundamentally different. We are watching birde fly since we are humans. Say we found out its about wings in 1500 BC in the mithos of Icarus. First flight 1903. We never seen a body doing interstellar travel except maybe astroids. And math will always be same, unless we just tear up reality(space-time) .
@@alperenozturk9235 Not at all. Yes we imagined we fly like birds which even now is impossible. But we do fly today. Just different way that our ancestors could think. The same can be with traveling between stars. Now we think about star ships and warp drives because our imagination is a projection of our world. We know that faster than light travel through space is imposible for us just like flying like a bird. But we know that the space itself can expand faster than light. We certainly do not know everything, what is possible and even less what is impossible. So I'd say maybe one day we, or what we'll become, will be able to travel between stars in ways we humans can't even imagine.
@@motomono I see where you coming from but you missed one point. We haven't seen any body doing what you have, or other hopefull thinkers describe. I believe we as humans are pretty much stuck in our near space. And we will have our minions(small or big machinery dedicated in simple operations) will scatter near star systems for information and resources.
UAP smiling. [Unacknowledged Access Project]. We have been there and done that. We can take ET home. UAP, is Quite a malleable Acronym, now wouldn't you say.
There is a 1 billionth scale model of the Solar System along the Melbourne foreshores with a 1.4m diameter Sun centred in St Kilda, a 12.5mm Earth 150m away and Pluto 5.8km away near Port Melbourne. When you walk the distance between 140mm Jupiter and 116mm Saturn (assuming they actually were in alignment, which they mostly aren't) you truly appreciate just how much nothing there is in space. I missed it the first time I was there, but a 215mm Proxima Centauri is near the Sun in this scale, based on having travelled the entire circumference of the Earth to reach it. The scale you mention of the Sun being the size of a grapefruit, the Earth would be much smaller than a peppercorn.
Yes! I live in port melbourne and over the Covid lockdown made it my goal to walk the entire solar system with my Doberman. We finally did it but we were pretty tired afterward lol….
I enjoy the channel Meatball studios here on TH-cam. One of the videos begins with a quark and goes to the end of the universe. It is all just a whole bunch of nothingness. My favorite theory for the shape of the universe is a giant 5D donut with a Big Bang in the center. If that is true then there are probably many such donuts (and other baked goods) sparsely distributed in something even bigger and mostly empty something.
The Robert L. Forward book Rocheworld is still one of my favorites where a large laser in the Lagrange point behind Mercury and harnessing the power of the Sun - I forget the exact details - is used to power a large light sail propelling a large exploration vehicle. The sail is designed to break in segments part way through the journey with the outer sections being blown ahead of the craft where they then focus the laser from Earth back to the sail on the craft decelerating it for arrival at Barnard's Star. One question I do have is how do we protect sensitive components and eventually people for long range high speed travel through interstellar space. GCRs are likely a real threat to astronauts at even interplanetary ranges and at relativistic speeds the thin interstellar medium becomes high energy particles constantly bombarding the spacecraft. The faster you go the worse this becomes.
I read Robert L. Forward's book "Rocheworld" as a teenager in the mid-1980s and this book is what started me on the path to the research I describe in his video. Forward's work continues to be a huge inspiration for the community researching interstellar flight.
The concern about GCRs is very real, but note that GCRs are already highly relativistic (traveling at 99% the speed of light and faster with GeV to TeV energies). So, the effect that GCRs will have on a spacecraft traveling at 20-30% the speed of light is not any worse than what our spacecraft already experience today. We have figured out how to deal with GCRs on our present day spacecraft (mainly, always have backup computers on board and on the ready, so when the main computer experiences a bit-flip, you just switch to the backup). The other concern is the interstellar medium (the ISM) will now also be impacting the spacecraft at mega-electron-volt (MeV) energies-since the spacecraft is moving through it at a fraction of the speed of light-and this will result in gigarads of radiation exposure over the mission duration. However, these particle energies are (relative to GCRs) low and manageable. The protons and other particles of the ISM will impact and sputter away a fraction of a millimeter of the leading edge of the spacecraft, but this should be manageable with a modest amount of shielding.
0:01 _"I feel like I am a dream killer"_ Heck yeah! Back then I showed up on the channel, and started dreaming of visiting a place with such lush vegetation as Fraser's backgrounds, only to later learn it's just very advanced green screen CGI! ( ;-;)
Only just found this video. Wish I'd seen it when it was first aired. ... I've got a LOT of catching up to do - so I'm going to be up all night watching videos, crunching numbers and generally giving my grey matter a much needed hell of a work out. Thank you 🥰🥰😊😊
Amazing talk thank you very much! So glad I subbed to this channel. Future generations are going to witness these Interstellar missions and they are in for a real treat! I'm glad the rest of us are around to see the first small steps taken!
I when the realities are told, it is not something to be disheartened, it is actually teaching us what cant work, making us realise we must re-think on how to do the impossible. I very much think certain things are possible but we live in an age like when we were trying to figure out powered flight. By learning what doesn't work, we learn what can work and eventually, will get there.
Well compare the evolution of space travel with nautical travel: at first we figured out how to row a boat, much later sails were added (also a drag device). With those we discovered new continents, had the VoC era, and much much later giant engines the size of houses were built to propel ships regardless of the elements
Money spent on this endeavor will reap untold advancements in our daily lives. Hats off to the professor who can make a difficult to understand subject understandable to those of us lucky enough to hear him speak. Thanks to Professor Higginsber, and Fraser Cain for tuning me in.
Money spent on anything to do with space is mostly diverted to 'science educator' hires who do nothing but talk all day. It's a farce at this point. Our only hope is the private sector.
I wish people would stop talking about Proxima Centauri as an example of a possible Earth 2.0. Proxima Centauri is, like the vast majority of these so-called "habitable zone" exoplanets, a red dward system where the exoplanets are spinning very close and rapidly around the star and so are probably tidally locked and being blasted by the numerous solar flares typical of red dwarves. In other words, a not so habitable exoplanetary system. The big problem is that right now, our main method of detecting exoplanets, the transit method, is heavily skewed towards finding planets with a very short periodicity around their stars, which means that they are located very close to their stars and have periods of several Earth days or weeks. This means that only those around red dwarves, with their low light output, would be in a habitable zone at these close orbits. This means that these red dwarf habitable zone planets will be tidally locked and will be blasted constantly by the solar flares of these red dwarves. The other two stars of the Alpha Centauri triple star system are a type G and type K star - and neither have exoplanets that we have so far detected, which does not mean that they do not have exoplanets, just that the piss poor transit method that we have is not able to detect them. The theories of star formation that we have would indicated that almost certainly, many other solid bodies would coalesce around a forming young star. If the plane of the planetary system does not cross the star in the same plane as our line of sight to that star, we will simply not be able to see these exoplanets using the transit method. The sun is a type G star, and I would be more excited if the Alpha Centauri A type G star was found to have exoplanets in the habitable zone.
New topic for John: Dynamic soaring. THANK YOU! I see applications in particle acceleration. I see applications in plasma control. I see applications in 30 story building air flow processes. I see thermodynamic applications akin to sonic refrigeration. You have just given me months of things to think about. I will never get any work done.
I have always dreamt about space travel myself but now that I'm approaching 60 I've finally realized that it's a pretty good idea to stay here for me. I've also been telling dreamers the sobering facts about the challenges with space travel. They weren't happy. This video was great. I'm about to listen again. I'm not sure if you asked about the risk associated with colliding with some dust particle when traveling at insane speeds. Do we know the probability distribution for dust particles of various sizes in interstellar space? If we did we could calculate a probability distribution for arriving at the star as swiss cheese or as a cloud of atoms. Or still be alive.
Exactly. The amount of energy imparted from a tiny particle at even 5% the speed of light would obliterate the vehicle. the shielding materials needed ruins the laser based propulsion entirely.
Dont forget we know nothing about intrrstellar space. We know theres a "lot" of hydrogen out there. And scientists seem to assume it is evenly distributed. But that is unlikely due to gravity..more likely clouds of hydrogen andpossibly other things. Sp youre happily zipping along at .1 c and...your entire vessel hits a cloud of hydrogen and incinerates in a millisecond
@@UKnowIfUKnow Interstellar dust grains are a significant concern, as I discussed with Fraser, but this issue is not a complete show-stopper: Interstellar dust grains are micron-sized and smaller. Alas, we cannot test these kinds of impacts (at 30% the speed of light) in the lab, but we can calculate how much energy they could explosively release on impact: At 30% the speed of light, it is about 10 J of energy. (This is just ½ mass * velocity^2, so you can check the numbers yourself.) This energy is the equivalent of a firecracker going off. It will certainly do some local damage, but the spacecraft can be designed with this in mind, including shielding and self-healing materials. Such an impact will not vaporize the spacecraft.
The greatest specific impulse I can currently conceive of without having to go into things like antimatter: Strap a powerful ion drive, to a thin film radio active solar sail, lined on the side facing away from the sun with a composite material wired to harvest electrical energy from the radio active decay to feed the ion thruster. Or several lightweight but powerful ion thrusters such as the EAPS. A thin film solar panel solar sail will also be pretty good, but the radio active one is better. Heck. Maybe it would be possible to make a thin film radio active solar panel material that also harvest the radioactive decay similar to the first scheme.
Those are all good ideas, and they have all been examined in some detail. Related to your thinking, the idea of using a radioactive sail that gets thrust from the fragments (alpha particles) it shoots out has also been explored. While all these ideas would work, they are all still rockets (ion thrusters, radioisotope sails, etc.) that obey the rocket equation, and as such, are not going to get to above about 1% the speed of light. Their exhaust velocities are limited (3-4% of c) and using a radioactive source results in carrying a lot of dead mass (because not all the fissile material ends up being used). If you are willing to wait 500 years for your probe to get to the nearest stars, these technologies will work. But if you want to get data back from a mission within the lifetime of the people who launched it, we are going to need to develop technologies that permit us to go faster.
@@A_J_Higgins Yeah. I was just talking big ISP. I'm mostly interested in colonizing our own solar system. Practical interstellar travel will happen when it happens.
It’s easy to make statements like, there’s a realistic way to reach a star 4 light years away in our lifetime, but without being able to significantly extend a human lifetime or suspend metabolism without aging or decaying mechanisms kicking in and restore it when needed, but we simply won’t have these technologies within our lifetime.
Most of my discussion with Fraser was about robotic probes for interstellar travel. Robotic probes preceded every human mission in our solar system (e.g., the first robotic mission to Mars was launched in 1962!), and it will almost certainly be the same for interstellar travel. But you might be surprised to find out that NASA is investigating "suspended metabolism" under the name "induced torpor". You can search on that term to find out more.
@@A_J_Higgins i think unless we all live like billionairs on earth there is no realistic chance that we conquer space. every planet out there unless allready inhabited is much worse than living in the middle of antartica or the desert. So i think unles we cant manunipulate every inch of earth to our liking space travel is just a future dream and to far away to predict any timeline.
My interest in the last decade has been in nuclear power and molten salt reactors specifically. The initial interest was in slow spectrum molten salt reactors using a fluoride/lithium/beryllium salt modeled on the Oak Ridge Molten Salt Reactor Experiment which ran for four year in the 1960s. Recent interest has shifted to fast spectrum molten salt reactors that use chloride salts which are safer, have better understood chemistry and are much cheaper. Sodium chloride is table salt. The advantage of fast spectrum reactors is at over 1 MeV U-238 and Th-232 become weakly fissile and add to the neutron budget. These reactors will run on spent nuclear fuel and plutonium from decommissioned weapons. They can also include depleted uranium as part of the fuel cycle. All this means there are very large stockpiles of fuel for these reactors currently being stored at considerable cost as high level waste. This could be the ample energy source needed to power an anti-matter production facility. Also molten salt reactors run much hotter than water moderated and cooled nuclear reactors making them far more practical for use in space. A cold water source is not needed to produce the thermal efficiency to draw the required amount of heat out of the reactor core. A molten salt reactor on a spaceship or a Moon base would use radiator fins for cooling. Hook one of these up to a Hall thruster and you have a much more efficient way to accelerate at least at interplanetary distances.
Moving to HALEU at about 18% enrichment as the new standard fuel for civilian use would be a good first step and is achievable in the near term with commercial ready reactors. TRISO packaging as standard could be an added bonus for a new standard. Dramatic advantages can be obtained just by updating the standard fuel.
Unlike many commenters below who seemingly take all ideas total literally and then bash them... I really enjoyed the tossing of ideas around. I enjoy the process of speculation and thinking outside of the box.
An idea for travel within the Solar System: Launch an array of these spacecraft sailing the solar winds in loops within the Solar System, "conveyor belts" of them going along the most desirable routes. Then, launch other ships that use their magnetic fields to extract energy from the magnetic fields of the conveyor ships as they pass, so that they can accelerate (and maybe, decelerate?) faster, either for journeys within the Solar System, or to boost interstellar vehicles to higher escape velocities than they could reach on their own. It would be a bit like jumping on a conveyor-belt walkway like you see in a major airport, with the conveyor adding its speed to your walking speed, except that there would be no direct physical connection between the conveyor ships and the traveler ships. The conveyor ships would probably be un-crewed and significantly smaller and lower in mass than the traveler ships, since there would need to be many more of them.
The idea he finishes describing around 29 minutes in makes me think of a non mechanical gyroscope with layers of counteropposing spinning fields creating opposing perpendicular forces. I've no clue how you could redirect one of the opposing vectors 180° to act in sync with the other one, but such a rotating field might also be part of what would allow and control steering and bouncing off the differential winds.
When I was around 11 or 12 years old, I had this idea of a solar wind surfer spacecraft. I imagined it riding the edge of a propagating solar wind/wave and gaining huge amounts of speed. I had read somewhere how surfers could gain speed faster riding a wave perpendicular vs parallel, and I extrapolated the idea out. I more recently learned about dynamic soaring, and the amazing speeds they are able to achieve with RC gliders. I never mentally extrapolated the same idea out to solar winds like I did with surfing. That's a wild concept!
Maybe an interesting thought: I wonder if there is a way to collect mass as one performs gravitational assists and solar wind turns that would allow for increasing one's kinetic energy without, as it were, gaining velocity and thereby running out of solar system? That is, in stage 1 of your sailing trip, you intentionally slow yourself by grabbing stuff (gas, whatever) as you perform these maneuvers and then once you reach a certain level of mass, you start stage 2, stop accumulating mass, and accelerate up to some crazy speed, then in stage 3, you take advantage of the energy of your accumulated mass and extreme speeds via Q-drive ideas by shooting your accumulated mass out the back.... Great video in any case! Really enjoyed it.
It’s so exciting to see what might be possible! I’ve always been convinced it’s impossible and that I would never see it in my lifetime. Here’s hoping! 🤞🏻 thank you for the detailed explanations! 😸
@@neoclassic09 Impacting a micron-sized dust grain at 30% the speed of light releases about 10 Joules of energy. This is the equivalent of a firecracker going off. It will certainly do some local damage, but it will not vaporize the entire spacecraft.
@@neoclassic09 Part of the beauty of this is that said particles will be directed down the gullet of said magnetic device, accelerated, and spat out the back end, this kinda resolves most of those issues IMO Reality, requires empirical testing however
@@A_J_Higgins no problem, as long as we can contain the rarely, but expected at least twice 1kg ball of matter at these speeds, pm a trip to Alpha Centauri, we should be ok
If we could achieve 2% of the speed of light in the solar system means that we could get to Pluto in 10 days! I had to do the calculation in Wolfram alpha, before the end of the episode, so I have no idea if they address this in the video
What assumption did you make about acceleration and deceleration time? (If you ignored it entirely, you're dramatically underestimating the time to travel short-ish distances like those within the solar system or even to reach the nearest stars.
Yes but you would just zoom past it.. you would have to accelerate half the distance then decelerate the other half. So still looking at months or years together there
What isn't possible today becomes possible tomorrow. Not every idea comes to fruition, but when our understanding gets an update, problems can crumble away.
Wonderful chat, I think locating those solar wind pockets of turbulence in real-time will be a challenge. I’m not sold on the interstellar mass ejection idea, there is no way to extract energy from the interstellar medium without pumping out as much enegy to collect it. You cannot add mass to your craft in the middle of your trip, if it’s mass that was already on at mission start..why was it added to begin with? The idea of catching electrons with a mag field and using it as a propellant is a far shot in the interstellar medium where there are fewer electrons.
I agree the idea of extracting energy from the interstellar medium that is blowing over the spacecraft (as viewed from the moving reference frame of the spacecraft) is difficult to accept at first glance; I had the same initial response when Jeff Greason proposed the idea (his "q-drive" concept). But after working through the analysis and equations, I confirmed it is not a perpetual motion machine. The q-drive simply concentrates the kinetic energy in the mass onboard a vehicle initially loaded with reaction mass and already in motion into a smaller mass (the payload of the vehicle without reaction mass) by expelling the reaction mass backward. To answer your question: "why was it added to begin with?" The answer is: Because that mass had an initial velocity that was created by another propulsion device (fusion rocket, solar sail, etc.). The q-drive then concentrates this kinetic energy into the smaller mass of just the payload while expelling most of the initial mass. Again, you are concentrating the initial kinetic energy of the larger vehicle into a smaller mass (thus, making it go faster), but doing this requires interacting with another medium (the interstellar medium, in this case). This is entirely consistent with the conservation of energy and momentum. If you want the full details, you can find Jeff Greason's paper “A Reaction Drive Powered by External Dynamic Pressure" which is linked in the video description above. This paper (and the subsequent work we have done building upon it) has gone through peer review prior to being published.
I'm glad we don't have to wait for a warp drive to be invented to get a closeup look at exoplanets! I don't think I'll live to 2050 to see a probe launched to Alpha C, but my son almost certainly will and that blows my mind.
Here are the distances to each of the mentioned star systems: 1. **TRAPPIST-1:** TRAPPIST-1 is located approximately 39.5 light-years away from Earth. 2. **Proxima Centauri:** Proxima Centauri is the closest known star to the Sun, located approximately 4.24 light-years away from Earth. 3. **Kepler-186:** Kepler-186 is located approximately 582 light-years away from Earth. 4. **Kepler-62:** Kepler-62 is located approximately 1,200 light-years away from Earth. 5. **LHS 1140:** LHS 1140 is located approximately 40 light-years away from Earth. 6. **Tau Ceti:** Tau Ceti is located approximately 11.9 light-years away from Earth. These distances are approximate and may vary slightly depending on the method used to determine stellar distances and any updates in astronomical measurements.
That anti matter factory would be interesting. Would have to be built in the middle of nowhere. Kilograms of anti matter and matter going up in an accident would be quite a headache Ahh, 13:00, Andrew said to build it in space, yes, that would be wise
@@elinoreberkley1643 Or Mars. Keep that antimatter factory far away. I ounce of antimatter released woulf yield 12 Megatons of TNT equivalent power. A kilo is 2.2046 pounds. A pound (British Imperial weights and measures) is 16 ounces. So, the mini Tsar-Bomba detonated in 1961 yield 58 megatons is 4.3 ounces. A kilo of positronium released due a magnetic vacuum bottle breach would create a mushroom cloud maybe hundreds of miles wide. A country destroying or even civilization collapsing event.
How might the intersecting solar winds at Alpha Centauri (3 stars interacting) allow a greater ability to generate dynamic lift than our single sun allows? Has this been considered? I'm picturing 3 soap bubbles connected together vs. our single soap bubble.
Light sail tech is interesting because it can leverage tech innovation post-launch. The idea is to simply assume that the power delivery tech would exponentially increase over time rather than design the mission based on current tech. Ditto for receiver tech. You could launch a mission using current transmission tech, but assume vastly superior receivers, and assume much more bandwidth than we currently have. Any mission that is based on current tech at the time of the mission is doomed to become quickly obsolete, with the next decade's mission passing this decades launch and watching it in the rear view mirror. In that case there is no point in launching anything until the mission can be complete in a couple decades. I think when people think about this topic, they tend to forget the technology tends to change rapidly on the order of years rather than centuries. Although it's admittedly embarrassing to note the absence of a moon base (let alone a moon mission) 55 years after Apollo.
... though I'd speculate that by the time a light sail mission arrives for a fly-by, our space telescope tech will be at the scale of square kilometers, with image quality possibly exceeding anything from the flyby. For an earth sized planet, we would need a kilometer of diameter per pixel of direct observation, which could be improved with interferometry and/or multiple exposure.
This sounds a great way to get relativistic speeds. Have you considered the effect of larger particles in the path of the vehicle which cannot be moved aside by the propulsion unit. Particle the size of a grain of sand would be highly destructive at 10% speed of light. How is the vehicle protected from the stationary objects in the path of travel?
At present, we do not believe there are that many sand-sized grains in interstellar space. The interstellar medium (ISM) is incredibly empty: There is only one molecule of hydrogen per 10 cubic centimeters. The ISM is mostly just gas (99%). Dust particles are only 1% of the ISM and are mostly 1 micron in size and smaller. If you collected all the dust between us and the center of the galaxy and collapsed it onto a flat plane, it would be as thin as the coating of dust on a dusty chalkboard. There is no evidence that sand-size grains in interstellar space, but the safest answer is: "We aren't sure." It would not be possible to deflect the spacecraft around the dust grains at these speeds, but it might be possible to deflect the dust grains out of the path of the spacecraft. For a large spacecraft with sufficient power, it is possible an onboard laser could identify (via LIDAR) and deflect (via pulsed laser) larger grains. A 1-mm size grain could easily be identified by LIDAR, and you would only need to search a very small area ahead of the spacecraft. We will likely need to send precursor missions to determine the composition of the interstellar medium. Fortunately, just such a mission (the Interstellar Probe) is under development at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
Thank you for your comprehensive reply. So dust is not a problem. Another thought I have is the use of all the H atoms in the path of the craft. Could they be collected, undergo fusion, hence release energy which is then used to propel the craft to a higher speed? I'm don't know if there is enough H to useful. Thanks@@A_J_Higgins
First, I am struck with how much I love Professor Higgins' bookshelf (but would hate to dust it as often as I would need to, were it here on this gravel road where I live, LOL!). And then I was able to pay attention to what he was saying, after I got done ogling the bookshelf. Just had to back it up to actually listen. 😄 The concepts he shared with us are quite fascinating! They could truly be used to send some kind of probes waaaay out there, and send back TONS of new information! A like and comment for the care and feeding of the Almighty Algorithm. ❤️ ❤️
Great interview. Love the subject matter. The only issue here is you need to work on not interrupting the guest. Was getting frustrating after a while.
Very good Fraser. I would very much like to continue to see your skepticism and sharp logic. For example, let me say about the question and the possibility of our species and the desire and longing for the stars: Regarding the antimatter drive: - In 1996 some PICOGRAM anti-hydrogen atoms were successfully produced at CERN in Geneva for a few NANOSECONDS. Andrew Higgins speaks of a few kilograms of it for a very, very long travel time. What quantitative progress is there from 1996 to 2023? To the sun sails: - Tiny solar sails have hardly any capable control mechanisms, far-reaching communication options and complex orientation apparatuses integrated into them. Although some tiny life forms on Earth seem to be able to do it with brains of 0.025 mm2. The mayflies.
This guy gets it. Best way to get humans to do something, is to tell them they can’t do it. I like yer style dude.
The only way humans "explore" is when they are refugees or invaders. The US went to the moon to show a big totem to the Soviets: We Are Strong! Don't Invade! Exploring is evolutionary dangerous, so it is only done out of greed or necessity.
Best way to get the most high quality info is to tell everybody they have no clue and tell your theories with absolute conviction. Sit back and wait for quality responses. Then tell everyone they are wrong and tell them why. Humans love to prove others wrong and do their best work to spite you.
@@Midg-td3ty 😆 so true my friend 🙏🤝
Why has no one told the medical researchers they can´t cure cancer yet? I can´t believe how much time iv wasted running marathons, wearing ribbons and making donations. I could have just wrote the doctors a mocking letter.
@@1112viggo you think there aren’t researchers and doctors trying to cure cancer for the fame of being the one who figured out the impossible? 🤔
Having had the privilege of having him as a professor, very inspirational to hear him speak on this topic!
That's really cool, thanks for sharing!!
Oh, I bet it's _very_ cool, having learned from him yourself, to have him on here & seeing him teach the rest of us this one little bit, too. 😁
Did he ever slap you?
Hmmm, as a physicist a lot of this seems quite impossible to build. one kg of antimatter... we cant't even create a few micrograms, et alone keep it contained in a space capsule
@@SwissPGO the fact we can produce it is important. The rest seems to be a matter of having lots of energy available (and the ability to keep it flowing) for the capture/containment step. the ability to store it will be a game changer.
Andrew Higgins seems a really down-to-earth guy for wanting to go interstellar.
Good to see that someone like Andrew Higgins is running the Interstellar Symposium.
There is a solution: a biological immortality. Is a breakthrough for an interstellar travel :D
@@xeniyal7454 well, one can also tweak the passage of time, it's as simple as adding mass.
then, once you pass through the Kerr's blackhole singularity you can probably be anywhere.
@@milanstevic8424 still not good enough. If we achieve biological immortality soon, me and you have pretty good chances to step on Proxima Centaurus B. Without it, we die before even probe achieve it.
@@milanstevic8424 lol you actually believe in an actual singularity? I’ve got news for you.
@@ModestestRUST buddy, Kerr's blackhole singularity is a scientific name and stuff, it's not a belief system.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity#:~:text=While%20in%20a%20non%2Drotating,as%20a%20%22ring%20singularity%22.
Share the news anyway, but keep in mind that no one has yet proved singularities to not exist, it's completely untestable at this point.
This guy is so endearing and honest. I'v paraphrased but -
"what a beautiful thought to tread lightly on Earth, industry doesnt happen here any more "
"Yeah we COULD do it that way but we must think of this, this and this"
Really easy to understand, thoroughly enjoyed this video, gonna go check your other stuff now, subscribed!
These are awesome ideas for steampunk sci-fi! Ships whizzing around the solar system, gathering speed for a journey and doing the opposite in the destination. Relativistic weaponry firing shots that seem absolutely ridiculous but catching the enemy on its next turn around a planet. I absolutely love how that kind of space travel resembles sailing more than modern rocketry.
I was supposed to be falling asleep to the sweet sounds of science, and when this talk got going I bolted wide awake and my imagination just went wild. What a gorgeous idea!! This is the most exciting thing I’ve heard since I first learned about the solar gravitational lens about a year ago. I cannot wait to see where this goes!!
Glad I'm not the only one that plays science videos to fall asleep to, LOL! I have a few playlists of things like year one university-level geology lectures and such, with people with a pleasant voice that are nice to nod off to! I strongly suggest you find Journey To the Microcosmos, which is a fantastic channel with Hank Green using his soft voice; especially around 1-2 years ago his voice was top-calm - I LOVE falling asleep to that voice!
(Edited to correct the channel name)
Love journey to the microcosmos!!
@Mary Ann the Nytowl I was putting this on to fall asleep too 😴 I love certain talks when falling asleep.
DIAGRAMS would be a choice supplement!
@@MaryAnnNytowlI do the same. I love when I’m in the right sleep stage and the volume is just right and I literally begin to dream what’s being said on the video.
Theoretical physicists are great but practical engineering is arguably more fascinating when discussing topics like this! Great convo!
" practical engineering is arguably more fascinating ". YES, and it's much more difficult expensive and time consuming.
Hilarious that you mention it when the practical engineering is entirely glossed over and taken as a given both by the interviewee and the guy presenting the video. And let's not forget the financials of such a venture. These things aren't built free of charge, you know.
practical and realistic here meaning building a thousand kilometers long tube filled with tons of ice. Sorry if I'm not waiting for this to be a thing in our lifetime or our kids lifetimes.
Perhaps eventually once there's an actual space-building industry mostly automated by bots and large scale 3D printing in a few centuries. But to get there we certainly need the dreamers and the pioneers with much smaller scales...
Nah, don't need 'em. Give me a garage full of decent tools, a roast beef and pickle sandwich, and I'll get you and your kids to Tau Ceti. My latent gravitational bridge drives are all the talk around Epsilon Eridani.
@@crustyoldfart I think you missed the point of "practical engineering." Practical engineering takes into account cost, especially whether or not the cost of building an apparatus is feasible based on what it needs to do. If it's difficult, expensive, and time consuming, then it's not practical.
This interview was speechless this man has so much information that he just threw on to all of us that it just blows my mind. I had no idea that birds can sense that in the wind and there was an actual application for using it with a glider. This changes everything and I really hope that the people that are in this field working on this live a long life so they can give us as much knowledge as possible for us to go into interstellar space. Thank you so much for this interview
Speechless! It was full of speech.
@@Peter_Trevor Ha,Ha!😆
How birds can sense these conditions.... just recalled an article describing how birds use a quantum physics effect to percieve magnetic fields. I wonder what else they can see?
Good tp hear that Jeff Greason's talents are being utilized. Though we've lost touch, I always appreciated Jeff's intellect and vision.
Andrew Higgins needs to write a book for the general public. This is a really fascinating topic. I'd read it and it would likely inspire many people to pursue this goal.
really? so you are applauding someone who says it aint possible and is proud that his mind is limited by science dogma?
well you guys aint scientists so it makes sense. like science fanboys.
like the guy who couldnt play in a team but is an armchair coach.
i salute your belief in the system. youtubers like this lower iq points.
unless you are researching something you dont get to say its possible...
i mean imagine a world where no one can lift over 100kg because everyone believed it to be impossible.
in that world these guys would be talking about how no human has done it.
this aint science. its a new form of religion.
before we had electricity no one would have believed it.
they are indoctrinated.
anyone can recite doctrine.you only need memory and a belief that its true.
true intelligence is discovering OR understanding a concept before its mainstream. why?
because when its mainstream you just need to memorize.
so please wake up science is just as sickening as religion was in the 90s.
covid jabs was the best example.
here is a prophecy this year its gonna be tried again in the winter.
and the jab was doctrine. funny how 60-70 percent of white people took it out of fear.
so many died. about 40 people died a week straight after that i know.....
so please stop looking for someone with all the answers.
every single human is a scientist.
the so called scientists havent cured cancer or aids.
havent found sustainable energy.
and seem to be purely rhetoric based or making viruses that accidentally escape from a lab.
so in a nutshell beat your fear of death and you see through their lies.
stay afraid and they can make you change your gender or hate foreigners.
the only time we can think like this is if we really understood everything.
we dont. especially not a greed based culture.
if you want some food for thought:
biology
chemistry
physics
?????? - there is a fourth branch of science that no one knows about.
however think about what these three study.
if you get it it should be obvious what the fourth one does.
however if you only have doctrine instead of critical thinking in you
it shall never make sense.
to those who get it... your welcome
i dont think it has a name yet but that just means its brand new.
however i strongly believe only those with a soul will see it.
good luck.
live strong
namaste
The goal of space travel is not far off. String theory states particles communicate at very far distances. That communication can be the start to jump points. Going from one particle in space to another same like partical. Then, energy conversion with quantum physics. Converting matter to energy, and back to matter. This, I am sure, would be sub quantum level reverse engineering. Then splitting atoms safely can be the power necessary to manipulate weak and strong forces. Implementing what we already know from the information available.
In all the years I’ve been watching science content on TH-cam this is by far the most exciting one ever. I was glued to this interview from start to finish and am now trying to figure out if I can get to Montreal for the symposium. Thank you so much!
Symposium sounds like a symphony of possums
A what!? Holy crap, take my money. That would be so freakin' cute! We could dress 'em up in little tuxedos and bowties and put a little cummerbund on the conductor. We're doin' it, dude. We're doin' it.
That was a fun interview. It makes me wish I were immortal to see what kind of technologies and discoveries are going to happen long after I would've died.
Don't worry, humans won't make it to be interstellar species. The proof is the universe, if it was possible, the billion, trillions of stars would have coughed up at least one civilization.
Testing those technologies in the solar system is very important in my opinion. The jump from chemical rockets to interstelar travel is huge. It would also be important to draw attention and funding to those projects.
One major obstacle is living on a ship for years.
@@Radrook353 We are going to have to create a new species that can survive zero Gs and high Gs but also able to have the thinking capacity of a human. Or just use robots.
And maybe actually watching the video...
It is mostly lies trying to get funding. Outside of our solar systems all their claims are simply made up. There is no way to prove any of it.
I remember as a kid, I used to think stars were just little specs of light that you could touch in outer-space lol I remember the day in school that I found out that those specs were actually distant sun’s just like our sun but super far away & you could never touch them! I was mind blown 🤯 Even today when I explain to other people that don’t know about space that those specs of light you see in the sky are actually distant sun’s just like our sun! it’s always fun to see them be mind blown just as I was all those years ago ☀️💫🚀🌎
There are many people who still don't know that those are suns or have a vague idea
You didn’t learn that, until you were school-aged? 😂 Did your parents not read to you, from books?
@@kirillsleptsov1680 wait what? Which people do you know that don't know about stars being stars like the Sun? Anyone would know that much.
@@SahilP2648 just regular people around
@@WizardClipAudio oh superior, are we?
Thanks!
Every time I hear about using the solar winds for interstellar travel I think about that Deep Space 9 episode (Explorers, Season 3, Ep. 22). Commander Sisko built a sailing ship based off of an ancient Bajoran design and achieved warp speed. I loved that show!
Thanks for the recommendation. I watched that episode last night.
...I couldn't get over how over-the-top steampunk he made that ship. 😄 the hand crabks and manual tiller were too silly for me. If this concept pans out, the power is not going to be on the order of a small sailboat ffs.
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 he was way over the top...I agree. He insinuated as much when he gave Jake a tour of the craft if memory serves me correctly lol...
That waa my favorite episode by far. He even used wood in its construction and the whole story was very plausible.
Zepharim Cochran would turn over in his grave!!
I’m about a year late watching this. I’m really liking this guest. Explanations about the solar winds were easier to understand than I had previously thought. Thank you. Also I’d like to hear more about the coils that were mentioned.
This is the opposite of click bait. Thiskept appearing on my feed, I clicked on it, and really enjoyed it. I'm now going to get a lot of magnets from hard drives, a really strong motorcycle helmet and a very long snorkel and aim for Alpha C. I might need a really big mobile phone to let you all know what I find.
Awesome, let Andrew know once you've got a prototype
That’s one hell of a snorkel!
@@JeremyAndersonBoise It's a quantum snorkel that is connected to a portal that provides air from the Bahamas.
46:26 on just a pure drag device like this can get you to the solar gravitational focus in in less than 10 years
Wow, amazing.
This was the video that ultimately urged me to pursue my dream of studying physics, now I start my journey next week. It was content like Fraser's that has kept my flame stoked through the rain. Thank you for this great interview and the months of inspiration I've received from your many videos.
Fantastic interview! Thanks. It's great to know we have people like Andrew Higgins right here at McGill.
Fascinating interview, thanks Frasier! Imagine getting up to 20 - 30% without a Jupiter massed quantity of negative energy! Didn't think I was going to watch the entire thing when I started it due to the length, but once he started talking I was hooked.
My dream is to have a spacecraft moving at 30% the speed of light along with hookers and cocaine
Wow, what a great interview with so many great ideas!
I feel like a kid or teenager reading Carl Sagan's book "Our Universe" and finding all those great ideas in there, for propulsion for space exploration (and also the ideas about more or less balloons to explore gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn).
But now here are fresh ideas, on some orders of magnitude even better... Wow!
How could I have missed this for a year, but finally TH-cam is persistently showing me the thumbnail of this interview in the recent days..
And it's worth every minute of watching it!
OMG! I know Joe Jackson! I used to work in the residential A/V feild out of a suite RIGHT NEXT DOOR to H-Bar Technologies, and actually got to tour their facility after asking him "Doesn't it require 'dammit' magnetic containment to store antimatter?", to which he responded "No, nothing nearly as extreme as you might imagine." He then showed me around and even showed me the containment vessels (two DIFFERENT types) which were only approximately the size of a large home deep freezer.
Just thouht I'd share...
This is a great conversation Fraser. Props to you for this and everything else you do!
This is such a great interview. Mr. Higgins is a great teacher!
😂😂😂
You are a dream killer Fraser, but you're also a dream creator because when you put down a person that is really driven to get something to work, they will someday get it done, one way or another.
Fraser is grinch period
"Fantasy" is a better word than "dream". When people confuse fantasy with reality, they deserve to be corrected.
@@thatswhatithought6519 😆Rip.
He’s not a dream-killer at all, he enables lucid dreaming.
Catching up on all the space news and stories. Loved this interview...even though most of it blasted over my head at 10% the speed of light. Thanks Fraser for another great interview
watching this interview a year later and dropping a reminder we are closer to our nearest star today then when this interview posted 😂🤯
So we just wait for Proxima Centauri to come to us.
Actually, all the Planets spiral away from the Sun over long periods of time like the Moon Spirals away from the Earth. This is a change in the magnitudes of each of the pair of forces since the larger orb always gains mass faster than the smaller orb of any of the orb pairs. The Sun Gains mass far faster than it looses mass converting Hydrogen to Helium, and getting rid of solar energy. The Sun spirals inward toward its Sun-Planet Barycenter, and the planets spiral away from the Sun-Planets Barycenter. The same is true of the Earth-Moon Barycenter. The Earth spirals inward toward the barycenter, while the Moon spirals away from the pair's barycenter. Currently the mass ratio is very close to 81.3 to 1.0 This number will gradually increase at an ever increasing rate. The Earth accelerates the moon to an ever higher orbit due to its increasing mass, and decelerates itself to a lower orbit. The Moon tries to do the same but looses the battle at a mass rate of 81.3 to 1.0 . The Earth wins at 81.3 / 82.3 ratio and the moon looses at a rate of 1 .0 / 82.3. The Earth spirals inward at an ever slower rate, while the Moon spirals away at an ever increasing rate. The absolute value of the distance between the two Orbs will continue to increase.
The time for the Moon to complete one orbit around the Earth tends to increase. Since 1965, they people with powerful telescopes have been bouncing laser beams off the Moon, and one of the Apollo Missions put a corner reflector on the Moon so more of the Laser light gets back to the source telescopes. The out and back time keeps increasing by milliseconds per years, so the distance keeps increasing by around 38.1 mm per year ( If I remember correctly ), questionable. The Change in the distance, divided by the distance, is proportional to the change in the mass of the system divided by the summation of the mass of the system which is also proportion to the change in the time divide by 2 times the elapsed time of the oldest and biggest orb in the system. The change in distance is one part in 9.0888 E 9, so the age of the oldest member ( Earth ) is 4544.4 million years. Two partner systems are easy to calculate, but multiple partner systems are very difficult to calculate, and any change in any of the ratios, like mass, distances, ages, external material supplies changes everything else, and the results will never be the same.
In short Chaos.
@@frasercain
We will no longer be human by that time.
lol....The Andromeda Galaxy might get here first.
@@Hysteresis11
Speak for yourself! 😅
Some of the best topics and expert guests anywhere ✨🦋
Real privilege to hear this man . Surprised he had the spare time . His brains so big it’s cauterised his hair cells. Excellent vid
If antimatter is central to the space propulsion, lots of applications are now attractive, even if Proxima ends up not viable.
1. Get out there a ways, with a quantum entanglement component. Still simultaneity a light week out? A light month out?
2. Further inspection of a dismissed anomaly--to make sure it should stay dismissed--the Pioneer effect. With antimatter-level thrust, we might be able to get much bigger scope of inspection, within only a decade. (The wider question: Are we seeing things through any type of gradual-onset filter? One only detectable if we get far enough out, and send signal back, to double-check.)
3. Chase down Oumuamua and inspect it.
4. Get out to our own solar gravitational lens, and have a look around--within a generation.
5. Lots of non-exotic app, involving the human component: opening up the outer solar system--without huge accumulation of radiation, shrunken-to-feasibility life support systems, etc.
6. Thorough clarification of Kuiper Belt reality.
7. Does the Oort Cloud exist? (NOT proven yet.)
This was an excellent interview, thank you.
I would *love* it if we went back to Neptune in my lifetime! I've loved Neptune since I was a kid - a long time ago - and even wrote a short sci-fi story about Neptune in middle school. Really enjoyed this conversation!
What's stopping you?
Oh ----you mean you want ME to send you. Don't hold your breath. Scientists have thousands of bright ideas that they yearn to have taxpayers pay for their fantasies.
Dreams are there to inspire us. They don't have to be practical or realistic, they can just be fantastic dreams.
Agreed. Although, I would add that it is helpful if your dreams are consistent with the laws of the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum.
@@A_J_Higgins I'd say it's helpful to know the difference between fiction and reality. They are very different, but both have their part to play. Staying within the realm of the possible is eminently practical. But dreaming the impossible can be fun, and provides us with mental energy. And sometimes, just sometimes, imagining the impossible may lead to breakthroughs. That being said, I also don't think anyone will break the laws you just mentioned. Some pursuits are foolhardy. Unfortunately, we don't know beforehand how fruitful an approach may be.
Best video of the year. Thank you Fraser you have given us something to get excited about.
I must be about your age Andrew, cos I was too young for Jupiter, but I remember Saturn, and then remember thinking of the eternity that would have to pass until Uranus. That eternity did, of course, pass (in only 5 years!!). Then Neptune came around. I haven't thought of those events in the way you just made me think of them since they happened.
Thanks for that, thank you sincerely.
On many stages of human development people were convinced that this or that was impossible. And it wasn’t that they did know nothing about the world. They had science and technology on some level.
But then after some time it turned out that people discovered the whole level of rules of the world and suddenly everybody can fly - just the way our ancestors couldn’t imagine.
Today we know it’s impossible to travel to other stars or galaxies in human lifespan but who knows what we discover in the future? Maybe it becomes possible in ways we can’t even comprehend.
I believe its fundamentally different. We are watching birde fly since we are humans. Say we found out its about wings in 1500 BC in the mithos of Icarus. First flight 1903. We never seen a body doing interstellar travel except maybe astroids. And math will always be same, unless we just tear up reality(space-time) .
@@alperenozturk9235 Not at all. Yes we imagined we fly like birds which even now is impossible. But we do fly today. Just different way that our ancestors could think. The same can be with traveling between stars. Now we think about star ships and warp drives because our imagination is a projection of our world. We know that faster than light travel through space is imposible for us just like flying like a bird. But we know that the space itself can expand faster than light. We certainly do not know everything, what is possible and even less what is impossible. So I'd say maybe one day we, or what we'll become, will be able to travel between stars in ways we humans can't even imagine.
@@motomono I see where you coming from but you missed one point. We haven't seen any body doing what you have, or other hopefull thinkers describe. I believe we as humans are pretty much stuck in our near space. And we will have our minions(small or big machinery dedicated in simple operations) will scatter near star systems for information and resources.
@@alperenozturk9235 What I want to say is that we don't know what we don't know. Do you agree with that?
@@motomono of course, its why its worth to keep studying.
I like how Higgins smiles every time he blows your mind (and mine)! 😂
UAP smiling. [Unacknowledged Access Project]. We have been there and done that. We can take ET home.
UAP, is Quite a malleable Acronym, now wouldn't you say.
Dynamic Soaring Glider - mind blown!
There is a 1 billionth scale model of the Solar System along the Melbourne foreshores with a 1.4m diameter Sun centred in St Kilda, a 12.5mm Earth 150m away and Pluto 5.8km away near Port Melbourne. When you walk the distance between 140mm Jupiter and 116mm Saturn (assuming they actually were in alignment, which they mostly aren't) you truly appreciate just how much nothing there is in space.
I missed it the first time I was there, but a 215mm Proxima Centauri is near the Sun in this scale, based on having travelled the entire circumference of the Earth to reach it.
The scale you mention of the Sun being the size of a grapefruit, the Earth would be much smaller than a peppercorn.
Yes! I live in port melbourne and over the Covid lockdown made it my goal to walk the entire solar system with my Doberman. We finally did it but we were pretty tired afterward lol….
I enjoy the channel Meatball studios here on TH-cam. One of the videos begins with a quark and goes to the end of the universe. It is all just a whole bunch of nothingness. My favorite theory for the shape of the universe is a giant 5D donut with a Big Bang in the center. If that is true then there are probably many such donuts (and other baked goods) sparsely distributed in something even bigger and mostly empty something.
@@planetdisco4821 o
If you heat that model sun to 5,778K, it would look just like the real sun from 150m.
@@DrDeuteron plus it would be great for a bbq
The Robert L. Forward book Rocheworld is still one of my favorites where a large laser in the Lagrange point behind Mercury and harnessing the power of the Sun - I forget the exact details - is used to power a large light sail propelling a large exploration vehicle. The sail is designed to break in segments part way through the journey with the outer sections being blown ahead of the craft where they then focus the laser from Earth back to the sail on the craft decelerating it for arrival at Barnard's Star.
One question I do have is how do we protect sensitive components and eventually people for long range high speed travel through interstellar space. GCRs are likely a real threat to astronauts at even interplanetary ranges and at relativistic speeds the thin interstellar medium becomes high energy particles constantly bombarding the spacecraft. The faster you go the worse this becomes.
I read Robert L. Forward's book "Rocheworld" as a teenager in the mid-1980s and this book is what started me on the path to the research I describe in his video. Forward's work continues to be a huge inspiration for the community researching interstellar flight.
The concern about GCRs is very real, but note that GCRs are already highly relativistic (traveling at 99% the speed of light and faster with GeV to TeV energies). So, the effect that GCRs will have on a spacecraft traveling at 20-30% the speed of light is not any worse than what our spacecraft already experience today. We have figured out how to deal with GCRs on our present day spacecraft (mainly, always have backup computers on board and on the ready, so when the main computer experiences a bit-flip, you just switch to the backup).
The other concern is the interstellar medium (the ISM) will now also be impacting the spacecraft at mega-electron-volt (MeV) energies-since the spacecraft is moving through it at a fraction of the speed of light-and this will result in gigarads of radiation exposure over the mission duration. However, these particle energies are (relative to GCRs) low and manageable. The protons and other particles of the ISM will impact and sputter away a fraction of a millimeter of the leading edge of the spacecraft, but this should be manageable with a modest amount of shielding.
There's other scify contemplating antimatter collection at Mercury.
0:01 _"I feel like I am a dream killer"_
Heck yeah! Back then I showed up on the channel, and started dreaming of visiting a place with such lush vegetation as Fraser's backgrounds, only to later learn it's just very advanced green screen CGI! ( ;-;)
lol ʕ´•ᴥ•`ʔ
1:00:48 "tread lightly". Beautifully spoken.
Only just found this video. Wish I'd seen it when it was first aired. ... I've got a LOT of catching up to do - so I'm going to be up all night watching videos, crunching numbers and generally giving my grey matter a much needed hell of a work out. Thank you 🥰🥰😊😊
one of the most insightful and informative interviews I've heard in a long time. thanks
We need a lot more interviews like this!
Amazing talk thank you very much! So glad I subbed to this channel. Future generations are going to witness these Interstellar missions and they are in for a real treat! I'm glad the rest of us are around to see the first small steps taken!
I when the realities are told, it is not something to be disheartened, it is actually teaching us what cant work, making us realise we must re-think on how to do the impossible. I very much think certain things are possible but we live in an age like when we were trying to figure out powered flight. By learning what doesn't work, we learn what can work and eventually, will get there.
Well compare the evolution of space travel with nautical travel: at first we figured out how to row a boat, much later sails were added (also a drag device). With those we discovered new continents, had the VoC era, and much much later giant engines the size of houses were built to propel ships regardless of the elements
Money spent on this endeavor will reap untold advancements in our daily lives.
Hats off to the professor who can make a difficult to understand subject understandable to those of us lucky enough to hear him speak.
Thanks to Professor Higginsber, and Fraser Cain for tuning me in.
Money spent on anything to do with space is mostly diverted to 'science educator' hires who do nothing but talk all day. It's a farce at this point. Our only hope is the private sector.
I just watched a video of one of the dynamic soaring gliders they spoke about, and saw speeds in excess of 500mph.
Great Interview! I've always been a fan for the solar wind ;-) and for a second age of sail, looking forward to it, Thank you Fraser and Andrew.
I wish people would stop talking about Proxima Centauri as an example of a possible Earth 2.0. Proxima Centauri is, like the vast majority of these so-called "habitable zone" exoplanets, a red dward system where the exoplanets are spinning very close and rapidly around the star and so are probably tidally locked and being blasted by the numerous solar flares typical of red dwarves. In other words, a not so habitable exoplanetary system.
The big problem is that right now, our main method of detecting exoplanets, the transit method, is heavily skewed towards finding planets with a very short periodicity around their stars, which means that they are located very close to their stars and have periods of several Earth days or weeks. This means that only those around red dwarves, with their low light output, would be in a habitable zone at these close orbits. This means that these red dwarf habitable zone planets will be tidally locked and will be blasted constantly by the solar flares of these red dwarves.
The other two stars of the Alpha Centauri triple star system are a type G and type K star - and neither have exoplanets that we have so far detected, which does not mean that they do not have exoplanets, just that the piss poor transit method that we have is not able to detect them. The theories of star formation that we have would indicated that almost certainly, many other solid bodies would coalesce around a forming young star. If the plane of the planetary system does not cross the star in the same plane as our line of sight to that star, we will simply not be able to see these exoplanets using the transit method.
The sun is a type G star, and I would be more excited if the Alpha Centauri A type G star was found to have exoplanets in the habitable zone.
New topic for John: Dynamic soaring.
THANK YOU!
I see applications in particle acceleration.
I see applications in plasma control.
I see applications in 30 story building air flow processes.
I see thermodynamic applications akin to sonic refrigeration.
You have just given me months of things to think about.
I will never get any work done.
It's an absolutely mind-blowing concept. I can see why it's got your brain racing.
I have always dreamt about space travel myself but now that I'm approaching 60 I've finally realized that it's a pretty good idea to stay here for me. I've also been telling dreamers the sobering facts about the challenges with space travel. They weren't happy.
This video was great. I'm about to listen again. I'm not sure if you asked about the risk associated with colliding with some dust particle when traveling at insane speeds. Do we know the probability distribution for dust particles of various sizes in interstellar space? If we did we could calculate a probability distribution for arriving at the star as swiss cheese or as a cloud of atoms. Or still be alive.
Exactly. The amount of energy imparted from a tiny particle at even 5% the speed of light would obliterate the vehicle. the shielding materials needed ruins the laser based propulsion entirely.
Dont forget we know nothing about intrrstellar space. We know theres a "lot" of hydrogen out there. And scientists seem to assume it is evenly distributed. But that is unlikely due to gravity..more likely clouds of hydrogen andpossibly other things. Sp youre happily zipping along at .1 c and...your entire vessel hits a cloud of hydrogen and incinerates in a millisecond
@@cdreid9999 Yep. Be careful what you wish for. Especially if you wish to go crazy crazy fast.
@@UKnowIfUKnow Interstellar dust grains are a significant concern, as I discussed with Fraser, but this issue is not a complete show-stopper:
Interstellar dust grains are micron-sized and smaller. Alas, we cannot test these kinds of impacts (at 30% the speed of light) in the lab, but we can calculate how much energy they could explosively release on impact: At 30% the speed of light, it is about 10 J of energy. (This is just ½ mass * velocity^2, so you can check the numbers yourself.) This energy is the equivalent of a firecracker going off. It will certainly do some local damage, but the spacecraft can be designed with this in mind, including shielding and self-healing materials. Such an impact will not vaporize the spacecraft.
Now that your concerns have been addressed, how soon are you planning on leaving?
This was the interview that got me into following this channel a year ago
What an awesome guest! He really spoke in Layman's terms so a schlep like me could understand. Great stuff. Extremely informative.
Like all sails and sailors, the solar winds blow and doldrums.
We will have to add thrust on our own and find the pattern interstellar seas...
The greatest specific impulse I can currently conceive of without having to go into things like antimatter:
Strap a powerful ion drive, to a thin film radio active solar sail, lined on the side facing away from the sun with a composite material wired to harvest electrical energy from the radio active decay to feed the ion thruster. Or several lightweight but powerful ion thrusters such as the EAPS.
A thin film solar panel solar sail will also be pretty good, but the radio active one is better. Heck. Maybe it would be possible to make a thin film radio active solar panel material that also harvest the radioactive decay similar to the first scheme.
Those are all good ideas, and they have all been examined in some detail. Related to your thinking, the idea of using a radioactive sail that gets thrust from the fragments (alpha particles) it shoots out has also been explored.
While all these ideas would work, they are all still rockets (ion thrusters, radioisotope sails, etc.) that obey the rocket equation, and as such, are not going to get to above about 1% the speed of light. Their exhaust velocities are limited (3-4% of c) and using a radioactive source results in carrying a lot of dead mass (because not all the fissile material ends up being used). If you are willing to wait 500 years for your probe to get to the nearest stars, these technologies will work.
But if you want to get data back from a mission within the lifetime of the people who launched it, we are going to need to develop technologies that permit us to go faster.
@@A_J_Higgins Yeah. I was just talking big ISP. I'm mostly interested in colonizing our own solar system. Practical interstellar travel will happen when it happens.
Awesome content. Thanks for the time.
Alexander valdimer kowaliuk here, lets do it.❤
A crazily missed opportunity in your video is using pictures, even napkin drawings, to illustrate what your guest speaker is talking about.
Very interesting discussion. Fingers crossed for a launch this century. 🤞
It’s easy to make statements like, there’s a realistic way to reach a star 4 light years away in our lifetime, but without being able to significantly extend a human lifetime or suspend metabolism without aging or decaying mechanisms kicking in and restore it when needed, but we simply won’t have these technologies within our lifetime.
We're talking about sending robots, not people.
Most of my discussion with Fraser was about robotic probes for interstellar travel. Robotic probes preceded every human mission in our solar system (e.g., the first robotic mission to Mars was launched in 1962!), and it will almost certainly be the same for interstellar travel.
But you might be surprised to find out that NASA is investigating "suspended metabolism" under the name "induced torpor". You can search on that term to find out more.
@@A_J_Higgins i think unless we all live like billionairs on earth there is no realistic chance that we conquer space. every planet out there unless allready inhabited is much worse than living in the middle of antartica or the desert. So i think unles we cant manunipulate every inch of earth to our liking space travel is just a future dream and to far away to predict any timeline.
My interest in the last decade has been in nuclear power and molten salt reactors specifically. The initial interest was in slow spectrum molten salt reactors using a fluoride/lithium/beryllium salt modeled on the Oak Ridge Molten Salt Reactor Experiment which ran for four year in the 1960s.
Recent interest has shifted to fast spectrum molten salt reactors that use chloride salts which are safer, have better understood chemistry and are much cheaper. Sodium chloride is table salt.
The advantage of fast spectrum reactors is at over 1 MeV U-238 and Th-232 become weakly fissile and add to the neutron budget. These reactors will run on spent nuclear fuel and plutonium from decommissioned weapons. They can also include depleted uranium as part of the fuel cycle. All this means there are very large stockpiles of fuel for these reactors currently being stored at considerable cost as high level waste.
This could be the ample energy source needed to power an anti-matter production facility. Also molten salt reactors run much hotter than water moderated and cooled nuclear reactors making them far more practical for use in space. A cold water source is not needed to produce the thermal efficiency to draw the required amount of heat out of the reactor core. A molten salt reactor on a spaceship or a Moon base would use radiator fins for cooling.
Hook one of these up to a Hall thruster and you have a much more efficient way to accelerate at least at interplanetary distances.
Moving to HALEU at about 18% enrichment as the new standard fuel for civilian use would be a good first step and is achievable in the near term with commercial ready reactors. TRISO packaging as standard could be an added bonus for a new standard. Dramatic advantages can be obtained just by updating the standard fuel.
Unlike many commenters below who seemingly take all ideas total literally and then bash them... I really enjoyed the tossing of ideas around. I enjoy the process of speculation and thinking outside of the box.
Exactly. It doesn't hurt to brainstorm within the laws of physics as we understand them. I think some people just don't like to speculate.
Love these interviews! So informative and captivating. Thanks to both of you 🙏😃
An idea for travel within the Solar System: Launch an array of these spacecraft sailing the solar winds in loops within the Solar System, "conveyor belts" of them going along the most desirable routes. Then, launch other ships that use their magnetic fields to extract energy from the magnetic fields of the conveyor ships as they pass, so that they can accelerate (and maybe, decelerate?) faster, either for journeys within the Solar System, or to boost interstellar vehicles to higher escape velocities than they could reach on their own.
It would be a bit like jumping on a conveyor-belt walkway like you see in a major airport, with the conveyor adding its speed to your walking speed, except that there would be no direct physical connection between the conveyor ships and the traveler ships. The conveyor ships would probably be un-crewed and significantly smaller and lower in mass than the traveler ships, since there would need to be many more of them.
I really loved this conversation! Need to listen again! So inspiring!
Absolutely riveting segment, Fraser. Andrew is quite a visionary. Gives me hope.
As always, thanks much for sharing.
Steve
This topic always gets my attention, thank you. Listening now!
Best qualifications for getting into interstellar propulsion? Basic pyhsics and sailing!
As an engineer, interstellar travel is a math problem begging for a solution. We’ll figure out greater than light speed travel at some point.
One day we’ll have someone not only smart enough to challenge Einstein but also surpass him. However until then we’ll only have followers of his ideas
The idea he finishes describing around 29 minutes in makes me think of a non mechanical gyroscope with layers of counteropposing spinning fields creating opposing perpendicular forces. I've no clue how you could redirect one of the opposing vectors 180° to act in sync with the other one, but such a rotating field might also be part of what would allow and control steering and bouncing off the differential winds.
Just got around to watching this. Fascinating stuff thanks Frasier!
Glad you enjoyed it!
@@frasercain what a gent.. the video is a year old, you have nearly 1/2 a million subscribers and you're still replying to comments.
Legend..
Brilliant!
I absolutely love Andrew Higgins' enthusiasm!
Agreed!
When I was around 11 or 12 years old, I had this idea of a solar wind surfer spacecraft. I imagined it riding the edge of a propagating solar wind/wave and gaining huge amounts of speed. I had read somewhere how surfers could gain speed faster riding a wave perpendicular vs parallel, and I extrapolated the idea out. I more recently learned about dynamic soaring, and the amazing speeds they are able to achieve with RC gliders. I never mentally extrapolated the same idea out to solar winds like I did with surfing. That's a wild concept!
Maybe an interesting thought: I wonder if there is a way to collect mass as one performs gravitational assists and solar wind turns that would allow for increasing one's kinetic energy without, as it were, gaining velocity and thereby running out of solar system? That is, in stage 1 of your sailing trip, you intentionally slow yourself by grabbing stuff (gas, whatever) as you perform these maneuvers and then once you reach a certain level of mass, you start stage 2, stop accumulating mass, and accelerate up to some crazy speed, then in stage 3, you take advantage of the energy of your accumulated mass and extreme speeds via Q-drive ideas by shooting your accumulated mass out the back....
Great video in any case! Really enjoyed it.
I Admire You Very Much! I appreciate the Fact You’re To the Point and Realistic ❤❤
It’s so exciting to see what might be possible! I’ve always been convinced it’s impossible and that I would never see it in my lifetime. Here’s hoping! 🤞🏻 thank you for the detailed explanations! 😸
until a speck of dust hits your craft at 30% the speed of light and vaporizes it
@@neoclassic09 Note we specifically discussed the dust grain impact problem here:
th-cam.com/video/SkGRVvA23qI/w-d-xo.html
@@neoclassic09 Impacting a micron-sized dust grain at 30% the speed of light releases about 10 Joules of energy. This is the equivalent of a firecracker going off. It will certainly do some local damage, but it will not vaporize the entire spacecraft.
@@neoclassic09 Part of the beauty of this is that said particles will be directed down the gullet of said magnetic device, accelerated, and spat out the back end, this kinda resolves most of those issues IMO
Reality, requires empirical testing however
@@A_J_Higgins no problem, as long as we can contain the rarely, but expected at least twice 1kg ball of matter at these speeds, pm a trip to Alpha Centauri, we should be ok
If we could achieve 2% of the speed of light in the solar system means that we could get to Pluto in 10 days!
I had to do the calculation in Wolfram alpha, before the end of the episode, so I have no idea if they address this in the video
I would take a piss on Pluto
And smoke a blunt
What assumption did you make about acceleration and deceleration time? (If you ignored it entirely, you're dramatically underestimating the time to travel short-ish distances like those within the solar system or even to reach the nearest stars.
Yes but you would just zoom past it.. you would have to accelerate half the distance then decelerate the other half. So still looking at months or years together there
What isn't possible today becomes possible tomorrow. Not every idea comes to fruition, but when our understanding gets an update, problems can crumble away.
Makes you wonder if there will be a point in the future where it no longer remains true.
Wonderful chat, I think locating those solar wind pockets of turbulence in real-time will be a challenge.
I’m not sold on the interstellar mass ejection idea, there is no way to extract energy from the interstellar medium without pumping out as much enegy to collect it. You cannot add mass to your craft in the middle of your trip, if it’s mass that was already on at mission start..why was it added to begin with? The idea of catching electrons with a mag field and using it as a propellant is a far shot in the interstellar medium where there are fewer electrons.
I agree the idea of extracting energy from the interstellar medium that is blowing over the spacecraft (as viewed from the moving reference frame of the spacecraft) is difficult to accept at first glance; I had the same initial response when Jeff Greason proposed the idea (his "q-drive" concept). But after working through the analysis and equations, I confirmed it is not a perpetual motion machine. The q-drive simply concentrates the kinetic energy in the mass onboard a vehicle initially loaded with reaction mass and already in motion into a smaller mass (the payload of the vehicle without reaction mass) by expelling the reaction mass backward.
To answer your question: "why was it added to begin with?" The answer is: Because that mass had an initial velocity that was created by another propulsion device (fusion rocket, solar sail, etc.). The q-drive then concentrates this kinetic energy into the smaller mass of just the payload while expelling most of the initial mass. Again, you are concentrating the initial kinetic energy of the larger vehicle into a smaller mass (thus, making it go faster), but doing this requires interacting with another medium (the interstellar medium, in this case).
This is entirely consistent with the conservation of energy and momentum. If you want the full details, you can find Jeff Greason's paper “A Reaction Drive Powered by External Dynamic Pressure" which is linked in the video description above. This paper (and the subsequent work we have done building upon it) has gone through peer review prior to being published.
I'm glad we don't have to wait for a warp drive to be invented to get a closeup look at exoplanets! I don't think I'll live to 2050 to see a probe launched to Alpha C, but my son almost certainly will and that blows my mind.
Math: nope
Wow, this was fascinating! Thanks so much, you two
16:50 I'm picturing a skateboarder on a half pipe "pumping" with his legs on each transition 🤘
I'm sorry if this analogy is bad
Amazing interview reach of proposals for the future 👍🏼 happy for that
Here are the distances to each of the mentioned star systems:
1. **TRAPPIST-1:** TRAPPIST-1 is located approximately 39.5 light-years away from Earth.
2. **Proxima Centauri:** Proxima Centauri is the closest known star to the Sun, located approximately 4.24 light-years away from Earth.
3. **Kepler-186:** Kepler-186 is located approximately 582 light-years away from Earth.
4. **Kepler-62:** Kepler-62 is located approximately 1,200 light-years away from Earth.
5. **LHS 1140:** LHS 1140 is located approximately 40 light-years away from Earth.
6. **Tau Ceti:** Tau Ceti is located approximately 11.9 light-years away from Earth.
These distances are approximate and may vary slightly depending on the method used to determine stellar distances and any updates in astronomical measurements.
Leia: "Would it help if I got out and pushed?" Han: "...It might!!"
That anti matter factory would be interesting.
Would have to be built in the middle of nowhere. Kilograms of anti matter and matter going up in an accident would be quite a headache
Ahh, 13:00, Andrew said to build it in space, yes, that would be wise
Are you insane? Maybe the Moon is a better place.
@@elinoreberkley1643 Or Mars. Keep that antimatter factory far away. I ounce of antimatter released woulf yield 12 Megatons of TNT equivalent power. A kilo is 2.2046 pounds. A pound (British Imperial weights and measures) is 16 ounces. So, the mini Tsar-Bomba detonated in 1961 yield 58 megatons is 4.3 ounces. A kilo of positronium released due a magnetic vacuum bottle breach would create a mushroom cloud maybe hundreds of miles wide. A country destroying or even civilization collapsing event.
How might the intersecting solar winds at Alpha Centauri (3 stars interacting) allow a greater ability to generate dynamic lift than our single sun allows? Has this been considered? I'm picturing 3 soap bubbles connected together vs. our single soap bubble.
Definitely worth thinking about!
Light sail tech is interesting because it can leverage tech innovation post-launch. The idea is to simply assume that the power delivery tech would exponentially increase over time rather than design the mission based on current tech. Ditto for receiver tech. You could launch a mission using current transmission tech, but assume vastly superior receivers, and assume much more bandwidth than we currently have.
Any mission that is based on current tech at the time of the mission is doomed to become quickly obsolete, with the next decade's mission passing this decades launch and watching it in the rear view mirror. In that case there is no point in launching anything until the mission can be complete in a couple decades.
I think when people think about this topic, they tend to forget the technology tends to change rapidly on the order of years rather than centuries. Although it's admittedly embarrassing to note the absence of a moon base (let alone a moon mission) 55 years after Apollo.
... though I'd speculate that by the time a light sail mission arrives for a fly-by, our space telescope tech will be at the scale of square kilometers, with image quality possibly exceeding anything from the flyby. For an earth sized planet, we would need a kilometer of diameter per pixel of direct observation, which could be improved with interferometry and/or multiple exposure.
This sounds a great way to get relativistic speeds. Have you considered the effect of larger particles in the path of the vehicle which cannot be moved aside by the propulsion unit. Particle the size of a grain of sand would be highly destructive at 10% speed of light. How is the vehicle protected from the stationary objects in the path of travel?
At present, we do not believe there are that many sand-sized grains in interstellar space. The interstellar medium (ISM) is incredibly empty: There is only one molecule of hydrogen per 10 cubic centimeters. The ISM is mostly just gas (99%). Dust particles are only 1% of the ISM and are mostly 1 micron in size and smaller. If you collected all the dust between us and the center of the galaxy and collapsed it onto a flat plane, it would be as thin as the coating of dust on a dusty chalkboard.
There is no evidence that sand-size grains in interstellar space, but the safest answer is: "We aren't sure." It would not be possible to deflect the spacecraft around the dust grains at these speeds, but it might be possible to deflect the dust grains out of the path of the spacecraft. For a large spacecraft with sufficient power, it is possible an onboard laser could identify (via LIDAR) and deflect (via pulsed laser) larger grains. A 1-mm size grain could easily be identified by LIDAR, and you would only need to search a very small area ahead of the spacecraft.
We will likely need to send precursor missions to determine the composition of the interstellar medium. Fortunately, just such a mission (the Interstellar Probe) is under development at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
Thank you for your comprehensive reply. So dust is not a problem. Another thought I have is the use of all the H atoms in the path of the craft. Could they be collected, undergo fusion, hence release energy which is then used to propel the craft to a higher speed? I'm don't know if there is enough H to useful. Thanks@@A_J_Higgins
Fascinating conversation! Thank you for making this happen
Asking all the right questions thank you so much!
First, I am struck with how much I love Professor Higgins' bookshelf (but would hate to dust it as often as I would need to, were it here on this gravel road where I live, LOL!). And then I was able to pay attention to what he was saying, after I got done ogling the bookshelf. Just had to back it up to actually listen. 😄
The concepts he shared with us are quite fascinating! They could truly be used to send some kind of probes waaaay out there, and send back TONS of new information!
A like and comment for the care and feeding of the Almighty Algorithm. ❤️ ❤️
Great interview. Love the subject matter. The only issue here is you need to work on not interrupting the guest. Was getting frustrating after a while.
Very good Fraser.
I would very much like to continue to see your
skepticism and sharp logic.
For example, let me say about the question and
the possibility of our species and the desire
and longing for the stars:
Regarding the antimatter drive:
- In 1996 some PICOGRAM anti-hydrogen atoms
were successfully produced at CERN in Geneva
for a few NANOSECONDS.
Andrew Higgins speaks of a few kilograms
of it for a very, very long travel time.
What quantitative progress is there from 1996 to 2023?
To the sun sails:
- Tiny solar sails have hardly any capable control
mechanisms, far-reaching communication
options and complex orientation apparatuses
integrated into them.
Although some tiny life forms on Earth seem
to be able to do it with brains of 0.025 mm2.
The mayflies.