Quick note since I didn't say it in the episode, yes you probably would have a mega-array at each star system, probably solar powered, pushing many ships at once up to that first few percent of light, or powering ion drives, or maybe a long mass driver. The first few relays would probably be higher powered too. Also, for anyone whose wondering, yes the Douglas Adams reference is to celebrate the channel hitting 42 thousand subscribers, I was going to do a Warhammer 40k reference for 40,000 subscribers but forgot, and its a bit more obscure than Hitchhiker's. As a sidenote, while next week's episode should come out here on time, it might be an hour or two early or late, there's some scheduling functions for when I'm away but I don't trust them to be reliable, and I will be away at the time :)
Robert Zubrin and Dana Andrews took a failed attempt at formulating Bussard Ramjets, and turned them into magsails that are quite efficient at slowing down interstellar craft. They also don't suffer from the rocket equation. Using these in conjunction with tethers could take care of much of the manuvering at the endpoint of an interstellar trip.
I love your videos, can I get your thoughts on a few questions? If these laser highway relays are putting off enough thrust to push a ship, wouldn't they also need to be firing in the opposite direction to keep their position? That would at least double the energy spent on any of the relays. Also, how would the lightsail ships dissipate their heat? Getting hit with a laser that could light up continents would fry anything in seconds, not to mention getting hit with it for years/decades at a time.
@Eric. the reflectance needs to be high. That may also be a reason to go with microwave. Aluminum is over slightly over 90% in the visible range. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9d/Image-Metal-reflectance.png/400px-Image-Metal-reflectance.png Aluminum would heat up a lot with a blue/red laser. A kilogram of TNT is about 4 megajoules. So if you have 99% reflectance, 1kg sail and 400 megawatts it should be blowing up like TNT in under a second. Not sure how fast a thin film radiates heat. On the bright side the radiant heat could add some propulsion. The stations generating the laser beams probably have to dump a lot of heat. Isaac's generator was 0.1% efficient so 99.9% is going somewhere else. So the station should be able to radiate much more thrust than the thrust from the laser.
Couldn't the mass driver just be circular around the originating star and then release the payload at a tangent towards the destination star? This way you can accumulate as much speed near a large power source almost like a very large particle accelerator but with more substantial payloads. Then just use the relays to slow down the vessels as they approach their destination using lasers and light sails. I can see such a scheme bootstrapping itself giving the initial vessels just enough speed and fuel to eventually slow itself down to stop at their proper place in the relay. Perhaps you can integrate this with the star lifting schemes and drive some of the stars' hydrogen along the relay path. Or else mass drive fuel to the relays at a slower speed and have the equivalent of tanker trucks dropping off fusion fuel to the relay stations on an ongoing basis. Alternatively, you can set up these relays at habitats in Oort cloud objects when available. Also, I think that instead of a light week between relays it would be better to have more, smaller relays so that the vessels can communicate to the forward relays and give them better targeting information. I think that a 24 hour cycle with 12 hours powering the laser to slow down incoming vessels and another 12 hours waiting for a signal from the vessel to confirm the "hit" and provide new velocity and location information would drastically reduce the risk of directing the lasers in the wrong direction. While waiting In the meantime you can either target other incoming vessels (perhaps from the opposite direction) or redirect the power to the needs of the local habitat.
I understand the inhabitants of the Gastronomy Sector are dedicated humanitarians - their greatest desire is to serve humans... Try their Soylent Green ice-cream.
But needing to take years, if not centuries, to travel between stars has a beauty of its own. I honestly can not really explain it. It is melancholic but also reafirming at the same time.
great to see the channel growth.. shit I remember when there was only a few hundred of us subbed can't remember exactly when I subbed but I know it was fairly quickly once I had found it. Thank you for the dedication you have to this channel and for continuing to maintain the quality of your productions especially considering the pace at which they are produced. I cannot speak for anyone other than myself but I am sure your hard work is appreciated by all of us, thank you..
If there were only a few hundred at the time, probably last august or July, I remember in September I had 800 and was terribly smug about that. I'm glad to know the channel's stayed fresh and interesting that whole time. :)
I've only just discovered the channel and have been binge watching earlier vids. Blown away by the quality of content and having great fun daydreaming on future fun times for our descendants (the lucky buggers). Pretty sure I'll be paraphrasing Robert B in a year's time, reminiscing on 42k subs when the channel blows up!
I can never think of space pirates without picturing some cheesy Tom Baker era Doctor who costumes or something kinda Guardians of the Galaxy flavored. :)
I wish Centuri (Centuri Engineering Company, the model rocket company, which owns Estes Industries, on paper [Centuri Corp.]) would be put back in business, perhaps as a "division" of Estes; I loved their futuristic kits. Don't feel bad, though; many people mistakenly called them *Centauri* Engineering. :-)
Isaac, this reminds me of a book I read almost 20 years ago by Marshall Savage: "The Millennial Project: How to colonize the galaxy in 10 easy steps". Great stuff! I've been a space geek since my earliest memories, playing rocket ship in my closet back in 1956. it's a great time to be alive, to witness the birth (hopefully) of a spacefaring civilization.
wouldn't it be funny if our society just crashed and then during the chaos a asteroid just killed us all and instead of seeing humanity become a spacefaring race you just see us all die a painful death
Lmao....15:07..Deep Thought has gone into very deep thoughts and says it will be busy for the next 7,5 Million years because some idiots ask it to solve faster than light travel...That killed me.
That was amazing. I really want to get into writing SciFi stories, but I want to use more realistic concepts such as Lightsails and Space Elevators. Can't wait for the Upward Bound series. :D
Alexrider02 One thing I loved about the Mass Effect series was the codex, which took the fictional inventions, like "mass effect/element zero", and applied them thoroughly, examining all the side uses and ways that they would be realistically applied in order to create a fleshed out, believable world.
Good time to give the ME series a try, newest installment is out in a month or two. I actually just started replaying the trilogy with that in mind. One of the few FPS games I enjoy.
Good to hear you recommend it, I'll have to keep an eye out if they go on sale. Love your videos, if I had a job at the moment you are one of the few channels I would love to support on Patreon, just because your videos are always so compelling. Keep up the good work. :D
I always thought that for starshot, the political reaction to a megalaser wouldn't allow it. However, we are lucky to have a moon with a face that never points at Earth. Perfect place to put this array, connected to solar panels at the poles. Another reason to revisit the Moon and industrialize
Static position lasers aren't terribly dangerous, especially a solar powered one, very big target, if someone hijacks or hacks one, you just use another laser to blast it.
AlHoresmi The EMP from an orbital nuclear strike would probably wreck havoc with electronics both on the ground, and of a bunch of the surrounding satellites. Also, unlike a laser, any blast would probably scatter debris and make a sizable region of orbit dangerous/unuseable.
Putting the laser on the other side of the moon makes it worse. No one on earth can see what you are doing. Obviously we have light weight/cheap mirrors that can reflect the laser so shooting around the moon is not much of a challenge. You could, for example, have the mirrors hang out around earth/moon Lagrange points 4 and 5. Is a much shorter range than 1 light week. Could tin foil hats replace camouflage as standard military gear?
They have inertial mass. It's different than rest mass. Anything moving at or near the speed of light increases in mass. Unlike anything with non-zero rest mass, photons' mass doesn't approach infinity as they approach C.
So close to 50,000!! The growth of this channel is awesome. I cant wait until a much wider range of people can come and enjoy your incredible content Isaac.
Few years ago I was in a discussion at the Club of Amsterdam, about Mars One. It was a great presentation and there was a guy there called Gerard van t Hooft, nobel prize winner. He said "humans won't do interstellar travels for millions of years" To which I said, it can be done with interstellar highways, precisely the above. I pick arguments with Nobel prize winners. Fortunately I had a politician witness.
Even Nobel winners can be wrong :) Actually they frequently are, or maybe just get recorded more. It is interesting though how many of these concepts have been kicking around for a decade or more and just not got popularized.
Well they have to be wrong sometimes, because they contradict each other. I would be surprised if there aren't Nobel winners who have said the opposite.
Millions of years...? After googling a little, it turns out that guy is a theoretical physicist. 150 years ago, he would be arguing that heavier than air flight is impossible.
what if you do: - a launch from moon - do a fly-by at the sun with chemical/electrical populsion - come back to moon, rendezvous with your solar sail and people - then fire some lasercanons from there what speed could you reach?
Your channel should be a part of every futurist, curious individual, or general optimists balanced diet. Keep up the good work and continue to push the limits of the community you've created. We need more like you.
I love how all the talking heads on tv say, "We won't leave the solar system in our lifetime," but countering the defeatist speech is right here on TH-cam. Thank you!
Sung to the tune of Tom Cochrane's 'Life is a Highway' You know Isaac, Life is an Interstellar highway You wanna ride it all night long Life's like a road that you travel on When there's one day here and the next day gone Sometimes you bend and sometimes you stand Sometimes you turn your back to the wind There's a world outside every darkened door Where blues won't haunt you anymore Where brave are free and lovers soar Come ride with me to the distant shore We won't hesitate To break down the garden gate There's not much time left today Life is an Interstellar highway You wanna ride it all night long If you're going my way You wanna drive it all night long Through all these cities and all these towns It's in your blood, and it's all around You love her now like you loved her then This is the road, and these are the hands From Mozambique to those Memphis nights The Khyber Pass to Vancouver's lights Knock me down and back up again You're in my blood, you're not a lonely man There's no load I can't hold A road so rough this I know I'll be there when the light comes in Tell 'em we're survivors Life is an Interstellar highway You wanna ride it all night long If you're going my way You wanna drive it all night long Life is an Interstellar highway You wanna ride it all night long If you're going my way You wanna drive it all night long There was a distance between you and I A misunderstanding once But now we look in the eye There ain't no load that you can't hold A road so rough this you'll know You'll be there when the light comes in Tell 'em we're survivors Life is an Interstellar highway You wanna ride it all night long If you're going my way You wanna drive it all night long Life is a highway You wanna ride it all night long If you're going my way You wanna drive it all night long Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, yeah Life is a highway You wanna ride it all night long If you're going my way You wanna drive it all night long
Of course, with breakthrough starshot they are not intending on getting their ship to slow down, since what they want is a flyby to take pictures and beam the information back to earth.
Yeah and considering its speed I'm not terribly sure what that's really going to accomplish, its a very small object that will zip through the area very fast, I'm thinking bigger local telescopes will get more done, but I still love the idea.
Isaac Arthur I think it'll be more of a proof of concept and initiative to develop the necessary engineering and tech, and could probably be supplemented to push larger, more useful objects later
Isaac Arthur According to the breakthrough starshot team themselves, the pictures their craft take would be the equivalent of a 300km- diameter telescope in LEO. If their optimistic-looking timeline actually works out, sending a probe might be more productive. They could also use the same tech to send a slower, higher mass space telescope to the sun's gravitational focal point, but they haven't outlined that as part of their mission. And of course their giant laser array system itself could function as a telescope as well.
Isaac Arthur What are your off-the-cuff numbers, by any chance? Their claim is here: breakthroughinitiatives.org/Target/3 Of course, there is the point that a 300 km telescope can do more than just look at alpha centauri (and other nearby star systems). I think using the breakthrough starshot technology for gravitational lens missions will work better for this reason, but an interstellar mission is always going to get more publicity than a gravitational lens project.
After a brief hiatus I am back to binge watching these fantastic videos which make me so hopeful for the future and wishing I could be there to see it. I love these videos Dr. Arthur, they just keep getting better and better. Thank you so much.
This is one of the most truly interesting Channels on TH-cam. I thoroughly enjoyed today's video, just like many of the other I have previously watched. Kudos Isaac.
Best sci-fi/fact and futurism channel on TH-cam. I feel better informed about all variety of related news as a consequence of having Isaac's work as a frame of reference. It makes watching sci-fi film more enjoyable as well (or less, depending on their stories).
Close enough for solar power there too, though considering the distances it would probably be easier to build closer to the sun as part of an initial Dyson-up.
I was thinking mostly in terms of the number of bodies, which would allow for omni-directionality. No matter what angle you were coming or going, there could be a laser propeller somewhere in your vicinity. Make a nice relay from the inner to the outer system. Maybe repeat it in the Kuiper belt too. But yeah, we'd need them all over the place - orbiting the sun, the Earth, the moon, the asteroids, and all the outer planets and their moons too.
I disagree, because you are going to have your speed limited by the centripetal force you would have to provide. Perhaps you might be able to do that by adding a large charge to your craft and adding huge magnetic fields or something, but if you're still going for the ring on a belt around the sun idea it would be better putting it in the Kuiper belt or even the Oort cloud, you need less centripetal force then.
Stefan: you rock dude! Amazing work on the animations, they fit in perfectly, and serve to make such complex ideas easier to visualize and comprehend. Thanks for helping one of my favorite channels! :)
Lukegear Ageed! Thursday mornings have quickly become one of my favorite parts of the week :) Also, as a fellow Luke, I'm curious if you were also named after Star Wars; I figure my dad liked the idea of always having an easy, go-to joke for life haha
Curiously, there's a mildy interesting story behind it, I'm brazilian, so due to portuguese language my name is actually the latin variant "Lucas" which gave rise to the name "Luke" in english. And, indeed, my dad used to joke around with how the names are so close to each other, and used to call me "Lucas Skywalker" when I was little, when he introduced me to Star Wars. So the joke stuck around in my mind, and since I love science, tech, and knowledge in general, I figured that I would use the "gear" as part of my name, since it is the symbol of technology and mankind's capacity to shape the world, thus my internet nickname and logo were born :)
Lukegear Cool! I'm technically a "Lucas" as well, as my mom wanted something more "presidential" (whatever that meant, it's hopefully not applicable now :P ), but I usually go by Luke haha
Did anyone else start imagining a interplanetary-Dyson swarm space train arrangement running on light ways instead of rails? I got a steampunk style space- western vibe, but I guess this would be laser punk. And love space westerns, so this tickles my fancy.
But where would the reflected high power laser beam bee pointed? Wrong turn of the sail in our solar system and voilà "Death star". :) But if serious great work, i enjoy every episode.
Ian Moone The sail would have to be incredibly smooth, probably more so than the best telescope optics. Otherwise, even just microscopic surface roughness would reflect the beam (which is slightly conical anyways) at differing angles, causing it to diffuse into a much wider cone quite quickly. You'd have to be incredibly, ridiculously close for the reflection to still be tight enough to do any damage :P
TheMasonX there's advantages to focusing it, if possible. If you can direct the laser back to a mirror near the laser source, then you can bounce the beam back and forth multiple times to get more momentum from the same light. There are serious engineering challenges, naturally.
Even if the sail or laser become miss aligned, you wouldn't necessarily have a death star scenario because the energies are off by many orders of magnitude. If you watch at about 5:30 where Isaac uses F=P/c he derives P=1.5GW. Giga watts is billions of watts - so the order of magnitude is about 10^9. But if you look into how much energy it'd take to blow up a planet (I quickly found this: scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/90193/what-is-the-wattage-of-the-death-stars-superlaser ) that guy says, "this puts the Death Star's power output at approximately 6.67 x 10^26 Watts, at minimum." However he assumed that the beam, at the given power output, only lasted 3 seconds. If we used our 1.5GW beam for long enough (and since in theory we are probably generating the beam from solar output, and or fusion we can use it indefinitely) at some point you'd have the 2*10^27 joules they used to calculate 10^26 watts. Watts is joules per second so solving for time we get s=J/P => s= (2*10^27 joules)/(1.5GW. Giga watts) which is about s=(10^27)/(10^9)= 10^18 seconds. Considering that 10^18 seconds = 3.1 × 10^10 years worst case scenario the solar highway pointed at a planet for a very long time would do surface damage at best, but you'd have to have the makers of the highway disappear from galactic maintenance pretty much forever, otherwise they'd just realign things.
How could a Galactic Positioning System be accurate enough to point a laser at from a distance? Multiple interferometers pointed at very bright stars? I really hope companies like spacex will come up with an ISS-style plan for an orbital assembly station of spaceships to circumvent the mass problem of the rocket equation. Do you think we need to get started on asteroid mining first or is launching up separate parts from earth more feasible in the short term?
Isaac Arthur Basically the exact same idea, scaled up haha. Do you think the doppler shift of pulsar timings could provide precise enough positioning for a cheaper, generalizable alternative/supplementary data source?
Potentially, but you can build an atomic clock more accurate than a pulsar and you can pick your own frequencies and emit very precisely on them. It also gives people a definite fix point to pick up on lower power signals like news, stocks, and traffic, as it were, but odds are each relay would actually have its own GPS calibrated very precisely off each other and the home systems
Is it possible to correct an atomic clock for the "delay" at relativistic speeds between the stationary beacon and a moving ship? In my understanding, the clocks of both the sender and receiver would have to run identically. It seems like ships themselves would have to correct for time dilation and the time it takes light to reach them, since even clocks on satellites around earth drift away from earth time.
Isaac Arthur Very true! I suppose in the case of interstellar highways they would be unnecessary. I guess I was probably more considering distant travel/exploration using other methods where the angular span of such "Galactic Positioning System" structures became increasingly minute, and therefore less accurate, something like that using existing natural references could provide some supplementary information to refine what you got beamed from back home. I also hadn't considered that each relay could very easily supply such information as part of the beam anyways. Thanks again for continually providing new ideas and expanding my framework of understanding :)
It's funny you mention space pirates attacking the relays. I had a science fiction idea a few years ago where a confederation of Oort-cloud-dwellers living on a small part of an interstellar travel route decided to use their giant lasers to shoot out the water supplies of passing starships so that they had to stop and the locals could steal their heavy metals from near stars (since all the starships are built inside star systems by those backward sun-hugging traditionalists), because heavy metals were just that rare in the Oort cloud (where all of their structures are made out of organic compounds like diamond and plastics). I don't know if that really makes sense, though.
just thought i'd say i've been subscribed for a few weeks and really enjoying the content. so far i'm about halfway through the material, it's given me a lot to ponder. i'm excited to watch the upcoming new series too. thanks for these great videos. : ]
at 10% _c_ , I wouldn't trust in solar counterthrust. Besides, the larger the sail, the more damage it will likely have sustained in transit. Need some sort of onboard or preceding installation for slowdown thrust.
Could a modern artillery piece/railgun suspended from a lighter-than-air craft at the maximum altitude of a helium balloon achieve orbit with their payload? It might be a cheap way to make microsatellites or deliveries into space.
Most artillery pieces shoot sub-sonic, projectile speed isn't so important when you're doing indirect fire. And no railgun I know of can get into space, but we'll be talking about that in the next month or so in the Upward Bound Series.
Man you put out some of the most insightful content I have ever seen. For awhile I had completely dismissed the idea of using lasers as being ridiculous and impractical. Your vision has completely altered my perception and I now see it as being a viable option.
Wow. And to imagine that so many things like this can be done right now if we stop waging bullshit wars and wasting time with poses and games of lust and (the illusion of) power... Mankind was meant for something else. Something big. Our minds should be able to grasp that, and to drop everything else.
"It can be done now under our current understanding of physics," is very different from, "it can be done now." Something like this would bankrupt the human race in millions of times over. It'll probably be centuries before we have the infrastructure and capability to do this.
I don't think it's as far off as you might imagine. Once we have the AI revolution, highways like this could easily be manufactured as fast as we could get the equipment there.
And maybe stop funding those crazy military ideas concerning space based lasers to shot down enemy ICBM? ;) (Yeah, I see the problem here - quite many space technologies are being seriously funded only because of their possible military application. I somehow doubt that if one was redirecting military budget it would end up in R&D., I can think of quite a few pressure groups that would be higher or any political priority list than some astronomers)
They probably wouldn't mind the expanded experience of many selves and occasionally catching up with a branch having interesting experiences in another solar system.
indeed they could get sensory data from their experiences but it won't have been them making the choices unless the life form went into suspended animation until it received the telemetry. And there is the small detail that there is another life form running around that now has rights of its own.
I think for a few tens of thousands of years ones copies would still say "That's what I would have done, Bro!" .. "Could not have said it better myself!" when reviewing each others life.
This channel is like an "anti-news" tablet. I look at the news, it's bloody depressing a lot of the time. I watch this channel and feel like we've got hope as a species and it cheers me up. Awesome cure! Now if we could only convince people in charge of vast fortunes and national budgets to watch it, perhaps there would be more hopeful stuff turning up in the news, too.
This episode is like an entire research paper in and of itself; never seen anything quite as in-depth and information-dense (especially on the subjects of frontier/future science and technology) across all of TH-cam. As a hopeful computer engineer with a fascination with spaceflight (and, well, space in general), this is really, _really_ cool to me x)
Isaac, I've been binge-watching tons of your videos lately, and I'm so glad I found your channel! Do you have a video where you tell us about your past? I'd be very interested in a "biography video". Or perhaps an article you've written on it? I know your past/journey to gaining all this knowledge must be truly fascinating. All of this, of course, is incumbent on you actually feeling comfortable making such a video / divulging such information to us. I know I would love to see such a video. You've briefly mentioned your past in certain videos, like when you were in grad school, when you were roommates with a mathematician and meteorologist, as well as stating you've spent much of your adult life in the military but you haven't gone into too much detail.
I've tried writing bio episodes many a time, again just recently as a 100k subscribers special, it doesn't work out. It's not really a privacy thing, I just seem to have problems writing it.
Thursday I work all day so most of the time, I watch it friday morning. Anyway, thanks for your hard work, I'm sure just doing one a week is hard enough as it is. All your videos are high quality, deeply researched stuff.
Wow! I just found one of my new top channels. Just the level of layman-professional description and proper visualization that I need. Not only for myself, but this series is able to get my wife from bio fields into... the universe.
They wouldn't, the positions would need to be stabilized and corrected. Either on board engines or light from nearby stars could be directed to correct the positions of way stations using light sails.
Another short note: you might use a detachable central sail (have a reflective large sail, and use reflected light from that sail to slow down the smaller central sail once it is detached). This means you don't need a laser at the target to get the system to work. And you'd also want something like a gigantic fresnel lens to refocus the launching laser beam, to deal with the beam divergence problem. Dr. Robert Forward dealt with these problems and solutions in one of his novels.
Hi Isaac Arthur, I'm relatively new to your Channel, though I'm a huge fan and love all of the work you and your subscribers do. I love this topic because I recently fell on an idea that could work as a Galaxy highway with our modern transportation systems. I also have a couple more ideas and will work the science out behind them just as you do, because I sincerely believe Humanity's future is beyond Earth. I would also like some of your Insight, if possible, on a few of my ideas. Thanks @isaacarthur
I love these space videos of yours :) Really inspiring, I've been working on a space game for a short while now and your videos have completely changed the direction I want to take the game. I was first thinking of pure survival in space, but a true space colonization game where you start out on or by earth and have to fund trips to gather resources etc and build your colony would be so much cooler. Would you be interested in alpha testing the game and coming up with suggestions once I have a more playable demo? (Right now I've been focusing on character movement in 0 G, so you're basically just a rag doll floating around in space with the ability to move and look around, so it might take a couple of months until I have something more playable)
Ha! I see what you did there at the end. Very subtle, so I'm not quite sure if that's a reference to Freelancer, but I'll pretend it is. Awesome video as always. I'm looking forward to the next ones; people really undersell space elevators.
+Isaac Arthur Thanks once again for yet another super-awesome video! Thank you for the time and the hard work you put into these vids. Your content is so far above everything else on TH-cam. Your channel is among the best things I have ever discovered on the internet in general!
Hey Isaac! You can also use lasers to SLOW DOWN. We don't have to go build the endpoint of our highway first. Ask any sailor how to tack against the wind.
This relates to interstellar warfare in that the super highway would become the most valuable resource to a colony, who then implements taxes on whoever wants to use their part of the system, so other star systems form “free use” guilds that don’t allow the ships from the “Maintenance tax” guilds to use their super highway, then a “Maintenance tax” guild star system blows up a “free use” guild ship stating that it thought that ship was armed, diplomacy breaks down, and now there is a desperate war to destroy the other side’s Dyson Spheres and plunge those solar systems into darkness with self-replicating robots star-lift opposition stars into brown dwarfs, and send Saturn-sized packages of that excess Hydrogen back to their own systems surrounded by orbital rings set up to create an Earth-like surface with 1 g gravity. The winner will end up far richer than any military conflict since the Franco-Prussian war as, while they would have a destroyed Dyson swarm, the only reason they won would have been better self-replicating robots than the other side, and by virtue of that will not have lost their stars to star lifting, and now have vast amounts of material to rebuild. The other side will be rendered impotent as with so little mass to their stars left, their planets and asteroids will follow the lines of inertia spiraling into the abyss, surviving on the fusion reactors they have left.
One thing comes to my mind - it should be possible for a ship to simply seed the stations behind it. The ship would start from earth, being accelerated by a laser form earth. Once it reaches desirable distance (and meets interstellar object that can serve as a fuel) It releases a "station" with its own sail. The beam reflected from the ship would be used to slow down the station to halt. The station would dock on the interstellar object, sets up fuel-mining operation. builds its own copy (possibly recycling the sail, landing gear, etc. for this new copy) and uses its new laser to "reload" the ship with this new station. The old station would then take on the torch and provide its laser to push the ship further. Such ship would never have to stop and could simply keep on going at full speed, seeding the galaxy with highways and colonies. It would also be able to return to its source, since it can seed the stations in a big circle, reflecting the beam slightly to side along the way. One big problem I see with it is, if the station fails to make its laser operational in time, the ship may end up out of range of nearest laser, at which point it ends up flying away into its doom. That can be partially avoided by seeding the stations roughly in a spiral, but that slows down the process significantly if your aim is to cover maximum distance instead of volume.
Accelerated matter streams for interplanetary and interstellar shipping of raw materials is a brilliant idea I never even considered. It makes shipping resources back from space actually feasible. You could even bundle the mining, refining, and shipping functions into one machine. It uses a laser or laser array to ionize the target asteroid material. Then it uses magnetic fields to separate and accelerate the various elements. Then it uses a series of magnetic lenses to collimate the beams and accelerate them to some high fraction of C. The stream wouldn't be dense enough to hurt anything after a few thousand kilometers but could still ships tons of matter every second.
Dang it! Now I have to wait a whole week for the next one! (what am I ten again waiting for my favourite toon to come on…) I blame you for getting me hooked :) JK, Great show again Artheus Prime!
Quick note since I didn't say it in the episode, yes you probably would have a mega-array at each star system, probably solar powered, pushing many ships at once up to that first few percent of light, or powering ion drives, or maybe a long mass driver. The first few relays would probably be higher powered too.
Also, for anyone whose wondering, yes the Douglas Adams reference is to celebrate the channel hitting 42 thousand subscribers, I was going to do a Warhammer 40k reference for 40,000 subscribers but forgot, and its a bit more obscure than Hitchhiker's. As a sidenote, while next week's episode should come out here on time, it might be an hour or two early or late, there's some scheduling functions for when I'm away but I don't trust them to be reliable, and I will be away at the time :)
Robert Zubrin and Dana Andrews took a failed attempt at formulating Bussard Ramjets, and turned them into magsails that are quite efficient at slowing down interstellar craft. They also don't suffer from the rocket equation. Using these in conjunction with tethers could take care of much of the manuvering at the endpoint of an interstellar trip.
I love your videos, can I get your thoughts on a few questions?
If these laser highway relays are putting off enough thrust to push a ship, wouldn't they also need to be firing in the opposite direction to keep their position? That would at least double the energy spent on any of the relays.
Also, how would the lightsail ships dissipate their heat? Getting hit with a laser that could light up continents would fry anything in seconds, not to mention getting hit with it for years/decades at a time.
@Eric. the reflectance needs to be high. That may also be a reason to go with microwave. Aluminum is over slightly over 90% in the visible range. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9d/Image-Metal-reflectance.png/400px-Image-Metal-reflectance.png Aluminum would heat up a lot with a blue/red laser. A kilogram of TNT is about 4 megajoules. So if you have 99% reflectance, 1kg sail and 400 megawatts it should be blowing up like TNT in under a second. Not sure how fast a thin film radiates heat.
On the bright side the radiant heat could add some propulsion. The stations generating the laser beams probably have to dump a lot of heat. Isaac's generator was 0.1% efficient so 99.9% is going somewhere else. So the station should be able to radiate much more thrust than the thrust from the laser.
@chris pearson, 15:09 Included in video.
Couldn't the mass driver just be circular around the originating star and then release the payload at a tangent towards the destination star? This way you can accumulate as much speed near a large power source almost like a very large particle accelerator but with more substantial payloads. Then just use the relays to slow down the vessels as they approach their destination using lasers and light sails. I can see such a scheme bootstrapping itself giving the initial vessels just enough speed and fuel to eventually slow itself down to stop at their proper place in the relay.
Perhaps you can integrate this with the star lifting schemes and drive some of the stars' hydrogen along the relay path. Or else mass drive fuel to the relays at a slower speed and have the equivalent of tanker trucks dropping off fusion fuel to the relay stations on an ongoing basis. Alternatively, you can set up these relays at habitats in Oort cloud objects when available.
Also, I think that instead of a light week between relays it would be better to have more, smaller relays so that the vessels can communicate to the forward relays and give them better targeting information. I think that a 24 hour cycle with 12 hours powering the laser to slow down incoming vessels and another 12 hours waiting for a signal from the vessel to confirm the "hit" and provide new velocity and location information would drastically reduce the risk of directing the lasers in the wrong direction. While waiting In the meantime you can either target other incoming vessels (perhaps from the opposite direction) or redirect the power to the needs of the local habitat.
Mircowaver exploded Eyeballs are actually a delicacy in the Gastronomy sector.
Well, almost everything is a delicacy there :)
There used to be a planet there with the best ice cream in the multiverse, but a treaty with the local sentient arachnoids ruined it... :/
In my cycle raw salarian liver was a true delicacy
LOL!
I understand the inhabitants of the Gastronomy Sector are dedicated humanitarians - their greatest desire is to serve humans...
Try their Soylent Green ice-cream.
The issues in the examples are so mundane and specific, they must be real... haha... Finally we have proof that Isaac is actually from the future :)
Fish Santiago Almost every example he's made makes me think he's from the future
Regardless, I will leave that comment at 100 likes...
I hope so, because sadly i lost almost any hope.
lol... cutest time traveler?
Grey Goo: Ayo, wat kind of universe u want?
Scientist: Go make paperclips.
Grey Goo: I got u fam.
Look, I don't HATE organics. It's just that they're made out of matter. And matter can be made into paper clips.
Human: make me a handful of paperclips.
Grey goo: *constructs a planet-sized hand filled with paperclips*
This is why we get them to make chocolate icecream instead, it's not as problematic to have a planet made of the stuff.
Aaand now I'm thinking of that idle-ish game where you eventually make an entire universe out of paper clips.
I'm not kidding, it's a thing. :)
@@robinchesterfield42 that's the joke...
I really hope we find some form of FTL someday. Imagine being able to travel between systems in only weeks not years.
ClarkThech lightspeed
If you just believe hard enough...
No I cannot imagine. The nice thing about research and travel is the surprise.
Solar sails
But needing to take years, if not centuries, to travel between stars has a beauty of its own.
I honestly can not really explain it. It is melancholic but also reafirming at the same time.
This episode has great humor
SnowToad haha true man
I broke the 123
great to see the channel growth.. shit I remember when there was only a few hundred of us subbed can't remember exactly when I subbed but I know it was fairly quickly once I had found it. Thank you for the dedication you have to this channel and for continuing to maintain the quality of your productions especially considering the pace at which they are produced. I cannot speak for anyone other than myself but I am sure your hard work is appreciated by all of us, thank you..
If there were only a few hundred at the time, probably last august or July, I remember in September I had 800 and was terribly smug about that. I'm glad to know the channel's stayed fresh and interesting that whole time. :)
True dat
Robert B the channels growth is absolutely insane, I subbed late August and the channel has just exploded in the last few months!
I've only just discovered the channel and have been binge watching earlier vids. Blown away by the quality of content and having great fun daydreaming on future fun times for our descendants (the lucky buggers). Pretty sure I'll be paraphrasing Robert B in a year's time, reminiscing on 42k subs when the channel blows up!
It was thanks to reddit that I found these videos and I am so happy, they are wonderful.
Movie of year 3000: "Pirates of the Centuri"
I can never think of space pirates without picturing some cheesy Tom Baker era Doctor who costumes or something kinda Guardians of the Galaxy flavored. :)
I wish Centuri (Centuri Engineering Company, the model rocket company, which owns Estes Industries, on paper [Centuri Corp.]) would be put back in business, perhaps as a "division" of Estes; I loved their futuristic kits. Don't feel bad, though; many people mistakenly called them *Centauri* Engineering. :-)
I got an idea 💡
"You will remember this standardized galactic day as the standardized galactic day where you almost caught space captain Zorg Sparrow!"
Isaac, this reminds me of a book I read almost 20 years ago by Marshall Savage: "The Millennial Project: How to colonize the galaxy in 10 easy steps". Great stuff! I've been a space geek since my earliest memories, playing rocket ship in my closet back in 1956.
it's a great time to be alive, to witness the birth (hopefully) of a spacefaring civilization.
John Everett WE were lucky to live on this era
Are you out of the closet?
John Everett - I know bro, hope we are still around to see them get to Mars. SpaceX or NASA?
@@EmileAI Oh without question.
wouldn't it be funny if our society just crashed and then during the chaos a asteroid just killed us all and instead of seeing humanity become a spacefaring race you just see us all die a painful death
Lmao....15:07..Deep Thought has gone into very deep thoughts and says it will be busy for the next 7,5 Million years because some idiots ask it to solve faster than light travel...That killed me.
Nice nod to Douglas Adams (specifically to his book; The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
That time might be worth it. The solar system will still be around and the galaxy will still be young.
That was amazing. I really want to get into writing SciFi stories, but I want to use more realistic concepts such as Lightsails and Space Elevators. Can't wait for the Upward Bound series. :D
Alexrider02 One thing I loved about the Mass Effect series was the codex, which took the fictional inventions, like "mass effect/element zero", and applied them thoroughly, examining all the side uses and ways that they would be realistically applied in order to create a fleshed out, believable world.
I've still never played any of the ME games. I've heard good things, I just haven't gotten around to them yet.
Good time to give the ME series a try, newest installment is out in a month or two. I actually just started replaying the trilogy with that in mind. One of the few FPS games I enjoy.
Good to hear you recommend it, I'll have to keep an eye out if they go on sale. Love your videos, if I had a job at the moment you are one of the few channels I would love to support on Patreon, just because your videos are always so compelling. Keep up the good work. :D
Alexrider02 I think Mass Effect 2 is still free on Origin
Grey goo: what is my purpose?
Idiot: you pass butter.
Grey goo: oh, my god!
Yep. Welcome to the club.
@@slevinchannel7589 Are you randomly commenting on every comment? And Isaac is talking about INTERSTELLAR spaceships, not some random rocket.
The best channel.
I always thought that for starshot, the political reaction to a megalaser wouldn't allow it. However, we are lucky to have a moon with a face that never points at Earth. Perfect place to put this array, connected to solar panels at the poles. Another reason to revisit the Moon and industrialize
Static position lasers aren't terribly dangerous, especially a solar powered one, very big target, if someone hijacks or hacks one, you just use another laser to blast it.
Andy Falconer we have nukes anyway, what's the problem?
AlHoresmi The EMP from an orbital nuclear strike would probably wreck havoc with electronics both on the ground, and of a bunch of the surrounding satellites. Also, unlike a laser, any blast would probably scatter debris and make a sizable region of orbit dangerous/unuseable.
lasers counter ballistic missiles
Putting the laser on the other side of the moon makes it worse. No one on earth can see what you are doing. Obviously we have light weight/cheap mirrors that can reflect the laser so shooting around the moon is not much of a challenge. You could, for example, have the mirrors hang out around earth/moon Lagrange points 4 and 5. Is a much shorter range than 1 light week.
Could tin foil hats replace camouflage as standard military gear?
YOU ARE A ROCK STAR!!
Logan Hester Stars are made out of plasma, not rock.
/s
Get your game on, go play!
Maracachucho Hey now!
RockStar? GTA creators?
I think I speak on behalf of humanity when I say we love you, Isaac.
I knew the "photon box idea" makes a great analogy for the relation between mass and energy, I never realized how god a fuel source it could be,
Photons have mass? I didn't know they were catholic.
Badumm tsh.
But seriously though, you missheard Isaac. He said they are a mess! That's why the starsail tries to get away from them.
So does that mean an infrared photon is a hot mess?
Wesley Howard - man, I think they call that blasphemy😹
They have inertial mass. It's different than rest mass. Anything moving at or near the speed of light increases in mass. Unlike anything with non-zero rest mass, photons' mass doesn't approach infinity as they approach C.
I would love a sci-fi series with space ships with sails and it would be mid colonial era themed like Treasure Planet I guess
thank you so much for your videos!
So close to 50,000!! The growth of this channel is awesome. I cant wait until a much wider range of people can come and enjoy your incredible content Isaac.
Thanks! It should hit some time today I think, about a month and half earlier than I expected when I last guessed at 40k.
Dear Astronauts,
Please don't lose anchorage. I like that city!
by far my favorite episode.......still will rewatch it a year later
Few years ago I was in a discussion at the Club of Amsterdam, about Mars One. It was a great presentation and there was a guy there called Gerard van t Hooft, nobel prize winner. He said
"humans won't do interstellar travels for millions of years"
To which I said, it can be done with interstellar highways, precisely the above. I pick arguments with Nobel prize winners. Fortunately I had a politician witness.
Even Nobel winners can be wrong :) Actually they frequently are, or maybe just get recorded more. It is interesting though how many of these concepts have been kicking around for a decade or more and just not got popularized.
Well they have to be wrong sometimes, because they contradict each other. I would be surprised if there aren't Nobel winners who have said the opposite.
Millions of years...?
After googling a little, it turns out that guy is a theoretical physicist. 150 years ago, he would be arguing that heavier than air flight is impossible.
what if you do:
- a launch from moon
- do a fly-by at the sun with chemical/electrical populsion
- come back to moon, rendezvous with your solar sail and people
- then fire some lasercanons from there
what speed could you reach?
right... 't Hooft is quite the pessimist. We will find a way...definitely. May be not as humans though.
My favorite channel on TH-cam. Your videos never disappoint.
I LOVE YOU ISAAC ARTHURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
lol
ZUUL42O haha
@@isaacarthurSFIA came here to say this.
Your channel should be a part of every futurist, curious individual, or general optimists balanced diet. Keep up the good work and continue to push the limits of the community you've created. We need more like you.
Love your videos,some for it goes over my head,but your presention is excellent,keep up the good work
I love how all the talking heads on tv say, "We won't leave the solar system in our lifetime," but countering the defeatist speech is right here on TH-cam. Thank you!
i can turn my 4G on and just watch your videos all day no matter where i am! such amazing videos. keep up the great work!
Thanks!
Your welcome!
Sung to the tune of Tom Cochrane's 'Life is a Highway'
You know Isaac, Life is an Interstellar highway
You wanna ride it all night long
Life's like a road that you travel on
When there's one day here and the next day gone
Sometimes you bend and sometimes you stand
Sometimes you turn your back to the wind
There's a world outside every darkened door
Where blues won't haunt you anymore
Where brave are free and lovers soar
Come ride with me to the distant shore
We won't hesitate
To break down the garden gate
There's not much time left today
Life is an Interstellar highway
You wanna ride it all night long
If you're going my way
You wanna drive it all night long
Through all these cities and all these towns
It's in your blood, and it's all around
You love her now like you loved her then
This is the road, and these are the hands
From Mozambique to those Memphis nights
The Khyber Pass to Vancouver's lights
Knock me down and back up again
You're in my blood, you're not a lonely man
There's no load I can't hold
A road so rough this I know
I'll be there when the light comes in
Tell 'em we're survivors
Life is an Interstellar highway
You wanna ride it all night long
If you're going my way
You wanna drive it all night long
Life is an Interstellar highway
You wanna ride it all night long
If you're going my way
You wanna drive it all night long
There was a distance between you and I
A misunderstanding once
But now we look in the eye
There ain't no load that you can't hold
A road so rough this you'll know
You'll be there when the light comes in
Tell 'em we're survivors
Life is an Interstellar highway
You wanna ride it all night long
If you're going my way
You wanna drive it all night long
Life is a highway
You wanna ride it all night long
If you're going my way
You wanna drive it all night long
Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, yeah
Life is a highway
You wanna ride it all night long
If you're going my way
You wanna drive it all night long
Of course, with breakthrough starshot they are not intending on getting their ship to slow down, since what they want is a flyby to take pictures and beam the information back to earth.
Yeah and considering its speed I'm not terribly sure what that's really going to accomplish, its a very small object that will zip through the area very fast, I'm thinking bigger local telescopes will get more done, but I still love the idea.
Isaac Arthur I think it'll be more of a proof of concept and initiative to develop the necessary engineering and tech, and could probably be supplemented to push larger, more useful objects later
Isaac Arthur According to the breakthrough starshot team themselves, the pictures their craft take would be the equivalent of a 300km- diameter telescope in LEO. If their optimistic-looking timeline actually works out, sending a probe might be more productive.
They could also use the same tech to send a slower, higher mass space telescope to the sun's gravitational focal point, but they haven't outlined that as part of their mission.
And of course their giant laser array system itself could function as a telescope as well.
No kidding? Well I stand corrected then, I trust them to have done their numbers better than my off the cuff guess :)
Isaac Arthur What are your off-the-cuff numbers, by any chance? Their claim is here: breakthroughinitiatives.org/Target/3
Of course, there is the point that a 300 km telescope can do more than just look at alpha centauri (and other nearby star systems). I think using the breakthrough starshot technology for gravitational lens missions will work better for this reason, but an interstellar mission is always going to get more publicity than a gravitational lens project.
After a brief hiatus I am back to binge watching these fantastic videos which make me so hopeful for the future and wishing I could be there to see it. I love these videos Dr. Arthur, they just keep getting better and better. Thank you so much.
I love all these videos.
me too
This is one of the most truly interesting Channels on TH-cam. I thoroughly enjoyed today's video, just like many of the other I have previously watched. Kudos Isaac.
U gotta love that thumbnail made of London Underground!
Best sci-fi/fact and futurism channel on TH-cam. I feel better informed about all variety of related news as a consequence of having Isaac's work as a frame of reference. It makes watching sci-fi film more enjoyable as well (or less, depending on their stories).
this is awesome!!!!
indeed
Good stuff going on here Isaac. Quickly beginning one of my favorite channels.
I really like this idea. The asteroid belt would be a great relay station, since we could spread millions of lasers evenly around the ring.
Close enough for solar power there too, though considering the distances it would probably be easier to build closer to the sun as part of an initial Dyson-up.
I was thinking mostly in terms of the number of bodies, which would allow for omni-directionality. No matter what angle you were coming or going, there could be a laser propeller somewhere in your vicinity. Make a nice relay from the inner to the outer system. Maybe repeat it in the Kuiper belt too.
But yeah, we'd need them all over the place - orbiting the sun, the Earth, the moon, the asteroids, and all the outer planets and their moons too.
I disagree, because you are going to have your speed limited by the centripetal force you would have to provide. Perhaps you might be able to do that by adding a large charge to your craft and adding huge magnetic fields or something, but if you're still going for the ring on a belt around the sun idea it would be better putting it in the Kuiper belt or even the Oort cloud, you need less centripetal force then.
Stefan: you rock dude! Amazing work on the animations, they fit in perfectly, and serve to make such complex ideas easier to visualize and comprehend. Thanks for helping one of my favorite channels! :)
Nice! Just what I was waiting for today!
Lukegear Ageed! Thursday mornings have quickly become one of my favorite parts of the week :) Also, as a fellow Luke, I'm curious if you were also named after Star Wars; I figure my dad liked the idea of always having an easy, go-to joke for life haha
Curiously, there's a mildy interesting story behind it, I'm brazilian, so due to portuguese language my name is actually the latin variant "Lucas" which gave rise to the name "Luke" in english. And, indeed, my dad used to joke around with how the names are so close to each other, and used to call me "Lucas Skywalker" when I was little, when he introduced me to Star Wars.
So the joke stuck around in my mind, and since I love science, tech, and knowledge in general, I figured that I would use the "gear" as part of my name, since it is the symbol of technology and mankind's capacity to shape the world, thus my internet nickname and logo were born :)
Lukegear Cool! I'm technically a "Lucas" as well, as my mom wanted something more "presidential" (whatever that meant, it's hopefully not applicable now :P ), but I usually go by Luke haha
Lucas fits even better. Since of course Luke Skywalker = Luke S = Lucas (George)
Did anyone else start imagining a interplanetary-Dyson swarm space train arrangement running on light ways instead of rails? I got a steampunk style space- western vibe, but I guess this would be laser punk. And love space westerns, so this tickles my fancy.
Think Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer sailing down the Cosmic Mississippi river of light.
But where would the reflected high power laser beam bee pointed? Wrong turn of the sail in our solar system and voilà "Death star". :) But if serious great work, i enjoy every episode.
Ian Moone The sail would have to be incredibly smooth, probably more so than the best telescope optics. Otherwise, even just microscopic surface roughness would reflect the beam (which is slightly conical anyways) at differing angles, causing it to diffuse into a much wider cone quite quickly. You'd have to be incredibly, ridiculously close for the reflection to still be tight enough to do any damage :P
eh point it at Australia.
TheMasonX there's advantages to focusing it, if possible. If you can direct the laser back to a mirror near the laser source, then you can bounce the beam back and forth multiple times to get more momentum from the same light. There are serious engineering challenges, naturally.
Yep, not something to use arriving in or departing a Dyson swarm.
Even if the sail or laser become miss aligned, you wouldn't necessarily have a death star scenario because the energies are off by many orders of magnitude. If you watch at about 5:30 where Isaac uses F=P/c he derives P=1.5GW. Giga watts is billions of watts - so the order of magnitude is about 10^9. But if you look into how much energy it'd take to blow up a planet (I quickly found this: scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/90193/what-is-the-wattage-of-the-death-stars-superlaser ) that guy says, "this puts the Death Star's power output at approximately 6.67 x 10^26 Watts, at minimum." However he assumed that the beam, at the given power output, only lasted 3 seconds. If we used our 1.5GW beam for long enough (and since in theory we are probably generating the beam from solar output, and or fusion we can use it indefinitely) at some point you'd have the 2*10^27 joules they used to calculate 10^26 watts. Watts is joules per second so solving for time we get s=J/P => s= (2*10^27 joules)/(1.5GW. Giga watts) which is about s=(10^27)/(10^9)= 10^18 seconds. Considering that 10^18 seconds = 3.1 × 10^10 years worst case scenario the solar highway pointed at a planet for a very long time would do surface damage at best, but you'd have to have the makers of the highway disappear from galactic maintenance pretty much forever, otherwise they'd just realign things.
Thank you for shifting and enlightening my paradigm this week. love your vision and videos.
How could a Galactic Positioning System be accurate enough to point a laser at from a distance? Multiple interferometers pointed at very bright stars?
I really hope companies like spacex will come up with an ISS-style plan for an orbital assembly station of spaceships to circumvent the mass problem of the rocket equation. Do you think we need to get started on asteroid mining first or is launching up separate parts from earth more feasible in the short term?
Probably giant huge solar powered clocks belching out the time from statites hanging over stars, that's how I'd do it.
Isaac Arthur Basically the exact same idea, scaled up haha. Do you think the doppler shift of pulsar timings could provide precise enough positioning for a cheaper, generalizable alternative/supplementary data source?
Potentially, but you can build an atomic clock more accurate than a pulsar and you can pick your own frequencies and emit very precisely on them. It also gives people a definite fix point to pick up on lower power signals like news, stocks, and traffic, as it were, but odds are each relay would actually have its own GPS calibrated very precisely off each other and the home systems
Is it possible to correct an atomic clock for the "delay" at relativistic speeds between the stationary beacon and a moving ship? In my understanding, the clocks of both the sender and receiver would have to run identically.
It seems like ships themselves would have to correct for time dilation and the time it takes light to reach them, since even clocks on satellites around earth drift away from earth time.
Isaac Arthur Very true! I suppose in the case of interstellar highways they would be unnecessary. I guess I was probably more considering distant travel/exploration using other methods where the angular span of such "Galactic Positioning System" structures became increasingly minute, and therefore less accurate, something like that using existing natural references could provide some supplementary information to refine what you got beamed from back home.
I also hadn't considered that each relay could very easily supply such information as part of the beam anyways. Thanks again for continually providing new ideas and expanding my framework of understanding :)
It's funny you mention space pirates attacking the relays. I had a science fiction idea a few years ago where a confederation of Oort-cloud-dwellers living on a small part of an interstellar travel route decided to use their giant lasers to shoot out the water supplies of passing starships so that they had to stop and the locals could steal their heavy metals from near stars (since all the starships are built inside star systems by those backward sun-hugging traditionalists), because heavy metals were just that rare in the Oort cloud (where all of their structures are made out of organic compounds like diamond and plastics). I don't know if that really makes sense, though.
By using a LASOR, eh?
Unstable Audio Productions A Major Lazor
just thought i'd say i've been subscribed for a few weeks and really enjoying the content. so far i'm about halfway through the material, it's given me a lot to ponder. i'm excited to watch the upcoming new series too. thanks for these great videos.
: ]
You're very welcome, thanks!
How much could you slow down using the solar wind of a destination star?
Quite a lot, especially if you're using a big mag sail an AU across or something.
Isaac Arthur So our initial highway setup ships might cary a remarkably large drag chute to aid in deceleration near stars, save fuel that way...
at 10% _c_ , I wouldn't trust in solar counterthrust.
Besides, the larger the sail, the more damage it will likely have sustained in transit. Need some sort of onboard or preceding installation for slowdown thrust.
Always a bright spot seeing one of your videos pop up. Thank you :)
Love your content...
Really looking forward to your new series about current and near future spacecraft! Another great video by the way, Thanks Issac-Jim
Could a modern artillery piece/railgun suspended from a lighter-than-air craft at the maximum altitude of a helium balloon achieve orbit with their payload? It might be a cheap way to make microsatellites or deliveries into space.
Most artillery pieces shoot sub-sonic, projectile speed isn't so important when you're doing indirect fire. And no railgun I know of can get into space, but we'll be talking about that in the next month or so in the Upward Bound Series.
Man you put out some of the most insightful content I have ever seen. For awhile I had completely dismissed the idea of using lasers as being ridiculous and impractical. Your vision has completely altered my perception and I now see it as being a viable option.
Wow. And to imagine that so many things like this can be done right now if we stop waging bullshit wars and wasting time with poses and games of lust and (the illusion of) power... Mankind was meant for something else. Something big. Our minds should be able to grasp that, and to drop everything else.
"It can be done now under our current understanding of physics," is very different from, "it can be done now."
Something like this would bankrupt the human race in millions of times over. It'll probably be centuries before we have the infrastructure and capability to do this.
I don't think it's as far off as you might imagine. Once we have the AI revolution, highways like this could easily be manufactured as fast as we could get the equipment there.
I agree wholeheartedly!!
And maybe stop funding those crazy military ideas concerning space based lasers to shot down enemy ICBM? ;)
(Yeah, I see the problem here - quite many space technologies are being seriously funded only because of their possible military application. I somehow doubt that if one was redirecting military budget it would end up in R&D., I can think of quite a few pressure groups that would be higher or any political priority list than some astronomers)
Humanity are adolescents, we are just finding ourselves, give it another 100 years and we will be on the right track i think
Great video. Discovered you a few weeks ago and have been binge watching your vids ever since.
Welcome to the channel, I'm glad yo're enjoying it!
Isaac Arthur Thank you!
these are so gud tho
been a month or two since i have seen your videos but i noticed you have gotten much better with your "R"s.
Good job man, keep it up.
A few others have mentioned that too, and I do seem to be getting less comments on it in newer episodes, but I can't say I've noticed myself.
Cyborgs or any computer intelligence would be well aware of the fact that a copy of them isn't them.
How would she know that?
as soon as the consciousness splits the two are different entities.
They probably wouldn't mind the expanded experience of many selves and occasionally catching up with a branch having interesting experiences in another solar system.
indeed they could get sensory data from their experiences but it won't have been them making the choices unless the life form went into suspended animation until it received the telemetry. And there is the small detail that there is another life form running around that now has rights of its own.
I think for a few tens of thousands of years ones copies would still say "That's what I would have done, Bro!" .. "Could not have said it better myself!" when reviewing each others life.
Great video, loved the animations. Keep up the great work!
This was so well put together I thought it was a mainstream documentary
when im bored i like coming back to this. Prob watched it 50 times now.
This channel is like an "anti-news" tablet. I look at the news, it's bloody depressing a lot of the time. I watch this channel and feel like we've got hope as a species and it cheers me up. Awesome cure!
Now if we could only convince people in charge of vast fortunes and national budgets to watch it, perhaps there would be more hopeful stuff turning up in the news, too.
These animations help a lot to understand some of the concepts
This episode is like an entire research paper in and of itself; never seen anything quite as in-depth and information-dense (especially on the subjects of frontier/future science and technology) across all of TH-cam. As a hopeful computer engineer with a fascination with spaceflight (and, well, space in general), this is really, _really_ cool to me x)
Thanks Tanner, I try to keep them info-dense but fairly straight-forward at the same time, and am never sure how well I do the juggling act.
This video is awesome. It has good science and subtle humor. You got my thumbs up.
Isaac, I've been binge-watching tons of your videos lately, and I'm so glad I found your channel!
Do you have a video where you tell us about your past? I'd be very interested in a "biography video". Or perhaps an article you've written on it? I know your past/journey to gaining all this knowledge must be truly fascinating. All of this, of course, is incumbent on you actually feeling comfortable making such a video / divulging such information to us. I know I would love to see such a video.
You've briefly mentioned your past in certain videos, like when you were in grad school, when you were roommates with a mathematician and meteorologist, as well as stating you've spent much of your adult life in the military but you haven't gone into too much detail.
I've tried writing bio episodes many a time, again just recently as a 100k subscribers special, it doesn't work out. It's not really a privacy thing, I just seem to have problems writing it.
I enjoy your voice almost as much as your content.
Thank you sir
"Deep thought has gone into very deepthought and will be busy for the next seven and a half billion years" LOL
Friday is my favorite day of the week because of your videos. I wish you did 2 every week!
:) Not Thursday? I'd probably fall over dead trying to do 2 a week
Thursday I work all day so most of the time, I watch it friday morning. Anyway, thanks for your hard work, I'm sure just doing one a week is hard enough as it is. All your videos are high quality, deeply researched stuff.
Wow! I just found one of my new top channels. Just the level of layman-professional description and proper visualization that I need. Not only for myself, but this series is able to get my wife from bio fields into... the universe.
...this channel is just such a relevant elevation, elegant evaluation, revalation.
I haven't looked forward to Thursday this much since Seinfeld. Love your work Isaac, thanks for taking the time to educate me.
Wow, Seinfeld, now that been a time and then some. :)
One of your very best - information-rich and entertaining!
Thanks Andrew, this is another one of those episodes I was worried might be too niche or obscure.
I know this is a really old episode but since a flashlight would accelerate from using its light, how would the relays stay in the same position?
They wouldn't, the positions would need to be stabilized and corrected.
Either on board engines or light from nearby stars could be directed to correct the positions of way stations using light sails.
i love the senario mini stories like asking the god computer a 6 million year question or making grey good that spews quadrillions of paperclips
I am so excited for the new series you mentioned at the end. Great idea!
It looks like it will be a fun series
Another short note: you might use a detachable central sail (have a reflective large sail, and use reflected light from that sail to slow down the smaller central sail once it is detached). This means you don't need a laser at the target to get the system to work.
And you'd also want something like a gigantic fresnel lens to refocus the launching laser beam, to deal with the beam divergence problem.
Dr. Robert Forward dealt with these problems and solutions in one of his novels.
Hi Isaac Arthur, I'm relatively new to your Channel, though I'm a huge fan and love all of the work you and your subscribers do. I love this topic because I recently fell on an idea that could work as a Galaxy highway with our modern transportation systems. I also have a couple more ideas and will work the science out behind them just as you do, because I sincerely believe Humanity's future is beyond Earth. I would also like some of your Insight, if possible, on a few of my ideas. Thanks @isaacarthur
I love these space videos of yours :) Really inspiring, I've been working on a space game for a short while now and your videos have completely changed the direction I want to take the game. I was first thinking of pure survival in space, but a true space colonization game where you start out on or by earth and have to fund trips to gather resources etc and build your colony would be so much cooler. Would you be interested in alpha testing the game and coming up with suggestions once I have a more playable demo? (Right now I've been focusing on character movement in 0 G, so you're basically just a rag doll floating around in space with the ability to move and look around, so it might take a couple of months until I have something more playable)
Ha! I see what you did there at the end. Very subtle, so I'm not quite sure if that's a reference to Freelancer, but I'll pretend it is.
Awesome video as always. I'm looking forward to the next ones; people really undersell space elevators.
"One of the more iwwitating..." Bahahaha I love this channel
Great video.
Gateway stations linking worlds.
+Isaac Arthur Thanks once again for yet another super-awesome video! Thank you for the time and the hard work you put into these vids. Your content is so far above everything else on TH-cam. Your channel is among the best things I have ever discovered on the internet in general!
Thank you!
Great episode.
Fantastic video! From a sci-fi writing perspective, this is a really awesomely unique alternative to hyperspace.
Thanks Luke!
Hey Isaac!
You can also use lasers to SLOW DOWN.
We don't have to go build the endpoint of our highway first.
Ask any sailor how to tack against the wind.
"thus allow you to watch your food cook without your eyeballs exploding, which tends to ruin dinner", spit on my monitor laughing at this.
The microwave ruining dinner made me chuckle, love the stuff, keep them coming :D
This is the most awesome channel ever.
Love your channel! Very nice dictation in this video, thanks for these videos!
Those laser stations would also need reaction thrusters for station keeping, Re your flashlight analogy.
Deep Thought says it was a wonderful episode, laughed, and will stay maser focused, and wants to ride on a space sail!
This relates to interstellar warfare in that the super highway would become the most valuable resource to a colony, who then implements taxes on whoever wants to use their part of the system, so other star systems form “free use” guilds that don’t allow the ships from the “Maintenance tax” guilds to use their super highway, then a “Maintenance tax” guild star system blows up a “free use” guild ship stating that it thought that ship was armed, diplomacy breaks down, and now there is a desperate war to destroy the other side’s Dyson Spheres and plunge those solar systems into darkness with self-replicating robots star-lift opposition stars into brown dwarfs, and send Saturn-sized packages of that excess Hydrogen back to their own systems surrounded by orbital rings set up to create an Earth-like surface with 1 g gravity.
The winner will end up far richer than any military conflict since the Franco-Prussian war as, while they would have a destroyed Dyson swarm, the only reason they won would have been better self-replicating robots than the other side, and by virtue of that will not have lost their stars to star lifting, and now have vast amounts of material to rebuild.
The other side will be rendered impotent as with so little mass to their stars left, their planets and asteroids will follow the lines of inertia spiraling into the abyss, surviving on the fusion reactors they have left.
Thanks, IA for all your great vids. Interesting & mentally stimulating. Cheers! :-)
One thing comes to my mind - it should be possible for a ship to simply seed the stations behind it. The ship would start from earth, being accelerated by a laser form earth. Once it reaches desirable distance (and meets interstellar object that can serve as a fuel) It releases a "station" with its own sail. The beam reflected from the ship would be used to slow down the station to halt. The station would dock on the interstellar object, sets up fuel-mining operation. builds its own copy (possibly recycling the sail, landing gear, etc. for this new copy) and uses its new laser to "reload" the ship with this new station. The old station would then take on the torch and provide its laser to push the ship further.
Such ship would never have to stop and could simply keep on going at full speed, seeding the galaxy with highways and colonies. It would also be able to return to its source, since it can seed the stations in a big circle, reflecting the beam slightly to side along the way.
One big problem I see with it is, if the station fails to make its laser operational in time, the ship may end up out of range of nearest laser, at which point it ends up flying away into its doom. That can be partially avoided by seeding the stations roughly in a spiral, but that slows down the process significantly if your aim is to cover maximum distance instead of volume.
Accelerated matter streams for interplanetary and interstellar shipping of raw materials is a brilliant idea I never even considered. It makes shipping resources back from space actually feasible. You could even bundle the mining, refining, and shipping functions into one machine. It uses a laser or laser array to ionize the target asteroid material. Then it uses magnetic fields to separate and accelerate the various elements. Then it uses a series of magnetic lenses to collimate the beams and accelerate them to some high fraction of C. The stream wouldn't be dense enough to hurt anything after a few thousand kilometers but could still ships tons of matter every second.
Exactly, so space mines and metal management is necessary to interstellar government and trade.
It is Thursday! AKA: "New Isaac Arthur Video Day!!"
Dang it! Now I have to wait a whole week for the next one! (what am I ten again waiting for my favourite toon to come on…)
I blame you for getting me hooked :)
JK, Great show again Artheus Prime!
Awesome episode! looking forward especially to the next one!