Interstellar Travel Without Breaking Physics with Andrew Higgins
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- Опубликовано: 31 май 2024
- Interstellar travel can be real. And you don't need to break the laws of Physics to do it. In this interview, I discuss a realistic way we can send missions to nearby stars in our lifetimes.
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00:00:00 Intro
00:02:06 How hard is interstellar travel
00:13:19 Ride solar wind like a bird
00:23:15 How a realistic mission can look like
00:40:20 Exploring the Solar System
00:46:50 Fastest gun in the world
00:55:39 Best way to get off planet Earth
01:01:08 Interstellar Symposium
01:04:00 First interstellar mission. When?
01:13:53 How to become an interstellar engineer
01:19:17 Outro
Interstellar Symposium
irg.space/irg-2023/
Andrew Higgins' group web page:
interstellarflight.space/
Twitter
/ mcgill_adastra
Jeff Greason’s idea for a “Reaction Drive powered by External Pressure” (the so-called q-drive).
tauzero.aero/wp-content/uploa...
New paper on Dynamic Soaring
www.frontiersin.org/articles/...
RC gliders reaching nearly 900 km/hour by performing dynamic soaring on wind shear:
• Dynamic Soaring - 882 ...
• New World Record RC Ai...
The Wait Calculation
academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...
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Наука
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.
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? 🤔
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.
There are so many problems with this concept that I don't even know where to start.
Recommended procedure for anyone:
1/ Buy KSP
2/ See and understand the orbital mechanics of the bodies
3/ Understand that it's already complicated to reach an inclination >20° in solar orbit
4/ Understand that it's impossible to stay in solar orbit as soon as the speed of the spacecraft exceeds 60km/s at 1UA.
5/ Understand that surfing on solar wind waves necessarily implies being able to detect the solar wind gradient around the spacecraft continuously.
6/ Understand that surfing on solar wind waves necessarily implies having an unimaginable TWR and therefore materials that resist.
7/ Understand that the solar liberation velocity at the heliopause is so low that it's insane to believe that we can stay in solar orbit down to even 0.05% of c.
8/ Stop believing in a whole bunch of far-fetched solutions and honour the engineers of the last 200 years by understanding that if they haven't already done it, it's because it's not possible.
If this concept is feasible in the next 150 years, I'll eat my hat!
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.
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?
All we need to do is reach 10% lightspeed. We could send the first manned mission to Proxima Centauri. It would be a 40-50 year journey, but it's possible to get there within a single lifetime. I think that's the most realistic goal at this point. The other possibility is sending a sleeper ship or generational colony ship which could possibly take hundreds of years to reach its destination. But trying to build a vessel that could survive for that length of time is also highly questionable and risky. And you'd also have to know there's a habitable planet before you send the mission.
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
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.
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!
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.
Good tp hear that Jeff Greason's talents are being utilized. Though we've lost touch, I always appreciated Jeff's intellect and vision.
One of the most powerful things in the universe, is the drive and passion of a human being when their mind is working.
We're Universal-editing programs and we're only just getting started
I would argue that there are likely other life forms in other star systems with an even higher level of drive and passion.
@@stevens-universe Well you'd be arguing that with zero evidence, so let's just say you'll have your work cut out for you if a scientist, or a science-minded person is who you're trying to convince, but have at it, hoss. Nothing wrong with trying to craft an argument.
Imagine how much we could accomplish if there were fewer hoarding all of the resources and there were more people living on less than one USD per day. Much easier to solve complex problems when you're well fed and have a place to sleep. Food for thought
@@allthingsdestructive You mean less people living on less than $1USD per day?
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!!
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!
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.
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 RUclips. 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
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 is a great conversation Fraser. Props to you for this and everything else you do!
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...
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.
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?
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.
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! 😅
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.
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.
1:00:48 "tread lightly". Beautifully spoken.
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.
In all the years I’ve been watching science content on RUclips 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.
I just watched a video of one of the dynamic soaring gliders they spoke about, and saw speeds in excess of 500mph.
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.
This is such a great interview. Mr. Higgins is a great teacher!
😂😂😂
35:19. The ship's cargo should be at the back in a bay area as in a cargo bay door emergency air pressure release. 💭
Fantastic interview! Thanks. It's great to know we have people like Andrew Higgins right here at McGill.
wonderful talk
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
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
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
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.
Antimatter catalyzed fusion is also a thing, and if our industry proves capable of making antimatter, it will soon figure out the right balance to use it for fusion.
We need a lot more interviews like this!
Real privilege to hear this man . Surprised he had the spare time . His brains so big it’s cauterised his hair cells. Excellent vid
The closest known black hole is either V Puppis (960 ly) or HR 6819 (1,000 ly). I proposel that we build an O'Neill Cylinder with an anti-matter drive to go there. This is a generation starship that use the black hole to slow it done and enter orbit about the black hole. We talking a journey of about 5,000-10,000 years or more at 20% of c. The mission to start a base to build Halo Drive starships as proposed by Kipper, "Fuel-free Relativistic Propulsion of Large Masses via Recycled Boomerang Photons". This will open select parts of the galaxy, hopping from black hole to black hole. The bad news, to get back to Earth is HARD - maybe we could launch a Halo Drive starship with just enough moment to reach Earth and Bussard ramjet for breaking. Starting with 10,000 people in the first O'Neill starship, they will have descendants throughout the galaxy that will far out number the population of the Solar System in about 50,000 short years or so. STRONG DREAM REIGN HERE.
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.
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.
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
Best qualifications for getting into interstellar propulsion? Basic pyhsics and sailing!
Stealing energy from the relative velocities of retrograde asteroids sounds epic.
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.
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.
At around 18:00 he's talking about dynamic gliding, and I think that's done in the book 7 Eves.
This was the interview that got me into following this channel a year ago
Bow shocks of planetary magnetic fields.
You might be able to accelerate a cubesat out of the Earth-Moon system using this and interacting with Earth's magnetic shock of solar wind.
Yes, this is an idea worth exploring. In our initial study, we found that the Earth's magnetosphere is a bit too small to perform dynamic soaring upon. However, if more effective means of generating lift with the solar wind are found, using the Earth's magnetosphere as a first stage is very promising.
@Andrew Higgins Cool!
So currently feasible efficiency precludes Earth. How about Jupiter, Saturn, or Neptune? Does the weird orientation of Uranus' magnetic field help or impede? How possible would it be to artifically create a magnetic bow shock for such a vessel to bound off of?
This is just so cool!
Best video of the year. Thank you Fraser you have given us something to get excited about.
So, sending out miniaturised AI probes instead of humans. That is a realistic proposal and I wish Andrew Higgins every success with the launch of the probe in his lifetime. Perhaps his descendants will witness the first probe's arrival. A fabulous dream that will become reality. 😉😁
I've always been a bigger fan of "hard" sci-fi, namely the kind that focuses on fusion drives and only ever mentions warp drives as "theoretical curiosities" that we haven't ever achieved.
So this is a welcome breath of fresh air.
So tired of the "aliens" having the FTL tech and gifting it to us.
So tired of us discovering how "easy" it is to go FTL ourselves.
It trivializes the true difficulty of all things space travel, and in so doing it loses a lot of it's punch.
There's some part of me that says "NASA and the like are purpose-oriented to tackle the most technically challenging areas of engineering we have yet faced, allowing a human to exist in an environment that has never encountered a being like them".
And the rest of me goes "That's just a hair's breadth distant from being literally impossible, so why are all these sci-fi media depicting it being as easy as driving to the grocery store?"
The story shouldn't be "XYZ plot, but in space". The story should be "Space, period."
Unfortunately, nobody seems to be interested in writing that kind of sci-fi, it all seems to be in books written in the 40's to the -60's, with only a few select authors. More of it is needed IMO.
Few example plots I can think of, just because there's oh-so-many ways for your ship to betray you in the most insidious of lethal ways:
Life support systems fail on you? Better hope the whole crew's not in hibernation, or that the automated systems can wake up enough engineers to patch it together enough to get you to a safe place, else you're gonna have an encounter with The Cold Equations.
Engines malfunction? Probably not gonna have the tools or materials to fix that, if it's a nuclear engine you better cut the failed one loose, and you better also have brought a spare (you're not gonna repair the magnetic bottle on your fusion drive if it got a railgun round shot thru the containment field coils cryo plumbing, and not JUST because it's "lethal in mere seconds" radioactive). By the way, you can't just say "oh it's not radioactive because it's using D-He3 fusion which is aneutronic", because even a D-He3 reactor is only "a lot less" radioactive, not "not radioactive", you're still doing high energy atomic physics, meaning D-D fusion is gonna be happening in that reactor in side-reactions, which emits even more neutrons than D-He3 fusion. The only reason it's "Less" neutronic is because those D-D side reactions are side reactions and not the main focus, so they don't happen nearly as often. Still plenty of them to cause the reactor itself to saturate any kind of radiation detector you care to point at it, with the drive turned off for 30 days and THEN measured.
Colony run short on supplies, like needing a water pipe? Use lasers to 3-d print a stone or concrete water pipe out of local regolith, because if you use a pipe from anywhere remotely near the ship's power reactor or nuclear engines, the whole colony is gonna be fighting any number of "new and interesting" cancers.
You thought Radium Jaw was bad, what do you think happens when the very water you drink and bathe with has been turned radioactive by a wrongly-selected piece of plumbing? Oh and it's not just pipes, valves and fittings are bad news too. So is something as mundane as an O-ring. Literally any matter that has been irradiated should be banned from contact with the potable water, ventilation, sanitation, or any other system that helps support the crew. Yes, that includes the sewer pipes, because you're almost certainly going to be recycling the wastewater from those systems.
Alien contatct? Nope, no sentients, microbes at best.
Alternately, if you do think we can contact sentients, it will be them contacting us, and us stumbling on to their transmissions as noise with strangely self-consistent patterns in it. Extremely extremely faint signals, we'd need at the MINIMUM a radio telescope on the Moon's far side to even have a chance of intercepting the signals so sent. The signal we sent, intentionally, probably didn't even make it to Alpha Cent, distance wise. That's how faint things get over such large distances. If you want a truly interesting set-piece, maybe us humans figure out that a pulsar isn't quite as perfectly regular as it should be in it's timing, instead it's somehow modulated. And then thru years of analysis using the most powerful supercomputers, we figure out that there is data encoded in this modulation. More years of analysis and we can figure out what that data is, if it's even digital data (who knows, they might develop computers based on "neuron" analogue cell-type constructions rather than doped semiconductors, depends on how easy it is to purify elements without resorting to what passes for biology on their world). Point is, expect it to look like "oddly patterned noise" for 5+ generations of analysis before we figure out what it is. Also expect some new religion to pop up to worship whatever it is they think it is we found when we actually still don't have a clue.
Really really drive home the point of how so much of actual new territory being explored by science is best described as "fumbling around in the dark inside a house", but the only data you have is the theory of what a house is, namely something like "a house is composed of a series of connected rooms sharing a roofing system, with one or more floors, passage between floors being facilitated by stairs, ladders, or elevators". And we don't know what rooms, roofs, floors, passages, stairs, ladders, or elevators are yet either.
Basically sometimes science is just flailing around in the dark and noting down what you bump into or knock over, and if you knock something over noting what noise it made when it fell.
10% the Speed of Light? 10% the Speed of Light!? I like the way this guy thinks!
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!
>Scientists have discovered magnetosheath jets, fast plasma streams, in Jupiter's magnetic environment
New article in nature I saw and remembered this video, seems like there's a difference in energy that could be exploited there for the techniques mentioned in this video also mentions similar jets could be around other planets. I love the idea of Jupiter not just being the go-to planet for gravity assists but also plasma assists for either acceleration or deceleration with a plasma magnet/q-drive/e-sail, such a convenient planet lol
Let's keep looking for these potentially free sources of energy!
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.
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.
@@Dead-Not-Sleeping 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?
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.
Every barrier we have encountered, or will encounter,has a will be overcome. Dream's in the past are now reality today. As will be in the future.
Taking advantage of energy differentials to generate thrust is interesting and I think more likely than all those designs that kind of hand wave the rocket equation….but a kilograms size craft generating a planet size magnetic field has me scratching my head
The hard sell, the hard truth is that human bodies are EXTREMELY fragile outside of a very narrow range of environmental conditions. We evolved to live in the African savannah.
So much more could be done if whatever devices did not have to support human frailty.
Exactly. This is why we'll send robots.
one of the most insightful and informative interviews I've heard in a long time. thanks
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
What an awesome guest! He really spoke in Layman's terms so a schlep like me could understand. Great stuff. Extremely informative.
I absolutely love Andrew Higgins' enthusiasm!
Agreed!
Energy density is always a problem, along with heat rejection. The temperature regime of sails to get to significant factions of the speed of light would be very close to or easily over the vaporization. I’m highly encouraged by enriched nuclear-salt water rockets… these can develop exhaust velocities comparable to high efficiency ion drives at thrust levels of chemical rockets.
There are two concerns here: When the laser is pushing on the sail, it is essential that the sail have very low absorptivity, because if it does absorb any laser light, yes, the sail will be vaporized. Fortunately, we now have materials (such as ZBLAN glass used in fiber optics) that only absorb parts per billion of the laser light incident upon them. The design of the sail will have to incorporate these materials, but it should be a solvable problem.
The other concern might be heating of sail by interaction with the interstellar media. This turns out to be mostly negligible: The impact of protons and ions in interstellar space will sputter away some of the forward-exposed surface, but once the laser is turned off, the sail can fly edge-on to minimize the surface area exposed.
The nuclear salt water rocket (NSWR) is a potentially feasible concept (although, given its massive radioactivity, I would personally decline to ride on one). It is still a rocket, however, and subject to the rocket equation. Any fission-based rocket can have, at the maximum, an exhaust velocity of only about 2% the speed of light (Zubrin’s original NSWR paper concluded an exhaust velocity of 1.5% of light speed might be possible.) Such a rocket might be able to get to 3% the speed of light (with a 90% propellant fraction), but not much faster. It would take more than a century to get to Alpha Centauri.
It is best to think of the NSWR as a dragster, well suited for zipping around the solar system, but not really capable of interstellar flight in human-lifetime timescales.
Isn't that stuff only radioactive enough for so long? That anti matter idea is much better, because at least anti matter doesn't decay, so the ship would not need a refinement unit, to constantly produce fuel.
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.
Reality is the adventure of the imagination.Even without the quantum math/algebra confusions, I've been fascinated with nature, astro0nomy, archeology, paleontology. It all starts with seeing, no matter who you are. IMagination helps, but seeing what the Sun has helped created and being a man of the Christian faith, yes Christian. there is more to crteation than what faith has taught us about REALITY. All of it, for us is the Sun. You are inspiring Mr Fraser.
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
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.
One could say that I'm a pragmatic, but I think we should be focusing on getting ourselves to being a T1 civilization and making the solar system our playground rather than going from T0 directly to T2.
Perhaps you’re right. But note that my discussion with Fraser was not about interstellar colonization, but rather sending the first robotic probes. What follows is not a rigorous argument, but I draw some inspiration from how exploration of our solar system actually proceeded compared to how it was envisioned in the pre-Space Age. The original Oberth/von Braun vision was that we would first develop orbital capability, then earth-orbit space stations that would serve as interplanetary shipyards, and only *then* would the first (crewed) missions be sent to the planets. Instead, what happened was in 1957 ICBMs were re-purposed to launch satellites, and then it was possible, just 3.5 years later, to start throwing spacecraft to Venus (Venera 1, launched Feb. 1961) and Mars (Mars 1, launched Nov. 1962). Not even the most forward-thinking writers of the 1950s thought we would be sending robotic probes to the planets that quickly after establishing orbital capability.
Similarly-perhaps irrationally-I have always thought that if we were clever in repurposing technology built for other purposes, we might be throwing our first robotic probes to the stars long before we finished settling and industrializing the solar system.
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.
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. ❤️ ❤️
Love these interviews! So informative and captivating. Thanks to both of you 🙏😃
There is also nuclear pulse engines, you build a shield behind the craft you want to accelerate thick enough to withstand multiple nuclear blasts and launch a nuke behind the shield and explode it, repeat it with around 1000 nukes, and you can accelerate to near 20% the speed of light, turn the craft around and repeat the process to slow down at your destination
You are likely thinking of Project Orion and Project Daedalus.
The bomb-propelled Orion would not have been capable of interstellar flight; it was intended for transportation in the solar system. Freeman Dyson did later propose an interstellar version of Orion in 1968, but it would require pure deuterium thermonuclear bombs (without a fission trigger) and was really just a sketch of an idea. Even in his very optimistic study, Dyson thought at velocity of only about 3% of the speed of light would be possible.
Project Daedalus and the follow-on Project Icarus are well known in the interstellar travel literature. Project Daedalus from the early 1970s was remarkable work and greatly stimulated people’s thinking about interstellar flight. It came about at a time when people thought laser inertial confinement fusion (ICF) (essentially, micro-fusion bombs) would be relatively easy, perhaps achievable using a benchtop laser facility. With the breakthrough result from the NIF in December, we now know ICF is real and works, but the NIF laser is the size of a football stadium!
This shows that there is still an enormous challenge to make an ICF-propelled rocket. The original Daedalus study proposed to mine the atmosphere of the gas giant planets to extract thousands of tons of helium-3 that could be used for propellants that don’t generate as many neutrons.
Even if it could be made to work, a fusion rocket has an exhaust velocity of about 4% the speed of light. This means that it would only ever be able to reach 8% or so of the speed of light due to the rocket equation. So, it would still take 50 years just to reach Alpha Centauri as a flyby (no stopping) mission.
"I work out everyday so I'll still be around when Star Trek happens". His heuristic that at 3 km/s objects become worth their weight in TNT, closely reproduces the correct enthalpy of explosion of 4.5 MJ/kg.
Not so much this negative energy esoteric Space - Time propulsion. But down to Earth hands on approach with these systems. Way to go🚀👍
Leia: "Would it help if I got out and pushed?" Han: "...It might!!"
Here watching from Laval
This is a video I keep coming back to. I don't know why I'm not hearing more about this 6 months later.
😮Fraser you did it! this is Jaw Dropping science the Dynamic Soaring Gliders are revolutionary ( 😊 )
Absolutely riveting segment, Fraser. Andrew is quite a visionary. Gives me hope.
As always, thanks much for sharing.
Steve
I zoomed to the video referenced it's amazing! Here's the title: Dynamic Soaring - 882 kph 548 mph World Record eye witness pov
kindda poetic that we're going back to winds as a means of propulsion.
That was extremely interesting! I listen to Astronomy Cast all the time (still trying to catch up from the very start - in the 200's now!) so I was glad that RUclips randomly threw this video my way!! A great discussion!
That dynamic soaring thing is super impressive. There is a video of it on RUclips.
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...
I know this video is old, but this has to be said. Our species needs more people like you and the scientists you interview. As a civilization we need to rekindle our interests in exploring beyond the walls we have set for ourselves else we will stagnate. You and others have settled into the roles that the giants of Bill Nye and Carl Sagan have done before you, and I hope that you do for others what they have done for me. For us to succeed as a species we need to turn our gaze starwards as any alternative will never be as bright.
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..
This topic always gets my attention, thank you. Listening now!
Questions: What would happen to a craft traveling at 2% of the speed of light if it collided with a particle the size of a grain of sand? What would be the probability of that collision happening?
There are not many sand-grain-sized objects in interstellar space. A lightsail would fly edge-on during the interstellar cruise phase and should be able to avoid striking larger grains like this. However, it can't be ruled out entirely. Laser-driven lightsail probes (as envisioned by the Breakthrough Starshot) would be able to be launched as swarms of numerous small laser lightsails, so if some were damaged or destroyed in route, at least others would get through.
Most interstellar dust grains are micron-sized and smaller. 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.
a simple plasma/ion field with magnetic deflection ( star trek's deflector dish concept ) or a mass shield sacrificial metals in front. ie like a knights shield.
Fraser reminds me of a younger Richard Dreyfuss.
On a serious note, one thing I am curious about is assuming that this plasma field thing did work and some sort of vessel could ride the solar winds, then how would someone identify the difference between a region of space that had reduced solar wind activity, to a region of space that had an increased level of solar wind activity? Therefore allowing the pilot to make the necessary adjustments in flight trajectory.
(Flight may not be the right word to use in this case)
Fascinating conversation! Thank you for making this happen
Worthy content. Gladly liked and shared.
The Bussard Ramjet -- definitely more romantic than practical
This guy is motivated, you just know he dont lay in on the weekend!