From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sun Sep 08 2002 - 13:46:19 MDT
On Sun, 8 Sep 2002 CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:
> You can't assume that. Intergalactic travel at near-light speeds
Yes, I can. If I try hard enough, I can assume about ANYTHING! Try me.
> makes for an incredibly hostile environment (extremely hard radiation
> for long periods of time) and it's not at all clear that it's
You're arguing from a conventional space probe and/or a squishy
perspective (these would be fried allright). A dry nanosystem with massive
redundance and hyperactive self-repair shouldn't have any difficulties
with hugging c really hard. You're of course screwed if you fly into a
speck of matter, so you have to clean the travel corridor (beam a lot of
power to push stuff out), and use lots of redundancy (thousands of probes
instead of one; just one of them has to succeed).
I don't really see why one would want to travel faster than, say, 0.95 c
anyway. Unless you want to sneak up on unsuspecting people, maybe.
> possible. I'm inclined to expect a natural origin for this thing, on
> the grounds that I don't see why a galazy would be engineered this
> way. But if civilization-adequate seeds can't travel faster than what
> you get out of fusion power, 0.1 c or so, an expanding ring is
You can travel very hard at c with fusion power, if the power plant is
very large (say, a star, or several of them), and you leave it at home,
and just beam the power in a tight beam to propel your tiny (few kg)
probe.
Use circumstellar clouds of microwave-radiating hardware pushing a probe.
The only difference to interstellar hops is that you can't focus your beam
well enough to deccelerate on intergalactic distances, so you have to
travel with heavy luggage (few kg of antimatter to deccelerate on
arrival).
> plausible for an intergalactic civilization.
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