From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 03:23:19 MDT
On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Avatar Polymorph wrote:
> "We don't know the minimum size for a seed. It needs a lot of data
My guesstimate is a few kg for the payload. The sail could be a few tons.
> and the ability to operate in space, which requires lots of
Space is a simple environment. It is not obvious that more than insect
intelligence is required to create a bridgehead/receptacle on the other
side. Less than a cubic micron is required to encode that information. A
sugarcube is enough for a sentient probe, less for a sentient probe seed.
> propellant. And your redundancy is heavily limited if (as I
Interstellar hops use off-board photons for propellant, for at least half
the reaction mass. Antimatter-catalyzed fusion drives require mg amounts
of antimatter and liters of hydrogen. Pure antimatter drives for
intergalactic hops would require kg quantities to kill relativistic speeds
(acceleration is free, and you don't need to brake the sail).
> calculated) launches require billions of solar energy equivalents.
I haven't done the math, but it's grams of matterenergy for each kg of
mass at ~0.9 c (0.5*mv^2, no need for relativistic mass corrections at
these speeds), right? I don't see how this is going to be a problem given
that fluxes like 10^12 g/s are available.
> Could the seed be a little baby nano-ramscoop which grows into a bigger
> nano-ramscoop containing the core-seed?
I've never seen a plausible design for a ramscoop. Can you use magnetic
traps to capture nonrelativistic protons?
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