From: Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sat Aug 16 1997 - 14:22:47 MDT
CarlF wrote:
>
>This message describes an amazing concept I came up with recently. I
>haven't worked out all the details, but if it's true it would be very cool.
>
>Remember that message I sent out a few weeks ago, about how you could build
>a device that could hover indefinitely in the atmosphere of the Sun? Well,
>consider this: such devices could be made self-reproducing, so they could
>cover much of the area of the Sun, and then used to extract raw materials
>from the substance of the Sun.
..
So the extraction machines at the surface can go on
>for a long time before running out of stuff to process. After a few hundred
>thousand years, we will have extracted most of the helium-3 and nitrogen-15
>in the swirly part of the Sun (the core of the Sun is non-swirly and doesn't
>mix with the outside). This will amount to a ball about the size of the
>Earth.
>
Assembling this mass into a ball presents a problem, as
we talked about. Maybe consider injecting the mas into a
low Sun orbit (LSO), then do the assembling into a sphere
with a crust.
Leaving it there in orbit, go out to the Oort cloud and gather
up a roughly comparable mass of whatever. This can be accomplished
with relativly little energy expenditure. This mass is now sent on a
long-period cometary-style orbit which intersects the orbit of the
fusion-primer sphere. With proper mass, timing and flyby distance (prograde,
passing behind the sphere) the sphere's orbital velocity is nearly cancelled,
allowing it to drop nearly straight in, as desired. The cometary mass
takes up a Solar orbit of higher angular momentum.
A variation on this is a combo shot: Drop the Oort cloud mass(es)
on orbits intersecting the big moons of the gas giants, either putting
them into periodic solar orbit or straight in.
>How to get the bomb to the center of the Sun? I suggest wrapping it in a
>few thousand miles of inert, abundant stuff (say aluminum and silicon) and
>then just dropping the whole ball in.
99% of the Sun's helium-3 was down below
>the layer we could reach before. Now it will be brought up to the surface,
>where we can build the grandmother of all fusion bombs with it. This one is
>about the size of Uranus.
And do the same here. A good deal of He3 can be obtained from the
gas giants, maybe enough to make this a one step procedure??
>--CarlF
Forrest Bishop
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