From: Samael (Samael@dial.pipex.com)
Date: Fri Dec 11 1998 - 04:45:13 MST
-----Original Message-----
From: Damien Broderick <damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
To: extropians@extropy.com <extropians@extropy.com>
Date: 11 December 1998 07:46
Subject: Re: Travelling the Stars
>At 02:34 PM 12/10/98 -0500, Dan wrote:
>>you
>>can get anywhere in the universe in an arbitrarily short amount of time,
as
>>measured by the traveler. No weird physics is involved here
>
>Just weird engineering. The faster you go, the harder the crap you run
>through, even if it's vanishingly thin by our standards. Using a Savage
>e-m catapult [cf. THE MILLENNIUM PROJECT] several solar systems in length
>(doable without weird engineering) and nano-sized AI craft, and another e-m
>system to catch you (built in advance by slower machines), maybe you'd get
>somewhere interesting before you were ablated. Otherwise I suspect we're
>better off looking for weird physics loopholes.
How about nano sized cradt with a whopping big shield in front of them (I
liked the idea in Songs of Distant Earth of using an ice shield as it
shouldn't be hard to pick up hydrox elsewhere).
Samael
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