Black Hole Powered Spacecraft

[n2doc]

Dark power: Grand designs for interstellar travel

25 November 2009 by Marcus Chown

SPACE is big," wrote Douglas Adams in his book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."

He wasn't exaggerating. Even our nearest star Proxima Centauri is a staggering 4.2 light years away - more than 200,000 times the distance from the Earth to the sun. Or, if you like, the equivalent of 50 million trips to the moon and back.

Such vast distances would seem to put the stars far beyond the reach of human explorers. Suppose we had been able to hitch a ride on NASA's Voyager 1 the fastest interstellar space probe built to date. Voyager 1 is now heading out of the solar system at about 17 kilometres per second. At this rate it would take 74,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri - safe to say we wouldn't be around to enjoy the view.

So what would it take for humans to reach the stars within a lifetime? For a start, we would need a spacecraft that can rush through the cosmos at close to the speed of light. There has been no shortage of proposals: vehicles propelled by repeated blasts from hydrogen bombs, or from the annihilation of matter and antimatter. Others resemble vast sailing ships with giant reflective sails, pushed along by laser beams.

All these ambitious schemes have their shortcomings and it is doubtful they could really go the distance. Now there are two radical new possibilities on the table that might just enable us - or rather our distant descendants - to reach the stars.

more:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427361.000-dark-power-grand-designs-for-interstellar-travel.html

[fascisthunter]

1. Helium3 may be the feul source for interstellar travel

and there is plenty of it on the moon.

[Oregone]

3. Sounds good in fantasy land

But if you went to harvest it, they would clone you and force you to work until you die, replacing you with a new clone. Trust me on this

[fascisthunter]

4. is it not possible in the future to process Helium 3?

or should I ask, is it an impossibility...?

[Oregone]

6. As possible as it is for corporations to clone you

:)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/

[fascisthunter]

7. ahhhh... now I understand what you were referring to

but prior to that movie I watched a program in regards to Helium 3, possibly being mined on the moon, then processed there for fuel. Can you tell me why it isn't possible?

[derby378]

2. Interesting, but without FTL travel...

...we have no real ability to explore the cosmos. I'm hoping that the Alcibierri warp drive pans out in the end.

[Wildewolfe]

5. Just made me chuckle a bit...

Going back to star trek canon. Romulan starships were powered by an artificial singularity instead of matter/antimatter.

Every time I see a flip cell phone I wonder about their vision sometimes....

[Fumesucker]

9. I suspect that we'll be able to "upload" our psyches to computers on spacecraft

To explore the cosmos before FTL drive will come about.

Bussard ramjets are a distant possibility for corporeal interstellar travel at STL speeds though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet

[Fumesucker]

8. Charles Sheffield "invented" the black hole powered drive in SF long ago..

The McAndrews drive.

And figured out a way to give it hundreds of gravities of acceleration without killing the (human) crew too.

All you need is some mini black holes and a way of handling them.

Sheffield is a physicist and his stories are very hardest SF.

http://www.amazon.com/Compleat-McAndrew-Charles-Sheffield/dp/067157857X

[Prometheuspan]

10. reality tests

in reality, the best chance we have for realistic drives to take us to other solar systems are nuclear powered ram scoop drive systems using magnetic fields and sucking energy down a hollow tube.

Black holes are too hard too handle, have their own mass to overcome, and then on top of that their own problems with inertia.
How do you hold a black hole still relevant to the ship? For instance.

We need to get out of science fiction, and quit with these exotic science fiction drives. We can build ramscoop systems with the technology we have right now that would get us to the nearest stars in hundred year time scales.

As long as we keep putting it off for fantastic and probably impossible sci fi drive systems, we won't ever do it.

But never mind other solar systems, there are trillions of colonizable objects inside of our own solar system, and that is where we should be putting our minds and eyes and thoughts and dreams and hopes and visualizations.

[Fumesucker]

12. Bussard ramjets are common in SF

Larry Niven is probably the most well known author to make use of an interstellar ramjet but the idea has been used by plenty of others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time

Poul Anderson used one in "Tau Zero", written in 1967, and took the idea to its ultimate logical conclusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero

More recently Alastair Reynolds has used Bussard ramjets in his "Revelation Space" novels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alastair_Reynolds

[Prometheuspan]

13. interstellar ramjets

its nice that science fiction authors have gone that route.

I'm all for warp drive. Even tell you how four or five different kinds of drives would work. But in theory, what will actually work
now, rather than science fiction maybe laters is the ramscoops.

Thanks for the interesting links.

:)

[qazplm]

16. I think

that there is plenty of dreams hopes and visualization to go around. Not exactly a scarce resource.

[freethought]

11. Anyone ever see the movie "Event Horizon"

This article reminded me of the movie almost instantly. The ship, the Event Horizon, was supposedly propelled by an artificially generated black hole, and to the "space faring" crowd the ship, as legend has it, was supposedly cursed.

Maybe you can rent the video or something.

[Prometheuspan]

14. yes i have seen that movie.

it was a lousy third rate kind of movie. lol

[cowcommander]

15. "Where we're going, you don't need eyes to see!"

Scared the hell out of me when I first saw it, kinda gives you pause that warp travel could have its dangers on the human mind.