the Limitations of Intergalactic Travel

Previous posts have discussed "mind uploading". I think it is more likely that we will send cryogenically frozen embryos across the vastness of space, and "grow" them when they reach a suitable destination, then feed them knowledge from endless video feeds when they wake. We'll have to keep them asleep while they grow, except for language lessons. We already freeze embryos today, so I see no reason why this couldn't be done, in theory. We'd have to protect the biological organisms from harmful radiation during the journey, we'd have to supply them with seedlings to grow food, and we'd have to build robots that could do construction work to build habitats and start crop growth. There are nearly as many challenges here as there are in building colony ships that travel for centuries with populations on board, but when the Earth becomes uninhabitable, we might resort to anything to save our species. Personally, I'd sign up for a colony ship with a 100,000 year journey ahead of it, but that's just me.

I do not think anything we can currently develop or technically create (such as solar sails, ion propulsion etc) or even when these technologies have been refined, that they will provide realistic interstellar travel.

Impractical might be a better word than unrealistic or maybe economically/politically unfeasible.

Impractical might be a better word than unrealistic or maybe economically/politically unfeasible.

the reason I stand by unrealistic as opposed to impractical are that impracticalities automatically assume possibility

It always boggles my mind when people express opinions suggesting that NASA worked out space travel decades ago and that all it would require is some investment and a bit of polishing off and we'll be skipping around the galaxy like true space cadets. Space travel is hard.

Antimatter/matter propulsion has the highest specific impulse that we know of. With a 1:1 ratio of fuel (itself a 1:1 mix of antimatter+matter) to ship we get a specific impulse of a megasecond. That means the ship can thrust at 1g for roughly 10 and a half days reaching a speed of ~10,000,000 mps which is 3.3% of the speed of light. To get to near 100% you would need thirty times this but remember you need to decelerate at the other end, that gives you a 60:1 ratio of fuel to ship if we use Am/M. Now Project Orion proposed using nuclear bombs but these can only match Am/M if the following few hypothetical were met;

The entire mass fissile material is converted to energy
-- It isnt, of all the uranium only ~2% undergoes fission. Of this only a half of a percent is converted to energy. Little boy, the Hiroshima bomb, contained over 60kg of uranium but only a penny's worth converted to energy. This means you need to pump up that ratio from 6:1 to 6,000-60,000:1

The bomb's mass is entirely fissile material
-- It isnt, most of the bomb is casing/primer etc. I can't find the exact figures with a brief google but it would be reasonable to assume that only 1-10% of the bomb is actually fissile. this pushes the ratio further to 60,000-600,000:1

The whole energy of the explosion hits the back of the ship
-- It won't, for a 1,400miles3 ship if we make it a cube that makes a ship ~11 miles on the side with each face 121miles2. If the explosion occurs 30 miles from the ship (about the recommended for Orion) then only 0.4% of the energy will hit the ship (the energy radiates as a sphere, the ship obscures a small part of this). This again pushes the ratio to 1,500,000-15,000,000:1

Aside from the horrendous fuel requirements there's a tendency for people to assume that all the other issues are just minor details when in actual fact all areas of space colonisation are extremely non-trivial. For an interstellar colony ship you need to;

Create a sustainable biosphere for the ship
--We have very little idea how complex ecologies work here on Earth let alone how to recreate one that is immune from ecological disaster.

Create an environment capable of growing food
--Same problem as above yet with the added problem of a ship biosphere being a small closed system. In addition a wide diversity of foods combined with the appropriate bacteria to fill up our guts (which contain 1kg of vital gut flora).

Pack a fully capable industrial system into a colony ship
--Many industrial complexes run over tens of km, add up all the wide variety of industries across the world plus the infrastructure and put it all in one place. In addition you need to redesign all of it to have near 100% recyclable capability (remember that closed system?)

Pack a fully capable work force
--In today's high-tech and diverse society there are literally 10s-100s of thousands of different specialities. Provide enough people in the profession to staff each job plus enough to train the next generation and the total number of people in the workforce? You're looking at a figure measured in the 10s-100s of millions of people

Design a long-term stable socio-economic system
-- Societies on Earth don't exactly have a track record of long term-stability. An interstellar trip could take 100s-1000s of years. The vehicle isn't going to be analogous to a captain and his crew, it's more like rolling up an entire country's population building a wall around it and then sending it off alone. Remember a single failing point and the whole mission is gone

Solve all of those problems without invoking magic wands of super-nanotech, AI and robots and then you can play space cadet.

Sorry for the long rant but it's a pet peeve of mine when people blindly assume that manned space exploration/space colonisation is easy then pretentiously claim that it's only reason X that we can't do it.

“of all the uranium only ~2% undergoes fission”. This is perhaps true for the Hiroshima bomb…the first ever bomb of its type not only used, but tested. The second bomb used was 10x more efficient, and modern bombs, boosted by fusion, are much more efficient than that.

“only 1-10% of the bomb is actually fissile”. Again this is perhaps true for the very oldest designs, but I’m sure modern ones are much better designed than that. Just a few years after Hiroshima they could make bombs two orders of magnitude lighter with the same yield.

~30 meters was the recommended for Orion. The bombs were shaped charges which directed almost all the available energy at the pusher plate.

“With a 1:1 ratio of fuel (itself a 1:1 mix of antimatter+matter) to ship we get a specific impulse of a megasecond”. This part I can’t don’t understand because I have no idea how this alleged matter/ antimatter propulsion system is supposed to work.

The only thing I can figure out is that it’s incredibly inefficient, as matter/antimatter annihilation produces enough energy which, if fully harnessed, could move a 1:1 ship not much slower than the speed of light. This matter/antimatter propulsion harnesses only a small fraction of the available energy. This leaves many possibilities, including that it’s more inefficient, or perhaps similarly to the Orion concept, and therefore it’s likely that it has the same sources of inefficiencies (if not more) as those outlined above. This would mean that they were calculated twice.

And then, of course, nobody says that the spaceship has to be 1:1 fuel to payload. 1:1 is damn good. Hell, some modern commercial jet liners do that.

I don’t have time to go through all the numbers and see for myself if Orion is feasible, but I hope you can understand how an armchair space cadet such as myself will, for now, continue to take their word for it, and not yours.

Are you kidding? A nuclear explosion 30 metres away???? Do you have any links for that? How small would the explosion have to be not to destroy the ship/flood it with radiation and yet provide useful thrust?"

Sorry but how did you work any of that out? A moment ago you mentioned not knowing anything about how antimatter propulsion would work yet now you are claiming that the specific impulse of antimatter is somewhere close to 30megaseconds (close to what you would need to get "not much slower than the speed of light"

Of course it doesn't have to be 1:1 but that's a good reference to the efficiency of a propulsion system hence why specific impulse assumes it. You may wish to still believe in Orion but you could at least look into it yourself, especially with the things I've discussed that are nothing to do with propulsion.

Well I'm happy to change my stance on the basis of the distance. I can't actually find the link I got mine from.

What do you mean by calculating the resultant velocity from E=mc2? Are you trying to go directly from mass -> energy -> momentum? I still fail to see why you think an antimatter rocket would be less efficient than Orion.

The fact still remains that project Orion (and for that matter Daedalus) were both concepts, not fully worked blueprints. They little more bearing as a realisable product as Da Vinci's drawings of a helicopter. Note that I'm not saying that nuclear fission/fusion are not potentially good propulsion technologies, I'm objecting to the notion that we've got it pretty much all figured out.