Unmediated propulsion, at all possible?

[24forChromium]

By "unmediated" I mean propulsion methods that does not involve ejecting significant amount matter in the opposite direction of propulsion, and I am speaking in the context of space travel, so pushing ambient matter probably won't work very well.

I would like to know what is the most plausible methods that we have.

 

[Simon Bridge]

Any propulsion method would have to involve the law of conservation of momentum - so you have to change the momentum of something else resulting in the change in momentum of the spacecraft .

The popular approach is to throw stuff away - you want alternatives.
This would involve changing the momentum of something else that is around the spacecraft ... think in terms of sails.
I think the main ones are light sails, using either sunlight or a big laser.

Note: "unmediated" is not a useful descriptor for what you want to talk about.

 

[berkeman]

By "unmediated" I mean propulsion methods that does not involve ejecting significant amount matter in the opposite direction of propulsion, and I am speaking in the context of space travel, so pushing ambient matter probably won't work very well.

I would like to know what is the most plausible methods that we have.

Since there is a very low level of hydrogen in space, there is a possibility of gathering and fusing that hydrogen for propulsion. Have you read about that mechanism?

 

[Simon Bridge]

Would a ramjet be described as "not involve ejecting significant amount matter in the opposite direction of propulsion"?
Mind you - it would be the space-drive equivalent of a jet engine.

Also found this one:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/en...method-of-laser-based- spacecraft -propulsion
(Better: http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04254 )
... the idea is to use graphene sponges in a solar sail ... however, as the mechanism seems to be ejection of electrons, does this count as "no involve ejecting ..." etc type of propulsion? You are still carrying fuel with you and the power source is remote.
(Fun conference procedings article: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=1743051)

Laser ablation is another approach - same sort of thing but more dramatic.

Standard light sails are reflectors - there are vids of laser propelled disks but I cannot find one that does not descend into woo woo land.
I don't think there has been a successful deployment of a light-sail yet ... but the planetary Society are working on one for next year.
iirc it is also possible to use the charged particles in the "solar wind".

There's also an enormous amount of stuff in the pseudo and junk science realms to be avoided.
The most common one coming up in searches is the RF resonant cavity thruster - several variations - which is strictly fringe in that it has attracted serious scientific study but the surrounding chatter is pretty much all hype. The effects are small enough to be more likely artifacts than actual thrust. There does not seem to be any a priori reason to think that the setup should do anything and if it did it would violate long standing physical laws... so lots of reason to think it doesn't do anything.

 

[CWatters]

To avoid discussing banned topics I've sent a brief PM.

 

[24forChromium]

To avoid discussing banned topics I've sent a brief PM.

I guess I shouldn't have made my "restriction" sound so strict, what I am really interested in is pretty much anything but space rocket, and I never suggested that the conservation of momentum should be broken.

Light sail is a pretty good idea, the only downside being that it requires the presence of light source in order to steer. The nuclear fusion by collecting floating hydrogen particles is also along the lines of what I was thinking about in a pragmatic point of view.

Going a little into the territory of science fiction, something that I was thinking about is to somehow propel a spacecraft by emitting photons from the craft itself, since photons carry momentum, my concern was, to make a "flash-light" that has enough power as a propeller, even if its run by nuclear fusion reactor (or other fancy stuff like anti-matter), it may be more economical to just shoot out high-speed objects with rest mass since the mass of the fuel may be used up even faster by that giant flash-light. Still more childish idea is somehow getting space itself to convey that momentum. That is based on the likely false mental model of space being a giant carpet and "force of gravity" being the gradient of that carpet, if I am sitting in a shopping cart on that carpet, I would just temporarily lift up that carpet behind me so the gradient becomes "propulsive", but since this motion of the carpet spreads out like a wave, the impulse would be later conferred to other objects, thus achieving the C.o.M.

 

[Simon Bridge]

Giant flashlight would be laser propulsion but you carry the laser with you.
You could work out how powerful that laser would have to be... but the reason laser propulsion currently leaves the laser behind is that these things are very massive for the energy density.

The "gravity carpet" approach would be a warp drive ... because that "temporary lift up the carpet" is, by definition, a space warp. There are famous FTL solutions to the Einstein equations for this but you are thinking, perhaps, of an STL version? ie. Would it be possible to "surf" a gravity wave?
Either way, modest effects typically require many solar masses of energy in the "engine".

The usual way of using gravity is to exploit naturally occurring free-fall pathways.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network
... get to the right location and fall to your destination. The catch is it takes a long time.

 

[mfb]

The "flashlight approach" needs huge amounts of antimatter, otherwise you use up your fuel so quickly that shooting used fuel as propellant is much more effective.

You can also take two black holes, spinning and orbiting in the right way to emit directed gravitational waves (as quasar CID-42 had them). Doesn't look practical, however.

 

[jackwhirl]

1. Build an Oh-My-God particle generator.
2. ?
3. Cruise through space expelling negligible amounts of matter.

 

[mfb]

I think you should be a bit more explicit in step one.

 

[Simon Bridge]

Generally:
One way of getting around the need to carry lots of fuel is to carry less but eject a little at a time at very high speed. That way you use less reaction mass for the same delta-vee. You still need to carry the energy around with you though.

I think the most advanced engine of the "throw less away faster" approach is a nuclear rocket - possibly the Orion type "lets ride a chain of nuclear explosions" idea. Ion drives tend to accelerate very small masses to high speeds too - but the detla-vee tends to be very small.

One of the advantages of regular rockets is that the energy is carried around as part of the fuel ... kinda generated as you go: accelerating a charged particle usually requires a separate energy source that has to be carried around. Although the delta-vee varies directly with the particle velocity, the required energy varies with the square of the velocity.

An OMG Particle drive is just a fancy way of saying "ultra-high energy ion drive".
I don't think anyone has thought the OMG particle events are caused by unknown particles with special properties: just normal charged particles that have acquired a very high kinetic energy. The effect (without actually crunching the numbers myself) would be like having a pitching machine pointing out the back - throwing baseballs at 100kmph... only I'm picturing something like 50 LHC-size accelerator rings (plus the power station to run them, and a source tank). Pretty good for SF.

All these would probably be ruled out by the clarification in post #6 though: "pretty much anything but a space rocket" ... all above are variations on space rockets.

 

[mfb]

I think the most advanced engine of the "throw less away faster" approach is a nuclear rocket - possibly the Orion type "lets ride a chain of nuclear explosions" idea. Ion drives tend to accelerate very small masses to high speeds too - but the detla-vee tends to be very small.

Ion thrusters can reach a higher exhaust velocity, but then their force gets smaller as they are limited by the power supply. Give them a nuclear power plant and many years, and they get really large delta-v. Orion is less effective than an optimized ion thruster, but it can get the acceleration done faster.

Dawn with its ion thruster has the record for single-stage delta-v: more than 10 km/s.

 

[anorlunda]

I once saw a whimsical proposal to make a light sail of aluminum, two atoms thick, the size of The Moon, pulling a one gram payload, boosted by lasers in near solar orbits. That reminded me that minimizing total mass is much more fruitful than increasing thrust. Why not carry that to the extreme? Send information by light rather than massive objects.

How about a wager that none of us would live long enough to see? The most likely first meeting between humans and E.T.s will come by transmitting DNA and aux data needed to grow a man at the receiver. Impossible as that sounds, it seems more probable than a massive interstellar ship.

 

[rootone]

That's a lot of data though!
The bare minimum to be useful would describe a human egg immediately after fertilisation + data necessary to describe some kind of artificial womb.
I am guessing here, but would not be surprised if that amount of data is in excess of all the data storage presently on Earth.

.. then you have to include an error correction mechanism, which would be quite a headache when the transmission time per bit is measured in 100's or more years

 

[anorlunda]

That's a lot of data though!
The bare minimum to be useful would describe a human egg immediately after fertilisation + data necessary to describe some kind of artificial womb.
I am guessing here, but would not be surprised if that amount of data is in excess of all the data storage presently on Earth.

.. then you have to include an error correction mechanism, which would be quite a headache when the transmission time per bit is measured in 100's or more years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome#Information_content. Used to have this quote

The 2.9 billion base pairs of the haploid human genome correspond to a maximum of about 725 megabytes of data, since every base pair can be coded by 2 bits. Since individual genomes vary by less than 1% from each other, they can be losslessly compressed to roughly 4 megabytes.

Although transmission time can be 100 light years, many bits can be enroute before the first bit arrives. Data rate and transit time are independent things. Dispersion of the signal is the main hindrance.

 

[rootone]

Yes, but that just describes DNA.
DNA will do nothing by itself, it needs all the rest of a functioning cell in order replicate and eventually produce a living organism.
and that cell needs to be in an environment which can sustain it with necessary nutrients.

 

[Simon Bridge]

The other approach is just to send less payload: i.e. transhuman ships where the crew/passengers are AIs. They can opt out of a lot of the travel time by running the clocks slow or just switching themeselves off for a bit.

 

[mfb]

We have something like 10¹⁶ atoms in a cell. Most of them are water, many of them are in common molecules, so the number of bits we would have to send is orders of magnitude smaller. 10¹⁶ bits are 1000 TB - without compression it won't fit on your home computer, but many places store more data than that.

I don't think that approach will give very interesting results, however. Even if an alien civilization manages to assemble a fertilized egg cell and to reproduce a womb-like structure, what do they learn from the experiment? A lot about our biology, sure, but nothing about our society, apart from "we are fine with having a human grow up in an environment we don't know, without contact to any other humans for its whole lifetime, which is probably short".

Edit: fixed bug

 

[Simon Bridge]

There have been a bunch of SF novels doing exactly that.

 

[24forChromium]

Slipping away from topic here, (but it appears that it's not a fatal problem?) would any alien intelligence be so paranoid/xenophobic that they would blow any other intelligent beings out of the sky just to be safe?

 

[jackwhirl]

Slipping away from topic here, (but it appears that it's not a fatal problem?) would any alien intelligence be so paranoid/xenophobic that they would blow any other intelligent beings out of the sky just to be safe?

Would we?

 

[24forChromium]

Would we?

If one race of aliens start doing that, every civilization would at least have a kilogram of antimatter bombs stored up before they contact the next race. That would be my guess. Maybe things would be different once a species of intelligence start colonizing various locations and live in largely isolated communities, at which point they may realize how little difference there is between another colony of their own kind and other aliens.

Would human beings be xenophobic enough? Maybe not now, because nothing of the sort of encountering alien civilization has happened yet, and our leadership are largely ignoring that possibility, so I can't tell.

 

[anorlunda]

If we are unable to send massive spacecraft to other stars, what could we do?

 

[24forChromium]

If we are unable to send massive spacecraft to other stars, what could we do?

What do you think would be the main reason why we can't? I am sceptical that technology would be the cause of such inability, it will probably be a financial issue. Also, if humanity is trying to run away from Earth because something bad is happening, who gets to get on board?

Anyways, if we are unable to send massive ships, it may be conceivable that we send small ones, maybe private companies or individuals would want to do that. In terms of relationship with extraterrestrial intelligence, sending spacecraft carry human beings into distant space is the equivalent of a person cloning itself, except there are no guarantee that the clone would be anything like itself and may want to make use of the original's flesh--the newly generated colony of human beings, if they can still be called that, may want to "re-invade" the solar system like any Sci-fi aliens.

 

[anorlunda]

Enrico Fermi asked the question. If it is possible for aliens to travel here, where are they?

 

[24forChromium]

Enrico Fermi asked the question. If it is possible for aliens to travel here, where are they?

Maybe they are being sneaky about it, that would be my input, some other people can talk about the technological and biogenetic reasons why they are not here or don't exist, what I would say is that civilizations may be very reluctant to expose their existence.

 

[rootone]

A civilization capable of interstellar journeys would have nothing to fear from us.
For one thing they would necessarily have to possesses technology way beyond out present level just to make such travel even possible.
Secondly, a civilization of that kind would in all probability be a planet wide civilization, while here on Earth we are still at the stage of slightly different looking gangs fighting among ourselves over territory and resources, (or sometimes even over philosophy!)

 

[24forChromium]

A civilization capable of interstellar journeys would have nothing to fear from us.
For one thing they would necessarily have to possesses technology way beyond out present level just to make such travel even possible.
Secondly, a civilization of that kind would in all probability be a planet wide civilization, while here on Earth we are still at the stage of slightly different looking gangs fighting among ourselves over territory and resources, (or sometimes even over philosophy!)

That is very true, humanity today is nothing to be feared by interstellar civilization, but even our primitive nuclear weapons can create cataclysmal alteration to the planet--a possible desired resource of the alien. In addition, human civilization and its science and technology has had an overall trend of exponential growth, whereas the alien civilization may be at the limit of their development, so it may be advisable for them to blow us out just in case. Then again, that is an exaggeratedly pessimistic point of view that even I am not entirely accepting.