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Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and its code hasn’t broken. Construct a stack of starships in orbit and you would be able to get a probe there. It’s never about

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and its code hasn’t broken. Construct a stack of starships in orbit and you would be able to get a probe there. It’s never about the technology, it’s about whether someone cares enough to spend the resources.

dmbche 2y ago
What do you mean about the starship stack? That's the array? For Voyager, I'll argue that it's mission is much simpler (doesn't need to aim forthe position of something 30 years in the future) and that we keep transmitting to it (the sheer distance will limit our involvement as the delays between transmissions grows). It's also not going at 0.15c, where it needs to do the calcs very quickly. I'm not sure how easy it would be to make a km wide Gw array on Earth, but building and powering it in space seems much, much harder. Just harvesting the GW takes 3 million solar panels. Just getting that to orbit seems unlikely. Even with very generous 1kg per panel we get 3 million kg to put in orbit, or 21 Falcon Heavy at max payload, or two years of putting nothing but solar panels up. It's so much. And then how much money is going to make the gram scale probe appear? Edit0: to clarify, the probe will have less time than the duration of the blink of an eye to take measurements. That's limiting what you can learn AND makes it very hard to aim correctly.
- toss1 2y ago
  When you have the means to harvest and beam out a GW in space, it is not like the only use for it would be sending those probes. Seems like damn useful infrastructure for almost anything else. So, we can expect the hurdles to be overcome for other purposes as well... Betting against humans making breakthroughs is usually a bad bet. As the saying goes: "You can say 'it can't be done' all you want, but please stay out of the way of those who are doing it."!
  - ngcc_hk 2y ago
    Militant use first if we are realist. Paid me or I will shoot you with 1Kw. I guess doing it on the far side of the moon is essential. :-(

dmbche 2y ago

What do you mean about the starship stack? That's the array? For Voyager, I'll argue that it's mission is much simpler (doesn't need to aim forthe position of something 30 years in the future) and that we keep transmitting to it (the sheer distance will limit our involvement as the delays between transmissions grows). It's also not going at 0.15c, where it needs to do the calcs very quickly. I'm not sure how easy it would be to make a km wide Gw array on Earth, but building and powering it in space seems much, much harder. Just harvesting the GW takes 3 million solar panels. Just getting that to orbit seems unlikely. Even with very generous 1kg per panel we get 3 million kg to put in orbit, or 21 Falcon Heavy at max payload, or two years of putting nothing but solar panels up. It's so much. And then how much money is going to make the gram scale probe appear? Edit0: to clarify, the probe will have less time than the duration of the blink of an eye to take measurements. That's limiting what you can learn AND makes it very hard to aim correctly.

toss1 2y ago
When you have the means to harvest and beam out a GW in space, it is not like the only use for it would be sending those probes. Seems like damn useful infrastructure for almost anything else. So, we can expect the hurdles to be overcome for other purposes as well... Betting against humans making breakthroughs is usually a bad bet. As the saying goes: "You can say 'it can't be done' all you want, but please stay out of the way of those who are doing it."!
- ngcc_hk 2y ago
  Militant use first if we are realist. Paid me or I will shoot you with 1Kw. I guess doing it on the far side of the moon is essential. :-(