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'Halo Drive' Would Use Black Holes To Power Spaceships (space.com)
A new study from researchers at Columbia University in New York suggests future spaceships could use black holes as powerful launch pads to explore the universe. The study "envisions firing laser beams that would curve around a black hole and come back with added energy to help propel a spacecraft to near the speed of light," reports Space.com. "Astronomers could look for signs that alien civilizations are using such a 'halo drive,' as the study dubs it, by seeing if pairs of black holes are merging more often than expected." From the report: Study author David Kipping, an astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York, came up with the idea of the halo drive through what he calls "the gamer's mindset." Using what he called a "halo drive" -- named for the ring of light it would create around a black hole -- Kipping found that even spaceships with the mass of Jupiter could achieve relativistic speeds. "A civilization could exploit black holes as galactic waypoints," he wrote in a study accepted by the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and detailed online Feb. 28 in the arXiv preprint server.
The major drawback of a halo drive would be that "one has to travel to the nearest black hole," Kipping said. "It's akin to paying a one-time toll fee to ride the highway system. You have to pay some energy to reach the nearest access point, but after that, you can ride for free as a long as you like." The halo drive works only in close proximity to a black hole, at a distance of about five to 50 times the black hole's diameter. "This is why you have to travel to the nearest black hole first and [why you] can't simply do this across light-years of space," Kipping said. "We still first require a means to travel to nearby stars to ride the highway system. Kipping is now investigating ways to exploit other astronomical systems for relativistic flight. Such techniques "may not be quite as efficient or fast as the halo-drive approach, but these systems possess the deep energy reserves needed for these journeys," Kipping said.
The major drawback of a halo drive would be that "one has to travel to the nearest black hole," Kipping said. "It's akin to paying a one-time toll fee to ride the highway system. You have to pay some energy to reach the nearest access point, but after that, you can ride for free as a long as you like." The halo drive works only in close proximity to a black hole, at a distance of about five to 50 times the black hole's diameter. "This is why you have to travel to the nearest black hole first and [why you] can't simply do this across light-years of space," Kipping said. "We still first require a means to travel to nearby stars to ride the highway system. Kipping is now investigating ways to exploit other astronomical systems for relativistic flight. Such techniques "may not be quite as efficient or fast as the halo-drive approach, but these systems possess the deep energy reserves needed for these journeys," Kipping said.
Maybe at some point civilizations come across a promising technology (like black hole creation) and don't see some hidden danger until it is too late?
Let me get this straight. Photons would be fired toward the periphery of a black hole, so that they'd slingshot around and come back... faster than light? What?
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
If this actually worked well, wouldn't we see halos around plenty of black holes, since other space-faring civilizations would be using the technique? Presumably enough laser light would be scattered by gravitational lensing or turbulence or whatever to be visible from here.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
"It never ceases to amaze me at the amount of fantasy physics that occur in science" - I am bored by the number of morons who make this exact comment, oblivious to the myriad "magic" advances that were so recently fantasy.
I didn’t read the article, but since the energy described would result in very short wavelength photons, wouldn’t the just pass straight through any solar sail? https://science.nasa.gov/ems/1...
Just a few, teeny tiny problems:
1. So you need to be close to the black hole. Except for the very largest black holes, the tidal forces will rip you apart. See the answer to problem 3 in this exercise: solar mass black hole, distance roughly 30 times the radius, tidal forces on a human-sized object of 50,000g. Good luck with that.
2. Aside from that, they are relying on a "slingshot" effect for the laser beam. But the photons are already travelling at light speed, so they cannot speed up. They energy increase will go into frequency: you'll be transforming light into hard gamma radiation. Enough energy to accelerate you to relativistic speeds is more likely to simply vaporize your ship.
3. If you survive the tidal forces and the radiation and actually get to relativistic speeds, you're going to need to target another black hole to slow down, by reversing the whole process.
4. Meanwhile, you still have to travel interstellar distances by some other means, to get to and from the black holes.
This isn't science. It isn't even science fiction. Heck, I expect more realism in bad space opera.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I'm currently playing Elite dangerous and taking part in the Distant Worlds 2 expedition community event. 8 months across the Galaxy and back. 8 months.
And while I have an unrealistic space ship with a fictional "Frame Shift Drive" that can jump approx. 41 light years at a time after "collecting fuel" by flying around a sun at speeds faster than light for half a minute (just as unrealistic) I *still* need thousands of jumps and days to cover the radius of our Galaxy without stopping for vistas.
Frontier, the developers of Elite Dangerous, did some neat things in trying to be sort of scientifically correct with the representation of space and solar systems. And it has shown me one thing I wasn't fully aware of until now: the scales we're taking about when we talk about our solar system, our '''neighbor''' systems or let alone our Galaxy are so absolutely unbelievably big the words "large" or "huge" don't even fit in the faintest way.
Bottom line: I'm pretty sure somewhere out there civilizations exist, have existed and will exist. However, that we ever get to meet them or they us is, to be realistic, very very very unlikely. Like, I'd say, even orders of magnitude more unlikely that life and then intelligent life comes to exist in the first place. Life happens in extremely narrow margins at our scale as it is. That we get to change the laws of physics and get to travel around the system, Galaxy or even universe like we get to ride a bike is nice daydreaming, but it won't happen.
Not for us and not for others. It's pure physics and a game attempting to show the scale of our Galaxy can drive home the issue of scale and distances we're taking about.
We're alone and they are too. And it will stay that way until we fade.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I hope it works out better.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.