'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.

Comments

Re:There ain't no black holes nearby

[Joce640k]

I want to know how we're supposed to stop when we arrive at our destination.

Fermis Paradox explained

[Qbertino]

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.