Authors: Warren D. Smith
We explore two crazy ideas for pushing spaceprobes to the relativistic speeds needed to reach other stars: (§1) "Graphene lightsail" accelerated by a laser on the Moon. (§2) "Magnetic superconductor loop" accelerated by charged particle beams emitted from a linac, betratron, Van de Graaff, and/or synchrotron on the moon. Although the first idea seems to be quite technologically infeasible, my initial analysis of the second idea made it look feasible, or at least not very infeasible, with technology plausibly attainable within 10-100 years! (Both analyses are mostly freshman-level physics.) This is not claimed to be a super-detailed very-complete analysis, but rather, only the beginning. Unfortunately §3 finds serious objections to our initially-rosy analysis of idea 2: (a) beam-aim precision requirements likely are too difficult to achieve in practice, (b) high- current betatrons only produce high electron not positron, currents — the latter might be impractical. One could counter that we don't know any fundamental physical obstacles preventing a and b in principle. But today's technology cannot do it. We conclude (§4) by suggesting future investigation of CEPP — cold electron positron plasma — since idea #2 indicates it is a potentially useful substance, and it likely has amazing properties.
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[v1] 2024-07-08 14:58:07
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