Yesterday I wrote about the MEGA Drive, a newly designed method of space travel that wouldn’t involve any traditional fuel sources. A revolutionary approach that could allow mankind to travel through space at near the speed of light just by using electricity. But in the near future there may be an even more revolutionary approach to traveling through space: taking the entire solar system along with us.
As Big Think puts it:
“Advancing space travel generally involves building more powerful and efficient engines for space vehicles like rockets or shuttles. But what if instead of an individual spacecraft, you took our whole solar system on a ride through the galaxy by moving the sun? Such is the not-too-modest proposal of nuclear astrophysicist Matthew Caplan from Illinois State University. He published his designs for stellar engines in the December 2019 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Acta Astronautica.
In the paper, Caplan envisions two stellar engine designs, with one of them based on the idea of encapsulating the sun in a megastructure that would take advantage of its energy. Another engine would make use of a giant sail to move the solar system by about 50 light years during the course of a million years.
Why would anyone even want to do this? One big reason would be to move the solar system if we’re anticipating running into a mega-explosion from a supernova or some such cataclysmic scenario. Of course, we’d need to be way more ahead technologically for any such endeavor.
If you were to be moving the solar system, the convenient thing is that theoretically everything inside it would move along at the same time. Being pulled by the sun’s gravity would keep the contents of the system in consistent orbit.”
But, still. We often hear about the risks involved with various geo-engineering schemes. That we could wind up making things worse despite our best intentions because we’re dealing with complex systems that we don’t fully understand. Those risks would be magnified times a hundred if we’re talking about messing with the position of the sun!
Plus, even if these concept worked wouldn’t we run into interstellar objects like Oumuamua, rogue planets, black holes, clumps of dark matter, and various other impediments that reside in the space between this galaxy and the next? Could we even steer a solar system sized ship? And how would we even get close enough to the sun in the first place in order to capture it?!
I’m not sure. But it sure would be impressive. Just imagine the look on an alien’s face when we roll up on their tiny little space ship with an entire solar system! That would be insane! And totally worth the effort…
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