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+--- Thread: Research A millisecond pulsar engine for interstellar travel (/thread-16853.html)
A millisecond pulsar engine for interstellar travel - C C - Nov 18, 2024
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2024/11/14/a-millisecond-pulsar-engine-for-interstellar-travel/
EXCERPTS: It’s no surprise that it should emerge through the work of Clément Vidal, given the philosopher’s long-standing interest in deep time and societies that go back to the early eons of the universe. Vidal (Center Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) is the author of the essential The Beginning and the End (2014) which along with his papers explores the terrain of matter and energy as a means of increasing order, and the possibility of locating ancient civilizations by finding what appear to be natural objects conceivably being manipulated by engineering on scales that we can only imagine.
Vidal’s latest plunges into what he calls the ‘Spider Stellar Engine,’ a steerable design using binary star pairs as parts of a propulsive system that uses one star as payload and the other as fuel. If this reminds you of Olaf Stapledon, you’re right, as it was he who wrote about artificial stars created to support interstellar voyaging in the 1930s...
[...] In this kind of engine, the payload is a neutron star of about 1.8 solar masses. The propellant is the low-mass companion star somewhere between 0.01 and 0.7 solar masses. And where are the passengers; i.e., the civilization that is transporting itself around the galaxy? We have a lot to discuss here, and I also want to dig into the Hooper paper referenced above as well as the subject of hypervelocity stars, which are possible instances of stellar engineering technosignatures. We continue next time, with an email exchange I’ve been having with Vidal and the fine-tuning of stellar engines.
Clément Vidal’s new paper is “The Spider Stellar Engine: a Fully Steerable Extraterrestrial Design?” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society Vol. 77 (2024), 156-166 (preprint). Leonid Shkadov’s original paper on the Shkadov thruster is “Possibility of controlling solar system motion in the galaxy,” 38th Congress of IAF,” October 10-17, 1987, Brighton, UK, paper IAA-87-613. The Forgan paper is “On the Possibility of Detecting Class A Stellar Engines Using Exoplanet Transit Curves,” accepted at the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (preprint)..... (MORE - missing details)