Interstellar Propulsion Technologies - RANKED!

[@J31]

Where is 'ludicrous speed' from Space Balls? That's gotta be S-tier

[@bobajango55]

Yeah, he conveniently left out the concept of going plaid

[@treuerjustin]

Good point!

[@ShaunCollege]

They still gotta work out how to keep people’s brains from going into their feet

[@markbills4122]

We've been jammed!!

[@JohnnyWednesday]

Scientists are famously against plaid

[@Particleman50]

Step 1. Capture Alien Step 2. Copy Their Tech. Step 3. Explore The Virgo Supercluster

[@alterbr33d]

Step 1 is actually step 10, because this Alien is most likely near another star, and as far as I know we don't have a Stargate.

[@JohnnyWednesday]

Step 4. Get wiped out by an advanced race of aliens for our criminal acts.

[@ChinchillaBONK]

TLDR of Xcom playthrough

[@GearZNet]

We may already have completed step 1. Step 2 and 3 on the other hand... a little more tricky.

[@Slashplite]

you need to storm area51

[@Inug4mi]

This is definitely one of the best “tier” videos I’ve ever seen. 👍

[@GaganDeepSingh-p6m3y]

Shut up 🤫, what are you ? Nothing exactly go touch some grass and touch some 9 year olds

[@GaganDeepSingh-p6m3y]

Hello 👋

[@maxliani]

You should have added to your ranking criteria the ability to decelerate. It’s worth nothing if a system can accelerate a payload to a fraction of C, if the system cannot slow down to reach and stop at the destination…

[@jevinliu4658]

Deceleration is basically just accelerating in the opposite direction, so it'd be similar

[@blas_de_lezo7375]

@@jevinliu4658you don’t have the lasers in Alpha Centauri to slow down the sail…

[@christopherkelly4555]

The idea with the laser sail is that it doesn't need to decelerate. It can take images and other measurements as it passes through the system. You send thousands of them spread out over time. Each 'generation' becomes more accurate and focused.

[@jevinliu4658]

@@blas_de_lezo7375 Good point, but for the rockets (which is most of these) then yes you can

[@peterd9698]

@@jevinliu4658 Going at that speed, we could save a lot of fuel by using a magnetic sail to brake against the interstellar medium and the destination star's stellar wind. (I guess it is called stellar wind not solar wind?) As someone else mentions, this is only important for human voyages, which would be several orders of magnitude harder than just sending a probe.

[@CelestialVenerableValinor]

"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit." Everything good about my life was made by the overall contributions of many people over decades, centuries and millennia. From all the technologies I'm using write know to the language I'm speaking, the knowledge and entertainment that fuels my imagination: it's not my work, its origin is clearly other people, most whom never had me in mind. Maybe I could be somebody's reason for happiness just by being the influence of the influence that led some to wonder or puzzle some ideas and create something that generations later would be enjoyed by folks lacking all concept in the worse of the cases or proudly enjoy being human in the best of the scenarios.

[@junfon7097]

We should create a religion out of that quote.

[@Kveldred]

Very nice of you, but I can't get excited about it. I want to be the reason that I make myself happy generations from now, y'know?

[@splatbubble]

Pity that is a dying philosophy. We must do our best to spread it, if there is to be any hope.

[@marsbase3729]

​@@junfon7097philosophy sure, but we don't need more religion

[@CartoonrBOY]

My wife and I were watching The Three-Body Problem, and I suggested that the best way to reach the Trisolarans before their invasion would be with a laser sail. I’m thrilled you agree!

[@pauljazzman408]

I don't really like the pessimism of Three body Problem, but didn't they use the nuclear pellet sail method to send out the earth probe with and uploaded mind?

[@junfon7097]

​@@pauljazzman408They did but Trisolariams meddled with their plan.

[@TheSpearkan]

​@@pauljazzman408Yes, and it was a pretty stupid plan if you ask me.

[@peashooting_clydesdale]

@@junfon7097智子封鎖了你的技術

[@explorer_1113]

@@junfon7097 nah, trisolarans didn't meddle, something went wrong on their end

[@mckirkus]

When it's clickbait because the content is actually good

[@Alpha_Sigma01]

Amen!

[@bastiaan7777777]

Speed of thought: Faster than you.

[@AndroidPoetry]

How is it clickbait? You get exactly what it says in the title.

[@TheKeule33]

So it is per definition NOT CLICKBAIT

[@mckirkus]

@@AndroidPoetry Clickbait doesn't deliver on the promise. I'm saying this does

[@acarrillo8277]

No Nuclear Salt Water rocket? Do you know about the website Project RHO?

[@the_Kutonarch]

Love that site, great reading.

[@beskamir5977]

I was also disappointed by that not being mentioned. NSWR is basically Orion but with continuous explosions instead of pulses. It's like switching from grenades to proper chemical rockets. Easily S tier, although the effort of acquiring enough uranium as well as testing it with such extreme radiation might be a concern. Still the max velocity for a reasonably sized ark ship powered by a NSWR is around 7% c which is truly insane. Add a laser solar sail to further help get the ship up to speed, and suddenly the entire trip can be done in a few decades rather than several centuries.

[@EnneaIsInterested]

Chernobyllin' to another star!

[@LuciFeric137]

Dr. Robert Zubrin is pretty sharp

[@joaomrtins]

That's the one I was trying to remember, good one

[@Glydaire]

A huge advantage of laser sails and beamed power is that your "engine" stays comfortably in your home system. If one laser station breaks the ship may not even notice while a replacement is built. It opens up the option of building more stations after the ship has launched to keep pushing the acceleration and make up for losses as distance to the ship increases. Compared to carrying ludicrous masses of fuel and being dependent on your own engine it seems almost a no brainer. But you have to trust the home system will keep the laser arrays on line all that time, you need them for braking as well! You also have to trust nobody starts to wonder what else you could do with an extremely powerful laser array in the solar system. Or in the case of nuclear pulse how you plan to sell the idea of manufacturing potentially hundreds of thousands of gigaton range bombs without raising any eyebrows. Basically any remotely interesting interstellar drive is also a weapon, more than rockets already are. This does lean into the "wait calculation" which might be a good follow up. We might have the tech to launch something at a few % of c, but that might be overtaken by something launched later using better propulsion. And so on. There's a very tired scifi trope where a generation or sleeper ship reaches its destination and finds it's already been colonised by FTL ships millenia earlier. You might argue against any interstellar mission until we have beamed power or antimatter production online, otherwise we're wasting resources on slow ships that will get overtaken later.

[@ImBarryScottCSS]

You might also argue that some future technologies never arrive and instead of sending ships we wasted milleia waiting for no reason 🤷‍♂️

[@Tlailax]

I feel the process of investing into and building spaceships would teach you lots of useful stuff (interstellar lifesupport, astronavigation, long distance communication etc) as well as galvanising more engineers & scientists into the industry. You would not build the electric engine if you didn't start with steam power, for all that they're unrelated. Could in theory, practically in the real world wouldn't.

[@technokicksyourass]

@@ImBarryScottCSS That's assuming there is not limit to understanding of physics. There is significant evidence that physics could be very close to solved, and lightspeed will never be exceeded.

[@chuffer595]

⁠Absolutely. The process of figuring out this stuff and succeeding with less effective methods still teaches us a TON. And as has happened a lot before, we'd probably find innumerable helpful stuff out just for life on Earth.

[@Solnoric]

Until someone figures out harvesting and storing antimatter from the wild antimatter is only an energy transfer medium, just like hydrogen, and not a fuel.

[@jones7299]

Love seeing the Enterprise D on your desk, gave me a chuckle thank you

[@XShaneX19]

3:36 Ah yes. I knew what that stands for

[@retr0pearce765]

I'm dying

[@Himmel23]

Nooooo😭

[@Rianggr3]

Nutroom?

[@Razorfiend]

I did a double take when I heard it.

[@Himmel23]

@@Rianggr3 Stay pure, you summer child you...

[@Yattayatta]

Nice tier list you have there sir, Laser sail won out as I thought it might! Huge congratulations on the time on Webb by the way, I look forward to the results!

[@LuciFeric137]

Ancient motie technology

[@AlbertaGeek]

@@LuciFeric137 I understood that reference.

[@ThomasPalm-w5y]

The problem with laser sails is if you want to stop at your destination, not just fly past it.

[@Yattayatta]

@@ThomasPalm-w5y Yeah, you won't be landing on anything. The idea last time I read the paper was sending a minor fleet of sails since the majority of the cost is in the laser, not the sails. You'd then zoom past the target with a variety of sails with different instruments, taking snapshots and sending them back.

[@AlbertaGeek]

@@ThomasPalm-w5y Physicist and SF writer Robert L. Forward (1932 - 2002) came up with a solution to that in his book _Flight of the Dragonfly._

[@Wooterkins]

Been Watching you for years now. My daughter has grown up watching your videos and you have in part influenced her intense love for the stars. Thank you for what you do.

[@CoolWorldsLab]

That is awesome!

[@gavinmorey6449]

5:17 I’ve been working part time on DRACO right now and I’m so excited about what this technology could open up to us in the near term!

[@adrianbarreto4225]

how long before we can see it in space?!

[@gavinmorey6449]

@@adrianbarreto4225 should be in space testing late 2027

[@jamesssss621]

That’s fucking badass.

[@katekodess5591]

Oh man, it's my dream to work on DRACO! Lemme know if you need avionics people ;)

[@Gary-Seven-and-Isis-in-1968]

I'll bet you say that to all of the professors.

[@toogood4u0089]

You’re the best dr.kipping! Great video! Thank you for doing what you do, keep it up

[@Matthew.Morycinski]

17:30 Even if "mind upload" were possible, it is not a way to travel. The person whose mind is being uploaded would not experience anything special, least of all being transferred to another planet. The person sent is a separate human being, sharing the memories of the original, but not affecting the original's future experiences at all. If we do a two-way transfer, we have to eliminate - the K word - one of the individuals. If we transfer the original destructively, we eliminate two people.

[@KingBritish]

Best KZbin notification is always one from Cool Worlds 😎

[@A-la-Weiss]

Also from Melodysheep

[@esbenkran]

So true!

[@Roguescienceguy]

Cool worlds, Isaac Arthur and Event Horizon for sharpening the knowledge knife. JMG and history of the universe/earth for falling asleep while boosting those free neurons during ones sleepcycle

[@Gunni1972]

Dude i get my dose of laughter from it. don't jinx it.

[@coda7994]

Absolutely! Cool Worlds has been my favorite YT channel for years now

[@JoeCensored]

Surprised nuclear pulse wasn't higher. Between it and laser sails, these seem like the two where the problems are largely solved, and we just need the will to start construction.

[@AruSharma04]

You explain things so perfectly, I could listen to you explain nursery rhymes for hours on end

[@bobbyd.roberson5588]

I feel like the most difficult part of interstellar travel won't even be the propulsion... It will be dealing with any interstellar dust clouds you might encounter. If your star ship is going 10% of the speed of light and hits something the size of a grain of sand then the amount of energy is equivalent to a small nuclear blast. You wouldn't be able to go above low speeds until you got past the kuiper belt for fear of blowing up your ship, and even then if there is some sort of interstellar dust cloud you'd have to be able to slow down while passing through it or shield yourself from extreme amounts of energy on the frontward facing portion of the vessel.

[@YayComity]

Maybe send 200 million disposable ships and hope one gets to the destination. If that sounds flippant, consider that it is the solution used by biology to successfully fertilize the egg that each of us owes our existence to.

[@douglaswilkinson5700]

Several solutions -- from Fraser Cain's interviews (qv) and Isaac Arthur(qv) -- have been proposed. E.g. lasers -- blue shifted by the spacecraft's 10%c -- would vaporize interstellar sand-sized particles.

[@john-thejohn-johnson4403]

or you can use a laser to blow the dust away

[@tommiest3769]

Good point. I would suggest sending out unmanned probes at arbitrarily high velocities to see what happens to them (e.g. how often and how severely are they affected by impacts with interstellar dust?).

[@Matt33318]

2 ships are moving through space, with 50% the speed of light. The first ship would have a huge steel dome (100m in diameter or larger) clearing the path for the other one, the other one which carry the important stuff would travel about 1 AU behind it with the same speed (16 minutes behind it).

[@Antenox]

The sad thing is that we can barely hope too the scientific projects lasting longer than a presidential term.

[@Gunni1972]

Of course, because they all serve ONE purpose...PROPAGANDA. "We are the no 1" at exacly that.

[@claudiobruno3194]

Right, if the driver is the US....

[@saladinbob]

Your bias aside the Halo Drive should be D tier. 1. You need a Black hole and unless the black hole is in the inner solar system we're shit out of luck because the crew would be dead before they got to it. 2, and 3. There would have to be a black hole close to the target destination otherwise it's a one way trip. Even if you got to it you'd need a metric shit ton of radiation shielding which increases the costs significantly. If we assume Planet IX is a primordial black hole and we had a drive capable of getting to it in a matter of weeks, at most months, then yes it would be S tier. But we don't so its feasibility is zero, it's cost is extraordinarily high and for obvious reasons hasn't even had any testing unlike anything in C-tier above. It belongs in D, or elevate the rest of D.

[@MaxMax-ox2dl]

If you have the technology to reach a black hole, you could just go directly to the planet and skip the middleman 😂

[@GoblinUrNuts]

I never even considered planet IX being a primordial black hole…. That would actually be rad

[@bennettpalmer1741]

I'm fairly certain that D tier is reserved for things that almost certainly break physics and could never be done, even in principle. While the Halo drive has the obvious issue of needing to reach a blackhole to get started, and of course there are absurd engineering challenges like everything on this list, from what I understand the physics does technically work, so it should make C tier, though probably near the bottom. It has a similar "bootstrap" problem to mind uploading, so I think it would would go in the same spot.

[@archimedesnation]

+1 My thoughts exactly.

[@andyhaley]

As soon as I saw the title I needed to watch to see where Halo Drive would be allocated. Middle of the scale seems safe to avoid perception of bias, but when it sits beside Ion drive, I have to believe that a developing technology (Ion drive) needs to carry a bit more weight that a theoretical technology. Perhaps there should have been more segments/categories to place the options (I myself am biased towards Halo Drive as it seems like a very good option of interstellar travel, not withstanding the previously commented hurdles).

[@Ozie1981]

The rule of thumb that I like to use in my own thought experiments is something I like to call the rule of 9's. If you accelerate at 9m/s^2, you will reach 90% of C in 9 months. These values are rounded and if you do the math, none of them work out to exactly that, but it's a useful back-of-the-napkin formula. I also like to use this because at 90% of C, time dilation will cause the travelers to experience roughly half the time as earth (excluding acceleration and deceleration), which is also a good psychological limit for the travelers. If you experience half the time of earth, then when you return, things will be different, but probably not totally alien.

[@SoarWithSimon]

For me, the laser idea behind Project Starshot is the best one. It decouples the launch mass from the launch system and I think for any appreciable speed you need that property. This is actually what your Halo Drive does in practice. It builds probably the biggest and maddest version of the idea - using a blackhole to build a laser array of biblical proportions. My opinion is that your Halo drive will work and be practical sooner than you think, I suspect there are many small blackholes we simply can't detect. A lot of the missing mass of the universe could be these objects. There might even be such an object in our solar system, as some people think the Planet X object could be a low mass blackhole - with a size of a grapefruit. It would probably have tremendous rotational energy, being compacted to that size. For me, it would make sense to fund a mission looking for this object directly and seeing if we can locate it. If it was a a genuine blackhole, it would form a tremendous staging post for getting us out of Sol. It's far enough away that it's hard to imagine an accident capable of sterilizing the earth but close enough that it could be feasibly reached by another one of the nuclear drives in a short amount of time.

[@damiensmith9240]

"Missing mass" aka dark matter, is still hugely hypothetical and planet X has a lot of evidence against it.

[@guidojones6107]

_"My opinion is that your Halo drive will work and be practical sooner than you think, I suspect there are many small blackholes we simply can't detect. A lot of the missing mass of the universe could be these objects. There might even be such an object in our solar system, as some people think the Planet X object could be a low mass blackhole - with a size of a grapefruit. It would probably have tremendous rotational energy, being compacted to that size."_ Oh dear, I strongly suggest you stop talking and learn some basic physics. Black holes invariably accrete a disc/halo of orbiting particles and are typically incredibly energetic, ie, incredibly easy to detect. Black holes are stellar remnants, *END OF STORY* they _do not exist_ as "grapefruit-sized" objects! Please keep the utter bullshit out of any intelligent discourse.

[@SoarWithSimon]

I find this line or argument funny. We know the universe contains far more matter than we can see. We know blackholes exist at stellar masses. We've been unable to observe WIMPs despite our best efforts. Is it really that crazy to say there are lots of small blackholes which are too small, too isolated to have an accretion disk? Is it anti-science to suggest we hunt for this mystery mass in the solar system that some reckon could be an example of this missing mass? I don't know. I grew up before the first exo-planet was discovered. I feel like you would have said on a thread about whether we should look for them back in the 90s is that it's pointless, hopeless and anti-science and I should check my science enthusiast's card at the local library. And yet they were detected and here we are on the Cool World's channel some 30 years later. You just need some imagination.

[@guidojones6107]

@@SoarWithSimon _"You just need some imagination..."_ "Imagination" is irrelevant. Exoplanets were a painfully obvious reality, we simply lacked the instruments to detect them reliably. All the other crap you spewed has no basis in reality, or physics. There's a enormous difference between mindless babble and well-researched scientific conjecture, you might want to try to understand the difference.

[@michaelreagan7149]

I've seen some papers that suggest Alcubierre style drives that are subliminal (thus no causality violations) , and don't use exotic mater but specially placed mater which I'm still trying to get info on. Might be our best approach ?

[@micha9000]

The subliminal variant still depends on locally generating a sustainable and stable warp field so it still requires engineering a technology that has been barely demonstrated in the lab to exist, Nevertheless; pursuing the technology, whether negative energy and exotic particles can be created is our best bet for achieving superluminal travel which is key to reducing relativistic time difference between arrival and destination points.

[@MyNameIsSalo]

@@micha9000 you can't pursue something that doesn't exist. No such thing as negative energy, mass or exotic particles. Not everything in the universe has opposites

[@Kestrel990]

@@MyNameIsSaloit can be said that negative energy does exist and it is something we have already discovered, or a least something that can be a substitute for it. It’s called the Casimir effect

[@micha9000]

@@MyNameIsSalo The point is to develop the science and technology till they either succeed or fail because a crucial aspect of science is wrong or the engineering is impossible or impractical. The point of the pursuit is to develop a device before it exists.

[@michaelreagan7149]

So I'm a bit confused on the definition of antimatter(negative matter ?) which seems to only reverse one property of a particle that being charge. As I understand it a particle has many properties, charge, spin, reaction to gravity, etc.. Wouldn't true antimatter have a total reversal of all of the properties like moving upward in a gravity field not downward, polar spin vs equatorial, etc., etc. ? Isn't a positron just a electron that has gained some how a positive charge ? Sort of like how you can magnetize a iron rod to have the N or S pole by how you align the magnetic particles.

[@bigjermboktown6976]

Even though I know antimatter is a long way off that to me is one of the most fascinating ideas for space travel and I just really want that to be a thing now!

[@ukaszlampart5316]

Containment is the biggest problem when designing the drive from the anti-matter (after obtaining the required amount of it). Actual drive would be relatively straightforward among the futuristic drives, proton/anti-proton reaction produces short-lived charged Pions that can be directed via magnetic field in one direction and extract big part of the energy directly as thrust.

[@Roguescienceguy]

It's highly likely that certain fringe scientists within some skunkworks-operation already cracked the code of superconductive(yes, at room temperature) cyclonic anti-gravity engines. I have seen quite a few UAP in LEO lately while staring through my telescope. I've seen nothing weird in the 25 years before that. Ofcourse one cannot openly admit that, but I have no problem with admiting the observation to you here. The stigma is kind of going away to, at least, casually mention it. That or it's aliens, but that would require braking a few laws of physics probably, because if said aliens were somewhere in our cosmic backyard then we would have spotted their presence.

[@micha9000]

Antimatter technology is primarily battery technology. We could create as much as we want if our societies accelerated the development of fusion technology or solar collection satellite tech. Then we might be able to develop the tech required to efficiently convert energy into antimatter and store it efficiently within a few decades.

[@oldmech619]

Fusion is still 300 yrs away. It is that difficult. And it needs to be financially stable.

[@micha9000]

ITAR achieved a net positive energy production using their test reactor recently. Given our history, practical fusion should be achievable within 100 years at the very most.

[@carterpochynok4874]

This is a great content format. I'd be way down for more tier lists from you!!

[@bigjermboktown6976]

Interstellar travel is one of the most fascinating things there is. Fortunately I think there is a lot more people getting interested in this kind of thing and also a lot of wealthy people are getting more interested in it so maybe it'll move a lot faster than it has at at least over the next 20 to 30 years maybe.

[@Libertaro-i2u]

There are already serious plans to do settlements on Luna and Mars, and even orbital spacestead rotating habitats, so interstellar travel doesn't seem too outlandish if colonization proposals in our solar system come to fruition and are successful.

[@secondaryfront]

If we reach the Oort cloud I would consider it a success. Reaching another sun system with crewed vessel... that would be bigger miracle than finding way for human biological immortality.

[@Nemophilist850]

"Warp drive" doesn't really violate causality so much as it violates the limitations of mathematics being used to understand the universe.

[@GrOuNdZeRo7777]

It's real, just not what current science understands. We in the black projects already figured it out in the 80s.

[@boatymcboatface666]

😂​@@GrOuNdZeRo7777

[@SahilP2648]

​@@GrOuNdZeRo7777 yes theoretically possible but practically impossible

[@Zoltan1251]

Exactly. Thank you. I always get so frustrated with causality explanation by graph. Just because you learn of an event before light reaches you doesnt mean causality is broken. I always thought about it the way Einstein explained it, that information is "printed" in light and light is traveling. You also cannot interact with it. Why do scientist constantly talk about the "observer" when over large distances it makes no sense? Math is lagging for sure.

[@mryellow6918]

​@@Zoltan1251the issue is if you go faster than light you can actually interact with it.

[@haruruben]

Life extension technologies like gene therapies could help us explore space, if you could live to 1,000 then a 40 year trip to Alpha Centauri wouldn’t be a big deal

[@Art-is-craft]

The trip with the right technology could be 15 years.

[@Kianwan]

I have always argued that the next big step in interstellar travel is in bio engineering, once we find a "cure" for ageing, traveling for a few centuries suddenly becomes possible.

[@Art-is-craft]

Constant acceleration could enable a craft to travel at fractions the speed of light. In theory it could enable 99% the speed of light. But it would be a one way journey to the nearest stars that takes a few decades.

[@rwarren58]

No. Not the nuclear pulse. The aliens would laugh at us as we come nuclear farting into their system. No nuclear pulses.

[@Flesh_Wizard]

Not if we do it first. Need a meme with the nuclear pulse drive with reverb fart SFX

[@oldmech619]

And I bet the aliens wouldn’t have any spare parts for an old pulse machine.

[@Dinoenthusiastguy]

But what if it's an alien race where farting is a sign of deep respect and peaceful intent 🤔

[@z-beeblebrox]

Vetoing interstellar drive option on the grounds of it's embarrassing

[@diegopusineri472]

It would be kinda scary for the aliens.

[@Chiefs555]

You rock, man. Thanks for making these videos. We really enjoy them.

[@jkuhl2492]

Warp Drive being D tier breaks my heart.

[@Durzo1259]

I was so hyped about it for years, until I learned that the energy required would be insane. If I recall correctly, it was all the energy in Jupiter to travel a few lightyears.

[@greggdavis368]

With the recent updates theory that greatly reduces the energy needed to create the warp bubble, has generated greater interest in the theory. I think we will see rapid advancement in this area research

[@PwntifexMaximus]

@@Durzo1259 It WOULD be if one distorted space according to the current understanding of gravity and relativity. Which fails to explain the obervations of "dark matter" and energy (really just the spin of galaxies at the extreme edges) Which means at the very least it is incomplete.

[@stevenshea990]

Better to break your heart than break causality

[@PwntifexMaximus]

@@stevenshea990 Causality is a secondary effect. Entropy is temporally symmetrical.

[@rambler5766]

In 1998, Bob Frisbee and Stephanie Lifer of JPL presented a similar study, looking at various fusion approaches which included matter-antimatter, beamed momentum sails, Bussard ramjets, and E-M catapults. They also looked at the infrastructure required to support these. Conclusion, IIRC, was that a most promising solution was fusion, catalyzed by a small matter-antimatter reaction.

[@jamieoglethorpe]

Another possibility is millenia-long lifetimes, in which case slow travel times matter less.

[@odie11771]

This just made my Sunday morning!! Lovely cup of coffee, no problems to think or deal with... and sit back and enjoy this art form.

[@MrMonkeybat]

My favourites are Plasma Magnet Sails with dynamic soaring and Zebrin's Dipole drive. My favourite FTL concept is Musha Jump Drive, will will have the exawatt chirped laser pulses for breaking spacetime any year now..

[@MPBrickz]

When you started the video with stuff like "too impatient" and "want it in my lifetime", I was going to say that kind of thinking is exactly why we will never have it... But then you ended the video with the exact rebuttal I was going to give at 22:00. Bravo.

[@dougieh9676]

Professor Kipping is my favorite KZbinr. 💯

[@Whippets]

Not sure I have anything intelligent to add here, but I really think we should focus on those A tier technologies (for now) and creating a staging ground (base) on the moon in order to free ourselves of atmospheric constraints. We still know so little about our own solar system, I think we should be working on a better understanding of our own backyard and those A tier techs are a good start to speed up exploration. Meanwhile more advanced technologies can still advance.

[@Art-is-craft]

The technology required to master our own solar system will be amazing. It will mean large city sized space stations, solar transport systems travelling at millions of miles per hour, advanced robotics, micro scaled bots, safe nuclear systems and advanced biotechnology. Most of the Star Trek fantasies we have will be our expansion within the solar system.

[@Whippets]

@@Art-is-craft Not in our lifetime (even assuming a 1-year-old). The general public sorely lacks the will.

[@Art-is-craft]

@@Whippets Technology is growing exponentially. Computational systems are doubling in power every six months. That means in a decade that leading edge data systems will be a million times more powerful. Every thing from chemistry to circuit design is going to be thousands of times more efficient at design side. So the types of civilisation developments humans seen over a century will play out in 20 years.

[@Whippets]

@@Art-is-craft Without the will of the general populace to move forward many of these innovations will not bear the fruit most optimists expect.

[@Art-is-craft]

@@Whippets We are already in the midst of that computational boom. Data processing is doubling in power every six months. That means a decade will produce 1 million times what we are right now. It is already being applied to chemical engineering and other fields. In 20 years it will be a trillion fold. This is not about techno optimism.

[@henrycobb]

We're gonna build a Dyson Swarm to build Automated Interpolation models, so stick lasers on it and send manned spacecraft up to over half c with 1G acceleration maintained for a year.

[@dontactlikeUdonkno]

Would be good for a robotic survey craft... but a 'manned' craft would probably want to slow down at some point... or it would basically be a relativistic joy-ride that never ends (except with a collision).

[@JohnnyWednesday]

@@dontactlikeUdonkno - "relativistic joy-ride that never ends" is my stage name

[@MrCmon113]

@@dontactlikeUdonkno Yeah, he didn't talk about that in the video, I guess the starshot idea is to just fly by the target system? But I guess you could use electromagnetic breaking in addition to the light pressure of the star to slow down? Don't know whether that would suffice.

[@laurencedejong]

Wait a minute, the positive and negative mass at 18:25 would move in the other direction right? The red one repels and the blue one attracts.

[@cylinder_down]

Please ! Anything but the NTR rocket !

[@micha9000]

Why? Just curious. I prefer a very advanced ion drive variant powered by antimatter but the NTR seems like an ok design

[@yoursteban3713]

​@@micha9000, ntr is an acronym for a hentai genre which is basically cuck porn

[@mechalincoln]

lmao I was looking for this

[@monklord6098]

@@micha9000 ask your wife and shell explain it

[@Yoel_Mizrachi]

@@cylinder_down Anything but NTR you say? Sure - how about Zurbin's nuclear saltwater rocket?

[@prototropo]

Whew! The flurry of ideas in Dr. Kipping's presentation nearly generated enough power to send my imagination traveling at relativistic speeds. Hmm, wait a minute; that gives me an idea . . . what if the action potentials of neuronal electrical signals in a billion people during intense imaginative episodes were somehow collimated and oriented in the direction opposite the trajectory of an anthropogenic thought-sail? With enough concentration . . . well, I need to work out more details, but stay tuned! Seriously, another fantastic video from the BEST channel on KZbin.

[@zetsubouda]

Mass Effect really had a lot of fun with that negative mass idea. It might not be real but imagination and dreaming is what drives STEM forward! Great video!

[@NorCalSkeptics]

Fusion-Enhanced Clark-Sheldon Drive is my top-rated propulsion system. First envisioned by Rodney L. Clark and Robert B. Sheldon, the FECS Drive is a rocket engine design using uranium and thorium nano-dust fission for its main energy production and uses the fission products as the main reaction mass. (Also known as a fission-fragment rocket drive.) Magnetic fields control the resulting plasma. Deuterium fusion boosts the fission energy yield and also thermally boosts exhaust velocity, Ve. FECS engines might also employ xenon both as a neutron barrier to protect engine walls and as reaction mass accelerated by the Hall Effect and by thermal energy. One of the fission products, xenon-135, is especially good at absorbing high-energy neutrons. The FECS drive also serves as a magnetohydrodynamic electricity generator for ship. Specific impulse approaches 1 million seconds.

[@RockyBoi812]

any more info on this? i would like to know more

[@Art-is-craft]

What gas is used to generate the plasma?

[@mariovwcardoso5970]

I believe when talking about space travelling, we ought to separate earth-to-orbit from all space travel per se. Imagine like you have a big tanker in a complicated port town, where you need the tanker to be pulled in an out by an smaller ship, while in the wide ocean, it goes by itself. I doubt we will come up with anything (other some megastructures) that will make chem rockets obsolete on the earth-to-orbit stretch... but, the pulse propulsion could really shine if built IN ORBIT. Maybe in moon's orbit, and depart from there... not problems with the nuclear booms that way, right? Final Thought: In the end, I think a sum-up of various of those ideas are what will probably do the trick... Why should they be mutually exclusive? Go to orbit with chem: build actual interstellar ship in space. Ion Drivers for cruising along the way Solar sails on the first stretch, probably the power up with nuclear stuff. Laser pushing after Neptune or the Jovian system? Blow booms to deaccelerate (since you won't have the laser rig at the destination). Whatever else works for course correction and get extra speed (gravity assists, nuclear thermal, etc) Extra: you need a power source for the craft anyway, and a good one to also power the I.D.... whatever leftover heat from a nuclear generator (I don't see a better option for a century long trip) can be used as nuclear thermal propulsion.

[@micha9000]

Good ideas. The solutions I see seem to work best when various technologies are combined together. Also I think the international rules are backwards; more restrictions should be placed on nuclear devices on Earth or inhabited colonies and less restrictions for space. Your last point depends on the thermodynamics.

[@amansharma9506]

What an amazing Outro section David! Really made me emotional man!...I am not a scientist but i really wish to see humanity progress on Interstellar travel in my lifetime, can't imagine how much u guys would want it. Like u, I wish to see a photo of an exoplanet or wish space tourism becomes affordable and I get to step foot on mars.

[@xtieburn]

I wonder if sub-luminal variants of the Alcubierre/warp drives could go up a ranking. Still requires engineering far beyond our current capabilities, but they are apparently possible to build within the bounds of well understood physics we know today, I.e. they require no exotic materials and dont violate causality.

[@SahilP2648]

But practically impossible

[@Norsilca]

Doesn't every version of Alcubierre require negative mass?

[@bilbobaggins5938]

@@Norsilca It will only require mass to exceed lightspeed.

[@Norsilca]

@@bilbobaggins5938 In order to move at all you have to warp spacetime like crazy; don't you need negative mass for that?

[@guidojones6107]

_"they are apparently possible to build within the bounds of well understood physics we know today..."_ Complete bullshit... They are some napkin-math nonsense that uses non-existent materials and properties, manipulated in ways that are most likely completely impossible (regardless how "advanced" your technology is...) This parroting of sci-fi nonsense really has to stop; humans are fast approaching a brick wall of being able to manipulate materials and natural forces. The idea that "progress" will somehow continue to grow in a linear and/or exponential rate is complete nonsense. There's a _slim_ possibility that in the future mankind might understand the quantum world, but that has no bearing *whatsoever* on our being able to influence and/or manipulate it in any meaningful way, the two things are not related _in any way_ .

[@House_Of_Cards_]

Man, I have been looking for a video like this for YEARS! 👍👍👍 Thank you so much!

[@secretweapon7764]

Honestly I don't expect humans to ever leave our home solar system. Our machine "children" will go on without us. The distance, time, supplies, and risks are too high for our biology. Humans will instead turn inward. In virtual reality you can explore new worlds and live long and interesting lives. People will simply choose that over a 10 thousand year trip in a generational ship. Best case, the machines might be willing to take some of us along in VR storage and build us new worlds when they find them.

[@EnneaIsInterested]

Except... We can do short jumps from Oort Cloud Object to OCO, to interstellar objects, and the trip for that can be much shorter. We just settle rather big objects along the way, and build out laser or microwave beaming relay stations at each new colony, so people can go very fast indeed. And on the other hand, we can probably make ourselves biologically immortal given enough biotech development, we're already doing life extension for pets.

[@hpcuthulu6249]

Nah I don't think so

[@Alexander21025]

Great point. The robots can send the info of the new world, and we can explore it virtually, safely, and comfortably at home. There would be no logical reason to go there. Even if we live forever, then travel is too risky.

[@banksuvladimir]

There’s nothing to “explore” in virtual reality. It’s necessarily based on things we already know and things we can think of.

[@dynamicworlds1]

We'd need to eventually move systems when our sun goes red giant, but in the short term I agree. We're already seeing an increasing trend toward urbanization on Earth as the advantages to living close together continue to outweigh the advantages to living spread out, and as we head deeper into the information age, that's only going to be more and more true. We're also seeing our population growth level off, so it's not like we're going to need a galaxy worth of space for humans to live in. O'Neill cylinders are also WAY more practical than terraforming. And that's all without figuring out true VR. Sure, I'd be excited to get photos from planets around other star systems, but there's just WAY too much to miss out on by actually going there unless everyone else was coming too.

[@mikewadel1887]

Love your channel and your videos. I especially enjoyed this one because I'm fascinated about interstellar travel as well. Keep up the great work!

[@Archangel-v5y]

Yes he's biased. The Halo drive is a D and a non-starter. 'You can use existing technology but all you need is a black hole...' uhm ok. I just happen to have this black hole in my pocket... lets give it a go.

[@guidojones6107]

You realize that it's all completely pointless bullshit, just for clicks from the ignorant or delusional, right?

[@ichigokurosaki647]

Black Holes exist, don't they? So I don't see anything wrong with it.

[@Archangel-v5y]

@@ichigokurosaki647 Really? Where's the nearest black hole? How do you get there? How long would it take? So its about as realistic as a warp engine. Which isn't a time machine, but if you can warp space... think about the effects of gravitational waves on your ship aka 'tides'. Larry Niven wrote an interesting story on it. (Neutron Star)

[@ichigokurosaki647]

@@Archangel-v5y Bruh, its based on existing scientific principles, unlike the warp drive which isn't. Which was his point in the video. Stop arguing for arguments sake.

[@Archangel-v5y]

@@ichigokurosaki647 Look, its a theory which can't be proven because there's no way to test. No black hole. Using his own classifications its a D but as he said, he's biased. You're the one trying to argue this . Until we crack fusion as an energy source, you can forget interstellar travel.

[@danielfrappier3378]

I have invented an "Extra-dimensional" drive that use the energy created when 2 dimensions collide. It could give us insane speed. I just have to figure out how to access another dimension, how to produce energy from it and put that in a drive. Alpha Centauri, here I come!!

[@TurntableTV]

"I have accepted that I will never step foot on another exoplanet as much as I wish that was not the case." Thank you for making me feel so small and insignificant again, Dr. Kipping!

[@ancliuin2459]

I liked the summary content a lot, fine visuals too. Happy to subscribe!

[@imarchello]

What about multi-stage interstellar systems? Are they viable at all? This video by Fraser Cain touches on them: kzbin.info/www/bejne/e2iXfJpug9V2r6c

[@Voltaphonic]

Oh hi fellow Fraser Cain viewer!

[@stricknine6130]

Great video! Thanks for making it!

[@lexiahollandsworth4734]

always learn and enjoy so much from this channel!

[@rJaune]

What's the smallest Black Hole that could work with the Halo Drive? Great video!

[@CoolWorldsLab]

The limiting issue is mass, the mass of the black hole needs to exceed the mass of the vehicle to be effective

[@Hlebuw3k]

​​@@CoolWorldsLab and exceed by how much? How much mass would the black hole lose during the acceleration process? How long would a black hole with a mass like 100x of the ship even exist for, before expiring due to hawking radiation?

[@micha9000]

A follow up interview with Isaac Arthur would be great. The rankings are reasonable. I would split the list into non-living accelerators and living accelerators. Also the variants can include different energy, energy storage and transfer methods. The best bet may be a variant of the Halo drive combined with the most reasonably viable technology required to move black holes into key points on an interstellar highway. My favorite idea would be to combine various technologies to create a fusion powered high energy particle accelerator with a yet to be invented technology to make the confinement of the particle steams and re-acceleration ( to increase the specific energy and speed of the particles) to yield a concentrated high energy, high speed dense stream (s) of particles out of the device. It would need to be hundreds of kilometers (ideally thousands) long to transport people and equipment and a few dozen kms to accelerate light machines to the stars. This is essentially a variant of the Daedalus machine except without a pusher plate; it uses a stream of fused particles that are directed and accelerated . Ideally it would be powered by mesons or antimatter technologies and enhanced by exotic material technology to make the machine components more efficient and safer for the payload.

[@AndrewBlucher]

Is Isaac Arthur a scientist? I think he's a scientifically literate KZbinr.

[@micha9000]

@@AndrewBlucher He has a degree in physics and is president of the National Space Society, His approach to analyzing both practical and speculative propulsion systems is rooted in known physical principles and the practicalities of historical precedent.

[@AndrewBlucher]

@@micha9000 You seem to be a fan and would like to defend him. I'm not a fan. Each to their own. But maybe you can change my mind: tell me what original ideas he's published.

[@micha9000]

@@AndrewBlucher I am not really a fan , more of a critic of some of his ideas which are solid in fact. He helped develop an original idea called Star lifting which involves retrieving material directly from a star. He also helped design something called an orbital ring. All of his designs are directly applicable to the crafting of science fiction stories and many are probably elements that will be considered in future designs, much as Arthur C. Clarke helped inspire the satellite space industry.

[@AndrewBlucher]

@@micha9000 Thanks for your answer.

[@Michael_19056]

Let's deal with Mars first. Or even the moon. Or even civilian space flight. Wouldn't it be awesome to simply look back at our home from a distance? I would be honored to see even that.

[@peterd9698]

I like to occasionally just look at the wikipedia page "List of Solar System objects by size". Additionally, I have heard estimates of a couple of hundred dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt, most yet to be discovered, and possibly thousands in the Oort cloud.

[@odysseyorchids9507]

As always brilliantly done bruv

[@Nikolasz1173]

3:36 Do not google NTR

[@QualiLap]

Wow, what a powerful outro! We seem to default to only thinking within a lifetime. I hope your words on this inspires many!

[@sergiotorres1069]

Antimatter-metallic hydrogen Impulse jump drive . Only thing is that u can’t go in a straight line but an upward jump. U turn on the ships plasma bubble by blasting the bubble with ultra intense laser to squeeze the photons into a dense shield of “squeezed light plasma”around ur ship .angle to ship 90° for a jump .release the Antimatter-metallic hydrogen into impulse thrusters redirecting the squeezed light plasma around the ship into then thrusters via vacuum burst and ur vessel is in motion till u run out off energy . About 20x the speed of light !!! in a hop worthy of sci-fi fans

[@Gunni1972]

That sounds like the self-licking Ice cream cone has a shape-charged Twin?

[@simonm3951]

Keeping in mind that the solar energy is extremely small the further the sail moves away, is it possible to have some kind of light prism to converge the minimal light into the sail to provide thrust?

[@thanosandnobill3789]

I wonder how people in year 1845 would have ranked future technologies that would be enough to destroy entire cities by flying above them 100 years later.

[@JohnnyWednesday]

They had manned gliders, ever smaller steam engines, balloons and explosives. I think their guesses would have been pretty close.

[@12pentaborane]

Interesting thought, I'd say the top tier would be a chemical weapon of some sort, explosives somewhere around C or D tier.

[@minorityofthought1306]

B52 is S tier.

[@tommygun80127]

In the early 1800's scientist thought speeds of 50 mph would kill a human being.

[@claudiobruno3194]

And at the same time, go back to, and re-read the Science magazines projecting in the '50s what kind of life we would have enjoyed in 1960....

[@tinkertalksguns7289]

You forgot a couple of serious possibilities even if we accept a minimum acceptable velocity of .1 C. A British company is developing a fusion drive that might have this potential and it is not a pulsed detonation drive, but if we oversimplify it is rather like an ion drive on steroids. It is possible that this drive or a more advanced, developed version of it would meet the 10% threshold. Also there is the nuclear salt-water drive which seems a little crazy but might actually work. Personally I would not have included chemical rockets at all given the amount of travel time. At a certain point a thing is simply not worth doing, and a 70,000 year trip to reach the nearest star is unworkable on so many levels as to be pointless.

[@micha9000]

Yes, I agree; the pulsed detonation drive from the 1960's Orion Project seems to occlude the vision of directly generation fusion energy in a continuous drive and using the particles and energy to create an effectively "ion drive on steroids". I tend to agree on the omission of chemical rockets due to the dictates of the rocket equation and the low top speed of exiting particle streams out of any chemical rocket. Nevertheless a sufficiently large chemical rocket with a small payload could exit the solar system and travel during thousands of years. Within a few million years much of the nearby spiral arms of our Galaxy could be visited. It can only make sense over thousands of years of human existence imo.

[@GoblinUrNuts]

But here’s the thing: chemical is good for cheap. So if we develop something we have to use as a slingshot; it’s a great way to get a massive payload out to orbit; if for example we wanted to do a dual system where primary propulsion gets it as fast as we can and then we use something at the edge of the solar system as like a “railgun propulsion” like having a massive fusion generator way out at the end of the solar system where we smash antimatter as a final kick to move something from a medium speed into far deeper into the subliminal range.

[@bennettpalmer1741]

I agree that considering chemical rockets as a legitimate plan is silly, but this tier list is also including things like Alcubierre drives and Wormholes. Given that chemical rockets are infinitely superior to those, because they do actually exist, it does make sense to include them on this list. I'd have put them at the bottom of C tier though.

[@toddlerj102]

Excellent as always, thank you.

[@dontactlikeUdonkno]

Antimatter is likely the most realistic way for us to reach relativistic speeds with spacecraft so I'd put it higher up. It's almost certainly not something we can do in the next hundred, or maybe even thousand years-but as a consideration for future humanity, it's firmly within the laws of physics. I'd hope we would produce it off-world though, as accidents in use of antimatter might turn out to be a/the great filter to technologically advanced or interstellar civilizations...

[@dontactlikeUdonkno]

I understand a condition of this tier list was whether or not it could be achieved within our lifetimes, but it's way more than one tier higher than a warp drive, or wormholes... and since chemical rockets launched today would take *way* longer to reach interstellar distances than a relativistic craft launched in 10,000 years, I'd say it wouldn't be one tier below those...

[@invisiblekincajou]

Military guys will grab it first.

[@istvanvincze7411]

@@invisiblekincajou Most military stuff is about how cheap something capable of destruction is. Just look at drones vs tanks and planes, missiles vs lasers and so on. Antimatter is LUDICROUSLY expensive and probably won't stop being expensive because the whole point of the thing is that it instantly annihilates if it ever touches matter. A few kg of the stuff wouldn't make a bigger explosion than a slightly comically oversized H-bomb, a technology which we already possess, and will only ever be cheaper as we advance. I am really confident antimatter won't be industrialized for military unless we find a way to make it unsettlingly abundant.

[@invisiblekincajou]

@@istvanvincze7411 but h-bombs were and still are ludicrously expensive and complicated. It is their insane destructive power which makes them so preciousssss to military guys.

[@istvanvincze7411]

@@invisiblekincajou h-bombs are very cheap in comparison. We have tens of thousands of the things. A kg of antimatter requires twice the global gdp. You would need orders and orders of magnitudes of production efficiency improvements ( or just raw economic power ) to manufacture enough for a bomb. Military has been constantly gravitating for safer and cheaper methods and it won't stop, not that it ever has. Using antimatter for the same purpose as an H-bomb is the same as using an entire town to manufacture sugar because you can use sugar to make makeshift bombs with some other cheap materials and using it in your rockets and artillery instead of... you know, literally anything with more literal bang for buck. It's a non-starter, if you want a big explosion, just make a nuke. If you want a bigger explosion, make a bigger nuke. If you want a comically oversized explosion 1. you are insane and put the planet in danger 2. make a comically oversized nuke. Never, never ever will antimatter overtake nukes in explosions *UNLESS* we learn how to make so much that the price for the energy density is justified. And that will happen way later than use for experimental tech, because those require way less than a bomb we already know how to make cheaper.

[@DerekKent-yt8pq]

Wonderful video and excellent point at the end. If we ever hope to explore the cosmos, we have to think as humankind and not as individuals. As the ancient Greek proverb says: "A society grows great when old men plant trees, knowing they will never enjoy their shade."

[@georgespalding7640]

Humans must not be complacent. We must not continue to leave all our eggs in one basket. We must explore other planets and stars, other systems which we may colonize eventually. To do this we must explore the Cosmos with some kind of a robotic starship to find out what is out there, and what challenges we will face in our search for another Home. Thank you, Dr. Kipping for showing us the possibilities.

[@guidojones6107]

@@OOL-UV2Don't worry, the Earth's biosphere is _staggeringly_ resilient, as is the life that clings to its surface! There is simply *no* cataclysm that would make Earth "uninhabitable". The Deccan Traps eruptions that lasted _millennia_ poisoned the atmosphere to levels that make our feeble attempts look meaningless, yet life continued. The KT strike was "bad", but basically irrelevant in the long-run. Humans will persist though quite honestly _anything_ the universe will throw at the Earth. That said, it may be a cycle of "rediscovery" ("knocked back to the stone age", as it were), but the huge benefit is that humans are long-past the cognitive revolution, so millennia of prior development is already "done". Basically, humans are just "noise" in Earth's biome, we are irrelevant.

[@Thomas-sb8xh]

@@OOL-UV2 yeah, better option is move to Mars which is next to the asteroid belt...

[@nightkondor]

I am super excited for your coming time in october with jwst!! Wishing you and the team lots of fun and findings!!🎉

[@djayjp]

Actually Sabine Hossenfelder stated that a superluminal warp drive ship wouldn't act as a time machine because that conclusion that it does only uses solutions to SR, not GR, which if solved for GR instead, apparently those paradoxes melt away.

[@CoolWorldsLab]

Alcubierre himself, inventor of the metric, concedes it violates causality. In his last paper on the topic, which was peer reviewed, he describes this fairly extensively (see arxiv.org/abs/2103.05610). To my knowledge, there is no peer reviewed proof or refutation contrary to this statement.

[@Art-is-craft]

The problem with time dilation, warp fields and so on is that they require very exotic physics that we are no where near to developing. The only known route we have at this point is based on classical mechanics of the old fashioned acceleration and speed. Constant low acceleration a 1 G is what humans can tolerate over long periods.

[@MrCmon113]

If she said that, she's wrong. Any superluminal travel would be time travel. Where do you think she claimed that?

[@djayjp]

@@CoolWorldsLab You should solve it for GR then and publish the findings! :)

[@djayjp]

@@MrCmon113 I'm 100% certain she did as I checked it again prior to posting this. But that was awhile ago now and she has made so many videos (and I watch too many yt videos lol). I can't find that video :/

[@ventsislav1796]

I like that "Yes neither me nor you will achieve that, but Mankind will!" Our personal life is nothing, yet Mankind's existence is rather different.

[@jameswalker7899]

Solar sails?! I've always read that as a practical matter they're not useful much beyond Mars' orbit, because the Sun's solar wind becomes too attenuated? And laser sails? That will require some pretty fancy lasers there? But a nice array of possible options. Warmest compliments. Thank you, sir. :)

[@CoolWorldsLab]

Solar sails use radiation pressure, not the solar wind (that would be an electric sail)

[@toddkloos3965]

If you want to launch a solar sail on an interstellar mission, you should actually start by sending it towards the sun. A very lightweight solar sail that starts very close to the sun can reach a pretty high velocity, far beyond what is practical to achieve by chemical rockets or nuclear thermal rockets.

[@rolypoly4920]

I think the Avatar movies have it closest to reality. Use laser sails to get moving, then use nuclear or antimatter to slow down on the other end, until that first ship can build a laser in the destination system. Cruising at 20-25% light speed is probably the ideal goal.

[@thedarkknight1971]

19:16 - "This can reach up to four thirds the speed of the black hole..." Four thirds? 🤔😏 😎🇬🇧

[@mtrichard1016]

Four thirds is a completely normal number. It's just another way of saying one and one third.

[@thedarkknight1971]

@@mtrichard1016 So.... Why not '1.3' times the speed of a black hole? Hmmm?

[@mtrichard1016]

@thedarkknight1971 1.3 and one and a third aren't exactly the same number.

[@FakeJelly212]

You should do another tier list ranking exoplanets for potential for life

[@zephyrfpv9871]

Notification gang💪

[@zephyrfpv9871]

@@J31 Dumb comment lol

[@zephyrfpv9871]

@@J31 Even dumber ahahhaha....seriously, who hurt you?!😂

[@Outist]

such a unique video sir, thank you for sharing with us.

[@laurencehaccour9876]

Wait a minute, weren’t you working on something, David? When do we get to see that? 🤗

[@CoolWorldsLab]

Soon! It’s submitted for peer review

[@AndrewBlucher]

​@@CoolWorldsLabLooking forward to hearing about it!

[@Dr.Westside]

As soon as I saw the Enterprise D on your desk I decided to watch .

[@Namdor2012]

One small problem Earthling, you were raised by gravity genetically over eons which renders your fantasie void of reason....Rotation or acceleration only generate artificial sensations of gravity, and microgravity environments like the space station already show how crucial real gravity is for biological processes..Deep Space, or extended space travel is off the menu...Sorry to burst your bubble..

[@guard13007]

You've fundamentally misunderstood something: There is no difference between acceleration and gravity for biological processes. You also somehow missed that the primary items being discussed here are for their use in probes, not biological.

[@Namdor2012]

@@guard13007 No, you fundamentally misunderstand cellular and Molecular Response, microgravity effects, acceleration as a variable Force and gravity as a constant Force: Gravity plays a key, consistent role in biological adaptation and function. Acceleration can induce temporary or stress-related effects, but these are not the same as the evolutionary, long-term impacts of gravity. At 1:00, transport humans not just robots..Primary outcome, sweet cheeks..

[@JabberW00kie]

Fantastic video. I know it’s not as feasible right now and it’s a long way off, but having a base on the moon or interstellar shipyards would take away so many problems. After all, no one drags a boat across several miles of land before setting it to sail in the ocean. Ships are built on the water.

[@Arma5666]

Pulsed nuclear seems like our best bet if we want to send something to alpha cen this century

[@rocinante4609]

I find these videos fascinating but its interesting that we imagine we may be traveling to an exoplanet one day. The reality is even setting up a permanent colony on Mars would require us to become a different species altogether. The human body just isn't built for that kind of stuff.

[@zohn-yq6wx]

Ok, let me try my engine. Before you can warp drive, you need 2 energy sources. Maybe we can do a experimental warp drive equation. Ok the first trip in the warp drive (space-time) tunnel must be by a (AI) pilot. Because of that energy, that friction, that heat, in others words thermo-radiation that surrounds the ship's static warp bubble shell, would kill any person in the warp ship. This is the new warp drive equation. (Positive infinite energy = +E)+ Dyson Sphere (magnifier) + (Warp Drive gravity coils ship) × (AI Singularity)^(+E🔼(-E))= ( negative energy > Jupiter)× (Thermo-radiation(temperature)= warp drive engines. Let me explain ok exotic matter(- negative matter) is a waste of time. You must use what's in front of you, in your environment. For example in the Alaskan frontier you might have to cut trees to build your own home or use snow for drinking water. Or ..Or how sailors 300 years ago sailed the sea useing that energy that friction that surrounds the sails called wind, and the ship would move without an internal power source(engine). Again remember you must use what's in front of you, your environment. Ok look at the first part of the equation. Remember what I said use what's in front of you. The (Sun = +E) is our positive infinite energy source for warp drive travel, not exotic matter. Most scientists say we need the power(mass/energy)= to planet Jupiter to make warp drive work. Ok the (Sun= +E) power level is 10 to 100 times greater than Jupiter. That's our power source. (We solved our energy problem ). We would put many large solar deflector array dishes around the equator of the sun. Built by a (AI) quantum computer. All the deflector array dishes around the equator of the sun will redirect the (+E) energy into one highly focused concentrated energy beam and aim it to the dyson sphere (magnifier). For example how you can start a fire useing a magnifying glass with the sun (+E). The (magnifier) dyson sphere, will be built by a artificial Intelligence (AI) scientist and engineer. The (AI) scientist will figure out how to harness, how to collect, how to magnify that energy beam to the correct intensity. That beam will be aimed at the warp drive gravity coils. You might say what happens next ? Just look at the equation. Next is (AI Singularity)^(+E 🔼(-E))= (negative energy > Jupiter). Ok so how or who will build this machine, can it be done by a (AGI) or (AI) or (Super Quantum Computer). No No none. Only a (AI) Singularity, with infinite processing speed can do this look (+E 🔼(-E)). The triangle 🔼= delta a science term, to convert and change +E to (-E) and we have more than enough (negative energy) for the warp gravity coils to work correctly. The warp ship will go into the space-time tunnel. Ok now you might say, it's in the spacetime tunnel without a internal power source(engine), to maintain power to the warp coils static bubble shell. I know, I know just look at the equation. Next is Radiation thermo temperature. Remember what I said use what's in front of us, our environment. Similar to those 3 examples i gave you remember. We will use the radiation thermo temperature that would kill a person. that energy, that friction, that heat, that radiation that surrounds the warp ship's bubble to maintain the warp coils running. You see you see. We don't need to bring an internal power source(engine) on the ship, no exotic matter required. We need to use that radiation thermo temperature (environment) that surrounds the ship's bubble and somehow convert use it's energy so that the warp coils of the ship can use that radiation(energy) in the spacetime tunnel. And the ship will travel without an internal power source(engine) in the spacetime tunnel. Similar to how sailors sailed the sea 300 years ago without an internal power source(engine). Only useing that energy that friction that surrounds the ship sails called wind to sail the sea. Exactly, we won't use wind, we will Sail with radiation thermo temperature(the environment). One footnote Professor David Kipping talks about thermo radiation in video titled "What's stopping us from building a warp drive " at [13:14] of video.

[@fteoOpty64]

I have one. My "Plasma-Drive retrofit for StarShip. It is a superconducting "wrap" around the ship having plasma conduits to accelerate plasma at near light speed through six small nozzles behind it. The power source is a couple of portable nuclear reactors. It generates plasma in a magnetic bottle containment vessel then direct it towards the plasma injectors up front that accelerates it across the ship. The main drawback is while in motion, there is no possibility of communications with the ship. It is mean for inter-planetary long haul transport. eg Plot a course for Mars, the ship will accelerate it half way, then cruise/slow down the other half. If you travel at 0.2c, there is no way of avoiding any obstacle. Method is similar to the "Tall Greys" launching their ship from the Nevada desert on a moonless night. (Towards the outer planets of our solar system)... This drive will be used in outer orbit of earth towards any planet but mostly for Mars. I believe there is "time dilation" for the occupants in the ship.

[@Terran720]

19:17 - "4/3 the speed of the black hole" - WTF? 😮

[@Gunni1972]

that's about 1/10 of the speed of time, right?

[@Terran720]

@@Gunni1972 I thought it meant 4/3 light speed, that's why I was astonished. Now I'm wondering what you mean by speed of time. 🤔

[@istvanvincze7411]

@@Terran720 Probably a joke about how time and space invert in a black hole?

[@JanWnogu]

All objects in the Galaxy are moving, so let's say the black hole is moving at 30 000 km/s, then you can speed up your ship to 40 000 km/s. What's so difficult?

[@bigsby6bender]

If you watch his video on the Halo Drive it will make sense.

[@Cronites]

I love the idea of the greatest wonder of this millennium being a giant crewed interstellar mission. Thanks for the inspiring insight as always, David.

[@bp.007]

i do not understand why halo drive is on B. not proven, no prototypes, and entirely theoretical, and extremly challenging with doubious physics 😀. mind upload should be S. it is proven, we have the technology now. Maybe a physical human cannot, but our offspring an AGI can hop on a laser sail, go visit alpha centauri and descibe what it is like, it looks doable if we put our collective effort towards it. Maybe if Elon takes a fancy to this idea and decides to sent his xAi to our neighboring star systems, maybe setup an actual literal starlink. that would be wild. heres to wishing for the seemingly impossible 🍻

[@archimedesnation]

So, NASA builds the laser array, China and Russia claim it's an antisatellite weapon, etc etc. It could turn ugly really fast.

[@JaapvanderVelde]

I feel another brief mention ought to be given to the concept of prolonging your life and just travelling in suspended animation (in whatever way possible). It's up there with mind upload, but I'd consider it closer to reality, since we know of lifeforms that live essentially forever, we're closing in on the mechanisms of aging, and we've gotten pretty good at putting our brains in a state of relative stasis. It would still be a matter of leaving everyone and everything behind for many centuries, but it's a little less impersonal than a generation ship that sentences entire generations without a say in the matter to this fate, and all the hardware to keep them actively alive for that time. It changes the equation when it comes to "within a lifetime".

[@technokicksyourass]

Mind upload is potentially a thing, but you would ask.. why not just send an AI instead of an uploaded mind. Cryosuspension will never be a thing. You would have to rewrite your biology entirely to make it work.

[@Yo0264]

Don't google NTR

[@Wilhelm-100TheTechnoAdmiral]

I googled NTR

[@Yo0264]

@@Wilhelm-100TheTechnoAdmiral ooof

[@paulc96]

Dear Dr. David, Thank you for another excellent video. Probably to avoid this video becoming too long, I would guess that you deliberately did not mention the concept of Hybrid Propulsion Technologies. Such as a Slingshot manoeuvre around the Sun, utilising a large Solar Sail at the appropriate time. The same Solar Sail could also be used to decelerate at the destination Star. Any sizeable Interstellar spacecraft would be built & assembled in orbit, making it practical to include several different, compatible Propulsion Technologies, from Ion Drives to Nuclear Thermal and potential Pulsed Fusion. And perhaps a Ram Bussard system could also be used, just to scoop up interstellar Hydrogen, to be stored for use as fuel. Many thanks again for all the great videos.

[@AlexWalkerSmith]

I have trouble ethically supporting a generational ship. Individuals born during travel will have been unable to consent. We evolved on Earth, it's where our bodies and minds are meant to exist, and it would be a major sacrifice to abandon it forever.

[@bigsby6bender]

Everyone born has done so without giving consent.

[@AlexWalkerSmith]

@@bigsby6bender Yes, on Earth where we have evolved to live, that's the difference.

[@eval_is_evil]

​@@AlexWalkerSmith have to agree on this

[@catalyst3713]

But what if the ship's environment near perfectly simulated earth conditions?

[@AlexWalkerSmith]

@@catalyst3713 I don't know if that's possible. It would need to be Matrix-level simulation to even be comparable to truly living on Earth. And then you obviously have a new ethical dilemma to deal with.

[@jamesgeary4294]

Would the hyperdrive in Stargate be something separate from warp drive? I got the impression it takes the ship into higher spatial dimensions than aren't normally accessible, almost like a slower wormhole transit.

[@kingcake777]

Here is my idea: use superheated mercury to repel a magnetic field then have it cycle back to liquid form and so forth. Mercury drive. I got this idea from ancient texts 👀

[@micha9000]

This might be a poor idea based on a perpetual motion device; i.e. a a stream that runs a waterwheel that deposits the flowing water to a stream uphill that flows down to the original stream path that runs the same waterwheel.

[@kingcake777]

@micha9000 that makes no sense. Im not a scientist its just an idea lol but it can work magnetic fields are up and coming i hear.

[@Kestrel990]

This is just a design for a perpetual motion machine which don’t work which doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be used as a spaceship drive, you just need to pump energy in Unfortunately it also does not work as a spaceship drive. As the mercury gets pushed away from the magnet it will also push the magnet away, and as it cools does it will pull the magnet closer but the magnet will also pull it closer It will just be like a spring, it can bounce in and out but that does not mean it is moving. Also It is cool that mercury becomes diamagnetic when heated up

[@micha9000]

@@Kestrel990 I think I understand. The engineering would be fascinating to see. I have imagined a propulsion device that does not rely on Newton's third law, but would self transform to travel a distance. A working practical demonstration might be a good start.

[@invisiblekincajou]

Idea to use mercury as propellant for ion thrusters was considered to be too dangerous because of toxicity. Personally, i think this reason is quite ridiculous, because mercury is ofc toxic, but so do hypergolic fuels, but they ARE in use and mercury is noit. And if someone is afraid of Hg deposition back to Earth (like when such vessel is accelerating in close viccinity to our planet), methinks that total amount of mercury divided by distribution area will lead to undetectable levels of waste.