Astrophysicist Proposes Paperclip-Sized Spacecraft Could Travel at Lightspeed to a Black Hole (sciencedaily.com) 58
"It sounds like science fiction: a spacecraft, no heavier than a paperclip, propelled by a laser beam," writes this report from ScienceDaily, "and hurtling through space at the speed of light toward a black hole, on a mission to probe the very fabric of space and time and test the laws of physics."
"But to astrophysicist and black hole expert Cosimo Bambi, the idea is not so far-fetched." Reporting in the Cell Press journal iScience, Bambi outlines the blueprint for turning this interstellar voyage to a black hole into a reality... "We don't have the technology now," says author Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in China. "But in 20 or 30 years, we might." The mission hinges on two key challenges — finding a black hole close enough to target and developing probes capable of withstanding the journey.
Previous knowledge on how stars evolve suggests that there could be a black hole lurking just 20 to 25 light-years from Earth, but finding it won't be easy, says Bambi. Because black holes don't emit or reflect light, they are virtually invisible to telescopes... "There have been new techniques to discover black holes," says Bambi. "I think it's reasonable to expect we could find a nearby one within the next decade...."
Bambi points to nanocrafts — gram-scale probes consisting of a microchip and light sail — as a possible solution. Earth-based lasers would blast the sail with photons, accelerating the craft to a third of the speed of light. At that pace, the craft could reach a black hole 20 to 25 light-years away in about 70 years. The data it gathers would take another two decades to get back to Earth, making the total mission duration around 80 to 100 years... Bambi notes that the lasers alone would cost around one trillion euros today, and the technology to create a nanocraft does not yet exist. But in 30 years, he says that costs may fall and technology may catch up to these bold ideas.
"If the nanocraft can travel at a velocity close to the speed of light, the mission could last 40-50 years," Bambi writes in the article, while acknowledging his idea is certainly very speculative and extremely challenging..."
"However, we should realize that most of the future experiments in particle physics and astrophysics will likely require long time (for preparation, construction, and data collection) and the work of a few generations of scientists, be very expensive, and in many cases, we will not have other options if we want to make progress in a certain field."
"But to astrophysicist and black hole expert Cosimo Bambi, the idea is not so far-fetched." Reporting in the Cell Press journal iScience, Bambi outlines the blueprint for turning this interstellar voyage to a black hole into a reality... "We don't have the technology now," says author Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in China. "But in 20 or 30 years, we might." The mission hinges on two key challenges — finding a black hole close enough to target and developing probes capable of withstanding the journey.
Previous knowledge on how stars evolve suggests that there could be a black hole lurking just 20 to 25 light-years from Earth, but finding it won't be easy, says Bambi. Because black holes don't emit or reflect light, they are virtually invisible to telescopes... "There have been new techniques to discover black holes," says Bambi. "I think it's reasonable to expect we could find a nearby one within the next decade...."
Bambi points to nanocrafts — gram-scale probes consisting of a microchip and light sail — as a possible solution. Earth-based lasers would blast the sail with photons, accelerating the craft to a third of the speed of light. At that pace, the craft could reach a black hole 20 to 25 light-years away in about 70 years. The data it gathers would take another two decades to get back to Earth, making the total mission duration around 80 to 100 years... Bambi notes that the lasers alone would cost around one trillion euros today, and the technology to create a nanocraft does not yet exist. But in 30 years, he says that costs may fall and technology may catch up to these bold ideas.
"If the nanocraft can travel at a velocity close to the speed of light, the mission could last 40-50 years," Bambi writes in the article, while acknowledging his idea is certainly very speculative and extremely challenging..."
"However, we should realize that most of the future experiments in particle physics and astrophysics will likely require long time (for preparation, construction, and data collection) and the work of a few generations of scientists, be very expensive, and in many cases, we will not have other options if we want to make progress in a certain field."
80 to 100 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Well, theoretically with a pair of quantum-entangled electrons or something like that, one in the probe and one at a base on earth, you might be able to measure by proxy... I dunno, something relevant at least, near or even slightly past the event horizon. You'd probably have to do this a whole bunch of times to get a big enough data set to infer any meaningful conclusions from it though. Still, could be interesting if we could somehow solve the larger problem you bring up, which is needing to extend the at
Re:80 to 100 years (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike in science fiction, in the real world it's impossible to transmit information through entanglement [wikipedia.org]. If two particles are entangled and you manipulate one of them, that doesn't let you manipulate the other in any controllable way. It just makes them not be entangled anymore.
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Unfortunately no. Despite some weird claims in the press, entanglement does not transmit information faster than the speed of light, because that is unphysical and impossible. And because of that entangled information can not escape a black hole.
Well kind of, there is hawking radiation, but thats a slightly different phenomena at play inv
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Insightful. Given enough time, the laws of physics may change.
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But but but! It works on TV.
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I believe that you suggest violating causality. In that case, just go full FTL.
Re:80 to 100 years (Score:5, Insightful)
what are the odds that 100 years later anyone would remember to be listening?
I think this argument is the least of the problems. We're still listening to the Voyager 1/2 after 47 years. After the paperclip mission reaches 50 years, every year gets it closer to the final destination and it will be reminded on whatever communication medium exists. Whoever paid for the 1 trillion euro laser is going to set reminders.
One hundred years is a lot, but still reasonable. Some people born a decade or two after the launch will know about it and be well alive when it gets close to the black hole. They will also tell their kids and grand-children constantly, like we do with the wars from the past.
Our society does follow up for very long time. Ninety-nine year leases are a thing. We're still looking to arrest surviving WWII nazis (here the list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ). Some particular steam locomotives have been used for 100 years. The Millau Viaduct (tallest bridge in the world, built 2004 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) came with a warranty of 120 years.
Re:80 to 100 years (Score:4, Insightful)
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The laser is only needed for the initial launch of 17 minutes. We could be shipping a relatively inexpensive paperclip spacecraft every day and they will relay each other using little energy.
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Relaying takes plenty of energy, and the chain of paperclips would still be a pretty good distance away from each other. The relays would need to be able to track each other (which is difficult for paperclip-sized objects at huge distances) and orient their antennas to listen and broadcast to the leading and trailing relays. Also, forces including gravity and solar winds are likely to push them apart in ways that would be difficult to predict 80 years out.
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I'm not saying it's easy, not even doable, but we're reducing the problem from 1 paperclip to orient itself and shoot signal 25 ly from Earth, to a paperclips orienting itself and shooting signal to 0.3 AU from each other (17 min at a average speed 0.15 c). Presumably they see signal from more than one forward paperclip (since they're not that far apart), so we're not in a single-point-of-failure situation. They only need enough energy to relay each other a number of times for the measurements, but not cont
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Am I the only person getting whiplash that we're rediscussing the exact same thing when this concept was already proposed as Breakthrough Starshot [wikipedia.org], and was big in the press at the time, incl. on this site?
Anyway, you still have to have the energy to transmit back, which was proposed to be from a RTG: My hot take: since you already have to have a (comparably) big sail anyway, which means booms to maintain its structure, use 232U to get many times the energy per gram as 238Pu (38,9 MeV vs. 5,6 MeV), at the co
Re: (Score:3)
Re: 80 to 100 years (Score:3)
Drag 100 ly of monofilament wire behind it, then you can listen to the black hole when the probe is captured by gravity and at least listen to it up to the entry into the even horizon. Assuming the wire doesn't immediately break at the start of the mission, and doesn't require more material than exists on Earth (I didn't work it out)
very rough guess for 100 ly "wire" (Score:2)
500 metric tons of you constructed it like DNA. I figure human DNA is about 2 m long and a human cell weighs 2-3 nanograms and went with 2 nanograms for the DNA.
Nearest black hole, was:80 to 100 years (Score:5, Informative)
The nearest known "black hole" is about 1500 light years away.
Any material object will travel at less than the speed of light, very likely a lot less. It will need to accelerate a rong, rong, time.
So, you're looking at a delay of at least 2000 years before a signal can be sent back even in principle
Now, if everyone is very lucky, the probe will be accurate to an arcsecond and fly by the vicinity of the black hole. With this accuracy that's a distance to the target of at least a solar system diameter, or 10-100 billion km. You can imagine what a paper-clip sized sensor can see of a "black hole" at this distance. Also, it will fly by at the speed of light. It will see nothing.
But assume it did see something. How does it send the data back? How likely are we to receive a signal from such a device? That's something you can easily check yourself, there's a shitton of antenna calculators on the web, so I won't even bother. It is obvious no data is coming back, not even if you sent the probe to Mars and it flew past the planet at 250km/s, not at 250,000.
In short, this thing is impossible even in principle. It is a bad fantasy, like the "AGI", the tariffs that revive the economy, the idea that not testing for a disease will cure it and the veracity of the Moon Hoax.
Getting a signal back? (Score:2)
It's going to be the biggest handwavium of the whole project, unless we discover a near-zero-energy way to bridge those light-years..
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Actually thats a valid point regarding these "breakthrough" style mini-probes. Theres an awful lot of energy required to get a useable signal back. I *suppose* the proposed laser thats propelling it could somehow send that info there, are we even gonna be able to pinpoint this stupid probe that far away?
I suppose if this thing IS travelling at some high fraction of C, there might be a way to convert the kinetic energy accumulated off its acceleration back into EM energy, presumably in a rather destructive f
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Simple - on the probe will be an array of millions of nanobots. The nanobot mesh network will calculate and rearrange the position of the bots. Each bot will be able to rotate its body to expose either a reflective flat side or a textured/convex absorbent/diffusing side. As the probe revolved in its flight path, the surface created by the nanobots reflects the laser back to Earth like a CD player, allowing us, and any future technology, to read the data because it will always be expressed in universally-rec
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We might invent Faster Than Light Travel by the time this probe is half way there... ;) or become dust...
Variation of Breakthrough initatives Starshot (Score:5, Informative)
This is a variation on the theme of the Breakthrough initiatives Starshot, which has slightly (but only slightly) more exploration of the problems involved. I was wondering how they wanted to get data back, their suggestion is to launch a lot more nanocraft as relays. Makes sense.
https://breakthroughinitiative... [breakthrou...atives.org]
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The idea of that Chinese guy who wrote "The 3-body problem", in which the aliens "unfolded" the "11 dimensions" of a proton, encoded an AI supercomputer of Earth size in it, "folded" it "back" to proton size and sent it to Earth to play mischief with my experiments (as if the ground connection in any experiment "cave" isn't bad enough) makes about as much sense.
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Power drops off cubed, using thousands of relays will reduce the required signal power by thousands cubed. It helps.
Breakthrough Starshot (Score:5, Informative)
The idea is not new ...
It was proposed first in 2016 by Breakthrough Starshot [wikipedia.org].
Screw holes, probe ProxCent B! (Score:5, Interesting)
Proxima Centauri b is the closest "interesting" object. I'd like to see a micro-probe shot in its direction at about .20c, reaching it in 25 years (with a 5 yr signal delay).
A clever solar sail aided by ground lasers can perhaps push it. Or it could be our first test of nuke starships.
A big problem is sending back a signal strong enough to read. A well-aimed laser seems the best choice so far.
It's probably unrealistic to try to enter orbit, so it would just quickly shoot past the planets*, record the data, and broadcast it home when done navigating, similar to New Horizons at Pluto, but quicker.
It will probably have to be self-managing, because a receiving apparatus is costly weight, and has too much of a delay.
* If we time it during a good alignment, it can visit multiple planets in the system, but otherwise would have sub-degree course adjustment abilities. We'll have to study the system from Earth to know the orbits very well before launch. It would probably have to analyze telescopic photographs on its own a few months before it enters the system to fine-tune course. For example, the exact distance from the parent star probably can't be known from Earth, because orbit computations only give ratios, not exact masses.
Why and what is it's power supply? (Score:2)
How does it transmit data? I get that small is better. And I can see how we explore the universe with remotes and robots. We are not a species built for space travel.
What is our fascination with Black Holes? I am not a physicist, but I work with them, is this an expedition to make the math add up. Much like Cern is? If the Math adds up we can do something with that? Fold space or get free energy or something ... ?
I read Homer's Odyssey years ago and the crew had a fear about being consumed by something who
Re: Why and what is it's power supply? (Score:2)
While we're at it (Score:3)
As amusing as it might seem to flush stuff down a black hole [youtube.com], it seems like it would be more useful to adapt this idea for determining the habitability of exoplanets. As a few of the commenters pointed out on that story from yesterday [slashdot.org], having your generational ship arrive at what actually turns out to be a demon class planet would suck. [youtube.com]
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it seems like it would be more useful to adapt this idea for determining the habitability of exoplanets.
Why choose to live in a gravity well that is not mobile? Movable planets, aka, huge space stations, are where it is all at. Hang out in nebulas for materials. Wander away from supernovas and such. This type of habitat could be kept going until the heat death of the universe.
Sounds like Kipping's TARS idea (Score:2)
Prof. David Kipping had a recent video on his Cool Worlds youtube channel about "TARS". Which would be capable of launching tiny sensor probes out into space by accelerating them on a spinning foil.
Collimation (Score:1)
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certainly not hundreds of kilometers
We can hit those retroreflectors we left on the moon* pretty easily. So while current technology may not be light years, hundreds of kilometers should be a cinch.
*Or the back lot of Universal Studios.
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We can hit those retroreflectors we left on the moon* pretty easily.
Grab that Svelto book, I think there's an easy problem or ten in there where you calculate spot sizes for a bunch of beams.
There's a reason it is "easy" to "hit those retroreflectors".
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Wouldn't microwaves be better than a laser? You can keep microwaves coherent simply by careful timing, much easier to make a large coherent emitter ... a large array so to say.
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The coherent microwave source is called "maser".
Allegedly, this one [nature.com] is among the most powerful one ever built.
Its power is quoted as "-10 decibel milliwatts". How much is that in watts is left as an exercise for the reader.
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You don't need an amplification medium for coherent microwaves. Because you can just switch a voltage electronically to generate a coherent microwave, and to combine lots of microwave beams coherently you just need timing synchronisation.
To keep lots of lasers coherent, you need to split one seed laser and then independently amplify the split beams, a PITA.
I already tried this (Score:1)
Sending clippy (Score:2, Funny)
Clippy (Score:5, Funny)
So clippy has decided to come out of retirement and start a new career as an astronaut.
Re:Clippy (Score:4, Funny)
So clippy has decided to come out of retirement and start a new career as an astronaut.
"I see you're trying to explore a solar system! Can I help?"
SCIENCE FICTION (Score:1)
> We don't have the tehcnology now, but we might.
Yeah, and gold could come strewing out my ass.
Light speed (C) is something matter can't exceed, paper-clip size (is that an IEEE standard or a NIST standard or where can I read up on "paper-clip" size... if it's made of aluminum, titnaium, or unobtanium...) is not a thing.
This is ./ on acid. Stop it. Put Editordavid out next to the cans for this week's garbage collection, and move on.
What a pile of crap.
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Light speed (c) is something matter* can't reach even in principle.
FTFY a bit.
Otherwise yeah, this is another proposal that will never happen.
--
* that is, objects built of particles that have mass, like, you know, everything
Re: (Score:1)
I appreciae you fixing that for me, except that you didn't.
I meant matter. I said matter. You did address the part where I said matter won't be brought to C or close so this is just circle-jerking. /. on weekends...
But you know,
https://byjus.com/chemistry/di... [byjus.com]
Best to you.
E
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On the rest of the article the author say "a third of the speed of light", and "close to the speed of the light".
It's just the headline being pants on head stupid.
Leave science fiction to real authors (Score:2)
There was a similar article on Slashdot about a week ago - not the same topic or news item, but similar in that someone with some bona fides as a scientist or engineer was making polyanna predictions about future tech or tech-based ways of life.
The two are similar because - it is all a big "so what?"
Whatever their credentials, they are not writing about real tech or its applications. They are just fantasizing about the future based on some theme peripherally connected to what they work on their day jobs.
In
Dark Forest (Score:2)
While we're speculating in the realm of science fiction, we really should think twice about transmitting a mega powered laser out into space continually for 50 or so years.
By the Dark Forest hypothesis, we would be announcing our presence and location to any other race in the same direction who might recognize our potential to become a threat. And very possibly leading to our doom.
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Why black holes? (Score:2)
There are a million other interesting things to study. Maybe before we send that big inter-generational ship to Alpha Centauri, we should send a few probes to check out the system and report back.
Ridiculous title. (Score:2)
This title is absolute nonsense, obviously. No real astrophysicist would propose anything involving actual matter traveling _at_ the speed of light. It's impossible under the existing definitions of "travel" and "speed of light". Maybe if they were proposing new definitions of "travel" or "speed of light' or new physics. Otherwise no. Accelerating physical matter to the speed of light would take infinite energy. Not in a "so it's a solved problem if we can just get our hands on an infinite quantity of energ
Don't forget the shielding (Score:2)
"at lightspeed" (Score:2)
Re: "at lightspeed" (Score:2)
I think they mean "light speed class" in the same way a 72 inch "class" TV actually may only measure 71.5". Except the fudge factor is far greater.