I JUST HAD THE SAME THOUGHT, LOL xD Imagine us trying to agree on something like that. The only way possible is to agree to flee away from some sort of cosmic danger in the direction away from that danger. Only in the face of death we can come together and agree on something.
that sucks that doing a livestream to respond to the community kills the channel in the algorithm, that's the opposite of what it should do. even if that may no be as entertaining, discourse with your audience is still incredibly important.
It's cos of the length. YT tracks engagement, so if you have a really long video that few people bother watching all the way through, then that tells the algorithm that it's probably not a good video and so it hurts the channel. Funnily enough this system was itself put in place to combat the widespread use of clickbait to get people to click on videos that was the big problem in previous years. If you want to make a long video, you better be able to make it engaging enough to keep people's attention. That's why long form video essayists take so long to upload - they don't just need a long script, but have to fill the video with enough cool stuff to make ppl stay.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn This kind of thing is one of the consequences of no one, not even RU-vid, knowing how the algorithm actually works or what it's definitely optimizing for.
As a mathematician, "i don't know if we definitely can't" is somehow much more intriguing than "i don't know if we definitely can". Must be something about proof by contradition that tickles the brain just right
The whole of scientific thought and process is based upon the concept that absolutely nothing can be proven to be ultimately true, while also asserting that somethings can definitely be proven not to be true. But while mathematics can model reality, that doesn't make mathematical models true and correct. So, whether or not mathematics can, or can not, definitely 'prove' someting, I would have thought that such was a superfluous question. Also, hasn't it been 'proved' mathematically, that certain mathematical problems are unsolvable? In that case, 'mathematics' seems to me to be just as much a branch of philosphy as it is a 'science'.
@@TML0677 not necessarily- we already have things that are doing what he proposed. It's just that are so ridiculously small compared to the sun, they won't make a difference. Launch a million, and you might be able to organise them in a way that moves the sun. It's literally defined by physics
In May '83 at Los Lamaos there was a conference titled Conference on Interstellar Migration. Despite the title this was a serious conference looking largely at plausible hyperadvanced mega-engineering projects with the participants well respected members of their scientific fields. In 1986 the book Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience was published which goes into 25 or so of these sorts of projects from the conference in detail and breaks them down to show how each could be actually done. It's a bit dated now, but is extremely interesting and should be in the library of anyone interested in this sort of topic. Starlifting and moving suns around is covered in the book.
While I agree that such things are extremely interesting to consider, such should only hold interest to writers of sci-fi books and their readers, not 'serious' scientists.. especially if they are earning their livings off of mundane tax-payers.
@@sunnyjim1355 That's your opinion, but it's not really a valid one, despite how frequently it's repeated. Ideas like this come out of research into trying to understand the universe. It doesn't cost extra taxpayer funds for someone to take the research they are already doing and think about how it could be practically applied, and doing so often leads to further understanding and insights into your field of research. And, as is often repeated by the hosts of this channel and other hard science ones like Cool Worlds Lab, if we are going to be serious about looking for life and technological civilizations elsewhere we need to be considering what is possible, not just what we ourselves can do right now, and seeing if there is evidence for any of these possibilities. If everyone took the approach you're espousing here we would never have tamed fire or figured out how to make tools. While that would be a better world ecologically, none of us would exist and none of the things we use and take for granted daily would exist.
"if we are going to be serious about looking for life and technological civilization" what makes you think we have to ? Also science as a job as we know it today is indeed payed by tax payers, as mentioned by OP. So you somewhat have to justify the usefulness of it, especially when the humanity has triggered anthropocene era. Lastly, i think your argument that we would not have tamed fired with this attitude is wrong. The setting back then was entirely different. Regards
@@mrvaleryhugo I very much disagree with much of what you've said. And, as I pointed out studies like what was covered at the conference are *not* the main thrust of the researcher's work. It's asides that come from their main work, like studying solar magnetic fields. That portion of their work is taxpayer funded and has a lot of important applications. Thinking about other ways that knowledge can be applied doesn't cost anything extra.
@Hugo VALERY If every scientific finding had to be justified, progress would simply stop. Often it isn't until some other scientific or manufacturing advancement occurs that a previously discovery then becomes practically useful. Jumping the shark aren't you?
yeah yeah Futurologists like him are craving for those SF things. I watched Isaac years ago and yeah it was pleasant for the imagination as it even says most of its stuffs can be build with actual tech but this is totally out of touch with the reality of the human race and the audience is full of daydreamers escaping the harsh reality of stopping the dumb capitalism destroying our home.
This has always been my realistic long term goal for Earth. If we can manage to just stay in a habitable zone then we should be alright, and being able to adjust our orbit would be a fantastic start.
@@WiseOwl_1408Even if we could move other planets it will never make more sense to move another planet into place and terraform it instead of moving the earth slightly and terraforming it a trillion times less. Let alone that it makes no sense that we would have the capacity to terraform a dead planet but not have the capacity to save a live one.
We can't stay in the habitable zone the sun will expand or change the orbit around the sun as it is in resonance with all bodies if you move the sun you move all with it. And we won't get that far anyway as the sun keeps fusing it's core grows releasing ever more energy and heat . All water will evaporate from earth long before the sun goes to red giant.
Great video! However, it neglected to mention the "Star Tug" (a concept I developed and published in Acta Astronautica; can be found by searching "Svoronos Star Tug"). The Star Tug combines aspects of the Shkadov thruster and Caplan engine to produce an even more powerful and efficient mechanism for controlling a star's movement, and it can, in principle, accelerate the sun to 27% the speed of light. Essentially, it replaces the giant parabolic mirror of the Shkadov thruster with an engine powered by mass lifted from the star, similar to the Caplan engine. However, instead of pushing a star from behind with a beam of thrust, as the Caplan engine does, it pulls the star from the front via its gravitational link to it, same as the Shkadov thruster. As a result, it only needs to produce a single beam of thrust (toward but narrowly missing the star), whereas the Caplan engine must produce two beams of thrust (one to push the star from behind and negate the force of gravity between the engine and the star, and one to propel the system as a whole forward). The result is that the Star Tug is a much more efficient engine capable of significantly higher accelerations and max velocities.
@@castonyoung7514 It depends on how close the engine is to the sun. The farther it is from the sun, the more energy it will take to lift mass (i.e., hydrogen from the sun to act as fuel) to the engine, and the slower the mass lifting process will be. This limits the power of the engine and how quickly it can accelerate the sun. In the paper, I perform calculations for two scenarios: when the engine is only 10,000 km above the sun's surface, and when the engine is 0.4 AU away from the sun (i.e., the orbit of Mercury). For the first scenario (10,000 km from the sun), assuming perfect efficiency, it would take the Star Tug ~165,000 years to reach 1% the speed of light, ~38.5 million years to reach 10% the speed of light, and ~3.7 billion years to reach 27% the speed of light. For the second scenario (0.4 AU from the sun), again assuming perfect efficiency, it would take the Star Tug ~3.25 million years to reach 1% the speed of light, ~100 million years to reach 10% the speed of light, and ~4.7 billion years to reach 27% the speed of light.
It’s funny - I didn’t even think twice before changing my notifications settings to help Matt during his comments at the end of the video. I guess that’s a sign that you truly love a channel. Thank you SpaceTime for all of the happiness you bring to me and others.
Okay Matt, turn on my notifications. And I do have to say I noticed that PBS SpaceTime in any form was not showing up on my feet as it usually did. I actually had to look you guys up, I don't usually do that. Most of my videos are catch-as-catch-can. PBS SpaceTime is that level of real science that I loved it having my head. Thank you all.
The hubris of humans knows no bounds! lol...Seriously though It's good that we have people that think about these things in a serious way...Maybe whatever they think up can't be used to move a star but maybe it could be scaled down and used here on earth for something...You just never know
With a big enough solar sail, you can use a star to push a spacecraft. With an even bigger sail, you can push a star. That is pretty cool all by itself, but turning the sun into a rocket capable of traversing the cosmos at 10% the speed of light is epic. Replicating this strategy on a Galactic scale to move an entire galaxy across the cosmos? THAT would be a world of levels above legendary.
Or probably just make the reflector a lot smaller, but wrap it around more of the star, focusing more of the light in right direction to get more acceleration. Or, just find a star that's already in the right place and go to that, quit being so sentimental!
Yep and you can in principal scale that up even more to the galaxy group and cluster scale. With the growing evidence that Lambda CDM is wrong because the Universe does have a nonzero cosmological dipole moment (and thus isn't symmetric nor isotropic at any scale within the observable universe) that might become important since we seem to be near the edge of a truly cosmologically vast local crunch basin where if preliminary work is supported by more comprehensive studies it appears that the rate of expansion between galaxies is slowing down in that direction for the bulk flows while the rest of the universe is accelerating away far faster than the all sky average(which again involves an implicit assumption of cosmological principal) would indicate. Note that without the cosmological principal assumption to drastically simplify the mathematics there is a model dependence on the relationship between distance and redshift which leads to a major systemic bias if that model is incorrect. This systemic bias has been shown to be large enough that it can completely eliminate "dark energy" (i.e. the systemic error is substantially larger than the signal for "dark energy") Well I digress. The point was if it is as it appears that all galaxies are in freefall within a universe with directionally dependent acceleration vectors (a.k.a. the general solution of the Einstein field equations in any inhomogeneous and anisotropic universe) then if we want to avoid infalling into M87 billions of years from now we would want to control our trajectory thus accelerated control of the trajectory of galaxy groups cluster nodes etc. may be important since expansion will not be able to move those galaxies away from us forever.
For the live-stream causing a hit to your algorithms, best thing I've heard is de-listing the livestream after it's done, then linking it in a community post. You can also make a Playlist of just livestreams that you delist after the livestream is complete so that you can keep them relatively accessible. It seems to be related to percentage-watched-time in this longer videos.
One of the things that's been noted with starlifting and building megastructures is that it's not just the planets you have for available mass: The sun itself contains more useful elements than the rest of the solar system combined. So, if you're shrinking the star intentionally, there's a decent chance that will also come with enough free and useful heavy elements to build whole planets, if you want.
I feel like we are now on the precipice of making the Death Star. And somehow excited to pimp it out as our new ride while we explore… 😅❤ as always I love how you bring to life so many options.
Love it! This actually got me thinking of another concept that wasn't mentioned in this vid... why don't we just create our own sun? If we can master fusion reactions, couldn't we just create an artificial sun that permanently burns (from fusion reactions) then we could just use the earth as our giant spaceship, wander off and explore the universe? It's probably logistically a LOT easier than trying to drag our old Sun along with us.
I was wondering why I don’t get this channel suggested anymore. It seems like this is the only one of my favorite channels that I have to remember to look up rather than it just popping up into my home feed. I set the notification now at least lol
If people on one side push at the same time as the other side pulls, I think we might be able to move a few inches. Or maybe the earth tips over and we fall off, I dunno.
I must say every episode I love the music. It opens my mind to the future and of our primitive timeline we are in, that so, there is so much to look forward too
Thank you, Matt. It was great to see you at the 'How the Light Gets In' festival in Hay on Wye last weekend. My wife and I hope that you return next year. It was truly an amazing experience for us to have lunch with you and Bahar. Thank you so much.
@@NoMusiciansInMusicAnymore nah, they should look into jumping off the tallest cliff sans any protection instead - assume that is a human, these blind praising people turn into noise rather quickly and dont mean much to anyone who works at PBS.
There was a sci-fi book that I read in the 90s called something like “Humans at the end of the universe “ in which humans colonize a planet that is moved by a mysterious being using a stellar engine. Their star is used up and they build a Dyson ring around a brown dwarf planet in the system, evolving into different forms along the way.
The concept of solar engines always make me wonder in the case that Andromeda is populated with life and they are aware of and preparing for their collision with us, using solar engines to sort of force as many stars as possible to not be ejected from the "collision" and are assuming we are doing the same as well.
I wonder if we were to use some variation of the caplan thruster could capture other planetary bodies and stars? Not only would humanity spread across the stars but we'd be able to maintain some level of contact with our sibling planets. As a writer and a TTRPG enthusiast this idea intrigues me and I have a couple of stories brewing after watching this and the kurzgesagt video.
As a fellow writer and TTRPG fan, I appreciate your comment! Also, I quite enjoy corvids myself, so I appreciate the username lol. God be with you out there friend. ✝️ :)
Early gang! If you combine this with slingshot maneuvers around supermassive black holes how far would our megajupiter go? Would love to see some sort of great slingshot(s) off the great attractor. We would need a lot of redshirts.
The Great Attractor based on recent work which falsifies the pure kinematic CMB dipole assumption may be bigger and farther than has been conventionally though as the bulk flow has been show to extend far back to Gigaparsec scales and potentially if the preliminary look at data recalibrated to account for systematic bias and error it may potentially extend out beyond the current observable Universe since its encoded so strongly in the now measured to be nonzero cosmological component of the CMB dipole.
There's one thing I've been wondering for awhile. Combining ideas from this episode with the recent PBS Space Time episodes on humanity's maximum reach and older episodes on autonomous colonisation of the galaxy: Could we turn theoretically propel the entire Milky Way (and possibly also the local group) quickly enough to be within range of the rest of the Virgo supercluster before expansion permanently separates us? I'm not an expert, so I'd have difficulty calculating such a thing. There is also just a crazy amount of thing to take into account like dark matter, stellar remnants, central black hole, interstellar gas etc. For example, it might be possible to exploit some stellar remnants and the Sagittarius A* by building different propulsion systems. You'd also obviously want to make sure it will work, otherwise you'll be jettisoning insane quantities of matter away from the galaxy, particularly if you it turns out you'd need to use hydrogen as fuel since you'll be depleting the galaxy of star forming material. Overall, it may seem far-fetched but considering the lengths of time "crawl-colonising" the Milky Way takes (1 to 10 million years from memory), it seems plausible that we'd have the technical capabilities by then.
For super efficient intergalactic travel, just alter the sun's orbit enough to slingshot around Sagittarius A* and let that carry you across the intergalactic voids. Also, considering the search for hyperadvanced aliens and starlifting, it seems like what they'd want to do is lift as much mass as possible out of the star to make it a red dwarf, but keep the mass nearby in the form of low-orbiting gas giants, so that that mass can then be fed into the red dwarf as it eventually dwindles, and burn for longer. And, what do we happen to see, but a galaxy full of predominantly red dwarves, surrounded predominantly by "hot jupiters"...
I dunno if they'd bother, red dwarfs last for trillions of years already. If you want a battery that'll last even longer than that you might as well use a rotating black hole.
Thing is, that kind of mass distribution is what you'd get naturally. And what we see in other galaxies matches the curve here. Besides, they'd turn those stars OFF and just use fusion plants in habitats. Why would you waste all that power? Even a Kardashev 1 civilisation (which we're short of), only gets 1/billionth the power of their star. The rest is literally missing them in all other directions. A K2 civilisation has to build a Dyson swarm to collect it. Or disassemble the star into a thousand gas cans, COLD cans so you keep the losses down and just use what you need. Stars are stupidly bad at fusion.
@@archapmangcmg This kind of project presumes a Type II civilization to begin with. Which I guess ruins the idea that all the hot jupiters are the doings of aliens, since they don't appear to have dyson spheres around them; other galaxies looking similar wouldn't have killed that though, since they could all have advanced aliens in them. But just for us when we get to that point, we could just keep the minimal amount of mass to gravitationally ignite fusion in the star (and the more reaction waste products it accumulates the better as that just makes it denser), surrounded by a small dyson sphere, and then feed in the minimal amount of new hydrogen (from the big sub-stellar balls of it sitting nearby) necessary to keep it burning just hot enough for the energy we need there.
@@Pfhorrest You wouldn't expect ALL galaxies at ALL points in time to have the same kinds of intelligent aliens in the same numbers doing same things. You'd expect a lot of variation, given our own sun isn't affected. Isotropy argues against the speculation. AKA where are all the aliens in our own solar system? And a fusion plant is a better idea than a star for doing fusion power. Stars throw away the power and their own material, wasting them.
What we need is a way to move our planet to orbit another, younger star when our sun gets too old. Keeping it warm enough during the journey might be the most difficult concern to deal with.
Thus you move our star by a much younger star probably a longer burning Orange large enough the Earth would not get tidally locked to it while remaining in habitable zone. Then you move the Earth to the new System. In my Sci-Fi idea instead a large enough hydrogen cloud from the void is brought in while Hydrogen and heavier on the Sun are moved away to that the Sun is refueled. Meanwhile Earth Core heat is refreshed to keep the plate motion going instead of stopping and the magnetic protective field remains running.
A shkadov thruster also makes an insane "death star" level weapon. If you have a Dyson Swarm cover the vast majority of the sun but leave a "tiny" hole you can efectivelly concentrate the whole loght emited by the sun into an single ray akin to a laser capable of quite literaly vaporise the surface of a planet 20.000 light years away from us.
No. Since sun light is incoherent light source (like LED, car head lamp,etc), you will be just imaging/projecting sun image to the far distance. So your focus spot (that is sun image) is magnified by proportionally to the ratio of distance object to sun distance (from the mirror). That is why your car head light (or flashlight) never focus down to a tiny spot regardless of how much you try.
@@Danji_Coppersmoke A hole in a Dyson swarm would be similar to a pinhole-camera. But it's not phase-incoherence which is leading to fan out of rays, it's the lack of a focusing lense, i.e. that the amplitude is still dropping proportional to distance square. Spherical wavefronts can principally also have an arbitrary large phase-coherence length, yet their amplitude is rendered by the inverse square law.
It wouldn't work with the type of mirror used for thrusters. But what if the whole star was enveloped by reflective material, and then you leave a hole out? Maybe with a half mirror aperture on one side. Like a stellar scale laser.
@@greenanubis That's either the Shkadov thruster or the Nicoll-Dyson Beam. Depends what you're using it for, really. The Nicoll-Dyson Beam makes the Death Star look like such a weak, short-ranged candle, it's pathetic.
I’m glad you touched on the algorithm! Was wondering why I was being shown everything I didn’t wanna see but had to find your channel :( notifications are on now thank you
Safer and easier, for sure. I'm not sure if the slight efficiency boost from being able to skip the "don't roast/freeze any planets" parts would actually be that big a deal. I'd assume the larger consideration would be "which direction do you want to go in".
@@SolarShado Thankfully we orbit at a pretty steep inclination from the galactic plane so we should be fine for going forwards and back in the sun's orbit or towards and away from the galactic plane, where it gets trickier is combining the 2 or going towards and away from the galactic center, we'd be right in the toaster zone at least some of the year.
@@SolarShado I'd much rather move vertically away from the milky way if we were planning on leaving it. Wouldn't it be cool in billions of years we might have the milky way all in our sky in formation.
The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwiseknown as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’ the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question ‘Where shall we have lunch?‘” Douglas Adams the restaurant at the end of the universe.
Wouldn't the electromagnetic cone just be accelerated towards the sun instead of pushing it. Unless the beam of hydrogen beaming back to the sun has the same thrust as the cone resulting in net 0 acceleration? I don't understand how the cone actually pushes the sun
Not sure this scale of transport will ever be feasible - but I do think that if our species ever goes interstellar, it's either going to have to be digitally, or in permanent oneal-cities that travel between the stars - not looking for a new home, just occasionally stopping to resupply, explore, maybe build a new interstellar city, and then move on, very slowly wandering the cosmos. The thing is, once you can build a ship that is so efficient that it can carry people through the generations between stars, you might as well just scale it up and call it home, and no-longer have to worry about if you ever find a habitable world at the other end of your journey.
Moving the entire solar system would require an insane amount of energy, which funnily is equal to the amount of energy I need in the morning to move my body towards the coffee machine XD
I think we need to research a way to harvest the smell of coffee and use it in a NCD (Need for Coffee Drive) for space travel. I’m certain this is the way towards the stars.
How do we deal with all the objects in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud? I would imagine that many of these objects would be displaced from their orbit and could hit the earth if we start changing the trajectory of the sun
It's a non issue at that point of technology. First at the higher speeds, you'd just leave a load behind, any that plunge into the inner system would be easy to dismantle for resources.
I'm not sure if that's actually very likely at the relative acceleration we'd be applying... But if it is, presumably any civilization capable of building a stellar engine would also have the capability to deal with any stray comets that decide to wander inwards: a swarm of outwards-looking telescopes and one (or more) of the various theoretical intercept/redirection methods would be a much smaller (perhaps even "trivial") project by comparison.
I would guess these objects along with the asteroid belt would be the 1st used to build this sail/rocket engine and the infrastructure required to operate it. If they haven't already been mined for other purposes well before we start manipulating the sun.
Matthew, my solution (perhaps you’ll concur) is to first gather all the unused mass orbiting sol and ‘bottle it up’ before we attempt moving the system. To elaborate, I would advocate putting all the bodies at hydrostatic equilibrium (minus sol 1,2,3,&4) around Jupiter; all the non round ‘asteroid looking’ bodies harvested for material; and tightening the orbits of 🪐 Uranus Neptune as close to Jupiter as is sustainable long term. Finally, I think it would behoove us to star lift all the “metals” from the sun before we start ejecting the solar wind into the void (in a particular direction obviously).
I love the videos and watch as soon as I can Matt, always the night of release, and this one was great because it's given my ideas for scifi tab letop rpg games I want to run in future. I do love trying to apply concepts that are feasible if possible and I somehow had not heard about Kaplan thruster or forgot about it.
I really enjoy this sort of speculative engineering, regardless of how plausible it is lol. Thank you very much for this one. I enjoy the hard science and mathematics videos, but I do quite like these speculative videos that shake things up every once in a while. Thank you guys for what you do! God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)
Not without the Sun coming along. And we need it to supply the energy to do the steering, anyway. That said, it’s been proposed that we could try move the Earth farther away very gradually to offset the Sun’s warming over the next few billion years.
@@KingdomOfDimensions Hundreds of kilometer wide micron thin mirrors are more complex than throwing a bunch of airtight boxes in space, we've already sent a few of the latter.
It could be used to step aside from a black hole, a collision with another star, or one predicted to go supernova. Alternatively, if you are into stellar engineering, you could move around star systems and planets around. Perhaps, you could pick a lone star system and use it for intergalactic travel (plenty of resources and a stable environment), if you don't care how long it will take to get there. Of course, any of these demands a civilization capable of planning thousands to millions of years in advance.
@@monadic_monastic69 Yea, thats the thing! Unless they started 100s of millions of years ago or billions of years ago, we would most likely never see it...
Particles are what happen when waves are so tightly concentrated in energy that it nearly completely replaces all time (as we it). Breaking it apart spreads out the energy, requiring time to... speed up, or become less - partical and more wave (as we see it).
I love your content so much. I won’t do notifications for any RU-vidr though. I don’t need RU-vid notifying me to come look at the app I already look at too much. Lol. ❤
I have a question:how would this machine prevent its own vapourizing? It's stated that it's capable of giving the Sun an acceleration of 10^-9 m/s²,this gives a thrust of about 2e21 Newton.The exaust velocity is stated to be 0.01*c,this gives an effective power P=1/2*2e21N*0.01*c≈3e27 Watts.That's nearly 8 times solar luminosity.Even assuming an efficiency of 90% the machine would still need to manage the heat of a star.Since it would be much smaller than a star(i guess 😅)how would it remain solid instead of becoming plasma?
