Interstellar Travel Without Breaking Physics with Andrew Higgins 

This guy gets it. Best way to get humans to do something, is to tell them they can’t do it. I like yer style dude.

These are awesome ideas for steampunk sci-fi! Ships whizzing around the solar system, gathering speed for a journey and doing the opposite in the destination. Relativistic weaponry firing shots that seem absolutely ridiculous but catching the enemy on its next turn around a planet. I absolutely love how that kind of space travel resembles sailing more than modern rocketry.

Andrew Higgins needs to write a book for the general public. This is a really fascinating topic. I'd read it and it would likely inspire many people to pursue this goal.

I remember as a kid, I used to think stars were just little specs of light that you could touch in outer-space lol I remember the day in school that I found out that those specs were actually distant sun’s just like our sun but super far away & you could never touch them! I was mind blown 🤯 Even today when I explain to other people that don’t know about space that those specs of light you see in the sky are actually distant sun’s just like our sun! it’s always fun to see them be mind blown just as I was all those years ago ☀️💫🚀🌎

Having had the privilege of having him as a professor, very inspirational to hear him speak on this topic!

One of the most powerful things in the universe, is the drive and passion of a human being when their mind is working.

Good tp hear that Jeff Greason's talents are being utilized. Though we've lost touch, I always appreciated Jeff's intellect and vision.

watching this interview a year later and dropping a reminder we are closer to our nearest star today then when this interview posted 😂🤯

Andrew Higgins seems a really down-to-earth guy for wanting to go interstellar. Good to see that someone like Andrew Higgins is running the Interstellar Symposium.

I was supposed to be falling asleep to the sweet sounds of science, and when this talk got going I bolted wide awake and my imagination just went wild. What a gorgeous idea!! This is the most exciting thing I’ve heard since I first learned about the solar gravitational lens about a year ago. I cannot wait to see where this goes!!

I’m about a year late watching this. I’m really liking this guest. Explanations about the solar winds were easier to understand than I had previously thought. Thank you. Also I’d like to hear more about the coils that were mentioned.

Dreams are there to inspire us. They don't have to be practical or realistic, they can just be fantastic dreams.

Theoretical physicists are great but practical engineering is arguably more fascinating when discussing topics like this! Great convo!

Every time I hear about using the solar winds for interstellar travel I think about that Deep Space 9 episode (Explorers, Season 3, Ep. 22). Commander Sisko built a sailing ship based off of an ancient Bajoran design and achieved warp speed. I loved that show!

This guy is so endearing and honest. I'v paraphrased but - "what a beautiful thought to tread lightly on Earth, industry doesnt happen here any more " "Yeah we COULD do it that way but we must think of this, this and this" Really easy to understand, thoroughly enjoyed this video, gonna go check your other stuff now, subscribed!

OMG! I know Joe Jackson! I used to work in the residential A/V feild out of a suite RIGHT NEXT DOOR to H-Bar Technologies, and actually got to tour their facility after asking him "Doesn't it require 'dammit' magnetic containment to store antimatter?", to which he responded "No, nothing nearly as extreme as you might imagine." He then showed me around and even showed me the containment vessels (two DIFFERENT types) which were only approximately the size of a large home deep freezer. Just thouht I'd share...

In all the years I’ve been watching science content on RU-vid this is by far the most exciting one ever. I was glued to this interview from start to finish and am now trying to figure out if I can get to Montreal for the symposium. Thank you so much!

This interview was speechless this man has so much information that he just threw on to all of us that it just blows my mind. I had no idea that birds can sense that in the wind and there was an actual application for using it with a glider. This changes everything and I really hope that the people that are in this field working on this live a long life so they can give us as much knowledge as possible for us to go into interstellar space. Thank you so much for this interview

Catching up on all the space news and stories. Loved this interview...even though most of it blasted over my head at 10% the speed of light. Thanks Fraser for another great interview

This is such a great interview. Mr. Higgins is a great teacher!

Testing those technologies in the solar system is very important in my opinion. The jump from chemical rockets to interstelar travel is huge. It would also be important to draw attention and funding to those projects.

There is a 1 billionth scale model of the Solar System along the Melbourne foreshores with a 1.4m diameter Sun centred in St Kilda, a 12.5mm Earth 150m away and Pluto 5.8km away near Port Melbourne. When you walk the distance between 140mm Jupiter and 116mm Saturn (assuming they actually were in alignment, which they mostly aren't) you truly appreciate just how much nothing there is in space. I missed it the first time I was there, but a 215mm Proxima Centauri is near the Sun in this scale, based on having travelled the entire circumference of the Earth to reach it. The scale you mention of the Sun being the size of a grapefruit, the Earth would be much smaller than a peppercorn.

1:00:48 "tread lightly". Beautifully spoken.

Amazing talk thank you very much! So glad I subbed to this channel. Future generations are going to witness these Interstellar missions and they are in for a real treat! I'm glad the rest of us are around to see the first small steps taken!

You are a dream killer Fraser, but you're also a dream creator because when you put down a person that is really driven to get something to work, they will someday get it done, one way or another.

We need a lot more interviews like this!

There are so many problems with this concept that I don't even know where to start. Recommended procedure for anyone: 1/ Buy KSP 2/ See and understand the orbital mechanics of the bodies 3/ Understand that it's already complicated to reach an inclination >20° in solar orbit 4/ Understand that it's impossible to stay in solar orbit as soon as the speed of the spacecraft exceeds 60km/s at 1UA. 5/ Understand that surfing on solar wind waves necessarily implies being able to detect the solar wind gradient around the spacecraft continuously. 6/ Understand that surfing on solar wind waves necessarily implies having an unimaginable TWR and therefore materials that resist. 7/ Understand that the solar liberation velocity at the heliopause is so low that it's insane to believe that we can stay in solar orbit down to even 0.05% of c. 8/ Stop believing in a whole bunch of far-fetched solutions and honour the engineers of the last 200 years by understanding that if they haven't already done it, it's because it's not possible. If this concept is feasible in the next 150 years, I'll eat my hat!

I would *love* it if we went back to Neptune in my lifetime! I've loved Neptune since I was a kid - a long time ago - and even wrote a short sci-fi story about Neptune in middle school. Really enjoyed this conversation!

That was a fun interview. It makes me wish I were immortal to see what kind of technologies and discoveries are going to happen long after I would've died.

Fantastic interview! Thanks. It's great to know we have people like Andrew Higgins right here at McGill.

This was the video that ultimately urged me to pursue my dream of studying physics, now I start my journey next week. It was content like Fraser's that has kept my flame stoked through the rain. Thank you for this great interview and the months of inspiration I've received from your many videos.

35:19. The ship's cargo should be at the back in a bay area as in a cargo bay door emergency air pressure release. 💭

Fascinating interview, thanks Frasier! Imagine getting up to 20 - 30% without a Jupiter massed quantity of negative energy! Didn't think I was going to watch the entire thing when I started it due to the length, but once he started talking I was hooked.

Great Interview! I've always been a fan for the solar wind ;-) and for a second age of sail, looking forward to it, Thank you Fraser and Andrew.

What an awesome guest! He really spoke in Layman's terms so a schlep like me could understand. Great stuff. Extremely informative.

This was the interview that got me into following this channel a year ago

Best video of the year. Thank you Fraser you have given us something to get excited about.

0:01 _"I feel like I am a dream killer"_ Heck yeah! Back then I showed up on the channel, and started dreaming of visiting a place with such lush vegetation as Fraser's backgrounds, only to later learn it's just very advanced green screen CGI! ( ;-;)

That anti matter factory would be interesting. Would have to be built in the middle of nowhere. Kilograms of anti matter and matter going up in an accident would be quite a headache Ahh, 13:00, Andrew said to build it in space, yes, that would be wise

The hard sell, the hard truth is that human bodies are EXTREMELY fragile outside of a very narrow range of environmental conditions. We evolved to live in the African savannah. So much more could be done if whatever devices did not have to support human frailty.

one of the most insightful and informative interviews I've heard in a long time. thanks

Love these interviews! So informative and captivating. Thanks to both of you 🙏😃

All we need to do is reach 10% lightspeed. We could send the first manned mission to Proxima Centauri. It would be a 40-50 year journey, but it's possible to get there within a single lifetime. I think that's the most realistic goal at this point. The other possibility is sending a sleeper ship or generational colony ship which could possibly take hundreds of years to reach its destination. But trying to build a vessel that could survive for that length of time is also highly questionable and risky. And you'd also have to know there's a habitable planet before you send the mission.

thanks for this; I've been intrigued a lot with dynamos, electromagnetism (and how euclidean paths can separate electrical currents from base magnetism), plasma, and even chemistry (trapped within our Gravity-well) including electronegativity and figuring out how to--if not reverse--prevent the apparent entropy it's subjected to. this talk rly is a 'breath' of fresh 'air' (medium)

Real privilege to hear this man . Surprised he had the spare time . His brains so big it’s cauterised his hair cells. Excellent vid

Fascinating conversation! Thank you for making this happen

Money spent on this endeavor will reap untold advancements in our daily lives. Hats off to the professor who can make a difficult to understand subject understandable to those of us lucky enough to hear him speak. Thanks to Professor Higginsber, and Fraser Cain for tuning me in.

This was a great conversation. I enjoyed it immensely 👍👍👍

I just watched a video of one of the dynamic soaring gliders they spoke about, and saw speeds in excess of 500mph.

That was extremely interesting! I listen to Astronomy Cast all the time (still trying to catch up from the very start - in the 200's now!) so I was glad that RU-vid randomly threw this video my way!! A great discussion!

one of the coolest physics videos I have seen in a long time!

New topic for John: Dynamic soaring. THANK YOU! I see applications in particle acceleration. I see applications in plasma control. I see applications in 30 story building air flow processes. I see thermodynamic applications akin to sonic refrigeration. You have just given me months of things to think about. I will never get any work done.

The Robert L. Forward book Rocheworld is still one of my favorites where a large laser in the Lagrange point behind Mercury and harnessing the power of the Sun - I forget the exact details - is used to power a large light sail propelling a large exploration vehicle. The sail is designed to break in segments part way through the journey with the outer sections being blown ahead of the craft where they then focus the laser from Earth back to the sail on the craft decelerating it for arrival at Barnard's Star. One question I do have is how do we protect sensitive components and eventually people for long range high speed travel through interstellar space. GCRs are likely a real threat to astronauts at even interplanetary ranges and at relativistic speeds the thin interstellar medium becomes high energy particles constantly bombarding the spacecraft. The faster you go the worse this becomes.

Wow, this was fascinating! Thanks so much, you two

Great guest. Fascinating!

Amazing interview reach of proposals for the future 👍🏼 happy for that

This topic always gets my attention, thank you. Listening now!

Asking all the right questions thank you so much!

Excellent content. Thanks for this. I will watch this again.

>Scientists have discovered magnetosheath jets, fast plasma streams, in Jupiter's magnetic environment New article in nature I saw and remembered this video, seems like there's a difference in energy that could be exploited there for the techniques mentioned in this video also mentions similar jets could be around other planets. I love the idea of Jupiter not just being the go-to planet for gravity assists but also plasma assists for either acceleration or deceleration with a plasma magnet/q-drive/e-sail, such a convenient planet lol

Great interview! That symposium will be quite interesting, can't wait to hear about it. Fraser will be busy :)

I Admire You Very Much! I appreciate the Fact You’re To the Point and Realistic ❤❤

Could you imagine if we find a way to harness these space winds and our spacecraft ends up finding a super advanced civilization, which then sees our bunk ass ship sailing through space?

Professor Higgins (OMG, that brings to mind "My Fair Lady") is full of extraordinary ideas! Great interview, Frazer!

If we could achieve 2% of the speed of light in the solar system means that we could get to Pluto in 10 days! I had to do the calculation in Wolfram alpha, before the end of the episode, so I have no idea if they address this in the video

So much great information here! Love the space travel and energy talk.

I absolutely love Andrew Higgins' enthusiasm!

I've always been a bigger fan of "hard" sci-fi, namely the kind that focuses on fusion drives and only ever mentions warp drives as "theoretical curiosities" that we haven't ever achieved. So this is a welcome breath of fresh air. So tired of the "aliens" having the FTL tech and gifting it to us. So tired of us discovering how "easy" it is to go FTL ourselves. It trivializes the true difficulty of all things space travel, and in so doing it loses a lot of it's punch. There's some part of me that says "NASA and the like are purpose-oriented to tackle the most technically challenging areas of engineering we have yet faced, allowing a human to exist in an environment that has never encountered a being like them". And the rest of me goes "That's just a hair's breadth distant from being literally impossible, so why are all these sci-fi media depicting it being as easy as driving to the grocery store?" The story shouldn't be "XYZ plot, but in space". The story should be "Space, period." Unfortunately, nobody seems to be interested in writing that kind of sci-fi, it all seems to be in books written in the 40's to the -60's, with only a few select authors. More of it is needed IMO. Few example plots I can think of, just because there's oh-so-many ways for your ship to betray you in the most insidious of lethal ways: Life support systems fail on you? Better hope the whole crew's not in hibernation, or that the automated systems can wake up enough engineers to patch it together enough to get you to a safe place, else you're gonna have an encounter with The Cold Equations. Engines malfunction? Probably not gonna have the tools or materials to fix that, if it's a nuclear engine you better cut the failed one loose, and you better also have brought a spare (you're not gonna repair the magnetic bottle on your fusion drive if it got a railgun round shot thru the containment field coils cryo plumbing, and not JUST because it's "lethal in mere seconds" radioactive). By the way, you can't just say "oh it's not radioactive because it's using D-He3 fusion which is aneutronic", because even a D-He3 reactor is only "a lot less" radioactive, not "not radioactive", you're still doing high energy atomic physics, meaning D-D fusion is gonna be happening in that reactor in side-reactions, which emits even more neutrons than D-He3 fusion. The only reason it's "Less" neutronic is because those D-D side reactions are side reactions and not the main focus, so they don't happen nearly as often. Still plenty of them to cause the reactor itself to saturate any kind of radiation detector you care to point at it, with the drive turned off for 30 days and THEN measured. Colony run short on supplies, like needing a water pipe? Use lasers to 3-d print a stone or concrete water pipe out of local regolith, because if you use a pipe from anywhere remotely near the ship's power reactor or nuclear engines, the whole colony is gonna be fighting any number of "new and interesting" cancers. You thought Radium Jaw was bad, what do you think happens when the very water you drink and bathe with has been turned radioactive by a wrongly-selected piece of plumbing? Oh and it's not just pipes, valves and fittings are bad news too. So is something as mundane as an O-ring. Literally any matter that has been irradiated should be banned from contact with the potable water, ventilation, sanitation, or any other system that helps support the crew. Yes, that includes the sewer pipes, because you're almost certainly going to be recycling the wastewater from those systems. Alien contatct? Nope, no sentients, microbes at best. Alternately, if you do think we can contact sentients, it will be them contacting us, and us stumbling on to their transmissions as noise with strangely self-consistent patterns in it. Extremely extremely faint signals, we'd need at the MINIMUM a radio telescope on the Moon's far side to even have a chance of intercepting the signals so sent. The signal we sent, intentionally, probably didn't even make it to Alpha Cent, distance wise. That's how faint things get over such large distances. If you want a truly interesting set-piece, maybe us humans figure out that a pulsar isn't quite as perfectly regular as it should be in it's timing, instead it's somehow modulated. And then thru years of analysis using the most powerful supercomputers, we figure out that there is data encoded in this modulation. More years of analysis and we can figure out what that data is, if it's even digital data (who knows, they might develop computers based on "neuron" analogue cell-type constructions rather than doped semiconductors, depends on how easy it is to purify elements without resorting to what passes for biology on their world). Point is, expect it to look like "oddly patterned noise" for 5+ generations of analysis before we figure out what it is. Also expect some new religion to pop up to worship whatever it is they think it is we found when we actually still don't have a clue. Really really drive home the point of how so much of actual new territory being explored by science is best described as "fumbling around in the dark inside a house", but the only data you have is the theory of what a house is, namely something like "a house is composed of a series of connected rooms sharing a roofing system, with one or more floors, passage between floors being facilitated by stairs, ladders, or elevators". And we don't know what rooms, roofs, floors, passages, stairs, ladders, or elevators are yet either. Basically sometimes science is just flailing around in the dark and noting down what you bump into or knock over, and if you knock something over noting what noise it made when it fell.

My interest in the last decade has been in nuclear power and molten salt reactors specifically. The initial interest was in slow spectrum molten salt reactors using a fluoride/lithium/beryllium salt modeled on the Oak Ridge Molten Salt Reactor Experiment which ran for four year in the 1960s. Recent interest has shifted to fast spectrum molten salt reactors that use chloride salts which are safer, have better understood chemistry and are much cheaper. Sodium chloride is table salt. The advantage of fast spectrum reactors is at over 1 MeV U-238 and Th-232 become weakly fissile and add to the neutron budget. These reactors will run on spent nuclear fuel and plutonium from decommissioned weapons. They can also include depleted uranium as part of the fuel cycle. All this means there are very large stockpiles of fuel for these reactors currently being stored at considerable cost as high level waste. This could be the ample energy source needed to power an anti-matter production facility. Also molten salt reactors run much hotter than water moderated and cooled nuclear reactors making them far more practical for use in space. A cold water source is not needed to produce the thermal efficiency to draw the required amount of heat out of the reactor core. A molten salt reactor on a spaceship or a Moon base would use radiator fins for cooling. Hook one of these up to a Hall thruster and you have a much more efficient way to accelerate at least at interplanetary distances.

Leia: "Would it help if I got out and pushed?" Han: "...It might!!"

Even at 20% the speed of light it will take us 20 years to reach the nearest star. Definitely possible in our lifetime.

Thanks so much for this! Sounds weird, but this episode just made my day. Cheers!

Absolutely riveting segment, Fraser. Andrew is quite a visionary. Gives me hope. As always, thanks much for sharing. Steve

At around 18:00 he's talking about dynamic gliding, and I think that's done in the book 7 Eves.

The closest known black hole is either V Puppis (960 ly) or HR 6819 (1,000 ly). I proposel that we build an O'Neill Cylinder with an anti-matter drive to go there. This is a generation starship that use the black hole to slow it done and enter orbit about the black hole. We talking a journey of about 5,000-10,000 years or more at 20% of c. The mission to start a base to build Halo Drive starships as proposed by Kipper, "Fuel-free Relativistic Propulsion of Large Masses via Recycled Boomerang Photons". This will open select parts of the galaxy, hopping from black hole to black hole. The bad news, to get back to Earth is HARD - maybe we could launch a Halo Drive starship with just enough moment to reach Earth and Bussard ramjet for breaking. Starting with 10,000 people in the first O'Neill starship, they will have descendants throughout the galaxy that will far out number the population of the Solar System in about 50,000 short years or so. STRONG DREAM REIGN HERE.

Just got around to watching this. Fascinating stuff thanks Frasier!

First, I am struck with how much I love Professor Higgins' bookshelf (but would hate to dust it as often as I would need to, were it here on this gravel road where I live, LOL!). And then I was able to pay attention to what he was saying, after I got done ogling the bookshelf. Just had to back it up to actually listen. 😄 The concepts he shared with us are quite fascinating! They could truly be used to send some kind of probes waaaay out there, and send back TONS of new information! A like and comment for the care and feeding of the Almighty Algorithm. ❤️ ❤️

That dynamic soaring thing is super impressive. There is a video of it on RU-vid.

One could say that I'm a pragmatic, but I think we should be focusing on getting ourselves to being a T1 civilization and making the solar system our playground rather than going from T0 directly to T2.

Andrew Higgins thanks for sharing your thoughts this was a wonderful interview. 🤘🇦🇺🌌

I have always dreamt about space travel myself but now that I'm approaching 60 I've finally realized that it's a pretty good idea to stay here for me. I've also been telling dreamers the sobering facts about the challenges with space travel. They weren't happy. This video was great. I'm about to listen again. I'm not sure if you asked about the risk associated with colliding with some dust particle when traveling at insane speeds. Do we know the probability distribution for dust particles of various sizes in interstellar space? If we did we could calculate a probability distribution for arriving at the star as swiss cheese or as a cloud of atoms. Or still be alive.

It’s so exciting to see what might be possible! I’ve always been convinced it’s impossible and that I would never see it in my lifetime. Here’s hoping! 🤞🏻 thank you for the detailed explanations! 😸

Every barrier we have encountered, or will encounter,has a will be overcome. Dream's in the past are now reality today. As will be in the future.

Great discussion

Best qualifications for getting into interstellar propulsion? Basic pyhsics and sailing!

Bow shocks of planetary magnetic fields. You might be able to accelerate a cubesat out of the Earth-Moon system using this and interacting with Earth's magnetic shock of solar wind.

What isn't possible today becomes possible tomorrow. Not every idea comes to fruition, but when our understanding gets an update, problems can crumble away.

Stealing energy from the relative velocities of retrograde asteroids sounds epic.

I'm glad we don't have to wait for a warp drive to be invented to get a closeup look at exoplanets! I don't think I'll live to 2050 to see a probe launched to Alpha C, but my son almost certainly will and that blows my mind.

Amazing talk :)

Taking advantage of energy differentials to generate thrust is interesting and I think more likely than all those designs that kind of hand wave the rocket equation….but a kilograms size craft generating a planet size magnetic field has me scratching my head

Maybe an interesting thought: I wonder if there is a way to collect mass as one performs gravitational assists and solar wind turns that would allow for increasing one's kinetic energy without, as it were, gaining velocity and thereby running out of solar system? That is, in stage 1 of your sailing trip, you intentionally slow yourself by grabbing stuff (gas, whatever) as you perform these maneuvers and then once you reach a certain level of mass, you start stage 2, stop accumulating mass, and accelerate up to some crazy speed, then in stage 3, you take advantage of the energy of your accumulated mass and extreme speeds via Q-drive ideas by shooting your accumulated mass out the back.... Great video in any case! Really enjoyed it.

😮Fraser you did it! this is Jaw Dropping science the Dynamic Soaring Gliders are revolutionary ( 😊 )

10% the Speed of Light? 10% the Speed of Light!? I like the way this guy thinks!

I zoomed to the video referenced it's amazing! Here's the title: Dynamic Soaring - 882 kph 548 mph World Record eye witness pov

"I work out everyday so I'll still be around when Star Trek happens". His heuristic that at 3 km/s objects become worth their weight in TNT, closely reproduces the correct enthalpy of explosion of 4.5 MJ/kg.

Worthy content. Gladly liked and shared.

Amazing

These videos are so very good. Thank you.

Like all sails and sailors, the solar winds blow and doldrums. We will have to add thrust on our own and find the pattern interstellar seas...