Non-Trivial Problem of Communication with Interstellar Probes 

Top tier interview right here. Marshall Eubanks is one of the best guest scientists I've seen on one of these shows. I won't lie, a lot of these scientists aren't great speakers and I zone out pretty quickly trying to listen to them. This guy is great. I could listen to him go on about space for hours. And this was such a fascinating subject! I learned a ton from this video. Lots of things I'd never considered about the Breakthrough Starshot project and its implications.

Even just knowing the dimensions, albedo, rotation, and accurate orbit - and having a thumbnail - of every known object in the Solar System would be revolutionary for our understanding. You don't need megapixel images or interstellar distances for this to be revolutionary.

When imagining future human achievements. The idea that no matter how far we reach. there will always be an unattainable horizon, is somehow comforting. The universe is on a scale none of us can ever truly comprehend. 💚♾️

This is one of the most fascinating interviews ever. Brilliant

Fraser, that was for many reasons, my favorite interview of yours I've seen. That's really saying something. It showed your talent as an interviewer and your knowledge of the field along with highlighting how interesting and incredibly smart your guest is. These guys putting craft into space are humanities greatest assets. Thanks for all the entertainment and education you send my way. Much appreciated.

I was more mind blown in 10 minutes than in the whole past 2 years.

Wow! 😮 Interstellar medium swarm drag steering control? Fraser oh boy you know some incredible people ✨. Yeah, these interviews are brilliant! Please keep them coming. You could see easily how much you enjoy this great man’s mind just like your audience 😂. Cheers! ✨🦋

I love this interview! So fun and engaging listening to this guest. Even if there was no specific subject, it'd be great just hearing you two talk about ideas and possibilities like in the first 13 mins 😅 Regular installments with Mr. Eubanks please!

I’m watching the Marshal Eubanks interview for the 5th time and I’m both totally entertained and learning new stuff every time I watch it. The idea of swarms of light powered swarms to SCOUT OUT exploration paths is brilliant - both intellectually and FISICALLY. That kind of pragmatism has LEGS because it politically warm and fuzzy.

How did I miss this? Interview of the Year!

This is one of your most intriguing guests. Thank you for not talking over him too much Fraser, I know it's tempting because the subject matter is so fascinating.

I love when he is trampling on the hopes and dreams of all the lightspeed enthusiasts😁

2:40 re:space is big - on the beach at Melbourne there is a scale model of the solar system- the sun is a beachball. the earth is a few cm in size 150m away. Pluto is a bit over 3km away. Next to the sun is Proxima Centauri - it is within 10% of the correct location, if you go all the away around the circumference of earth. ...

Haha, finally another person but me in team Venus! :) Great interview. It's amazing how our perspective changes when we deal with interstellar probes. It's just amazing we can tackle this and send a missions that will take 40 years to travel. I wish we all lived much longer, so that we can witness such missions.

Great interview/discussion Fraser! Hope you do more like this.

Fascinating interview, I am always totally amazed with some of the concepts that scientists are working on. Hope to hear many more interviews like this.

This is the best interview I’ve watched so far on your channel. Congratulations to both! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

"collision induced molecular spectroscopy" might just be my new best phrase for describing an experiment - smack it real hard on the way past and see what glows and flys off ...

Fraser, when talking about asteroid mining, you seem focused on the cost of launching material to the asteroid. That is mostly a one time fixed cost. The mine would use on site materials to create return pods (including fuel) to return the product. Assuming it can work autonomously, the continuing cost is small. It just needs occasional SMALL resupply flights of consumables that can not be created locally. Just like a big mine on Earth, it takes several years to pay back the investment. After that it becomes a cash cow. There are multiple industrial use metals with current or near future supply issues. In some cases it is known sources. In others it is political. Cobalt is an example where both apply.

Realy enjoyable and interesting chat. Thanks for putting it up.

Loved it. Those were some of the questions I've been wondering about, some of them for years and years.

Yes. The "Fish don't know they are wet" theory. It's all around and we can't tell. I like it! Can we build a ML algo that can detect alien spacecraft if we don't have any alien spacecraft to show it? I'm not sure, because I'm a dummy, if we can train ML without samples... can we? We can train it to detect cancer, because we have samples.

Such a great interview, Mr. Eubanks held my attention non-stop. Thank you, Fraser, once again.

My favorite interview to date. Amazing.

Thank you Marshall - No one has said this before and I’ve always thought ‘we see what they want us to see’. I have always thought that what we might NOT be seeing THE universe but one that is currently being presented to us. As our space telescopes get better we might one day figure out we’re being fooled, or better said we are like the baby in a crib with those toys hovering above them that she reaches out to play with. For her, that is the universe. Yet there is a full room beyond her crib that she will have to learn to walk to see.

Right now we are barely able to explore the Moon… for Alpha Century we will probably need another 500 years or even more

I love this, more of this Fraser please! I must watch this again.

This may be the best thing I’ve ever seen on RU-vid! 🙌🏻

Great interview. I had heard about project Starshot Breakthrough before, but Marchall's insight on it was really eyeopening.

Amazing interview, i actually learned alot from your conversations here. Thank you so much for not editing this down to conform to RU-vid's matrix and actually leaving in the meat and potatos of the conversation. I always learn something new and exciting when i watch your channel , thank you!!

Fascinating issues discussed here. Much enjoyed the dialogue.

Love this channel so much keep up the great work FC FROM a fan from the UK

Great questions, thank you!

That was a great interview, and topic. Enjoyed it!

Thanks Fraser, I enjoyed that talk.

The hugh pitched tone at 18:40 made me think an alarm was going off.

What a fun interview, thanks 😊

Can't wait to watch this AGAIN.

LOOOL the galaxy is an art project. loved it!

Loved it!

Nice human pace, I like listen to your videos.

Very interesting guest. Should get him on the show again

Wonderful interview

I am just in the beginning, and I love this conversation!

If you're sending a fleet of spacecraft to another star system, that is a Starfleet. And I can't believe you gave up the opportunity to call it that.

Amazing interview

At the 8:30 mark my man takes a drink of some kind of “apple juice” colored drink, and that’s what it probably takes to be on this level

Very cool interview!!!

great interview

Fascinating conversation

@44:40 this seems like something that AI could do....be completely autonomous, figure out wat needs to be done within mission parameters, and send/receive data without worrying about time lag from controllers here on earth.

Very interesting, thanks 👍

Very cool interview

@10:44 "buckle up.." lol .... i got my 5 point harness on for this show ...😂 Edit: Wow! Using ol' Sailing techniques, 'tacking into the wind' for interstellar travel.....yeah totally Bonkies !!!

This conversion has Rendezvous with Rama vibes

I love the thought of using this system to explore planet 9 and the rest of the kuiper belt.

Nice to be hearing about this now. I have been wondering about it.

Oh yes looking forward to watching this lets go Fraser you mad lad ⛳

Thank you

sailing through space using concepts learned from sailing the seas. 4 dimensional tacking techniques when the interstellar medium is calm 3rd edition

I always thought a staggered swarm might work best. So they'd basically be able to relay back the information. Send a small swarm out initially, and then another swarm every 12 months or something, with the last swarm being sent after the first swarm gets there and completes its mission. The other swarms can also take data and send it back but we would get the data much later

I really like the way Eubanks explains things that even I thought I had a reasonably firm grip on already. He was able to make a lot of this information even more understandable. Good stuff. Example: human's really don't (or at least this human) understand the scales space works at, 60k kilometers/s still has travel times of up to a year for stuff in our solar system..just .. wow.

Love this guy, I look at it like we’re already building from Voyager, rather than running to a dedicated Proxima mission, we can (and are) making a swarm of retired Kuiper craft; I imagine if we can keep an old school craft like Voyager alive so long we ought to be able to design modern electronics to survive on a micro trickle of decay power for several or many times as long, working their way in a final useful direction learning how it is out there until we do go for the star shot and have a dozen trusty clunker scouts holding the door

I think there's a chance that the distances are shorter than we think. Most relativistic arguments assume the dielectric permittivity and permeability of empty space are constant. It does so because the postulate of special relativity is that the two-way speed of light is constant for all observers, not the one-way speed of light, which may be different in different directions, for example to and from a star. It would be interesting to see how that subtle but important reasoning plays out in distance measurements.

Obviously talk to it through modulation in the power beam and receive by some sort of display on the sails so we can read it.

Even if you did push limits of speed while exploring local system planets etc. Would the local stellar medium be too dense to fly through? And would walked from local probes cause noise for telescope observations?

Brilliant

Very cool

Tack. Oh yeah sails are back cool.

Fantastic interview.

My first questions would be: - How many CM2 should there be in a unit? - How thick is a sail? - How do you stabilize this area? - How do you keep the sail surface directionally stable without the sail starting to flutter? - How do you make trajectory corrections? Want a few more impossible-to-answer ones?

Love his shirt and syrup...... ❤

Morgan Freeman voice :) Loving the episode!

question at these sworm speeds can u say use a supersmall lazer or device turned in and act like a mini hydronclider enough to make its own partical fuel/energy ? and a question about are we geting reading on micro noise from things out there are we able to add a reverberation of sorts from these as a communications carryer? booster

This project was my first thought when Wade suggested sending a probe in 3 Body Problem.

On the subject of signal relays, the complaint of "single point of failure" is only true for a limited set of conditions. In particular, while the bandwidth will necessarily be undermined due to minute misalignments, the concept of a "distributed amplifier" could just as well be applied to multiple objects pointing in the same direction as to a single object. Set aside perhaps three frequencies, one for the initial (fairly high power) "local" signal, one for a lower power "full chain" signal (derived from the local signal, used to provide the data signal to every member of the chain by every _earlier_ member of the chain), and medium-power one for a "to Earth" signal (derived from the full-chain signal), and if the probes all along the chain actually _can_ contribute, then you can get enough signal strength that there isn't a single point of failure anywhere except the immediate area of the signal's origin.

I am but a lowly mechanical engineer however I like to think that I have a pretty good grasp on a lot of these concepts revolving around interplanetary and interstellar travel. And what I hear from people irl and on the internet are things like a lot of people think Dr Alcibierre invented a warp drive and we just need to build it. When I burst that idea bubble they inevitably argue and we end up with me telling them that we humans in the current year cannot fly direct to any body in the solar system outside of the moon, all of our spacecraft rely on gravitational assists and the fuel they have is reserved for small maneuvers with Cassini being the closest thing to sci fi with its having to fire its engine to slow down and enter Saturn's orbit. And we have no infrastructure in space, the ISS is a research platform not a gas station, we haven't refueled any of our craft, on paper we can do it but on paper landing on the moon should be something we had down pat but how many unmanned craft have either missed the moon or crashed into it vs landing on it since apollo? There's a ton of tech on the drawing board and in development that will allow us to explore or exploit the solar system but at the moment we're still stuck in low earth orbit as far as manned spacecraft go. Chemical rockets are great for getting up and out of the gravity well but for humans to go anywhere past the moon nuclear propulsion is really the only viable option and we know how to build fission rockets aka nuclear thermal propulsion, hell a nuclear fusion system where you expose water to the super hot fusion plasma converting that water to plasma is probably buildable with current tech ie an inertial confinement reactor. But none of this stuff outside of nuclear thermal(fission) exists so people need to reel in their expectations and understand just how primitive our spacecraft are

Marshall rocking the Beetles hair cut!

Using A,I for exploring the galaxy would be our best option and it keeps that tech off earth too.

Those probes also could be used to build a gravitational lensing telescope, as they pass at 500 AU distance. Whatever the swarm is pointing to, this is the time to point their telescopes back (as long as they are built to stand or blot out sun's glare).

What about Robert L Forward's Rocheworld described light sail deceleration idea? The 'ship' is in 2 parts. 1 part bounces light back to the payload to decel it, while going past the target itself.

Hey Frazer, I wasn't aware that the "power system" required for sending info from Proxima to earth had been solved. Is this the case? I've been in touch with a number of individuals working on the power system from time to time, and was told the problem hasn't as of yet has not been solved. Plz reply or send link. Thank you, Kevin Hambsch

Now we can't stop the probes in and reasonable matter but is there any hope of slingshotting it somehow to cause it to move laterally relative to its normal trajectory such that the relative distance between us and the probe slows giving us more time to transmit the data? Surely 100km is more than close enough to swing it around the star at least a tiny bit or smack into its atmosphere really slowing it down assuming we had like 1 in idk, 100 or so capable of withstanding the temperatures to act as a Relay .

if the air -> interstellar medium analogy kind of works... Is there a "photonic" boom, when you exceed the capability of the spacetime medium? :) And if there could be one - could we extrapolate it's signature based on the air analogy? Btw. what happens when you exceed the limits of water? some kind of a bubble of superheated/phase transitioned water forms around the object, I presume?

What about sending a "string" of minicrafts where the first ones carry the instruments whereas the following ones use their "grams" worth for better antennas?? Isn't that a viable plan?

Lovely interview!! A few question that I might have missed but didnt hear the answer to: What happens to these jelly pancakes when they are blasted with 100gw laser cannons? Wouldnt they just burn up? Love the idea but definitely need to see some tests ! Also since the laser is a point and not a field, wouldnt it be hard to push the pancakes in a particular direction? Do you have to continually blast them for 20yrs? Or is this an initial burst of energy and then they coast?

Does the quantity, size and speed of things that hit James Webb give us important data about the solar system?

We will need a proof of concept for breakthrough starshot anyway, but, as he calls it, 'one eye' is the best poc I can imagine. We will develop this technology to actively survey the outer solar system, and eventually send survey swarms farther and farther

Hi , 6:54 , sounds funny with the overtalking

Because of the inverse square law, sending information with radio or any other electromagnetic comms aint going to happen unless you have an absolutely massive energy source on the craft

Don't interstellar asteroids present a potentially more dangerous threat to Earth because we would have a shorter warning time to prepare for impact? Wouldn't that be reason enough to have scattered satelites throughout the solar system with at least a secondary duty watching for interstellar objects?

this project is SO amazing... it gets difficult to control anxiety about all of this !!

I keep running into having to explain that Dr. Alcubiere didn't propose or design a warp engine or ship and that he came up with the math / equations to describe a means by which light speed could be gotten around. And then the bubbles really burst when I tell them that in the most optimistic scenarios something like a ship using a warped bubble of space time would require the mass-energy equivalent of something the size of jupiter. But it kills me that people think we're building the tech to explore our entire solar system and other star systems when our best currently operational craft are still chemical rockets. Space x building rockets that can be re-used and actually land themselves are great but even their best is still a chemically powered rocket. And then there are the people making fun of the moon probes from Russia and India that crashed instead of landing, and they have no idea how difficult it is to land something on any celestial body even the moon. Space exploration hasnt even learned to crawl as it pertains to manned craft. Going to mars is nothing but a stunt just like apollo. If the astronauts survive im sure theyll do valuable science but itll be a one and done. We need to build infrastructure out there, like refueling stations, automated emrgency aid stations between earth, the moon and mars. We haven't even tried any of the shelter ideas on the moon and knowing how you're going to live on mars before you get there might be a good idea. We have no standardized anything for working and living up there, almost everything nasa sends up is custom one off hardware. So yeah we need to do a lot of work before doing anything past the earth moon system for crewed exploration.

Just as you utilise the vibration and colliding with other ones and Taloric current circles within circles that draws into the process of creating gravitational vacuums that flow into the process of creating light will emerge from the starting point this is similar to balance of capacity to holding the resonating moment of the silence

Interesting

Eubanks, eu rock!

imagine how many random encounters you'd roll taking 8 yrs or w/e to get to the nearest star

What would the laser pushing the probes along do to the Proxima-Alpha Centuari system - not all the laser light is going to just hit the swarm. How bright a flash would be to them? And would we see the illuminated swarm in the night sky as it retreated? Maybe redshifted…

Fraser you should get a wig as well. Great chat.

This is an amazing interview! I absolutely loved it, and a question came to mind. Why aren't we focusing on using the Moon as our holistic focus/training ground with robotics, rovers, probes, communications, logistics and sustainment, engineering and infrastructure, security, mining, science, etc? The cost of learning lessons is high, but we're close enough to quickly observe, orient, decide, and act where we can make changes/adjust, respond, employ/codify lessons, build/produce whatever is needed, and incorporate them into operations in relatively quick order. Then use that template for points between the Moon and Mars, and then Mars, and so on. Also, are we going about this the right way? We absolutely have friction/distrust with China and Russia (for example) and have built partnerships with trust and interoperability with others, but invariably, we're all going in the same direction. We all have various experiences and expertise (depth/breadth) and can maximize our resources if we're going about this together rather than individually or in small groups. Thank you again for this awesome interview, and am rewatching it as I know it will take a couple of views to fully grasp and understand it.