Can We Move THE SUN?
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- čas přidán 30. 05. 2023
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Interstellar travel is horrible-what with the cramped quarters of your spaceship and only the thin hull separating you from deathly cold and deadly cosmic rays. Much safer to stay on here Earth with our gloriously habitable biosphere, protective magnetic field, and endless energy from the Sun. But what if we could have the best of all worlds? No pun intended. What if we could turn our entire solar system into a spaceship and drive the Sun itself around the galaxy? Well, I don't know if we definitely can, but we might not not be able to.
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Good luck getting everyone to agree on a destination.
"I swear kids, I'm gonna turn this solar system right around if you don't settle down back there!"
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.
bootes is calling to us. we must embrace the void
@@jkfecke imagine the entitlement lol 😂😂😂😂
Who says that you need everyone to agree? It's not like most people could stop it. 😅
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'.
F=ma so probably yes, just can you do it with enough force to make a perceptible difference
@@sunnyjim1355 Mathematix should be and stay only a tool for a real science. The question raised in the video requires physics, Chemistry, biology,...
...and 1.: Sci-fi. Cause this is all not possible..and we are watching a youtuber making stuff up for money
@@ilicdjo 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
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 CZcams, knowing how the algorithm actually works or what it's definitely optimizing for.
Most people just hate live video like I do. I don't have the time or patience to watch one hour of undefined content
In fact I usually speed the videos to 2x depending on a few factors.@@pedro.alcatra
PBS and Kurzgesagt. My favorites channels on the YT.
This man casually educating us while he is in space without space suit never ceases to amaze me
Thats because he is in a superimposed quantum state of being simultaneously both in space and not.
Haters will say it's a green screen
We should crowdfund him a sweater so he'll be less chilly
In space no one can hear you talk bullshit
I couldn't agree more. Also, you should Google his age. Living in space may have slowed down his aging.
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?
As someone who watches Science Fiction with Isaac Arthur (SFIA), a Shkadow thruster is something that I have known about for years 👍😊
"Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur". And agreed. Did you watch his Megastructure Compendium?
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.
Indeed, this and "Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur" are my two favorite space-related channels!
@@archapmangcmg "Science Fiction with Isaac Arthur" more accurately describes his channel, so it's a understandable mistake.
@@Lexivor Science and Sci-Fi, sure. But he DOES include a lot of science in the videos.
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.
If we could move a planet we wouldn't need to worry if earth was always fine or not
@@WiseOwl_1408Earth will always be important to humanity.
@@Real_Eggman}p
@@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.
It's fascinating that anyone has even considered moving an entire star.
Check out Issac Arthur
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
Larry Niven - Ringworld series.
That's stuff people should be free to think about every day at least for 20 minutes!
when you're a star you can do anything
1:34 "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction." is Newton's 3rd law, not the 2nd one. Newton's 2nd law is F=ma.
Ah, sheeeeeeeit!
I was just about to make this exact same comment.
For any scientist that’s almost like getting your name wrong!
@@TheWyrdSmythe It's easy enough to misspeak.
Correct version:
++F = d/dt(mv)
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.
Exactly how long before it reaches 27% the speed of light (from its initial frame of reference) though?
@@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.
@@castonyoung7514 Better buy the extended warranty.
@@alexsvoronos amazing concept!
How many years do you think would be added to the Sun's lifespan by erecting a 'Star Tug'?
Lets all lend a helping hand to PBS Spacetime, Matt, and the crew that puts it all together. Turn on those notifications, and open the videos asap.
Thanks for your work Jakub, have you ever thought about going into PR or at least PA?
@@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.
Those who say they are saving the planet are in reality destroying civilization.
Responding comment of approval
@@xBINARYGODxhuh? What does your comment even mean??
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.
Years from now people are gonna look back to this comment and name the method after you.
Hmmmm? I wonder if those "hyper velocity stars" should be investigated for advanced civilisations??
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!
Moving the galaxy around would make the makers a Type III civilization on the Kardashev Scale
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.
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.
Don’t give Rep Hank Johnson any ideas - he’s worried enough about Guam tipping over with too many people on it…
they pulled it off in Pirates. Maybe it'll work
That's not how physics works, you would need everyone in the left hemisphere to duck while those on the right jump
Here on earth people are commiting suicide due to depression and nobody is doing anything to prevent that
@@NoMusiciansInMusicAnymore but how high?
The way CZcams treats a high-quality education channel with nearly 3mil subs as shabbily as they do everyone else speaks volumes.
12:35 I really appreciate that Matt straight asks to watch the video to keep the algorithm happy; instead of resorting to cheap plays like clickbaits.
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.
your poor feet!
CZcams ads are getting more intrusive
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.
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.
That's why I love this channel, actually attempting to answer a question I have asked myself......
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
Having all notifications is a must for this channel, every new episode is a blast, highly recommended.
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.
I have an idea, maybe we could build lots of the stellar engines around multiple different stars to control a whole fleet of stars!
Maybe that's why stars at the edge of a galaxy are moving so fast! They are planning their escape!
You are the *one* youtube channel that I'll turn all notifications on for Matt. Done. Thank you for enriching my life with these videos.
when my mom says maybe, it’s pure sadness
when Matt says maybe, it’s pure awesome
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.
Whoops at 1:30! "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction" is Newton's 3rd Law, not the 2nd.
It would make more sense for that one to be the second law's since it involves two objects. Let's support the change!
Great video as allways. Keep them coming. 👍
These ideas are great for the philosophy of longtermism and human cooperation.
0:47 Building a star encompassing a Dyson sphere would be even more awesome.
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.
That won't happen during this century and unlikely to happen during the next 500 years.
the sun is local
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.
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.
haha great point!!!
@@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.
I only understand like a quater of what these videos say but I still love watching them. Thanks for breaking down such complex and interesting topics!
Thank you for keeping us updated😊
It's simple. We just need to do the following:
1. Resurrect Archimedes.
2. Give him a truly gigantic lever.
You can move the earth if all the robots point their exhausts up at the same time. We will then hereby dub it "Robot party week"
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
This is by far the best type of space travel. And that's because we can all take part in it!
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.
Maybe we can collect other stars instead of going around. Genshin Impact but with stars instead of waifus.
@@farfa2937 A universe with no waifus? Better to die.
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.
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.
Sounds like a fun sci-fi story.
I like the picture of the "Crazy pysics" 😊
All glory to the Hypnotoad.
In the event that you could move the sun, you would also disrupt the orbits of the plants and cause planetary orbits to misalign depending on their position within their orbit.
Nope, you're just not moving the Sun that fast. It's not going to be detectably out of position. This is something that takes thousands of years to go anywhere, even with the "fast" version. The slower versions take 250 000 000 years to go 10s of light years.
And gravity is constantly working.
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
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 convenient, then, that the sun _contains_ an insane amount of energy! 🙂
"There's coffee in that nebula!" 🚀
@@emm6064 at this point, I need caffeine on a cosmic scale. Universe can't provide. It bad. Help me LOL
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.
switched to all notifications!!! Love you guys!!!
I am a piece of the sun. I refuse to allow my body to be violated like this 😡
We are star stuff, not our sun's stuff? I'm confused what the implication of this joke is even supposed to be?
@@solsystem1342 *insert "you must be great at parties" joke*
You're destined to be Brown Dwarf my friend and there nothing wrong with that.
Don't worry, I'm sure that any future start-related project will be done only with proper consent ❤.
Tay, you're a whole star, don't ever downplay yourself like that again.
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.
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.
Fantastic video, as always! The visuals are just amazing!
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.
watch the movie SUNSHINE 2007@@milferdjones2573
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.
Nicol-Dyson Beam.
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 LOVE that you made a video about a question I have long pondered.
Thanks for all the episodes. Hope the algorithms show their favor.
"If I had a week, I couldn't list all the reasons why that wouldn't work" -Batman
Well it is already moving across the universe
wandering earth project ✨
I've actually had their poster for stellar engines for a year or 2 now, so glad to see it covered over on this channel as well.
they made a movie on this, The Wandering Earth
I too thought about this when I saw to the title and the preview pic
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. ✝️ :)
They are conceptually fun and great for sci-fi. Logistically and economically they're almost certainly impossible.
Me: I want to travel the galaxy, but I'm too lazy to leave my sofa.
Matt: Say no more!
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.
Caplan is proper spelling, apologies.
I think we as a civilization are a bit too much on the Kardashian scale to ever be able to step up on the Kardashev one
Type III Kardashian civilization consumes all the energy from all people all the time, making Kardashev one impossible.
The important part of this plan is that we have to keep the Earth habitable!
oh it'll definitely be habitable for hundreds of millions of years, for cockroaches and bacteria at least
@@Jay-cf6dz they can eat all the twinkies and similar, which have shelf life on order of proton decay half life
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.
Love kurzgesagt! You have no idea how long it took me to spell that xD
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
With the solar sail, wouldn't it be more efficient if you put the mirror out of the planetary plane?
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.
@@Soken50 Build a smaller mirror for Earth and the other worlds, redirecting their usual light. It's not like you'd notice the lost thrust.
@@archapmangcmg ok, I'll get right on that è_e
Thanks Matt.
Lots of leverage needed.
A well tamed black hole in the right spot might do the job. The trick would be keeping it altogether.
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 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. ✝️ :)
I was gonna say that Kurzgesagt did a very nice video some time ago about a stelar engine.. but you beat me to the punch
They're putting that Soros money to work I see.
These are all completely new to me! Maybe a colab with a sci-fi expert Quinn's Ideas would take this topic to next level🎉
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
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
All those objects are in orbit with 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).
If some species out there was busy moving their star system around using one of these methods, could we see it?
That's exactly why we're browsing our sky so much heh
It depends. If they were very far away from us doing so, then no (and in fact we would still see their star system still in its original spot).
@@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...
Excellent video. Congrats.
3:25 the push is not infinitesimally small, as it is still divisible
I'm no expert but I'm fairly certain moving the sun would be at least one order of magnitude more difficult than enclosing it in a Dyson Sphere.
Given you need one, or at least a Dyson swarm to do it, yess
A swarm of what are effectively just mirrors is far cheaper than a swarm of habitats.
nah bro it's already moving so you're obviously wrong :)
@@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.
Yes. But you know, we might get bored and want to try new things....
Technically, it's already moving across the universe. The real question is; Can we steer planet earth? 😂
Get real , they can't every fix the potholes down my road
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.
@@fighteer1 tbh constructing shade inbetween the earth and sun is going to be waaay easier than moving the earth.
@@happylittlemonk removing trucks and other heavy vehicles
Los Angeles traffic, but make it the Milky Way!
Super happy to see the Space Time / Kurzgesagt crossover!
My favourites CZcams show talking about my other favorite CZcams show !
A better question would be, why would we want to?
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.
But can we move the galaxy?
Unlike the sun and the solar system, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy does not dominate the mass of the rest of the galaxy. So what we'll need to do is move all of the individual stars. Which means we need to send Von Neumann probes to build Dyson swarms around every star, and then have them all thrust together, to get the motion we want.
I suggested upthread that when moving just the Sun, we could slingshot around the supermassive black hole for a boost, but unfortunately only a few stars can do that, since the impact of all the stars trying to do that would just eject the black hole out of the galaxy instead.
But we can at least have a few stars do that slingshot to cross the intergalactic voids ASAP, and get on starlifting all of the stars in the other galaxies too, so that we can get stared on pushing ALL the star in the accessible universe "downward" (in alignment with gravity) toward each other to hold as much of the cosmos as possible together against the expansion of space.
My guess is that by the time we could we would have know interest in doing so.
@@Pfhorrest Better to disassemble the other stars and planets, bringing the treasure back home. You could move most of the galaxy to storages a few dozen light-years from Earth.
And build a galactic-scale civilisation without the impossible lag.
@@archapmangcmg For the stars already gravitationally bound to each other, like in our local group, yes, but the idea here is to accelerate things that are not gravitationally bound in the directions they're already falling, to counteract the expansion of space that will eventually have them all falling apart from each other instead of together. Just push things close enough and to a fast enough speed that gravity can grab a hold.
Then yeah, once things aren't going to go flying apart, bring them all even closer together, sure.
@@Pfhorrest how far out are you talking? cos even grabbing stuff within 50 m ly will be a massive task and much of that will stay in our pocket anyway.
Commenting because that reminds the algorithm that you engage with this type of content.
I love these kind of videos, and your is so well done. Thank you so much ♥ !
Scraping the bottom of the content jar.
I always think of moving the Sun when the sunlight
gets really unconfortable on my desk. One of these days I
might decide to go and do it.
Found this to be very uplifting and engaging!
What a great video! I love these really far flung ideas, they're like a playground to the mind.
One of the best educational contents!!!
Thank you PBS Space Time. Thank you PBS.
Excellent diversion into what is (currently) fantasy, Matt.
Excellent, as always. 😃
Definitely watch as soon as I see Space Time...
Another amazing viseo! Thanks for making me think!
Great episode.
I wish kurzgesagt would mention PBS spacetime like you always mention them