Light Years "Soon"
100 years ago, “Moony Goddard” was considered a crank. Perhaps 99% of people trying to do what Goddard actually did WERE cranks. But all it takes is a few who can do the math, persistently experiment, learn from failure, and submit their discoveries for peer review.
Nobody will will travel to space with bottles of dew, as Cyrano de Bergerac described in “L'Autre monde ou les états et empires de la Lune”, published posthumously in 1657.
As Циолко́вский/Goddard/von Braun/钱学森 rockets are to dew bottles, future varieties of electromagnetic acceleration can be radically better.
Launch Loop (launchloop.com) is my stab at a electromagnetic launch system; maybe that will also require 300 years of development, but I hope it inspires capable and ambitious young entrepreneurs to do much better much sooner.
Earth escape energy is 17 kilowatt-hours per kilogram. Solar system escape energy, launched solar-prograde from Earth, is 140 kWh/kg . Some data centers pay a few cents per kWh.
Rockets consume vastly more energy accelerating gigantic exhaust plumes backwards into the atmosphere. Inefficient as hell, but a compact way to store megadeath in a silo and deliver it halfway around the world.
A few dollars of electricity per kilogram can be “halfway to anywhere” … someday. “Anywhere” probably MUST be, as individual data center power consumption grows towards gigawatts, and global data center power consumption grows towards terawatts. Our Earth Is Too Small. Exa-computation belongs Out There, see L1AI - Server Sky .
Beyond the Earth, almost all sunlight (384 trillion terawatts) streams into the interstellar void, never to touch matter again. The black body temperature of that void is 2.7 Kelvins. The Shannon energy content of a bit is ln(2)×kT, about 2e-18 Joule at 300K room temperature, and 2e-20 Joule at 3K. You can juggle those numbers, extend to the future lifetime of our galaxy, and arrive at VAST bit production rates with three digit exponents.
Velocities of 100 km/s? Not soon. But at that velocity, a light year is 3000 years travel time. The distance to the nearest million stars is about 400 light years, perhaps 2 million years. Impossible in room-temperature human lifetimes, perhaps achievable with cryonic suspension and molecular-scale repair.
None of us know how to do that … yet. But 99.9% of us don’t know how to design and manufacture a computer chip (I did). When some of us learn electromagnetic launch, the Milky Way galaxy is (in a gigayear or two) their oyster. Ours too, if we pay the fare.
I’m guessing half the people reading this don’t know how to rewire a ceiling light. And half of those challenged people may assume they can predict the future of technology, even though they have no clue how the characters they type end up on their screen. I prefer to hear from competent people learning to be more competent. I hope that some of the best will 请把他们的作品翻译成英文给我
Keith L MSEE UCB 1975