Re: Travelling the Stars

Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Fri, 11 Dec 1998 17:21:22 +0000

At 02:34 PM 12/10/98 -0500, Dan wrote:
>you
>can get anywhere in the universe in an arbitrarily short amount of time, as
>measured by the traveler. No weird physics is involved here

Just weird engineering. The faster you go, the harder the crap you run through, even if it's vanishingly thin by our standards. Using a Savage e-m catapult [cf. THE MILLENNIUM PROJECT] several solar systems in length (doable without weird engineering) and nano-sized AI craft, and another e-m system to catch you (built in advance by slower machines), maybe you'd get somewhere interesting before you were ablated. Otherwise I suspect we're better off looking for weird physics loopholes.

Damien Broderick