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The bussard ramjet is an idea by bussard that may enable us to go to other star systems in as little a 100 years. It works by gathering the hydrogen in the interstellar medium, and fusing it to obtain energy. Later adaptations include using a nuclear reactor to power the reactons. The hydrogen would be collected bu a large magnetic sail.
Issues with this are mainly that 99+% of the interstellar medium is protons, which do not fuse well in our reactors.
The conventional solution to this problem would be, I guess to bring neutrons, which isn't possible because they have an average lifetime of 15 minutes, and aren't storeable. :?
I suggest that we make the neutrons. This is How
accellerate an electron to 1 MeV, then smad=sh it into a proton. The energy will end up as mass in the neutron, and as speed for the neutron. hit the protons with that, and you start with a small energy gain, due to differences in binding enregy between H-1 and H-2. Then fuse the deuterium.
What do you think?
-Josh
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That Idea has been bounced around a little bit on the New Mars forum. It would be a generational ship to be sure. The only stars that you would be able to get to in a timely fashion or that hundred year period or so would be stars in ten to twenty light years of Earth. There probably about twenty to thirty stars in that area. After that, the distances get so large that even that space ship your talking about will become unworkable, because the time it takes to get there also increases with more light years. The ship would have to be fairly big one too, because you would have to do in house repairs on your space ship. So you would want a machine shop of some kind inside the space ship to be able to make those new parts or repair the those old parts to keep that ship functional. You would probably want a space ship for several hundred people with the expertise in every area needed and support equipment to make it happen. It would look more like the Queen Mary Crews Ship designed to house people for several month vs an air line that only does for a few hours. I don't see any small space ships making this trip and if they actually try it, it will probably be fatal because of the lack of resource committed to the project.
Larry,
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I believe a ramjet would accelerate more slowly that originally advertised, so it may take generations rather than some person's lifetime, but consider this, if the ramjet works, you have both a source of energy and of materials if you slow some of the particles down from the stream. A large enough interstellar ramjet world ship with sufficient population could subsist off the interstellar medium indefinitely! The magnetic ramscoop would have to be vast indeed to gulp down sufficient hydrogen, and the larger the fusion reactor, the more likely it would be able to achieve proton fusion. So basically instead of traveling to the "edge of the universe" in a single human lifetime, it would take several. With a slow gradual acceleration at a fraction of a gee, it would take several human lifetimes to achieve near light speeds relative to Earth. The ramjet can be thought of as a multi-generational one way time machine in any event, after several thousand years has passed, there would be no point in returning to Earth any way and Earth would likely have forgotten about them in the meantime. You might as well bring everything you would need to colonize elsewhere, this means a large population in a generation worldship.
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Since the time of Bussard's original proposal, it has been discovered that the region surrounding the sun has a much lower density of interstellar hydrogen than was believed at that time. By 1978, analyses indicated that Bussard ramjets were not feasible.[1]
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New research debunks a popular concept for interstellar travel
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