David Kipping

It has to survive the journey.

Probably a large fraction of them won't survive the journey, but they're cheap enough that you could maybe manufacture millions of them.

And some of them do arrive and are able to send back an image or...

Maybe even if you wanted to have a person there, we might have some way of doing a telepresence or some kind of delayed telepresence or some kind of reconstruction of the planet which is sent back so you can digitally interact with that environment in a way which is...

Not real time, but representative of what that planet would be like to be on the surface.

So we might be more like digital visitors to these planets.

Certainly far easier practically to do that than physically forcing this wet chunk of meat to fly across space to do that.

And so that's maybe something we can imagine down the road.

The Halo drive, as I said, is thinking even further ahead.

And if you did want to launch large masses, large masses could even be planet-sized things.

In the case of the Halo drive, you can use black holes.

So this is kind of a trick of physics.

I often think of the universe as like a big computer game, and you're trying to find cheat codes, hacks, exploits that the universe didn't intend for you to use.

But once you find them, you can...

address all sorts of interesting capabilities that you didn't previously have.

And the Halo drive does that with black holes.

So if you have two black holes, which are a very common situation, a binary black hole, and they're in spiraling towards each other, LIGO's detected, I think, dozens of these things, maybe even over a hundred at this point.

And these things, as they merge together, the pre-merger phase, they're orbiting each other very, very fast, even close to the speed of light.

And so Freeman Dyson, before he passed away, I think in the 70s, had this provocative paper called Gravitational Machines, and he suggested that you could use neutron stars as an interstellar propulsion system.

And neutron stars are sort of the...