Trevor Collins

That wind is fat particles moving.

The sail is catching it.

It's pushing the ship across the ocean.

In space, you could do that with photons.

Photons, if you look at the equation of momentum, I think it's momentum equals...

Speed times mass.

Photons have incredibly low mass, but incredibly high velocity.

And the idea is, you know, if you cast a like think of like aluminum foil, but maybe even way thinner and cast into the size of a football field, you cast a wide enough net.

You're going to start bouncing photons off of that and slowly.

Slowly over time, those photons will transfer enough momentum, enough speed to the craft that in theory, this spacecraft could get to 10 to 20 percent the speed of light.

It's a long buildup period, but that's the theory behind it.

And what James Benford is saying is that.

an intelligent species has a light sail craft and they're using a microwave blaster to basically shoot it with a microwave beam to give it more photons to feed off of to further accelerate rather than just relying on the passive light of a sun.

They're just blasting this thing and maybe for like a couple of minutes they missed and it shot past the aircraft, went into deep space only to be received by our satellite.

You're totally right.

You said this earlier, but what if they're like, what if they're like blasting a radio signal to a planet 200 light years the other direction of us and our silly little planet just happened to get right in the way and they're like, sorry, interference.

I think I hit a planet.

And our plan is going, what the hell was that?

I mean, you think of like early days, cell phone towers, and you're like, ah, it's cloudy, man.

I can't get a good signal.