Radio and optical SETI look for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations even though we have no evidence that such exist. The search is eminently worthwhile and opens up the ancillary question: How would a transmitting civilization produce a signal strong enough for us to detect it at interstellar distances? Beacons of various kinds have been considered...

The propulsion technology the human characters conceive in the Netflix version of Liu Cixin’s novel The Three Body Problem clearly has roots in the ideas we’ve been kicking around lately. I should clarify that I’m talking about the American version of the novel, which Netflix titles ‘3 Body Problem,’ and not the Chinese 30-part series, which is also...

Fusion runways remind me of the propulsion methods using pellets that have been suggested over the years in the literature. Before the runway concept emerged, the idea of firing pellets at a departing spacecraft was developed by Clifford Singer. Aware of the limitations of chemical propulsion, Singer first studied charged particle beams but quickly...

Let’s talk about how to get a spacecraft moving without onboard propellant. As noted last week, this is apropos of the design shown in the Netflix streaming video take on Liu Cixin’s novels, which the network titles ‘3 Body Problem.’ There, a kind of ‘runway’ is conceived, one made up of nuclear weapons that go off in sequence to propel a sail and...

You never know when a new interstellar propulsion concept is going to pop up. Some of us have been kicking around fusion runway ideas, motivated by Netflix’s streaming presentation of the Liu Cixin novel The Three Body Problem. There Earth is faced with invasion from an extraterrestrial civilization, but with centuries to solve the problem because...

Eugene Parker, after whom the Parker Solar Probe was named, seems to have been the first to have accurately predicted the stream of particles emitted by the Sun that forms the ‘solar wind.’ Parker made the call in a 1958 paper, when solar sailing was just being noised about for the first time, so it wouldn’t have struck him that the term was a bit...