Re: Calling Isaac Newton...
If you want to go down the route of “magic just takes longer”, the problem is that there is no way to know which of the myriad magical solutions is best and closest to feasible at system-level. If you’d started Michelangelo on designing a CPU, should he work on Babbage’s Difference Engine, or help Newton play with coloured light and prisms (which ultimately turns out to be quite useful for optical resist technology)?
It’s better to set yourself nearer term goals. And frankly, having worked in the space industry, one of the biggest problems is that every project with a timeline longer than ten years turns into a boondoggle. Basically, unless the project completes in a timescale of your current job, nobody has any great interest in either finishing it, or really solving the problems. It’s just an annual budget, and people are “contributing”. They aren’t motivated to make the damn thing work.
If I want to accelerate 4 grams of payload to 15% light-speed, then we could “just” store 0.3g of antimatter in a magnetic bottle and let it annihilate as trickle, using it as thrust. That’s (today) completely infeasible, but theoretically do-able. Obviously, we need a nearly perfect gamma-ray micromirror and collimator. And ultra-vacuum technology decades beyond current, to prevent the antimatter annihilating inside the storage bottle. And ways of cooling the antimatter to keep it confinable, and miniaturised superconducting magnets to confine it without their power usage needing to increase the payload mass. But none of that sounds beyond early 22nd century technology to be honest. And definitely all closer to reality than building an 18km diameter launch mirror in space. Plus it solves the problem of being able to decelerate when we get to where we’re going.
The real point is that technologies a century away usually don’t solve problems in the way they look today, rather by discarding assumptions. Could improved sensor, CPU and comms technology mass micrograms rather than grams? Would it make more sense to scale up particle accelerator technology (which already approaches light speed, with picograms per particle bunch) than scale down rocket technology? Would a solar-system-scale coherent array optical telescope achieve better observation resolution anyway in the target star system than a 4 gram micro-spacecraft zipping through at 7000km/s a million km from any planet (Spoiler: yes it could. 25cm resolution. Tech demonstrator missions are on the horizon, and it really might be feasible within 50 years).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
