Listening to Michael Longcor’s song “Windward Passage” started me wondering how workable a solar sail would be as a way of moving things around in space and how much of the answer I could calculate on the basis of simple physics.
It's a pretty interesting experience looking behind the curtains. I was really interested in fusion for a while and surprisingly there are some insufficiently hyped possibilities. Spin polarization of the fuel could increase reactivity to the point of increasing the reaction power by 70%. It's predicted that a high-powered tokamak plasma will have a more stable boundary effect for the "scrape off layer", which may double the output. If the effects work in harmony you have a three times more powerful reactor. Overall you can find more reasons to doubt, but interestingly these are often as hyped up as the positives. People prefer a binary prediction.
Climate change has been a very interesting one too. If you get into the weeds of the existing studies you may not notice that they are located in a brightly lit section of the possibility space which is almost exclusively focused on costs. It appears to me that the more complicated models even obscure to the people using them how a number of small biases in one direction can add up to a lot.
I have been looking at climate change for quite a long time and before that at population growth. In both cases there are both positive and negative effects, sufficiently uncertain that one cannot tell the sign of the net effect. I had a link to a draft of my book on consequences of climate change at the end of the post you are responding to, webbed for comments.
It seems counterintuitive to me, but the rocket scientists insist that it takes more delta-v to "fall into the sun" than it does to exit the solar system.
Amazon has a number of books concerning the issue. Look up Space Sailing (I got that over 10 years ago) and solar sailing. You will have a lot of hits. There are also papers going back many decades.
If you want to really rabbit hole on this, look into plasma sails.
TL;DR: the idea is to use (massless) magnetic fields in lieu of material sails, thereby circumventing the thinness requirements.
Interesting. That uses the solar wind instead of light pressure.
It's a pretty interesting experience looking behind the curtains. I was really interested in fusion for a while and surprisingly there are some insufficiently hyped possibilities. Spin polarization of the fuel could increase reactivity to the point of increasing the reaction power by 70%. It's predicted that a high-powered tokamak plasma will have a more stable boundary effect for the "scrape off layer", which may double the output. If the effects work in harmony you have a three times more powerful reactor. Overall you can find more reasons to doubt, but interestingly these are often as hyped up as the positives. People prefer a binary prediction.
Climate change has been a very interesting one too. If you get into the weeds of the existing studies you may not notice that they are located in a brightly lit section of the possibility space which is almost exclusively focused on costs. It appears to me that the more complicated models even obscure to the people using them how a number of small biases in one direction can add up to a lot.
I have been looking at climate change for quite a long time and before that at population growth. In both cases there are both positive and negative effects, sufficiently uncertain that one cannot tell the sign of the net effect. I had a link to a draft of my book on consequences of climate change at the end of the post you are responding to, webbed for comments.
On fusion, the present Physics Today has an article on fusion and stellerator possibilities.
It seems counterintuitive to me, but the rocket scientists insist that it takes more delta-v to "fall into the sun" than it does to exit the solar system.
But then again, planets and moons continue to exist.
Amazon has a number of books concerning the issue. Look up Space Sailing (I got that over 10 years ago) and solar sailing. You will have a lot of hits. There are also papers going back many decades.