Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur cover image

Colonizing the Kuiper Belt (Narration Only)

Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur

00:00

How to Use Spaceship Drives to Save Energy and Fuel

The escape velocity from the solar system in the vicinity of Earth is 94,000 miles per hour or 151,000 kilometers per hour. You can use this to move an entire comet inward by beaming power to it and absorbing it rather than reflecting it. This is one option for interstellar colonization as we looked at earlier this year in using asteroids and comets as spaceships. The notion though is that a piece of matter given speed by a photon you beamed in to serve as the propellant does better than that photon bouncing off a ship does by itself. If the energy beaming trick does not work though, impractical or too dangerous, and fusion also doesn't become viable, and there aren

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