Chrysalis Podcast

Sci-Fi Podcast "CHRYSALIS" | Part One: Awake | DUST
DUST

I've taken to listening to this podcast on my walks, and it's pretty entertaining. It's about an interstellar war between an artificial intelligence that has somehow survived the destruction of humanity and some creepy aliens who visited that destruction on Earth. The computer wakes up some time after the humanities defeat and slowly starts putting itself together from the bits and pieces it finds lying around.  It continues, building on what it knows and what it finds, and constructs redoubt buried deep underneath Mt. Everest. In this cavern it constructs a new body for itself, a 27 kilometer long spaceship. When it is ready, it blows the top off of the mountain and launches himself into space and attacks the alien ships that are hanging out in the neighborhood. He destroys them but also manages to steal enough technical information to allow him to duplicate their faster-than-light warp drives, something that is essential to all good space operas.

The problem I have is that no one has written a story that imagines a way to travel to other stars knowing just what we know now. But I like to think I have a way. It would be a massive project, but I have faith that we could pull it off. The whole trick is raising the exhaust velocity of your rocket to a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. I mean we already do this subatomic particles, we'd just have to scale it up so that we were pumping actual grams of matter to these insane velocities. And the trick to doing that is being able to produce a ga-zillion megawatts of power. I did some calculations once upon a time and my conclusion was that the Borg ship from Star Trek was actually packed with nuclear fusion power electrical power plants. Imagine a fusion reactor that can generate a gigawatt of power inside a cube measuring one meter on a side. Now image a kilometer sized cube packed with, (how many is 1,000 cubed?) one billion of generators, now you have power plant producing a billion gigawatts of power. You ought to able to accelerate some mass with that.