While the concepts outlined in the team’s new paper pave the way toward making travel through space nearing light speed a reality, constructing such an engine is likely something that will only be feasible far in the future, as the present state of technology would not allow for such a device.

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

... by an astounding margin.

The paper is paywalled and I am too lazy to look for a free/open link, but the shown graphs indicate many squared meters of energy concentrations of 1 - 10 * 10^39 joules.

The entire energy output of the Sun, in a year, is around 10^34 joules. 6.6 * 10^39 joules is apparently the estimated total mass energy of the Moon, if you basically perfectly E = mc^2 transformed it into pure energy.

In 2010 the estimated total energy consumption of humans on Earth was 5 * 10^20 joules.

So we just need something around ten billion * ten billion more joules than that, presumably generated by something i dont know, naval frigate sized?

Yeah. Faaaaaar off indeed.

[–] Lucid5603@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.02709

[–] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks! =D

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