News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox”: The Percolation Theory Hypothesis by l33tman on Friday December 25, 2020 @09:17AM (#25536594)
Travel doesn't cost any energy, only acceleration and decceleration, so if you accept a slow travel this isn't particularly expensive. Especially with drones you wouldn't need a huge spaceship with environmental systems for squishy bio-masses like humans... :)
Re:Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox”: The Percolation Theory Hypothesis by tsimionescu on Friday December 25, 2020 @11:22AM (#25537281)
That's only true if you're launching a piece of rock. Otherwise, it does cost energy to maintain a system running and, at the very least, tracking time for 10000 years.

It's not even obvious that it is theoretically possible with current circuit technologies. Pieces would fuse together, moving parts would erode, all sorts of organic materials might deteriorate, everything would be affected by the huge amount of time. And you would almost certainly need energy to actively fight this entropy so that you would have an active machine when you reach your destination.

Re:Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox”: The Percolation Theory Hypothesis by ganzuul on Friday December 25, 2020 @01:04PM (#25537966)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_logic

Iron is nuclear ash, and this tech is just about the most reliable implementation of logic we have. It was used in the V2 rocket and US nuclear submarines. It's abandoned tech though and was never pushed beyond 1MHz. If however you have a decade to compute your reactions then that might not matter.

Superconducting magnetic loops also store their flux indefinitely, and in space keeping it cool would be trivial.