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A comment on Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET. Parent comment

Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by x5n1 on Monday July 20, 2015 @08:21AM (#9915487)
We need to build a huge space ship with a fusion engine and send it to the nearest star. But that sort of doesn't make any sense because we have lots of our own solar system to explore.
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Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by charriu on Monday July 20, 2015 @09:42AM (#9915940)
There might also be the small problem of actually building the fusion engine first. I don't think that's something we're really able to do right now, is it?
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Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by bryondowd on Monday July 20, 2015 @10:25AM (#9916216)
Three of those are fission, not fusion. And Daedalus looks more like a very high level concept, without the actual tech to accomplish it.
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Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by x5n1 on Monday July 20, 2015 @10:47AM (#9916381)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...

You could potentially replace fission with fusion and speed things up. And yes they were high level designs because of the supposedly immense expense.

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Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by bryondowd on Monday July 20, 2015 @12:52PM (#9917280)
Right. I'm sure fusion will one day allow us to do incredible things. We just haven't figured it out, yet. Right now, our best attempts at fusion (to my knowledge) put in orders of magnitude more energy than they get out. And the first applications of positive fusion energy would likely be to generate cheap power on Earth, long before it reaches a point where we could drive a ship with it.
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Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by 0xffff2 on Monday July 20, 2015 @03:49PM (#9918547)
Daedalus is not even a high level concept at the level we are talking about, it's a completely different level altogether. Project Daedalus was more like a project to establish reasonable parameters on which to base a high level concept.
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Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by rimantas on Monday July 20, 2015 @10:50AM (#9916409)
Well, the nearest star is the Sun, so…
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