Sergey Brin, the brilliant Tech billionaire who co-founded Google, is building an airship at a cost of 250 million dollars, that would allow him to carry his home to wherever he goes. Could this concept be extended to the solar system as a whole? Might we want to take the Sun with us for a ride through the Milky Way galaxy?
Ecclesiastes 1:9 argued: “there is nothing new under the sun.” This gloomy perspective need not be true forever. With a few more centuries of science and technology, our civilization might develop a stellar engine that propels the Sun and allows us to travel with it through the Milky Way galaxy and beyond.
Fritz Zwicky, the astronomer who discovered dark matter in 1933, wrote in his 1957 book Morphological Astronomy: “Considering the Sun itself, many changes are imaginable. Most fascinating is perhaps the possibility of accelerating it to higher speeds, for instance 1,000 kilometers per second directed toward Alpha-Centauri in whose neighborhood our descendants then might arrive a thousand years hence. All of these projects could be realized through the action of nuclear fusion jets, using the matter constituting the Sun and the planets as nuclear propellants.”
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