Everything Old… a corrective

Hi All

My first reaction to the “New Scientist” reporting the conclusions of William & Arthur Edelstein was to write an angry blog-post, but then I realised that such gamma-factors (~5,000) run up against the thermal glow of the galaxy and the CMB red-shifted into a white-hot blaze. It’s not just the proton radiation we have to worry about too. Dust, cosmic-rays and so on, all get focussed & intensified by relativistic aberration as well as the blue-shift. Essentially a “hard wall of light” forms, making such extreme speeds unhealthy. So I’m inclined to agree with the Edelsteins, though James Essig’s suggestion of ultra-dense matter shielding may well be the ‘unobtainium’ miracle needed to ultimately achieve such. However since the intensity falls off rapidly at lower gamma factors, this really isn’t an impediment to more modest ranges – a gamma-factor of ~50 would experience a much more benign radiation field.

Interestingly Alastair Reynold’s fictional “House of Suns” deep future view has maximum speeds of a mere 0.9999 c, even though they’re protected via some kind of space-time ‘interdict’ shield – though it’s hard to imagine what could power million ton starships doing 1200 gees at 0.999c…

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