Ah okay.
I'm not sure you'd need that much more wattage for interstellar probes... I'm assuming either chucked potatoes or laser sails, with no exotic propulsion systems or even ion drives, just some mostly passive sensors and a laser or radio transmitter to send data back home (or to the nearest network node). That would just need enough battery storage to use sparingly, punctuating long recharge times.
The waste will be hot for thousands of years, so there's no need to rush. We could make shitloads of such probes.
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brb Monkhouse Stampede, Wed 9 Nov 2022, 17:55,
Reply)
Depends what you mean by interstellar.
Lasers as you will know are neither perfectly collimated nor immune to being scattered by space dust. The last time I read about the subject they were talking about needing megawatts.
It’s all (literally) academic really.
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jonbob loves you, Wed 9 Nov 2022, 18:19,
Reply)
A proposed comms laser for Breakthrough Starshot is a mere 100W:
phys.org/news/2020-05-interstellar-probes-starshot.html
It would need at least one 30m receiver at this end, or possibly smaller assuming a relay network of probes. The denser the relay network, the less powerful and accurate each laser needs to be.
There's talk of drawing power from the interstellar medium, which sounds far fetched compared to nuclear waste. ;)
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brb Monkhouse Stampede, Thu 10 Nov 2022, 20:35,
Reply)
Pointing at Earth will be tricky to say the least!
I notice it also assumes improvements in detectors, which reminds me of something Carl Sagan once said about radio telescopes. Apparently if you summed up all the energy picked up by all the world’s radio telescopes it would amount to about the same as a single falling snowflake.
Let’s just build a few self-sustaining habitats, strap a few fusion rockets to them and fling 'em into the void eh?
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jonbob loves you, Thu 10 Nov 2022, 21:12,
Reply)