Recently there was a conference, the One Hundred Year Starship, and of course many people came
in with designs to have gigantic fusion rockets take us to Mars and beyond Jupiter, into the
stars. Other people said yes, antimatter rockets, that's the way to go, and we all
had this mental vision of the Enterprise going to the nearby star systems. . . . There is
another way to do it. Think of Mother Nature. When Mother Nature wants to propagate life,
one possibility is to send out seeds, not just one or two, but millions of seeds.
Most of the seeds never make it, but one or two do and as a consequence that's how trees
in forests propagate. So why not create a nano ship using nanotechnology? How big
would it be? Some people like Paul Davies say it could be as big as a bread box. Other
people say it could be even smaller than that. Why not something the size of a needle?
And because they're so small it wouldn't take much to accelerate them to near the speed
of light. Realize that a very small tabletop accelerator
can accelerate electrons to near the speed of light, so it wouldn't take much for us
to accelerate nano molecules to very, very fast velocities near the speed of light using
electric fields. Now these probes would be different from ordinary probes. They
would be nanobots. They would have the ability to land on a hostile terrain and create a
factory just like a virus. That's what viruses do. They replicate. One virus can create
maybe a thousand copies, then a thousand, thousand copies and then a million, billion,
trillion and all of the sudden you have trillions of these things propagating through outer
space. And how would you do it? One possibility is to use the field, magnetic fields around
Jupiter. Calculations have shown that you can whip around Jupiter using what is called
the Faraday Effect to whip particles to perhaps near the speed of light.
And again, we don't have these nanobots yet. We have to wait until nanotechnology becomes
sufficiently developed, but when that happens perhaps the 100 year starship is not going
to look like the Enterprise. Perhaps it will look like tiny, little needles by the
billions sent into outer space and maybe only a handful of them land on a distant moon to
create factories. And doesn't that sound familiar? This is the plotline of the movie 2001.
Remember that gigantic obelisk on Mars? That was the Von Neumann probe, a virus, a
self-replicating probe that can then explore the universe near the speed of light.