Antimatter is an excellent power source but think of it more like a battery, or an energy storage device than providing energy in and of itself.

You can collect some from radiation belts if you have efficient enough facilities, but your best way to create antimatter would be to have something like a dyson swarm collecting lots of solar energy to run a type of particle accelerator and continually collect the small amounts of antimatter it creates for storage.

Then you use the antimatter as an extremely energy dense and efficient portable energy source for things like space ships or deep space space stations in combination with fusion reactors.

Oh you will be soo sorely missed oh no.

I see what you did there. Whether intentional or not.

Thank you for your art.

The one about the woman doing some gardening reminiscing sexually seeing a “slug thrusting innocuously across the rhododendrons” about “planet Alderon and the alien who used to make love to [me]” is one of my favourite sentences in all of existence.

Every time I read I’m in pieces.

Do you have any evidence about the poles switching times during the Roman era? As far as I was aware the last time it happened was like half a million years ago or something, which certainly was not during the Roman era.

As a medical professional and someone trained in the scientific method I actually find this concept rather distressing and have considered it before.

Like say we have X issue and there are grants to do scientific studies on it but 99% of the money is there to do studies proving X angle and only 1% of the money is there to just to consider Y angle, you’re going to end up with an information bias. I don’t want to get into controversies but I’ve seen this sort of thing happen within other scientific fields and it concerns me greatly. To clarify, I am 100% believing of anthropogenic climate change phenomenon, BUT there is now a huge amount of money there specifically to study how almost anything is caused by climate change and very little about things that are not and I have a friend who did a type of geography postgrad who pointed out that some of them are basically just mindlessly choosing such funding for research trying to find stuff that might’ve been affected by it as its always there and other areas aren’t to get money for their research and postgrad studying. I won’t insult them by saying that they’re deliberately fudging data (I would never know though) but when you overwhelmingly fund for one particular type of evidence you’re only really going to have that type of evidence if that makes sense.

Clarifying again. I Do believe in fairies climate change I do I do I do. I just query the way a lot of the funding is managed and how it’s affecting science.

We don’t need to send “say 100 tonnes” at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

For that same cost we could use a launcher like SpaceX starship and send dozens of microoprobes into orbit and use Earth-side laser arrays to accelerate them to a significant two-digit percentage of the speed of light. We can do that today with currently available technology if we just make the infrastructure. None of it is outwith our current technological expertise.

The OP is asking about images of an extrasolar planet. Or of evidence of life there. Not necessarily juman boots on the ground.

If we take that, we can even do that without even leaving our solar system. With technology currently available at our development level (should we decide to build it - plans are available) we are capable of sending types of telescopes to many, many AU beyond the sun in a particular direction within a couple of decades (same time it would take to send a starshot prove to the Centauri systems) to use the sun’s gravity well as a lens to image extrasolar planets with a pixel resolution of tens of km. That’s enough to see cities.

You’re arguing over some semantics that aren’t even in question in the particular sub thread here. We can and could send probes to nearby star systems in a time measured in decades, not millennia. It’s not about 100t behemoths. It’s about micro probes using microtechnology on the probe itself and macro technology here on earth as a form of propulsion with transit time being only 5-10 times the light year distance.

We don’t know where life is. It could be next door. It doesn’t necessarily take thousands of years to get information from our closest stellar neighbours. If we want to use the “if could be so far away” the answer is infinity, not thousands of years. But the answer as to whether we can get information about planets on our local stellar group, the answer is yes, with currently available technology and within decades to hundreds of years (Ly distance divided by 0.2) for now. And within a century or two with that technological capability plus fusion, including antimatter catalysed. A large number of stars are in the hundreds of years rather than the thousands. There are almost 60,000 stars within 100 light years. Even with those pessimist figures that’s less than a thousand years to get there at current tech. Within a few centuries we’re looking at a much quicker and much more efficient probe.

Voyager isn’t propelled by laser sail propulsion though. There have been papers written, showing we could send laser-solar sail probes to the Centauri stars in a timescale of decades not centuries with current technology.

You’re wrong. I know exactly the distances I’m referring to. The Centauri stars are around 4 light years away. Using laser-propelled micro probes we could accelerate them up to 20% of the speed of light. Meaning it could be a 20 year journey. The science checks out.

And with a combination of nuclear pulse propulsion, fusion and/or antimatter-catalysed fusion, which could be available within a century or so, you could even send manned vessels able to get there within a couple of generations. That’s hundreds of years, not thousands.

Close to the speed of light, the time it takes to get there is the number of light years away it is. Though you’d have to accelerate and slow down. At a constant acceleration of 1g for around a year and a constant deceleration of 1g at the half way point (not currently feasible with modern technology) you could get there within half a dozen years real time.

Not necessarily. There are ways we could send probes to Proxima Centauri or Alpha Centauri and image exoplanets with currently available technology within current lifetimes. The problem is both funding and development and whether it’s actually worth it.

You’d need a lot of infrastructure (several nuclear power stations worth of energy and a massive laser array) but it could be done. We’re just not doing it.

With the advent of a super heavy launch vehicle that can be refilled in orbit like Starship, we could also just make a gravity tractor.

A fully expendable, fully refilled SS could get a beast of a gravity tractor out there.