Jan 19, 2021 23:25 seanselec@gmail.com Posted on: Breakthrough Initiatives

I believe there's a fellow inventor who came out with his idea of the halo drive... I believe between his ideas and how I've tweaked it I've solved your energy problem acceleration problem and at FRACTIONS of the cost. Using his idea of slingshotting a light beam around a black hole to achieve forward momomentum with the beam first accelerating as it is fired pushing against the medium slingshotting around and recharging at a higher frequency as it propells into the sail to also recharge at a higher energy. This would take thousands of years to achieve meaningful acceleration. But by crunching a few numbers and using the new metamaterials available to us analogous to blackholes we could indeed suspend metamaterials behind the craft analogous to blackholes and fire our beams into them. Which would in return rotate them return them to our sails are a higher frequency blue beam exhaust returning to the walls as a violet high frequency after passing threw our meta material generators as-well as traveling threw the medium of the vacuum upon returning to the capture sail we'd recover all the energy used to provide ignition to our laser drive and more. Getting a two for one energy boost and propulsion system. The drive would always return more energy than it expended by returning a higher frequency wave than it released to create the energy as-well as creating a 'tank-tread' if you will to roll our sail craft over the medium of a vacuum. As-well by returning multie beams on multiple positions on the sail we could control the frequencies to complete complex manuvuers threw the vacuum, only limited by the durability of our materials as to length of time we could operate said laser drive. I believe the self charging laser drive is the vehicle that will take you to proximab and beyond. Please let me know if you'd like technical specs or data with moving forward with your project I believe by using lasers and metamaterials analogous to blackholes we could travel at FRACTIONS of today's fuel costs as-well as material costs being able to run a multiple redundant laser array for several hundred dollars as opposed to the millions of the energy had to be continuously generated after initial ignition of the drive propulsion, navigation as-well as quite a bit of left over energy to run other equipment would be astounding I don't think ANYONE else in the field of theoretical or practical physics is anywhere close to the efficiency to the speeds, manuvuerability or field conservation as my laser drive, I must admit without the equations, and breakthroughs of my follow researchers in both the proposition of the halo drive and metamaterial fields analogous to blackholes this engine design may not have come to be. But I believe with technology TODAY not decades from now we could launch a cost effective mission within MONTHS NOT YEARS that would only be limited by the permeability and permisivity of the vaccuum medium. Truly a self sustaining drive able to reach speeds upwards of 90%c now and this day and age with little to no fuel loss other than some threw convection of heat to the vacuum, I believe is the answer your project is looking for. Sean J Selec seanselec@gmail.com please contact me for technical questions or to recieve diagrams of my drives design I look forward to meeting with your technical engineering team to take our dreams and all of humanities dreams to the future. I can provide citations, to every set of proofs and formulations to show the laser drive is ready for service as soon as you're ready to say go. In science reality not science fiction.

Jan 26, 2021 16:55 Breakthrough Initiatives Posted on: Breakthrough Initiatives

Dear Sean – thank you for your interesting idea.

Metamaterials are not equivalent to black holes in terms of the underlying physics. But we do plan to use metamaterials for the construction of the light sail.

The nearest known black hole is thousands of light years away, so any propulsion method using the space time curvature around it is impractical for our civilization. A pair of black holes can act as a “gravitational slingshot” and launch material objects, like stars, near the speed of light. For two related papers, see:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.5022.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.5030.pdf
For other astrophysical accelerators, see the possibility of light sail launch by stellar explosions,
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.03247.pdf

Regards,
Prof. Avi Loeb
Chair, Breakthrough Starshot Committee