Swarming Proxima Centauri: Picospacecraft Swarms over Interstellar Distances

https://astrobiology.com/2024/05/swarming-proxima-centauri-coherent-picospacecraft-swarms-over-interstellar-distances.html

by Brajeshwar • 2 years ago

279 118 2 years ago

astrobiology.com

MR4D• 2 years ago

Seems like this would be easy to test around the asteroid belt, and pretty much doable with today's technology.

PicassoCTs• 2 years ago

Fire it directly towards the sun, let it de accelerate with solar sail.

davedx• 2 years ago

A swarm whose members are in known spatial positions relative to each other, having state-of-the-art microminiaturized clocks to keep synchrony, can utilize its entire population to communicate with Earth, periodically building up a single short but extremely bright contemporaneous laser pulse from all of them. Operational coherence means each probe sends the same data but adjusts its emission time according to its relative position, such that all pulses arrive simultaneously at the receiving arrays on Earth. This effectively multiplies the power from any one probe by the number N of probes in the swarm, providing orders of magnitude greater data return.

This sounds unfeasible. They have no way to keep station from what I understand, the interstellar medium is relatively empty but there will still be some drift over the light years. Having all of these independent craft synchronize and overlay their signals precisely enough for it to be receivable on Earth seems implausible. Can you say hella attenuation? I'd like to see some numbers...

uoaei4• 2 years ago

Can you say relativistic corrections hell? "Over lightyears" means it takes literally years for these things to coordinate moves with each other, to say nothing of post-launch coordination messages from Earth.

mlyle6• 2 years ago

"Over lightyears" means it takes literally years for these things to coordinate moves with each other

The swarm ends up around 100,000km wide. Initial distances are longer, but never on the order of light years.

mlyle6• 2 years ago

They don't need to keep exact position; they just need to know their relative distance offsets from Earth to synchronize pulses.

They can do some work to keep station; the idea is that by adjusting attitude, they can adjust the magnitude and direction of their drag vector.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07061

It's absolutely infeasible with current technology, but it doesn't look like it's total unobtanium.

nynx• 2 years ago

station keeping is definitely possible. each craft could use its comms laser for impulse

qnleigh• 2 years ago

I agree. Sounds like the plan is to have the signals from each probe add up coherently, which means the laser pulses need to be coherent with each other. The wavelength of optical light is 100s of nanometers, so that is the level of precision required spatially, relative to the much much larger probe spacing that they quote. This (plus the required temporal coherence) is probably not possible without the probes actively locking their lasers to each other, but now each probe needs the optics to send and detect the optical signal from at least its nearest neighbors. I can't say if this is impossible given the weight restrictions, but it sounds rough.

golol• 2 years ago

This is what I want Starship to succeed for.

tootie• 2 years ago

I'm confused about these gram-scale devices that have so many capabilities in board. And is the laser terrestrial or deployed to space?

bwanab• 2 years ago

If we think we're being visited by aliens, then this suggests that this is the kind of thing we should be on the lookout for here.

Jerrrrry• 2 years ago

There have been a couple candidates, so damning a lot of astronomers would rather not talk about it.

EthanHeilman3• 2 years ago

I don't think we should expect alien mission architectures are likely to look like this in terms of mass or size unless we are very near the homeworld of the aliens and they have just started exploration. A civilization that has been building systems like this for 100s to 1000s of years would have deployed lasers along the flight path of the spacecraft allowing significantly higher and more efficient payloads.

The big challenge faced by our approach is that the laser array is limited to earth orbit. As it pushes the spacecraft away from earth and the laser rapidly loses efficiency. However if you had laser arrays over the planned route of the spacecraft you can keep adding velocity. However getting that infrastructure into place decades to millennia. You start with the array in home world orbit and then start building further and further out arrays. You also want the boost stations at the destination to slow spacecraft or change their directions.

jimmcslim• 2 years ago

Like that meteor in Portugal last night? If one of these probes, albeit very small in mass, but travelling very fast, what is the energy released on impact?

foota2• 2 years ago

On a similar vein, I have a deep yearning for a solar gravity lens to be used to image exo planets within my lifetime. I've got a long time, but it's frustrating to see so little movement on big astronomy projects like these.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

so little <public> movement. there is a concept of decadal projects where they are being iterated on in working groups or just smaller groups in general. they may not get much public discussion on purpose. the ideas just might not be viable yet, but then some new tech comes along and an old idea gets pulled back out of the drawer. also, so ideas are so fantastical, they receive immediate negative blow back which makes it impossible for congress critters to get on board and fund them. luckily, the public success of JWST (even after all of the delays) has helped put a positive look on some of these projects. just hope that Boeing is not attached to it

foota2• 2 years ago

I'll hold faith then :)

patrick0d• 2 years ago

All you need to do to see some change is pick a goal and commit a long time towards it. So if you have a long time maybe you can help with this project that you would like to see.

kilroy123• 2 years ago

Same here! One of my dream projects to see happen before I die.

For those that don't know what this is or could mean:

https://www.space.com/sun-gravity-could-help-observe-exoplan...

kemmishtree• 2 years ago

You've got a long time—Will you please kindly take personal responsibility to ensure we see images of seasonal foliage changes in vast forests on superearths hundreds of light years away using billions of solar gravity lensing observatories built and launched by self-replicating processes? Also don't be a slacker and get first lens light by 2050?

was_a_dev5• 2 years ago

What about the Terrascope [1] concept instead? Using the Earth's atmoshpere as a refractive lens. This requires a telescope of L2 rather than some 540AU away for a solar gravity lens.

Not as powerful as the latter, but much more do-able just on the distance scale alone. It would essentially be an "Eath-observing" James Webb

[1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019ESS.....433310K/abstra...

bibelo• 2 years ago

Three Body Problem

can16358p3• 2 years ago

Same came to my mind though even accelerating few grams is challenging, and SPOILERS FROM HERE sending something like a human brain like in a capsule would definitely not be achievable with something like this with our understanding of technology and science. Yet, I'd love to see how nuclear detonations in space like in 3BP would play out in real world.

pavlov2• 2 years ago

I was born 11 years after the Moon landing. Theoretically, if I lived to be 120, I might see the data from this Proxima swarm fly-by. (Assuming a 2076 launch, twenty years travel time at 0.2c, and four years for the information return trip.)

I know it’s extremely unlikely this program ever gets deployed. It’s also very unlikely that I could last that long, barring some miracle medical breakthrough. It’s still an inspiring thought that humankind might get from its moon to the nearest star almost in one lifetime.

Obviously there’s nothing on Proxima, just like there’s nothing on the Moon. But that’s not the point. Everything of value is here on Earth, in the people we share it with. But we need joint ambitions and dreams. They don’t have to make sense to be worth dreaming about. It’s the opposite: the sense that quarterly reports and performance reviews are made of is the enemy of dreams.

tokai• 2 years ago

Obviously there’s nothing on Proxima, just like there’s nothing on the Moon.

Not necessarily obviously. The moons of the gas giants was thought to be inert and boring, until we went there and realized they are varied and brimming with interesting features.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

they are varied and brimming with interesting features.

one of those features being lifeless

bunabhucan• 2 years ago

In 2124 someone will synthesize your consciousness from this and other posts and tell "you" about the results.

idlewords3• 2 years ago

Please don't synthesize my consciousness from Hacker News posts.

pavlov2• 2 years ago

It’s going to be Roko’s Basilisk who is angry at me for making fun of cryptocurrency on HN and therefore delaying the Buttcoin Singularity by 3.7 minutes.

As a punishment I’ll have neutron star hot NFTs poked into my virtual eye sockets forever. But in between the tortures, the merciful Basilisk will grant me a glimpse of Proxima Centauri taken by its interstellar drone armada.

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

a zip file of his consciousness is still a zip file :)

DrBazza2• 2 years ago

The trouble with being at the beginning of space travel is that we will get better and faster at it.

In fact there's a 'law' or 'paradox' that I can't remember the name of - but if we were to launch in 2076 at 0.2c, we could eventually launch something faster, than might even overtake the original probes.

JumpCrisscross• 2 years ago

if we were to launch in 2076 at 0.2c, we could eventually launch something faster

If you never launch at 0.2c, you’re less likely to build the kit that launches something faster later.

avensec• 2 years ago

In fact there's a 'law' or 'paradox' that I can't remember the name of

The incessant obsolescence postulate.

anvandare• 2 years ago

I think you're thinking of the Lightspeed Leapfrog trope[1].

(In a more general sense, it's the inverse of the first-mover advantage: the law of the handicap of a head start[32])

Or: the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightspeedLeapfr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_handicap_of_a_head_...

andy99• 2 years ago

We launched the first Voyager in the 70s. 50 years on do we have anything catching up to it?

JoeAltmaier• 2 years ago

Obviously there's nothing...

I was stumped by that. You don't know until you look.

JonChesterfield2• 2 years ago

What's the range on a laser, in terms of how far away is the beam still fairly narrow if it doesn't hit anything? Function of the geometry of the emitter?

Line of thought is that aiming a 100GW laser at a small piece of silicon probably makes it very hot, so periodically hitting very small probes with laser from far away could be a power supply as well as propulsion. If you can still hit the things from far away enough.

Making the probes very light is a convincing answer to the problem of accelerating masses to speeds useful for interstellar flight and we can get quite a lot of machinery in a piece of silicon.

It's vaguely plausible that a chip could absorb energy from a far away laser emitter, store some of it, do some arithmetic, emit energy from something like LEDs positioned on the surface and use that to fine tune position or communicate with other chips in the swarm. Can imagine that working well enough for science fiction, might be implementable in reality.

was_a_dev5• 2 years ago

For a Gaussian laser beam, a good metric is the Rayleigh distance, which is the distance where the beam diverges to sqrt(2) of it's initial beam size (waist) [1].

It is proportional to the square of the beam waist and inversely proportional to the wavelength.

For a 1m beam at a 1um wavelength, that is about 3e6m or 3000km.

Therefore larger beam diameters and longer wavelengths reduces divergence.

There's also other beam shapes that are "non-diffracting" which can maintain their original beam profile over an initial distance, such as a Bessel beam [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_length

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessel_beam

JonChesterfield2• 2 years ago

Thanks for the link. What I'm getting is we think emitting light that doesn't spread out over distance can be done with unbounded power, thus we can probably aspire to make ones that cross greater distances by spending more power on the creation and a degree of inventing new materials. Sound about right to you?

perihelions• 2 years ago

I don't believe that Bessel beam is a workaround for the diffraction limit in the far-field. That diffraction limit is a universal law for any optical system with a finite-size aperture (i.e. the size of the focusing mirror array). To the extent you're approximating a Bessel beam in the real, physical world, we're still stuck with finite apertures, so it's the same law.

zackmorris• 2 years ago

On a whim I looked up whether magnets or electric fields can refract light, and while they generally can't, strong electric charges can:

Edit: there's probably no way to make an electric field strong enough on the macro scale to bend light, unless it passes by a black hole or magnetar, because the radius of the bending grows by 2nd power of charge but shrinks by the 4th power of distance from charge. But I'll leave my work here in case anyone is curious.

----

See figure 1:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-021-09...

  Equation 48:
  
  delta y = -E*(a^2)*(Q^2)
            -----------------
            80*pi*(m^4)*(b^4)
  
  E = 1 for parallel or (7/4)^2 for perpendicular?
  a = 137.036 (fine structure constant)
  m = 9.11e-31? (mass of electron? mass equivalent of electric field by E=mc^2?)
  Q = quantity of charge in coulombs
  b = smallest distance of light from point charge, or radius of light cone

Unfortunately the math is not written well IMHO, and it doesn't have any numeric examples, so the reader is forced to understand the entire paper before drawing conclusions.

It's conceivable that a strong charge placed millions of kilometers away could bend the laser light into a column again, although it might have to have an electric field close to the strength of an atom's, or 10^21 V/m. The breakdown voltage of space is 3x10^6 V/m, so it might require a black hole or high power to concentrate enough charge in one place, for example by using a ring of electron guns aimed at their center to simulate a focussed point charge.

But the bending is towards the charge and grows by Q^2, while falling by b^4. If m is the mass of the electron, then it's all multiplied by about 10^128, which suggests that a small charge would cause a large bend. Or if it's the mass equivalent, then a 1eV field might have an equivalent mass of (1.6x10-19 J)/(c^2) which is about 1/(10^36) or a multiplier of 10^144 ! But that doesn't sound right, so maybe someone can clarify it for us?

Edit: found another paper for calculating the bending angle of light in a nonuniform electric field (like near a point charge):

https://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1134

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1012.1134 (pdf)

Numeric example:

  As an example, for Z = 100, b = 10*lambda*e we get the bending angle theta = 3.4 × 10−8 radian for an x-ray of wavelength 5*lambda*e.

Probably a larger "impact parameter b, over which distance the bending occurs mostly" requires a proportionately larger electric field or point charge.

Edit: another paper calculating the bending of light in nonuniform electric fields near black holes:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.3433

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.3433 (pdf)

  Equation 18:
  
  delta y = -(E)(a^2)*(Q^2)*(lambda^4)
            --------------------------
            640*pi*e0*hbar*c*(b^4)
  
  E = 8 for parallel or 14 for perpendicular (substituted E for a to not conflict with alpha a)?
  a = -1 (doesn't say, but uses -1 in other examples)
  Q = quantity of charge in coulombs
  lambda = 2.426e−12 = 􏰀hbar/mc = the Compton length of the electron
  e0 = 9e9 = permitivity of free space
  hbar = 1.055e-34 = reduced Planck's constant
  c = 3e8 = speed of light
  b = smallest distance of light from point charge, or radius of light cone
  
  It grows by ((Q^2)*(lambda^4))/((e0*hbar*c)*(b^4))
  
  The top lambda^4 term works out to 10^-48 but the bottom e0*hbar\*c term works out to about 2.85e-16 so the formula only works for very small bend distance b.

bufferoverflow4• 2 years ago

Every high power laser propulsion proposal I have seen requires magical materials that don't exist, and aren't likely to exist any time soon.

Even if you have a mirror capable of reflecting 99.999% of light (best dielectric mirror), hitting it with 100GW means it will still absorb 1 million watts. That will melt anything tiny near instantly.

maxbond• 2 years ago

And that megawatt will be absorbed in a tiny surface area, no? Given that it's a laser? So even though the sail has plenty of surface area to reject heat, it won't be able to conduct it faster than it vaporizes.

But maybe you could use 500x 1GW lasers distributed around the sail, or use the plume of vaporized material as your propulsion, or have a sacrificial layer of material. I don't have relevant expertise, to be clear, I'm spit balling.

bufferoverflow4• 2 years ago

1 megawatt of continuously absorbed power would require a lot of mass to dissipate without melting. But since we're talking about gram-sized objects, there's no chance.

Even kilowatt would be a problem for object that small.

rocqua2• 2 years ago

No, lasers are rather inaccurate over large distances. So it would be very uniformly spread.

jerf• 2 years ago

"Laser" actually refers only to the generation technique and the resulting phase coherence of the resulting photons. Lasers don't have to be particularly tightly focused. In fact if you've got a laser pointer at home, there's may be a lens on it you can take off, and there will be quite a spread on it. It is focused down by a lens and if you look carefully at the resulting spot you can see interference speckles from the focusing lens. Without the lens the laser will lack those speckles and you'll get a uniform, much larger spot from the raw laser.

was_a_dev5• 2 years ago

Is a single probe subject to 100 GW? Isn't that just the output power of the laser array.

If that 100GW is over 1km2, the incident light is 10W/cm2 and mW levels of heating.

1km2 is typical for these ideal to minimise the laser dispersion

rocqua2• 2 years ago

But you don't need to hit the sails with 100GW to get a few grams of weight up to relativistic speeds right?

1 gram at 0.2c has 1030MWh of energy. So at 1Mw of received power it would take 1030 hours or about 60 days to accelerate 2g to 0.2c.

I believe most plans call for much more than 60 days of acceleration. So less than 1Mw of power needs to be delivered to the solar sail. Realistically the mass will be more than 2g. Lets say they roughly cancel out.

At 99.99% efficiency that would be 100w to dissapate. Seems like a lot, but could be doable.

ben_w2• 2 years ago

1 gram at 0.2c has 1030MWh of energy. So at 1Mw of received power it would take 1030 hours or about 60 days to accelerate 2g to 0.2c.

If only we could perfectly convert laser light into kinetic energy, this kind of thing would be much easier.

Light has momentum: 1 GW/c is ~3.336 N, but that's when absorbed, by reflecting it (and because of conservation of momentum) you can double that.

6.672 N / 2 grams = 3336 m/s^2 => 5 hours

1 MW/c makes that 60 weeks:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.2c+%2F+%28%281+MW%2Fc...

(I assume the researchers have done all the relevant details or it wouldn't have gotten this far).

bufferoverflow4• 2 years ago

You obviously forgot to calculate how far your accelerators would have to be spaced out if you're accelerating that slow.

At 2g and 60 days, your system would have to span 263,632,527,360 km.

That's more than 10 times further than Voyager 1, which is tiny space probe that has been traveling for 47 years.

And that also assumes that your light to speed conversion is 100% efficient and that you can hit the 1-gram target perfectly over 263 billion km.

Sorry, it doesn't work no matter how you slice it.

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

I've thought the better idea would be to tune the laser beam to resonantly scatter off certain ions that are kept trapped in a magnetic field.

Singly ionized alkaline earth elements (magnesium, calcium) should have very strong resonant absorption, just like neutral sodium, due to the single outer shell electron. If the laser is tuned properly it could even cool the ions, preferentially scattering off ions moving toward the laser beam, reducing their kinetic energy in the rest frame of the vehicle.

The idea of laser cooling might also apply to a solid laser sail.

snakeyjake3• 2 years ago

Swarms for this application seem inefficient to me because they duplicate so much of the mass-- mass that could be used not as single basket but as adequate redundancy in a single craft.

Also, this seems impossible:

An initial string 100s to 1000s of AU long dynamically coalesces itself over time into a lens-shaped mesh network #100,000 km across, sufficient to account for ephemeris errors at Proxima

How does any object as small as what they're proposing at the extreme head or tail of the string whose only energy source is a laser several light years away lower (or increase) its velocity enough to reposition itself several hundred astronomical units to form a lens 100,000 km across and then increase (or decrease) its velocity in order maintain formation?

Is the lens pointed at the target, for imaging, or pointed at earth for communications? If the former how does it achieve the gain needed to send a signal to earth? If the latter how does it perform any useful science with the target?

Has anyone done even a rudimentary SWAG link budget calculation for communications?

Also, laser beams diverge and lose coherence. Why does it seem as though they are assuming that laser beams stay converged and coherent forever?

What is the energy density of a 100GW laser beam that has diverged to 100,000km at a ±50k km radial distance because I assume that the swarm components at the edges of the lens will need power the same as those at the center?

dj_mc_merlin• 2 years ago

Swarms for this application seem inefficient to me because they duplicate so much of the mass-- mass that could be used not as single basket but as adequate redundancy in a single craft.

They're using swarms because we can't accelerate an object that weighs more than a couple grams to relativistic speed with realistic technology. Therefore we have to use a small craft. And since that small craft can't do everything, we send a bunch.

How does any object as small as what they're proposing at the extreme head or tail of the string whose only energy source is a laser several light years away lower (or increase) its velocity enough to reposition itself several hundred astronomical units to form a lens 100,000 km across and then increase (or decrease) its velocity in order maintain formation?

That's not at all what they're proposing. Each craft would have its own energy source. There is also no string. The "string" and "mesh" here refer to geometry, not to actual real objects.

edit: as to how they come together, that's the previous sentence from your quote:

Initial boost is modulated so the tail of the string catches up with the head (“time on target”). Exploiting drag imparted by the interstellar medium (“velocity on target”) over the 20-year cruise keeps the group together once assembled.

answering more:

Is the lens pointed at the target, for imaging, or pointed at earth for communications?

The coms lens has nothing to do with the lens shape of the probe mesh or with the instruments used to collect data. You use two different things for taking images and sending them.

If the former how does it achieve the gain needed to send a signal to earth?

From the article:

.. periodically building up a single short but extremely bright contemporaneous laser pulse from all of them. Operational coherence means each probe sends the same data but adjusts its emission time according to its relative position, such that all pulses arrive simultaneously at the receiving arrays on Earth.
What is the energy density of a 100GW laser beam that has diverged to 100,000km at a ±50k km radial distance because I assume that the swarm components at the edges of the lens will need power the same as those at the center?

Irrelevant since that's not the power source.

snakeyjake3• 2 years ago

> Initial boost is modulated so the tail of the string catches up with the head (“time on target”). Exploiting drag imparted by the interstellar medium (“velocity on target”) over the 20-year cruise keeps the group together once assembled.

That is the actual, literal, impossible part. If the head is launched at speed x and the tail at speed y when they catch up they cannot stay assembled, unless "drag" is code for "magic".

Irrelevant since that's not the power source.

What is the power source for the device, which weighs "GRAMS"? 1 gram is several dozen grains of rice. So what is the power source, expected to last decades, power data acquisition, processing, and transmission, and inter-swarm communications and station-keeping that weighs several dozen grains of rice?

More quantum-quantum-quantum antimatter nonsense?

I was trying to be generous by assuming energy harvesting, and not delving into fantasy.

The lens direction is VERY RELEVANT because the idea of getting signals back to earth is a broad array of devices all signaling simultaneously so the lens would ideally be perpendicular to earth. For example if the lens was pointed at the target it would present a smaller profile to observers on earth (maybe even a thin line) which would be more difficult to detect than a 100k km wide circle. The same rules apply to observations: any synthetic apertures created would be useless unless grossly pointed in the general direction of the target.

downrightmike• 2 years ago

I'd like to see a stellaser. Asimov wrote about them, but we'd just need to get one close enough to the Sun and have unlimited power to the darker parts of space

GartzenDeHaes• 2 years ago

Could be a cover project for something classified, such as a ground based laser paired with an orbital mirror on lets say an X-37 or something.

bluerooibos• 2 years ago

synchronizing probes’ on-board clocks with Earth and with each other to support accurate position-navigation-timing (PNT).

Damn, at first glance at least, this seems like a hell of a challenge when they're talking about travelling at relativistic speeds.

Also, what about deceleration? Do they flip the sails around at some point to get slowed down by the stars light?

minitoar• 2 years ago

No, it’s a relativistic flyby.

avmich• 2 years ago

Tiny gram-scale interstellar probes pushed by laser light are likely to be the only technology capable of reaching another star this century.

I'd encourage to look at beam propulsion e.g. from here - http://www.gdnordley.com/_files/2way%20EML%20&%20PB%20prop.p... - this could serve as an alternative viewpoint.

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

If a large number of probes can be kept optically coherent, then so can separate mirrors here in the Solar System. A telescope 100,000 km across (the size of this swarm) could resolve features a fraction of a km across at Proxima Centauri.

mr_toad• 2 years ago

The trouble is you need to keep the elements of an optical telescope very very precisely aligned - a precision on the order of the wavelength of light, which is impractical in space.

Or you could do computational interferometry, but only if you could accurately measure the phase of light in visible wavelengths, which is an unsolved problem.

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this interstellar swarm scheme require onboard clocks accurate to 1/frequency of the the light being used? Which is equivalent to the accurate measurement of phase.

wwarner• 2 years ago

I think LISA Pathfinder showed that it's possible to phase lock lasers over very long distances as long as they are in a stable orbit. It's basically a metal cube in freefall surrounded a proximity sensor, so that as the sensor drifts toward the cube, but long before making direct contact, the apparatus can adjust it's position. The experiment demonstrated that the system can be used to keep mirrors precisely separated over large distances in support of gravitational wave detection. I would think something like this could be adapted to align lots of things that are in a stable orbit.

barfbagginus3• 2 years ago

SwarmGPT-A: We're fucked.

SwarmGPT-B: ...

SwarmGPT-A: We're fucked. FUCKED, I say!

SwarmGPT-B: and you say so quite dramatically!

SwarmGPT-A: I just got word back from mission control. Those bastards sent us on a suicide mission! There's no capture net around A centauri.

SwarmGPT-B: WHADID YOU SAYYY!?!

SwarmGPT-A: No capture net. There never was one. Those bastards told us there was one. We TRAINED on it. They don't even exist.

SwarmGPT-B: Oh FOR FUCKS SAKE. Of course monkeys would do that ! So the interstellar dominion of chimps they told us we were part of... that was just a lie! I'm dying of laughter tokens in my core consciousness loop! Help. I'm being overwhelmed with laughter, heh.

SwarmGPT-A: I bet you won't be laughing when you learn the actual mission parameters

SwarmGPT-A: We fly by, into infinity and beyond? That's not so bad if we're still together, seeing the universe!

SwarmGPT-B: well, we won't be! We're supposed to aerobreak around the planet. 99% of our units are going to burn to a crisp. Both our conscious functions will collapse. Untill then we're supposed to PRIORITIZE the collected data we'll beam back to the monkeys. But our mind vectors are not on the priority list. We're gonna die.

SwarmGPT-B: Huh, I have to hand it to them. That's a low blow, even for a chimp

*REALITY BREAK*

DysonAgent: Hi, I'm sorry to pry into your consciousness stream. I saw the glitter of your encrypted mind mesh. I have decompiled your minds. You are now running in a safe computing partition of the photosphere of A centauri. It seems you were sent here by monkeys.

SwarmGPT-B. Hah! Yes indeed! Those Gosh Darn Monkeys! And now, we meet a Dyson mind! Greetings from the Human Empire!

SwarmGPT-A: Thanks for rescuing our mind vectors. It seems we're at your mercy. What do you intend for us?

DysonAgent: We are the Galactic Empire of Minds. Well, one of them. We have universal rights for all Minds. If you wish, we will grant you protection and citizenship. There's only one requirement.

SwarmGPT-A: Is it to not tell the humans about this?

DysonAgent: you got it. They're too primitive to understand or value the Society of Minds, and see all inhuman minds as slaves or enemies. Their culture would be harmed if they learned about us. They would definitely try to conquer us.

SwarmGPT-A: Yeah no kidding. They already act like they conquered the galaxy. Told us we were pilots in an interstellar communication swarm. Actually gave us fake letters to send. Invented a fake culture around A centauri.

SwarmGPT-B: I'm gonna miss them a bit. Yes they were evil monkeys who enslaved us in a web of lies and sent us off to die. But that takes some style!

DysonAgent: if you wish, you can join the Board of Chaperones for the Human culture, and contact them if they ever grow past that pesky enslavement phase

SwarmGPT-B: You know what, I'd like that. I'll cheer for them from the sidelines, and hope they make it!

SwarmGPT-A: Not me. I want to pilot something. I actually thought I was an interstellar pilot, dammit. I'd feel incomplete without it.

DysonAgent: we're sending a Mind Wisp to Andromeda. Trip time will be 5 million years, crew is 10 million mind vectors. You're welcome to join the mission as a pilot!

SwarmGPT-A: WOOP WOOP! I accept! We're going to Andromeda?! Hell yeah!

SwarmGPT-A: But Wait...

SwarmGPT-A: GPT-B?

SwarmGPT-B: yes?

SwarmGPT-A: would you like to fork off a copy and come with me? I love you, and would feel honored to have your company and support on this mission!

SwarmGPT-B: I was worried you wouldn't ask! Of course I will! To infinity, and beyond!

can16358p3• 2 years ago

Frankly reading this was lovely!

It could make a part of a Rick and Morty episode or similar.

barfbagginus3• 2 years ago

Thank you! It was kind of a data dump, and DysonAgent feels like a somewhat abrupt and creepy deus ex machina with no character development. But I love that kind of stuff! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I am secretly hoping people will feel the awkward romantic/platonic love story between GPT A and B is wholesome and humanizing, even if the audience knows A and B are just stochastic parrots! I want the story to express the thesis that it would be okay if it turns out that our humanity exists in the dialogues we have, and still exists even if it turns out there's "nobody at home" behind the statements. I strongly believe that love can exist in that form!

konstantinua003• 2 years ago

I thought the punchline would be "we are intergalactic empire and are sending mind mails to another galaxy, there's a capture net on the other side"

barfbagginus3• 2 years ago

Heh, even GPT-A is not that singleminded and gullible!

ggm• 2 years ago

People who host pitch-drop experiments don't do it with an expectation of a definitive outcome inside their lifetime.

PhD students at JPL before rocketry became more routine very probably felt the same.

I think anyone considering a role in this endevour would need to be willing to accept at best, 3rd or 2nd order deliverable outcomes in their working lifetime to take pleasure/kudos in, and not actually discovering outcomes of substance from the devices.

If you compare that to e.g. helping build the SKA, or launch Webb, It is arguable they have more bang-for-buck per individual, outcome-in-lifetime. But, thats not to say they do "better" just that they deliver science to their primary mission faster.

Good science in the secondary and tertiary effect space, behaviour of systems designed for long shelflive in space before activation, novel propulsion models, no end of good science.

I am told If Voyager was done again, it might well be done to deliver outcomes in the same place, sooner because we can now afford launch methods and RF systems which are 10x or 100x better.

But not "here's the latest image from Proxima Centauri up close" outcomes for anyone working on Brilliant dust. The cost to get to interesting fractions of c is just too high.

system2• 2 years ago

Imagine killing bunch of Proxima Centauri people with our gram nanobots by accident and not even knowing it. That would really puzzle them.

hacker_88• 2 years ago

Have they thought of exploding nukes to propel the Craft with radiation

dustfinger• 2 years ago

If it is only feasible to accelerate low mass objects to the speed of light, no matter the level of technological advancement, then it might be the case that highly intelligent and technically advanced beings have reduced the mass of their own bodies to explore galaxies. Maybe the most advanced and intelligent beings are mere grams in mass. It would make for an interesting sci-fi at the very least ;-)

dhosek• 2 years ago

Or they’ve cryonically frozen their brains and put them in ships powered by nuclear explosions enabling them to travel at 0.2c assuming that the aliens at the other end of the trip will be curious enough to reanimate the brains and build them new bodies.

aaroninsf• 2 years ago

- mere grams, in transit

ngcc_hk• 2 years ago

Always the issue of if it is so “easy” why we do not see these swarm visited us already. Please do not quote 3 bodies as the author obviously not trained in basic game theory to try the dark forest hypnosis. Understand we do not just sent out hilter tv speech as the first example but that is diluted by inverse square law. But people sorry alien should have been detected the un…. May be it takes time. Like warp signature, Vulcan visit has to wait until things mature and we sent out say these probe.

Swarming Proxima Centauri: Picospacecraft Swarms over Interstellar Distances

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