Commentary on X
@DanielleFong Also useful for avoiding stars that go boom. Shkadov thrusters are a bit wimpy, but my estimates for gravity tractors give a decent acceleration without having too do something too radical (he said, while AI minions were review stellar mining and disassembly...)
12:32 PM · Jul 14, 2026@anderssandberg i just think it's a weirdly practical idea, compared to warp drive (unobtainium MAYBE) and generation ships. just move the thing
12:55 PM · Jul 14, 2026@DanielleFong The star lifting literature is thin. Must do something about it. Once the Dyson swarm is up and running.
12:54 PM · Jul 14, 2026View all
my modest proposal for this and future civilizations is to make a kind of directionally biased Dyson swarm so that we can directionally locally scoot around the local neighborhood of the Milky Way and visit other stars using the entire solar system as a generation ship Why not?
11:11 AM · Jul 14, 2026Well, I guess one reason is that if you think you're going somewhere dangerous, maybe you don't want to be dragging the whole family along (c.f. whole families on the Enterprise). I mean once we can do things like move the sun around, I'm sure we'll be able to fly away but most people will probably still live down in the gravity well.
1:10 PM · Jul 14, 2026@DanielleFong Generation ships are so annoying! To get anywhere they still need huge engines. The only ones that makes sense are Oort homesteaders or mobile solar systems.
3:47 PM · Jul 14, 2026