What is a Gravity Machine? Remember that part in Star Trek IV where Kirk, Spock and co. used the gravity of the sun to whip their ship up to an extraordinary speed. It’s like that, but with less time-travel and another star. Here’s more from Centauri Dreams:
Freeman Dyson’s notion, explained in the paper “Gravitational Machines” that we looked at last week, was to extract energy from a binary star system, as shown in the figure from the paper below. The ever imaginative Dyson, remember, was captivated by the possibilities of engineering on the part of advanced civilizations, whose works we might observe in the form of technosignatures. Here, the idea involves two stars of mass equal to the Sun revolving around a common barycenter. A spacecraft can be injected into an orbit that maximizes the gravitational effect…
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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