Interstellar Propulsion and The Three Body Problem #SpaceSaturday
Netflix’s 3 Body Problem may confuse those who have read The Three Body Problem, the first in a trilogy from China’s own Liu Cixin. The Netflix series splits main characters, under-explains some plot points, over explains others, and pulls bits from the second two novels, The Dark Forest and Death’s End. For instance, the [spoiler alert] probe sent out to meet the [spoiler alert] alien fleet doesn’t appear until the second book. Here’s more from Centauri Dreams:
[The Three Body Problem‘s] many references to a ‘radiation drive’ seem to be referring to antimatter. What Cixin calls ‘media-propelled spacecraft’ is opaque to me, and I’d welcome reader comments on what it represents. Then there is a ‘curvature drive’ that appears in the final volume of the trilogy, but let’s leave that out of the discussion today. Perhaps it’s a kind of Alcubierre concept, but in any case I want to focus on fusion runways and sails for now, because the Netflix eight-part video presents the idea of sending a relatively small payload toward the invasion fleet using a form of nuclear pulse propulsion.
Here the presentation is accurate if rudimentary but the idea is fascinating. Because I don’t find this in the novels, I am wondering about where, along the route to production, the show acquired a technology made famous originally by Project Orion, with its sequence of nuclear explosions visualized as occurring behind a spacecraft’s huge shock absorbers. Wonderfully, the idea opens up to multiple interstellar propulsion ideas in the literature, including Johndale Solem’s Medusa concept and various fusion runway notions that emerged decades ago, one by my friend Al Jackson and Daniel Whitmire, another by Jordin Kare, who christened his concept the ‘Bussard buzz bomb.’
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