Since this is Future Day, I found an article on NextBigFuture.com has suggested that the drive that would propel us to the stars in the best time is what is called the BlackHole Drive aka Schwarzschild Kugelblitzes or SK’s.
Some of the benefits of this drive are: This is a Blackhole made by light from a laser. The “fuel” or sweet spot is 600 billion kg in the size of a proton. It would create 160 petawatts of power. And the functional length of time for the drive would be 3.5 years or when the blackhole would evaporate. With this drive we could achieve an acceleration of 10% of lightspeed in 20 days.
Why don’t we pursue this drive, you may ask? Well, there are some pretty severe drawbacks, one of them being the lasers we have today are not powerful enough to create the subatomic blackhole sometimes referred to as a Schwarzschild Kugelblitz or SK. The reason we don’t have a laser powerful enough is that with our current technology, the ring accelerator required to collide the particles together would need to be 1000 lightyears across. You read that right 1000 lightyears. It would take us longer to build the accelerator ring so we could create a blackhole to get us to Alpha Centauri than it would take to get there with a solid rocket craft, assuming we could build one big enough for all the fuel we would need.
So, girls and boys, nerds and nerdettes, distant space travel still eludes us, at least for the time being.
Below is an interesting video on various interstellar travel options.
And here is a link to the article explaining in some detail the specifics of an SK drive on NextBigFuture.com
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