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8/3/2025, 9:14:50 PM
>Mercury and Venus, now unbearably hot because they are too close to the Sun, can be shoved into orbits near the Earth by nuclear explosions, Zwicky said. Frozen planets like distant Jupiter can be blasted nearer the Sun.
>“Jupiter is so big and its gravitational pull so strong that man would find it difficult to move about on the surface.” Zwicky said. “The answer is to whittle it down to proper size with terrajets and nuclear power, using the debris to increase the size of Jupiter’s moons so they too can be colonized.”
>In this connection it should be mentioned that it is a misnomer to talk about journeys within the solar system as belonging to the realm of astronautics. We should rather place them in the field of helionautics. Astronautics, strictly speaking, will be concerned with voyages to other stars. Remarkably enough, to achieve such feats, we might not even have to leave the earth. It would suffice to accelerate the sun itself to a very high speed and let it drag all its planets with it.
>In order to exert the necessary thrust on the sun, nuclear fusion reactions could be ignited locally in the sun’s material, causing the ejection of enormously high-speed jets. The necessary nuclear fusion can probably best be ignited through the use of ultrafast particles being shot at the sun. To date there are at least two promising prospects for producing particles of colloidal size with velocities of a thousand kilometers per second or more. Such particles, when impinging on solids, liquids, or dense gases, will generate temperatures of one hundred million degrees Kelvin or higher—quite sufficient to ignite nuclear fusion. The two possibilities for nuclear fusion ignition which I have in mind do not make use of any ideas related to plasmas, and to their constriction and acceleration in electric and magnetic fields.
>“Jupiter is so big and its gravitational pull so strong that man would find it difficult to move about on the surface.” Zwicky said. “The answer is to whittle it down to proper size with terrajets and nuclear power, using the debris to increase the size of Jupiter’s moons so they too can be colonized.”
>In this connection it should be mentioned that it is a misnomer to talk about journeys within the solar system as belonging to the realm of astronautics. We should rather place them in the field of helionautics. Astronautics, strictly speaking, will be concerned with voyages to other stars. Remarkably enough, to achieve such feats, we might not even have to leave the earth. It would suffice to accelerate the sun itself to a very high speed and let it drag all its planets with it.
>In order to exert the necessary thrust on the sun, nuclear fusion reactions could be ignited locally in the sun’s material, causing the ejection of enormously high-speed jets. The necessary nuclear fusion can probably best be ignited through the use of ultrafast particles being shot at the sun. To date there are at least two promising prospects for producing particles of colloidal size with velocities of a thousand kilometers per second or more. Such particles, when impinging on solids, liquids, or dense gases, will generate temperatures of one hundred million degrees Kelvin or higher—quite sufficient to ignite nuclear fusion. The two possibilities for nuclear fusion ignition which I have in mind do not make use of any ideas related to plasmas, and to their constriction and acceleration in electric and magnetic fields.
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