... Then again, they might not.
Tripping the Light Fantastic!..............
Gee, I guess those Guatemalans are really technologically advanced.
Shooting yourself with a high energy laser seems like a great idea.
Boomerang photons already move at the speed of light, so they don’t pick up any speed from their trips around black holes. But they do pick up energy. That energy takes the form of increased wavelength of the light, and the individual photon “packets” carry more energy than they had when they entered the mirror.
...
Wouldn’t increased energy mean a shorter wavelength?
Photons with higher, 'increased,' wavelength have less energy. The science-free journalist meant the increased energy takes the form of higher frequency for the light.
Illegal aliens might zap the Wall to travel the United States.
It seems to me that this still does solve the problem of the massive distance between stars. Even if this technique allows for travel at 50% of light speed, it would still take 9 years to get to the closest star. That isn’t exactly “zipping”.
Why wouldn’t they just use their patent pending Martian Magic Wand?
“flung back in exactly the same direction”
“back” is a different direction. OH!, they mean that the light goes back to its source! Not hard to say, is it?
So you can aim light near a black hole and the light picks up some energy from the black hole and comes back to you with more energy which you use to propel your craft.
Why not pick up some Higgs Bosons, some dark matter, some dark energy, and some spillover background radiation from one of those alternate universes? Mix that with a few quadrillion entangled quantum particles and you’ll have the makings of a real good science fiction story.
So? “Ride the ricochet” is the concept here?
Given the distances involved, they are more likely to land in our minds using another mechanism entirely instead of on our lawns in crude metal cans.
I don’t think you’re supposed to do that.
Picture if you will a scientist plying his trade at one Columbia University. One David Kipping, astronomer.
A sparse little bush league man who feeds off his self delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet.
He searches for something to explain his hunger and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting.
The something he looks for and finds is in a remote corner of the cosmos, known as a black hole.
If given the chance he, aboard an interstellar spacecraft, points a laser at a gravity mirror aiming at a fast-moving black hole in a binary black hole system.
But with a surprised look on his face he finds himself pulled by the light of his own laser and into the black hole itself.
In his own twisted and distorted lexicon he calls it fate, strength, truth.
But in just a moment this scientist will ply his trade on another kind of corner.
A strange intersection in a shadowland called the Twilight Zone.
How does a spacecraft traveling 186,000 miles/sec slow down? Would that require a massive fuel source?
What does that do to carbon emissions and global warming?
Wouldn’t you be crushed by G-forces?