Falling into resonance was one of the scariest things I have ever done. There was nothing to see, there was nothing to do -- there was just the quiet voices of the pilots and their modi muttering checklist items and counting down, and my own pounding heart. The only feeling was vibration as the power output cranked up to maximum and then a slight sensation of falling which was weird since were already in free fall. Our greatest moment of danger was objectively quite boring.
I'm told that our starship briefly became a comet -- a tiny speck of matter with a huge tail of luminous hydrogen glowing against the Jovian tableau. It wasn't rocket thrust; it was just the spent coolant from our reactor. Positrons wheeled around the magnetic donut in one direction, colliding at a predictable rate with normal electrons injected in the other direction. A beryllium/lithium ceramic converted some fraction of the radiation into electric potential and the rest got wicked away as heat, released as a giant plume.
We have enough antimatter for the return trip -- now locked into a perpetual magnetic racetrack in a storage orbit -- but we cannot make any more. The small amount we have was synthesized at the L4 facility, a giant physics lab kept a constant and safe distance from Earth. Starships need vast amounts of power but must also be compact and light, so energy at a planetary scale gets compressed into just a few grams of irreplaceable fuel. We represent the honed cutting edge of the entire human industry.
Remarkably, a single exotic material isn't enough. Interstellar travel relies on one even more strange: QED's, the charged quantum singularities that can be found only deep inside stars or gas giants. The population that powers our loop drive was mined from the depths of Jupiter using billion-Gauss coils the size of small moons. In theory there should be many more in our Sun, but the power to harvest them would be astronomical.
Travel to the stars is cramped, dangerous and enormously expensive. It robs us of our lives by throwing us forward and backward in time, depriving us of any continuity with the friends we may leave behind, or the future humanity that we may seek to join on our return. Yet it's worth it. I still feel ashamed of my cold feet, and of the terror I felt as I risked non-existence at the start of this voyage. The knowledge we have gained over the last century has made all the risk worthwhile.
But there's a final limitation. The Schwartz-deSegas ratio means that loop drive will top out at just under 1000 light years. Tuning the resonance for our own 500 light-year trip was like matching a note exactly using a piano with trillion keys -- it's clear that however great our technical competence we will soon reach the practical limit. Once that 1000 light-year bubble is fully explored we'll have to strike out from someplace else -- from a center other than Earth. We'll need a habitable star system, one with an affinity for humans and the resources we need for our most basic technologies. It should be far from Earth but not too far, and it should have a ready source of QED's for building starships and a suitable jumping off point for future expeditions.
What humans need, to continue their outward exploration, is a planet like Sigma 957.
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