Im thinking about writing a science fiction novel with as little ‚fiction‘ as possible and playing in a really, really far future, maybe millions of years, partly because I did not find any story covering this (although duck AI said there are some stories about that, feel free to recommend!). I found one podcast about this thought experiment I have yet to listen to, but nothing else.
So for as little fiction as possible, I need to have a somewhat realistic way of travelling of course. But not only that, communication would take way too long if colonies in different solar systems are lightyears apart.
So I got inspired by the greatest of geniuses Mister Patrick Star („why don’t we just take bikini bottom, and move it somewhere else?“)
Now my actual question: would it theoretically be possible to travel with the entire solarsystem? Somehow use the suns energy and bundle it in one direction (but still don’t have the colonised planets get no sunlight) so that we ‚fly‘ to the next solar system, and the distances between us and exoplanets become so small that travelling and communicating between them takes a reasonable time? How would that affect gravity? Would it be possible to calculate and prevent from destroying the gravitational balance of our system or the milkyway?
And further, also move on with the second solar system and start ‚collecting‘ systems?
For me, that sounds like the only realistic way to 1. colonise other planets (and not evolve into too different species) and 2. maybe even encounter alien life, maybe if the milkyway and andromeda collide we also will find intelligence.
As an alternative, there's also the idea of collecting a huge amount of solar power to make a tiny black hole using some very very hard to make lasers. A 5×10^9kg black hole is ideal.
Isaac Asimov talks about it a bit in Imperial Earth and from what I remember he uses accretion of matter as a source of fusion energy. Back in my early uni days I did a small research project on this idea, and you can actually get a ton more efficiency by turning the whole thing into something like a NERVA thermal nuclear rocket engine. If you include Hawking radiation in the calculations and are particularly clever with the design, the whole thing becomes suprisingly controllable over a range of thrust, and you get a constant 1g acceleration which resolves a bunch of biological issues around weightlessness.
It does require a little magic. You have to tether the black hole to the ship, and you need to use some pretty intense magnetic fields to contain the exhaust that's being ejected at about 87% the speed of light (this also turns it into a fantastic way to destroy a planet by pointing it at the surface), but the fuel pumps used on the first stage Saturn V F1 engines are enough to feed it. The main issue imo is the absurd amount of radiation that'll sterilise all life on the ship, but you can reach Proxima Centauri in about 4 years and the black hole should last for about 1000 before it's spent (which interestingly is more about it becoming more massive, not less).