Stellasers

Isaac Arthur discussed “stellasers” in a recent episode called “Colonizing the sun”. These stellasers are large mirrors for trapping solar light and beaming the trapped light like a laser to push on spacecraft we might want to send abroad. Why not send information signals to stars that are likely to have planets? If there’s a better way to send VR surrogates across intergalactic space, I’m all ears. Maybe once having signalled these likely places you start to receive a whole bunch of new signals from closer stars that didn’t know you were in the game? Information could be multiplexed across solar relay points between our sun and more distant stars using a kind of population-coded routing system that differentially prioritizes components of the signals to be sent. We could for instance separately build a stellaser for blue/green/red wavelengths of light, that fires these colours into distinct relay pathways that bend toward your solar direction to better accommodate that wavelength of light from your direction. Actually, I’d like to know if separating bands of light increases each band’s probability of having some photons (noise around c) arrive faster than c. Red light travels faster than blue light in mediums other than the vacuum. I wonder if that could be built on?