Using Stars as Spacecraft
Rather than building a spacecraft to travel through interstellar space, it might be more beneficial to transport the sun itself. This way, we could transport everything we own, including our planet. Some researchers believe that a very advanced civilization (see my article on civilization levels) here (You can access it by clicking here.) If it does such a thing, he claims that we may have observed it or could observe it. How do we move a star before this?
Gregory Benford in Bowl of Heaven And Larry Niven They imagined a large bowl surrounding the star (think of half a Dyson Sphere). Using the star's energy, plasma jets could be generated in one direction, creating motion that would last for centuries.
In the book, there is a piece of speech from another humanity that discovered such a star;
“…How did you capture the jet-shaped extension in one direction of the star?”
"It seems to me that the magnetic field is under control and moving in one direction," he said, moving his hands.
"A neon jet provides the thrust outward. And inside are habitat chambers, more habitat than planets in a thousand star systems you could conquer. Attached to it by centrifugal gravity…"
"They're not fully inhabited. It's just a rim thing. It's mostly mirrors. It's not just living space," Cliff said. "That moves, yes. A whole starship? A star with a spacecraft!"
Keith Cooper has an article based on Fritz Zwicky's (1898-1974) book, Interstellar Studies, and he proposes a wild idea. This idea is to use the sun as an engine to take us all to Alpha Centauri. This concept would excite the sun's photosphere, creating hot spots and creating asymmetric solar flares, forcing the sun onto a new path. Zwicky envisioned such a journey to Alpha Centauri taking 50 centuries and taking our planet with it. But Keith Cooper's article leaves some unanswered questions about this. There's no information about the engine that creates the asymmetric flares, how it would slow down, how it would affect the solar system once it arrived, or whether it would cause other stars to deviate from its path.
If a civilization with advanced technology were to attempt such a thing, the stars they used would be behaving in an unusual way. And such stars have been identified. We call these stars hypervelocity stars. Their speeds—especially those close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy—are so high that they exceed the escape velocity of the Milky Way, making them independent of the galaxy's gravity. However, it's known that these stars wouldn't behave this way under the influence of such a civilization.
