There were no Titans. I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I expected not to find anything. But childhood aspirations and fantasies should be entertained every now and then.
We oohed and ahhed as we stopped at Uranus and then Nep-tune. They weren't necessarily close to each other, but with warpdrive at thirty times the speed of light, no place in the solar system was that far away. Even the Pluto-Charon system, which is about thirty astronomical units from Earth, is pretty close at those speeds. The total trip to the three outer planets including the ooh and ah time of about thirty minutes was only an hour or so. It was obvious that things were going to be a lot different for the human race, at least for those "with the need to know."
We spent some time at the Pluto-Charon system looking around. We actually landed but didn't get out. There wasn't much to see. Pluto is an ice ball. The humorous part of the trip was the fact that we had beaten the NASA Pluto-Kuiper mission by several years. I thought about trying to track down the approaching spacecraft to just take a look at it. Maybe some other time. Our mission was to develop warp capabilities that would enable interstellar travel. We had to continue with learning how to navigate over large distances. So far, we had only been as far out as about thirty times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The distance to the nearest star is about hundred thousand times that. We still had quite a ways to go. At thirty times the speed of light, the trip to the nearest star would take about two months.
We wandered around in the Kuiper-Belt a bit and then decided to travel through the Oort Cloud and then the Heliopause. The Heliopause where the solar system meets the rest of the galaxy is considered the edge of the solar system at about a hundred astronomical units. There were some really neat plasma light shows there. Our spectrum analyzer systems picked up radio noise centered around the two to three kilohertz range and at awesome power levels. We pushed through the Heliopause out to about three hundred AUs. I checked our navigation and suggested to Tabitha that we bounce back to the Moon just to make sure. The nonstop trip took about an hour and a half. We docked at the moon for a few hours and had lunch at home.
By three o'clock that afternoon, we were ready to try for the solar gravitational focus. According to General Relativity any large massive body like the sun actually bends spacetime enough in its near vicinity that the paths of light rays traveling near that massive body are bent. In other words, the big object acts like a very large lens. This fact has been verified experimentally in many different ways since 1919. However, nobody has yet travelled to the focus of the large solar lens.
I had more reasons than just curiosity for traveling to the solar focus. Lets digress for a second.
The largest telescope built by mankind so far is on the order of about a hundred meters. It is a multiple mirror interferometer in Hawaii. The idea of making large telescopes is to increase the resolution. This means that the better the resolution the smaller the objects you can see, farther away. The way to determine the smallest object seeable by a telescope is to use the Rayleigh Criteria equation. The formula states that the minimum resolvable object diameter is found as 2.44 times the wavelength of the light (assume 550 nanometers for yellowish green light) times the distance to the object (five light years or 4.55 x 1016 meters) divided by the diameter of the telescope's primary optic. Assuming that you want to image an Earth-like planet that has a diameter of about 12,000 kilometers, Rayleigh's Criteria says that we need a telescope at least two kilometers or more in diameter! The Hubble Space Telescope is 2.4 meters in diameter and the James Webb Space Telescope is only a few times bigger than that. So we're a long way from imaging planets even around the nearest star even if you consider the ground-based interferometer in Hawaii.
Now consider the solar focus. The diameter of the Sun is on the order of a million kilometers. Using that as the diameter of the telescope primary in the Rayleigh formula shows that we could see a hair up an ant's ass on planets around stars out to a few tens of light years away. We could image planets much much further out than that. Talk about the ultimate telescope. I had what is known in amateur telescope making circles as "Big Aperture Fever" or BAF. Even worse, my case was acute, chronic, and was a special strain called BMFAF. You can guess what the MF stands for.
According to General Relativity, the solar focus should be somewhere between five hundred and eight hundred AUs depending on the wavelength you wish to view. The lensing effect works for all electromagnetic radiation not just visible light. Anyway, imagine a telescope that large. All that would be needed to use old Sol as the primary optic would be to place a detector at the focus. I planned to add other optics to do some image correction and cleaning up but the complete system is simple commercial adaptive optics and software. The hard part is getting to the solar focus. The other hard part is lining the star you wish to view up with the Sun and with the detector. The three objects must form a straight line: the star, then the Sun, then the detector. Assuming the solar focus is six hundred AUs from the Moon Base, then that means a trip time of about three hours to view one star. Of course there would be multiple stars in the field of view of the telescope depending on which eyepiece you use, but we were most immediately interested in stars close to Earth. Now we're talking about maybe fifty stars sparsely spaced whose light paths were rays passing through the surface of a sphere six hundred AUs in radius. It would take some time hopping around the solar focus to get images of all of these star systems. Three hours one way, there then a day or so of observation, then three hours back. Let's assume two days per star system. That means that it would take about a hundred days to look at each of our local stellar neighbors. I decided to start with the closest and move outward. That is once we got the telescope system working properly.
So, we zipped out to the solar focus in line with Alpha Centauri, which is the closest star to Earth. Tabitha popped open the hatch that enclosed our telescope secondary system. It took Jim and me another five or six hours before we had the system functioning the way we wanted it to perform.
There were several planets in the Alpha Centauri system but there was no hint of any planets that could support life as we know it. Using a visible spectrometer, we could analyze exactly what elements were in the atmospheres of these planets. None supported our kind of life. No water, chlorophyll, or oxygen.
Slightly disappointed, we warped back to the Moon. This time we decided to tax the ECC's to ninety-nine percent. Using most of the energy we had available enabled us to deepen the Alcubierre warp. We only shaved off about half of the trip time. In other words, it took about thirty-three times more power to increase our warp speed by a factor of two. Obviously there was some nonlinear function involved here that I hadn't counted on. My solutions to the Einstein equations were only accurate at low warp speeds. Between twenty and fifty times the speed of light, something else was going on. I'm still thinking about that. Jim suggested that spacetime might be quantized like the excitation levels of an atom and that there is some Moor's potential well that we have to overcome. Interesting idea. Like I have said before, Jim deserves a Nobel Prize.