Editing Openai/691a2d9f-c044-8012-bccf-942bfce6334d (section)

=== Assistant: 17-11-25 02:44 ===
17-11-25 02:44
GPT-5.1 Thinking

Right, I get what you meant now:

Not “naturally going to Alpha Centauri,” but

: 

So could we just “piggyback” those as early oases on a near-straight outbound path?

Short answer:
* We don’t have a known comet catalogued as “this one’s outbound asymptote points neatly toward Alpha Centauri.”
* And even if we did, it would only help for a tiny fraction of the 4.2 light-year distance, because bound comets still live overwhelmingly inside the Sun’s gravity well and then turn around.

I’ll break it down.

===== Alpha Centauri is a point on the sky with some RA/Dec direction. For your “oasis chain” to be meaningful as interstellar infrastructure, you’d want comets whose outbound asymptotic direction is within a very small angle of that target. =====

Because small angle errors blow up over light-years:
* At 4.3 light-years, a 1° angular offset corresponds to roughly 4.3 × tan(1°) ≈ 0.075 light-years of lateral miss which is ~4 700 AU off to the side. That’s huge.

So “close to straight route” means:
* you want fractions of a degree alignment if you want something that stays anywhere near your corridor on interstellar scales.
* We simply do not track comet orbits in those terms (as “heading toward star X”), and nobody maintains a list like “these comets’ orbital asymptotes point within 0.1° of Alpha Centauri.”

Even if some comet incidentally does that, we haven’t tagged it that way.

===== Even more important than angular alignment: =====
* Almost all comets we know are on bound orbits; even long-period ones are still tied to the Sun.
* They go out to some aphelion (maybe thousands or tens of thousands of AU), slow, turn, and fall back.

Your starship, once it has climbed out of the Sun’s deep potential and is on an interstellar escape trajectory, is effectively on a near-straight geodesic toward Alpha Centauri.

A bound comet:
* may start roughly in that direction for a while
* but its path curves under solar gravity long before it has gone even 1% of the distance you care about.

So you might get, at best:
* a depot that helps you in the first few hundred or few thousand AU, but
* for the remaining hundreds of thousands of AU, the comet peels away and you never see it again.

In other words: comets can at best be Solar System–edge oases, not actual “halfway points” to Alpha Centauri.

===== What comets can do, plausibly: =====
# Early-leg assist - Provide water, extra reaction mass, and maybe some energy while your ship is still relatively “near” the Sun (within a few thousand AU). - That can help reduce the fuel you need to launch from Earth’s gravity well.
# Outbound staging - You might nudge the orbits of some comets a little so their outbound leg stays roughly aligned with your intended escape vector for a while. - You then use them as staging posts for probes or early deep-space missions, not as actual interstellar depots.
# Kuiper/Oort infrastructure - For building up activity in the outer Solar System (Kuiper belt / inner Oort Cloud), comet-retrofits are meaningful: - waterbanks - fuel quarries - data vaults - But that’s still “inside the desert edge,” not across the desert.

===== Then realistically the path is: =====
* Don’t hope nature gives you the perfect one.
* Pick a long-period comet that: - passes near Earth or within reachable Δv window - has an orbital plane and outbound direction close-ish to the Alpha Centauri line
* And then: - apply propulsive nudges over many orbits - gradually precess/tweak its orbit so its outbound asymptote more closely aligns with your desired interstellar trajectory

Even then:
* You still won’t get a comet that goes to Alpha Centauri
* You only get one that is slightly better aligned for the first few thousand AU
* After that, your ship’s trajectory is its own; the comet is long gone.

So the role of such a comet is launch-corridor helper, not genuine “oasis halfway to Alpha”.

===== You basically rediscovered three key facts: =====
# No known natural comet currently gives you an Earth → Alpha Centauri logistics highway. If we want anything like that, it’ll be because we engineer orbits, not because we got lucky.
# Comets are useful near the origin star, not across the interstellar leg. They’re great for: - bootstrapping activity in the outer system - providing reaction mass and water at the edges But once you’re tens of thousands of AU out, you’re effectively alone.
# True interstellar “oases” would have to be artificial. That means: - seeded depots - self-replicating probes - or some very exotic infrastructure, not just “hitch a ride on a convenient comet.”

So your instinct that “there has to be one” is emotionally right (it would be elegant if nature pre-built a corridor), but physically it’s almost certainly no, and logistically it wouldn’t help much beyond the Solar System’s shoreline.

If you want, next step we can sketch a realistic outer Solar System “desert edge” chain using asteroids/comets as early oases, then show where you inevitably have to switch to pure ship-borne nuclear/fusion for the true black gulf.