I feel that Florence is talking more pie in the sky, long term. Kind of like when she was talking about the more efficient use of suns would be to disassemble them and use them as power plant fuel.

Quote Originally Posted by Rockphed View Post
Well, she did just save every robot on the planet from drooling-idiotdom. At the same time, I am fairly certain that the energy required to move that much dust into a new solar-system is prohibitive. That is even assuming that those dust levels are even close to accurate. I suspect that the dust between us and Alpha Centauri wouldn't be enough to form a red dwarf, much less a new sun, but then I am a pessimist.
How to capture interstellar particles is indeed the problem. How much dust is between us and Alpha Centauri depends on what you mean by between (how wide a cylinder you are drawing), but of course the wider you draw it, the harder it is to grab the stuff at the far reaches.

Not for building stars, but merely for travel, the concept was conceived of as Bussard Ramjets, which would be fusion rockets, which would use these magnetic collectors to pull in hydrogen to use as fuel. The feasibility of such things are stymied by the fact Sol sits in a low-density pocket of the galaxy, and because we haven't really perfected man-made fusion to be that super energy source we'd hoped it would be yet.