An interstellar movement has been brewing for the past sixty or so years among physicists and engineers who have taken a serious look at what it would take to get to the stars. Their work is not based on wishes but on physics, and while they are aware of the intractable distances to reach even the nearest star (4.2 years at the speed of light itself), they have continued to study how to send spacecraft on such epic journeys. Organizations have emerged — DARPA’s 100 Year Starship, Icarus Interstellar, the Tau Zero Foundation — whose members call to mind physicist Robert Forward’s injunction: “Travel to the stars is difficult but not impossible.”
Centauri Dreams readers know all this, but at least on the basis of Adam Frank’s op-ed Alone in the Void, many readers of The New York Times do not. A professor of physics and astronomy himself (University of Rochester), Frank is well versed in the problems of distance and time and understands how difficult it will be to send humans to the stars any time soon. But while acknowledging the ‘exciting theoretical research’ on unmanned vehicles currently underway (Project Icarus is an ongoing design study for such an unmanned probe), he leaves the implication that rapid interstellar travel is nothing more than a Hollywood fantasy.
Interstellar Concepts Emerge
Yet ever since the first serious studies of interstellar propulsion began in the 1950’s, numerous concepts for crossing the starry gulf have been examined that violate no laws of physics and could well be achieved by a civilization with the technology our grandchildren — or their children — may have at their disposal. We can’t get a huge space sail to ten percent of lightspeed by beaming a powerful laser at it, but our descendants may have the energy resources to do just that. We’ve been looking in these pages at ramjet concepts that in some cases use interstellar hydrogen and in others tap energy from X-ray lasers, while others examine the potential of nuclear fusion. A century from now we may have learned how to use antimatter in rockets.
Image: The Andromeda galaxy reminds us how vast cities of stars like the Milky Way really are. Will humans ever be able to leave our Solar System and reach even the closest stars? Credit: Bill Saxton, AUI, NRAO, NSF.
History reminds us that while progress is not inevitable, it can move quickly once unleashed, as the digital revolution of the last few decades attests. Our advances in computers may be complemented by a nanotechnology that will allow us to lower payload mass and make the propulsion problem a little less intractable. These concepts aren’t yet focused on human interstellar flight but there is no reason why taking the first steps in examining them couldn’t eventually lead to that outcome. But what Frank is saying is that going to the stars is such a long-term prospect that we might as well consign the idea to the realm of magic.
For the concepts I’ve cited simply don’t appear in Frank’s essay, nor does he mention the work of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project, or the recently published Frontiers of Propulsion Science, which collects essays from leading theorists on the latest research and how it might be applied. Instead, he focuses on Hollywood:
From “Star Trek” to “Star Wars,” from warp drive to hyperdrive — the idea of rapid interstellar space travel is such a deep meme for cultural visions of space and our future that Hollywood films don’t even have to waste time introducing them to the audience. You pull a lever and zap — you are in a new star system. How many people would be surprised to know that warp drive isn’t even a coherent concept, let alone a near-future technology?
Starflight and the Human Lifetime
Does warp-drive — if it ever becomes possible — have to be a near-future technology for us to study it? Here I question Frank’s assumptions, because the curse of our times is our focus on short-term results, and our unwillingness to look beyond our own lifetimes. The warp drive under question would not violate Einstein’s Special Relativity because rather than moving an object through spacetime, it would manipulate spacetime itself, an operation requiring vast amounts of energy but one on which there is no such speed limit. No one knows whether these investigations — or those into ‘wormholes’ that could be traversed to connect remote parts of the universe — will ever bear fruit. It is safe to say, however, that if we dismiss any study of these concepts we have guaranteed a negative result, and why do so?
Frank goes on to describe what he calls ‘an inconvenient truth’:
While our children’s children’s great-grandchildren will live with ever more powerful technology, they will also live ever more intimately with ever more billions of others in this, our corner of the cosmos. Looking back and forward, my bets are now on that same human genius, ambition and hope to rise to the occasion. We will have no other choice. There will be nowhere else to go for a very long time.
Who could doubt that this vision, of humans living on an ever more crowded Earth, is likely to come to pass whether or not we develop human interstellar flight? And yes, learning how to live with each other is not a matter of choice as our technology and our weaponry become ever more advanced. But the interstellar movement notes several other key points, and I bet on its genius, ambition and hope. Even as our species nurtures the home world, we live in a dangerous environment whose history has been punctuated by mass extinctions, some of them caused by impacts from space debris.
Getting representatives of humanity off this planet is an insurance policy that guarantees our survival. Let’s forget fast travel for the moment and take an evolutionary view of what could occur. Human expansion into the Solar System involves developing new propulsion technologies to help us change the trajectory of potentially dangerous impactors like asteroids. In doing this, we master techniques for living in space that result in large habitats off-planet. None of this violates any laws of physics and invokes no magic, but it potentially leads to self-sustaining colonies, born and bred in space, spreading out on millennia-long interstellar journeys.
Of Vision and Commitment
Focused attention can be disruptive, as physicists and engineers go to work on problems that seem intractable, and we cannot know what might rapidly accelerate the time-frame for interstellar flight. But a commitment of a small part of our resources to studying how we might one day move out into the stars is a long-term investment whose outcome may surprise us. History shows that humans are a visionary and exploring species. We will move into the cosmos if we can because it is in our nature, and it is the nature of researchers in today’s interstellar movement to take the small steps of foundation-building that may lead to a grand structure in the future.
Frank is certainly correct that the time-scale is long and the result unsure, and he’s also right that Hollywood versions of star travel have simplified it to the point of absurdity. No one can guarantee that humans will ever travel to the stars, but it is a dead certainty that giving up in despair will leave the outcome in no doubt whatsoever. Meanwhile, interstellar theorists learn patience. They have to, for they understand that the first interstellar probes, even the unmanned ones, surely won’t fly in their lifetime. Why should this be so hard to explain to the readers of a great newspaper? Since when did we lose the ability to see beyond our own mortality, building a vision that someone we’ll never know in a century we’ll never see can finally make real?
The NWT editorial brings up a possibility that we must consider; that we ‘might’ be stranded forever on this planet. That is a future possibility in our trade space. Even if this is the future that will come to pass, however, we stand far more to gain by attempting to reach beyond, than by giving up.
Progress is not made by conceding defeat.
The ongoing efforts to make space joy rides profitable and to eventually set up bases on the Moon and Mars are fitting steps. And by tackling the extreme challenges of interstellar flight we create the path toward revolutionary advancements – another possible future in our trade space.
None of us are clairvoyant about the future. The NWT article makes a number of assertions about trends that are not certain, and errs on some facts (I know that others plan to comment on those, so I’ll leave that to them). So, with none of us knowing the future, the future is ours to aim as we see fit.
Frankly, I want my “now” to have the thrill of pursuing the ‘seemingly’ impossible future where humanity thrives beyond Earth, and where the advancements to make that happen have improved life of Earth.
I’m certain we will create a better future by attempting such ideals than by just waxing pedantic.
Marc Millis
I was completely bumfuzzled as to why the NY Times ran Frank’s Op-Ed… what ,just recently, brought that subject up?
Clarke used to love this:
On appointment as Astronomer Royal, Richard van der Riet Woolley, reiterated his long-held view that “space travel is utter bilge”. Speaking to Time in 1956, Woolley noted
“It’s utter bilge. I don’t think anybody will ever put up enough money to do such a thing . . . What good would it do us? If we spent the same amount of money on preparing first-class astronomical equipment we would learn much more about the universe . . . It is all rather rot”
(By the way the comments in the E version of NY Times on this essay were amusing.)
Good read cheers.
Well if the cost of antimatter is much cheaper maybe.
well we need a breakthrough in making Antimatter, if so it would be possible to at least send a probe or us to the stars.
So really we can make it, so there is a very good chance we mite find away to make lots of it for cheap.
If in the next 10 years someone finds away to make mass of it for cheap, could we go to the stars 100%????????????????????
Whats a Newspaper?
Well ex for the internet our new technolgy has stagnated. I have been watching old shows from the 60s and 70s lately and I am really unimpressed by the last 40 years. Watch the westerns and compare 1860 to 1960. 1960 to 2060 is looking like a bust or worse at this point and the nattering nehbobs of neagtivism at the NYT need to share the blame. They declare existing technology as failed!
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/a-quixotic-solution-the-test-tube-burger/?src=rechp
Cultured Meat has been made and eaten(tasteless until processed like most meat). Its a scaling issuie at this point.
The NYT would prefere to see us give up and starve on our crowed planet
When the first obviously Earth-Like exoplanet is directly imaged it will be a turning point for mankind. The proposals for interstellar flight, both practical and theoretical, will receive a lot of scrutiny. But it won’t be a single event like this that will crank up the necessary human ingenuity and willpower. It will be the convergence of technology (whatever passes as state of the art at that time), economy, and furious curiosity. That mankind is more capable of such journeys than people genrally realize is frustrating.
Breakthroughs in fundamental physics don’t come easy and they are no credible means to predict them, and certainly cannot be scheduled. Many such breakthroughs are serendipitous and only obvious, if ever, in retrospect.
Without such a breakthrough, Frank isn’t far wrong in his views. Where he goes wrong is to claim that any such breakthrough is in the far-distant future. He cannot possibly know that (see above). Knowing what we currently know of how the universe works, rapid interstellar travel requires an unreachable enormity of energy, and then channeling that energy in a strictly-controlled pathway. This is equally true of conceptions of a warp drive, which doubly suffers from failing the fundamentals.
As far as this goes, I agree with him; however, I do not agree with his pessimism since there isn’t much that we can do now that does not require any fundamental physics breakthroughs. Regardless of the propulsion system, including those that are not possible with what we know of physics, we still need to develop the technology to live and thrive in space and alien environments, which we can do now for only brief periods.
All we need is a reason and a willingness to do so, whether it be profit, ideology or something more pure. That is currently lacking, for the most part. Change that and we can take the next step. Then when we can (we hope) light a new type of fire under those sustainable habitats we can go to the stars.
Thank you Mr Gilster for your defence of the interstellar community. I have a lot of respect for the New York Times, although its dissapointing to read such an article which is (i) negative and pessimistic in its outlook and (ii) contains factual errors which were not researched sufficiently (iii) contained no references to the actual research that has been conducted historically in addressing the (difficult and challenging) interstellar problem. The later Sir Arthur C. Clarke had an interesting quote that Dr Frank may be interested in reading:
“Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it is desired greatly enough. It is no argument against any project to say: ‘The ideas fantastic!’ Most of the things that have happened in the last fifty years have been fantastic, and it is only by assuming that they will continue to be so that we have any hope of anticipating the future. To do this – to avoid that failure of nerve for which history exacts so merciless a penalty – we must have the courage to follow all technical extrapolations to their logical conclusion.”
A.C.Clarke, Profiles of the Future
Finally, I leave a quote for the New York Times to ponder, and the dangers of repeating history.
“That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react – to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools”.
Rocket Man by David A Clary, page 97 quotes the NYT article from 13th Jan 1920
Optimism people, optimism and hope in the face of adversity, whilst keeping grounded on the bottom line requirements for what it really takes to do such an ambitious mission.
Best wishes
Kelvin F. Long
Aerospace Engineer, Physicist & Author
Proud Starship designer
What is a problem is, for me, the constant reference to Star Trek. I feel it’s in fact some kind of brake on imagination instead of an help. People are amazed by things that look like Start Trek technologies and newspapers and books encourage this (c.f. “the science in Star Trek”), but for example only a few people would consider credible alternatives such as solar sails.
A good thing also would be to continue to produce a string of high quality studies like Forward did and about which Centauri-dreams tells us. We should not increase interstellar travel awareness at the price of credibility.
Credibility efforts should not stop once scientific soundness is achieved. There are interstellar gaps between what science authorizes, what is possible at the price of a few percent of US GDP plus a few dozen of lives and finally the high reliability that planes enjoy. Interstellar travel is a long travel anyway, not a 20mn jump to Earth orbit, so reliability is a challenge as great as others.
Jean-Pierre
Paul, you are a terrific spokesman for us. Well done!
The New York Times did not apologize for its comments regarding Goddard until the day humans first walked on the Moon in July of 1969.
There are notable exceptions like Dennis Overbye, but a lot of journalists are not versed in science and technology and it shows with alarming frequency. Throw in a political bias and it gets even worse towards things like space exploration and utilization.
That is why most scientists REALLY need to educate the public on their professional fields on a regular basis. Their careers and their fields depend on it more than ever now.
A further counter to the short-sighted NYTimes piece:
Understanding the difficulty of interstellar voyaging gives us an inkling of what aliens face.
For example, in dense regions of the galaxy, like globular clusters and the inner portions of the galactic bulge, the problem is lesser because the interstellar distances are less than a light year.
Remember A. C. Clarke’s first Law (amended):
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
I think growing up embedded in a cultural environment that trivializes manned space travel can produce very contrasting reactions when you finally grow up and confront the harsh realities of such a dream.
For some, it is like the death of their childhood dreams, resulting in feelings of betrayal, cynicism , disbelief and rejection about what they previously held in high esteem. You can spot them at any manned space discussion: the disdainful, mordant and spiteful that are so incisive and apparently objective, but which by showing such keen interest in disproving , also show they were so devoted once and were equally so disappointed.
For most of the juvenile space enthusiasts, they simply put an end to their musings about those ideas, left behind as childish dreams or guilty-pleasure curiosities.
For a few (which I believe would be strongly represented here), the ideals simply get different context, goals and means. It passes from being ‘when am I going to travel to space?’ to ‘when is -anyone- going to go?’, and for even fewer, it becomes ‘what can I do to allow this to happen to -anyone- some day?’
It can pass from being a juvenile wish, to become a moral imperative, a philosophy tied to your most cherished values. Because, why do we want manned space travel for anyway, besides for ensuring life in general, and human life in particular continues to be? Because you simply believe it’s worth it. And that’s a very defensible philosophical position IMHO.
Human history is full of examples of human migrations that took centuries and milennia to happen, why do we expect manned space travel and space settlement to be any different?
The reason may to be simple egotism and the actually puerile desire of seeing things ourselves, in our short lifetimes. Well, you can certainly outgrow that expectation and set the focus on what matters: allowing humankind to move over there, and help things happen even if you won’t see them.
That was such an eloquent response without being in reprisal. Leaving discussion of propulsion and physics aside, I believe that lurking beneath, some people fear that the real agenda of interstellar travel involves a highly selected group that deserves to go, leaving an overpopulated world behind to…to use a word…rot. When we look at the adventures of explorers like Magellan, Hudson, Lewis & Clark, Franklin’s Arctic expedition, and others, their voyages were far from cozy. In fact, the term ‘rot’ comes to mind. The dangers are immeasurable; the risks are high. Explorers, and those who plan, finance and outfit them, always face ridicule for wanting to adventure into the unknown.
“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” John Lennon
I agree, Paul. Discussing Dr. Frank’s article with some pro-space exploration friends, the general consensus was mild disappointment with his attitude.
He wasn’t interested in educating folks on all the exciting new avenues for research that are on the horizon, or all the potential for new technologies. There are so many interesting developments going on right now with space flight technology- but, for example, he only briefly mentioned even mentioned robotics. His aim wasn’t to interest the public in astronomy and space exploration- it was to warn everyone: “you’re stuck on Earth.”
Of course he’s correct in describing how difficult interstellar travel will be. But he had the opportunity to frame the challenge in a much more positive light. Why not use the opportunity to get people excited about and interested in space travel?
“Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring – not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: Staying alive…. If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.” – Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
“I would not see our candle blown out in the wind. It is a small thing, this dear gift of life handed us mysteriously out of immensity. I would not have that gift expire… If I seem to be beating a dead horse again and again, I must protest: No! I am beating, again and again, living man to keep him awake and move his limbs and jump his mind… What’s the use of looking at Mars through a telescope, sitting on panels, writing books, if it isn’t to guarantee, not just the survival of mankind, but mankind surviving forever!”
– Ray Bradbury, Mars and the Mind of Man, 1971
More quotes on the subject of space and survival here:
http://www.spacequotes.com/
And for those who view the desire to explore and understand space as a childish activity, I give them this quote:
“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.” – Henry David Thoreau
The NYT article you link to is astonishingly bad, and I have difficulty accepting the claim that it was written by a professor of physics and astronomy.
We are “trapped in our solar system”: this could only have been written by someone with no clue as to how large our Solar System really is. “In a kind of cosmic version of Manifest Destiny”: Tom Murphy uses the same straw man to beat us with; in reality, space advocates are far more aware than most that there is no “destiny” or other mystical hocus pocus involved, and, rather than predestined to spread around the universe, we could all too easily go the way of the 15th-century Chinese, or indeed the Troodontids. “The idea of rapid interstellar space travel is such a deep meme”: for Hollywood, maybe; the author clearly wasn’t at last summer’s Worldships symposium, but even Hollywood puts its astronauts to sleep for several years (Alien; Avatar; Prometheus). “No salvation from population pressure or biosphere degradation”: obviously, those are problems that in the very nature of things must be sorted out well before the first starship leaves for Alpha Centauri.
I would guess that the author has (like Tom Murphy) joined the popular anti-progress bandwagon. Our task in this case is not to prove that interstellar flight as such is plausible, but to develop a convincing scenario of continued human growth and progress, without which there will be no starships.
Stephen
Oxford, UK
His only problem was using the word “millenniums.” Those are long enough periods of time to change things beyond imagination, which is where his logic is running into a wall.
Human millenniums are about as extreme as light years. 1,000 years from now we’ll probably at least have generation ships “seedpods in the wind” if we haven’t already ‘evolved’ into sentient robot ships by then.
I am not sure what the relevance of New York Times article was. I suspect its uninspiring tone will prove just as forgettable to the reader as to the writer a year hence.
Far more worrying is the games opening ceremony where, not just Britain’s cultural heritage was featured, but its industrial revolution and engineering heritage as personified by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. This made it significant that their planners thought Britain’s scientific heritage too insignificant or obscure to mention.
In New Zealand we were designing new banknotes about twenty years ago, and needed names of famous dead citizens to go on them. Our politicians came up with a myriad of suggestions, a list that was notable only for its absence of scientists, but they didn’t get to chose. In the end it was left to a poll, which New Zealand’s greatest ever scientist (Rutherford) topped by a wide margin. This is exactly as I expected, the point being that the general public do not show the same lack of interest in science as our leaders assume.
That is the true problem. Now work on it!
Making a shield for a space ship.
First it would be putting a magnetic field across the front of the space ship. This magnetic field will be the same as the Hadron Collider Particle Crasher / Particle accelerator.
We will send atoms / particles around the magnetic field at the front of the space ship at hi speeds. Any incoming particles will hit each other at hi speed.
That should 1,destroy them. 2 rickashay them like 2 bullets hitting each other in mid air. 3 slow them down by 90+%.
This way there will not be charged particles making contact with the space ship, behind the magnetic particle accelerator shield.
I think the statement about interstellar not being an escape route is right. The idiocy is the fantasy that humankind will remain unchanged by venturing into the void and trying to live in that vast new environment – the experience will change us in fundamental, unknowable ways. Adapting to such new habitats will require embracing human diversity and not fearing change. Sitting on one planet is a basically conservative vision and the road to extinction as a species.
Paul, your rejoiner above might be a suitable reply to be put in the NYT .
I would like to object here to the use of words such as “unreachable”. As the excellent work of the Daedalus team has shown, and as is obvious from simple back-of-the-envelope calculations, a reasonable efficient nuclear rocket is well capable of making it to neighboring stars. We need an engine, something that will fission or fuse atoms of fuel, and send the remains out the back using a good fraction of the energy produced. And we need a lot of fuel, preferably something that it is fairly easy to obtain a few thousand tons of, and that does not require a tank: Lithium instead of He3, or Uranium, Plutonium or Thorium. This always was and remains the most realistic form of interstellar travel. The more “exciting” and “elegant” methods tend to have fatal flaws, a few of which I want to remind us of:
1) Sails: By design these are very thin, and are without possibility of shielding. This severely limits the velocities that they can safely sustain for years in the face of erosion by oncoming ISM.
2) Nanoprobes: Same, really, as sails, with the additional problem that none of the means of propulsion we know scale to small size.
3) Breakthrough physics: Unknowable, as has been stated, so not really something to wait up for.
I am firmly with team Icarus: Let us design something that can be based on solid, current physics, and a minimum of extrapolation of current technology. It will make it that much more difficult for the naysayers to dismiss our ideas.
It appears to me that Mr. Frank may have started with a conclusion (we’re stuck here) that supports a political position (we must focus on saving our planet), and then chose some arguments to support the conclusion. As a long time reader of the Times, I suspect that since this position aligns well with the views of the Op-Ed page editors and that Frank is a credentialed academic expert, they were happy to publish it.
After making his arguments Frank gives us the implications of his conclusion:
“Think about it. No salvation from population pressure on the shores of alien worlds. No release from the threats of biosphere degradation in the promise of new biospheres. No escape from our own destructive tendencies by spreading out among the stars like seedpods in the wind. For as many epochs in the future as there are epochs of human history in the past, we may simply have to make do, get by with what we have and, in the end, learn to get along.”
So it seems that the point of the piece is simply to debunk the idea that we might be able to escape these problems by expanding our civilization to the stars.
While people are arguing over still non-existent (and possibly impossible) spacefaring technologies, it’s worthwhile considering why we may never get to leave earth: Those Who Never Got to Fly
The NYT op-ed piece and the Centauri-Dreams comments brings to mind personal history. My own early involvement in interstellar travel research, during the depths of the Cold War, was based upon a young person’s pessimistic opinion regarding the long-term prospects for human survival on Earth. The only possibility for my own future would be some mechanism that could transfer ME (and perhaps a few pretty young human females) to another habitable world.
As I matured, I realized that this fantasy was unlikely to occur. Although I could never hope to escape, I could contribute to studies that would allow humanity and other terrestrial life forms to inhabit the extraterrestrial zone, no matter how stupid our political leadership becomes.
But to inhabit regions beyond the Earth, we must evolve in certain ways. War must be banned and altruism must replace cut-throat competition among residents of space habitats. Gradually, perhaps over the course of centuries, human communities will develop that are able to survive and thrive in the interplanetary void.
In a rational environment, these will be the communities that will “boil off” from their Sun-bound orbits to accomplish millennial journeys to near stars. Unless physics breakthroughs occur, sails, fusion, and/or antimatter will propel these ships.
But, as always, there are caveats. What happens if the current “searches for Pandora” succeed? How will the mass of humanity react if there is a habitable world in the Alpha Centauri system? It is at least possible that the transfer of a few humans in a faster ship will become a high priority.
And this is the main rationale for Icarus, 100YSS, Tau Zero, etc. We cannot know the future. We cannot predict that loopholes in nature’s laws do not exist–after all, one of these gave us fission! Another may give us warps!
So let’s work to preserve the Earth, spread life to near-space and continue researching possibilities for an interstellar future. This future will surely come if humanity survives–eben though it may be far in our future.
Sono d’accordo, con quanto esprime Greg Matloff.
Se non cambiamo i nostri “paradigmi” mentali e sociali, sarà inutile tentare di uscire dal nostro Sistema Solare.
Vogliamo esportare “altrove” la nostra cupidigia, le nostre guerre, e il nostro modello di sviluppo, che già “mostra la corda”?
Non andremo molto lontano, nello spazio, se non avremo risolto i nostri problemi ambientali, e il nostro modo di agire, rispetto agli altri esseri umani, e alla natura, che ci circonda…
Saluti da Antonio Tavani
Via Google Translate:
I agree with what is expressed by Greg Matloff.
If we change our “paradigms” mental and social, will be useless groped to leave our solar system.
We want to export “elsewhere” our greed, our wars, and our development model, which already “showing the ropes”?
We will not go very far, in space, unless we solve our environmental problems, and our way of acting, than other human beings and nature that surrounds us …
Greetings from Antonio Tavani
Eniac: ‘I would like to object here to the use of words such as “unreachable”.’
Perhaps a fair comment. I was thinking in terms of the type of rapid interstellar travel that the NYT article dismisses. Icarus with its objective of sub-100 year voyage to the nearest star(s) is out of this class. It’s also debatable whether the required fusion propulsion to achieve even that much is a technology problem or something deeper. I remain comfortable with my use of “unreachable” in regard to the NYT article’s scope.
Interesting comment above by Greg Matloff. I heartily applaud his conclusion: “So let’s work to preserve the Earth, spread life to near-space and continue researching possibilities for an interstellar future.” The choice is between a progressive future versus decline and fall: either we achieve a sustainable balance of industrial civilisation with Earth’s environment AND spread out into the Solar System and ultimately to the stars, or we collapse and achieve neither of these things.
Stephen
While I would certainly be willing to entertain the first two, the third, in my opinion, is exactly what our interstellar future is about. True, there will never be “interstellar civilization”, because of the immense communication time lag. But, sending “seedpods” is an entirely more managable problem.
Well said.
At very least we will have a chance of a lifetime in million years in the future where a star passed just 1 light year away from sun.
I would have much preferred to read an article in last week’s NYTimes discussing the necessity of bringing about an interstellar future so as to ensure the continued survival of the human species. It is an undeniable truth that our extinction will occur if we choose to stay put on one orb and yet this very fact seems lost to so many.
A point of contention I have with the article is the idea that we will in some way, use space and, more specifically, interstellar travel as “an escape from our own destructive tendencies.”
A truly troubled declining world will be even less equipped to undertake massive projects, nor will it have the geopolitical stability needed to bring about gradually the technological innovations needed for such journeys. Think about it like this: how successfully are extremely stressed individuals who are in crisis able to realize their goals and muster the concentration for large-scale transformation? In my experience as a mental health professional I can safely say that the alleviation of stress is a prerequisite for achieving other milestone life goals. Similarly, it seems to me as though a more mature, sustainable, humane, as well as technologically advanced civilization will be what is needed to bring about interstellar civilization. In other words, I think it’s unlikely that we will be using interstellar engines to escape an ever more troubling future possible future world as this article seems to suggest.
Optimism, is the creative seed of human thinking, nothing is impossible. NASA and other space agencies and private enterprises must get away from focoussing their resources on sending probes to the Solar System over and over again and focus on propulsion systems that are now part of the realm of fantasy, such as fusion propulsion, antimatter propulsion. Solar sails are no use beyond Saturn. The sending of so many probes to Mars to me is questioable, Mars is not a Habitable planet unless there are plans to terrafirm it. The hunting of exoplanets similar to Earth is fascinating, but still puzziling as to why not look to the Alpha Centauri system first, the closest stars to the Sun, a mere 4.2 light years away. That binary system migh harbor planets, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. Alpha Centauri A, a G2 spectral type with metallicity of 151%, slightly more than the Sun while Alpha Centauri B is a spectral type K1 V, 160% mettalicity . Obviously sending a probe to the Alpha Centauri system with current propulsion systems is useless, and that is why more research on fusion has to be done. Fusion propulsion in the not so far future will enable NASA and ESA to send probes or even humans to Alpha Centauri system first and then possibly to Gliese system. Out with the doubters that say human travel to the stars will never be possible and in with thinkers that are optimist, such as me. Obviously travel concepts like time travel via warmhole, will stay on the realm of fantasy, such concept requires the harness of vast energies found at black holes. Why not, mabye nano black holes could be created and use them as propulsion, they would consume matter around them thus driving the space ship; once that spacship arrives at the star system, starve off the nano black hole so matter will not fall in into its event horizon. Chemical propulsion used in today’s space travel is expensive and useless in terms of payload distance, chemical propulsion requires massive rockets which are very expensive, basically chemical propulsion robes a lot of resources from NASA and ESA, and those resources that could be used on things like fusion research, antimatter research, magnetic drivers research. Sad to think that NASA and other space agencies are still stuck in a warp drive, stuck in the 1950’s in terms of recket tecnology and with the current thinking at NASA, the sun will go red giant phase first before humans go to mars, by then will be too late, Earth will be vaporized by the Sun’s red giant phase.
Carlos A. thinks he wants to explore the Gliese system.
You astronomers really need a systematic non-numeric nomenclature for stars bearing planetary systems. May I suggest Gliese alpha for the first Gliese star to be confirmed as holding planets then Gliese beta etc. People can remember these suffixes but don’t remember numbers. Non astronomers also like planets, and tweet among themselves after interesting discoveries, so your reluctance here exasperates a problem that may not exist for other categories of star.
One angle everyone seems to be forgetting, whether we go directly to another system or not, we still shouldn’t be stuck in this one. As discussed on this site in articles several months back, we can still proceed outward to the outer moons, the Kuiper belt, those trillions of Oort cloud objects, and on into the outer Oort clouds of other stars. We might never care to venture near another star, but continue, sub-light speed, across the Galaxy. Our own system alone could conceivably support trillions of humans. We are only limited by our own imagination.
Alas, history repeats itself right on track. If everyone had that same defeatist stance, I believe our species would still be hunter-gathers! Fortunately, it only takes one mind to stand on the cumulative knowledge of his predecessors and add one more link to the chain. The next link just might be the one connecting us to the stars.
Cynics might call you a dreamer, overly-optimism, unrealistic, or perhaps…naive. Who is really naive? Those who have vision, hope and ambitions or those who choose to disregard a clearly defined pattern that five-thousand generations of a species have laid out? The human imagination and determination is tried and true. There this no physical problem beyond the scope of a solution.
The radius of our star system (lets say .00125 ly) compared to the distance of our nearest star (4.2 ly) has an immense ratio (3360:1). This makes theorizing about, or applying, intermediary subliminal travel seem quite moot. Efforts should be allocated towards superluminal travel, relatively speaking of course.
The Alcubierre metric is a good starting point.
I am pretty sure terraforming a planet in our solar system (yes, even the no-hope-for-it venus) still make more sense and affordable than go to another star by a very-very-very long shot.
Kelvin Long:
Here (if I may be pardoned a small act of auto-horn-tooting), in convenient t-shirt form, is the actual, classic NY TIMES passage — “ripped from the headlines”, as it were:
http://rlv.zcache.com/his_plan_is_not_original_tshirt-p235977087935614566bfn9z_900.jpg
Not so very much has changed there since 1920, really.
The Declining Significance of the Frontier in Space History?
Posted on July 30, 2012 by launiusr
It began to be perceptible in the late 1960s, and was certainly recognized in the 1970s, that the intermix of frontier imagery, popular culture expectations, and Cold War concerns was beginning to break-down. This was true across broad swaths of American culture, but it was also very apparent when it came to understanding the history of spaceflight. First, the construct of the frontier as a positive image of national character and of the progress of democracy has been challenged on all quarters and virtually rejected as a useful ideal in American postmodern, multicultural society.
Western historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, for one, has argued that the frontier myth, used as a happy metaphor by many, should be seen as a pejorative reflection. She argued that it denotes conquest of place and peoples, exploitation without environmental concern, wastefulness, political corruption, executive misbehavior, shoddy construction, brutal labor relations, and financial inefficiency.
Limerick suggested that when the old western American frontier is conjured as an image that NASA is seeking to advance into space that someone from the space agency should punch the speaker “for insulting the organization’s honor. It’s a wonder no one—no shuttle pilot, mission coordinator, mechanic, or technician—said, ‘Now cut that out–we may have our problems, but it’s nowhere near that bad’.”
Conservative politicians became the bearers of the frontier mythology increasingly used to justify the space program as the Cold War slipped away, while liberals grew increasingly restless with the exploitation and oppression that the frontier myth seemed to imply.
Full article here:
http://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/the-declining-significance-of-the-frontier-in-space-history/
If you want a sense of what many people thought the future would be like back in the day, I recommend checking out Paleofuture:
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/
And Tales of Future Past:
http://davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm
You can see that not long ago, humanity had a grand vision of our future, that science and technology would make things better for us. These were not childish dreams, they were laid out by serious, intelligent people, most often prominent businessmen and scientists.
Take a gander at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City from either of those linked blogs to get an idea what people thought was in store for our civilization: Hopeful and amazing were two words among many for it. This vision made manifest came at the end of a decade that had suffered through the Great Depression and was seeing another global war looming on the horizon, one worse than the first world war just two decades earlier.
Yet none of this stopped the makers of the 1939 World’s Fair from creating a vision of current and future humanity that was nothing but bright. The Futurama exhibit gave visitors a tour of The Year 1960 via seats mechanically conveying them past detailed, functioning models of concepts that still have yet to happen in 2012, such as vehicles that are automatically controlled on highways to reduce accidents.
If you read Roger Lainius’ latest blog entry, which I have attached in this thread just before this post, the late 1960s and 1970s are when the future took a turn for the dark. Soon it wasn’t very cool to imagine a future like the Jetsons, but one where humans were oppressed and the cities and environment were dank and depressing was A-OK culturally.
It was almost as if whole segments of humanity wished the future would be post-apocalyptic. Now THERE is a childish fantasy for you: A world where most everyone is gone and the few surviving males get to roam around the ruins of civilization, playing among what they did not earn or deserve, and fighting off other survivors or mutants while getting the few available women for themselves because the choices are so darn limited.
I ask you, does that sound better than a future where we are exploring and colonizing the stars as a mature and united humanity? The ones who think a post-apocalyptic world would be cool and fun are likely those who have never had to deal with living in real poverty conditions, a place where everyone loses eventually. Rather few people, especially those who lived in the industrial or First World nations, would be equipped to going back to the conditions those who lived during the European Dark Ages found themselves in, or even a typical American farmer from a century or two ago.
As for those who like the NYT op-ed person think that leaving Earth is immature and we should stay put on our one planet forever, I wonder how long they think we can keep growing in population (9 billion by 2050) and running our civilization as we have in the past before something goes wrong, most likely a lack of resources and territory combined with the reactionary actions of various disenfranchised groups.
And that same old whiny, ignorant song about how we need to solve our problems on Earth first before we can move on into space: Besides the fact that I hate that viewpoint for many reasons, we already have thrown many billions of dollars and other resources at human problems, most of them self-made, and the last time I checked they are still with us. If we wait for humans to get “better”, by that analogy we should never have left the caves. We are going to make mistakes and problems wherever we go, but hiding under our beds is just going to invite social stagnation and worse.
Our current economic crisis (going into its fifth year now) was created not by putting money into a space program, but by supposedly mature people who were greedy, selfish and very short-sighted when it came to the future. Most of the world is now suffering from their actions. Many billions of dollars and other currencies have been thrown at this artificial problem, which seems at best to have held off the rising flood waters. 2013 is predicted to be worse economically, not better. This assumes that someone or some group doesn’t do something really stupid due to all that Maya 2012 prophecy nonsense.
There are some businessmen who are looking at a future in space that involves mining planetoids to create a permanent society in the Sol system, which could lead to our eventual expansion into the rest of the Milky Way galaxy. Their attitude and plans are a wonderful breath of fresh air into a future that has spent the last few decades looking like something out of Mad Max or Soylent Green or any number of zombie flicks.
The pro-space community and scientists need to support this kind of future. We also need to explain it to a general public that when it comes to these things is often afraid and ignorant, more now than ever. Otherwise we will keep pathetically lamenting over why no one has sent humans back to the Moon or on to Mars – at least until the barbarians crash down the gates. After that we can find that NYT op-ed guy and say “You enjoying being stuck on Earth now?!”
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am not letting anyone with a questionable agenda take away the future from myself and my children, certainly not without a fight. Go back and look at how our recent ancestors thought things would be for our species. They may not have gotten the technology always right, but their outlook was amazing and incredibly positive. And we are supposedly the ones with the better foresight, knowledge, and technology.
Carlos, Re: chemical propulsion
Agreed, however to get the expected large amounts of hardware for interstellar missions into orbit at this stage there are no working alternatives to chemical rockets. The alternatives on the drawing board such as space elevators have their own problems and need their own technological breakthroughs (large scale manufacturing of carbon nanotubes in this case) to become viable.
Maybe a solution will present itself from fundamental Physics or Quantum Vacuum Physics however at this stage it is unclear if we’ll be stuck with chemical propulsion for earth to orbit transfers…
In light of the recent Higgs boson announcement related to mass, could the Higgs field around an object be modified to change its inertia?
Cheers, Paul.
There is an unspoken assumption among many space travel theorists, perhaps a product in part of the over-reliance on Star Trek comparisons. It is that the humans who undertake space-travel will be as squishy and fragile as their naturally evolved ancestors.
It seems to me quite possible that genetic and artificial manipulations, accompanied by sophisticated and miniaturized artificial intelligence, might develop to a high degree long before the technology of wormholes or Martian terraforming. In this case, people who adapt themselves and other life forms specifically to live and thrive in harsh environments might be the ones who leave Earth and expand into (or create) other environmental niches in the Solar System and beyond. No fragile domes, space suits, radiation shelters or artificial-g centrifuges required (or at least less of a need for them). And if such adaptations are possible, engineering a life-span or hibernation capability to allow interstellar travel at a few percent of light speed seems possible, too.
Perhaps we need to focus on achievable goals.
Noyadays, interstellar travel is not.
We need to colonize our solar system deeply before make this big jump, but we find a way to FTL travel with little resources.
The hard way requires a lot of not developed technologies, like hibernation, fusion or massive antimatter producción and good confinement, selfreplicative machines, advanced IA, closed systems, flexible molecular printing, experience with space habitats, gigant telescopes to find a good target, a lot of infrastructure and resources…
It’s good to focus on long term, but we need achievable goals, so we need to make intermediate goals before the first interstellar ship.
Solar colonization, beginning with Moon, Mars, and asteroids (space habitats) is already a formidable challenge, but not much that manned travel to Moon in 60’s.
We need, a plan, will, and… ¡start!
Very fascinating article, I have a plausible theory for propulsion system needs to work on traction in space , when I was growing as a child wondering why this airplanes and rockets sending it to the space its like taking a hammer in to the space how primitive as species we are with these technology we would not be able to travel even our own solar system since my child hood I have been thinking about space travel
Couldn’t agree more with ljk’s comments.
The doom sayers have had their triumph in the 70’s with the cancellation of the Apollo program. Their agenda is at it’s heart, I believe, anti life. The planet is not overpopulated, and in fact the growth rate is actually slowing in most countries. I grew up in the 60’s and vividly recall my teacher telling us how terrible the world might be in the year 2000 with all those ‘extra mouths to feed’ as if that was the measure of human value.
As one of those 1960’s ‘extra mouths’ I’m usually glad I turned up!
The left loves a sob story and one NYT photo shoot of a homeless man trumps the efforts of tens of thousands to develop space travel, a trade off they gloat about. It’s is a result of mass communications that rational thought has been largely replaced by emotive images. We all know the script – ‘billions spent on a trip for a few White men yet billions are poor in the third word! You racists!!!
Yada Yada
Human expansion will happen, as long as there are – non left wing – humans. It matters not if the US or the West in general does it or more likely China or Japan. The potential is unlimited and no intelligent creature can turn it’s back on such promise.