Back in 1968. when I saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey on the gigantic curved screen at the Ambassador Theater in St. Louis, I thought that the timing was a bit optimistic. December of that year would see the first trip around the Moon, a startling and expansive moment, but even with Apollo in the air, I thought a human mission to the moons of Jupiter would take longer than 2001. 2025 seemed more like it. Now, of course, we see that 2025 is out of the question for manned missions, and the best attitude for space futurists is caution.
It’s easy to see how tricky the future is to predict by looking at the past. If you extrapolated from the technology of the Hellenistic Greeks, you would have wound up with a space-going civilization somewhere around 1300, as Carl Sagan once speculated. Bumps happen along the way, civilizations topple, technologies are shelved. Even so, the allure of prognosis keeps us looking ahead, and the truly optimistic among us can easily go over the top. As witness a fascinating study performed by Tom Murphy that is now up on his Do the Math blog. Thanks to Philip Bagust for passing this along.
Attitudes About the Future
Murphy is a physicist at UC-San Diego, now working on General Relativity by bouncing laser pulses off the reflectors the Apollo astronauts left on the Moon. Prompted by an unwise comment by a student (“If it can be imagined, it can be done,”) Murphy created a survey to see what people thought was likely in the future by way of technology. He sought comments from academics about ideas ranging from futuristic jet-packs to wormholes, asking physics faculty at a variety of top-20 schools across the US, as based on graduate program rankings drawn from US News and World Report.
But to keep things in perspective, Murphy presented the same survey questions to physics grad students and physics undergraduates, as a way of tracking attitudes according to age, expertise and selected path in life. So, for instance, the survey asked what is the likelihood that humans can carry out the bulk of transportation in personal flying machines rather than being tied to the ground in cars. Respondents could choose from the following:
0. No Opinion
1. likely within 50 years
2. likely within 500 years
3. likely within 5000 years
4. likely to happen for humans eventually
5. unlikely to happen for humans
6. less than 1% likely to ever happen, or impossible
The answers to 20 questions like these are all laid out graphically on Murphy’s blog. It turns out that professors don’t think personal flying cars are likely — in fact, more of them chose ‘unlikely to happen for humans’ than any other answer. Grad and undergrad students, however, opted for choice 2, ‘likely within 500 years,’ perhaps reflecting an optimism divide or simply a lack of knowledge of the problems involved. Murphy, a licensed pilot, says he is with the faculty on that one. After all, flying and driving are two different things: “Unleash the population into 3D space and watch the mayhem!” As a former flyer myself, I can’t help but agree.
Technologies and Skepticism
So you see the method. The range of questions goes from flying cars and jetpacks to up-close study of black holes, permanent Moon colonies, fusion power, terraforming, robots and more. Have a look at Murphy’s site for the complete list. For now, I want to focus on the items most pertinent to the interstellar community. The fusion issue seems timely since early starship designs like Daedalus rely on a form of fusion, and so does the ongoing Project Icarus. Murphy frames the issue this way: “Power our society with fusion, opening up practically inexhaustible supplies of deuterium on the planet (forget about tritium here—imagine D–D reactions)?”
We’re not talking about fusion engines for spacecraft, but it seems clear enough that a breakthrough in fusion on the ground would help us develop options for space travel. The old saw is that fusion is always 50 years in the future, so you might have expected that to be reflected in the survey. But while almost no one said it would never be accomplished, few thought it would be available within decades. In fact, faculty, grad students and undergrads all cluster around choice 2, ‘likely within 500 years.’ Fusion, it seems, may take a while.
Clearly a survey like this has no predictive value of its own, but let’s think about what it does mean. When you’re talking about futuristic ideas, as we so often do in these pages, it’s obviously helpful to get a range of opinion, and that includes especially people who specialize in issues related to the subject at hand. I doubt many of Murphy’s faculty are fusion engineers, but they do work in the discipline of physics and thus understand the issues involved. It’s also useful to see where popular opinion on such matters is, and here we see that while many undergrads think fusion is a long way off, a much larger group of them than faculty think it might happen within 50 years.
A Star Trek Future?
You can see what we’re coming around to. Murphy now asks survey responders what they think of the Star Trek universe, quizzing them on things like warp drive, wormholes and teleportation. The question on warp drive is posed this way:
Come up with a means of interstellar travel that allows round-trips to locales tens of light-years away within years or decades, without having Earth (and its people) age substantially more than the traveler—thus operating outside the normal confines imposed by sub-luminal travel and special relativity (the equivalent of warp drive in Star Trek)?
Choice 6, ‘less than 1% likely to ever happen, or impossible,’ is the overwhelming choice of faculty, with 91 percent finding it essentially impossible. Both grad students and undergrads chose choice 6 more than any other, but a wider range of answers show up among them, including a few who opt for warp drive within 500 years or less. As to wormholes, faculty opinion is almost unanimously in the ‘not likely’ to ‘impossible’ range, while teleportation shows the same faculty skepticism but much broader support for the idea among the undergrad community.
I won’t go through all the items in this survey other than to note that a lunar colony within 500 years is widely accepted — few think it will happen within 50 years. 80 percent of the respondents in each group think it will happen someday, but few peg it within the next five decades. Murphy comments:
Pause for a second to reflect on the fact that 50 years after the space race began, we think it will be at least another 50 before we’re living on the Moon. I’m guessing this is a radical change in attitude compared to prevailing views in the 1960?s. An interesting departure from the expert gradient shows up here: undergrads are more skeptical than grads. This reversal may be due to the termination of the U.S. human spaceflight program during a stage in life (late high school, early college) when world views are forming and fluid. Perhaps this group has been more impacted by the shutdown than grad students whose noses are buried in research.
Two other quick things to note. First, on the question of whether humans will ever open a line of communication with aliens, the answer from the survey seems to be, across the board, ‘someday’ but not within the immediate future. The other interesting point is that Murphy does not ask about interstellar travel using slower methods that do not violate Einsteinian relativity. It would be helpful to see the breakdown there, though I suspect we would see an answer somewhat like the SETI question, with most respondents putting it in the ‘someday’ camp.
Exponential Growth vs. Outlandish Ideas
But among the professional physicists, out of the 20 ideas Murphy covers, only one (auto-pilot cars) is deemed likely to happen within 50 years, and only two (true robots and fusion power) make the 500 year cut. Murphy comments that although we’ve been living in an era when progress felt like an exponential rush, physicists still bet against ‘the more outlandish notions’:
A key element here is that we know a heck of a lot more about fundamental physics now than we did 200 years ago. Undoubtedly we have much yet to learn. But the frontiers 200 years ago pertained to everyday time, length, and energy scales. Today’s frontiers are at 10?18 m scales on one end, and at cosmological scales on the other. Ultra-high energy frontiers are increasingly hard to access, requiring monster machines like the LHC at CERN. The chances that new physics will intercede at human-familiar scales are increasingly slim as the boundaries of our knowledge push out. Most technological developments of the last 50 years have been based on incremental progress in manipulation of matter, rather than on fundamental breakthroughs in physics like electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, or general relativity from roughly a century ago.
Murphy’s survey gives us a sense where professional and popular opinion is on a range of ideas that weave through today’s science fiction. And that’s worth keeping in mind: Science fiction wouldn’t carry the imaginative charge it does unless its ideas pushed us beyond the conventionally expected. How realistically should we take the futures it shows us? When it comes to space, the weight of opinion in this survey is that a future interplanetary, much less interstellar, culture is a long way off if it arrives at all.
Some would find this pessimistic, but I think it’s simple realism based on experience. On the other hand, optimists will say that realism is sometimes overtaken by unexpected events. My own axiom: It is the business of the future to surprise us. There’s historical precedent for that one, too.
The latest “revolution” in physics was the discovery of the Holographic principle. It states that the physics in the bulk of the spacetime must be equivalent to a theory happening only on the degrees of freedom of the boundary. This is a highly counterintuitive result which hints at a strong nonlocality of the physical world. As a space enthusiast i hope that this leads to some breakthrough in understanding of realistic wormholes and topology, but the truth of the field is that physics don’t believe anymore that spacetime can be topologically nontrivial: for instance, in the case of black holes, they assert that every bit of information that comes in must eventually come out, even if extremely scrambled (not sure if the same happens with rotating black holes). Beyond personal hopes, the realistic expectation is that it might take 2 or 3 hundred years before fundamental physics research will discover something that will affect our lives as deeply as electromagnetism or nuclear fission research did in the past
One significant flaw of this survey is that it jumbles together what may be possible and what may be desirable. For example, flying cars may be possible but not desirable, or desirable but too expensive for most people, or desirable if there is also a control system to make it idiot proof. The same confusion applies to other questions, such as fast interstellar flight and controlled fusion, though perhaps to a lesser degree.
With the questions as posed, Murphy is not controlling for whether the respondents are answering “can we?” versus “will we?” The results are therefore not indicative of much at all. In any case, an opinion, even an informed opinion, is still just an opinion. Interesting but not useful.
Quoting Paul from his article:
“If you extrapolated from the technology of the Hellenistic Greeks, you would have wound up with a space-going civilization somewhere around 1300, as Carl Sagan once speculated.”
As smart and perceptive as some of the Ionic Greeks were, they lacked what many scientists still lack today: A rapor or an interest in rapporing with the general public and those in power who also know little about science. Even moreso, guys like Archimedges, brilliant as they were, had little to no interest in making practical applications of their work. They actually considered such things as beneath them.
This is why devices like the Antikythera Mechanism were not widespread in the ancient world. Not obviously because it was impossible for our ancestors to conceive and build a device which could predict the motions of celestial bodies, but because it was deemed fit only for the personal use of the rich. The rest of the society had no say in such matters and consequently were often unaware of such knowledge, nor did they find it of any relevence to their daily lives. Over two millennia later, we still have much of the same problem despite the Enlightenment et al.
The same problem can be found in non-Western cultures as well. Socities like the Chinese were very advanced and Mesoamerican cultures had astronomical knowledge better than Medieval Europe, but it did not lead to starships.
Carl Sagan did note this later on in his Cosmos series, pointing out how the scientists who used the Library of Alexandria didn’t seem very big on supporting general social causes, but I have to disagree with him rather strongly that if the ancient Greeks supported Democritus over Plato that we would be colonizing Alpha Centauri, simply because the Platonic inward-looking attitude (which also did a lot of dismissing of astronomy and other worlds in general) was more appealing to the masses, then and now.
In 2001 a Space Odyssey, I think it’s worth making the point that the manned mission to Jupiter’s moons was a response to finding the monolith on the Moon. In Arthur C Clarke’s novel, the monolith sent a signal out there, so the mission was spurred on by that event.
So although 2001 was a bit early, would a manned mission in 2025 be realistic, if it turned out there was proof of ET activity out there? I think it would incentivise it beyond current plans at the very least…
I think there’s a danger to following probability/statistical analysis to closely. It prevents people from taking chances when one isn’t certain about the outcome. All to often probability does not match reality.
We’ll get private aircars when AI advances to the point where the aircars can fly themselves. Since microscopic brains like those of fruit flies, gnats, and fairy fly wasps can manage it, I don’t think the weight of the autopilot will be a significant constraint!
Thanks for posting this, Paul. There is still room for upside surprises, but the caution that physicists have concerning many of Murphy’s questions is wise. IMO, there could be some developments in synthetic biology which would dumbfound Captain Kirk. But as far as time travel, wormholes, warp drive, or transportation by teleportation … NEVER.
Ten Years after Criswell
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/04/020416073334.htm
The concept of Lunar Solar Power (LSP) has been around for over a decade and yet remains largely unknown to the public. Atomic bomb propuslion, aka Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (NPP), is another little known gamechanger that inspires derision instead of the serious consideration it deserves. Along with LSP and NPP, any mention of freeze and revive whole body cryopreservation makes for eye rolling or at least uncomfortable blank stares. These three technologies represent the future survival of the human race in a way that no other group of concepts can. They require no breakthroughs or new laws of physics and each one has truly profound implications for the human race.
The question must be asked; are we truly intelligent beings? We stand at the doorway to a new age, a technological second coming of Christ, yet we turn away in distraction. Lunar Solar Power would provide all the energy we could possibly use- and more. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion would open up the solar system to exploration and establish colonies and a solar system superhighway of beam propelled commercial spacecraft. Even the space colony dreams of John Desmond Bernal (1929) and Gerard K. O’Neill (1976) become possible with such energy and propulsion resources.
And finally the ability to freeze, indefinitely store, and revive a human being brings the greatest revolution of all. The first successful procedure would change the world overnight. Not only would the entire intellectual resources of the planet be rededicated to reversing the aging process, but star travel would become practical. Travel to other worlds would take us off the endangered species list.
I better clarify my previous statement: Yes I know Archimedes made practical instruments for war, getting water, etc., but he never regarded these inventions in the same manner as he did his abstract mathematical ideas.
Archimedes considered his proudest achievement to be this:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.4422.pdf
I want to clarify as well that I am not doubting the Greeks could have come up with an interstellar vessel given enough time. The problem, then as now, is that a small group of smart men and women need public and political support to accomplish such a major task.
In order to get such support, the people need to be educated not only on the mechanics of such things, but also in the why such things are important. Ending the Two Cultures divide would be a good start.
This is a good demonstration of how bound peoples’ imaginations are to their past. It’s easy to say the future will be different from the past, but when it comes down to actual details, no, it won’t be.
I was very surprised to even see Paul commit this error: “Murphy, a licensed pilot, says he is with the faculty on that one. After all, flying and driving are two different things: “Unleash the population into 3D space and watch the mayhem!” As a former flyer myself, I can’t help but agree. ” Of course the population won’t be piloting their flying cars themselves. We’re only a few years away from them not even driving their own ground cars.
Interesting results for the questionnaire, but a surprising lack of optimism for items that should work within the realms of known physics:
– Fusion should happen within 50 years, possibly even aneutronic fusion, and could be cloaser than 50 years. There are a variety of interesting new approaches and results, among them Tri-Alpha’s resurrection of correct older QM values.
– Air transport is a matter of energy efficiency. We still put stuff on ships or rail too, because they can beat cars. When we have automated cars for the public, probably within 20 years, since they are admitted to public streets now, we certainly may have automated 3D air transport of premium goods. A matternet using automated vehicles certainly appears within range in 500 years wherever it make sense (faster and/or more efficient than other transport). For the development of personal air transport, automation is key. (You can put me in the pilot category too. Automated appears better than VFR for quite a few things.)
– A SETI event could happen much earlier than convenient for us, certainly closer than “someday”.
– The Star Trek universe is a different matter. Transporters are certainly far fetched in physics but work well as a plot device. Warp drive/worm holes to manipulate is unlikely and just more plot devices to scale down time required for interstellar flight.
– Robots are also closer than 100 years, since the brainpower can be offloaded. The limits are the power sources.
It seems a pity that this survey didn’t include some questions where we could attempt to control for changing profiles of scepticism and optimism in these groups in situations were all are equally well informed. I also wonder how much a positive answer by undergraduates in favour of, say, warp drive, is an expression of a desire to understand the physics of such a possibility, rather that a truly held belief?
Ljk says “devices like the Antikythera Mechanism were not widespread in the ancient world”. And that is a huge debate in itself. Have you ever noticed how all that archaeological pottery is broken? That didn’t happen after burial, that was because these were all thrown away because replacement was cheaper than repair. The sort of mechanisms you speak of would be so valuable that they would never be thrown out, and the Antikythera Mechanism itself shows sign of several hand-repairs. Classical Greece may have been much more advanced than you think (or not).
Ron S: “For example, flying cars may be possible but not desirable, or desirable but too expensive for most people, or desirable if there is also a control system to make it idiot proof.”
Several were developed…but were mediocre cars and lousy planes. Tradeoffs happen. I have a book about this, WONDERFUL FUTURES THAT NEVER WERE.
While the survey gives us some basic parameters of the differences between undergrads, grads and established physicists, it misses the important element of “cause”. Is warp drive, teleportation, lunar colonization, etc. unlikely to happen because they are physic-ally impossible, or would they become immediately more likely or likely to happen sooner if the necessary political and cultural commitment were there? Perhaps established physicists, much more than undergrads, are just jaded with the political process of funding scientific research which colors their optimism and their responses.
I may be repeating my self, but so be it.
An odd thing about Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001 is that main technical advisers Fred Ordway and Harry Lange had spent the late 50’s to the early 60’s working at Marshall , for von Braun, on how to use Saturn technology to go beyond Apollo. (They amassed immense amounts of data.)
They came to work , on leave, in 1965 for Kubrick because both had become discouraged that nothing much would happen beyond Apollo , nothing like a Mars Expedition that it.
They were, in fact discouraged, and 2001 gave them a chance to , at least, vicariously realize their dreams. (I doubt Ordway ever expressed his reservations about what we see on the screen happening in 30 years from 1968, no need he was having too much fun.)
Even I , a space cadet, and right in the thick of day to day Apollo things in 1968, thought to myself “as beautiful as this looks, no way!”.
2001 is a special case and I put it into an alternate universe , over there!
But Hollywood is just plain weird about placing things so close to the present that no one thinks … for example … no! things will not look like that in 5, or 10 or 20 years… that’s just chronowimping!
(I exclude Gene Roddenberry , because of his knowledge of modern prose SF, and George Lucas just because he either got lucky or is smarter than I thought he he was!)
I have to wonder if Murphy knew of the ploy, I don’t know who invented it , in prose SF … maybe Campbell… of doing this , you set up your super science future , lots of gosh wow toys!… and you NEVER GIVE A DEFINITE DATE!
I clever ploy, why is a date important anyway?
(Now I must say a lot SF prose writers used 200 to 500 years in the future as dates , but that still playing it safe.)
One thing.
Did Murphy ever ask or think of asking on these questions “What kind of error bars would you estimate?”
Harder question!
I put ‘power our society with fusion’ as unlikely, not because I think a working fusion reactor is all that implausible, but because I don’t think fusion would have any advantage over such fission reactors as the Integral Fast Reactor or the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. Either of those 2 fission reactors would supply plenty of energy for a population of billions for billions of years.
Since you started with Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is worth noting that Clarke observed that we tend to overestimate change in the short term, but underestimate it in the long term.
Delphic methods are not that good at predicting futures. At best physics defines the impossible, not the welter of factors that define the future.
I suspect that technology will surprise us and allow for some of the old dreams of spaceflight but in very different form than we expect.
Stan said on November 12, 2012 at 17:32:
“Of course the population won’t be piloting their flying cars themselves. We’re only a few years away from them not even driving their own ground cars.”
Now there is an idea that has been predicted for decades and still has yet to happen. I know there is that ability to parallel park automatically, but as for driving, it always seems to be a few years away. As for flying cars, how long before someone would pack such a vehicle full of explosives and slam it into a building or a sports stadium during a big game?
Rob Henry said on November 12, 2012 at 19:22:
“Classical Greece may have been much more advanced than you think (or not).”
Somehow you interpreted my previous comments as saying classical Greece was not terribly advanced. Quite incorrect. I know they were very advanced both in innovations and devices. The comment I was getting at was that there were darn few of such things as the Antikythera Mechanism and could only be afforded by the very wealthy.
Such knowledge was also only passed along primarily to the upper classes; as a result, the much larger underclasses did not appreciate or care for such devices and ideas, which along with little incidents like Roman conquests and later barbarian invasions played their roles in bringing about the Dark Ages.
And here is something else to ponder as people play games on their smart phones yet have only the vaguest idea how they work:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49792179/ns/technology_and_science-science/
I consider elements of “2001” as a depiction of the Von Braun scenario. Particularly the big wheel space station and the moon base. These are right out of Collier’s magazine and were seen at the time as plausible by 2001. The story had it where the mission to Jupiter was spurred by the discovery of the monolith, which otherwise would never have occurred. The mission to Jupiter as depicted in the movie can easily be considered a proxy for a mission to Mars that, at the time, was also considered plausible by 2001 (Von Braun thought it would be done in the early 80’s).
In essence. “2001” is the cinematic depiction of the Clarke/Von Braun scenario that was in vogue during the 50’s and 60’s.
…And forget about Tom Swift’s “Triphibian Atomicar,” a nuclear-powered personal car/aircraft/watercraft! :-)
I thought that I would comment on this blog. Tom Murphey’s survey is fascinating because of what it tells us about our attitudes, not about the practicality of doing various things. In fact, what it tells us is that we have systematically weeded the dreamers out of the space program (present company excepted, of course.)
I am currently attending a graduate course in space sciences and I find the same sort of malaise there. The students are pretty much only there to mark time while the economy improves…hoping that a new set of credentials will help them get jobs. The professors seem to be a discouraged bunch, who bemoan the lack of government funding for space science.
Sorry, but this simply won’t cut it! Space is the most exciting thing we could possibly do…and we are collectively subscribing to despair and discouragement. If it looks like space exploration is stalled because we have turned it over to bureaucrats and academics, then it is time to take a different approach: how about we think outside the box for a change?
Lets turn our paradigm box inside out. We currently assume that space is too expensive, that getting anywhere is too difficult and that it will take too long to actually do anything. What if we simply assume the opposite in each case and see where it leads us?
Money: most of it is in the hands of private space enterprise. Instead of beating a dead government funding horse. Why not team up with the private guys and exchange expertise for space on their launch vehicles? Yes, I know some of this is happening, but it could be grand alliance and right now if you mention such a thing to an academic, you get a snearing reply that it isn’t pure science. Science for science sake is probably not a winning proposition right now, but science for revenue is and would likely return some pretty good data as a byproduct.
Difficulty: Please! Of course, it is difficult, but not impossible. We are so used to a NASA approach to space, that we can no longer build a box for less than a million dollars. When you buy NASA, you buy an unacceptable level of overhead and regulation. Ditch that and things start looking a whole lot easier: witness SpacEX.
And while I am at it, I think that it ought to be possible to build a transportation system that would get you anywhere in the solar system pretty easily. How about roping a couple of asteroids together and spinning them up over time. Ultimately, you will have a mass sling that could accelerate a spacecraft up to solar escape velocity or a realistic interplanetary velocity pretty straight forwardly. Maybe Planetary Resources is missing a bet: instead of platinum or water, sell delta V!!
Timeframes: Check out history….it always takes longer to start something than to finish it. It took generations to figure out how to fly, but then it took a few decades to land on the Moon. Same with other endeavors. Once we actually go into space and do useful stuff there, the time to acheive mastery won’t be measured in mutiple hundred years, but by years. If we simply set up a mining operation on the Moon, within a decade, there would be a thriving space presence, regardless of what we find there. Trust me!!
And to that point, we won’t go to the stars unless we are already working in space. And when we do go to the stars, it will seem a natural offshoot of what we are already doing in space and we won’t accept multi-generational transits.
I don’t think we do ourselves any favors by buying into the doom sayers who will always tell us why something is too hard or too unrealistic. Dreamers are never realistic…but they drag the rest of us with them…we need to encourage the dreamers and, instead of accepting Murphey’s survey, we need to ask how it is that we let our educational system turn dreamers into sceptics.
IMHO :-)
A glimpse at a gateway
Recent articles in the news media suggest that NASA is studying new architectures for human space exploration that could make use of a “gateway” station at a Earth-Moon Lagrange point.
Jeff Foust reports on the some technical details about those ongoing NASA studies provided at a recent conference.
Monday, November 12, 2012
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2188/1
Just a couple of comments
1) I did not expect to see automated intelligent self navigating cars without building tracks or some extensive infrastructure… . Google has them and they are going mainstream in the next 5 ( to ten) years. safer than having text- messaging humans driving, I suppose.
2) We need to have more Toys that put children in the roles of space explorers… I always had model rockets but I am going to build my grandchildren toys that are more engaging.. I built tree houses for my slen and now- a days, children’s playgrounds have castles and forts… what about children’s playgrounds that are SPACE SHIPS? Things you can climb on and around? look out the windows on imagined mars landscapes? Have girls and guys play dress up in toy pressure suits? Video games that include not just war scenes and pov shooters, but asteroid landscapes and low gravity adventures.. the ideas go on and on..
You know, I still have a mint condition hardback copy of Cosmos- I read it when I was about 11- desperately trying to make sense of some of the more ‘physics’ related discussions; however, I plugged away. Always the pragmatist, Sagan captivated me with his employ of wonder and his tireless push to get out there. Carl Sagan, and his grounding anecdotal paragraphs put a relatively difficult subject within reach of the average intelligent mind such as mine. I also had a book called The Science In Science Fiction. Written in the early 80’s it talked about possibility regarding advanced technology and what is likely to appear and what is not. One thing that sticks in my mind is how it went on to say that face to face discussion such as in Star Trek, now FaceTime, posed huge challenges.
Regarding the question of how fast we develop into a space faring civilisation, I cannot help but think, that rather than our curiosity, it will be our own greed for resources that ultimately drives us outward. But what happens when we do find another living planet, do we become that oppressive alien species that Hollywood has feared and continues to do so. The film Avatar suggested this to me- South America all over again. Surely this is our destiny.
I was under the impression that the USS Discovery was already planned as a manned mission to the Jupiter system (Saturn in the 2001 novel) and certain elements were changed only after the Monolith TMA-1 sent its signal towards the gas giant world.
Back then it would seem only a logical progression that after a lunar base and undoubtedly manned missions to Mars, a crewed vessel to Jupiter – perhaps to set up a base on Callisto, the only Galilean moon outside of the deadly Jovian radiation belts – would be next. Either than or in parallel with manned missions to Venus and Mercury.
I wonder whether the results of the survey actually vary with expertise, or more with age?
I’m not a physicist at all, but my answers to the questions correlated strongly with the faculty answers (my age-group) rather than the undergrads (my expertise level).
Regarding past predictions such as 2001, I think that the real inaccuracy was in not appreciating how some technologies would impact others. Specifically, once you have reasonably advanced computers, there’s little need to send humans into space. We have sent spaceships to Jupiter, and beyond, but they weren’t manned because that was not necessary.
This also affects the responses to the questions in the survey too. The questions specifically use the word ‘human’ but this is ambiguous.
“What do you think is the likelihood that humans can: Do astrophysics by traveling to sources (outside our solar system) rather than via telescopes?”
Well, if that means humans actually travelling outside the solar system I’d say somewhere between 5000 years and never. However, it’s pretty likely we’ll have probes visiting the Oort cloud within 50 years, and if/when we discover large bodies beyond that we’ll probably send probes there within 100.
@ljk
I would have to look to nail it, but I am sure you are right, in 2001, the novel at least*, the Discovery was build or almost already built for trip to Saturn. (A grand tour of Jupiter and Saturn may have been in the cards).
Because of the Monolith things had to be retrofitted for a new mission.
(I note , in the novel Haywood Floyd had been to the colony on Mars.)
Clarke kept Saturn , but Kubrick’s lead VFX supervisors just could not come up with a Saturn that worked in 70 mm. Doug Trumbull was only one of those FX guys who never gave up, which is why we got Silent Running a few years later.)
*I note: A ton of background material in the novel was on the production boards at Kubrick’s studios in England… but MGM was really very nervous about the money Kubrick was spending, in fact he had to go hat in hand to beg for more, which he got, and to think the total was 10 million in 1968 dollars, a lot, counting inflation, but lord what he could have done with 200 million! So it stayed on the story boards.
In the novel Floyd travels to the station in a two stage HTOL vehicle, I recently found a Harry Lange drawing of it! Alas, not enough time for it in the film.
Yes, flying cars have been around a long time, at least since the 50s, but the problem with their development has not been technological or scientific. The problem has been legal: how to work out all the access, right-of-way, liability, and all that issues that are fairly tractable on a 2-D surface but very difficult in 3-D space. Without the legal issues resolved, there is no possibility for a market to develop, and without a market you can’t have competition, profit incentives, creativity trade-offs, technological improvements and the whole business that we know and love as economic progress. Or at least damn little of it. Since today most lawmakers are preoccupied with transfer payments, very easy to understand, they are loath to get involved in something as complex as 3-d cars. Personally, I have no idea what would come out of such a market (surprise, neither does anyone else) but it would be cool to find out.
And then we come to this: “Today’s frontiers are at 10?18 m scales on one end, and at cosmological scales on the other. Ultra-high energy frontiers are increasingly hard to access, requiring monster machines like the LHC at CERN. The chances that new physics will intercede at human-familiar scales are increasingly slim as the boundaries of our knowledge push out.”
And so forth and so on. I must protest. I do believe that there is a great deal, a huge, out-of-control amount of physics to be discovered in the range well short of those extreme boundaries. I think the best thing that could happen to physics would be if the “monster machines” (good phrase, admittedly), CERN and its ilk were shut down and forever entombed in the earth.
Note: I find most scientific-types to be poor prognosticators. They do not understand markets, have no interest in them, typically feel contempt for them, and view their own very narrow specialties as the key to understanding universe. Such arrogance does not serve progress. People of future civilizations, should there be any, may well look back on these times and wonder “Why on earth were they hung up on that? Higgs boson?! You’ve got to be kidding.”
Was Mars ever really a practical next goal after the Moon though? The mission time alone is almost 2 orders of magnitude greater, to say nothing of all the other technical difficulties. I don’t recall any discussion in the 60s/early 70s of (say) missions to near-Earth asteroids which might take a few weeks or months. Throwing in the fact of asteroids possibly having valuable resources, this might have been a more plausible next step than a Mars mission. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have been proposed at the time (I welcome correction).
There’s an Australian hip-hop song which is about being disappointed by science because it hasn’t yet delivered “Back to the Future” style hover-boards. A “Mr Fusion” home fusion reactor would be handy to have too.
As pointed out by others here, the likely chaos of people flying around in 3-space could probably be solved by extensions of computer technologies that are already coming into practical being.
The bigger issue is the trade-off problem (also mentioned here). The requirements of a car and an aircraft are so different that you end up with a suboptimal airplane that can function as poor excuse for a car.
At the heart of it though is energy availability. If we had a light weight, high energy, long duration energy source, the vehicle wouldn’t really have to “fly” aerodynamically – just in one way or another “levitate” (lots of practical options here). Very light weight airframes and configuration imperatives based on aerodynamics would no longer be the dominant design factors. You’d just need a good shell (make it watertight while we’re at it), and appropriate methods of locomotion for each modality.
When might we have such an energy source? Who knows. Just the kind of unpredictable game changer that make technological developments so hard to predict.
Nobody seems to have noticed the sermon with which Tom Murphy rounds off his survey article: “It matters. The belief that we can escape our Earthly bounds (and problems) impairs our commitment to take positive corrective action to address problems here on Earth. When I initially wrote the piece Why Not Space, I was blown away by the certainty expressed in many comments that we would of course break free of our evolutionary nursery. Fish crawls onto land; reptile takes flight; man jumps to the stars. A compelling storyline, yet likely completely wrong. Desolation and danger cut in the wrong direction to make space a natural leap. We don’t do so well away from our eggshell-thin biosphere. Even high mountains and ocean depths pose serious challenges to human survival. If we’re destined for space, why don’t we live undersea today? Space is orders of magnitude more difficult still, leaving aside the stiff energetic barrier to getting there in the first place.”
I emphatically disagree with Tom Murphy here. The belief that we can escape our Earthly bounds does absolutely NOT imply that we can escape solving our Earthly problems, and does absolutely NOT impair our commitment or abilities to do so. On the contrary, in a healthy economy all possible avenues of progress are explored by a variety of different people, and moreover reinforce one another, as for example global peace and environmental management have been furthered by the use of satellites launched on what were originally military missiles.
Murphy’s reference to “the termination of the U.S. human spaceflight program” illustrates his eagerness to write off spaceflight as a lost cause. Obviously, that program has not yet been terminated and is not likely to be so. NASA has two astronauts in orbit right now (Sunita Williams and Kevin Ford), has had astronauts in orbit continuously (I believe I’m correct in saying) for the past decade, and will continue to do so for the next half decade at least (accidental damage to the ISS permitting). Meanwhile the roadblock of the Shuttle program has at last given way to new initiatives from American industry which are on course to expand the American and more broadly human presence in low Earth orbit.
Stephen
Oxford, UK
“A “Mr Fusion” home fusion reactor would be handy to have too.”
Could some type of LENR make it true!? http://ecatnews.com
It is 864 comments on the latest article…
“Science fiction is only fiction up to the point that it’s science fact”.
by Peter H. Diamandis
For a less reverential treatment of Tom Murphy, by an economist:
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/murphys-law.html
This is just off the top of my head, but I have to point out that we often DO assume that continuing development equates to greater energy use (e.g. Kardeshev type I, II, and III civilizations). So Murphy’s argument isn’t completely unreasonable.
The right of way for flying cars is being addressed in a slightly different domain – drones. How drones can be flown and how they mix with existing airspace use is actively being worked on.
@ AStronist “Fish crawls onto land; reptile takes flight; man jumps to the stars.”
Poorly written metaphor. Amphibians which can breathe on land evolved from fish ancestors. Flying reptiles and birds evolved from non-flying ancestors. X that can survive in space evolved (or was designed) by man.
That metaphor suggests humans will not be the inheritors of the space environment, but some evolved or created creature or artificial entity.
The forms of the vehicles in 2001 was probably as much about art and audience expectations as about what was being thought about. I have von Braun’s “Space Frontier” (copyright 1963-1967) that clearly has him talking about Skylab type, microgravity space stations, rather than rotating wheels that had been suggested earlier.
Space Station 1 looked magnificent on screen, and was complemented by the Blue Danube Waltz so well, that my generation sees 2001, not Vienna ballrooms when listening to the piece. It was obviously also much easier to build a segment of Space Station 1 than to try to depict personnel floating around in free fall. It also led nicely to that great opening scene in the Discovery, with Poole running around the centrifuge, a space station in miniature. I don’t think it has ever been done better.
Audiences had seen movies with spinning space stations in many SciFi B movies, and that was the expectation of how things should be. Kubrick didn’t break that expectation, although the look of the space hardware shaped all subsequent expectations in movies.
@NS “Was Mars ever really a practical next goal after the Moon though? ”
In the aforementioned book by von Braun, Mars was definitely the next step for him. He saw the space station as the assembly point for the construction of Mars ships to land on Mars in the mid 1980’s. Realistic? That I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have bet against it, given funding and a strong desire to make it work.
I certainly don’t have anything from the 1960’s that suggests a mission to an asteroid. How much was known about NEA’s in those days, compared to the asteroid belt?
I don’t recall reading von Braun specifically, but what I remember from the time is that Mars was always assumed to be the next step for manned spaceflight after the Moon. And of course if NEO’s weren’t known or considered worthwhile then Mars would have the next-closest place.
Just comparing the trips in terms of relative length though, I’m doubtful that if I completed a 1 mile hike, a 100 mile hike would be the next thing I’d try.
Here are plans from 1966 for a manned planetoid flyby mission:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/manned-asteroid-flyby-mission-1966/
In 1967 there were also plans drawn up for manned missions to flyby Venus:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/2012-venus-transit-special-3-robot-probes-for-piloted-venus-flybys-1967/
Of course these ideas never got past the proverbial drawing board, but in 1967 it would not have been generally seen as out of bounds. Humans on Mars by 2000 even less so and a big space station was a near certainty.
I don’t like saying things like Imagine if we had stuck to our pre-Apollo plans for space, but it does make you wonder where we might be now if we had.
Civilian drones will be ‘common in a decade’ but pilotless passenger planes are still a long way off
John von Radowitz
Wednesday 14 November 2012
Pilotless civilian aircraft could start to become a common sight in British skies within the next 10 years, it was claimed today.
Scientists say aviation is at a “crossroads” with the development of civilian drones that can safely fly themselves.
Civilian Unmanned Aircraft (CUAs) would first be introduced to carry out jobs such as search and rescue in hazardous conditions, monitoring the weather and environment, checking roads, railways and power lines, forestry and policing.
Full article here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/civilian-drones-will-be-common-in-a-decade-but-pilotless-passenger-planes-are-still-a-long-way-off-8316801.html
To quote:
The global market for CUAs is predicted to be worth between £34.6 billion and £39 billion per year by 2020.
To the best of my knowledge the JFK/Johnson administrations had no real plans beyond the Moon.
The center directors were given freedom to explore future scenarios which is how von Braun got Project Empire started in 1963. (By the by there again is a connection with Fred Ordway… who was pulling this together for von Braun.)
Empire was an evolution from The Mars Project started in 1947! (By the by there is Krafft Ehricke again , by way of General Dynamics.)
Von Braun’s (1948) Project Mars’s timeline was, build the Ferry first (actually more Shuttle like than Saturn V)…build a space station, Moon Expedition, on to Mars. (This is way the Colliers series presented it.)
I think , except for the short lived NASA Design reference missions out of JSC in the early 90’s , there have been only spotty ‘this and that’ funded stuff… I would even count the VSE in that.
For the USA , current economics has/will drive manned exploration into the background.
A grand international effort to spread the economics about might work, but that seems blocked , not only by current economics, but also an international Xenophobia, which is a real bother to me since I worked ISS for more than 20 years , which I could find few faults with.
We should remember that science goes forward in often unpredictable ways.
Yes-we don’t have colonies on Mars or the Moon as was once envisioned.
But on the other hand, I read a lot of SF and I struggle to remember anyone predicting that within 30-50 years we will know hundreds of planets beyond our own System, or that it will become possible to think about imagining directly other biospheres. While I would love us to have colonies SF authors wrote about decades ago, all is not lost. Science still continues to bring us exciting discoveries and barring some major world catastrophe will continue to do so.
I think some of the questions really would need changing-they are very stuck in the past. Probably nobody who seriously researched star travel or possibility of extraterrestrial life and intelligence believes in something like Star Trek happening. Indeed that was the song of old SF, nowadays many Hard SF authors tend to envision civilizations of millions of years apart and subluminal ships as the method of travel(Watts, Reynolds, Stross)
@Wojciech J
“I read a lot of SF and I struggle to remember anyone predicting that within 30-50 years we will know hundreds of planets beyond our own System,”
If we just limit it Science Fiction 1940 – 1960 … I don’t remember any SF writer predicting we would discover >hundreds of planets<*, but I do remember an uncountable number of SF writers positing there would be, in 200 to 500, years hundreds , if not thousands of colonies on planets way beyond the solar system!
Didn't Asimov have millions of colonized planets in the Foundation series and that's story started in 1942!
(*My guess is that I am wrong about that and some SF writer guessed, in a story, Kepler's discoveries.)
I read the blog and the entry by Murphy. It is not a very useful study. Questions are very general, often based on old-fashioned ideas that nobody today views as serious. The author quite openly declares his bias and does even intervene when he is not satisfied with result.
I look down, I see a planet. I look up, I see a few more planets. I see the Sun around which the planets revolve, indicating a common and natural origin. I see stars and, with more effort, determine that the Sun is also a star. I then can say that some fraction of those stars have planets, and potentially even planets with life of some sort, or at least habitable in some fashion.
What we’ve done in the past decades is better constrain the estimates on the quantity of planets and their arrangements into systems. So even a fiction writer in the mid-20th century who is a scientific dunce (and most were not) could easily conceive of galactic empires, existing or potential. There are enough stars hanging around that even with an estimate that is off by several orders of magnitude there is still an ample supply of hypothetical habitable planets to make support their fictional plots without overly stressing the credulity of their readers.
Early computers that were programmed to generate various planetary system formation scenarios tended to come up with versions that were more or less similar to our Sol system: Little rocky planets near the star, big gaseous ones towards the back.
In Carl Sagan’s book Cosmos, published in 1980, they did a planet generator and again, most of the solar systems were similar to ours. One did have a giant planet near the star as a I recall, and another had a gas giant that got so large it became a sun. But again, even scientists didn’t seem to buy into alien systems resembling anything but ours with only minor variations.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/commercial_books/CB179-1.html