“We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town;
We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down.
Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need…”
— Kipling, from “The Song of the Dead”
We’re lucky that science fiction fans are such packrats. They not only keep beloved books and magazine issues from their past but also catalog them relentlessly. Because of both these traits, I can turn to my own bookshelf and pull out the November, 1957 issue of Astounding Science Fiction to see P. Schuyler Miller’s review of John Campbell’s Islands of Space, in which he described the novel as “very characteristic of the best ‘hard’ science fiction of its day.” Miller had a lot to do in subsequent book reviews for the magazine with establishing ‘hard SF’ as a category.
Campbell’s book, extensively revised from its original appearance in the spring, 1931 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly, is an interesting curiosity in being the first appearance of a ‘warp drive’ in science fiction. Here the concept emerges as a way of folding spacetime in ways that allow superluminal travel. The concept flows freely in science fiction of all sorts, led directly to Star Trek’s famous ‘warp factor,’ and was inspiration for Miguel Alcubierre’s investigation of whether or not ‘bending’ spacetime could actually be achieved, and how much energy it would take to do that.
It also moves between the ‘hard SF’ Miller describes and the more picaresque ‘space opera,’ heavy on adventure and short on technical detail. Whatever the subgenre, Islands of Space is an early fanciful leap in which protagonists Arcot and Morey discuss how their ‘space strain’ drive works and why other forms of propulsion are also useful:
“See here; with this new space strain drive, why do we have to have the molecular drive at all?”
“To move around near a heavy mass—in the presence of a strong gravitational field,” Arcot said. “A gravitational field tends to warp space in such a way that the velocity of light is lower in its presence. Our drive tries to warp or strain space in the opposite manner. The two would simply cancel each other out and we’d waste a lot of power going nowhere. As a matter of fact, the gravitational field of the sun is so intense that we’ll have to go out beyond the orbit of Pluto before we can use the space strain drive effectively.”
And look, here’s the first appearance of another science fiction motif, a higher dimension through which spacecraft can move without violating Einsteinian relativity. It solved a lot of problems in the days when hard SF inevitably edged into space opera as it approached c:
They were well beyond the orbit of Pluto when they decided they would be safe in using the space strain drive and throwing the ship into hyperspace.
I can only speculate how many writers’ careers were saved in those days by being able to deploy hyperspace to wave away all those bothersome problems with physics.
I’m not going to linger on Campbell’s novel, which the extraordinary E. F. Bleiler, who seems to have read every science fiction tale published as the genre was emerging, described as “greatly overloaded with unnecessary (although at times ingenious) exposition, hence almost unreadable; weak novelistically; and clichéd in its action plot.” All too true, alas, as I remember from reading it in my grad student days. But how stuffed with ideas Campbell’s writings could be, even when they went far off the rails in some of his later editorials in Astounding and Analog.
Giancarlo Genta, whose work in automotive engineering at Politecnico di Torino in Italy is highly regarded, is also a SETI theorist who has authored numerous papers in astronautics as well as Lonely Minds in the Universe (Copernicus, 2007). On top of this, Genta has written science fiction tales of his own, like The Hunter (Springer, 2013), which explores first contact with a highly dangerous alien civilization. His most recent paper is a look at interstellar exploration as it moves from fictional musings into actual hardware, with numerous SF references on the way.
Genta has recourse to the ‘hard science fiction’ terminology, referring to it as “science fiction strictly based on scientific knowledge.” That’s a handy, vest-pocket definition and I like it. We can add the idea that hard SF attempts to present innovative technologies with consistency and intellectual rigor, so that it demands a level of detail that can be glossed over in SF oriented more toward the social sciences. Poul Anderson could work in both camps but is probably best known for hard SF like Tau Zero. Arthur C. Clarke’s credentials at hard SF are foundational to the field. A trip through Greg Benford’s ‘Galactic Center’ novels is a master class in how hard SF is done.
A touchstone volume for those interested in the continuing vitality of the form is the Hartwell and Cramer collection The Hard SF Renaissance (Tor, 2003), which assembles work from the major creators in the subgenre. These are likely familiar names to most Centauri Dreams readers, and some have appeared in these pages: Stephen Baxter, David Brin, Hal Clement, Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, Karl Schroeder, Allen Steele. That hardly exhausts the list, and I’ll direct you to this volume for others. You’ll find 960 pages of hard SF to work with inside.
In the Genta paper, I enjoyed being reminded of A. W. Bickerton’s quote from 1926. The British scientist was as outspoken about lunar travel as some scientists were about interstellar travel a few decades ago, saying:
This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists. To escape Earth’s gravitation a projectile needs a velocity of 7 miles per second. The thermal energy at this speed is 15,180 calories [per gram]. Hence the proposition appears to be basically impossible.
In any case, science fiction has dealt with all of these themes, though as Genta points out, the further we move into relativistic realms, the more likely the author is engaging in space opera’s robust adventurism than the detailed physics of hard SF, which work best when dealing with concepts for which we have current solutions, no matter how imaginative. We don’t yet know how to produce a Von Neumann machine but the concepts are clear, and hard SF has emerged from the likes of Clarke and Fred Saberhagen, for example, to explore their Darwinian evolution and dangers.
Robert Forward’s Rocheworld has often appeared in these pages as an example of a manned interstellar mission whose physics is explained at a high level of detail. This journey to Barnard’s Star grew from Forward’s work on beamed propulsion systems and included an ingenious concept for crew return using the same beamer. Slower travel in space arks is a staple of science fiction with roots in novels like Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky, drawn from two novellas and first published as a book in 1963. But the literature is rich and includes such classics as Brian Aldiss’ Non-Stop, Harry Harrison’s Captive Universe and many others.
Gene Roddenberry’s warp factor scale, developed for Star Trek, is nonlinear, with warp factor 6 requiring 7.32 days to reach Alpha Centauri, whereas getting to Vulcan (supposedly orbiting 40 Eridani) would require one month. But we have to have velocities like this to achieve science fictional goals whether of the hard SF, social sciences or space opera variety. Interstellar diplomacy? Poul Anderson couldn’t explore it without having a way to move not just faster than light but far beyond that limit. As Genta points out in the paper in Acta Astronautica:
“…to make it possible what science fiction describes, not only spacecraft must travel in FTL conditions, but their speed must be more than 2 orders of magnitudes greater than light speed. Just traveling slightly faster than speed has little advantages with respect to what in science fiction is called ‘subluminal’ travel.. True FTL travel is even more difficult to achieve. And even in this case, the situation will be like world wide travel in the nineteenth century: very costly (beyond the possibility of almost all people, except the very rich and the government officers) and slow (requiring weeks or months). In this situation very few people could travel, but empires spanning more than one continent, and international diplomacy were possible.
If we master a warp technology of some kind, we still have the problem of entering and exiting a warp condition, or for that matter entering a wormhole, if such exist and become a feasible way to travel. It may prove necessary to locate the departure point outside the stellar system the craft is in – Arcot and Morey noticed this problem in the Campbell novel. In this case, we need to factor in time to exit and enter the departure and arrival systems at speeds less than light. On the other hand, if wormholes exist and we can find a way to pass through them, we must first travel to them. Genta discussed these issues in a paper with Roman Kezerashvili in 2020 as well as in a 2023 paper on system-wide infrastructure as a precondition for interstellar expansion (citations below).
Science fiction tales often assume but rarely discuss the existence of inertial dampeners that allow high accelerations without seeming effect on the crew. Communications by FTL methods range from the ‘subspace messages’ of Star Trek (moving faster than light and verging on the instantaneous as the story lines progress), to recording information on a material substrate which could be put aboard a small probe and sent to destination (the probe is thus assumed to be faster than the craft that launches it). Early images of Earth from spy satellites were deorbited and returned on film, beginning our study of the best methods for re-entry from orbit.
I read a lot of novels, but these days most of my reading in interstellar topics is in scientific papers and books they have spawned. Nonetheless, we have to develop the imagination needed to know where necessary advances in technology will be made. Science fiction has been serving that purpose for a century now, and much longer depending on where you locate its origins – Brian Aldiss goes all the way back to Mary Shelley in Billion Year Spree, for example. The field remains robust and doubtless is encouraging as many new scientists as it did when I was a kid all goggle-eyed from Anderson’s The Enemy Stars. Long may it thrive.
The paper is Genta, “Interstellar Exploration: From Science Fiction to Actual Technology,” Acta Astronautica Vol. 222 (September 2024), pp. 655-660 (abstract). See also Genta and Kezerashvili, “Achieving the required mobility in the solar system through Direct Fusion Drive,” Acta Astronautica Vol. 173 (2020), 303-309 (abstract). The paper on system infrastructure is “Is a solar system-scale civilization a precursor to going interstellar,” in L. Johnson, K. Roy, Interstellar Travel, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2023.
The original “Islands of Space” is in Amazing Stories Quarterly (1931 Spring):
https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_Quarterly_v04n02_1931-Spring_frankenscan/mode/2up
Great cover, but you can tell they weren’t paying much per word. The story is a tough read by modern standards.
Great article, Paul! And it addresses in one sitting a key issue of both science fiction (emphasis on science) and real interstellar space travel: Going faster than the speed of light and how that relates to whether we will ever see a truly united galactic civilization or the equivalent of city-states with huge separations in time and space between them and other city-states.
I was especially bemused by what was written about John Campbell’s novel in the Wikipedia page you linked to, which is worth quoting here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islands_of_Space
Reception
Theodore Sturgeon, reviewing the Fantasy Press edition, wrote “This is a real lousy book”, faulting its lack of characterization, suspense, and plot, and a writing style “such as would dry up the purple blood of the sleaziest fan magazine”. “BUT –“, he continued, “Islands is a voyage far afield and a catalogue of the marvels of other-where, … a cornucopia of technological and mechanistic matter, both real and extrapolated, poured out prodigiously and with abandon, [and] a narrative which could not occur without its science — the purest, and almost the rarest form of science fiction.” Sturgeon concluded, “It is high time and past time for [science fiction] to infuse itself with the rich hot blood of the old space-opera”.[5]
P. Schuyler Miller wrote that the book version “has been carefully modernized, [but] it’s old-fashioned now. It is also very characteristic of the best “hard” science fiction of its day.”[6] This is the first published use of the term hard science fiction.[7]
E. F. Bleiler described the original text as “Greatly overloaded with unnecessary (although at times ingenious) exposition, hence almost unreadable; weak novelistically; and clichéd in its action plot.”[1]
Perhaps it is not what one might call great literature, but the comment by Bleiler about it being overloaded with unnecessary exposition reminds me of that great tome of American literature, Moby Dick by Herman Melville. It has whole chapters about whales and whaling dropped right into the middle of the story. Depending on one’s level of education and overall patience among other factors, these sections are either enthralling and enriching or maddening. But here, you can decide for yourself with this wonderful online annotated version (just do not read Chapter 15 if you haven’t eaten yet, and I mean that in the best of ways):
http://powermobydick.com/
And I would be remiss not to add a link to the online versions of Islands of Space:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/20988
The advantages that so-called mainstream written works of fiction have over science fiction – especially in its early days – is that since the subject matters and characters most often came from and lived strictly on Earth, the authors seldom had to go into great detail to explain certain things, such as human emotions and reactions to various situations. There was a terrestrial version of universality that one could pull from when reading and relating to a novel.
Science fiction lacked that luxury: The author often had to explain things because many subjects were not only unfamiliar to the average human, but their knowledge of science and technology was also often limited. My apologies for generalizing, but you also know this is generally true, right to the present day.
Of course this became a double-edged sword, for the SF author would be criticized if he or she did not properly explain certain things enough, or chastised if he or she went into what the reader considered to be too much detail. I for one love getting those moments of detail.
Arthur C. Clarke often had long footnotes and appendices in his later novels, which enriched the reading experience for me.
To cite just one example, I first learned from Clarke’s 1976 novel Imperial Earth that the American flag planted on the lunar surface during the Apollo 11 mission in July of 1969 was blown over when the Apollo Lunar Module (LM) named Eagle ascended from the Moon, caused by the necessary blast from its ascent stage rocket.
These tidbits were especially appreciated in the days before the Internet and nearly instant access to reams of information.
I also want to add that Tom Clancy was a master of incorporating technical details as the need arose in his novels without slowing down the story. Just check out his most famous work, The Hunt for Red October, and see for yourself.
Of course this isn’t just confined to science fiction novels: Films have needed extrapolations too, or so at least they thought. In the cases of Destination Moon (1950) and Conquest of Space (1955), George Pal elected that trope representing the Everyperson whom they thought might need help with the technical details: Da Guy from Brooklyn. In the case of Conquest, the guy really was from Brooklyn! See more here:
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2024/05/08/set-your-gyros-for-mars-giving-a-second-chance-to-conquest-of-space/
Somehow extrapolation can seem even clunkier in a film, even when it is necessary and welcome. Even 2001: A Space Odyssey resorted to extrapolation when necessary: Think of the scenes with the BBC 12 interview with the crew of the USS Discovery.
In the end, you either like them or you don’t. However, I guarantee future generations will have at least some appreciation for them as certain things become less relatable due to societal changes.
As for FTL drives, I will answer that in a separate comments post.
I have several big issues with FTL drives, not the least of which is that it remains oh so very hypothetical despite the occasional “news” item that some scientist proclaims it is technically possible – only the author of the news item often fails to add any details, often because the scientist in question is either too vague or way too technical on the subject.
In addition, we have barely begun to scratch the surface of STL drives for interstellar travel – yet the general public often assumes that a vague cabal of scientists are working on a warp or hyperdrive, which will make its appearance any day now and off we go to Alpha Centauri!
I wrote an essay on this blog about the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. Among the many subjects I delved into on this work, I talked about the FTL drive of the main ship, the C-57D. I had more to say that just technical issues on the matter, so I am quoting the relevant parts here, which are still relevant seven years later:
You may also be asking yourself why fret over the concepts of hyperdrives and warp drives since this is, after all, science fiction. I give you these answers: For one, many people are both outright “educated” and heavily influenced by the offerings of the cinema and other entertainment media, no matter how good or bad they truly are, whether one wants to accept this or not.
Forbidden Planet and its descendant Star Trek, along with so many other related science fiction, have long implanted in the minds of many of all intellectual stripes that this is how humanity will achieve the stars, by someone or some group in the future “naturally” developing one of these FTL drives even though physics have shown just how complex and difficult if not outright impossible they are to achieve.
This is both intellectually and culturally “dangerous” in that many viewers do not delve into the physics and technology of FTL propulsion, or slower-than-light (STL) propulsion for that matter, and therefore are trusting that Hollywood is being both accurate and honest on the subject. The other problem is that these same folks also presume that either future humans (I am looking at you, Interstellar) or altruistic aliens will one day come along and automatically give us these things, saving present humanity from all the thinking, studying, and general hard work that are otherwise required for such advances.
Now yes, there is a non-zero chance that this is indeed how we end up with some kind of FTL drive to ply the starways with. However, just how wise is it for the development of our species and civilization to pin our future on beings who we do not know with any certainty will in fact do such a thing or that they even exist at all. Waiting around for someone else to uplift us is often the road to stagnation and worse whether others dwell in our galaxy and our future or not.
Focusing on FTL drives also takes the focus of science and engineering away from the numerous STL propulsion methods that quite frankly make up in terms of actually working what they may otherwise lack in terms of speed and the dream of crossing the galaxy with the same amount of ease and lengths of time that we now do with aircraft. This is critical because while STL concepts have better chances of happening that FTL methods, they are not without their own challenges.
For example, nuclear fusion, which powers the stars and is the propulsion method of choice for robotic star probe projects such as Daedalus and its successor, Icarus, has been incredibly difficult to reproduce a controlled version of outside of hydrogen bombs. Even after decades of research and billions spent for funding, we still have not been able to maintain a controlled nuclear fusion reaction for more than a matter of seconds, and we are talking about doing this for “only” a terrestrial power plant, not a starship engine.
The Breakthrough Starship concept which has received so much press of late, and rightly so, requires among its technologies a very powerful laser, more advanced than any laser which has been made so far. Even the nuclear fission pulse propulsion project called Orion, the one STL method for reaching the stars that could be built with current technology, has largely been hampered by social and political fears. I have not yet mentioned even more sophisticated concepts such an antimatter, which has one big hurdle of costing absurd amounts of money for even a single gram of its key ingredient.
So while I am not opposed to research into hyperdrives and warp drives and any other method that can exceed the speed of light for a space vessel, I am concerned when they are focused on by the public, scientists, and technologists to the exclusion of the methods that are perceived as less glamorous, when in fact these STL propulsion proposals are quite fascinating and, dare I say, “sexy” in their own right – not to mention more likely to happen. There are several good reasons why the hyperdrive design of the C-57D is left to the imagination, however they do not help us if we really do want to be exploring the galaxy via starships by the 23rd Century or even sooner. Otherwise, everything we have seen on the big and not-so-big screens along with all the SF literature on the subject will remain far more fantasy than science.
This came from part 1 of my essay, which may be found here:
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2017/09/11/creating-our-own-final-frontier-forbidden-planet/
I don’t think that today’s interplanetary technology will suffer if we speculate about visionary technology like warp drives and anti gravity. What we have now will be continued to be used until we get something better. Space travel technology can become obsolete in the snap of a finger though. If one knows general relativity, some of the problems of FTL drives are already solved if one has thorough read and studied the literature so I agree with you on that. \
An anti gravity drive does not have be interstellar. In fact it would still have a reaction mass, but it would be a propellant less thrust unless it is a diametric drive which would only be constrained by any planetary or stellar gravitational fields. That reaction mass would be relativistic inertia.
I wish I had been more of a packrat when I was young. All those Eagle comics with Dan Dare, stories from 1961-62+ that have never since been republished.
As an A C Clarke fan, I now regret the loss of a Boys Adventure book that contained several of his short stories from “The Venture to the Moon” and “The Other Side of the Sky” with interior illustrations that I have never seen reproduced. I have never been able to track that book down. Probably published in the late 1950s/early 1960s when I was a young lad but could read fluently.
Clarke mostly steered clear of FTL travel, seeming to prefer STL flight unless absolutely necessary for the story “e.g. The Star”, and the monolith star gate in “2001: ASO”. IMO, his best stories remain within the solar system, although his hard-SF stories are charming in their retro settings of alt-space.
I have the same problem not saving the favourite from my early years.
In my case the space hero was named Jeff Hawke.
The first episodes published here had a believable style, where I later in life learned was based on actual studies. Ranging from VonBraun and others early on to more advanced nuclear concepts with extremely stretched out nuclear powered vehicles used in the exploration of the more distance reaches of the solar system.
Example image from the later period of this ‘realistic’ period.
https://cafans.b-cdn.net/images/Category_32864/subcat_173959/enzt1zFs_0701161028401.jpg
Later on J.H developed into space opera, after humanity had made contact with an ‘Galactic empire’. Even as a young person I had a feeling the author / artist did not take this scenario seriously, as the stories often deteriorated into pure slapstick humor. And that idea might have been pushed on from editors and managers in an attempt to make the story popular for a wider audience.
Not many episodes from this space opera period was ever published here. Perhaps local editors found the material incomprehensible, or it might even have been that the mockery of the ‘galactic empire’ and their inept bureaucracy was viewed as politically problematic.
The A.C.Clarkian style of the earlier period did indeed influence me quite a bit.
And I ended up with ‘Hard scifi’ as well. While my interstellar communication network push the possible with a bit of handwavium. I’m not alone, so do others in the genre.
Alastair Reynold’s interstellar ships would not work either in the real world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawke
Andrei,
I used to cut out the Jeff Hawke strip from the newspaper when I lived in England. Then about a decade or so ago, Titan Books published a couple of collections.
I was very envious when I was in Italy in the early 1990’s to see huge collections of the Jeff Hawke stories printed in Italian. I gather Sydney Jordan was immensely popular there. But not so much in the UK. :-(
The Jeff Hawke Club published all the stories, most of which are still available, although some are offered as scans of printed copies. They also published the post-Hawke stories with a different character name, but it is clearly the same character. Interestingly, that latter series starts with the semi-destruction of the Moon – not unlike the Stephenson Novel “Seveneves” which I am now listening to as an audiobook.
The cheapest way to get the Jeff Hawke stories you want is to purchase short-term access to the Daily Express archives. You can then download the page with the comic strips and then extract the strip. A bit painstaking,, not made easier by some sloppy scanning and some strips missing due to newspaper printing strikes. [The last I tried was around $15 for a week.] Once I had the extracted strips I wrote some code to compile them into pages and printed them out.
In the end, I forked out the dough to get all the stories I wanted from the Club, most with Willie Patterson as the writer and Jordan as the artist. IMO, when Patterson became the writer, the stories were far better, allowing Jordan to improve his artistry which got a lot better over time (as did Hampson’s on the Eagle Dan Dare comic.)
If you want to follow up on getting the Jeff Hawke strips either via the JH Club or the Daily Express archive, and have difficulty finding the links, you can contact me via Paul Gilster for help. There is also a Jeff Hawke Facebook page and William Rudling is the man to contact about buying the stories.
Good to know you are a fellow JH fan.
@Alex
You have here a free book with Jeff Hawke’s strip…but it’s in Italian. FYI, it was not very well known in France but was published in some monthly for teenagers at this blessed time of the 70s
https://archive.org/details/jeffhawke/mode/2up
@Fred
I checked and all those stories are available in English
legitimate heir [Heir Apparent]
woman who would be king
The giant laser [Ice Burner]
The chalk circle
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
The song of the Charioteer
I checked my collection and all the Italian stories Jeff Hawke Italian Collectionare now translated JHC site. There are also a couple of later Jeff Hawke/Lance McLane stories that were published in the Scottish Record that are not available in the Italian collection.
Correction:
All the stories in Italian are now available in the original English.
Some time in the past I did check and noted collections had indeed been printed in Italy, Spain and France.
And you’re right, there’s stories I do wish to revisit, such as the one about the old monk who turned out to be a former racing driver with a metal body provided by extraterrestrials. I found the story touching back then, and am interested to see how that and a few others stand up against the tooth of time.
That strip example is from “The Bees on Daedalus”. I agree his style was much better by then. [ Jordan’s artwork was also helped by Nick Faure.] I started collecting the stories starting with “Daughter of Eros” when I was cutting them out of the newspaper after my parents read it. It was also a lot more sexy too! I don’t know if that was to compete with the James Bond strip in the same paper at the time, which also had very attractive and seductive women either with or against Bond. [ I also have some of those Bond strip collections, the stories based on the Fleming novels.]
Astronomy magazine takes a look at five methods for interstellar travel, albeit briefly:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/these-are-5-ways-to-achieve-interstellar-travel-ranked/ar-BB1pT0QB?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=4f073cf9b48648bcc04fbd8641e24612&ei=8
I’ve always felt the best science fiction was about how new radical technologies (or events, such as a First Contact) would affect human society and culture, or even individual psychology. Consider Alfred Bester’s “The Stars my Destination” where the introduction of personal teleportation turns human society upside down. A related twist is the same writer’s “The Demolished Man”, where crime, police work and the law are transformed by widespread use of telepathy by the police.
H.G. Wells “War of the Worlds” examines the consequences of colonialization and empire when they are inflicted on the greatest empire of the 19th century.
Jules Verne’s “20000 Leagues Under the Sea” is not, by this definition, real science fiction. Captain Nemo and his Nautilus make for a cracking good read, but it is about the effect on one man’s obsession and his technological prowess. Verne did not speculate on how submarine warfare would change naval tactics and strategy and the subsequent, inevitable impact on geopolitics and conflict.
Another major science fiction theme is an examination of how current social issues can be explored and dissected by transferring them to other times and worlds. Robert Silverberg wrote a number of novels like this, works which were not only social commentary of great power but of (in my opinion) great literary merit. One example: his “A Time of Changes” where he takes apart the counter culture of the 1960s, both its promise and its betrayals. And consider Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness”….
Writing should be about people, not machines. FTL travel is fun to speculate about, but we still do not know (and may never know) whether it is a potential for the future, or just another space groupie’s wet dream; wishful thinking and fantasy of the most puerile order. Perhaps the novel we need concerning FTL is one that uses its impossibility to explain the Fermi Paradox. If superluminal travel is relatively easy to achieve, shouldn’t the Galaxy (and our solar system) be simply crawling with alien spacecraft? If c indeed is the upper speed limit of the universe, then there is a good reason we haven’t had visitors yet. I find that a much more comforting thought than fantasizing about speedy and easy interstellar travel.
Quote by Henry Cordova: If superluminal travel is relatively easy to achieve, shouldn’t the Galaxy (and our solar system) be simply crawling with alien spacecraft? They are. We just can’t see them with our primitive technology. If the warp drive used stealth technology even today’s stealth technology like RAM radar absorbent materials, it would be completely invisible to our radar.
So all those alien spacecraft from all those alien cultures all have hi-tech cloaking gear to avoid detection, but they all want to come here and they all are obsessed with us not knowing they are there. Oh, and one more thing. They are all so simultaneously knowledgeable about our level of technology that they all know exactly what they need to do to avoid being spotted.
That makes no sense at all.
Use Occam’s razor to cut away all those assumptions and what is left is that they just ain’t there at all. Or maybe there’s just one or two, and their visits are billions of years apart.
@they’re all obsessed with us
Henry, it’s because there’s the Big Mac on sale with a free Coke :D
A very good summary of my own thoughts on that matter.
When the cultist jump to the conclusion that one observation of something unknown just HAS to be visiting aliens.
The scientific approach require one to ask, what the object is, and if controlled by one intelligence – why it behave that way.
The hypothesis that it could be one interstellar visitor can then quickly be put in the bin. Since the behaviour make no sense.
There’s enough of actual mysteries to spend our minds on, from cryptozoology, where I do consider a couple to be at least intriguing enough, that they need to be investigated. The recent finding of a Spade-toothed whale – never observed living and alive serve as an example we have not covered all areas on our world yet.
While we in space got GPM J1839−10, which is so odd, and defy most attempts to explain it’s behaviour. That the option it might not have a natural cause, at least can be considered. (It’s most likely a very odd magnetar anyway.)
What Occam’s razor shows me is the technology is based on the first principles of physics which are the same everywhere in our universe. Therefore all technological civilizations in our galaxy and universe must follow a convergence from similar more primitive propellant rockets with combustion chambers so more efficient propulsion, the space warp, anti gravity being optimal.
A ET civilization with warp drive or even sublumenal interstellar travel would have little difficulty understanding our primitive technology and foiling or radar since they have their own radar. We already know how to do that so the must also. The four forces remain the same so with physics we can conclude that a warp drive still has to use radio signals and radio transmitters to communicate with each when it is not in warp. Unlike Star Trek, it is impossible to communicate during warp because space moving much faster than light will either stretching radio wavelength to infinity or make an event horizon which completely blocks phasers, lasers, radio signals while at warp. It also deflects space debris.
If you can’t see something on radar that moving or stationary in space, then one has a lot of area space to look at with a telescope, so it is very difficult to find. That does not mean it is not there.
Radio transmitters and radar will never become obsolete, so all the technological civilizations in our galaxy and universe must have them which is why I like them.
@Henry
In France, we have a specific term for this litterrature generally before the 1930s: we call it “anticipation novel”. It was only after WW2 – and the transition from a metal society to an atom society – that the term SF appeared. Indeed Jules Vernes were writers who tried — to anticipate — the development of their time that they had perfectly perceived to make the reader dream through adventures. We must not forget that the European and especially French society of the 19th century was a society of castes.
We must not forget that the European and especially French society of the 19th century was a society of extremely hierarchical castes: we could not talk about everything and anything in the salons. The poorest didn’t have time to read all this after 12 hours in the mine and “think about astronomy” was not a topic that was being addressed in the bourgeoisie, at most, a few young girls from wealthy families could have a book by Jules Verne to entertain themselves … I would almost say “secretly”. Rich young men are only interested in taking over dad’s factory or doing politics.
The scientific world was finally cut off from society. With the exception of Camille Flammarion who popularized astronomy with his books and G.Méliès with his film ‘The Journey in the Moon” the world of astronomy in Europe remained closed to society and thus in a way the imagination was “bridled”.
The anticipation novel was part of a form of adventure journalism, more accessible than the philosophy of the 18th but not yet turned to distant space. Finally, we must also consider the newspaper which was the only important media of the time. The poorest could not read or could not buy it; the richest bought only newspapers that “corresponded to their social caste” and whose main subject was politics and Prussians! An exception was the cartoonist Albert ROBIDA who tried to imagine the future …of Paris. See his drawings on google on Paris in the year 2000 and compare;)
A little later after the WW1, Maurice RENARD unbridled this literature a little with novels of “fiction” but not really of “science” – we must distinguish the two words – even if the author was inspired by the technological advances of his time. This style of novel was then oriented towards the thriller-mysterious-fantastic (close to S. Holmes)…but still on earth. It wasn’t until after the 30s and 40s that the sci-fi novel or comic book really came to us. I was also going to add with the release of the woman: I let Paul find us a subject on it;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Renard
All this to say that talking about SF in Europe at these times is a form of nonsense. The imagination could not develop fully through the context as we know it today.
I agree with Henry. In a way we are condemned to speculate on the basis of our current knowledge and we make some kind of projections of the evolution of our societies but we cannot foresee the unexpected that will completely change the order of the world. In other words our projections that are realistic, our hard SF, is limited in time because the more we “advance” the more incertidude is important. for better or for worse ;)
@Fred
The contemporary term in English is “speculative fiction”, that is, not just merely cowboys in space, but a serious inquiry into “what would happen if…”. BTW, it is my understanding Jules Verne did write true speculative fiction, including a very ingenious description of Paris in the (his) far future. It his says his predictions were quite insightful. I have not read it myself (I’m not even sure if it has been translated into English), but I have read reviews.
I have an unread copy, with an English translation, of Verne’s “Paris in the Twentieth Century” in my home library. It is set in the 1960s. There are a few simple drawings in it, but nothing of note.
Paris in 1960, to be precise. It’s not as accessible as his “Fantastic Voyages” as it’s social satire. I think Verne was worried the humanities would be neglected as France industrialized.
The imagination has brought us our interstellar ideas first and our science has advanced enough to bring some of those ideas into reality. Star Trek, etc. is very inspirational. Warp six would only be 211 times the speed of light. I have made some of my own though experiments on the warp drive with the assumption that it is possible based on first principles. An ET civilization which completes their first working warp drive will have a maximum velocity based on its energy. We can assume that as technology becomes perfected and refined, due to inventiveness and innovation, more energy efficient or better designs result in a greater energy output, then faster and faster warp drives will be build in the future. I get the impression that maybe 1,000 and 10,000 times the speed of light are possible.
An ET civilization which has been technological for tens, hundreds or several billion years might become an intergalactic civilization with one million,ten million and one hundred million times the speed of light? This certainly seems science fiction today, but based on my detailed though experiments in general relativity, we don’t really know today how much energy it takes to make a warp drive and therefore we don’t know the correct maximum velocity of a warp drive. We can intuitively speculate that fusion reactors might not be enough and yes a matter anti matter drive will do the trick.
@cent millions de fois la vitesse de la lumière?
Okay, but what’s the point? to go faster from here to another point in the universe, so to explore (and colonize?) faster, which means that we would have a considerable amount of information to manage: will the man of tomorrow – or the cyborg or the robot – be able to do so? It seems to me that the idea of speed is related to trade and/or domination/predation. Won’t she make us sad: look at the car. The FTL trip is technically interesting but what will it really bring?
I would have to call myself a modernist where science fiction is concerned. As a kid (60 years ago now, I can’t believe it) I read with wonder all the greats of the time and loved them. My favourites were Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, and Sturgeon (loved him). But I also love updated approaches to the genre by greats such as Kim Stanley Robinson (who I consider the greatest SF author of all time). It’s so tough to discuss favorite authors I think because there are so many greats. With science the paradigms have changed dramatically since the 1950’s and things I thought might one day be possible like warp drives seem highly unlikely to me now. We have to consider the likely timespan of civilizations, and the ability to remain stable and productive over thousands of years (which in human terms is huge length of time but is insignificant compared with deep time). I think we will burn bright but I think we all know what happens to the stars that burn brightest. Let’s reassess every 10 years and see where we are. The challenge is there. Survive and thrive long enough to overturn even the most solidly established paradigms of the present (or so we think). or follow a possibly more predictable path of rising and falling.
I’ve always considered FTL to be impossible and, thus, have favored the “O’neill L%” approach of orbital space colonies. However, there have been recent suggestions that FTL may, indeed, be possible. Let’s way we get such a method that allows us to do, say, 200-300c. Could a ship transition into this straight from Earth orbit, like Star Trek? Or would it have to reach say 0.1c or be away from the gravitation of the sun to do the transition? In any case, we’re still talking travel times of several weeks to several month. Given that the nearest habitable planets are likely 50-100 lyrs out. This translates to several months of travel.
The best depiction of how this would work was in something called the “Handbook for Space Pioneers” that was written in the late 70’s. There were two authors, one was an electrical engineer and the other an industrial designer. So they were the appropriate guys to write such a thing. It is probably the best fictional description of what interstellar settlement would be like if such a thing were possible. It is quite Heinleinian in character. Its a collection of short stories of normal people living normal lives (e.g. a mining engineer or a consumer goods sales guy).
It features giant colonizer ships, the size of our largest cruise ships, that carried 5,000 colonist at a time to the new worlds. Lets say the cost is about $1000 per person per day. A 3 month voyage would be about a $100K per person. This comparable to what it cost people to migrate from Europe to North America in the 18th century as well as out west in the 19th century. It was doable. But the trip would be “once in a life time” deal for most people. However, anti-aging life extension will be a reality (and the aging phenotype an artifact of history) by the time we get such an FTL. People could then save up a $100K equivalent over a 20-30 year period and be able to move on to a new world every 30 years or so if they so choose.
Quote by Abelard Lindsey: “Could a ship transition into this straight from Earth orbit, like Star Trek? Or would it have to reach say 0.1c or be away from the gravitation of the sun to do the transition? ” It would have no problem leaving from Earth orbit considering general relativity and Newton’s law of universal gravitation where the strength of the gravitational field attenuates to the square of the distance. With the push of a button the gravitational field surrounding the ship locally would much greater than the Earth and Sun. Subluminal speed leaving Earth orbit might be safer though as that space junk might be deflected into different orbits which could be in potential a violation of a prime directive.
Recreational interstellar trips would be too expensive at first until a civilization refined and perfected their warp drives and made a lot of them, but I don’t see why scientists might not take a few space tourists with them, like the international space station, but they would be put to work in similar fashion.
I agree with the O’Neil approach of building space colonies but I think that is a far as we should go. If we find planets that are suitable for life as we know it, to the extent that we could send colonists there, I suspect there would already be life there. Should we then send our species to that habitable and inhabited planet, and then do what, take it over, replace/overrun/overpower the existing life that exists there? Where would we draw the line, which level of life would be feel comfortable replacing? I think our destiny, if we have one, should be in space habitats, not in deep gravity wells of already inhabited planets.
Good point. However, along with radical life extension and fusion power (there are over 20 fusion power start-ups now) we should have honest to god, SF-style, biotech food factories to go along with out FTL journeys to the starts. This should radically reduce the amount of land used in settling Earth-like worlds than if we have to produce food by growing plants in dirt.
I’ll retain hope for the Lentz drive, but in all likelihood the fastest way to the stars is in the collapse of our illusions. The fixed boundaries of our universe are things we only assume are true, and for the most part, wrongly.
For example, we’ve been taught we are humans, members of a single species of the genus Homo. Yet an ever growing body of evidence shows that bacteria in our intestines affect whether we are shy, aggressive, autistic… seems like practically any personality trait examined. The protists in our brains may also have a say. It seems people are not organisms, but ecological communities.
In time all of our fixed points of reference fall. The races which people once dreamed were divinely created and defining of each man’s purpose have turned out to be tiny ripples in a multimillion-year stream flowing out of Africa. When we examine the great empires people made and dreamed of, we find only that law is crime and crime is law. What was lush is now desert, mountains bear the fossils of ocean beds, and the bedrock myth of past causality marches inexorably forward, one equation or organoid at a time, to its foreordained execution.
Perhaps a time will soon come when people perceive themselves as quantum state, able to be measured at different places separated by a spacelike interval with concordant results, so that they are not really located in any one place or time at all. Perhaps more advanced aliens do not use warp drives because even the concepts of motion and space and time have become irrelevant to them.
There won’t ever be a Lentz drive with FTL because his idea borrows the idea of the Alcubierre Warp Drive, the idea of dragging one’s own local space reference frame with one. This idea won’t work without negative energy which we might do better to call it negative curvature, but ordinary gravity with positive energy density. In other words, the idea is that gravity can cause negative space curvature and expanding space, but we don’t see it directly like the expanding space between two large bodies like neutrons, stars, graviational galactic dipole repellers, etc. There will be an Alcubierre Warp drive. Every warp drive built in the future will have to use his idea which really is far ahead of it’s time and Visionary. The same is true of Albert Einstein’s special and general relativity.
Lentz do indeed build on the work of Alcubierre.
The main point is that Lentz tries to find a solution to the little stumbling block that nature do not allow the physics needed for the Alcubierre drive.
We can create a tiny space with negative energy in a plate gap. If the plates are so closely spaced that wavelengths are unable to enter.
But negative energy cannot exist on a macroscopic scale, as is needed for a spacecraft.
And this is at the core of Lentz counter proposal. Only using positive forces – that at least will not be cancelled out by the natural laws.
(Yes plates for creating negative energy is used for the Casimir effect, its the same setup actually.)
There’s one possible saver for the Alcubierre: Exotic matter or the manipulation of dark energy. But we don’t even know if any of those two even can exist.
And the final blow to both is that we don’t even know such could be made possible – and to top that, it also would open the door for time travel to the past.
Yes the matter worth looking into as there’s often spinoffs from groundbreaking physics.
So feel free to call me Skeptical, if the hurdles above still could be overcome – it will in any case be a project that only Kardashev scale civs might consider. (So yes, if such exist they might be time traveling to get the best spot for their weekend picnic also.)
“they might be time traveling to get the best spot for their weekend picnic”
I think I read their story: Roadside Picnic.
Well spotted. =)
It was indeed a reference to Arkady and Boris Strugatski’s Roadside picnic.
The imagination is source of creation that is why it must be maintained. I found in one of my comics another idea of interstellar travel that I liked: it is a kind of tube between two points of the universe in which no light penetrates thanks to powerful magnetic fields. To form the “tube”, imagine two telescopes face to face and perfectly aligned each in orbit on two very distant planets. Everyone can propel in this tunnel a shuttle that contains our heroes in a state of herbernation or equipment.
Roger LELOUP is a French cartoonist passionate about technology. He was famous in the 80s for his heroine “Yoko Tsuno” a pretty Japanese who lived extraordinary technological adventures, terrestrial or not. A kind of initiation to the hard SF for the teenagers we were and at a time when the literature of the same genre was not as developed as today. Even if these ideas are very questionable, they had the merit of making us dream and make us love space. See some drawings here: https://archive.org/details/yoko-tsuno-nl-06/page/n11/mode/2up
impossible not to be amazed at these pages;)
Thank you Paul for making me discover G. Genta unfortunately not translated into French. We know more Carlo Rovelli.
@Fred
I really like the artwork. It is a pity for me that the story is in Dutch.
Little mistake: R. Leloup is Belgian. He says, “When you’re doing science fiction, the most important thing is to be credible. In my craft, there is everything you need to fly, nothing is superfluous. I myself have to believe it, otherwise it does not work.”
Here’s the webpage about Yoko with all space machine, in french but google will help you: https://yokotsuno.fr/les-albums/machines/les-engins-vineens/
Alas, I did not find any digitized album in English. To understand : Yoko has friends E.T., the Vinéans who come from the planet Vinéa on the side of M33 they are blue, looks like Spoke and are nice but the rest of the planet earth doesn’t know anything about it;)
BTW Genta’s article is an excellent synthesis of the possibilities of interstellar travel with the means we know. The issue of geographic and temporal landmarks during FTL travel is very intriguing. For “one-way” trips to 10 or 100 times C, the question is solved, we would not find anyone on earth and the earth would probably no longer exist. (see Tau zero) even at lower speeds this type of trips would probably cause psychological problems to even prepared crews. So I think that to be feasible, it would have to be a slow adaptation-evolution over several generations so that the species can adapt to this type of travel…
How about proton beam propulsion…
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a61548076/proton-beam-propulsion-proxima-centauri/
How about the Dean drive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive
BTW, what about Cavorite?
Funny how giving something a catchy name somehow makes it eligible for serious consideration.
“Campbell’s book, extensively revised from its original appearance in the spring, 1931 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly, is an interesting curiosity in being the first appearance of a ‘warp drive’ in science fiction.”
read it here : https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/SF/ASQ_1931_1.pdf
Why Going Faster-Than-Light Leads to Time Paradoxes
Will it scramble our diaries and history books?
More on the subject of
time paradox with FTL travel
Kipping seems to allow FTL travel as long as it doesn’t require interactions.
Using his space-time chart, suppose we can travel space instantaneously, so that the FTL line is parallel to the space axis. So we jaunt to Vega, living at Vega’s time line, look around, take some pics, and then jaunt back to Earth a short while later. What causality violation exists? The observers on Earth see the travelers depart and then return. At some time in teh future, they would see teh travelers arrive at Vega and take pics before disappearing. AFAICS, since they cannot intervene, no harm no foul.
FTL travel wouldn’t break any causality.
26 years later, Earth observers would see teh travelers arriving at Vega, but even if they jaunted over, they would be 26 years too late to do anything.
Now his time and space axes translation is somewhat difficult to understand. Rotate the instantaneous jaunt, which would translate to 26 years in the past. On Earth? Does this mean they could stop their future selves from taking that jaunt to Vega? IDK. I don’t see how, as they are at Vega. When they return to Earth, I don’t see how they would have doppelgangers living there, but now 26 (or 52?) years older.
For now, I accept the consensus that c is teh speed limit. But since photons travel at c, we could subjectively travel instantaneously to Vega, even if 26 years have passed on Earth when we got there. If we had to maintain a cohesive polity among the stars, we could do so within a volume that allowed coordination at some desired time scale. If that was 10, 100, 1000 years that would be the size of the volume. With flexibility, there could be multiple intersecting volumes that traversed teh galaxy, where any action at the center would take perhaps 50 millennia to reach the rim bubbles.
A question for you gentlemen.
Do we know if Mars had plate tectonics in its early history?
Most of the info I find on the internet is over 20 years ago and suggests its still an open question.
Here are some starts regarding the subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tectonics_of_Mars
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/mars-experienced-a-precursor-to-plate-tectonics/
To quote from the above:
On Mars, plate tectonics never got going. So, while some areas of the planet have been transformed in a way that keeps us from studying the earliest periods of Mars’ history—looking at you, Olympus Mons—scientific consensus is that nearly half of the planet’s surface is over 3.6 billion years old. This provides the opportunity to study processes that occurred in the first half-billion or so years after Mars formed.
And yet…
https://www.astronomy.com/science/scientist-discovers-plate-tectonics-on-mars/
https://geology.com/press-release/mars-plate-tectonics/
If we want to settle on other planets, we’ll have to use genome editing to alter human DNA
By Sam McKee published yesterday
It sounds like science fiction, but many scientists believe editing the human genome is key to our advancement across the solar system.
https://www.space.com/settling-other-planets-will-mean-human-genome-editing
Pretty much what I said here:
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2022/11/04/in-person-or-proxy-to-mars-and-beyond/