The recent upsurge of interest in interstellar travel,
as manifested in symposia, workshops, a serious contract funded by DARPA titled
“The 100 Year Starship,” at least two dedicated web sites, and astronomer
confidence that “out there” are perhaps hundreds of millions of planets like
Earth, has stirred reminiscences that are germane to the subject, if only to
support the argument that big things happen from little steps along the way.
Post-World War II, a substantial amount of effort went
into ferreting out peaceful uses for nuclear energy, among which were submarine
and ship propulsion, commercial nuclear power plants, and fantastic
geo-engineering schemes like using nuclear explosions to dig canals. General
Atomics, then a division of General Dynamics in San Diego, California, was one
of the sites where free-wheeling thinking and analyses were routine among a
select cross-section of scientists. One idea that got a great deal of attention
was powering a very large rocket with nuclear explosions. The scheme involved exploding
small bombs behind a huge plate, atop which was mounted the spacecraft on a
bank of compression springs, the purpose of which was to absorb the shock of
the explosions. Scientists working on the concept included Freeman Dyson, Ted
Taylor and Kedar Pyatt. Proponents presented data that showed a capability for
interstellar travel. Soon however,
the ban on atmospheric nuclear explosions squelched the idea (keywords: Orion
Rocket).
A serious study of a starship was undertaken by the
admirable British Interplanetary Society (BIS) during the 1970’s with its
Daedelus concept. This was a feasibility look at a fusion powered unmanned probe
designed to approach Barnard’s Star, about ten light year’s distant, within the
lifetimes of some of the engineers working on the project. Off and on, BIS has
continued in the ensuing years with other concepts ( keywords: Daedelus Star
Ship).
In the early nineties, Son Jon and I, BS-ing far into
the night, came up with the idea of starting up a professional society, “The
Interstellar Propulsion Society,” dedicated to exploring propulsion devices
that would make interstellar travel possible, the idea being that if you could
solve these problems, then the rest of the technology would rapidly fall into
place. We would invite papers and publish a monthly journal. It started off
with a bang. We got notables like Robert Forward, Sir Arthur C. Clarke,
Professor James Arnold (all deceased now), and the super enthusiast Marc Millis
to agree to sit on the executive board. But as the months passed, this
ambitious effort became overwhelming and we had to abandon it. Meantime, Marc
Millis, who worked at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, approached Headquarters and
asked the question: “Hey, shouldn’t we be doing this?” There was agreement to
the tune of a $25,000 allocated to look into the subject. When the money ran
out, to Marc’s dismay, there was no further interest. But Marc continued working privately, in the process
producing some of the most interesting presentations on the subject ever seen.
In the course of time
Marc left NASA to pursue advancements in interstellar travel. He set up the Tau
Zero Foundation, dedicated toward that end. There are two web sites: www.tauzero.aero
and centauridreams.org. Centauri Dreams is the medium for disseminating public
information. Tau Zero aims at collecting and publishing serious papers. Son Jon
keeps his hand in, helping with the web sites, while I am now just an
interested bystander, and even a somewhat skeptic about the wisdom of attempting
interstellar travel.
But
these efforts too could falter, as the organization’s proposal to work DARPA’s
100 Year Starship study, funded at
$500k, was awarded instead to
astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African American woman to go into space. It
should be noted that this study does not design a starship. Its purpose is to
establish a foundation for other studies over the next 100 years, both
government funded and private, leading ultimately to solutions to the problem
of interstellar travel.
In
another scene, NASA has again entered investigations relating to interstellar
travel, exploring ideas of achieving warp speed by exploiting mathematical
loopholes that indicate that warping space-time is theoretically possible. In
such a scheme a starship’s engine would compress the space ahead of it and
expand the space behind it. In effect, the starship moves rapidly to another
place without adverse effects on the travelers. In this wild scheme of things
travel to the nearest stars might be accomplished in a matter of days without
adverse effects, instead of hundreds of years by conventional propulsion. To
this end, Dr. Harold White, lead scientist for Advanced Propulsion in NASA’s
engineering directorate and a few colleagues are undertaking small scale
experiments in a Houston “skunk works” to demonstrate that space time
compression is indeed possible.
I have
become a skeptic because it seems that the Great Creator of the cosmic
experiment, which now credibly contains the possibility that there must be
other populated planets, must have worried about cross-contamination, were the
inhabitants of one planet to approach another. For instance, how could carbon
based explorers conceivably interface successfully with silicon based life on
another planet? Suppose one of the
creations has advanced so far that it concludes that all other life forms are
irrelevant and must be eradicated?
Concerns such as this would help to explain placing them at distances so
far apart that travel from one to another would be impossible. I can imagine
now, after having viewed productions such as Star Wars and Star Trek, Avatar
and Outlanders, the Great Creator would feel vindicated in having made that
decision.
Then again, my
thoughts often turn to the uninteresting
“asteroid” that has been tracking Earth’s orbit around the sun at a
position in line with its axis of rotation for some hundreds of years. I hope
to reveal more (frailties of aging a consideration) in an upcoming novel,
titled “An Exceptional Journey to the Moon,” of how its inhabitants are working
the problem of seamlessly merging into Earth’s population, happily, one hopes,
with the result that it becomes significantly upgraded.
