Boldly Going: Part One

Rather than having a spaceship carry a passenger, have the passenger be an actual part of the spaceship!

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise: its five year [ongoing] mission; to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life forms and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man [no one] has gone before.”

Who can forget those immortal words from the TV shows Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation? But, will humans somehow ‘make it so’ in a Star Trek envisioned universe? I suggest it’s unlikely at best; more likely near impossible.

The whole premise for the exploration and colonization of space, in the Star Trek universe, rests on warp drive – faster than light (superluminal) travel. Without that, all that boldly going at faster-than-light velocities, comes pretty much down to a rate that molasses flows in Antarctica. Unfortunately, Einstein and generations of physicists after him all sing the same song. Superluminal travel is a big no-no. Also a big no-no for the sake of this essay are the common sci-fi ‘cheats’ of travel through wormholes and other hyperspace scenarios. While they have some theoretical underpinning; the obstacles for practical use are so high that I don’t see them as viable interstellar travel options. I also rule out velocities close to the speed of light because the energy required propelling an object ever faster and faster and closer and closer to near light speeds increases even faster. It does you little good to go from 90% light speed to 91% the speed of light if your energy requirements double or triple! And light speed itself is unobtainable because you’d need an infinite amount of energy to achieve it, and no starship can carry an infinite supply of energy on board.

However, it’s amazing what even sub-light speeds can achieve relative not to a human lifespan, but say to the too date lifespan of the human species. I other words, think thousands to tens-of-thousands, even hundreds-of-thousands of years duration. Is that thinking way too long term? Not when compared to the age of our own solar system, far less the age of our Milky Way galaxy!  Humans could, molasses style, explore and colonise the galaxy, with interstellar velocities physicists would be able to coexist with, in roughly the same order-of-magnitude time frame as it took humans to explore and colonize the Earth.

Faster-than-light (superluminal) propulsion is one of the main things glossed over in the various sci-fi space operas that have been on display, of which Star Trek is an obvious, but only one of many, examples. Where the spaceship’s gravity comes from is obviously another. You see all these Hollywood, etc. spaceships zipping around obviously providing artificial gravity for the occupants, but the ‘how’ is never really adequately explained. The relevant physics is probably even more glossed over that superluminal propulsion. The only way we know to provide a sense of gravity is to rotate your vessel or space station. 2001: A Space Odyssey got that bit spot-on, but it was the exception to the rule. Have you seen the Starship Enterprise rotate? Why don’t Kirk, Spock, Bones and the rest of the Enterprise crew float around the ship? Of course it might be possible to bioengineer humans to withstand zero-G for decades on end and then land on a high gravity planet or in a high gravity environment none the worse for wear, but that’s a pretty big ask. 

Propulsion or gravity aside, that’s not to say humans won’t ever boldly go, it’s just not likely to resemble anything seen on our TV screens (or the silver screen either, for that matter).

Why boldly go at all? There might be some economic benefit to be had in exploiting the resources (mineral and/or energy) of our solar system, maybe settling on the Moon, Mars, or some other real estate in the solar system, maybe just establishing space stations as colonies within a reasonable radius of the Sun. There’s enough real estate and/or space, to keep us confined to the solar system for millennia to come – and then some. There are little economic cost-benefits to be had by exploiting the resources of extra-solar solar systems. If you live in Sydney, why journey to New York for your food shopping when there’s a supermarket across the street!

As for seeking out new civilizations, well that’s what terrestrial SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) is trying to do. SETI is a heck of a lot easier and cheaper than fuelling up the Starship Enterprise!

As a kick-off point, let me suggest three apexes of a triangle than will propel us to eventually boldly go.

Exploration and colonization is in our genes. It’s what we do.

Reproduction is even more in our genes – it’s what we have to do.

Survival, the third apex of this triangle, is also in our genes and collectively is something we must do and must do well (even if all individuals eventually fail to survive and go kaput). Collectively, it’s unwise to put all ones survival eggs in just one real estate basket (Planet Earth). Bad things can happen and if they do you’d better be out of harms way. That one real estate basket also eventually includes our entire solar system, for Mr. Sun isn’t going to last forever. When Mr. Sun goes kaput, we go kaput.

So exploration/colonization, reproduction and survival are linked. Since one can reproduce more individuals per unit of time than die, to avoid ultimate crowding, there’s a need to find new virgin real estate territory. How do you do that? Exploration! The more spread out you are, the less likely something bad is going to cause a mass extinction of a species. Survival! So boldly going is ultimately more about reproduction, and spreading out and colonization, than pure exploration just for the sake of exploring. We’re not going to boldly go and just explore for the hell of it.

So how do we boldly go without faster-than-light Star Trek warp drives? Well, we do it the molasses-in-Antarctica way. Slowly! By slowly I mean somewhere between 1% and 10% light speed (which obviously is a tad faster than the flow of actual molasses in Antarctica).

One way to reproduce and survive is to send our ancestors to the stars, meaning our microbial ancestors, who are still around. If you’re going to boldly go, it’s unlikely that cost will be no object. Size and weight matter when it comes to boldly going. Microbes are small and light. Send out rocket after rocket after rocket filled with microbes that lie dormant in the cold of space (no life support needed). Send them towards the stars. Like the seeds of a plant, 99.9% fall by the wayside. But, every now and again one, eventually, will find a suitable extraterrestrial home; then another and another. We’re seeding other worlds, the shotgun hit or miss method. By the way, the ethics of this need not concern us, any more than a plant seedling has scruples about sprouting and out-competing other plants already established where it lands and takes root. Sending microbes to the stars would distribute and reproduce life-as-we-know-it, but that strategy wouldn’t of necessity end up producing clones of the human species.

A second way is to attach a bit of intelligence to what you send out, yet still keeping things small and light. Nanotechnology and miniaturisation of not carbon, but silicon is an option. It’s artificial intelligence in mankind’s image. So, we send out to the stars, molasses fashion, intelligent probes; the sort of probes that can make decisions about ultimate planetary destinations when they reach those stars. They chose real estate where they can land, use local resources to make copies of them, and boldly go onto another destination. These are known as Von Neumann probes. Note that again, no expenditure of life support resources is required. The drawback here is that Von Neumann probes spread out and colonize what amounts to our intelligence, but not our biology. Whether of not Von Neumann machines would evolve on their own would I guess depend on what sort of artificial intelligence they were programmed with initially.

The one huge drawback to boldly going by proxy, whether microbial or Von Neumann probes is that you get to stay at home. You don’t want to do that. You too want to boldly go. The only real incentive for starting out on a journey is to be there at the finish – journey’s end – even if the journey is fairly lengthy and time consuming like travel was back in the days of sailing ships and covered wagons. Still, you were there at the finish line. That’s why the idea of multi-generation space colony starships, the sort where migrations from one stellar system to another that takes hundreds to thousands of years, just doesn’t strike a responsive chord. You don’t finish what you start. The exception would be if the survival of mankind was in immediate jeopardy, say like the Sun going nova within a hundred years. If there’s no other option, it’s escape that matters, not the destination. You just gotta get out of Dodge by sundown, or else.

The alternative is hibernation for those hundreds to thousands of years the journey takes. Hibernation is akin to an eight hour overnight sleep. Sleep is like a sort of time travel where you journey to the future instantaneously. One minute it’s 11 pm; the next it’s 7 am! The problems here are 1) perfecting the required hibernation technology; 2) you still need minimal life support infrastructure; 3) you still got to expend energy to transport that near worthless big toe of yours. The only part of you that really needs to get from point A to point B is your mind. 

To be continued...