Curse You, Albert Einstein! By A.E. Williams

Curse You, Albert Einstein!

By A.E. Williams

Imagine you are on a road, in a convertible car that is REALLY fast. There you are, zooming along at over a hundred miles an hour, the wind in your hair, and the bugs in your teeth. (Well, hopefully no bugs…) Now, you see a speed limit sign up ahead. It says MAXIMUM SPEED is 500kph. Your car is capable, you think, of going faster than that. So, you push down the accelerator, and the engine whines and suddenly you run out of fuel. You coast into a gas station; fill her up, and take off again, determined to hit 500kph. Leaning hard on that pedal, you approach that limit and suddenly, the engine winds down. 

You are out of fuel. Again! Luckily, there is ANOTHER gas station, so this time you gas it up with Premium. You get an oil change while you are there. In fact, you put on new tires and even pump them up to maximum pressure. As a final consideration, you PUT UP THE TOP!

Now, grimly gripping the wheel, you embark on toward your destination, pushing the limits of man and machine, as the engine screams in protest, and the revolutions climb – and, you’re out of gas again.

Such it is with Faster-Than-Light travel in the world of Einsteinian and Newtonian physics. Just as soon as you get going, you end up running out of something. The faster you go, the heavier you get. The more fuel you need. The fuel adds more mass.

It’s a vicious cycle of fail.

There’s no easy way to say this, but in real space, faster than light is, so far, not an observed phenomena. This makes it a bit difficult to travel around the place. But, is there any hope at all for we science fiction nerds? Can there be a loophole? A worm-loophole, maybe?

Let’s take a look …

FIGURE 1: It’s all HIS fault![1]

E=MC²

We’ve all seen the famous equation. It’s been pounded into our heads since the 1940’s, with all the movies and books and stories and everything. Einstein’s problematic equation.

Energy equals Mass times Speed of Light Squared

That C is CONSTANT, at 186 282.397 miles per second.[2]

If you algebraically[3] re-arrange the equation a bit, then you can get:

E / M = C²

This means that as Mass Increases, you need more Energy so that the numbers on both sides of the equation are the same.

So, let’s do a simple[4] math problem to show how this works:

I am going to use two numbers to get a result. They are X and Y.  These are called VARIABLES, because, as you will see in a moment, they can vary in value.

I am also going to have a number C, for CONSTANT. I want C = 4 for this problem, okay? It will ALWAYS be 4. Because that’s what a CONSTANT does, it stays the same; constant.

Now, there are many ways to have the LEFT side equal the RIGHT side.

If we set the RIGHT side to 4:

16 / 4 = 4

This is true. It will always be true. [5]

4 = 4

If I say let X = 16 and Y = 4, then this will mean the EQUATION is true. [6]

Here are ALL the steps:

Given:

X=16
Y = 4
C = 4

The equation is going to be: [7]

X / Y = C

Substitute the values for the variables:

16 / 4 = 4

4 = 4

Now, let’s change the 16 to 480.

Why? Because I want to show what happens if X gets bigger.

480 / 4 = 120

This is NOT true.

Why? Because 480 / 4 does NOT equal 4, correct? It’s 120.

Well, A.E., you may be asking, why can’t we just use 120 instead of 4, QED?

Because the 4 on the RIGHT hand side will ALWAYS be 4.That is why it is known as a CONSTANT. The VARIABLE values are the two on the LEFT side. They can vary, in order to make the equation TRUE.

So, the illustration shows the relationship between X and Y, which in good old Albert’s fine equation, equate to E and M.

(We won’t go into the ‘squared’ bit, because it simply makes the relationship exponential, meaning it happens a LOT faster as things get bigger.)

This matter / energy thing gets compounded by two other interesting aspects of space-time. As a body approaches the speed of light, it gets HEAVIER. This requires MORE energy, (fuel) to make it accelerate more. Remember the automobile in the beginning?

Every time you approach the speed of light, you end up running out of fuel because you are not only carrying the mass of the car and passenger, but also need enough energy to carry the mass of the fuel itself ( and pumps, engines, tanks, wiring, all of that).

In real-world rocketry, there is an equation known, oddly enough, as The Rocket Equation.[8]

Basically, it states that a rocket, because it needs to carry fuel and machinery to create that all-important thrust to send it off into space[9], has a mathematical point of balance. Exceed this point, and the rocket won’t go anywhere. It’s too heavy to lift itself off of the launch pad.

Science fiction authors usually just ignore all of this.

Figure 2: Eat Me, Physics!

They invent novel ideas that circumvent nasty old Einstein and his mean old math.

And, in doing so, create something wonderful:

HOPE

Figure 3: Jedi Mind Trick[10]

The greatest contribution of science fiction to real science is that we all hope, one day, to have some of the neato-keeno things that can be glimpsed emitting from the fertile minds and frenetically typing fingers of the best of us.

Think of your cell phone. Now, what is this, then?

Figure 4: Can you hear me NOW?[11]

That little beauty was on the telly in 1965! Only a mere twenty years later, the telephone industry figured out how to get almost every living human to buy one of these things, and gouge them for the privilege. Is science fiction great, or what?

And how about flying cars? Or jet packs? Or…

But, I digress.[12]

Returning to our discussion of FTL, let’s also take note of the enormous amount of resources needing to be carried as provisions. Sustaining life as we gallivant across the Galaxy is going to be a bit problematic. (More of that mass stuff, don’t you know…)

I think it’s telling that most of the good, fun science fiction we all know and love just throws all this tedious fact stuff out the airlock, and gets on with the story. Why bother being accurate, when you can just make something up?

The problem is that people are getting more skeptical, because we ARE able to ask some pithy questions, thanks to the Internet. Our global hive mind is opening all of us up to potentials, and possibilities. We can fact check our own stuff, now. And, in doing so, our ability to be taken in by some hand-waving magical legerdemain is diminishing.

About damn time!

Oh yeah, about that damned time – time slows down. Well, relatively speaking that is. Speed of light travel slows time down dramatically, to the effect that a crew that departs on a sixty year mission may only age a few months, with respect to their perspective.

To everyone else, sixty years is going to pass by, and when the crew returns, everyone they know will probably be dead or just about. [13]

As a science fiction author, I am able to create all manner of cool stories about how my heroes’ space ship can just do something magic and get to the next part of the story. But, in real life, there are genuine obstacles to interstellar and intergalactic, because it just don’t work that way, folks.

Here’s an example for comparison:

The Voyager spacecraft, after travelling in space for thirty-eight years, is 19.5 billion kilometers away from Earth. It’s the closest we’ve come to interstellar travel. Note the very long time spent traversing the Solar System. This is peanuts compared to interstellar travel. The nearest star is 4.24 light years from us; current technology will get a probe there in about ten-thousand years.

Of course we yearn for a shortcut. FTL is it. But, we haven’t managed to create black holes, wormholes, folded space or even antimatter warp drives yet. [14]

A lot of this hinges on whether or not Einstein was 100% correct.

 IF ( and it’s a big if) we are able to locally affect our space time fabric, or find a sub-ethereal layer, or manage to master some manner of gravitational waves, we may be able to bend these physical laws to our advantage.

The big problem is that since everything can only travel at light speed, including light, radio waves, microwaves and similar radiations it is impossible to actually see anything ahead of you.

As the ship accelerates, it is catching up to light that already impinges on the ships viewing sensors (ie photodetectors or camera lenses). The shift in the speed will tinge any images blue.

 This is because of the Doppler Effect, the well-known phenomenon that can be easily observed as a vehicle passes you. It sounds distant, then close, then distant. But, the vehicle’s engine is not going any faster. The noise is a constant buzz, but it sounds the way it does because of the position of the emitting source relative to you as it passes by. The same is true of light, and it is used by astronomers to gauge acceleration between objects in space. There is a red shift as thing are receding away from Earth, and  blue shift as they move towards us. This is because the waves of light are further apart as the object is moving away from us, and they get compressed as they move towards us.

At near-light speeds, this causes a problem as the ship overtakes the visible light from objects. The light waves are stacked upon each other as they are emitted or reflected from objects, and the frequency shifts to the blue end of the spectrum. The practical effect of this is to make any pilots blind to what is outside the ship. Even specialized sensors are subject to this law of physics. It will require some very clever engineering to overcome this obstacle.

Another problem will be that of communicating to other vessels, and even with Earth. The current standard is the radio wave. These travel at the speed of light, so traveling from say, Mars to Earth takes about thirteen minutes. If you are sending large packets of data, then a round-trip conversation would take hours.

It also is asymmetric, like using a walkie-talkie or CB radio. The first speaker would transmit, then wait for the receiver to get the message, decode it, think about it, then respond with an answer. The process repeats itself for EVERY communication between those two points. NASA and ESA use military protocols to assure that communications are efficiently transmitted, (there is even talk of a Cosmic Internet being developed!).

But the harsh reality is still the same…when NASA gets information from Voyager, it is already 18 hours old!

Imagine if a satellite were sending data from the Crab Nebula 6500 light years away! A transmission from there would be over six and a half millennia old, and that would be only one-way!

In conclusion, there may someday be ways to shortcut these physical laws. The Universe in which we live constricts our ability to roam freely. Perhaps that is for the best. But, that will have to wait to be the subject of another of our upcoming discussions.

Up Next:

June - Cyborgs, Artificial Intelligences, Trans-Humans, the Singularity and the Merging of Humans and Machine.

July - The Physics of Science Fiction Weapons.

August - The Reality of Living in an Undersea City.

A.E. Williams,  May 10, 2015

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[1] "Albert Einstein (Nobel)" by Unknown - Official 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics photograph.

Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons  

SOURCE: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Einstein_(Nobel).png#/media/File:Albert_Einstein_(Nobel).png

[2] In 1972, using the laser interferometer method and the new definitions, a group at NBS in Boulder, Colorado determined the speed of light in vacuum to be c = 299792456.2±1.1 m/s. This was 100 times less uncertain than the previously accepted value. The remaining uncertainty was mainly related to the definition of the meter.

SOURCE: Wikipedia

[3] Hey! Come back! There won’t be a lot more math, I promise!

[4] Feel free to skip this part, if you like.

[5] In our Universe, at least!

[6] Bear in mind that this only is for THIS particular problem, with the rules we are using. Normally, you can have constants and variables trading places on each side, as long as you are consistent. But, that’s too much algebra for this short example.

[7] This looks like E/M = C², right?

[8] This equation was independently derived by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but more often simply referred to as 'the rocket equation' (or sometimes the 'ideal rocket equation'). However, a recently discovered pamphlet "A Treatise on the Motion of Rockets" by William Moore^[2] shows that the earliest known derivation of this kind of equation was in fact at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in England in 1813,  for weapons research.

Source: Wikipedia, again. Hey – don’t judge me! I like the convenience and it’s probably 85% accurate in general. Political and geopolitical or biography stuff is subject to alteration, but they get the science and math parts right pretty much always! And, let’s face it, when you Google this later, which entry are YOU going to read???

[9] Thank you, Sir Isaac Newton and your Second Law of Motion! (Not to be confused with the Second Law of Thermodynamics!)

[10] I mean, hang on just a second here. I was going to go for the very obvious “A NEW HOPE” gag, but, is it really ‘NEW’?  Remember, we are supposedly watching things that happened “A long time ago, in a galaxy far away”. If you’ve stayed with me this far, then you know that we are observing stuff that ALREADY HAPPENED. Not exactly ‘New’, now is it? Although, to be fair, if you have only JUST NOW seen this, I suppose it counts for ‘new’. Did you pop out a wormhole, then? Maybe you’d care to share just how that works, hmmm? Yeah. Didn’t think so…

Source: THIS GUY

[11] SOURCE: "20090704-1971 Star Trek TOS Communicator Replica" by David B Spalding - Own work.

Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20090704-1971_StarTrekTOSCommunicatorReplica.jpg#/media/File:20090704-1971_StarTrekTOSCommunicatorReplica.jpg

[12] Sorry, I was looking on Google for cool things, and then got sad because we still don’t have all the cool things.

[13] Which is kind of depressing when you realize that all those Star Trek crews are flying off into space, at relativistic speeds. Except as regards Voyager…that’s just depressing all on its own.

[14] NASA is currently announcing that they are working on this technology, but it will be quite some time before the means to safely navigate a ship with such engines is also developed.

Source: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive

Guest post by A.E. Williams: How Spaceflight and The Challenges Therein Have Been Addressed in Science Fiction

A.E. Williams has kindly agreed to write a regular column for the Speculative Fiction Showcase, based on his wealth of experience, and fascination with space travel both real and fictional.

 

The very first science-fiction story that is popularly recognized as having anything to do with the concept of modern space travel is probably Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon”. In this tale, the adventurers travel to the Earth’s Moon in a modified cannon shell – it is pointed at the Moon and fired, with much fanfare, from Tampa, Florida.

Oddly enough, Verne predicted much of the issues with which manned space explorers would need to contend.

With the exception of the fatal effects of the immense shock from an instantaneous acceleration to escape / orbital velocities, Verne’s idea was sound. In fact, NASA and Iraq had programs to launch satellites using cannons as recently as 1990[1]. Of course, these satellites would have had few moving parts; live payloads were out of the question.

But, Verne’s vision sparked the idea of men traveling across space to other planets.

Since that time, there have been thousands of different tales of space adventure. Science fiction has brought us every manner of device and apparatus to move people from one end of the galaxy (nay, the Universe!) to the other.

Some of these schemes were ridiculous, and played for satirical purposes, or were parodies of actual ideas.[2]

What I’d like to explore in this article, however, is how the very real problems of manned space travel were ‘solved’ to some extent by the speculative fiction authors who became very clever in just how we should proceed to move into space.

Let’s start with a few of the more famous modes of space travel:

Rockets –

Rockets follow the simplistic physical laws of ballistics, and sustained propulsion of a cylindrical tube filled with air, food, water and people has actually happened! 

In science fiction, post-Verne, there are many places where the possible issues were enumerated and addressed.

Arthur C. Clarke’s writings, including ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, Robert Heinlein’s stories, E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith and many Golden Age authors took serious engineering minds and bent them to the task of answering thorny questions such as what actually happens to the human body in space, the effects of temperature, pressure and radiation on living entities, and the stresses of acceleration and deceleration.[3]

The mechanical engineering problems surrounding structures and forces were incorporated into many of the best hard science fiction of the times. The authors were serious in considering what actually might occur during these flights of fancy, and came up with ingenious ideas.

Heinlein went so far as to show how the Moon could be used as a launch pad for Earth-bound missiles made of mined moon rocks, and how they could be used as serious weaponry against the Mother Planet. His calculations were intended to show the scientific rationale about gravity wells, but he inadvertently illustrated one of the biggest issues facing spaceships, which is how to avoid debris while traveling around.

But it also showed the feasibility of using the Moon as a base of operations for advanced space missions.

‘Destination Moon’ was a film that used Heinlein’s musings to bring some verisimilitude to the silver screen. It showed how action / reaction would work in zero gee environments, as is shown when one of the key characters uses a fire extinguisher to fly around the room.

Other ‘Invasion’ films utilized stock footage of V2 and Redstone launches to convince audiences that these were actually alien craft, or were threats to other planets.

To say that the fictional creatures from other worlds were not much amused by our antics is putting it lightly.

The 1950’s and ‘60’s presented us with alien onslaughts on all sides, from the novel “Starship Troopers” to the flying saucers in the films “The Thing from Another World”, “Mars Attacks!” and  “Earth vs the Flying Saucers”.

A strange variation of this was “The Day the Earth Stood Still” wherein Klaatu, a traveler from another galaxy (!) comes to Earth to warn us of our hubris at combining nuclear bombs and rockets. His vehicle, a true flying saucer, was discussed in detail during some exposition in the film with the top mind of that Earth.

The relativistic effects of Einstein’s new theories on Faster-Than-Light travel may have made viewers heads spin, but the dialog was grounded in scientific roots.

These stories and approaches still mainly glossed over the incredible distances involved. Even “Forbidden Planet”, with its revolutionary saucer-ship didn’t really clearly depict the time and space parameters that we now are just beginning to understand.

To get around the problem of the actual flight-times becoming lethal, the concepts of ‘Generation’ ships were introduced. These were miniature worlds, entire ecosystems with populations that traversed the blackness at a relatively slow speed, but taking millennia to get to their final destinations.

Again, Heinlein, in “Universe” set the bar very high. The story took place on a giant spherical ship where the radiation shielding had partially failed. Mutated beings mixed it up with the normals, while the ship headed endlessly into deep space, its original purpose lost to the ravages of time.

Keir Dullea, of ‘2001’ fame, explored this more fully in the television series “The Star Lost”. Bruce Dern touched upon the idea of isolated ecosystems orbiting in space in “Silent Running”,  Niven and Pournelle spoke of Ringworlds, and good old dependable A.C. Clarke’s “Rama” capped off the idea until the advent of ‘The Borg’ reignited it. [4]

Because it was taking so MUCH time to get from point A to point B in these stories, the science fiction authors next needed to come up with ways to speed things up a bit.

Enter Faster-Than-Light travel, or FTL.

Now, E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith had handled this quite well in the “Skylark of Space” and “Grey Lensman” space operas, by simply annihilating copper bars atomically, releasing all of their innate power into machines that manipulated bands or frequencies of this energy. Much like radio, television and microwaves today are used for many purposes from heating food to allowing us to read words on fluorescing screens, the heroes of these adventures took all of it in stride. 

Their facile use of these technologies involved a bit of ‘hand-waving’, such as electronic teaching machines and the like, but in the final analysis they were allowed to succeed in ignoring inertia and momentum mainly because the author simply chose a deux ex machina approach to the problem.

For an instance, let’s think about how we actually assure that our passengers will survive the long, arduous flight from one planet to another. (Interstellar travel is another breed of cat entirely, but for now, let’s take baby steps.)

Wing Commander, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and many other universes consider traditional naval vessels as models to be imitated, both in the construction of the space ships, and in how they are crewed. Think of space submarines, battleships and aircraft carriers – these are the basic craft used to convey people from planet to planet. They use impulse engines for shorter distances, and warp drives for the inevitable FTL travel. 

Some of the things brushed aside or hand-waved away include inertia, momentum, friction, impacts with space debris, and relativistic effects. Deflector fields, shields or other devices clear a path in front of any FTL spacecraft in ways that defy physics.

Think about it this way – you are driving your car down a highway, and an animal jumps out of a forest line just ahead of you. How you react to this hazard depends on many factors. 

First is your vessel. Is it small, like an Audi R8, or large, like a tractor-trailer?

How fast are you going? Are you accelerating or decelerating?

Is the animal small, like a cat, or large, like a moose?[5]

Now, the amount of damage to your vessel depends on the mass of the animal, the velocity at which you contact it, and the directions both of you are traveling.

Without getting into too much gory detail, this is the problem facing every satellite, missile, and space craft ever created.

When in flight, one does not merely change direction and swerve to avoid an obstacle. Oh, no – what one does is disintegrate that obstacle, or push it out of YOUR path.

As the speed is increased to escape velocity and beyond, even the tiniest flake of paint becomes a real danger. The film “Gravity” got much of this correct, as did “Pitch Black”.

Many other science fiction novels warn of spacesuit punctures from micro meteors, and other wear and tear that would occur.

So, science fiction authors sort of ignore the problem as having been solved by magnetic or other energy beams that push this stuff aside. You can see the issue here – in order to do so, these deflectors must travel ahead of the ship.

A recent Vsauce episode addresses the problem of light being emitted from an FTL ship, but that only spoke to photons – massless particles that can’t really move anything aside.

How can something be projected in front of the ship, with enough force to move debris, yet also not enough force to obliterate it? Think about this for a moment.

As your starship enters a solar system, at tremendous speed, and is decelerating, it encounters a satellite. What happens next?

This brings up the parallel problem of how navigation is supposed to work. Even if there is some huge AI computer that has a fourth-dimensional space map, this super-GPS[6] must be able to be updated instantaneously to accommodate the space and TIME changes that are occurring as the ship enters a given space-time co-ordinates.

Remember, for FTL travel, the time around the ship changes with respect to a frame of reference. [7]

This causes some interesting effects as well, and was the subject of much scrutiny when the recent film “Gravity” hit the theatres.

In PART TWO of this article, we will look at some other examples of science fiction authors intriguing efforts to predict how future manned space flight would unfold.

Get ready to dive deep into even more about FTL Travel – using “Star Trek”, “Star Wars”, “Interstellar”as examples. We will delve into  Hyperspace, Wormholes, black holes, etc.

And let’s not forget the really out-there concepts of space flight:

Other Space – Travel outside of relativistic space!

 The Aether – EE Doc Smith’s ideas on space travel!

Dune’s Spice Ships, ‘folding space’ 

… and other weird ideas!

See you next time[8]!

NEXT UP:

April - An Exploration of the Physics Behind Faster Than Light Travel.

May - Cyborgs, Artificial Intelligences, Trans-Humans, the Singularity and the Merging of Humans and Machine.

June - The Physics of Science Fiction Weapons.

July - The Reality of Living in an Undersea City.

A.E. Williams  March 07, 2015

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[1]
                        [1] Source: http://www.astronautix.com/articles/abroject.htm
 

[2]
                        [2] Most of Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is about how one could travel the length and breadth of the known Universe, in time, space and hyperspace by the use of the clever ‘electronic thumb’.

[3]
                        [3] An interesting article could be written concerning gender roles and how they were presented by these authors. I may do one in the future! The general consensus seemed to be that women and men were equally subject to the laws of physics, though.

[4]
                        [4] The Generation ship is actually an idea stolen from our own human experience – we travel on such a device, every day we are alive. Think about it – a closed spacecraft that takes millions of years to travel the Universe. Food, water, life are all balanced – carefully taking billions of changes into consideration. The Earth is a star ship, but we don’t really notice, since we are always imagining new and improved ways to do things.
 

[5]
                        [5] A moose once bit my sister. No, really!

[6]
                        [6] Galactic Positioning System

[7]
                        [7] “Interstellar” does a fair job of depicting this, as does “2001:A Space Odyssey” to some extent.
 

[8]
                        [8] Get it?

Guest post - A.E. Williams - MANNED Space Exploration? It’s Getting Old – PART II

A. E. Williams has kindly agreed to write a regular column for the Speculative Fiction Showcase, based on his wealth of experience, and fascination with space travel both real and fictional.

This is part II of his essay on manned space exploration.

In PART I of this article, I was pontificating about how we, as a species, are wont to let a great many of our most fabulous and wonderful achievements rot and decay, instead of trying to preserve them for posterity.

In PART II, I would like to look at some historical documents, and also to the ways in which science fiction both predicts and extrapolates science fact.

But first, a word about record keeping.

We all know that human beings love to keep records of their achievements. We can see the monuments to great men and adventures. The invention of writing has allowed a vast transfer of knowledge across centuries. Science, mathematics, history, and cultural data are being saved and passed on to following generations, with a hope that lessons be learned and mistakes avoided.

We point to museums and libraries as repositories of knowledge, and the resting place of many of the great intellects of history. But even these vaunted and revered places can suffer from the vagaries of the human condition as we swarm over the planet, seeking to master the ‘Others’ whom we encounter.

From Alexander the Great, to Genghis Khan, to Napoleon, to Hitler, from Stalin to Pol Pot, to Mao, and even including recent leaders such as the Prime Ministers of England and the Presidents of the United States, men have unleashed the dogs of war.

The devastation wrought on the temples of science and engineering, to the coliseums of rational thought and reason has retarded our progress as a species far too often. [1]

We can mourn the loss of many of the best and most thorough works of mankind as we uncover evidence of purges throughout recorded time.

The Great Library at Alexandria, the Dead Sea Scrolls, lost books of the Bible, the oral traditions that never made it into a printed form, and other magnificent and intricate bits of arcane knowledge are lost forever. [2] I would not want to be perceived as being Eurocentric in compiling these examples, for there is also ample evidence that many scrolls and books from the Oriental, Persian, and Ottoman (along with many other cultures) have been lost to time.

When wars, natural disasters or pogroms decimate our pooled intelligence, it takes us a long time to recapture these experiences, and then even more time to assure that they can be passed on to our heirs and descendants.

The written word, and the invention of the printing press, the greatest advancements of their time, are inadequate to the task of easily conferring the wisdom of experience, rigorous methodology, and the testing results that can only be found by hard work and years of analytical thinking about the complex processes we need to raise ourselves into the light of rational thought.

Library science and systems management give us the tools to begin to index and develop massive taxonomies, whereby we can categorize, sort, store and retrieve this important data.

But, the march of progress brings with it the loss of compatible media formats. Who among you remembers the illustrious 1.44MB floppy disk as anything other than a relic? Yet, entire businesses were founded and fun on this technology. More recently, think of how the CD-ROM has been antiquated by the advent of cloud storage. Soon, physical media, of the kind that an individual would own, will be a thing of the past. All the data will reside in the massive storage systems of the Cloud, or whatever its future incarnations will become.

The creation of the Internet has come as close as anything so far invented at reaching the redundancy necessary for humanity to actually push forward our combined knowledge.

The computational algorithms, coupled with the advances in search and analytics technologies, will give future generations the ability to decode much of our present world, through cross-correctional techniques that go much further in reducing bias and prejudicial influences.

We are still in the infancy of this process, but I foresee a time in the very near future where certain standards will be adopted, and agreed upon as being sufficient to provide repeatable proofs of claims. When that occurs, our race will hopefully have achieved the maturity to rationally deal with the responsibility that will entail. [3]

Let’s take a closer look at how the contest between the two super powers of the 1960’s shaped this process, and led to the development of a superior technology and science. In order to easily explain this situation, I have found it of value to review some of the films that were made concurrent to the Space Race.[4]

The 1967 spy film “You Only Live Twice” is a perfect example of a Cold War adventure movie at its finest, and the lengths to which Hollywood believed governments would go in order to capture important technical information about enemy space projects.

In that movie, the evil organization Spectre, (which is standing in for the USSR, the Evil Empire of that time), is led by Ernst Stavros Blofeld, (who is standing in for Nikita Kruschev, the world’s Premier shoe-banger of the time).

Blofeld has ordered a special rocket be launched from a secret base located in the interior of an extinct volcano in Japan.

In the beginning montage, Spectre’s spacecraft opens its mechanical maw and captures an orbiting Gemini space capsule. It then fired its retro rockets, and returned the unfortunate (American) space explorers back to the secret evil layer. [5]

My point here is that the technology that was depicted in the film was not too far removed from the reality of the times. The physics was sound…if not the plot.

The Cast, Noting How Closely the Spectre Rocket in “You Only Live Twice”[6] Resembles the V-2

The film showed the dreams of Von Braun writ large – a single-stage-to-orbit craft, with the ability to take off vertically and return for a vertical landing at the initial launch site.

The recent launches of the Falcon X and Falcon 9 rockets from SpaceX demonstrate that SSTO craft are almost a reality.

These current technology rockets take off and land, ostensibly in the same location with the use of landing legs. Note that this was successfully predicted by a James Bond film, over 40 years ago!

These film makers took pains to extrapolate a plausible scenario, to a logical conclusion. It is science fiction of the hard variety, at its heart, but the technical difficulties regarding materials science and the actual physics of space travel have postponed the realization of this imaginary craft until today.

There are very good reasons for this. The rockets built by Von Braun and his team at Peenemünde were designed for a one-way trip. The fictitious rocket in the Bond film was designed not only to return to its launch base, but also to make repetitive flights with very short intervals between them, in order to replenish fuel and oxygen.

The real-world analog to this, the STS Space Shuttles, took months of careful assembly, testing and retesting to assure the astronauts and technical personnel are safe during the mission. It does not always go well, and in 1986 and 2003 we learned again the high cost of mistakes.

Space travel is an unforgiving mistress. The reuse of ships is hampered because of the caustic and dangerous nature of the propellants, their corrosive abilities on the materials used for containing them during conflagration, and the enormous stresses built up during the flight phase. All of these factors provide the inevitable degradation of equipment and the breaking down of key components.

An example I can supply surrounds the turbo pumps for the SSME. When initially designed, they were to have lasted without retrofit for 4 or 5 flights. That is, the six turbo pumps (two for each of three main engines) would only need overhaul after four flights.

This was the design specification.

In reality, they needed to be removed and repaired after almost every flight. [7]

If we contrast this kind of real-world performance vs fictional performance, we become aware of the myriad factual difficulties with which science fiction authors must contend.

Now, let’s use the example of a science-fiction television series, such as “Star Trek”, which was made at the same approximate time. We notice that the USS Enterprise is a space-warp driven craft that has a complement and crew of trained scientists, and is roughly the size of a battleship. It travels faster than light with no problems whatsoever.

When the crew of the USS Enterprise wants to perform a translation of men or materials from ship to planet, they use the transporter. This has been shown, via some interested physicists performing calculations, to be a device requiring a substantial amount of energy to operate.

Their other alternative was space flight using a shuttlecraft.

The United States Space Shuttle Atlantis would never be as efficient in using energy to get up and back from space as the entirely fictional shuttlecraft Galileo 7.

The reason behind this is the hard wall of physics.

To review my points, in one instance Hollywood was abiding by the laws of physics and extrapolating a plausible and likely outcome of the near-future space technology. A single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicle was an achievement many of the scientists and engineers of that era felt was well within the scientific abilities of the day.

As of this writing, we have yet to become adept at manipulating whatever forces of nature would allow the use of space-warp technology, transportation that is instantaneous between two points such as is depicted by the transporter, or even the regeneration machines that they use on board the Enterprise to make coffee.[8]

 

The “USS Enterprise” from “Star Trek” – Science or Fantasy?[9]

The divide between science fiction and reality is nowhere more evident than in the pristine nature of the future as depicted in the Federation and other films of that type versus the reality of our own space program. The general cleanliness of the ships and cities, the way everyone has their own place and function and the way that there is unquestioned obedience to society is a bit scary.

And, let’s also not forget how the technology has altered the world. People can choose to pursue old-fashioned activities such as growing grapes, or painting, or acting.

But these are at most an avocation, or hobby. The promise of the Federation is that everything is there for a citizen of Star Fleet. All they need do is comply.

Every time data is needed for retrieval on the show, one of the characters goes “Computer” and is almost instantly given the answer to any query, no matter how mundane or complex. [10]

If only such tremendous ability to store and retrieve vital information were true![11]

Some time ago, famed science-fiction author Larry Niven had pointed out that the original blueprints for the Saturn – V rockets (our only true spaceships of any note to date that qualify as interplanetary) were basically molding and decaying at the bottom of a filing cabinet in some office in an obscure building in central Florida.[12]

A brief perusal of even the last 40 years’ worth of technology that is being stored at Cape Canaveral in Florida shows the decrepitude and general state of disrepair of what was once the highest of all of our technologies.

Can we actually stomach the idea that this, an accomplishment that is probably the single greatest achievement of the human species, the literal zenith of human technology and achievement, is being left to rot and turn to dust?

And further, that with only a modicum of effort we could have been prevented this obscene outcome?

So, here we are facing a conundrum.

We are attempting to move into the future but the past is rapidly removing our successes. The victories that we had are now hollow in the sense that we have nothing to which we can point that qualifies as a suitable replacement.

 

The Saturn-V – Our Only Real Spaceship?[13]

One would like to imagine that something such as the privatization of space travel, coupled with the commercialization of and / or the inculcation of tourism-related space travel as being put forth by Messieurs Branson and Musk, among others, would lead to an appreciation of the value of such endeavors.

At what point will it become necessary to jettison this outdated information?

The question is important, in that, should mankind succeed in colonizing other worlds, it may be that the answer as to how best exploit these new resources is in our history.

The lost past may have provided the keys to our new future, and we just did not deem it important enough to preserve.

A final thought – what legacy are we leaving the future generations regarding all of this historical information? At what point should we begin to instruct our children as to the necessary skills for survival of our species? Do we even know what languages to use?

Mathematics, the sciences, and engineering benefit from centuries of repeatable testing and observation of our universe, and the ways in which interactions among the elements contained within happen. Yet, as the information expands to capacity, where do we draw the lines?

Are only the smartest of us to reap the benefits of these technologies? Do we need to know certain phrases or rituals to be allowed access to the bounties of the secret sanctums of routine knowledge?

As we mature, and reach out into space, I would expect many of these questions will be resolved.

But, we may not like the answers.

NEXT UP:

March - How Spaceflight and The Challenges Therein Have Been Addressed in Science Fiction.

April - An Exploration of the Physics Behind Faster Than Light Travel.

May - Cyborgs, Artificial Intelligences, Trans-Humans, the Singularity and the Merging of Humans and Machine.

June - The Physics of Science Fiction Weapons.

July - The Reality of Living in an Undersea City.

A.E. Williams  January 31, 2015

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[1] Ironically, it is in seeking to improve ways in which we kill each other that much of the truly useful advances have been made.

[2] Not to mention the loss of artistic masterpieces and other artifacts succumbing to the senseless brutality of unfettered warfare.

[3] Wikipedia is a start, but there are many problems to still be surmounted with providing canonical, properly cited, and fully peer-reviewed information.

[4] I personally find it humorous to watch movies from the 60’s that depict what Hollywood thought was accurate with regards to space travel. Many of the films show some creditable effort at maintaining realism, but others border well over into the realm of sheer fantasy.

[5] The science behind this bit is remarkably accurate, aside from the fact that one ship eats the other. (Parenthetically, this particular James Bond film is the source for the plot behind the enormously hilarious “Austin Powers – International Man of Mystery” movie).

[6] Promotional image of the cast during the filming of ‘You Only Live Twice’, 1967.

  Source

[7] The team on which I participated managed to produce an improved LOX turbo pump, which flew on every mission after 1996 or so, until the fleet was retired. My understanding is that these particular pumps were able to weather 12 missions without need of repairs.

[8] 3-D printing promises to bring some of that old science fiction magic closer to us all the time, though!

[9] Fair Use Image from Wikipedia Commons

[10] The hubris of the writers to simply assume such an advanced artificial intelligence would be at the beck and call of mere humans on a star ship is pretty amazing! IMHO, the more recent film “Interstellar” has a very balanced examination of using A.I.s as our ‘slaves’.

[11] You must understand the difference between a SEARCH engine, such as Google, and an AI. The AI is a virtual genius, with the ability to parse, understand, and correctly interpret a query regardless of from whom it is being made. There is an innate assumption that the people who ask these questions are ALLOWED to ask them. Imagine, if you will, a child asking about how to make a nuclear missile, or how to procure a phaser. The implicit understanding is that there are safeguards, right? Well, WHO makes the rules  as to whom these rules apply, hmmm? Star Trek is pretty neat, but there are definitely some big questions that are glossed over routinely. At least you know who the bad guys are in Star Wars.

[12] There may have been copies of these blueprints in Houston or California.

[13] NASA Image