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The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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Rocket Scientists Are Stupid Smart People
August 20th, 2008
OK, maybe, maybe not, but Robert Lemos writing for wired.com, playing up the hyperbole, makes them sound like it with this pronouncement: Rocket Scientists Say We’ll Never Reach the Stars.
Which I don’t think anyone quoted in the article ever quite says.
Never say never, especially in cases of engineering. It isn’t impossible to reach the stars. It’s merely very, very difficult, especially given our technical know-how today. If the sun were about the size of a mustard seed, the solar system would all be within about ten meters or so (each planet being a dust speck essentially), and the nearest stars would be some 50-100 miles away. The gulfs between the stars is vast indeed.
But I have to say that sometimes this stuff makes me mad. Not that it’s wrong, but that it’s presented in a very narrow way with a very non-creative perspective. Let me make my case based on items in the article.
The case is made that even reaching the nearest stars cannot be done with foreseeable technology in a human lifetime. OK. But even giving a pass on the foreseeable technology bit, why is a current human lifetime an insurmountable hurdle? Apparently it is to the rocket scientists who forgot that generation ships are a possibility, as well as suspended animation, robotic explorers (who could be us in a post-human future), or any of a dozen other ways that make a long-timescale a smaller issue.
How about the energy considerations? Well, we have a dork (sorry — stupid smart person) who, according the article which may not be giving his talk a fair shake, who makes a big deal about the difficulty in fueling an interstellar trip with Earth-originating fuels. Did he consider that the sun is an easier and more accessible energy source in space than the Earth? I’m not talking deep space solar panels or anything similarly simple and stupid, but for a laser propelled craft the laser could be powered by a system close to the sun and powered by the sun. Anyway, it seemed like a very tiny argument on his part.
And we have technologies like the space elevator being dismissed in a single sentence because the materials breakthrough hasn’t been made just yet, even though we’ve made a lot recently that are extremely encouraging. And the comment about the engineering making sense is pretty snide and insulting. I haven’t actually seen a compelling case made for any fundamental flaws. Feel free to point me at one if you know one, and make sure it hasn’t already been sufficiently addressed in The Space Elevator by Edwards and Westling.
[Small aside. I had an engineer in the audience of a panel where we touched on the space elevator. He dismissed the idea as too dangerous due to the catastrophic effects of a falling cable. I knew his fears were silly but couldn’t recall why at the time — frustrating. The proposed cable is not based on continuous fibers but shorter fibers bound together by adhesive, which would disintegrate under re-entry, and the pieces would float to Earth safely.]
Anyway, I suspect the meeting was a mix of optimistic visionaries and uncreative naysayers, but Lemos wanted to make a compelling story for his article. And I guess that makes me guilty, too, with my headline. There are a lot of ways for us to go to the stars, and it’s just a matter of figuring out which are the most practical as our capabilities increase. The time to even think about saying “never” is when we’re already zipping about the solar system and have been doing so for a while and actually want or need to go elsewhere. If we don’t destroy ourselves, or suffer catastrophic loss of technology, we’ll get to the stars because extinction is the alternative and we respond well to that sort of threat. Never say never when it’s merely engineering and creativity missing. Save “never” for the really impossible things.
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Thanks for pointing out the possibility of a solar-powered laser-propelled craft. Here is a variant: in principle at least you could use the same device, a phased array at optical wavelengths printed on a thin membrane to both gather energy from the sun and convert it into collimated light. You have to make it big, to gather enough energy, and that large size gives you a large effective aperture, so that (provided that you can maintain phasing across the aperture) you can put almost all that energy into a very tight beam, e.g. onto a lightsail at interstellar distances. For example, if the lightsail and the projector were the same size, operating at a wavelength of a micron, when the lightsail was at the same distance as alpha centauri they would each have to be about 300km in diameter, unless I dropped a decimal point somewhere.
Another useful factoid: IIRC the sun pumps out about 3e26 Watts, 24/7, which (again if I didn’t drop a decimal point) is enough to get 1e6 kg up to .7c *per second*, assuming we captured all of it, and put it all into accelerating lightsails.
[…] we have this blog post by Mike Brotherton (”Rocket Scientists are Stupid Smart People”) relating to Space […]
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Using a laser propelled craft would be ineffective because the ratio of distance in relation to the amount of power/force produced by the solar winds is reduced by the power of four ( I dont know the exact distance off the top of my head) but what I do know is the further away the craft gets from the sun , the lasers/ solar winds propelling the craft would not be enough to propel it over the vast distance.(BTW, the sails on the craft would have to be miles across to even achieve the propulsion to get it moving at the speeds wanted.)One more note is that if you point a laser at the moon from earth, it wouldnt be a single dot over there but rather a several mile wide dot(of course you wouldnt see it because the light had dispersed so much)again this goes back to the exponential decrease in laser propulsion.
Another comment is these people are quite intelligent,with very realistic interpretations, the TV nerd , and the actual people are two different things. Not all life is like Hollywood.
Another note is that they emphasize the vast distances as being nearly impossible because they are, the resources required are phenominal. To truly understand the mechanics of organizing and putting into effect such an exploration mission would be nearly impossible as of yet, not to mention most likely bankrupting all of NASA and their affiliates.
Instead they focus on what is logically achievable in our lifetime, even if we sent a craft off towards our nearest star , none of us would live to see it reach the star, nor would the fuel(nuclear powered or not)even come close to being enough to make the trip.Suffice it to say that it wouldnt even make it to the star.
And… Suspended animation is so far an ineffective form of sustained life, with far more problems occuring and no long term possibilities for a living being to remain alive for longer than a few hours, a brick wall in its study.
Generation ships might work, but who would volunteer?Where would the fuel come from?It would require a mini earth environment involving many problems of operation. Maintenance? Supplies? Teachers for the next generation?Energy? these things dont just appear, and you wont have the use of a sun as an energy form.Heating? Keep in mind nuclear power doesnt last forever, Uranium Isotopes have to be replaced about once every 7yrs in the average power plant.
The bottom line is generation ships are ineffective.
Lastly, the space elevator, find me one team of engineers who want to plan and design a 60mile set of cables to hoist “I dont know what into space”, its not the idea that makes it bad but rather cost, and effeciency. Could it really haul several thousand lb parts into space up a 60 mile elevator,it would be easier to shoot a man in a cannon to alpha centauri.(joke) Bottom line its just very unlikely.
If I missed anything let me know,again its my opinion and my right to express it, not insulting you or anyting of the sort, just showing that it is alittle more complex than it seems, which is why engineers say what they say, and they have the right reasons to say it.
*footnote
My focus on this thing was not grammer at all. Please excuse the run-on sentences, they are plentiful.
Thoughtful comments, R, which don’t contradict my main point. There’s a difference between really, really difficult and intrinsically impossible.
Your first point about lasers is true (there is beam spread) but not entirely correct in practice (your numbers are pretty vague, but they are well understood). Also, you don’t try to accelerate a ship with a laser forever. Just when it is relatively close and then you let it coast.
And that’s the thing. We have already sent ships beyond the solar system and can reach distant stars in huge time limits. Those can come down, and there are other solutions. One thing that is perhaps possible in our current lifetimes is machine intelligence. If that happens, speeds are not a significant issue any more.
What is entirely possible to do would be to send a very small ship, laser accelerated here, carrying technology to another star. Depending on what you wanted to do, that technology could reproduce itself, reproduce humans (carrying appropriately frozen cells), etc. Braking could be a problem, I grant, but there are ways of solving that one, too. Just depends what you want to do.
Star Trek type futures look pretty impossible, I’d agree.
The whole point of the space elevator is that it would be vastly cheaper than the rockets we currently use. That’s not at all costly or inefficient. Problematic? Sure. Simpler than a space shuttle, though, and orders of magnitude cheaper per kilo hoisted. Read the Edwards and Westling book, or more recent updates and criticisms if you want to have a serious discussion about it. If it works at all, cost is the last problem with the scheme. But don’t ask rocket scientists about elevators. Not their specialty, and perhaps seen as competition.
While I am sympathetic to the idea of focusing on what we can do now or soon, I really hate the idea of saying never and killing dreams. Some people are unhappy with the stars being so hard to reach, but say it’s impossible and they may withdraw their support more generally.
I say science is about what is impossible or not. Engineering is about doing whatever isn’t impossible. If it isn’t impossible, there’s a solution.