Sunday, September 27, 2009

The Sky Calls to Us.
If We Do Not Destroy Ourselves, We Will, One Day, Venture to the Stars.


(H/T)

Yesterday morning, with rain in the forecast for today, I went flying. It was a fairly routine local flight, made more to warm up the engine, boil off any condensation and to keep rust at bay (for me and the engine) than for any other reason. It also gave me a chance to fill up the tanks; I had not done that after my last flight as the line at the gas pumps was too long. Besides that, long experience has shown me that the bugaboo of atmospheric water condensing on the walls of a partially-filled fuel tank and contaminating the fuel really doesn't happen over much less a period of time than months, so if I've taken off with fuel tanks and finish the flight within 1.5 hours, I often won't bother refueling after such a flight.

So, as the first decade of the 21st Century shambles towards its close, I went flying in an aircraft made 60 years previously. As I said, it was a routine flight. But for how many thousands of years had people dreamed of flying and yet, there I was, flying. Those dreamers, spread over all those millennia, would have been astonished and probably delighted to have sat in my airplane, seeing the landscape laid out from over half-a-mile up in the sky, as we flew through the sky at a speed that would have been beyond their comprehension (120mph). It was impossible to do, in their day, but there I was, flying through the sky in an airplane that is now considered to be ancient, outmoded and slow.

And so we progress. Within less than two centuries, we have gone from being able to travel maybe fifteen miles a day across land (if the roads were tolerable and there was an inn to stop at) to being able to journey from a home in Boston to a relative's home in California in less than a day. We seem stalled at that speed for the last fifty years, but that will eventually change, as it always does. After all, took nearly two thousand years to get to the point where overland travel was appreciably faster than it was in the height of the Roman Empire.

If we can keep our civilization intact over the following centuries, I do believe that humans will venture to the stars. The technology to do so will be as unimaginable to us today as the inner workings of an aircraft engine would have been to a Sumerian, but provided that we do not destroy ourselves or our habitat on this big blue marble of a planet, the technology will come and we will go to the stars.

A still more glorious dawn awaits.

10 comments:

  1. That was a lovely use of an over-used device, the auto-tuned voice.

    It was like Kermit the frog singing an intellectual ballad ( sorry Carl ).

    Whenever I get discouraged about the state of the world, it helps me to take a longer view. As long as possible. Things will get better, eventually, even if it doesn't involve me personally.

    In the meantime, we've got frikkin' airplanes. How great is that? If there were one person, living or dead I could give an airplane ride to, it would be... obviously? ...

    Leonardo daVinci. It would blow his mind.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Have you ever seen a film called Morons From Outer Space? That's pretty much how I imagine us in space some day. Not so glorious, really, just there.

    Still, we will get there some day, if we don't destroy ourselves somehow, either through aggression, stupidity, or indifference.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Cujo, I haven't heard of that movie, let alone seen it.

    Sarah, I'd take him skydiving.

    ReplyDelete
  4. One problem is that there are some fundamental physical constants that we're running up against here. The faster you go, the more energy it takes. Storing energy in hydrocarbon bonds is a fairly dense method of storing energy, but to go faster you must carry more fuel, and the more fuel you carry, the less cargo you can carry -- thus why every SST has not been commercially viable, they simply could not carry enough people and cargo to make them cost-effective compared to slower subsonic aircraft. Then there is the fundamental constant of the universe, c , the speed of light. That pretty much guarantees that humanity itself is never going to go to the stars -- it would take too long, and the vast vacuum of space is too difficult to send fragile biological constructs across. Perhaps mankind's machines -- perhaps even mankind's mental makeup -- will reach the stars, but the notion that the actual biological sausage creatures called "man" ever will doesn't pass the laugh and giggle. Star Trek is *fiction*.

    Not that it really matters. This civilization is doomed, and I seriously doubt there will be another one after it. Not for a few million years until a new ecosystem has a chance to evolve from the wrecked ruins of this one, anyhow...

    ReplyDelete
  5. BadTux, if one happens to believe that what we know, now, will always constrain what we can do, then you are correct.

    On the other hand, Sumerians couldn't fly. The Romans could not send a telegram from Rome to Athens.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Such pessimism, BadTux. Tsk, tsk, tsk. :)

    I agree the next next step ( out of the solar system ) is a big one, but it's not impossible. There are near-c propulsion ideas, they just require humans to be able to find a way to control astronomically large energies.

    If we had a drive capable of a constant 1-g acceleration, you could go places in a human lifetime.

    Then there's the "ark" generation ship idea... which probably requires both a desperate need and a known habitable destination first.

    ps - Earth bound misfit - daVinci sky diving, really? I know he sketched chutes, but like me, I think he dreamt of flying, not falling.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Flying does not break fundamental physical laws of the universe. Birds and insects do it, for cryin' out loud. There is a fundamental difference between "we don't know how to do it" and "violates fundamental physical laws of the universe".

    In the case of approaching the speed of light, approaching it requires expenditure of energy approaching infinity. We are again talking fundamental constants here. There is a fundamental constraint to the amount of energy contained in a given mass (e=mc**2, remember?).

    Regarding the notion of an "ark ship", the core problem is one of permeability. The planet Earth keeps its atmosphere on board via gravity, a fundamental physical quantity of the universe, and replenishes it regularly via internal nuclear reactions that release various gasses into the atmosphere as volcanos belch etc. A spacegoing vessel of any type, even the hollowed-out asteroids beloved by "hard science fiction" writers, lacks sufficient mass to keep its atmosphere on board via gravity, and therefore must keep it on board via a membrane of some sort. The problem is that even if said membrane is made of yards of cement or rock or steel, over a sufficient period of time it serves as a diffusion membrane similar to the one used by the Manhattan Project to separate out U-235 from U-238. Lighter particles escape faster than heavier particles. The internal atmosphere thus becomes deprived of lighter gases over time. Granted, we are talking timeframes of centuries... but that's the timeframes we were already talking about, remember?

    The clear conclusion is that biological sausage creatures are not going to the stars, it is simply too difficult to provide for their needs over that length of time. It may eventually be possible to download the entire state of a human mind and place it into a machine and send humanity to the stars that way, but replicating the entire ecosphere of planet Earth where sausage creatures evolved on anything smaller than planet Earth on time scales of centuries simply is not feasible because of the constraints of the physical laws involved. Machine intelligences which do not require gaseous substances for survival could do it, because the laws of diffusion for solids take place over millennia, not centuries. But it's hard to say that even a human intelligence downloaded into a machine would be the same thing as "humanity" -- it would be a new creation with much different development over time because the body in which an intelligence develops has significant impact upon its evolution.

    ReplyDelete
  8. BadTux, I'm aware of the energy requirements of near-c acceleration. A relatively (ha!) modest fraction of c would be enough to explore the local neighborhood, given some patience.

    I try to keep an open mind, and believe it a little soon to decide humans understand all physics completely enough to rule out interstellar travel forever.

    For some wayoutthere physics speculation, see the papers here.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Oh, and the NASA breakthrough site has been idle for some time, and the project leader has moved on. Some of the links don't work. Here is a current page with some nice overview pages on the issues, both with current technology and speculative physics.

    ReplyDelete
  10. What we don't know about the cosmos is far more voluminous than what we do know. "Dark energy" and "dark matter" are nothing more than fudge factors to account for the fact that, based on what we observe, the Universe isn't acting the way our models would predict. There has to be something else going on, so the astronomers call it "dark matter" and "dark energy".

    If we have no real clue as to what is really going on, then how can we say that we have a definitive handle on how we would travel?

    ReplyDelete

House Rules #1, #2 and #6 apply to all comments. Rule #3 also applies to political comments.

In short, don't be a jackass. THIS MEANS YOU!
If you never see your comments posted, see Rule #7.

All comments must be on point and address either the points raised in the blog post or points raised by commenters in response.
Any comments that drift off onto other topics are subject to deletion.

(Please don't feed the trolls.)

中國詞不評論,冒抹除的風險。僅英語。

COMMENT MODERATION IS IN EFFECT UFN. This means that if you are an insulting dick, nobody will ever see it.