Lingua Astra...

Image Source: What a generational spaceship would actually look like, Rachel Feltman, Popular Science

Topics: Evolution, Interstellar Travel, Science Fiction, Spaceflight

Mrs. Flynt played "telephone" with us, simply lining up the entire fifth grade class in one line, arranged with chairs to accent the exercise. She showed a note to the student at the beginning of the line. She then whispered the contents of the note to the student to her right. I heard it from my neighbor, and whispered it in kind. It followed down line until it got to the last: the note's contents had completely changed from the first student to the twentieth.

I do not recall the original contents of the note, but the exercise has been repeated here on Earth without the need for fusion reactors, rotating habitats to induce artificial gravity, space lasers or Klingons. Culture on a generation starship would change from its origin planet. A society would emerge diametrically different than its original, hopefully far better than our current one, inculcating survival principles that would allow it to finish the journey to its destination, and thrive once there.

In science fiction, there’s something called a generation ship: a spacecraft that ferries humankind on a multiple-generation-long journey to brand new star systems or even galaxies.

The idea has also been touted here in the real world by those hell-bent on traversing the stars. But there’s a major problem with the concept, and we’re not talking about the countless generations doomed to be born and die for the sake of a mission they never agreed to — that’s a whole other thing. Rather, Universe Today points out that, if past is prelude, the language spoken on the ship would eventually evolve to the point that it seems incoherent back on Earth.

On an Interstellar Flight, Language Itself Would Evolve, Dan Robitzski, Futurism

The Slingshot Effect...

An artist’s illustration of a spacecraft’s escape trajectory (bright white line) from our solar system into interstellar space. Credit: Mike Yukovlev Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory - Link 2 below

Topics: Astrophysics, Interstellar Travel, NASA, Spaceflight, Star Trek

Yes, an actual slingshot effect does exist.

As much a fan as I am of the Trek, this isn't it.

When a spacecraft in orbit about a primary body comes close to a moon that is orbiting the same primary body, there is an exchange of orbital energy and angular momentum between the spacecraft and the moon. The total orbital energy remains constant, so if the spacecraft gains orbital energy then the moon's orbital energy decreases. Orbital period, which is the time required to complete one orbit about the primary body, is proportional to orbital energy. Therefore, as the spacecraft's orbital period increases (the slingshot effect), the moon's orbital period decreases.

But because the spacecraft is much, much smaller than the moon, the effect on the spacecraft's orbit is much greater than on the moon's orbit. For example, the Cassini spacecraft weighs about 3,000 kilograms, whereas Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons, weighs about 1023 kilograms. The effect on Cassini is thus about 20 orders of magnitude greater than the effect on Titan is. [1]

*****

It would begin in the early 2030s, with a launch of a roughly half-ton nuclear-powered spacecraft on the world’s largest rocket, designed to go farther and faster than any human-made object has ever gone before. The probe would pass by Jupiter and perhaps later dive perilously close to the sun, in both cases to siphon a fraction of each object’s momentum, picking up speed to supercharge its escape. Then, with the sun and the major planets rapidly receding behind it, the craft would emerge from the haze of primordial dust that surrounds our star system, allowing it an unfiltered glimpse of the feeble all-sky glow from countless far-off galaxies. Forging ahead, it could fly by one or more of the icy, unexplored worlds now known to exist past Pluto. And gazing back, it could seek out the pale blue dot of Earth, looking for hints of our planet’s life that could be seen from nearby stars.

All this would be but a prelude, however, to what McNutt and other mission planners pitch as the probe’s core scientific purpose. About a decade after launch, it would pierce the heliosphere—a cocoonlike region around our solar system created by “winds” of particles flowing from our sun—to reach and study the cosmic rays and clouds of plasma that make up the “interstellar medium” that fills the dark spaces between the stars. Continuing its cruise, by the 2080s it could conceivably have traveled as far as 1,000 astronomical units (AU), or Earth-sun distances, from the solar system, achieving its primary objective at last: an unprecedented bird’s-eye view of the heliosphere that could revolutionize our understanding of our place in the cosmos. [2]

1. How does the slingshot effect (or gravity assist) work to change the orbit of a spacecraft? Scientific American, July 11, 2005
Jeremy B. Jones, Cassini Navigation Team Chief at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
2. Proposed Interstellar Mission Reaches for the Stars, One Generation at a Time
Scientific American, Lee Billings, November 2019

Going Interstellar...

Artist’s depiction of a space probe, propelled by a solar sail. (Image credit: Andrzej Mirecki)

Topics: Exoplanets, Interstellar Travel, NASA, Space, Space Exploration, Spaceflight, Spacetime

Solar sails have been discussed for a long time as the most viable option for interstellar travel at current technological attainment. That will entail the nanoengineering of polymers that can be durable to things like micro-meteor strikes at 0.1 c (one-tenth the speed of light) as well as shielding for electronics so as not to fry instrumentation on the exceedingly long journey. I hope we're mature enough societally, socially and emotional intelligence-wise to complete the project. It would be a shame if our instrument transmitted information back to Mother Earth, and for a myriad of bad reasons, no one was here to receive the message.

NASA is in the earliest stages of planning an exoplanet expedition, set to mark the 100th anniversary of its first crewed Moon landing, Apollo 11. A small team based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hopes to send a spacecraft to a distant planet in search of life.

In 2016, a funding bill was passed that called upon NASA to investigate methods of interstellar travel that could reach at least 10 percent of the speed of light by 2069 [the 100th year anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission]. It also requested a mission to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own.

A probe is set to be sent to the chosen exoplanet to determine whether or not life is present. A few years after its launch, NASA will send a large telescope into deep space, which will use gravitational lensing to offer a full view of the exoplanet.

At present, there’s some debate as to whether Alpha Centauri or another system will be selected, as there are several candidates being considered. Of course, there are some big questions to be answered before this mission becomes a reality.

NASA Is Planning the First-Ever Interstellar Mission, Brad Jones, Futurism

#P4TC:

TRAPPIST-1...

Interstellar Transitions...

Space.com: The Spaceships of 'Interstellar' Explained

Topics: Colonization, Evolution, Exoplanets, Founder's Effect, Interstellar Travel

Part of the reason we became a "United States of America" was in the coming to America.

I'm sure the Native Americans would have looked far more Asian had they stayed from the land bridge into Alaska. I'm sure if the colonists were not so, if they had stayed in Europe (or, kidnapped from Africa), they probably would know how to survive in their typical environments and predictable weather. The first winters were brutal; the Native Americans who helped them survive were repaid sadly, with a distasteful brutality.

However, the first Martians will likely be former Earthlings that will not have alien natives to push around. They will however, have 1/3 g and a completely different weather environment - i.e., far away from the sun; no air outside their habitats to breath, no green grass or blue skies. Like the colonists to the Americas, there will be substantial mental changes that will occur, hopefully directed and positive. Distant from the former home world, they will no longer have close ties to it. In one hundred years of colonization - four generations - might want to be "on their own," independent, establish their own economy, product and trade to barter with. The farther from home we venture, warp drive or sub light, the more likely aliens we encounter will eventually be us.

One of the more prescient things - which featured the many talents of its actors - was the crew of the Enterprise seemed to be always doing something: plays, harps or Holodecks. The Terran analogy would be life on a submarine - literal death, either crushing ocean pressure or the cold vacuum of space - is outside the hull of your vessel, so keeping your mind busy is imperative to not going stir crazy (submariners can disagree with my analogy freely). We also may not become the "United Federations of Planets" utopia Gene Roddenberry envisioned,  unless our current self-centered, selfish philosophies don't change as we venture forth. Lighting a "candle in the darkness," we should consider where our next steps fall.

A Democratic Technocracy...

Bernal Sphere interior, complete with California-style wine and cheese party, and human powered flight in the lower-gravity area near the axis. Painting by Rick Guidice courtesy of NASA. Source: National Space Society

A Democratic Technocracy I’d define as "a representative democratic republic of elected officials independent of outside financial interests with experience in and/or an appreciation of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to effectively govern a nation and global economy exquisitely dependent on STEM."

More in the embed/link below, and my thoughts on "Interstellar."

Snarky Commentary 3 by Reginald L. Goodwin

A Little Bit of Bedlam...

Image: Neil Armstrong and Arthur Clarke met for the first time during a NASA conference held on Wallops Island, VA in June 1970, having shared the bus that took them out to Wallops from NASA headquarters.

From Centauri Dreams by Paul Gilster

As we approach the 45th anniversary of the first landing on the Moon, journalist and author Neil McAleer has been looking back at an interview he conducted with Neil Armstrong on March 16, 1989. The author of Visionary: The Odyssey of Sir Arthur C. Clarke (Clarke Project, 2012), McAleer has lived among and written about the space community for many years. We learn little about Clarke from this interview, but Armstrong’s character comes through — he’s terse, focused, always impatient to get back to work. I suspect Centauri Dreams regular Al Jackson, who worked with Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in his role as astronaut trainer on the Lunar Module Simulator (see The Magicians of Confidence), will recognize Armstrong’s mode here immediately. His self-imposed distance could never conceal the cool competence he displayed on the most breathtaking descent in history.

An interview conducted by Neil McAleer

I requested this interview with Neil Armstrong 25 years ago, when I was writing and researching the first edition of my Arthur C. Clarke biography. That work was the reason. I wanted to know how they met and what kind of relationship they had during the early years of the Space Age.

The interview’s first question, not on tape, asked Mr. Armstrong if he knew how Arthur C. Clarke’s substantial Epilogue (“Beyond Apollo”) for the book First on the Moon came about.

[Armstrong] “I just don’t have that kind of information.”

This book—subtitled, “A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr.”–is considered the official eyewitness account of Apollo 11’s journey to the moon’s surface and return to Earth. It was published in 1970, the year after their historic mission.

[McAleer] “Did you ever actually meet Clarke, by the way?”

[Armstrong] “Yes. We attended a NASA meeting for a couple of days, and I can’t remember where it was. It seems to me it was somewhere in Virginia. [Wallops Island I found out later]. It must have been around 1970.”

Centauri Dreams: Neil Armstrong - A Little Bit of Bedlam

Tomorrow: M.A.D.

Interstellar Communications...

Figure 2, page 3 of the paper (arXiv link below)

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Here’s an interesting question. If we ever want to communicate with civilisations around other stars, what will be the best way to send a message, given that we will know nothing about how they intend to receive it?

That’s the question considered today by David Messerschmitt at the University of California, Berkeley. It turns out that the laws of physics, the nature of interstellar space and a little common sense place surprisingly strict bounds on how communication can take place. So if extraterrestrials think in a way that is anything like us, communication of one kind or another is distinctly possible.

Messerschmitt begins by listing the way in which any form of communication is likely to be limited. To begin with, he says that the power of any signal falls with the square of the distance traveled. Assuming that energy is likely to be a limiting factor for a civilisation, an important property of any interstellar transmitter will be to minimise the energy per bit in any signal–while still allowing the reliable extraction of the information it contains, of course.

One potential shortcoming is that the science and technologies that Messerschmitt invokes were all developed on Earth within the last century. That’s a blink of an eye in cosmological terms.

Back in the 1970s, the American astronomer Carl Sagan pointed out that any alien civilisation is likely to be at a very different stage in its evolution. Should it be less mature than us, however, this civilisation will not have developed radio technology in the first place.

That means that our potential contacts are likely to be much more advanced, probably centuries or millennia ahead of us. Sagan asked whether it is possible that these civilisations will have stumbled across a better form of interstellar communication technology, one that seems like magic to us.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Physics arXiv: How to Design an Interstellar Communications System

Schwarzschild Kugelblitz...

Source: Discovery link below

The fastest object ever built by the human species is the Voyager 1 space probe, moving at a speed of 18 miles per second. If it were heading toward Proxima Centauri (which it’s not), Voyager 1 would reach our nearest stellar neighbor in about 80,000 years.

Clearly, if interstellar travel is to be accomplished on human timescales, much greater speeds are required. At 10 percent of the speed of light (a thousand times faster than Voyager 1, but a conceivable speed for likely soon-to-be-realized fusion engines), Proxima Centuri could be reached in approximately 45 years -- less than a human lifetime.

In his 1955 paper Geons, John Wheeler, one of the pioneers of the theory of black holes, coined the term "Kugelblitz" -- which translates literally to "ball lightning." He suggested that if enough pure energy could be focused into a region of space, that energy would form a microscopic black hole, which could be described by the equations of Karl Schwarzschild -- a "Schwarzschild Kugelblitz" (or SK).

Fast forward 19 years to the ground-breaking work of Stephen Hawking, who realized that quantum mechanical effects near a black hole’s event horizon (the boundary beyond which no light or other radiation can escape) would give rise to the emission of radiation, so-called "Hawking Radiation." The smaller the black hole, the greater its radiated power and the less its mass, but the shorter its lifetime until it completely evaporates.

To be useful, a SK would need to be small enough to expel the required energy, light enough to be reasonably accelerated, but large enough to have a sufficiently useful lifetime. Such a Schwarzschild Kugelblitz would be incredibly small, smaller than even a proton, which is one of the basic constituents of an atom.

Despite being so miniscule, Schwarzschild Kugelblitzes are incredibly heavy. A typical SK weighs more than two Empire State Buildings, and has a power output of approximately 129 petawatts (1 petawatt = 10 quadrillion watts). This is 10 million times the July 2013 power consumption record of New York City!

In 1993, Schwarzschild Kugelblitzes pierced the realm of popular culture, albeit under a pseudonym. In the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Timescape", an artificial quantum singularity (i.e. Schwarzschild Kugelblitz) is revealed to be a Romulan Warbird’s power source.

Thermodynamics: the study of energy and its transformations (description from my undergraduate textbook). Along with fusion power eventually becoming a reality, this could substantially change the way we generate power, wean us of our need for fossil fuel from countries not-to-friendly and change the Calculus of our geopolitics...hopefully for the better.

Discovery: Kugelblitz! Powering a Starship With a Black Hole
Jeff Lee, Icarus Interstellar
Harvard Abstracts: Geons, by John Wheeler
(Note: Dr. Wheeler taught at UT Austin, Texas)

V'Ger...

Artist conception, Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Not exactly "warp factor one," but its a start...

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun.

New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident. A report on the analysis of this new data, an effort led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, is published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.

"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."

NASA: NASA Spacecraft Embarks on Historic Journey Into Interstellar Space
Star Trek Memory Alpha Wiki: V'Ger

As Monarch Butterflies...

Monarch butterflies travel thousands of miles before seeding forward, and...dying.

Perhaps the first starships will be one-way, a beneficial self-insurance of survival.

Sadly, the conundrum would be "who," birthing an interstellar caste system...I can see the lottery/survival/reality show. Joy...

Of course, any sentient inhabitants may not meet our new "Mayflower" with a welcome party, nor assist us through the harshness of a new world. Or, landing during the planet's Jurassic period could be kind of...dicey!

Related site: 100 Year Starship

Wandering Exoplanets and Series Finales...

Who knew?

I was at the bottom of the pareto for Screen Rant's review of Smallville's finale: largely because I have a physics degree and I'm a comic purist.

Darkseid was referenced as some kind of a spirit/mist, and apparently "the devil": the planet Apokolips kind of wandered into earth's orbit to cause the end of the world, which is apparently this Saturday (I plan to be blogging on May 22^nd). Superman/Christ-Avatar saves us by "pushing" the planet away -- one would hope it fairs better than city buildings in his grip. Here are my nerd points:

- F = ma: Kal-El would have to be of considerable mass and have considerable acceleration to PUSH a planet. The earth's velocity is about 100,000 kilometers/hour. Apokolips, our wandering planet might be a little slower, but looked kind of...massive in the CGI cartoon of it.

- Limited time was given to tidal forces, earthquakes of the entrance to our orbit of another planet, nor what force/propulsion system actually propelled it INTO our orbit.

- After spending a lot of time building up a "Watchtower" and a "Justice League" during the series (and hinting at a Legion of Doom), only Supes and Green Arrow see any action in the finale. What justice is that?

- Until this Nature article, I did not know planets "wandered" galaxies without suns.

MY guess: the science fiction plot device of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge had already been taken by the Marvel Comic movie Thor (and claimed by Marvel's lawyers), so they could not use the typical New God Tech/Mother Box Powered/Boom Tube. The link even mentions comparisons to Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge.

I also like the reference to the Arthur C. Clarke quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It made Asgard merely part of the other eight of the nine worlds, and benevolent (though highly warlike) space aliens.

Like I said...I'm a nerd, and a story purist.

Nature News: So many lonely planets with no star to guide them

Dreaming dreams; seeing visions...

The long-haul starship plan

One participant in the workshop was former NASA scientist Marc Millis, a leading authority on breakthrough propulsion physics concepts that might make interstellar hops a doable proposition.

"The meeting and the DARPA funding is about creating an organization that could last for 100-years, rather than about the technological and sociological advancements necessary toeventually create starships," Millis said. "In fact, the funding is not allowed to be spent on any research or educational activities related to interstellar flight, but instead can only be used to define that organization. As much as I really like the name, '100-year starship,' this study should instead be called the '100-year organization study.'"

Millis pointed out that the overall goal of the organization is to sustain research that will lead to the creation of a starship in roughly 100-years, and to inspire students along the way. By asking “why-what-how,” it was hoped to flesh out some substance to define that organization, he said.

SPACE.com links:

NASA's 100-Year Starship Project Sets Sights on Interstellar Travel

Star Trek's Warp Drive: Not Impossible

VIDEO: Warp Drives and Worm Holes