by Pa Rock
Reader
When I read to relax, I usually immerse myself in the mystery genre or historical fiction. When I stray from those two realms of comfort, I sometimes drift toward science fiction. It's a guilty pleasure that I picked up in a college course where a fellow named John Mayfield taught me to appreciate writers like Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut.
Last fall, while stumbling around an amazing used bookshop in Salem, Oregon, I picked up the newest issue of Analog, a "science fiction and fact" pulp magazine of which I had been a reader some years before. The first piece in that issue (September/October 2109) was a guest editorial entitled "More than One Way to Skin a Starship" by fiction writer Allen M. Steele. Mr. Steele talked about the long-standing push-and-pull between science fiction writers and actual scientists, noting that the work of each serves to spur on the other: Science fiction writers use advances in science for direction in their writing, and scientists use ideas and concepts put forth in science fiction writing for inspiration and direction in their work.
I've not read any of Mr. Steele's fiction work, but I did check him out on The Google. His primary focus seems to be on interstellar (between stars) space travel and intergalactic (between galaxies) space travel - long and far more complicated rides than just a six-month hop over to Mars. Steele's main point in the article was to skip past fantastical "warp drives" and other sci-fi inventions and discuss the very real difficulties in long-distance space travel.
The primary problem is this: Albert Einstein posited many years ago that it would be impossible to travel beyond the speed of light, and so far he has not been proven wrong. That means that a trip to the star Betelgeuse - 642.5 light years from Earth - would take 642.5 Earth years to get there, if the starship somehow managed to attain the speed of light and travel at that speed for the entire trip. Mr. Steele pointed out that current fiction literature addressing this type of trip usually has the starship crews descending into madness on the journey and never completing the trip - or descendants completing the trek but having long-since forgotten why their ancestors set out in the first place.
In discussing ways that sci-fi writers have sought to solve this problem, Steele talks about "warp-drives" like on the Starship Enterprise - drives that apparently can exceed the speed of light and prove Einstein wrong, and "traversable wormholes," or shortcuts through space and time somehow engineered by man. Both of these remedies have been engineered by sci-fi writers, but have yet to make it into the real realm of science.
In my limited reading of science fiction I have also encountered plots where spaceships fly into - or are sucked into - black holes which take them to surprise destinations, and space vehicles that save great amounts of time and distance by slicing through waves or folds in space instead of plodding along on their surfaces. That second scenario, of course, requires a whole new vision of what interstellar space may actually be like.
There is another possibility, and that is having the same crew make the entire trip. They could be put to sleep, as with Hal's crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey - and then have their bodies somehow preserved from aging - perhaps through a deep freeze - and hope that any aliens which the ship might encounter will not view them as a gift of frozen meat from their Gods.
One more version of the "same crew" idea was explored by a writer named Poul Anderson in a book called Boat of a Million Years that I came across twenty or so years ago. Anderson envisioned that very, very rarely, and for reasons totally not understood, a person would be born on Earth who was immortal. He or she could be killed, but, barring harm from an outside source, would not die of old age or normal deadly maladies. They reached a young adult age and then remained at that age. Anderson discussed a dozen or so of these imaginary mortals and how, once they figured out that they were different, managed to move and hide among Earth's growing population - and then how they began finding one another. At the end of the novel, when technology had reached a level that could support extended space travel, they all assembled and had blasted off into a never-ending trip across the heavens.
Kepler Space Mission Data reported in November of 2013 its belief that over 40 billion Earth-sized planets are orbiting in the "habitable" zones of sun-like stars in the Milky Way - our home galaxy. That's a lot of possibilities for life beyond Earth - and the Milky Way is just one of thousands of galaxies. The nearest star to our sun is "Proxima Centauri," and it has a recently discovered orbiting planet in its "habitable" zone that scientists have named "Proxima b." - and it is a mere 4.24 light years from Earth. It would take a determined starship launched from Earth or our moon four-and-a-quarter Earth years to reach - traveling at the speed of light, and another four-and-a quarter years to send a message about its findings home - also at the speed of light.
And all of that would require a government or some other institution willing to fund such an expense. That could possibly happen in the lifetimes of my grandchildren, or more likely, their grandchildren.
But getting to Betelgeuse will probably take awhile.
Reader
When I read to relax, I usually immerse myself in the mystery genre or historical fiction. When I stray from those two realms of comfort, I sometimes drift toward science fiction. It's a guilty pleasure that I picked up in a college course where a fellow named John Mayfield taught me to appreciate writers like Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut.
Last fall, while stumbling around an amazing used bookshop in Salem, Oregon, I picked up the newest issue of Analog, a "science fiction and fact" pulp magazine of which I had been a reader some years before. The first piece in that issue (September/October 2109) was a guest editorial entitled "More than One Way to Skin a Starship" by fiction writer Allen M. Steele. Mr. Steele talked about the long-standing push-and-pull between science fiction writers and actual scientists, noting that the work of each serves to spur on the other: Science fiction writers use advances in science for direction in their writing, and scientists use ideas and concepts put forth in science fiction writing for inspiration and direction in their work.
I've not read any of Mr. Steele's fiction work, but I did check him out on The Google. His primary focus seems to be on interstellar (between stars) space travel and intergalactic (between galaxies) space travel - long and far more complicated rides than just a six-month hop over to Mars. Steele's main point in the article was to skip past fantastical "warp drives" and other sci-fi inventions and discuss the very real difficulties in long-distance space travel.
The primary problem is this: Albert Einstein posited many years ago that it would be impossible to travel beyond the speed of light, and so far he has not been proven wrong. That means that a trip to the star Betelgeuse - 642.5 light years from Earth - would take 642.5 Earth years to get there, if the starship somehow managed to attain the speed of light and travel at that speed for the entire trip. Mr. Steele pointed out that current fiction literature addressing this type of trip usually has the starship crews descending into madness on the journey and never completing the trip - or descendants completing the trek but having long-since forgotten why their ancestors set out in the first place.
In discussing ways that sci-fi writers have sought to solve this problem, Steele talks about "warp-drives" like on the Starship Enterprise - drives that apparently can exceed the speed of light and prove Einstein wrong, and "traversable wormholes," or shortcuts through space and time somehow engineered by man. Both of these remedies have been engineered by sci-fi writers, but have yet to make it into the real realm of science.
In my limited reading of science fiction I have also encountered plots where spaceships fly into - or are sucked into - black holes which take them to surprise destinations, and space vehicles that save great amounts of time and distance by slicing through waves or folds in space instead of plodding along on their surfaces. That second scenario, of course, requires a whole new vision of what interstellar space may actually be like.
There is another possibility, and that is having the same crew make the entire trip. They could be put to sleep, as with Hal's crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey - and then have their bodies somehow preserved from aging - perhaps through a deep freeze - and hope that any aliens which the ship might encounter will not view them as a gift of frozen meat from their Gods.
One more version of the "same crew" idea was explored by a writer named Poul Anderson in a book called Boat of a Million Years that I came across twenty or so years ago. Anderson envisioned that very, very rarely, and for reasons totally not understood, a person would be born on Earth who was immortal. He or she could be killed, but, barring harm from an outside source, would not die of old age or normal deadly maladies. They reached a young adult age and then remained at that age. Anderson discussed a dozen or so of these imaginary mortals and how, once they figured out that they were different, managed to move and hide among Earth's growing population - and then how they began finding one another. At the end of the novel, when technology had reached a level that could support extended space travel, they all assembled and had blasted off into a never-ending trip across the heavens.
Kepler Space Mission Data reported in November of 2013 its belief that over 40 billion Earth-sized planets are orbiting in the "habitable" zones of sun-like stars in the Milky Way - our home galaxy. That's a lot of possibilities for life beyond Earth - and the Milky Way is just one of thousands of galaxies. The nearest star to our sun is "Proxima Centauri," and it has a recently discovered orbiting planet in its "habitable" zone that scientists have named "Proxima b." - and it is a mere 4.24 light years from Earth. It would take a determined starship launched from Earth or our moon four-and-a-quarter Earth years to reach - traveling at the speed of light, and another four-and-a quarter years to send a message about its findings home - also at the speed of light.
And all of that would require a government or some other institution willing to fund such an expense. That could possibly happen in the lifetimes of my grandchildren, or more likely, their grandchildren.
But getting to Betelgeuse will probably take awhile.
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