The Starship: Bringer of Harmony

Williams K Hartmann is an American space artist. In 1984 he wrote a book titled “Out of the Cradle, Exploring the Frontiers Beyond Earth”. In this book he proposed something which is quite profound and which had become known as the Golden Rule. It states that “Space exploration must be carried out in a way so as to reduce, not aggravate, tensions in human society”. The Starship has the potential to do just that.

Firstly, the manufacture, construction and assembly of a Starship is an enormous undertaking which is likely to require the capabilities of people and organizations from across the globe. Any sensible cost estimates for a Starship program will usually be in the trillions of dollars, so with the 2012 Gross World Product of the entire planet being in the region of $80 trillion, the Starship economics begin to become tractable if done on an international basis. The implication here is that the construction of a Starship will likely require human co-operation on a global scale not seen before. The nearest we have to this model is the International Space Station (ISS), a structure that is 450 tonnes in mass and has cost approximately $150 billion. But it has involved not just the United States, but also the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, Russia and many other countries. The ISS stands out as a superb achievement in human co-operation as a large scale construction project and it is on the critical path to Starship construction. And by the way, I prefer the original name, “Space Station Freedom”.

Second, as we move away from the planet Earth and visit other worlds, we will look back upon that pale blue dot and learn to treasure it more. Over the 3.5 billion years of history of life on Earth, humans have risen to the top of the food chain, due to our apparent intelligence (although frequently one wonders). But there is a down side to our ascension, which is that all of the other animals on the planet are forced to compete with us for resources and land, as we embark on the conquest of the natural world without due consideration for the consequence of our actions. The Amazon rainforest for example is disappearing at a rate of something like 600 square km per month, mainly due to deforestation by human settlement and land development. Yet, we continue to consume, we continue to not strive to live within our means. We always want more. As the dominant species on the planet Earth we have a duty to be the moral caretakers of Gaia – the only world we have ever known. That is the responsibility of those who would choose to rule. If we do not learn to take our responsibilities seriously, what hope then is there for the new worlds we aspire to colonise? As we learn to design and build Starships, we must also learn to change our ways because the Starship and current man are not compatible; we must adapt our nature, to nature.

A third element that the Starship brings is universal freedom to expand. With our population on Earth growing at an average rate of something like 2% per annum, we will be at 10 billion people by around the year 2050. Clearly, humans have a need to explore and expand but with the limited resources of the Earth this is not sustainable. The Starship brings with it the opportunity to expand at will in all directions to anywhere, utilizing the abundance resources of space appropriately as we move from one world to the next. The Starship is our vehicle of universal liberty.

Forth, we still have many problems on the planet Earth. I have already mentioned over population, but what of starvation, disease, conflicts, poor resource distribution, and energy sources? Science and technology has the potential to solve all of these problems given sufficient time and support. As we strive to invent new propulsion systems, power systems and other technologies, this brings with it as yet not-conceived technological spin-offs which will have the capacity to change and improve the human condition.

Sixth, let us understand the implications to human culture as we pursue the mission of the Starship. This brings with it an informed and educated population as we need more engineers, scientists, biologists and other specialists. Many will be inspired by what is achieved by the Starships and will seek similar careers producing a scientifically informed population which has to filter back up to the political system. This will naturally lead to improvements in how decisions are made, based upon data, rather than emotional trends in popular society.

Finally, and relating to culture, is learning to live with each other’s differences, no matter what the colour of our skin, our sexual orientation, gender or philosophical outlook. The 1960s saw the peak of the civil rights movement in America, a period where people simply desired to be seen as equals and rightly so. We have made great progress since those dark days, but there is clearly much more work to be done. As we embark on the voyage of the Starship we are surely to meet Alien beings which are stranger than we could ever imagine in both appearance and in cultural values. The science fiction novel “The Mote in God’s Eye” by Larry Niven, contains a description of the Mote, which is one of the best representations of realistic aliens I have yet come across. How would we really react when we meet these beings from distant stars? Will we find their ways distasteful, unethical, and immoral? What makes our ways right?

It is clear that as we pursue the dream of the Starship, we must also learn to live with each other, because any differences we have down here on Earth, will be nothing in comparison to what awaits us in the darkest depths of the Galaxy. It is entirely possible that out there lays the best of our hopes and dreams and the worst of our nightmares. We should prepare for all eventualities, and the best way to do that is to learn to practice tolerance and compassion for each other first.

The Starship: What is it for Anyway?

A Star is a distant stellar objective, burning nuclear reactions at its core, releasing fusion energy and radiating outwards across all matter and fields in its path. A ship is a vessel that will take passengers or cargo from A to B, from here to there or from there to here. So, you want to travel on a Starship, but why? In ages past people have travelled from one continent to another on ships. This could have been to do trade or to settle a new land or simply to visit friends. Today, we can also take a world cruise and visit many continents across the globe in a matter of weeks. We also live in the age of passenger jets where you can get up for breakfast in London and be in New York just after lunch. These seem like long journeys to us during the trip but they are the blink of an eye in the grand context of interstellar travel.

The nearest star is Proxima Centauri at 4.3 light years distance. A light year is the distance that light travels in one year at its speed of around 300,000 km/s, which is equal to 9,460 billion km away. So the nearest star is 40,678 billion km distance. If you could travel at only 1% of the speed of light, it would still take 430 years to get there. Going back in history that is the year 1583 and in that year the Italian scientist and philosopher Galileo Galilei would only have been 19 years old. By the time the Starship reached its destination after centuries of travel time, what history would have passed by back on Earth? Indeed, how would the culture on board the Starship have evolved? They would have their very own rich and interesting history, although hopefully no conflicts. What if we could travel at 10% of the speed of light? Then it would take us a mere 43 years trip time, half a century. In Earth’s history that would be the year 1970 which is one year after mankind first walked on the surface of its small gravitational companion – The Moon. That certainly sounds more reasonable.

And when that crew gets to their destination what will they find? Will it be pastures green, new life, new civilizations? Or will they have to work hard for many decades in order to establish a viable colony? Of course, those who arrive at the destination from the slow century’s long mission would never have known the planet Earth and it would only be a memory in the banks of their computers and stories told by their great grandparents of old. For the quicker decades long mission, some who set out on the journey may still be alive when they arrive but how would they react? Would they be disappointed by what they find and look back with their deep space telescopes at the distant Sun, wishing they were home and had never made the attempt? The colonists would be resigned to their situation and would have to make the best of whatever they have. Hopefully, with hard work and optimism, they can make a liveable home for themselves and learn to mine the resources of their new stellar system. In time, towns will spring up, followed by cities as an entire civilization emerges in this new place suspended by the light of a different sun beam.

As the new generation grows up they will hear tales of the green and blue planet Earth, the home of their genetic origin and the will wonder looking up at the stars at night, what that planet must be like. They will hear about its deep and vast watery oceans, its cold polar ice caps, its hot dry deserts, and wet and wondrous jungles adorned with so many species of life you cannot count them all. To them, Earth will appear as a place of myth and fantasy, a place of magic and splendour. Their urge to learn more about it will grow. Their yearning to see it for themselves and to feel the touch of a rain drop on a cold windy day, will become strong.

Today there are some of us who look at the stars with a dream to travel there, to wonder among those glistening gems that shine in the deep, and to satisfy our tenacious curiosity for what may be there. Some of these future interstellar colonists will have a will of adventure just like their ancestral explorers and eventually they will be determined to make the crossing back, to the place from where they had come. What a moment that would be, a human being from the distant stars many centuries later returning to the planet Earth. As a species we can be proud of all that we accomplished and welcome our Star Child as one of our own. They may appear different, perhaps of altered complexion – although there would not have been time enough for evolution to do its work. But their character and personality would certainly be different. They would have less of our weaknesses and more of our strengths. These humans from the stars would be made from the hardships they had endured making their distant space colony a success. They would have things to teach us, and the children that were sent away had come home to tell us their stories. Yet, this would still be only two star systems occupied by our kind, and the entire Cosmos would still await us to be explored.

Eventually, some of those distant colonies will be so far away, that they may forget Earth altogether. As natural catastrophes’ happen on their adopted planets perhaps their entire history will be wiped out over eons of time. The name Earth may have no meaning for some of these future colonies. But does this matter, because our seed would be out there and life, the most precious thing in the Universe, would be flourishing. How wonderful is nature to give us this great tapestry of space and time, matter and energy that we see before us scattered across the dome of our sky? So that one day we may go out to it, and finally learn the meaning of what it means to be a Starship human. So what role does the Starship play in all this? It is our vessel; that takes us from star A to star B. All animals on Earth undergo some form of migration, including birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects and crustaceans. Even tree populations may migrate over the landscape through generations, typically due to environmental suppression or dispersal capacity of the population by seed. Perhaps humans too have it within our biological drivers to migrate to new places, so that we may survive, learn, adapt and grow. In the timescales of the Cosmos, humans going to the stars and returning may be like a form of migration. How awe inspiring is nature to lay out all of these opportunities for us? The question is; are we intelligent enough to yield the technology we develop for this purpose or will we destroy ourselves in the attempt? In some ways, the development of the Starship is a test of our nature and fitness for survival out there, due to the duality of the advanced technology which can be used for good, or bad. I’m personally optimistic that we can mature from our childhood slumber and embrace the promising future that is before us.

God Speed! Second star to the left – eyes forward.

Leonardo and the Starship

An invention is a unique device, method or process. It could be something completely new and never seen before or an improvement on an existing product. Often these technologies can be disruptive innovations which completely change the market place, taking the performance of a product onto a new paradigm of thought. The automobile or motor car for example, was an incremental technology changer, because it did not result in a major disruption to the market place which was dominated by the horse-drawn carriage. But once mass production of cars took off in the early 1900s and their performance involved significant reductions in journey times, the technology transitioned to a game-chaning innovation. This is an example of a technology that was not immediately disruptive, but with its introduction and further investment, it soon became one. It is what you might call, revolutionary. Those products which do not dramatically affect the market place are known as evolutionary, and they merely add incremental improvements to a technology over time.

One of the greatest inventors in history was the Italian Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci who lived between 1452 and 1519. Among his many accomplishments were his many engineering innovations. This included designs for a bridge, diving suit, cannon, large cross bows tanks, submarine, and designs for various flying machines including a hang glider, parachute and something that resembles a helicopter. Leonardo clearly had some understanding for the basic laws of momentum, centripetal force, friction and the aerodynamics of aerofoils. He used an extensive knowledge of engineering, including pertaining to gears, pulleys, cantilevers and hydraulics. Despite all Leonardo’s genius, it would not have been possible to successfully construct some of the machines of his imagination, simply because the technology and physics knowledge did not yet exist. From the perspective of many people in his time, Leonardo’s inventions would have seemed fanciful and not something that would ever be a part of any plausible future. To the minds of us today, his inventions were prophetic, future looking, realistic and credible in principle. Opinions are relative when viewed through the lens of history.

Today, many people spend their time designing vessels what could someday travel to other stars. How will history view these attempts? We know that space travel is possible, and indeed we have sent spacecraft to the furthest reaches of our solar system. Many of the technological advances made today take us that little bit further, faster and sooner. They are evolutionary technologies (e.g. chemical propulsion) although some can now been seen as revolutionary (e.g. electric propulsion).

Today, eager minds, young and old, imagine what the future spacecraft will be like, the ones that we can definitely call revolutionary, and the ones we can especially call disruptive. Is it possible that we can conceive of “da Vinci machines” that will take us to the Stars in decades, years, months, weeks or even days? From all we have learned about the laws of physics and its application to technology, we can at least answer this question with a positive: Yes, it does appear possible at some point in the future.

The British Interplanetary Society Project Daedalus study of the 1970s was essentially a proof of existence theorem, to show that interstellar travel was feasible in theory. In general, many agree that the team succeeded in this aim. One of the key elements of the design was the need to carry Deuterium and Helium-3 fuel, and due to the scarcity of Helium-3 this necessitated mining the material from the gas giants. This was suggestive of the need for a solar system wide economy and so the first launch date was pushed out quite extensively. In order to build large Starships (Daedalus was approximately 53,000 tonnes) you need large space infrastructure in place and in particular cheap and reliable access to Earth Orbit. The Project Daedalus Study Group expected that this would plausibly come about between the years 2200-2250. Given that the Daedalus probe was to take around half a century to get to its stellar target of Barnard’s star, the first Starship would not be arriving at a distance star system until around the year 2300.  Can we do better?

When I initiated the Project Icarus study I placed a design constraint on the mission of mainly fusion based propulsion. Internal to the team this was interpreted to mean that approximately 80-90 percent of the thrust generation of the mission should come from fusion reactions, although the remainder could be augmented from alternative propulsion systems. This was done not because it was the view of the team that fusion was the best way, but mainly to facilitate a design constraint so that the problem would be tractable within a finite duration of the project. In addition, it was thought important to maintain continuity with the original Daedalus project, which was also fusion driven. Given the advances in science and technology over the last few decades what would we do differently?

One of the obvious goals for the design team is to shrink the mass. This includes the enormous 50,000 tonnes of fuel, 450 tonnes of payload, and 2220 tonnes structure mass. The team are looking at typical payload masses of around 150 tonnes and typical propellant masses of around 20,000-25,000 tonnes. Because Helium-3 raises obvious acquisition issues, the team are also looking at alternative reaction combinations such as Deuterium-Tritium, Deuterium-Deuterium, and even options like Proton-Boron. However the design turns out, it is likely that the Project Icarus design will have some resemblance to the original Project Daedalus Study but also have some marked differences. No need for that old vacuum tube electronic technology for example, although the need for an Artificial Intelligence based system is still thought to be high.

One of the clear distinguishing characteristics between the two projects (Daedalus and Icarus) is the need for deceleration. At the outset of Project Icarus the team had a discussion about projections for future deep space astronomical platforms. It was soon realised that by the time we actually launch a Starship, we will likely know where we are going and what is there, before we ignite the engine. The resolution of telescopes will be so good that we will be able to resolve atmospheric compositions and perhaps even detect orbiting Moons around the planets in the target system. There is unlikely to be any surprises, at least on a planetary scale. For this reason, in order to justify the cost and effort of the Starship endeavour, flying through the stellar system in a matter of days was seen to be inadequate and it was determined that atmospheric penetrators and the boots of atmospheric landers needed to be placed directly onto these most interesting of worlds. Hence for Project Icarus deceleration is the name of the game. To achieve this the team are looking at the use of Magnetic sail systems (MagSails), rearward deployed sail systems (Medusa Sails) and of course reverse engine thrust.

Nuclear fusion propulsion is just one of the methods for getting to the stars. The many others include antimatter or exotic solutions like space drives and warp drives. Some propose to go the way of propellantless solutions and to fly by the “wind” of the Sun using solar sails or converging the solar energy into laser powered systems using large Fresnel lenses. Who is to say which one of these concepts that we dream up will be the actual blue print for how the first interstellar missions are conducted? On the other hand, it may be the case that they are all form a part of our future, each performing their own role, optimised for their specific purpose, payload and destination. None of our efforts would have been wasted, it would have been time well spent preparing the way of the Starship for our future interstellar generations.

When Leonardo da Vinci considered flight, he didn’t just think of one machine, but he considered many methods, be it parachute, glider or helicopter. He observed that there were forces of nature, and although he did not understand by what rules they were governed, he set out to find ways to tame them and mimic nature for good use. One wonders how he would have approached the problem of designing a Starship if he existed in our times? Would he have focussed on only one method? No, the evidence is that he sought multiple solutions for a problem and it is likely that he would have been looking hard at ways to master the solar wind, tame the atom, or collide the anti-protons, to produce energy for the Starship. Although the Starships we design today may not appear ready for the existing markets and the technology they require not sufficiently mature, it is possible that we are in the position of Leonardo all those centuries ago, who conceived of machines that were centuries ahead of his time. In this respect, we are all then students of the Renaissance.

“When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will always long to return”.

Leonardo da Vinci

Time for the Stars?

In the year 1956 the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein published his memorable novel “Time for the Stars”. This was a tale of two twin brothers, one who stayed at home and the other who went off on a fantastic journey to the stars in a so called ‘Torchship’. They stayed in constant communication through the power of telepathy; the ultimate long distance communications device. The mission was put together by the Long Range Foundation, a non-profit organization that funds expensive, long term projects for the benefit of human kind. Moving at sub-light speeds the vessel takes many years to get to its destination. When we read science fiction, it all makes star travel seem so near and within our grasp. Our minds conceive of countless technologies, devices, and machines by which the journey can be launched. But when is it really “Time for the Stars”? By this question, we mean of course when will we will be in a position to actually launch the first Starships towards those distant lights of Suns that shine like candles in the dark of our Cosmos? Well, several authors have actually looked at the problem, and it’s interesting to see what they have got to say about it.

The American born Robert Enzmann derived his ‘Ezmann Starship’ concept sometime in the 1960s. This would be a fusion powered vehicle carrying a colony of humans on a 60 year trip to the stars. It would travel at around 9 percent of the speed of light using its nuclear pulse based engines. Although Enzmann never wrote up his ideas, a recent 2012 Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS) study reviewed the Starship in it’s entirely in a paper titled “The Enzmann Starship: History and Engineering Appraisal” by Adam Crowl, Kelvin F.Long and Richard Obousy. The American author (and pioneer of model rockets) G.Harry Stine later look these ideas as a basis for his 1973 article in Analog magazine titled “A Program for Star Flight” in which he described an enormous ten-ship colony mission launched to the stars beginning in the year 1990. The entire program would involve ten vessels and cost something like $100 billion spread out over a couple of decades.

One of the first people to try and estimate when star flight would be possible using credible scientific methods was the British born physicist Freeman Dyson. In his 1968 paper titled “Interstellar Transport” published in Physics Today, he looked at 4 percent economic growth rate scaling and concluded that this implied a Gross National Product for the United States of around one thousand times larger within 200 years. This meant that the first mission would be feasible from around the year 2168.

The American Brice Cassenti examined the problem in a 1982 JBIS in his paper “A Comparison of Interstellar Propulsion Methods”. He looked at velocity trends throughout history from the 1800s including sailing ships, early race cars, Earth escape velocity and solar escape velocity.  He concluded that the first missions on the order of 10 light years distance would be feasible around the year 2182.

During the British Interplanetary Society Project Daedalus Study of the 1970s Alan Bond and Anthony Martin considered the clear need for large space based infrastructure in order to facilitate the design, construction and assembly of a large multiple Mega-tons Starship. The (unmanned) fusion powered Daedalus would travel at 12 percent of the speed of light reaching its target stars in around half a century. They predicted it would not be feasible until around the year 2100 at the earliest although most likely much later.

Bond and Martin also lead the follow up 1984 World Ship studies published in “World Ships – An Assessment of the Engineering Feasibility” and “World Ships – Concept, Cause, Cost, Construction and Colonisation”. These were enormous vessels tens of kilometres in length, capable of carrying thousands of people and included an ocean. They would travel at a slow few percent of the speed of light towards the distance stars in journey times measuring centuries. They concluded, optimistically, that such vessels might be feasible around the year 2200.

The American physicist Robert Forward was renowned for his efforts to develop propellantless propulsion systems. He pioneered studies in solar sails, laser sails and even antimatter powered engines. In his 1976 JBIS publication titled “A Programme for Interstellar Exploration”, Forward constructed a plan for going to the stars as part of a strategic roadmap which saw the first light-sail based missions being launched around the year 2000.

A more recent examination of the problem was performed by the American physicist Marc Millis in his JBIS publication titled “First Interstellar Missions, Considering Energy and Incessant Obsolescence”. He looked at energy scaling trends in history from the year 1980 to 2007 using an assumed average growth rate in world energy production of less than 2 percent. He then compared that to the energy you need to push either a robotic probe or a small colony ship towards the stars. His analyses lead to the predicted dates of 2200 (for the colony ship) and 2500 (for the probe). The reason the colony ship was deemed to be launched sooner was due to the much smaller energy requirement.

The British science fiction author Stephen Baxter also discussed the problem in his 2010 JBIS paper titled “Project Icarus: Three Roads to the Stars”. Baxter examined three scenarios for the next few centuries including an energy constrained Earth, and energy rich Earth and an interplanetary Mankind. Although he did not make a prediction on a specific date, Baxter’s research leads him to conclude that a Starship could be launched by a society closer to ours in nature, and closer in time, than is often imagined.

As reported in my own JBIS paper published in 2011 titled “Project Icarus: The First Unmanned Interstellar Mission, Robotic Expansion and Technological Growth”, many of these (excellent) projections miss out the important role of “disruptive technologies” which will alter the assessment on when the first missions are possible. In particular, it was shown how for a 100 year flyby space probe mission to Alpha Centauri 4.3 Light years away, and assuming an ideal cruise velocity of 2,700 AU/year (1Astronomical Unit = mean distance between the Earth and the Sun), that if we started from an assumed mission capacity of 5 AU/year in the year 2020 then assuming a greater than 8% technology grown annually in mission capacity (as measured by the attainment of cruise speeds) it may be possible to launch an interstellar probe by around the year 2100.

All of these efforts are worthwhile attempts to essentially predict the future, although note the large range in projected first launch dates and thereby uncertainties in the prediction of interest; ergo – we do not know. But many of them rely on linear extrapolation techniques. If history has taught us anything, it is that technology does not usually follow linear trends in this way. The science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke made a similar point in his 1975 Analog essay published in “Man, Space and Destiny” which was also presented to the US House of Representatives. He said:

 “It is a cliché that we often tend to overestimate what we can do in the near future and grossly underestimate what can be done in the more distant future. The reason for this is obvious, though it can only be explained with a certain amount of hand-waiving. The human imagination extrapolates in a straight line; but in the real world, as the Club de Rome and similar organizations are always telling us, events follow a compound interest of exponential law. At the beginning, therefore, the straight line of the human imagination surpasses the exponential curve; but sooner or later the steeply rising curve will cross the straight line, and thereafter reality outstrips imagination. How far ahead that point is depends not only on the difficulty of the achievement but also upon the social factors involved”.

When thinking about the future there is a constant tension between our imagination and our reality. Our imagination believes in the infinite extent of possibilities that lay before us. Our reality grounds us to what nature really allows, to the well understood laws and constraints of physics. As we strive to predict the future, we would be sensible to keep a good balance between our speculative musings, and our rigorous derivations, between our subjective desires and our objective analyses. Going to the extreme of one way or the other will result in wildly under predicting or over predicting what is possible. It is the rare person indeed, who can follow in the footsteps of people like Arthur C.Clarke and get the balance right.

As the current starship design endeavours (e.g. Project Icarus, Project Dragonfly) head towards their final quarter in deriving our Starship design, we too will be asked to make projections on when we think such a probe could be built and indeed, how much it would cost. In some ways, these questions are more difficult to answer than addressing the nuts and bolts engineering of the probe itself, because the uncertainties on our assessments are so large. All we can do is extrapolate using worst case and best case techniques and hope that the real answer lies somewhere in between. But ultimately, does it matter if our projections are wrong or right? For it is the pursuit of the game itself that will get us there and as long as we continue to look forward and out to those distant worlds of light, the time of the stars will someday surely come. Meanwhile, here’s hoping for 2063 and Zefram Cochrane’s warp drive. Anyone want to take some bets on that prediction?

The Emergence of the Starship

In the year 1865 and 1901 Jules Verne and H.G.Wells published their now famous novels “From the Earth to the Moon” and “The First Men in the Moon” respectively. Their ideas were not completely crazy, although the physics needed some work. In Verne’s novel the crew would be propelled to the Moon using a projectile mechanism, the same way a bullet is fired from a gun. That the acceleration would have killed the crew is a minor detail. In Well’s novel, he decided to embark on what today we call a breakthrough propulsion physics device, painting the vehicle with a special kind of paint called Cavorite, which had the unusual property of effecting anti-gravitational lift.

We got to the Moon eventually, but the Saturn V was not quite the way these authors imagined it. At some point the ideas went from imagination to reality, as the examination of the physics and engineering technical issues became more credible. A technological transition occurred when the real lunar ship emerged into our world, and crystallised from a thing of thought, to a thing of matter and energy. Today, we imagine what a future starship may look like. And we are fortunate to live in an age where the idea is crystallising out of the imagination as many credible methods for how we accomplish this seemingly impossible mission begin to materialise.

Essentially, we are constrained by the ideal rocket equation, which expresses the additive velocity increments from successive engine stages, as a function of the vehicle exhaust velocity and mass ratio – the mass ratio being the ratio of initial wet mass (fuel + structure) divided by final mass (payload + structure) which arrives at the target. The objective is to get a high mass ratio, which means that the amount of mass remaining at the end of the mission should be a low percentage of the total start mass, although there is a trade-off because you want your payload fraction to be a minimum size. Alternatively, one can have a high exhaust velocity, but this means choosing fuels which are energetic and release large amounts of energy/gram of substance. Typically, these go alone the lines of chemical, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, antimatter. All Starship designs which carry propellant rely on the ideal rocket equation in this way.

Some people like to search for “loop-holes” to this equation however, in the form of propellantless solutions. This includes using solar energy or stay at home laser propulsion, so that only the payload itself is accelerated. These are known as solar sail and laser sail type systems. You can combine rocket and non-rocket solutions in the form of the Bussard interstellar ramjet which utilizes the interstellar hydrogen of space, funnelled in through a large magnetic scoop, as it accelerates up to the speed of light. Another hybrid is the Medusa sail, which combines elements of Orion nuclear pulse propulsion with solar sail technology.

When you look at Starship design this way, through the lens of the ideal rocket equation, it’s almost as if nature has given us a toy to play with: “here! Take this rocket equation, study it, bend it, exploit, it, perturb it, break it…find a way”. The stars call us ever closer by their glistening shines of light across the Cosmos, beckoning us ever closer to discover the riches that orbit them on their myriad of worlds. But meanwhile, the ideal rocket equation acts as our constraint. The stars make us want to go, and the rocket equation tethers us to a limitation on our desires.

There is a way around this problem of course, which is to go around the ideal rocket equation altogether and even the need for stay at home propulsion drivers. Welcome to the exotic science of breakthrough propulsion physics where anything appears possible if you can throw enough variables together. This is in the form of space drives, warp drives and exotic constructions like worm holes. But we must be careful as we play with these toys that nature has given us; these “gedanken experiments”. Because, as we move away from understood physics (which is validated by experiment) there is always the danger that our speculations will become wide of the mark. But without any constraint to pin us to reality, there is no way to tell for sure. So whilst we marvel at these new creations from our minds of intellectual thought, we should also be aware that this does not guarantee that it is represented by reality.

One of the tools of theoretical thought is so called “back of the envelope” calculations. This helps us to develop an instinct for the ball-parkness of an estimate to satisfy ourselves that the full calculations (e.g. computer codes) are giving us the right answers. But sometimes, these estimates can become so vague that physicists (and astronomers) often refer to it as “hand waiving”. I am okay with hand waiving, within reason, but I do worry that when our physics speculations become so vague that this is equivalent to disco dancing in the dark. The public do not always know the difference between what is known science and what scientific speculation is. I feel that is our duty as scientists to communicate to them the distinction clearly. We do so by carefully caveating our statements and declaring our assumptions with honesty and transparency and avoiding unnecessary hype. But sometimes, our caveats, assumptions and uncertainties can be so large, that our speculations diverge wildly from how we know nature really works.  

In science what grounds us is experiment and observations. That is how we test our ideas and refine our theories. When we move into territory where we cannot test those ideas, we move away from the scientific method and you are in danger of no longer practising science but something else; a form of pseudo-science. This is a cautionary note, a heads up to all those would be Starship designers – to be aware of losing your way.

"In physical science the first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be." [PLA, vol. 1, "Electrical Units of Measurement", 1883-05-03, Lord Kelvin]

World Ships: The Long Journey to the Stars

The distances to the stars are so vast, that unless faster than light travel is discovered, human missions across the galaxy will be represented by starships carrying hundreds to thousands of people, on a voyage into the unknown, with a wide number of discoveries laying before them. What will they find? Who, will they meet? Humans have been an explorer species for centuries, and few adventures epitomise this so well than the voyage of HMS Challenger in 1872 sailing out from Portsmouth in England on a trip that was of immense importance and would continue until 1876.[1]

It was sponsored by the British government and organized by the Royal Society in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh. Its mission was to chart the depths of the ocean (given little was known at the time) and the movement of the continents of the seas, to look for marine life, minerals and any clues to climactic phenomena. Its discoveries were of huge importance to oceanography. The specific scientific objectives were determined by the Royal Society as:

• To investigate the physical conditions of the deep sea in the great ocean basins (as far as the neighbourhood of the Great Southern Ice Barrier) in regard to depth, temperature, circulation, specific gravity and penetration of light.

• To determine the chemical composition of seawater at various depths from the surface to the bottom, the organic matter in solution and the particles in suspension.

• To ascertain the physical and chemical character of deep-sea deposits and the sources of these deposits.

• To investigate the distribution of organic life at different depths and on the deep seafloor.

  The vessel was a three-masted corvette with auxiliary steam. It was a Royal Navy vessel, but was modified for the scientific expedition. This included removing 16 of Challenger’s 18 guns and her spares to make space for the scientific equipment. The mission was so unique that some of the instruments used for the mission were invented specifically for the expedition, demonstrating that pushing the boundaries of exploration, also leads to new technologies. The Captain of the vessel was George Nares and he was accompanied by Commander John Maclear. The ship was 200 feet long, 40 feet wide and with three masts and supplementary steam power, 2,306 tons displacement with a wooden hull and compound engine, 1,200 horse power, with 1 screw. She was originally built at the Woolwich Dockyard in England, February 13, 1858. The ship carried a crew compliment of over two hundred, with 21 officers. The crew had dropped to under 150 by the end of the expedition due to deaths and desertions and general departures planned from the outset. The scientific team was led by Professor Wyville Thomson and he was accompanied by the naturalists Henry Moseley and John Murray. The team went on to catalogue over 4,000 previously unknown species. The work of the scientific team led to a report titled “Report of the Scientific Results of the Exploring Voyage of H.M.S Challenger during the years 1873-1876″.[2]

  The voyage was a journey that would circumnavigate the world, covering over 68,000 nautical miles and lasting for thousands of day’s duration. The voyage started at Portsmouth and went on to Lisbon and Gibraltar and then the Canary Islands and Virgin Islands. This was before crossing the Atlantic to Bermuda and back again to the Azores, Maderia and many other places. Some of the other destinations the ship visited includes: Cape Verde Islands, Halifax, St Paul’s Rocks, Fernando de Noronha, Bahia, Cap of Good Hope, Tristan da Cunha, Prince Edward Islands, Crozet Islands, Kerguelen Islands, Heard Island, Antarctic Circle, Melbourne, Wilsons Promontory, Cape Howe, Sydney, Wellington, Tonga, Fiji, Cape York, New Zealand, Wellington, Port Hardy, Queen Charlotte Sound, Cook Strait, Wellington, Kermadec Islands, Tongatabu, Jijian islands, Raine Island, Cape York Peninsula, Arafura Sea, New Guinea, Aru Islands, Kai Islands, Banda Islands, Ambon Island, Ternate Island, Celebes Sea, Samboangan, IIoilo, Island of Luzon, Hong Kong, New Guinea, Manila. The route that the ship took is shown in the map below.

  At the end of the Challenger Expedition, the ship was returned to the Royal Naval and was used by the Coast Guard and later as a drill ship for the Naval Reserves. It was decommissioned in 1878 and then became a floating warehouse in 1883 in the River Medway. She was finally demolished for scrap in 1921. The only part of the ship that remains is her figurehead, now kept at the Southampton Oceanography Centre.

  When we reflect on the voyage of Challenger, we marvel at what she accomplished. So honoured was her trip that one of the US Space Shuttles was named after her. What expeditions will humans mount in the coming centuries? Not on the oceans of Earth but towards those sea of Suns. We can only speculate on what they may discover. Perhaps centuries from now, there will be another ship called Challenger, with scientists aboard, searching for new discoveries. In many ways this ship will be similar to the original Challenger expedition, but in a very marked way it will be different. This is because it will be a Starhip, looking for minerals on other planets and searching for marine life on the worlds of other stars. The name ‘Challenger’ reminds us as human beings that we need to continue to challenge ourselves to the next frontier, if we are to continue evolving as a species towards a more positive future for ourselves. We do this by placing hope and optimism firmly in our future and believing in the unlimited potential of each other.

[1] E. Linklater, The Voyager of the Challenger, Cardinal, 1972.

[2] Report Of the Scientific Results of the Exploring Voyage of H.M.S Challenger during the years 1873-1876

Intelligent Life in the Galaxy (Part 2)

Continued from Part 1...

Hypothesis 2. We live in a crowded galaxy. This has a much larger suite of options in terms of explanations, and it is mainly a problem for the disciplines of physics, astrophysics and moral philosophy. If we take as a priori assumption that we live in a crowded galaxy but are not observing or seeing any evidence of intelligent life, then we can examine the problem from three levels of investigation. The first is observations, the second is analysis and interpretations, and the third is moral philosophy as applied to extraterrestrial socio-cultural groups.

When we say we are not ‘seeing’ evidence of intelligent life in the galaxy, we have to ask what is meant by ‘seeing’? Principally, our only mechanism for interacting with the Cosmos over large distance scales is via the observations of light, be it through radio waves, micro-waves, infra-red or optical. This means that we are interacting with the universe purely through the electromagnetic spectrum and then trying to use that information to interpolate about what is taking place to manifest that specific spectrum that is observed. So the first thing we could do is to expand our range of observations, to encompass the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but also to go outside of it to observe other phenomena. We could also examine the vast animal kingdom of the planet Earth for examples of species that have senses or interaction mechanisms that are not just through the electromagnetic spectrum, and then to hypothesise for alien biology’s where nature may have found a similar solution. Overall, we need to vastly expand our horizons for what we are trying to ‘see’ and in particular to avoid a human centric perspective.

This also includes a re-examination for what we observe with light and whether our assumptions about homogeneity throughout the Cosmos are correct. This Copernicus principal has served us well in past centuries, and there are good reasons to think that the universe is homogenous and uniform on all scales (although fractal modelling of the large scale universe might suggest a breakdown in this model on extra-galactic scales). But it may not be in certain parts, and if that is the case, then our observations will simply be in error.

As well as ‘seeing’ we can try to access other senses by which we might interrogate these distant worlds. Currently, the laws of physics appear to prohibit us from smelling, tasting or hearing them. But certainly we can touch them, if we have the courage to send out reconnaissance probes and land planetary landers onto the surface of any bodies in orbit around those distant stars.

So let us say that we have then exhausted all options in terms of observations, presumably after a multi-decade program of work and we still conclude that we are not ‘seeing’ any evidence of intelligent life in the galaxy. The next stage is to question our methods of analysis and interpretations, of the data that we are observing. It is entirely possible that the evidence is staring us in the face, but we are ignoring it because it does not fit within our pre-conceived notions. This could be for our definitions of life or intelligent life for example, and living systems may be much more ubiquitous that is imagined within our limited definitions. We also need to examine our methods, such as the requirements of the scientific method for reproducibility and falsifiability. If an event cannot be observed again, it is immediately disregarded and thrown out. When in fact, this is inconsistent with the large scale belief of human history – i.e. many claim there was one biogenesis event which gave rise to all living things. We also have a tendency to throw away so called outliers, because they do not fit the statistical trend of a data set. We should go out of our way to scrutinise those outliers and not be so keen to disregard them because they do not fit our preconceived notions of how things work. There is also a bias in science, such as a rush to conclude that an observation must be explainable by some astrophysical event. Although this is not an unreasonable position to take, alternatives should be considered, no matter how wild, and the door should never be closed on what possibilities there may be.

One example of data that may be staring us in the face is the famous 1970s ‘Wow!’ signal, for which a 72 second radio burst was observed from one of the detecting horns, never to be observed again. Scientists have spent much time examining the signature and the apparent location of the source, on the assumption that it is either an astrophysical event or ET attempting to communicate with us via radio beacons. All nearby terrestrial sources have been ruled out. Yet, one possibility that may explain the energy emission is that it is in fact a mobile source, as in a starship engine signature at a distance. Similarly, there are at least 35 other similar signatures in the astrophysical data base which do not receive attention, but may be explainable by this cause. Yet because it is considered too fantastic a possibility, the apparently free thinking and open minded SETI community which has spent much of its time examining the data, doesn’t even consider this option. Some earlier attempts have already been made to examine what long range starship signatures may look like. This includes the Zubrin paper “Detection of Extraterrestrial civilizations via the Spectral signature of advanced interstellar spacecraft” (Progress in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, ASP Conference Series, Vol 74, 1995). This idea has also been examined by Viewing in his paper titled “Detection of Starships” (JBIS, 1977).

So let us say we have now greatly expanded the scope of our interpretations and analysis, and even after this program of work we still conclude that we do not see evidence of intelligent life in the galaxy. On the priori assumption that intelligent life does exist, but we are not seeing it, this leaves several possibilities, most of which comes down to forms of moral philosophy, given the nature of the uncertainties involved in such futuristic scenario building.

The first is that there is some agreed consensus not to interfere with our cultural development. Alternatively, there could be a genuine fear to interact with us, due to our immature nature, or the unwise manner by which we use our technologies. We might also not be seen as good custodians of our own planet, so what example are we setting for how we might conduct ourselves out there. We can take an analogy of a family living in a street, and there is another house in the street with a family of convicted felons, known liars, instigators of violence, overall bad company; from which we might choose to cross the road rather than interact with them. Another example could be there is a family which are perfectly fine in terms of obedience to law and order, but they are from a different culture to us and they have strange ways which are alien to us and we have tendency to fear that which we do not know or understand. Intelligent life in the galaxy may choose to avoid us for any one of these reasons, which are all variations on the zoo hypothesis.

Alternatively, it could be that we are simply not of interest to any advanced intelligent life form, the same way that we walking down the street would not be interested in an ant crossing the road. This would be the case if our cultural and/or technological development was so far apart, of order a million years or more. It could also be the fact that because of the huge gap in development, that they cannot see how to communicate with us, because we are simply too primitive. Another possibility related to this is the technological runaway effect, where some form of full blown transcendence or AI convergence has been achieved by those advanced alien societies, thus exacerbating the cultural and technological divergence between us. Such things are imagined in the concepts of von Neumann probes, self-replicating machines.

It is clear therefore that we need to question the scope of our observations as well as reassess our interpretations of the data we are measuring, if we hope to have any chance of detecting evidence of intelligent life in the galaxy. But ultimately, any life forms travelling across space will be using starships of a form. It is therefore highly prudent to widen our imaginations as to what form they may take, as well as what observable emissions they may make which we can detect – accepting that the known laws of physics will apply, or the unknown laws of physics will eventually be elucidated by such studies. The act of designing starships is also a self-fulfilling prophesy in that by imagining them we are inching forwards towards their fruition. Hence we come to my own motivation for the starship, and why I am pushing it so hard – to increase our chances for finding them and thereby understanding if we are alone, or in a crowded room, and all of the profound implications of that, particularly for religion and philosophy.

We have explored the two extremes of a crowded galaxy and a galaxy with only one example of intelligent life – us. But there are obviously lots of other options in between these two extremes, such as there being two intelligent species in the galaxy, or dozens, which would not necessarily meet either of the definitions of the two extremes examined above. So it may be that the galaxy is populated by intelligent civilizations among its 100-400 billion stars, but they are just not frequent enough to notice each other. This comes down to a question of distance and time. Given the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, and the average star distance is around 5 light years, this means that in any interstellar crossing a starship will encounter 100,000/5 = 20,000 stars on its line of sight path. Now it will obviously pass within a few light years of others on that journey, so let us be charitable and say it will come within observational distance of around 100,000 stars on one galactic crossing. That is still only 100,000 / 100 billion = 0.0001% of the entire stellar population. And so if there are say optimistically even as many as 100,000 intelligent civilizations in the galaxy distributed over the 100,000 LY diameter spiral, we are looking at a very low probability of interaction.

The other issue is a temporal one. In that even with say 100,000 intelligent civilisations in the galaxy, with each stars separate evolution, planetary formation timescale, the rise of life, then emergence of intelligent life and eventually a space based culture, these events will not all happen in parallel. Some may be overlapping, but it is more likely that there will be limited windows upon which to discover other intelligent civilizations that have a similar level of technological development to us. By similar, I mean within one million years, because anything less or more than this has implications for interest and also whether it is possible to conduct meaningful communications between worlds. Overall this is a question of probability and population size which feeds into the likely hood of interaction.

Another possibility is that we are once again anthropomorphising the problem, mapping human hopes and desires onto an extraterrestrial species. Our primary driver for exploration and discovery is curiosity and the growth of industry. But an intelligent extraterrestrial species may not have the same motivations of us. They may choose to cross the galaxy but for entirely different reasons, and on their journey not even be listening out for the presence of others. Survival is likely to be a primary driver for exploration, but we do not know this for sure.

Finally, if we do live in a crowded galaxy, then any reasonable analysis of the number of stars, number of planets, the evidence for life formation on Earth, the age of civilisations, certainly makes it highly probable that they, meaning ET, are already here in some form, or are at least aware of us and perhaps observing from a distance. Certainly, if any life is found on the planets within our own solar system (such as on Europa or Mars) as evidence of separate biogenesis, then the probability of life in the galaxy will increase too – and we must conclude that not only have they been here but are here now in some manner. This is not to support the vast claims of UFOs and alien abductions, many of which can be examined by any reasonably thinking person and dismissed as mistakes, misinterpretations, fantasies or fabrications. That said; there is a small quantity of those observations, perhaps less than 0.1% which is of interest and could be examined further. But those incidences are lost in the noise of the fantastic claims, and also in the difficulties of distinguishing from genuine sightings and government black programs which are by their nature secretive and explicitly clandestine – and sometimes to the extent that government programs have been used as cover stories for reported sightings therefore making proper objective analysis difficult.

What we might consider however, is that if we presume an intelligent species is observing us from a distance, the same way that we observe the animal kingdom from a distance, or the same way that our telescopes are now looking for evidence of habitable planets around other stars. It is entirely likely, given the advanced state of their technology, that they can observe and therefore learn a lot about us, including from emission signatures to indicate evidence of wide scale industrialisations, or the development of nuclear based technology. When the world’s highest atomic explosion was detonated by the Russians, it achieved a yield approaching 60 Mtons, and it was so energetic that it created two new elements, later named Einsteinium and Fermium. It is these sorts of signatures that would be of interest to any observing civilisation, as evidence that we are maturing technologically. In particular since nuclear technologies have myriad applications to starship power and propulsion systems. It is possible, that they would place ‘sentinel’ type probes in the outer limits of our solar system as a form of warning beacon, as envisioned by Arthur C Clarke’s “2001 A Space Odyssey” or his short story “The Sentinel” published in 1951. The idea of searching for extraterrestrial artifacts which might have this function has been suggested previously by Freitas in his 1983 paper “The Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts (SETA)”.

Once we have attained technological prowess, they would then be interested in what direction we were going to go, towards technological annihilation and/or stagnation or technological maturity. If it appeared that we were in fact heading towards technological maturity, then the next question they might ask is when will we achieve space capability, in terms of sending missions to the outer edges of our solar systems and eventually to the stars – in effect when are we coming?

We have in fact made this question easy for any advanced monitoring ET to assess, due to the invention of the World Wide Web, itself perhaps a precursor to a form of large scale artificial intelligence not unlike a Matrioska brain concept. Given that the information from the web is beamed via space satellites, accessing that information may present an easy way to retrieve data about our civilisation – and by the way, this is another area we could examine for evidence of ‘interstellar hacking’. One area they might be interested in is at what point we start to express interstellar ambitions, towards the stars. They would be interested in our designs, our concepts, or our philosophical and moral perspectives, and even our analysis of their existence, such as this very document that I am writing. In which case, all of the interstellar organisations and their principal protagonists and advocates, would also be of interest to them – and with that chilling thought; it’s time to turn off the lights and go back to a candle and type writer.

Intelligent Life in the Galaxy (Part 1)

I will restrict the analysis only to the galaxy, since any conclusions can be scaled up and extrapolated to the larger scale. The apparent question is why we do not see intelligent life in the galaxy, usually framed as the Fermi Paradox. This is an apparent contradiction between our theoretical expectations for intelligent life in the galaxy and our observations that we do not see any.

We begin this essay by clearly stating what the Fermi Paradox actually is. A paradox apparently exists between our theoretical expectations for intelligent life in the cosmos, based upon our measurements of stellar structure, age, composition, type, evolution, and our observations which are in apparently conflict with this expectation. This suggests straight away that there is something wrong with one or both or our two assertions: (1) that our theoretical models are incorrect (2) that are observations are incorrect. In order to bring them both into alignment, a detailed and rigorous revisiting of these assertions is required.

Firstly, we can define a paradox as a statement that apparently contradicts itself, such as a logical paradox which is an invalid argument. A paradox will often have revealed errors in definitions that are assumed to be rigorous. Because of this, I do not see the Fermi problem as a logical paradox, but more of a logical contradiction in terms. That is to say, that in classical logic, a contradiction consists of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions. It occurs when two conclusions which form the logical, usually opposite inversions of each other. Hence I like to reformulate the Fermi Paradox as the Fermi problem.

Instead, it is better to look at the Fermi problem, from the standpoint of a mathematical axiom. An axiomatic system is any set of axioms from which some or all axioms can be used in conjunction to logically derive theorems. A mathematical theory consists of an axiomatic system and all its derived theorems. So with the Fermi problem, any statement which asserts the presents of intelligent life in the galaxy is a theorem, which must derive from the axiom that the galaxy is capable of hosting intelligent life in the first place. We know that this this axiom is true, because we are here, and so we represent the manifest evidence for the starting point of reasoning, to be accepted as true without controversy. Given that we exist, we are left to ask do others exist? This then leads to the development of a hypothesis as a proposed explanation for the phenomenon. And in the Fermi problem there are two forms of hypothesis that are proposed. The first hypothesis is that the galaxy is capable of hosting more than one intelligent life form on separate worlds around other stars. The second hypothesis is that we have the technological capability to measure the presence of such intelligent life should it exist. But these are not logical paradoxes, merely mutually exclusive and independent hypothesis which can be tested, in order to develop full theorems. But as we shall see, there are numerous issues with our handling of both hypothesis which make reasonable progress not sensible, due to the logical fallacy of the questions and how they are framed.

The first point of our analysis is simply to ask if interstellar travel is even possible. Because if is does not appear to be, then that would be the explanation for the Fermi problem. However, given that the 1970s Project Daedalus study conceived of a fairly credible machine, despite its flaws, it is not an unreasonable interpretation of this work that in the future (even if centuries or millennia) we can design a much improved machine which is far more credible, and therefore interstellar travel does appear to be feasible in theory, as a proof of existence problem. This conclusion is amplified even further by the fact that Daedalus was just a method via fusion, and since then we have conceived of a dozen other methods by which a machine could be propelled to the stars – which is a form of validation for the original Project Daedalus conclusions that interstellar travel was possible in theory. This is a conclusion one might choose to only apply to robotic vessels, but we have also conceived of various methods by which biological crews may be transported (e.g. seed ships) and so this conclusion would seem to be applicable to human missions too, at some point in the future. So given that interstellar travel appears to be feasible in theory, we must look for other solutions.

We also live in an age where countless exo-planets are now being discovered around other worlds. But one fact that has not been considered is that if an alien species never discovers a science that goes beyond simple chemistry, and they live on a large mass planet, then they will never be able to leave that planet due to the enormous escape velocity associated with the gravitational well. To assess this, one would need to know more about the mass function of Earth type planets and Jovian type planets that exist in the galaxy, in order to inform any statistical assessments.

Certainly, our observational telescopes are improving our knowledge of the universe every day, and giving us insight to inform our ‘best guesses’ about what may be possible. But it is also clear that sending starships too far away destinations, as a form of in situ reconnaissance, will add valuable to such an effort as a form of scientific enquiry.

We can look at the problem by examining two extremes, and then everything else in between. These two extremes are that we are the only intelligent life in the galaxy, or that we live in a crowded galaxy. The idea that we are the only intelligent life in the galaxy, and therefore the first intelligent life to arise in the galaxy, has been argued by many. This includes Viewing in his paper “Directly Interacting Extraterrestrial Technological Communities” (JBIS, 28, 735, 1975) as well as Hart in his paper “An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth” (QJRAS, 16, 128, 1975) and Tipler in his paper “Extraterrestrial Intelligent Beings Do Not Exist” (QJRAS, 21, 267, 1980). The idea that we live in a crowded galaxy, has been argued by authors such as Shklovskii and Sagan with their book “Intelligent Life in the Universe” (Holden Day, 1966) and also Sagan and Drake in their paper titled “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (Sci.Am., 232, 80, May 1975). Bond and Martin examine these two extremes succinctly in their paper “Is Mankind Unique? – The Lack of Evidence for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (JBIS, 36, pp.223-225, 1983). Let us consider both of these extreme possibilities in turn, before we consider everything else in between.

Hypothesis 1. We are the only intelligent life in the galaxy. This seems to be highly improbable, purely from a statistical point of view. That said, evolution by natural selection does allow for spontaneous mutations that have never been seen before. It could be that intelligence is a form of evolutionary mutation and we are merely the first to exhibit it. Then again, there are also examples in the animal kingdom of Earth where two species, having no connection to each other on the evolutionary chain, (different lineages) have a similar design element or analogous structures, because nature has found that solution twice for those two different species – this is known as convergent evolution – as opposed to homologous structures or traits which do have a common origin. An example of this would be vertebrate wings as forelimbs, such as used on bats and birds – they are analogous and resemble in each in the same way, and they fulfil similar functions, but their roles in flight have evolved separately. On this basis, looking for evidence of a separate biogenesis on Earth or outside of the Earths biosphere is entirely reasonable. In particular, since mutation by natural selection favours those mutations which are beneficial, and natural selections appears to guide the evolutionary processes to incorporate only the good mutations into the species and expunge any bad mutations. Given that intelligence appears to be an advantage to survival, it would be a surprise if nature has not allowed this mutation to occur in other species. Overall, it would seem fair to conclude that the idea of there being only intelligent life on this world is mainly a problem for biology to address, and not the other disciplines of science.

In addition to this, biology tends to define an organism as any contiguous living system, and it is generally the consensus that all types of organisms are capable of some degree of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development and homeostasis – the so called properties of life. An organism may consider of one cell (unicellular) or more than one cell (multicellular) and they are typically of microscopic size and hence termed microorganisms. There will also be an ecological connection between any organisms and their environment. Biological classification will also tend to cite the following organisational groups as a form of hierarchy: atoms, molecules, macro molecules, molecular assemblies, organelles, the cell, tissue, organs, organ systems, organisms, populations, species, community, biosphere. If we are to fully understand the apparent limitless pathways of evolutionary biology and the application of natural selection, it might be prudent to look for evidence of these organisational types operating in unexpected systems. This could be in apparent ecological systems or even astrophysical systems.  Who is to say that the entire galaxy is not in some way operating, in analogy if not directly, as a giant organism? Overall, we need to establish a greater dialogue among the many disciplines of human thought to ask a broader question about what is life.

Considering the question of biology in the Cosmos, it seems to me to be a highly arrogant position, to assume that biology has only occurred on one world in a vast and expansive universe over its 13.8 billion years of history. This position would seem no different to me than the age old assertion that the Earth was the center of the solar system and thereby the universe. The reason it takes so much longer to address the biological element to this apparent anthropocentric thinking, is that the distance between the planets and by implication the stars is so much further away, and it is only in fairly recent times that we have achieved the technological capability to begin to ask this question when we became a space fairing species. My own view, based on statistical arguments alone, is that not only has intelligent life been to our solar system, but they are here now – but the nature by which they are here is non-trivial to unravel, given our biased thinking, preconceived notions, assumptions about them, lack of knowledge, and the poor manner by which we frame our questions such as the Fermi Paradox.

to be continued...

Interstellar Wormholes

With the recent box office film ‘interstellar’ many people are excited about the prospects of wormholes as a means for interstellar transport. These have been depicted in other television programs, such as in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine universe. Although there is currently no evidence that such exotic objects exists in nature, it is possible that they could be artificially created, perhaps from versions of higher dimensional string theory and engineering of the fundamental space-time foam.  Wormhole research is today an exciting subject with dozens of papers published in peer reviewed journals every year, but it is worthwhile to be reminded of its origins and it starts from a surprising place.

In 1915 Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, his description of gravity that neatly defines how objects will attract one another and affect the space and time around them. Many years later the American physicist John Wheeler would coin the phrase “space tells matter how to move, and matter tells space how to curve”. Einstein described gravity as a manifestation of space-time curvature.  General Relativity is a continuous field theory in contrast to the particle theory of matter.

Einstein was also involved in the development of quantum mechanics, the theory that described sub-atomic particles. But he was not entirely happy with its inherent uncertainties and probabilistic character. So in 1935 he worked with Nathan Rosen to produce a field theory for electrons, using General Relativity. His paper was titled “The Particle Problem in the General Theory of Relativity” (Phys.Rev, 48, 73, 1935). They were investigating the possibility of an atomistic theory of matter and electricity which, while excluding singularities of the field, makes use of no other variables other than the metric of the general relativity and the potential of the Maxwell theory. In essence, they asserted that the most natural elementary charged particle was found to be one of zero mass.

In the end, what they produced was something quite unusual. They started with the equations for a spherically symmetric mass distribution, typically used for black holes and known as the Schwarzschild solution, and performed what is known as a co-ordinate transformation to remove the region containing the curvature singularity. The solution was a mathematical representation of physical space by a space of two asymptotically flat sheets (negative infinity to positive infinity) connected by a bridge or a Schwarzschild wormhole with a ‘throat’.

Now admittedly, this was not a traversable wormhole, for that we had to await the arrival of physicists John Wheeler in the 1950s and Kip Thorne in the 1980s. In 1987, at the encouragement of Carl Sagan for his novel “Contact” (later a feature film) Thorne and his colleague Michael Morris, were able to construct a metric to describe a spherically symmetric and static wormhole with a proper circumference with the co-ordinate decreasing from negative infinity to a minimum value where the throat was located and then increasing form the throat to positive infinity. This solution has the distinctive feature of being horizon-less. The Thorne and Morris paper titled "Wormholes in Spacetime and their use for Interstellar Travel: A Tool for Teaching General Relativity" (American Journal of Physics, Volume 56, issue 5, May 1988). This paper really helped to establish wormhole research as an exciting pursuit of academic enquiry.

Since then many papers have been published, an indeed astronomical surveys have been conducted to examine the deep stars in search of natural wormholes, none have yet been identified. It is important to remember the origin of a field, and although the Einstein-Rosen Bridge was not a traversable wormhole, and it wasn't the author’s intention to produce one, they did produce the first mathematical attempt at a wormhole solution, and they should be remembered for that. It just goes to show, that often in science, you can produce something quite unexpected.

Warping to the Stars

Warping to the Stars

Like many, I have been inspired and thrilled by the stories of Star Trek. The creation of Gene Rodenberry was a wonderful contribution to our society and culture. I recently came across an old book in the shop window of a store and purchased it straight away. The book was titled “The Making of Star Trek, The book on how to write for TV!”, by Stephen E.Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. It was published by Ballantine books in 1968 – the same year that the Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke “2001: A Space Odyssey” came out. What with all this and Project Apollo happening, the late 1960s does seems to have been the year to have witnessed history. 

In this book, one finds the story of how Roddenberry tried to market his idea for a new type of television science fiction show.  It is clear from reading it that Roddenberry was very much concerned for humankind and in the spirit of Clarke’s positive optimism, he was trying to steer us down a different path. In this book we find out many wonderful things about the origins of Star Trek, including that the U.S.S Enterprise was originally called the U.S.S Yorktown and that Captain James T.Kirk was originally called Captain Robert T.April. He was described as being “mid-thirties, an unusually strong and colourful personality, the commander of the cruiser”.

The time period that Star Trek was said to be set was sometime between 1995 and 2995, close enough to our times for our continuing cast to be people like us, but far enough into the future for galaxy travel to be fully established. The Starship specifications were given as cruiser class, gross mass 190,000 tons, crew department 203 persons, propulsion drive space warp, and range 18 years at light year velocity, registry Earth United Spaceship. The nature of the mission was galactic exploration and investigation and the mission duration was around 5 years. Reading these words today, we see that what Roddenberry was doing was laying the foundations for many future visions of what Starships would be like.

What I found absolutely fascinating reading this book however, was the process by which they actually came up with the U.S.S Enterprise design. Roddenberry met with the art department and in the summer of 1964 the design of the Starship was finalised. The art directors included Pato Guzman and Matt Jefferies.

Roddenberry’s instructions to the team on how to design the U.S.S Enterprise were clear: “We’re a hundred and fifty or maybe two hundred years from now. Out in deep space, on the equivalent of a cruise-size spaceship. We don’t know what the motive power is, but I don’t want to see any trails or fire. No streaks of smoke, no jet intakes, rocket exhaust, or anything like that. We’re not going to Mars, or any of that sort of limited thing. It will be like a deep-space exploration vessel, operating throughout our galaxy. We’ll be going to stars and planets that nobody has named yet”. He then got up and, as he started for the door, turned and said, “I don’t care how you do it, but make it look like it’s got power”.

According to Jefferies, the Enterprise design was arrived at by a process of elimination and the design even involved the Sales department, production office and Harvey Lynn from the Rand Corporation. The various iterations produce many sheets of drawings – I wonder what happened to those treasures? The book shows some of the earlier concepts the team had come up with.

Today, many of the public take interstellar travel for granted, because Star Trek makes it look so easily with their warp drives and antimatter powered reactions. But for those of us who try to compute the problem of real Starship designs, we know the truth – that it is in fact extremely difficult. Whether you are sending a probe via fusion propulsion, laser driven sails or other means, the velocities, powers, energies are unreasonably high from the standpoint of today’s technology. But, it is the dream of travelling to other stars through programs like Star Trek which keeps our candles burning late into the night as we calculate away at the problems. In time, I am sure we will prevail.

There is an element of developing warp drive theory however that is usually neglected and I think it is now time to raise it – the implications to the Fermi Paradox. This is the calculation performed by the Italian physicists Enrico Fermi around 1950 that given the number of stars in the galaxy, their average distance, spectral type, age and how long it takes for a civilization to grow – intelligent extraterrestrials should be here by now, yet we don’t see any. Over the years there have been many proposed solutions to the Fermi paradox. In 2002 Stephen Webb published a collection of them in his book titled "If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens...where is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life".

Webb, Stephen, “If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens…Where is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life”, Paxis.One of the ways to address this is to ask if interstellar travel was even feasible in theory. Although the British Interplanetary Society, Project Daedalus proved that it was. If you can design on paper a machine like Daedalus at the outset of the space age, what could you do in two or three centuries from now? But even then travel times across the galaxy would be quite slow. The average distance between stars is around 5 light years, the Milky Way is 1,000 light years thick and 100,000 light years in diameter. Travelling at around ten percent of the speed of light the transit times for these distances would be 50 years, 10,000 years and 1 million years respectively. These are still quite long and the probability of encountering another intelligent species from one of the 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy may be low. But what if you have a warp drive?

The warp drive would permit arbitrarily large multiple equivalents of the speed of light to be surpassed, so that you could reach distances in the galaxy fairly quickly. Just like Project Daedalus had addressed whether interstellar travel was feasible as an attack on the Fermi Paradox problem, so the warp drive is yet another question – is arbitrarily large speeds possible, exceeding even the speed of light? If it was, then our neighbourhood should be crowded by alien equivalents of the first Vulcan mission that landed on Earth in the Star Trek Universe.

To my mind, if we can show in the laboratory that warp drive is feasible in theory as a proof of principle, and yet we don’t discover intelligent species outside of the Earth’s biosphere, of the many solutions to the Fermi paradox, perhaps there are only two remaining. The first would be some variation on the Zoo hypothesis, and the second is that we are indeed alone on this pale blue dot called Earth. Take your pick what sort of a Universe you would rather exist in?

The City & The Stars

The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke was first published in 1956 and is based on an original short story entitled 'Against the Fall of Night'. Before I read the book several years ago, I had just finished reading the twin pillars of Olaf Stapledon's literary career: Starmaker and Last and First Men. I knew that Stapledon had been a big influence on Clarke and this was prominent throughout the pages of The City and the Stars. The story is set initially in the apparently Utopian city of Diaspar, a billion years in the future. The citizens of Diaspar are immortal; the humans are created by machines and people can die and be reborn from the computer, which stores their life's memories. To maintain population control, the computer chooses which citizens to awake from their virtual death in order to live another lifespan in Diaspar.

In the story, Clarke proposes a definition of the ideal machine: that "no machine may contain any moving parts". The central character - Alvin - is different from his contemporaries because this is his first life and in some ways he is responsible for the renewal of human civilization to come. But Alvin has a passion, to get outside of the city and explore, an almost infectious obsession that drives his every action. Eventually, he is helped by what can only be described as a deliberate and mischievous anomaly in the computer program (called Khedron) that shows him the way. There is a fundamental paradox in the story. The city of Diaspar is a perfect place, but the world outside is not. After a long period of galactic war the city of Diaspar is the last resting place of humanity, protected from any would-be invaders by a large domed shield.

Humanity was once a star-fairing species but has been forced to adopt an insular existence. Diaspra is also a form of dystopia, offering its inhabitants all they could ever want including immortality, but inhibiting their freedom to explore the world outside.

Outside the city is the human settlement of Lys, an apparently technologically less advanced place with no interest in space travel, consisting of mortal people who have perfected mental telepathy. In Lys, Alvin meets a companion called Hilvar and together they explore the planet. Eventually they meet an ancient extraterrestrial creature and his fellow robot that were loyal to their masters - 'The Great Ones'. Their journey leads them to the discovery of a spaceship and they are able to leave Earth and travel to meet a powerful but child-like being of pure intellect called 'Vanamonde,' who can travel through space instantaneously.

They establish a telepathic communication with the being. From this encounter they learn the truth of what happened to the rest of the human race and the terrible deeds of the insane being known as 'The Mad Mind', a form of 'mentality', which had been imprisoned inside a 'black star'.

Like much of Clarke’s writing, this story contains a powerful blend of credible science fiction and large ideas which border on the metaphysical.

Clarke maintains a perfect balance between these two limits and demonstrates, as he does with many of his other books, that he is a corking good writer. The City and the Stars is one my favourite science fiction novels by Clarke. I left the book wanting to know more, about where Alvin travelled to next.

SETI Extremes of Analysis

A simple way to frame the Fermi paradox is as a contraction between our theoretical expectation for intelligent life in the galaxy (based on probability arguments) and our observation that none is observed. When reading different peoples views about the Fermi Paradox the proposed explanations have a pessimistic and an optimistic extreme

The traditional chauvinism arguments that prevail in the scientific community were advanced by Martin & Bond [1]. Drake-Sagan chauvinism essentially advocates a crowded galaxy [2, 3] and arguably the extreme viewpoint of this constitutes an acceptance of alien abduction as a real phenomenon. Hart-Viewing chauvinism advocates that our species is probably the first intelligence life to arise in the galaxy [4, 5, 6], and arguably the extreme view point of this constitutes a belief in a deity (religious) who created only mankind and none others – Mankind is unique.

There are many other potential solutions proposed to explain the Fermi paradox other than the two extremes argued above. Such as the galaxy is too big to allow interaction within our civilization time, or that we are being deliberately quarantined from other more peaceful species in a so called Zoo hypothesis. It may also be the case that advanced intelligent probes are or have been here but our limited technology is not capable of detecting them. Another favourite is that civilizations reach a critical point in their technological development where they either flourish or destroy themselves in a nuclear war. Large scale natural catastrophes will also impact the number of civilizations in the galaxy and thereby the probability of interaction. 

The Fermi Paradox is really a conflict of two ideas. Idea one: the universe is teaming with life. Idea two: the universe is empty. Yet our observations currently seem incapable of resolving these two philosophical perspectives. These are framed within the question of comparing our theoretical expectations with our experimental observations – the fact that they are in conflict implies one is incorrect. Either our theoretical expectation is wrong or based on a false premise. Alternatively, our experimental observations are flawed, limited or looking in the wrong regime. How do we resolve these ‘facts in conflict’ – through logic. The first point of our reasoning must be that this is not in fact a paradox but merely a logical contradiction.

We can define a paradox as a statement that apparently contradicts itself, such as a logical paradox which is an invalid argument. A paradox will often have revealed errors in definitions that are assumed to be rigorous. Because of this, I do not see the Fermi problem as a logical paradox, but more of a logical contradiction in terms. That is to say, that in classical logic, a contradiction consists of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions. It occurs when two conclusions which form the logical, usually opposite inversions of each other. Hence I like to reformulate the Fermi Paradox as the Fermi problem.

Instead, it is better to look at the Fermi problem, from the standpoint of a mathematical axiom. An axiomatic system is any set of axioms from which some or all axioms can be used in conjunction to logically derive theorems. A mathematical theory consists of an axiomatic system and all its derived theorems. So with the Fermi problem, any statement which asserts the presents of intelligent life in the galaxy is a theorem, which must derive from the axiom that the galaxy is capable of hosting intelligent life in the first place. We know that this this axiom is true, because we are here, and so we represent the manifest evidence for the starting point of reasoning, to be accepted as true without controversy. Given that we exist, we are left to ask do others exist?

This then leads to the development of a hypothesis as a proposed explanation for the phenomenon. And in the Fermi problem there are two forms of hypothesis that are proposed. The first hypothesis is that the galaxy is capable of hosting more than one intelligent life form on separate worlds around other stars. The second hypothesis is that we have the technological capability to measure the presence of such intelligent life should it exist. But these are not logical paradoxes, merely mutually exclusive and independent hypothesis which can be tested, in order to develop full theorems.

Today many debate the different arguments of the so called Fermi Paradox, but there are numerous issues with our handling of it which make reasonable progress not sensible, due to the logical fallacy of the questions and how they are framed. When we forget the fundamental rules of reasoning and how to construct and deconstruct logical arguments as taught to us by the classical Trivium, we are bound to lead ourselves astray and destined to not answer the questions that our curiosity drives us towards.

References

[1] Martin, A.R & A.Bond, “Is Mankind Unique? – The Lack of Evidence For Extraterrestrial Intelligence”, JBIS, 36, pp.223-225, 1983.

[2] Shklovskii, I.S & C.Sagan, “Intelligent Life in the Universe”, Holden Day, 1966.

[3] Sagan, C & F.Drake, “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”, Sci.Am.,232,80, May 1975.

[4] Viewing, D, “Directly Interacting Extraterrestrial Technological Communities”, JBIS, 28, 735, 1975.

[5] Hart, M, “An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth”, QJRAS, 16, 128, 1975.

[6] Tipler, F.J, “Extraterrestrial Intelligent Beings Do Not Exist”, QJRAS, 21, 267, 1980.

New Forthcoming Book

I am pleased to announce that a new book by myself will come out in the new year, titled 'The Stars in our Times'. It is a collection of essays based on numerous blog posts I have written over the years, with each of the arguments expanded upon. I hope you like it, and buy a copy.

Contact me if you would like to purchase a copy once it is published.