In the comments for yesterday’s post on anti-matter there was some discussion about the methodology for interstellar travel; matter/anti-matter annihilation as a form of impulse power versus the use of a worm hole to poke in and out of space as needed. As was intimated (being turned inside out) the current understanding of general relativity does not present any clear mechanism for human beings to utilize such a phenomenon and remain alive. And that got me thinking.
Five hundred years ago if you wanted to go from Portugal to India you would get on a sailing ship and circumnavigate the continent of Africa and then cross the Indian Ocean. And when you returned from this trip thirty months would have passed. Today, a direct flight from Lisbon to Calcutta would take about twelve hours. Call it a day for a round trip. That’s about 900 times faster than the old way. A trip to Mars at its shortest takes about six months. Adding in the return trip makes the whole voyage something like 26–34 months. If somehow, we could increase our speed by the same 900 times we could go round trip to Mars in a day.
Of course that’s impossible. But only in the sense that we would be trying to improve the same means of travel in the future case. So, if you told Vasco da Gama he could make a round trip to India in one day he would assume you were either joking or insane. Because the very idea of a jet plane was an impossibility in his world. Before you can have jet planes you need Galileo, Newton and Maxwell. In other words, you need the mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to know that a jet plane could exist.
What if the mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering of the twenty second, twenty third and twenty fourth centuries conspire to make the round trip to Mars only one day by finding a completely novel approach to travel. What if wormholes really could be harnessed for human transport? Then a day long trip would just be a convenience for meals whereas actual travel time would be zero. But you argue, “wormholes are a theoretical aspect of relativity that have never been observed and if they exist would be as inimical to human life as a black hole would be. And I would counter that feeding flammable liquids like octane into a machine that produces electric sparks and depends on metal parts rotating thousands of times per minute is much too dangerous a method for transporting humans from place to place.
So, I won’t say I know that we’ll ever reach the stars. But I think anyone who says categorically that we cannot is making assumptions that cannot be taken as fact. They are conjecture based on the current understanding of physics and engineering. So, I guess we’re free to fantasize about galactic empires and worm holes and warp drives and anything that makes us happy. And some days I want to read about the day after tomorrow and other days I’ll dream about galactic empires. Why not?
Like A.E van Vogt’s “Far Centaurus” or Heinlein’s “Time for the Stars”, in the time a sleeper ship or relativistic-speed-craft launched to a nearby star arrives, the crew discover that a practical interstellar/FTL/Warp/wormhole drive has been perfected in the time it took for them to make the trip.
Yes, the cutting edge can be a dangerous place.
Not a lot of SciFi plays directly with Relativistic speeds. Heinleins Time for the Stars does (and yes the instantaneous nature of the telepathy provides the key for the drive that breaks the Light Barrier). Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War in a great degree hinges on the relativistic issues as our “heroes” travel further and further afield, so instead of 10’s of years it becomes hundreds. I’ll have to look up the Van Vogt. I know some of his stuff (Slan, Weapon Shops of Issher) but by the time I was reading in the early ’70s on much of his… Read more »
The newspapers and scientific journals are filled with articles by “Experts” proving that something is impossible. Only for it to be demonstrated years or even days later. (See the Wright brothers.)
Man will never fly. The concrete in Hoover dam will never harden. Outer space travel is impossible.
They all made the same mistake: They were based on what we knew then.
BTW, the assumption about the Hoover dam was that it would be a monolithic pour. The “Expert” never realized you could pour it in sections and pump ice water through it to speed the curing.
One of my favorite examples was the idea that a train moving at something like fifty miles an hour would asphyxiate the passengers for some reason. That seemed to be a problem with understanding fluid dynamics I guess. I think the doomsayer was a physicist.
Flatly stating that something is impossible is a form of arrogance.
Here we need Clarke’s (as in Arthur C.) 1st law When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong As for space drives there is always the Alcubierre drive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive). It is theoretically valid, though it requires several forms of unobtanium including negative mass (!). Described in 1994, it is notionally rather (unintentionally) like Star Trek or other Warp drives from SciFi. Power requirements are also immense. Initial estimates were that annihilating the whole mass of Jupiter would be enough, that… Read more »
Based on how far we’ve come in five hundred years, I definitely wouldn’t categorically say anything is impossible except world peace.
That’s true. And I believe I have done it myself a number of times. What can you do. Naysaying is pleasurable.