With all the excitement about \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d making a gazillion dollars at the box office I was thinking about how we get past the reality of the limitations on humans surviving space travel.\u00a0 I mean what do we think about our interplanetary (not to mention interstellar) travelers bombarded with cosmic radiation and metabolically wasted away by microgravity?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yikes!<\/p>\n
First off, think of all the great old books and movies that have been rendered null and void by these realities.\u00a0 Other than maybe the Moon, the old ideas of colonies are falsified by what we\u2019ve learned.\u00a0 No colonies on Mars and the Jovian moons.\u00a0 No asteroid miners in the Belt.\u00a0 All just flights of fantasy.\u00a0 What\u2019s an American boy from the baby boom to do?<\/p>\n
Well, I guess the thing to remember is that one age\u2019s wild guess is eventually replaced by a later age\u2019s measured recalculation.\u00a0 Jules Verne had men travel around the Moon by being shot out of a cannon.\u00a0 Of course, when someone from the twentieth century crunched the numbers, they probably figured out that a cannon that could send a projectile around the Moon would reduce the occupants to a puddle of goo by virtue of the acceleration needed to reach escape velocity in just the few seconds that the \u201cbullet\u201d was inside the barrel of the \u201cgun.\u201d\u00a0 And yet these twentieth century engineers didn\u2019t just throw their hands in the air and say \u201cImpossible.\u201d\u00a0 They invented chemical rockets.<\/p>\n
And maybe that\u2019s what will happen with space flight.\u00a0 Even in \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d Frank and Dave have a rotating ring with pseudo-gravity.\u00a0 Maybe a practical way to protect humans from radiation will also be perfected.<\/p>\n
Or maybe the science fiction of the future will involve robot missions to the planets and stars but with some kind of instantaneous communication to allow humans to experience the sights and sounds of the robotic mission as if in the first person.\u00a0 Or maybe they\u2019ll fall back on good old \u201cpsionics\u201d to allow humans to explore space-time without leaving the confines of Mother Earth.<\/p>\n
Or maybe we go back to the suspended animation idea.\u00a0 And we add to that a nice heavy duty radiation shield around the cryo-unit.\u00a0 We can have a robotic autopilot and only thaw the humans at the destination.<\/p>\n
Or how about intelligent robots whose memories can then be downloaded for humans to view or even \u201cexperience\u201d as transferrable memories.\u00a0 Or maybe we can build a wormhole in high orbit around Earth and pop out close to other planets or even exo-planets.<\/p>\n
And none of these things have to be proven science.\u00a0 They just have to be figments of our imagination that give us the framework for a story or a future that entertain us.\u00a0 In a decade or a century what we know to be impossible will change again.\u00a0 And so will what we find to be possible.\u00a0 We are very clever monkeys and what is impossible today becomes possible in a different way tomorrow.\u00a0 There\u2019s no reason to give up our stories or our dreams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With all the excitement about \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d making a gazillion dollars at the box office I was thinking about how we get past the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1263,4],"tags":[265],"class_list":["post-36967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-sff","tag-science-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n