CAN SF OFFER BETTER WAYS TO GET FROM HERE TO THERE?

Over the recent holiday season my wife and I visited family in a large city, including lots of experience with public and private transportation. Subways, streetcars, buses, and hours in a private car over snow-and-traffic-clogged highways moving little or not at all. It made me wonder again why we still don’t have better ways of getting from place to place—faster and more convenient ways. Sure, there are lots of good things to be said about newer mass transit vehicles, given the challenges. But individual self-driving pods would be a lot nicer, and when I consider the four-hour and six-hour drives that separate us from some family members, a Star Trek transporter or Larry Niven’s stepping disks would be a godsend!

It’s often pointed out that, after nearly a century of imagining them, we still don’t have flying cars. Actually, some do exist but they’re hideously expensive prototypes that would still be revoltingly expensive in production, and none are really practical for the workday commute. More like a quirky toy for the private pilot who likes to keep his aircraft in his own garage.

At the other end of the cost scale are a lot of wacky personal street devices that mostly look like variations on a powered skateboard. Fun, maybe, but not terribly useful on a crowded sidewalk or a roadway with cars. Not to mention stairs! Check out this video.

A cool site called Technovelgy has collected transportation concepts proposed in dozens of works of science fiction. It’s revealing that almost all of them fall into a small number of basic categories: cars, flying belts, maglev transports, moving roadways, and teleportation.

Since the invention of the automobile we’ve been obsessed with personal vehicles—might as well call them cars—fast, often self-driving, sometimes self-levitating for a smoother and faster drive, very often able to fly, and once in a while even able to travel in time (who can ever forget Back to the Future’s DeLorean?) The self driving car is enticingly close to becoming practical, and could make a huge difference to urban commuting, if only by eliminating torrents of rage over every other driver’s utter incompetence! I enjoy driving, but I’d gladly give up the privilege in urban environments in exchange for knowing that none of the other vehicles was controlled by idiots. Again, flying cars would be great for long-distance travel but not worth sky-high prices to most people. And amphibious cars would be a treat for those of us who live on islands, but of no value to almost anyone else.

Of course, the terrific versatility of a flying belt (or rocket pack, or maybe the turbofan-powered Martin jetpack) is very appealing. Who doesn’t wish they could fly like a bird? Zip anywhere without waiting in line-ups or hunting for a parking space. But so far its physical manifestations have been lacking, with serious safety and distance limitations. Bad weather would be a pain, too. Given the impressive advances in drone technology due to improvements in battery tech, I can’t say that we’ll never get to a practical personal lifting device. Solving antigravity would do it, but I don’t think I’ll hold my breath for that just yet.

Magnetically-levitating trains, monorails, and personal transport pods already exist, providing much greater speeds than normal tracks. New proposals, like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop (in a vacuum tunnel to further enhance speed) and Tel Aviv’s SkyTran have promise. But development costs are terribly high, which means that governments rarely move ahead with them until conditions get truly desperate. And high-speed maglev transports are really only an advantage over longer distances, not for downtown urban traffic.

For the city dweller, moving sidewalks and roadways might be the answer if we could solve issues of inertia and momentum. We already have “human conveyor belts” in places like airports, but more than one speed is rarely offered. Even in the 1940’s Robert Heinlein described side-by-side “slideways” with velocities up to 100 miles per hour, but did he really think through what it would be like to step from the 60 mph belt to the 80 mph belt beside it? Without some kind of inertia-dampening field, spectacular face-plants would be the norm. And don’t suggest the pneumatic tube variation used in Futurama—an air lift tube might work as a strictly vertical elevator, but otherwise no thanks!

What about teleportation—the most versatile and convenient of all? As big a fan as I am of Star Trek, I have a hard time believing that its transporter technology will ever be possible. That a computing device could accurately locate and reproduce billions of atoms constantly in motion, including electrons in their shells of probability, seems unlikely. I actually consider it more likely (though admittedly not by much!) that a means might be found to warp and pierce space/time in such a way as to produce personal wormholes that would allow us to slip instantly from place to place. I like the idea, until I start to imagine the universe as Swiss cheese.

There is a fringe concept in cosmology proposing that at the quantum level of the zero point field lies an ultimate blueprint underlying the entire cosmos, describing the nature and location of everything. If it's true, and if we could ever decode that information and manipulate it, theoretically we could transform any kind of matter into any other kind. But, more to the point of this blog, we could change our own location coordinates and thereby reappear anywhere we wanted to be. We wouldn’t be travelling in any sense, we’d be altering the condition of the very universe, with ourselves in a different place and time than before. Instantaneous. Painless. Worry-free. (Although you’d have to know your destination with perfect precision and be able to harmlessly remove any matter already existing in that space, or trade places with it.)

Interesting refinements of the regular transportation modes crop up all the time (check out super-cavitating boats and city-wide zip lines in this Listverse article, plus solar-powered and magnetically-charged buses). But it would be cool to come up with something truly new—beyond the main categories—and be able to implement it within our lifetime. My saddle sore backside would thank you.

WHY GO BACK TO THE MOON?

Saturn Apollo image courtesy of NASA

U.S. President Donald Trump signed a directive this week instructing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to once again focus on sending a human crew to the Moon. Humans haven’t been on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in December of 1972—forty-five years ago—although there have been robotic probe landings by Russia and China. Former President Barack Obama had urged a crewed landing on an asteroid instead, as practice for a Mars voyage. So why does Trump prefer to shift the focus back to the Moon (although, notably, there haven’t yet been any announcements about funding or a timetable)? Perhaps because the Chinese space agency previously announced plans for a manned lunar landing by 2036, and appeared to confirm that intention this past June.

Other than “staying in the lead” in manned lunar exploration, as Trump puts it, why should anyone put that much money and effort into landing humans on the Moon again? It’s already been done.

Actually, I find myself in the rare position of agreeing with The Donald this time. There are lots of reasons that a focus on further Moon exploration is not misplaced. It offers many advantages over other possible destinations in the short term. One of them is that we have already been there, so we have a good idea what to expect, which means explorers can pay less attention to the process of getting and staying there, and more on learning stuff.

The Moon offers a huge surface area and the great variety of its topography can benefit a multitude of purposes. For both research and manufacturing, it provides the advantages of low gravity and a vacuum environment without the disadvantages of zero gravity: liquids can pour, air can circulate thermally, and there is an “up” and a “down” (no small point when you’re working with tools). Extremely high temperatures and extremely low temperatures are both available for a couple of weeks at a time (as compared, for example, to a spinning asteroid). Water on the Moon can be used for human consumption, but also processed to make oxygen for rocket fuel and other chemical reactions. Radio telescopes and other electromagnetic sensing technology can operate on the farside to take advantage of the Moon’s great bulk to block interference from Earth.

We badly need to learn more about the mineral composition of the Moon at large because, in spite of the Apollo missions and numerous unmanned landings, the areas sampled still comprise only a very small percentage of what’s there. Minerals and other elements found on the Moon can not only be used to produce infrastructure on site, but also hurled by mass launchers throughout the solar system much more cheaply than by using rockets and at vastly less expense than shipping objects from Earth. Along with mineral resources native to the Moon, there are certain to be metals and other valuable commodities from the many asteroid strikes on its surface.

From a purely scientific point of view, the Moon can teach us about the origins of the solar system, the accretion of planets, the formation of orbits, and more about asteroids (from those many impact craters).

But the most important advantage of the Moon is that it’s so close. Only a three day journey away. Locations on the near side are in a direct line-of-sight from Earth. Communications suffer a time lag of just over a second instead of many minutes. All of that means lower costs in fuel, time, and crew stress. Less exposure to cosmic radiation (one of the most serious obstacles that Mars-trip planners are struggling to overcome). A much greater chance of rescue in the event of a serious accident. Smaller and less complicated spacecraft (with a reduced need for shielding, extensive recycling facilities, or physical fitness equipment). Much more attractive time-frames for potential space tourists. And the list goes on.

We still have a huge amount to learn about living and working in space. Much of it will inevitably be through trial and error. Although still hazardous, to be sure, the Moon is a safer, more practical practice environment than anywhere else beyond our home planet. In our long journey toward the stars, it’s our front porch.

From a science fiction perspective, our giant natural satellite has captivated our imaginations forever, and there are far too many wonderful literary speculations about it for me to begin to list them. But I do want to touch on one. The premise of Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”, later to form the basis of 2001: A Space Odyssey is exquisitely logical. That an extraterrestrial species which visited our planet just at the dawn of human intelligence would place a device on the Moon to alert them when humanity reaches the level of space-faring technology is not far-fetched at all. I consider it almost inevitable.

So, yes, let’s go back to the Moon. Let’s find the doorbell and ring it, and then wait to see who answers.

OUR FIRST INTERSTELLAR VISITOR

NASA JPL artist's illustration

Some of us believe that our solar system has had visitors from other stars, and others don’t. But last month there was concrete proof.

(Actually, it’s probably rock, not concrete, but it is real and it came from “way out there”.)

It’s an asteroid given the name Oumuamua (a Hawaiian word meaning “a messenger from afar arriving first”) discovered by the Pan-STARRS1 observatory in Maui on October 19, 2017. Not a spaceship full of alien invaders, thankfully, but still pretty interesting because it’s the first confirmed sighting of an object passing through our solar system that we know came from beyond its borders. Oumuamua’s regular changes in brightness lead scientists to believe that it’s probably cigar-shaped, perhaps four hundred meters long (about the size of a very large aircraft carrier) and rotating along its length. None of the asteroids in our system are that shape, which only adds to the mystery. It hurtled around the sun in a path resembling a comet’s orbit but it has no tail or accompanying gas cloud, and it entered the system from far above the plane of the ecliptic (the disk-like zone in which the planets and most other material orbit the sun). It wasn’t spotted until after it had already passed close to the sun, a swing-by that gave it much greater speed and a whole new direction. Don’t worry, it’s not going to come anywhere near Earth, although some scientists are so excited about it that they’re proposing an urgent effort to send a rocket chasing after it.

That probably won’t happen, firstly because such projects can’t be put together overnight, and secondly, because the chase rocket would have to go faster than any man-made object yet created. Still, you can understand their interest. Oumuamua is already changing thinking about the composition of solar systems, and who knows what else we could learn with a good close look? Think of how long it must have been wandering through the void; an orphan; a leftover from the formation of another star, flung away from its home by a Neptune-like planet. Even if it isn’t occupied by anything living, it could provide a lot of physical evidence about conditions long ago in a [star system] far, far away.

A science fiction reader learning of Oumuamua will inevitably be reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s landmark 1973 novel Rendezvous With Rama, which won just about every SFF award that ever existed. In the novel, a 50-kilometer-long cylindrical object is discovered passing through the solar system and is found to be a mammoth spacecraft—pretty much an artificial world in a big can (reminiscent of a space colony design that’s known as an O’Neill cylinder). Coincidentally, in the story Rama is discovered by a (then fictional) program called Spaceguard tasked with finding and tracking space objects that might threaten Earth—exactly the same job the Pan-STARRS1 observatory was doing when it found Oumuamua!

Could the roving asteroid actually be an alien spacecraft? Well, there haven’t been any signs of that, but we don’t know nearly enough about it to give a definitive No either. And I’m certain that such a possibility has crossed the minds of those scientists so eager to send a reconnaissance mission after it. How could they help but wonder? Unfortunately, Clarke’s book is set in 2131 when spacecraft technology is capable of chasing and catching up with Rama. Our century has seen the Rosetta space probe rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko—an outstanding feat—but we’re just not up to sending a team of explorers after Oumuamua.

There are similar SF stories, including an excellent novel by Greg Bear called Eon and its sequels, which tell of a giant hollowed-out asteroid that appears in orbit around Earth and includes a long corridor that may lead beyond this universe. Don’t be surprised to see more such tales to come, inspired by the discovery of Oumuamua. Especially since the asteroid approached from a direction called the solar apex, a point in the sky toward which the solar system moves in its orbit through the galaxy.

Which means that wherever Oumuamua came from, we’re headed that way!

GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT PRESERVING SPECIES

https://www.mikesgearreviews.com/facts-svalbard-international-seed-vault-infographic/

I’ve mentioned more than once that Earth is a fragile place. Precarious would be an appropriate description of life here. Scientists believe there have been five mass extinctions of life forms over Earth’s history. The worst one took 96% of marine species and about 70% of land creatures. But species are going extinct all the time, and that sad state has only grown worse as humanity has grown more powerful. We also lose great numbers of crop species as plant breeding and genetic modification, along with the trend to giant corporate farms, drastically decreases the variety of our food crops being planted.

We could do a lot to prevent this just by cleaning up our act—producing less pollution and curtailing our ravenous appetite for the environments other species call home. It’s bad enough that living entities face danger from droughts and other weather fluctuations, predators, pests, and disease, without humans adding to the toll. There’s always the chance, too, that some large disaster will wipe out species on a vast scale. It could be a nuclear war, nanotechnology run amok, an asteroid strike, or even malicious action by an alien force from beyond our atmosphere, whether sentient or microscopic. Earth is still the only place in the universe that we know is home to living things, and that’s a heritage too precious to leave at risk.

There are many efforts to protect life forms here on Earth, including wildlife preserves and parks, but also many seed vaults and gene banks around the world. A reader of this blog named Mike reminded me of them, and has written on his own website about what is probably the most famous: the Svalbard International Seed Vault, a so-called "doomsday vault" on the island of Spitsbergen, Norway. There are upwards of 1400 seed vaults around the world, but other facilities preserve genetic material from both plants and animals, and sometimes actual specimens. Some of the very largest are in the UK, US, Russia, and India. All of these efforts are to be commended, yet since they’re all on Earth they still face risk from earthquakes, storms, floods, human conflict, and even rampant industrial development.

Isn’t it time we took a longer view and made efforts to preserve species from Earthbound hazards by creating real “offsite” storage sites—meaning off-planet? Whether on the frozen spaces of the Moon, in a hallowed-out asteroid, or even in the far reaches of the solar system like Pluto, there’d be no worries about weather, oxidation, or corruption by germs. With any luck, it’ll be a while before human conflicts get that far out, too. Yes, we’d have to protect the samples from cosmic radiation and possibly extremes of temperature, but that would mainly be a matter of picking the right sites. Of course, it will be even better when we can take actual living creatures beyond the Earth, but genetic samples are better than nothing.

Since I like to tie my science in with science fiction, I have to admit the scenario sparks my imagination too. Imagine the story potential of sending Earth life out into the void.

Survivors of a planet-wide holocaust could, of course, use the contents of the gene vaults to reproduce Earth life on a new colony world, or maybe even time travel to a prehistoric Earth and seed it with familiar species they know can survive there. Alternatively, they could try to rehabilitate the Earth in their present-day or at a key moment in the apocalypse that would prevent complete destruction.

By happenstance, the contents of one or more gene vaults might end up on another hospitable planet far away and eons in the future, and become exposed to the local environment in such a way that Earth life spontaneously regenerates.

A powerful being or beings might create a duplicate Earth for reasons of their own with a variety not seen in human history.

There are also endless “B” movie possibilities. Radiation, alien microbial life, or tampering by extraterrestrials could mutate our animals, insects, or plants into monstrous forms we wouldn’t recognize (until they suddenly appear in some remote outpost and start eating the crew!)

Invading aliens might use the genetic material to disguise themselves and infiltrate Earth without us ever being the wiser. At the very least, they could learn the most efficient ways of attacking us long before getting close enough to Earth to be detected.

Oops, those examples may have undermined my argument a little (especially the “B” movie ones), but the truth is that every life form is precious and deserving of preservation (OK, mosquitoes are on the borderline) and as the only species on Earth capable of doing anything about it, that task is up to us. Let’s not put it off until it’s too late.

HOW MUCH OF THE TIME ARE WE REALLY CONSCIOUS?

Photo credit: jgmarcelino via VisualHunt.com / CC BY

You land on a web page, and you watch as the page fills in piece by piece—maybe a coloured section appears before a banner image fully loads, then text re-aligns, a sidebar populates itself one article at a time. You wish it were a little faster, but it’s only mildly annoying.

Now imagine if all of the things you see, touch, hear, taste, and smell came into your awareness the same way—gradually, a bit at a time. If you moved your eyes much the constant reloading could drive you crazy. Gradually becoming aware that your hand was on a hot stove burner could have unpleasant consequences. Yet, surely the brain has to take some amount of time to process each of the sensory signals it receives: translating a light wavelength into the colour blue, or a certain vibration in the air as a musical note. So why aren’t we aware of the process—why don’t we experience the partial results? New research from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland suggests the reason is contained in a new explanation of consciousness.

For all of the things we’ve learned about our brains, there’s still no clear understanding (and a lot of controversy) about how consciousness works. We seem to experience the world in a continuous stream of sensations, but researchers have found many ways to trick our brain and those tricks provide insight into its processes. For instance, an unexpected sight, immediately replaced by an expected one (say, the sight of a clown face for a fraction of a second while looking at a landscape) can be completely edited out by the brain before it reaches the level of consciousness—the person is never even aware they saw it. Optical illusions often show that the brain makes adjustments of colours and shapes in objects according to the object’s surroundings, based on what the brain would expect from that object in the natural world. An example of that is this shadow illusion (you can have lots of fun with other optical trickery here...after you’ve finished reading!) Obviously our conscious minds aren’t witnessing everything. So what’s going on?

According to the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne studies, the processing of sensory input happens in a state of unconsciousness, with no perception of time, and when the steps are complete we become conscious of every aspect of the stimulus all at once—the “final picture”. This seems to suggest that we’re not actually conscious all of the time we think we are. The EPFL researchers claim these intervals can last up to 400 milliseconds, or four-tenths of a second for visual stimulus (they haven’t tested the other senses). That’s a fair bit of time when you consider how quickly things happen in the real world. It doesn’t mean our brains can’t react to partial data—we just might not be conscious of it yet, which could explain how you hit the brake pedal without thinking when the brake lights of the car in front of you light up. Or how your eyelid flicks closed just in time to protect your eye from that badminton bird you didn’t even see coming.

Yes, they’re saying that we experience consciousness in chunks, sometimes only every 400 milliseconds (though the intervals can be shorter if less processing is involved). If it helps, think of how we watch movies and appear to witness a continuous stream of action though we’re really seeing 24 still frames per second.

Where can we take this new understanding?

• If we could assist our brains to process stimuli faster, would we experience a kind of hyperconsciousness? (Maybe that’s what certain mind-altering drugs do.)
• If we could discover what brain signal triggers the unconscious and conscious states, we might be able to use that for everything from anaesthesiology to refreshing ourselves with micro-naps during the day.
• The more we learn about this process the more ways we might discover to trick the brain. And if we can trick the brain, we can control what a person sees, hears, and feels. Perfect virtual reality, for good and for bad. (Cue the SF scenarios where some evil force—alien or government—enslaves the population by creating a perfect illusion for them to live in! Like The Matrix.)
• This concept of consciousness also has ramifications for the idea of “uploading” our minds into computers. Would we need to build in digital delays equivalent to these unconscious intervals to keep our minds from going insane?

It’s early days when it comes to this research, and I’m sure there won’t be consensus about the mechanisms of consciousness anytime soon. But every thing we learn is useful, and if it creates more questions than it answers…isn’t that the real fun part of science? I know it’s the fun part of science fiction, so bring on the brain teasers—I have stories to write.

FUTURE BUILDING 101

Science fiction authors are expected to have a crystal ball. Not with the precision focus of a fortune teller’s, thank goodness, but able to see the broad strokes of the future, mainly from observing social and technological trends. Because, we humans now have the power to shape our bodies, our minds, even our planet, for good or bad. We’re building our future world.

Personally, I’d like a Star Trek future (the optimistic Gene Roddenberry vision) as opposed to, say, a Neuromancerfuture, or a Blade Runner future, or a MaddAddam future. But if we don’t truly understand what we want, how will we know what to build?

This blog is as good a place as any to look at the future we want and the things we’ll have to do to make it. So I’ll be doing that in coming weeks. Just don’t hold me to any predictions. And don’t ask me for a personal reading.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to know that one of the most critical needs for our future is clean energy. Coal and oil burning pollute the air and do scary things to the climate. Nuclear fission produces waste that’s radioactive for thousands of years, and its accidents could give us all cancer. Solar and wind energy sources are becoming more efficient, but may never meet all of our needs. So the best bet looks to be (drum roll please)…nuclear fusion.

Wow, I just broke some news that’s been around for a hundred years.

OK, so just because it isn’t new doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Nuclear fusion reactors use fuel that’s in great abundance (usually hydrogen isotopes made using seawater and lithium), produce waste that loses its radioactivity within a few hundred years, not thousands, require few safety measures because the reaction can’t sustain itself, won’t poison the environment with long-lived radio-isotopes in the event of a leak, and produce a lot of energy. Fantastic, right?

Unfortunately the pin that bursts the nuclear fusion bubble is that so far we haven’t been able to produce a sustained fusion reaction that doesn’t use as much energy to keep it going as the amount of energy it produces. Not such a profitable equation. However, many scientists believe the problem is just a question of scale: build a reactor big enough and the thing will work without needing large amounts of energy to keep the flame lit. Based on that theory, a huge facility in Cadarache, France called the ITER Project is being built by a partnership of the European Union (as hosts), the U.S., China, Russia, Japan, India, and South Korea. It is a mega-project, after all. Mega as in: an original budget of about 5 billion euros but now projected to reach 16 billion. And that’s just for an experimental reactor that isn’t intended to generate electricity, but simply prove that the concept is viable!

If you get heart palpitations thinking about all of the other worthwhile things 16 billion euros could pay for, remember that if fusion can be made to work on a commercial scale, it could solve nearly every problem related to energy production that we face today, and then, thanks to cheap and abundant energy, go on to solve many other problems (running plants to turn seawater into fresh water, for example).

Fusion energy is the future we want. So the monetary investment is what we need to do to get it.

That’s the way this future-building thing works.

THE BEST FUEL IS NO FUEL, IMPOSSIBLE OR NOT

There was quite a stir a week ago as NASA confirmed the success of an engine that runs without fuel. Your first reaction will be, “Where can I get one of those for my car?!” So perhaps I should call it a propulsion method with no apparent propellant. And it might be usable for spacecraft, but your Chevy is going to have to keep on sucking gas.

The first version of this system was something called the EmDrive by its British inventor, Roger Shawyer. The EmDrive produces thrust from electrical energy by bouncing microwaves inside a sealed container. Physicists said such a thing was impossible because it violated the law of conservation of momentum: to get something moving, you have to exert a force, whether it’s feet on pavement or hot rocket exhaust sprayed in the opposite direction—you gain momentum by taking it from something else. But Shawyer wasn’t deterred. He even got support from a Chinese team that built an EmDrive in 2013 and found that it produced enough thrust to potentially move a satellite around in space.

Non-Chinese physicists still weren’t buying it until an American named Guido Fetta built a microwave thruster of his own, persuaded NASA to test it out, and on July 30^th, 2014 the NASA team unveiled its results: impossible or not, the microwave thruster did produce thrust using electrical energy alone—no propellant. The amount of thrust was much less than the Chinese results (Shawyer blames this on Fetta’s design) but still undeniable. The NASA scientists only reported their methods and results—they did not choose to speculate about how the thing works. But as Wired magazine points out, they implied that the microwave thruster may be pushing against the “quantum vacuum plasma”: a froth of the universe’s tiniest particles that, according to quantum mechanics, pop into and out of existence constantly in empty space. In that case, it’s not violating any laws. It’s also not impossible.

This is big news. One of the greatest challenges involved in space travel is the mass of propellant needed for any type of rocket engine. To be able to do without propellant is huge. An EmDrive thruster could be powered by solar energy or presumably, for interstellar travel, a nuclear reactor. The thrust produced is small, but steady, and over the vast distances of space it’s steady that wins the race.

To me, the aspect of the news that’s even more delightful is that it’s yet another instance of someone proving that the “impossible” is no such thing. I realize that the discovery of the laws under which the universe operates is at the core of advancing human knowledge. But when will people stop using the word impossible? I couldn’t begin to list all of the “impossible” things that have proven to be not only possible, but sometimes the next law against which other impossible things are measured.

For now, our best scientists still believe that such things as faster-than-light travel and time travel are impossible. As a science fiction writer, I don’t dare accept that because it would spoil too many great stories! But more than that, I’ve come to see that “impossible” just means “not yet” or perhaps “not within our current understanding”. I’d strongly urge scientists to remove the word from their vocabulary—there’s just too good a chance that they’ll eventually have to eat it.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

Another historic challenge for the scientific community has fallen by the wayside: the search for the elusive gravitational waves predicted by Einstein and crucial to the Big Bang Theory (the real one—not the TV show) has ended in success.

A team of astrophysicists announced this week that their exotic equipment based at the South Pole has detected variations in the universe’s microwave background radiation that are polarized, made that way by ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by gravitational waves produced in the great expansion that followed the Big Bang. No-one’s ever detected gravitational waves themselves since Einstein described them in his Theory of General Relativity ninety-nine years ago, but this is the strongest evidence yet of their existence. The scientists spent three years crunching the data to eliminate every other possibility for what they found. More than that, the existence of these gravitational waves gives a huge boost to what’s known as the Inflationary Universe Theory: that in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded to something approaching what we see now. So a double whammy for the South Pole observation unit, and two major milestones achieved in one stroke.

This comes not all that long after the discovery of the Higgs Boson in the summer of 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Called the “holy grail” of particle physics, the Higgs Boson (and the omnipresent Higgs Field) are what give objects mass. Their existence was predicted back in 1964 but forty-eight years passed before it could be proven (after which the originators of the idea received a Nobel Prize). Even a few years ago, some wondered if gravitational waves and the Higgs Boson would ever be found. I’m reminded that the proof of extraterrestrial planets is only a few years old, too, though now there have been hundreds discovered, and it’s generally thought that they far outnumber stars in the galaxy.

It makes me wonder: if the great scientific quests of our time are all being achieved, will we suddenly have a whole lot of physicists out of work? There must be something we can put their talents to. Wormholes and black holes are still sexy. How about the multiverse theory (so we can escape climate change to an Earth we haven’t screwed up yet)? Or with so much brainpower on hand, surely time travel isn’t an insurmountable problem? OK—maybe that one is too risky, but at the very least they’ve got to find a way to give us faster-than-light travel or we’ll never get to see any of our own galactic neighbourhood, let alone the rest of the universe.

Or maybe, just maybe, they can go to work on the true unsolvables: why buttered toast always lands face down, and where single socks go when they vanish from the clothes dryer.

Just trying to help

SPACEFLIGHT ISN'T GLAMOROUS

Today is the anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the spacecraft destroyed by an explosion 73 seconds after liftoff on January 28, 1986. On February 1, 2003 the shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas during re-entry. Seven crew members perished each time and, of course, there have been other fatalities in the history of spaceflight. That got me thinking about the way we romanticize astronauts and other explorers. Is it because of that risk of death? Or because they’re going places most of us will never go?

It certainly isn’t because such occupations are glamorous in their day-to-day reality. Seafaring explorers lived in appalling conditions with cramped quarters, no hygiene, and rampant illness: dysentery, smallpox, and scurvy because of their lack of nutrition. Arctic explorers brave weather that makes even this winter of the “polar vortex” seem balmy in comparison, forcing them into adopting methods of food preparation and waste disposal that most of us would find revolting. And astronauts definitely have their share of distasteful circumstances to contend with.

The Mercury astronauts went through grueling training that involved a lot of vomiting, enemas, and catheters. The first American in space, Alan Shepard, famously had to pee in his spacesuit because of a long launch delay in 1961. Soon after that a urination system was designed for men that was like an extra tough condom with a tube at the end leading to a collector bag. But when it was decided to integrate women into the astronaut program during the space shuttle years, the toilet design was a problem—the male engineers didn’t have a good understanding of female anatomy regarding urinating in zero gee. Some navy nurses volunteered to undergo weightlessness aboard NASA’s infamous Vomit Comet aircraft and pee to see how the urine would behave. Urinating in space can be a very serious matter if the spacecraft or space station’s toilet malfunctions. High tech diapers were chosen as the solution. Spaceflight fans have made much of the fact that Sandra Bullock wears somewhat sexy underwear in the movie Gravity. The reality is more like thick shorts of a super-absorbent material, like a pull-up diaper. The wearing and disposing of such things, not to mention the handling and disposal of other human waste, can’t be considered sexy in any way. Equally unappealing is the inescapable fact that long-term spaceflight requires the recycling of as much water as possible for drinking and other purposes, including human waste water. Don’t think about that too hard.

There are lots of other ways that the astronaut life is undesirable. In zero gee most astronauts experience space sickness at some point. They get back pain. Fluids shifting in their bodies make them become congested like having a bad cold. They lose bone mass and muscles atrophy without regular strenuous exercise. Heart muscles lose their conditioning. Then there’s the clothing: moon suits and EVA suits are bulky and uncomfortable enough in an atmosphere, but once in the vacuum of space the air in them causes them to stiffen even more, making it difficult to move. The food? Well, it used to be that astronauts had to eat paste-like foods from plastic squeeze tubes, and special compressed space food sticks that didn’t produce crumbs. Now they can eat fresh fruit, candy, peanut butter etc. but they still have to be careful that particles, and especially liquids, don’t get away and fall into the electronics. You and I can have a far more enjoyable meal any day of the week.

Sure, they’re part of an elite group, and they get some fantastic views out the window. But, all in all, there’s not much to envy about what astronauts go through. So I suspect most of us will remain content to romanticize our space heroes…and worship them from afar.

LOSS OF INFORMATION HURTS US ALL

We call this the “Information Age”, don’t we? Yet several news items I’ve come across this week show that a huge amount of important information is in real danger of vanishing forever, some by neglect and accident, much by willful disregard.

First there came the revelation this month that as much as eighty percent of the data from research studies conducted over the past couple of decades has been unintentionally lost by being sent to no-longer-active email accounts and trusted to electronic storage devices that became outdated and inaccessible, or were replaced but not fully copied. It’s not hard to see how this could happen. How many times have you upgraded a hard drive but accidentally or deliberately left some files behind? In fact, how many files have you saved to CD or even floppy disks, confident that you could always retrieve them later? University of British Columbia researchers tried to access original data from more than five hundred randomly-chosen ecology studies conducted between 1991 and 2011, and found that data usually remained fully accessible for the first two years after publication, but the chances of finding it thereafter declined by 17% with each year that passed. The researchers blame the fact that such data remains in the hands of the original conductors of the research, and so they’re calling for centralized data archives to which all published research data would by transferred and kept. Great idea, but there’s a problem with it, which brings us to the next story.

We have archives of research data already—they’re called libraries. Unfortunately, since many of them are publicly funded, their continued existence remains at the whim of the serving government. In Canada we have a long-reigning conservative government that is a proven enemy of science. Don’t take my word for it—look it up, but keep a box of Kleenex handy. One of their most recent efforts is to close a half-dozen world-renowned research libraries. The government claims that the data in the libraries is being digitized and preserved. Scientists and library staff are saying this is not true: the information is simply being culled and what isn’t deemed worth transporting to the few libraries remaining open is scrapped. Scientists have been scrambling to save irreplaceable volumes destined for the dumpster.

None of us has a crystal ball. We can’t know what old information we will one day need as a baseline for comparison to a new set of circumstances. Many important natural and social trends only become evident after the analysis of data from very long periods of time. The unintentional loss of data is regrettable and can be stopped. The willful destruction of data is unconscionable and must be stopped. Canadians have protested such government cutbacks without success. The rest of the world needs to take notice and shame the Canadian government into stopping this practice, and send a message to any other governments who might consider such a policy. Before the information age is returned to a much darker time in our history.