According to Frederick Smith, traveling to the stars, perhaps divested of our carnate bodies and turned into gleaming computer-driven machines of stainless steel and plastic, is eminently feasible.  It’s right around the corner you feel, if you read his glowing prognosis, which sounds something like Star Wars, which I suppose he saw at least 10 times.

To hear Smith talk, you’d think it was the easiest thing in the world to get up to a considerable fraction of the speed of light, say 10% or 30,000 kilometers a second, shoot across a gulf of 41 trillion kilometers in a mere 43 years aboard the craft, and set up housekeeping in a biodome on some planet whose existence hasn’t even been established so far.  Or better yet, if we have just a little patience, we can go the 193 trillion kilometers to planet Gliese 581c, in a mere 204 years, which should be no problem with our new stainless steel bodies, susceptible of in-flight repairs, upon with Smith predicates his dangerously infectious optimism.  Of course, we don’t really know that Gliese 581c is earthling-friendly; it just happens to be in the sort of proximity to its parent star that suggests that it may have liquid water.  But no matter, we can always set up a self-contained space station there, even if the water turns out to be ammonia and the temperature is always 200 degrees.

I venture to say that no one alive today will live to see Gliese 581c, unless science gets into high gear fast to prolong human longevity.  Smith is thirty-something.   Will he live to be 225 years old, with or without steel limbs and plastic organs? I surely don’t know why he is so excited?  He’s not going to the stars. 

Here are some informal comments from NASA that seem slightly less enthusiastic than Smith’s almost religious ecstasy:

“So let’s step up to next possibilities, nuclear rockets with a predicted performance that’s 10 to 20 times better!

Well...it’s still not looking all that good. For a fission rocket you would need a BILLION SUPERTANKER size propellant tanks to get you there, and even with fusion rockets you would still need a THOUSAND SUPERTANKERS!

Even if we look at the best conceivable performance that we could engineer based on today’s knowledge, say an Ion engine or an antimatter rocket whose performance was 100 times better that the shuttle engines, we would need about ten railway tanker sized propellant tanks.

That doesn’t sound too bad, until you consider that we didn’t bring along any propellant to let us stop when we get to the other star system...or if we want to get there quicker than 9 centuries.

Once you add the desire to actually stop at your destination, or if you want to get there sooner, you’re back at the incredible supertanker situation again, even for our best conceivable rockets.

In conclusion, we’d really like to have a form of propulsion that doesn’t need any propellant! This implies the need to find some way to modify gravitational or inertial forces or to find some means to push against the very structure of spacetime itself.”

NASA continues, further in the same article, outlining the three breakthroughs that must be made in order to enable space travel:

“To overcome this difficulty, we need either a breakthrough where we can take advantage of the energy in the space vacuum, a breakthrough in energy production physics, or a breakthrough where the laws of kinetic energy don’t apply.”

Does Frederick Smith have the breakthroughs all planned out?  Or does he doubt NASA’s authority?  I mentioned these to him months ago, in other articles.

On a more modest scale, Smith laments the fact that we have not done more to set up housekeeping on the Moon.  This is a relatively easy task, he says, talking about recycling modules, spreading solar panels and building a sublunary station far away from cosmic radiation.  Yes, I admit that something like that might be in the realm of the possible, but to what purpose?

If we’re so good at tailoring environments, however hostile, to our own needs, why don’t we do it right here on planet earth?  If we can build a viable city on Gliese 581c or on the Moon, surely we can build cities in Antarctica, Greenland, the Sahara, the Himalayas.  So what are we ewaiting for?  

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