I didn’t mean to suggest that Frederick Smith is expecting to find other worlds exactly like those in Star Wars.  I only meant to suggest that it is as obvious as can be that Smith is completely saturated with notions that he got from science fiction.  Yes, I too have a great imagination.  My novel, A Tale Of Ung, takes place in Ti, a galaxy some megaparsecs from the Earth.  But I know that, in reality, this galaxy could never, never be reached by people from our planet.  Alas!  For it’s such a beautiful place!

Smith analogizes the conquest of space to the building of the pyramids, as if it were an exstablished fact that the Pharaohs, overcoming all reservations, achieved their goal.  But the truth of the matter is that the Pharaohs sought to reach the Sun, but never got anywhere near.  So the pyramids remain as a monument to the failure of their ambitions.  And I think that therefore the analogy is very suitable, but not in the way Smith meant.  I think ultimately the space program will be similarly aborted, unless we look to dim centuries of the distant future.

Then Smith starts talking about nuclear pulse propulsion, which he says enables spaceships to reach 10% of the speed of light.  However, as Smith acknowledges, this kind of propulsion is still in the experimental stages.  NASA’s Operation Longshot produced a design that would enable a ship to reach Alpha Centauri is 100 years.  That’s only 4% of the speed of light, and it wasn’t done; it was just talked about.

Smith goes on to mention a number of projects that will locate earth-like or habitable planets with much more accuracy than has been done so far.  Perhaps 150 planets within 45 years will be found.  Great!  Great!  But locating a planet with sophisticated interferometers and telescopes is one thing.   Going to the planets is another.  I’d be awfully reluctant to target a planet 45 light years away just because a wobble in the parent star suggested the proximity of some earth-sized planet.

Smith pooh-poohs the need for building a planetary biodome per se, reasoning that a spaceship itself is a biodome of sorts.  Perhaps we needn’t land on a planet al all.  So why are we targeting planets?  Just shoot the thing off into space in any direction.  All we need is energy and raw materials, says Smith.  To me that’s an insurmountable order.  Are you just going to send spacepeople to their deaths?  Surely they can’t live forever aboard a spaceship.  They’d need an infinite supply of energy and raw materials.  The point wasn’t lost one me, as Smith puts it; I just didn’t take it seriously.

Then Smith really goes headlong into the realm of fantasy by saying that we will exist as software aboard these ships, so we won’t need food or water.  I think he got this idea from Frank Tipler, a Tulane University physicist whose Omega Point Theory consists of scanning people into cyberspace, where, at the time of the Big Crunch, they will all live happily ever after, under the tutelage of Jesus Christ, in Paradise.  Smith has merely de-Christianized Tipler’s notions.  You may be able to replicate a human brain in cyberspace, but can you convert a living person into a subroutine in some super-program?  I’m not as confident as Smith in this sort of possibility.

Anyway, Smith points out quite accurately that planet Earth cannot support five or ten times the present population, so we ought to be looking to outer space for salvation.  I don’t see how converting some thousands or even millions of people into software and shipping them out towards the stars is going to help the population crisis back home.  If we don’t care when or if the ships arrive at some planet, we can send them out now.  They may be floating in space for eons, but do we care?  The way to deal with population at home is to start imposing birth control.

Smith acts as if I am some sort of dullard who has no interest whatsoever in the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial beings.  It’s quite the contrary.  As old as I am, I often find myself daydreaming about distant worlds.  But I simply don’t see a way to get there.  There are galaxies out there that have trillions of stars apiece.  Surely somethere among those millions of millions, there must be wondrous empires far exceeding anything in Star Wars. But hoping to go there is like falling in love with a woman who lives in an electron that you have magnified billions of times.  Good luck winning her hand!

Smith says I once wrote that I consider astrobiology a ‘fake’.  I don’t know if I used that word.  Perhaps I did.  I don’t consider it a fake so much as a waste of time.  How can a university set up a curriculum to study life on other planets?  What are they going to study?  Are they going to classify possible plants and animals?

It may be precarious to have the whole human race on one planet.  Naturally it would be better if we had several homelands.  But Smith calls it ‘foolhardy’, as if we have a choice that we are stubbornly refusing to make.  But so far, we don’t have that choice.  There’s only so much we can do, and we have no guarantee of eternal life.  One day, we may have to face up to the fact that the human race, like the race of dinosaurs, is mortal.

Smith acts as if I were undervaluing the accomplishments made to date on the moon, when I said that they were only “in the realm of the possible”.  All I meant is that a lunar station is only of limited use for the time being.

Smith makes fun of my idea of colonizing Greenland.  Why should we piddle around with Greenland when we can go to Gliese or some other star, which is so much more exciting and romantic, and at the same time satisfy Smith’s insatiable curiosity?  I say rather than build idle spaceships full of digitalized people, build desalination plants and turn the Sahara into a beautiful green homeland for hundreds of millions of flesh-and-blood people.

Then Smith derides my excerpts from a NASA article, by saying, in effect, that NASA consists of many, many scientists, some of whom agree with me and some of whom agree with him, the latter of course being the ones that we should be listening to.  They are the ones who are working to improve the prospects of the human race.  I think they’d do better by tackling desalination of seawater and extraction of uranium from seawater.

We’ve sent thousands of supertankers of fuel across the oceans, so what’s the problem with sending into space the thousands more that we’ll need to get a single spaceship to the nearest star?  However those maritime supertankers accomplished a little more than delivering digitalized spacemen, never to return, on the wild goose chase of all time.  It costs $10,000 a pound to send something into space, Smith continues.  Launching a thousand supertankers, each with a deadweight of 600,000 tons, would cost us $12 quadrillion dollars, which is the Gross World Product for 250 years.

It took only 200 years to build Chicago, so obviously in some finite period of time we could build a habitable space galley on which thousands of people could live happy lives for generations.  The difference is that the people who built Chicago built it for themselves out of materials close at hand.  Smith would have a nation build a cosmic Chicago that most of the builders would never use.  A special elite would be chosen to board the galley and go, why the people who did all the work would be back on planet Earth, empty-handed, putting up with cold weather, traffic, taxes, commuting and the rest of the humdrum routine.  I don’t think they’d go for it.

Smith lambastes my myopia, arguing that because we don’t yet have fusion reactors, I’ve concluded that they must be thousand of years away.  Well, show me one, and I’ll revise my views.  They may come about in 100 years, or a 1000, or never, I’m sure I don’t know.  Offhand, it seems to me that you would have to create a facsimile of the Sun to produce a fusion reactor, but how can you replicate the Sun without replicating the tremendous solar mass?

	Web useless-knowledge.com