At the risk of beating a dead horse, I need to write this because I'll write about space again in the future, and, if I continue to knock heads with Thomas over this cause, I can refer back to this with just a link. Therefore, I feel the need to respond to some of what Thomas said in this piece, which was a response to this piece.

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.

What Keyes attempted to do was link science fiction that virtually everyone is very familiar with to real ideas about science. Many scientists and engineers in a variety of fields are working on all of the ideas I discussed. In fact, I quoted a few who also work for NASA. To make that analogy to then just dismiss the specifics out of hand is a tactic that I often see. It's also applied to some of the more grandiose large scale engineering responses to fix global warming, large atmosphere scrubbers and the like. When did the human race become so fearful of large challenges? When did we resign ourselves to just sit down and take whatever the universe hurls at us, as if we we're powerless victims? Do I get my ideas from science fiction, or do I get it from NASA engineers who design fast spacecraft? Or, both? Or, do many of those working on these projects get their ideas from science fiction? Did the idea for the communication satellite come from science fiction? Did the fathers of modern rocketry, whose rockets could barely reach the Moon but who dreamed of the stars get their ideas from science fiction? The answer to all of these is yes.

It is a truism that before anything can be achieved, it must first be imagined – this applies to non-science related endeavors as well. This does not imply that all unrealized goals are futile – were this the case, we'd still be living in caves, the same caves that the views of Thomas, given their thought-out eventualities, would have us return too.

However, let's stick to specifics. Let's not just say, “feh, blah, kvatch, crap – just a bunch of scifi – spaceships with lasers and paranoid robots – fun but not REAL” and attack the real issues, the science, the probabilities involved, and the potentials of going down this space road, or avoiding it. After all, is there anything at all we can talk about in regards to the future without broaching some topic that sounds to someone like science fiction? Science fiction is cursed – it's the reason that many get into science to begin with, and then it becomes a bane for those same people, for the likes of Thomas use the fact that fiction can differ from reality to make blanket generalizations.

In the recent DARPA challenge, robot cars raced, making their own decisions, for 7 hours around a 132 mile track. They had to avoid obstacles and avoid each other. It was amazing to watch, as the second place car caught up with the lead car, and passed it without a scrape. Surely, the stuff of science fiction even 20 years ago. Yet, far more than 20 years ago, it seemed like an eventuality, a continuation of the tech existing already at that time:

The first Grand Challenge took place on March 13, 2004 on a desert course stretching from Barstow, California to Primm, Nevada, but did not produce a finisher. At the second DARPA Grand Challenge, held on October 8, 2005, the Stanford Racing Team completed the 212.4 km (132-mile) course in just under 7 hours to win a US$2M prize. Both the first and second DARPA Grand Challenge competitions advanced the technologies needed to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicles capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time. The third event, The DARPA Urban Challenge, scheduled to take place November 3, 2007, further advances vehicle requirements to include autonomous operation in a mock urban environment.

This isn't to say that all science fiction becomes reality, it is to say that branding futuristic ideals as science fiction is a truism, not a statement of probability, not without being fleshed out further.

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.

Keyes extended my analogy into new ground and I'll work with that in a moment. My analogy was about the extreme difficulty of building the pyramids, the technology and logistics involved, the notion of first having to construct an infrastructure. You need not only to find the resources, but ways to move them about. Whole new technologies and strategies had to be applied for these decades long projects.

As to how he extended the analogy, well, I haven't actually heard that they attempted to reach the Sun, but I'll go with it. Did they fail? Was their effort worth nothing? Even today, we can't be sure exactly how they built those monsters, how they pulled off such amazing feats. In any case, lets go! Lets try to send a human colony ship the the nearest star. If we fail, if they all die en route or go drifting off into space never to be heard from again, think of what we'd have accomplished to reach that state! Despite the risks, I'm sure the world is full of people who'd gladly take that risk, many from NASA itself. Onward and outward!

If the space program was ended, what would we do if a large asteroid came a knockin'? Would we say, “Well, it is our time. Hey, we had a good run, didn't we! Besides, we can always pray...”

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.

So, given that NASA already has designs for craft with speeds ranging from 3% to 80% light speed, and given that a few of those ideas are based on existing technology, can we really rate the probability of such craft being assembled as impossible until 1000 years into some dim future? The craft that go 3 and 4% light speed use existing, already working, technology. The craft that is expected to go 10% is based on nuclear technology, bomb-technology, technology that we already have, but which hasn't ever been applied in this way directly. Anyone can search for a list of craft that NASA has designed that never make it into space. Most are terminated by bean counters, and not due to technological hurdles. After I submit this article, I'll submit another article that I had actually written first that includes a specific example, a modest telescope designed to hunt for extra-solar planets that was scrapped again and again for no scientific or technological reason.

In other words, the argument that just because NASA hasn't built such craft implies that they won't exist for 1000 years is as short-sighted as saying that it will never happen because science fiction also has fast spaceships.

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.

In my last article in this series, I listed a small armada of telescopes that will do much more than just guess at the existence of planets. Keyes might be too timid for such a voyage, and indeed, most people would be. Luckily, there are more than enough who would not be too timid. In fact, getting a seat on such a craft would no doubt be highly competitive, as are the near-miracle and highly dangerous launches we call Space Shuttle missions.

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.

Here we have a rather clear case of where the very intelligent Keyes doesn't think a proposition through. Keyes states the obvious – that humans in space would need raw materials and energy, and then asks, in the same breath, why we'd target star systems. Because it is in star systems where raw materials and energy are to be found! That's the practical answer. The other answer, which I've given twice already in this series, is that we want to know about the conditions of other Earth-like planets, we want to know about models of life and geology to help us piece together our own puzzle. Pure science and the quest for knowledge and all of that, in other words, are good reasons for targeting other solar systems as opposed to empty space.

Infinity is a larger number than 50, 100 or even 1000 years. If we send big enough ships, we can travel for far greater time spans. The Earth is just a big spaceship, so big that it now supports billions of people. How big would a ship have to be to support 100 people? Perhaps Keyes can do the math. We could hollow out a very small moon or a large asteroid, stocked by nature with raw materials, give it a spin, and attach nuclear engines and nudge it into sling-shot orbits which would cast it towards the target. If we want it to get there faster, we have only to remove rock, and fill it with fuel. The bigger this body, the harder it will be to move at a decent speed, but the easier it will be for humans to live inside for many many decades if need be, or perhaps far longer.

If future humans learn to make cheap anti-matter or use some new method to catch up to these original hardy explorers, all the better. The very process of making that original craft no doubt lead directly to the anti-matter and other advances. Just waiting around is dangerous. I'm sure we'll eventually catch up to the Voyagers. Perhaps we'll leave them alone, or, catch them and put them into museums. This doesn't mean that we should not have launched the Voyagers, that we should have waited until we had the tech to send probes at much higher speeds. We needed their data and the experience of launching such craft to reach our current level of know-how.

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 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 . 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.

Talk about a stretch of imagination and fantasy, here Keyes seems to invent ideas that I haven't ever addressed. Existing as software is an entirely different consideration than Tipler's idea that at the end of time and space, every sentient creature in anywhere will ride out infinity as entropy reigns supreme in a giant, infinite, uber computer. I haven't actually read anything by Tipler. I only know about him because a former UK writer was entranced with the idea of preventing the universe itself from dying.

People living in cyberspace is a relatively old idea and obviously implies life-extension, but it has nothing to do with preventing the low-energy state universe that science now predicts, where the stars will eventually move so far apart from each other that nuclear fusion ceases and that everything goes dark for the infinity afterwards, with temperatures falling to absolute zero and where not a single photon remains to cast even the smallest light. This is just, again, like saying, “Smith wants Star Wars, he wants the US Air force to construct the Death Star to blast invading aliens!”

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.

Wouldn't we care? Wouldn't we care that the species has some hope of living on, even if every individual can't be saved? By the way, assuming we could soon convert people into software representations of themselves, wouldn't that allow both the Earth to house quadrillions instead of billions, and make sending every may woman and virtual child into space infinitely easier? Again, I wonder if Keyes has thought these options through to their logical conclusions...

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.

Ahh! But we do have choices that we can make right now to better our chances, for, if humanity as a species is to go extinct, shouldn't be prolong our stay in the universe as long as possible? Isn't that the reason for making desalination plants, as Thomas suggests elsewhere? Shouldn't we at least urge Congress to fund the existing designs for very fast vehicles based on existing technology, as well research into those around the corner? Keyes has said that he deems it possible to live on the Moon, yet, can't imagine why we'd want too. I have trouble rectifying these two seemingly contradictory views. Wouldn't the Moon be a second homestead? Even if the population of the Earth far outweighs the population of the Moon, isn't it worth having a second home for humanity? Wouldn't losing the entire species forever be that much worse than losing the billions now on Earth? It's not as if living on the Moon would jeopardize living on the Earth - it's not an either/or proposition. The more, the merrier!

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!

Finding ET, a shot in the dark at the moment, is a wonderfully worthy goal that should also get billions in funding. Programs like SETI are already working on this. But finding ET is a parallel issue. Even finding another planet with primitive life out there would be of immense scientific value. If we found so much as a germ in Europa's oceans or around Barnard's star, we will have doubled our examples of unique life, remembering that all life on Earth is related and has a common ancestor of course.

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?

Do those studying plate tectonics throw their hands up in the air because they haven't actually traveled to the mantle or the core? Astrobiolgy concerns itself with “extremophiles”, Earth critters which show an amazing ability to live in very hostile environments. The undersea vent ecosystems as well told us that life can exist without the direct energy input from the Sun. Based on these discoveries and based on the various probes that we've sent around the Solar System, we have an impressive number of targets for life in our own backyard. And, thanks to extra-solar planet-finding studies, of which there are many more on the horizon of ever increasing sophistication (as I noted in my last article), we have even more possible targets of study. Many disciplines are linked. Astrobiology is ultimately tightly integrated with evolution and abiogensis. If I ever return to college, this field is something I'd consider, even knowing full well that I'd most likely never personally drill into Europa's miles of ice, let alone wade around in a tidal pool on an extra-solar planet.

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.

Besides noting the rather silly idea that we have to wait for new physics or Einsteins when existing designs using existing technologies exist for faster interstellar travel, yes I did counter with other NASA folk who have differing views. Anyone who has followed NASA over the years understands these two grand schools of thought exit, that humans in space takes away from real science research versus the idea that if we don't keep humans in space, we risk losing our long term ability to live there. Of course I prefer we listen to the latter – why else would I keep writing these articles? This isn't like evolution or global warming, where the vast majority of scientists and all major science groups the world over are on the same page, after all. This war is still being waged...

Neither NASA view wants to give up on the space program as Keyes does, and the real conflict here is MONEY. With limited money, of course there is infighting. The answer is to give them MORE MONEY, another worthy response to the, “well, what can we do??” argument that Keyes presented above.

If a comet slams into the Earth, all of that expensive desalinated water sucked down by dessert dwellers will mean little after all. Allah help us!

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.

First he asks us to imagine that sending fossils fuels around the oceans of a speck is more important than possibly saving the race itself, then he gives us high numbers. If the sole issue with any project is cost, then I'm not interested. For example, in the 1990's, there were several programs which had good initial successes. Meant to replace the Space Shuttle, they would have reduced the cost to $1000 per pound – already one order of magnitude lower. Most were scrapped due to funding issues, naturally. Getting a politician to see beyond the next election cycle is far trickier than getting a super-tanker into space (again, assuming we'd actually need a super-tanker launched from Earth when the Moon and the near-Earth asteroids can provide us with the same material for a fraction of the cost). A fission/fusion bomb rocket would cost even less, down to 32 cents per pound, and requires no new technology.

One can now buy a four gigabyte memory stick for around $50. Perhaps Keyes can remember a time when one kilobyte of RAM cost thousands of dollars. And what about computers with clock speeds in the kilohertz range? Such computers would take hundreds of years to boot Windows. Today, computers run in the gigahertz range. Another idea taken quite seriously but which Keyes would no doubt scoff at is the space elevator concept. Such a tool, another massive effort, would drastically reduce the cost of moving material to orbit and could even launch small satellites. It might be the single most expensive project ever that could alone ensure a return orders of magnitude better than the initial investment.

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 built it for themselves out of materials close at hand. Smith would have a nation build a cosmic 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

To build a space colony, we would also use the materials at hand, we'd learn to use raw materials from up there, just as the folks who built Chicago used the local raw materials. It takes both knowing where to find what AND how to use it. The second part of this seems to be about a view of human nature, that contractors would refuse to build something if they were excluded. I hardly think this is true. They would no doubt be handsomely paid, given the risks of working in space and of course future colonies would follow. Eventually, it wouldn't be just a select group. By the way, elite is the wrong word – they would undoubtedly be highly educated experts, yes, just as current manned NASA missions aim to get the most qualified people.

Human nature and feasibility are two different arguments in any case, and I've addressed this elsewhere. Many proposed space missions are canceled for no reasons of feasibility. The recently launched mission to Pluto was on the chopping block more than once.

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?

Our projections of future tech aren't black and white. Something isn't either 1000 years away, give or take an infinity, or eminently doable RIGHT NOW. There is a vast middle ground. In the early 1990's, I told a friend of mine that in 10 years, I'd email a movie to him. We had gotten together after we each moved to different states and traded movies, software and music. There wasn't enough time to watch all of each other's, so my solution was that I would email it to him as soon as the tech caught up with my ideas. Why did I say this? Because I could email him text and certain kinds of music already. The size of a movie was several orders of magnitude larger, yet, given continuing advances in data transmission rates, I couldn't imagine that it would just cease. The probability was very high that I was correct. At that time, 1.4 kilobytes per second was the normal online speed for most users not lucky enough to have access to a college computer lab.

Indeed I was correct. In fact, various online services now give you the storage space for free that it takes to hold a full-length movie. In the early 1990's, this was super-computer territory. My speed now, from home, is anywhere between 500 kilobytes and 1.2 megabytes per second. Movies come in various formats - the smaller format, the highly compressed xvid movies, download in about 20 minutes. A DVD quality movie downloads in under three hours. Faster speeds are already available in my area.

Interestingly enough, there were sour predictions in the 90's that giving everyone access to high speed Internet would cost billions since an entirely new infrastructure had to be built. I'm not sure how much it ended up costing, I'm also sure that I don't care. I have it and it works.

We can already create fusion reactions, both in experimental reactors and by blowing up nuclear bombs. Mass isn't the issue. The issue seems to be maintaining that very hot plasma without destroying the reactor housing – the high temperatures needed to form a self-sustaining reaction. The gas must be levitated by strong magnetic fields and such. It's a “tricky” thing to pull off, but is down to very technical, engineering, issues. There is a very straight forward plan to build several reactors in a row, each one bigger, until a commercial reactor is available. Many countries are involved and feel that the returns could be marvelous and are well within reach, that this is the next logical step up from existing fission reactors without many of the associated problems. Even short-sighted politicians are convinced - that alone ought to say something...

There is a big difference between, say, time travel and fusion reactors, in other words. For Keyes to just stuff any technology we don't have perfected into his “dim future” bag is short-sighted – an easy, stock response similar to saying that I've seen Star Wars too often.

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