You can say anything else you want about Frederick Smith, but just don’t say he’s realistic and don’t say he’s concise.  These 5000-word articles, full of wild ravings, are much more than I can deal with.  Can’t he say his piece succinctly, in 1000 words or less?  He doesn’t have so much to say that it’s necessary for him to go on and on and on.  He expects me to have dwelt on every ‘point’ he makes.

Robot cars raced for 7 hours.  Therefore, we’re practically in the Andromeda galaxy, apparently.  I didn’t follow the link.  Frankly, I don’t care a bit about the robot cars.

We shouldn’t even talk about the pyramids.  They have nothing to do with space travel.  Of course, the effort of the Pharaohs was for nothing.  What good did the pyramids ever do anyone?

Smith is probably right in assuming there would be plenty of volunteers for space flights, volunteers who would have long, lonely, tragic decades to repent their folly.

Smith is full of nonsensical linguistic trickery.  For example, he refers to the earth as a ‘speck’ compared with his big picture, space fantasy, and says that an asteroid could come along any day and wipe us out.  We’d say, “Well, it is our time. Hey, we had a good run, didn't we! Besides, we can always pray...”  Let me remind Smith that somehow the ‘speck’ has managed to revolve about the Sun for 4 billion years, without Smith’s visionary ravings.  We managed just perfectly well without a far-fetched space program.  But don’t misunderstand me.  I would be 100% in favor of a space program that had any real chance of accomplishing the colonization of space.  It’s just the fantasies that bore me.

In another linguistic gimmick, he pretends to paraphrase me thus, . “Let's not just say, ‘feh, blah, kvatch, crap – just a bunch of scifi – spaceships with lasers and paranoid robots – fun but not REAL.’” He’s not paraphrasing Thomas Keyes.  My writings are always dignfied.  I take offense at that sort of thing.  He can talk that way to Ron Lewis or Ken Hughes, but not to me.

Supposedly, there are plans, possibilities, designs, theories, ideas and projects.  There are plenty of if’s, maybe’s, probably’s, may’s, might’s, should’s and would’s.  It’s easy to talk about 3% to 80% of the speed of light, but let’s see it.  To date, the top speed that has been reached by a spaceship is 250,000 kilometers an hour, which is 0.02% of the speed of light.  Smith says, “The craft that go 3 and 4% light speed use existing, already working, technology.”  He means, “The craft that somebody claims may go 3 and 4% light speed...”  He uses a linguistic trick to add a feeling of reality to an unsubstantiated claim.  It always comes down to the same thing.  They haven’t done it yet, but they can do it soon, and I shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.

Smith is still hollowing out imaginary Moons, “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.”  Give it spin, just like that!  It costs billions of dollars to build a single 2500-megawatt power plant.  How much vaster a project is hollowing out an asteroid, with providing not only a power plant, but all of the facilities that go into a city, water supply, sanitation, farms, streets, lighting, transportation, communication, housing, entertainment.  A city like Chicago must be worth trillions of dollars.  Those trillions are merely the measure of the effort that it took to build it.  Get real, Frederick, you’re a dreamer.

Smith continues, “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.”  Of course we target planets so we can land.  It was Smith who said we may not even have to leave the spaceships.  The question is how we land.  It could take 100 years and thousands of tons of propellant to stop a ship moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.  Or does Smith have some magical way to dispel kinetic energy?  Then, if we land, and the planet turns out to be a lemon, how do we migrate to a second planet?

More if’s pop up along the way, “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.”  Smith’s whole thesis is a pastiche of if’s.

Here’s another linguistic gimmick, “People living in cyberspace is a relatively old idea...”  It makes it sound very real.  It’s an old idea that people may live in cyberspace, not an old fact.  Telepathy, metempsychosis, teleportation, telekinesis and ideoplasty are all old ideas.  That doesn’t mean they’re about to happen.  Show me a man in cyberspace, and I’ll be impressed. 

In short, everything that Smith has to offer is something that he says is going to happen.  It’s never anything that has already happened.  I hope he’s right.  There’s nothing I’d love better than to see the human race ruling the universe, endued with all the fabulous wealth of the galaxies.  But old ideas about virtual people and unrealized designs for spaceships don’t even amount to a foot in the cosmic door.

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