Never Say Never Ever

I’m feeling decidedly down in the dumps today, for a couple of reasons.

First, over the past 5 years or so I’ve watched 98, yep, 98 episodes of the Star Trek series ‘Enterprise’ and I've got only 2 more episodes to watch. When I was a kid, I thought Sci-Fi was a load of mumbo-jumbo. I preferred to read factual, historical stuff or novels about interesting characters in unusual situations. My preference was for the US heavyweights – Mailer, Irving, Roth, Wolfe, Updike, you know those guys that you read and you think, feck me, there’s a seriously large and sophisticated brain behind these words. I loved stories, but not stories about green men or bug-eyed aliens.

It’s strange then that as I got a bit older, I started to really get into Sci-Fi. One of my favourite episodes from the Enterprise series is when Captain Archer and his crew come upon a planet with 2 races where one is in desperate need of medical and scientific assistance.

The plot rotates around interfering with a doomed species (Valakians) that dominates a currently lesser but evolving species (Menks) or allowing the species to die and allow the dominated species to evolve on their own without the oppression of the other.

Archer meets with Doctor Phlox and asks him to develop a cure. Phlox says that he doesn't think that it would be ethical to give the Valakians a cure because it would interfere with an evolutionary process that has been going on for thousands of years. Based on his genome studies, Phlox sees increasing skills and intelligence in the Menk that quite possibly would leave them the dominant species - provided the Valakians died off. He suggests that Archer simply let nature take its course. Archer isn't happy with his doctor's dilemma. Doctors are supposed to heal. Phlox says he's a scientist, and must be concerned with the larger issues. He then uses an analogy of early Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis and what would have happened if some well-meaning aliens had interfered. When pushed for an answer, Phlox discloses that he has indeed found a cure.

Though he isn't happy about it, Phlox decides to place his trust in the Captain to make the right choice. When he meets with Archer, he asks the Captain to reconsider. Archer says that he spent the night reconsidering, and that his decision went against his principles. He had to remind himself everyday that until a directive was written that outlined what could and couldn't be done, he was in no position to play God. Archer gives the Valakians a medicine that will give them more time to find a cure on their own.

Good Sci-Fi is about what-ifs and thought experiments not intergalactic shoot ‘em ups and light sabre duels. When we open our minds and imagine what could be possible we’re halfway to creating a solution. Much of modern physics is built from thought experiments - where experiments can’t be performed due to practical limitations but potential practical and ethical consequences can be examined. (Note to myself: explore the use of thought experiments to explain difficult subjects in layman’s terms.) The thought experiment that I recall most vividly is from my days as a philosophy student and it goes like this: A scientist wants to build a bat from scratch. He/She knows every material aspect that makes up a bat and he knows how to put this material together to make a bat. But because he will never know what it is actually like to be a bat then he cannot be sure that he has really made a bat.

In essence, the mix of logic and emotion that combines to make science fiction helps us think the unthinkable; to be innovative, mashing together existing but separate knowledge to create new ways of life and modes of living.

Which brings us to my other reason for feeling a tad miffed. At a recent Joint Propulsion Conference in the US, rocket scientists from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and academia doused my (along with humanity’s) interstellar dreams with ice cold water. The scientists analyzed many designs for advanced propulsion and the calculations show that, even using the most theoretical of technologies, reaching the nearest star in a human lifetime is nearly impossible.

The main stumbling block concerns propulsion. Utilizing the best rocket engines Earth currently has to offer, it would take 50,000 years to travel the 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri, our solar system's nearest neighbor. Apparently it would take at least the current energy output of the entire world to send a probe with our best rocket engines to the nearest star.

Robert Frisbee, group leader in the Advanced Propulsion Technology Group within NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has put forward a radical design that calls for a long, needle-like spaceship. In its entirety, the spaceship would weigh a gigantic 120 million metric tons including fuel - the Space Shuttle weighs in at a mere 2,000 metric tons. With all that fuel and a super-sophisticated superconducting magnet propulsion system, it would still take nearly 40 years to travel the 4.3 light years to Earth's nearest neighbor, Alpha Centuri, he said. (So with advances in cryogenics we could easily get someone to the next star system within a lifetime!)

Interstellar missions are big because of the massive amounts of energy required to get moving fast enough to make the trip in anything like a reasonable amount of time. So big in fact we’d have to mine the outer planets to find enough fuel.

Over recent years, scientists like Frisbee, have turned their attention to alternative-propulsion systems that can be developed over a shorter period, say the next 50 years. Nuclear power is a possibility but radioactivity would limit its use to outside Earth's atmosphere, and the politics are positively toxic. Antimatter engines, worm hole drives, warp generating reactors - the conference found most to be utterly unworkable.

It’s a bummer – according to the experts, interstellar travel is bloody hard, takes way too long and we’ll die of old age before we get there. But as Frisbee said, ‘It's always science fiction until someone goes out and does it. All it takes is one breakthrough to make the calculations work’.

I’ll leave the last word to Dr Who who said, ‘Never say never ever’.