Up, Up, and Away... (eventually)

This should be a short note. It covers something that it seems people should have figured out about 50 years ago- Scrap NASA.

Ok, maybe not everyone. Just the nitwit who decided that launching rockets at the heavens was the way to get payloads in orbit.

There are two elements to being in orbit: be far enough away from the surface to be above most of the atmosphere, and be going fast enough (minimum) to keep up with any particular spot on the Earth's surface.

I know... I know... shooting off rockets is fun! But we're talking results, not entertainment. The same RESULTS can be obtained by a two-piece system consisting of a lifter that gets altitude (that distance-away-from-surface thing) from a large balloon and the actual spaceship that only needs to go up a little further and gain that slightly faster lateral speed.

So, we're talking a simple dirigible built for a reasonably high speed (horizontally) with gas bags sized to lift a few hundred tons. Once the spaceplane part lifts off, the lifter can practically drift back down. The spaceplane takes off from the lifter and accelerates up into space at whatever angle works best for the orbit it's headed for. It can glide back down. I think the space shuttle demonstrated that.

This whole scenario gives us an orbital delivery system that puts a lot of loose hardware in orbit without using disposable boosters or other trash-generating nonsense. I really think it might cut down on the physical risk to the crews, as well. If you design well and throw in some luck, the lifter could possibly rendezvous with an incoming ship and pick up the crew, if nothing else, in case of emergency. It beats the heck out of our current system.

This important, at least until we start mining asteroids. Any starship we build is going to eat up quite a bit of material. We might as well get it up there with a little finesse. It all hinges on kicking our addiction to loud noise  and bright lights.

That kind of leads me into one other thing already mentioned- where we're headed. The practical side of that will be both picking where we want to go and then getting there. And it is a practical problem. Perhaps we should send out some telescopes in opposite directions. When you look up àt the stars, they appear kinda 2D right? So we need some paralax. That could do a bunch of useful things. You can get a more accurate idea of how far away a star is, you can maybe get an even better idea about any planets where you're headed, and we may even see things we'd otherwise miss. It seems like a good investment, to me.

Perhaps it's good that we don't have an FTL drive. The crew won't have any doubt about which way is home. Imagine that we do have a warp drive (or a 'Punch' drive?). We go interstellar and suddenly we're there instead of here. You then count on being able to pick out one dimmish yellow dwarf out of billions of stars. Maybe even worse because you won't be 100% certain that where you are is where you wanted to go. Well, we will have even better computers and image-matching software. An additional issue is that at FTL speeds, what we aim at won't be where we see it when we get there. It'll be 10 or 20 or 50 years along its orbit. We will have to mind our p's and q's on the trip.

I'm going out and buy stock in yhe company that makes Carafate. There are going to be lots of ulcers before we call this job done!

Wherefor art thou going, dude?

I don't think that simply pointing in a random direction aand pulling the trigger will work well as a mechanism for picking a destination for our first interstellar journey. Don't get me wrong, we will learn a huge amount no matter where  we go. But it would perhaps be better if we pick someplace not too like Earth.

...! Hmm??? I assure you it's true- we should not pick a place too like our planet. Oh, sure, we'll face lots of problems. On the other hand, we may not have to face a long list of others. Maybe we should  pick a place that gives us easy probllems to work with. That means, to me, that we pick someplace that will not harbor life like us. Specifically life like micro-organisms. As a race that can't even travel around our own planet and be guaranteed to survive, do we want to tempt disaster by picking up something  while on vacation? I'm sure that we'll find something interesting no matter where we go.

I think that just picking the crew will provide us endless entertainment :). Can you imagine the newest prime-time show: Dancing TO the Stars... Anyway, it's going to be some rough job. We willl have to try to gather a large group to crew the ship and every one will have  to be honest about their opinions and emotions. I'll leave you to imagine how likely that is. And once you find ONE honest person, all you need is 5 or 10 thousand more. Why? Because if you can't find out how they really feel, how can you tell if they'll fit in with the rest of the crew? I guess, though, that in this large a crew, we can afford some people who simply don't care for the others (mildly). As I said, it's not going to be easy. Maybe we'd better start now...

Split Decision

Starships. Not really 'nuff said. Yes, I covered drives, but there is so much more to say. Everything from the structure of the hull to who should comprise the crew.

Let's just mention hulls for a moment. The issue is: should we go for a low-mass shell or should we tell the drive design gang to suck it up and use a hollow asteroid. I have to admit that unless someone drops a warp drive in our laps, I lean towarrds the latter. The good-sized nickel-iron roid would give us a lot of stress-free shielding and that's not a thing to ignore. Shielding is going to cause a lot of sleepless nights for the engineers.

And crews.

I'm not going to assume that any ship is going to be generational, just that it's going to be a long trip. That depends so much on the drive that we, now, can't leave out any possibilities. The average I've heard, though runs decades and even that's only to the NEAREST stars. One way. We're not crewing with infants... or eunuchs... so it will be generational whether we like it or not, barring that warp. And the crew has to be large enough to allow for people to find acceptable love matches. About all we can do is weed out any anti-racial flakes. That homogenous attitude will have to carry over into skills, as  well. We will certainly need teachers to pass along the skills. Since this whole thing is not a backyard project, we're going to have to deal with military types supplied by the government. It's not something you want to trust robots with.

No prejudice, just that I have yet to see a robot supply compassion or friendship that I'd trust first contact  to.

Is that crazy? I don't think so. It seems to me that it's so critical that we have to assume that anyplace we plan on going, we're going to find somebody else already there.  They'll either be tourists or local residents. Being logical, it also means that yes, those interesting lights in the sky are not ALL weather balloons! Let's be grateful that the people behind those lights have been fairly peaceful, so far. And we should plan to carry on that tradition. I, myself, have seen something that is in the purest sense  a UFO. I have no idea what it was, but when you see a 10x20 or so bright white glowing rectangle floating along on a windless night doing 20 mph, silently, a hundred feet up, it does give you pause. Then you get a big laugh out of it when they try to tell people that it's an advertising banner being pulled by a plane. I would like to believe that we are mature enough not to make pulling the trigger the first thing we do.

So, maybe not all the crew is under age 22... We really can't afford any xenophobes in that group and we need a few 'older and wiser' heads in the mix.

At least we can relax about things like environmental systems and gravity. With the size of such a ship, those issues are minimal and something we could handle with today's engineering. No sweat.

Little Green Men

I feel that for all the more that UFOlogists are firmly headed for the future, they've missed a thing or two  in the present. Like computer tech. Fortunately, it's not all of them, but considering what kind of push-back they face, I'm not sure they can afford any.

Consider helicopters. Marvelous things. Not the highest tech, but effective for many things. Like hovering just above the geographic horizon outside the restricted airspace of certain hush-hush bases. Lacking a little finesse? Sure, but it looks to me like they know you're there even if you travel by atv. So, why not trade subtlety for really getting in there where you can see what's going on (if anything). It might just be enough advantage to get that proof you're after.

Also think about GIS software.  Correlating sightings on a map becomes a lot easier. There's a program coming up on tv that shows a 'phenomenon corridor' across the 37th parallel and it shows how easily mapped data reveals patterns. The more data and types of data you add, the more things may show up.

This is 2014. We've got fairly good investigative instruments. And yet we've supposedly had our hands on alien (LGM) technology for decades. If false, then we need to move on to something more productive, like building our own saucers. If true, then either our instruments suck and we can't tell how these things are made or we can tell, but we can't make the materials. That would be pretty sad. And that's just the shell. The toe-stubbing part may be the machines that make it go. That, at least, is something we could face - it's a matter of engineering rather than being so far behind that we don't know where to start. Face it, they know how to come here and we have no idea how to go there (where-ever that may be).

Any alien that shows up here is automatically superior in technology. I guess that may be our entrance exam to the galaxy- can we figure out how to get out there? I prefer not to think about how they might 'allow' us access to mocked-up pieces of junk that they know doesn't and can't work. That's job one: is any ship we may acquire really a viable piece of actual technology and not  their version of Hollywood special effects? Oh, I really hope that ships aren't fakes! That would be a heart-breaker.

Yes, there's always the wild card chance that they hand us a fake and we figure out some way to make it work, but I really don't want to hang the future of space travel on it!

Shallow Water

...runs faster? I don't know. Fridays are like that. But speaking of faster, let's chat about faster for a bit. Faster than what? How about everything? People are certainly hung up over the speed of light, as I mentioned before.

Of course there is a good reason to be concerned about the speed of light. Even if we were able to engineer something to go that fast, it would still take 4 plus years to get someplace exciting. More than a long bus ride, hmm? Still, we need to get out there and the longer it takes us, the more we need to work on the problem. If you don't believe that the space program is the most important thing in our collective lives, then you really haven't given it any thought. It's a little less important than breathing, but not by much.

Now we get to the rough stuff - speed. I'm not sure what it's going to take for us to build a starship NOW. I am fairly sure that we won't turn out a dozen a week any time soon. And even at the speed of light, our ability to communicate with our people will be limited to the speed of a ship, just like it was in the days of sailing ships and pirates.

We need to find that one good answer that lets us do it. We have to get at least close to the speed of light, if not faster than. We've got to move a significant number of people somewhere else. Let's look at options...

Rockets, chemical or rubber-band: let's not get silly. They stopped being relevant around 50 years ago.

Nuclear: there's some room for consideration there, but the window is closing for a pure reaction engine.

Plasma jet: still has some legs and if coupled with a mass-ramjet, has its good points. And if we can get a fusion reactor running for power, it could the job for now.

Solar sail: I know that people love it, but I am yet to be convinced it's practical. Especially when you're ten lightyears away from home and something traveling like a b.o.o.h. in the wrong direction vaporizes a twenty acre hole in your sail.

All those have one very important thing going for them - they're all past the theory stage. We might not do them with off-the-shelf parts, but darn close to it. The next group makes things, as I said, 'rough'. They will take some theoretical advances.

Anti-gravity drive: or is it a gravity drive? We'll find out as soon as we figure out what gravity is. It is far and away a favorite- clean, quiet, and environmentally responsible.

Anti-matter: what can I say? It's the Rolls-Royce of drives. One thing they never mention is how you apply all that raw power to propulsion. Oh, well...

Warp drive: Hmmm... it solves so many issues that it's a shame it doesn't exist (yet?). It makes FTL travel possible, which is a huge plus. Probably needs anti-matter for a power source.

And that is as far as it goes. Is anyone even working on any of this? If not, there must be an awfully large number of people out there with faith in a benificent deity who will happily protect fools and faithful alike. If someone wants to kick a plasma drive around the chat room, let me know. I have a few uninformed ideas I'd throw into the fray.

Snap Quiz

All right, we've covered a basic idea or two. Or have we?

One thing you HAVE to keep firmly in mind: Nothing is certain! Question everything!

Now I know that some really well-read person out there is going to tell me that I stole that from Bob Heinlein, but I did so fair and square. Besides, he's dead, so if he's offended, I invite him to tell me so and I'll change it.

However, it's really true and you would think that with all the evidence to support it, that they would have learned the lesson. Need I trot out the old tale of how bumblebees can't fly? I hope not.

What is it that so many scientists seem to have forgotten that (or just plain ignore it)? Simply that all these "laws" of physics and physical constants themselves are ONLY TRUE FOR THE PLACES IN WHICH WE HAVE TESTED THEM. Period! We are making an ass of u and me if we assume anything else.

Take, for this exercise, the case in which one of our long-distance space probes. One of them was following the precomputed orbit, which includes a sling-shot maneuver. And the probe didn't do it 'right'. Uh huh, it didn't follow the path that they 'knew' it would. Now, shall we accept that that's impossible because the computed orbit is constructed by using the "laws" of physics and physical constants that are "facts" OR shall we admit that we don't know everything we thought we did?

There are other examples. I just heard that CERN has studied neutrinos. They say that neutrinos travel at the speed of light or just under that. I think perhaps they need to rethink a few things.

First, if it takes infinite energy to propel objects (neutrinos) to the speed of light (via E =mc (2)  (sorry, no superscripts in this typeface). Ah, yes.... So, since there are more than one neutrino going at lightspeed, I guess that either Einstein was full of it, or neutrinos are not physical objects, or maybe... just maybe..... those who assume that the conditions here on Earth don't represent those elsewhere. And I'm sure that there are plenty of other examples

Physicists are nibbling at the edge of understanding this. Their latest effort is called quantum physics. Unfortunately,  there's a long way to go.

Come to that, it must mean that light is not made up of photons. Either light and neutrinos are waves or some "laws" of physics go into the outhouse with other waste. After all, CERN doesn't have infinite anything in the basement with their hadron collider or i woild have heard about it. And speaking of light (etc.), what about something simple, like refraction? I don't even want to touch that one. Something any schoolkid can demonstrate and we don't even know why it works. Of course that doesn't stop us from playing with matches...

I'm not sure how long it's going to take us to become as smart as we think we are.  All I can do is hope it's soon enough.

So, please at least consider doubting almost everything. When we can go places we will get the chance to find a few facts. Then we'll make up new laws or decide that the Area of Truth is larger than we thought. If I was as emotionally wedded to the current "laws" as some people seem to be, it would make me want to cry... Or it may all turn out to be true... everywhere... which I admit would surprise me. Something is very wrong with our outlook on physics.

Here is a patently crazy idea:

As I said, consider that the universe we can see is painted on a 'space' 'balloon'. What if we poked a 'hole' in that balloon and inside we found Nothing. I mean. Capitol 'N' Nothing. Imagine that inside the balloon is a Nothing that doesn't exist, because there's no space or time anywhere off the fabric of the balloon. So... if a tiny hole gets poked by  something and goes in any sort of direction that intersects the fabric anywhere else in space, then pokes another little hole (or maybe since there is such a Nothing, poking one hole creates a hole somewhere else, too?)... If that were possible, it certainly would do something about getting from here to there, hmmm? And then we'd have to rethink black holes. Again.

Of course it's a crazy idea. I mean it couldn't possibly be true, could it? It would go against everything everybody knows... Against all the 'laws' of physics, hey? :*D

And how would one prove it? Or disprove it? Or even work on it?

Homework for next time: e = mc2, is it really true? If so, then someone must have made matter from energy, right?

Recently In a Galaxy Very Very Nearby

With that out of the way, let's start digging. Like any good Hole, it helps to start at the beginning- the Monobloc.

Got that concept? Good! We're going to have to talk about Time... or really 'time'. The difference seems to be that Big T doesn't exist. At least not in the way that some physicists and cosmologists have been slinging it around. I suppose that this is going to upset a lot of people. Especially the ones whose view of the universe depends heavily on it. By Big T Time, I mean the concept of Time as almost a sacred thing. I'm definitely pointing at those who love using a Time variable in equations (you know who 'm talking about Albert E.).

Instead, let's leave it at small t time. I mean a simple measurement of interval- 'the time between New York and Boston by train is...'. This neatly takes care of any questions you may have about the nature of time. It also punches a neat hole through this "Space-Time I keep hearing about. No such thing. Sorry. It's semantics. Certainly it takes 1 (Earth) year of time for light to go 186000x60x60x24x365.25 miles. That kind of concrete measure is pretty simple.

Ok, that's settled. Now I can go back to a couple of things I glossed over in the above paragraph- the expansion off space and holes come to mind.

First Theory: Cosmology. I need to float this one out there. I can't prove it, but it seems reasonable. The universe MAY be cyclic. I don't think anyone has the proper perspective to speak authoritatively on this subject. We all have our favorite theory and I'll bet a billion dollars that mine is right :^). Anyway, in my universe, I can explain something that's clearly bugging physicists- the "fact" that every other body of stars is receding from the Milky Way- Bubbles. Or balloons, if you want to think of it that way. Consider: every body occupies a fixed position in the fabric of  space and, like a bubble or balloon, space itself is expanding. As space expands, every body will be seen to be moving away from every other body as the space between them increases. As for the rest of it, perhaps space is expanding faster and faster, which is why other galaxies seem to be accelerating.

Holes: black and white and what that means. Physicists are also hot and bothered by all the 'missing' matter in the universe. And maybe even the energy. Dark matter and dark energy. The obvious connecting points for the two halves of the universe are the holes- black holes on our side are white holes on the other side. Looked at that way, the total matter and energy are a lot closer to accounted for. I don't know if they've taken the masscon suspended in black holes into account. There isn't a lot of accessible chatter about cosmology on the internet. Perhaps their minds are elsewhere...

Ah, yes, the cyclical part. If it turns out to be true, then our universe may shrink back to a point, switch 'polarity', and pop again.

In closing, I'm sorry to say that this probably shoots down Time travel. I don't know that you could revisit events that have already occurred, but I seriously doubt you could experience things that haven't happened yet. And, yes, I've considered switching 'polarity', traveling to what would be 'the past', looking around, and then reversing the procedure. I just can't think of a good reason why it would work, even if someone can engineer it. It would assume that we are all duplicated on the other side and everything happens the same.

I think that's enough for now. Despite all the universal energy, typing has used enough of mine.