Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001
Some nice pictures of SF-inspired concept spacecraft over at Wired. And if you’re into that sort of thing why not check out Memories of the Space Age.
Those were the days, when we had real fake spaceships and it was all-about-the-science.
Researchers in Geneva are trying to figure the speed of quantum entanglement, aka “the fact that measuring a property of one particle instantly determines the property of another…” Experiments with photons 18 km apart suggest that entanglement “moves” at least 10,000 times the speed of light. “I think there’s probably much deeper issues,” comments one of their British colleagues. [SciAm]
Meanwhile, to propel your starship by real-life warp drive, two Baylor U. physicists say you can too change the laws of physics. Just bend the space around the ship by recreating conditions that existed when the universe was expanding, and light moved faster than it does today. All we need is 11 dimensions a la string theory, and a mass the size of Jupiter to convert to pure energy. And we thought an invisibility cloak was impressive. [io9; Discovery News; preprint]
Back in this millennium, bulky, expensive, and complicated electronic routers are slowing down the Internet. A possible solution: slow down light itself, through the use of “metamaterials” to do away with all that tedious mucking about during the switching process.
“With these materials, you could imagine something more like a single chip with the metamaterial handling the routing—all the capability of one of these big filtering systems, but the size of your fingernail,” says Dr [Chris] Stevens [of Oxford].
[image: Star Gate by Imbecillsallad]
Suggestions for what exactly to do with the International Space Station are always welcome. Michael Benson, writing in The Washington Post suggests sending it to the Moon:
The ISS, you see, is already an interplanetary spacecraft — at least potentially. It’s missing a drive system and a steerage module, but those are technicalities. Although it’s ungainly in appearance, it’s designed to be boosted periodically to a higher altitude by a shuttle, a Russian Soyuz or one of the upcoming new Constellation program Orion spacecraft.
This seems a little crazy, but then so does spending $156 billion on the ISS in the first place (check out the discussion on Slashdot about the technical side of it). As it is, we don’t seem to be getting much in the way of tangible benefits from the ISS. As Michael Benson points out:
But if the station’s goal is to conduct yet more research into the effects of zero gravity on human beings, well, there’s more than enough of that already salted away in Russian archives, based on the many years of weightlessness that cosmonauts heroically logged in a series of space stations throughout the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. By now, ISS crews have also spent serious time in zero gravity. We know exactly what weightlessness does and how to counter some of its atrophying effects. (Cue shot of exercycle.)
In any case I’m fairly cynical about the medium-term benefits of human space travel. We have enough trillion dollar problems here on Earth without wasting money on white elephants like the ISS.
I agree that people need frontiers and visible symbols of human progress. To inspire a sense of wonder about the universe is very laudable, but surely we are not so unimaginative as to be unable to find other, less literal, frontiers than space?
Advances in biology, neuroscience, and computer science can provide enough sense-of-wonder to keep everyone happy. Also these areas are much cheaper to pursue (in comparison to space travel) and have the potential to yield much more practically useful results.
Purely scientific study can be pursued by unmanned probes without going to the expense of transporting tin-cans full of hominids billions of kilometres to plant a flag.
[story in The Washington Post via Slashdot][image from chidorian on flickr]
With France assuming the (rotating) presidency of the European Union, the BBC reports on a potential shift in European space policy;
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s well-known admiration for all things American now extends to space exploration. Speaking to the BBC, a senior official involved in French space policy said that it was time to shake up the European Space Agency and make it more like the US space agency (NASA) by giving it a new, politically-led direction …
The official said that Europe was in danger of becoming redundant in global space terms and it needed an agency that followed a clear political agenda.
“The United States, Russia, China and Japan would not do what they do in space without a political motivation; Europe has only had a scientific motivation until now. So what we are saying is, let’s get the same chances as the others.
But while the BBC reads this shift in emphasis as from ’scientific’ to ‘political’, the Financial Times focused on the small print - interpreting the announcement as a move towards a ‘military angle for space strategy’;
French ambitions range from setting up an EU spy satellite system to joining a manned US mission to Mars.
Paris wants to exploit synergies with existing civilian space projects. For example, Galileo, the €3.4bn ($5.4bn, £2.7bn) rival to the UScontrolled global positioning system, is classed as a transport project, although it could be used for military operations.
Hmm. The European Space Agency’s most recent press release on Gallileo mentions nothing of military applications, focusing instead on the five civilian services;
the Open Service, the Safety of Life Service, the Commercial Service, the Public Regulated Service, and the Search and Rescue Service.
Now, why does this make me uneasy?*
[image by thewritingzone]
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[ * Only kidding - I'm a total Galileo fanboy. Of course, if Sarkozy were a Doctor Who / Bond villain, Bruce Sterling's obsession with said Gallic premier could be explained as the result of some kind of sinister mind control laser... ]
The Space Fellowship website notes that Russia is planning to set up an orbiting platform from which to stage manned missions to the moon and Mars.
“After 2020, Russia plans to create and put into orbit a near-Earth experimental manned complex to ensure transport operations to the Moon and Mars,” Anatoly Perminov said.
This has certain similarities to some original NASA lunar mission plans, which was to build up an infrastructure in orbit that would stage missions outwards, rather than launching the whole kit from the surface.
