Between Science and Science Fiction
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Ever since the days of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, science fiction has formidably shaped the public’s perception of science and in some cases has predicted its progress. While authors such as Arthur C Clarke hit the mark on satellites and others successfully predicted mechanical pets and artificial meat, we have still yet to see glorious spinning space stations. Award-winning author and astrophysicist Gregory Benford recently dealt with these issues in a lecture given at Foothills College in California, and talked also about the human passion for exploration and the corresponding tendency to withdraw into isolation, as well as possibility of terraforming the Moon. New Mars staff writer Joel McKinnon covered the event.
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| Foothills College |
Foothills College in Los Altos, California is one of the most verdant little community college campuses I’ve seen - all lush grasses and shady walkways through a generous sprinkling of trees. It seemed an odd place to come to hear the workings of a space-age mind like Gregory Benford. In a lecture sponsored by NASA, SETI, and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Dr. Benford came to speak on the boundaries between science and science fiction. As a working plasma physicist with over 150 scientific papers to his name and a lifetime achievement award from the Lord Foundation, Benford is clearly qualified to speak about science. As a Campbell and two-time Nebula award winning science fiction writer he seems to have that category pretty well covered as well. His novel ‘The Martian Race,’ features a hybrid government/private sector approach to the effort of getting human missions underway in the form of a prize offered to the first team to successfully meet a series of carefully defined objectives. It’s a great story that works on many levels, with typically great characters and excellent science, and explores many of the best reasons for making the trip. Mars Society president Robert Zubrin calls it “one of the finest novels about human exploration of the Red Planet ever written.”
As his talk unwound on this pleasant evening I began to see that there is a core message within Dr. Benford’s outlook that is more appropriate to the eco-friendly locale than first meets the eye. As a major scientific mind and a colossal visionary, Benford cares deeply about the future of his planet and his species.
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| Cover of Amazing Stories |
Benford demonstrated some of his ideas with the aid of screen projections of some old familiar images from the golden years of science fiction; covers of Analog and Amazing Stories - the alluring imagery enticing young readers into the future as seen by the most visionary authors of the pulp sci-fi era. Benford showed how science fiction is always making predictions - some good and some quite bad. He showed a vivid cover showing skyscrapers in New York City under attack- not from terrorists but from an environmental source. No, not global warming, but a return of the ice age. Benford reminded us this may ultimately be true- but in this case the writers missed the big, more immediate threats. Some of the predictions were just plain funny. Scantily clad women in space or on planets with little or no atmosphere protected only by a glass bubble breathing apparatus. Apparently vacuum and extremes of heat and cold weren’t seen to be significantly threatening.
A good example of a prediction right on the mark was the use of ironclad fighting machines imagined by HG Wells. Winston Churchill was sufficiently impressed to initiate a program to attempt to build such devices and within a few short years tanks were appearing on the battlefield in the closing years of World War One, to devastating effect. One of the wild ideas shown was a city floating high in the atmosphere supported entirely by microwave beams. Wait a minute- that turns out not to be so far fetched. Benford and his identical twin brother have initiated a project to support a solar sail by microwaves and are currently planning their first test of such a technology. If successful it will be the first demonstration of power beamed across thousands of miles through empty space to accomplish real work. Beyond such a test lies the potential for amazing new methods of high-speed locomotion through our solar system.
One of the clearest images from early science fiction that has failed to show up is the classic toroidal spinning space station. SF writers knew it only made sense to create gravity in space this way. Our modern efforts at long duration habitation of space have borne out the wisdom of this vision. Microgravity is hard on the body and constitutes a serious limit on mission length. What went wrong? Why haven’t we yet performed experiments of such technology? Benford explains that one of the most significant errors of the SF visionaries was an assumption that the space programs would be rational. Surely the program planners would pay heed to the engineers and scientists that know all about these things, right? In the real world these very important decisions are made by bureaucrats whose only concern is the current budget and how to stay out of the red.
Another mistaken assumption is that the first steps lead to bigger steps, which lead to obvious huge steps, etc. If humans were to reach the Moon, the early writers thought, they’d soon establish a moonbase, which would set the stage for travels to Mars and beyond. Not a single writer could conceive of humans reaching the Moon in the sixties and never going beyond low Earth orbit the rest of the century. This exemplifies one of Benford’s major points. Progress, in fact history, is non-linear. The leaps into the future are not rationally calculated in a smooth progression. Instead humanity tends to jump here and there- sometimes forward sometimes back. Sometimes when it looks like the stage is set for something truly amazing to unfold everything inexplicably collapses. Enter the Ming dynasty 1400 AD.
Six hundred years ago the most powerful country on Earth was China. The Ming Dynasty was the richest, most populace, most knowledgeable, and the best organized nation on Earth. The 400 ship Ming navy was far and away the most impressive of all armadas on the planet. The Chinese people included enterprising adventurers ready and able to take on great voyages of discovery, some of which journeyed far into the Indian Ocean, approaching the southern tip of Africa. A few more years would have seen the Mings encounter Europe, long before the Portuguese were ready to make similar voyages eastward. At the height of all of this expansion the regime changed and the bureaucratic class stepped to the fore. The interests of the powerful were threatened by the great voyages of discovery and the new ideas being encountered and disseminated among the populace. Within a few short years the entire Ming navy was dismantled and it became a capital crime to explore the outside world. China, instead of being the discoverers of the rest of the world, doomed herself to be the discovered. China was never again a serious force in the emerging mix of nations.
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| Greg Benford |
Benford feels that the glorious future of space settlements and utilization of space resources for the benefit of humanity and the preservation of our planet are by no means assured. Our retreat from the Moon could be a wise pause as we contemplate how to do this outrageous push forward properly. It could also be the leading edge of a Ming-style collapse. Benford makes a powerful argument that humanity needs space. The development of our species has been punctuated by discoveries that have propelled us forward after long epochs of relative stagnation. The discovery of the use of stone tools a million years ago, the discovery of agriculture ten thousand years or so ago, the industrial revolution a few hundred years back. There is a steady pattern of these events and according to the exponential pattern at which they occur we are due for another. The next step can only be the utilization of space resources. Without undertaking this step we may reach the limits of our technological progress due to exhaustion of the planets resources.
It’s tempting to think that we should just be content with where we are. Stop the mad urge to build bigger and better machines and find peace and fulfillment within ourselves. Benford understands that this is not really a viable option. Unless we wish to retreat to a completely non-technological society we will need to continue to tear apart the Earth’s crust to find fewer and fewer available resources. We’re already in big trouble on this score. If we really want to keep earth beautiful we have to think about other real estate for human habitation. We could always terraform the Moon.
Huh? Terraform the Moon? I thought it was Mars we would remake into a new Earth? Benford makes a strong case that the Moon is a much better option for such an effort. To give Mars an Earthlike atmosphere would require expenditure of huge resources for thousands of years. The Moon, already the right distance from the sun, could become Earthlike within a few hundred years. Here’s how you do it according to Chef Benford. Take about 40 comets and, using the existing volatile outgassing from their cores, steer them towards our heavenly sister. Arrange for each of the comets to impact the Moon in such a way as to impact the equator at just the right angle of incidence to speed up the rotational rate to a point where the Moon rotates in 5 days rather than about 28. This makes the length of day tolerable for human habitation. At the same time, the volatiles in the comets introduce enough air and water to constitute a balmy, earthlike atmosphere. Due to the convection patterns of the hot air rising at the equator and falling at the poles, the whole Moon would have a climate similar to the state of Florida. And here’s the icing on the cake. Since the gravity is so much lower and the atmospheric pressure is even higher than Earth’s, it would be easy for anyone to strap on a pair of wings and take flight!
Maybe this particular idea would pan out and maybe not. In any case, we have to think big and we have to be bold or else we’re in serious trouble. There is a tendency to take progress for granted. Benford makes a strong argument that the lessons of history say it ain’t necessarily so. If we want our remote descendents to enjoy a beautiful planet we have to start thinking of how we’ll make this work. Science fiction has a powerful role in envisioning the promise of a better future and disseminating these powerful ideas among the general populace. A verdant Earth is not incompatible with far-flung visionary thought, as was so effectively demonstrated by the ideas in the air on this fine evening at Foothill College.
Filed under: Articles on June 13th, 2002
I think the current space station does not spin because of a fundamental public perception about space: Space is zero-gravity. From a layperson’t point of view, it makes no sense to go to all that trouble to get (mostly) out of the gravity well, and then ruin the effect by creating new gravity.
The challenge that space advocates face, is to generate a deeper understanding of the various space environments, and articulate the advantages of each one. Astronauts landing on mars after an 8 month trip without gravity risk hurting themselves from lack of ‘mars legs’. A spinning ship during the journey seems like a prudent precaution. Problem is, it must then be sold to mundanes who expect zero gravity.
The apparent absence of interest on NASA’s part in spinning the space station, or future ships, to generate artificial gravity, despite the obvious benefits (and the increasingly well understood dangers of zero gravity exposure over time)…is very puzzling. I have seen arcane references to “coreolis effect”, but no systematic explanation of why the weightlessness problem cannot be addressed fairly easily. I suspect it’s one of Robert Zubrin’s “dragons” put out to scare off early explorers!
Hmm… I don’t see anything irrational about building a space station using modules that fit comfortably in the payload bay of our space shuttle. Modules inherently incompatable with a toroidal design. Even if one were to design a space station which used those modules, it would take hundreds (possibly thousands) to make a structure big enough where 1G was comfortable. NASA has a budget limit. And at 10k a pound, you really can’t do much. Believe me, everyone at NASA wants to do this sort of stuff, but they’re keeping their goals realistic.
BTW, I don’t see why 40 comets couldn’t terraform Mars.
History teaches that what doesn’t get used gets lost…the Romans couldn’t imagine the level of ignorance that the western world would find itself in after the fall. Will our ancestors forget the Apollo 11? Will that become an urban legend? Will the Voyager’s become a ‘wishful afterthought’ of a drunken, drug-induced future of bland consumerism?
As for terraforming the moon…how do you steer a comet? What about the lifeforms that live on the comet (if they exist?)
I think there are two main reasons for little research into artifical gravity by spinning a structure. First the current station (back when it was still Freedom) was sold to congress as a microgravity research platform, so gravity would be a hindrance. Second- and I think a more important one- NASA gets support for its funding by spreading the costs around the country, and so always favours a more expensive option when there are simpler alternatives (e.g. current station design, which calls for over 30 shuttle flights, when a single shuttle-C based station could have been launched and fully operation in 1 day, and provided more internal volume). Zero-g sets lots of problems that need to be ’solved’ (and lots of research money spent on)- toilets, washing machines, food, etc all need to be specially designed. If the station had artifical gee they could use (more or less) everyday appliances, but then how could NASA justfy its budget?
Also the current station reinforces the myth that only super fit ‘right stuff’ astronauts can live in space, so keeping it the preserve of the Johnson elite.
As for the terraforming the moon with comets, I don’t see how 40 would be enough, I’d guess that a lot of volatiles would be lost in the impact blast. Plus the moons gravity is too weak to retain an atmosphere for a long period (well, over millions of years)
In our haste to terraform Mars we would likely make a tiny mistake in our calculations and bounce one of those comets right off the moon and into Earth’s gravity, thus ending any need for terraforming or space exploration. :)
The comment on sci-fi writers not conceiving of going to the moon until after the 1960s is incorrect. Asimov wrote about going to the moon in a 1939 issue of Trends.
Well,my comment, would be if the dildo was shoved a little further up the ass, it would be perfect. In my view the hippos should live to the point of sex.
Terraforming the Moon? Ok, let’s find 40 comets and then maybe we’ll have a breathable atmosphere. But to my knowledge the Moon lacks carbon and nitrogen. Will be tough living up there without these elements.
Perhaps processing Mars’ CO2 atmosphere will provide large quantities of carbon. There will be so much of it that the Martians will want to get rid of it and perhaps sell it to the Moon.
But…the Moon is a perfect place for observatories. Do we really want to put so much effort in destroying such a unique scientific research opportunity?
Let’s terraform Mars, which already has all necessary elements and day-night cycle virtually identical to Earth’s.
On to Mars!