Starstruck

                                                    NASA

According to the Times (“In a Breathtaking First, NASA’s Voyager 1 Exits the Solar System," NYT, 9/12/13)  on August 25, 2012, Voyager I, originally launched in l977, passed from “solar plasma” or what is known as the heliosphere to “the plasma of interstellar space.” In lay terms Voyager I exited the solar system to begin the next stage of its journey. Travelling at the speed of 38,000 miles per hour it will take about 40,000 years to reach its next destination “a dwarf star dispassionately known as AC+793888 in the constellation of Camelopardalis,” according to the Times. Reading the Times story at first creates a feeling of déjà vu. You may not have heard of this star or that constellation but it all sounds like an episode of Star Trek. The Stars My Destination is the title of novel by the sci fi writer Alfred Bester, first serialized in Galaxy Magazine back in l956. What’s hard to awaken to is the fact that this isn’t science fiction and that the self-same level of capability that sent Voyager I into orbit could easily have sent off a much large ship, say something capable of carrying a biosphere. Following Moore’s Law computer chips keep getting more and more powerful. According to the Times when Voyager I left the earth 36 years ago it had computers “with one-240,000^th the memory of a low-end iPhone.” If those computers took it the first ll.7 billion miles to the edge of interstellar space, one can only imagine the capability of future Voyagers powered by quantum chips. The story made it to the front page of the print edition of the paper, but containing all the usual diagrams, it looked like a lot of pieces that have been written about NASA space missions. However, if you looked closely at the photo, you could see the chrysalis of the spacecraft that would some day transport generations of a dying civilization to their new home on a far away star.

The Stars Our Destination I

Someday the earth will be like one of those towns on the South Shore of Long Island, like Long Beach or like Broad Channel in the Rockaways which have been hit one time too many. It will be the result either of some external force like the asteroids which caused the ice age or the problems will emanate because of the way carbon emissions in the upper atmosphere and the consequent Green House effect have caused a catastrophic shift in our weather profiles. Someday the inhabitants of the earth will be in the position of the German Jews at the time of Hitler. There were those who couldn’t believe in the prospect of annihilation and those who escaped with a few possessions just before the gauntlet was lowered. But how will the migration take place and what will be the latter day vessel, the Noah’s Ark, into which people and animals will escape? And where will civilization go? The only mildly hospitable planet in the solar system is Mars. The others are either too hot or too cold and even Mars is a trek. If we talk about going further out into our galaxy of the Milky Way, we are talking about some kind of migration taking place over generations. It would be biblical in scope. But the forty days and nights would probably be changed to light years and many life times would be spent in travel to the new found land. The science fiction writer Alfred Bester’s famous tome is The Stars My Destination. The question is: when it’s time to move, which one will we shoot for?

A Dark Matter

“We must cultivate our garden,” is Voltaire’s famous quote from Candide. The quote is obviously offered as an antidote to the Leibnitzian windmill chasing of his character Pangloss who is always saying “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Adam Frank’s op-ed piece, “Alone in the Void" (NYT, 7/24/12) similarly serves as refutation of the kind of inflated notion of scientific progress offered by titles like Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Sure there’s string theory and quanta, but let’s remember that for now these theories refer to the working of subatomic particles and not flesh and blood creatures who have to worry about shuttling at 42^nd Street to catch the uptown Broadway Local. “From ‘Star Trek’ to ‘Star Wars,’ from warp drive to hyperdrive—the idea of rapid interstellar space travel is such a deep meme for cultural visions of space and our future that Hollywood films don’t even have to waste time introducing them to the audience, “ Frank remarks. The occasion of Frank’s piece is the crossing of Voyager 1 from the solar system to “the icy dominions of interstellar space,” a journey that will have taken 35 years. Frank estimates it would take a space craft nearly a millennium “to reach nearby stars,” in the unlikely event it was possible “to increase the speed of our spacecraft one hundredfold.”  “Think about it,” Frank concludes. “No salvation from population pressure on the shores of alien worlds. No release from the threats of biosphere degradation in the promise of new biospheres. No escape from our own destructive tendencies by spreading out among the stars like seedpods in the wind.”  Herbert, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury and Clarke were all wonderful writers and visionaries. However, their futuristic message may also be a good way out of facing more imminent problems—like the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice shelf—that threaten life on earth.