Is This A Good Idea? Warp Drives For Spacecraft?

August 26, 2009

What if we were able to equip spacecraft with faster-than-light warp drive engines, like the Enterprise has in Star Trek? Imagine that instead of being limited to the 25,000 miles per hour that the Apollo spacecraft achieved on the way to the moon and back, astronauts could travel at the speed of the Enterprise and other Constitution-class starships in the 23th Century Federation fleet — roughly 5.4 billion miles per hour?

At that speed, the immense distances of space would suddenly shrink to human scale, making it possible for us to discover, explore and even colonize distant worlds. It would be possible to reach the dwarf planet Pluto, on the edge of our solar system 2.66 billion miles from Earth, in a little more than a half hour, instead of the more than 12 years it would take at Apollo speed. More importantly, it would be possible to travel 62 trillion miles to the solar system of Epsilon Eridani, the home of Spock’s fictional planet Vulcan and the nearest star that may possibly have an Earth-like extrasolar planet in the so-called habitable zone, in about 15 months. Gliese 581c, a possibly habitable world about five times the size of Earth, would be a roughly three-year trip away. Pretty cool, huh?

If you’re a space travel enthusiast like I am, it’s hard to conceive of a downside to warp drive — provided, of course, that it wouldn’t incinerate spaceship passengers and cause the Earth to be sucked into a black hole, as naysayer physicist Stefano Finazzi has theorized. One big problem might be fuel efficiency, since bending space itself, as a warp drive would do, would require an almost unfathomably enormous energy expenditure. As Lawrence Krauss calculates in his book The Physics of Star Trek, reaching the nearest star to our sun, the Alpha Centauri system, would require the equivalent of 100,000 years’ worth of current total U.S. consumption. If a hydrogen fusion reactor powered the warp drive, a starship would consume thousands of times its weight in hydrogen on a long trip. In Star Trek, of course, script writers ingeniously get around this problem by utilizing the fictional crystalline element dilithium to regulate a matter-antimatter reaction that generates the needed power. But as we’ll discuss, scientists actually are trying to develop such an energy source for space travel.

Now, some of you may be wondering: “So why are you now blogging about warp drive for spacecraft? The Star Trek movie came out back in May, and the DVD isn’t being released until November. Can’t you at least write about a gadget from a current blockbuster?” OK, well, I suppose it would have been more newsworthy to write about the speculative technology in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. But G.I. Joe’s gadgetry—as befitting to a movie based on a line of action figures—looks like a cheesy, scaled-up version of the accessories you would find on the shelf at FAO Schwarz. (See Popular Mechanics’ “Five Extremely Dumb Military Designs From G.I. Joe.”). And just as importantly, I haven’t been into G.I. Joe since my parents got me the dorky beret-and-turtleneck-clad French Resistance Fighter version of the action figure for Christmas when I was a kid, instead of the cool Mercury Astronaut version that I coveted.

Besides that, warp drive has an enduring appeal. Like the hand-held flip communicator from the seminal 1960s TV series that presaged today’s cell phones, warp drive is another of those once-outlandish sci-fi innovations that scientists now realize may someday actually be possible.

The oldest reference that I can find to “warp drive” is in a 1953 collection of short stories by science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, who later wrote for the Star Trek TV series (he’s the one who dreamed up the Vulcan salute). But while sci-fi writers commonly employed warp drives in novels and stories, they usually danced vaguely around the subject of how they would actually work, since the common interpretation of Albert Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity dictated that faster-than-light travel was impossible. Some envisioned instead that travel to distant space might be possible by flying spacecraft through a network of wormholes—essentially, tunnels in space-time, first envisioned by German mathematician Herman Weyl in the 1920s. But that solution had a flaw also, after 1960s physicists demonstrated that such wormholes, if they existed, would be inherently unstable.

It wasn’t until 1994 that theoretical physicist and Star Trek fan Miguel Alcubierre published “The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity,” a paper that offered a way for a faster-than-light warp drive to work without changing the rules of Einsteinian physics or discovering a passageway through space-time. Alcubierre noticed that general relativity didn’t actually say that faster-than-light travel was impossible, but only specified that objects couldn’t move faster locally than light. He envisioned a spacecraft sitting motionless inside a bubble, while it caused time-space to expand behind it and to contract in the direction that it wanted to go. Alcubierre figured that the time-space distortion process would be powered by some sort of “exotic matter,” which sounds a lot like the matter-antimatter engine dreamed up by Star Trek writers.

Alcubierre’s blueprint for faster-than-light travel may sound even more bizarre than wormholes. But other physicists find it intriguing. In 2008, Baylor University physics associate professor Gerald Cleaver and graduate student Richard Obousy published a paper describing a way to create and propel an Alcubierrean bubble, by manipulating one of the additional dimensions envisioned in string theory. http://www.superstringtheory.com/. And theoretical physics researchers at NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, who are searching for a way to make interstellar travel feasible, think the concept has promise as well.

As Space.com recently reported, they’re encouraged by theoretical models that suggest that space-time expanded at a rate faster than light speed [the speed of light?] shortly after the universe’s inception, and by laboratory experiments in which ultra-cold rings cause gyroscopes above them to spin, suggesting that they are detecting the effect of the rings moving space-time.

But we’re still a long way from developing a working warp drive. Finding an energy source remains a huge obstacle. The Baylor researchers, for example, estimate that the amount of energy needed to manipulate that extra dimension to move a 10-meter-long ship would be the equivalent of the entire mass of the planet Jupiter, converted into pure energy.

So what do you think? Is the warp drive an idea worth pursuing? Or would we be better off crawling into a wormhole? Express your opinion below.

Is McCain or Obama Better for Science? Part 2

October 20, 2008

For those of you who weren’t sufficiently entertained by the presidential debates, here’s something you might appreciate more.

OK, back to our featured question: Which presidential candidate would do more to advance science and technological development? In last week’s blog, we examined GOP nominee Sen. John McCain’s positions. This week, we look at those of the Democratic nominee, Sen. Barack Obama. (And while this may stamp me as a media enabler of the political status quo, I’m not going to examine the positions of third-party candidates Ralph Nader and Bob Barr, in part because they haven’t taken any policy positions on science and technology.)

Obama’s campaign Web site has a short section on his science and technology policy positions. In it, he promises to avoid the mistakes of the Bush administration, which, as we noted last week, actively tried to censor government scientists when their research contradicted the president's political positions, and made politically motivated appointments to important scientific advisory committees. Instead, Obama says that

Is McCain or Obama Better for Science? Part 1

October 13, 2008

Some of you may be wondering when I’m going to get back to writing about human-animal hybrids, telepathic ray guns and other similarly weighty topics, but bear with me, because we’ve got only a few weeks left until the 2008 presidential election. This is a contest with really important, potentially world-changing issues at stake — though you wouldn’t know about it from the mainstream media, which is focused primarily upon the candidates’ personalities and campaign tactics. I’ve been particularly irked, for example, at the cable news fixation upon the  McCain campaign’s efforts to exploit the tenuous-at-best link between Obama and  onetime '60s radical William Ayers, and upon the Obama campaign’s counter-attacking  attempt to resurrect the Keating Five scandal, in which McCain was involved back in the days when he wore wider ties and had more hair. The MSM’s feigned disapproval of candidates getting down and dirty is more than a little disingenuous. In truth, the blow-dried bloviating class loves it when politicians call each other names, because angry, impassioned brouhaha makes for more dramatic television. (Just ask Judge Judy.)

How easily I digress. This week’s topic is one that you probably won’t hear about on Hardball or Hannity and Colmes. Which candidate would do more, policy-wise, to advance science?

Al Gore's Energy Challenge

August 08, 2008

Full disclosure here. While I am indeed extremely concerned about global warming and what we can do to avert a climate catastrophe in the too-near future, there’s an ulterior motive behind this week’s essay as well. I’m hoping, albeit improbably, that my favorite Futurama talking-head-in- a- jar, former Vice-President -turned- Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, will somehow stumble upon this page via Google Alerts and actually deign to post a comment on my blog. As you can see from this picture of his Nashville office, he’s got a few things on his plate right now. But hey, Mr. Vice-President, if you do happen to be reading this, it wouldn’t take too long to pound out a few words of encouragement or wisdom, would it? And while you’re at it, sir, please feel free to weigh in on the recent controversy in this space regarding the relative merits of Survivor vs. Night Ranger when it comes to 1980s Lite Metal mullet-rock. We all could benefit from a statesmanlike resolution of that question.

                     

Robotic Bartenders?

July 25, 2008

I was going to write this week about Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his bold challenge in a recent speech that the U.S. should endeavor to generate 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2018. But I’ve decided to postpone that weighty discussion and instead examine another visionary proposal: robotic bartenders.

Unlikely as it may seem, there is a six degrees of separation connection between the two ideas. In addition to being the winner of the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election and a climate change crusader, Gore’s resume also includes occasional guest appearances as a talking-head-in-a-jar on the animated series Futurama — whose cast of characters also includes Bender, a hard-drinking automaton that has been known to close down a few 31st-century gin joints.

But I digress. If a robot can paint and weld in automobile plants, fly combat missions in Afghanistan and even vacuum the carpet in your living room, why shouldn’t it be able to mix at least a passable vodka martini?

Personal Jet Packs?

April 11, 2008

I’m hearing complaints that I tend to blog too much about bleak, scary hypothetical end of the world  scenarios.  As a result, I’m going to put aside my previously planned topic — the pros and cons of various strategies for dealing with a global onslaught of flesh-eating zombies — and instead focus on a subject that inspires a tad more bonhomie: The personal jet pack.

If your only familiarity with the personal jet pack comes from the James Bond flick Thunderball, in which Agent 007 relies upon the gadget to escape some pistol-wielding bad guys, you may be surprised to discover that the jet pack — or rocket belt, as it’s sometimes called — actually is a real, functioning technology that’s been around for more than 60 years. During World War II, German scientists developed the Himmelstürmer (in English, “sky stormer”), a pair of what essentially were miniature V1 missiles  attached to a harness. The device was designed to enable Wehrmacht combat engineers to leapfrog distances of up to 75 yards over minefields, barbed wire and bombed-out bridges. A prototype was captured by U.S. forces and sent back home for study. After the war, the Pentagon wanted to develop a more powerful version, which it dubbed the Small Rocket Lift Device, for use in reconnaissance and amphibious landings.

The first functional personal flying device was the Bell Rocket Belt, invented by engineer Wendell F. Moore in the 1950s and early 1960s, which used nitrogen and highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide to power twin jet nozzles that sprouted from behind the wearer’s shoulders like angel wings. In 1961, a week after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first orbited Earth, an extremely brave individual named Harold Graham made the first unassisted jet-pack flight at an airport near Niagara Falls. He reached an altitude of just 4 feet and traveled about 30 yards, but it was a start. Eventually, Graham managed to elevate to a height of 30 feet and cover slightly more than the length of a football field. That year, he gave a demonstration for President John F. Kennedy at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Nevertheless, the military was underwhelmed by the original Rocket Belt, because it had one severe limitation: users could only stay in the air for a maximum of 21 seconds. In the late 1960s, the Pentagon took another stab at the concept, investing $30 million to develop Bell’s Individual Mobility System, which employed a gas-turbine jet engine powered by kerosene fuel. The IMS could stay aloft for 20 minutes and cover much larger distances than the Rocket Belt, but it too had drawbacks. The system weighed a hefty 170 pounds and was loud enough to make it useless for surveillance. The project eventually became a victim of budget cuts.

From then on, other than the jet-pack pilot who made a spectacular landing at the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and an occasional appearance as a prop in science fiction movies, the concept was pretty much relegated to the dusty corner of oblivion occupied by the likes of the Amphibicar, the Dymaxion House and the Picturephone.

That is, until recently, when two companies — U.S.-based Jetpack International and a Mexican competitor, Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexicana — began marketing personal flying devices to civilian thrill seekers who happen to have $150,000 or so to spend. Both are developing next-generation gadgets that promise to break through the previous time and distance limitations. According to a 2007 story in Popular Mechanics, Jetpack’s upcoming $200,000 T73 model, scheduled for release sometime in 2008, will burn jet fuel instead of using hydrogen peroxide, and will remain aloft for 19 minutes with an 11-mile travel range. Meanwhile, TAM is working to develop its own Jet Belt, whose single titanium jet engine will be capable of delivering 490 pounds of thrust.

So will jet packing become the next hot extreme sport? As this YouTube video suggests, it must be incredible fun. The downside: As the manufacturers readily admit, personal flying devices are pretty dangerous and require lots of careful training. Is the prospect of a careless adrenaline junkie running out of fuel and plummeting to Earth — or crash-landing on the roof of your house — simply too great of a risk? Express your opinion below.

Should Scientists Create Artificial Life Forms?

February 15, 2008

Mycoplasma genitalium is a bacterium that resides on epithelial cells inside the genital tracts of humans suffering from non-gonococcal urethritis. Up to this point, M. genitalium’s main claim to fame was that it is one of the least complex organisms known to man. But now, the humble microbe is the subject of worldwide headlines; researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute have just accomplished a scientific first by assembling a near-perfect replica of the bacterium’s 582,970 base-pair genome from its chemical components.  If Venter’s team is able to insert the synthetic genome into a living bacterium, which they hope to do sometime in 2008, in theory, at least, it should take over control of the organism’s functions, in the same way that installing and booting up a copy of a new operating system would run a computer.

The Venter Institute’s feat moves us one step closer to the day when scientists can create totally synthetic life forms that don’t exist in nature. As the New York Times explains:

"Synthetic biologists envision being able to design an organism on a computer, press the 'print' button to have the necessary DNA made and then put that DNA into a cell to produce a custom-made creature.

'What we are doing with the synthetic chromosome is going to be the design process of the future,' said J. Craig Venter, the boundary-pushing gene scientist."

The ability to create synthetic organisms could be tremendously useful, and profitable too. Scientists might be able to design a fuel-producing microbe that efficiently converts biomass into ethanol, or create custom-made cellular factories to produce ingredients for medicines. (Already, University of California scientist Jay Keasling has used synthetic biology techniques to program yeast cells to produce artemisinin, a substance used in treating malaria, more cheaply than it can be extracted from tree bark.) They even might devise tiny biological robots that could adapt to their environments with greater agility than any machine, or manmade bacteria programmed to attack and kill cancers. It’s not too hard to imagine the creation of synthetic life forms eventually turning into a trillion-dollar global industry.

On the other hand, it might be just as easy to cause incredible harm with such technology. An organism custom designed for a benign purpose might escape into the environment and mutate into a crop-ravaging pest. Worse yet, malevolent governments or terrorist organizations might eventually be able to create new types of lethal pathogens for biological warfare. Here’s an article from The New Atlantis that lays out some of the potential perils.

So what do you think? Should scientists be allowed to create synthetic life forms, or are the potential risks too scary? Express your opinion below.

Should Humans Be Cloned?

February 01, 2008

If you’re uneasy about the FDA’s recent decision that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is safe for human consumption, this story is really going to rock your world. Stemagen, a La Jolla, Calif.-based private-sector stem cell research company, has announced that its scientists have for the first time created a human embryo by cloning adult cells through somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same process used to create cloned animals.

You may be thinking that you’ve heard this before, because you have. Back in 2004, South Korean scientists announced that they not only had created a human embryo via cloning but had successfully extracted stem cells from it. After their work could not be replicated, lead scientist Hwang Woo-Suk was forced to admit that the results had been fabricated.

As a result, Stemagen seems to have taken extra care to document its findings, an article accepted by the peer-reviewed scientific journal Stem Cells. The researchers had an independent lab do DNA fingerprinting to prove that the embryos were true clones of the cells from which they originated.

Stemagen chief executive Dr. Samuel H. Wood, who doubled as a donor of the cells from which some of the embryos were cloned, describes the project as “a critical milestone in the development of patient-specific embryonic stem cells for human therapeutic use, potentially including developing treatments for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases.”

But not everybody is going to hail this as a breakthrough. The idea of creating an embryonic clone of a person in order to harvest stem cells — and then discarding the clone — is abhorrent to opponents of most conventional embryonic stem cell research, who consider the destruction of an embryo to be murder. Even those who aren’t outright opposed raise some potentially troubling questions. For example, bioethicist and blogger Arthur Caplan writes:

In the paper announcing the breakthrough, the authors note that they got three out of 25 attempts at clones to turn into human clone embryos. That is a success rate of about 10 percent. Even if that success rate improves in the future, it still means that six or more eggs are going to be required for a researcher to make a stem cell from a clone made from the DNA of one of your own cells.

Where will hundreds of thousands of eggs come from when hundreds of thousands seek cures? Will we pay poor women to create them? Egg-farming, using powerful drugs with serious risks, may not be the most humane way to ask a poor woman to earn a living.

And although this obviously isn’t the Stemagen scientists’ intention, some undoubtedly worry that the process will be used to produce human infants who are perfect genetic duplicates of a cell donor. (It may already have happened, if you buy the 2004 claim of a mysterious outfit named Clonaid that it actually had produced 13 cloned human children; skeptical New York Times journalists pointed out that the company was founded by the leader of a sect that preaches space travelers originally populated Earth through cloning.) If such cloning proved feasible and the process was widely available, would people resort to cloning in an attempt to make themselves (or at least their genetic blueprint) immortal? Or would companies obtain cell samples from the most productive workers and use them to create a generation of super employees who would bump those of us with conventional origins into the unemployment line? Would human clones have the same civil rights as their progenitors? What if terrorists used cloning to create an endless supply of suicide bombers? That all may sound crazy,  but crazy things sometimes happen.

What’s your opinion on human cloning? Say your piece here.

Do We Need a Crash Effort to Thwart Killer Asteroids?

January 04, 2008

Astronomers’ recent announcement that an asteroid has about a 1-in-25 chance of smashing into the surface of Mars brought back the memory of those alarming headlines in 2002, when a 1,000-to-1,300-foot-long rock named 2001 YB5 hurtled toward Earth. What CNN labeled the "killer asteroid" turned out to miss our planet by 375,000 miles, about 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the moon. But by asteroid standards, that’s way too close for comfort.

Sure, sizeable asteroids don’t strike the Earth very often — on average, an object 1 kilometer (.6 miles) or larger hits every 500,000 years. But when they do, all hell usually breaks loose. Scientists believe an asteroid 6 miles in diameter struck the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago, releasing energy that was the equivalent of 100 million megatons of TNT and generating a planet-wide heat pulse so intense that according to one recent study, it probably killed off the dinosaurs in a matter of hours. In 1908, another asteroid probably caused the Tunguska Event in Siberia, a mysterious aerial explosion that generated enough force to level 80 million trees and cause an earthquake estimated at 5 on the Richter scale.

Nobody is sure how many potential killer asteroids are out there, but astronomers already have discovered more than 5,000 Near Earth Objects (NEOs) — that is, asteroids, comets and meteors whose orbits bring them within 124 million miles of Earth. About 900 of these have been classified as Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs), objects at least 500 feet in diameter that come within 46.5 million miles of our planet (about half the distance between Earth and the sun).

Even the least imposing PHAs have the potential to cause a devastating tsunami, while the bigger ones could wipe out an entire city and kill millions of people. (Imagine, for example, what would have happened if the Tunguska Event object had exploded over Moscow.) But it’s the exceedingly remote but nevertheless possible collision with a Yucatan Event-sized asteroid that really gives cause for concern, because it could wipe out the great majority, if not all, of the living creatures on Earth.

So if we’re threatened with the prospect of annihilation from the cosmos, what are we doing about it? If life were a Hollywood movie — say, the 1998 Hollywood disaster flick Armageddon — NASA simply would launch Bruce Willis and his intrepid team into space on a mission to land on the giant asteroid, drill an 800-foot-deep hole, drop in a nuclear bomb, and then remotely detonate it, cutting the PHA precisely in half so that both pieces narrowly miss Earth. (As the Bad Astronomy blog notes, splitting an asteroid in half might well cause one of the pieces to hit Earth with even greater velocity.) In reality, NASA isn’t doing much at this point beyond surveying space and attempting to identify and chart the NEOs and PHAs out there, a project for which the government has allocated a relatively minuscule $4.1 million a year. (NASA hopes to have that job 90 percent complete by 2020.) A 2007 NASA report to Congress only briefly touches upon possible killer-asteroid mitigation strategies. Instead of trying to split an asteroid into pieces, scientists have contemplated using the gravitational attraction of a giant spacecraft to pull the asteroid in a different direction, or using a giant mirror to focus solar energy on the asteroid’s surface and boil off material, creating thrust that would change its path.

In order to actually be able to do any of these things in the foreseeable future, however, we’d likely have to allocate many billions of dollars to an effort vastly more ambitious than the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program to put men on the moon. Developing effective asteroid-diverting technology might well divert resources and attention away from other important priorities, such as the efforts to mitigate global warming. On the other hand, if a killer asteroid strikes Earth, we might not be around to worry about climate change any more. So what do you think? Should we launch a crash program to deal with the threat of killer asteroids? Offer your opinion below.

Should Scientists Try to Eliminate the Need for Sleep?

December 21, 2007

During one of my usual late-night Googlethons fueled by potent Vietnamese coffee, I came across a fascinating 2006 article from New Scientist, “Get ready for 24-hour living,” which discusses the recent development of drugs that can allow a person to remain awake for hours or even days without ill effects. One such drug is modafinil, a medication whose maker, Cephalon, describes it as the “first in a new class of wake-promoting agents.” Approved by the FDA as a treatment for narcolepsy, excessive sleepiness caused by obstructive sleep apnea/hypopnea and shift work sleep disorder, modafinil also reportedly is popular off-label with overachievers such as “Yves,” a 30-something software developer from Seattle who has been using it on-and-off for several years, mostly to burn the candle at both ends.

"I find I can be very productive at work," he says. "I'm more organized and more motivated. And it means I can go out partying on a Friday night and still go skiing early on Saturday morning."

But the present generation of eugeroic drugs such as modafinil and CX717, another compound whose sleep depriviation-countering effects have drawn interest from the U.S. military, probably are just the start. New Scientist reports that several pharmaceutical giants are gearing up research on wakefulness drugs, and that the Pentagon is also looking at technologies such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, which might be used to switch on or off portions of the brain affected by sleep deprivation. The publication quotes Oxford University circadian biologist Russell Foster, who envisions that, in the next decade or two, it’ll be possible pharmacologically to turn off the need for sleep. As a result, according to Foster,  people routinely will be awake and active for 22 hours a day.

The ability to function at a high level without sleeping much — or at all — for long periods would have some definite upsides. Medical residents wouldn’t have to worry about misdiagnosing emergency-room patients because their cognitive faculties have been reduced to goo by brutally long shifts. Truck drivers could pull coast-to-coast runs without slowing down, except for an occasional pie-and-coffee break. Particularly ambitious people could hold two full-time jobs at once or simultaneously earn multiple Ph.D.s. Earning a spot for the longest this-or-that in the Guinness Book of World Records would become a lot easier.

But what about the possible downsides? According to the National Sleep Foundation, less-than-normal amounts of good quality sleep have been linked to health problems such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension and depression. The precise role of sleep in memory processing is not completely understood, either. Would reducing or eliminating sleep cause an epidemic of related health problems? What sort of effects would it have on our personalities and social interactions? With all that additional time to read blogs and watch 24-hour cable news, would we all suffer from mega information overload — or worse yet, become so insufferably well-informed on every subject that we’d bore each other to death?

So should scientists develop wakefulness drugs and technology to their logical extreme? Or should we keep on snoozing? Express your opinion below.