Is This A Good Idea : Science Channel

October 31, 2011

For some, the word starship conjures up a young William Shatner in tights, barking orders from the bridge in Star Trek. Others may experience a painful flashback of the 1980s band of the same name, the misguided offspring of rock royalty Jefferson Airplane, which produced hits such as "We Built This City", ranked by music fans in a 2004 poll as the worst single ever released. But for me, it brings to mind Ferdinand Magellan, the 16th- century Portuguese explorer who led the first expedition that circumnavigated the globe. So, before I get into arguing that 21st- century humanity should join together in a fantastically costly and high-risk global project to build a starship and journey to other solar systems, let me explain why Magellan paved the way for it.

Magellan's Voyage Brings a New Perspective

One of the biggest threats to the human race's future, I fear, is our increasing tendency to hyper-focus obsessively upon short-term cost-benefit analysis, to the exclusion of all other considerations. This leads me to wonder: If Europeans had a similarly myopic mind-set in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, would they ever have sent explorers to the New World? Or would those voyages of discovery have been deemed too expensive and not likely enough to produce short-term rewards? Nancy Smiler's fascinating 2001 book, Magellan and the First Voyage Around the World, describes the fateful presentation that Portuguese entrepreneur Ferdinand Magellan gave to the teenage Spanish king Charles I in 1518. Magellan sought financing for a westward voyage to establish a new, shorter route to what were then called the Spice Islands, an Indonesian archipelago that was Europe's only source of mace and nutmeg, which were prized not just for flavor but as food preservatives. The proposition was sketchy, at best -- Magellan claimed to know of an uncharted strait though South America -- but he promised the king a gigantic return in wealth and power. The king, amazingly, not only quickly agreed but insisted upon squeezing out other investors and putting up the entire budget for the expedition: the equivalent of about $337,000 in today's dollars. (Thanks to the real estate bubble, many of us bought houses that cost more than that.)

In case you didn't pay attention in history class or in geography, the quick, easy route Magellan envisioned turned out not to exist, and after laboriously sailing around the tip of South America, he was killed by angry natives in the Philippines before he could even get to the Spice Islands. But one of his five ships survived and made it back to Seville, and its 38,000-mile trip was the first documented circumnavigation of the globe. Its real treasure -- a wealth of knowledge of new lands and peoples -- altered the European view of reality and led, ultimately, to the wired, interconnected, global culture that we have today, where a Spaniard and an Indonesian can negotiate a business deal via Skype and trade goods by air freight.

Magellan's misadventure is a prime example of how humanity often makes transformational leaps through serendipity. You never know what you're going to find out there, until you go. And that's why humans must go to the stars.

Starship Task Force

To steal a phrase from a singer with a bit more gravitas than Mickey Thomas: You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. To the contrary, hundreds of starship proponents, from scientists and engineers to sci-fi fans, attended a recent symposium in Orlando put on by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's futurist think tank, to discuss the agency's 100-Year Starship Study. The latter is a year long government-supported effort to research the challenges of interstellar space travel, and to come up with a viable plan for marshaling the resources and know-how to build a starship and launch a successful mission to another star.

As this document from a previous workshop by the project explains, there are plenty of good, serious motivations for such a mission. The ability to locate and explore Earthlike extra-solar planets may provide humanity with a future refuge, in case we mess up our own planet's ecosystem to the point where it becomes unable to sustain us. We might make contact with extraterrestrial civilizations and finally answer the question of whether there are others like us in the universe. We might make scientific breakthroughs that expand our conception of the universe -- and perhaps even help us to deal with our problems on Earth. And it could be that exploring the cosmos is an evolutionary imperative, the ultimate manifestation of the same restless curiosity and urge to roam that led early humans to spread over the face of this planet.

Science fiction authors have been dreaming of interstellar travel for what seems like forever. But scientists didn't began talking about the feasibility of interstellar travel until at least the mid-to- late 1940s, after Stanislaw Ulam, a Polish émigré mathematician who worked on the Manhattan Project and was one of the fathers of the H-bomb, came up with the idea of using nuclear energy to power a spacecraft. Here's a 1955 scientific paper that Ulam co-authored on the concept.

In 1968, as this Reuters article details, the physicist Freeman Dyson envisioned a 10,000-ton starship, powered by explosions from hydrogen bombs, which would embark on journeys lasting multiple centuries.

If that sounds like a long time to be away from home, remember that the most daunting obstacle to interstellar travel is the enormous distances that a starship would have to cover. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth, is 4.22 light- years away, which is about 24.8 trillion miles. So far, the fastest manmade vehicles, the Helios solar probes launched in the 1970s, have only attained a top speed of about 150,000 miles per hour, so get out your calculator and do the math. If you left today, your expected arrival time at Proxima Centauri would be sometime in the year 21,000, give or take a few decades. More recently, scientists have explored the possibility of creating warp drives similar to the ones in science fiction, which would utilize distortions of Einsteinian space-time created by the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy. (Here's a blog post that I wrote in 2009 on the possibility of such engines. )

Technological Barriers

We aren't even close to developing such a quantum leap in technology, let alone finding an energy source ample enough to power it. As this Technology Review article details, one researcher guesstimates that it will take at least another two centuries, at the current rate of technological progress, for our civilization to solve those problems. That's led some naysayers to conclude that humans will never develop a way to escape the solar system. But others, such as physicist Joseph Breeden, aren't ready to give up. According to this New York Times article, Breeden has dreamed up an unorthodox propulsion method:

First, find an asteroid in an elliptical orbit that passes close to the Sun. Second, put a starship in orbit around the asteroid. If the asteroid could be captured into a new orbit that clings close to the Sun, the starship would be flung on an interstellar trajectory, perhaps up to a tenth of the speed of light.

"The chaotic dynamics of those two allow all the energy of one to be transferred to the other," said Dr. Breeden, who came toting copies of a paper describing the technique. "It's a unique type of gravity assist."

Now, I'm no physicist, but that sounds pretty intriguing to me. But the important thing, I think, is that we try to find a way to get to the stars. I'm guessing that the immense expense, brainpower and manufacturing resources necessary to achieve such a goal are such that it would be best accomplished by an international partnership, perhaps even a global one. And having an enterprise that would require many nations to work together could have a unifying effect on our endangered species, one that we desperately need.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

Credit: Stefano Bianchetti/CORBIS