Back in 2012 I reported on Peter Garretson’s What Our Civilization Needs is a Billion Year Plan, an essay advocating a robust human expansion to the stars. Lt. Col. Garretson lives and breathes futuristic issues. A transformational strategist for the US Air Force, he has served as an airpower strategist and strategic policy advisor to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force on his Strategic Studies Group, the Chief of Irregular Warfare Strategy, Plans and Policy, and spent four years as the Chief of Future Technology for HQ USAF Strategic Planning. He is currently an Instructor of Joint Warfare at Air Command and Staff College and the lead for Space Horizons, Air University’s endeavor to “re-imagine spacepower in the age of asteroid mining.” A long-time space advocate, he has written widely on issues ranging from planetary defense to solar power; you can follow his work at his website: http://www.petergarretson.com/. In today’s open letter to Centauri Dreams, he lays down a first draft for a bill aimed at energizing NASA’s role in developing the technologies needed for starflight.
by Peter A. Garretson
Sooner or later we are going to discover an Earth-like exoplanet, and when we do, we are going to want to go there. The 100 Year Starship, Icarus Interstellar, Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, Initiative for Interstellar Studies, Tau Zero and Centauri Dreams are all catalyzing terrific work that forwards general spacefaring and space industrial capabilities. And like NASA’s BPP more low-dollar work could lead to great NIAC-like thinking and advances. Those of us who already know that this should be our direction should have ready legislation to move forward. Here is an initial draft of what might be in such a bill:
Gene Roddenberry Memorial America Starfaring / Starship bill.
It is the will of the Congress that America should become a star-faring civilization, bringing new life to uninhabited worlds, ensuring our continuity, security and prosperity for our posterity. It is the will of the American people for America to develop the capability to “seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”
And if it is the dream of Congress, by America’s Quadricentennial (2176) America will have reached another star.
To that end, NASA, the DOE, and DoD are authorized and encouraged, in concert, and in concert with private industry and academia to:
- Develop technologies and capabilities to enable interstellar probes
- Develop propulsion and life support capabilities that could enable a manned mission in a single human lifetime
- Develop off-Earth industrial capability to construct and launch such missions through space resource utilization (space mining and space power)
- Enable thriving off-Earth communities and a space economy that could support the expense of such a mission
NASA is directed to:
- Sponsor a Conference every two years to review the most exciting and profitable destinations and present visions and ideas to the public
- Review and present to the public progress and conceptual designs for interstellar missions
- Present to Congress, every two years, the most exciting and profitable destinations beyond our heliopause, and progress in the necessary technology.
//Signed//
PETER A. GARRETSON, Lt Col, USAF
Air University Space Horizons Activity Lead
You have my vote. I am not a congressional representative, so maybe that does not help much. I hope we could do something meaningful before 2176.
I expect any effort to become a star faring civilization to be global, but I would like to see America lead that effort. I hope we are still able to dare mighty things.
Peter, thank you for your important initiative! A NASA-sponsored dedicated conference is what we need to unify the efforts of our world-wide interstellar community. It is also very helpful when someone can pay at least part of the travel costs and the hotel, and it is also easier to convince your boss to send you to a NASA conference!
I am less sanguine about this plan because:
1. America (USA) is likely to be a declining nation in 2176 (c.f. The British Empire). Why not hitch the vision to a global endeavor?
2. 160 years is really too far a horizon to spend money of technologies rather than science. Why not fund the NSF instead, and then decide on technologies to develop if they have value beyond that of interstellar travel. For example, life support system components could be very useful for conserving fresh water, recycling organic wastes, which in turn changes how cities are designed. Perhaps arcologies and mile high skyscrapers would decouple from city infrastructure.
3. Industrial capacity should be developed for economic purposes, not as goals to support interstellar travel. As such, government agencies should facilitate technologies and markets, but private industry should do the heavy lifting.
The same applies to off-Earth colonies.
4. Nasa already has done tomes worth of paper studies and conceptual work (I have quite a few in my library. They are worth very little. Instead a slimmed down Nasa should focus on technology development and pathfinding, e.g. deep space probes. (I would consider spinning off JPL in this regard and fund them).
I think it is fairly evident that an interstellar voyage, even a starwisp flyby, will require an economy much larger than the US has today. I suspect it may even require a solar system wide economy, which is stable enough to allow for human lifetime planning horizons. If so, the economic logic must be there to justify such an economy, and it must be private capital that takes the risks and gets the rewards. Government directed economic policy is likely to result in poor choices and wasted resources. I’m all for government providing incentives and paying for upfront science and technology, but not to be vested in certain industries and technologies. That is a problem that I see could happen with this particular plan.
Suppose we decide that some sort of beamed power is the way to go. It would be far better that the expensive power facility have other, primary roles, rather than be a one off dedicated facility. It may be that lasers primarily used for planetary defense should be the beam technology. Or perhaps general purpose microwave facilities used to beam power to Earth from solar power sats or to mining ships would be a better choice. Industrial uses should come first, and then their co-option for interstellar travel.
I agree in with Alex Tolley. There are programs that could do huge service right here on Earth that would dovetail neatly into Interstellar travel. Any short term prospects absolutely depend on new physics, best served by cutting edge science.
Barring a physics breakthrough Interstellar travel depends on social and cultural progress that is best tackled for it’s own sake.
@ Alex Tolley,
I fully support you ideas. I often think about the amount of money necessary to “survive” a manned Mars landing and shudder at the thought of poisonous particulates that inhabit the surface of Mars.
The level of decontamination necessary to re-enter any habitat “might” end up being more expensive than the propulsion expenses for the trip to Mars. The decontamination science we would gain from this problem alone would underscore my requirement that any mission of this expense should have a dual (space/Earth ecology science) use for the technology developed.
In addition, I recently became aware of the needs for earth borne microbial symbiosis to maintain human health beyond the well documented muscle atrophy, eye irregularities and radiation contamination. As we become more aware of the health issues related to “surviving” long duration deep space travel, we should also begin to realize how truly unique and precious our home planet is and take more vigorous steps to protect and enhance our survive-ability right here on earth.
While it’s rational (?) to justify protection from a ELE asteroid or comet, the odds of that happening vs the very real possibility of ruining our home planet habitability makes space travel a weak justification. In fact, based on the logic of such a scenario, mass movers or generation ships seem to be the only realistic solutions. REALLY..??
Personally, I’d rather leave clean air and water for future generations.
We are truly a most paradoxical of creatures that are capable of such wondrous imaginings and yet we’ll despoil, with reckless abandon, our own home environment. We currently treat everything as disposable until we have buried ourselves in our own garbage.
I shudder at the thought of treating the universe with the same level of disregard. I would point to the NEO man made orbiting junk pile and the planetary surfaces of some planets that are becoming littered with various “disposable” rocket parts and dune buggies as proof positive of the future impact humanity will have on the universe.
Our mom’s were right. “Clean up your room, make up your bed, empty the garbage and THEN you can go out and play.
Peter – this is the most forward-looking and inspirational proposal from a U.S. military/government representative that I have seen in some time. I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes in your world – maybe there are ongoing projects that are mind-boggling in their reach – but from a public point of view this is one of the most powerful government-based proposals since Werner von Braun’s days.
Alex – yes, all of what you say is quite practical and correct. Starflight lies at the end of an incredibly difficult road we have barely begun to travel.
However, this proposed bill from Peter is a spark that inspires and excites the public; it’s not meant to be a detailed step-by-step blueprint. If a spark ignites a fire among the U.S. citizenry – on any subject, not just space – then historically, government funding begins to flow. Funding creates a detailed blueprint and then the process begins to make it real.
Our world is subject to private corporation command and control at all levels of society and government. Even so, no entity carries the authority, booms a louder voice, or commands global attention as powerfully as the U.S. government. A formal law regarding a national starflight initiative – passed by the Congress and signed by the President – could be a mighty boost toward making the starflight dream a reality.
There is new technology that will Chang Space Travel. I believe that the Antigravity technology is the way to go Electrogravitics and Field propulsion will do a lot better than what is going on now, it will reduce weight to almost nothing and the field propulsion should reduce the effects of radiation. Not sure how that works, but I believe if a field was devised much like how the earth prevents the radiation from hitting the Earth this would be sufficient .
I suppose you could say that John F Kennedy and Werner von Braun decided to go to the moon back in the sixties…Personalities count…The world is descending toward WW III and you know what that might mean for your ideas…Good luck…
I’ve noticed a tendency that many people avoid working toward goals until the solution appears imminent, or until its need is imminent. For those who think that way, I have questions:
(1) Is the easier stuff more important, or just easier?
(2) How does one get to the point where “the solution appears imminent” if no one worked on it before then?
(3) If important goals are achieved sooner than expected, how is that a bad thing?
I think it will take a modest sized country to commit itself to making a niche for itself by becoming the door to the solar system for the the rest of the world. It would be the type of national commitment beyond any typical program by a government agency such as NASA could ever generate. It’s a level that could never be attained in the United States. One could envision India, China or Russia making such a long term commitment.
Big things have little beginnings . And everything has to have a beginning . To make all of the objectives of the letter come to pass and to tap into the pioneering and inquisitive nature at the very heart of the human psyche we need a tangible goal. We need another planet that unequivocally has signs of life , as we recognise it, and better still relatively nearby. The excitement of such a discovery would swamp all other news and help exoplanet science move from still being a fledgling science on the periphery of astrophysics to its rightful place at the centre . With associated budget. Times are hard but it’s amazing now money can be found for a popular cause and we are not talking trillions to reach the first and most important target , simply a few tens of billions over a decade or so .
Any Interstellar mission requires orders of magnitude improvements in propulsion. We need an international Interstellar Propulsion Institute formed and funded, and it can be largely independent of the rest of the design effort. Once humans reach the asteroid belt they will more or less have the rest of the technologies needed for Interstellar missions.
The USA could do it alone if Lt. Col. Garretson’s bosses quit squandering $$Trillions of our money on failed enterprises (since 1945). I would not normally make such a political statement here, but that is going to turn out to be the real solution.
The manned space program peaked in the 1970’s and (heads up Alex) the USA has been in decline sense the 1980’s. Nobody is going to be sending people to Mars let alone to another star system. There is no good economic or scientific reason to send people into space. There is only religious motivation, and the faith in the Great God of Progress is failing.
@Marc Millis
Consider for moment that Victorian Britain, at the height of its global power around 1850 decided to commit to landing on the moon, or Mars by 2020. Would it have made any sense to have the Royal Navy commissioned to work towards such a goal, even committing significant resources to such a goal? Think of the many scientific advances that needed to be made in the future that they were completely unaware of. Would those advances have come more quickly, and at what opportunity cost? Britain basically abandoned world leadership in aerospace after WWII as it was a nation in severe decline. It couldn’t even maintain its military R&D and started to buy instead. All that funding for a Moon landing would be largely a sunk cost with who knows what economic opportunities lost with it.
Another example, of a far lesser vision, was Japan’s 5th Generation project, that collapsed for a variety of reasons, in which MITI betting on the wrong technologies was key. MITI couldn’t even get a decade of foresight correct.
If we look at interstellar flight today, it seems to me that the vision is quite well expressed by the various groups, including the BIS’ Icarus project. We all have our favorite technology horses, but the likelihood is that they will all look like those fanciful flying contraptions that were so popular before flight really got going. We could spend huge resources on exotic propulsion technologies only to find that a science discovery offers a cheap solution instead. Or maybe those exotic technologies become expensive white elephants that can never to built in any functional craft, let alone a star ship.
The proven way to progress is to create technologies that can be used in a wide variety of roles, but ultimately commercially useful. For example, while radar was a government developed technology to solve a WWII issue, it became a tool that is now as trivial as looking inside walls by handymen. Had radar only been a tool that could be used to track aircraft, built and run by a government agency, it would never have become a commercial success that sustained all those spin-off market functions.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was thought that airships would be the technology of choice for passenger travel. Governments even invested substantial funding to support those efforts, including Britain’s famous, but ill-fated R101. Just imagine if despite setbacks, governments decided to continue with airship development, setting back the development of heavier than air flight.
We see that spending inertia today with military procurement. Expensive solutions for military purposes long obsoleted by newer technology and very different military scenarios. Vested interests maintain the waste.
Today Nasa is doing the same with the SLS, a solution for its vision of a Mars mission. The SLS is a huge white elephant, with no economic logic, and likely to be bypassed by private rocket development and probably very different approaches to Mars mission goals. The SLS is starving Nasa’s other projects and costing the nation not just billions in development, but losing us opportunities in science and exploration. It is nothing more than a pork barrel and jobs program, because it offers no sustainable economic value. Whether other private rocket developers can create sustainable businesses I don’t know, but their approaches will at least have that goal, which if it succeeds, will be afar better grounding for space development. And if someone creates a useful fusion engine that looks economically advantageous, I wouldn’t doubt SpaceX and its competitors will jump on that technology quickly.
I think the case has to be shown where government visionary ideas have resulted in sustainable, self perpetuating, economic development. To me, the US space program is a good example of massive spending for no useful purpose. As a result supporters have emphasized spinoff technologies to justify the spending. As a Keynesian stimulus, the race to the moon was a far better use of funds than the Vietnam War, but ultimately it was an unsustainable program that has limped along on unfulfilled promises with very little to show for the spending. Commercial communication satellites are a very different matter, and even Earth observation satellites now have proven commercial value. As a result, the public doesn’t have to be energized with glowing visions of what might be, because operators don’t need that. The economic payoff is the goal.
Today those flyby images and data of Pluto may just look like non-commercial scientific knowledge. For the paltry cost I don’t even mind if that is all it ever is used for, but it wouldn’t surprise me if those images become the first crude maps to exploiting that world for some purpose we cannot imagine today.
@Ashley Baldwin. I tend to agree. It will be the science returns of the new telescopes that will first show us those new worlds. It will then result is small, flyby probes to send back far better images and data. If that is exciting enough, this will lead to bigger probes, and eventually to some sort of sentient landing. But if physics keeps those worlds too far away in time, I seriously doubt that much funding will follow. Humans have managed to commit to generations to build cathedrals for a goal, but even that time span was limited. I cannot imagine a vision for a STL vehicle that would take a millennium to reach its goal being funded by any human society in the next century of two. Maybe if human longevity is vastly extended, this might change.
@Andrew Palfreyman = I too wish that US military spending was deeply curbed. It is obscene. A tiny fraction of that spending could be used far more productively, even possibly to get to that “new physics” that might solve the travel time to living exoplanets issue.
“seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”
I am absolutely sick to death of that phrase ! I wish to God they had never ever started that in the original Star Trek series. First off, it is absolutely meaningless. There’s no assurance that we will find any type of extragalactic civilizations and it’s always making everything that sounds so triumphant rather than a carefully conceived and thoughtful planned being used to achieve your goals. I absolutely hate it.
But what I do love is the fact that at last we’re seeing the issues of cost being addressed here in an article. I don’t believe that even if a habitable planet for our species was found tomorrow that that would be enough to set in motion a Manhattan Project type of program to get every body to pony up and start coming out with some kind of interstellar exploration plan. Why do I say that? It is simply because the fact that right now most of the world is an extreme dire consequences. With regards to so many aspects of our civilization. I don’t know if global warming is in fact a proven entity, but on the safe side were going to need fast more quantities of faith and clean power anyway. That’s just one issue.
Additionally, of course, there’s all the militaries of the world which must in some fashion or another come to grips with the intense instabilities that were now seeing that are propagating around the world. In addition, the economies of most of the countries of the world is best not in that great of a shape. It is my personal hope that even if we were to find a another planet that we could go to we would not go balls up crazy and simply insist that we should start throwing money at some project like this. This should be a back burner project will matter what we find in the way of any kind of habitable planets.
Stimulating debate!
Some general factors around successful projects, no matter what the arena:
In the mandate, or legislation, focus on the goals and aims.
As far as the aim: the immortal words of Capt. Kirk that Peter has co-opted are an excellent start. However we need to examine any hidden assumptions or other baggage in the Star Trek vision that may ride along with these words. A new wording, fresh without the after-images of phasers and photon torpedos…
Too often mandates attempt to select a solution rather than define the problem space. For example, is the best approach to our goals the development of off-Earth industrial capability and space resource utilization? Depends… on what form the solution to achieving our goals. We’ve had much prior debate at Centauri Dreams on just these questions. For example, we shouldn’t pick a solution, say beaming technology based on spaced base power if a reaction-less drive technology turns out to afford us a better solution to achieving our interstellar aims.
Another success factor is involving the right stakeholders. Stakeholders are those who have an interest – whether through an expected benefit or a potential adverse impact – on the project and its outcome. I’m not sure that Defence has an interest in the aim of interstellar exploration. Certainly there is strong potential for interest in spin-offs of technology and infrastructure that could be associated with interstellar capability for defensive purposes, including protection against rouge meteors or other bona-fide threats. Similarly, DOE involvement would seem to assume a spin-off based on the spaced-based energy infrastructure that this proposal ‘solutions.’
Solutions should arise in the sequence of working out our real aims are first, who is involved in the achievement, benefit, and consequence of those aims, and then finding appropriate solutions to achieve them. Prematurely focusing on tangential spin-off benefits at the start empowers stakeholders who are only tangentially interested in the primary goals, and could easily tilt the balance and actually pose a risk of not achieving the stated aim.
But if the Earthlike exoplanet is several hundred light-years away, or more, as is quite probable, how sensible and realistic is it to spend money now to plan for such a trip? Let’s wait to see if we discover one first, find out as much as possible about it, and then decide if it’s worth the effort and expense. If we’re lucky enough to find one within 20 LY, then a journey might be possible.
Unless, of course, it’s already inhabited by a civilization far in advance of ours….
Meanwhile, research into advanced propulsion systems will continue by natural progression of science and technology.
Pete-I think it’s a wonderful idea.
JB
@Alex Tolley
> Consider for moment that Victorian Britain, at the height of its global
> power around 1850 decided to commit to landing on the moon
As long as we’re considering counterfactuals… Rocketry would have been developed in Britain, albeit somewhat more slowly because there would have been need for concurrent advances in machining, materials, chemistry, and aerodynamics. Instead of Tsiolkovsky, there would be the name of some Brit on the rocket equation. The field would have developed as a strategic military technology, its secrets held tightly, analogous to the development of nuclear weapons. Rocket artillery, on decline in the late nineteenth century, would have been revitalized. Liquid fuel rockets would have been developed by World War I, along with a doctrine of strategic bombing. Advances in aerodynamics needed to understand flight stability would have led to airplanes a generation or two before the Wright brothers.
To put this more analytically, the problem is not targeting a long range goal. The problem is trying to prematurely accomplish that goal rather than to progress in small, practical, achievable steps that advance human knowledge and know-how. In endeavors like these, the actual goal is somewhat secondary. It’s the striving toward it that matters.
This is an excellent starting point for humanity embracing the long-term goal of becoming a space-faring, and indeed, interstellar, civilization within the next 200-300 years. I think that such a goal should be just as important as dealing with the challenge of climate change, global poverty, and helping societies to embrace education, health care and security.
I know many Centauri Dreams readers are fans of ‘unmanned’ interstellar flight – i.e. Starwisp, and beamed propulsion of small craft containing either uploaded humans, AIs, or perhaps genetic material only. I’m not a fan of this concept, and I think what Lt. Col Garrison is arguing for is a more traditional paradigm of humans exploring interstellar space in person on practical and realistic starships. Although he is using the language and vision of Star Trek, I don’t think he is necessarily saying we must have warp drives, use hyperspace or create wormholes. He’s talking about interstellar flights within a human lifetime, and to me this speaks to a stepping stone approach of humanity spreading beyond our solar system, one star system at a time. That means that we need to start detecting habitable planets around nearby stars, rather than those hundreds or thousands of light years away.
Clearly though we need a propulsion system that can travel even tens of light years in a single mission within a reasonable time frame – perhaps 30-50 years. He’s not talking about generation ships or space arks. That I think is the biggest challenge – how do we accelerate a spacecraft up to a high relativistic velocity to make such a mission possible?
In the interim everything he is proposing opens up the wider solar system. The intense debate over Louis Friedman’s argument that humanity will never spread beyond Mars I think shows the depth of feeling over where our limits should be. Simply put – there should be none, both in terms of the spread of humans through the cosmos, and also in our aspirations for scientific advancement and technological development to enable that spread to occur. Lt Col Garrison shows far more vision than Friedman in this regard.
@Alex Tolley
>>1. America (USA) is likely to be a declining nation in 2176 (c.f. The British Empire). Why not hitch the vision to a global endeavor?<<
I'll submit that tasking congress as per col Garretson is *precisely* the correct step, despite capabilities and/or aspirations of the of the international community. Congress is charged with the welfare of the united states, not the international community, and we voters who would flog/support such an effort are taxpaying u.s. citizens. His tasking seems less an insult to other countries than it is recognition that a formal start and statement of goals has to be initiated *somewhere* where that start can be realistically defined and realised — at the time of initialisation.
Striving is the key…..
I know of one way that this would be developed quickly and that is finding indications of other civilizations in our galaxy. The main reason we have not seen a type three on the Kardashev Scale is either no civilizations beyond ours exist or more probable is there are so many out there. So what would all these creatures be doing, protecting there own turf, but they would develop their solar system and nearby systems also. What would be most important to them is the cradle of their civilation the sacred home planet. Signs of this would be low infrared signature, because of clearing out and using the asteroids, comets and maybe even the dust in there solar system. Long term goals would include extenting the life sun, this could be done by creating a binary star from the B,A,F and G type stars that have a short life span. The spectroscopic binary stars might be a good place to look, since there are so many of them. At the other end the K and M types may be modified by dumping elements into them to stop the intense solar flares. Look at our system and think what we would do to save and protect our Earth for billions of years into the future. Those are the not so obvious signs that we need to look for in other stellar systems!
,
I think it is fairly evident that an interstellar voyage, even a starwisp flyby, will require an economy much larger than the US has today. I suspect it may even require a solar system wide economy, which is stable enough to allow for human lifetime planning horizons.
This seems unduly pessimistic. If we take the peak of the Apollo programme as a ceiling for “how much the US government can realistically spend on space”, that was 0.75% of GDP. Ten years of that, starting now, gets you over $1.3 trillion current dollars. Enough (with reasonably-predictable launch costs) to put 100,000 tonnes of hardware into GEO at $10,000/kg, and leave you $300 billion to develop and build the hardware itself. That seems like enough for a starwisp project. SPS studies produce gigawatts of microwave-beamed power for just 80,000 tonnes in GEO. And, when you’ve launched it, you turn it round and start making money from selling the electricity it generates…
1. Dig a BIG hole, gang up with Russia to put majority of the nukes under it and launch as much consumable material (water, sand, steal, etc) as possible to orbit.
2. Build SPS stations, ban fossil fuel power plants, substantially reduce CO2.
3. Build laser/microwave stations, defense planet from asteroids.
4. Open outer space commercially, individual/company can purchase material from depot of 1, laser/microwave beam time of 3. With both material and energy, they can mine asteroids, build hotel, or whatever makes sense.
5. Seriously invest into fusion for both power generation and propulsion, open outer solar system to human being.
I love Interstellar mission as much as anybody here, but, it should come naturally, not as a government initiative.
Any Civilization sufficiently advance will have an electronic
signature.
@ajay – you may be right about affording a Starwisp. I think more important is this point:
It would be far better IMO to have a large solar power sat facility beaming energy to Earth in an economic scenario and then to be able to use another such facility to beam the power for a Starwisp before then selling that power when no longer needed for acceleration. The economic rationale comes first, then the technology can be repurposed.
@randomengineer
I agree. So why would US taxpayers willingly support taxation for a project that brings little to no ROI? This would be a classic Sen. Proxmire “Golden Fleece” award. Much as we laud Apollo today, the US space program was widely reviled by many at the time for spending huge resources on putting a few white faces on the moon, rather than tackling important economic and social issues domestically. That was just a 10 year program, not a 160 year one. We would be better off spending money on projects, infrastructure and R&D, that will increase US GDP faster and more sustainably, so that the pot for future discretionary spending projects is far larger.
Whether this should be an international program or not, is debatable. But my point was that if it has real merit, it is more likely to be taken up in the future by the next global economic great power, not the USA, in the same way that the USA took on teh mantle of technological leadership from the fading British Empire.
@Malcolm Davis
If so, I first would like to see such decadal human crewed missions in the solar system, much like the Discovery mission in Clarke.s 2001: A Space Odyssey, before we attempted interstellar flight at much higher velocities. I think we can agree that the cost of robotic missions is much lower. It seems to me that the rational choice for high ROI in science of a mission to a star would be to use the lowest mass vehicles possible to reduce the cost and infrastructure needed to accelerate such a vehicle. Now if some new physics comes along that allows a simple vehicle to cross interstellar space in very little time, then obviously we have more choices for our budget, but this is highly speculative and would reintroduce the Fermi problem again.
@Terry Mosely
The SETI folks would be wetting their proverbial pants. Assuming they were friendly, the issue might then be how to maintain a conversation with them? Initially by radio, but perhaps later by an AI probe that could talk to them directly and stream the conversation back to earth.
@Alex Tolley
Agreed – and you could do a series of science missions along the lines of what you are talking about – unmanned robotic probes – that blaze the trail ahead of crewed spacecraft. But I don’t think sending robotic probes alone is what Garrison is meaning. He wants want I want, which is for people to be able to physically and personally travel to the stars on starships that can accelerate close to the speed of light. That’s going to be highly challenging to achieve, but an endeavour (should I say ‘enterprise’) well worth trying to undertake. I think the purely robotic paradigm falls flat with the broader human need for exploration. Its a flash in the pan – look at New Horizons. You and I (and everyone else on this blog) know that its continuing to return good science, but the broader public attention has shifted on to other things. If you imagine an interstellar New Horizons that does a flyby of a nearby star system using beamed energy, and we get a few hours (or even days) of imagery and science, that would be amazing – but it would not compare to a crewed spaceship arriving at a planet orbiting such a star, going into orbit, and then ultimately sending a landing party down to the surface. You’ve still got the problem of speed of light limitations on communications – so imagery of that landing party takes years to get back here – but maybe that is where the breakthrough physics needs to focus. A means to circumvent the speed of light for energy and information, rather than physical mass.
I know you might say lets just upload humans into robot bodies, or ‘rebirth’ them at the destination using frozen genetic matter as a solution, but that’s going to be very difficult to do – how do you upload a human being into a robot – and will be opposed by a broader cross section of humanity, most of whom are not even aware of the transhumanist movement, let alone support it. When we travel to the stars, people are going to be expecting ‘Star Trek’. I believe this is what Garrison is asking for, and it is what I would support – albeit without the faster than light travel that looks so easy in Star Trek, yet clearly remains impossible based on our current understanding of physics. In my view humans have to physically be there on the surface of a new world, or in orbit – then its interstellar travel.
@ Marc Millis:
“I’ve noticed a tendency that many people avoid working toward goals until the solution appears imminent, or until its need is imminent. For those who think that way, I have questions:
(1) Is the easier stuff more important, or just easier?
(2) How does one get to the point where “the solution appears imminent” if no one worked on it before then?
(3) If important goals are achieved sooner than expected, how is that a bad thing?”
I agree with Marc, we must work on the hard stuff NOW in order to get to the point where the solution appears imminent, the sooner the better!
This is why Peter´s initiative is so important, thanks Peter!
Angelo Genovese. The problem is that “hard stuff” that you are aiming for becomes irrelevant due to changing circumstances. In which case the effort becomes a sunk cost. If solutions may require the better part of a century to achieve, the likelihood of circumstances changing increases.
Let’s look at a good example of a “hard problem” – controlled nuclear fusion. I think the first efforts were with Britain’s Zeta reactor in 1957. Nearly 60 years later we still haven’t cracked the problem. In the meantime, inexpensive, solid state, PV solar energy has been economically demonstrated and is now on a rapid growth trend, with much cheaper panels on the horizon. In addition, decentralized power is being mooted as a more robust approach than centralized power supply. It may therefore result in solar PV becoming one of the dominant power supply technologies from individual electronic gadgets to regional baseload supply, obsoleting fusion reactors as a technology before they even reach breakeven. If so, the costs of the program if abandoned become sunk, and those sunk costs become possibly magnified as lost opportunity costs had resources been applied in more productive directions.
This is a simple case, where the goal, power supply, remains the same. But we can easily imagine cases where even the goal shifts. For example, passenger transportation infrastructure – roads, rails and air continue to expand to accommodate ever more human bodies moving between places. Yet communication technology could allow us to cheaply achieve many of the same goals from a distance. Sea travel by passengers is now almost purely for vacations and is dominated by goods transport. It is conceivable that the daily commute for millions of workers could be obviated by telecommuting and telepresence, thus largely obsoleting much transport infrastructure, which then shifts to handling the movement of goods. Even that might be reduced by local 3D printing and other technologies.
Therefore the idea that goals are only worked on when solutions seem imminent makes a lot of sense. The goal is achievable with an extension of the existing technologies of the time. The goal will also be desirable at that time, otherwise it would no longer be a goal.
The one big example of a long term goal that was achieved is heavier than air flight – at least 2000 – 3000 years if we use the legend of Icarus as the vague starting point. But note that practical human piloted flight was best achieved by the Wright Brothers, and not the contemporary government sponsored Langley Aerodrome machines. If SpaceX achieves low cost, [partially] reusable heavy lift rockets, they will have achieved a similar feat against the government sponsored SLS. The issue of shifting goals regarding Mars landings and exploration is another topic.
@Alex Tolley We might have to wait a while for the “If SpaceX achieves a low cost, reusable heavy lift system” since Space X does not have anything ready to match the payload capability of the SLS, especially if you want to launch an interplanetary rocket with VASIMR as the propulsion system of any other propulsion system such as Nuclear, etc. The falcon heavy lift vehicle only has 4.5 million pounds of total thrust and the SLS has 7.2 million pounds of thrust total.
@Geofreey – F9H – 53 MT to LEO, SLS 70 MT. Compare to the Space Shuttle at 27.5 MT. F9H is a heavy lift vehicle. However the point is not whether SLS can lift a heavier load that F9H to LEO, but which system is the most useful and economical. If payloads can be split, then it isn’t necessary to put them all on the same launch. The important factors will be cost to orbit and availability (flight frequency). If SpaceX demonstrate reliable reusability, when coupled with more frequent launches, they will become the carrier of choice for all but government mandated carriers. Nasa failed before with the Space Shuttle, and eventually the military was able to use their own launchers again after being barred from doing so. The SLS, if it ever flies, is already obsolete and will only be justified by designing large payloads that only it can carry, rather than designing payloads to meet a goal, or preferably the flexibility to meet many goals.
Mike Fidler:
Are you sure of this? Africa is the cradle of humanity, and I see no sign of us holding it sacred. Same for the Middle East as the cradle of civilization, or Britain/Spain as the origins of American colonization. Like the Americas, any interstellar colonies will almost immediately be independent and hold themselves a lot more sacred than the “motherland”. They will also work to repeat the process and themselves establish new colonies, with no good reason for the process to ever stop in its tracks, at least until it reaches the boundaries of the galaxy.
“So why would US taxpayers willingly support taxation for a project that brings little to no ROI?”
Glory? Entertainment? National pride?
I mean, by definition the things that a government does don’t generally have direct and easily measurable ROI, that’s why governments do them. What’s the ROI on Social Security?
And if you argue “ah, there is an indirect ROI in that a country with a healthy population and a prospect of a secure old age will be richer and happier” – a massive government programme involving huge amounts of spending in the high-tech industries is probably going to have noticeable indirect ROI in that sense too. Keynesian multipliers, you know.
Eniac said on December 11, 2015 at 0:45:
Mike Fidler: What would be most important to them is the cradle of their civilation the sacred home planet.
“Are you sure of this? Africa is the cradle of humanity, and I see no sign of us holding it sacred. Same for the Middle East as the cradle of civilization, or Britain/Spain as the origins of American colonization.”
Very sad but also very true, Eniac. I see the early rebellions of our first colonies as the actions of teenagers rebelling against the authority of their parents. Eventually of course future generations of colonists will look up on their “Mother” Earth with fondness tempered by time and distance. Unless we lose track of Earth like in Asimov’s Foundation series or Battlestar Galactica.
@Alex Tolley >> So why would US taxpayers willingly support taxation for a project that brings little to no ROI?<<
We already do this and have done so historically, and ROI always happens; the question is whether near or far term. The airline industry wasn't an industry until the US government invested big money into cargo aircraft for the postal service. The interstate system. Technology like GPS was funded by taxpayers and developed for military needs, not for urban hipsters to use social media to hilite trendy restaurants for their city peers. And yes GPS cost quite a bit but at the trickle down consumer level the number of jobs and sales and businesses created is an order of magnitude of ROI to americans [and the world.] Meanwhile what is now the basic iPhone was pretty much inspired by star trek communicators, and the iPhone in many ways is actually much cooler than the original vision. How many jobs etc have been created along the way vs investment made at the governmental level in getting the underlying infrastructure in place?
This is not to glorify tech for tech's sake, but illustrating the idea that if you move along a known vector, unplanned things are going to happen and many 0f these will, one way or another, deliver the ROI — which means that near term ROI is not really the defining metric to look at.
Lastly, have a look at Possony/Pournelle "Strategy of Technology" which addresses your p.o.v. at the national level. The US may not be declining at the speed you perceive. Link to original paper is at the bottom of the wiki page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_Technology
@ajay – fair point that measurable ROI is an oversimplication. Perhaps what I should have said was the creation of value over a relatively short time horizon.
In this case the time horizon is 6+ generations, almost as long as building cathedrals (which were not democratically planned).
@RandomEngineer
Name a technological goal that was initiated somewhere around the US Civil War that we are just finishing, or anything in between with such a long time horizon. The fusion power example is “always 30 years away” has become a joke with the obvious point that it is promoted as being feasible within a human lifetime, so keep funding.
Your examples are well known but do not consider the time horizons. None are multi-generational. None are almost religious goals in their scope and time to achieve. While I would agree that spin off technologies for a star ship program would be a benefit, the point I raised regarding Apollo was made to show that a vocal minority opposed the spending. As a US taxpayer, I oppose the extent of military spending, but there is little I can do about it, and all my elective choices don’t want to rock that particular boat either, except at the margins.
To take a trite example, the Pilgrims (nor Columbus) had a government program to build ships seaworthy enough to cross the oceans. They used teh technology available at the time. In Columbus’ case, he got government funding on the promise of ROI. In the Pilgrims, it was the mature available technology that with age became cheap enough to fund privately.
Whether FTL or fusion/anti-matter driven world ships, these technology goals are far in the future and going to be very expensive. Yes we might get useful spinoffs, but as I stated earlier, the funding could be spent on other projects that would give us more immediate returns to grow the economy. I would rather have a richer economy that grows by more immediate investment, than a relatively poorer one that is spending for a distant goal that might be made irrelevant by events. If you redirect military spending towards that goal, then I am OK with that, although a lot of my fellow taxpayers would rather take that funding to improve education funding as one more immediate example with a short term payoff.
I think we are facing a similar problem with Nasa’s current plans for Mars. It is a distant goal, requiring a lot of funding, with little return to the general population. I would far prefer Nasa to focus on “pathfinding” and new technology development, and let private groups use that technology to achieve their Mars goals, whether a flyby and return, Mars orbit with robotic surface exploration, a Mars landing for posterity, or even eventual colonization. That is these group’s choice to make and spend funds, and it will be more diverse and less costly because of multiple goals and likely existing technology that can be reconfigured for their goals. One can argue that this endeavor is so costly that only a government agency with huge resources can achieve this goal, but I disagree. Private ventures will prove far more cost efficient, if only because participants will bear a higher risk of failure. We already have technology that could be cobbled together to get a small crew to Mars with a flyby and return, if they would take the risk. Brian McConnell and I have outlined an approach using electric engines and water for propellant, consumables and radiation protection that might lessen the cost due to much lower mass requirements. It would still be risky, but I have little doubt that people with a Lindbergh, Earhart or even Scott disposition would take the risk for fame and posterity.
@Alex Tolley thanks for taking time to converse with me on this. I think that a long term path — a vector investment as it were — that had intermediate and worthwhile goals in mind would possibly be a hybrid that could work? e.g. phase 1 might require development of spaceborne solar which gives us the necessary energy for phase 2 as well as the necessary / required experience building big stuff in space; the energy return from phase 1 would have immediate ROI and the building big stuff bit would have value of its own. I don’t know if anyone has put together anything like this that is spelled out in steps.
Do you think the problem is that the goal is too far reaching or that there is no visible payoff until the very end? If the latter, maybe stepwise ROI would be useful. I say that with the gov’t investment into the postal system as the example, I’m pretty sure the immediate ROI of fast delivery of large things can be viewed as an intermediate step for accelerating the notion of a viable airline industry [one that is still paying.]
Again, thanks for your time.
LJK:
An interesting thought, but not very credible in these data-rich times (and beyond). You will always be able to look up “Earth” on Galactopedia, in any of a billion languages, including ancient English.
Eniac:
You forget how the the Apollo program brought home just how small and rare our home planet is. We will be in a unforgiving environment in space and on other planets and you cannot just jump on a ship or wagon and go some place else. Cooperation and planning will entail a new mentality as we face the problems of living on other planets or in space. I believe any advanced civilization will base it’s philosophy on something similar to Taoism. The problem that we as a civilization do not take seriously at present is that the Fermi paradox has been solved. For the past 68 years we have been watching them and they do not seem intent on taking over the universe!
@randomengineer – you still have teh problem of not knowing if those intermediate goals are economically worthwhile, or a technical dead end that are only being supported for the end goal.
Space solar power seems like a laudable intermediate goal, but what if a much cheaper non-polluting energy source is developed? What do you do? Develop it anyway, or abandon it. If you abandon it, does it block the achievement of the end goal? OTOH, if SSP is a good project, why not support development anyway, rather than as a component of a long term goal? Why not make it a commercial project, perhaps supported by guaranteed sales for energy supply?
I think we can answer Marc Millis’ questions thusly:
It is “easier”, but more importantly it is solved when there is a need for the solution. This increase returns and minimizes lost opportunity costs.
This falls out of the myriad technological solutions that surround us. Unlike the depictions of limited technology in scifi novels, technology is much richer in reality. James Burke’s “Connections” is a better way to think of this. In reality the technology ecosystem is a constantly exploding evolution of new solutions based on previously evolved parts.
It isn’t. The hubris is to believe the goals deemed important today will be important in the future, especially when the time horizon is very long. Some long term goals like stabilizing climate change are truly important (and we know most of the solutions to achieve it). Interstellar travel for humans? We don’t know if that will be important. If it is, which technologies are the best to achieve it? The choice will determine the technology development trajectory.
@Eniac. Thank you. You’ve educated me. You stimulated me to find a more comprehensive explanation on Wikipedia. Who knew that one could be schooled in Latin on CD. (Serves me right for not doing Latin in Grammar School back in England.)
Some day we will discover an earth-like exo planet.
Well, you would think. You might hope. Sometimes I wonder…
How far away is that sucker? How earth like are we talking?
And when we do, we will want to go there!!
Except…no F’ing way. Forget about it.
You can’t get there from here. Well, perhaps something could…in a few tens of thousands of years at snail mail speed. And you couldn’t get help or have any options.
Sometimes, the optimism drains from me after I read the news and gauge the pulse of this threatened planet.