Thursday, June 23, 2011

Anybody want to take a really, really long-distance trip?


If so, the latest Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative might interest you. Wired magazine reports:

Darpa recently launched a program called the 100 Year Starship, which is exactly what it sounds like: an effort to achieve interstellar flight by the year 2111. This is Darpa, so they’re dead serious. They also recognize that 2011-era technology probably isn’t good enough to forecast the state of the art over the next 100 years.

But technology isn’t sufficient for an effort as epochal as reaching other galaxies. That’s why they’re holding an open symposium on the implications of interstellar travel in Orlando come September. And they want you to submit your thoughts.

“This won’t just be another space technology conference — we’re hoping that ethicists, lawyers, science fiction writers, technologists and others, will participate in the dialog to make sure we’re thinking about all the aspects of interstellar flight,” David Neyland, director of Darpa’s Tactical Technology Office, said in a statement issued Wednesday. You’ve got until July 8 to submit “speaking abstracts for papers and proposed panels” to the project.

Topics Darpa wants covered:

  • Education as a mission, who goes, who stays, to profit or not, economies in space, communications back to earth, political ramifications, round-trip legacy investments and assets left behind.
  • Why go to the stars, moral and ethical issues, implications of finding habitable worlds, implications of finding life elsewhere, implications of being left behind.
  • To have gravity or not, space and radiation effects, environmental toxins, energy collection and use, agriculture, self-supporting environments, optimal habitat sizing.


There's more at the link.

This sounds really interesting! Trouble is, no-one can have any idea right now of where technology will be in 2011. Remember early predictions of how computer usage would develop? None of those pontificating on the subject a few decades ago had much of a clue what would happen, and the results prove it. I daresay this DARPA program will suffer from the same technological myopia. Nevertheless, it should be a fun exercise.

Peter

9 comments:

Comrade Misfit said...

DARPA (nee ARPA) was more or less responsible for developing and funding ARPANET, which was the beginning of the spam-laden Internet that we all love today.

That was something like 40 years ago, so I'd not snark too heavily on them.

Jenny said...

It troubles me that a writer at WIRED can go nonchalantly from "interstellar" to "reaching other galaxies."

I'd expect that kind of utter inability to grasp the difference in scales involved from, say... the NYT. But a geek magazine?

Anonymous said...

Wonderful! Another government project that'll eat up more money we don't have. (But can always put on the taxpayer credit card, I guess.)

Wait. The upside: we'll put more folks to work (with accompanying benefits and pensions, of course)!

The beat goes on and the lunacy continues.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

@Jenny: To be fair, the only difference I can think of between the two is the amount of resources required, which will be far less of a problem if we have a lossless life support system, likely powered by the recycling of resources by natural processes such as those present in plant life, etc..

This is of course assuming that by "interstellar travel", they mean "within our own galaxy". If they mean "missions to Mars", then we have an entire propulsion system to worry about.

@Anonymous: For the record, the US government spends a tiny amount of its GDP on space-related activities (something along the lines of single-digits, IIRC). If you're worried about eating up more money that we don't have (which, I should add, the government has been doing by merely existing), go after the big pensions and entitlement programs, not something that can actually be remotely useful. Unlike global warming legislation and other items, space is something that countries all around the world are making actual, legitimate progress in, hence why I consider the money well-spent. DARPA isn't NASA (who to be fair is being constantly asked by people to do X thing, Y thing, and Z thing while funding A, B, C things), DARPA is serious business. They get stuff done.

Anonymous said...

And my "entire propulsion system", I mean "a propulsion system that allows us to leave the solar system in a reasonable amount of time". Sending humans to Mars is actually doable with our current technology...

Mikael said...

If they were to send out a ship to another galaxy in the next hundred years, I'd fully expect that the descendents of the original astronauts(it's a multi-millenia trip, the nearest galaxy is 25,000 lightyears away) would probably be greeted by human civilization when they arrive at their destination, due to advances in technology during their long voyage.

Now for interstellar travel, the nearest stars are "merely" decades of travel. Sufficiently young astronauts might even make the round trip to some of the closest neighbours and back before dying of old age.

Anonymous said...

Mikael, for it to be "merely decades" would require propulsion systems far in excess of what we have now.

Antibubba

Dave H said...

The biggest problem with going those distances is energy. Once a ship is free of orbit (which takes energy too, but it can be done a little at a time) it takes MUCH more to get it to even a nearby star, as much again to stop so they can look around, and double the amount to get back to tell about it. We're talking fusion power, and lots of it. Chemical rockets won't do.

There's been an idea kicking around for decades of a way to do it with mostly current technology. It's called Project Orion. You buld a huge metal plate, then build a spaceship on top of it mounted on shock absobers. Every now and then the ship drops a hydrogen bomb through a hole in the plate, and when it detonates it kicks the plate, the ship, and everything else forward. You keep doing that until you reach the speed you need to get where you're going within a reasonable amount of time, then when you arrive you spin around and use the bombs to decelerate.

Takeoff is really hard on the launch pad, though.