How About a Dirac for that Starship, Space Cowboy

So, you want to go to the stars.  There is so much talk of exoplanets and wouldn't it be peachy to vacation near Aldebaran or some such and, sure enough, some day kids will.

We won't use terms like 'Super Earth' or 'Mega Earth' because they don't mean anything more than a planet is bigger than Earth or it is much bigger.  Beyond that, the words tell you almost nothing and that's a key point about what our colonists will do when they arrive.  That's covered lately in the scribe but first we have to get there.


The Starship Drive

If there is any God in sci-fi, other than Stephen Hawking's sci-fi which isn't supposed to be sci-fi (e.g. there is no God), it's Paul Dirac.  There are Dirac drives for starships, Dirac transmitters to send information across light years, and there would probably even be Dirac sex toys but sci-fi writers are generally a chaste bunch so that may be a while in coming.

Today's sci-fi writers are lazy and all of them cop to a hyperdrive or a warp drive which magically transports the ship through n-dimensional space, dives through a wormhole, or uses some other sleight of starship to cross interstellar distances.  Maybe the physicist nutheads in CERN will discover some way a Higg's Boson relates to a hyperdrive but we have not heard that yet.

If such a hyperdrive exists, that may obviate the time dilation effect mandated by Einstein's general relativity.  For the sake of this discussion, we will assume time dilation (i.e. stretching of time with approach to light speed) holds and that's consistent throughout.  If we have done any kind of a job of writing this, you won't need deep physics to understand it.  Hopefully it's even a halfway decent read.


So, Paul Dirac was so insanely bright and so insane in general he was even too much for Einstein:

"This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful"   (WIKI:  Paul Dirac)

Schrödinger is Facebook's favorite physicist or, more accurately, his cat is all over Facebook.  Schrödinger won the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics along with ... Paul Dirac.

Unknown who contributed the most to earning the prize but we haven't seen any Schrödinger drives on starships lately.  It could happen, we just have not seen one yet.

Starship Size

So we shall assume our starship has a Dirac drive which really can leap cross interstellar distances in one bound which must not take more than about twenty years or our colonists.

This ship has to be big because it will establish a colony on some distant planet and it cannot possibly ferry supplies back and forth.  Depending on whether such an interstellar voyage takes days, months, or years, it may be necessary to have hydroponic farming onboard.

The importance of the farming also applies to arrival on the target plant because, ideally, the colonists will use the ship as their base and move down relatively slowly to the surface.  They won't take that hydroponic kit down to the surface for quite a long time because they would be fools to tear down kit they may need to escape and it may take some while to discover various subtle threats on the surface.

If we're planning the mission from here at the Rockhouse, there will not be one target planet but several because the colonists may decide this one is unsuitable for whatever reason and can then keep on pushing toward the next alternative.  Coming back to Earth is not a particularly good option because of the time dilation effect.  So much time would have passed they would be as useful as a pickle on a wedding cake.

Time Dilation (i.e. stretching of time)

The biggest reason the starship has to carry everything needed for a colony is because it's necessarily a one-way trip because of the time dilation effect of traveling at or near the speed of light.  Time dilation comes from the perspective of Earth when the starship gets close to light speed.  Time passes normally for those on the starship but, from Earth's perspective, ten years will pass while only one passes for the starship troopers.  Therefore, that starship travels maybe ten years to the other planet and ten years back but they will arrive on an Earth in which maybe fifty or a hundred years have passed.

The above is straight out of Einstein's general relativity and there are all manner of relativisms in physics now but that's the baseline for it and sci-fi can take it where it will.  Staying with Einstein, that time differential will exist:  for the starship troopers, twenty years will have passed.  For Earth, maybe two hundred years have passed.  That aspect is not sci-fi and is dictated by Einstein's relativity.

Testing a Starship

We don't want to get too bogged in physics because we like to play project planner here because the bitch of travel on a starship is we may see them leave but, because of the time dilation effect, we will never know if they made it.  Here on Earth years will pass while only minutes pass by on the ship.  They will be fine but there is no way they can possibly tell us that.

There's one teeny tiny problem with testing a starship, tho ... how could you ever know if it worked.  Maybe you make your computers so clever, the ship only travels for, say, one light hour and then turns to come back.  From our standpoint, maybe twenty or two hundred hours have passed but we can handle that.  The real duration would be much longer because of the time taken to reach light speed, decelerate, and then do it again on return.  Even so, it should be possible in a human's lifetime to do that but, whew, it would require some long, long experiments.

It's tempting to invent some sci-fi dodge to get past the fundamental paradoxes but it's crap sci-fi if it wouldn't really work or at least have some credible sense of working.  We fully believe the starships will happen and we hope they will happen soon but, for the sake of design, we have to assume the truth of Einsteinian relativity and any outbound starship is necessarily, from our standpoint, making a one-way mission.

Medical Considerations on the Target Planet

Assuming we successfully achieve an orbital insertion around the target planet and the ship will be used for the home base for a considerable time, the next biggest consideration is how will you make this work on the ground when they don't even have an outhouse down there.

Keep in mind there will be a substantial delay before putting anything on the ground because we won't know much about the place.  Everything discerned about this planet has come through analyzing the light from its star and that reveals chemical make-up, general climatic suitability, etc but it tells you zero of any type of life.  We won't even know if there is any kind of tree which could be used to fabricate an outhouse.

The biggest threat in going to any foreign location is in microorganisms and there is frenetic discussion in scientists regarding life on other planets.  More specifically, the excitement is regarding the genesis of DNA.  The excitement is regarding any possibility DNA owns a ubiquitous presence for any carbon-based life forms anywhere.  Many have the opinion DNA was seeded to Earth from elsewhere via comets or similar type of non-sci-fi explanation.

If the ubiquity of DNA is true, it doesn't mean at all we are likely to encounter familiar life forms than it is to assume that on Earth.  When your only familiarity is with dogs and cats, running into a moose is going to be a major freakshow.

Ubiquity of DNA mandates microorganisms because they will come first in any evolutionary system. Whether such organisms are any threat to humans is going to take an exhaustive analysis and this is a prime reason for continuance of the base on the starship.  Many microorganisms are species-specific and are no threat to humans and presumably that would be true in any system but there are also some which are not.

You won't need one McCoy for this starship, you will need a whole roomful of them.  This starship has to be really, really big.

Note specifically: we believe this is going to happen.  So what if the starship is really, really big.  Mine the Moon and get what you need from there.  Drag in an asteroid and harvest that.

The only thing you need to do the mining is energy.  Maybe the Sun provides sufficient or will you build a nuke planet.   Here at the Rockhouse, we're already building the nuke plant because it's a fookin' asteroid.  Who cares if it blows up, gets radioactive or so.  We will use drones to mine it and there's a good chance humans will never set a foot on the surface.

So our colonists need a Bio pass before they can really go down to the surface and take off their helmets.  That's going to take an exhaustive and sophisticated medical analysis so we'll assume they're clever colonists and they did that successfully.

Building on the Target Planet

Right away we want to build things.  We need that damn outhouse right away and we need to build shelters, start farms, and then get on to some serious building.  There isn't so much as a shovel down there so all building equipment all the way through major construction equipment must come too or there must be some realistic way to make that equipment using resources from the target planet.

If you're thinking 3D printing then you get that li'l elephant stamp on today's paper.  Chinese are building houses with 3D printing technology so carry that up to the sophistication and technology which will have been achieved by the time starships are flying about and they should be capable of some monumental things.

(Ed:  elephant stamp?)

Some teacher in my very early years would show kids we had done good work by using a rubber stamp with an elephant.  The elephant, with one notable exception, remains a standard of wonderful things.

(Ed:  one notable exception?)

Politics, dear boy, politics.

So we have some really hotshot 3D printers which can make things all the way up to major construction equipment.  Keep the temporal perspective since maybe we're fifty years down the road. The accomplishments reasonably predictable in 3D printing should be easily sufficient for such large-scale work.  It seems at most there would be needed a fabrication type of facility to assemble the 3D-printed parts.

We've got this stuff and we're building things.  We're tapped into the natural resources because, yes, we did 3D-print some mining equipment first.  Our farms are starting to produce, we're making some stuff, and we are making it happen.

How Many Starship Travelers

So we come right back to the top with how many people will be on this ship.  Some think starships will rescue Earth from a population problem but that's fantasy.  Will you have a thousand people on the ship, ten thousand ... or even a hundred thousand.  There's no possible way you could build enough starships to transport any significant percentage of a population of seven billion people.

We can't all go but some will and right now our colonists are doing great ... but, even with a hundred thousand of them, there are not so many.  There needs to to be intensive specialization in our colonists along with significant capability for generalization to get the best possible chance of survival.  We have just exercised the most profound exercise in eugenics ever demonstrated because these colonists are prime time excellence.  They are smart, capable, and all the things we thing are exceptional in people.

How About Freeze-Drying the Colonists

Stasis or suspended animation is another favorite of sci-fi writers and often there is the flight crew for the starship and the beef back there in cold storage to be awakened for colonizing the target planet.  The concept is not entirely sci-fi because scientists have successfully put possibly even hamsters into some type of stasis but assuming success with humans is one massive jump.

Stasis is a potential solution for the problem of supplies aboard the ship because they're minimal in that circumstance.  However, they still need to be supplied with nutrients which would come from the ships stores.  That fact limits the range of the starship to the quantity which can be sent with them.  There is also the tiny problem a computer failure can croak the lot of them whereas they would have a fighting chance to fix it if they were not in stasis.  Or you saw "2001," and the computer gets too intelligent for its own good and croaks the crew out of willfulness.

Note:  the NASA solution for insane computers is, in many cases, to use five of them and get the best guess.  Before you dismiss that as weak, let's see you drive a robot on Mars and you have seen how many times they have done it.

Eugenics with the Best and the Brightest

The aspect of eugenics is not trivial because any aspect of the human genome which is not present in the colonists can never come to them except by spontaneous mutation, just as it did the first time around.  The parallel consideration is the 'brain drain' on Earth because we have taken our species best DNA and simply shot it off into space.  Here at the planning and design committee, we say screw that and those colonists will need to leave behind sperm and egg donations to the future of the planet. Otherwise we practice a process of forced human genetic selection in taking our best and, in effect, killing them.

Being Fruitful and Multiplying

There is likely planned a baby-making frenzy because we do so love being the dominant life form.  There are more ethical considerations in this because we can't even communicate with all the creatures on this planet so how will we communicate with any which are there.

It seems a dim consideration to assume there is no life on the planet.  The original atmosphere of Earth was poisonous to us and instantly fatal but life transformed that.  It does not seem reasonable to assume an Earth-like planet got that way due to some other mechanism because that is not what happened here.  Therefore, if there is a strong presence of oxygen and carbon dioxide, it seems almost indicative of the presence of life.

Assumption of intelligent life on the target planet doesn't necessarily follow because of the observed rarity of it here on Earth.  That's not gratuitous cynicism but rather the observation there are vastly more insects on the Earth than humans.  Most of the life on this planet is highly unintelligent so it seems reasonable this would prevail elsewhere.

The Dangers of Terracentrism

Assuming the target planet resembles Earth in any more ways than having oxygen and being round is not reasonable unless we can make a valid case for the likely truth of it.  In writing this, we have been mindful of that so hopefully this leaves some considerations over getting to the target planet, how we will survive when we get there, and how we will build it into something which serves in whichever way the colonists deem suitable.

Maybe also keep in mind Harry Harrison's Deathworld series and maybe you know of Pandora with all its dangers on Pandora (i.e. from "Avatar") but the Deathworlds are infinitely inventive on ways to kill you.

What About the Knowledge

The Star Trek answer is all the knowledge is in the computer.  That's fine, Grace Hopper, but where in the computer.  A substantial part of the planet's knowledge is on the Internet now but good luck finding it.  There needs to be an evolutionary change in our ability to store and retrieve knowledge, as opposed to simple information, before we can say anything is 'in the computer' and have it mean anything.  That's fine if it's in the computer but how do easily get it back out again.

Unless our starship has a Dirac transmitter in addition to that Dirac drive, there's no way to communicate with Earth.  All the knowledge the target planet will need forever has to be transmitted in some way in which it can actually be retrieved and used purposefully.  We anticipate research into neural networks and the like may well rise to that type of storage capability so we will assume by the time of starships that capability will exist.

About the God People

You're going to need some majorly talented God people for this expedition because these colonists will likely feel more orphaned than any people ever did in history.  They not only cannot go back, Earth as they know it does not exist anymore.  The people they knew have grown old and died and the Earth has advanced in unimaginable ways.  The sense of anomie in a cold, uncaring Universe would likely be extreme.

(Ed:  what about the Allah people?)

We all accept he's the same God so it might be a good idea to work out the confusion before we start chucking people toward distant stars.  Sending Earth's spiritual confusion out to the stars doesn't seem such a hospitable thing as surely some other civilization would be pleased to avoid all that.  We aren't rejecting religion but we definitely reject the conflicts between them.

The ideal may be the God people are Sensitives with high empathic ability and they're also talented in psychiatric analysis.  The ritual of exorcism in Catholicism is routinely mocked but the people who do it are highly intelligent and they're gifted in psychology.  Much of what they do is psychology since only psychiatrists prescribe drugs with the psychology.

We do not endorse any religion but strongly support the spiritualism of humanity which we believe is strong and real.  American Indians often state it best.  Go out to the stars with Catholic orthodoxy as you will but we foresee the same spiritual chaos evolving if it is not well-tempered with the native spiritualism in us all.  With such spiritualism, the purpose of the colonists will not likely be to plunder the planet but rather live in harmony with it.  Maybe that's dismissed as hippie doggerel but there's no need to defend it since you know it already.

Special Consideration

Please, please do not name the target planet New Earth.  It's not even close to a New Earth because the original Earth will have aged two hundred years for the colonists' twenty.  From their perspective, this is not only laughable as a new Earth, it's not even credible as an old one.  It's more like an Ancient Earth from their perspective.

Happy trails, Starriders, your day is going to come soon enough.

Note:  the Mystery Lady and I covered this in our twisted way in the first public live we ever did.  We have been dreaming of the stars for a long, long time.  Someday we will get there.