Never Again
Page 42
That being said, the concept of DefenseNet is actually practical inasmuch as we would depend on two things:
1) Knowing about the incoming threat soon enough to make a difference.
2) Having a sufficiently powerful laser(s) to aim against the object.
We today have the technology to launch space-based lasers, and with enough time and investment, we can stand a reasonable chance of detecting incoming threats. There are many ongoing projects associated with Near Earth Object collision avoidance. Some proposed projects have intended to use lasers (e.g. Strategic Defense Initiative, DE-STAR, etc.)
The concept is actually quite simple. A highly focused energy beam (e.g. LASER) would be used to raise the surface temperature of a portion of an asteroid to ~3,000 degrees Kelvin, causing a violent reaction at that spot which would eject material from the surface of the asteroid, thus shifting the asteroid’s trajectory ever-so-slightly. In other words, you’d have a big rock which you really have no chance of destroying, but by heating the edge of one, you can cause a violent reaction on its surface. The small explosion that would occur from such superheating would nudge the incoming threat just a bit. The further away, the more effective this approach is.
I’d further note that with a laser, you won’t find a faster means of delivering an impactful solution to a discovered target. Speed of light is still pretty fast.
Magnetic Confinement Fusion:
One of the key items that was introduced in this story was a mysterious engine created by Frank, and it introduced a wide variety of new concepts. One of them was a room-temperature superconductor called stanene. Although this is one of the holy grail items of science, it is actually something people are experimenting with.
However, in Frank’s engine, a concept was introduced that seemed completely fanciful, but is actually based in reality. That is the concept of containing a fusion reaction in a magnetic field. Some keywords that readers can use if they want to further research such topics would be magnetic bottle, magnetic mirror, or tokamak.
The difficulty with controlled fusion is in creating the conditions in which two atoms can effectively be squeezed together such that the force of squeezing overwhelms the inherent repulsion of the nuclei. One of these squeezing methods employs extreme temperature increases of the material in excess of 10,000,000 degrees. Under such conditions, the substance turns into a plasma, and further pressure needs to be applied so that fusion would actually occur.
Under such conditions, the atoms can be manipulated within the confines of magnetic fields.
Granted, that I’ve taken the concept and gone beyond known technology. However, the extension isn’t necessarily within the realm of fantasy. What I stipulated in Frank’s engine was that fusion could occur, energy is released, and the store of energy could strengthen the field even more—producing an even higher efficiency matter-to-energy conversion and thus confining what is essentially a very hot and volatile system within an unimaginably strong magnetic confinement.
Fusion today is not an efficient process, but most scientists believe that via some method of magnetic confinement, it will eventually become efficient.
Einstein’s equations describe the relationship of mass to energy and energy to mass, and they make clear that vast stores of energy are contained in the smallest amount of matter. Therefore, one could imagine a future where power is never at a premium.
Hopefully, that time is not that far away.
Warp Ring:
In this book I describe what Doctor Holmes called a Warp Ring, and oftentimes I refer to the phenomenon it creates as a gravity bubble.
The concept is simple to imagine, inasmuch as you wrap something (e.g. a ship, Earth, etc.) in a bubble, and it is the bubble that travels at tremendous speeds while everything within the bubble doesn’t have any relative sense of motion whatsoever.
Definitely sounds like something out of pure space fantasy, but would it shock anyone to know that there are scholarly papers discussing the topic? I used one of these papers in particular to form some of my model of what this warp ring could do.
I refer you to a paper produced by Miguel Alcubierre called, “The Warp Drive: Hyper-fast travel within general relativity.”
For purposes of research on practical experiments to some of Doctor Alcubierre’s work, I would also refer you to Doctor Harold “Sonny” White, working out of the NASA Johnson Space Center. He had an excellent paper titled “Warp Field Mechanics 101”.
I’ll admit that for many folks, this is where the explanation should probably stop, but I’ll just briefly touch on more advanced topics.
One should note that Doctor Alcubierre mentions general relativity in the title, and he does so for very specific reasons. There’s a difference between general relativity and special relativity.
For special relativity, observers from different reference points will measure mass and speed differently, because space and time will expand and contract so that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant to all observers.
Sometimes these things are best explained with an example. For instance, I may turn on a flashlight and the light pouring forth will be traveling at 300,000 kilometers per second, usually denoted as the symbol “c”. If I’m on a spaceship traveling at .5c and I turned on that same flashlight, the light pouring forth is also traveling at c.
I know for some of you, you’re scratching your head and asking the following question. If you were standing on Earth and could see the light from the spaceship rushing by, wouldn’t the light be going 1.5c, and if it isn’t, why not?
For the person in the space ship, all seems to be going normally, when in fact, time and space have warped around them. Time is moving slower for them, and distances are contracted. That’s what allows the person in the spaceship and the person watching the spaceship to both observe things comply with special relativity.
I’ll leave the reader to stew on that for a moment, and I offer a good-natured apology if it is confusing, it is a complicated topic.
However, special relativity is actually a subset of general relativity. General relativity is describing spacetime itself. Spacetime is actually a model in which space and time are woven together to simplify talking about the four dimensions that would normally involve space and time. Here, Einstein determined that large objects cause a distortion in spacetime, and that distortion is known as gravity.
Anything that proposes traveling at arbitrarily high speeds would need to take advantage of this warping of spacetime.
The Warp Ring leverages this fact in the same way that Doctor Alcubierre’s paper does. It harnesses the expansion and contraction of space itself and in so doing, envelopes the object in a bubble of sorts. The object (e.g. ship, Earth, etc.) isn’t moving, but space itself is moving around it.
In the case of this story, the Earth is riding on this distortion, kind of like a surfer rides a wave.
I’d also suggest reading up on inflation theory. It does provide some good background reading if you’re inclined to learn more about faster-than-light movement.
As an aside, I will note that things like time dilation have been experimentally verified. I’ll refer you to the U.S. Naval Observatory experiments by Hafele and Keating, which documented what happened when four incredibly accurate atomic clocks were synchronized and two of them were flown around the world while the other two remained stationary. When the clocks were brought back together, the time had shifted ever-so-slightly for the clocks which had been traveling at jet-like speeds. For them, time had slowed ever-so-slightly.
The explanations I give in the book are actually congruent with the concept of the Warp Drive that Doctor Alcubierre mentioned.
The only things we’re missing are a substantial (ridiculous amount) of energy and the still theoretical concept of negative mass.
In attaining some of these things, you could imagine our ability to wrap an object (e.g. ship, Earth, etc.) into a bubble of sorts.
This bubble is gravitationally isolated and when the bubble itself moves, the contents within it don’t even sense the movement.
Kind of cool, don’t you think? I’m waiting for Doctor Holmes to be born, so he can fiddle with things and we can make it so.
Space Elevator:
Space elevators have been written about for quite a while in the science fiction realm, but there isn’t that much fictional about them.
First of all, what is a space elevator?
Simply put, imagine if you could put an object high enough up in space that it would maintain geosynchronous orbit. We do that all the time when we launch satellites. Such an object could act as an anchor for an elevator of sorts.
Imagine if you could drop a rope down from such a height and tie it down wherever it lands on Earth. You could conceivably build something that climbs up and down that rope and easily bring objects into space.
Why bother?
Well, with today’s technology, it is very resource expensive to bring things into space. You could easily imagine that if the Earth had a myriad of space elevators, it would be much easier to assemble large objects (e.g. spaceships?) in space.
So what’s the issue, let’s get started!
The issue has always been, and still largely is, the material that you’d make this hypothetical rope from.
I like to use examples when explaining things, so let’s do that.
You need to be roughly 22,000 miles above the Earth to maintain geosynchronous orbit. That’s the height where the gravity pulling you down and the centrifugal force that makes you want to fly away are effectively even.
That means we need rope that is 22,000 miles long at a minimum. So how much does such a thing weigh?
I’ll take for an example the lightest climbing rope I could find. This rope weighs 48 grams per meter and has a rather impressive 1660 pounds of carrying capacity.
Well, how much does 22,000 miles of that rope weigh?
With my handy calculator in hand, it turns out that it comes to about 1,699,467 kilograms, or about 3,746,683 pounds just for the rope. That basically means that the rope isn’t strong enough to even hold itself up nor any payload.
That illustrates the biggest problem space elevators have faced: what to make them out of.
In this story, I talk rather extensively about graphene. I’ll leave it to the reader who is interested to read up more about graphene and its capabilities, but let’s just say that if the mass manufacturing of graphene can be achieved (which is not an impossibility), then that would make something like a space elevator extremely practical.
I’ll further note that graphene has rather amazing physical properties such as electrical and thermal conductivity that surpasses those of many of the known “best of” types of conductors.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I am an Army brat, a polyglot, and the first person in my family born in the United States. This heavily influenced my youth by instilling a love of reading and a burning curiosity about the world and all of the things within it. As an adult, my love of travel and adventure has allowed me to explore many unimaginable locations, and these places sometimes creep into the stories I write.
I hope you’ve found this story entertaining.
- M.A. Rothman
You can find my blog at: www.michaelarothman.com
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And on Twitter: @MichaelARothman