Warp Speed

by Travis S. Taylor

  CHAPTER 22

  It was going to take a while to figure out the tricks of interstellar navigation. We decided to start small and take baby steps out of the solar system. We warped to Mars in about two and a half minutes. We had christened our little warpship the U.S.S. Einstein. Tabitha and Margie were at the controls. Jim and I were in charge of celestial navigation. Rebecca and Sara were watching the power plant and warp core. Al and Anne Marie were in charge of general mission logistics. We entered into an orbit around Mars and started looking for interesting things. We landed in Cydonia. There were no pyramids to be found anywhere. We found no face either. I was always hoping there would be something.

  We traversed several canals and headed to the Martian North Pole. Near where the ice caps met the desert, we took a few core samples. I never noticed any living creatures crawling around. It's possible that there might be some microbes in the core samples. When we had completed checkout of our exploration capabilities, we would come back to Mars and hang out a while. This time was more of a shakedown flight. We did hit the list of experiments and observations that a lot of planetary scientists had been writing about for decades.

  We started near the equator then flew southwest to Ophir Chasma and back around east to Juventae Chasma. We saw all sorts of slope and bedrock material, cratered plateaus, and degraded craters. Then we turned northward toward the northern plains, Kasei Vallis, and the Viking I landing site. We finally sat down on the peak of Olympus Mons.

  We hadn't developed individual warp fields yet. In fact, we were several years from that if at all, so we had to steal about ten new SAFER EMUs from NASA. We had our Earthside black bag connection take care of the paper work. NASA never knew that they had the spacesuits to begin with. We sat up a group in the Research and Development Dome back on Moon Base 1 to reverse-engineer the EMUs, redesign them, and make them more mobile and useful. That would take a year or so also.

  At any rate, we suited up, cycled through the airlock with a lights-off lights-on maneuver, and descended the loading ramp of the Einstein. Once we had set foot on the Martian surface, Tabitha and Margie set up an American flag. The view from Olympus Mons was incredible. Sara scratched into a rock with a screwdriver "Sara Tibbs was here." Then she passed it around and we each took turns. Jim signed it last and dated it.

  This wasn't a science mission. This was a technology demonstration mission. We had proven we could fly about four times the speed of light and navigate to a specific point. We had proven we could determine where we were once we dropped out of warp. We then demonstrated that we could locate and land on a planet and conduct EVAs. It was time to head back home. Tabitha corralled us back into the Einstein and we began the liftoff checklists.

  "Ramp up?" Tabitha asked.

  "Check." Margie replied.

  "Everybody on board?"

  "Check."

  "Okay, liftoff."

  "Check."

  Not much of a checklist. The warpships made spacetravel almost as easy as a Sunday drive, as long as there were no technical difficulties. This time we stressed the ECCs up to three percent and shaved another minute and thirty-seven seconds off the trip. It took about twenty-three seconds in warp to travel back to the Moon. The average speed was about twenty-four times the speed of light.

  Tabitha brought us into the spaceport's waiting zone, which was just outside the spaceport warp field. The spaceport's field is always set to oscillate on and off at a kilohertz or so. She simply flew Einstein through it when it was in the off position--of course, that was done in fractions of a second via a flight control computer and was transparent to her. We debarked and transferred the samples and EVA suits to a quarantined lab for analysis and cleanup, respectively.

  Analysis of Einstein showed that it was in tip-top condition. The space travel at twenty-four times the speed of light had had no ill effect on it. It was a good ship. We prepared it for our next flight. This time we planned to visit every planet in the outer solar system and a few Kuiper Belt objects to boot.

  Our flight trajectory was designed as multiple warps. The first warp would be straight to Jupiter space. We clocked out at about thirty times the speed of light. I'm here to tell you that Jupiter is beautiful! We did a very fast orbit around it so we could look at the giant red spot. Absolutely amazing. A few times, we actually turned off the warp field so we could see it with our own eyes for a few seconds. Then we clicked the field back on and looked through the viewscreen. We wanted closer looks at the moons, and the radiation from Jupiter was a bit more than we wanted to deal with. After all, both Tabitha and 'Becca were about five weeks or so pregnant. Oh, I guess I forgot to mention that. It would appear that they are having a race to see who can have the first baby in space. We wanted to attempt our first interstellar jump before they got too uncomfortable and big for space travel. The EMUs aren't designed to accommodate a woman in her third trimester. And both Tabitha and 'Becca said that we're not setting foot on an alien world without them.

  We mostly wanted to see Europa. It supposedly had a very deep ice coating along with a water ocean underneath the ice. We pushed Einstein through the thick layer of ice on Europa's surface. The ECCs operated at only two percent to do this. At about ninety-four kilometers, the stresses on the warp field stopped and we could tell that we had broken through to a water ocean. The hole that we had just made through the ice immediately froze shut above us. We slowly panned around and illuminated the dark ocean with the outside lights, which were set to oscillate opposite the outer warp field. Near what seemed to be the bottom of the Europan ocean we found a lava flow. There was a lot of particle debris floating and drifting in the water but we couldn't tell if it was alive or not. A larger piece of the floating material seemed to alter its path and then it darted toward a smaller chunk. The smaller chunk took off like a bat out of hell. We focused the cameras in on the region a little tighter and realized that the debris floating in the water were actually schools of some type of fish.

  "I want one of those!" Al said.

  "Not sure how we could catch it, Al," Margie responded. "We can come back and get one some other time."

  We sat still for a while and watched the fish swim and eat each other. These weren't ordinary fish. Upon closer inspection, we could see that they had no eyes. I also wasn't sure if I saw any gills or not. We would have to catch some of these things and have the right folks study them. Some other time. We'd watched the fish for about twenty minutes when Tabitha decided we should continue with our mission. Again, we were on a technology demonstration mission, not a science exhibition.

  We tunneled back up through the ice and out to a very high orbit around the Jupiter system. Jim and I did a little celestial navigation and then on to Saturn.

  Okay maybe I'm an old softy when it comes to the beauty of our solar system, but Saturn is an incredible sight. It is hard to say which I like better, Jupiter or Saturn. The big ticket item at the Saturn system was Titan. Ever since I read The Puppet Masters I wanted to know if there really were Titans. Titan's dense atmosphere has kept its surface a secret from astronomers. We learned its secrets. In fact, the planetary scientist had hit it pretty damn close. At about a hundred and eighty kilometers from the surface we hit a layer of nitrogen that was at one Earth atmospheric pressure. At about twenty kilometers from the surface, we hit a cloud of methane vapor. Just below the clouds it was raining methane and the stresses on the warp field suggested atmospheric pressures on the order of a thousand or more times greater than that of Earth. Visibility was very poor and we couldn't see well enough to navigate. Infrared didn't help, because there was none. The cloudy moon was cold. We had to switch to radar navigation and if we came back, we would bring a sonar system or something also. We did feel our way around with the radar for a while until we found a lake. The lake was at about minus one hundred seventy-seven degrees Celsius. The lake was liquid methane.

  There were no Titans. I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I expected not to find anything. But childh
ood aspirations and fantasies should be entertained every now and then.

  We oohed and ahhed as we stopped at Uranus and then Nep-tune. They weren't necessarily close to each other, but with warpdrive at thirty times the speed of light, no place in the solar system was that far away. Even the Pluto-Charon system, which is about thirty astronomical units from Earth, is pretty close at those speeds. The total trip to the three outer planets including the ooh and ah time of about thirty minutes was only an hour or so. It was obvious that things were going to be a lot different for the human race, at least for those "with the need to know."

  We spent some time at the Pluto-Charon system looking around. We actually landed but didn't get out. There wasn't much to see. Pluto is an ice ball. The humorous part of the trip was the fact that we had beaten the NASA Pluto-Kuiper mission by several years. I thought about trying to track down the approaching spacecraft to just take a look at it. Maybe some other time. Our mission was to develop warp capabilities that would enable interstellar travel. We had to continue with learning how to navigate over large distances. So far, we had only been as far out as about thirty times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The distance to the nearest star is about a hundred thousand times that. We still had quite a ways to go. At thirty times the speed of light, the trip to the nearest star would take about two months.

  We wandered around in the Kuiper-Belt a bit and then decided to travel through the Oort Cloud and then the Heliopause. The Heliopause where the solar system meets the rest of the galaxy is considered the edge of the solar system at about a hundred astronomical units. There were some really neat plasma light shows there. Our spectrum analyzer systems picked up radio noise centered around the two to three kilohertz range and at awesome power levels. We pushed through the Heliopause out to about three hundred AUs. I checked our navigation and suggested to Tabitha that we bounce back to the Moon just to make sure. The nonstop trip took about an hour and a half. We docked at the moon for a few hours and had lunch at home.

  By three o'clock that afternoon, we were ready to try for the solar gravitational focus. According to General Relativity any large massive body like the sun actually bends spacetime enough in its near vicinity that the paths of light rays traveling near that massive body are bent. In other words, the big object acts like a very large lens. This fact has been verified experimentally in many different ways since 1919. However, nobody has yet travelled to the focus of the large solar lens.

  I had more reasons than just curiosity for traveling to the solar focus. Lets digress for a second.

  The largest telescope built by mankind so far is on the order of about a hundred meters. It is a multiple mirror interferometer in Hawaii. The idea of making large telescopes is to increase the resolution. This means that the better the resolution the smaller the objects you can see, farther away. The way to determine the smallest object seeable by a telescope is to use the Rayleigh Criteria equation. The formula states that the minimum resolvable object diameter is found as 2.44 times the wavelength of the light (assume 550 nanometers for yellowish green light) times the distance to the object (five light years or 4.55 x 10 meters) divided by the diameter of the telescope's primary optic. Assuming that you want to image an Earth-like planet that has a diameter of about 12,000 kilometers, Rayleigh's Criteria says that we need a telescope at least two kilometers or more in diameter! The Hubble Space Telescope is 2.4 meters in diameter and the James Webb Space Telescope is only a few times bigger than that. So we're a long way from imaging planets even around the nearest star even if you consider the ground-based interferometer in Hawaii.

  Now consider the solar focus. The diameter of the Sun is on the order of a million kilometers. Using that as the diameter of the telescope primary in the Rayleigh formula shows that we could see a hair up an ant's ass on planets around stars out to a few tens of light years away. We could image planets much much further out than that. Talk about the ultimate telescope. I had what is known in amateur telescope making circles as "Big Aperture Fever" or BAF. Even worse, my case was acute, chronic, and was a special strain called BMFAF. You can guess what the MF stands for.

  According to General Relativity, the solar focus should be somewhere between five hundred and eight hundred AUs depending on the wavelength you wish to view. The lensing effect works for all electromagnetic radiation not just visible light. Anyway, imagine a telescope that large. All that would be needed to use old Sol as the primary optic would be to place a detector at the focus. I planned to add other optics to do some image correction and cleaning up but the complete system is simple commercial adaptive optics and software. The hard part is getting to the solar focus. The other hard part is lining the star you wish to view up with the Sun and with the detector. The three objects must form a straight line: the star, then the Sun, then the detector. Assuming the solar focus is six hundred AUs from the Moon Base, then that means a trip time of about three hours to view one star. Of course there would be multiple stars in the field of view of the telescope depending on which eyepiece you use, but we were most immediately interested in stars close to Earth. Now we're talking about maybe fifty stars sparsely spaced whose light paths were rays passing through the surface of a sphere six hundred AUs in radius. It would take some time hopping around the solar focus to get images of all of these star systems. Three hours one way, there then a day or so of observation, then three hours back. Let's assume two days per star system. That means that it would take about a hundred days to look at each of our local stellar neighbors. I decided to start with the closest and move outward. That is once we got the telescope system working properly.

  So, we zipped out to the solar focus in line with Alpha Centauri, which is the closest star to Earth. Tabitha popped open the hatch that enclosed our telescope secondary system. It took Jim and me another five or six hours before we had the system functioning the way we wanted it to perform.

  There were several planets in the Alpha Centauri system but there was no hint of any planets that could support life as we know it. Using a visible spectrometer, we could analyze exactly what elements were in the atmospheres of these planets. None supported our kind of life. No water, chlorophyll, or oxygen.

  Slightly disappointed, we warped back to the Moon. This time we decided to tax the ECC's to ninety-nine percent. Using most of the energy we had available enabled us to deepen the Alcubierre warp. We only shaved off about half of the trip time. In other words, it took about thirty-three times more power to increase our warp speed by a factor of two. Obviously there was some nonlinear function involved here that I hadn't counted on. My solutions to the Einstein equations were only accurate at low warp speeds. Between twenty and fifty times the speed of light, something else was going on. I'm still thinking about that. Jim suggested that spacetime might be quantized like the excitation levels of an atom and that there is some Moor's potential well that we have to overcome. Interesting idea. Like I have said before, Jim deserves a Nobel Prize.

  We had proven that there was no life around Alpha Centauri. The next step was to look at Barnard's Star, which is only slightly further out. Barnard's Star is about six light years from Earth and is a faint red giant or M class star on the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram.

  Using the solar focus telescope system, Jim brought the star system into view at low magnification and stopped out the bright spot caused by Sol, and by Barnard's Star. An array of planets came into view. Two were fairly large gas giants, one of which was twice the size of Jupiter, and three were planets in the realm of Earth-like in size. The spectrometer computer dinged at us and said that oxygen and chlorophyll had been detected. The light from Barnard's Star had illuminated the planet's atmosphere and the wavelength bands that get absorbed by oxygen and chlorophyll had been absorbed and not reflected off one of the planets--the spectrometer instrument enabled us to measure which bands of light were received by the telescope and which ones weren't. But which planet?

  We zoomed in on the inner three planets one at a ti
me. The first planet was a barren rock much like Mercury. The second planet closest to Banard's Star was blue and green and looked like a Mars-sized Earth. We spent hours zooming in on the planet. There were oceans, mountains, trees, and even grass. We saw no artificial structures of any sort. There was life there, but most likely not intelligent life.

  The third planet was mostly like Venus.

  We bounced back to Moon Base 1 and began discussing who was going to visit Barnard's Star. We decided that we were all going. We were too valuable to America to risk getting lost in space, but we didn't care. Was that selfish? We knew we could get back.

  We had one problem. At fifty times the speed of light, the trip would take at least fifty days there and fifty days back. That's a little more than three months. Tabitha and 'Becca were pushing two months pregnant. The Einstein was very comfortable for few hours, just like a minivan is comfortable for a ten-hour drive to the beach. But you can't live in a minivan for three months. We had to build a real starship. We would just have to be patient.

  The crew split up into three groups. Tabitha and Sara and I made up one group, Annie, Al, and Margie made up the second, and Jim and 'Becca made the third group. We took turns. One week you got to bounce out to the solar focus and continue planet hunting. One week you got to work the starship construction project. The third week you watched over the military research and development aspects of our Moon Base 1 operations. Each team alternated through the three jobs. There were over a hundred and fifty personnel on the Moon Base now but we were the original brain trust. We felt an obligation to making sure it functioned and continued all of its missions, not just the really fun ones.

  Tabitha, Sara, and I took the first watch designing the starship. We took blueprints from the International Space Station habitat modules and began redesigning them. Our idea was to build three habitat size modules, just a little larger, and connect them side by side, then lay two on top of those three, and then one on top of the two. So we would have a pyramid of six cylinder-shaped modules. We would then attach the U.S.S. Einstein to the middle cylinder module in the bottom line of three. Remember that the Einstein doesn't have rocket engines in the back of it where the Shuttle does. In fact, this is where the loading ramp is located. We could retrofit Einstein fairly easily to the new configuration. There were two side doors also so loading and unloading wouldn't be a problem.