Freedom's Last Gasp

by M. A. Rothman

  All these things have a basis in academic research and history. Let me hopefully tantalize you with the possibilities, as I point out things in the book that might have initially seemed like works of fantasy, but have real science behind them.

  As I give very brief explanations of what may be very complex concepts, my intent is to only leave you with sufficient information to give a remedial understanding of the subject. However, for those who want to know more, it’s also my intent to leave you with enough keywords that would allow you to initiate your own research and gain a more complete background understanding of any of these topics.

  Well, that’s enough of my babbling, let’s get to the science of science fiction.

  * * *

  The Tube Network:

  * * *

  In this story, we introduce a new transportation system that has become the primary means going from point A to point B in very little time. It seems somewhat fantastical that a trip from New York City to Los Angeles might only take an hour, whereas a flight today usually is triple that, at minimum.

  The elements of such a transport method have been talked about already in popular culture by Elon Musk with a project called the Hyperloop. The premise for the tube network is really no different.

  The biggest problem today in high-speed transport is friction. Not so much the friction of tires on the road, but air friction. Even a plane suffers from a tremendous amount of drag associated with having to push through air, which is rather dense at high speeds. Think about the devastation a hurricane causes when 200 mile-per-hour winds blast against most buildings.

  Now imagine 700, 1000, or even 2000 mile-per-hour winds. We don’t have many materials that can deal with that type of friction. However, under what conditions do we not have any friction?

  A vacuum.

  Much like in the vacuum of space, things can move practically as fast as they want and suffer no ill effects because the ship, train, whatever, is pushing through emptiness. Well, the tube network (much like Musk’s proposed Hyperloop) has two key elements that must be in place for it to work. No friction under the vehicle. This is addressed by existing technologies associated with magnetic levitation. In essence, high speed trains would move forward not on wheels but on a magnetic cushion with nothing touching between the train and the rail underneath.

  The second element is the need for a vacuum. By creating a tube and sucking the air out of it, the train in essence becomes a self-contained space ship on Earth. It moves without friction and has the potential for amazing speeds.

  To give you a practical example, let’s imagine that you’re in one of these tube pods that I described in the book. And to ensure we aren’t overly stressing anyone out, the maximum acceleration will be about .3 G, which is about the same force you experience during takeoff in a commercial jet.

  Let’s assume you start from a standing position, at 0 miles per hour. After one minute of acceleration you’d be going nearly 400 miles per hour. After five minutes, you’d be going almost 2000 miles per hour.

  Amazing, isn’t it?

  The technology to do this exists, but the reason it isn’t yet practical is that there is a huge cost for developing a means to maintain a true vacuum across long distances. These things are likely addressable over time and as technologies and power sources evolve.

  So, if I was asked whether or not I believe we’d have a tube network in the next 100 or so years, I’d give it a fairly decent chance. It can be done.

  Real-time Communicator:

  * * *

  The real-time communicator. This is a trope of sorts in science fiction. How does Star Trek communicate with star fleet across the galaxy and have a back-and-forth conversation? It should be impossible, and here’s why…

  Let’s imagine you want to talk to someone one light minutes away. (A light minute is the distance light travels in one minute.)

  Well, imagine you pick up the phone, and start the conversation. It would look something like this:

  * * *

  Me: “Hi there.”

  Friend: hears me say “Hi there” a minute later and then they say, “You owe me $5.”

  Me: After waiting two minutes total, I hear, “You owe me $5.”

  * * *

  Not exactly riveting TV nor conducive to convenient conversation. So, to address this problem, we need to science up a solution. Well, in many science fiction novels they wave hands and say they’re using quantum entanglement as the means by which to solve such a problem. Which is fancy-speak for there isn’t a clean way to address this issue, and I’ll get into why, and dive deep into how it might actually be done with as little nonsense as possible.

  First, what is quantum entanglement?

  Briefly explained, quantum entanglement is the idea that through a variety of methods a single item can be split into two parts where each of the parts end up sharing an unseen link even though they may have a relatively great distance between them.

  Let’s for a moment imagine I take a jelly bean and split it in half with a very special knife. The result is two pieces of jelly bean, but they have this weird property. If I turn one of the jellybeans over, the other jellybean flips over as well. Seems like magic – and trust me, for most, it is a bizarre piece of voodoo.

  The amazing thing is that quantum entanglement has already been experimentally verified both at the subatomic level as well as at the macroscopic level using two small diamonds.

  So, given that, you can imagine if someone had an entangled phone, one is located with you, and the other is on the far side of the galaxy. You might be able to have a nice conversation without delays.

  For most of you, the description should end there. But, I can’t leave well enough alone, because even though everything I’ve said above is true, what I described is also nonsense.

  The following is only for the brave at heart, I’ll start explaining at a graduate course level:

  There’s a fundamental flaw in this scenario, but before I even go into it, let’s describe what a practical communication protocol even looks like.

  When I send somebody a message, we’ve always heard about 1’s and 0’s, and that’s true, but in a practical sense, we send messages we can read, like “Hello there.”

  Let’s just focus on the “H” of hello there, I’ll walk us through a rudimentary encoding exercise.

  An “H” numerically would be equivalent to a 01001000 as an eight-bit ASCII encoded character. For basic computer scientists, that’s the equivalent of a decimal 72, or a hexadecimal 48. But, again, 1’s and 0’s, our “H” is known as a 01001000. It is known as an eight-bit encoding because each bit (the 1 or 0) occupies one space and to encode one of our human-readable characters, let’s say it takes upwards of some combination of eight 1’s and 0’s.

  So, if I had a device that was quantum entangled, I’d need eight different bits to be entangled with each other, and if someone sets up the correct pattern, I can remotely read the “H”. That’s awesome.

  There’s a but coming, and you know it.

  Every time you read one of those entangled bits, it becomes unentangled. So, basically each end gets one shot to write or read. And once you did, those bits aren’t talking with their sisters or brothers anymore, and you’re done. And what makes matters even worse is that if you read something before someone sent the message, you’ll never get the message.

  Okay – now that sucks. And that’s also why I said the use of quantum entanglement is kind of nonsensical without a lot of forethought. Especially as a eureka moment in the novel, and the writer simply says, “I used quantum entanglement” to solve the problem. I like to go deeper.

  So, what to do? Remember folks, I like to present you with things that could be, as much as I possibly can.

  I noodled on this a long time and here’s a possible scenario where such a thing could work given what we know of quantum entanglement.

  Imagine you had a [gun] magazine full of sets of these entangled eight bit
s. Once you use a set, the next one comes up, etc. Since we’re talking about particles that could easily be subatomic in size, in a practical sense this magazine could hold a ridiculous number of these entangled sets of bits. I’d even assert you’d have two magazines, one for reading, and one for sending. Well, fine, now what?

  Imagine you had a synchronized high accuracy clock on both communicators. Basically, the premise would be that each communicator would on a regular basis, let’s say every millisecond, read a set of bits and send a set of bits. If the communicators were idle, they’re basically spitting blank messages at each other and reading blank messages. After each message, the unentangled bits are tossed, and the next set are used, on both devices. This way, they’re always synchronized and talking via the correct set of entangled particles.

  So, when a message is sent by someone, it’s immediately received. And that would form the basis of the real-time communicator.

  Think of the magazines as a battery of sorts. Each communicator may only be good for n-number of years before they run out of entangled sets of bits.

  And obviously I only covered the transmission of a single character. Ultimately, that same method can be used to transmit text messages as well as audio and video.

  Are we anywhere close to making one of these? Absolutely not… and then there’s the question about whether it’s possible to explicitly force (write) the setting in the first place - but the science is “close enough” that it could be possible, with a wink and a nod.

  * * *

  Project Thor:

  * * *

  I talked about the KBP, the kinetic bombardment project, as a concept where telephone-pole sized rods of tungsten were lifted up into space and in effect were dropped onto unsuspecting targets. It may seem somewhat fantasy-like, and has certainly been used before in science fiction as a weapons system, but the reality is, the concept was actually developed in the 1950s by Doctor Jerry Pournelle while he was working at Boeing, doing analysis of proposed new weapons systems. He’d nicknamed the idea behind such a weapons system as Project Thor.

  The science behind it is actually pretty simple. The metal rods were made of tungsten, which is a very dense and heat resistant material. Its melting point is over 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas things like steel melts at around 2,500 degrees. It may not seem like it would be all that destructive, but if you are in essence taking a very tough and dense material and throwing it at very high speeds, you’ll end up with impacts that could mimic small nuclear explosions, but without the radiation and fallout.

  The initial estimates by the Air Force were that a roughly 20-foot-long rod of 12-inch thick tungsten weighing approximately 19,000 pounds would slam into the Earth at ten times the speed of sound, and be the equivalent of twelve tons of high explosives. This alone would devastate a couple city blocks, and utterly destroy well-built concrete buildings. It would also likely blow out the windows upwards of half a mile from the site of impact.

  And taken to further extremes, if you imagine a small engine pushing the rod along its way, increasing the speed, and if the rod were a bit bigger, you could have impacts at upwards of 30,000 mph and the equivalent of 500 tons of high explosives. Easily leveling a city block, destroying most buildings in a half mile from the impact site, and blowing out the windows of everything within a mile of the impact.

  Much of what the novel covered is true. Small engines to push these rods, the ability to aim based on a GPS coordinate would be relatively trivial with known technology, and it would be very hard to detect before it smacked into its target, largely because it’ll have almost no radar cross section. There won’t be a launch detected, because it’s simply a dropping object from above the atmosphere.

  The thing that makes it impractical is that it’s very expensive to get these rods up into orbit.

  Might there be some up there now?

  Very hard to know, but I’m sure if there are, it’s classified.

  * * *

  Nanites:

  * * *

  Though the specific applications of nanites in this novel are fictional, nanites themselves are not a thing of fiction. The engineering world has had the ability to create things at the molecular level for quite some time.

  The best example of this is in computer CPU manufacturing. Today, we are mass-manufacturing electronics with processes dealing with trace widths as low as seven nanometers. That’s more than a thousand times smaller than the width of the finest hair. An atom averages anywhere from 0.1 to 0.3 nanometers wide.

  We’ve even been able to manufacture tiny machines at the nano-scale. Think of a nanite as a tiny robot. A nanorobot, if you will. Molecule-sized robots have been the promise of medicine for quite some time. The concept used in Perimeter, where these “tiny doctors” are able to repair the body (within reason), and fend off sicknesses, is not really as ridiculous as it might seem.

  Today, it is already possible to synthesize nanites that can determine where they are, and deliver minute units of a medicine to the correct locations. For instance, if one of these nanites was carrying a drug meant to treat a specific form of cancer, it would also carry a sensor that would help it identify its molecular target.

  The advantages of such a precision approach are obvious. Chemotherapies, by contrast, blast the entire body with poisons, damaging healthy cells along with the cancerous ones. Nanites could be “programmed” to target only the unhealthy cells.

  Yet today we are not using nanites as tiny doctors. Why?

  Many challenges exist—among them, the ability to manufacture these nanites in a sufficient quantity to do clinical testing. This is hugely expensive today, and frankly, that’s the biggest technical hurdle.

  But once that hurdle is crossed, the field is open for what could be a revolution in medicine, generating entirely new methods of treating cancer, other diseases, and even possibly halt the aging process.

  * * *

  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 sp
aceship 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.