Abstract
Marc Millis zips through the western suburbs of Cleveland in his green Chrysler convertible, the top down on a benign day in early spring. In the front seat, hair blowing in the wind, is physicist and science fiction writer Geoffrey Landis. I am in the back, getting the full brunt of the airflow, eyes watering as I lean forward to eavesdrop on the conversation up front. These two NASA futurists, working out of Cleveland’s Glenn Research Center, have their eyes on the issues we’ll need to resolve to achieve interstellar flight, but just now they’re talking about frontiers and human courage, and how the two relate to each other. It is just two months after Space Shuttle Columbia’s fiery end over Texas.
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Notes
“new dialogues between Achilles and the tortoise.” —Carroll’s work appeared as “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles,” Mind 4, no. 14 (April 1895), pp. 278–80. The Hofstadter dialogue appears as introductory material to each chapter in the author’s Gödel,Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
“then an antimatter rocket.” —Interview with Marc Millis at Glenn Research Center, April 3, 2003.
“to listen to their own words fifty years later reporting on their journey.”—Van Vogt’s tale is reprinted in the collection Destination: Universe (New York: Signet Books, 1952).
“in his science fiction novel Mars Crossing.”—Geoffrey Landis, Mars Crossing (New York: Tor Books, 2000).
“And it’s going to take a long time.” —Interview with Geoffrey Landis at Glenn Research Center on April 3, 2003.
“His `Warp Drive When?’ Web site.”http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWVV/PAO/warp.htm.
“the proton is a whopping 430 times more massive than when it is at rest.”—A wonderfully readable overview of the relationship between mass and energy is David Bodanis’s E=mc: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation (New York: Walker and Co., 2000). Recall that mass and weight are not the same thing. Weight is measurable in a gravitational field, whereas in orbit, even the heaviest satellite has no weight. But all objects have mass, which is a measure of the resistance of the object to motion and is normally measured in kilograms. Mass is therefore a measure of the object’s inertia. That orbiting satellite still has plenty of mass, so that moving it is no small job no matter what its weight. It was Einstein’s insight that mass and energy are the same thing. Converting one to the other is possible and violates no physical laws. While each can change its state, the total amount of mass and energy remain the same. The conversion factor, of course, is huge. In Einstein’s famous equation, the energy released is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light.
“7,00o times the mass of its payload in fuel.” —Lawrence Krauss, as quoted in Jeff Greenwald, “To Infinity… and Beyond!” Wired Magazine issue 6.07, July 1998.
“to achieve faster-than-light speeds.”—NASA Office of Advanced Concepts and Technology, Report from the Advanced Quantum/Relativity Theory Propulsion Workshop, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, May 16–17, 1994.
“The Physics of Immortality.”—Tipler’s book is breathtaking reading no matter what you think of his concept of using the energies of a so-called “big crunch” at the end of time to re-create everything that has gone before. The book was published by Doubleday in 1994.
“I find words almost useless for mathematical thinking.”—Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 548-49.
“science essays and short stories.”—Robert L. Forward, Indistinguishable from Magic (Riverdale, N.Y.: Baen Books, 1995).
“time machines do not seem to be forbidden by the known laws of physics (this, however, does not mean they are allowed).”—Robert L. Forward, “Possible Faster-Than-Light Physical Phenomena: A Brief Survey,” Advanced Quantum/Relativity Theory Propulsion Workshop, NASA Office of Advanced Concepts and Technology, May 16–17,1994.
“Ultrarelativistic Rockets and the Ultimate Fate of the Universe.”—By A. Kheyfets and W. Miller, and F. Tipler III, respectively.
“io billion times the amount of energy in the entire universe.”—Ulysses Torassa, “Warp Drives and Wormholes: It’s a Workshop,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 11, 1997.
“far-out physics.” —Lawrence Krauss, The Physics of Star Trek (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Krauss is also the author of Beyond Star Trek: Physics from Alien Invasions to the End of Time from the same publisher (1997).
“they can still be useful by provoking other, more viable, ideas.”—Marc G. Millis, “Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Workshop Preliminary Results,” NASA TM-97–2o6241, Nov.1997. Presented at Plenary Session III Views of Future. STAIF, Jan. 27,1998, Albuquerque, N.M. Also Available in Space Technology and Applications International Forum-1998, ed. El-Genk, DOE CONF-98o103, CP42o, pp. 3–12.
“a respected scientific journal like Classical and Quantum Gravity?”—Quantum Gravity 11 (May 1994): L73—L77.
“the `warp drive’ of science fiction.”—Ibid.
“physicist John Cramer.”—John G. Cramer, “The Micro-Warp Drive,” Analog Science Fiction and Fact, February 2000.
“the scientist got his inspiration from the show.”—Alison Goddard, “Surfing to the Stars on Warped Space,” New Scientist 142, issue 1929 (June 11,1994): 18.
“the possibility of engineering a similar effect by human efforts”—Alan H. Guth, The Inflationary Universe (New York: Perseus Publishing, 1997).
“they sent forward to control the wall of the spacetime bubble in which they traveled.”—Natario’s paper, “Warp Drive with Zero Expansion,” appears in Classical and Quantum Gravity 19, no. 6 (March 21, 2002), pp. 1157–65. See also Eugenie Samuel, “The Truth About Warp Drive,” New Scientist 173, issue 2334 (March 16, 2002), p. 9.
“seems to demand more energy than is available in the entire universe to make it work.”—Michael J. Pfenning and L. H. Ford, “The Unphysical Nature of `Warp Drive,”’ Classical and Quantum Gravity 14 (1997): 1743–51.
“How do you produce the exotic matter needed to manipulate negative energy?”—A straightforward look at the Alcubierre drive is provided by M. Szpir in “Spacetime Hypersurfing,” American Scientist 82 (Sept/Oct 1994), pp. 422–23. Also see Larry Gonick’s column “Science Classics” for a playful look at the “warp and woof drive” in Discover, Dec. 1994, pp. 44-54.
“a bubble of spacetime using warped space, one that is large on the inside but tiny on the outside.”- Chris Van Den Broeck, “A `Warp Drive’ with More Reasonable Total Energy Requirements,” Classical and Quantum Gravity 16 (1999), 3973-79.
“This doesn’t mean that the proposal is realistic.”-Ibid., 3978.
“We want people to think about the possibility of doing things in a different way.”-Robert Cassanova, telephone interview, January 3, 2003.
“Arthur C. Clarke’s novel The Fountains of Paradise?” -Clarke’s novel remains the definitive vision of a space elevator. It was first published by Harcourt in 1979.
“the image of distant objects is magnified by intense gravity.”-John Cramer et al., “Natural Wormholes as Gravitational Lenses,” Physical Review D (March 15,1995): pp. 3124–27.
“a space completely filled with matter.”-Bernard Haisch and Alfonso Rueda, “How to Abhor the Void While Loving the Quantum Vacuum,” Mercury 29, issue 5 (Sept/Oct 2000): 32.
“co-authored by physicist Alfonso Rueda.”- Ibid.
“the prestigious Physical Review.”-Bernard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda, and H. E. Puthoff, “Inertia as a Zero-Point Lorentz Force,” Physical Review A, 49 (February 1994): 678–84.
“sea of radiation that fills the entire universe.”-Bernard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda, and H. E. Puthoff, “Beyond E=mc2,” The Sciences, November/December 1994 p. 27.
“the interactions of charge and field.”-Ibid., z6.
“I don’t know who the others were.”-Arthur C. Clarke, 30o1: The Final Odyssey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 61.
“the even more fantastic possibility of controlling inertia.”-Ibid., 245. p.174: “the Casimir Effect.”-Robert Forward, “Extracting Electrical Energy from the Vacuum by Cohesion of Charged Foliated Conductors,” Physical Review B 30, no. 4 (August 1984): 1770–73.
“the real behavior of this quantum vacuum.”-Jordan Maclay, “An Analysis of Vacuum Fluctuation Energy and Casimir Forces in Conductive Rectangular Cavities,” Physical Review A 61, 052110–1 to o5zno-18 (moo) provides technical background. “Energy Unlimited” by H. Bortman is a useful layman’s description of Maclay’s work in New Scientist, January 22, 2000, pp. 32–34.
“there would be no such thing as inertia.” -Telephone interview with James Woodward, October 7, 2003.
“transient fluctuations in its mass.”- See James F. Woodward and Thomas Mahood, “Mach’s Principle, Mass Fluctuations, and Rapid Spacetime Transport.” Available online at http://chaos.fullerton.edu/-jimw/staif2000.pdf.
“it would be our first evidence that wormholes actually exist.” -The paper Landis is referring to is Cramer et al., “Natural Wormholes.”
“stretching to infinity in both directions.” -Geoffrey L. Landis, “Approaching Perimelasma,” in Impact Parameter (Urbana, Ill.: Golden Gryphon Press, 2001).
“cards home to be shuffled”-“What We Really Do Here at NASA” also appears in Parameter.
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Gilster, P. (2004). Breaking Through at NASA: Science on the Edge. In: Centauri Dreams. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3894-0_7
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