Double Bind Paradox of Speed and Containment

The proposition is that both a maximum speed between “c² and c to the power of c” and the physical containment of a nuclear explosion is possible.

The paradox faced is a double bind. The two major objections are always going to be until proven otherwise:

Physical containment impossible
Speeds faster than light impossible

Unfortunately as with any paradox, if you relax your objection to one of the binds, the other becomes stronger.

Maybe it is "a vision thing" but when I started off trying to "invent" interstellar space travel 10 years ago, I had to pull on a number of intellectual resources. I was reluctant to do any "searches" on the Internet because of a perhaps unjustified fear of triggering a security response. Hence I did not come across Orion until 6 months ago, which was about a year after reading about the similar "Daedalus" project about 18 months ago. However I had successfully concluded the quest of my invention 2 years ago, so none of the details of these projects really contributed. However I am now trying to gradually insert any sensible modifications into my own framework.

When I speak of "intellectual resources" I am referring to a degree in "social and economic history" and being widely read in philosophy. My knowledge of nuclear physics is limited, perhaps usefully, to an in-depth study of The Manhattan Project during World War 2. Such knowledge ends with the surrender of the Japanese and indeed I did not understand the Hydrogen bomb until I read the Orion Project book by Dyson. However what Oppenheimer and crew did successfully at Los Alamos by studying it at school on an independent physics project at the age of 16, enabled me to comprehend the rough dynamics I required to envision an interstellar project. However it is by the study of development paths over hundreds of industrial and pre-industrial years, as an economic historian, that I do actually arrive at a different conclusion than the original Orioneers.

I think we have to be aware how "theological needs" manifest themselves as scientific fact in different ways according to the moments in history our ancestors lived through. For instance from the Manhattan Project there is the story of how just before the first test was to be made, a rebellion broke out amongst the scientists on the project. They were afraid that the "chain reaction" they were about to release for the first time would "set fire to the world" and destroy everything. Oppenheimer had to go to Einstein and come back with his theoretical assurances this would not happen. Thus I have to ask is America right to promote Einstein as entirely a "man of peace"? Surely he was also a weapons scientist?

This is not an often cited story. Einstein did participate in the making of the atomic bomb at a high supervisory level. There is nothing wrong with that per se, many scientists do work on military programs. However there are both "theological" and scientific implications from the whole manner in which the "Judeo-Christian relationship" has made an idol out of a scientist. Mixing politics with science can create lies.

I set out to "invent" interstellar travel as an "economist". It would serve to repeat a common definition of this science. Economics seeks to allocate scarce resources, with the proviso that the term "scarce" shall be re-defined by technical innovation. The biggest scarce resource therefore has to be our limitation to one planet and thus strictly under this terminology the duty of every economist should be to consider at what point technological innovation will allow us to expand to two and more planets. While the majority of economists now focus on monetarism to the exclusion of everything else, it does not mean that other economic models will always remain secondary to it.

Certainly only the major powers with stocks of A bombs (e.g. Orion fuel pellets) would be able to conquer nearby worlds. I use the term "conquer" in respect to the history of the Spanish "Conquistadores" in the New Americas, continually pushing into the interior in search of "El Dorado" (gold city). I do not think we have any model for colonization other than that of America from 1492+ and so until we know for a fact otherwise it is best to anticipate the same conditions again. It may seem "Eurocentric" but then you can run yourself in rings with alternative scenarios. The still dominating force in America today is a religious leader from the centre of Europe's flat earth mapping "Jerusalem". Maybe the logo for the Orion Re-think should be the pre-Columbus maps of the world with Jerusalem drawn at the very centre! - Sort of appeal for everyone.

Double Bind Paradox of Speed and Containment continued

As an economist I would throw any plan to reach the stars by traveling under light speed in the bin. This maybe hard to accept but business has to pay for an interstellar exploration and has to expect economic rewards if it is successful. I am also afraid the "Star Trek" idea of benign "First Directives" influencing development is fanciful. Our first discovery may create a special case of "kid gloves" approach but space expansion is 3D not 2D. Once you have an "invention" that can propel you quite a few light years in only a few months, the space lanes are open to business for those powers with sufficient weapon stocks to convert into peaceful fuel pellets. That would not include the U.K., we would have to tag behind America, but France, China, Russia and Israel would all be relatively free to go off and do their own thing. Proliferation of nuclear materials would not be relaxed, if only to maintain the monopoly of space expansion amongst these powers and their respective languages and customs.

In these days with Billions of dollars of investment in communication satellites, the original Orion concept needs rethinking. Without the use of cannon to focus the EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) of such an explosion in space, the EMP could damage or destroy half the world's orbiting satellites in one go. Now I can see a world without any satellites, relying on cable, but I am sure the multinational media corporations might have something to say! The original Orion Project was drawn up before EMP was such a big issue, but it is certainly one thing that cannot be ignored in our day and age.

As for diameter of the cannon aperture that would be about the size of a football. However the thickness of the cannon might be several yards to several dozen. Obviously at some stage, if resources are unlimited, even the most ardent skeptic has to be able to foresee that the cannon would not shatter. However without enough cutting edge materials knowledge, I comfort myself that since the 11th century humankind has been facing the challenge of making guns, cannons and barrels to withstand explosions. With such a wealth of painstaking development over literally nearly a thousand years, it is in my humble opinion very daft to abandon such a challenge and resort to what Orion is proposing: surfing the wave! That is riding the plate's ricochet.

I understand why this route has been taken. However my gut feeling is that first explosion can be contained no matter how overwhelming it appeared to its makers. Indeed my sense of urgency is that I do not feel safe living in a post MAD world, with so many assemblies that could potentially be used if politicians lose the peace, where the natural theory of "non use" is seen as madness. Hence there is a tangled web of belief we have created. Perhaps the biggest is that we are capable of sustaining indefinitely a world peace where humanity has evolved "mentally" beyond himself to reject their wholesale destructive use. The belief that a big war is now impossible is wrong. Its a sort of belief that holds true until the night before the all too predictable descent into hell - and then it will be too late to say "Shouldn't we be using these nukes in space?". That is the only natural theory of "non use" that "any planet, anywhere" really has upon entering the atomic age. It has to grasp that if it is to beat the survival odds. We haven't.

So it all goes back to your economics and your framework for returns on investment. Travel at speeds under the speed of light will never justify such investment, or at such low levels that the much needed value of profit would not guarantee the protection of a natural theory of "non use".

In the end I ask you this: If in the end we destroy ourselves completely through atomic conflict is it because:

1. God has no evolutionary design and it is quite to be expected that a planet reaching the atomic age will destroy itself given enough time.
2. Man created the false God of light speed, which God himself had not created and did not quite understand.

Supporters of Orion (Orioneers) need to start thinking of a "pusher-plate surrounded by a tube" to form the shape of a strong barrel or cannon". Imagine an army officer in the First World War describing his thousand ton heavy pounder as a "pusher plate with tube"? It is a cannon man!