Introduction

This book gives a simple solution to the biggest problem mankind has ever faced. It argues that there is nothing inevitable about climate change or global wars. It was no labour of love to deliver this final product for you, the public, to read. Rather it demanded a painstaking effort to convert essays, jottings and internet postings into a hopefully digestible product. By offering you this opportunity to come to terms with my arguments, my vision for collective human survival becomes a shared burden.

The great news is the suns which we see at night and call stars could be comfortably reached in 3 days. That is by means of a correctly designed spaceship. The bad news is that population pressures and manufacturing capabilities mean that countries such as China will be the great colonisation powers. There is plenty of other bad news that has delayed at times my will to publish this book. However the final moral choice is between permitting the Chinese or “Mongolian Hordes” to over-run “white civilisations” on other planets or allowing our world destroy its own billions by thermonuclear war. The historical assumptions found in the golden period of 1950s science fiction was that colonisation of the stars was the destiny for Europeans and North Americans. So immediately distance yourself from that. The reader should realise there is an obligation to compromise with the economic and political realisms of the age.

Of course this book is all hypotheses. My grand speculations must tread a delicate line between pseudo-scientific nonsense, classified nuclear secrets, racial clap-trap and conspiracy theories. However it is not for dispute that the legacy of the nuclear arms from the Cold War arms race bestows the means and capacity to destroy our world 3 times. The horrific day after, assuming survivors, will not be a practical moment to begin reflection on how mankind got it wrong. This book has been a painstaking effort to compile, because it is written against the back-drop of that threat. There are things within that are going to be said against peoples, races, religions, governments and scientific theories. Scientific theories so hallowed as to be as near religions as modern scientific man will allow.

Your only requirement is to benefit from this book is a will to believe there is a better future. The science within this book is only discussed within easy reach of basic history and uses comparative values to make its point. The future is where mankind in only a decade can well commute within the stars as easily as between New York and London. I ask you to suspend disbelief on 1 point only. There are a number of scientific arguments covered that require you to understand why “Project Orion”, a recently declassified project published by Penguin books, was a false start. The essential point is to understand there is a minimum size to a nuclear explosion that cannot be reduced any further. For the purposes this book, you must expel from your mind any thoughts that the nuclear “hand-grenade” would ever exist. “Critical mass” is the weight of the Uranium at which when brought together it will explode, with the force of Hiroshima. It is of no value to entertain speculation that smaller explosions can be created with advances in technology; such theories are contrary to effective understanding of this book’s solution. If you can do that, I can give you the stars.

Otherwise nuclear arms control begun in the middle of the Second World War leaves even the most highly educated with a mix of confused messages. That has created seriously muddled thinking on the subject of basic nuclear physics, shared by the great majority. That is especially when it comes to the practical use of this invention to explore the unlimited wealth of our galaxy and this universe. It is not the purpose of this book to clear up these mixed messages. Nor should such general confusion matter provided you faithfully stick to and observe my explanation on “critical mass”. It will become clearer in discussion around the topic of a “pusher-plate” why reducing the theoretical size of the atomic explosion leads to is an impassable trap.

By careful steering around the rocks of nuclear secrecy, I will explain why such secrecy has resulted in some theories being perceived as facts. When they are not facts but still theories! There are is also one very common nuclear fact that is totally untrue, but it will not be necessary to mention that again in the book. Such an almighty lie in the interests of nuclear non-proliferation, despite my reservations on how it distorts the path of history, is not to be revealed. Provided you remain faithful to the basic scientific fact that critical mass cannot be reduced in size to create smaller explosions, your judgment on the issues of application and development will not be compromised by a lack of any privileged information.

Imagine for the moment a use of a time machine that can carry the first Uranium detonation in the Los Alamos desert in 1945 back into the new millennium. You know nothing other than this first peaceful test in the desert has proved to mankind that this exciting new discovery releases a huge amount of energy. You have the equation E=MC2 that tells you that no oxygen is required to create such a powerful fire. It is completely self-contained. This book will explain how application of this new technology in outer space is what we now know as a “green technology”. Powerful radiation is harmlessly cast into the depths of space via explosion where lethal solar radiation is simply the natural state of affairs in such an environment. With that we travel.

The reader should not imagine himself, if not yet at retirement age, to be excluded as a future traveller to the stars. Developing the atomic propulsion system and manufacturing the spaceships will require a worldwide reduction in the production of consumer goods. That sacrifice now, of less overt consumption of unnecessary luxuries, will be rewarded by opportunities to visit new frontiers, discover new civilisations and new flora and fauna. It is however perhaps necessary to remind ethical visionaries that the Star Trek “Prime Directive” ideology means nothing because of the practical population pressures. I refer to the “Mongolian hordes”, not out of disrespect to the Chinese but to rather acknowledge the power in the C13 when Europe cowered under the threat. However popularly Star Trek represents fantasy of science-fiction, there is an undertone of “white supremacy”. That is governing a galaxy benignly still presupposes Caucasian Whites will be supreme in the conquest of space, as it was in the golden era of such fantasy literature in the 1950s. The manufacturing capacities and population pressures in our modern world mean that it will be countries such as China that decide what if any “ethical vision” governs the colonisation of the stars.

Introduction continued

The moral dilemma is whether “to leave the living peoples of other world’s to their own devices” or sacrificing our own planet of billions in an undateable but inevitable global thermonuclear war. If reaching the stars in 3 days of comfortable flight should seem like mere idle fantasy, the reader might remind himself that nuclear Armageddon on a happy sunny day might appear pure fantasy as well. However the latter is an accepted fact of our technological progress, so nightmarish we naturally reject both fantasies, good and bad. If the bad fantasy ever comes to pass, there will be no second chance of “public enquiries” or “democratic decisions” to censor the academics, scientists and politicians over an incorrectable development. All action is this case is too late.

Despite this alarm, the content within cannot attempt to correct the moral view of society. Rather it must occasionally bring morality and ethics into the fray for the purposes of useful comparison. Political power is something that the majority of us view on news reports. Religion is something we are often rightly suspicious of or simply follow because we were born into this or that country.

The reaching of the stars and the colonising of them is not going to diminish “ethical conflicts”. Science fiction will always contain rich veins of “social engineering”, racial stereotypes and elements of racial supremacy. It is so because the world is composed of many different races spread across many geographical units known as countries. In the First World War, millions died fighting over a few hundred kilometres of territory. In the practical challenge to reach the stars, all such “ethical conflicts” or “racial tensions” will be reproduced by the competing nuclear powers set out to conquer such worlds. Taking such conflict into the stars is not such a bad thing. It will certainly not be eliminated as only the production of film and TV entertainment can portray with “artistic license”. In the real world the technological capacity to reach thousands of stars within a matter of weeks would result in a spectacular land-rush. There is little point in predicting the governing ethics of such colonisation prior to the fact. Each earth nation capable of planting its flag on any new world would have to develop its own political policies, enlightened or not. Moralists should not condemn too quickly some perhaps unavoidable “white supremacy” undertones in a unique scientific horizon, star exploration and colonisation. Not without also acknowledging the reality of such new invention is also a likely to be a surrendering of dominion to a new Chinese Superpower in space.

This book is therefore written with a heavy-heart. A moral decision has been made to condemn an estimated 80% of the stars first reached to non-white rule. My sympathy with the Star Trek concepts of “First Directives” of a benevolent bureaucracy of the galaxy imposing a law of non-interference on under-developed worlds is thus irrelevant. The Chinese and other nations with burgeoning populations are in the real world going to impose their own versions of “right and wrong” on foreign worlds. But I ask you this. Assuming the theory within this book is correct, and that the nearest stars can be reached within 3 days travel and thousands within weeks, should I not publish? Perhaps destroy my own work because my conclusions are not palatable to my own taste?

For many years, after turning over the alternative scenarios and technologies, the fact of a book in your hands means a final decision was made. Each evolution in the stages of modelling gave me another reason not to publish. There are so many: destroying other planetary civilisation, increasing the likelihood of nuclear conflict on earth, revealing nuclear secrets, writing technical gibberish that could not be understood, insulting dead scientists or revealing my own untameable prejudices. All of these dangerous elements cannot be excluded from this book, even after careful editing. The purpose of this book is thus paramount. To furnish an argument on how to reach the stars effectively, economically and within very reasonable time frames e.g. 3 days.

If you read this book, the technical answers are easy to understand but the sense of social mastery is missing. The very nature of my effort is to repress a natural instinct to conform to current social and scientific wisdoms. That is with one goal. That is the reaching of the stars within an “economically viable” time frame. The dispersal of human energy into space colonisation will avert global thermonuclear war. My method of doing this is by using social and economic history to pinpoint how and where we have assumed certain scientific facts to be unquestionable. This may outrage some scientists and also offend some people for an indelicate handling of moral issues.

However what I offer is both a warning and a solution. The warning is that whatever efforts of “climate control” or “peace-keeping” are made, remaining forever bound to this single planet is atomic genocide. The fantasy that there is sustainable global economic future, devoid of war, is mere wishful thinking brought about by the perception of circumstance. My solution is an amalgamation of my imagination and a cross-fertilisation of ideas made between science and the arts. I say 3 days to the nearest star, and I mean 3 days. Should you not wish to start to be convinced that this optimism is well-placed, I give you leave to close this page. Otherwise all the explanations how are contained within this book. I reiterate that the nuclear age is the very age of star flight.

Star Jump Science

Introduction

Introduction continued