Star Travel is for Every One

You may be asking yourself “what is in it for me?” The answer is short and sweet. To reach the stars within your life-time and to see your children one day regard it as a common enough trip – such as travelling to Spain or New York. “So that does that mean in 20 years or so?” you may then ask. No, if all development stops were pulled out and because of the ensuing “land-grab” or race to the stars I am talking about you being there in 5 years from now. That is if the politicians stopped cooking the planet, the scientists stopped blocking the truth and the world in general was just plain lucky. Of course you may think this hope of such a fantastic journey being available to each and every one of us just a sickly joke. What is no joke is the legacy capacity of a lethal cocktail of nuclear weapons from the Cold War with the potential to destroy our civilisation 3 times over. With that in mind, what you offer your children may be a simple black and white future. Choose to think ahead of the regret you would feel for mankind if you were one of the lucky survivors of a nuclear Armageddon. Was it inevitable?

This book puts together a collection of thought concluded before discovering the history of Project Orion (1957-1965). The book of that title by George Dyson clearly outlines the strength of conviction by top atomic scientists after WWII that mankind’s only future in the heavens was atomic, not chemical. A happy coincidence of not wishing to search the Internet for information on atomic star flight, for fearing of drawing unwanted attention to my interest, I did not discover this resource early on. Thus I relied on the project work I remembered from my Los Alamos study of the construction of the atomic bomb while 16 years old. My job is now to weave together these two approaches, theirs and mine. There are considerable differences in approaches but the preparedness of these early pioneers to suggest only a ground launch and subsequent contamination of the atmosphere sharply reduces development time. If this perhaps only one-off measure was allowed, the target of mass colonisation of the stars beginning at the end of 5 years is a realistic proposition.

However my approach is not as a scientist, but as a social and economic historian. In certain areas I have been forced to generate some mathematical theories to explain why faster than light travel and gravitational relativities are for me at least certainties. I leave it for better mathematicians and physicists to expand on the arguments, perhaps within string theory or whatever fashion. A vital part of my job is to recognise where certain things are beyond me and to defend those things I know to be inherently true. Time and again I will return to the argument of a social and economic historian. Yes, you may tell me such and such details, backed up by quoting the famous personalities of physics. But this world is run by politicians who are perhaps not evolving at the rate of intelligence that science is. Karl Marx is associated with the term “crisis of capitalism” to describe the years in which a world turns to war, leaving the peaceful ups and downs of the economic cycle. As a social scientist, I want to know what an opposing scientist thinks the future of mankind is in the long term given all the nuclear weapons we have.  Often the answer is “mankind’s self-destruction” because “politicians control the world”. Wrong. The answer is “mankind’s self destruction because scientists tell the politicians how the world can be controlled”. But despite inviting the hostility of the majority of physicists alive, I will challenge Einstein’s theory of relativity. Not as an academic exercise, but to hope that with a bit of luck a spark may be lit to see the error of our ways before it is too late.

Star Travel is for Every One continued

One thing beyond me is the visualisation of how a ground launch would work within the containment of a nuclear explosion I propose. My conceptual work on the behaviour of massive forces in space that atomic testing would unleash, before I discovered Project Orion, cannot be easily adapted to the ground launch model. Better scientists that I can do that. Therefore some of my arguments against the fallacy of a pusher plate may be wrong in respect to a ground launch. But that is only the start of the journey. If putting 500 ton cannon into orbit to begin containment testing can be done via the original Orion design, then so be it. Indeed I have argued that any testing on earth because of gravity, atmospheric pressure and the lack of vacuum would likely prove containment to be impossible. As for speed and acceleration factors that make a functioning ship take you to the nearest circumference of stars within a matter of weeks, again I admit my scientific model is elementary. Much of this book is therefore about explaining how and why history shows that scientists can get it fantastically wrong when tackling the big theological issue in life: principally the relationship between the earth and the sun.

The stakes are however very high. If scientists tell the politicians that it cannot be done, then our leaders will seek out the best next alternative to offer the nations that elect them. If we cannot look out to the stars to conquer them, but can only look inwards instead, history shows we will eventually fight a much bigger war than WWII. Part of my “lucha” (struggle) is to argue that this is not inevitable and that the error is in scientific reasoning rather than to be found in some intangible goal of evolution in human intelligence. Social and economic history does not recognise any such significant evolution over short periods of time (centuries) and as such it is unscientific to place any faith that we are evolving a global system of behaviour beyond a “crisis of capitalism”. This is my science and so with a will not wilt I declare we must as a species we must “fly or fry”. Neither my hand nor yours is upon the tiller. Indeed Marxism would argue that no one’s is since our class struggles (or competing and different peoples seeking a better life) determine history. The tiller is thus in the hands of the scientific community, so I hope this collection of words will open new doors to research and bind together sufficient interest to stop the resource hungry madness of the moment dragging us to global nuclear war.