Old cliches and space travel

[PB666]

I was watching the PBS space-time series the other day and one episode was on artificial gravity and sci-fi and of course we have the warp drive discuusion, and worm holes and sub space communication.

I should ask folks, if you are going to pull one of these things from a sci-fi program use the please use sci-fi theory tag so that we don't take it all too seriously. The Cannae drive discussion is bad enough.

Fake Gravity. So basically most sci-fi space movies have people walking around on decks as if they were on earth. Babylon 5 somewhat got it right. PBS space time shows the reason why your circle has to be a certain size to appear like surface interactions.

Each section is devided by topic so the wall of words is more windows of words.

Warp drive. We keep coming back to this one. I my opinion we can only, with modern technology, warp space to the tiniest degrees, its not suitable for space travel in any known form. Space is very big and you would need a drive capable of facilitating speeds near the speed of light to allow traveling betwen two stars in one lifetime. Star trek, Battlestar galactica, SG1, star wars, etc all are just stretching an idea to the extremes of unfeasibility.

Wormholes. SG1 is the big one here. So the basic precept is that now-ascendant beings created worm hole nuclei and carried them to far off worlds and put 100s into machines. You dial the machine and a wishing well pops up that you can walk through. The problem here, wormholes do appear to exist, but at present they appear to be quantum wormholes on the order of that scale and they apoear to 'open' for quantum time frames. The energy required for the human size worm hole is huge, really really huge. Space teavel would be more lik SG universe than SG1, and realist shows would not be very popular, cancelled in fact. Even so scooping plasma from a star with a busted up ship will not get you to the speed of light.

Sub-space communication. So basically quantum entanglement does apparently allow communication FTL, but the base problem is two communicating parties need a third party to provide them with entangled particles, so i cannot pick up an entagled particle and communicate with alpha centauri. Someone has to take half of a pair there. If the trip takes forty thousand years then both of us would need to keep our pairs stable. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, we would need to keep quantum pairs stable for hundreds of years. The nature of these pairs means I prolly wont be sharing hulu with my fellow centauri, more than likely it would be like 'arrived cetauri, survived report agian in 100 years'. The second issue here is that the sender needs to alert the recipient that he has altered the spin, so that the recpient knows to check the spin on his end. The only real way to do this is either send an EM signal or have preset checkins. And both parties would need two sets of entangled particles, one for sending and recieving, and both woukd need replicates for each bit sent. So the both line is sub-space requires stabilized pairs lots of them sets of pairs and preset communication times, at least one cycle ahead.

Transporters. Teleportation. Beam me up scottie. Quantum entanglement does allow for transferring of informatiom. There are so many technical problems here that span all of science.

1. There is not enough memory in all the world to hold the information contained in a soil nematode let alone a human.

2. You have to kill A to synthesize B. The last thing A is going to remember is being atomized 'oh, ____'. But on a more fundemetal note, individual A needs to be at 0K to fix his information, which basically killed him, and then he needs to be disintegrated without heating him up. and record every atom, every 3D location diwn to 1/10th of an angstrom, and the context, which in and of itself violates the hiesenberg uncertainty principle. This alone makes teleportation impossible. Life is made of complex electron bonds, particularly DNA, this is something you have to be absolutely perfect in recording, its not PCR, its building a DNA molecule from free radicals.

3. That information needs to be encoded in entangled pairs. sending the entangled pairs for a tobacco mosaic virus will probably require more entangle particles than human kind will ever be able to store in one place at a time.

4. You have all of A in a 3D matrix, but you need to read that matrix, so how do you know when to read.

5. Quantum mechanics does not allow reconstitution of the information. The individual would have to be frozen to 0k to assemble, the assembly is adding heat, basically adding free-radicals one at a time which then form parts of molecules then hole molecules, the heat would need to be released. And in the end you would have a frozen individual that was dead. Also, Any flaw in the assembly, for example DNA damage, could result in nonviable cells or rapidly progressing cancers. Life has a context, pretty much living is that context. Teleportation does not have a living context, the information for its context was living up until ciphering the information killed it....froze it and disintegrated it.

Terraforming. The genesis project, Spore, SG1. The problem with terraforming is that, as far as we can tell Earth like planet or precursors are rare. You cannot convince a nebula to create earth, that would require massive amounts of energy and alot of time, the first generally provided by super nova. earth like planets will have life, we can expect ediacara like biota on these worlds. Earth itself had life 3.8 billion years ago, shortly after the great bombardment phase had ended. if an earth like planet lacks life, its star is probably unstable.

For earth-like planets, we would not be terraforming, we would be chimerizing and hoping for the best. Those old life forms would become viruses and diseases to us as our life would be to them, and don't think otherwise. What we know now is that life is very hard to get rid of in totality. On earth it lives deep in the crust at the boundary of steam/water.

Terraforming a protoEarth is also not trivial. It would take 100s or 1000s of years of humans living in space, adding biota at the right times. The major problem, coal and shale, the great oxygenation event is associated with the burying of deoxygenated carbon. This is a process that takes time and lots of it. At the efficiency of about 1:1000 sunlight over restricted areas of the surface CO2 is converted to sugar and O2, the sugar is coverted to graphite and O2. To do it right someone needs to take the trees strip them of thier non carbon nutrients, cut them into rectangular objects and bury them deep underground replacing all oxygen. Then the whole thing needs to be heated and recompressed. Oxygen is what allowed complex animals to inrease thier encephalization quotient and ultimately facilitated humans.

Terraforming is possible, but neither quick or easy and requires an interstellar ship capable of carrying the templates for biota as well as keeping the colonist seeds alive.

Cryogenisis. Suspended animation. is possible for a broad spectrum of biota. Essentually you could freeze dry brine shrimp eggs and store them below -80 for an indefinite period and some would hatch. Doesn't work with humans. Our mylienated sheathing and neurons don't like ice. Restive states, we simply waste away, made worse by the lack of gravity in space. Low temperture stasis, we may sleep; viruses and bacteria will have a snack. Immune system does not function well at low tempertures. At 4C we can suspend cells but after a few days they start dying, RBCs are particularly prone to lysis after 3 days. The problem with LTS is that our fat and cell membranes like to be at body temperature, if we replaced these with omega fats we could do better. We need to keep immune intregrity up and intestnal integrity up. The problem with this is that these two systems are some of the most stemcell taxed systems in the body, so we woukd need to find a way of cloning, exactly, stem cells like paneth cells and replacing them.

Basically Sci-fi uses alot of scientific jargon to do that which is impossible for the grand scale stuff...

Moving massive mass

Getting across space

Rescuing people equipment from emergency sutuations