{"id":7244,"date":"2012-10-24T13:33:20","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T18:33:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=7244"},"modified":"2012-10-29T14:39:25","modified_gmt":"2012-10-29T19:39:25","slug":"why-we-may-never-get-to-alpha-centauri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=7244","title":{"rendered":"Why We May Never Get to Alpha Centauri"},"content":{"rendered":"

(sung to the glam tune of The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys<\/em>)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week, astronomers announced that Alpha Centauri B may have an earth-sized planet in tight orbit<\/a>. Space enthusiasts were ecstatic, because the Alpha Centauri triplet (a close binary, Alpha A and Alpha B, circled by Proxima) is the closest star system to ours at a distance of 4.3 light years. The possible existence of such a planet buttresses the increasing evidence that planetary systems form around every possible configuration: in particular, binary systems had been traditionally discounted as too unstable to maintain planets. Terms like \u201cin our back yard\u201d and \u201cstone\u2019s throw\u201d were used liberally and many expressed the hope that the discovery might spur a space exploration renaissance.<\/p>\n

As with many such discoveries, the caveats extend from here to Proxima. The planet\u2019s existence has been inferred by the primary\u2019s wobble, rather than from direct observation. This means that independent confirmation will be required to pronounce it definitively real. The lifespan of such a planetary system remains an open question. The specifics of the system (including the reason that a wobble was detectable) suggest that the planet, if present, is closer to Alpha B than Mercury is to the sun \u2013 which in turn means that it would be tidally locked, awash with the primary\u2019s radiation and too hot for liquid water. Last but decidedly not least, it would take us about eighty thousand years to get there with our current propulsion systems. Depending on one\u2019s definition, eighty thousand years exceed the entire length of human civilization by a factor of two to ten.<\/p>\n

So besides the fully justified calls for an immediate robotic probe mission, cue the \u201csolutions\u201d of FTL, warp drive and uploading in addition to those within the realm of the possible (nuclear fusion, light sails, long generation ships\u2026 I\u2019m even willing to put Bussard ramjets in this bin). Lest you think such suggestions pop up only on places like io9<\/em> or singularitarian lists, I assure you that talk tracks examining such scenarios with totally straight faces were entertained at both last year\u2019s<\/a> and this year\u2019s Starship Symposium. The warp drive scenario got a boost when a NASA-linked lab announced that they thought they could sorta kinda fold space<\/a>\u2026 if they could get enough strange matter (as in: a few stellar masses\u2019 worth) and manage to stabilize it beyond the usual nanosecond life length. Then again, a NASA-linked lab gave us the \u201carsenic bacteria\u201d cowpat<\/a>, so nothing of this kind surprises me any longer.<\/p>\n

Science fiction has been the entry portal for many scientists and engineers. The sense of wonder and discovery that permeates much of SF makes people dream \u2013 and then makes them ask how such dreams can become real. The problem arises when science fiction is confused or conflated with real science, engineering and social policy. When that happens, our chances of ever reaching Alpha Centauri decrease steeply, for at least two reasons: the fantasies make people impatient with\/contemptuous of real science and technology; and when this pseudo-edginess substitutes for real science, you get real disasters. The recent sentencing of six Italian geoscientists<\/a> to years in jail for \u201cfailing to predict\u201d an earthquake with casualties speaks to both these points. So does the story of the Haida community<\/a> that allowed a \u201cbusinessman\u201d to dump tons of iron into its coastal waters, based on his assurance it would improve conditions for its salmon fisheries. The resulting potentially lethal algal bloom has become visible from space.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Propulsion systems are an obvious domain where fiction (and the understandable fond wish) is still stronger than fact, but there are others. One is using space opera terraforming paradigms for geoengineering. (\u201cStan Robinson did it in the Mars trilogy, why not us?\u201d) Another is using cyberpunk novels to argue for economic solutions \u2013 think of Greenspan\u2019s belief in Rand\u2019s \u00dcbermenschen fantasies. More recently, Damien Walter, a Guardian<\/em> columnist, earnestly urged<\/a> the head of the British Labour party to bypass austerity and resource limitations by\u2026 implementing ideas from Banks, Stross and Doctorow (Walter also wrote a column about women writing hard SF and used a man as his star example; between him and Coren<\/a>, it looks like elementary reasoning is not a particularly strong suit at the Guardian<\/em>). Commenters added Herbert\u2019s Dune<\/em> to the list, using swooning terms about the politics and policies it portrays. (\u201cBanks\u2019 Culture does it, why not us?\u201d) Just intone \u201c3-D printing!\u201d or \u201cMe Messiah!\u201d over a rock pile, with or without Harry Potter\u2019s wand, and hey-presto: post-scarcity achieved, back to toy universes and customized sexbots! I won\u2019t go over the semi-infinite transhumanist list (uploading, genengineering for \u201cvirtue\u201d etc), having done so before<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A related problem that looks minor until you consider social feedback is the persistent mantra<\/a> that SF has been forced willy-nilly to become inward-gazing and science-illiterate because… reality moves too fast, thereby instantly dating predictive fiction. Much of this is justification after the fact, of course \u2013 writers \u201cmust focus on maintaining their online presence\u201d so who has time for background research? \u2013 but the basal argument itself is invalid. There\u2019s exactly one domain that\u2019s moving fast: technology that depends on computing speed, although it, too, is approaching a plateau due to intrinsics. To give you an example from my own field, I\u2019ve worked on dementia for more than twenty years. During this time, although we have learned a good deal (and some of it goes against earlier \u201ccommon sense\u201d assumptions, such as the real role and toxicity of tangles and plaques) we have not made any progress towards reliable non-invasive early diagnosis of dementia, let alone preventing or curing it. The point here is not that we never will, but that doing so will require a lot more than the mouth farts of stage wizards, snake-oil salesmen or pseudo-mavens.<\/p>\n

When faced with these facts, many people fall back to the Kennedy myth: that we went to the moon because of the vision of a single man with the charisma and will to make it reality. Ergo, the same can be done with any problem we set our sights on but for those fun-killin\u2019 Luddites who persist on harshing squees (file this under \u201cunclear on concepts\u201d and \u201cperpetual juvenility\u201d). Messianic strains aside, there were very specific reasons that made the Apollo mission a success: it was tightly focused; it had no terrestrial repercussions; it was the equivalent of gorilla chest-beating, another way of establishing dominance vis-\u00e0-vis the USSR; and it was done in an era when US was flush with power and confidence \u2013 the sole actor involved in WWII not to have suffered enormous devastation of its home ground. The outcomes of \u201cwar on cancer\u201d, \u201cwar on drugs\u201d and \u201cwar on terrorism\u201d (to just name three of many) illustrate how quickly or well such an approach works when applied to complex long-range problems with constellations of consequences.<\/p>\n

Mind you, as a writer of space opera I\u2019m incorrigibly partial to psionic powers and stable wormholes (in part because they\u2019re integral to mythic SF). And the possible existence of a planet in the Alpha Centauri system is indeed a genuine cause for excitement. But I know enough to place the two in separate compartments, though they\u2019re linked by the wish that one day we have propulsion systems that let us visit Alpha Centauri in person, rather than by proxy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n


\nSelected related articles<\/strong>
\nThe Double Helix: Why Science Needs Science Fiction<\/a>
\nSF Goes MacDonald\u2019s: Less Taste, More Gristle<\/a>
\nMiranda Wrongs: Reading Too Much into the Genome<\/a>
\n\u201cArsenic\u201d Life, or: There is TOO a Dragon in my Garage!<\/a>
\nThe Charlatan-Haunted World<\/a>
\n
\nImages:<\/strong> 1st, Alpha Centauri A and B seen over the limb of Saturn (JPL\/NASA); 2nd, the algal bloom in the NW Pacific after the iron dump (NASA\/Wikimedia Commons); 3rd, real science: The Curiosity Mars rover (Maas Digital LLC\/National Geographic)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(sung to the glam tune of The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys) Last week, astronomers announced that Alpha Centauri B may have an earth-sized planet in tight orbit. Space enthusiasts were ecstatic, because the Alpha Centauri triplet (a close binary, Alpha A and Alpha B, circled by Proxima) is the closest star system to ours […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10,13,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology-and-culture","category-science","category-science-fiction","category-space-exploration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}