New Concept of Interstellar Spaceship
Dear Friends,
Please read the following article on a new concept of an
interstellar spaceship. It would cost $20 trillion, our gross
national product of 20 years, and take 10,000 years or 300
generations to reach one of the very closest planets on a
neighboring star system.
Think about it.
Of course, you and I are interested in starship design.
Frankly, here is a realistic one. We could really do it. However.
It just makes you realize several things:
(1) How precious and rare our earth is! All other
conceivable places in the universe are literal hells. How
homesick we would be after having traveled out for a few
years on such a journey. And when we got there, what a
disappointment. Far greater than Columbus felt. The place would
be far worse than Antarctica. At least there you can breathe the
frigid air.
(2) How precious each human being is, and life itself is!
Since the Big Bang, our constituent stardust traveled for aeons
before it could collect itself as this earth, and then eventually
constitute life, and then intelligent life. Yet we look at one
another, at other human beings, as scum, as vermin. We ignore
and mistreat and abuse, worse, exterminate one another. If you
traveled for 10,000 years and then found no one, how much you
would long for even the vilest wretch on earth.
(3) How precious our time is! Think about traveling for ten
thousand years to visit a hoped-for planet, expecting to find
life, and indeed you found intelligent life, but they persecuted
you and kicked you off the planet. You were unwelcome there.
That's what God felt like, working and waiting and yearning for
umpteen millennia, to finally send a righteous true man or
woman, and he was crucified, and He had to kick off, and travel
for two thousand more years. Seventy more generations. It seems
like we forgot the purpose of the latest journey we set off on
2,000 years ago. Now the time has come again, and we have
landed, and what a precious time this is, once in a millennium.
No. Much rarer. Finally the one and only time has come.
Read.
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Interstellar Spaceship Design
January 18, 1999
By Kenneth Chang
ABCNEWS.com
Length: 1.2 miles. Passenger capacity: 1 million people. Cruising
speed: 1.3 million mph. Cost: $20 trillion. These are the general
specifications of an interstellar spaceship drawn up by Steven
Kilston, a staff consultant at Ball Aerospace & Technologies in
Boulder, Colorado. Oh, and the launch date? Sometime in the 26th
century.
While the ideas of Kilston - an undergraduate research student
of the late Carl Sagan at Harvard University in the mid-1960s -
are fanciful, they aren't utter fantasy. Kilston manages
brainstorming efforts at Ball for NASA's proposed Terrestrial
Planet Finder, a space-based telescope that would be able to
spot Earth-size planets around nearby stars.
The high-powered telescope won't get off the ground for decades,
but Kilston recalls, "One of my thoughts was, 'If we find a
planet, what are we going to do about it?'"
In his spare time, Kilston drew up plans for an interstellar
spaceship, which he simply calls, "The Project."
Hardly Sleek
It looks like a big, flying, spinning can.
Presenting his ideas at a meeting of the American Astronomical
Society in Austin, Texas, earlier this month, Kilston says that
while the project would involve many technological advances, it
doesn't require any fictional fabrications such as "hyperspace"
or "warp drive."
Talking with colleagues at Ball and elsewhere, Kilston tried to
make some reasonable extrapolations of modern-day technology and
resources. "I realized this wasn't such an impossible task, as
many of us had been led to believe," he says.
For example, it currently costs $10,000 to send a pound of stuff
into orbit. He anticipates in a century or so, that cost will drop
between $1 and $10. Asteroids or the moon could be mined for
minerals and water.
Not Too Fast, Either
One important choice: the spaceship would travel at speeds far
slower than the speed of light. First, accelerating a big object
to near-light speeds takes a lot of energy. Second, if you run
into anything while traveling that fast, it would cause a lot of
damage. Hitting a grain of sand while traveling at 1/10th the
speed of light is equivalent of blowing up a ton of TNT. "I don't
want to go near light speed," Kilston says. "I'd bump into things
too hard." Kilston's proposed 1.3 million mph traveling speed is
just 1/500th of the speed of light. At 1/500th of the speed of
light, it would take 500 years to travel one light-year, or
10,000 years to reach a star 20 light-years away.
One-Way Journey
That's why The Project is so big: a traveling space colony more
than a spaceship. A journey spanning 300 generations requires a
stable, vibrant mini-civilization.
Rotating once a minute would simulate gravity approximately equal
to Earth's. With 10 decks of living quarters, the square footage
would be twice that of Manhattan.
That averages out to a 30-by-40-foot space for each of the 1
million inhabitants. The top deck, with its view of the center
of the spaceship, could include ballparks, concert halls,
amusement parks.
"You don't want to have a life like in Manhattan," Kilston says.
"You want to have a better life than that."
But the technological hurdles, Kilston readily admits, aren't
small. The biggest probably would be the engines. Kilston
imagines some sort of powerful fusion rockets.
Even at the Project's relatively slow speeds, speeding the
spaceship up at the beginning of the voyage and slowing it down
at its destination would consume more than 99.9 percent of its 8
million tons of hydrogen fuel. Powering the ship and keeping its
1 million people alive and happy for 10,000 years would take
only the remaining 0.1 percent.
Time Line of The Project
2000 - People ponder interstellar travel. Basic research, a Mars
colony lays the foundation.
2100 - A detailed design for an interstellar spaceship is created
2200 - Prototypes of the fusion engines, repair robots and other
technologies are built and tested.
2300 - The 100 million tons of material necessary are gathered
and construction begins.
2400 - The completed spaceship takes a century-long test cruise
through the solar system.
2500 - The Project departs for New Earth, scheduled to arrive
somewhere around the year 12,500 A.D.
Long-Term Planning
Assembling this behemoth spaceship wouldn't happen overnight.
The time line Kilston has sketched stretches over five centuries,
including two centuries for design, one century for construction
and one century for test driving the spaceship through the solar
system.
In the fast pace of the modern world, it's hard to conceive
starting something that one won't finish, but Kilston points to
other great projects in human history - Egypt's pyramids,
Europe's cathedrals - that spanned lifetimes. "Some of the large
cathedrals in Europe took longer than 500 years to build,"
Kilston says. "Even though they knew they and their children and
their grandchildren would never see them finished, they would
still be willing to work on these cathedrals, because they
thought it was valuable."
Just embarking on such a grandiose project could help unify the
world. "Children get very enthused about it," Kilston says. "If
we have a project, we have much more teamwork and optimism for
the future."
Even in science, where researchers stress that progress comes in
little steps and "breakthrough" is usually hype, it's still
inspiring to dream the big, distant dreams.
Alien Rights?
Distant technology aside, there are also ethical quandaries about
expanding to other planets, even if they don't have intelligent
life on them.
"Do microbes have rights?" says Jill Tarter, senior program
scientist of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA, who read
through Steven Kilston's poster about his interstellar spaceship
at the American Astronomical Society meeting. "Perhaps he hasn't
given a whole lot of thought about that question, that
potentially habitable worlds are probably inhabited. Assuming
there's no intelligent species to speak up for themselves, can
we simply march in and eradicate that planet's biology and
substitute ours?
"I'm not sure," she says. "I think that's an ethical discussion."
But she liked reading Kilston's proposal: "I have a lot of
conflicting thoughts about it, but I'm glad someone has taken a
look at it."
SUMMARY
An aerospace engineer has sketched ideas for a spaceship to
carry a million people to another star.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
If an spaceship were leaving tomorrow for a 10,000-year trip to
colonize another star system, would you go?
Yes, it'd be a worthy adventure, even if I won't get there.
No, I like the planet I'm on.
I'll wait for the Star Trek warp drive.
"One of my thoughts was, 'If we find a planet, what are we going
to do about it?'" -- Steven Kilston, Ball Aerospace
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