by Ben Bova
We pride ourselves on being “the literature of ideas.” But too many of us are locked into the past: the future we dream about is a juvenile’s dream—a juvenile of 1945, at that.
Instead of stepping into the real world and taking charge of it, as we should be doing, we sit back with still-yet-another version of a Doc Smith epic, or the latest heroic spasms of Conan the Kumquat.
And don’t you women snicker at the phallic fantasies of the men. Neither as writers nor as readers have you raised the level of science fiction a notch. Women have written a lot of books about dragons and unicorns, but damned few about future worlds in which adult problems are addressed.
Fandom stays firmly in the vanished remains of the old ghetto, like a tribe that clings to the ruins of an ancient city. We revel over the nonsense regurgitated in fan magazines when we should be pondering the ideas of Rene Dubos or Hans Bethe.
Now, all of this is fine, if that’s what you like. I’d be an ungrateful sonofabitch to insist that you must take your heads out of those yellowing pages and assume your rightful place in the real world.
The trouble is, you are bright, intelligent, vigorous, capable men and women. The real world needs you, needs your intelligence and dedication, and needs it now. There are not many like you. As Cyril Kombluth pointed out in “The Marching Morons,” there are more idiots out there than genuises. By far.
I can’t force you to become active in the world beyond the science fiction ghetto, so I’ve got to convince you that you should. The place where you are most needed, where you can make the most important contribution, is in the space program.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Arthur C. Clarke’s... and Robert A. Heinlein’s... and Willy Ley’s... and the words of many other writers.
When I first started reading science fiction, “flying to the Moon” was a popular way of saying that something is impossible. “Harry Truman has as much chance of beating Tom Dewey as he has of flying to the Moon.” Hearty laugh.
But the poets of that era—the science fiction writers— dreamed of going to the Moon. Writers such as Ley, and Heinlein, and Clarke showed that it could be done. They convinced the American people that it should be done.
By 1961 we had a President who accepted the challenge and led the American people to the Moon. Some of you may be old enough to remember that in 1961 we were far behind the Russians in space efforts. By 1969, a scant eight years later, we had raced ahead so far, so fast, that the Russians pretended they had never been interested in the Moon at all.
And we believed them! Our space technology reached the Moon so easily that many Americans fell for the delusion that it was all a big public relations stunt.
Even science fiction writers (some of them) thought that the space program had somehow lost its excitement, its romance, its poetry.
What had happened, of course, was that the poets had been shouldered aside by the engineers. Science fiction writers had helped to get the program started, but they could not do the actual technical work. I certainly would not want to ride in a rocket engineered by me! Getting to the Moon required engineers and astronauts, administrators and bureaucrats. Not poets.
So the science fiction writers stood on the sidelines and watched. Some refused to watch. Some became antagonistic. Brian Aldiss complained bitterly that American science fiction writers were “sucking up to NASA” and that this was ruining American science fiction. Barry Malzberg, on hearing that Spiro Agnew was in favor of going on to Mars, castigated the whole space program and everyone in it as tools of repression.
These were foolish statements, made under the passions of the moment. There is an old Russian story about a fox and a sparrow and a pile of manure that ends with the moral: It’s not always your enemies who put you in it, and it isn’t always your friends who get you out of it, but if you’re in it up to your neck the least you can do is keep your big mouth shut!
Because of the general backlash against space—a punishment, mind you, for being successful—the Nixon Administration was able to slice away at NASA’s funding. While Nixon himself smilingly greeted the first astronauts to return from the Moon, his White House aides were cutting the throat of the Apollo program. Apollo did not die; it was foully murdered.
If we had used our space capabilities through the decade of the 1970s as we had originally planned to, we would today be beaming energy from space to the Earth. We would be preparing to mine the Moon and the asteroids for the megatonnages of natural resources that have been waiting there untouched for four and a half billion years.
Instead, we have allowed our ambitions in space to dwindle to almost nothing. And our national economy, our prestige, our power, our standard of living, our own selfrespect, have all dwindled equally over the past decade.
Enemies of the space program say we should not spend so much money on space, as if we take cartloads of greenbacks up in rockets and leave them on the Moon. We do not spend a lot of money on the space program. I know that NASA’s budget of $5 billion per year looks huge. But consider the job that needs to be done.
Consider the fact that the Department of Defense spends $5 billion every two weeks. And the Department of Health and Human Services spends that much every nine days. Consider the fact that we, you and I, spend $7.5 billion per year on pizza, $18 billion on cigarettes, $40 billion on booze, and God knows how much on pot.
During the course of the Apollo program we spent $23 billion to reach the Moon. We got in return, not merely a few hundred pounds of rocks, but the team and the technology that can take us anywhere in the solar system that we wish to travel. During those same years the Federal government spent more than $500 billion on programs to help the poor. Who has been helped? There are more poor today than there were when those programs began. And the gap between rich and poor has widened, not narrowed.
Make no mistake about it. We need the energy and the natural resources that exist in space. Today, the world’s population is almost 4.5 billion. By the end of this century it will be at least 6 or 7 billion. Can you imagine the social turmoil, the political conflicts, the terrorism and wars of a world twice as crowded as we are today? A world with fewer natural resources, less food, less energy?
We must reach out to the wealth that waits in space and bring it safely here to Earth, to make everyone richer. Not a welfare system, where we slice a finite-sized pie of resources into smaller and constantly-smaller pieces until everyone starves. That is the politics of scarcity. It leads only to doom.
We have at our fingertips a new bonanza that will give us a hugely larger pie, so that everyone can share in abundance.
And that is why you are needed.
Science fiction fans can see the future more clearly than politicians and businessmen. It is up to you to convince them that our future lies in space.
“Ye are the light of the world... but men do not light a candle and put it under a bushel... let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works...”
All around this country, grass roots organizations are forming to support a stronger, more effective space program. These groups include the National Space Institute, the L-5 Society, the Planetary Society, the AIAA, the A AS, and many others.
I urge you to join these groups, to use your energy and intelligence—and your experience in organization—to help these grass-roots groups to build a powerful voice in favor of a truly vigorous space program.
And more.
Twenty years ago, the environmental movement was as small and scattered as the space movement is today. Now the environmentalists are a powerful political force. Unfortunately, most environmentalists tend to look at the space program with suspicion, if not outright hostility. This is a tragedy for both sides, because the long-range goal of both sides is exactly the same: we both want a clean, green, safe planet Earth, a home world for humankind that is a good place to live on.
We must bridge these gaps of mistrust and misunderstanding between the environmental
ists and the space enthusiasts. We must prove to our political and business leaders that either we reach into space or we collapse here on Earth and sink into decay.
You can help.
It is time you lifted your faces from those fantasies of the future and got to work here in the present. We build our future by what we do—or fail to do—today. Now. Here.
The future begins today. Let us build together the kind of future that we all want to live in. And let us start now.
It’s Right Over Your Nose
I do a good deal of lecturing around the country, on a number of topics. I like to spring this one on astronomy groups. It’s an old conundrum among astronomers and cosmologists: “If the universe truly holds many intelligent life forms, why have we not found any evidence of their existence?” This essay shows that we have. It takes a fairly detailed understanding of modern astronomy to find the weak points in my argument. Sometimes, I almost convince myself!
All right, so we believe that there could be older, smarter races out among the stars. Maybe they’ve even visited here. Perhaps they’re watching us with some gentle amusement as we sweat over our dinky little shuttle missions and Voyager probes.
When are we going to get some evidence about these alien races—some cold, hard facts that show they really exist?
Many astronomers and cosmologists will give you statistics. They’ll state that out of the billions and billions of stars in the universe, even if intelligent races arose on only one out of every hundred billion, there would still be a huge number of intelligent aliens out there. But we’re not interested in statistics and speculation now. We’re after evidence—something we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell.
And we want the evidence now, for us, not our descendants.
For years, astronomers have searched the stars for intelligent signals with radio telescopes. There are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Unless intelligence is very commonplace, the chances of getting to chat with alien creatures on the radio during our own lifetimes are very slim at best.
All right. Somebody’s out there—we hope. But probably not close enough to reach by interstellar phone. So we run smack into the starflight problem again. If we have any hope of seeing or hearing them, either they have to get close enough to make at least a radio contact or we have to go out and find them.
Maybe they are out there, flitting around among the stars, but we just don’t know it. Maybe we’ve actually seen their starships without realizing it. What would a starship look like, from Earth?
Let’s try to construct a starship mentally and see if we can find anything in the heavens that fits the description. After all, we have some fairly decent telescopes and radio receivers. Maybe, if we know what to look for, we can come up with a hunk of evidence that shows they’re really out there.
We must assume that interstellar ships will be propelled by some form of rockets. We’re forced into this. No other propulsion system that we know of today can move a vehicle through space. Except solar sailing, in which you allow the minuscule pressure of starlight to push you along. But solar sailing is incredibly slow. It would take a ship hundreds of years to get from here to Pluto. Count it out as an interstellar propulsion system.
Perhaps a starship would have some form of propulsion that we don’t know about—antigravity, or something equally far out. But if we don’t know how it works, we don’t know what to look for. There could be a sky full of such ships and we’d never realize it.
So we’ll have to live with rockets.
Dr. Edward Purcell, a Nobel laureate in physics from Harvard University, tackled the very same problem some years ago. He worked out the mathematical foundations for interstellar flight; it is published in a book called Interstellar Communications (1963). But Dr. Purcell did the job in order to show that interstellar flight is not only impossible, it’s hogwash—pure and unadulterated!
He first pointed out that the best you could hope for was a speed of about 99 percent of the speed of light. Fine, we can accept that. As we saw in “Starflight,” relativity theory shows that you can’t go faster than light, but at speeds close to light speed there’s a time-stretching effect that allows you to cover enormous distances while hardly aging a moment. Combine that with cryogenically suspended animation during the dull portions of the trip, and you’ve got the possibility of exploring practically the whole known universe within a human lifetime.
But how do you get to that speed? Purcell showed that if you use nuclear fusion engines—even fusion engines that are 100 percent efficient—the rocket ship needs about 1.6 billion tons of propellant for every ton of payload. Billion. A bit uneconomical.
So Purcell looked into the possibilities of using an antimatter drive for the rocket.
Antimatter was first predicted theoretically, and then discovered in experiments involving huge particle accelerators—“atom smashers” such as cyclotrons and synchrotrons. Whereas a normal electron has a negative electrical charge, an antielectron has a positive charge and is called a positron. A normal proton carries a positive charge, an antiproton is negative. For every normal type of subatomic particle there is an antiparticle.
Antimatter has the interesting property of reacting violently when it contacts normal matter. Both the normal matter and antimatter are completely annihilated and transformed into energy.
In contrast, our hydrogen fusion reaction turns only 0.7 percent of the original hydrogen’s matter into energy. A matter-antimatter collision turns 100 percent of the material into energy.
So Purcell examined the possibilities of using matter-antimatter reactions to drive a starship. He found that you need “only” 40,000 tons of propellant—half of it antimatter—for every ton of payload.
But two other problems arise. First: how do you hold antimatter? It can’t touch any normal matter, or boom! Perhaps a strong magnetic field—a “magnetic bottle”— could do it. Second, the rocket exhaust of an antimatter drive would pour out some 1018 watts of gamma rays. That’s a billion billion watts of gamma radiation. This is more energy than the Sun lavishes on our Earth—and sunlight is far more gentle than gamma radiation. If you turned on that kind of engine, you’d bake Earth—or whatever planet you’re close to—to a fine dead ash.
Purcell concludes, “Well, this is preposterous.... And remember, our conclusions were forced on us by the elementary laws of mechanics.”
Preposterous? That’s his opinion. It would have been Leif Ericson’s opinion if one of his Viking cohorts had shown him the blueprints for a nuclear submarine. It would have been Orville Wright’s opinion if he had seen sketches of a swing-wing supersonic jet plane.
All that Purcell’s equations really show is that starships should be bulky—huge. And as for radiating 1018 watts— marvelous! That kind of light bulb should be visible over long distances and help us to find starships, if they’re out there. It’s probably safe to assume that anyone smart enough to build a starship might also be smart enough to coast away from planetary neighborhoods before lighting up his main engines.
And, of course, the Bussard interstellar ramjet gets around the propellant problem almost entirely.
But there’s another consideration that leads to the conclusion that anyone’s starship is going to be huge—the time problem.
All starflights are going to be one-way trips, in a sense. Thanks to the time-dilation effect at near the speed of light, you can cover thousands of light-years in the subjective twinkling of an eye, but when you return to your home world, thousands of years will have elapsed there. Even in a very, very stable society, things would have changed so much that you’d be out of place. And even if your friends have tremendous life-spans, either they would be so different from you when you return as to be virtual strangers or they would be the biggest bores in the galaxy. People change, and cultures change, over the millennia.
So interstellar voyages are going to be one-way voyages, in effect—unless our concept of the universe is glaringly wro
ng.
This means that a starship will become all the home that its crew ever knows. Which, in turn, means that the crew’s family is going to be aboard. The ships will be little cities of their own—and maybe not so little, either. For just as the Old Testament patriarchs begat new generations, interstellar families are going to grow.
Several thinkers have mentioned in the past that a hollowed-out asteroid might make a good spaceship. Why not consider a larger body, something the size of the Moon or Mars? There would be plenty of room for families and cargo, and lots of hydrogen fuel locked away in the planet’s bulk. All the natural resources of a full-sized world would be right there. Sure, the planet-ship would be getting smaller all the time, but you could probably pick up other unpopulated chunks in your travels. In fact, the moons of ice-giant planets such as Jupiter might well be perfect fuel tanks for interstellar ships—little more than fat balls of hydrogen ice.
The starship crew would have to live underground when they’re in between stars, but they’d have to live indoors in a factory-built ship anyway. At least, on a reasonable-sized planet, when they got close enough to a warm star they could come outdoors just as soon as their atmosphere thawed out.
The propulsion system that pushes a moderate-sized planet through interstellar space at relativistic speeds (close to light speed) would have to be so powerful that it boggles the imagination. As we’ve already seen, it staggered at least one Nobel Prize winner. But it’s not beyond the known laws of physics! Certainly, we can’t build such a rocket engine now; but there’s no fundamental law of physics that says it’s impossible to build such an engine.
All right, now we know what to look for. At least, we think we know one of the things that we might want to look for. Is there anything resembling a planet-sized starship, using fusion or antimatter rockets, within sight of our telescopes?
Well, what would it look like through a telescope?