Beyond: Our Future in Space

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Beyond: Our Future in Space Page 29

by Chris Impey


  6. The Proxmire incident was described in “Searching for Good Science: The Cancellation of NASA’s SETI Program” by S. J. Garber 1999. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 52, pp. 3–12. Bryan’s attack is described in “Ear to the Universe Is Plugged by Budget Cutters” by J. N. Wilford, in the New York Times on October 7, 1993, online at http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/07/us/ear-to-the-universe-is-plugged-by-budget-cutters.html.

  7. “That Time Jules Verne Caused a UFO Scare” by R. Miller, online at http://io9.com/that-time-jules-verne-caused-a-ufo-scare-453662253.

  8. “Where Is Everybody? An Account of Fermi’s Question” by E. Jones 1985. Los Alamos Technical Report LA-10311-MS, scanned and reproduced online at http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/la-10311-ms.pdf.

  9. More than fifty (mostly) plausible explanations for the “Great Silence” and the absence of contact are laid out in If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens . . . Where Is Everybody? by S. Webb 2002. New York: Copernicus Books.

  10. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe by P. D. Ward and D. Brownlee 2000. Dordrecht: Springer-Verlag.

  11. There’s a robust argument to be made for procrastination. In any field where the technology advances exponentially, the sum of all previous projects will be eclipsed by the next project. In astronomy, this was the case through the 1980s and 1990s as CCD detectors advanced in size and sensitivity so rapidly that each new survey greatly surpassed the one that preceded it. The same argument could be made currently for mapping genomes. The argument is facetious, and of course science progresses because scientists continue to try to advance knowledge without waiting for the better capability that’s imminent.

  12. Built in the early 1950s, the Arecibo dish is a formidable radio telescope. It’s so large that it’s not steerable; it just stares at a strip of sky that passes overhead. The dish is made of aluminum panels equal in area to a dozen football fields. The feed that detects the radio waves is suspended above the dish by three towers the size of the Washington Monument. Frank Drake likes to say that the dish could hold 100 million boxes of breakfast cereal or all the beer drunk on Earth in a single day.

  13. “The Great Filter—Are We Past It?” by R. Hanson 1998, an unpublished paper archived online at http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html.

  14. “Where Are They? Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Finds Nothing” by N. Bostrom 1998. MIT Technology Review, May/June, pp. 72–77.

  14: A Universe Made for Us

  1. Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge, ed. by D. Broderick 2006. Giza, Egypt: Atlas and Company.

  2. The evanescence of our civilization and cultural artifacts is sobering, given the technological prowess we exhibit. One book that conveyed this vividly was The World Without Us by A. Weisman 2007. New York: Picador. Weisman plays out a future where we cease to exist overnight and the infrastructure of human civilization decays and disappears with surprising rapidity. The Long Now Foundation swims against the dominant cultural trend by espousing “slower and better” over “faster and cheaper” and supporting projects with a millennial time frame. Most notably, its Clock of the Long Now is a mechanical timekeeping device designed to operate for 10,000 years without human intervention.

  3. Wired magazine, April 2006, online at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/posts.html?pg=4.

  4. The experiments on mice are being conducted by Mark Roth at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. See http://labs.fhcrc.org/roth/. Dog experiments have been done at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh. See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas_section4-21.html?_r=0.

  5. Cloning After Dolly: Who’s Still Afraid? by G. E. Pence 2004. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

  6. “Embryo Space Colonization to Overcome the Interstellar Time Distance Bottleneck” by A. Crowl, J. Hunt, and A. M. Hein 2012. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 65, pp. 283–85.

  7. “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations” by N. Kardashev 1964. Soviet Astronomy, vol. 8, p. 217. For his more recent work, see “On the Inevitability and Possible Structures of Supercivilizations” by N. Kardashev 1984, in The Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Recent Developments, ed. by M. G. Papagiannis. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 497–504.

  8. “The Physics of Interstellar Travel: To One Day Reach the Stars” by M. Kaku 2010, online at http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-interstellar-travel/.

  9. “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation” by F. J. Dyson 1960. Science, vol. 131, pp. 1667–68.

  10. “Fermilab Dyson Sphere Searches” using data from NASA’s IRAS satellite, with results quoted online at http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm.

  11. Universe or Multiverse? ed. by B. J. Carr 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also “Multiverse Cosmological Models” by P. C. W. Davies 2004. Modern Physics Letters A, vol. 19, pp. 727–44.

  12. The first fine-tuning argument was the fact that the age of a biological universe cannot be too short or too long, “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle” by R. H. Dicke 1961. Nature, vol. 192, pp. 440–41. Since then, the idea has been explored by a number of physicists, for example: Coincidences: Dark Matter, Mankind, and Anthropic Cosmology by J. Gribbin and M. Rees 1989. New York: Bantam. Also: The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? by P. Davies 2007. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. For a philosophical perspective, see A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology by A. McGrath 2009. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

  13. “Naturally Speaking: The Naturalness Criterion and Physics at the LHC” by G. F. Guidice 2008, in Perspectives on LHC Physics, ed. by G. Kane and A. Pierce. Singapore: World Scientific. See also Prof. Matt Strassler’s excellent primer online at http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-hierarchy-problem/naturalness/.

  14. “Eternal Inflation and Its Implications” by A. Guth 2007. Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Physical, vol. 40, no. 25, p. 6811.

  15. Impossibility: Limits of Science and the Science of Limits by J. Barrow 1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  16. “X-Tech and the Search for Infra Particle Intelligence” by H. de Garis 2014, from Best of H+, online at http://hplusmagazine.com/2014/02/20/x-tech-and-the-search-for-infra-particle-intelligence/.

  17. Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory by A. Turing 1951, reprinted in Philosophia Mathematica 1996, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 256–60. The von Neumann quote comes from Stanislaw Ulam’s “Tribute to John von Neumann” in the May 1958 Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, p. 5.

  18. “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” by N. Bostrom 2003. Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 211, pp. 243–55. The views of Kurzweil and Moravec are represented in their popular books, in particular The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by R. Kurzweil 2006. New York: Penguin; and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind by H. Moravec 2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Credits

  Figure 1 Creative Commons and Wikpedia/Ataileopard. Figure 2 Courtesy Elsevier and Chuansheng Chen/University of California Irvine. Figure 3 The scholar and academic skeptic Carneades, from the medieval book Nuremberg Chronicle.

  Figure 4 NASA History Division. Figure 5 A Treatise of the System of the World by Isaac Newton, published in 1728. Figure 6 NASA Great Images. Figure 7 Wikimedia Commons and Fastfission. Figure 8 Wikimedia Commons and Lokilech. Figure 9 Wikimedia Commons and Russian Federation. Figure 10 Mark Wade/Astronautix

  .com. Figure 11 U.S. Government/USAF. Figure 12 Roel van der Hoorn/NASA. Figure 13 NASA. Figure 14 Wikipedia Commons and David Kring/USRA. Figure 15 Wikimedia Commons and NOAA/Mysid. Figure 16 Chris Impey. Figure 17 Chris Impey. Figure 18 Wikimedia Commons and Kelvin Case. Figure 19 “Countdown Continues on Commercial Flight,” Albuquerque Journal. Figure 20 NASA/Regan Geeseman. Figure 2
1 SpaceX. Figure 22 NASA. Figure 23 U.S. Government/FAA. Figure 24 Wikimedia Commons and Nasa.apollo. Figure 25 NASA/Kennedy Space Center. Figure 26 Andrew Ketsdever. Figure 27 NASA/JPL. Figure 28 NASA. Figure 29 Wikimedia Commons and Aldaron. Figure 30 Matthew R. Francis. Figure 31 Planetary Habitability Laboratory/University of Puerto Rico. Figure 32 Postage stamp, Chinese State. Figure 33 Wikimedia Commons and Dave Rajczewski. Figure 34 Data source reports of Satellite Industry Association. Figure 35 Patrick Collins. Figure 36 NASA/Dennis M. Davidson. Figure 37 NASA. Figure 38 NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Figure 39 NASA/JPL/Caltech. Figure 40 NASA/John Frassanito and Associates. Figure 41 NASA. Figure 42 Christopher Barnatt/Explaining the Future.com. Figure 43 NASA/MSFC/D. Higginbotham. Figure 44 From Xenology: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of Extraterrestrial Life, Intelligence, and Civilization by Robert A. Freitas, Jr., 1979, Xenology Research Institute, Sacramento, California. Figure 45 Biosphere 2, College of Science, University of Arizona. Figure 46 NASA. Figure 47 NASA/JSC. Figure 48 Javiera Guedes. Figure 49 U.S. Government/LLNL. Figure 50 NASA. Figure 51 NASA. Figure 52 Wikimedia Commons and Picoquant. Figure 53 H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF. Figure 54 NASA. Figure 55 Wikimedia Commons and Fastfission. Figure 56 Chris Impey. Figure 57 Wikimedia Commons and Bibi Saint-Pol. Figure 58 Andrei Linde. Figure 59 Wikimedia Commons and Was a bee.

  Index

  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

  Page numbers starting with 265 refer to endnotes.

  Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

  Able (monkey), 47–48

  Aboriginal Australians, 8

  abstract thinking, 13–17, 18–19

  Abu Dhabi, UAE, 106

  Adams, Mike, 82

  adenine, 6

  Advanced Robotic Development Lab, 206

  aerodynamics, 26, 66–73, 82–83

  aesthetic judgment, 15

  A4 rocket, 33

  Africa, 15–16, 120

  as origin site for early human dispersion, 5, 7–8, 11, 15, 118, 186, 202, 218, 262

  Air Force, US, 239

  covert projects of, 69, 72

  in rocket development, 36–37, 48, 71, 85

  Rutan’s work for, 82

  in space exploration, 50, 73, 272

  airplanes:

  development of, 69–72, 83, 262

  safety of, 108, 109

  Albert (monkey), 47

  Alcubierre, Miguel, 229–30

  Aldrin, Buzz, 108, 170

  aliens, extraterrestrial:

  aggressive, 259

  hyperintelligent, 258, 260, 260, 262

  hypothetical categorization of, 252–57

  lack of evidence of, 236–37, 239–44, 257, 291

  potential to communicate with, 52, 189, 234–35, 238, 239, 246

  potentially dead civilizations of, 243–44

  search for, 186–91, 189, 236–44, 246, 291

  aliens, extraterrestrial (continued)

  speculative number of, 188, 233–35

  as unrecognizable, 216, 244

  Allen, John, 192–93

  Allen, Paul, 84–85, 188

  Allen Telescope Array, 188–89, 243

  Alling, Abigail, 194

  Alpha Centauri system, 132, 133, 215, 216, 219–20, 222, 225–26

  Alzheimer’s disease, 115

  Amazon, 79, 103

  Americas:

  European settlement of, 204, 243, 250

  population dispersion into, 8, 218

  amino acids, 8

  Amish, 203

  ammonia, 125, 173

  Anaxagoras, 17–18, 17

  Anderson, Eric, 275

  Anderson, Laurie, 76

  Anders, William, 270

  Andes mountains, 172

  population adaptation to altitude in, 119

  Andreessen, Marc, 79

  Andrews, Dana, 223

  animals:

  in Biosphere 2, 193

  evolution of, 172

  human beings compared to, 186, 262

  minimum viable population in, 201

  in religious sacrifice, 119

  in scientific research, 46–49, 250–51

  Anonym, Lepht, 207

  Ansari, Anousheh, 91

  Antarctica, 169

  Antares rocket, 275

  anthropocentrism, 244, 291

  antimatter, 221–22, 254

  ants, 193

  apes, human beings compared to, 10

  Apollo 1, loss of crew of, 43, 107

  Apollo 11, 13, 30, 45, 56

  Apollo program, 30, 42–44, 49–51, 55, 64, 108, 157–58, 158, 170, 176, 196, 219, 270, 271, 272

  Arabs, use of rockets by, 23

  Archon Genomics X Prize, 93

  Archytas, 19, 22

  Area 51, 238, 240

  Arecibo Observatory, 239, 243, 292–93

  Ares, 163

  Ariane 5 rocket, 113

  Arianespace, 106

  Aristarchus, 19

  Aristotle, 19–20

  Arizona, University of, 193

  Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of, 156

  arms race, 24, 36, 139

  Armstrong, Neil, 43, 45, 56, 71, 74, 108, 158

  Army, German, Ordnance Department, 32

  Army, US:

  in rocket development, 35, 36

  in space exploration, 50

  Art of Electronics, The (Horowitz), 237

  artificial intelligence (AI), 179, 208, 245, 249, 259

  human intelligence surpassed by, 258

  Artist in Space program, 74, 76

  Artsutanov, Yuri, 149

  Asia, population dispersion into, 7–8, 11, 15, 218

  Asimov, Isaac, 94

  Asteroid Redirect Mission, 104–5, 146, 156

  asteroids:

  capture of, 104–5, 146, 173, 276

  impacts by, 245

  mining of, 155–56, 182

  astrobiology, 123–24

  astronauts, 141, 272

  physiological effects on, 114–17

  selection criteria for, 73–75

  sex and, 200

  see also specific individuals

  Atacama Desert, population adaptation to dry environment in, 119

  Athene, 163

  Atlantic Ocean, first non-stop flight over, 90–91

  Atlas rocket, 36–37, 71, 72

  atmosphere:

  of Earth, 8, 70–71, 70, 118, 167, 172, 174

  of exoplanets, 216

  habitability requirements for, 132–33, 216–17

  of Mars, 124, 164–66, 173–74, 216

  of Venus, 171

  atomic bomb:

  Soviet, 35, 36

  US development of, 35, 36, 239, 244

  atomic energy, 219, 244

  Atomic Energy Commission, 99, 222

  Atomists, 18

  atoms, 19

  manipulation of, 258

  in nanotechnology, 151

  rearrangement of, 229–30, 232

  attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 11, 12, 86

  Australia:

  isolation in, 204

  population dispersion into, 7–8

  Autonomous Nanotechnological Swarm (ANTS), 182

  aviation industry, 91, 99

  accident rate for, 108

  Aviation Week, 71

  B-2 bomber, 70

  Babylonians, 163

  Bacon, Roger, 23

  bacteria, 172, 180

  Baikonur Cosmodrome, 65–66

  Bailey, Ronald, 207

  Baker, David, 169

  ballistic missiles (ICBMs):

  Chinese, 141

  intercontinental, 36–37, 65

  long-range, 30–34, 33

  balloons:

  flight principles for, 68–69

  high-altitude, 32

  hot-air, 47, 68, 89

  Barrow
, John, 258

  Bass, Ed, 192–93, 285

  Baumgartner, Felix, 68, 272

  Baum, L. Frank, 188

  behavioral b’s, 15

  Bell X-1, 71

  Bell, Alexander Graham, 78

  Bell Labs, 153

  Benford, Gregory, 223–24

  Benford, James, 223–24

  Bennett, Charles, 230

  Bering Strait, land bridge across, 8, 120, 218

  Berlin Rocket Society, 32

  Berlin Wall, 41

  Berners-Lee, Tim, 78–79

  Bernoulli, Daniel, 68

  Berserker series (Saberhagen), 177, 259

  Bezos, Jeff, 103

  Bible, 148–49

  big bang theory, 131, 255

  “Big Ear” telescope, 237

  Bigelow, Robert, 102–3

  binary stars, 126

  biohackers (grinders), 207

  biomarkers, 216–18

  Biosphere 2 experiment, 192–97, 193, 285–86

  black projects, 69–70, 72, 144

  Blade Runner, 204, 208, 259

  Blue Origin, 103

  Boeing X-37, 72, 85

  Bohr, Niels, 213, 288

  Bostrom, Nick, 207, 245–47, 260–61

  Bounty, HMS, 202

  Bradbury, Ray, 164

  brains:

  computer interfaces with, 205–7

  human, 12–17, 203, 283

  of orcas, 190

  radiation damage to, 115

  simulation of, 259–61

  “brain in a vat” concept, 260

  Branson, Holly and Sam, 89

  Branson, Richard Charles Nicholas, 80, 86–89, 95, 97–98, 101–2, 106

  Breakthrough Propulsion Physics, 290

  Brezhnev, Leonid, 42

  Brightman, Sarah, 102

  Brin, Sergey, 275

  British Airways, 87

  British Interplanetary Society, 221

  Brokaw, Tom, 74

  Brother Assassin (Saberhagen), 177

  Bryan, Richard, 238

  buckyballs, 151, 231

  Buddhism, 20, 267

  Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 197

  Buran, 72

  Burnett, Mark, 75

  Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 164

  Burrows, William, 35–36

  Bush, George W., administration of, 93

  Bussard, Robert, 222

  butterfly effect, 195

  By Rocket into Interplanetary Space (Oberth), 31

  California, population dispersion into, 8

  California, University of:

 

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