Where No One Has Gone Before

by Kent Ballard

 

I surprised myself last week while watching the NASA coverage of their Orion test. The first day was a nasty reminder of all the times when the world and I waited through countless holds. But on the second day, at around T minus 20 seconds, a miracle happened.

I became young again.

Young enough that it was all still a mystery. So young that the unknown no longer held any fear. I was young enough to challenge the universe on its own terms and I was confident of victory. We could face this great thing. And we could beat it.

But the glow of those engines has died out now, and I’m back on Earth. What I see is not encouraging. We’re not only fighting the universe here. We’re fighting ignorance and superstition and mankind’s eternal curses of greed and stupidity. And no amount of engineering can help us.

When I was a small child, very few people believed it would ever be possible to land a man on the Moon. You would still get laughed at for saying you thought differently. We not only landed a dozen men over several missions, we took cars with us and drove around on the damned thing, a uniquely American way of conquering any new land.

You’ll get laughed at today while talking about starships. Never mind the fact that we’re now investigating the Alcubierrie Drive, a dead ringer for the legendary Warp Drive that powered four generations of fictional ships around the galaxy. And if you try to talk to people about the EmDrive, all but a very tiny handful will have no idea what you mean. If you explain that it means thrust from electrical power only—a reactionless, fuelless thrust—if they have any grasp of physics they’ll simply tell you it isn’t possible. But it is. We’re working on that too. And the Chinese are very interested in it as well. Both nations have small working models that produce thrust and are scaling them up. Other nations will follow soon.

Still, the uneducated moan and wring their hands about all that money spent in space. They’re fools and always have been. Not one cent has ever been spent in space. All that money was spent here in our economy and it went to develop new chemicals and materials, processes to miniaturize things, new kinds of batteries and power sources, computers that are cheaper, faster, smarter, and smaller. NASA employs many more plumbers and bulldozer operators than astronauts, more bricklayers and electricians than physicists, and they give more paychecks to janitors than to people working on new propulsion systems. And they do it all on much less annually than one battle cost in Iraq or Afghanistan and they spent a helluva lot less blood buying all that too. The United States has now spent over nine trillion dollars supposedly fighting poverty. We have more poor now than when we started. But for the same expenditure we could have had a world that looked more like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—and with more employment and better employment for everyone.

Breakthrough technologies do that. When personal computers were new, there was a worry about the economic disruption a “paperless office” would cause. People believed secretaries everywhere would lose their jobs. (Yes, I know, but they really believed that.) What actually happened was computers made countless thousands of new jobs that didn’t exist before and you cannot find a secretary today without at least one computer monitor on his or her desk. One did not eliminate the other. They made each other stronger and more efficient.

People who would boldly go anywhere first have to deal with the others who laugh at them. Cold fusion became the fodder for late night talk show jokes. Fleischmann and Pons died discredited, unable to find work anywhere in the enlightened world of academia that blackballed them. And while cold fusion has been replicated many times over, it hasn’t been officially invented yet because no one has found the secret to starting and stopping it when they want. Therefore it does not exist—but universities around the world keep on doing it and studying it because the riches of King Solomon’s mines await the first team to control it. But they study in secret for the most part. They don’t want to be laughed at, the second-worst imaginable thing in academia, and they don’t want to rock any boats, by far the worst sin. Also some of them could be killed. Controlled cold fusion would wreck the oil industry overnight and set the world economy on its ear. You’d better believe that this work is not only very real but also very dangerous. If you were totally without morals, how many people would you kill for several trillion dollars?

I was listening to some forgettable comic making fun of NASA recently. He said they should make their minds up about asteroids. On one hand, they’re claiming that one could fall on us and kill us all, and on the other they’re talking about lassoing one and bringing it closer to Earth. What gives?

He’s probably not stupid, merely uneducated. I would enlighten him by showing him a map of the Earth, carefully pointing out the gigantic craters left behind by asteroid strikes, and ask him if he’d mind being under one when it hit? And if he did, who would he go crying to in order to save his ass? The Department of Homeland Insecurity? His police department? The Post Office?

Then I’d ask him if money meant anything to him, and point out that a great deal of money is now being invested in robotic devices to mine asteroids in space. Asteroids are like candy. They come in many different flavors. The right kind of asteroid is worth a ridiculous sum of money. How much? It’s been estimated that just one small (thirty yards or so across) S-type asteroid contains over a hundred pounds of gold and platinum, and about one and a half million pounds of other metals like iron, aluminum, titanium, lead, nickel, and other expensive things. The people who no longer laugh at this, and who are investing money today, figure that 241 Germania—a common enough asteroid—contains mineral wealth equal to $95.8 trillion dollars on today’s market. That’s equal to the annual GDP for the world. Bold people are going for a piece of that.

I’d point out too that by taking this wealth from space, no little bunnies or pretty trees would need to be bulldozed away. Those metals can be taken—and will be taken—with no scarring of the Earth, no poisonous mining runoff, and no need for decades of expensive land reclamation projects that might or might not ever be completed. We may not live to see starships, but we will buy things made out of metal from space because those products will be cheaper than Earth-mined metals.

And don’t write off starships either. If the past century has taught us anything, it’s not to laugh too loudly at the impossible. Be honest with yourself. Who would have ever believed in nukes, lasers, or smart phones? Or that two of the three would be developed by private enterprise? Or that the other one would be considered one of the greatest engineering feats in history but only used twice? The point is, don’t scoff at technology and never try to predict it. You’ll always be wrong.

My youthful feeling the other day was bittersweet. Sure, I was one of those kids who idolized the early astronauts and could rattle off every nut and bolt that made up a Mercury or Gemini capsule. But I also bristled at—and fought—the idea that it was all a Cold War stunt. No, space meant more to me than that. It still does. But the old enemies still exist, and I find myself fighting the same ignorance, the same luddites, the same refusal to see what this means to our species. Human history has barely begun, but we wrote another line of it last Friday…no thanks to them.

In the end it means the survival of humanity, that we won’t all be taken out helplessly by a rogue asteroid, solar flare, some virus from hell, or our own stupidity. That’s worth fighting for, even if that day seems so terribly far away. And on a deeper and more spiritual level, it means new hills for people to hike up simply to see what’s on the other side. We need both. We need the security of knowing we can take hits, terribly brutal hits, and still be around. And without our curiosity we would no longer be human. If we should ever lose that we’ve lost everything, including any hope we ever had.

For me, the end of the space program will come at that time when people think no more about hull designs or propulsion systems or radiation shielding, when the great thing before them is that next hill or that next curve in the river ahead. Because at that time, we will never again run out of hills and rivers to explore, new places to go, new lands to seek.

We will be more free than humans have ever been before. We will be free forever.

10 thoughts on “Where No One Has Gone Before

  1. Nice dot connecting there Comrade. We are indeed our own worst adversary. While this should be inexcusable, it is largely understandable. The tasks and challenges are daunting enough without insisting on political and monetary advantage from the pursuit. There is an us and them, but it’s the opposite of what most people are led to believe. For brief moments, such things are exposed as the frauds they are, but then are quickly buried beneath a deluge of bullshit.

    We lack the payload capacity to launch with the baggage of mankind in tow.

  2. Yup, and even if they took 80% of the world’s population I’d never get a ticket. But better a few than none. I can see myself as the heroic elder scientist holding the hordes at bay while the giant rocket fires down the launch tracks.

    Who am I kidding? I’d hold onto the fins for dear life. I’d ride it like Slim Pickens. Hand me that jug of whiskey and that oxygen bottle. Carjacking rockets is thirsty business.

  3. 1 in 4 of the world’s children are stunted because of inadequate nutrition. We already have enough wealth and food to alleviate this problem today.
    Any discoveries in space will of course not benefit these kids. Why should they? We don’t take care of them now even though we already have the means.
    We all should know who space exploration will benefit. Some of us with good hearts apparently do not. Probably because of propaganda by the mass media which of course is owned by…

  4. As it turns out, one of the few things I researched for this column was asteroid mining. I wondered some of the same things you mention.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining

    This article states that C-type asteroids have lots of “organic carbon, phosphorus, and other key ingredients for fertilizer which could be used to grow food.” Most fertilizers today are petroleum-based, therefore expensive. Too expensive for many third-world farmers to buy. Hundreds of thousands of tons of fertilizer would go a long way to feed these kids. And everybody else. Will it be available by next planting season? No. Will it ever be available for the world’s hungry? I think it will.

    The only issue is transportation. But as far as any resource I was able to dream up, the asteroid belt holds more of it than mankind will use in many, many centuries. It’s all just waiting out there. Not going after these resources seems a terrible waste, especially if we have to rip our own planet apart to get them here.

    Today it would be a folly to think about asteroids as an economic solution for anything. The first cellular phones cost four thousand dollars too–and that was just thirty years ago, in 1984 dollars. I believe engineering and hard work will bring down the cost of spaceflight. The first shipments to Earth may not be precious metals, or even common construction metals. They may well be fertilizers. If so, we’ll need them even more desperately then than now. But we will never get them without making the effort to do so.

  5. Interesting, Kent… My dad was an optical engineer working on the space projects during the Kennedy administration, and beyond. His excitement for all the discoveries always ignited my enthusiasm. You are right. It is only ignorance really that holds us down. Apathy. My husband gets excited over all the tremendous leaps in medicine as a result of the space program. He’s a physician. People absolutely do not think in terms of the industry called on to build the apparatus. But then, people I meet usually don’t investigate… they watch TV and spew back whatever hits the most accessible part of their brain. I feel very fortunate to have been given a first hand introduction into the world of science through the people who’ve been in my life through one means or another. If these folks hadn’t been in my life I’d probably not know any different as well. So, how to get the information out into the public? How to make intelligent understanding accessible to all? My employer listens to Fox news all day long. I hear history being re-written on a daily basis. It unnerves me, but there’s not a god-damned thing I can do about it. I need the money, my employer signs the check, I go home and pay the rent. End of story. I hope you keep writing…

    • I’ll keep writing as long as I can. Thank you, Kathleen.

      Have you ever heard the term “Breakaway Civilization?” There is a very, very long explanation and this short one which I’m about to make up. It means a small group developing the technology to leave Earth and then just doing so. They would be the brightest (if not the best) but they would simply leave and abandon us.

      Any breakaway group would, of course, be very, very picky about who came with them. Education, skills, and youth would be the first priorities of course. But after that things become darker. They could choose for race or religion. They could choose certain ethnic backgrounds. Hell, they might not want any blue eyed people. Who knows? I don’t see them taking any poor, handicapped, or stupid, that’s for sure.

      And it’s been suggested if they did that and wanted to be successful, they’d also take every calculation, every formula, and every blueprint for their technology with them. That might hold us back another 50-75 years. Looking for their descendants would be impossible. It’s a big galaxy. Things might even go worse for us if we did find them.

      But Orion is ours. That baby belongs to us all. When we begin to refine metals and fuels in space, soon after that we’ll build ships in orbit. It won’t be anything as lovely as wanderlust or the urge to explore that will drive people. It’ll be money. Once we can convince Unca Scrooge there are trillions and trillions of dollars out there to be had, you will see things go pretty quickly. In 1847 not many people were in California. Ten years later the westbound Conestoga wagons covered the plains. It can happen again, too.

  6. Thank you, Kent! At least I have something else in my little private satchel to consider today as I head out to go listen to the folks at Fox going on and on and endlessly onnnn at my client’s house this afternoon. I try to stick around for the miracle which I know is just around the bend……

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