Good luck...just way too many issues to address

"Space travel: Finding the technology to traverse the stars"

The research-and-development arm of the U.S. military is launching a 100-Year Starship Study to find the technologies necessary for interstellar travel.

by

Amina Khan

August 6th, 2011

Los Angeles Times

What will it take to build a spaceship capable of traveling to the stars? And what if you wanted it to be ready to launch in just 100 years?

It may sound like the premise of a science fiction show or reality TV series. But these are serious questions being asked by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research-and-development arm of the U.S. military.

This fall, DARPA intends to award up to $500,000 in seed money to a group that proves it would do the best job of developing the necessary technologies — whatever they may be — for interstellar travel. The proposals had better be good — if none of them are up to snuff, the agency won't hand out the money. To stimulate discussion on the research possibilities, DARPA officials will hold a symposium that brings together astrophysicists, engineers and even sci-fi writers so they can brainstorm what it would take to make this starship enterprise a success.

David Neyland, director of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, explained in an interview with The Times the inspiration for the 100-Year Starship Study and what he expects it to accomplish.

Where did you get the idea to travel to another star?

When I came to DARPA about three years ago, I was looking for ways to inspire a new generation of scientists and engineers to become involved with research and development, like I was inspired when I was a kid. And in the course of thinking this through, I fell back on my science fiction reading heritage — to the days of reading books by people like Robert Heinlein and the story he wrote, "Time for the Stars."

In that book, he characterized an organization called the Long Range Foundation, a group of people that invested in things that nobody else would invest in. One of the things they invested in was rockets and spaceships and interstellar travel.

They became the founding fathers, if you will, of interstellar flight in that story. So I won't say that I created an idea from scratch.

Why the 100-year deadline?

There's the old Jules Verne story, "From the Earth to the Moon," which was written and published in 1865. It was actually written as a comedy, but it postulated a future in which humankind could build a giant cannon and fire guys in a container and land on the moon. That book inspired generations of folks to think about space travel. It was 100 years later when we were launching Saturn rockets and 104 years later when we were actually landing human beings on the moon.

So I thought that 100-year time frame was really good. We don't necessarily know the answers to the problem, but we do know the questions — or at least some of the questions — to ask, kind of like Jules Verne.

What's the goal of this project?

A lot of folks think that we're asking for somebody to come in with a plan on how to build a starship. That's actually the wrong answer. What we're looking for is an intuitive understanding of the process of inspiring research and development that comes up with tangible products.

"Products" doesn't mean physical products, but might be a new computer algorithm, a new kind of physics, a new set of mathematics, a new philosophical or religious construct, a new way of growing grain hydroponically. The organization needs to have the gestalt of how to inspire that kind of research.

The laser guns, faster-than-light engines and robot companions we see in movies are often inspired by far-out research like the starship program. Does it work the other way around, too?

The role that has been played by Hollywood cannot be understated. The first cellphone I had was a Motorola Startac — not because it was the best cellphone on the market but because it was like a communicator that Capt. Kirk had when I was watching "Star Trek."

Quite literally, in the Department of Defense, people have said, "Gee, that was a really cool idea. Why don't we go build that?" I want to leverage that.

What Jules Verne postulated in terms of a cannon firing people to the moon is about as impractical and unrealistic as you could get, but he inspired people to think about building space vehicles. He didn't actually ask the specific questions, much less postulate the right technologies. But he got people thinking about it. So that's the motivation of the 100-Year Starship Study.

What will we see a century from now?

In my wildest dreams, all the technologies necessary for long-duration, long-distance spaceflight. And I'm not sure that's really unreasonable.

Look back 100 years. If you could have had James Clerk Maxwell and Guglielmo Marconi and Albert Einstein sit around a lunch table in the early 1900s, they would have had all the math necessary to create an iPhone. But there's nothing that they could have done to characterize the integrated circuits, the satellites, the communication links or the Internet, to draw a plan that would have led them to an iPhone until Apple introduced it 100 years later.

That's how I see where we are with this. We know the questions to ask, but we don't know all the questions to ask. We can hypothesize where we want to get to, but it's a pretty broad target that we're aiming for.

Tom Wolfe's thoughts on space travel

Surely you remember Tom Wolfe...author of The Right Stuff. In the Sunday edition of The New York Times he shared the following thoughts.

"One Giant Leap to Nowhere"

by

Tom Wolfe

July 19th, 2009

The New York Times

WELL, let's see now ... That was a small step for Neil Armstrong, a giant leap for mankind and a real knee in the groin for NASA.

The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I add "godlike"? — quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11's Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.

It was no ordinary dead-and-be-done-with-it death. It was full-blown purgatory, purgatory being the holding pen for recently deceased but still restless souls awaiting judgment by a Higher Authority.

Like many another youngster at that time, or maybe retro-youngster in my case, I was fascinated by the astronauts after Apollo 11. I even dared to dream of writing a book about them someday. If anyone had told me in July 1969 that the sound of Neil Armstrong's small step plus mankind's big one was the shuffle of pallbearers at graveside, I would have averted my eyes and shaken my head in pity. Poor guy’s bucket's got a hole in it.

Why, putting a man on the Moon was just the beginning, the prelude, the prologue! The Moon was nothing but a little satellite of Earth. The great adventure was going to be the exploration of the planets ... Mars first, then Venus, then Pluto. Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus? NASA would figure out their slots in the schedule in due course. In any case, we Americans wouldn’t stop until we had explored the entire solar system. And after that ... the galaxies beyond.

NASA had long since been all set to send men to Mars, starting with manned fly-bys of the planet in 1975. Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who had come over to our side in 1945, had been designing a manned Mars project from the moment he arrived. In 1952 he published his Mars Project as a series of graphic articles called "Man Will Conquer Space Soon" in Collier's magazine. It created a sensation. He was front and center in 1961 when NASA undertook Project Empire, which resulted in working plans for a manned Mars mission. Given the epic, the saga, the triumph of Project Apollo, Mars would naturally come next. All NASA and von Braun needed was the president's and Congress's blessings and the great adventure was a Go. Why would they so much as blink before saying the word?

Three months after the landing, however, in October 1969, I began to wonder ... I was in Florida, at Cape Kennedy, the space program's launching facility, aboard a NASA tour bus. The bus's Spielmeister was a tall-fair-and-handsome man in his late 30s ... and a real piece of lumber when it came to telling tourists on a tour bus what they were looking at. He was so bad, I couldn't resist striking up a conversation at the end of the tour.

Sure enough, it turned out he had not been put on Earth for this job. He was an engineer who until recently had been a NASA heat-shield specialist. A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this stand-up Spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crew mates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour ... while back home, NASA’s irreplaceable team of highly motivated space scientists — irreplaceable! — there were no others! ...anywhere! ... You couldn't just run an ad saying, "Help Wanted: Experienced heat-shield expert" ... the irreplaceable team was breaking up, scattering in nobody knows how many hopeless directions.

•

How could such a thing happen? In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.

From the moment the Soviets launched Sputnik I into orbit around the Earth in 1957, everybody from Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson on down looked upon the so-called space race as just one thing: a military contest. At first there was alarm over the Soviets' seizure of the “strategic high ground” of space. They were already up there — right above us! They could now hurl thunderbolts down whenever and wherever they wanted. And what could we do about it? Nothing. Ka-boom! There goes Bangor ... Ka-boom! There goes Boston ... Ka-boom! There goes New York ... Baltimore ... Washington ... St. Louis ... Denver ... San Jose — blown away! — just like that.

Physicists were quick to point out that nobody would choose space as a place from which to attack Earth. The spacecraft, the missile, the Earth itself, plus the Earth's own rotation, would be traveling at wildly different speeds upon wildly different geometric planes. You would run into the notorious "three body problem" and then some. You'd have to be crazy. The target would be untouched and you would wind up on the floor in a fetal ball, twitching and gibbering. On the other hand, the rockets that had lifted the Soviets' five-ton manned ships into orbit were worth thinking about. They were clearly powerful enough to reach any place on Earth with nuclear warheads.

But that wasn't what was on President Kennedy's mind when he summoned NASA’s administrator, James Webb, and Webb's deputy, Hugh Dryden, to the White House in April 1961. The president was in a terrible funk. He kept muttering: "If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody — anybody ... There’s nothing more important." He kept saying, "We've got to catch up." Catching up had become his obsession. He never so much as mentioned the rockets.

Dryden said that, frankly, there was no way we could catch up with the Soviets when it came to orbital flights. A better idea would be to announce a crash program on the scale of the Manhattan Project, which had produced the atomic bomb. Only the aim this time would be to put a man on the Moon within the next 10 years.

Barely a month later Kennedy made his famous oration before Congress: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth." He neglected to mention Dryden.

INTUITIVELY, not consciously, Kennedy had chosen another form of military contest, an oddly ancient and archaic one. It was called "single combat."

The best known of all single combats was David versus Goliath. Before opposing armies clashed in all-out combat, each would send forth its "champion," and the two would fight to the death, usually with swords. The victor would cut off the head of the loser and brandish it aloft by its hair.

The deadly duel didn’t take the place of the all-out battle. It was regarded as a sign of which way the gods were leaning. The two armies then had it out on the battlefield ... unless one army fled in terror upon seeing its champion slaughtered. There you have the Philistines when Little David killed their giant, Goliath ... and cut his head off and brandished it aloft by its hair (1 Samuel 17:1-58). They were overcome by a mad desire to be somewhere else. (The Israelites pursued and destroyed them.)

More than two millenniums later, the mental atmosphere of the space race was precisely that. The details of single combat were different. Cosmonauts and astronauts didn’t fight hand to hand and behead one another. Instead, each side’s brave champions, including one woman (Valentina Tereshkova), risked their lives by sitting on top of rockets and having their comrades on the ground light the fuse and fire them into space like the human cannonballs of yore.

The Soviets rocketed off to an early lead. They were the first to put an object into orbit around the Earth (Sputnik), the first to put an animal into orbit (a dog), the first to put a man in orbit (Yuri Gagarin). No sooner had NASA put two astronauts (Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard) into 15-minute suborbital flights to the Bahamas — the Bahamas! — 15 minutes! — two miserable little mortar lobs! — then the Soviets put a second cosmonaut (Gherman Titov) into orbit. He stayed up there for 25 hours and went around the globe 17 times. Three times he flew directly over the United States. The gods had shown which way they were leaning, all right!

•

At this point, the mental atmospheres of the rocket-powered space race of the 1960s and the sword-clanking single combat of ancient days became so similar you had to ask: Does the human beast ever really change — or merely his artifacts? The Soviet cosmo-champions beat our astro-champions so handily, gloom spread like a gas. Every time you picked up a newspaper you saw headlines with the phrase, SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... The Soviets had produced a generation of scientific geniuses — while we slept, fat and self-satisfied! Educators began tearing curriculums apart as soon as Sputnik went up, introducing the New Math and stressing another latest thing, the Theory of Self-Esteem.

At last, in February 1962, NASA managed to get a man into Earth orbit, John Glenn. You had to have been alive at that time to comprehend the reaction of the nation, practically all of it. He was up for only five hours, compared to Titov's 25, but he was our ... Protector! Against all odds he had risked his very hide for ... us! — protected us from our mortal enemy! — struck back in the duel in the heavens! — showed the world that we Americans were born fighting and would never give up! John Glenn made us whole again!

During his ticker-tape parade up Broadway, you have never heard such cheers or seen so many thousands of people crying. Big Irish cops, the classic New York breed, were out in the intersections in front of the world, sobbing, blubbering, boo-hoo-ing, with tears streaming down their faces. John Glenn had protected all of us, cops, too. All tears have to do with protection ... but I promise not to lay that theory on you now. John Glenn, in 1962, was the last true national hero America has ever had.

There were three more Mercury flights, and then the Gemini series of two-man flights began. With Gemini, we dared to wonder if perhaps we weren't actually pulling closer to the Soviets in this greatest of all single combats. But we held our breath, fearful that the Soviets' anonymous Chief Designer would trump us again with some unimaginably spectacular feat.

Sure enough, the C.I.A. brought in sketchy reports that the Soviets were on the verge of a Moon shot.

NASA entered into the greatest crash program of all time, Apollo. It launched five lunar missions in one year, December 1968 to November 1969. With Apollo 11, we finally won the great race, landing a man on the Moon before the end of this decade and returning him safely to Earth.

•

Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after, congressmen began to wonder about something that hadn't dawned on them since Kennedy’s oration. What was this single combat stuff — they didn’t use the actual term — really all about? It had been a battle for morale at home and image abroad. Fine, O.K., we won, but it had no tactical military meaning whatsoever. And it had cost a fortune, $150 billion or so. And this business of sending a man to Mars and whatnot? Just more of the same, when you got right down to it. How laudable ... how far-seeing ... but why don’t we just do a Scarlett O’Hara and think about it tomorrow?

And that NASA budget! Now there was some prime pork you could really sink your teeth into! And they don't need it anymore! Game’s over, NASA won, congratulations. Who couldn’t use some of that juicy meat to make the people happy? It had an ambrosial aroma ... made you think of re-election ....

NASA's annual budget sank like a stone from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s. It was at this point that NASA's lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Wernher von Braun. Toward the end of his life, von Braun knew he was dying of cancer and became very contemplative. I happened to hear him speak at a dinner in his honor in San Francisco. He raised the question of what the space program was really all about.

It’s been a long time, but I remember him saying something like this: Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.

Unfortunately, NASA couldn't present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent.

As a result, the space program has been killing time for 40 years with a series of orbital projects ... Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, the International Space Station and the space shuttle. These programs have required a courage and engineering brilliance comparable to the manned programs that preceded them. But their purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston's Johnson Space Center — by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to earth. The shuttle program, for example, was actually supposed to appeal to the public by offering orbital tourist rides, only to end in the Challenger disaster, in which the first such passenger, Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, perished.

•

Forty years! For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress. They have so many more luscious and appealing projects that could make better use of the close to $10 billion annually the Mars program would require. There is another overture even at this moment, and it does not stand a chance in the teeth of Depression II.

"Why not send robots?" is a common refrain. And once more it is the late Wernher von Braun who comes up with the rejoinder. One of the things he most enjoyed saying was that there is no computerized explorer in the world with more than a tiny fraction of the power of a chemical analog computer known as the human brain, which is easily reproduced by unskilled labor.

What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin's tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings, or, rather, human beasts. On Freud's tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.

July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA’s engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA's true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars.

Return to the Moon poll

40 years ago we went to the moon. Should we return?

Yes...1
No...3

I won't belabor the point but a trip to the Moon [or anywhere else...like Mars] at this time is just not a good idea. The United States' fiscal crisis cannot warrant such a venture, NASA has some serious economic issues, the methodology of getting there is outdated and risky, and the whole idea of pushing man into space is questionable. It is still a better idea to send satellites and probes. Common sense rules over grandeur of space travel--let the science fiction writers satisfy that need.

Good reason to keep feet on the ground

"Fuel leak" was what is was called this time...the time before was a fractured fuel valve. Shuttle Discovery has made 35 previous trips and despite retrofitting of the craft, it is getting fatigued and old. It has outlived its function. Fortunately the issues was found while all was on the ground. These are small but significant issues that could abort or totally jeopardize a mission. These missions are but a few hundred miles away but consider a small issue thousands or millions of miles away--then what. It just shows that the mechanicals of any system can fail and cause problems. Best to stay put and let probes, satellites, and unmanned vehicles do the work and take the risks...and done cheaper.

"Launching of Shuttle Postponed Again"

by

Kenneth Chang

March 12th, 2009

The New York Times

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The space shuttle Discovery will remain on the ground until at least Sunday after a hydrogen leak scrubbed a launch attempt on Wednesday.

"We're in the business of launching, not scrubbing," said Michael D. Leinbach, the shuttle launch director at a news conference Wednesday evening. "But our business requires perfection, and our vehicle was not perfect today."

Technicians will not be able to get a close look at the leak site, near the connection of a vent line to the external fuel tank, until Friday afternoon. The vent line carries away excess hydrogen pressure from the tank and the spacecraft to where it is safely burned.

If the fix is straightforward and quick, shuttle officials hope to launch the Discovery at 7:43 p.m. Sunday.

That will put a time crunch on the mission, because the Discovery has to undock to make room for the arrival of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, scheduled to launch the next day.

If the Discovery launches Sunday, the mission would be shortened from 14 days to 12 days and one of the planned four spacewalks would be eliminated. If the launch is pushed back to Monday or Tuesday, then the mission would be further shortened with time for probably only one spacewalk.

But that would still accomplish the main objectives of the mission: to deliver the last segment of the space station's backbone truss, a replacement part for a water recycling system and Koichi Wakata, who will join the crew of the space station.

If the Discovery cannot launch by Tuesday, then the mission will likely be pushed to April, with repercussions on the schedule of future shuttle missions and the construction of the space station.

The countdown was proceeding smoothly toward a 9:20 p.m. liftoff under clear skies and full moon. But at about 2 p.m., when the hydrogen tank reached 98 percent full, sensors detected a hydrogen leak at the valve next to the external tank, creating a potential flammability problem. The launch was called off at 2:36 p.m.

Mr. Leinbach said he was 99.9 percent certain that the leak was in the ground equipment and in the shuttle itself, which would make it easier to fix.

"We'll replace what needs fixing," Mr Leinbach said. "We have spares on the shelf."

NASA officials said the leak was not related to three hydrogen gas valves that were inspected after a similar valve broke during the mission of the shuttle Endeavour in November. That failure had no effect on Endeavour’s ascent into orbit, but it did lead to concerns that if a larger piece broke off it could be catastrophic.

NASA postponed the launching of Discovery several times to analyze the valves, and the mission is now a month behind its original launching date.

Through experiments and computer simulations, NASA engineers concluded that it was highly unlikely that a piece from a valve would cause significant damage, and a new magnetic testing method convinced them that the three valves installed in the Discovery were free of cracks.

The Discovery's main cargo is a 45-foot-long, 31,000-pound truss segment with two sets of solar panels.

When the solar panels are unfurled and plugged in, the station’s power-generating capacity will rise to 120 kilowatts from 90 kilowatts.

Also aboard Discovery is a 180-pound replacement part for a water recycling system that the Endeavour took to the space station in November. But a key part in the apparatus that transforms urine into drinkable water failed almost immediately. NASA would like the recycling system fully functional before the expansion of the station of the station crew from three to six, planned for late May.


Changing horizon of space exploration participants

Colonization or contamination?

Deceased--Ernst Stuhlinger

Deceased--Konrad Dannenberg

Deceased--Thomas F. Rogers

In remembrance...our space travelers

ISS--"dump or keep" poll

"Manned space travel" poll

Space ethics

Space exploration?...Stephen Hawking's perspective

Sex in space--amusing but a problem

Sex in space--redux

Sex in space taken seriously

Space tourism?

Space travel...real issues

Value of space exploration?

Von Braun sketches for sale

Sex in space--redux

This morning I received a reply to "Sex in space taken seriously" by reader David. The link he offered was quite relevant and deserved a better presentation than a mere reply buried in this blog. It concerns a rather serious and complicated issue of "sex in space". David's reference was to a documentary that appeared on the History Channel on December 2nd, 2008.

David also cites...

"Outer-space sex carries complications"

Sex in space taken seriously
Sex in space--amusing but a problem

In passing...

Philip José Farmer
January 26th, 1918 to February 25th, 2009

"Philip José Farmer, Daring Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 91"

Clyde Caldwell's cover art for Philip José Farmer's Strange Relations

Colonization or contamination?

Is this really an issue. Contamination cannot be avoided. Maybe contamination of a foreign environment is not necessarily a bad thing. Is it just a matter of interpretation and perspective. Maybe this is the way the potential of life is spread throughout the universe. There are current hypotheses of life forms reaching Earth from Mars and hitching a ride on comets and meteors smacking into Earth. Such dispersal of foreign life forms is random and accidental and may not be that disastrous by adding new life forms and perhaps life forms that are resistant to indigenous environmental conditions that have prohibited life formation.

"Are We Bringing Our Germs to Mars?"

by

Bryan Walsh

February 5th, 2009

Time

Star Trek fans know it as the Prime Directive: that there should be no interference with the internal affairs of other civilizations. (Given the frequency with which captains Kirk, Picard, et. al., violate it, however, the Prime Directive seems more like a Prime Suggestion.) Since human beings have yet to explore very far beyond Earth, pondering an interplanetary noninterference policy of our own may seem a little premature — at least until we've mastered warp drives and phasers.

But in fact, such a directive already exists in some form — the international Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which governs the legal framework for activities in space. Best known for banning governments from putting nuclear weapons into orbit, the treaty also requires space-faring nations to avoid "harmful contamination" of other worlds while exploring the solar system. Human beings have yet to set foot on other planets, so the risk today comes from bacteria that can hitch a ride on unmanned spacecraft like NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, which arrived on the red planet's surface last May.

Even though Phoenix was assembled in a special clean room to minimize bacterial contamination, and its arm, which would have direct contact with Martian ice, was heat-sterilized before launch, it's likely that dozens or more species of microbes hitched a ride on Phoenix's 10-month trip to Mars. Once on Mars, it's possible that bacteria shielded by the structure of the spacecraft from the harsh Martian UV radiation could stay alive, in dormancy, for hundreds of thousands of years. And if native microbes do exist on Mars — nothing has been found yet, but scientists hold out hope that the ice present on parts of the planet harbors life — there's a risk that foreign bacteria could contaminate or somehow change the development of their Martian counterparts. But beyond the broad language of the Outer Space Treaty, we don't really have set guidelines for how we should treat microbial life on another planet should we run across it.

That's why NASA planetary scientist Christopher McKay, in an article in this week's Science, suggests the need for a stronger policy that ensures all exploration of Mars be "biologically reversible" — meaning we would be required to effectively wipe away our footprints and remove any possibility of contamination, by leaving behind nothing that could foster alien microbial growth. Such a policy would be especially necessary if we discover that life on Mars has emerged independently of life on Earth — what McKay calls a "second genesis" — as opposed to Martian life that arose through the exchange of meteorites between Mars and a hospitable Earth, a condition in which the two planets would share a tree of life and contamination would be less of a concern. If there really were a second genesis on Mars, "contamination by even one Earth bacterium may be a serious issue of environmental ethics," McKay writes. We only have to look back at the damage that invasive species have inflicted on virgin territory on our planet, like the infamous cane toads that ravaged Australia, to know what Earth bacteria could do on an alien surface.

For now, it's not difficult to make sure that we avoid squashing new life as we search it out — although doing so could add considerable cost to any space mission. Probes like Phoenix can be more fully sterilized before launch, and debris from any unmanned craft could eventually be recovered. The real challenge will occur if and when humans set foot on Mars or any other planet and begin establishing a more permanent presence, especially if we explore beneath the surface, out of the reach of the sterilizing solar UV radiation. When that day comes, we'll need to step carefully to make sure that native life on Mars — yes, I'm sorry, I have to say it — lives long and prospers.

Human error...an LHC problem emerges

So, human error was to blame for the shut down of the LHC. Okay, that is acceptable--humans do make errors. It is a minor setback that can be repaired. It's a good thing that this was a terrestrial malfunction and not happening half way to Mars with humans in danger. The point being, and this is a legitimate extrapolation, that mechanical errors are possible and can escalate to a serious situation especially in a highly restricted environment such as space.

"One bad electrical connection sparked collider shutdown"

by

Alexander G. Higgins

2008

Associated Press

GENEVA - A bad electrical connection likely caused the malfunction that sidelined the world's largest atom smasher days after it was launched with great fanfare, a senior scientist said Monday.

The fault was probably a poor soldering job on one of the particle collider's 10,000 connections, said Lyn Evans, project leader of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Organization.

Only one fault in 10,000 isn't bad, "but it cost dearly," Evans said. It will take at least two months for the repair, meaning the collider cannot be restarted until spring, after its mandatory shutdown due to high electricity costs during the winter.

Evans said he still hasn't been able to examine the damage because the collider is too cold to be opened. The machine operates at extremely cold temperatures to take advantage of superconductivity - the ability of some metals to conduct electricity without any resistance near absolute zero degrees.

It has to be warmed gradually to room temperature over five weeks so that humans can work inside and make repairs, Evans said. Then it will take another five weeks to re-chill it.

The collider was started before a global audience on Sept. 10, with beams of protons being fired at nearly the speed of light around the collider, first in one direction and then in the other. The electrical fault occurred nine days later.

Before the failure, the plan had been to step up power on the collider so that scientists could start with test collisions of subatomic particles before the winter shutdown. That will have to wait until next April, Evans said.

He said he expected it will then take about a month - until the end of May - to get the machine to high energy.

"It was a hard blow for us," he said. The failure occurred during the final test of the collider - a large tube running around the circumference of a 17-mile circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva. All the other seven sections of the tunnel had passed the test.

CERN specialists have already figured out that a connector between electromagnets failed and heated up, causing a magnet "quench," or shutdown. It apparently melted a hole in the tube, causing a leak that spilled about a ton of the liquid helium used to chill that section.

The high-energy collisions enable physicists to understand better how the smallest bits of matter - and everything and everyone - are made. They also hope it will take them even closer to the "Big Bang," which many theorize was the massive explosion that formed the universe.

By colliding protons from the nucleus of hydrogen atoms at high energy, the CERN machine is designed to recreate, on a minuscule scale, a view of what matter looked like in the rapid cooling one-trillionth of a second after the explosion.

Space travel...real issues

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
The Shadow knows."

As I wrote several years ago, the concept of space travel for man is extremely complex and fraught with unknown issues. Any one issue could abort the entire sojourn and such is the idea of the influence of the Earth's magnetic fields on the physiology of humans. Maybe best just to use probes and the like at this time.

"Magnetic Hunger Could Drive Space Travelers Insane"

October 2nd, 2008

SpaceDaily

The absence of Earth's magnetic field could lead to astronauts developing mental disorders during interplanetary flights, particularly expeditions to Mars, Russian scientists said.

Researchers from the Biology and Biophysics Research Institute at Tomsk State University and the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Biomedical Problems have conducted a number of experiments to study rats' behavior when isolated from the Earth's magnetic field.

The experiments showed that the rats lost social skills, had problems with memory, and experienced changes in their internal organs.

Natalya Krivova, the biophysics institute director, and Kirill Trukhanov, lead researcher at the Institute for Biomedical Problems, told RIA Novosti that the terrestrial magnetic field affects all living organisms.

"Moreover, the field, in the history of biosphere existence, changed and at some moments became zero," Trukhanov said. "There is a suggestion that certain catastrophes in biota, say, dinosaur extinction, are connected with the disappearance of the magnetic field at certain moments."

The scientists constructed a special unit where the terrestrial magnetic field was reduced to a little as one-thousandth of its usual strength. Twelve rats were put into the "magnet-free chamber" for 25 days, and then for another 10 days, while another 12 rats remained in normal conditions.

Both groups were monitored 24 hours a day. Krivova said the first thing researchers observed was increased aggression among rats living under the reduced magnetic field.

She said fights are a way for rats to establish a hierarchy, and they stop once the social order is set. The scientist said the rats deprived of the usual magnetic field "forgot" how to establish the hierarchy and lost social skills.

The rats were also observed to have memory failures. The group experiencing a small magnetic field forgot their surroundings and began inspecting the already known environment once again.

The Earth's magnetic field intensity is 50 microtesla, which is thousands of times stronger than the magnetic fields of Mars or Mercury. It is this powerful field that protects the Earth's surface and all living creatures from the solar wind, a flow of charged particles from the Sun.

Trukhanov said existing manned spacecraft operate at relatively low altitudes, where the magnetic field is about 20% less than on the Earth's surface; but astronauts on interplanetary expeditions would have to live with the absence of magnetic field.

Trukhanov suggested artificial magnetic fields could be generated on spacecraft to prevent mental disorders.

Human condition--ultimate loneliness?

"Rocket Scientists Say We'll Never Reach the Stars"

by

Robert Lemos

August 19th, 2008

Wired

Many believe that humanity's destiny lies with the stars. Sadly for us, rocket propulsion experts now say we may never even get out of the Solar System.

At a recent conference, rocket scientists from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and academia doused humanity's interstellar dreams in cold reality. The scientists, presenting at the Joint Propulsion Conference in Hartford, Connecticut, analyzed many of the designs for advanced propulsion that others have proposed for interstellar travel. The calculations show that, even using the most theoretical of technologies, reaching the nearest star in a human lifetime is nearly impossible.

"In those cases, you are talking about a scale of engineering that you can't even imagine," Paulo Lozano, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a conference attendee, said in a recent interview.

The major problem is that propulsion -- shooting mass backwards to go forwards -- requires large amounts of both time and fuel. For instance, using the best rocket engines Earth currently has to offer, it would take 50,000 years to travel the 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri, our solar system's nearest neighbor. Even the most theoretically efficient type of propulsion, an imaginary engine powered by antimatter, would still require decades to reach Alpha Centauri, according to Robert Frisbee, group leader in the Advanced Propulsion Technology Group within NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

And then there's the issue of fuel. It would take at least the current energy output of the entire world to send a probe to the nearest star, according to Brice N. Cassenti, an associate professor with the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That's a generous figure: More likely, Cassenti says, it would be as much as 100 times that.

"We just can't extract the resources from the Earth," Cassenti said during his presentation. "They just don't exist. We would need to mine the outer planets."

A 160-Million-Ton Needle

Interstellar propulsion systems are not a new idea. Rocket scientists, aeronautical engineers and science-fiction enthusiasts have proposed such designs for several decades.

In 1958, U.S. scientists explored the possibility of a spaceship propelled by dropping nuclear bombs out the back, a so-called nuclear-pulsed rocket. The research, called Project Orion, was killed by the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the budgetary requirements of the Apollo Project.

In 1978, the British Interplanetary Society designed a mission to Barnard's Star, almost 6 light years away, using a pulsed fusion rocket fueled by deuterium. Building such a spaceship would require mining the outer planets for fuel for at least two decades, scientists said at the Joint Propulsion Conference this year.

But the thought experiments continue. At the conference, Frisbee presented a theoretical design for a ship using antimatter to propel its way to nearby stars.

Frisbee's design calls for a long, needle-like spaceship with each component stacked in line to keep radiation from the engines from harming sensitive equipment or people.

At the rocket end, a large superconducting magnet would direct the stream of particles created by annihilating hydrogen and antihydrogen. A regular nozzle could not be used, even if made of exotic materials, because it could not withstand exposure to the high-energy particles, Frisbee said. A heavy shield would protect the rest of the ship from the radiation produced by the reaction.

A large radiator would be placed next in line to dissipate all the heat produced by the engine, followed by the storage compartments for the hydrogen and antihydrogen. Because antihydrogen would be annihilated if it touched the walls of any vessel, Frisbee's design stores the two components as ice at one degree above absolute zero.

The systems needed to run the spacecraft come after the propellant tanks, followed by the payload. In its entirety, the spaceship would resemble a large needle massing 80 million metric tons with another 40 million metric tons each of hydrogen and antihydrogen. In contrast, the Space Shuttle weighs in at a mere 2,000 metric tons.

"Interstellar missions are big," Frisbee said, in part because of the massive amounts of energy (and hence fuel) required to get moving fast enough to make the trip in anything like a reasonable amount of time. "Any time you try to get something up to the speed of light, Newton is still God."

With that fuel, it would still take nearly 40 years to travel the 4.3 light years to Earth's nearest neighbor, Alpha Centuri, he said.

Down and Out On Earth

Even improving humans' access to near space is not easy.

Scientists have all but discarded ideas for rockets that can reach orbit using a single stage. Instead, private space ventures have focused on lightening the payload and rocket and on increasing reliability. If space tourism comes into vogue, then launch providers could benefit from economies of scale.

But alternative-propulsion systems? They are not in short supply in people's imaginations, but most fail the test of reality, Marcus Young, a researcher at the U.S. Air Force Research Lab's Advanced Project Group, told conference attendees. Young and his team surveyed ideas for launch vehicles that could be accomplished in the next 15 to 50 years and found most to be unworkable.

Space elevator? Even if the engineering made sense, the design requires a breakthrough in materials science to create cables long and strong enough. Rail guns? A vehicle would have to shoot down a 100-kilometer track at 50 times the force of gravity to achieve orbit. Nuclear power? Radioactivity would limit its use to outside Earth's atmosphere, and the politics are positively toxic.

"There are a lot of ideas that initially you say, 'Hey, that might work,'" Young said. "But after a little research, you quickly find that it won't."

Yet, just because science fiction is not yet a reality is not a reason to make science suffer, said MIT's Lozano.

"There is a lot of interesting stuff that you cannot do even in the solar system," he said. "We have the technical means to do it. But some of the most sophisticated technologies ... we have not developed. Not because we can't, but because we have not made it a priority."

As for interstellar travel, even the realists are far from giving up. All it takes is one breakthrough to make the calculations work, Frisbee said.

"It's always science fiction until someone goes out and does it," he said.


SETI--ultimate loneliness?

Trekies and scifi buffs--"Warp Drive"

You can decide for yourself.

Abstract:

Over the last decade, there has been a respectable level of scientific interest regarding the concept of a `warp drive'. This is a hypothetical propulsion device that could theoretically circumvent the traditional limitations of special relativity which restricts spacecraft to sub-light velocities. Any breakthrough in this field would revolutionize space exploration and open the doorway to interstellar travel. This article discusses a novel approach to generating the `warp bubble' necessary for such propulsion; the mathematical details of this theory are discussed in an article published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. The theory is based on some of the exciting predictions coming out of string theory and it is the aim of this article to introduce the warp drive idea from a non-mathematical perspective that should be accessible to a wide range of readers.


Putting the "Warp" into Warp Drive

Sex in space--amusing but a problem

Complications rise.

"For Better or Worse, Sex in Space Is Inevitable"

by

Jeanna Bryner

space.com

Weddings in space could be right around the corner, and experts figure the inevitable cosmic consummation will be just around the next corner.

The Japanese firm First Advantage and the U.S.-based private spaceflight firm Rocketplane Global, Inc., announced last week they will host weddings in space for about $2.3 million (240 million yen) apiece.

For all we know, sex in space has already taken place. But NASA officials aren't talking about that much.

Beyond space tourism as a platform for steamy shenanigans, space missions are the perfect petri dishes for close encounters, and this year NASA certainly has a busy flight schedule, with five missions planned. And more countries than ever are now venturing into space, with Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata slated to become Japan's first long-duration space flyer this year and China gearing up for its first spacewalk scheduled for October.

Things will get even more interesting with future long-duration missions envisioned for the moon, Mars and beyond.

"To say that astronauts are some superior beings who cannot have interests in any kind of sexual feelings for three years ... I just don't buy it," said Jason Kring of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. Kring also pointed out the possibly negative consequences of pregnancies in a microgravity environment.

"Are we going to sterilize our crew members before sending them to Mars?" said Kring, who studies the psychological effects of long-duration space missions.

Meanwhile, nobody claims to know whether "it" has happened already in space.

"We don't study sexuality in space, and we don't have any studies ongoing with that," said NASA spokesman Bill Jeffs of the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "If that's your specific topic, there's nothing to discuss," he added, referring to "sex in space."

In any case, science journalist Laura Woodmansee, who penned "Sex in Space" (CG Publishing Inc., 2006), predicts "honeymoons in space and out-of-this-world sex will be a reality within a decade."

Close encounters

Small groups tapped for lengthy space stints will likely experience related psychological effects. For instance, trivial annoyances could become divorce-level issues for couples. Other interactions are likely to be far more enjoyable.

Here on Earth, the closest analog to long-term isolation of groups in space is the South Pole, where about 200 researchers live year-round.

Last month, before six months of winter darkness descended over Antarctica's McMurdo Station, the research base received a delivery of about 16,500 condoms.

"There's an unspoken behavior there [at the polar base] where you take a spouse for the time you're there — you have an exclusive relationship with someone," Kring told SPACE.com. "It's understood that when you leave, that relationship is over."

He added, "I don't know how it's going to work on a three-year mission to Mars."

Lawrence Palinkas, a professor of social work, anthropology and preventive medicine at UCLA, agreed.

"Certainly at polar research stations, there's sexual relations, sexual contact, between men and women," Palinkas said. "On a three-year mission to Mars, that's a possibility as well, although NASA in the past has tried to downplay the need for and the implications of sexual needs on a mission that long."

Coed crews

Up until the 1980s, NASA crews were all male. In 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space aboard the shuttle Challenger. Missions now routinely include one or two women.

"[For] a true long-duration mission if we go to Mars or back to the moon, politically, I don't think you're going to see an all male or all 'American' crew," Kring said.

Politics aside, "research would suggest that a mixed crew of men and women would probably be best," Kring said. "And this goes back to the Antarctic research where it used to be the expeditions were all men."

Nonetheless, co-ed crews, like the all-male ones, will have hefty workloads and little play time.

"They're mission-oriented. They're very focused on the task at hand," said NASA spokesperson Nicole Cloutier-Lemasters of the Johnson Space Center.

Sexual frustration could ensue, however. "Human sexuality is a basic need and now you're trying to tell people, 'Hey for three years, you can't do that.' They're going to figure out a way to do it," Kring said.

If they do, they're on their own for now. Palinkas said there "is no official policy" at NASA regarding sex on space missions. "There really has been no research conducted on the area to know whether it [sex in space] would be a good thing or a bad thing," he said, "but it probably is inevitable."

How it works

Sex is about more than psychology and rules and mission plans, of course. And when you get down to it, the key to successful sex in space is about managing a microgravity environment.

In "Sex in Space," Woodmansee describes several positions that might work, ranging from the modified missionary position to seated with "interlocking Y legs."

Props also could come into play, including a shared elastic waistband or tethers to hold one partner to a stable structure, she writes.


Do Astronauts Have Sex?

Out-of-this-world sex could jeopardise missions

Outer-space sex carries complications


"Sexxxxxxxxxx innnnnnnnnn spaceeeeeeeeee". Well, it was bound to surface--"romance/sex" in space. The relationships initiated in space or on other planets are just as complicated there as they are here and there are no rules. It is basically a manifestation of a desire to be wanted and a sharing of experiences. Maybe it is something innate to pair and propagate the species. But just remember the complications: The dating part, the sex part, the rivalry, the rejection. What if the situation happened with aliens? The whole mission could suffer. This may just be another good reason to curb space travel for a while.

Value of space exploration?


As hoteliers design zero-gravity hotel suites for out-of-this-world unions and with the first honeymoon in space already scheduled, this provocative account reveals the truth about romantic rendezvous in Earth's orbit and beyond as well as the advantages and difficulties of having sex in space. Questions the space agencies are too embarrassed to discuss—such as Has anyone "done it" in space? What will happen to the first baby conceived in space? and Have astronauts and cosmonauts practiced "docking maneuvers" while in orbit?—are thoughtfully answered, while science-fiction myths about interstellar intercourse are dispelled. From chemistry to psychology, this exploration runs the reproductive and sexual gamut, from lust and sexual mechanics to conception, pregnancy, and birth in low-gravity situations.


Sex in Space

by

Laura S. Woodmansee

ISBN-10: 1894959442
ISBN-13: 978-1894959445

Deceased--Alvin M. Marks

Alvin M. Marks
October 28th, 1910 to May [?], 2008

Quite an inventor...from the practical [optics] to the fantastic ["space train"].

"Alvin M. Marks, Inventor With 122 Patents, Dies at 97"

by

Bruce Weber

May 31st, 2008

The New York Times

Alvin M. Marks, a prolific inventor who held patents on polarized film for sunglasses, a 3-D moviemaking process, a generator the size of a grapefruit that could produce enough electricity for a house, a windmill with no moving parts and a trillion-dollar "space train," died Sunday in Gardner, Mass. He was 97 and lived in Athol, Mass.

The cause was liver and pancreatic cancer, said Molly Bennett Aitken, his former wife.

A man capable of both small-bore pragmatism and large-scale imagination, Mr. Marks held 122 patents. An expert in optics, he developed several variants of polarized film that were used in sunglasses and to reduce glare on television screens; a headlight system to aid night driving; and window panels that change gradually from transparent to opaque and back again.

In 1951, he was granted a patent for a "three-dimensional intercommunicating system" that could be used to make TV shows and movies. He was president for many years of the Marks Polarized Corporation, based in the Whitestone section of Queens, where, along with his brother, Mortimer, who died in 2006, he invented many improvements on his original device, even though three-dimensional moviemaking never became the widespread technique he hoped it would.

For much of the latter half of his career, Mr. Marks focused on developing alternative and low-cost energy sources. An early experimenter with solar energy, he served as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, and in 1967 was a consultant to the United States Senate on new technologies.

His inventions in the energy field include several aerosol electric power generators for home use as well as larger-scale generators, including the "windmill" with no moving parts, which proposed the placement in remote locations of enormous screens that would emit charged water particles into the wind to create power.

In recent years, he had been developing an array of minute antennas capable of collecting sunlight and transforming it into electricity, as well as a corresponding battery for storing it.

Alvin Melville Marks was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 28, 1910. His father, Alexander, was a lawyer. He studied at a variety of colleges and universities, including Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, Harvard, M.I.T. and New York University, receiving a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Cooper Union. Because he could read German, his former wife said, he spent much of his Navy service during World War II translating intercepted Nazi documents.

After his first two marriages ended in divorce, he married Molly Bennett in 1967; they divorced a decade later, and she subsequently married Gerard Aitken III, who became Mr. Marks’s business partner, helping to raise money to support his research. Mr. Aitken died in 1987, and Mr. Marks adopted the two young children his partner and friend had had with his former wife.

All told, he had five children, two stepchildren and two adopted children, all of whom survive him. They are Sara Marks Tabby of Merion Station, Pa.; Bridget Marks of New York City; Jacqueline Marks of Dallas; Sean Christopher Marks of Litchfield, Conn.; Frederick Peter Marks of Athol; Douglas Marks of Pensacola, Fla.; Meridyth Senes of Burlington, N.J.; Gerard J. Aitken IV of Swan Lake, N.Y.; and Hannah Aitken of New York City. Mr. Marks is also survived by 12 grandchildren.

"My father was fluid with unconventional relationships for years," said Ms. Marks Tabby. "That’s how he ended up having a hand in raising nine children."

In 1989, Mr. Marks won a patent, with Peter G. Diamandis, for perhaps his most audacious invention, a plan to circumvent conventional space travel with a 6.6-million-pound, 180-foot train that would be propelled into outer space in an electromagnetic tunnel. It would cost trillions of dollars and take a decade to build, he said, but once complete, it would cut the cost of space exploration drastically.

"It’s a feasible idea and should be given consideration," he told The New York Times at the time.

Space ethics

Tied to the previous post is the much broader question of "space ethics". It will happen...mankind will explore the universe; we will visit other solar systems and planets and hopefully encounter other beings. What sort of criterion should be established in exploring the universe as regards to extraction of resources and, assuming that we are not unique in the universe, alien life forms? Does mankind march in with dollar signs in our eyes [greed and the desire to make a "quick buck"] or with our Model 101445 Atomic Blaster Ray Gun blasting those different from us out of their chairs--either scenario radically modifying/destroying environments and other life forms? Essentially, what sort of rules of conduct should be employed on mankind's odyssey and who should contribute to those rules of conduct: Scientists, philosophers, teachers, you and me?

It's quite possible that we are descendents of a "cosmic" sneeze. Scientists are still fussing over the Mars rocks. But as an extrapolation, consider this: It is truly one species feeding off another. We just happen to be at the top right now unless we are confronted with faster, stronger, and smarter species [or in the wrong place at the wrong time]. But those are anomalies such as the human being eaten by a tiger, stepped on by an elephant, or succumbing to a bacterial infection, etc. This situation is reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode called "To Serve Man" : A cookbook for aliens feasting on mankind. We could be just a link in an enormous food chain--not yet realized.

Mankind will probably carry the history of plunder into space. If there is a buck to be made, someone will be there with exploitation high on their agenda. Tucked away in the back of the space ship's cargo bay will be crates of chewing gum and pretty beads.

Here's a sticky situation. Suppose that man met with an alien life form equally intelligent and yet, despite all attempts, communication could not be established. Would it be the wise thing to step backwards, throw the ship in high gear, and place an "X" on the celestial map warning all others to avoid the planet at all costs or...? The issue of galactic language [communication] truly muddles the issue even more. It would be lucky indeed if there were a common universal means of communication. Some have offered mathematics, but those are very precise descriptive forms of communication of common events and by no means tender emotions. Some have offered pictographs. We now have the metaphorical "Tower of Babble" in outer space. Thus, one must start all over again. Perhaps it would be better to stay home and read a book. You know, when one thinks about it, regardless of a working set of galactic ethics, all of it is totally worthless when confronting an alien species if communication is impossible. Certainly universal tragedies would happen. Perhaps "distance" and "communication" will define the history of mankind's movement and contacts in space more profoundly that a set of good ethics and technology. Homo sapiens may really be reduced to an existence of isolation and loneliness.

Who would initially be involved in establishing a workable sense of ethics. Granted, as eons passed and other beings became involved, a set of ethics must be established. By whom? Do we take advise from philosophy, theology, science? And what a confusion would occur when other cultures incorporate, as quite normal, something that mankind would find repulsive. Who or what body would be the ultimate arbiter in the formation of intergalactic ethics?

Similar to the idea of establishing intergalactic buoys warning species who share our perspectives to avoid this planet would we disdain similar cultures that have a sense of ethics extremely repulsive such as a ritual sacrifice involving their own species. Suppose these individuals could provide something that would be very important to enhance mankind and the travel in space...maybe a fantastic cure for a debilitating disease or a serum to eliminate or reduce toxic chemicals ingested by humans. Would practicality over shadow a set of ethics. Could we condone a savage situation to take home a box of trinkets--regardless of the benefits?

How ironic it would be to discover at least one or all galactic cultures exactly like ours. A stagnant universe? A universe of the same species would certain alter one's perspective in the formation and acceptance of the universality of ethical concepts. Perhaps the basic traits of benevolence and bellicose postures and everything in between are universal characteristics of all species. So, essentially, we need not be too concerned about establishing a sophisticated ethic. We will just meander the universe plundering and reconstructing the damage done. My Model 101445 Atomic Blaster Ray Gun would be ethical after all.

"Prime Directive"? A directive fraught with potentially disastrous results. The issue of "interference" regarding another species could run the risk of self-annihilation or another species being eliminated. And the issue could well be compounded by the factors of "pain and suffering" which most humans find intolerable. And yes, western influence run the same risk here on this planet. Whatever the motivation in the name of greed, power, conquest, or religious conversion the western influence can certainly cause major changes. I well remember a story regarding an anthropological study of one of the indigenous peoples of South America--the feared head hunter tribe called the Jhivaro. The deal was that the anthropologists were to strictly observe and yet a rather unpleasant episode happened that would cause one to stop taking notes and do something to alleviate the botched decapitation of a woman from a rival tribe. Where does one draw the line, for the anthropologist could have finished the demise of the woman with a single gun shot but opted to let the events play out as agreed. The same could be applied to ethics in space. As far as NASA is concerned, I seriously doubt that the astronauts are provided much ethical material since the space travel issue hasn't even begun. I suppose that each astronaut carries a bundle of personal ethics.

Maybe we have this all wrong. Perhaps the most practical posture to adopt is nothing more than the perpetuation and protection of Homo sapiens. To the trash can for any ethical stands of universal fairness or "prime directives". The universe may well be a cauldron of vicious and violent species where only the strongest and aggressive survive. Species will come and go in an infinite universe. So the "prime directive" may now state: "Shoot now and ask questions later". Perhaps the "conflict resolution" posture would work well on a large scale of species vs species. But suppose you were at the O. K. Corral on a Venutian desert facing a very hostile and armed alien bent on beating you to the draw and terminating your existence. I seriously doubt that talking your way out of that potentially mortal situation is going to keep you alive. The "conflict resolution" notion evaporated and was replaced by a "quick draw". The "prime directive" has become very personal--your life is on the line and there are not very many individuals that would succumb to the ultimate sacrifice.

I am not convinced that altruism, good will, fairness, etc. permeate the universe. Such a notion is unfounded and simply may be a minority point of view doomed to universal evolution of all species. But, from our perspective, they are fine ideas to carry into space and subject to rejection and modification despite being somewhat Pollyanna. A set of rules and regulations from NASA would be inadequate for not taking into account all contingencies and possibly biased depending on the constituents of the NASA committee that agrees on a code of "space ethics". Who are these people And, the "exception to the rule" idea is an open ended interpretation that may precipitate disastrous consequences depending on circumstance and various individuals.

The history of mankind has not been too stellar [pardon the pun] with greed and violence among many more characteristics being all too normal. There is no current evidence or belief that mankind will change anytime soon. Thus, those traits will be carried into space and practiced on alien environments and species. Mankind is just not mature enough to develop a set of universal ethics and travel in space. It is possible that those characteristics are temporary [evolution will dictate a better species] and that the whole of the universe is peopled with similar species. Good news for the former for it shows change and hope. Bad news for the latter for it shows a violent and aggressive universe. Perhaps by the time mankind achieves a higher set of universal ethics, the chances of contacting other life forms may have faded away if one subscribes to the popular hypothesis of the "big bang" and the ever expanding universe--it would be impossible to contact anyone for the factor of "distance".

Don't misunderstand me...ethical goals are a "good thing" regardless of the inherent nature of the universe.

If mankind is to remain in solitude by design [the uniqueness of a species/a theological view] or a result of the physics of the universe, a heuristic set of ethics will surly ensure an extended duration of the species Homo sapiens. Life without ethical values is not a life worth living.

Outright declared hostility by an aggressive species would dictate self-preservation without a doubt--"prime directive" or not. It may well be that the definition or interpretation of "self-defense" may be wrong. The apparent aggressive species may be just posturing to protect themselves much like a growling/barking dog, the rattle of a rattle snake, the discharge of n-butylpercaptan by a skunk, etc.

And another factor to consider, and this compounds the issue too, is the issue of language. There just may be no way for communication and, as exemplified on earth, many words/phrases have different meanings: A "hello" may be misunderstood as "get off our planet" and who knows what would result from that situation.

Assuming that the incident of the demise of an alien happened in the early stages of mankind in space and there was no universal judicial system then the individual that caused the demise of the alien would be responsible and perform a certain retribution. That could be a problem for it may extend beyond something personal. If communication with the rock were possible, it might well be that to satisfy the demands of the aliens that the individual must forfeit a life--maybe the lives of the entire crew. Now that would cause problems. Problems would be compounded if it were discovered that these rocks held some important information or harbored certain necessary resources. If the event, way distant in the future, where there was a consortium of aliens in conjunction with humans whose purpose was to adjudicate such species infraction, then the issue would be different. I suppose that when the time arrives and we become friends and trade with many species, that such a body of lawgivers would exist. Oh my, lawyers in space!

Remember the book by H. G. Wells called The Time Machine where in the very distant future on earth the subterranean subspecies called the Morlocks bred and fed upon the weak surface subspecies called the Eloi? Perhaps "ethics in space" is a non relevant issue or so we may discover--just a big "free for all", the old West mentality, only the strong and dominate survive. Frankly, I would invest my money in stock that promoted a set of "universal ethics". That might even the odds against the bad guys of the universe and level the playing field a bit. Universal justice may prevail.

Mankind will begin a journey into space with the best set of ethics possible based on our limited knowledge and experience and as the universe unfolds modifications will be made. Endless global debate without mankind taking the first step would be counter productive. And there may well never be a unified set of ethics--mankind's course of existence as the species Homo sapiens may just disappear.

It is somewhat ironic that there is the notion that man wants to perpetuate his species through, for example, efforts to curb world hunger and financially assist third world countries; but, on the other hand, man is forever redefining and refining methods to self-destruction. Perhaps this existential dichotomy will work out.

Being the recipient of extra terrestrial assistance is also an issue of philosophical significance for the paranoid features may be demonstrated in not really knowing the authenticity of a benevolent alien race. I guess when faced with ultimate peril, mankind, if such an offer were presented, would cash in on the offer and sort things out later.

It is interesting to note that some of the linguistics that we use to discuss these issues may have no universal antecedent. The term “pride”, for example, may exist nowhere but on earth. Thus, such philosophical statements are meaningless and further the complications with other beings.

Our questioning about our species in relation to the universe is not unique. Grant that there are conditions in the universe for the evolution of sentient beings and that sentient beings evolve and also contemplate their own existence and juxtaposition to the universe. We and they ponder the possibility of extraterrestrial life and contact with same. Would this conclude a posture of cascading universal interrogatory questions of co-alien existence: That there is a possibility of a universal body of ethics too? Interesting to discover, as we are now finding out, that there are many fundamental laws governing the function of the universe and just perhaps there is a body of ethical precepts that await unfolding by all sentient species. Sentient species uniqueness would not be necessarily measured only by what we ethically carry into space, but simply by our physical constitution and whatever matrix of dominant species characteristics is promoted--a propensity for conquest, subjugation, and dissemination of evil, the antithesis, or a mixture.

There is room for freedom of species diversity. The point being that similar questions of the universe may well be shared by all inhabitants of the universe. Not all aliens have to be thinking of mankind as a food source.

In conclusion, there is something more fundamental here and that is the major types of ethical values employed. Two salient types are: 1.) “universal” ethics and 2.) “situational” ethics. In the former it is assumed that the principles of ethics are true throughout the universe and that all sentient beings will adopt such values and strive to abide by them. This is sort of another “argument ad ignorantiam” whereby the postulate is considered true by virtue of the fact it cannot be proven untrue. That is somewhat on shaky ground even though the values are considered good and worthy. There is no guarantee that sentient beings would adopt the same philosophy let alone the fact that there may or may not be other sentient beings that we would even contact. The “situation” ethics simply states that ethical values are contingent upon such factors as cultural dispositions, geography, and time [historical]. In other words ethical values are constantly changing. Historical evidence is abundant, for we today would look at Spartus and its ethics as barbaric and crude--but it worked for them. Even today there are situations that are common and accepted in Asia that are not approved of in Western Europe. So to extrapolate this concept to space travel, it would be apparent that man’s early sojourns and possible alien contacts be based on one set of ethics and always subject to modification. To have a positive relationship with aliens that consume their pets as fine cuisine, mankind might just have to adapt rather than storm the kitchen with lasers blazing in an attempt to save the "Trebles”. No doubt, such modifications don't come easily and will certainly affect all humans as our species is dispersed throughout the universe. It would be arrogant for mankind to assume that the “universal” or “situation” ethics would be the “correct” ethical principles. Somehow, we must learn to get along with our neighbors be they next door or on the other side of the galaxy.

Further reading...

"A Grim Reckoning"

"Astroenvironmentalism: The Case For Space Exploration As An Environmental Issue"

"Law, Ethics and Extra-terrestrial Life"

"Life, Longevity, And A $6,000 Bet"


And finally, a spaceperson's personal hygiene may be everyday issues on deep space ventures and may become a serious issue of "space ethics". Bad enough for the travelers to endure each others personal issues but all may well fall short when the ambassadors of Earth finally contact the inhabitants of planet Mongol and Emperor Ming gets "wind of" the emissaries. All that cool advanced technology denied and potential galactic wars ensue because Captain Pharto and crew neglected to address those issues. I'm sure NASA is somewhat concerned about the problems of personal hygiene, containment of bacteria, and the general placation of the crew's overall general well-being and comfort.

"No Bath Time/ In space, it's not easy being clean"