Space travel is bilge

Originally published 18 July 1988

The Space Cap­tain looked around the con­trol room. ‘Sit tight, every­body,’ he said. ‘We’re going into over­drive.’ His hand moved a small lever. There was a slight, almost imper­cep­ti­ble shud­der, and a pur­ple light glowed on the con­trol pan­el as the ship streaked toward Antares.”*

Ah, yes. Galac­tic trav­el. A zip through hyper­space. The meat and pota­toes of sci­ence fic­tion. We have trav­eled so often to Antares and beyond, in books, films, and tele­vi­sion, that it seems only a mat­ter of time before humans must actu­al­ly embark upon such a voyage.

Impos­si­ble, says the physi­cist. No way, says the astronomer. Or as Sir Richard Wool­ley, once Britain’s Astronomer Roy­al, so tidi­ly put it: “Space trav­el is bilge.”

But don’t tell that to the stu­dents in my astron­o­my class. They will lis­ten polite­ly to what I have to say about the unbridgable dis­tances to the stars, about the ener­gy require­ments for trav­el at speeds close to the speed of light, and about nature’s absolute pro­hi­bi­tion on trav­el at speeds greater than the speed of light — they will lis­ten polite­ly and then they will say “But how can you be sure? Maybe there’s lots of stuff we don’t know yet.”

And, of course, they are right. One would hate to be caught with one’s imag­i­na­tive pants down, as was Dr. Lee De For­est, the man who invent­ed the vac­u­um tube, who in 1957 was quot­ed as say­ing that man would nev­er reach the moon “regard­less of all future sci­en­tif­ic advances.”

Who, a hun­dred years ago, would have imag­ined fly­ing through the air to Europe at twice the speed of sound? Who would have guessed that we would get to the moon only 12 years after De For­est pro­nounced it impos­si­ble. Humans will be col­o­niz­ing Mars before the mid­dle of the next cen­tu­ry, easy. Can Antares be far behind?

The ways to go

Lis­ten to the sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers: There are lots of ways to get to Antares fast.

There’s old reli­able hyper­space. Accord­ing to this view, our famil­iar three-dimen­sion­al uni­verse is fold­ed or crum­pled in a high­er dimen­sion, as a flat piece of paper might be crum­pled in three-dimen­sion­al space. The space trav­el­er moves quick­ly from one place in the uni­verse to anoth­er by tak­ing a short cut through the high­er dimension.

A vari­a­tion on the hyper­space theme imag­ines a nifty short cut through a black hole, which in this souped-up ver­sion of the gospel of rel­a­tiv­i­ty is actu­al­ly a worm­hole through a high­er dimension.

Or one might avoid nature’s pro­hi­bi­tion on faster-than-light space trav­el by tak­ing a quan­tum jump. In the stan­dard inter­pre­ta­tion of quan­tum physics, elec­trons in the atom jump from one ener­gy lev­el to anoth­er with­out tra­vers­ing the space (or ener­gies) in between. If elec­trons can do it, then why not the Antares-bound spaceship?

And if this stretched-out physics does­n’t do the trick, then one can always explore psy­chic dimen­sions. Dema­te­ri­al­iza­tion. Trav­el from one place to anoth­er as pure thought. Recon­sti­tute the space­ship as bod­i­less infor­ma­tion, instant­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed with­in that great Mind which is the universe.

Why not? I’ll tell you why not. It’s all bilge.

These thoughts on the impos­si­bil­i­ty of space trav­el are inspired by a book called No Way, The Nature of the Impos­si­ble, edit­ed by math­e­mati­cian Philip Davis and physi­cist David Park. The book con­sid­ers in delight­ful detail what it means to say “impos­si­ble” in all areas of sci­ence. It is from Park’s own con­tri­bu­tion to the book, a chap­ter called “When Nature Says No,” that I bor­rowed the sci-fi episode that begins this col­umn — and Sir Richard Wool­ley’s roy­al­ly-stat­ed opin­ion on the impos­si­bil­i­ty of space travel.

Possible and not so impossible

The essays in No Way con­sid­er the “impos­si­bil­i­ty” of every­thing from climb­ing Mt. Ever­est to par­ent­ing a per­fect child. The edi­tors con­tend that “because mankind is inspired by the chal­lenge of the impossible…it behooves us to have some con­cep­tions of what it is.” I agree. A healthy notion of what is pos­si­ble and impos­si­ble is at the heart of all good science.

“To live at the bound­ary between the pos­si­ble and the impos­si­ble, and to be aware of it, is to be tru­ly alive,” say Davis and Park. And they wise­ly add: “What is real­ly new in the world emerges at this boundary.”

Their words apply equal­ly to moun­taineers, par­ents, and prospec­tive space trav­el­ers. To imag­ine that every­thing is pos­si­ble — as do the peo­ple who read super­mar­ket news­pa­pers, politi­cians who believe in astrol­o­gy, and grow­ing num­bers of New Agers — takes the edge off liv­ing at the bound­ary. To imag­ine that the impos­si­ble is carved in stone takes the edge off too.

Sci­ence is dif­fer­ent from super­sti­tion and from sci­ence fic­tion because it cleaves to the bound­ary between the pos­si­ble and impos­si­ble. It is a del­i­cate bal­anc­ing act — to be skep­ti­cal and open at the same time. I don’t believe in UFOs because I am firm­ly con­vinced that space trav­el is bilge. But I also know that our present knowl­edge of the world is par­tial and ten­ta­tive. Some­day, humans may trav­el to Antares. Some­day Antar­i­ans may vis­it Earth. I’m pre­pared to be astonished.

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* Excerpt from No Way: The Nature of the Impos­si­ble by Philip J. Davis and David Park. © 1987 W. H. Free­man and Co. Reprint­ed with permission.