In some ways it's rather disappointing if not unpleasantly disillusioning; I've come to believe that Science Fiction's glorious vision of an interstellar theatre, upon which one day mankind may play its part, along with many other spacefaring life forms, is sadly not going to happen. At least, it won't happen in the way we expect. Don't despair though, I think the future is as exciting as ever.
Frankly, I don't believe there's any justification for interstellar travel. Naturally, I'm assuming, much against my wishes, that the light-speed barrier is intractable and no-one would for pleasure alone, want to set off upon a journey of at least many decades through a tedious void, more than likely relying upon one's descendants to enjoy the arrival. Even if we could travel at several times the speed of light aboard a craft not unlike the USS Enterprise, I feel that one big point is overlooked - the purpose of travel. What is so supremely important about human bodies that their portage is a prerequisite of interstellar exploration?
In our solar system, we have enough energy, materials, and living room for umpteen future millennia. The only reason we look outside is our thirst for knowledge, and greed for the wealth of what we conceitedly regard as colonisable space. To be realistic, we'll just have to grow up and learn that one Eden is enough. If anyone wants to leave it, they'll have to face the fact that they won't be able to get back in.
Knowledge on the other hand, I believe is subject only to our own limitations in discovering it. As Douglas Adams once described in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there's no reason, given sufficient technology, why we can't extrapolate the entire universe from a piece of fairy cake.
To think of one day having the technology to travel faster than the speed of light, I believe is similar to imagining that one day we'll have typewriters with speech input. Both utilised in Star Trek, incidentally. They're very similar ideas; enhanced communication limited by a physical medium.
We're just as likely to explore the stars by sending bags of water around at light speed, as we are likely to use intelligent computers to send messages with ink on dried wood pulp. Yet, given the popular abuse of fax, a contemporary example of intrinsically anachronistic technology (even Morse code is more efficient!), I've resigned myself to expect that a lot of effort will still be spent trying to move human bodies at ever greater speeds.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but if you have deluded ideas about your requirements, then you may miss out on the time saved if your real needs could have spawned invention more easily.
Establishing our real needs provides the foundation to my thinking. We don't really need to travel, we just want to communicate as easily as possible.
Even today, the truth of this statement can be appreciated. Just think what the world would be like today if we undo the invention of television; without such a potent communicator, and given modern modes of transport, you can bet that travel would have been far more popular than it is today.
Mankind has always been changing from survival behaviour as an animal, through industrious behaviour as a social being, and now into interactive behaviour as an information processor. We will always retain some vestiges of our past behaviour; we'll still try and survive, individually and co-operatively, we'll still develop our industries to ever greater heights, but knowledge and information are going to be of far greater importance in orienting our behaviour in the future than anything else.
The most important discoveries in the future will not be in the realm of physical engineering, but in that of information engineering. This means we must adjust our expectations of change away from the world of the tangible and toward that of the intangible. Developments in information technology will continue to accelerate far beyond those in propulsion technology.
I believe that there is a key technological innovation that will have a profound effect, and one that will arrive far sooner than faster-than-light travel. Moreover, it will make pursuit of FTL travel pointless. This is telegnosis - instantaneous communication - the ability for distant sites to exchange information without needing to transmit messages through space.
In the rest of the article I will describe how I reach the conclusion that given such a facility, corporeal travel will become redundant.
Why do we find the
concept of interstellar travel so easy to believe?
I think we make the mistake of treating neighbouring stars as early explorers treated newly discovered continents on the other side of the planet - there to be explored and exploited. I see no reason why we should extrapolate continental exploration into stellar exploration, or at least expect things to turn out similarly.
One thing that is different, is that in the former case we developed intercontinental travel technology before we even theorised the existence of other continents. It was only superstition and ignorance that held us back. On the other hand, even before we set toe in the oceans, we could see other stars. They seemed nearer then, and even now that we know how astronomically vast the distances involved are, we are conceited enough to imagine that the stars will soon fall within our grasp.
The problem with interstellar travel, unlike navigating across the Atlantic, is that it requires more than breaching our scepticism. It requires breaching a natural law. While we may have contempt for our environment, priding ourselves with a technology we consider able to thwart all limitations, we remain subject to the laws of nature. There is nothing to suggest that we can change these laws. And one law in particular, puts the kibosh on interstellar travel - the light-speed barrier.
The solution to the light-speed barrier is to realise that travel is a primitive enabler of interaction between corporeal information processors, e.g. human beings. What we really need is not to travel faster than the speed of light, but to communicate faster than the speed of light.
There is no natural law (we know of so far) that prohibits instantaneous information transfer. Moreover, there are signs that it is feasible. The most encouraging concerns the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox - spooky action at a distance or quantum correlation, where quantum entities such as photons may still affect each other, however far apart they are.
Physical travel to a distant location allows:
1) Transfer of information
2) Transfer of resources:
Work, power, materials, natural formations, products, machinery, and information processors such as mechanisms, life forms, and intelligences.
Without travel it would be impossible to work at (let alone communicate with) remote locations (assuming they're uninhabited). We have to send something there to do the work and set up communications facilities.
Our best endeavour so far is the Mars lander vehicle which was able to examine surface material and communicate its findings. Note that this was done without physical human presence, and this leads to the basis of my argument: why do we need human beings in space except to overcome the deficiencies in communication speed and robot intelligence?
Assuming
instantaneous communication and robots of superior intelligence, why do human
beings need to travel?
There are plenty of reasons for travel on an earthly scale such as obtaining resources and living conditions, and intercourse for various purposes - biological to intellectual. Even interplanetary travel could be argued for the same reasons, if we assume a need for exponential population growth over the next few millennia.
However, when it comes to interstellar travel - the very term itself is nigh on an oxymoron - the reasons that could be proposed for it do not hold much water.
BUT: It is unlikely that there will be experiences available to human beings outside our solar system that cannot be reproduced or simulated within our own.
BUT: Exploration can be achieved by sending out telepresence devices.
BUT: This barrier is in effect defeated by telepresence.
OK: So aeons in the future, when Homo Sapiens will have evolved into a solid state, solar powered brain, linked into some homogenous, astronomically large colony, powered by an improved solar fusion reactor, with robots telepresently exploring the universe, and we start running out of energy, then, perhaps, we can justify the trip to Proxima Centauri - if it's still going!
So, if we have telepresence, there is no need for human beings to travel to the stars. All we have to do now is develop our telepresence technology sufficient for this purpose, which in turn relies upon instantaneous communication.
There are four primary methods of communicating:
i) Transporting structures of matter and energy (writing, floppy disk)
ii) Encoding information in indirect energy transfers (sound, cable TV)
iii) Encoding information in direct energy transfers (heliograph, radio)
iv) Indirectly
via quantum correlation
(interstellar telepresence)
The first method is typically sub-sonic, the second at sub-light speed, the third at light-speed and the fourth instantaneously. Current technology is already encroaching upon the fourth method.
I expect that the next communications breakthrough, of the same magnitude as geostationary communications satellites, will be laser umbilical repeaters for telepresence exploration robots.
The LUR will be required to maintain a laser link between remote robots beyond earth orbit such that we can exploit the quantum correlation effect to obtain real-time control. Each LUR will transmit each of a pair of correlated photons to its neighbours to allow them to communicate with each other. Thus one can envisage a series of these repeaters stretching between robot in outer space and the control centre on Earth - hence 'umbilical'.
I expect that there is a more elegant form of instantaneous communication. This would be based on the same phenomenon that ‘communicates’ natural laws throughout the universe. If you consider that natural laws evolved as the universe evolved, i.e. properties of fundamental particles were developed at the earliest stages of the Big Bang (rather than by a deity), then there is no reason to assume that we have a finished set.
Evidence that the set is not finished is the existence of indeterminism in the universe. If there can be an event whose outcome is not determined (whether observable or not) then this represents a vacancy in natural law. All we have to do is figure out how to use these gaps to insert our own miniature laws. Since natural law is manifest throughout the universe and does not require transmission, we can continuously modify our inserted laws to provide another means of instantaneous communication.
If you find that too far fetched, then a more palatable alternative is communication via gravity waves. As far as I understand it, gravitational changes are experienced instantaneously. So, if a quasar is a rapidly spinning binary, then we should feel its fluctuating attraction instantaneously, if indeed it is fluctuating. Unfortunately, I don't see an easy way to modulate these gravity waves - apart from perhaps lobbing asteroids at the quasar at particular intervals!
If you really want to be far fetched, how about this... Thinking of quasars, it strikes me that these may be (possibly artificial) correlated photon emitters. All you would have to do to communicate anywhere in the galaxy is find a quasar that is equidistant-distant from the two parties trying to communicate. If one party modifies enough photons in a recognisable pattern then the other party should see a trace of that pattern in its sample of photons (assuming an equidistant quasar). This would create spherical shipping lanes per known quasar, for each port (planet).
Anyway, however one implements instantaneous communication, I believe that this will explain the mystery of why we don't observe alien radio transmissions. Aliens are as likely to use radio for inter-planetary communication as we are likely to use carrier pigeon for inter- continental communication. Just as we in Europe can't find any evidence of carrier pigeons from America, so we can't find any evidence of radio transmissions from Betelgeuse.
I'll use another analogy. At a party, there is a diverse selection of people, of all ages. Everyone talks to everyone else, with one key exception: very few people try and drum up a conversation with the baby. It's not that they don't want to, or that it's not intelligent, it's just virtually impossible and will take a few years before any sense can be obtained. A few people may try and elicit some response, but the fact is the baby only senses its environment in a primitive way. This is why babies don't often get invited to parties. Earth is a baby in the galactic party of intelligent life forms that use instantaneous communication.
A much more accurate analogy of Humankind's place in the hubbub of pan- galactic chit-chat, is that of someone ignorant of the global computer network (Internet, JANET, CIX, Compuserve, bulletin boards, etc.). If you're not on the net, you're of no interest as far as conversation is concerned. Once you obtain the technology to connect, you've joined the party, but until then, you're effectively incommunicado.
If we assume that the radio phase of a life form is about a couple of centuries in duration which occurs just before its discovery of instantaneous communication, then for all life forms throughout the universe you could toss a coin to determine the distribution of communicative life forms as opposed to incommunicative life forms. When it lands on its side you have planet Earth and perhaps a few others - and by the time our radio messages even meet, SETI will have its work cut out just concentrating on the task of cataloguing.
Extra terrestrial intelligences are another key component of interstellar exploration. Rather than send out probes to other stars, we build telepresence robots for ETIs and send them our requirements so that they, in turn, can let us use their telepresence robots. In a very short time, all ETI known space will become accessible to us.
Incidentally, interstellar war in this scenario would seem to be totally pointless, since we would only be exchanging information as opposed to material resources. Of course, I suppose some life forms may have an exceedingly strong compunction to proliferate, and would secretly (using telepresence robots in our solar system) manufacture some of their species in our system abiogenetically. A future problem for the immigration authorities...
Investments in propulsion technology are still sound, but go out and buy plenty of shares in companies doing significant R&D in simulation, virtual reality and telepresence.
Don't stop dreaming of travelling to the stars, for that is all we will ever do, as our dreams will come virtually true.
New Scientist (EPR Paradox newsletter)
A is for Andromeda (Fred Hoyle?) (remote construction of telepresent robot by co-operating receiver)
2001 - a space odyssey - Arthur C Clarke (seems to hint at the idea of remote transceivers)