No. Not the mountain in the Himalayas. Kardashev II Civilization status – a civilization using the energy output of its star. Earth intercepts just 2.2 billionths of the Sun’s energy and presently we use ~1/10,000th of what Earth receives. Thus the plateau of K-II seems a long way off. However we could boot-strap our way there by developing an automated space economy. And the first step isn’t huge.

Philip Metzger and Robert Mueller have both been busy developing a Map of the way to K-II via quasi-self-replicating robotics on the Moon.

Here’s Phil’s 2011 100 YSS Presentation: Nature’s Way of Making Audacious Space Projects Viable
Abstract

Building a starship within the next 100 years is an audacious goal. To be successful, we need sustained funding that may be difficult to maintain in the face of economic challenges that are poised to arise during these next 100 years. Our species’ civilization has only recently reached the classification as (approximately) Type-I on the Kardashev scale; that is, we have spread out from one small locality to become a global species mastering the energy and resources of an entire planet. In the process we discovered the profound truth that the two-dimensional surface of our world is not flat, but has positive curvature and is closed so that its area and resources are finite. It should come as no surprise to a Type I civilization when its planet’s resources dwindle; how could they not? Yet we have gone year by year, government by government, making little investment for the time when civilization becomes violent in the unwelcome contractions that must follow, when we are forced too late into the inevitable choice: to remain and diminish on an unhappy world; or to expand into the only dimension remaining perpendicularly outward from the surface into space. Then some day we may become a Type-II civilization, mastering the resources of an entire solar system. Our species cannot continue as we have on this planet for another 100 years. Doubtless it falls on us today, the very time we intended to start building a starship, to make the late choice. We wished this century to be filled with enlightenment and adventure; it could be an age of desperation and war. What a time to begin an audacious project in space! How will we maintain consistent funding for the next 100 years? Fortunately, saving a civilization, mastering a solar system, and doing other great things like building starships amount to mostly the same set of tasks. Recognizing what we must be about during the next 100 years will make it possible to do them all.

He presents a stark choice and though it’s based an arguably finite resource base, the road to freedom surely lies with not being restricted to one planet.

Metzger, Mueller and their NASA colleagues have submitted a technical paper to the “Journal of Aerospace Engineering”:

Affordable, Rapid Bootstrapping of Space Industry and Solar System Civilization

Abstract:

Advances in robotics and additive manufacturing have become game?changing for the prospects of space industry. It has become feasible to bootstrap a self-sustaining, self-expanding industry at reasonably low cost. Simple modeling was developed to identify the main parameters of successful bootstrapping. This indicates that bootstrapping can be achieved with as little as 12 metric tons (MT) landed on the Moon during a period of about 20 years. The equipment will be teleoperated and then transitioned to full autonomy so the industry can spread to the asteroid belt and beyond. The strategy begins with a sub-replicating system and evolves it toward full self-sustainability (full closure) via an in situ technology spiral. The industry grows exponentially due to the free real estate, energy, and material resources of space. The mass of industrial assets at the end of bootstrapping will be 156 MT with 60 humanoid robots, or as high as 40,000 MT with as many as 100,000 humanoid robots if faster manufacturing is supported by launching a total of 41 MT to the Moon. Within another few decades with no further investment, it can have millions of times the industrial capacity of the United States. Modeling over wide parameter ranges indicates this is reasonable, but further analysis is needed. This industry promises to revolutionize the human condition.

Robert Mueller presented on the Plan at several different meetings, his presentation slides being available here:

Robotic, Self-Sustaining Architecture to Utilize Resources and Enable Human Expansion Throughout the Solar System

I got in touch with Phil and will hopefully have more to discuss in Part II of this blog post.

A pre-print from yesterday, submitted by Branislav Vlahovic:

Observed Cosmological Redshifts Support Contracting Accelerating Universe

Vlahovic, a Professor at NCCU, discusses the possibility that our Universe is Closed and has already passed its maximum radius, at 15 billion years of age. He explains that the observed red-shift would be observed even in a collapsing space-time and the Universe might be ~24 billion years old, with 6 billion years before re-collapse in an Anti-Big-Bang. The reverse of the Big Bang, typically called a “Big Crunch”, is when all the (negative) gravitational potential energy of the Cosmos will be returned to (positive) heat energy and the contents reduced to “pure-energy”. Not healthy for Intelligent Life like us.

To have a present day Hubble parameter of ~70 km/s/Mpc the Universe would need to have a mass-energy density about 4.4 times the critical density, Omega-Naught. That means a Cosmic census of about 50 billion Galaxies as massive as the Milky-Way and a Universe that’s presently 7.5 billion light-years hyper-radius, with the opposite side some ~11.8 billion light-years away. An interesting consequence of such a claustrophobic cosmos is that we might be seeing double images of quasars – one image being their hyper-luminous form billions of years before their current more sedate Galaxy form. If peculiar velocities (non-cosmological motions) off-set the most recent image from the position of their past form, then we’ll see a Quasar with a high red-shift near a “closer” Galaxy with a lower red-shift. This would answer the puzzle of why some Quasars appear to be springing from regular Galaxies.

This web-site isn’t afraid of exploring impending Cosmic Dooms – a Sudden Singularity a few million years from now has been discussed previously – but this one is interesting. It’s not far enough away for the Cosmos to be reconfigured for a controlled collapse, as per the Omega Point Theory, but it does invite exploring ways to break-out of our Cosmos. One option, also mentioned here, is to learn how to live in black-holes, which – if sufficiently large – can survive a Big-Crunch to spring-forth in the next Big-Bang. Alternatively we might learn how to harness the worm-hole created by the Ring-Singularity of rotating black-holes – in theory this will allow access to other Universes.

Can we survive the transition to other Universes, potentially with totally different laws?

Since the 1970s Dr. Michael Persinger has been developing a physical understanding of paranormal phenomena. More recently he has worked with modern neuroscience technology to study “anomalous cognition” – which he defines as gaining information via more than the usual five senses. Not exactly telepathy. Instead he proposes that the magnetic field around objects, especially the background terrestrial and interplanetary magnetic fields, can store information and human brains can retrieve it. To further communication of his work to the widest possible audience he has made it all available on-line:

Dr. Michael Persinger

…includes his early 1970s work on geomagnetic phenomena and UFOs, etc., which gave him a certain scientific infamy. Such “ultra-terrestrial” explanations for UFOs neither satisfy the sceptics or the believers, but does provide the basis for developing a scientific understanding of how humans and the Earth, as a collective entity, interact.

One can speculate further and imagine a bestiary of magneto-plasma based lifeforms which share this world with us, but tracking such elusive phenomena is incredibly difficult. I’ve had my own encounters and can understand the difficulty. My friend Andrew Collins isn’t as restrained about attempting to communicate with such possible entities and documents his ideas and experiences in his latest book:

Andrews Collins News… “LightQuest” book coming soon

…perhaps you can get in-touch with the Geo-Psyche? Just beware that all your attempts are through the most tricky communication medium of all – the human psyche.

Tiny Methone snapped up-close by Cassini around Saturn…

…I’m not saying it’s an alien artefact, but that’s what I’d expect a distinguishable alien artefact to look like. Unnaturally smooth…

The Official Announcement has arrived…

Mae Jemison and Team Establish 100 Year Starship With Goal to Make Interstellar Space Travel Reality by 2112

…also covered by Paul Gilster, at “Centauri Dreams”,…

100 Year Starship Organization Launches

…while Sharon Weinberger writes it up for the BBC’s International front page news…

100-Year Starship: Mae Jemison reaches for the stars

…the common thread is that this Organization is about finding a Way for humanity, as a whole, to turn their eyes to the stars. Reaching for the stars will enrich all our lives here on Earth, and 100 Year Starship will be looking for the best ideas to do that. Travelling to the stars requires creating a sustainable way of living for the years, probably decades, it will take to reach other star-systems. By learning to do that we’ll develop the technologies that will enable people to live well here on Earth.

Here’s one possible route – just one idea based on a talk by Mark Edwards at the September 2011 Symposium. He’s been advocating the use of algae as a means of creating food, pharmaceuticals and materials for years. The systems he has developed, using a bunch of algal species, can produce a broad variety of products – many of which we already consume without knowing it. His vision was food/drug/fabric/cosmetic “independence” for the average person – in a real way an automated Cornucopia, able to feed, treat, decorate and even clothe us, all through sunlight, carbon dioxide in the air, and some nutrients. Can you imagine doing away with the hit-and-miss of dirt-farming? And all perfectly suited for living in space for decades at a time.

That’s just one (very good) idea amongst probably thousands (millions) more. In time, as creativity is channelled into such concepts, I’m hopeful of a near total transformation of how we feed, clothe, decorate, house and power our selves and lives. Even with Crazy-Times ahead, thanks to the GFC 2.0 looming in Europe and beyond, I believe we can solve our problems and transform our lives. Our hope and self-belief need a common focus, and I think the 100 Year Starship is just the vehicle for that. What will make our lives better here, will enable us to take them There, to the Stars.

So join us in this journey, in whatever way you can.

Recently this website, Build the Enterprise, hit the news because of the author’s rather quixotic call to build a real interplanetary version of that most famous fictional starship lineage. Unfortunately the site’s Forum-ware is very cantankerous, so I posting my discussion of necessary redesigning of the concept (slightly reworded for clarity)…

Running the numbers, the figures are wrong, wrong, wrong.

Here’s a preliminary list.

(1) Wet mass is quoted as 84,822 tons. Propellant load is 12,474 tons. Yet elsewhere, in pounds, it’s 187 million/55 million. Inexplicably the propellant mass has been halved. To get to Mars in 90 days with the quoted mass-ratio, (187/(187-55))= 1.42, means a very high exhaust velocity is required. Exhaust velocity and jet-power are inextricably related by:

P = 1/2.T.v

where P is the jet-power, T the thrust and v the exhaust velocity. To get to Mars in 90 days requires a high delta-vee (dv) – enough to travel to Mars on a short trajectory, against the Sun’s gravity, then matching to Mars’ orbital velocity. With a VASIMR that low mass-ratio might get it to Mars in 90 days – with a dry tank. The 0.002 gee acceleration quoted however is IMPOSSIBLE. Thrust, T = M.a i.e. mass (84,822,000 kg) times 0.0196 m/s^2 = 1,662,511 newtons thrust. With a bit of algebra we find that with a 1.5 GW jet-power the exhaust velocity is an impossibly low 1,262 m/s. A reasonable exhaust velocity (high-thrust VASIMR mode) is 15,000 m/s – meaning a maximum acceleration of ~0.00024 gee or a jet-power of nearly 25 gigawatts.

However a lot more propellant will be needed if the vehicle thrusts all the way at that exhaust velocity, so on a typical trip to Mars a VASIMR steadily builds up the exhaust velocity to a maximum 300 km/s at the half-way point, then a steady decline as the vehicle slows down for Mars arrival.

Often people will say VASIMR can get to Mars in 39 days. They don’t often say what power and fuel that requires. To reach Mars in 39 days also required that particular VASIMR option to aerobrake into orbit around Mars – something not recommended for a large vehicle like “Enterprise”. The required propellant mass would be 230,000 tons, and the power source would mass 48,285 tons, while delivering 96.6 GW of electrical power to the engines. A 90 day mission is far less challenging in technological terms.

[Additional note: time under power over the same distance is related to the power by the 1nverse cube - thus taking 90 days means a power-supply that's 8% the size of the 39 day trip.]

(2) In many ways the shape of the Enterprise is quite good. The frontal area is low, thus presenting a smaller target for potential meteoric impactors. Handy when going at high speed through our rather junky solar system. The original 1960s design also placed the antimatter reactors on booms as far away from the habitat as possible. The movies, and all later Trek, rather idiotically had the antimatter warp-core in the middle of the secondary hull – not a healthy idea at all. And plasma conduits all over the place… asking for trouble.

There is a major issue not addressed by the TV spaceship creators. Waste heat. Specifically for the Gen-1 “Enterprise” the VASIMR is essentially an externally powered fusion rocket – hydrogen plasma is heated and directed just like in an operating magnetic-mirror fusion reactor. The difference is that there’s no attempt at energising it all the way to fusion conditions. In theory, a VASIMR could be up-graded to be an actual fusion rocket. But without actually making its own fusion power, the VASIMR needs to get power from fission reactors, and they all put out excess heat. There’s only one way to get rid of excess heat in space when it’s not being thrown over-board in the rocket exhaust gases and that’s via radiators.

And the “Enterprise” – Gen1 or the fictional versions – don’t have them. A real “Enterprise” will need a set of “wings” – big radiators – to handle the heat or else the whole lot will cook.

(3) The back-up fuell-cells are a good idea, but for use in space they need an additional supply of oxygen of their own. A MW bank of fuel cells will use a lot of oxygen in a hurry, so you need to have a bank of liquid Oxygen (LOX) tanks to supply it.

(4) Why is the “Enterprise GEN-1″ 3 times bigger than the fictional version? The fictional upgraded “USS Enterprise” was just over 300 metres long, yet its proposed namesake is ~950 metres long. I suspect an imperial-to-metric conversion error.

My preliminary, and hopefully friendly, critique. I look forward to dialogue with the concept creator.

Heaven is a planet 80 times bigger than Earth! Or so the late Percy Collett revealed to the world. For years I’ve had a vague memory about a Missionary with a story about a trip to Heaven. Thanks to the wonders of Google I tracked it down – he visited Australia in 1989, on a speaking tour of various Pentecostal Churches. One of which was near my home town and I had managed to catch a radio advert for, thus the memory.

Thanks to his faithful disciples’ transcripts, and notes taken down by sceptical investigators, I gather Dr. Percy told a lurid tale of being carried to Heaven, which is 3 trillion miles away, in just six hours by an Angel, dipping passed the Sun and planets on the way. He saw the New Earth, which is being constructed near Heaven, then Heaven itself, which is 2 million miles around. Immense buildings form God’s City, with the Giant Gold Cube City from the Apocalypse included.

Such visions are nothing new and Dr. Collett’s visions don’t add much to the canon. The pseudonymous “Enoch” started the Judeo-Christian craze for big visionary journeys, but the Akkadians and Sumerians had their own versions, predating the current crop by a millennium or two. The updating to the post-Copernican Universe is welcome, but the message isn’t new or startling. Jesus is still coming back “some time soon” so you’d better be good, for goodness’ sake…

The physics of Heaven is a bit more interesting. A solid planet can’t be 80 times bigger than Earth, as its gravity compresses its atoms into higher and higher densities past a certain mass. At most it would be 3-4 times Earth size. Even lighter elements mean a maximum at just over Jupiter’s size for pure hydrogen planets – at most about 15 times as big as Earth. To be 80 times Earth’s size, the planet must be a “Super-mundane” planet – an artificial shell world around a natural object within. To be 80 times bigger than Earth, then by Newton’s gravitational equations, that means it masses (80)^2= 6,400 times Earth’s mass to give Earth gravity on the surface. If we assume a negligible Shell mass, then that’s a 20 Jupiter mass central object – coincidentally (?) a brown dwarf object might lurk in the Oort Cloud at roughly 3 trillion miles with about that mass.

So is Heaven really a vast artificial planet? Once upon a time, it was a solid or aethereal shell directly above our heads and we were like deep-sea fish on this heavier, grosser world. Once the crystal or aethereal spheres were shattered in the 16th & 17th Centuries, Heaven has been looking for a new locale. More modern updates have pushed it into Hyperspace, or totally other space-times or Eternities, but maybe it conceptually lurks just beyond our present day reach, and always will. Alternatively, the Mystics, like Jakob Boehme, place it “next door” to our everyday world, accessible by all who are ready to see it.

A comment on Transterrestrial Musings suggested I might be against space development. A quick browse through my earlier blog-posts would quickly correct such a misapprehension. What I was arguing was the race to bust up planets to make cybernetic “Islands of the Lotus-Eaters” might be as much a trap and a dead-end as the Luddite call to “return to the Earth” and thus effectively go extinct.

Spreading into the Cosmos is non-optional for Humanity – Humanity 1.0 or our future upgrades, whatever their architecture. But disassembling the planets isn’t needed – at least, not yet. Take Dvorsky’s “Dyson Shell” plan. For many reasons a Dyson Shell is unlikely as a habitat and Dyson (like Stapledon before him) meant a Cloud or Swarm of habitats to increase habitat size for Life. However a Dyson Shell isn’t non-sensical if we want something else – energy collectors. Wrapping the Sun in “statites” – optically levitated structures – is perfectly reasonable and avoids the issues of the science-fictional Shell Habitat. Such structures, however, have a vulnerability, from in-falling meteoroids and comets. Stuff is always falling into the Sun, or coming very close.

The simplest mitigation effort would be making the individual collectors small enough to manoeuvre out of the way of the in-falling matter. Given sufficient detection time the collector in danger can shift sideways. But that does have one important implication – the collectors need sufficient space between them to do so. Thus coverage of the Sun is likely to be less than 100%, more like 50% or less. This constraint lets us then compute the rough mass of the Dyson Shell.

For a perfect absorber the ratio between the outward force of sunlight to the inward pull of gravity is 1:1300. That means energy collecting statites need to be very thin. Interestingly, because the sunlight and gravity decline in intensity via the inverse square law, except in very close proximity to the Sun, a statite able to levitate near the Earth will do so at any radial distance from the Sun. The exception is when close to the Sun and instead of being a “point source”, the Sun is a great big wall of light. For materials purposes we’ll assume an operating temperature of 1000 K and 50% conversion efficiency, which puts our collector at about 0.1 AU. Here the sunlight is 100 times stronger than at Earth’s orbit.

To levitate the collector’s areal mass density is 0.00077 kg/m², which is very thin. A possible design is large reflectors concentrating onto an energy converter, though the exact details we’ll leave for future engineers. What that figure lets us do is estimate the total mass required. At 0.1 AU the total area is 2.81 x 10²¹ m², meaning the total mass of our 50% coverage Dyson Shell is 1.08 x 10¹⁸ kg. About a quadrillion tonnes. Being so thin each collector can solar-sail its way inwards to its operating position around the Sun. It also means the fraction of Mercury mined, as Mercury masses 3.3 x 10²³ kg, is very small.

To transfer the energy collected, solar pumped and energised lasers, presumably solid-state, will be used. With half coverage of the Sun and 50% conversion efficiency, the total energy supplied to the Solar System civilisation is a staggering ~10²⁶ W. Essentially a million tonnes of energy per second is available.

So what do we do with it all? One possibility, which would go a long way towards making a Dyson Swarm, is transferring the power to distant objects and terraforming them. Not just the planets we know, but the potentially thousands of planet-sized objects between the stars, the Nomads of the Galaxy which were recently in the science news. Again, the difficulties of managing so many planetary sized laser streams is an exercise for future engineers, but even with 100,000 Earth-sized worlds illuminated (the Sun’s output is equivalent to 2.2 billion times what Earth receives) the total amount of sky covered by each stream is minute so streams crossing planets will be rare and predictable, thus can be mitigated. Engineered eclipses?

A final thought, for the Worriers, is that power transfer lasers, on planet scale, don’t need to be very intense. Eventually the Earth will need a planetary shell to modify the Sun’s natural input, as its luminosity increases during its Main Sequence climb, but that’s not needed for laser defense just yet. A question worth pondering is just how thick a shell is needed and how high it needs to be, as well as how strong. That’s for a future posting.

A worthwhile predecessor to my present musings is the 1996 efforts by Kelly Starks & the gang at the Lunar Institute of Technology. As you’ll note the “updates” have lagged somewhat, but the Starship Design Study is well worth a look. They went into a lot of detail and their discussion of drive technology, life-support, the trade-off between prepacked supplies and CELSS, and similar minutiae is very handy, if dated slightly.

Some highlights…
Fuel/Sail Class Starships …explains the basics.
Explorer Class Starships …details the “small” design (25,000,000 tons!)
Mission Plan & Manifest for Explorer Class …breakdown of payload and mission plan. Lots of mining of Lithium-6 at destination for journey home.
Bussard Fusor Discussion …for a long time my only reference on Bussard fusor performance available online. Now Askmar.com is the place to go to.

Of course such gigantism is unlikely to ever be very practical. Real crewed starships need something better than mere fusion to get up to decent speeds. I’d bet on Hawking radiation powered Black Hole Starships and/or Reverse Baryogenesis Total Annihilation drives. The ultimate IMO would be the Neutrino Ramjet – basically it uses macroscopic sphaleron fields to annihilate scooped mass, producing a pure collimated neutrino beam. Such a vehicle would be able to launch from planets without melting down continents and have essentially unlimited range. The stuff dreams are made of…

George Dvorsky recently blogged on the easy way to boot-strap civilisation into Kardashev Type II status. For those new to the Kardashev Civilisation levels, Type I uses the energy received by its planet – humans use and control about 0.01% of that presently. Type II uses and controls the energy output equivalent to its star’s output, about 2.2 billion times more than Type I. A Type III uses the energy output of its Galaxy – roughly 30 billion times the previous level.

A recent paper by Japanese theorists proposed possible ways a Type III civilisation might tap the energy potential of a Galaxy’s Black Hole, essentially creating a tame Quasar. Collectors 1,000 light years from the Active Region would beam energy to any part of the Galaxy requiring it, even to near inter-Galactic distances. To get in the way of such a power-beam would probably rapidly reduce whole planets to rock vapour, so controlling distribution will be quite a challenge.

Similarly Dvorsky envisages surrounding the Sun in energy collectors built from materials extracted from the planet Mercury, even going so far as to disassemble the planet. Then the rest of the planets might follow, to be converted into “computronium”, which is essentially smart materials for building virtual environments for virtual life-forms to live in. Alternatively large real habitats might be constructed, though these rapidly run into materials strength issues as they grow in size.

Such wholesale consumption of star systems seems kind of short-sighted to me. Enthusiasts argue that because natural planets are essentially random arrangements of elements, crafted by simple “generator codes” then simulated planets made the same way will do just as well. Perhaps. But I find the prospect of ripping apart planets without first studying them in detail kind of artless. Regardless of how elaborate our simulations, the Universe is vastly more detailed and thus escapes the necessary simplifications of our copying/mimicking of its processes. What would we miss by artless consuming it all willy-nilly?

In the long-term I am not against converting the available inert matter into living material, biological or otherwise. To be against that is anti-Life and ultimately futile. But once we reach the post-biological stage must we then hasten our pace of consuming the cosmos? The available mass-energy is only being trickled out by the stars. At most they fuse and radiate away 0.9% of what’s available. There are many trillions of years of the Age of Stars before us, as Post-Biologicals once we have our First Singularity. Why trash the planets in a few centuries?