Interstellar travel, in case you didn’t realise, is a passion of mine, so when it gets asinine press coverage I get pissed. Here’s an egregious example…
Starship pilots: speed kills, especially warp speed
…which talks about flying to the Galactic Core at 99.999998% the speed of light (so the ship-time is ten years, for a 50,000 ly trip.) The silly thing is the way the high radiation exposure levels at such speed is reported as though it was (a) new and (b) a fatal objection to interstellar travel. It’s neither.
The researcher is a radiologist, William Edelstein, at John Hopkins University’s Med School and his piece is being presented at an American Physical Society meeting…
Speed Kills at the APS Meeting
…and if that’s the quoted speed it’s hardly an impediment to interstellar travel, just ultra-speed travel. But we already knew that! The interstellar community has written about these issues for over 30 years. What does Dr.Edelstein & son hope to contribute to the debate?
Yes, it is amusing how closely this resembles the old arguments about why both manned heavier-that-air flight and space flight was impossible. “Rocket flight in space? Preposterous! There is nothing to push against…”
And the silly thing is that if “warp speed” (i.e. v>c) turns out to be genuinely achievable, then it will probably have to be done in such a way that this issue is irrelevant.
Hi Pat
Good point. Whatever ‘FTL’ becomes viable – if and when – then it won’t be through regular space. It’s interesting that even a soft SF writer like Ursula LeGuin has her Hainish Nearly-As-Fast-As-Light ships go into “NAFAL Space” so they can dodge the proton storm and ISM debris.
The other hazard, which I want some hard figures on, is the hazard from the CMB (2.735 K) and the average thermal glow of the galaxy (5-10 K) – both of which get concentrated and intensified by aberration and blue-shift. How does one integrate the whole sky input and then compute its aberration and blue-shift intensification at extreme gamma-factors?
Yes, it’s an old argument to many of us.
Other hand, it’s just another statement in a long debate. I think there’s a kind of “social argument” going about whether manned space flight makes any sort of sense in the long range, comparable in some ways to the long argument about whether slavery was morally acceptable.
I.e., matters of fact are of less signifiance to the participants than their emotional states; and the “debate” will likely be decided by force majure (e.g., a Civil War) than by logical agreement.
Some people like the idea of humans spreading into the cosmos; others find the notion pointless or even repellent. This isn’t going to be resolved for all time by a handful of (mostly) American citizens arguing in the year 2010.
Not to say this is an argument for ceasing to argue…
Hi Mike
As an Australian my awareness of vanishing frontiers makes the Diaspora to the Stars seem like an imperative or else the human spirit will go stale, forget what it already knows and descend into a prison crafted out of its own shit.