Railroad to the Stars: Riding the Lightways

We used and still use the oceans to sail ships to The New World, and everywhere else.

We used railroads to get our Steam Locomotives and later Electric Locomotives from city to city and all points in between. Still do.

We use asphalt to do the same for Tractor-trailers, to drive to and from work, and to visit Grandma on the weekend as all good young parents should.

So who the heck are we to think we won't have to have another media like oceans, railroad tracks, and smooth asphalt, that is to say the seas, the rails, and the highways, to do the same when it comes to getting to the stars?

The news is good. We know how to do it. Or at least I know, and I know I'm not the first with this idea, for I have done the research. So it's not just me.

I'm just writing to publicize; to get the word out that the Engineering is a done deal. All that remains is first agreement, then commitment from the PTB, then the energy, which means money. But if you have commitment, the money then energy will flow. Been my experience.

We already know, and people are planning, the next media of transportation:

We will do it with light. Good old photons.

Old reliable!

The way to build it, and this is my idea but I'm probably not the first, is to have a series of stationary Light Stations strung between Sol System and Tau Ceti or Procyon.

The Light Stations would beam laser light of a specific magnitude and frequency at "starships" riding the "lightways." Being the "locomotives" of this system, the starships would be built and automated to receive the laser "boost" which would free them from having to carry on-board fuel which means extra mass.

Unless of course, some "genius" figures out how to extract energy from the vacuum first. Good luck on that one. Even a prognosticator like me won't go there.

There are several resources I used in coming up with this idea, but before I give them ...

The essential point is to design and build these lightway stations first, then launch them to their permanent (relative to two star systems) spacial positions. They will of course be refurbished on a regular basis of families and material, but that's not the essential first point. It will however make the first future young enterprising person to act on such a repeat business a very wealthy person.

We can do this. We have a lot of humans who want to work but can't today due to the lack of jobs. We can give them jobs. We also have too many freshly minted PhD's in Physics and Mathematics who are struggling to find permanent positions in their fields, whose knowledge and skills can be fruitfully applied to making this so.

So let's make it so.

(With apologies to Jean-Luc)

Steven Colyer
World's 2nd biggest Space Nut after the professional Astronomer Phil Plait who writes the most excellent (Garth said) weblog: Bad Astronomy. I'll never be better than No. 2 because nobody can top Phil.

Dec. 15, 2010

P.S. Things must be done in stages with steps, therefore here is my proposal No. 1: Start with experiments in cislunar space, that is the space between Earth and the Moon. Make the project Apollo-like, which means hitting up on Governments and the Globals (I know, kissy-assy time, I hate it too). Start with unmanneds, then dogs, chimps, and finally people, otherwise known as "Spam in the can." Or forget the dogs and chimps, sacrifice some lab-grown bacteria instead. PETA will be pleased. After that, build a lightway to the moon, and points outward after that. A circular lightway in orbit around the Earth after testing and proof will most likely be the first step. Well whatever the first step, let's get steppin'! Ciao.

Resources:

Wikipedia entry on Interstellar travel. Ignore the "Urgent Appeal of Wikipedia (Co-)Founder Jimmy Wales." He just wants us to send him money or he's threatening to charge us for access to Wikipedia. Yeah, screw that, I'll just go back to the Encyclopedia Britannica. At least those entries have to be peer-acceptable. No lies. And definitely no money from me. They still have libraries, right?

Wikipedia entry on Beam-powered propulsion. Again with the Jimmy Wales, sheesh.


Fine-tuning The Interstellar Lightsail


About the weblog: Centauri Dreams :

Tracking Research into Deep Space Exploration

Alpha Centauri and other nearby stars seem impossible destinations not just for manned missions but even for robotic probes like Cassini or Galileo. Nonetheless, serious work on propulsion, communications, long-life electronics and spacecraft autonomy continues at NASA, ESA and many other venues, some in academia, some in private industry. The goal of reaching the stars is a distant one and the work remains low-key, but fascinating ideas continue to emerge. This site will track current research. I’ll also throw in the occasional musing about the literary and cultural implications of interstellar flight. Ultimately, the challenge may be as much philosophical as technological: to reassert the value of the long haul in a time of jittery short-term thinking.

Laboratory Technician

Top Physics Blogs

2014: Humanity's First Interstellar Probe Enters Interstellar Space

NASA's Voyager 1 Spacecraft Nearing Edge of the Solar System
By SPACE.com Staff
posted: 13 December 2010
11:27 pm ET

NASA's Voyager 1 probe is nearing the edge of our solar system after 33 years and nearly 11 billion miles of spaceflight. The spacecraft may make the final crossing into interstellar space in just four more years, NASA announced today (Dec. 13).

The Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a region of space in the outer solar system where the speed of solar wind – charged particles streaming from the sun – is effectively zero. NASA scientists think the steep drop in solar wind speed is a sign that it has been blown sideways by a more powerful interstellar wind that blows in the spaces between stars.

"The solar wind has turned the corner," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement. "Voyager 1 is getting close to interstellar space."

Voyager 1 has traveled about 10.8 billion miles (17.4 billion kilometers) from the sun since it launched on Sept. 5, 1977 on a mission to swing by the gas giant planets of Jupiter and Saturn.

But Voyager 1 did not stop there. It continued on its way and in 2004 crossed a solar system boundary known as the termination shock – the border at which the sun's supersonic solar wind crosses a shockwave, slows down and heats up. 

The region immediately beyond the termination shock, where Voyager 1 is now, is called the heliosheath. The edge of the solar system is a cosmic border known as the heliopause. [Diagram of the Voyager probes' locations]

The heliosheath forms a turbulent outer shell of the sun's cosmic reach, which scientists call its "sphere of influence." Once Voyager 1 travels beyond the heliosheath and crosses the heliopause, it will officially be in interstellar space. The spacecraft is hurtling toward the solar system's edge at a steady rate of about 38,000 mph (61,155 kph).

NASA thinks Voyager 1 could cross into the interstellar frontier by 2014. When the probe makes the crossing, there should be a sudden drop in the amount of hot particles Voyager 1 encounters and a spike in the number of cold particles it detects, NASA officials said. 

A sensor on Voyager 1 called the Low-Energy Charged Particle Instrument recorded the speed (or lack thereof) of the solar wind around the spacecraft, NASA officials said. In August 2007, the sun's solar wind was blowing outward like a steady gale at about 130,000 mph (209,214 kph). Since then, it has been slowing down by 45,000 mph (72,420 kph) each year.

In June, Voyager 1's solar wind sensor began clocking an outward speed of zero. Scientists tracked the speed measurement for months to make sure it was accurate.

"When I realized that we were getting solid zeroes, I was amazed," said Rob Decker, a Voyager Low-Energy Charged Particle Instrument co-investigator and senior staff scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "Here was Voyager, a spacecraft that has been a workhorse for 33 years, showing us something completely new again." 

The observations were presented today at the fall 2010 meeting of the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Voyager 1 was actually one of two spacecraft launched in 1977 to explore the outer solar system. On Aug. 20 of that year, just a few weeks before Voyager 1's launch, NASA launched Voyager 2 on a grand tour of the solar system that flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Both spacecraft rely on nuclear power sources to generate electricity. 

While Voyager 2 launched first, it is traveling slower and in a different direction than Voyager 1. After completing its planetary flybys, Voyager 1 swung up to leave the solar system in a northern direction, while Voyager 2 pitched down on a more southerly course.

Voyager 2 is currently about 8.8 billion miles (14.1 billion km) from the sun and is traveling about 35,000 mph (nearly 56,330 kph) – 3,000 mph slower than Voyager 1.

Voyager 2 should see the solar wind speed dwindle to zero in the next few years, NASA officials said. 

From Space.com

Birth Into 6th Dimension

World's Most Intense Laser

HERCULES Laser is Most Intense Laser in the Universe, Almost as Powerful as the Death Star

from Gizmodo

"If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory." - Physorg

If that doesn't amaze you, you need a slap. The HERCULES laser can produce that intensity instantaneously, and it is said to be the most intense known light in the universe. The beam is sustained for 30 femtoseconds, with one femtosecond being equivalent to a million billionth of a second. So, it lasts longer than you do in bed, and it also performs a little better, too. However, this isn't Dr Robotnik having a wacky time for no use, it is hoped that the research will give rise to powerful cancer treatments, and when we say powerful, we do mean 300 terawatts of power, with an inconceivable, 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter. What is that equivalent to? An astonishing, 300 times the capacity of the U.S. electricity grid. All of that energy is concentrated into a 1.3-micron point, which is roughly 100th the diameter of a human hair.

Victor Yanovsky, who spearheaded the laser's development, says the HERCULES is around two orders more powerful than its nearest competing laser. A beam can be generated once every 10 seconds, and the entire contraption accommodates several rooms, is constructed from titanium-sapphire and the light that enters at one end is processed by mirrors and other optical elements. This results in an increase in the energized quality of focused light.

The high intensity light, beyond medical uses, could also be implemented in crazy physics based procedures called "boiling the vacuum," which will apparently result in spontaneous matter generation. Crazy. Let's hope no one hell-bent on world domination starts attempting to put together a real Death Star, or we'll all be screwed. May the Force be with you. (Note to self: End more articles with that line.) [University of Michigan via Physorg]

From Gizmodo:  here.

The Shape of Inner Space - Mid-Read review

A wonderful book about the joys of Mathematics and Geometry. It's not just about String Theory! Even those opposed to strings should enjoy it.

I'm still halfway through this book and I'm enjoying it like a fine wine. My pre-read anticipatory review is here.

I strongly recommend this as a holiday gift for a scientifically-minded loved one, which includes yourself should your significant other ask what you would like.

I shall not finish it before Xmas given my current dirty job, so here's a nice review from an Amazon reader, Nigel Seel. I can concur with his assessment given what I've read so far:

This book, from a mathematician, covers the period from the first proof that Calabi-Yau spaces actually might exist to their current central place as a preferred model for String Theory's extra dimensions. Shing-Tung Yau is the Fields Medalist godfather of the eponymous manifolds and Steve Nadis had the unenviable task of writing it all down so that the rest of us could have a prayer of understanding it. He also did the interviews and fleshed out the physics side. The best way to review this book is just to explain what it says chapter by chapter.

Chapter 1: The universe is a big place, maybe infinite. Even if its overall curvature suffices to close it, observations suggest that its volume may be more than a million times the spherical volume of radius 13.7 billion light year we actually see. The unification programme of theoretical physics doesn't really work, however, if it's confined simply to three large spatial dimensions plus time. It turns out that replacing the point-like objects of particle physics with tiny one-dimensional objects called strings, moving in a 10 dimensional spacetime may permit the unification of the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces plus gravity. Well, today it almost works.

We see only four space-time dimensions. Where are the other six? The suggestion is that they are compactified: rolled up to be very small. But that's not all, to make the equations of string theory valid, the compactified six dimensional surface must conform to a very special geometry. That is the subject of the rest of the book.

Chapter 2: Yau was born in mainland China in 1949. His father was a university professor but the pay was poor and he had a wife and eight children to support. When Yau was 14 his father died leaving the family destitute: Yau's destiny seemed to be to leave school and become a duck farmer to pay his way but in a flash of inspiration he decided instead to become a paid maths tutor, teaching as he was learning. Yau's astounding talent led him from this humble background to the University of California at Berkeley by the time he was 20. As well as autobiographical details, this chapter also outlines the idea of a metric on curved spaces, introducing Einstein's theory of gravity.

Chapter 3: Yau's early work at Berkeley was in the area of geometric analysis, used in the proof of the Poincare conjecture (1904). This conjecture states that a compact three dimensional space is topologically equivalent to a sphere if every possible loop which can be drawn in that space can be shrunk to a point without tearing. The conjecture was proved in 2002 by the controversial Russian mathematician Grisha Perelman. Work in this area set the scene for Yau's celebrated proof of the Calabi conjecture: that what subsequently became known as `Calabi-Yau' (CY) spaces actually exist.

Chapter 4: The Calabi conjecture is simple to state if not to understand: it asks whether a complex Riemann surface (conformal, orientable) which is compact (finite in extent) and Kähler (the metric is Euclidean to second order) with vanishing first Chern class has a Ricci-flat metric. All these concepts are explained in this chapter. One of the more interesting features of a space satisfying Calabi's conjecture (if it existed) was that it would satisfy Einstein's vacuum field equations automatically.

Chapter 5. Yau initially didn't believe the Calabi conjecture and at a conference held at Stanford in 1973 went so far as to give a seminar "disproving" it. Calabi contacted Yau a few months later asking for details and Yau set to furious work, the argument slipping out of his hands the harder he tried to make it rigorous. Yau concluded that in fact the conjecture must be correct and spent the next three years working on the problem. In 1976 he got married and on his honeymoon the last piece of the puzzle dropped into place. The conjecture was proved correct.

Chapter 6. What Yau had proved was a piece of mathematics but he was sure there must be applications in theoretical physics. However, nothing happened until 1984. Parallel developments in string theory (ST) had determined that ten dimensions were needed to allow sufficiently diverse string vibrations to occur to capture the four fundamental forces and to induce `anomaly cancellation'. The search was on for a six dimensional compactified space to complement four dimensional space-time. The chapter describes how physicists came to CY spaces via supersymmetry and holonomy.

CY manifolds within ST are very small (a quadrillion times smaller than an electron) and are riddled with multidimensional holes (up to perhaps 500). The way strings wrap around the CY surface, threading through holes, is intended to reproduce observed particles and their masses. This has proven a fraught task as it requires a very special CY manifold to even get close. Yau has estimated there might be 10,000 different manifolds but no-one really knows.

The chapter closes with a discussion of M-theory, Edward Witten's framework for uniting the five different string theories developed in the 1990s. M-theory is defined in 11 dimensions and includes `branes' of anything from 0-9 dimensions. Apparently the universe could have 10 and 11 dimensions simultaneously but the mathematics (via CY spaces) works better in 10.

Chapter 7 discusses a challenge to the applicability of CY spaces due to the quantum field theory requirement for conformal and scale invariance. The CY metric doesn't (without tweaking) allow for this. This research led to a concept called mirror symmetry which associates CY manifolds with distinct topologies with the same Conformal Field Theory (CFT). This proved important for calculation.

Chapter 8 talks about the success of ST in deriving the Bekenstein-Hawking formula for (supersymmetric) black hole entropy. The very large number of required black hole microstates are constituted by wrapping branes around sub-surfaces of a CY manifold to build the black hole. The chapter ends by extending these ideas to the celebrated AdS/CFT correspondence.

Chapter 9 notes that ST has yet to reproduce the Standard Model (SM) and recounts some of the attempts being made. Yau's favourite is E8 x E8 heterotic ST and the technique is to break the many symmetries of E8 down to the 12 required by the SM [SU(3) with 8D symmetry, 8 gluons; SU(2) with 3D symmetry, W+, W-, Z; U(1) with 1D symmetry, photon]. We are not there yet.

Chapter 10 talks about mechanisms to keep the compactified dimensions small when energetically they would prefer to be large. The CY manifolds are stabilised by quantised fluxes. Suppose there are 10 values (0-9) for a flux loop and 500 holes in a CY manifold then there are 10 ** 500 different stable states. This extraordinary crude estimate has been widely publicised as "The Landscape Problem" for those who were hoping that there would be exactly one CY model for the universe. Yau is unimpressed, never having believed in such uniqueness in the first place.

Chapter 11 continues the theme of `explosive decompactification' and recommends not being around if and when it happens.

Chapter 12 surveys the search for hidden dimensions. They may be visible `out there' for telescopes to pick up. Alternatively there's the LHC.

Chapter 13 is an essay on truth and beauty in mathematics.

The final chapter raises a deep question. CY manifolds are solutions to Einstein's gravitational field equations in a vacuum. But Einstein's theory is classical - smooth all the way down (except for rare singularities). However, the QM view of space-time at the Planck scale is anything but smooth: the term `quantum foam' has been coined. What kind of geometry - quantum geometry - could model this?

Yau's view is that at present no-one has much of a clue although he describes some ideas exploring CY topology changes via singularity introduction - the flop transition -which could shed some light on what quantum geometry could look like.

In summary this is not a book for the faint-hearted. It gives a mountain-top view of the research area which is Calabi-Yau theory and its application to String Theory. One never forgets however how much inaccessible mathematics and physics lies behind Steve Nadis's persuasive and fluent writing.