Gwynne Dyer: Building a starship for the next century

Never mind the constraints of the miserable present: the shrinking budgets, the lost opportunities, the collapsing morale. Thinking is free, so let’s think really big. Let’s think about...building a starship in the year 2112.

Well, I’ve already been thinking about that for decades, actually, but that was just wishful thinking. Now there’s a whole organization for thinking about it, with a proper budget and government support and participation by private enterprise, and from Thursday to Saturday (September 13 to 15) they’re holding a public conference in Houston, Texas: the first annual symposium of the 100 Year Starship Initiative.

The sessions have ambitious titles: “Time and Distance Solutions”; “The Mission: Human, Robotic or Reconstituted?”; “Destinations and Habitats”; “Becoming an Interstellar Civilization”.

But the organizers also realize that this project will take as long as building a Gothic cathedral: one session is simply called “Research Priorities for the First Ten of 100 Years”. Then they’ll have to set priorities for the next 10 years, and the next, and the next....

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency wanted to create an organization to foster “persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel possible". The winning proposal, by the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, declared that “100 Year Starship will unreservedly dedicate itself to identifying and pushing the radical leaps in knowledge and technology needed to achieve interstellar flight.”

The 100YSS, as it’s known, would probably not exist if the professionals interested in space flight had really challenging near-space projects to work on. They don’t: one American space scientist described the current American space program, and indeed those of its rivals elsewhere, as "trying to finish what we started in the 1960s". Low-orbit operations are vital, but they are not inspiring.

Some of these frustrated professionals work at NASA and the DARPA, so there is official support for thinking big. There’s not much money: DARPA gave the 100YSS only half-a-million dollars of seed money (out of its $3-billion budget), but then nobody is planning to build expensive hardware now. They just want to think about what kind of hardware (and software) would be needed to go to the stars.

If they want to go on thinking big thoughts for very long, of course, they’ll need more than half-a-million dollars, but the rest of the money will have to come from private enterprise. For the moment, that means mainly from the well-funded space companies founded by billionaire entrepreneurs who made their money in other new technologies, and now want to do something even more interesting.

So appoint a charismatic former astronaut to lead the organisation–Dr. Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space–and make sure that both private business and potential international partners feel comfortable with the approach. It’s a natural area for international cooperation: there are probably never going to be rival national starship programs. Add a truckload of ambition, a pinch of hard-nosed realism, and stir.

The first public outing for this enterprise is the symposium in Houston, and its popular appeal is obvious. It’s a heady thought that this may be where the future course of human history is set, and at this stage nobody has to deal with dreary things like budgets and project management.

The most outrageous concepts can be welcomed, examined, and pursued or rejected. But is there any realistic prospect that human beings could ever build a starship?

Nobody knows. As Douglas Adams’s seminal work, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, sagely observed: “Space...is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.”

Building a starship would therefore require not just four or five generations of technological revolutions. It would also require the overturning, or at least the wholesale reinterpretation, of the laws of physics as currently understood.

Last time around, it took about five centuries, say from 1450 to 1950, to get through a comparable scale of change in technology and physics. But of course things move much faster now.

At any rate, it’s hard to see what harm the 100YSS could do, even if it never achieves its objective. If the history of space flight up to now is any guide, at the very least it would produce radically new technologies that have major positive impacts on human welfare. And if it actually succeeded... That would be the biggest deal in human history.

The most recent estimate is that there are about 30,000 planets suitable for our kind of life within 1,000 light years of here. Most observers assume that if a planet can support life, then it will almost certainly have life. It would be a great pity to miss out on all that because of a mere lack of ambition.

Comments

18 Comments

scissorpaws

Sep 13, 2012 at 6:14am

Their scale is off. This is like those guys in 1450 trying to figure out how they could break the sound barrier. This should be The 100 Year Interstellar Initiative. Then they could all watch "2001 A Space Odyssey" and figure out how all these things could be built over the next century. That big wheel space station and the little ships heading off for Saturn and Jupiter, Mercury. It's really just a matter of money. And for comparison the recent Democratic and Republican conventions cost $100 million each, taxpayer dollars. There's lots of money when the politicos feel it's for a good cause.

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Patrick2

Sep 13, 2012 at 6:57am

The OLPC project aimed to produce an extremely low cost computer for children's education around the world. Also know as the $100 laptop, the first concept was for a PC powered with a hand crank.

Today, the computer itself doesn't stand out much from commercially available pads and netbooks. Partly because the OLPC was a model, an inspiration, a predecessor to all of those other inexpensive computers.

The OLPC was a success, even if not many units are out there. Its display technology, some of the low power innovations, even the inspiration are still there.

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Gregory Nicholls

Sep 13, 2012 at 9:05am

Cme on, Gwynne, you usually make sense. Within a thousand light years of here? Is that all? So a spaceship, if it could travel at the speed of light, if it could do so with out killing the folks inside, would arrive at its destination in a thousand years. What if there was life there? If they had the technology they'd probably destroy the spaceship before they were contaminated by the alien bacteria.
How would the astronauts communicate with earth? When they are a mere hundred light years away, a signal would take a hundred years to get here. The reply would take a hundred years to get back.
There are so many reasons why spending vast amounts of money is a bad idea, even if the money comes from the private sector. (Hey, CEO's, why not pay your slave more money instead?)

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SPY vs SPY

Sep 13, 2012 at 9:58am

How about a 100 year Earth Project instead.

Alternatively

Folks could get together and list all the problems we currently face and will face in the next 100 years, here on Earth.

Then we could start to discuss what really needs to be done and changed so that we call could actually all live descent lives 100 years from now.

Outer Space is the dream world we fantasise about, when we feel overwhelmed by our Earthly Problems.

Dreaming wont solve our problems, only cooperation, personal awareness and thoughtful action.

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Leone

Sep 13, 2012 at 12:38pm

Why not aspire to fix this planet AND search for others? Each activity might aid the other.

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Robert Potier

Sep 13, 2012 at 2:49pm

for spy vs spy. It is called the united nations and it spends a lot more money then 500k on that.

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AncasterMike

Sep 13, 2012 at 3:08pm

I'm with scissorpaws.

First you need to build some infrastructure and economy in near space. Mine the Moon and asteroids and build it outside of Earth's deep gravity well.

To break the light speed barrier, we need to wait for a guy smarter than Einstein, which might be a while.

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Sheeple

Sep 13, 2012 at 3:27pm

We have a 4 billion + years old spaceship called Earth lets fix that so that we have it for the next 4 billion years as habitable.

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A relevant quote

Sep 13, 2012 at 9:55pm

<blockquote>
The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
</blockquote>

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W D HART

Sep 13, 2012 at 10:00pm

INSANE

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