A VIRTUAL VACATION?

The May holiday weekends in Canada and the United States serve as unofficial kickoffs to summer. We camp in the outdoors, open up our summer vacation properties, or just kick back with cool beverages in the backyard, all to celebrate not being cooped up in the house by Winter’s nastiness. Soon it will be full-on summer vacation time: wilderness excursions for the adventurous, campground stays for those with kids, and long road trips for those who have kids and are very brave, optimistic, or just forgetful.

But there are lots of reasons to believe that the ‘vacation trip’ might soon become a thing of the past. Let’s face it, the concept of the individual family car is unsustainable over the long term because of climate change and the dwindling supply of oil. And even with a robust infrastructure of charging stations for electric cars, with power supplied by solar and wind farms, I think the tradition of the road trip will fade.

Other forms of vacation transportation face the same challenges. Aircraft burn huge amounts of fuel and are shameful polluters. Cruise ships too. Passenger trains might enjoy a resurgence of popularity, but the track infrastructure in North America has been neglected for years and I’d be surprised to see any appetite to rebuild it (unless rail interests here suddenly become willing to learn from Europe and Japan). Even highly-efficient transit systems like Elon Musk’s proposed Hyperloop (a super-high-speed magnetically-levitated train traveling in an enclosed tunnel at near-vacuum) would be useful for reaching a destination but hardly a means to enjoy the journey.

Wait—as a science fiction writer, shouldn’t I be touting the dream of space tourism? Second honeymoon jaunts to luxury hotels on the Moon or Mars?

With current technology, and any improvements of it that we can reliably predict, that’s not going to be possible for any but the ultra-ultra-wealthy. Far too wasteful of energy. But also too slow to appeal to many people anyway. Being cooped up for days, weeks, or months with nothing to look at but black space would make the worst road trip to Disney World look like heaven (space crews will have to keep busy or they’ll go nuts).

But, you say, we all need a change of scenery, so what’s the alternative?

Maybe the reality is…we should look to virtual reality. After all, is it really necessary for our body to sit around on a beach in Jamaica as long as our mind thinks we are? The experience is what’s important, and we experience the world through our senses. Those can be fooled. The makers of the VR headset Oculus Rift have finally released their consumer version, bringing a whole new realism to gaming and, potentially, many other forms of entertainment. Oculus features extremely high definition screens with extra peripheral detail for each eye and awesome refresh rates to trick our brains into seeing a seamless visual environment. Of course, the audio component—precision surround sound—has been available for years. As for the sense of touch, the network of nerves throughout our skin isn’t the same all over our bodies—it’s highly concentrated in our hands and face, and much less sensitive elsewhere. Gamers already experience sensory feedback systems that use vibrating pads in gloves and pedals to simulate touch, and there’s lots of room for refinement there. The rest of the body could probably be tricked by systems of heating and cooling pads, plus air-driven pressure points inflated and deflated like a fighter pilot’s flight suit (used to regulate blood circulation during high-g manoeuvres, but certainly adaptable to other uses). Something as crude as a motion chair or platform wouldn’t be needed except for more active pursuits like waterskiing or hang-gliding.

The sense of smell isn’t hard to fool with aerosol systems, and taste really only comes into play when we eat or drink. So we make sure there’s a supply of real margaritas on hand (or any other taste treat, provided by the staff of a VR vacation emporium, perhaps in your favourite shopping mall).

The possibilities mentioned above don’t even include the progress being made in direct brain-computer interfaces. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been focusing heavily on implantable neural interfaces in recent years. Brown University’s BrainGate project is making great progress in allowing paralyzed people to control technical devices with only their thoughts. The more precisely we can use EEGs and Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy to sense the activities of greater numbers of brain cells, the more ability we’ll have to affect a specialized environment directly with our minds, so we won’t be dependent on just witnessing some software designer’s idea of a perfect vacation, but will be able to create our own. Eventually, sending signals into precise brain centres, we’ll be able to temporarily replace the input from our senses and trick our brain into accepting something wholly fictional as reality.

At some point (in the 23rd or 24th centuries?) we might combine that direct brain interface with projection technology and produce something like Star Trek’s holosuites. But in the meantime, these true virtual reality technologies will be developed long before a fast and cost-effective means of space travel. Plan to holiday on Mars from the comfort of your own living room (you won’t even have to get shots!)

For now, after a hard blog-writing session, I’ll give my brain a vacation that fits my budget: a cool brew and a few hours in front of the Scenery Channel.

IMPLAUSIBLE SPACESHIPS COULD BE POSSIBLE

At a science fiction convention recently, I heard panellists complaining that most spaceships in science fiction, especially in movies and on TV, just aren’t realistic. And it’s true. But there are some creative concepts that might vindicate some of those fiction writers and moviemakers.

One is the thought that we could someday harness gravity to propel our ships. It’s not a new idea—in H.G. Wells’ First Men In The Moon the main character coats a sphere with an antigravity material, causing it to launch into space, and then opens parts of the coating to allow the craft to be pulled to the Moon by gravity. A slow form of travel, to be sure, but maybe we’ll one day learn to manipulate gravity the way we use light energy in lasers. (Comic strip detective Dick Tracy’s Space Coupes of the 1970’s somehow used magnetism to get to the Moon and back, but I’m not buying it.)

Speaking of lasers, last month Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner announced plans to spend $100 million to send miniature probes pulled by light sails to Alpha Centauri. Mind you the probes would be little bigger than a computer chip with a sail about a meter wide. They’d be propelled by the light from a gigantic laser array pumping out 100 gigawatt laser pulses, which would push them fast enough to travel the four-light-year distance in about twenty years. It’s not impossible that such technology could be scaled up to propel passenger-carrying craft.

The concept of a faster-than-light “warp drive” isn’t pure fantasy, either. In the mid 1990’s mathematician Miguel Alcubierre conceived of a way to get around the light-speed barrier of Einstein’s theories. It would involve warping space: compacting space itself ahead of the spacecraft and expanding it behind, so it would be the bubble of space contained between these areas of altered space that would actually exceed the speed of light, like a surfer riding a wave. Yeah, it makes my head hurt, too. And the Alcubierre Drive would require exotic materials that might not exist. Still, we can hope.

One of the most interesting and controversial proposals of recent times would answer the problem of fictional spaceships not carrying thousands of tons of fuel. In fact, it would be a total game-changer. It’s an electromagnetic drive now often called the EM Drive (shown in the photo) designed by an English scientist named Roger Shawyer about fifteen years ago, but it’s so revolutionary, and contrary to prevailing belief, that most scientists simply won’t accept that it works. The Shawyer engine uses microwaves bounced around in a sealed chamber to produce propulsion. Established wisdom says that in order to go in one direction in space we have to throw something in the opposite direction. So scientists declare that Shawyer’s device can’t work. Except Shawyer showed that it does. And then Chinese researchers got one to work, and an American inventor showed a working model to NASA, and now a respected German professor has made one that works (though he’s still not sure why it produces thrust). The jury’s still out on the EM Drive, but acceptance is growing, and if it turns out to be workable it just might prove that many of the fictional spaceships we’ve read about in books and seen in movies are more realistic than we thought.

Not X-wing fighters, though. They’re still pure fantasy.

THE IMPLAUSIBLE SPACESHIPS OF SCIENCE FICTION

At the Ad Astra science fiction convention I attended recently in Toronto, a number of panels touched on the question of realistic spaceships in fiction.

Star Wars X-wing fighters? Not realistic, especially in space. With no air for wing surfaces to act on, there’s no reason to have wing-like structures, and no sensible way the ships would swoop and soar, darting in and around larger ships and into canyon-like spaces on death stars.

The mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind is gorgeous, and impressive as hell, but I can’t imagine any practical reason to make a ship with so many strange levels, and bizarre things sticking out of it.

Star Trek’s beloved Enterprise? Well the idea that a burst of plasma from a matter-antimatter reaction could push a ship forward is OK, but there’s never any indication of how it slows down again. It creates a “warp field” to allow it to surpass the speed of light and then pops out of warp drive at some unspecified speed that doesn’t seem to be related to anything. Then it goes into orbit around a planet. Real spaceships have to use just as much thrust to slow down as they use to speed up, or possibly harness the drag from a planetary atmosphere for braking (a process that involves a lot of orbits and a lot of excess heat to deal with).

Creators of space-based games like Warhammer 40000 use their imagination to design warships with bat-like wings, spidery legs, huge tail fins, tentacles etc., all to look alien and cool. Except all those frills add huge quantities of extra mass, surplus surface area (the easier to be hit by intentional fire or debris), all amounting to vast areas of waste space.

The Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey was realistic, and some of the ways spacecraft behaved in the recent TV series The Expanse weren’t too bad. Overall, though, an awful lot of fiction just plain ignores the realities of space travel, especially the time it would take to get places, the huge amounts of fuel required, and physical properties like inertia and momentum. Things that aren’t moving don’t want to move, and things that are moving don’t want to stop. To make them do either requires a lot of force. To expect to travel through space with the convenience and comfort of the family car, in a sleek package that looks like a futuristic jet fighter, just isn’t, well…realistic.

Of course, the plausibility of a spacecraft design has as much to do with its intended purpose as with its technology.

Gigantic spaceships, many kilometers long (Star Wars, Independence Day, the game Eve online) with vast chambers full of complex plumbing might make for exciting chase scenes and dramatic battle sequences, but large size usually means excessive mass (what on Earth we’d call weight) and the greater the mass, the more force required to get it moving, stop it from moving, or change its course. So high mass is generally not a desirable thing in a spaceship. In a space battle such a behemoth would be virtually impossible to get out of the way of an incoming missile or other weapon. And what do they need so much room for anyway? On the other hand, a colony ship intended to travel to another star could require centuries for the trip, so it would have to be enormous—you’d need to carry enough people to ensure a genetically diverse population for the colony, and maybe even an entire Earth ecosystem to transplant in the new world. Another justification for high mass (though not necessarily large size) would be if the ship required something like a big shield of water around it to protect the occupants from cosmic radiation. (FYI, here’s an amazing graphic showing size comparisons of nearly every fictional spaceship out there. Wow!)

Spaceships that are never intended to enter an atmosphere have no need for a sexy streamlined shape—they can be as ungainly as you want, as long as the structure can handle the strain of acceleration and deceleration. But a shuttle craft to and from a planet’s surface would benefit from an aerodynamic design, able to get some lift on the glide down, and with less wind resistance to contend with on the way back up.

One of the ways TV and movie spaceships most often fail in the realism department is that they don’t include enough space for the fuel the ship would use. They’ll show a craft about the size of a small bus to carry a dozen people to and from orbit (like in the movie Elysium). The American space shuttles were the size of passenger jetliners for a crew of seven, and required a mammoth liquid-fuel rocket and two solid-fuel boosters just to get them into orbit. Sure, we hope there will be significant gains in efficiency in the coming century or two, but as long as spacecraft use reaction drives (shooting something out the back to push them forward) they’ll require a significant amount of mass to eject. And gravity isn’t going away anytime soon.

What’s your biggest complaint about spaceships in fiction—the faux-pas that blow all their credibility out of the water?

There are some ideas being explored that could make “unrealistic” spacecraft into viable concepts. We’ll have some fun looking at them in my next post.