Small, water-rich near-Earth asteroids can be captured by spacecraft, allowing their resources to be extracted, officials with the new company Planetary Resources say.
Image: Planetary Resources, Inc.
Science and space exploration have caught up to science fiction in many ways, producing marvels beyond the imaginings of the visionary writers of the past. Yet there are staples of science fiction that current technology is still leagues away from attaining, and which some doubt can ever be achieved.
For example, interstellar travel.
"'Beyond the solar system' is too far away," said Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the "Red Mars" trilogy and the upcoming "2312" (being released May 22 by Hachette Books' Orbit imprint). "It's a joke and a waste of time to think about starships or inhabiting the galaxy. It's a systemic lie that science fiction tells the world that the galaxy is within our reach."
However, NASA itself has said the idea is worth pursuit and has teamed with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to sponsor the 100 Year Starship project to spur scientists to look into it.
Jack McDevitt, author of the Nebula award-winning "Seeker" and the upcoming "The Cassandra Project" (Ace, Nov. 6), agrees with Robinson that traveling to other stars is farfetched.
"Ditto time travel," he added in an email to SPACE.com. "We will probably never develop antigravity or artificial gravity, or truly intelligent (i.e., self-aware) machines. There will always be limits to human life spans. Other technologies that will probably never arrive because of affiliated social problems: flying cars and invisibility. (Think drunks at 6,000 feet.)"
Yet McDevitt also pointed out that life spans are getting longer, in accord with fictional visions. And many other science fiction predictions have come true.
"We walked on the moon," he said. "And we've come a long way with automated space vehicles. The real world has caught up with predictions regarding implants and communications systems."
Some writers have seen the landscape of science change radically during their lifetimes.
"The very idea of orbiting artificial satellites and sending astronauts to the moon was science fiction when I first started my career," said Ben Bova, author of the award-winning "Titan" and the upcoming "Orion and King Arthur" (Tor, July 3).
Both writers and governments of the past envisioned using computers to organize society.
"The Soviets in the 1950s and '60s were desperately struggling to invent computer power that would have been strong enough to run the Soviet economy," Robinson said. "They failed, as we know, but what's interesting is that the computer power they were trying for, that would run a national economy, is just a fraction of what we have now. So you can imagine a kind of automated economy that isn't monetary, where people put in their needs, they make what they can, they get what they need, and that they organize it by computers or artificial intelligence." [Terraforming the Solar System: Q&A With Kim Stanley Robinson]
In some cases, science fiction has even been the engine that drove science to realize certain goals.
"Science fiction helps to inspire young readers, who then go and make science fiction become actual fact," Bova told SPACE.com in an email. "Science fiction stories, and films such as George Pal’s 'Destination Moon’ (written by Robert A. Heinlein) helped to convince the taxpaying public that space flight was not only possible, but desirable from both a political and economic point of view."
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10 Comments
Add CommentWe can always wait for the new (old) USS Enterprise to be built in 20 years and go explore our solar system, but we will not get any further than that until we figure out how to create and put a super nova in our gas tank. We definitely need to get our minds away from fossil fuel for space travel to happen. If we can create a Sun and explode it and put it back together and explode it again, that may produce the speed we need in space to travel light year distances within a few days...that may be a good start. As soon as we figure out how our Sun was created and produce a shield that can hold an explosion like that, we may then be heading in the right direction for above light speed travel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"'Science fiction writers missed the most salient feature of our modern era: the Internet,' McDevitt said."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClearly, Mcdevitt has never read any of William Gibson's work, or any of the other "cyberpunk" authors.
Our number one need now above all else, is a new form of energy to harness (safely that is). Boiling water and using steam to spin big 'fans' isn't going to take us anywhere. Interstellar travel will happen, it's an inevitability. The only questions are how fast can we go, and how do we power it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this????????????
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHumans haven't even been to Mars and unmanned spacecraft have explored a speck of a speck of our own solar system.
The author of this article is not a science fiction reader.
There are a number of ways to do interstellar travel, the SF writers are merely unaware of them:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this* Slow interstellar: colonize a comet and burn a small part of it's hydrogen in a fusion reactor for enough kick to travel to the next star. Save the rest to power your city during the trip. A good size comet has enough materials to build a large city with. Your initial colony may be a lot smaller and grow along the way.
* Beamed travel: Send a small robotic probe quickly to the next star. Have it build a receiving station. Use the Sun as a gravitational lens to focus a communication laser to the receiver and send the description of a person instead of sending them bodily. Atomic force microscopes can scan at an atomic level, so you send an atom by atom map of their body. Even at that level of detail it's a million times less energy to send the description than the actual object.
And no, I don't have the technical details of how to do it, merely demonstrating there are other ways than the science fiction cliche of a metal skinned starship with big engines.
You overstate the usefulness of atomic force microscopes. They can generate an IMAGE of an object with molecule-level (not atom-level) precision, but they can't tell you anything about its composition. They're also unable to provide information about anything beneath the surface. You could scan a person & beam the information to generate a statue on the other side, but nothing more. even if you could find a way to beam a precise, atom-by-atom description of a person across interstellar distances it would still take years (or longer) to get them there (4.2 years to Proxima Centauri, the closest star) and you'd have to figure out a way to animate the new body once it was constructed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is an uncomfortable truth that it is probably impossible for our species to colonize outside of our own solar system. There are just too many obstacles and dangers to overcome, and we will never achieve velocities for our spacecrafts which would make extrasolar travel practical or feasible (in fact we will probably only be able to reach but a very small fraction of the speed of light). When you consider the dangers from cosmic rays and high velocity objects (that can compromise hull integrity with catastrophic effect) and the logistical problems of inflight fueling, ship maintenance, the creation of a failsafe life support system and food supply, extrasolar system space travl is nothing more than a fantasy. I am a fan of Star Trek but I know that the world it portrays is not achievable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI forgot to add that time (that is genuine and not due to relativistic time dilation) travel is and always will be impossible, because it is impossible to isolate an event or object from its nonlinear causal framework or its dualistic part/whole function within a given framework of intrasystem and intersystem interaction (reference General System theory by Ludwig von Bertelanffy). Since velocities by macroscopic objects will never achieve anything more than a pitifully small fraction of the speed of light so-called relativistic time travel (due to time dilation) will never be a significant consideration.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat many or most or all, I can't think of an exception, classic (prior mid-1950s) scifi writers missed was the invention of the transitor and minaturization of comm gear and computers. The computers, if addressed, were huge tube affairs, even the aliens had big ones.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese science fiction writers lack imagination. Scientists are more imaginative and optimistic. Arthur Clarke said the problem with interstellar space travel is not speed but biology. Humans have short lifespan relative to interstellar travel time. If advancement in medical science can put astronauts in indefinite hibernation, they can travel for thousands of years and wake up when they reach their destination.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisComputer scientists Turing and Shannon never doubted intelligent machines are possible. SETI astronomer Seth Shostak believes if they find advanced intelligent life, it will not be flesh and blood. It will be robotic, basically intelligent machines. He believes this will also be our future. Eventually we will replace our body with robotics like the Terminator. The advantages are obvious. It's super strong, doesn't get sick, doesn't get old, easy to repair and replace, virtually immortal.
Robotic beings don't have problem with interstellar travel. With nanotechnology, you can make them very small. Your spaceship will weigh in grams. It requires little energy to accelerate to very high speed.