Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Gregory and James Benford on the "Starship Century"

Episode Date: September 30, 2013

“Starship Century—Toward the Grandest Horizon” is the new collection of fact and fiction assembled by Gregory and James Benford. The brothers are among the leaders of a renaissance in research and thinking about interstellar travel. They have returned to Planetary Radio to talk about this story of human destiny among the stars.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Gregory and James Benford on the Starship Century, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We continue our coverage of humanity's interstellar future with the brilliant twin brothers who have just edited a book about that dream, Starship Century, Toward the Grandest Horizon. Bill Nye takes a break from dancing with the stars to talk with us about the latest dance between a commercial space capsule and the International Space Station.

And it's all about shrouds and clouds of planets when Bruce Betts drops by for What's Up. We begin with Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, I was all set to talk about your blog entry from the 26th of September, and the first thing you told me is that you have part two of this up now, and it's all about trying to date things, that is, physical things, especially on the moon. That's right. I had started doing a research for an article on clay minerals on Mars, and I just kept on digging back and back and back into paper after reference paper.

And finally, I found myself writing a blog entry about the moon's large impact basins and how we use them to set up geologic timescales across the solar system. How did they actually create this timescale? Because out of this one article is a list of all of these huge basins in what we think may be the approximate order they were created? That's right. So we use the same general kinds of principles on the moon as we do on Earth. There's two main things you do.

One is that you simply look at which things overlap each other. If something overlaps something else, then whatever's getting overlapped was already there when the later thing happened. And so that establishes an order just by the law of superposition, which is one of the founding principles of geology. The other thing that we do on the moon in particular is that we look at impact craters. And any surface that has a ton of impact craters is older than a surface that has fewer impact craters. And so you can get a surface that was heavily crater of impact craters is older than a surface that has fewer impact craters. And so you can get a surface that was heavily cratered, and then maybe it got struck by another crater, or lava poured out onto the surface. And it basically it covers up all the craters and

resets the clock. And then slowly you build up craters over time. And so this is super powerful, because you can actually look at two lava surfaces on totally different sides of the moon that are not overlapping each other. And just by counting craters, you can tell which one is older than the other one. So here's this list of these basins. You point out that a bunch of these are from pretty much the same blink of an eye period. That's what many researchers think. The story is actually a little bit more complicated than that, though. So there's this long list, and toward the end is this one called Imbrium. It's the second newest of the big basins on the moon. And then halfway down the list is this other one called Nectaris. And so we developed this long list, and then we sent the

Apollo astronauts to the moon, and they picked up lots of rock samples and brought them back. And when we looked at samples that came from the Imbrium impact and some rocks that we think came from the Nectaris impact, they all had ages that were very close to each other. And that's one of the pieces of evidence that have led scientists to think that there was this thing called the late heavy bombardment where all of these big basins happened on the moon roughly at the same time, around 3.8 billion years ago. But if you look at a map of the Imbrium impact and where the Apollo astronauts landed, it's also quite possible that everything that they picked up came from imbrium in which case it wouldn't be such a

surprise that everything had roughly the same age so this is one of those major unsolved problems in lunar science what do we need to do to resolve this sample return so we need to go to other spots on the moon now that we've done you know we, we did a lot of sample return with Apollo and Luna. The problem is that we didn't have these geologic maps yet. So we didn't quite understand what it was that we were sampling. And now that we have really excellent maps and really excellent understanding of the order in which things happened, we can much more carefully target the places on the moon that we need to go to get the samples to answer these questions.

One of the big and most popular places to go would be deep in the South Pole Aitken Basin on the far side of the moon, which samples mantle material from the moon and is also one of the oldest events recorded in the moon's geologic history. All right, Emily, two parts to this so far, and she still hasn't gotten to Mars, as she said. Check it out at planetary.org.

And let's go back to the moon, Emily. She is Emily Lakdawalla, the senior editor for the Planetary Society and. And let's go back to the moon, Emily. She is Emily Lactuala, the Senior Editor for the Planetary Society and our Planetary Evangelist, a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Emily, have a great time next week at the DPS conference. I plan to. Up next is Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, the week started with a couple of major accomplishments on the commercial side, one of them being a new arrival at the International Space Station. Yes, the Orbital Sciences Cygnus cargo module.

Nearly a ton of cargo, 1,300 pounds of cargo taken up to the International Space Station by a commercial company on a commercial rocket. This is NASA's future, perhaps. And, of course, now two companies that have accomplished this. SpaceX itself and now Orbital Sciences. The thing is, you want the International Space Station to become useful because the laboratory, as it is called, is complete. And so in order to do that, you want to get up and down there less expensively. And this is definitely on the road. You know, for many years, since the Cold War, since the Apollo era, the world's largest space agency, NASA, has built

rockets, pieces of rockets at 10 different centers. That's been okay, but it's expensive to build things in 10 different centers and assemble them. So in the future, we hope that these companies, Orbital Sciences and SpaceX, will make rockets and the space hardware in an assembly line fashion. And that will lower the cost. And certainly, at least in the case of SpaceX, we seem to be approaching the time when there are going to be people inside those Dragon capsules. Boy, it sure looks like it. You know, they started – that was the big idea from the beginning. They're not modifying an existing capsule. They designed it to be human rated or man rated, as it's called,

from the get go. So that also lowers costs where you don't have to go back and change things. So it's an exciting time in new space. Bill, thanks again. Look forward to talking to you next week. Thank you, Matt. Bill Nye, he's the CEO of the Planetary Society, and he joins us for this little commentary section of Planetary Radio each week. We'll be back in just a moment with the Benfords, Greg and Jim, to talk about the Starship Century. I've just enjoyed more than a week out among the stars. It began as we talked with Lewis Friedman in our last episode. Then I welcomed Gregory Benford and his twin brother James to a live webcast at Southern California Public Radio

that featured a surprise appearance by science fiction writer David Brin. New Public Radio that featured a surprise appearance by science fiction writer David Brin. We have a link to that utterly fascinating 90-minute conversation on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. The Benfords now return to Planetary Radio to talk about Starship Century, their brand new book that begins with an essay by Stephen Hawking and then winds its way through brilliant science fiction stories and terrific science-grounded speculation from the best thinkers in the field. Greg Benford is, of course, a Nebula Award-winning science fiction author who was also a longtime professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine.

James is also a physicist and the president of Microwave Sciences. The brothers have done pioneering research on propelling sails with microwaves. The Benfords will put all the profit from sale of Starship Century towards support of Starship Research. You can learn more and buy it at starshipcentury.com. Jim, Greg, thank you so much. I'm especially honored to be talking to you twice in the same week. Let's, for this radio audience, talk a little bit more about Starship Century.

And Jim, since you have top billing on the book, I'll start with you. What generated this book? When we were preparing for a conference in, sponsored by DARPA in Orlando, called 100 Year Starship, two years ago, just now, we realized that this is an opportunity to pull together what was a nascent, emerging, getting bigger, everyday interest in the interstellar. The principal goal we had for the book was to collect the visions of interstellar thinking at this time across the spectrum from the physical, biological, and other sciences, all the way to the social, political, humanistic perspectives, including essays, science fiction

stories, and even a poem. As I said up front, it is quite a collection. I mean, if you want to see probably more of the world's smartest people all brought together in one book, this is the place to go. Now, this could not have been cheap to create because it is full of illustrations. Greg, you are well represented in here. Talk about the contributions you made, including a fictional story, which I think is a bit of a tribute to Robert Heinlein. Indeed, yes. It's called The Man Who Sold the Stars,

a direct echo of The Man Who Sold the Moon, published in the late 1940s. And it deals with the same kind of person, the person, in fact, whom we now see leading the charge in most space entrepreneurial directions. I modeled it on people I know, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Paul Allen. They are innovative entrepreneurs who are driven to goals that seem almost imaginary to other people. The goal of this character is to push out into the solar system and make use of its resources to expand human horizons, both economically and culturally in other ways. And I follow him all the way through to near the end of his life when he actually gets to go to the nearest star, which turns out to be not Alpha Centauri.

No, it turns out to be a star that is much, much closer to us, yet to be discovered. I guess this is a real possibility. Earlier this year, we found a brown dwarf star only about six light years away, that is two light years further away than Alpha Centauri. And statistically, there's a good chance that there might be one closer, just given the density of such stars.

These stars, there may very well be habitable zones around them, even though they are pretty cool compared to our own sun. Yes, around a dim brownish star, a habitable world where you could say have liquid water on the surface would be so close, it would be like Mercury, it would be tide-locked toward its star, and one side would be warmed and the other cold. We don't know a lot about such worlds, but we do know that they will certainly exist. Jim, as you said, you cover pretty much all aspects of starship travel, starship development. It's some of the stuff about propulsion, which I found the most interesting and exciting and provocative. We're still looking at sail technology as the most practical way to cross these gulfs.

Yes, that's entirely true. The sail looked like that is a beam-driven sail, driven by a laser beam, a microwave beam, is the only way we know the physics entirely. We know the physics well. We think the engineering is credible. The major features of such flights have been demonstrated by ourselves, actually, in the laboratory. And we know how to estimate the costs. That cannot be said of any other approach to interstellar propulsion.

Yeah, it's nice to speculate about fusion torch ships, the only problem being that no one has so far achieved controlled fusion. There were some twists even on the sail technology. Greg, one in particular that I'm thinking of that you talked about, it has to do with getting a little bit more thrust than just photons alone would give you. Yes, Jim and I discovered in experiments we did at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory a decade or so ago, accidental discovery, really. If you have something layered on a sail and then you illuminate it very, very strongly,

you get a rocket effect as the stuff boils off. And that can be very good at the opening of a sail flight. If we had some ablative substance painted on the sail for one-time use only, and then the sail sails only under sunlight thereafter. In fact, we're able to show that if you could do this to sails in orbit around the Earth, you could liberate a sail from the Earth's gravitational potential well in a matter of a couple of weeks, whereas now it takes about a year to sail a sail up, say, beyond the moon. I am thankful for the optimism that runs throughout this book.

But it is not without talking about some of the challenges of interstellar flight, not all of which are simply how do you build an engine or a ship that gets us fast enough to make this kind of travel practical. You've got one story about life support, which remains a major challenge, isn't it? That is, if we're going to put humans on these ships. Well, it certainly does. And I want to point out that a lot of people read it and don't realize that there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek there.

It's actually a subtle comedy. It's called Living Large by Rich Lovett. a subtle comedy. It's called Living Large by Rich Lovett. And it addresses the many, many problems you have in a sealed habitat traveling for a very long period of time. Not just the matter of how do you produce a stable ecosystem that will interact with the human community and stay alive, but also emergencies and accidents and other kinds of things you have to take account of when you have nowhere else to go. We haven't done that sealed ecosystem on Earth either. I think we need a lot of work on that if we're going to go interplanetary, much less interstellar. Our conversation with Gregory and James Benford about the Starship Century will continue in a

minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do.

And together, we can advocate for planetary science, and dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more.

It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Starship Century, toward the grandest horizon. That's the new collection of outstanding fact and fiction edited by our guests this week. Gregory and James Benford are among the leaders of what I call the renaissance of interstellar travel research and thought. The outlook is overwhelmingly optimistic, but as we've heard,

the enormous challenges of travel to the stars are also considered. You gave the last word to another past guest of this show, Paul Davies, the brilliant Paul Davies, who worries that we won't know which microbes we need to bring. Yes, and that's a pretty basic thing that evolved out of some discussions that he and I had a few years ago. There are an unknown number of microbes that exist in the ecosystem of Earth. It's really a very large number, and we don't know which ones are really fundamental over the long term. If you took only 10% of them, would the ecosystem be stable? Would you miss something chemically? So basically, you've got to take your dirt with you.

Right. NASA's neglect of the whole problem of a true, closed, long-term biosphere is, I think, a scandal, because we know we'll need it to colonize just the solar system. And the fact that we haven't done it, and we have not done any experiments on centrifugal acceleration, are the two clear indicators that the deep agenda of NASA is not to do interplanetary travel at all within the lifetime of any current administrator. Wow. That's a well-known understory behind the whole NASA story. Would you then agree with Lou Friedman, who was on this show last week and joined us briefly on stage as well, that ignoring interplanetary for the moment, which we do at our peril,

that the first interstellar missions, and maybe many of these missions for a long time after they begin, are going to be robotic? Robotic AIs, artificial intelligences. Yes, I agree with that. And there's a really good Steve Baxter story in the book about talking to the AI that's on its lonely way to Alpha Centauri with some good plot turns. Yeah, it's a lovely story.

That given, of course, we're going to develop those capabilities by opening up the solar system itself, expeditions to the outer planets, or just things like robotic mining of asteroids or repair of geosynchronous satellites. All that will be robotic. And we need to step up our game on that, too. that you made in this conversation. It sounds like you're expecting the biggest advances to come from the commercial side, the people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and others. True enough. The analogy I used in the talk was that the American West

was opened up largely by entrepreneurial spirits, not by government programs. The government would give a railroad the right to the land near its path, but it was people like Leland Stanford who actually built a railroad. What's that quote from Thomas Jefferson? He said, it will take a thousand years for the frontier to reach the ocean, meaning the Pacific. He was off in order of magnitude.

In fact, trains were running within a little over half a century after he made that statement all the way to San Francisco. I sure hope that we're off by at least an order of magnitude from some of the predictions that some pessimists make today about how long it's going to take us to push out around the solar system and onto the stars. Gentlemen, I'm thrilled by the optimism that permeates this book. I wonder, do you have any doubts that it is our destiny to become an interstellar species? Well, I don't. And in fact, I want to point out this wonderful essay by the world's foremost futurist, Peter Schwartz. In the book, his piece, Starships and the Fates of Humankind, he applies his planning methods, his ways of thinking about the future,

and comes to a conclusion that it's almost a certainty that starships will come into existence. That's a very positive result from a guy who started out thinking the answer was going to be no, and realized that it probably is yes. But the sobering thing is, this makes the Fermi question, how come we haven't been visited by aliens, even bigger. Yeah, where is everybody? Why haven't we heard from them? I think the only explanation that really appeals to me is that they're scarce,

and they're far away, and they don't know we're here. Or maybe we're in that zoo that you talked about, Greg, and they're waiting for us to develop a warp drive before the Vulcans decide we're worthy of their company. It could stack, but then all of those civilizations would have to agree on that. Yes. Not to interfere with us. That certainly didn't happen with any Western powers having to do with the development of Asia, for example. They were competitive. They wanted to get in there first. Interesting point. You'd think that somebody would want to come down here and make money off of us. Greg, the other alternative, of course, is that we are the very first in the galaxy to get close

to this capability. That's true, and that's sobering. Let me venture, though, my own view that actually I think we're just not as interesting as we think we are, and people aren't coming to see us. We're a very early society. There's probably not a whole lot for anybody else to learn from. What did Douglas Adams say? Our entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide is Earth mostly harmless, I think, or harmless, actually, initially. Harmless so far. There is a book that makes interstellar travel commonplace. May it happen someday, and your efforts are helping to take us there. The book that you two have just put

together is Starship Century. I highly recommend it, and the best way to get it is at starship century.com. It is also where more of your funds that go into purchasing this book will go toward the research that James and Gregory hope to fund in the development of starships, ushering in this era of the 100-year starship or the starship century. Thank you so much again, guys, and I really can't wait until we have another excuse to talk. Thank you. Terrific.

Gregory Benford is the professor of physics at UC Irvine, who has been there for many, many years. Got there before I got there as a student. The multi-award winning science fiction author that introduced many people to that genre. His brother, James Benford, is the president of Microwave Sciences, and he literally wrote the book on high-power microwave. In fact, it's in its second edition. That textbook that is in use, I bet, around the world has about 145 papers in his bibliography. And Greg Benford, pretty much the same. So researchers and dreamers alike, well-grounded dreaming about the future of humanity among the stars.

Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, to tell us what's up in the night sky, and then we'll go on to giving away some gravimetric, gravity-related swag. Hey, how are you? Fine. That, like, Newtonian stuff that you got? Yeah.

Neutronium. Newtonium gravimetric cheese muffins wouldn't that be an awesome swag to give away but sadly we don't have those to my knowledge so hard to bake so what's up what's down what's down low in the west you all know the answer that's right shortly after sunset venus looking super bright, still just stunning, looking like an airplane that's not moving and not blinking. Also, Saturn hanging out much dimmer, but hanging out over fairly near Venus, looking yellowish. And in the pre-dawn east, you can check out Jupiter pretty high overhead, looking very, very bright, and below below that more reddish and much dimmer Mars. It was this week in space history in 1957 when Sputnik 1 became the first spacecraft orbiting the Earth. And about a year later, it was this week when NASA was founded.

So we can't be too far away from Sputnik 2 and our friend Laika. Oh, yeah. But now we're just on Sputnik 2 and our friend Laika. Oh, yeah. But now we're just on Sputnik 1. Random space fun. A little 1957 Martian action there.

Venus was known and is known as the morning star and the evening star because it looks super bright like it's out there doing now. And some groups, civilizations, thought these were two separate objects. But in 1581 BC, we see from the Venus tablet of Amasiseduga that the Babylonians understood the two were actually a single object. They could support this with detailed observations.

Duga, Amiseduga, Hauser? No, that's different. The Amisedugi Hauser, that's a different tablet. Okay, we're going to move on to the trivia question. What happened to Mariner 3? What went wrong with Mariner 3 that had to be corrected for Mariner 4, which was successful in the first successful flyby of Mars?

What did we find out, Matt? Well, we found out from quite a few people that the problem, maybe strictly speaking, wasn't so much Mariner 3, but the shroud that protected it as it rose up through Earth's atmosphere. That is correct. And it just didn't open up. Yeah, when the front of the rocket, the fairing or shroud doesn't open up, things go poorly. A lot of people pointed out that that meant it would have had to run on battery all the way to Mars, and that just was not going to happen. What was interesting is when I heard Mike Malin talk a few weeks ago,

he was saying that they actually designed, machined, and installed a completely new shroud made out of metal, the only thing they could do fast enough to replace the failed one, and they did it in just a matter of weeks between Mariner 3 and Mariner 4. Would you believe that Daryl Gardner of Lake Stevens, Washington pointed that out as well? It used this new all-metal shroud, and Mariner 4, of course, a tremendous success. Sad to say, Daryl was not our winner. Now, here's the surprise. Kurt Lewis, who gets quoted a lot on the show, I correspond with him a lot,

I could not find any record of him having won in the last two years, even though he enters all the time. Kurt said, indeed, it was the rocket shroud and closing Mariner 3 that failed to separate properly. Mariner 3 unable to function, it remains a derelict in solar orbit. I feel that way sometimes.

Derelict in solar orbit. Unable to function. Curtis hails from Missouri City, Texas, and he added, please come up with questions having more comic potential. There just isn't anything funny about a stuck shroud. It's all fun and games till someone's shroud gets stuck gee this is starting to sound like a seth rogan movie um let me uh what do i mean by that i have no idea no idea what you mean by that david caplan another

regular listener said that the other mariner 3 is a 122-foot yacht available for charter along the East Coast. No mention is made of its attempt at going to Mars, but it probably couldn't make escape velocity. Yeah, it's a different Mariner 3. Yeah. I'm pretty, I'm almost positive. What do you got for next time? Give me some numbers. What is Mercury's eccentricity? What is Mercury's eccentricity?

What is Mercury's eccentricity? Give me, you know, at least two or three digits of its eccentricity, and then we'll talk in a couple weeks about what that all means. Go to planetary.org slash radio guest. You have until Monday, October 7. That's Monday, October 7 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. I was just testing you, Matt. Don't go to planetary.org slash radio guest.

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. That would be correct. Thank you. I failed. Okay, everybody. Go out there. Look up in the night sky and think about temperature sensors and where it would be amusing to place one. Thank you and good night. Not inside the Shroud, that's for sure. and think about temperature sensors and where it would be amusing to place one.

Thank you, and good night. Not inside the Shroud, that's for sure. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects, the eccentric director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. These two Shrouds walk into a bar. And you may have noticed that we didn't mention the prize this week. It's another swag package from the movie Gravity, starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and is made possible by the forward-thinking members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.