Peter Schwartz
The Starships ARE Coming
Starship destiny
We now know, Schwartz began, that nearly all of the billions of stars in our galaxy have planets. If we can master interstellar travel, "there’s someplace to go." Our own solar system is pretty boring---one planet is habitable, the rest are "like Antarctica without ice" or worse.
So this last year a number of researchers and visionaries have begun formal investigation into the practicalities of getting beyond our own solar system. It is an extremely hard problem, for two primary reasons---the enormous energy required to drive far and fast, and the vast amount of time it takes to get anywhere even at high speed.
The energy required can be thought of in three ways. 1) Impossible---what most scientists think. 2) Slow. 3) Faster than light (FTL). Chemical rockets won’t do at all. Nuclear fission rockets may suffice for visiting local planets, but it would take at least fusion to get to the planets of other stars. Schwartz showed Adam Crowl’s scheme for a Bussard Ramjet using interstellar ions for a fusion drive. James Benford (co-author of the book on all this, Starship Century) makes the case for sail ships powered by lasers based in our Solar System.
As for faster-than-light, that requires "reinventing physics." Physics does keep doing that (as with the recent discovery of "dark energy"). NASA has one researcher, Harold White, investigating the potential of microscopic wormholes for superluminal travel.
Standard-physics travel will require extremely long voyages, much longer than a human lifetime. Schwartz suggested four options. 1) Generational ships---whole mini-societies commit to voyages that only their descendents will complete. 2) Sleep ships---like in the movie "Avatar," travelers go into hibernation. 3) Relativistic ships---at near the speed of light, time compresses, so that travelers may experience only 10 years while 100 years pass back on Earth. 4) Download ships---"Suppose we learn how to copy human consciousness into some machine-like device. Such ‘iPersons’ would be able to control an avatar that could function in environments inhospitable to biological humans. They would not be limited to Earthlike planets."
Freeman Dyson has added an important idea, that interstellar space may be full of objects---comets and planets and other things unattached to stars. They could be used for fuel, water, even food. "Some of the objects may be alive." Dyson notes that, thanks to island-hopping, Polynesians explored the Pacific long before Europeans crossed the Atlantic. We might get to the stars by steps.
Futurist Schwartz laid out four scenarios of the potential for star travel in the next 300 years, building on three population scenarios. By 2300 there could be 36 billion people, if religious faith drives large families. Or, vast wealth might make small families and long life so much the norm that there are only 2.3 billion people on Earth. One harsh scenario has 9 billion people using up the Earth.
Thus his four starship scenarios... 1) "Stuck in the Mud"---we can’t or won’t muster the ability to travel far. 2) "God’s Galaxy"---the faithful deploy their discipline to mount interstellar missions to carry the Word to the stars; they could handle generational ships. 3) "Escape from a Dying Planet"---to get lots of people to new worlds and new hope would probably require sleep ships. 4) "Trillionaires in Space"---the future likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson will have the means and desire to push the envelope all the way, employing relativistic and download ships or even faster-than-light travel.
Schwartz concluded that there are apparently many paths that can get us to the stars. In other words, "Galactic civilization is almost inevitable."
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primer
Peter Schwartz likes taking a long view. He’s a founding board member of The Long Now Foundation and in his career as a scenario planner he’s at the forefront of futurist thought, known for his book, The Art of the Long View, a canonical text of thinking long-term, and for founding the Global Business Network, a strategic planning consulting firm. In a Long Now SALT in 02008 he debated historian Niall Ferguson about the potential for human progress, arguing strongly for the importance of optimism. “Optimism” he concluded, “lets you imagine how you can overcome problems, and those possibilities motivate change.”
Schwartz’s long view has, in the last few years, begun to extend well off-planet, past Mars and the asteroid belt, and even beyond the Oort Cloud – in a Long Now event in 02010, he asked NASA Ames Research Center Director, Pete Worden about the possibility of starships that might take humans out of our own solar system. In response, Worden announced that NASA and DARPA had just begun a program to fund realistic, scientific research into the prospects of what they were calling 100-year starships:
Long Conversation – Pete Worden Announces 100-Year Starship from The Long Now Foundation on Vimeo.
Since then, thinking and planning for interstellar travel has snowballed. The inaugural 100 Year Starship Symposium was held in 02011, with a second in 02012 and the third later this month. Each event has gathered dozens of papers seeking to collectively establish a rough sketch of the technological, physical and social engineering interstellar travel will require.
Starship Century is an anthology just released (and on sale at the upcoming lecture) that features writing by Peter Schwartz, Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Neal Stephenson and many others on the existential necessity, the voluminous challenges, and the unprecedented promise of travelling to the stars.