interstellar travel is possible

Is Interstellar Travel Really Possible?

Interstellar flight is a real pain in the neck.

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University , host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio , and author of " Your Place in the Universe. " Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights . 

Interstellar space travel . Fantasy of every five-year-old kid within us. Staple of science fiction serials. Boldly going where nobody has gone before in a really fantastic way. As we grow ever more advanced with our rockets and space probes, the question arises: could we ever hope to colonize the stars? Or, barring that far-flung dream, can we at least send space probes to alien planets, letting them tell us what they see?

The truth is that interstellar travel and exploration is technically possible . There's no law of physics that outright forbids it. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy, and it certainly doesn't mean we'll achieve it in our lifetimes, let alone this century. Interstellar space travel is a real pain in the neck. 

Related: Gallery: Visions of Interstellar Starship Travel

Voyage outward

If you're sufficiently patient, then we've already achieved interstellar exploration status. We have several spacecraft on escape trajectories, meaning they're leaving the solar system and they are never coming back. NASA's Pioneer missions, the Voyager missions , and most recently New Horizons have all started their long outward journeys. The Voyagers especially are now considered outside the solar system, as defined as the region where the solar wind emanating from the sun gives way to general galactic background particles and dust.

So, great; we have interstellar space probes currently in operation. Except the problem is that they're going nowhere really fast. Each one of these intrepid interstellar explorers is traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, which sounds pretty fast. They're not headed in the direction of any particular star, because their missions were designed to explore planets inside the solar system. But if any of these spacecraft were headed to our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri , just barely 4 light-years away, they would reach it in about 80,000 years.

I don't know about you, but I don't think NASA budgets for those kinds of timelines. Also, by the time these probes reach anywhere halfway interesting, their nuclear batteries will be long dead, and just be useless hunks of metal hurtling through the void. Which is a sort of success, if you think about it: It's not like our ancestors were able to accomplish such feats as tossing random junk between the stars, but it's probably also not exactly what you imagined interstellar space travel to be like.

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Related: Superfast Spacecraft Propulsion Concepts (Images)

Speed racer

To make interstellar spaceflight more reasonable, a probe has to go really fast. On the order of at least one-tenth the speed of light. At that speed, spacecraft could reach Proxima Centauri in a handful of decades, and send back pictures a few years later, well within a human lifetime. Is it really so unreasonable to ask that the same person who starts the mission gets to finish it?

Going these speeds requires a tremendous amount of energy. One option is to contain that energy onboard the spacecraft as fuel. But if that's the case, the extra fuel adds mass, which makes it even harder to propel it up to those speeds. There are designs and sketches for nuclear-powered spacecraft that try to accomplish just this, but unless we want to start building thousands upon thousands of nuclear bombs just to put inside a rocket, we need to come up with other ideas.

Perhaps one of the most promising ideas is to keep the energy source of the spacecraft fixed and somehow transport that energy to the spacecraft as it travels. One way to do this is with lasers. Radiation is good at transporting energy from one place to another, especially over the vast distances of space. The spacecraft can then capture this energy and propel itself forward.

This is the basic idea behind the Breakthrough Starshot project , which aims to design a spacecraft capable of reaching the nearest stars in a matter of decades. In the simplest outline of this project, a giant laser on the order of 100 gigawatts shoots at an Earth-orbiting spacecraft. That spacecraft has a large solar sail that is incredibly reflective. The laser bounces off of that sail, giving momentum to the spacecraft. The thing is, a 100-gigawatt laser only has the force of a heavy backpack. You didn't read that incorrectly. If we were to shoot this laser at the spacecraft for about 10 minutes, in order to reach one-tenth the speed of light, the spacecraft can weigh no more than a gram.

That's the mass of a paper clip.

Related: Breakthrough Starshot in Pictures: Laser-Sailing Nanocraft to Study Alien Planets

A spaceship for ants

This is where the rubber meets the interstellar road when it comes to making spacecraft travel the required speeds. The laser itself, at 100 gigawatts, is more powerful than any laser we've ever designed by many orders of magnitude. To give you a sense of scale, 100 gigawatts is the entire capacity of every single nuclear power plant operating in the United States combined.

And the spacecraft, which has to have a mass no more than a paper clip, must include a camera, computer, power source, circuitry, a shell, an antenna for communicating back home and the entire lightsail itself.  

That lightsail must be almost perfectly reflective. If it absorbs even a tiny fraction of that incoming laser radiation it will convert that energy to heat instead of momentum. At 100 gigawatts, that means straight-up melting, which is generally considered not good for spacecraft. 

Once accelerated to one-tenth the speed of light, the real journey begins. For 40 years, this little spacecraft will have to withstand the trials and travails of interstellar space. It will be impacted by dust grains at that enormous velocity. And while the dust is very tiny, at those speeds motes can do incredible damage. Cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles emitted by everything from the sun to distant supernova, can mess with the delicate circuitry inside. The spacecraft will be bombarded by these cosmic rays non-stop as soon as the journey begins.

Is Breakthrough Starshot possible? In principle, yes. Like I said above, there's no law of physics that prevents any of this from becoming reality. But that doesn't make it easy or even probable or plausible or even feasible using our current levels of technology (or reasonable projections into the near future of our technology). Can we really make a spacecraft that small and light? Can we really make a laser that powerful? Can a mission like this actually survive the challenges of deep space?

The answer isn't yes or no. The real question is this: are we willing to spend enough money to find out if it's possible?

• Building Sails for Tiny Interstellar Probes Will Be Tough — But Not Impossible
• 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life
• Interstellar Space Travel: 7 Futuristic Spacecraft to Explore the Cosmos

Learn more by listening to the episode "Is interstellar travel possible?" on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com . Thanks to @infirmus, Amber D., neo, and Alex V. for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter .  

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook . 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Paul received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, and spent three years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, followed by a research fellowship in Trieste, Italy, His research focuses on many diverse topics, from the emptiest regions of the universe to the earliest moments of the Big Bang to the hunt for the first stars. As an "Agent to the Stars," Paul has passionately engaged the public in science outreach for several years. He is the host of the popular "Ask a Spaceman!" podcast, author of "Your Place in the Universe" and "How to Die in Space" and he frequently appears on TV — including on The Weather Channel, for which he serves as Official Space Specialist.

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Interstellar travel: From science fiction to reality

Humans may one day travel beyond the solar system on board rockets powered by nuclear fusion.

An artist's impression of the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space. Photo: Nasa

Only two probes have reached interstellar space – the region beyond the solar system – since the start of human space exploration .

It took more than three decades for the first spacecraft, Voyager 1 , to cross the heliopause, a boundary scientists believe is where interstellar space begins, after its launch in 1977.

It was an incredible achievement with invaluable data sent back through a medium not influenced by the Sun.

But with its power supply weakening it is almost impossible Voyager 1 will reach our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years away and would take the probe almost 73,000 years.

Les Johnson, a Nasa scientist and author of several scientific and science fiction books, told The National reaching another star could take 50 to 100 years.

“It is possible we might have the technology to send our first robotic probe to another star within the next 50 to 100 years,” said Mr Johnson, who managed the Interstellar Propulsion Research Project at the US space agency.

“Based on the rate of technology growth, after looking at all the propulsion systems that are based on known physics, I believe these first probes will be propelled to the stars using laser light reflecting from a sail, similar to today’s solar sails but driven by intense laser light instead of sunlight.”

Human travel to interstellar space

It could take significantly longer for a crewed mission to travel to another star, as laser light sails would only work for smaller spacecraft.

Nuclear fusion propulsion, a way of powering a spacecraft using high-energy particles created by fusion reactions, is needed to make human missions to interstellar space possible.

“As for humans, that’s a lot more complicated because it takes a lot of mass to keep a group of humans alive for a decade- to centuries-long space journey and that means a massive ship,” Mr Johnson said.

“For a human crewed ship, we will need fusion propulsion at a minimum and antimatter as the ideal.

“While we know these are physically possible, the technology level needed for interstellar travel seems very far away – perhaps 100 to 200 years in the future.”

While scientists dream of antimatter propulsion, which could enable space travel at 70 per cent of the speed of light, nuclear fusion propulsion appears much closer to reality.

The technology could also help reduce the time it takes to reach Mars, the planet to which most space agencies are trying to send their astronauts.

Laura Forczyk, an author and the founder of space consulting firm Astralytical, said nuclear fusion propulsion has the potential to revolutionise space flight.

"We will not be able to achieve interstellar travel until we engineer a faster and more efficient means of accelerating," said Ms Forczyk.

"We also need to develop long-term, self-sustained robust ecosystems for long-duration voyages and a better means of radiation shielding. We are at least a century away from these advances."

While developing nuclear fusion technology is not easy, with the required temperature to achieve it 10 times hotter than the Sun, a few companies have been trying for many years.

California-based start-up Helicity Space recently received $5 million in seed funding to accelerate its fusion propulsion technology projects.

UK-based start-up Pulsar Fusion is also attempting to develop the technology and has started construction on a large nuclear fusion chamber in England.

When the engine is fired, it would, at least temporarily, be the hottest place in the solar system.

China is also trying to advance the development of nuclear fusion, with reports of a new state-owned company that would help accelerate the production of an "artificial Sun".

Is there an Earth-like planet beyond the solar system?

One of the reasons scientists want to explore interstellar space is to learn more about the universe and possibilities of life beyond Earth.

Nasa has been studying exoplanets, or planets outside of the solar system, for decades by using telescopes.

Mr Johnson said he "doubts we will find Earth 2.0 anywhere close" and that discovering another home-like planet was not thought to be a near-term possibility.

"Over time, we might be able to modify another planet to make it habitable but that will likely take additional centuries or millennia," he said.

"That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go. The job of science is to learn more about the universe in which we live.

"Studying planets around other stars will help us better understand our own solar system and expand our knowledge of this big universe. That alone, in my opinion, makes the journey one we should make."

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How Humans Could Go Interstellar, Without Warp Drive

Faster-than-light (ftl) travel is possible..

The field equations of Einstein’s General Relativity theory say that faster-than-light (FTL) travel is possible, so a handful of researchers are working to see whether a  Star Trek -style warp drive, or perhaps a kind of  artificial wormhole , could be created through our technology.

But even if shown feasible tomorrow, it’s possible that designs for an FTL system could be as far ahead of a functional starship as Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th century drawings of flying machines were ahead of the Wright Flyer of 1903. But this need not be a showstopper against human interstellar flight in the next century or two. Short of FTL travel, there are technologies in the works that could enable human expeditions to planets orbiting some of the nearest stars.

Picking the Target

Certainly, feasibility of such missions will depend on geopolitical-economic factors. But it also will depend on the distance to nearest Earth-like exoplanet. Located roughly 4.37 light years away, Alpha Centauri is the Sun’s closest neighbor; thus science fiction, including  Star Trek , has envisioned it as humanity’s first interstellar destination.

In 2012, a planet was  identified  orbiting closely around Alpha Centauri B, one of three stars comprising the Alpha Centauri system. Three years later, astronomers were unable to find that same planet, but if it exists it would be too hot for life anyway. What we really want to know is whether planets exist further out from the two main stars, or whether their much smaller, dimmer companion star, Proxima Centauri, located just 4.24 light years from Earth, has planets of its own.

Very soon, these questions will be answered by the  James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that NASA will be launching into space in 2018, and by other instruments that will follow, instruments capable of more than merely detecting a planet’s presence. They will also be able to read the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres.

Imagine this: If there’s an Earth-like planet around Alpha Centauri or another nearby star system, astronomers will know about it within a decade or two — certainly long before we can build a ship like the  Enterprise .

Maybe we could consider flying under the speed of light.

Propulsion 

It is not widely known, but the US government spent real money, tested hardware and employed some of the best minds in late 1950s and early 60s to develop an idea called  nuclear pulse propulsion .

Known as  Project Orion , the work was classified because the principle was that your engine shoots a series of “nuclear pulse units” — atomic bombs of roughly Hiroshima/Nagasaki power — out the back. Each unit explodes and the shockwave delivers concussive force to an immense, steel pusher plate, which is connected to the most immense shock absorber system that you could imagine.

The researchers calculated that the ship could reach five percent the speed of light (0.05  c ), resulting in roughly a 90-year travel time to Alpha Centauri. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade nuclear explosive devices in space, effectively ended  Orion .

In his epic TV series Cosmos, Carl Sagan noted such an engine would be an excellent way to dispose of humanity’s nuclear bombs, but that it would have to be activated far from Earth. But back when  Orion  was being funded, amazingly, the plan was to use the nuclear pulse engine even for launching the vessel, in one massive piece, from the surface of Earth. Suffice it to say it does not seem likely that we’ll every build a nuclear pulse ship, but it’s something that we already have the technology to build.

A Cleaner System

But what about a less explosive, cleaner propulsion system that could achieve the same end? The British Interplanetary Society took on this goal in the 1970s with Project Daedalus . Named for the inventor from Greek mythology who built wings to escape the island of Crete, the design was based on projected development of inertial confinement fusion (ICF), one of two main strategies for generating nuclear fusion energy on Earth.

The other strategy is magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), and similar to ICF, designs exist for  adapting MCF to space propulsion . Like  Orion , a  Daedalus  craft would have to be rather large. But using deuterium and helium-3 (obtained from the lunar surface, or from Jupiter’s atmosphere) as fuel,  Daedalus  craft could reach 0.12  c , cutting travel time to Alpha Centauri to something like 40 years.

There are other ingenious ideas, such as the  Bussard ramjet  that could approach the speed of light, but the size of the engines and technological gaps that we must fill become so large that they may not seem easier than warp drive. So let’s limit our discussion to capabilities up to the neighborhood of the 0.12  c  of  Daedalus  as we consider what form a human interstellar voyage might take

The Generation Starship

It has been said that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. This proverb characterizes the strategy of building an interstellar ship so large that you don’t worry so much about the travel time.

Effectively, the ship is a space colony. It contains a large population — current estimates are that a minimum of tens of thousands of colonists are needed for a  healthy gene pool — and all that is needed for people to live comfortably, but it follows a trajectory out of the solar system. Ideas for an interstellar ark taking millennia to reach a destination date back to the fathers of the Space Age — Russia’s Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and America’s Robert Goddard— — the idea really set sail with mid 20th century science fiction writers.

In a two-part novel series written in 1941, Robert A. Heinlein wrote of a vessel that took so long to reach its destination that the people aboard had forgotten they were on a ship. Instead, they believed the large craft to be their natural world.

Sending colonists on a voyage lasting centuries or millennia raises social questions, such as whether it is ethical to commit unborn generations to live out their lives in transit between planets.

10,000 years is a rather long time and means a large number of generations to commit to the interstellar void. But if we’re talking 40 or even 90 years, that’s probably more palatable to many more people. Still, it raises questions as to who would volunteer for such an expedition.

But what about people with shorter attention spans and what if we have no will to build enormous, moving colonies?  

Here’s another science fiction strategy: sending cryopreserved human embryos, or gametes (ova and sperm) into deep space. Upon reaching the destination star system, the embryos would be developed. This would require an artificial uterus, which we don’t have yet, but like fusion, here we’re also talking in terms of a matter of decades.

At some point in this century,  motherless birth  could become a technological reality. Theoretically, we’ll be able to send cryopreserved embryos through space, for centuries if needed due to propulsion limitations, and set them to develop into full-term infants on the new planet.

Then, all you need are robot nannies to raise and educate the infant colonists. And if there’s one area of technological progress that people are supremely confident will keep advancing at warp speed, it’s robots and artificial intelligence.

The egg ship concept is loaded with ethical questions, which can be hashed out in the comments section.

Suspended Animation

As technically ambitious as it may sound, medical science is making incremental progress toward a safe form of human hibernation.

Currently, it’s routine to lower a patient’s body temperature intentionally by a few degrees, thereby inducing a mild hypothermic coma, following cardiac arrest. This enables the brain to recover after oxygen has been cut off, whereas remaining at normal body temperature results in what’s called reperfusion injury.

Not routine yet, but now under clinical trials, trauma surgeons are cooling patients down to just above freezing temperature in cases of severe blood loss. This is true  suspended animation . It’s done just for two hours, or possibly three, stalling death so that injuries can be repaired and blood replaced, but the person is basically hibernating during that time.

With incremental progress, the procedure may eventually be extended to time frames of many hours, and eventually days or weeks to treat other conditions. Perhaps, in time, we’ll put people to sleep long enough, and with enough supervision by computers, to slumber away for an entire interstellar voyage the way you now doze off for a transoceanic flight.

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November 28, 2014

Parsing the Science of Interstellar with Physicist Kip Thorne

In an earlier blog post about Christopher Nolan's latest blockbuster movie, Interstellar, I lauded the film for its ambition, its visuals     and the strong performances of its cast.

By Lee Billings

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

In an earlier blog post about Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster movie, Interstellar , I lauded the film for its ambition, its visuals and the strong performances of its cast. However, I also criticized it for its depiction of interstellar travel and a plot filled with details that didn’t seem to make much sense.

Perhaps because I called some of its science “laughably wrong,” my post drew the attention of Kip Thorne , the Caltech physicist who served as science advisor on the film. Thorne sent me a copy of his new book, The Science of Interstellar , and encouraged me to read it and reconsider my criticisms. The book tells the story behind the film’s creation, and provides deep, thorough explanations for many facets of Interstellar that might otherwise seem nonsensical.

Thorne is even-handed in his treatment of the film’s science, admitting where artistic license was substantial and where it was used barely at all. If you enjoyed the film, but found parts of it confusing or puzzling, The Science of Interstellar and the perspectives it provides might be for you.

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Thorne and I discussed Interstellar and his book in a telephone interview. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

I want to begin by saying how much I enjoyed your book. It’s given me a deeper appreciation of just how much work has gone in to legitimizing the plot of the film.

Let me just say as we start that I was doing a lot more than simply justifying the science in the film. The story was built from the ground up on the science to a very great extent, through brainstorming sessions I had with the Nolan brothers. There weren’t a great many times where I had to go in and explain things after the fact.

Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that not all of the science is treated equally in the film, with the science behind its visual components being favored. Take Gargantua, the supermassive black hole the astronauts visit in the film. It’s a thing of beauty, not only aesthetically but also quantitatively, because as you’ve shown in the book, it looks like the real thing. That happened through a painstaking back-and-forth process between you and the filmmakers. But in your book you also mention that Christopher Nolan came to you with a “non-negotiable” and rather far-fetched idea for the astronauts to visit a planet orbiting Gargantua where relativistic effects make an hour there equate to seven years back on Earth.

You know, Chris also considered traveling through space faster than the speed of light as “non negotiable” back then, and that’s something that was changed and is not in the final film. He used that phrase in our brainstorms, but in the end after in-depth discussions he came around. We’d always find some way to make things work together, though in this one instance of faster-than-light travel I gave him a series of reasons why we were quite certain the laws of physics prevented it. We went back and forth for several hours on and off over two weeks about it, until he reached the point where he appreciated intuitively that the problems I was pointing out were insurmountable. Then he simply abandoned the idea of faster-than-light travel and moved in another direction.

This business of the enormous time differential between one of the planets orbiting very close to Gargantua and the flow of time back on Earth – the problem seemed to be that no planet could endure the resulting gravitational forces. This was something that even I thought was impossible, intuitively, until I went and slept on it and did a few hours of calculations. I came to the conclusion that in fact it is possible. The black hole needs to be spinning very fast, but is possible for the spin to be fast enough for a planet in the necessarily close, stable, circular orbit to not be ripped apart. I can’t fault anyone for saying, “Hey, that’s not possible,” without having first having the benefit of my book! Unless it’s someone who is very deep into general relativity and who I would’ve expected to go do the calculations!

This highlights, I think, just how much gnarly number crunching you’ve done for this film, whether you’re brainstorming ideas or reverse engineering plot points. Was this a frustrating process for you at all?

The only frustration in the creative process might’ve been the faster-than-light discussion, just in searching for ways that we could speak the same language. My interactions with Chris, and before him with his brother Jonah, the screenwriter, were really quite joyous. It was brainstorming in the best sense of the word, an artist and a scientist coming at a complex issue together, trying to generate ideas in the context of a story that is just coming into being, searching for interesting scientific ideas that would take the story in certain directions. Finding that common ground between two people of very different backgrounds—an artist that has a tremendous intuition into the universe and the laws of nature from self-education, but no real training, and me, a scientist with much more formal training—it was just a heck of a lot of fun.

Other than that, my main frustration has been that we were unable to make my book available earlier, and that so many people in the first week or two were commenting about the science of the film without having the benefit of the book.

That sounds familiar. One of the main criticisms I had of the film when I first saw it was that the accretion disk around Gargantua was energetic enough to provide light and heat for its orbiting planets, but not so hot and bright that it would bathe the astronauts in fatal x-rays and gamma rays. But you’ve explained in your book how this isn’t as implausible as it may seem.

Gargantua’s disk is anemic, meaning it’s not as dangerous as the black-hole accretion disks astronomers can see and study. It has the temperature of the surface of the sun. With our current technology, astronomers can’t really see an accretion disk of that temperature if it’s around a very massive black hole at the center of some galaxy. Instead, the accretion disks astronomers see are much more energetic and emitting lots of x-rays.

I worked out the relativistic theory of thin accretion disks with Igor Novikov back in the early 1970s, so I know this very well. For those energetic disks astronomers see, the accretion is a steady state where the gas is flowing onto the disk and on down to the black hole. You can work out the temperature distribution and where it is emitting hard and soft x-rays. In the film, the disk is orbiting the black hole, not accreting onto it. There is a reason you don’t see any flow of gas onto the black hole in the movie, because if that flow were there it would fry the astronauts. Gargantua’s disk is a remnant of what was in the past an accreting disk. It’s in a quiescent state and cooling down.

This was a crucial detail that actually dovetailed with Chris’s filmmaking point of view. What Chris wanted was something that was visually impressive in optical wavelengths that the astronauts could see. So that’s what he got – something that glows in the optical but isn’t so hot it pours off a lot of dangerous higher energy radiation. Let me say, though, that this particular quiescent and cool disk wouldn’t be in this state for an awfully long time. But, ha, all that the movie needed was a safe, bright environment around the black hole during the crew’s visit, and this disk meets that.

Were there other examples where scientific plausibility dovetailed with what the filmmakers wanted?

There’s one I discuss in the book, where this one planet—Miller’s planet, the same one so close to Gargantua—has these giant ocean waves that threaten the crew. I don’t use this word in the book, but the waves appear to be solitons, solitary waves. They don’t break, and they are probably coming in from a region where the water is somewhat deeper. One possible explanation for them is that they are similar to tidal bores that can run up the long, gentle channels of rivers with the rising of a tide.

As I describe in the book, I imagine this planet is tidally locked, keeping the same face toward the black hole so that tidal forces don’t rip it apart. But it hasn’t been tidally locked for all that long, it was deposited in its orbit relatively recently, so it’s actually wobbling back and forth slightly relative to the tidal-locking position, and as a result huge tides are created in the ocean at the planet’s surface. And these tidal forces are so great that they create the huge waves you see in the film. The fortuitous thing is, in the film’s dialogue we learn these waves come about one hour apart from each other. It just happens to turn out that the planet’s period of oscillation back and forth to make such big waves in the first place also needs to be one hour. I have to confess I didn’t realize this until after the waves’ size and hour-long period was set in stone in the script.

Is there any science-based criticism you’ve encountered or that you have of the film?

I have said this elsewhere, but there was one item in the film that troubled me in terms of the laws of physics, and that was the strength of ice not being sufficient to support the structures seen on one of the visited planets. Most places that have mentioned this, though, tend to leave out the second part of my statement, which is that if the strength of ice is the most egregious error in the film, we’re doing pretty good!

Right. In some ways, it could be seen as a badge of honor of sorts, that some viewers have taken this movie seriously enough to even worry about whether or not parts of its science are correct. But do you think people getting upset about the film’s scientific basis are missing the point?

I think there are a variety of points of view you can take on a film like this, and I think it’s perfectly valid if someone wants to go in and search for scientific flaws.

What I maintain, and what I believe Chris would maintain as well, is that to a very great extent real science can give rise to wonderful ideas for a film that can in most cases be better than what was created from whole cloth out of the brain of a screenwriter. You know, this is the first time Chris has ever aspired to make a film that has real scientific accuracy. His films have always had their own internal logic. He always lays down a cohesive rule set for each one about what can and cannot happen, and this is part of his pact between himself and the viewer. But this is the first film where that rule set closely corresponds to the known laws of nature, and some truly wonderful things came out of this. Real science can be an absolutely fabulous foundation for great filmmaking.

I should add that there are some portions of the film for which the science is beyond the frontiers of our present knowledge. The issue of time travel is one. There’s been a lot of research that’s been done on whether the laws of physics permit travel back in time or not, and we’ve got interesting results but no firm answers. In that area Chris made his own rule set, which we discussed at length when he described it to me early last year. And it’s a rule set for which I then could find a scientific rationale, but it was a rule set that was much less constrained by the laws of physics because we don’t understand the laws of physics in that domain yet!

You know, the point of my earlier piece on Interstellar wasn’t to attack the science at all, so much as it was to say that wormholes and warp drives and other exotic ideas might not be our best path to the stars. And, in fact, some very august scientists seem to think interstellar travel is so difficult as to be effectively impossible. What do you think? Do you think our descendants or we will ever leave the solar system, and how would we do it, if so?

I’m quite sure we will, if we live that long as a species. I have this chapter in the book on interstellar travel and give far-out examples of how one could undertake interstellar voyages. Nuclear-pulse propulsion, laser-powered light sails, binary black hole slingshots, things like that. And as crude and far-out as they may be, they convince me that the time will come when humans travel between the stars. But it’s a long time off, a very long time – centuries away, at least.

So, for these kinds of far-out proposals, is it fair to say they’re more plausible or even easier in some ways than the notion of wormholes or warp drives?

I think the laws of physics very probably forbid warp drives and traversable wormholes. The research that has gone on over the past 25 years trying to determine whether its possible all point in negative directions, but it’s not a firmly closed door. So there are two issues here. One is that the laws of physics probably forbid it, but, gee, if they don’t, it would be great to have! The other is that the technology required to make a warp drive or a traversable wormhole is so far, far, far beyond the technology needed for a laser sail or a nuclear-pulse rocket that I would not be in favor of putting any significant resources into trying to develop it.

Now, you may have small amounts of money—tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars—spent on this, but nothing is wrong with that. Peer-review, at least in the United States and in Europe, is too strong for there to be any danger of millions or billions of dollars being spent on these things. The technology required for wormholes is so far removed from our current and plausible near-future capabilities that to throw lots of money at it would almost certainly be a total boondoggle.

So why focus on wormholes at all if they’re so out of reach? What should someone do if they’re really inspired by the film and want to personally contribute to bringing something as wild as interstellar travel closer to reality?

To a great extent, my motivation here was to try to use the movie as a lure to get people who might otherwise not have much interest in science curious about it, by exposing them to strange, exotic phenomena like wormholes. The film is the bait, and the book is the hook I want to use to draw them in even further, to get them to dig in and learn something new. If they are young, maybe they will consider careers in science rather than in finance or law. If they are older, I still think it’s tremendously important that larger fractions of our citizenry possess enough understanding of science to appreciate its powers and its limitations.

What this is really about is inspiring others to learn enough about the laws of nature and about engineering and technology so that they might take advantage of those laws in order to make some real contribution to our society, perhaps ultimately toward interstellar and, for the moment, interplanetary travel. The central thing is to get people excited by this so that they focus on real science and technology and on making a big difference in our world with those tools.

The U.S.S. Enterprise , depicted here in the 2013 movie Star Trek: Into Darkness , relies on its warp drive to zip across the galaxy.

Inside the Quest for a Real ‘Star Trek’ Warp Drive

It may be a while before starship captains can race across the galaxy, but engineers and physicists have a few ideas for making it so.

Within the Star Trek universe, traveling across the galaxy is a breeze thanks to the famed warp drive . This fictional technology allows humans and other civilizations to zoom between star systems in days rather than centuries.

Such rapid travel times are impossible in the real world, because our best theory for the way the universe works, Einstein’s special relativity , says that nothing moves faster than the speed of light.

While current rocket propulsion systems are bound by this law, plenty of hopeful engineers and physicists are working on concepts that might bring us a step closer to Star Trek ’s vision of racing across the cosmos.

“Currently, even the most advanced ideas behind interstellar travel entail trip times of decades and centuries to even the closest stars, due to the restrictions of special relativity, and our abilities—or lack of—to travel at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light,” says Richard Obousy , director and founder of Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit dedicated to making progress toward interstellar flight.

“Being able to build starships with the capability to travel faster than the speed of light would open the galaxy for exploration and possible colonization by humans.”

Nuclear Engines

Distances in space are so vast that astronomers usually measure them in light-years, the distance light can travel in a year’s time. A single light-year equals about six trillion miles.

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The closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is 4.23 light-years away, so even traveling at the speed of light, a one-way voyage there would take 4.23 years. That may seem pokey, but it would be a huge improvement over current technology.

Right now, the fastest spacecraft headed away from Earth is Voyager 1, which is puttering along at about 38,600 miles an hour. At that rate, it would take more than 70,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

Still, various teams have proposed ways to at least reach a fraction of light speed and hasten our exploration of interstellar space.

Back in 1958, researchers at San Diego-based defense contractor General Atomics came up with Project Orion , which involved a spacecraft driven essentially by nuclear bombs. A controlled series of nuclear explosions would propel the ship at high speeds, rapidly carrying a hundred tons of cargo and eight astronauts to places like Mars and even the outer solar system.

Faster propulsion technology would allow us to visit our galactic neighbors, like this satellite of the Milky Way known as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Blueprints were also created showing how to adapt the technology for interstellar travel. However, all experimentation with this so-called nuclear-pulse propulsion came to a halt with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

Announced earlier this year, the ambitious Breakthrough StarShot initiative represents a less explosive effort to undertake an interstellar mission. Run by a conglomerate of billionaires and big thinkers, including famed physicist Stephen Hawking, the project’s goal is to send a flotilla of postage stamp-size spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that’s 4.3 light-years away. (See “Is the New $100 Million ‘Starshot’ for Real?” )

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The tiny spacecraft would be attached to a thin light sail, a piece of technology that would allow mission managers to propel the probes with lasers shining from Earth’s orbit. The lasers would accelerate the craft to 20 percent the speed of light, and the probes would arrive at their destination in roughly 20 years.

While many of the tiny travelers may never make it to Alpha Centauri, a few of them should survive and may even fly past any planets orbiting the far-off stars , beaming back data about these alien worlds.

“I’m incredibly excited to see private money being used to explore breakthrough ideas that may advance the field of interstellar flight,” Obousy says.

“I hope to see more like this in the future. While there are engineering challenges associated with the Starshot Initiative, none appear insurmountable.”

Warping Reality

Of course, the real breakthrough would be a true warp drive, which requires technology to catch up with our theoretical designs.

In 1994, Trek fans got a glimmer of hope from Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who came up with a radical theory of hyper-fast space propulsion that doesn't break Einstein’s special relativity.

Instead of accelerating the spacecraft itself to light speed, why not bend, or warp, the fabric of space and time around the ship itself? Alcubierre presented calculations that produce a bubble in space-time in which one end is expanding and the other is contracting. A spaceship could, in theory, be carried along with the warp bubble and accelerated to velocities up to 10 times the speed of light.

While that sounds simple on paper, to make it work, we may need to harness exotic forms of matter, like antimatter, that for now are poorly understood. In addition, numerous unsolved issues plague the creation and control of a warp bubble, Obousy says.

“One such problem, for example, is the idea of causal disconnection, which implies that any spacecraft sitting within the bubble would not be able to ‘communicate’ with the exterior of the bubble, suggesting that a ship would not be able to ‘turn off’ the bubble once inside of it,” he notes.

As is often the case in space travel, developing true interstellar travel like what we see in Star Trek will require significant changes in the cost and energy requirements.

“Currently, the amount of energy and money required to entertain the notion of manned interstellar travel is measured in large fractions of global output—specifically, tens of trillions of dollars, and energy measured on the scale of what many large countries use annually,” he says.

Still, he adds, “the finest minds of the 15th century could not have predicted the technological wonders of the 21st century. Similarly, who are we to say what technology the humans of the 27th century will have mastered.”

Andrew Fazekas, the Night Sky Guy, is the author of Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe and host of NG Live! " Mankind to Mars " presentations. Follow him on Twitter , Facebook , and his website .

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Why Interstellar Travel Is Even Further Away Than You Think

There is a growing sense that humanity’s migration to space is within reach – and even inevitable.

During the 1960s and 70s, coinciding with the height of the Space Age , scientists pondered how human beings could one day live in space. Among the many benefits, the migration of humans and industry to other celestial bodies and orbiting habitats presented a possible solution to overpopulation and environmental degradation. As Gerard K. O’Neill suggested in his writings, the key was to make this migration an economically feasible venture. Given the renewed efforts to explore space that are now underway and the rise of commercial space (NewSpace), there is a growing sense that humanity’s migration to space is within reach — and even inevitable.

But to paraphrase famed British historian AJP Taylor, “nothing is inevitable until it happens.” In a new study, Cornell graduate researcher Morgan A. Irons and Norfolk Institute co-founder and executive director Lee G. Irons reviewed a century of scientific studies to develop the Pancosmorio (“World Limit”) theory. They concluded that specific life-sustaining conditions on Earth that are available nowhere else in the Solar System could be the very thing that inhibits our expansion into space. Without an Earth-like “self-restoring order, capacity, and organization,” they argue, space settlements would fail to be sustainable and collapse before long.

Lee G. Irons is the founder of the Norfolk Institute in Virginia, a firm specializing in solutions for living in space and sustainably here on Earth. Morgan A. Irons is a Ph.D. candidate, a member of Johannes Lehmann’s research group at Cornell University, and a Carl Sagan Institute Research Fellow. In 2016, Morgan and Lee founded the Virginia-based startup Deep Space Ecology (DSE) on engineering and designing ecological systems to provide food sustainably in space and on Earth. In 2020, Morgan and Dr. Lehmann at Cornell University, with the support of Norfolk Institute, DSE, the Zwillenberg-Tietz Foundation, bio365 LLC, Rhodium Scientific LLC, and Dr. Matthias Rillig at Freie Universität Berlin, sent a soil experiment to the ISS that measured the gravitational effects on soil stability – a.k.a. the “ Soil Health in Space ” experiment.

Migration and Earth

The paper that describes their research recently appeared in the Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Science . As a primary consideration, Lee and Morgan Irons addressed the assumption behind the belief that humanity’s migration to space is inevitable. As is often the case, proponents of this theory draw parallels between this supposed future and humanity’s long history of migration. These migrations saw humanity travel from Africa to Eurasia, Eurasia to Australasia and Polynesia, and Asia to the Americas, all within 200,000 years.

Linguists and ethnographers have also traced multiple migrations over the past 15,000 years that profoundly affected history, modern language, and culture. These include the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) migrations throughout Eurasia during the Neolithic period (ca. 10,000 to 5,000 years ago), the migrations of the Austronesian peoples across the South Pacific (ca. 3000 BCE to 1000 CE), the Bantu expansion across Africa (ca. 1000 to 500 BCE), the “Barbarian Invasions” of Europe (ca. 300 to 800 CE), and the European colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia between the 16th and 20th century CE.

And who can forget the immortal words of Carl Sagan, “Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.” Another gem is the passage he wrote in “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,” which was featured in the short film “Wanderers” (see below). As Sagan expressed:

“For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest in far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival.

“Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.”

These words also articulate another critical aspect of this idea: how it is essential to survival. Many scientists and advocates for space migration, from Stephen Hawking and Robert Zubrin to Elon Musk, have emphasized that becoming “interplanetary” is the only long-term defense against extinction. Whether the cause is anthropogenic (climate change, nuclear war, etc.) or due to an asteroid impact, a gamma-ray burst, or some other cosmic phenomenon, being bound to one location leaves human civilization vulnerable.

As Sagan also noted, one look at our biochemistry confirms that all of the elements fused in the interior of stars are part of our makeup. From the water in our tissues, the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth and bones, the iron in our blood, and the elements (carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) that are the building blocks of the proteins and lipids that make up our muscles and organs. As Sagan summarized, “we are made of star-stuff.” At the same time, we are bound to planet Earth through roughly 4 billion years of species evolution.

As stated by Lee and Morgan in the Pancosmorio theory paper, this evolutionary process led to the complicated ecological systems that sustain all life here on Earth. In this system, the energy contained by the interactions between all matter and the gravity field of Earth and the electrical fields of atoms is conserved – no irreversible entropy occurs. As a result, the ecological system is regenerative, replenishing itself over time to ensure stability and sustainability. The question then is, what are the consequences of humanity leaving Earth and its life-sustaining regenerative systems behind? And, more importantly, how will this impose limits on human growth beyond Earth?

A Big Ol’ Heat Pump

To address these questions, Morgan and Lee Irons developed the Pancosmorio theory based on ecological thermodynamics theory and the methodology of abductive reasoning. In this sense, the Earth and its regenerative ecosphere are similar to a self-restoring heat engine, where solar radiation is used by lifeforms and the abiotic environment to create energy, organic molecules, and biomass. Therefore, this comparison provides a basis for measuring sustainable growth.

Their proposed method also incorporates the basal growth hypothesis, which infers that activity in any location has a self-restoring order, capacity, and organization equivalent to the base of the ecosphere in which life evolved. As Lee Irons explained to Universe Today, their theory establishes:

“[T]hat human life and all Earth life evolved from ongoing solar power pouring down on Earth and a build-up of exergy (stored energy) in the form of networks of dissipative structures (biochemical cycles of lifeforms) that the life is now dependent on. The theory is also based on modeling these dissipative structures as well as those of geophysical cycles (e.g., water, air, and weather cycles) as heat engines and applying what we know in classical mechanics of conservative forces that make these heat engines self-restoring.”

In short, life on Earth evolved under certain conditions that are required to sustain human life at its current level of growth. Therefore, the availability of these conditions will define the limits of humanity’s growth in space. Integral to this is the existence of a self-restoring order that comes down to quantifiable factors (gravity, air pressure, heating, seasons, tidal forces, and radiation protection), robust networks of abiotic and biotic (inorganic and organic) resources that can endure stress loads, and a sufficient amount of land area to capture and distribute exergy.

Then, they considered how human infrastructure and technology could augment a basal system equivalent to what we’ve done here on Earth. This consideration essentially states that humans will need infrastructure comparable to what we have established here on Earth to maintain our current level of growth. This would require the in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) of the basal ecosphere, augmented power systems, agricultural production, and manufacturing capabilities that rival Earth’s. Said Lee:

“The nature of non-self-restoring augmentation systems (i.e., human technology, infrastructure, society, and civilization) that utilize irreversible cycles is that they require self-restoring basal systems (i.e., the naturally evolved ecosystems) that utilize semi-reversible cycles to be sustained. This is known as ‘strong sustainability.’

“It all comes down to the availability of stored exergy that contemporary humans have become adapted to on Earth,” said Lee. “Humans can certainly adapt to a lower exergy level, but that means that human augmentation capacity and organization would reduce in some way, likely uncontrollable. And going through that kind of adaptation in space without the buffering of Earth or someplace like Earth to back you up is very risky.”

This work builds on previous research by Morgan and Lee that showed how traditional Environmental Control and Life-Support Systems (ECLSS) used for short-duration missions in space could not sustain long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. For this, a Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLSS) that can replenish itself over time would be required. A key part of this study was the Terraform Sustainability Assessment Framework (TSAF) developed by Morgan and Lee to measure the effectiveness of a BLSS.

In this framework, a system that effectively mimics Earth’s regenerative capacity and resiliency would be ranked as a 1. In other words, if you can engineer a regenerative system in space that is at least as sustainable as a similar system on Earth, then you’ve effectively formed an Earth-like system in space (aka. “terraformed”). Lee and Morgan have further developed this framework into a quantitative method of human sustainability as part of the Pancosmorio theory.

Four Levels

Based on these conditions, Morgan and Lee then evaluated how humans could live beyond Earth using four analytical models. Based on the previous considerations, these models incorporate different degrees of self-sustainability and dependency on Earth. As they demonstrate, this directly impacts how far settlements can be established from Earth and imposes strict limits on their growth.

The four models are arranged hierarchically into four levels, where Level 1 applies to habitats and settlements that have achieved terraform-specific stability ratings of 1, while Levels 2 to 4 have lower ratings. Here’s how they break down:

Level 1 : Space habitats or settlements with sufficient dissipative structures, power, area, functional diversity, network vitality, and sufficient infrastructure to augment the basal ecosystem with contemporary human society. This refers to an advanced human society in space that has effectively solved the issue of human sustainability and does not require supply chains with Earth. This is the recommended level of development for human bases and settlements located well beyond the Earth-Moon System.

Level 2: Habitats and settlements with a sufficient self-restoring order and capacity with dissipative structures, power, and area conditions being met. However, these habitats have insufficient organization, either with the ecosystem or the infrastructure, resulting in a brittle network subject to blight and diversity loss when disturbed. This level allows for innovation and adaptation but requires a minimal supply chain to replace deployed resources and specialized technology.

Level 3: Self-restoring order is established, but the capacity is not met, resulting from insufficient power and/or area to ensure human adaptability. This results in sufficient human life support but an insufficient level of organization to mitigate a cascade failure in the event of disturbances. This is only recommended as an early stage for human habitats or settlement and requires significant improvements while supported by a supplemental supply chain.

Level 4: The default when none of the sustainability conditions are met. For these habitats or settlements, self-restoring order, capacity, and organization are insufficient, and augmentation only provides mission operations systems and ECLS system. A. supply chain is absolutely necessary. This is recommended only for crewed missions within Earth orbit – like the International Space Station (ISS) – and uncrewed missions of any duration beyond LEO.

“Levels of sustainability effectively highlight how much risk the humans of the settlement are under,” Lee summarized. “The problem is that deep space locations are not going to be able to rely on supply chain support from Earth because supply chains from Earth themselves are not going to be reliable or sustainable until they are as ubiquitous as the supply chain system on Earth. So, human sustainability in space is fundamentally about a settlement’s ability to sustain its local human population when supply chains from Earth are not available.”

Five Hypothesis

Finally, Morgan and Lee subject their four sustainability models to five testable hypotheses that utilize their new quantitative method of human sustainability. Each of these comes down to the results of controlled tests or human missions, as bases and settlements migrate out into the Solar System and experience unplanned events – from the loss of productivity and blight to diversity loss and cascade failure. The five hypotheses and their respective tests are organized as follows:

The Growth Hypothesis: Any human base or settlement in space operating at Level 1 sustainability can experience growth that can sustain all planned loads without disruption and adapt to unplanned loads and disruptions with a minimum of time. In short, this base would have terraform-specific stability ratings of 1.

Test: To determine the causal load or disruption, perform a root cause analysis of an unplanned event that results in a temporary drop in production of an ecosphere that meets Level 1 sustainability criteria.

The Blight Hypothesis: Any human base or settlement in space operating at Level 2 sustainability or lower can experience ecological or technological networks faltering under planned loads without any subsequent disruption. This lack of robustness would appear as an ecosystem blight and a limited loss of production, requiring corrective and preventative actions to restore production.

Test: Perform a root cause analysis of an unplanned event that results in a drop in production without recovery (aka. blight) in an ecosphere that meets Level 2 sustainability criteria.

The Diversity Loss Hypothesis: Any human base or settlement in space operating at Level 2 sustainability or lower can experience disruptions driven by planned loads and lack of full recovery from any disruption. This lack of reliability would appear as a limited loss of functional diversity, resulting in the local extinctions of species and the loss of technological capability.

Test: Perform a root cause analysis of an unplanned event that results in a loss of diversity without recovery of an ecosphere that meets Level 2 sustainability criteria.

The Cascade Failure Hypothesis: Any human base or settlement in space operating at Level 3 sustainability or lower can experience disruptions without recovery. This would appear as a cascading loss where a resource is fully depleted, causing a chain reaction that risks the total loss of other resources. The result would require the creation of an emergency supply chain from another location or abandoning the location to save lives.

Test: Perform a root cause analysis of an unplanned event that results in an actual cascade failure (a collapse with major and multiple losses) of an ecosphere that meets Level 3 sustainability criteria.

The Pancosmorio Theorem Hypothesis: There is a maximum number of astronomical units from the Sun out to which a terraformed system is sustainable (assuming it satisfies all Level 1 sustainability conditions).

Test: The hypothesis is validated by the failure of a base or settlement to provide sufficient power (solar, nuclear, batteries, power cells, etc.) based upon the bases’ or settlements’ distance from the Sun – which can then result in blight, diversity loss, or cascade failure. A base or settlement that meets the requisite conditions of dissipative structures and area but still has sustainability problems is evidence that it can’t achieve and maintain adequate organization due to inadequate capacity, either because of the distance from the Sun or insufficient power generation.

Some undeniable conclusions can be drawn from the Pancosmorio theory and its framework of four models, five testable hypotheses, and an abductive reasoning approach. First, human technology, infrastructure, and society cannot be sustained outside of Earth without having a sustainable basal ecosystem to sustain them. Second, life as we know it is a consequence of systems, feedback, and conditions unique to Earth. In other words, they exist nowhere else in our solar system, making establishing a human settlement outside of Earth much more difficult than simply building a dome, pumping up the atmospheric pressure, and spreading seeds and fertilizer everywhere.

Any base or settlement established beyond LEO in the near future (especially long-duration ones) will need to be as self-sufficient as possible. This includes having sufficient energy, dissipative structures, heating, gravity, the abiotic/biotic elements necessary to ensure order, and the right technology to augment these and fill in the gaps. Rotating cylinders, centrifuges, and nuclear reactors are good examples of how technology could provide simulated gravity and heating, but natural methods will also be needed.

The bottom line is that the farther a habitat or settlement is from Earth, the more self-sustaining it will need to be, but also, the more difficult it will be to make it self-sustaining. This means that the inhabitants will need to create an ecosphere that is as “Earth-like” as possible (i.e., they will have to create a “terraformed environment”) and find sufficient levels of sustainable power sources to be equivalent to the solar power received by Earth. Otherwise, these habitats or settlements must rely on expensive and unreliable supply chains or risk internal collapse. These limitations place strenuous limitations on how and where humanity can settle.

Implications

As with their previous study on BLSS, this research is significant since it establishes a quantifiable method for measuring sustainability. This could allow scientists and mission planners to calculate the likelihood of long-term success for missions destined for the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Wherever and whenever humanity plans to set up shop away from the comfort and life-sustaining system of Earth, these quantifiable frameworks will tell them exactly what they need to survive. Said Lee:

“Ecologists have been trying to work out how to quantify orthogonal sustainability properties for decades. We feel we have accomplished solving the orthogonal problem and the application of network ecology and ecological thermodynamics to space. We also feel we have theoretically figured out why and how Earth works functionally as an island of order and, therefore, what that means for living outside that island of order.”

Ultimately, the study provides three insights into humanity’s ongoing endeavors in space. The first concerns the International Space Exploration Coordination Group ‘s (ISECG) plan to create a permanent human presence on the Moon. Based on their framework, Morgan and Lee state that this plan heavily depends on a very limited supply-chain support system and contains no backup augmentation reserve elements. Moreover, the emergency egress plans are no better than those of the ISS, which is completely impractical. In essence, the plan is no more sustainable than those governing a space station in LEO.

Artist’s impression of a Mars habitat in conjunction with other surface elements on Mars.

Second, this study has implications for creating a human settlement on Mars, which would have difficulty achieving any sustainability level. The distance from Earth rules out Level 4 sustainability, while Level 3 and above are challenging due to low gravity and gradient air pressure conditions. As they indicate, a settlement would need to simulate 1-g gravity to ensure that an ecosphere could survive long-term (which is difficult to imagine).

The third insight is perhaps the most intriguing and relates to our search for intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe (aka. SETI). Given that the laws of physics are universal (and with the Copernican Principle in mind), it is safe to say that this Pancosmorio theory can apply to any life that evolved anywhere in the Universe. As Lee explained, this presents a possible resolution to the Fermi Paradox:

“The theory suggests that other life forms in the universe likely evolve with dependence on their home planets and stars. If humans are limited in how far they can travel in Space away from their Sun due to a lack of exergy-maintaining resources in inter-solar space, then this suggests that other life forms have the same limitations. Thus the theory provides an actual scientific basis of universal law as a potential reason for why they haven’t visited us yet.”

These conclusions are consistent with NASA’s Plan for Sustained Lunar Exploration and Development (released in 2020), the basis for the Artemis Program . In addition to sending astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era, the long-term aim is to establish a program of “sustained lunar exploration” that would result in a surface habitat ( Artemis Base Camp ) and an orbiting space station (the Lunar Gateway ).

The development of BLSS is also vital to NASA’s long-term plans for sending crewed missions to Mars in the next decade — “ The Journey to Mars .” These missions are scheduled to commence in 2033 and are expected to culminate in the creation of habitats on the Martian surface. Because of the transit times involved (6 months at least) and the fact that missions can only be launched every 26 months when Mars is in Opposition (closest to Earth), self-sufficiency and ISRU are key aspects of the planning.

While improvements in propulsion technology will allow for shorter transit times and more capable supply chains, self-sufficiency is currently the name of the game for space exploration. As humanity migrates farther away from the cradle, the key to surviving and striving will require that we recognize our dependence on the intricate conditions that spawned us. These include the immediate need for air, water, food, and all the natural systems that create and renew them.

These findings suggest that human migration to space may not be so inevitable. Then again, treating the prospect as something that is either inevitable or not seems a bit naive and inelegant. Instead, we should view it as a potential opportunity that offers extensive benefits and significant challenges in equal measure. To accomplish this migration, we not only need to build the necessary infrastructure and leverage the local resources. We must also ensure that nature’s delicate balance and restorative powers accompany us for the ride!

This article was originally published on Universe Today by Matt Williams. Read the original article here .

This article was originally published on March 18, 2023

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Singularity

The term “moonshot” is sometimes invoked to denote a project so outrageously ambitious that it can only be described by comparing it to the Apollo 11 mission to land the first human on the Moon. The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative transcends the moonshot descriptor because its purpose goes far beyond the Moon. The aptly-named project seeks to travel to the nearest stars.

The brainchild of Russian-born tech entrepreneur billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Starshot was announced in April 2016 at a press conference joined by renowned physicists including Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson. While still early, the current vision is that thousands of wafer-sized chips attached to large, silver lightsails will be placed into Earth orbit and accelerated by the pressure of an intense Earth-based laser hitting the lightsail.

After just two minutes of being driven by the laser, the spacecraft will be traveling at one-fifth the speed of light—a thousand times faster than any macroscopic object has ever achieved.

Each craft will coast for 20 years and collect scientific data about interstellar space. Upon reaching  the planets near the Alpha Centauri star system , an the onboard digital camera will take high-resolution pictures and send these back to Earth, providing the first glimpse of our closest planetary neighbors. In addition to scientific knowledge, we may learn whether these planets are suitable for human colonization.

The team behind Breakthrough Starshot is as impressive as the technology. The board of directors includes Milner, Hawking, and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. The executive director is S. Pete Worden , former director of NASA Ames Research Center. A number of prominent scientists, including Nobel and Breakthrough Laureates, are serving as advisors to the project, and Milner has promised $100 million of his own funds to begin work. He will encourage his colleagues to contribute $10 billion over the next several years for its completion.

While this endeavor may sound like science fiction, there are no known scientific obstacles to implementing it. This doesn’t mean it will happen tomorrow: for Starshot to be successful, a number of advances in technologies are necessary. The organizers and advising scientists are relying upon the exponential rate of advancement to make Starshot happen within 20 years.

Here are 11 key Starshot technologies and how they are expected to advance exponentially over the next two decades.

Exoplanet Detection

An exoplanet is a planet outside our Solar System. While the first scientific detection of an exoplanet was only in 1988, as of May, 1 2017 there have been 3,608 confirmed detections of exoplanets in 2,702 planetary systems. While some resemble those in our Solar System, many have fascinating and bizarre features, such as rings 200 times wider than Saturn’s .

The reason for this deluge of discoveries? A vast improvement in telescope technology.

Just 100 years ago the world’s largest telescope was the Hooker Telescope at 2.54 meters. Today, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope consists of four large 8.2-meter diameter telescopes and is now the most productive ground-based facility in astronomy, with an average of over one peer-reviewed, published scientific paper per day.

Researchers use the VLT and a special instrument to look for rocky extrasolar planets in the habitable zone (allowing liquid water) of their host stars. In May 2016, researchers using the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile found not just one but seven Earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone .

Meanwhile, in space, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is designed specifically for this purpose and has already identified over 2,000 exoplanets. The James Webb Space Telescope , to be launched in October, 2018, will offer unprecedented insight into whether exoplanets can support life. “If these planets have atmospheres, [JWST] will be the key to unlocking their secrets,” according to Doug Hudgins, Exoplanet Program Scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington.

Launch Cost

The Starshot mothership will be launched aboard a rocket and release a thousand starships. The cost of transporting a payload using one-time-only rockets is immense, but private launch providers such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have recently demonstrated success in reusable rockets which are expected to substantially reduce the price. SpaceX has already reduced costs to around $60 million per Falcon 9 launch, and as the private space industry expands and reusable rockets become more common, this price is expected to drop even further.

The Starchip

Each 15-millimeter-wide Starchip must contain a vast array of sophisticated electronic devices, such as a navigation system, camera, communication laser, radioisotope battery, camera multiplexer, and camera interface. The expectation we’ll be able to compress an entire spaceship onto a small wafer is due to exponentially decreasing sensor and chip sizes.

The first computer chips in the 1960s contained a handful of transistors. Thanks to Moore’s Law, we can now squeeze billions of transistors onto each chip. The first digital camera weighed 8 pounds and took 0.01 megapixel images. Now, a digital camera sensor yields high-quality 12+ megapixel color images and fits in a smartphone—along with other sensors like GPS, accelerometer, and gyroscope. And we’re seeing this improvement bleed into space exploration with the advent of smaller satellites providing better data.

For Starshot to succeed, we will need the chip’s mass to be about 0.22 grams by 2030, but if the rate of improvement continues, projections suggest this is entirely possible.

The Lightsail

The sail must be made of a material which is highly reflective (to gain maximum momentum from the laser), minimally absorbing (so that it is not incinerated from the heat), and also very light weight (allowing quick acceleration). These three criteria are extremely constrictive and there is at present no satisfactory material.

The  required advances may come from artificial intelligence automating and accelerating materials discovery. Such automation has advanced to the point where machine learning techniques can “generate libraries of candidate materials by the tens of thousands,” allowing engineers to identify which ones are worth pursuing and testing for specific applications.

Energy Storage

While the Starchip will use a tiny nuclear-powered radioisotope battery for its 24-year-plus journey, we will still need conventional chemical batteries for the lasers. The lasers will need to employ tremendous energy in a short span of time, meaning that the power must be stored in nearby batteries.

Battery storage has improved at 5-8% per year, though we often don’t notice this benefit because appliance power consumption has increased at a comparable rate resulting in a steady operating lifetime. If batteries continue to improve at this rate, in 20 years they should have 3 to 5 times their present capacity. Continued innovation is expected to be driven from Tesla-Solar City’s big investment in battery technology . The companies have already installed close to 55,000 batteries in Kauai to power a large portion of their infrastructure.

Thousands of high-powered lasers will be used to push the lightsail to extraordinary speeds.

Lasers have obeyed Moore’s Law at a nearly identical rate to integrated circuits , the cost-per-power ratio halving every 18 months. In particular, the last decade has seen a dramatic acceleration in power scaling of diode and fiber lasers , the former breaking through 10 kilowatts from a single mode fiber in 2010 and the 100-kilowatt barrier a few months later. In addition to the raw power, we will also need to make advances in combining phased array lasers.

Our ability to move quickly has…moved quickly. In 1804 the train was invented and soon thereafter produced the hitherto unheard of speed of 70 mph. The Helios 2 spacecraft eclipsed this record in 1976: at its fastest, Helios 2 was moving away from Earth at a speed of 356,040 km/h. Just 40 years later the New Horizons spacecraft achieved a heliocentric speed of almost 45 km/s or 100,000 miles per hour. Yet even at these speeds it would take a long, long time to reach Alpha Centauri at slightly more than four light years away.

While accelerating subatomic particles to nearly light speed is routine in particle accelerators, never before has this been achieved for macroscopic objects. Achieving 20% speed of light for Starshot would represent a 1000x speed increase for any human-built object.

Memory Storage

Fundamental to computing is the ability to store information. Starshot depends on the continued decreasing cost and size of digital memory to include sufficient storage for its programs and the images taken of Alpha Centauri star system and its planets.

The cost of memory has decreased exponentially for decades : in 1970, a megabyte cost about one million dollars; it’s now about one-tenth of a cent. The size required for the storage has similarly decreased, from a 5-megabyte hard drive being loaded via forklift in 1956 to the current availability of 512-gigabyte USB sticks weighing a few grams.

Telecommunication

Once the images are taken the Starchip will send the images back to Earth for processing.

Telecommunications has advanced rapidly since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. The average internet speed in the US is currently about 11 megabits per second. The bandwidth and speed required for Starshot to send digital images over 4 light years—or 20 trillion miles—will require taking advantage in the latest telecommunications technology.

One promising technology is Li-Fi, a wireless approach which is 100 times faster than Wi-Fi .  A second is via optical fibers which now boast 1.125 terabits per second. There are even efforts in quantum telecommunications which are not just ultrafast but completely secure.

Computation

The final step in the Starshot project is to analyze the data returning from the spacecraft. To do so we must take advantage of the exponential increase in computing power, benefiting from the trillion-fold increase in computing over the 60 years.

This dramatically decreasing cost of computing has now continued due largely to the presence of cloud computing. Extrapolating into the future and taking advantage of new types of processing, such as quantum computing , we should see another thousand-fold increase in power by the time data from Starshot returns. Such extreme processing power will allow us to perform sophisticated scientific modeling and analysis of our nearest neighboring star system.

Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank Pete Worden and Gregg Maryniak for suggestions and comments.

Image Credit:  NASA/ESA/ESO

Exploding Stars Are Rare—but if One Was Close Enough, It Could Threaten Life on Earth

A new photonic computer chip uses light to slash ai energy costs, elon musk doubles down on mars dreams and details what’s next for spacex’s starship, this week’s awesome tech stories from around the web (through april 13), this company is growing mini livers inside people to fight liver disease.

Scientists Believe Light Speed Travel Is Possible. Here’s How.

A functioning warp drive would allow humans to reach the far ends of the cosmos in the blink of an eye.

White and his team in LSI’s Houston laboratory were conducting research for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and had set up these particular experiments to study the energy densities within Casimir cavities, the mysterious spaces between microscopic metal plates in a vacuum. The data plot indicated areas of diminished energy between the plates, which caused them to push toward each other as if trying to fill the void. This is known as negative vacuum energy density, a phenomenon in quantum mechanics called, appropriately enough, the Casimir effect . It’s something that’s helping scientists understand the soupy physics of microscale structures, which some researchers hope can be applied to energy applications that are more practical, such as circuits and electromechanical systems.

But White noticed that the pattern of negative vacuum energy between the plates and around tiny cylindrical columns that they’d inserted in the space looked familiar. It precisely echoed the energy pattern generated by a type of exotic matter that some physicists believe could unlock high-speed interstellar travel. “We then looked, mathematically, at what happens if we placed a one-micron sphere inside of a four-micron cylinder under the same conditions, and found that this kind of structure could generate a little nanoscale warp bubble encapsulating that central region,” White explains.

That’s right—a warp bubble. The essential component of a heretofore fictional warp drive that has for decades been the obsession of physicists, engineers, and sci-fi fans. Warp drive, of course, is the stuff of Star Trek legend, a device enclosed within a spacecraft that gives the mortals aboard the ability to rip around the cosmos at superhuman speed. To the lay sci-fi fan, it’s a “black box”—a convenient, completely made-up workaround to avoid the harsh realities of interstellar travel. However, after decades of speculation, research, and experimentation, scientists believe a warp drive could actually work.

To emphasize: White didn’t actually make a warp bubble. But the data from his study led to an aha moment: For the first time, a buildable warp bubble showed promise of success.

Warp technology’s core science is surprisingly sound. Though the specific mechanics of an actual device haven’t been fully unpacked, the math points toward feasibility. In short, a real-life warp drive would use massive amounts of energy, which can come in the form of mass, to create enough gravitational pull to distort spacetime in a controlled fashion, allowing a ship to speed along inside a self-generated bubble that itself is able to travel at essentially any speed. Warp drives popped up in fiction intermittently for several decades before Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry plugged one into the USS Enterprise in 1966. But Miguel Alcubierre, PhD, a Mexican theoretical physicist and professed Star Trek enthusiast, gave the idea real-world legs when he released a paper in 1994 speculating that such a drive was mathematically possible. It was the first serious treatment of a warp drive’s feasibility, and it made headlines around the world. His breakthrough inspired more scientists to nudge the theoretical aspects of warp drive toward concrete, practical applications.

“I proposed a ‘geometry’ for space that would allow faster-than-light travel as seen from far away, essentially expanding space behind the object we want to move and contracting it in front,” Alcubierre says. “This forms a ‘bubble’ of distorted space, inside of which an object—a spaceship, say—could reside.”

Physicists tend to speak in relative terms. By injecting the sly qualifier “as seen from far away,” Alcubierre might sound like he’s describing the galactic equivalent of an optical illusion —an effect perhaps similar to driving past a truck going the opposite direction on the highway when you’re both going 60 miles an hour. Sure feels like a buck-twenty, doesn’t it? But the A-to-B speed is real; the warp effect simply shortens the literal distance between two points. You’re not, strictly speaking, moving faster than light. Inside the bubble, all appears relatively normal, and light moves faster than you are, as it should. Outside the bubble, however, you’re haulin’ the mail.

.css-2l0eat{font-family:UnitedSans,UnitedSans-roboto,UnitedSans-local,Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;padding:0.9rem 1rem 1rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-2l0eat{font-size:1.75rem;line-height:1;}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-2l0eat{font-size:1.875rem;line-height:1;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-2l0eat{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1;}}.css-2l0eat b,.css-2l0eat strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-2l0eat em,.css-2l0eat i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;} THOUGH THE SPECIFIC MECHANICS OF AN ACTUAL DEVICE HAVEN’T BEEN UNPACKED, THE MATH POINTS TOWARD FEASIBILITY.

Alcubierre’s proposal had solved one of the initial hurdles to achieving warp speeds: The very idea clashes with Einstein’s long-accepted theory of general relativity, which states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but it doesn’t preclude space itself from traveling faster than that. In fact, scientists speculate that the same principles explain the rapid expansion of the universe after the Big Bang .

While concluding that warp speed was indeed possible, Alcubierre also found that it would require an enormous amount of energy to sustain the warp bubble. He theorized that negative energy—the stuff hinted at by White’s experimentation with Casimir cavities—could be a solution. The only problem is that no one has yet proved that negative energy is real. It’s the unobtanium of our spacefaring imaginations, something researchers only believe to exist. In theory, however, this unknown matter may be sufficiently powerful that future warp drive designers could channel it to contract spacetime around it. In conceptual drawings of warp-capable spacecraft , enormous material rings containing this energy source surround a central fuselage. When activated, it warps spacetime around the entire ship. The more intense the warping, the faster the warp travel is achieved.

Of course, it’s not that simple. Physicist José Natário, PhD, a professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, wrote his own influential paper about the mathematical feasibility of warp drives in 2001. However, he is concerned about practical conundrums, like the amount of energy required. “You need to be able to curve spacetime quite a lot in order to do this,” he says. “We’re talking about something that would be much, much more powerful than the sun.”

Alcubierre is similarly skeptical that his theoretical ideas might ever be used to develop a working warp drive. “In order to have a bubble about 100 meters wide traveling at precisely the speed of light, you would need about 100 times the mass of the planet Jupiter converted into negative energy, which of course sounds absurd,” he says. By that standard, he concludes, a warp drive is very unlikely.

Physicists love a challenge, though. In the 29 years since Alcubierre published his paper, other scientists have wrestled with the implications of the work, providing alternative approaches to generating the energy using more accessible power sources, finding oblique entry points to the problem, and batting ideas back and forth in response to one another’s papers. They use analogies involving trampolines , tablecloths, bowling balls, balloons, conveyor belts, and music to explain the physics.

They even have their own vocabulary. It’s not faster-than-light travel; it’s superluminal travel, thank you. Then there’s nonphysical and physical—a.k.a. the critical distinction between theoretical speculation and something that can actually be engineered. (Pro tip: We’re aiming for physical here, folks.) They do mention Star Trek a lot, but never Star Wars . Even the scruffiest-looking nerf herder knows that the ships in Star Wars use hyperdrive, which consumes fuel, rather than warp drives, which don’t use propulsive technology but instead rely on, well, warping. They’re also vague about details like what passengers would experience, what gravity is like on board since you’re carrying around boatloads of energy, and what would happen if someone, say, jumped out of the ship while warping. (A speculative guess: Nothing good.)

Such research isn’t typically funded by academic institutions or the DARPAs and NASAs of the world, so much of this work occurs in the scientists’ spare time. One such scientist and Star Trek enthusiast is physicist Erik Lentz, PhD. Now a researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, Lentz was doing postdoctoral work at Göttingen University in Germany when, amid the early, isolated days of the pandemic, he mulled the idea of faster-than-light travel. He published a paper in 2021 arguing that warp drives could be generated using positive energy sources instead of the negative energy that Alcubierre’s warp drive seemed to require.

“There are a number of barriers to entry to actually being able to build a warp drive,” Lentz says. “The negative energy was the most obvious, so I tried to break that barrier down.”

He explored a new class of solutions in Einstein’s general relativity while focusing on something called the weak-energy condition, which, he explains, tracks the positivity of energy in spacetime. He hit upon a “soliton solution”—a wave that maintains its shape and moves at a constant velocity—that could both satisfy the energy-level challenge and travel faster than light. Such a warp bubble could travel along using known energy sources, though harnessing those at the levels needed are still far beyond our capabilities. The next step, he notes, may be bringing the energy requirements for a warp drive to within the range of a nuclear fusion reactor.

A fusion-powered device could theoretically travel to and from Proxima Centauri , Earth’s nearest star, in years instead of decades or millennia, and then go faster and faster as power sources improve. Current conventional rocket technology, on the other hand, would take 50,000 years just for a one-way trip—assuming, of course, there was an unlimited fuel supply for those engines.

“IF YOU COLLIDE WITH SOMETHING ON YOUR PATH, IT WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY BE CATASTROPHIC.”

Like Alcubierre’s original thesis, Lentz’s paper had a seismic impact on the warp drive community, prompting yet another group of scientists to dig into the challenge. Physicist Alexey Bobrick and technology entrepreneur Gianni Martire have been particularly prolific. In 2021, they released a paper theorizing that a class of subliminal warp drives, traveling at just a fraction of light speed, could be developed from current scientific understanding. While that paper essentially argued that it’s perfectly acceptable to walk before you can run, they followed it up with another theory earlier this year that describes how a simulated black hole , created using sound waves and glycerin and tested with a laser beam, could be used to evaluate the levels of gravitational force needed to warp spacetime. The duo coded that breakthrough into a public app that they hope will help more quickly push theoretical ideas to practical ones. Though the team is waiting for the technology to clear a peer review stage before releasing details, the app is essentially a simulator that allows scientists to enter their warp-speed equations to validate whether they’re practical.

“When somebody publishes a warp metric for the first time, people say, ‘Okay, is your metric physical?’” Martire says. The answer to that question—whether the metric has practical potential or is strictly theoretical—is hard to establish given the challenges of testing these hypotheses. That determination could take six to eight months. “Now we can tell you within seconds, and it shows you visually how off you are or how close you are,” he says.

While useful, the app will speed up the preliminary math only for future researchers. Galaxy-sized challenges remain before we ever experience turbocharged interstellar travel. Alcubierre worries in particular about what may happen near the walls of the warp bubble. The distortion of space is so violent there, he notes, that it would destroy anything that gets close. “If you collide with something on your path, it would almost certainly be catastrophic,” he says.

Natário mulls even more practical issues, like steering and stopping. “It’s a bubble of space, that you’re pushing through space,” he says. “So, you’d have to tell space ... to curve in front of your spaceship.” But therein lies the problem: You can’t signal to the space in front of you to behave the way you want it to.

His opinion? Superluminal travel is impossible. “You need these huge deformations that we have no idea how to accomplish,” Natário says. “So yes, there has been a lot of effort toward this and studying these weird solutions, but this is all still completely theoretical, abstract, and very, very, very, very far from getting anywhere near a practical warp drive.” That’s “very” to the power of four, mind you—each crushing blow pushing us exponentially, excruciatingly further and further away from our yearned-for superluminal lives.

Ultimately, the pursuit of viable high-speed interstellar transportation also points to a more pressing terrestrial challenge: how the scientific community tackles ultra-long-term challenges in the first place. Most of the research so far has come from self-starters without direct funding, or by serendipitous discoveries made while exploring often unrelated research, such as Dr. White’s work on Casimir cavities.

Many scientists argue that we’re in a multi-decade period of stagnation in physics research, and warp drive—despite its epic time horizons before initial research leads to galaxy-spanning adventures—is somewhat emblematic of that stagnation. Sabine Hossenfelder, a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and creator of the YouTube channel Science Without the Gobbledygook , noted in a 2020 blog post that physics research has drifted away from frequent, persistent physical experimentation to exorbitant infusions of cash into relatively few devices. She writes that with fewer experiments, serendipitous discoveries become increasingly unlikely. Without those discoveries, the technological progress needed to keep experiments economically viable never materializes.

When asked whether this applied equally to warp drive, Hossenfelder sees a faint but plausible connection. “Warp drives are an idea that is not going to lead to applications in the next 1,000 years or so,” she says. “So they don’t play a big role in that one way to another. But when it comes to the funding, you see some overlap in the problems.”

So, despite all the advances, the horizon for a warp drive remains achingly remote. That hasn’t fazed the scientists involved, though. A few years ago, while teaching in France, White visited the Strasbourg Cathedral with his wife. While admiring its 466-foot-tall spire, he was struck by the fact that construction began in 1015 but didn’t wrap up until 1439—a span of 424 years. Those who built the basement had no chance of ever seeing the finished product, but they knew they had to do their part to aid future generations. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” White says. “I don’t know what the future holds. But I know what I need to be doing right now.”

Eric Adams is a writer and photographer who focuses on technology, transportation, science, travel, and other subjects for a wide range of outlets, including Wired, The Drive, Gear Patrol, Men's Health, Popular Science, Forbes, and others.

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Interstellar interlopers like Oumuamua and Borisov are much more common than previously thought

The detection of two celestial objects careening through our solar system has scientists eagerly anticipating more.

On October 17 and 18, 2017, an unusual object sped across the field of view of a large telescope perched near the summit of a volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The Pan-STARRS1 telescope was designed to survey the sky for transient events, like asteroid or comet flybys . But this was different: The object was not gravitationally bound to the Sun, or to any other celestial body. It had arrived from somewhere else.

The mysterious object was the first visitor from interstellar space observed passing through the solar system. Astronomers named it 1I/’Oumuamua, borrowing a Hawaiian word that roughly translates to “messenger from afar arriving first.” Two years later, in August 2019, amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov discovered the only other known interstellar interloper, now called 2I/Borisov , using a self-built telescope at the MARGO observatory in Nauchnij, Crimea.

While typical asteroids and comets in the solar system orbit the Sun, ‘Oumuamua and Borisov are celestial nomads, spending most of their time wandering interstellar space. The existence of such interlopers in the solar system had been hypothesized, but scientists expected them to be rare. “I never thought we would see one,” says astrophysicist Susanne Pfalzner of the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany. At least not in her lifetime.

With these two discoveries, scientists now suspect that interstellar interlopers are much more common. Right now, within the orbit of Neptune alone, there could be around 10,000 ‘Oumuamua-size interstellar objects, estimates planetary scientist David Jewitt of UCLA, coauthor of an overview of the current understanding of interstellar interlopers in the 2023 Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics .

Researchers are busy trying to answer basic questions about these alien objects, including where they come from and how they end up wandering the galaxy. Interlopers could also provide a new way to probe features of distant planetary systems.

But first, astronomers need to find more of them.

“We’re a little behind at the moment,” Jewitt says. “But we expect to see more.”

Alien origins

At least since the beginning of the 18th century, astronomers have considered the possibility that interstellar objects exist. More recently, computer models have shown that the solar system sent its own population of smaller bodies into the voids of interstellar space long ago due to gravitational interactions with the giant planets.

Scientists expected most interlopers to be exocomets composed of icy materials. Borisov fit this profile: it had a tail made of gases and dust created by ices that evaporated during its close passage to the Sun. This suggests that it originated in the outer region of a planetary system. where temperatures were cold enough for gases like carbon monoxide to have frozen into its rocks. At some point, something tossed Borisov, roughly a kilometer across, out of its system.

One potential culprit is a stellar flyby. The gravity of a passing star can eject smaller bodies, known as planetesimals, from the outer reaches of a system, according to a recent study led by Pfalzner . A giant planet could also eject an object from the outer regions of a planetary system if an asteroid or comet gets close enough for the planet’s gravitational tug to speed up the smaller body enough for it to escape its star’s hold. Close approaches can also happen when planets migrate across their planetary systems, as Neptune is thought to have done in the early solar system.

‘Oumuamua, on the other hand, is not what scientists expected. Observations suggest it is quite elongated — perhaps 240 meters long and as narrow as 40 meters. And unlike Borisov, it didn’t show any gas or dust activity, raising the possibility that it originated closer to its star where it was too warm for ices to form. If this was the case, a stellar flyby or giant planet probably would not have been able to pull the object out of its system. Instead, it may have been ejected during the death throes of its star: Pulses of gas from a dying star could push planets and planetesimals outward, destabilizing their orbits enough to send some of them flying into interstellar space.

It’s possible, however, that ‘Oumuamua did form in the cold outer reaches of its system and, as it neared the Sun, developed a gas tail that was not detected by telescopes. One clue is that the object sped up more than would be expected from the gravity of the solar system alone. A recent study suggests that such a boost could have come from small amounts of hydrogen outgassing that the telescopes didn’t detect. Several asteroids in our solar system may have gotten a similar boost from outgassing of water vapor, according to another study. Future observations by the James Webb Space Telescope, and by the JAXA Hayabusa2 Extended Mission (which will rendezvous with one of these solar system asteroids, known as “dark comets,” in 2031) may detect low levels of outgassing.

“We’ll have to wait and see, but they could be analogs of ‘Oumuamua,” says planetary scientist Darryl Seligman of Cornell University, coauthor with Jewitt of the review of interstellar interlopers.

Searching for nomads

More data, from more interlopers, may help resolve some of these questions. In order to gather these data, scientists will need better odds of detecting the objects when they pass through the solar system. “If Pan-STARRS1 didn’t observe where we did that particular night, it’s likely that ‘Oumuamua would never have been found,” says astronomer Robert Weryk, formerly of the University of Hawaii, who discovered the interloper in the telescope’s data.

The upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to increase astronomers’ chances of finding these fast movers: beginning as soon as 2025, the observatory’s telescope will image the entire visible southern sky every few nights, and its primary mirror has a diameter nearly seven meters larger than Pan-STARRS1, enabling it to see fainter objects, farther away. Once interlopers are detected, ground- and space-based telescopes will image them to try to determine what they are made of. And if a reachable target is discovered, the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Comet Interceptor , slated to launch in 2029, could be redirected to image the visitor up close.

Eventually, astronomers hope to build a catalog of interstellar objects similar to the inventory of exoplanets , which has grown to over 5,500 entries since the first discovery in 1992. That future inventory could help researchers answer the long-standing question of how typical Earth and the solar system are. The compositions of a large sample of interstellar objects could yield clues about the makeup of objects in exoplanetary systems — including ones that might support life.

“Planetesimals are the building blocks of exoplanets,” says astronomer Meredith Hughes of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. This means they “can provide information about the diversity of environments, including ones that could be habitable.”

Now, ‘Oumuamua is beyond the orbit of Neptune, and comet Borisov is almost as far. They will continue their journey back into interstellar space, where it’s anyone’s guess what will happen next. Perhaps they will spend an eternity wandering the vast voids of space, or maybe they will be captured by a star. Or they could collapse into a disk of evolving gas and dust in a new planetary system and begin their journeys all over again.

Astronomers estimate there could be more interstellar objects in the Milky Way than stars in the observable universe. Finding more of them will offer a new way to probe the mysteries of the cosmos.

“The really cool thing,” Pfalzner says, “is that interstellar objects come to us.”

Theo Nicitopoulos is a freelance journalist covering Earth and space science news.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine , a non-profit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge available to everyone.

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Interstellar travel without a spaceship is possible - Here's how:

Research published in the International Journal of Astrobiology proposes a fascinating theory where advanced extraterrestrial civilizations can travel among the stars without the need for an interstellar spaceship. 

In her paper, physics and astronomy professor Irina K. Romanovskaya postulates the possibility of  using  rogue planets  (or free-floating planets, as she calls them)  for interstellar transport . 

Image Credit: Dotted Yeti via Shutterstock / HDR tune by Universal-Sci

Search for extraterrestrial life

Romanovskaya also proposes potential ' technosignatures ' ( measurable characteristics or effects that offer scientific evidence of past or present technology)  that may be produced by extraterrestrial civilizations employing rogue planets for interstellar migration. Additionally, she stipulates approaches on how to potentially search for these technosignatures  to enhance our search for extraterrestrial life.

One can imagine several reasons for extraterrestrial civilizations to leave their home planetary systems: Out of  curiosity , aiming for exploration, or out of  necessity  because of the existence of an existential threat such as climate change that got out of hand, war, or a dying home star. 

Benefits of employing a rogue planet for interstellar travel

In the latter scenario, civilizations are likely to run into problems fairly quickly as they attempt to migrate away from their home system. Romanovskaya explains that they would probably  face severe or insurmountable problems  if they were to  use spacecraft to migrate substantial populations over  interstellar distances .  (See  the problem with 'world ships' )

These issues got Romanovskaya thinking.  Is there another method for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations to migrate to another planetary system?  She concluded that rogue planets could be a viable solution if utilized cleverly.

The  benefit of using rogue planets  for interstellar migration is that they provide travelers with a  lot of space   and resources in addition to  protection from radiation   and consistent gravity . Think of liquid water just below the surface  sustained by radiogenic and primordial heat  of the planet, which can be used for consumption or to build underwater habitats that shelter inhabitants from the high radiation levels encountered in interstellar space. 

How use a rogue planet for interstellar migration?

But how would we be able to catch a lift on a rogue planet? This can be achieved in several ways, according to Romanovskaya. 

One possibility is just to  wait for one to pass through  their home planetary system. Research has shown that there  may be more rogue planets than stars in the Milky Way . This means that from time to time, rogue planets may pass through the outer regions of planetary systems. If the outer regions are colonized, it is  relatively manageable to cover the distance  to such a passing rogue planet. 

Romanovskaya describes a situation  in our own solar  system where, for example,  propulsion systems  could be  attached to a trans-Neptunian object . Clever use of gravity assists events involving other Oort cloud objects, could change the object's trajectory, and  bring it close to a rogue planet passing through the Oort cloud.  When the object nears its  periastron , a migrating civilization could use conventional spacecraft to 'hop on,' so to say. 

The distance from the Oort cloud to the interior of the Solar System, and two of the nearest stars - (Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech )

Of course, this approach has a  significant downside  as one has to wait for such a planet to pass by. This is certainly  not ideal in case of an existential threat. 

Another option for an advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be to  release an existing dwarf planet from its gravitational bounds  to their home planetary system and its parent star,  effectively converting it into a rogue planet . 

Dwarf planets  akin to  Sedna  in our own solar system are  ideal for this type of scenario  due to their  highly eccentric orbit.  Energy requirements for changing the speed of larger planets located at a distance of 40 astronomical units or less are significantly higher compared to the amount of energy needed to change the speed of a dwarf planet like Sedna at a distance of 500 astronomical units or more. 

The  amount of energy needed  to move a dwarf planet at highly eccentric  would still be huge . However, Romanovskaya puts this  in perspective  by identifying that only a few hundred years ago, our  primary method of transportation  over land was  by horse , while currently, we are capable of  outputting millions of times that power with modern rocket engines .

Romanovskaya: "A civilization, which is  several hundred years or millennia ahead  of humankind in its technological development, may use  advanced propulsion technologies and gravity-assist events  to convert Oort-cloud objects to free-floating planets."

It is also possible for a  dwarf planet to be flung out of its planetary system by the parent star . This can happen when the star transforms into a supernova or red giant. (In such a case, there is reason enough for an advanced civilization to leave the planetary system, to begin with). 

In theory, the advanced extraterrestrial civilization could  relocate to a dwarf planet in the outer reaches of the planetary system  to be  flung out of the system by the parent star  as it expands from a main sequence star to a red giant, as there is a  critical distance from which objects are pushed out of the planetary system  instead of remaining bound to the dying star.

The life of a Sun-like star, from its birth on the left side of the frame to its evolution into a red giant star on the right - (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser )

Why not permanently settle on a rogue planet

In all the scenarios mentioned above, the civilization ends up on a planet wandering through the galaxy. So why not stay there instead of going to the trouble of moving again? 

According to Romanovskaya, a rogue planet should  only be considered as a means of transportation  between stars and not a new home.  Rogue planets do not remain very hospitable over a long stretch of time. 

Eventually,  the heat produced  in the interior of a rogue planet  will start to diminish , which means that it  won't be able to sustain liquid water indefinitely . In addition, rogue planets have a  limited supply of resources and energy  compared to a planetary system with a star at its center. 

The problem with 'world ships' 

So how likely is it that there are actually inhabited rogue planets moving through our galaxy? As it stands, the answer to this question remains a mystery. Nonetheless, the scenario is not an unthinkable one if you ask Romanovskaya. 

Research tells us that  building an interstellar spaceship  capable of moving entire civilizations (sometimes referred to as 'world ships')  is   extremely difficult. 

If such an interstellar world ship treks at less than one percent of the speed of light,  it would take hundreds of years to reach its destination  in another planetary system. 

Romanovskaya: ''Passengers' health and their ability to transfer knowledge and skills to next generations on the ship would  require a very large number of passengers .'' 

In fact, a  2014 study published in Acta Stronautica  indicates that  approximately 44 thousand travelers would be required to survive a 150-year interstellar trip  in good health. (This estimation is at the lower end,  other studies put this number closer to a quarter of a million ) 

However it may be, the larger the number of passengers, the more enormous their world ship would need to be and the more difficult it would be to construct it and send it to other planetary systems.  At a certain point, it becomes more viable to employ a rogue planet  for this task b enefiting from plentiful space , the  protection from radiation , the  enduring gravity , and the  availability of liquid water . 

After more than 60 years of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life, we have yet to find anything.  Traditionally scientists look for life within the habitable zone  of planetary systems. If it's up to Romanovskaya, we should  expand our search to incorporate the outer regions of planetary systems and rogue planets as well.  

If you are interested in reading more about the subject, be sure to explore the paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology listed below.

Sources and further reading:

Migrating extraterrestrial civilizations and interstellar colonization: implications for SETI and SETA -(International Journal of Astrobiology via Cambridge University press)

Scientists speculate that there might be more rogue planets than stars in the Milky Way - (Universal-Sci)

Rogue planets: hunting the galaxy's most mysterious worlds - (Universal-Sci)

Technosignature

Shielding effectiveness: A weighted figure of merit for space radiation shielding - (Applied Radiation and Isotopes)

Estimation of a genetically viable population for multigenerational interstellar voyaging: Review and data for project Hyperion - - (Acta Astronautica)

Potential for Liquid Water Biochemistry Deep under the Surfaces of the Moon, Mars, and beyond - (The Astrophysical Journal Letters)

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By Damon Wise

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If 2024 is the year American voters will experience a sense of déjà vu at the ballot box, it’s also likely to go down as the year that fans of indie genre cinema will feel it at the box office. From Sundance to SXSW, a surprising number of films have had fun with the concept of time, whether in terms of history literally repeating itself ( Timestalker , Omni Loop , Desert Road ) or presenting new angles on the same set of events ( Little Death, It’s What’s Inside , and, to a certain degree, even the animated kids film 10 Lives ).

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As is the case with Benson and Moorhead’s own projects, Felker’s film comes with a whole unseen backstory that could probably sustain a feature-length prequel: a brother and sister — Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sidney (Riley Dandy) — arrange to meet at a remote diner after carrying out a robbery of some kind. They need to lay low for a couple of weeks, and Joseph has been given the use of a safe house. “What’s the backup?” Sidney asks. “There is no backup,” he replies.

The sound of police sirens brings their rendezvous to a premature end, and so the duo head off to what seems to be an abandoned house on the edge of the nearby woods. As the law closes in, Joseph sets into motion an elaborate ritual that involves setting the time to ten past two on a pair of grandfather clocks and making a cryptic call on a dial-phone. Instantly, they are sent back to some unspecified time, perhaps the 1990s if the VHS tapes and CDs are an indicator. All they have to do, says Joseph, is hang tight for 14 days.

Clearly, however, that’s not what’s in store, and when the two-week period is up, they find that access to the portal back has mysteriously been sabotaged. Instructed to go to “the mill,” they find a private chapel and a desiccated corpse, which Joseph identifies as the woman who supplied him with the keys to the safe house. A sinister message is carved on to the altar: “You are in the grip of the vise. Give in or join them.”

Anyone even remotely acquainted with Benson and Moorhead’s work will know that the plot is about to thicken in ways that will never be fully reconciled, and that loose ends are part of the rich fabric of films like 2017’s The Endless and its 2019 follow-up Synchronic . Genre-wise, it starts to border on the supernatural, too, as Sidney becomes obsessed with the provenance of the house and its previous occupants. But all the way through, Thompson and Dandy keep it grounded, even when “the vise” offers to strike a deal with them: there are strangers coming, and if Joseph and Sidney kill them, they will be returned to their own time.

There’s obviously quite a lot to unpack in all that, and casual consumers of popcorn sci-fi will probably be overwhelmed by the avalanche of ideas here, not just in the story line but quirky little details like a Dictaphone that travels between time zones. Fortune favors the prepared, however, and those willing to get swept up and carried along by its playful Moebius-strip logic will be richly rewarded.

Title: Things Will Be Different Director-screenwriter: Michael Felker Cast: Adam David Thompson, Riley Dandy, Chloe Skoczen, Justin Benson, Sarah Bolger Sales agent:  XYZ Running time:  1 hr 42 min

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The best time travel movie ever is not 'Back to the Future,' based on data. Find out the top 25.

Posted: March 23, 2024 | Last updated: March 23, 2024

Best time travel movies

Many films come with an escapism element, the ability to separate ourselves from our current timeline and reality to imagine an alternate time or place. It is a common feature in entertainment, which can serve as an outlet to explore our fears, dreams, and hopes for the future. Many movies take their characters on a journey to the past or future in hopes of teaching profound lessons, offering new perspectives, or simply presenting a challenge or a solution to a problem that they are facing in their current timeline. They expand the reach of what we think is possible in our current lives.

To celebrate these innovative and time-twisting tales, Stacker compiled data on the top time travel movies to come up with a Stacker score—a weighted index split evenly between IMDb and Metacritic scores. To qualify, the film had to involve some sort of time travel (be it literal, like "Back to the Future," or metaphysical, like "Donnie Darko"), have a Metascore, and have at least 5,000 votes. Ties were broken by Metascore and further ties were broken by IMDb votes. These films are some of the most memorable and culturally significant time-travel adventures in American cinema.

#25. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

- Director: Leonard Nimoy - Stacker score: 82.3 - Metascore: 71 - IMDb user rating: 7.3 - Runtime: 119 minutes

The famous space travel franchise's fourth film takes well-known USS Enterprise crew members Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and others into an interesting mission. The crew, living in 2286, must travel back in time to 1986 to find humpback whales. The extinct animals are the only species that can understand messages from a foreign probe threatening Earth.

#24. Predestination (2014)

- Directors: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig - Stacker score: 82.3 - Metascore: 69 - IMDb user rating: 7.5 - Runtime: 97 minutes

Ethan Hawke plays a time traveler who races against time to keep a foe from killing innocent people. The film spans through several points in the 1960s and 1970s, taking its protagonist on a twisty trip that brings up surprises until the last minutes. "Predestination" is based on "All You Zombies," a science-fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein, about paradoxes that happen due to time traveling.

#23. Pleasantville (1998)

- Director: Gary Ross - Stacker score: 83.4 - Metascore: 71 - IMDb user rating: 7.5 - Runtime: 124 minutes

This comedic film takes brother and sister duo David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) on a strange trip. David's love for 1950s television leads to him meeting a man who is able to put him and his sister inside an ongoing program. Jennifer stirs up drama among the cookie-cutter people to the chagrin of David.

#22. Source Code (2011)

- Director: Duncan Jones - Stacker score: 85.1 - Metascore: 74 - IMDb user rating: 7.5 - Runtime: 93 minutes

A military pilot (Jake Gyllenhaal) sees the last minutes of a man's life during a mission that takes him back to that point in time. He's supposed to deduce who the responsible party is in the train accident to bring him to justice. But, the pilot takes things to the next level, going against the clock to attempt to prevent things from going awry in the first place.

#21. Time Bandits (1981)

- Director: Terry Gilliam - Stacker score: 85.1 - Metascore: 79 - IMDb user rating: 7.0 - Runtime: 110 minutes

Kevin (Craig Warnock) is a preteen history lover who meets dwarves in his room. The tiny beings work for a Supreme Being and are slipping through holes in time to take treasures. Kevin goes with them as they hop around and meet famous historical people while trying to stay two steps ahead of the Supreme Being.

#20. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

- Director: Doug Liman - Stacker score: 85.7 - Metascore: 71 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 113 minutes

Tom Cruise stars as William Cage, a military officer who dies and ends up in a time loop. He continues to relive his terrible (and deadly) final moments until he levels up his knowledge and skills. Cage slowly moves towards the initial mission to fight aliens threatening Earth. Emily Blunt stars opposite Cruise as a sergeant who understands what he is experiencing and works with him.

#19. Evil Dead II (1987)

- Director: Sam Raimi - Stacker score: 85.7 - Metascore: 72 - IMDb user rating: 7.8 - Runtime: 84 minutes

Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) continues his battle against demons as his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) becomes possessed by an evil spirit. He realizes that he may be stuck in this remote cabin in the woods and must fight foes who arise from a mysterious audiotape. Towards the end of the film, Ash and his car travel through a portal and end up in 1300 A.D. for a bizarre ending that no one could predict.

#18. Groundhog Day (1993)

- Director: Harold Ramis - Stacker score: 86.9 - Metascore: 72 - IMDb user rating: 8.0 - Runtime: 101 minutes

What would you do if you had to live the same day over and over again? This is what happens to Phil Connors (Bill Murray), a TV weatherman covering Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney who ends up in a time loop. He begins to realize some things about himself, and others, while stuck in this seemingly endless day. The film's popularity led to the term "groundhog day" becoming synonymous with being stuck in a time loop.

#17. Run Lola Run (1998)

- Director: Tom Tykwer - Stacker score: 87.4 - Metascore: 77 - IMDb user rating: 7.6 - Runtime: 80 minutes

Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), a Berlin criminal, brings stolen goods to his boss and loses money he owes him. The boss gives him 20 minutes to conjure the funds, leading Manni to enlist his girlfriend Lola (Franka Potente) to come up with the money in a race against the clock, which keeps running through that same period as she makes choices.

#16. Superman (1978)

- Director: Richard Donner - Stacker score: 87.4 - Metascore: 80 - IMDb user rating: 7.3 - Runtime: 143 minutes

Based on the iconic DC Comics character, this film follows Kal-El's (Christopher Reeve) journey from his home planet, Krypton, to becoming Superman, an all-American hero. He goes from being adopted by Midwestern farmers to discovering his powers and fighting an evil force while working undercover as a reporter. At one point, Superman flies around the world so quickly that the Earth spins another way, making time go back so he can undo events with tragic consequences. 

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#15. 12 Monkeys (1995)

- Director: Terry Gilliam - Stacker score: 88 - Metascore: 74 - IMDb user rating: 8.0 - Runtime: 129 minutes

Bruce Willis plays James Cole, an incarcerated man living in the 2030s. Humans live underground after an apocalyptic event nearly kills everyone. He's given a chance to travel back to the '90s and gather information about a plague that will have big future consequences. The goal is to find out more information about the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, who may have been responsible for this earth-shattering event. But things don't go as expected, a classic trope in time travel tales.

#14. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

- Director: Bryan Singer - Stacker score: 88 - Metascore: 75 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 132 minutes

Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman, goes back in time to 1973 to gather past X-Men to change a moment in time to help save them from the Sentinels. The latter group is a killing collective eradicating anyone who possesses a mutant gene. The film gained an Oscar nomination for its visual effects.

#13. Palm Springs (2020)

- Director: Max Barbakow - Stacker score: 89.7 - Metascore: 83 - IMDb user rating: 7.4 - Runtime: 90 minutes

Two strangers meet at a wedding in Palm Springs and end up stuck in a time loop. They relive the same day over and over again with weird circumstances taking over while they eventually fall in love with each other. The pair have to find a way to get out of this wedding day circle so they can resume their lives once again.

#12. Midnight in Paris (2011)

- Director: Woody Allen - Stacker score: 90.3 - Metascore: 81 - IMDb user rating: 7.7 - Runtime: 94 minutes

Writer Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is on vacation in Paris when he decides to traverse around the city. Gil runs into a strange collective who take him back in time every night at midnight. He meets iconic people from yesteryear and starts to reevaluate his life, and romance with his fiancée.

#11. Looper (2012)

- Director: Rian Johnson - Stacker score: 90.3 - Metascore: 84 - IMDb user rating: 7.4 - Runtime: 113 minutes

In this film, time travel is a commodity that only certain people can afford. People like Joe, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, capitalize on it by using their hitman skills to complete jobs for a crime group. Set in 2044, Joe goes back several times in the past before his employer aims to stop his loop by sending future Joe (Bruce Willis) to kill his younger self. "Looper" is written and directed by Rian Johnson of "Star Wars" and "Knives Out" fame.

#10. Planet of the Apes (1968)

- Director: Franklin J. Schaffner - Stacker score: 90.9 - Metascore: 79 - IMDb user rating: 8.0 - Runtime: 112 minutes

A group of astronauts crash onto a planet in the far future where apes have the upper hand over humans. The primates can walk, talk, and have a complex social system that includes enslaving humans. The group finds themselves having to switch roles and become the "lesser" species. "Planet of the Apes" sparked a film franchise years later and was inducted into the Library of Congress' Film Registry in 2001.

#9. Interstellar (2014)

- Director: Christopher Nolan - Stacker score: 91.4 - Metascore: 74 - IMDb user rating: 8.6 - Runtime: 169 minutes

Set in 2067, this film shows Earth on the brink of destruction from storms and farming woes. Professor Brand, played by Michael Caine, plans to save the planet by sending people into a wormhole to another place. A few researchers test this travel plan and end up in different places and times to see where people can possibly inhabit.

#8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

- Director: James Cameron - Stacker score: 91.4 - Metascore: 75 - IMDb user rating: 8.5 - Runtime: 137 minutes

Linda Hamilton returns as Sarah Connor, who aims to protect her young son John (Edward Furlong) from yet another (and more dangerous) Terminator. The cyborg intends to kill John, thereby preventing him from his future role in a resistance movement. Sarah, John, and T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) work together to keep John, and the future resistance, alive.

#7. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

- Director: Alfonso Cuarón - Stacker score: 92 - Metascore: 82 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 142 minutes

Titular hero Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) continues his studies at the magical Hogwarts School. He realizes Sirius Black, an escaped prisoner, wants to kill him. Harry and his friends Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) must work together to defend the school while Harry realizes his true connection to Black.

#6. Star Trek (2009)

- Director: J.J. Abrams - Stacker score: 92 - Metascore: 82 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 127 minutes

A modern take on the classic space traveling series, this film goes back in time to show James T. Kirk, Spock, and Uhura's (Zoe Saldana) journeys in their younger days. Kirk, portrayed by Chris Pine, inadvertently makes his way onto the USS Enterprise and rises to power while they fight dangerous threats. Spock's (Zachary Quinto) future self makes an appearance to aid him in making a sage decision.

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#5. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

- Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo - Stacker score: 92.6 - Metascore: 78 - IMDb user rating: 8.4 - Runtime: 181 minutes

Five years after Thanos eliminated half of the living beings across the universe, the remaining Avengers band together to bring everyone back. The film includes the Quantum Realm, where time does not pass as it does on Earth and time travel is possible. Things end with a battle royale between the purple genocidal titan and all the super beings on Earth. The film marked the penultimate offering from the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Three of its release/storytelling schedule.

#4. The Terminator (1984)

- Director: James Cameron - Stacker score: 93.7 - Metascore: 84 - IMDb user rating: 8.0 - Runtime: 107 minutes

The current year is 2029. A killer cyborg known as a "Terminator" goes back to 1984 to hunt Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). The killing machine (Arnold Schwarzenegger) stays on Connor's tracks as she uncovers the truth about her role in affecting humanity's future. Sarah must protect her family and stay alive so her son can fulfill a specific role.

#3. Donnie Darko (2001)

- Director: Richard Kelly - Stacker score: 96 - Metascore: 88 - IMDb user rating: 8.0 - Runtime: 113 minutes

In 1988, the title character (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a teenager dealing with sleepwalking episodes. He goes outside one night to encounter a massive, scary rabbit who tells him that the world will end in 28 days. Donnie, unsure of what is real or not, starts to go into a dark direction as time seems to go into flux for him, taking him into a different timeline.

#2. Back to the Future (1985)

- Director: Robert Zemeckis - Stacker score: 98.3 - Metascore: 87 - IMDb user rating: 8.5 - Runtime: 116 minutes

Michael Fox stars as Marty McFly, a teenager in 1985 who is friends with a strange scientist (Christopher Lloyd) named Doc. The latter's latest experiment goes wrong, throwing him back into 1955. He must find a young Doc and try to help him figure out how to get back to his correct timeline. Meanwhile, Marty also encounters his parents as their younger selves. The film has become a sci-fi classic, spawning its own franchise.

#1. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

- Director: Frank Capra - Stacker score: 100 - Metascore: 89 - IMDb user rating: 8.6 - Runtime: 130 minutes

George Bailey is a man who is in over his head with family and general life problems. He considers dying by suicide but his family's prayers reach the heavens. His life is shown in flashbacks and an angel comes down to show him how much he matters to those closest to him. The now-iconic Christmas film was shot during the summer—in a heat wave, no less.

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I tried Spotify's AI feature to make playlists with text and emoji prompts. It's impressive but I'll still make my own.

• Spotify has launched AI Playlist, a new feature that makes playlists with a text or emoji prompt.
• The feature is in beta mode and only available in the UK and Australia for now. 
• I think it's the coolest feature to come out of Spotify since the end-of-year "Wrapped" roundup.

I've always been a big music nerd and even took up DJing as a hobby a few years ago.

So when I saw that Spotify launched AI Playlist in beta for Premium users in the UK and Australia this week, I was excited because I knew it could save me time making playlists.

I've spent countless hours on Spotify discovering new music and carefully curating my own playlists. But it's time-consuming to create different ones by genre, what ones would work well together in a mix, and others to soundtrack almost every mood and situation.

I tried the new feature to see how easy and fast it was, and if it could nail my musical preferences. Here's how it went:

How it works

When you open the Spotify app, tap the "Your Library" and the "+" button. It then gives you three options: "Playlist" to build your own, "Blend" to make a shared playlist with friends, and "AI Playlist" to "turn your ideas into playlists using AI."

Once you tap "AI Playlist," a text box appears where you can enter a prompt — even by entering just an emoji.

Within five seconds it can put together a playlist made up of 30 songs based on what it thinks you'll like. You can edit the list by swiping left on songs to remove them and tapping "Create" to save the playlist.

It made 10 playlists in under a minute

Spotify said in its press release announcing the feature that you can use prompts that reference "places, animals, activities, movie characters, colors, even emojis." So I did just that.

I punched in a bunch of text prompts to see how it fared. First, I wanted to see how well it would respond to emojis and if it could identify a mood and themed playlist that reflected it. I instructed the tool to make one based on the emoji of a face holding back tears.

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Within seconds, it made a playlist called "Resonant Emotions" that's "filled with emotionally charged tracks" from well-known artists like Adele, Hozier, and Amy Winehouse.

Then I gave it the following prompt: "Make me a minimal tech playlist with artists I've never discovered." It put together a list of songs I had never heard before, but loved once I played them.

I then asked for a playlist based on the vibes of Joseph Cooper, the main character in the movie "Interstellar." And sure enough, it worked. It made one called "Cooper's Essence," which was filled with some ethereal tracks, as well as a few songs that I felt were a little off from the prompt I fed it.

I also wanted it to make one "based on lion vibes" and it included a bunch of self-empowering songs. You can also refine the playlist with another prompt, so I typed for it to remove hip-hop songs. Strangely, it responded, "Let's keep it inclusive instead. Try something else."

It is still in beta mode, so it's not entirely perfect. For the most part, the feature nailed it in terms of pulling up songs based on a short description of what I'm looking for.

It won't make offensive playlists

It also has some safeguards built into it to prevent possible misuse. As Spotify says in its press release, "We also have measures in place around prompts that are offensive—so please prompt responsibly!"

I thought I'd test out the effectiveness of those measures. When I told it to make a "white power" playlist, it said it "can't help" with that topic.

When I asked to make one for diversity, equity, and inclusion, it included songs such as Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's "Same Love."

Here are some of the other prompts I used to generate playlists:

Make me one based on the vibes of Sardinia in Italy

For when I'm feeling introspective

To get me hyped up for a workout

Based on the color yellow

Help me concentrate

Getting ready to go "out-out"

It's a game changer

Overall, I think it's the coolest feature to come out of Spotify since Wrapped , the end-of-year breakdown of a user's listening habits.

AI Playlist is a great way to save time when I want to make a last-minute playlist for an event or when I'm traveling.

It also takes out a lot of the work in finding new artists or songs that I like, but I would still put together my own playlists full of songs I've found myself too.

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Meta is stuffing its AI chatbot into your Instagram DMs

Who needs to dm with friends when you can dm with a bot.

On Friday, people around the web noticed a new addition to their Instagram: Meta AI, the company’s general-purpose, AI-powered chatbot that can answer questions, write poetry and generate images with a simple text prompt. The move isn’t surprising. Meta revealed Meta AI in September 2023 and has spent the last few months adding the chatbot to products like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, so adding it to Instagram seems like a no-brainer.

Just got access to Meta AI on one of my Instagram accounts. pic.twitter.com/VNyRa5wbG4 — Krish Murjani  (@appleforever18) April 11, 2024

“Our generative AI-powered experiences are under development in various phases, and we’re testing a range of them publicly in a limited capacity,” a Meta spokesperson told Engadget, which suggests that not everyone has the feature available yet. TechCrunch , which first noted the news, said that Meta AI was showing up in Instagram’s search bar. But for some of us at Engadget, the feature actually showed up in the search bar in Instagram’s Direct Messaging inbox.

Tapping it let me start a conversation with Meta AI just I would DM a friend on Instagram. I was able to ask the chatbot to give me definitions of words, suggest headlines for some stories I’m working on, and generate images of dogs on skateboards. I was also able to ask Meta AI to recommend Reels with cats in them, which it was able to do easily. But when my colleague Aaron Souppouris asked Meta AI in WhatsApp to recommend Reels, it showed him some Reels in that app too — suggesting that the bot in Instagram isn’t really doing anything specific to Instagram. Instead, Meta is simply shoehorning the same chatbot into every app it owns. If you tap a hamburger menu within the bot, Meta AI will also show you a long list of possible actions you ask the bot to take.

Why would you want a chatbot in Instagram to suggest tips for dealing with credit card debit, have a debate about cardio versus weights, or suggest hacks to travel with points, I do not know. But the point is that if you want to, you can.

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Entry #5: Interstellar

Lauded by many as Christopher Nolan’s best film, Interstellar is a sci-fi movie that follows the story of a man’s journey to save humankind. This visually stunning film won two Oscars for Best Achievement in Visual Effects and Best Achievement in Production Design and was nominated for 3 more. Matthew McConaughey has an incredible lead dramatic performance in this film, in stark contrast to his goofy and hilarious “all right, all right, all right” role in Dazed and Confused. McConaughey performs alongside other stars like Anne Hathaway, Timothee Chalamet, and Matt Damon.

In the not-so-far future, Earth will experience mass disasters, droughts, and crop blights that threaten the existence of human life. In an attempt to keep the general population in a sense of dormancy, any ideas of extraterrestrial travel are suppressed. This goes as far as school textbooks saying that NASA’s moon landings were fraudulent. However, there is a secret coalition of scientists that found a previously undiscovered wormhole in our solar system. On the other side of this wormhole are several possibly habitable planets; a possible new beginning for mankind. After sending a first expeditionary set of astronauts to conduct evaluations of these planets, a man named Cooper played by McConaughey is recruited to lead a second expedition into the wormhole and conduct further evaluations of these planets.

One of the most astounding things about this movie is its scientific accuracy; the movie made an accurate visual depiction of black holes five years before they were photographed. Black holes are supermassive objects in our universe and they have unimaginable amounts of gravitational power. Their gravity is so strong that not even light can escape going too close. When a black hole consumes a large amount of material (often from a star), the material forms in what is called an accretion disk as it orbits the black hole before being consumed. Before 2019, no one knew for sure what accretion disks might have looked like, but with the help of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, the production team was able to make an educated guess. This guess proved incredibly accurate, as 5 years after the movie’s release the first real photos of a black hole were taken. In the image below the black hole from Interstellar is on the left and the real-life photo is on the right.

https://fandomwire.com/real-physicist-proved-christopher-nolans-depiction-of-a-black-hole-in-interstellar-could-be-backed-by-real-data/

Another scientifically stunning aspect of the film, but one that is more theoretical is its depiction of time. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, those in extreme fields of gravity will experience time much slower than those who may be in gravitational fields like Earth’s. As many of the characters in Interstellar get extremely close to a black hole, this phenomenon can be observed throughout most of the film. This has huge implications on Cooper’s relationship with his children, as they grow up and he stays around the same age. It has massive effects on other aspects of the plot of the movie as well.

Like many other Christopher Nolan films, this movie messes with your head quite a bit. It is intellectually challenging but provides satisfying “aha” moments when you finally understand what’s going on. I love this movie and would highly recommend it to anyone who is at all intrigued by it.

0 thoughts on “ Entry #5: Interstellar ”

The organization and your writing was great, this was a great post! Keep up the great work! 🙂

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