Sadness About the Stars

If we look up on a clear night, far away from light, we see the sky filled with stars, stars that seem, to some of us, anyway, stunningly beautiful, impossibly beautiful except when we look, there they are. Our view is of only a few thousand stars, but we now know there are perhaps one trillion billion stars in the Universe -- maybe more -- stretching away from us for tens of billions of light years. Many of these stars have planets -- we now know that for sure -- most of which are likely just gas or barren rock or ice.  But many -- many, even if but a teeny fraction of the total -- have oxygen, water, and land.  There's a yearning in some of us to see those places, for we suppose they are harbors of wonder.  Yet, real as they are, we will never go there. It is likely no one ever will.

I can only speak for some of us, but for some of us it is as if we live inside a glass house built in a beautiful garden but we may never go outside. The joy of looking at the garden eventually subsides beneath the enveloping sadness that we will never enter it or explore it.

So, a year and a half ago or so -- February 2011 -- Lee Billings, writing as a guest author for boingboing, published a lengthy post asking whether we would ever "reach the stars," describing the difficulties in doing so, and the efforts of some volunteers to try to make it happen. It's the best thing on the subject I've ever read.  But ...

Billings tries throughout his post to maintain an upbeat attitude even while acknowledging one possibly insurmountable obstacle after another. It's the sum of those obstacles that leaves us feeling hopelessness and sadness about the stars. It's as if a roommate in the glass house was hatching a plan to shrink themselves down and crawl out through the kitchen sink. Others keep taking crayons and drawing doors on the walls, pretending they've fund an exit. We need a roommate who can find us a real front door.  Billings writes optimistically about the crayon drawings.
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At this point, since we're talking crazy talk about going to the stars, let me "go off the page" and offer a few assuredly modest thoughts about how going to the stars might be achieved. I am not the person who can find the front door, but I do have a couple of wacky ideas on travel to other star systems ....

What are the problems? Well, first, we don't know where to go.  We can't just shoot wildly out into space to find another habitable planet. Space is pretty much empty space. Second, it will take a really long time to get there. That really long time is probably tens of thousands of years -- a bare minimum maybe one hundred years -- regardless, more than a lifetime. Related to that, third, we can't build a ship that will go fast enough.  The bigger the ship, the more power it needs, which requires an even bigger ship, and there's an upper limit.  Fourth, we can't easily build a ship that will stop once we get there. Waving as we fly by feels inadequate. Fifth, with people traveling for so long, we will need to build them adequate living space, supply them with food, energy sources, clothing, and other stuff for daily life, and so on. So our ship will have to be really really big. Sixth, the astronauts will need materials and equipment designed for use on their arrival. So the ship's even bigger. Seventh, the ship will have to be sufficiently shielded and constructed to withstand going through space at the high speeds it will undoubtedly travel.  And so now the ship is really really really big. Eighth, the people are going to need some artificial gravity since living permanently in freefall isn't healthy, it turns out. Bone density or something seems to wane. And, ninth, building all the above -- if it could be designed -- will likely be extraordinarily difficult (such a ship would probably have to be built in space) and time consuming and costly and that leads to questions as to the political and financial will to build such a ship even if we could design it.

Of course, many schemes have been proposed for "generation spaceships" that could carry people for the decades or centuries or millennia it would take to reach other suitable solar systems. The schemes fall into only a few categories. One calls for ships immense far beyond anything humans have ever built that somehow function as worlds in themselves where people live and farm and work and play and pass on life to their progeny until eventually the new system is reached. These are the spaceships of, for example, the movie WALL-E and the science fiction classic Universe. Another calls for the astronauts to somehow be placed in suspended animation until the new world is reached. They're asleep or frozen or hibernating for years, decades, or centuries without physical decline. When the astronauts get to their location they are woken up or defrosted or whatever, hop up, and go about their business, usually after a good meal. This type of space travel is exemplified by movies such the Alien franchise and 2001: A Space Odyssey.  A third is magical space travel where the astronauts go through "hyperspace" or a "wormhole" or the like and pretty much instantly show up exactly where they want. There are a zillion examples of that, like Star Wars and its progeny and the Star Trek franchises, just to name a zillion.

For obvious reasons, none of the above are good solutions.  They are such non-solutions that they're not solutions at all but imply that the problem may be insurmountable. As our best work after decades they all rely at some level on magic happening. 

So, I propose a different solution. And, no, it's not send robots because that's no fun. I don't know why sending robots we will never hear from again is any less fulfilling than sending people we will never hear from again, but it is. So, robots can come along, yes, but it's not only robots. Anyway, here's my solution:

We send frozen embryos. 

These are easy to transport because they're small.  Also, they're already frozen.  

And, frankly, they're fungible (no, frozen embryos are not people) -- we can make lots and lots of them (it's actually something many enjoy doing albeit not in vitro) -- so we can send them out by the scads, all over the place.  It would be helpful, of course, to target them at the good planetary candidates which we may discover in the next few decades.  We don't need to worry about how long it will take to get there.  We just calculate their flight path very accurately and send them on their way.

Oh yes, there is the problem that human embryos do not just develop on their own. We'll need an artificial womb to grow them, robots to give birth and raise them, an artificial learning environment, artificial food. Yet, it doesn't have to be anything too special because, frankly, this is the only existence our astronauts will have ever known. And it doesn't have to exist for too long, Just long enough so they can survive on the new planet. In fact, embryo growth and birth and child rearing does not need to begin until they land.  The spaceship is more or less an unheated folded up pod going to a new planet.  It relies on the (hopeful!) sunlight and oxygen and water and soil on the new planet.  Sure a lot of these missions would fail.  We send out a whole lot, playing the odds.  And the time to get there? It doesn't matter, because, regardless, we'll never hear back from them.

Size of the ship? Just big enough since no one will be living on it.  Provisions? Just enough to sustain things on arrival until more can be made. Speed? Doesn't really matter. We sling shot them into space, let them coast, and forget about them.  No way no matter what they'd get anywhere before we're dead, anyway. Stopping? We use careful trajectories to put them into solar then planetary orbits.  Yes, it will take a while to do the math.  Artificial gravity? Unnecessary.

So that's my plan.  Space embryos. Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? No. Thank you.