Parting Thoughts About TVIW

I enjoyed two brain-filling days this week at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (TVIW), taking notes as the conference "rapporteur," a fancy French word for reporter. The advantages of being a rapporteur are that you get a seat up front and plenty of room to set up a computer and type. The primary disadvantage you have is that you're so busy taking notes it's really difficult to absorb what's being said. Over the next week or so, I plan to go back over my notes and harvest what I can for article- and blog-writing purposes. My very high-level perspective comes from asking myself whether an interstellar workshop was really a practical thing to convene.

• While most space advocacy conferences (ISDC, NewSpace, etc.) focus on current or near-term (within 25 years) space activities, TVIW concentrates on the long-term and very long term (50-500+ years).
• The talks ranged from the practical (before we go to Alpha Centauri, where do we go and what do we need to do here in this solar system first?) to the esoteric (how might we detect alien races' starships around black holes?). They also included everyone from a 13-year-old Huntsville kid whose Geiger counter detected a gamma-ray burst before NASA to a former NASA astronaut to serious physicists and mathematicians pressing for better machines than the Large Hadron Collider to find that breakthrough that might get us to "warp drive" or something like it.
• Someone has to focus on the long game because it is very easy to get bogged down or discouraged by the near term, especially if you are easily annoyed by bickering or bad news, which all too often floods the news channels.
• Interstellar travel advocates are walking that fine line between concrete advocacy and science fiction because a lot of what they are advocating, while predictable if you understand how technology develops, might not happen within their lifetimes. There are a lot of leaps and stumbles that have to occur before we build technologies capable of sending humans starward--and even then, there's no guarantee whether those technologies would be employed that way, or when. As one attendee noted (name withheld as a courtesy), "It's difficult to sort out who's a serious visionary and who's a kook--and there are no set standards for that yet."
• The attendees were serious-minded people, and I'd say most of them (90+ percent) had a realistic understanding of "interstellar politics." While they're passionate about problems 500 years or 5 billion years in the future, the average person is worrying about this week's bills. Some of the more visionary politicians can think beyond their current term. Most reflective people might consider the world they leave their grandchildren. But who really has the time, energy, or inclination to think about our civilization in the next millennium or our species when our sun expands into a Red Giant well beyond any conceivable horizon? Darned few. 

So when faced with the realistic dichotomy between present-minded thinking and passionate future-minded imagination, how do you at least get the future started in the right direction? This was a workshop, after all, not simply a conference at which to pontificate. The participants had to come out with (and agree to) some sort of practical, near-term plan that could tie the present to the future and still sow the seeds for technologies and space vehicles not yet born.

What they came up with was a straightforward goal: ensure that humanity has access to one terawatt of electrical power from Earth orbit by 2050. Ridiculous? Consider that every second, at our comfortable reserve 93 million miles away, every square meter of the sunward side of our planet is getting hit with 1,365 Watts of energy. (Go do the math--it's 1,365 X 255 X 10 to the 12th power.) Solar power is serious stuff in space, where there's no night or day and the sun is "on" all the time. One terawatt is about one-fourth of all the energy the U.S. consumes in a year.

What does all that energy have to do with interstellar travel? Well, let's say you had solar collectors large enough to collect even a small percent of that energy and transmit it to Earth as microwaves. How big would that collector have to be? One proposal was a solar array the size of Texas. If you had a civilization that could obtain the resources to build such an array in space, you'd have a civilization that could travel great distances through space, capture and mine asteroids, manufacture materials and massive structures in space; and transmit incredible energies across space to orbiting satellites for relay to Earth. That civilization would have people used to living in space for long periods at a time, far away from the mother planet. They'd be used to living in and repairing large spacecraft. They'd be used to solving problems days, weeks, or months away from help. A civilization capable of all that eventually could send human beings to other star systems based on the lessons learned doing useful things in our solar system...incidentally making our home world better in the process.

So, yeah: it's a little goofy to be thinking about building the starship Enterprise (or even a slower-than-light version of it) when there are a lot more important near-term concerns to think about. But give these folks a little credit: they are simultaneously naive, far-thinking, creative, and ambitious enough to consider such efforts worth doing.

Why an Interstellar Workshop?

I won’t lie to you: even some of my space-minded friends think it’s a bit impractical to hold a workshop on sending robots and humans to other star systems. Mostly it’s about practicality: “We’re trying to keep SLS funded!” “It’s difficult enough getting to the moon!” “That’s science fiction!” Of course going to orbit with a heavy-lift launch vehicle or sending humans to the moon was once the stuff of science fiction, too.

But seriously: why talk about the stars when we’ve not yet sent humans beyond Earth orbit since 1972? We’ve got some robots out at the edge of the solar system, toying with the dust between the stars, and one machine is racing toward what used to be called the farthest planet, Pluto. Space travel is difficult. It’s expensive. We’re working on more near-term projects right now. And there are important, serious problems affecting our nation and our planet right now. All true. Practical concerns fill our days, and they're often serious.

So let's talk practically. We have energy concerns. Food production takes energy. Transportation requires energy. In fact, most of what we do, from communication to fertilizer production, requires energy of some sort, and energy is a problematic commodity because of its by-products (smog, smoke, and carbon dioxide for petroleum; radiation and thermal pollution for nuclear). A lot of petroleum can be found in unstable parts of the world that don't like the United States too much. And there are a lot of people in the world who would like to live as well as Americans, with access to plentiful food, clean water, and cheap energy. Energy from space can address that problem. The Earth receives 1,365 watts per square meter at this distance from the sun. We're starting to capture some of that energy on the ground, but that solar energy is filtered by our atmosphere, and the Earth rotates and puts up interesting weather (clouds), which block that energy. Solar energy in space is on all the time, and it's relentless. 

Our economy is dependent on satellites: communications, finances, weather reporting, military operations, resource management, ATM cards, air freight services, and many, many others. Do we need better satellites? Yes. And we need to improve our ability to get those satellites into space more cheaply. As my friend Les Johnson put it, "We [space advocates] have succeeded: our economy is now addicted to satellites." Take them away, and our economy would collapse. 

And while we're at it, if we can get satellites up there more inexpensively, we can do other things, like move dangerous asteroids out of the way. We don't want to end up like the dinosaurs. We don't want (as Robert A. Heinlein put it) "all our eggs in one basket." And while we're moving those asteroids, we might want to consider mining them for the metals and water that are inside them--for use in space or for eventual export to Earth. We have deep-pit mines the size of asteroids on our world, and they leak a lot of unpleasant things into our environment. It would be nice to do the mining out in space, on high-radiation rocks with no atmosphere or people around. Stop a mass extinction, clean up the environment: those are things humanity can support, yes? From an energy, environment, and economic perspective, long-term access to space is a practical activity. 

Yet we need to keep our eyes on the stars.

Our telescopes are discovering other worlds around other stars. Earth is not the only planet in the universe--eventually we might (I'd say will) discover that it is not the only one with life on it. We need to learn about that life because that's what we do. If it's intelligent life, we have even more challenges ahead, but a productive, challenge-minded humanity with a multi-world civilization would be much better able to cope with it than one world and limited horizons. Interstellar travel is the ultimate expression of humanity's willingness to challenge and improve ourselves. We can apply the lessons learned in exploring and using the resources of space to improve our home world. If we try to go, we will be saying as much about ourselves as if we stop.

Dreaming the Future: The Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop

The life of an enterprising space-geek writer is always interesting, especially if said writer lives and works in a space-geek town like Huntsville, Alabama. This past Saturday, I was attending the semi-monthly Stammtisch (discussion group) at the home of Marshall Space Flight Center Advanced Concepts engineer Les Johnson. Les is organizer of the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (#TVIW13 on Twitter), a two-day gathering of scientists, engineers, science fiction writers, and others interested in sending humans or robots to other star systems.

As a preview of the event, Les had one of the speakers give an informal version of his talk. Robert Kennedy, who works at a company called The Ultimax Group, had a rather simple, but ambitious (and expensive) idea for simultaneously reducing global warming and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. But first, a little background:

Les had an important ground rule for this talk: to reduce the level of potential friction, for the purposes of Mr. Kennedy’s talk, we had to stipulate that global warming was happening and focus instead on the ethical implications of large-scale efforts to stop or mitigate it. For the most part, the group (about 15 people) adhered to this.

So with this in mind, Kennedy and his coauthor Eric Hughes started discussing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and their findings related to global warming. IPCC has three primary committees: one focusing on pure science (what’s going on), a second group focusing on potential effects and economics of CC, and a third group—the most political and controversial here in the U.S.—which concentrates on the political implications of CC and what to do about it.

One potential solution to CC is something called geoengineering—making large-scale changes to Earth’s environment to reduce global temperatures. Some of the scarier proposals along this line come out of Russia, including creating factories to belch large quantities of sulfur compounds into the atmosphere; floating platforms in the ocean to generate long-lasting clouds (thereby reflecting sunlight), and seeding the ocean with iron oxide to encourage algal blooms and increase consumption of carbon dioxide. The IPCC Annual Report 4 (AR4) made a one-paragraph mention of geoengineering, promptly dismissing the idea. That hasn’t stopped people or governments from thinking about it.

Kennedy proposed—prepare to be shocked—a space-based solution for global warming. The idea? Build a massive solar array—a circle of solar cells merely the size of Texas, place it between the sun and the Earth. Still being a bit ignorant of such things, I asked an obvious question: “You’re not blocking out the sun completely, are you?” The answer is no. Placed in a stable orbital position (the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point), this array would block ~0.1% of the solar energy striking the Earth. It’s rather like placing a grain of sand in front of a flashlight. So what difference would that make? A lot, it turns out. That .1% reduction in solar energy—insolation is the technical term—is about the same as the amount of heating humanity is pumping into the atmosphere through energy production and breathing.

On the reverse side of these solar cells—a microwave power transmitter, which would provide electrical power through space to a receiving station (or stations) on Earth. Want to know more? Stay tuned until 11:35 a.m. Central Time, when Kennedy’s talk will be streaming.

The Workshop is going to be streamed live on UStream.