I was recently on a medium-haul bus ride, sitting within earshot of the driver\u2014but not the closest passenger to him. I\u2019d encountered him a few times before: a somewhat chatty middle-aged fellow given to telling the occasional joke into the microphone for the whole bus. He is, on the whole, a friendly and likable guy, who does his job well.<\/p>\n
The passenger sitting in front of me obviously had talked with him before, because at one point he asked the driver for an update on his ion drive. It took three tries to have his question heard correctly: \u201ceye-on drive?\u201d But once clear, ho boy did the conversation take off!<\/p>\n
This post is partly for entertainment value, but also serves to highlight delusions about space. Granted, some people might judge this character to be a little \u201cout there,\u201d but to my ears all space talk is at a similar level of crazy.<\/p>\n
Game Changer!<\/p>\n
The floodgates were open for the driver to talk about his game-changing idea. According to him, NASA knows a\u00a0little\u00a0bit about ion drive but they\u2019re not apparently aware of the benefit of\u00a0repulsive\u00a0ion drive: pushing against the ejected charge electromagnetically (not just its chump inertia). Do that, and you\u2019re\u00a0really\u00a0cooking! Acceleration becomes\u00a0exponential, the driver claimed.<\/p>\n
Apparently, he was really close to being done with the prototype. He had finally figured out how to keep the coils cool enough to prevent melting the plastic on which they were wrapped. Seems important. Or maybe try a different material? Anyway, it basically works now, but he still needs to solve the control issue. He said he was making progress on driving the coil by stepping up the voltage from an electronic speed controller of the sort one would use for a drone\u2019s rotor motor.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, yup: I\u2019ll be taking a trip to California soon.\u201d This was the first of several hints as to his target audience. \u201cAfter all, he\u2019s the richest man on Earth and seems to be open to radical new innovations.\u201d An additional reference in praise of Tesla cars eliminated any further ambiguity as to who he intended to wow with his technology\u2014even though never called by name.<\/p>\n
\u201cI simply refuse to sell it to China. I don\u2019t care how much they\u2019d offer. At least if I sell it to my guy, it\u2019ll take a while before anyone uses it for weapons.\u201d He explained that a rocket with no heat signature would be ideal for stealth attacks that would render defense systems useless. \u201cNo one will see them coming.\u201d<\/p>\n
His goal is to have his ion drive be implemented for space travel first, \u201cso that I\u2019ll have a way off this rock before they make it glow in the dark.\u201d He\u2019s only slightly concerned about this fate, because, as he gibed: \u201cOh heck, at least I\u2019ll be rich. Nuke \u2019em all\u2014I\u2019ve got caviar!\u201d<\/p>\n
At this point, he switched gears to express enthusiasm for a zero-combustion engine\u2014explaining how a rail gun uses electromagnetism to accelerate a projectile to high speeds. Well, you can also contrive to move something back and forth\u2014like a piston, in fact. So, imagine a car engine whose pistons are moved not by little combustion explosions, but by an electromagnet sheathing around each cylinder. One question: why bother retrofitting a combustion engine architecture and have to mess with pistons (and crankshaft and transmission) if you can reconfigure the geometry to just move the damn wheel directly with, you know, a rotary motor like an electric car already does? I must be missing something rather big. Anyway, no carbon, no oxygen. It won\u2019t require cleaning like a solar panel would. Set one up on Mars and you\u2019d have safe, reliable power. \u201cJust something I came up with in the bathtub,\u201d he noted\u2014joking that \u201cI may not be an\u00a0actual\u00a0genius, but I can play one on TV.\u201d He focuses on \u201cmaking something that would change the world, sometimes coming up with a good one, and other times not so much\u201d\u2014modestly. It almost made me believe his good ideas must actually be good, if he is discerning enough to tell the difference\u2026<\/p>\n
Back to the ion drive, it would apparently also solve the thorny problem of landing on Mars without a thick atmosphere to slow down the lander, and without wasting billions of dollars on the sky-crane approach, in which the rocket workhorse destroys itself after lowering its cargo. It\u2019s a technology of many talents.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s jump back to the zero-combustion engine (the driver kept bouncing, so you\u2019re getting the same experience, here). He thinks maybe the smart move is to draw that up first to float in front of the big guy to pique his interest. Then he can ice the cake with an ion-core performance (groan). Apparently, this electromagnetic engine will never go dead, as long as it stays running. Did I hear that right? The next part was unambiguous and eye-popping: it takes less power to operate than it can produce. My thought is that as long as Mars is equipped with power outlets and a power plant somewhere that can be ignored in the calculation, he might be right.<\/p>\n
An Exception?<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think this guy is really that unusual in both his assuredness of a space future, and a confidence that he can do something big as an unappreciated underdog. That\u2019s how it works in the movies, so our culture is saturated with this notion of the lone underestimated genius who changes the world with insight and grit\u2014doubted by elite jerks like me at every turn. Our culture irresponsibly manufactures loads of folks like this all the time. Then failure eventually makes them bitter and they vote their anger so that our culture reaps what it sows.<\/p>\n
Now, the more serious and technically experienced space enthusiasts would doubtless roll their eyes at this guy\u2014while others like me roll eyes at them\u2014and they roll eyes back at me (mutually-assured eye fatigue). Just as our bus driver lacks some basic awareness of conservation laws and other physics, the space enthusiasts are wholly ignorant in ecological terms. What\u2019s more, they don\u2019t see what that has to do with anything. And even if it\u00a0was\u00a0important, how hard can it be, compared to rocket science and robot sidekicks? Ecology is more of a \u201csoft\u201d science, after all, right? Nothing \u201chard\u201d about it? Ecology, in this sense, is similar to a Prime Directive that can be drafted by any teenager or LLM: an easy detail requiring little actual work.<\/p>\n
The Cost of Ignorance<\/p>\n
I think of it in terms of this analogy. Let\u2019s say you approached a 25-year-old average Joe and said: \u201cWe are holding open a position for you at the prestigious Mayo Clinic as Chief Neurosurgeon. The job starts in ten years. Your mission is to get yourself ready by then, and if you can do so, the high-paying job is yours for life.\u201d How does Joe react?<\/p>\n
\u201cHot damn! Okay. Let\u2019s roll up our sleeves and get started. The first thing I need to focus on is what sweet ride I\u2019ll use to commute to work. No ordinary car will do: I have to design something from the ground up. I\u2019m thinking either ion drive or zero-combustion electromagnetic pistons. Hey: maybe I can finally put my 3-D printer to some actual use! This will take a while, but I think in ten years\u2019 time I\u2019ll be prepared for the commute.\u201d<\/p>\n
What is our guy missing? Medical training, perhaps? You know: preparing for actually\u00a0doing\u00a0the job?<\/p>\n
If someone wants to live on Mars, don\u2019t skip over the word \u201clive.\u201d What is it to live? What is Life? Life is ecology. Life does not exist in a vacuum\u2014as individually-wrapped separable units\u2014but in a contextually-rich, interlocking web with a loooong evolutionary heritage that has proven itself over deep time. Trying to live on Mars without the first clue about how Life\u00a0lives\u00a0is very much like aiming to be chief neurosurgeon without the first clue about the actual job: instead focused only on how we might\u00a0get\u00a0there.<\/p>\n
To live outside of one\u2019s ecological context\u2014and in fact where no ecology of any relevance exists\u2014would require somehow creating a suitable ecology, or borrowing a sufficiently-complete subset of an existing one that can tolerate a completely novel setting for which the beings are not adapted. We have zero idea how to do either (upcoming post), and much less to show in terms of demonstration.<\/p>\n
My guess is that if I had piped up on the bus to point out conservation of energy or charge (what are the ions to repel against?), the driver wouldn\u2019t say: \u201cOh, I was not aware and will need to go back to the drawing board\u2014maybe I\u2019m totally on the wrong track.\u201d Likewise, space enthusiasts confronted with warnings of ecological deal-breakers are not likely to accept that they have any critical-failure-relevance to their dreams. Something in their brains will shut down the threat before it can destroy anything precious and even challenge their core identity. It won\u2019t matter too much in the end, though, as these fantasy enthusiasts won\u2019t get any closer to Mars than the bus driver will get to \u201cthe big guy.\u201d It\u2019s just a little sad, is all.<\/p>\n
Teaser image credit: Author supplied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I was recently on a medium-haul bus ride, sitting within earshot of the driver\u2014but not the closest passenger…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-498575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}