Showing posts with label Gene Roddenberry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gene Roddenberry. Show all posts

Wednesday 27 February 2013

An index of possibilities: is science prognostication today worthwhile or just foolish?

A few evenings ago I saw the International Space Station. It was dusk, and walking home with the family we were looking at Jupiter when a moving bright light almost directly overhead got our attention. Too high for an aircraft, too large for a satellite, a quick check on the Web when we got home confirmed it was the ISS. 370 kilometres above our heads, a one hundred metre long, permanently crewed construction confirmed everything I read in my childhood: we had become a space-borne species. But if so few of the other scientific and technological advances I was supposed to be enjoying in adulthood have come true, has the literature of science prediction in these areas also changed markedly?

It is common to hear nowadays that science is viewed as just one of many equally valid methods of describing reality. So whilst on the one hand most homes in the developed world contain a myriad of up-to-date high technology, many of the users of these items haven't got the faintest idea how they work. Sadly, neither do they particularly have any interest in finding out. It's a scary thought that more and more of the key devices we rely on every day are designed and manufactured by a tiny percentage of specialists in the know; we are forever increasing the ease with which our civilisation could be knocked back to the steam age - if not the stone age.

Since products of such advanced technology are now familiar in the domestic environment and not just in the laboratory, why are there seemingly fewer examples of popular literature praising the ever-improving levels of knowledge and application compared to Arthur C. Clarke's 1962 prophetic classic Profiles of the Future and its less critical imitators that so caught my attention as a child? Is it that the level of familiarity has led to the non-scientist failing to find much interest or inspiration in what is now such an integrated aspect of our lives? With scientific advance today frequently just equated with cutting-edge consumerism we are committing an enormous error, downplaying far more interesting and important aspects of the discipline whilst cutting ourselves off from the very processes by which we can gain genuine knowledge.

Therefore it looks as if there's somewhat of an irony: non-scientists either disregard scientific prognostication as non-practical idealism ("just give me the new iPad, please") and/or consider themselves much more tech savvy than the previous generation (not an unfair observations, if for obvious reasons - my pre-teen children can work with our 4Gb laptop whilst my first computer had a 48Kb RAM). Of course it's not all doom and gloom. Although such as landmark experiments as the New Horizons mission to Pluto has gone largely unnoticed, at least by anyone I know, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and Mars Curiosity rover receive regular attention in popular media.

Perhaps the most regularly-occurring theme in science news articles over the past decade or so has been climate change, but with the various factions and exposé stories confusing the public on an already extremely complex issue, could it be that many people are turning their back on reading postulated technological advances as (a) technology may have greatly contributed to global warming; and (b) they don't want to consider a future that could be extremely bleak unless we ameliorate or solve the problem? The Astronomer Royal and former President of the Royal Society Martin Rees is one of many authors to offer a profoundly pessimistic view of mankind's future. His 2003 book Our Final Hour suggests that either by accident or design, at some point before AD2100 we are likely to initiate a technological catastrophe here on the Earth, and the only way to guarantee our species' survival is to establish colonies elsewhere as soon as possible.

But there are plenty of futurists with the opposite viewpoint to Rees and like-minded authors, including the grandly-titled World Future Society, whose annual Outlook reports are written with the aim of inspiring action towards improving our prospects. Most importantly, by including socio-economic aspects they may fare better than Arthur C. Clarke and his generation, whose space cadet optimism now seems hopelessly naïve.

One way near-future extrapolation may increase accuracy is for specialists to concentrate in their area of expertise. To this end, many scientists and popularisers have concentrated on trendy topics such as nanotechnology, with Ray Kurzweil perhaps the best known example. This isn't to say that there aren't still some generalist techno-prophets still around, but Michio Kaku's work along these lines has proved very mixed as to quality whilst the BBC Futures website is curiously old school, with plenty of articles on macho projects (e.g. military and transport hardware) that are mostly still in the CAD program and will probably remain that way for many years to come.

With so many factors influencing which science and technology projects get pursued, it seems worthwhile to consider whether even a little knowledge of current states and developments might be as useful as in-depth scientific knowledge when it comes to accurate prognostication, with luck instead playing the primary role. One of my favourite examples of art-inspired science is the iPad, released to an eager public in 2010 some twenty-three years after the fictional PADD was first shown on Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) - although ironically the latter is closer in size to non-Apple tablets. In an equally interesting reverse of this, there is now a US$10 million prize on offer for the development of a hand-held Wi-Fi health monitoring and diagnosis device along the lines of the Star Trek tricorder. No doubt Gene Roddenberry would have been pleased that his optimistic ideas are being implemented so rapidly; but then even NASA have at times hired his TNG graphic designer!

I'll admit that even I have made my own modest if inadvertent contribution to science prediction. In an April Fools' post in 2010 I light-heartedly suggested that perhaps sauropod dinosaurs could have used methane emissions as a form of self-defence. Well, not quite, but a British study in the May 2012 edition of Current Biology hypothesises that the climate of the period could have been significantly affected by dino-farts. As they say, truth is always stranger than fiction…

Friday 1 April 2011

Moonage daydreams: lunacy, conspiracy and the Apollo moon landings

It's astonishing to think that in less than two weeks' time it will be half a century since Yuri Gargarin slipped the surly bonds of Earth in Vostock 1. Although a generation has grown up since the end of the Cold War, any study of early astronautics cannot exclude a major dollop of politics. This is particularly true of the Apollo moon landing programme and President Kennedy's commitment to achieve this goal by 1970. Now as much a part of history as a fading memory, a small but significant number of theorists doubt the veracity of the missions. But are they just the same crackpots/misguided types (delete as required) who claim to have been abducted by aliens, or is there anything more concrete to go on?

A wide range of conspiracy stories has been circulating since rocket engine company employee the (now late) Bill Kaysing self-published his 1974 opus We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Of course conspiracy was very much in the American psyche during that period: the Watergate affair had occurred 6 months prior to the final moon landing mission in December 1972 whilst President Nixon's resignation followed the release of the crucial audio tape evidence in August 1974. In a sense, the world was ready for Kaysing's theories, but can an impartial assessment show how accurate they are? Much of his thesis can be dismissed with a little application of the scientific method: the alleged problems on photographs and movie footage such as disappearing cross-hairs or incorrect shadows and lighting are easy to resolve. In another vein, the waving of the US flag on the lunar surface, attributed to wind in an Earth-based moon simulator, is just foolish. Why would such amateur mistakes occur if an elaborate cover-up were true?

However, new evidence recently made public from former Soviet archives hints that the conspiracy theorists may be on to something after all. Telemetry tapes from the USSR's land- and ship-based deep space network suggest that there was an additional signal hidden, via frequency division multiplexing, underneath transmissions to the Apollo craft. This implies that what actually went to the moon were pairs of empty spacecraft: a robot version of the lander (or LM); and a command module (CSM) with an automated radio system. This latter set-up would isolate the hidden transmissions received from Earthbound astronauts and beam them back to fool the world into thinking the spacecraft was manned. The crew themselves would divide their time between Apollo mock-ups built inside a weightless training aircraft or 'vomit comet' (ironically also the technique used in the 1995 film Apollo 13) and a recreation of the lunar surface in the infamous Area 51 complex in Nevada. Of course the associated activities of sending robot sample-return missions to bring back massive quantities of moon rock (the same method used by the Soviet Luna missions from 1970 onwards) would presumably have eaten so deeply into NASA's budget as to be responsible for the cancellation of the last three moon-landing missions (or fake missions, as perhaps we should refer to them).

The obvious question is why go to all this length when the programme's fantastic achievements – the rockets, spacecraft, and their entire cutting-edge infrastructure - had already been built? Again, the USSR can add something to the picture. Fully six months before the Apollo 11 flight, the Soviet Union officially announced it was pulling out of the moon race and would not even attempt a manned flight to the moon. Then the month after Apollo 11's splashdown, the Soviets launched Zond 7, an unmanned variant of their Soyuz craft (a design still in use today to ferry crew to the International Space Station), on a circumlunar trajectory. What is interesting is that the craft carried 'special radiation protection'. Had they found a fundamental obstruction to a manned lunar landing mission? Less than one month prior to Apollo 11, when you would have thought NASA would have been completely focussed on that mission (and bearing in mind the massive amount of unpaid overtime required to maintain schedules), the US launched a pigtail monkey called Bonny into orbit aboard Biosat 3. This almost unknown mission was terminated more than twenty days early, with Bonny dying 8 hours after landing. What was so urgent it needed testing at this crucial time? In a word: radiation.

The Van Allen Belt consists of two tori (basically, doughnuts) of high-energy charged particles trapped by the Earth's magnetic field. After its existence was confirmed by the USA's first satellite, Explorer 1, continuous observation proved that the radiation intensity varies over time as well as space. Unfortunately, 1969-1970 was a peak period in the cycle, in addition to which it was accidentally augmented by artificially-induced radiation. In 1962 the USA detonated a 1.4 megaton atomic weapon at an altitude of 400 kilometres. Although by no means the largest bomb used during four years of high-altitude testing, Operation Starfish Prime generated far more radiation than any similar US or USSR experiment, quickly crippling a number of satellites, including some belonging to the Soviets.

The theory holds that this additional radiation belt would have had a profound effect on manned spacecraft travelling beyond low Earth orbit. An additional whammy would be the danger of deep-space radiation once away from the protection of the geomagnetic field. The BBC's 2004 docudrama series Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets showed this quite nicely when the interplanetary Pegasus mission lost its doctor to cosmic radiation. There is also speculation that the impact of cosmic rays on the lunar surface generates a spray of secondary particles that would prove hazardous to astronauts. Although it's not clear if the Russians were sending animals into space during the late 1960s as per the Biosat series, Bill Kaysing claimed he had been given access to a Soviet study that recommended blanketing lunar surface astronauts in over a metre of lead!

The Apollo missions of course utilised what was then cutting edge technology, but even so the payload capacity of the Saturn V rocket did not allow for spacecraft with anything but the lightest of construction techniques. Indeed, the Apollo lunar module had outer coverings of Mylar-aluminium alloy – a substance that appears to be a high-tech version of baking foil. In this instance it seems rather apt, in the sense that it may well have lead to self-basting astronauts, had they actually been on board. In all seriousness, the heaviest of the fuelled-up CSM-LM configurations was around 40 tonnes (for Apollo 17), only five tonnes short of the maximum lunar transfer trajectory capacity. Since it took an 111-metre tall Saturn V to launch these craft, it is clear that lead shielding wasn't really an option.

Some conspiracy theorists have argued that Stanley Kubrick, coming directly from four years of making 2001: A Space Odyssey, was involved in the hoax filming, but this seems rather ridiculous (although another irony is that 2010: Odyssey Two director Peter Hyams had earlier made the Mars mission conspiracy film Capricorn One, the film's hardware consisting of Apollo craft...) A far more plausible candidate to my mind is Gene Roddenberry, the originator of Star Trek. The Apollo 8 circumlunar flight over Christmas 1968 (including a reading from Genesis, no less), the 'happy' (from a ratings point of view) accident of Apollo 13, even the use of America's first rocket-launched astronaut Alan Shepard as commander of Apollo 14, hint back to the homely yet patriotic heroics of Kirk and co. As for the photographic effects crew, my money would be on one 2001's effects supervisors, namely the engineering genius Douglas Trumbull. Today even amateurs like myself can attempt to replicate their brilliant work: here's my take of Armstrong and Aldrin, done many moons ago, courtesy of Messer Airfix and Photoshop (shame you can't see the cross-hairs at this size):

Apollo lunar lander
As for how all those involved have managed to maintain silence over the decades, Neil Armstrong's publicity shyness is about the only example I can think of that bolsters the argument. Except there is also the curious case of Britain's own "pretty far out" David Bowie, who somehow seems to have been in the know. It sounds bizarre, but if you examine his oeuvre from Space Oddity onwards ("your circuits dead, there's something wrong") to the film The Man Who Fell to Earth (complete with a cameo from Apollo 13 commander James Lovell as himself) you begin to find a subliminal thematic thread. For me, these culminate in the 1971 song Moonage Daydream, with the deeply conspiratorial lyrics "Keep your mouth shut, you're squawking like a pink monkey bird...Don't fake it baby, lay the real thing on me..."

Couldn't have put it any better myself!