Tomorrow’s Energy Solutions In Today’s Science Fiction Books

August 23rd, 2011 |

Two things happen when you read a lot of science fiction. For starters, your more literary mainstream friends roll their eyes at you a lot. Second, you spend a lot of your non-reading time thinking about how science fiction ultimately fits into real life. If you’re eco-minded, there’s a temptation to start thinking about how sci-fi can become green technology.

Though it’s a bit of a cliched concept, science fiction does have a way of coming true (though with apologies to H.G. Wells, not even the beta version of Time Machine 1.0 is quite ready yet). Of course, you often need to wait decades or, in some cases, more than a century, to see the correlations.

If being an avid reader of science fiction is socially risky, being a writer of science fiction is even more so, as many little-known dabblers in the genre have discovered. While Mark Twain left the world no sci-fi novels, it’s a little-known fact that he did aspire to the genre and left us a few odd short stories. One of them, called From the ‘London Times’ of 1904, centered around an imaginary device called a “telelectroscope,” which was essentially a telephone with a “moving picture” screen that, when connected to a network of telelectroscopes all around the world, created a worldwide system of information sharing.

Outlandish, huh? That’s what the public thought in 1898, of course, when the story was published, which may explain why Twain’s sci-fi stories weren’t terribly popular. Today, of course, most of us have “telectroscopes” in our homes, a fact that likely would have amused Twain to no end.

There are, of course, two kinds of science fiction: the kind whose writers feel no need to tether themselves to anything so limiting and pedestrian as physics; and the second kind, which features no science that isn’t supported by known scientific principles, at least on paper. While the former is largely about escapism, it’s the latter kind – and the Grandmasters who authored it – that has a way of posing as technological prophecy.

The High Priest of science-rooted science fiction was Arthur C. Clarke, mathematician, physicist, Royal Air Force veteran, inventor, futurist and author of more than 100 science fiction novels. His 1953 novel Childhood’s End which is about a takeover of earth by advanced and mysterious aliens is noteworthy for many things, but what strikes the modern, scientifically literate reader the most is Clarke’s employment of technologies that were part of only his imagination in 1953: e-mail, fax machines and cloud computing, for starters.

So with a nod to Twain and Clark, have the alternative energy and green technology solutions of the future already been proposed – today, next week or even a hundred years ago – by the writers of science fiction? Are our energy solutions already in existence on the dusty shelves at the back of the book store where only people like me and that guy you went to high school with who wore his pants hiked up under his armpits go?

Maybe. Let’s take a look.

Was Star Trek’s warp drive actually invented by a Mexican physicist?

While Trekkers everywhere know that the warp drive – which enabled space ships to travel faster than light – was invented by a man named Zefram Cochrane. In real life, however, it may ultimately be attributed to a Mexican physicist named Miguel Alcubierre who has worked out – at least in extremely theoretical form – how a warp drive could work. (To physicists, something becomes “theoretically feasible” if it doesn’t violate Einstein’s theory of general relativity.) In 1994, Alcubierre proposed a method of “stretching” space in a wave which would cause the “fabric” of space ahead of the stretched spot to contract, and the space behind it to expand. In essence, this would create a kind of “warp bubble” in normal space-time: while any inhabitants of the bubble would not actually be moving faster than light themselves, the space around them would be shifting faster than the speed of light.

While it looks great on paper, don’t expect a warp drive next year, next decade or even by next century. And it’s not actually green, due to theoretical propulsion method’s energy requirements. By some estimates, the amount of energy (in the form of mass) required to bring the propulsion method to fruition would be far greater than the mass of the Universe itself.

Which could be a bit of a problem.

While others who have subsequently worked on the model claim they could cut the energy requirements all the way down to the mass of about three average-sized stars, aerospace companies have yet to begin selling suns, as shipping and delivery are still a bit problematic, and they are seldom on sale.

Antigravity

The concept of anti-gravity as a great tool for science fiction writers isn’t new. H.G. Wells toyed with the concept in his novel The First Men in the Moon, which was published in 1901. In it, one of the primary characters, a Dr. Cavor, develops a material known as “Cavorite” that shields the space above it from the effects of gravity. Using it, a craft can be made weightless, and then with the assistance of the air pressure below the craft, it can then be shot off into space in a rocket-less launch (think how much money that would save NASA!)

So is it possible? Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1910, theorized that gravity is caused by the altered shape of space, deformed by massive objects. So since gravity is a result of deformed space rather than being a “true” natural force, it’s not possible for there to be “negatively deformed space.” Later studies, though, discovered that while it may not be mathematically possible to have negatively deformed space, it might be possible for an object to have negative mass, which could, in theory, produce a repulsive gravitational field.

In reality, the while warp drive is just mathematical fun on paper, some scientists thinking anti-gravity could be nearly within reach. Back in 2006 at a conference called the Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF), an event organized by the University of New Mexico Institute for Space and Nuclear Power Studies (UNM-ISNPS), a physicist named Franklin Felber presented a paper that theorized that humans will be using antigravity-powered spacecraft that can travel at nearly the speed of light by the end of this century

Felber’s research shows that anything moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying right in front of it, in a kind of “antigravity beam.” The closer a mass gets to the speed of light, the stronger this antigravity beam would become.

Felber’s calculations overcome two traditional problems physicists had with figuring out how travel near the speed of light could ever become feasible: for starters, they solve the problems of the enormous energy requirements, second they explain how payload (or people) could be moved at close to the speed of light while leaving them undamaged by the enormous stress of such acceleration.

With antigravity, it’s the repulsion of a body speeding through space that would provide the enormous needed energy needed to accelerate mass quickly. As for limiting stress, Felber shows that the payload being transported would fall weightlessly in its antigravity beam even as it accelerated close to the speed of light, protecting it from stress.

While Felber’s research is a huge step, it’s a little early to start packing your bags. And when you do, bring a lot of underwear…even at close to the speed of light, the trip to a nearby star will still take years.

Matter/Antimatter Drives

Stepping down from methods least feasible to most feasible, we get to antimatter, an energy source so likely in humanity’s future that even NASA has already tinkered with the idea in its drawing board plans for a manned mission to Mars.

While it’s less well embedded in the public psyche than warp drives, matter/antimatter propulsion is bread in butter to sci-fi authors. Arthur C. Clarke makes frequent use of it, particularly in his “Time Odyssey” Trilogy co-authored with mathematician/engineer Stephen Baxter. Hard core Trekkers also know that both starships Enterprise and Voyager used antimatter technology, as well.

So here’s the idea. As anyone with a modicum of physics education (or anyone who read Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons) knows, when an equal amount of matter and anti-matter meet, they “annihilate” one another in a flash of energy reaction so complete, it provides the highest energy density of any known propellant, making it possibly the most efficient energy source in the Universe.

How efficient? Think about this: while literally tons of chemical fuel would be needed to propel a manned spacecraft to Mars, just a few tens of milligrams of antimatter would be needed to cover the same distance with an antimatter drive: an amount smaller than an M&M.

According to the Encyclopedia of Science, matter-antimatter annihilation is so energy efficient that only 71 milligrams of antimatter would produce as much energy as that stored by all the fuel in the external tank of a Space Shuttle. It is theorized that an inter-stellar journey could be accomplished with as little as a single gram of antimatter.

Feasible it might be, but matter/antimatter propulsion still has some drawbacks.

For starters, some antimatter reactions produce gamma rays – high frequency electromagnetic radiation that is deadly to humans. The earliest paper suggestions of antimatter-powered space ships employed antiprotons, which are more likely to prouduce gamma rays. While subsequent theoretical designs have used antielectroncs (also called “positrons” due to their positive charge), which make gamma rays with about 400 times less energy, this may still be too much for human health.

Another limit to this type of propulsion is that while only milligrams of antimatter would be needed, anti-matter is a little hard to get your hands on. Since it doesn’t really exist naturally in sufficient quantity anywhere on or near earth, it needs to be manufactured. While tiny amounts of anti-matter are created by the use of giant particle accelerators such as the one at CERN in Switzerland or Chicago’s FermiLab, those amounts are incredibly tiny: measured in nanometers, which is far short of the milligrams that would be required to propel a ship for long distances.

To try and get over this hurdle, in the 1990s, researchers at Penn State University designed a ship called the ICAN-II (ion compressed

The ICAN-II, the world's first (theoretical) antimatter-powered ship.

antimatter nuclear II) spacecraft (anti-catalyized micro fission) in its engine. In theory, ICAN-II would have only required only 140 nanograms of antiprotons to effect a 30-day journey to Mars. While 140 nanograms of antimatter is still a lot by current production rates, it might actually be feasible.

One way or another, antimatter could end up being how humans get to Mars. An on-again, off-again program called the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) conducts research to see if the idea of a positron-powered spaceship is feasible for a future manned mission to Mars. The program, on hiatus since 2007, was reengaged by NASA earlier this year.

Of course, science fiction doesn’t stop here. Writers who are more interested in propelling their stories than their spacecrafts will reach into areas of physics that are poorly understood: dark matter and dark energy are favored concepts. It’s a great way for an author to dodge real scrutiny on the probabilities of his or her fictional technologies.

And while sci-fi flavored energy sources tend to be mostly about the propulsion of inter-stellar spacecraft, most of the concepts – the more feasible ones like antigravity and antimatter, anyway – would appear to have a number of applications right here on earth waiting for them. While public transportation may switch entirely to electric vehicles within the next 100 years or so, creating that electricity in a sustainable way will continue to remain a challenge. While I don’t anticipate zipping around town in an antimatter car within my lifetime, I can well picture my great-grandchildren doing so.

And if you think that energy and technology companies aren’t already at least talking about ways to capitalize on the production of antimatter for the world’s future energy needs, then I have a dark-matter-powered spaceship to sell you.