Why You Can't Get There from Here by Physics

Not By Physics

o you think interstellar travel is possible? Put your own ideas in the Guestbook. Dr.H will eventually comment on your ideas, in your guestbook entry, or delete it if it is garbage. If you give a valid email address, you will not be subjected to spam, but you may receive a personal email from Dr.H, and that will be the subject line: "A personal email from Dr.H" so don't delete it as spam.

o you think Dr.H is a genius or a crackpot? Opinions differ. Read his essay on physics, and form your own conclusions. In this essay, he shows that an interpretation of physics which eliminates paradox, singularity, and infinity is possible, without changing any of the equations. You just have to believe that the de Broglie waves really exist, and are not a mathematical fiction.

o you think UFOs are what they appear to be? Star traveling humanoids? Almost the only data of any scientific value is provided by the "landed occupant" cases. Read excerpts from Bowen before making up your mind.

o you want to know more? Then buy his books. Or don't buy his books. He doesn't care. But you may find it easier than staring at a computer screen for hours. His 2002 book is Jumping Lightyears and has everything from this website and more. His 2003 book is A Science of Civilization and has a picture of the sacred white bison on the cover. That may seem an odd symbol of civilization, but Dr.H thinks civilization has more to do with restoring ecological systems and learning from other spiritual traditions (including those of the First Nations) than it has to do with cities or technology.

t is impossible to get to the stars in any reasonable length of time by any means known to physics. Lawrence Krauss proved that in his careful analysis of The Physics of Startrek. He has done all the calculations, demonstrating the absurdity of everything about the TV series "Startrek." Scientists already know this. That is one reason they ignore the evidence for UFOs, since there is no room in their worldview for anything but physics. In Charles Bowen's book The Humanoids there is rigorous scientific proof of the reality of UFOs in the popular sense. Yet, academics refuse to look at such data. This is not a new problem. Galileo faced it from his fellow academics as we see in this letter from Galileo to Kepler:

"I think, my Kepler, we will laugh at the extraordinary stupidity of the multitude. What do you say of the leading philosophers here to whom I have offered a thousand times of my own accord to show my studies, but who, with the lazy obstinacy of a serpent who has eaten his fill, have never consented to look at the planets, or moon, or telescope?" An excerpt of a letter from Galileo to Kepler,19th August 1610, www.humanistictexts.org

ddly enough, UFO enthusiasts are convinced that UFOs are piloted by alien species who simply have a more advanced technology than ours. But that is because they don't understand physics. Technology does not work by magic. It works by the laws of physics. And the laws of physics forbid any space-traveling much faster than one-tenth the speed of light. A slightly smarter group of crackpots realize this, but know that physics is not complete, and experiment with mathematical alchemy that will give them some sort of FTL travel. Yes, it is certainly true that physics is not complete. However, future discoveries shall not contradict past discoveries. They shall simply add to our knowledge in places where we know it is presently lacking, such as the nature of dark matter, or what really happens in a "singularity," a place where existing theory fails.

hy is it impossible to get to the stars by physics? The stars are just too far away. Even if we could accelerate to near the speed of light, that would still be far too slow for interstellar exploration. Most of the familiar objects that we can see in the night time sky are hundreds or thousands of light-years away. That familiar constellation of the winter nights, the Pleiades (Seven Sisters), is 425 light years away. A round trip at the speed of light would take over 850 years. It would be like leaving during the High Gothic era and returning in the 20th Century. That is not exploration; it is exodus. I will show you how we can visit other star systems in just a few hours.

e are looking for G2 or K2 singlets. Multiple star systems could have planets, but would their orbits stay in the comfort zone where water is liquid for billions of years? Probably not. Our own solar system is chaotic in the mathematical sense. And civilization requires stability. The slow oscillation every 100,000 years of the Earth's orbit from circular to slightly elliptical paces our ice ages. So we are only looking for singlets. The "2" indicates metal rich stars. Our own star is G2, what is called a yellow dwarf. K2 is the next sized smaller. Maybe we could call it an orange dwarf. Judging from the gray skin of many of our alien visitors, many come from K2s, which do not produce enough ultraviolet to cause sunburn. The smallest of stars, red dwarfs and brown dwarfs, are thought unlikely to have planets with life. For a red dwarf, a planet close enough to be warm enough to have liquid water would be so close as to be disrupted by tidal interaction. Red dwarfs are quite common, though they cannot be seen with the naked eye. A full eighty percent of the stars within about 21 light-years are red dwarfs. Brown dwarfs have recently been detected in the infrared, but are not common. In any case, they are far too dim to give rise to life. So, how far do we have to go to find K2 or G2 singlets, old enough, and with enough metal to produce a civilization? Thousands of lightyears.

he nearest star system is Alpha Centauri, about 4.3 light-years away. This is a group of 3 stars, one of which is a G2. But another star is only 40 AU away, about as far away as the Kuiper belt is from our sun. Complex life requires extremely stable orbits, which we shall not find in systems with multiple stars. There are two stars, each a little over 10 light-years away, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, both said to be sun-like. However, both are smaller, fainter, younger and depleted in metals compared to our sun, and they are part of multiple star systems. Not good candidates. There are many web sites about both. http://www.solstation.com/stars/ is a web site that has a lot of information on stars within 30 light-years. Our sun appears to be the only high metal G2 singlet within about 22 light-years that is old enough to have developed a civilization.

he trouble with stars much larger and brighter than our own is that they will not survive long enough to evolve intelligence. There is a relationship between mass, brightness, color and longevity. A G star has a small enough mass to last a long time. Our star has already burned steadily for about 5 billion years, and should be good for another 5-10 billion years. Why is longevity so important? Because it takes 4.5 billion years to evolve intelligence and civilization. For several billion years, a star traveler would have found nothing more exciting on Earth than stromatolites, colonies of cyano-bacteria. It takes several billion years to generate enough oxygen to oxidate all the iron in the sea, and all the rocks on the shore. Only then can oxygen begin to build up in the seas and the atmosphere. Oxygen in the atmosphere is a sure sign of life. Complex cells, able to utilize oxygen, only appeared about 1.5 billion years ago at the very earliest.

or ninety percent of Earth's history, there has been no life on land. Mammals have existed for only the last one percent of our history. It just takes time to get to where we are now. And stars that are as much as twice as massive as our Sun will not last long enough for intelligence to evolve. When we add in the unlikely circumstances that produced our moon, and gave our Earth-Moon system a lot of angular momentum, one can see the point of such books as Rare Earth. Rare indeed. We might have to travel thousands of light-years to find other star-systems with civilization. Such star-travel must be possible, because we have been visited by over 50 species of star-traveling humanoids over the past 50 years, even though such star-travel is impossible by physics or technology. The Star Ship Enterprise will never be built, and real interstellar craft do not in any way resemble the Enterprise, nor do they travel at "Warp One," much less "Warp Nine."

he fastest possible rocket would expel an ionized propellant. This rocket could conceivably reach 1/10th the speed of light. The limiting factor on this kind of rocket (impulse power to Trekkies) is a law of vanishing returns, not Einstein's speed limit. To go faster requires more propellant, which increases ones initial mass, thus making one accelerate slower. At about one-tenth the speed of light, simply adding more propellant does not increase the velocity one can reach. A better alternative would be a solar sail, since it could provide acceleration to leave home and deceleration when it approached its target star. The forces involved would be enormous (about 17G), so some way would have to be found to cushion the human body. I suspect that the only form of human life that can survive 17Gs is a blastocyst. We already know that only a blastocyst can be frozen and thawed later and be viable. When a woman's egg is fertilized in the fallopian tubes, it begins dividing and subdividing without growing any larger. By the time it reaches the uterus, it will be a hollow ball of cells, with a small pile of stem cells inside, and that is a blastocyst. A blastocyst is the only form of human that can be made in the laboratory. I am sure no one has tried this, but I suspect a blastocyst could survive 17G just fine. So, the first generation and the last generation on a voyage with a solar powered ark might be blastocysts.

rimitive and dangerous cultures like ours could launch a one-way "Ark" which would take many generations to cross a few light-years, by using a solar sail. A primitive culture would probably only do this if it found some sort of radio or laser beacon, saying "here I am, a nice, fat, water-rich, oxygenated planet, ready to be conquered." It is for that reason that the SETI search is not a search for Intelligent life. It is a search for stupidity. Such a beacon is an invitation to invasion by such as us, raping and looting and conquering. Only spiritually advanced cultures can jump lightyears, so the vast distance between stars provides a natural quarantine against space-travel by nasty, brutish cultures like us.

hat about those favorite tricks of science fiction writers: cryogenics and time warp? Time warp does not become noticeable until one reaches about 90% of the speed of light. Some hope to harness the ZPE in space to constantly accelerate half the trip, and decelerate the other half. But there is no ZPE in empty space. This fanciful idea is based on virtual particles, which imply an infinite energy for space, a reductio ad absurdem for virtual particles. I don't care if it is part of the Standard Model after 1927. It is still wrong.

or the voyagers themselves, relativistic effects could make the trip take far less of their time, if velocities close to C could be reached. Time and space are relative to the frame of reference, if two such frames have a velocity near the speed of light C with respect to one another. Some enthusiasts don't really care how long a voyage might take in Earth time, if it could be made speedily in space-craft time. But I wouldn't call that exploring the universe. It would be an exodus, a one-way trip as far as one's civilization is concerned.

s far as cryogenics and similar ways of extending life indefinitely, they only work for species that have evolved those capabilities. For instance, some bacteria can dehydrate and crystallize and become a bacterial spore, which is viable for millions of years. Just add water. Such cryogenic travel, if it worked, would be even less like exploration.

hat about hibernation? Even human beings can survive several hours of immersion in cold water because of the mammalian hibernation reflex. However, such hibernation cannot last for years and years. Mammals that regularly hibernate allow their temperature to fall to the ambient temperature, and the heart beats only occasionally. But such mammals have to wake up every few months, and rev up their metabolism. Why? Physiologists aren't sure, but think it is because of their need for sleep. By the way, there is no evidence that hibernation increases lifespan.

here are primitive species that can actually be frozen and revived. However, they have evolved that ability over millions of years, usually by dehydrating and filling their cells with glycol (anti-freeze). Such species cannot remain in a frozen state very long, certainly not for hundreds or thousands or millions of years. And again there is no evidence that being frozen part of ones life increases longevity.

hen we consider the orders of magnitude of both space and time required for a space craft powered by physics, we can see why most scientists have no interest in putting people in space, and no interest in a Mars colony or a Moon colony, considering this is a dead end. It is not a jumping off point to Interstellar travel. No one is much interested in "space exploration" where a single round-trip voyage would take 2000 years or more with impulse power. Indeed, I would define "interstellar travel" as the ability to visit star systems thousands of light-years away in a few hours. If it takes thousands of years, it is exodus, not space travel. So the scientists listen to radio signals, assuming this is the only likely method of interstellar communication, and ignore UFO reports, since everyone knows UFOs are impossible! In a similar fashion, Galileo's colleagues refused to look through his telescope, since everyone knows that heavenly bodies are eternal and immutable, and thus could not have spots (on the sun) or craters (on the moon). There is no fool like an educated fool.

ome interstellar travel enthusiasts are working on alternative physics, hoping that the future progress of physics will provide some hope for the star traveler. In particular, they are looking for ways of using the supposed ZPE (Zero Point Energy of the vacuum) to allow unlimited acceleration. But wait a minute! They still face the 0.1C speed limit imposed by propellant. Anyway, there is no ZPE. See Physics Without Paradox, where I point out the well known fact that ZPE entails an infinite energy to the vacuum, a reductio ad absurdem for that theory. Lawrence Krauss, the author of The Physics of Startrek agrees with me. The devotees of alternative physics are also looking for methods of propulsion that do not require a propellant. Maybe by warping space... However, Krauss, in his Physics of Startrek does the calculation to see how much energy would be required for warp one. It is more than the entire sum of energy put out by our sun, in its past, present and future.

pace travel, as I have defined it, is only feasible if we can jump thousands of lightyears in an instant. Physics provides no hope in this endeavor. Yet, I know from personal experience as well as rigorous scientific studies that the UFOs are here. A paradox. Fortunately, psychics, mystics and UFO observers know there is more to reality than physics. This more or less defines the forbidden sciences, the ones academics ignore, just as Galileo's academic colleagues at the University of Padua refused to look through his telescope.

ere is a thought to consider. UFOs of various species began arriving in our skies less than two years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I do not think that is a coincidence. I believe that the "foo fighters" returned to their homeworld after the end of WW 2, and spread the word along the star traveling grapevine, that Earth had entered an interesting new phase. We had developed nuclear bombs, but no strong international government to keep them from being used. They didn't come to save us. They are just curious. And they know that any contact between advanced and primitive cultures usually results in the death of the primitive culture. So they obey the Prime Directive and do not land on the White House lawn. The chief point, however, is that for the word to spread along the grapevine, for scientific conferences to be held and expeditions planned, their actual travel over interstellar distances must be instantaneous. In other words, they must jump hundreds of lightyears at a time. Star travel is not really possible otherwise. And what they have done, we can do. After all, one of the surprising discoveries about our visitors is that they are all humanoids like us. Not exactly like us, of course, but having the same body plan, and a similar evolutionary history on their homeworlds. There is a lot that we can learn from the UFO phenomenon, and one is that all UFO aliens are liars. Another is that jumping hundreds of lightyears is possible. Since physics provides no such capability, we know that we must look elsewhere.

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