It’s been worth the wait.

Since the probes started sending data back to Earth, scientists from JPL have been helping Kloor’s team turn it into the most accurate visual renderings of first few planets of the solar system anyone has ever seen. These reputedly amazing visuals will form the bread and butter of Quantum Quest, an animated, science-fiction, large-format film film that’s now been 12 years in the making.

Each rendering will be founded on contours developed from radar data, and then surfaced over with visual data, all merged together through CGI. And although the plot will feature a crew of talking neutrinos and photons taking a “solar safari” from the sun to Saturn’s moon Titan, all the space visuals, Kloor swears, will be real.

But unlike the real solar system, in Quantum Quest, there will be sound in space.

Naturally, this isn’t the sort of explosions and lasers we heard in Star Wars or Serenity. Quantum Quest aims for a more exacting standard of scientific precision (aside from the talking particles). I had a chance to talk to Kloor and his composer, Shawn Clement, in the midst of the madness of Comic-Con. First, he explained that the Huygens Probe did actually record sound (while it was in Titan’s atmosphere) and transmit it back to Earth.

But more of the film’s score is inspired by radio signals Cassini detected coming off the rings of Saturn, rather than actual sound. Of course, the human ear does not, as a rule, “hear” radio signals. To get around that, sound engineers “frequency shifted” the signals down into the audible range. Another challenge was that the sounds were also very long; they didn’t modulate quickly. So to get them into a format that could be used in a film, engineers compressed the signals into smaller packages. Kloor said these manipulations were necessary, but don’t alter the fundamental shape of the sound.

Clement never had to deal with any of this himself. He and the sound magicians at Skywalker Ranch, who are handling the background folio for the film,  got the samples already in audible form. To write the music, Clement started mucking around with the sounds in his synthesizer, but found that it wasn’t really working. So instead he went old-school and busted out a guitar and a violin.

“What I did with those was mimic those sounds a lot,” he said. “But I was able to manipulate that and do what I wanted to do. It worked out really, really well. You’re hearing those sounds and hearing them shift and change and eventually, by the end, you get the full orchestra.” Clement sent me a couple of clips of his music:

Neat-o space sounds inspired by radio waves from Saturn’s rings

After all these years, the film is finally due out in February 2010.

For any curious readers of the Loom, we’re already checking with Yturralde if he wouldn’t mind if we submit a pic of his tattoo to Carl’s Science Tattoo Emporium.

Given the awesomeness of science non-fiction that year, I might almost expect it to be a down year for science fiction. Not so. 1969 had some good sci-fi—maybe not as good as landing on the moon, but damn good nonetheless.

It was, for example, the year Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut challenged the idea that sci-fi wasn’t an appropriate genre for high-brow “literary-fiction” writers, tradition that has carried forward to become the “counter factual” fiction (sci-fi by any other name…) of writers like Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon. It was also the year Ursula K. LeGuin explored gender and identity in Left Hand of Darkness, and Michael Crichton scared the bejesus out of everyone with his  mutated virus in The Andromeda Strain. Ray Bradbury published a collection of short stories in I Sing the Body Electric (the title story of which became The Electric Grandmother), and Isaac Asimov collected some of his best stories in Nightfall and other Stories.

In June of that year, TV watching geeks saw Captain Kirk set his phaser on stun for what they thought might be the last time (oh, what they didn’t know!) when Star Trek went off the air. Perhaps in mourning, ardent fans held the first Star Trek convention before the show was even canceled, in March 1969 at the Newark public library. The Doctor (you know Who) regenerated for just the second time as Patrick Troughton made way for the 1970 arrival of Jon Pertwee.

In movieland, sci-fi screenwriters would have a hard time following up Barbarella, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Planet of the Apes, all of which came out in 1968. Gregory Peck struggled to rescue stranded astronauts Gene Hackman, Richard Crenna, and James Franciscus in Marooned, which came out four months after the moon landing. The novel that provided the basis for the movie actually used the single-occupant Mercury capsule, but Hollywood updated it for the Apollo era. The space station in the film is based on NASA’s early drawings for SkyLab. In some ways the movie was ahead of its time, as producers decided not to include a regular score and instead use a series of beeps and hums to evoke the isolation of space. (Turner Classic Movies will be airing Marooned at 1:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 21. Check local listings and set your Tivos!).

Tough to compete with actual space travel when you’re a science-fiction writer or producer, but still, not a bad year to be a nerd.

If a nanoparticle field emission thruster (the aforementioned NanoFET) has been a subject of investigation for University of Michigan electrical engineer Brian Gilchrist for several years now. Gilchrist, joined by a team of scientists, has published and presented papers (pdf) at conferences (pdf) around the country, trying to show the theory of how electronically charged nanotubes could enable a spaceship to achieve astonishing speeds.

As Gilchrist envisions it, a nanoFET engine would be installed as a series of flat plates around our spaceship—let’s say the Millennium Falcon. So instead of the white glare of rockets pointed off the back of the Falcon as it flees TIE fighters, there would be a series of flat panels that resemble the silicon wafers that go into microchips (the MEMS production process would be very similar). Each panel would be covered in round discs, each 10 centimeters in diameter, which in turn would be comprised of thousands of emitters, each roughly 100 micrometers in diameter.

Each emitter works a bit like an tiny particle accelerator: The anode of the emitter charges the nanoparticles, which are then accelerated and then shot out a tube by a strong magnetic field generated by a stack of microchip-like components. “In that a particle accelerator uses an electrical field to propel charged particles to high speeds — that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Gilchrist told MSNBC. Thanks to Newton’s third law, as the ship ejects particles in one direction, the ship moves in the opposite direction. Eject long, thin nanotubes for high-efficiency, slow acceleration; use short, thick nanotubes for better acceleration at greater cost of energy. The NanoFet could potentially eject nearly any type of nanoparticle that would take a charge.

The nanoFET is also remarkable flexible and scalable. A plate of nearly any size could be placed more or less anywhere on the object to be propelled, and each plate could be nearly any size. So instead of the Millennium Falcon merely being the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, it could also be astonishingly maneuverable, with smaller plates on different parts of the hull to establish tight turns and sudden changes in direction.

The only real downside is that nanoFETs are not imagined to provide the kind of high acceleration needed to break Earth’s gravity and escape orbit. But once in space, a ship equipped with nanoFET would have an extremely thin and lightweight engine with a commensurately compact fuel source. The nanoFET would be able achieve nearly constant acceleration. Do that for long enough, and speeds of 90 percent of light speed might become possible. Just think, if the Americans in Armageddon had a nanoFET powered space ship available to get out and intercept that asteroid, that whole Affleck-Armageddon fiasco could have been avoided. And wouldn’t we all want that?

DISCOVER: What kind of realistic technology could we use to get to nearby stars? Which stars would be feasibly reachable by such technologies?

Kevin Grazier: It’s a saying plastered on T-shirts and bumper stickers—the kind sold at both science-fiction conventions and physics departments nationwide:

186,000 miles per second:
It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

The speed of light, of all electromagnetic energy, in a vacuum is the ultimate speed limit in the universe. Nothing that has mass or carries information can travel faster.

This universal speed limit is a direct fallout from Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Special relativity implies that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, but values that we tend to think of as constant in our daily experience—mass, length, and the rate of the passage of time—are not. Depending upon the relative velocity of two observers, these values will “adjust” so that both observers see the speed of light as a constant. Two observers travelling at high speeds relative to each other will find themselves in strong disagreement about measurements like the length of each other’s spacecraft and the rate of the passage of time.

Another consequence of special relativity is that, as an object travels increasingly faster, it behaves as if it has increasingly more mass. Therefore the amount of thrust it takes for an incremental change in velocity (known in the space program as a delta-V) is vastly greater at high speeds than at low. This effect is also highly nonlinear: It takes almost an order of magnitude more thrust to accelerate from .9c (nine-tenths of the speed of light) to .99c than it does to accelerate from .5c to .7c. An object travelling at the speed of light would act as if it had an infinite amount of mass and it would, therefore, require an infinite amount of energy (read: an infinite amount of thrust/fuel) to attain it.

This is, of course, a shame for civilizations (like ours) who want to explore planetary systems around other stars first hand. The distances involved are, well, astronomical. Just within the Solar System, it typically takes NASA probes 6 months to a year to reach Mars; it took Cassini 6 years, 9 months to reach Saturn. The (currently) fastest object created by humankind, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, will take 40,000 years, give or take a few thousand years, before it makes its closest encounter with its first star: AC+79 3888—currently located in the constellation Ursa Minor. At that speed few Time Lords, and even fewer humans, would survive the journey to even “nearby” star systems.

Current chemical rockets, and even the more efficient ion drives, cannot propel humanity to the stars at a reasonable speed, but there are concepts for interstellar spacecraft drives that are promising, that could be constructed in a practical sense, and you may be surprised how long the designs have been around. Stanisław Ulam, a Polish mathematician who participated in the Manhattan Project, proposed nuclear pulse propulsion back in 1947.

The idea is simple: explode a series of nuclear bombs behind a spacecraft. The explosions are directed against a thick steel “pusher plate”. The pusher plate is, in turn, connected to the spacecraft by a huge shock absorber to lessen the high G forces from the impulsive accelerations. In the straightforward terminology of Jimmy Johnson, the engineer on the Phaeton:

Basically, we gonna blow us up a bunch of big ass bombs off the ass-end of this here ship. Big ass bombs gonna vaporize some big ass alloy plates, and the translation of all that big ass energy’ll make us go real fast. Real fast. Yippe kai-ay, m…

The practical attempt to design and develop nuclear-pulse propulsion was performed by General Atomics in San Diego in the 1950s and 1960s. Ultimately the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty between the Unites States and Soviet Union made the testing for such a drive illegal, nevertheless over 50 years ago the design seemed practical and could be implemented within the bounds of existing technology. For more information, NASA and Star Trek designer Mike Okuda provided still more details on Project Orion, the U.S. government’s investigation into a nuclear-pulse spacecraft.

An Orion-style drive powered by thermonuclear explosions could theoretically reach speeds of .08c to .10c. That could get a spacecraft to the nearest stars within a human lifetime, but not within Phaeton’s 10-year mission. Virtuality is set in the mid-21st century, and it’s reasonable to assume some technological advances in the intervening time. Phaeton does not use thermonuclear explosions for propulsion, the charges dropped out the back are matter/antimatter charges (yes the thrust for Phaeton is, in essence, provided by photon torpedoes). The obvious assumption is that by the mid-21st Century, science has solved problems regarding the generation and containment of antimatter. One estimate has shown that Orion-style drive propelled by matter/antimatter explosions could attain speeds of .5c to .8c.

If Phaeton’s Orion Drive (named after the real-life nuclear concept) could propel it to 80 percent the speed of light, it could get to Sol’s nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri (4.4 light-years away) in just 5 years, 6 months. That’s certainly a vast improvement, and shortens the round-trip mission time to several nearby stars to less than a human lifetime.

Only, it gets better.

Special relativity, which bit us in the asteroid when it comes to top-end velocity, does our crew a favor as our spacecraft attains speeds that are a high fraction of the speed of light. Recall that for objects travelling at relativistic speeds, values like mass, time, and length appear to “adjust” to keep the speed of light a constant. At high speeds, distances that we measure at “rest”, or at low speeds compared to c, appear to be shortened. This effect is called Lorentz contraction or Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.

Moving at a snappy .5c, the distance to Alpha Centauri is only 3.8 light-years (down from 4.4), and the apparent travel time is a bit over 7 years, 6 months. At 80 percent light speed, the distance is 2.6 light-years, and the travel time is 3 years, 3 months—less elapsed time for the crew than it would take for light to make the same journey.

Travelling at a speed of 0.7c is the “break even” point, where the combination of spacecraft velocity and Lorentz Contraction means you are travelling at “functional light speed” (the distance to Alpha Centauri in that frame would be 3.1 light-years and the travel time 4 years, 5 months). Of course time passes at different rates based upon their relative speeds as well, a phenomena called relativistic time dilation, so if Phaeton were travelling at a speed of .7c, for every year that passes for the crew, a year and five months would pass for The Edge of Never viewers back on Earth. Billie Kashmiri alludes to this in her confessional near the end.

With the phenomena of Lorentz Contraction as an aid, many more star systems become potential targets of a 10-year mission. There are sound scientific arguments why astronomers believe that any star that could potentially have a planet with life, in particular intelligent life, must be similar to our Sol: from mid-F range on the Herzsprung-Russell Diagram to mid-K. There are several stars in that size/temperature range in Sol’s neighborhood. Below is a screen capture of a spreadsheet that the producers of Virtuality used to select the target star for Phaeton’s mission (text color corresponds to the star’s color):

On the spreadsheet are the stars’ distances at rest, and at various fractions of light speed—with the corresponding travel time.

Click image to embiggen.

Epsilon Eridani, the nearby star that the Phaeton is sent to explore, has one, perhaps two planets orbiting it, as well as at least three asteroid/planetesimal belts. If we assume that Phaeton’s Orion Drive can get her up to .8c, or 80 percent the speed of light, then because of Lorentz contraction the journey (normally 10.5 light-years) is only 6.3 light-years, and it takes just under 7 years, 11 months. So if the Orion Drive can reasonably get a spacecraft up to .8c, then Phaeton’s mission is actually closer to 16 years. If, however, the Orion Drive was capable of propelling Phaeton to .9c, or 90 percent the speed of light, then the distance to Epsilon Eridani is only 4.6 light-years, and the one-way flight time is 5.1 years.

So in order for Phaeton to get to Epsilon Eridani and back within the stated 10-year mission duration, we clearly see that the ship’s Orion Drive would have to propel her to over 90 percent the speed of light (.9c). For all the elements of Phaeton’s mission that might be practically attainable by the mid-21st Century, this is where a little science fiction enters the picture.

Thank you to Steve Cooperman, Doug Creel, and John Weiss for their helpful input and comments.

Meta-conspiracy: Does the government want you to believe in UFO’s? [via Futurismic]

Real-life Terminator robots here, here and here.  [via Technovelgy]

Video of low-altitude flight over the lunar surface by the Japanese KAGUYA explorer [via Pink Tentacle]

Recently released scenes of the upcoming remake of V combine two of our favorite things: creepy aliens and Party of Five! [via thrfeed]

Alas, the year 2001 has come and gone without moon bases, or privately operated orbital shuttles, but we’re getting there — the International Space Station may not have a Hilton, or rotate to provide artificial gravity, but at least it did just get its last major array of solar panels in place. And although PanAm Airways doesn’t exist any more, let alone the Orion III Space Clipper, private spaceflight did take a step forward recently with successful test flights of WhiteKnight Two, the launch vehicle for Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo private suborbital spacecraft.

2001: A Space Odyssey’s influence on later science fiction is impossible to underestimate, and the balletic spacecraft scenes set to sweeping classical music, the tarantula-soft tones of HAL 9000, and the ultimate alien artifact, the Monolith, have all become enduring cultural icons in their own right. Still, for those barbarians who find the measured pace of the masterpiece a little slow, check out this awesome one minute version of the movie. In Lego.

What exactly was Kara, and were people chasing down a rabbit hole when they assumed her father was Daniel, the missing 8th model cylon?

Ron Moore: Daniel is definitely a rabbit hole. It was an unintentional rabbit hole, to be honest. I was kind of surprised when I started picking up [that] speculation online.

For those of you who don’t know, there was a deep part of the cylon backstory that had to do with one of the cylons that was created by the final five [called Daniel. Daniel] was later sort of aborted by Cavill… it was always intended just to be sort of an interesting bit of backstory about Cavill and his jealously. A Cain and Abel sort of allegory. Then people really started grabbing on to it and seizing on it as some major part of the mythology. In couple of interviews and in the last podcast I tried to go out of my way to say “look, don’t spend too much time and energy on this particular theory,” because it was never intended to be that major a piece of the mythology.

David Eick: It’s like Boxey in that way!

Moore: Kara is what you want her to be. It’s easy to put the label on her of “angel” or “messenger of God” or something like that. Kara Thrace died and was resurrected and came back and took the people to their final end. That was her role, her destiny in the show… We debated back and forth in the writers’ room about giving it more clarity and saying definitively what she is. We decided that the more you try to put a name on it, the less interesting it became, and we just decided this was the most interesting way for her to go out, with her just disappearing and [leave people wondering exactly what she was].

We see Galactica jump away from the Colony. Are we to assume there are a lot of pissed off Cavills out there still, or were they destroyed?

Moore: The final [cut] came out a little less clear on that than I intended…. It was scripted and the idea was that when Racetrack hits the nukes—the nukes come in and smack into the colony—it takes the colony out of the stream that was swirling around the singularity and [the colony] fell in and was destroyed. I think as we went through the [editing process], when we kept cutting frames and doing this and that, one of the things that became less apparent was that the colony was doomed. The intention was that everyone who was aboard the colony would perish.

At what point did you decide to make it Earth-of-the-past that we were going to wind up on, and what was your reason for that?

Moore: We decided that a couple of years ago. I don’t think we ever really had a version of the show where we [were] in the future or in the present, those didn’t seem as interesting. In the early [development of the show], we would talk about the fact that we would see a lot of contemporary things in the show from language to wardrobe to all kinds of production design details. That only made sense to us in terms of a lot of things that we see in the show and we feel are taken from our contemporary world are actually theirs to begin with. [They] somehow spread down through eons and came to us through the collective unconsciousness. Or, more directly, [as when] Lee said we would give them the better part of ourselves.

Eick: There was a time when we were talking about “they land, and its Pterodactyls and Tyrannosaurus Rex.” But the idea that they were part of the genus of humankind seemed like the right—and more affordable!—way to do that.

Moore: We also had this image of Six walking through Times Square that we came up with long ago.

Who attacked the original Earth?

Moore: The backstory of the original Earth was supposed to be that the 13th tribe of cylons came to that world, started over and essentially destroyed themselves. There was some internecine warfare that occurred among the cylons themselves, which was another repetition in the cycle of “all of this has happened before and all will happen again.” Even they, who were the rebels that split off, [had] enough of humanity in them as cylons that they eventually destroyed themselves.

Why did Cavill decide to kill himself?

Moore: Cavill killing himself actually came from Dean Stockwell [the actor who played Cavill]. As scripted in that final climatic CIC battle, Tigh was going to grab Cavill and fling him over the edge of the upper level and he was going to fall to his death. Dean called me and said “y’know, I just really think that, in that moment, Cavill would realize the jig is up and it’s all hopeless, and he should just put a gun in his mouth and shoot himself.” And I said: “…Okay!”

For the actors, what was the last scene that you filmed and what was the mood like on the set?

Mary McDonnell: My last scene was Laura Roslin’s last moment in the Raptor. That was about 3:45 am on a very small set. I think I was one of the first people to wrap—she died and we all hugged, and my son and I went to the airport and went back to LA… It happened quickly, it was set to happen a week later and the schedule was changed, so suddenly it was over, it was really interesting, very much like the show for me.

Edward James Olmos: My last day was when I was on the mountainside and it was the last moment that I was on camera. It was quite an experience all the way around, that moment in time. I think everybody had a real easy time [acting] with the emotions that we had at the very end, it’s pretty honest all the way around. The last time that I saw Starbuck and Lee was the last scene where I saw them [in the show]. Pretty intense.

McDonnell: But we’re here, and we’re alive! I wore bright blue so you would know I was alive.

With the use of “All Along The Watchtower,” are you trying to get at some notion that there is some universal consciousness that goes back as far as the human/cylon races’ arrival?

Moore: The notion is sort of how you posited it. The music, the lyrics, the composition, is divine, eternal, it’s something that lives in the collective unconsciousness of everyone in the show and all of us today. It’s a musical theme that repeats itself and crops up in unexpected places. Different people hear it and pluck it out of the ether and write songs. It’s a connection of the divine and the mortal. Music is something that people literally catch out of the air and can’t really define exactly how they composed it. [So] here is a song that transcends many eons and many different people and cultures and the stars, and was ultimately reinvented by one Mr. Bob Dylan here on Earth.

Eick: It was a simple way, I thought, to communicate clearly the idea [the show is not set in the future.] That this is a story about a culture that gave birth to ours. There was an episode in season one in which Helo and Sharon are running for their lives. They hole up in a diner and there’s a cylon centurion cornering them. For the longest time we planned to have an old jukebox in the diner that would play “Yesterday”, or whatever we could afford—

Moore: Not “Yesterday.”

Eick: —Probably not “Yesterday.” Something from The Guess Who perhaps. I think we felt it was too soon. It would confuse things and…people would just be thrown by it, but we were thinking about it that far back, that music would be a great way to say to the audience that it follows [a] cyclical theme of “this has all happened before and will happen again.” This culture is the one that gave birth to ours, so that all the colloquialisms and all the slang that you hear and the behavior that is idiosyncratic—playing cards or whatever—we get that from them, not the other way around.

There’s been a lot of talk about how setting an end date for a scripted serial helps to recharge it. Did you find that true?

Moore: In terms of the writers’ room it certainly focused us. We made the decision that fourth season was going to be the last season once we got to the end of the third season. We had writers’ retreats, and we had dedicated sessions to say “this is the end, what’s the last story, what’s the final arc?” It really made everybody very focused and very specific about exactly how this was going to line up. Part of the motivation to make it the final season was that we didn’t want to get to the place where we felt like the ship was keeling over and we were having a problem. We all instinctively felt that the show had the reached the third act by the time the show got to the end of that third season.

Eick: Going back a year before that, Ron and I sat down for our biannual “what the hell do we do this year meeting?” Heading into season three there was a real sense of creative frustration. We wanted to expand the show and … find a new ways [of] story telling. [So season three] became what we call the cylon-centric season. It’s when we introduced the base ship, it’s when we introduced some new cylons. It gave the show life, but after a year of that, when we sat down heading into season four, it was a much shorter conversation. It was basically “okay, what if we end it? What if we just decide it’s over?” Let’s call this…the dovetailing season. If we know that going in, how would that inform story telling decisions?” So it was a very early decision. I remember from my perspective going into that 4th season there was a different energy on the set. There was tremendous focus and concentration that I was getting from the entire ensemble.

McDonnell: Part of what was extraordinary about that is as you are able to view [the end approaching] you can then kick into gear and plot your finish. What that ends up doing is simplifying things for you. You know where your head is and you can let go in many moments were you probably would have worked very hard [before, but] you didn’t need to. So a lot of us felt a kind of simplification. A kind of humility that came over us and that gives you a lot of energy. You just know where you are going and you are proud to be a part of it. And you let go. That was the experience I think many of us had.

Olmos: We had a meeting at the very beginning of the show and we all, 13 of us, sat down in my trailer—

McDonnell: He had the biggest trailer.

Omos: —it was beautiful! And we sat down as we discussed the possibilities. I talked to them about making sure we understood that if, by chance, this situation was to move forward and we were to do this as a series, and this was to go on to for one year, four years, ten years, who knows, that we had to understand what that meant… I just knew that…the story would have a beginning, a middle and an end, and that we had to pace ourselves.

So at the end of the third season, beginning of fourth season, we had a meeting, and we were told then that this was going to be the final season. Everybody got very depressed…I don’t think any of the actors wanted to stop the show… But we had hit the end, we were going into the fourth and final act. And we knew it. So we talked about the very first time we ever got together, and we said it’s like a marathon. In marathon you have to start off fast, really really intensely strong, your first mile has to extraordinary. Then the next 24 miles have to be consistent…. And then the last mile has to be the strongest mile that you’ve run the whole 26 miles…To win it, your final mile has to be your strongest mile… So we knew where we where coming from, we knew where we were, and now we knew where were going… I think that led to some of our strongest performances.

In the last scene, are “Six” and “Baltar” angels or demons?

Moore: I think they’re both. We never try to name exactly what the “Head” characters are—we called them “Head Baltar” and “Head Six” all throughout the show, internally. We never really looked at them as angels or demons because they seemed to periodically say evil things and good things, they tended to save people and they tended to damn people. There was this sense that they worked in service of something else. You could say “a higher power” or you could say “another power,” [but] they were in service to something else that was guiding and helping, sometimes obstructing, and sometimes tempting the people on the show. The idea at the very end was that whatever they are in service to continues and is eternal and is always around. And they too are still around…and with all of us who are the children of Hera. They continue to walk among us and watch, and at some point they may or may not intercede at a key moment.

It turned out that the nearby NASA research facility was developing a version of the Streptoccucus bacteria that, when injected into a person, produced a ton of hydrogen sulfide, reducing the person’s breathing rate and core body temperature– essentially, hibernation.  As it happens, hydrogen sulfide (familiar to which anyone who’s ever smelt a rotten egg), is considered one of the possible options for inducing hibernation in mammals.

In 2003, Mark Roth, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute, saw a documentary on spelunkers that discussed the danger of hydrogen sulfide: the gas is produced by volcanoes and deep-earth vents, and it can rapidly induce a coma. Moth imagined that breathing a mixture of hydrogen sulfide and other gases could cut off just the right amount of oxygen to the blood to induce suspended animation in mammals. He experimented by putting a mouse in a chamber with 80 ppm hydrogen sulfide, and the mouse entered a state of hibernation (the character of Jacob Hood demonstrates this effect on the show). His results were replicated in May by scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital. Unfortunately, a January paper in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine showed that there were problems getting the technique to work on larger mammal, like pigs. Instead of inducing a state of hibernation, the study found the gas actually acted as a stimulant.

But there’s always the vampiric alternative. In 2005, Dr. Patrick Kochanek drained dogs of about half their blood and replaced it with a cold saline solution. The process actually put the dogs into totally suspended animation. As reported in DISCOVER, the dogs had no heartbeat, no breathing, nothing.  The dogs were left asleep for three hours before Kochanek pumped the saline out and the blood back in. Most of the dogs came back to life with no ill effects. A few dogs suffered from brain damage and lethargy, leading to charges of “zombie dogs”.

Following up on this research the next year, a scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Hasan Alam,  was looking into ways to keep a critically injured patient alive while awaiting surgery. Alam actually drained  a pig’s blood almost entirely before replacing it with a cold saline solution of nutrients. He left the pigs in this state of animation for two hours to approximate surgery, and then revived them. He’s tried his technique on 200 pigs and achieved a 90% success rate for revivals.

The way I figure it, putting humans into hibernation — even extreme hibernation —  isn’t going to make it possible for a single person to traverse the light years between us and our stellar neighbors. It just takes too long, even at an extremely slowed metabolic rate. For that we’ll still need either a generation ship or straight up cryonics. But for shorter, but still tedious,  journeys between planets, traveling in hibernation may be just the thing. Personally, I hope they’re able to improve on the hydrogen sulfide technique, rather than the cold-saline technique. I don’t think anyone likes the idea of traveling 100 million km to Mars with half their blood in the fridge.

In 2006, Japanese scientists from Okayama University teamed up with Sapporo Breweries to conduct several experiements on barley, the raw material for many beers. This was not a study entirely focused on working out how to make a Cold One in outer space: Barley handles stress from lack of water or reduced oxygen better than wheat or rice, so it’s actually a useful study organism for astroculture in general.  They tested whether barley grown in space would show any negative effects compared to barley grown on the ground (it didn’t) and they put some of it in storage for six months, to see how it would fare.

Like the dwarf wheat American scientists grew in space in 2002, the barley showed almost no ill effects from growing in microgravity or radiation. The scientists found only one enzyme increased from slight oxygen deprivation, but the plants did well.

The stored barley was returned to Earth and the scientists planted it and managed to grow healthy plants. They grew another generation from those plants, and produced 100 pounds of barley, which they plan on harvesting this weekend. The plucked barley will be given to the brewer Sapporo, who will brew it into 100 bottles of space beer. Or, as the marine biologists might say, the barley may have a terrible fermentation accident, after which the alcoholic byproduct might fall into bottles.

Sapporo doesn’t plan to sell the beer, nor do they know exactly how they’re going to distribute it. Perhaps they could send a sample bottle or two to SciNoFi HQ?

The use of plants to recycle air and provide food for long term space trips is one of science fiction’s favorite tropes. It makes so much sense, right? Green plants and algae use carbon dioxide and convert it into oxygen, which humans and other assorted mammals breath in and convert back to carbon dioxide. The planet Earth itself functions, more or less, under exactly this sort of closed system.

In the 1990s, NASA’s Advanced Life Support division  conducted a series of experiments at the Johnson Space Center to see if they could make the system work on a much smaller scale. Working with the Utah State University, they developed USU-Apogee, a kind of dwarf wheat that  grows to its full height of 18 inches in just 23 days under spaceship-type conditions (primarily 24 hours of artificial light).  The wheat’s small, double leaves are also thought to be more efficient for processing carbon dioxide than plants with larger leaves.  In the 1995, NASA locked a scientist in a 7.2 meter chamber for 15 days with a crop of dwarf wheat. The scientist, Nigel Packham, exercised on a treadmill every day and conducted experiments the rest of the time. By the end of the 15 days, Packham emerged healthy, and the results indicated the wheat had produced more than enough oxygen for one man. Even better, the scientists found the plants actually increased their respiration rate when Packham was active and producing more CO2, and then slowed down when he became less active.

In subsequent experiments they used chemical and mechanical means to recycle air and water for a four-volunteer crews for 30 and then 60 days. And in a fourth test, conducted in 1997, NASA installed five volunteers in a three-story chamber for 90 days and had them use a combination of plant, mechanical, and chemical processes to recycle their air and water, and to provide some of their food. The experiment was deemed a success, and a yet larger experiment was planned for 2001, but it appears to have never been conducted.

But NASA has not abandoned the project. In 2002,  Gary Stutte spend 73 days on the International Space Station so he could conduct Photosynthesis Experiment Systems Testing and Operations (PESTO, née Photosynthesis and Assimilation System Testing and Analysis (PASTA)). He grew some USU-Apogee dwarf wheat in three cycles of 23 days so he  could try to determine the effects of microgravity on the plant. The result? Stutte found that the plants grew and respired at about the same rates in microgravity as they did on earth. Looks like Lethem’s— and the rest of SciFi’s— premise of using plants to provide the oxygen on for our great colonizing spaceships is on pretty solid footing.

Image courtesy of NASA

Science fiction writers must have breathed a collective sigh of relief, as Epsilon Eridani has been used in countless novels, short stories, TV shows, and movies as the location of more-or-less Earth like planets. Nothing dates a science fiction story like the cold hand of reality, such as when Mars was revealed to be a cratered desert with not a canal in sight, or when the clouds of Venus were shown to be concealing a lethal landscape of shattered rock, rather than lush jungle swamps.

In describing Mars as place with canals, and Venus as a lush jungle, science fiction authors weren’t making it up entirely unbidden — early scientific thought had speculated that Mars and Venus did have canals and jungles. It wasn’t until the space age arrived and we could send probes out to check in the 1960s that the truth emerged. Similarly, because Epsilon Eridani is close in mass and spectral signature to our own sun, scientists have long speculated that it might be a good location for a habitable planet. The fact that it is also one of our closest galactic neighbors, just 10.5 light years away, has also made it a serious candidate for a visit by a first- or second-generation interstellar space probe, when we get around to actually constructing them.

With all this legitimate scientific interest, it’s not surprising science fiction authors jumped on the Epsilon Eridani bandwagon: in TV and movies alone, Epislon Eridani has appeared as the location of the Babylon 5 space station, Mr. Spock’s homeworld, and is the chosen destination for the crew featured in the upcoming Virtuality. This time it appears as if their faith in scientific speculation has been justified, with their stories avoiding the fate that befell Wells’ The War of The Worlds or Heinlein’s Space Cadet. At least, until we send that probe out.

The ignorance of the population is actually the result of a deliberate decision by the city’s builders. In order to keep the population tucked safely away for 200 years, the builders decided to remove the temptation of the surface world by excluding any record of its existence–and to make sure curious inhabitants stay within the cavern, technologies such as batteries and candles are excluded as well, literally tethering would-be explorers to a power outlet.

In this City of Ember is exploring a problem that science-fiction writers have wrestled with for decades, and which real-life space agencies have realized they must also address. In a nutshell, the problem is that the type of people who build cities, or want to fly spaceships, are not the best suited to sitting around doing nothing. In science fiction, as with City of Ember, this often crops up on the level of entire societies: how do you keep a closed society from either outgrowing the capacity of the systems that sustain it, or maintain good mental health among those generations who are doomed to being just a link in a chain not of their own making? Harry Harrison’s 1969 book, Captive Universe, is probably the classic of this genre, set onboard a so-called Generation Ship (a spaceship that takes centuries to cross between stars, with several generations of passengers living and dying before it reaches its destination). For a modern twist, check out Greg’s Egan’s recent Incandescence, about a civilization that must eke out an existence within the confines of a planetoid orbiting close to a neutron star.

Space agencies haven’t got to point of worrying about Generation Ships, but they are getting worried about the psychological health of the crews that will one day explore Mars. Unless radical and unexpected improvements in propulsion technology happen, people who explore Mars will have to endure a many-month-long voyage from Earth (and an equally long return journey). The problem is that a crew composed of the hard-charging, driven, and competitive Type-A personalities that dominate today’s astronaut corps may not do well once cooped up onboard a spaceship for a few months–a more mellow personality may ultimately be more successful. As a result, space agencies and private organizations like the Mars Society are conducting simulations to find out what happens to people sealed up together in a few rooms for long periods of time, and what mix of personalities is most likely to prevent murder or mutiny in outer space.

A helluva lot of fun actually, dispelling my fears about its premise. You see, Wright has tried to make a game based around evolving a creature from a tidepool through sentience and beyond before: in 1990, as a sequel to the seminal SimCity, he released SimEarth. SimEarth allowed players to control things like plate tectonics, or bombard a planet with comets to create oceans, in the hopes of creating an ecosystem conducive to intelligent life. While intellectually interesting, the actual gameplay was a little dull.

But Spore has fun baked into its DNA: the game takes up a whopping 4 gigabytes of disk space, and all those bytes show up in the deep richness of the game’s environments (and then some. For example, in a later stage of Spore, there’s an in-game tool you can use to compose your own national anthem.) A huge amount of effort has gone in making the gameplay intuitive, rather than have the player drown in a sea of complex controls with no clear idea of what to do (which was big part of the problem with SimEarth.) Rather than an omniscient God looking down on your worlds, Spore puts you right into the action, and gives you the feel of truly exploring something vast.

Spore has five distinct stages, and the biological evolution angle actually only shows up in the first two. The first stage is brief, as you try to avoid being eaten in a tidepool and accumulate enough points to be allowed to crawl onto land. The second stage is where things really get interesting: as a land creature, now the goal is to accumulate enough points to develop sentience. As you roam the landscape, you have frequently have the chance to alter and incorporate new parts into your body plan. Your personal preferences and style of play will soon mold a unique creature–want to feast on that herd of heavily-armored herbivores two hills over? Invest in some serious teeth and claws. Tired of getting eaten by a nasty predator? Maybe faster feet are what you want.

The kind of choices you make in each stage of the game manifest in different starting abilities at the next stage. After the initial two stages, cultural evolution takes over, and you find yourself designing villages and airplanes rather than better tails and arms. In truth, the two middle stages, where you bring your tribe to continental prominence, and then seek global economic, military or religious domination, are the weakest, simply for being the least original. The gameplay adopts a style familiar to anyone who has played a real-time strategy title. But they’re still fun.

The final stage is when you achieve interstellar flight: you can explore the universe, searching for rare artifacts, or trade and establish diplomatic relations with your neighbors, or go to war, or all of the above. Comets, asteroid belts, nebulae, black holes, gas giants and more fill a galaxy full of stars. You can visit every star, every planet orbiting every star, and every valley and hill on every planet–I’ve visited 250 star systems so far, and I haven’t even really made a dent in the total population.

My only quibble with the game is that there is no autosave and only one “save” slot per game, meaning that if you make a mistake that leads to disaster, you sometimes find yourself spending a lot of time just digging yourself out, but, on the other hand, this does play into the whole evolutionary concept of effects–good and bad, small and large–inexorably shaping the future.

So, Spore came out a few years later than anyone expected. Usually that means Bad Things (veteran gamers will remember the Daikatana debacle), but in this case the obvious attention to getting the details right means that Spore was worth the wait.

While it’s perfectly possible to bring enough bottled air, food and water for a space voyage lasting a few days — as was done in the early days of the space age — for longer journeys the amount of supplies you would have to bring along would overwhelm the cargo capacity of any conceivable spaceship. Instead, recycling is the order of the day, as is done now on a limited basis on the International Space Station where oxygen is generated from waste water such as moisture in the air.

Current recycling-based life-support systems use machines and chemistry. Ideally, for very long journeys — or for setting up long-term bases on the Moon or Mars — we’d like to use biology instead. Not only do biological systems have the capacity for self-repair and high-efficiency, they often can also be eaten, cutting down on the amount of food that must be brought from Earth. Hence all the interest in biospheres. (Incidentally, Isaac Asimov started talking seriously about this idea back in 1966, but he dubbed his self-contained ecosystems “spomes,” short for “space homes,” which never quite had the ring of “biosphere.”)

The Russian space program did a lot of early work on biospheres, but probably the best known attempt to create a biosphere was Biosphere 2, a huge structure constructed in Arizona that conducted a series of long-duration experiments in the 1990s. But as scientist and futurist Freeman Dyson described to DISCOVER, Biosphere 2 couldn’t maintain a closed ecosystem and air and other supplies had to be brought in from the outside. Current research is focused on getting things right with less ambitious projects, such as the University of Guelph’s project to develop small self-contained greenhouses that could provide astronauts with fresh vegetables in their diet and turn carbon dioxide into oxygen.

In other news, it appears that the Eureka producers have started playing a reality-game game — try calling the phone number on the cannister of film shown at the very end of the episode (by the way, the middle grouping is NH(zero) not NH(oh)).