Live With It

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

In the case of faster-than-light travel, we’re stuck with Ignore It or Unexplained Science. It’s possible to Live With It. If you can’t go faster than light, go slower than light. We can add Bussard Ram Jets or light sails, gradually accelerating to a useful fraction of light-speed. We won’t even try for trans-light speed, heading outward at a relative crawl. That’ll require decades or centuries of travel. That could work, but those solutions arrive with their own new problems.

We’ll need a “generation” ship even for the close stars. Youthful astronauts launch for Proxima Centauri; their grandchildren arrive to send back data. That involves maintaining a closed ecosystem for decades and shielding passengers and plants from a universe awash with cosmic rays. Otherwise, Generation 1 dies from lack of oxygen or fails to reproduce after being sterilized. Everybody dies of cancer, or the crew can’t control the ship because of accumulated brain damage. Social problems aboard would be huge.

A well-shielded craft would solve some problems, but its mass would reduce it to even slower crawl-speed, no matter what was pushing it. The crew would go from “generation” to generations. Could we maintain a viable social system and a closed ecosystem that long? I doubt it.

A round trip? You’re kidding, right? Slower-than-light flights are all one-way. Earth wouldn’t be your Earth anymore if you ever returned. The big problems rise from keeping a crew awake for an incredibly long time. So, put ‘em to sleep. We don’t have “cold sleep” or suspended animation for humans, but those are the kind of reasonable future developments that Science Fiction thrives on. Don’t wake up the crew, unless you can put them back to sleep. Machines don’t have to worry about century-long flights. Let a super-computer oversee all the sleepers. We could call him “Hal.”

Maybe you could wake the crew periodically. That leads to social complications. What if something goes wrong with the rotation? What if an active crew member goes bonkers?

You’ll need a ship that cosmic rays can’t reach the crew or the frozen passengers. A shaped asteroid would be the logical vessel. You’d have to postulate controlled fusion for energy, a perfectly recycling closed ecosystem, frozen sleep, and solutions to a myriad of social problems, but those are difficult. Trans-light speeds are impossible.

With so many scientific mountains to climb, why would we go there in the first place? Maybe we have to. Has the Earth become uninhabitable? Is the Sun about to explode? Have aliens driven us from our home? The writer can shine with new ideas there. Maybe we just want to go to the stars. Could interstellar travel become a religious quest? Could a star trip become the ultimate “high” for the enormously rich? Perhaps, for certain pre-disposed humans, the stars will become the ultimate Mt. Everest. Each new reason is the parent of another story.

Past writers have found a dozen exits bypassing the “No FTL” roadblock. Try out a few yourself.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.