Bridge of a Million Starships – for Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday

 

Needs another thousand years development but recent advances in fusion seem promising

I posted on 1^st December on just about the only definable (and safe!) point in space that all our intelligent neighbours - of ~1.4Trillion star systems - could be expected to agree on: the mid-point between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies, the ‘AMiTe point’ (see the post for where to find this in the sky).

The inhuman, monstrous-awful distances and timescales to get there recalls Blaise Pascal:

“Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere…  I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me.”

The great science-fiction authors weren’t daunted by such difficulties. One of them, Olaf Stapledon, even gave us the adjective ‘Stapledonic’ for concepts on the very largest scale (the word is now practically ungoogleable, returning one broken link and one unsafe site). But the greatest of all, and a good engineer to boot, was Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the geo-synchronous orbit for communication satellites, whose 105^th birthday it would be today. Boy, did he do immensity.

The journey of an intelligent species – all the way “from Apes to Angels” – is the background to 2001: A Space Odyssey, perhaps the grandest of all journeys. I’m not sure we’ll ever get to the Angel stage, but we’ve come such a long way and have further to go. A vast time dimension is the backdrop to The City and the Stars which takes place “two and a half billion years from the present - ten rotations of the Galaxy”. Humanity has, sort of, reached an end-point but could there be a chance for ‘rebirth’? (a cyclic view similar to mine). There’s a good jaunt to the Centre of the Galaxy, needing a faster-than-light space-drive, which adds distance (and emptiness…) to the picture but in the end it’s the renewal of the human race which will be the imperative. But the real immensities of distance and time – for spaceships obeying the unbreakable, unshakeable velocity limit of c – are best conveyed in Rendezvous with Rama (ignoring sequels). The mystery, “that chilling touch of the alien, the not-quite-knowable*,” of the apparently uninhabited ‘worldship’ of Rama passing through the Solar System remains unbroken at the end - but one conclusion that protagonists and readers can make with certainty is that Rama is one of a chain of similar ships, at least three! Another will follow in seventy years’ time.

I like this vision of chains of ships. If you are going the immense distance to the AMiTe point (see post of 1^st Dec and the AMiTe page on this blog), then being part of a chain means you can get the signal back. A million starships, spaced at 4 light-years apart, would give you a very good chance of interacting with a similar chain coming the other way ‘antiparallel’, or parallel - originating from somewhere else in the Milky Way. See the paper for the maths and rationale of 4.19 light year and 59 year launch separation. Is a million a big number? Not when you consider the >200 million SUVs in the world, and especially if you have several 10’s of millions of years – short by Clarke’s timescale in The City and the Stars. Clarke lived a long time (1917-2008) but didn’t expect to see things like a Space Elevator with his own eyes; he wouldn’t mind taking the long view.

But I think he would like to look up to that fuzzy blob of M31, the right-hand edge (edge closest to Sagittarius) and wonder just how many lines-of-a-million-starships, each originating from a different solar system, are threading their way to, and through, that ‘empty’ region of space. Could be quite a buzz there.

Picture credit IMDb under ‘non-commercial’ license.

*John Leonard, New York Times