tempus fuggedabbouddit

welcome to part three of a little screed originally provoked by this admittedly tongue-in-cheek new york times article blaming snafus plaguing our expensive new large hadron collider on gremlins from the future. all cheekiness aside, stories like this serve as fodder for the public's mindless love of the three great fictions of science fiction. part one raided the star wars' intergalactic cantina. part two pulled the plug on star trek's warp drive. today we take a time-out on time-honored time travel.

actually, "trek wars" fans get a bit of good news this time: time travel is possible. but that's good news only if you're looking for a one-way ticket into the future, because there ain't nothing else on the itinerary.

as pointed out in part two, gravity warps space, and since space and time are initmately bound (whence the term "space-time"), gravity also warps time. this has been demonstrated with atomic clocks, which run slower under gravity's influence. take this idea to its conclusion and you can "time-travel" by simply parking a spaceship next to any gravitationally intense object. neutron stars, white dwarfs and black holes are perfect. as you bask in the glow of the gamma ray death scream of interstellar matter spiraling past you into oblivion, events on earth will appear to flit by, but to those on earth monitoring your ship, you'll have entered a state of essentially suspended animation.

but wait — what if there are no black holes in the neighborhood? don't worry, einstein's theory of special relativity demonstrates that the effects of high-speed motion (acceleration) can simulate the effects of gravity for the traveler. we all experience this anytime we ride in a vehicle. when we speed up, we're pulled into our seat; when we cruise, we feel nothing (other than the normal pull of gravity, which we typically ignore), as we do when standing still; when we slow down, we're pulled out of our seat. so in lieu of finding a black hole, you can "time-travel" by simply stepping on the gas and not letting up. as you eventually approach the speed of light, you'll seem suspended in time to those left behind as your existence is extended thanks to relativity.

still, neither of these scenarios represent the sexy type of time-travel that "trek wars" fans love dreaming about: where they get to undo or avoid some remorseful event in the past, play the ultimate stock tip or become a b-movie actor:

sorry to disappoint again, but there ain't no going home. (and obviously not in 2004!) not only are there just as many practical theories about time-travel as there are about warp drives — that is, exactly bupkis — there's no evidence that time can travel backwards or that we can travel into the past. time's arrows fly in only one direction.

consider the definition of time: the interval between two events. if correct, in order to reverse time, we must reverse the events. consider a glass bottle, tossed from your hand to the trash bin. it hits the rim and shatters on the floor, sending pieces big and small everywhere. reversing time is therefore a humpty dumpty act; a time machine would have to retrace the trajectory of every shard as well as the trajectory of the intact bottle as well as the trajectory of your hand — that's a bit of a workout, isn't it?

actually, more than you can imagine, considering that your hand, the glass, the trash bin, the floor and the air surrounding them are all composed of a ginormous (you just knew that word was coming, didn't you?) menagerie of subatomic particles, all in constant motion and interaction. suddenly, the workload on our time machine just went up exponentially: it has to retrace the changes in the spin, vector, orbit, charge, vibration, etc., etc. — that is, every characteristic we can name, including those we have yet to discover — of every particle in that ginormous cloud of particles making up every object we're sending back in time. the machine would also need to isolate the cloud of particles comprising you the operator from its effects (it wouldn't do you any good to go back to 1976 and not remember that leisure suits actually sucked!), no small task if we have to account for the air moving in and out of your lungs, the hair and dandruff falling from your scalp, and the dust mites in your eyelashes!

now that's a workout! imagine trying to send a city or the entire planet back in time. and i suppose it would be just rubbing it in to point out that you wouldn't be able to send anything back before the date you first turned on your machine. (you wouldn't have any data!)

needless to say, no one has a clue how to reverse the order of events in our universe. relativistic physics allows us to play games with our perception of events, because our perception changes as we change our frame of reference, which affects when the light that originally captured the events finally reaches us:

changing our frame of reference changes the apparent distance (time) between the dots (events) on the timeline without affecting their order.

but just changing our frame of reference is like playing games with a film projector. speeding the film up, slowing it down or trying to run it backwards just ain't the same as manipulating the actual events it portrays — no more than photoshopping a image of yourself will get you back your hairline. that's voodoo. the two have nothing to do with each other. we might be able to play with the projector, but time's arrows fly on, unperturbed.

the li'l engine that couldn't

welcome back, "trek wars" fans! i trust that my last rant, the first of three on science fiction's three biggest fictions (intergalactic relations, space travel and time travel), didn't leave you too demoralized, despite my sincere efforts to do exactly that. after all, we live among a potentially exciting galactic club with 100 million potential members, so it's a little shocking that nobody can actually get in the door. talk about "talk to the hand!"

the problem, of course, is that everyone's too damn far away, nobody's got wheels and half the hood's underage anyway. sending out the invites alone, traveling at the speed of light, would take 15,000 years just to get to our first date. if we're lucky. forget about rsvps.

but what about faster-than-light travel? what about "warp drive"? after all, everyone knows nobody walks in l.a.!

well, it's certainly the most popular and most seriously considered way to roll: all you have to do is create a "warp bubble" around your ship that allows it to compress space ahead of it and expand space behind it, exactly the way it's shown in the "next generation" intro.

so ... just exactly how does one create a warp bubble?

... crickets ...

or in more clinical terms:

no scheme that may allow travel at warp velocity has yet been devised that has also been accepted by mainstream science.... they give no knowledge as to how a warp bubble might actually be established.

an approach that may be facilitated by our present level of technological advancement has yet to be proposed.

but figuring it out is just a matter of time, amirite?

*if only* ...

by manipulating the extra spatial dimensions of string theory around a spaceship with an extremely large [translation: ginormous] amount of energy, it would create a "bubble" that could cause the ship to travel faster than the speed of light.

the energy requirements for some warp drives may be absurdly gigantic, e.g. the energy equivalent of 1067 grams might be required to transport a small spaceship across the milky way galaxy. this is orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the universe.

we know gravity warps space, as demonstrated by the bending of light around our sun. unfortunately, even the sun, whose gravitational binding energy is measured (in joules) by a six-comma-whatever-whatever followed by 39 zeroes, manages to deflect light only one quarter of a thousandth of a degree, which should give everybody a gobsmacking clue to the scale of the ginormous (there's that word again!) additional forces needed to generate the amount of warping needed to make our "warp bubble", a bubble powerful enough to compress 15,000 light years of space into a weekend jaunt! all we need is a warp engine capable of doing the work of a ginormous number of suns!

but hey, we'll have the most powerful fuel available in the universe — antimatter — feeding the engines, amirite?

again, sorry to disappoint; antimatter's powerful, no doubt ... but it should be obvious by now that it just doesn't have the bang we need. it's the law of diminishing returns, folks. we got the biggest bang for our buck sixty years ago when we figured out fission and fusion. compared to chemical energy, nuclear energy outperforms it by up to six orders of magnitude. but antimatter outperforms nuclear energy by only four orders of magnitude, not nearly ginormous enough to turn a one megaton ship into the gravitational energy-equivalent of a thousand suns. that's like an ant producing the power of a freight train!

and to the suffering bowels of the budget-conscious, antimatter does tend to give the bean counters indigestion:

antimatter is said to be the most costly substance in existence, with an estimated cost of $25 billion per gram for positrons, and $62.5 trillion per gram for antihydrogen. this is because production is difficult (only a few antiprotons are produced in reactions in particle accelerators), and because there is higher demand for the other uses of particle accelerators. according to CERN, it has cost a few hundred million swiss francs to produce about 1 billionth of a gram (the amount used so far for particle/antiparticle collisions).

... which, with no way to store it, tends to make it a little hard to come by:

assuming an optimal conversion of antiprotons to antihydrogen, it would take two billion years to produce 1 gram or 1 mole of antihydrogen ...

but "trek wars" fanboys and fangirls needn't succumb to dispair. the situation is actually quite encouraging if we can apply moore's law to problem: by doubling the production rate every two years, we'll have our first gram in only 60 years. in just another twenty years after that, we'll finally have our first kilo of the most expensive fuel ever pumped, and just in time for the machines to wipe us out.

next rant: time travel.

size matters

ok, i'm calling bullshit on this story about spoilsports from the future screwing with our expensive new supercollider ... because production delays never happen to big projects. riiiight. talk about your lame excuses for failure!

now, i don't really need to call bs on this story in particular, since the reporter, who describes the storytellers as "otherwise distinguished physicists", sounds like he's already serving up his article on a platter of tongue, stuffed delicately in cheek.

still, it's shameless headline-grabbing stories like these, often the bastard child of some scientist's impish poke-in-the-eye and some journalist's laziness and gullibility, that continue to warp john and jane q. walmart's already rudimentary understanding of just what is and isn't possible in this universe. they've been left fat, lazy and loopy by a steady diet of star trek and star wars.

now don't get me wrong: i'm a huge fan of "trek wars" and science fiction in general (you should see my library) and i wouldn't be the armchair geek i am without their inspiration. on the other hand, i'm also a big fan of superhero comics. but the same folks who can generally grok that humans can't fly or deflect bullets or shoot lasers from their eyes, will tell you with no effort of thought that they believe the three great fictions of modern sci-fi: that aliens have or will visit the earth; that we'll return the courtesy after figuring out faster-than-light travel; that time-travel into the past is possible.

each of these fictions has already consumed more ink than i can practically devote to them, so i'm going to keep things short and sweet. today's rant covers alien races. there'll be no messy details, math, no greek and no quiz. i just want certain hard realities to sink in for once.

in the colorful dramasphere "trek wars" inhabits, the universe is as crowded as calcutta with intelligent races. here's a poem i once read in the philly weekly many years ago:

the only aliens we like are the ones on star trek 'cause they all speak english — martin espada, "gov. wilson of ca talks in his sleep"

ok, it's obvious that's a joke, but still, it's a big universe, right? we can't be the only ones here, can we?

most likely not. the ginormous size of the universe, its ginormous age and the ginormous number of stars in it make it pretty hard to argue against the universe performing multiple encores. in our own galaxy, one among 100 billion galaxies, people paid to study these things estimate 100 million suns like our own, which is considered pretty run-of-the-mill in size and age. that's 100 million rolls of the dice, which we know already hit the jackpot at least once. we're likely surrounded by extraterrestrials.

but there's a catch. (you knew there'd be a catch, didn't you?)

alas, the very same factors which make alien neighbors a virtual certainty — the ginormous size and age of the universe — make it impossible for any of us to ever meet. most folks hear the numbers and dumbly acknowledge them without attempting to truly appreciate their ginormous scale. others, like young earth creationists, simply refuse to accept them. the numbers are stupefying and, like a curt cabbie, they simply drop our tiny brains off with a terse "end o' the line, mac". creationists jumped out the ride after only 6,000 years.

in our own galaxy, those 100 million candidate suns are on average about 15,000 light years apart. we're about one million light years from our nearest neighboring galaxies and everybody's moving even further apart due to the continued expansion of the universe. these distances are inconceivably vast, beyond even the paid imaginations of the writers of "trek wars", who would have viewers believe that texting between the stars will be no more inconvenient than picking up your communicator and that traveling between them no more inconvenient than shuttling from boston to burbank.

but it's not so much a problem that the universe is "too big" per se: the real problem is that our lives are waaay too short! to appreciate the dilemma from a different perspective, consider the lowly housefly. it lives only a few weeks — what's the likelihood that a boston fly will ever meet a burbank fly, especially if neither knows the other exists or quite where to look? it's the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack — times gazillion! and even if both knew where to go, they'd be dead long before they could meet even halfway.

oh, and did i point out the ginormous age of the universe? 14 billions years and counting makes it unlikely that the lifespans of different alien civilizations will overlap during a period when they might be capable of communicating with each other. with your nearest neighbor just 15,000 light years away, you'll have to wait only 30,000 years for a reply. talk about a dull conversation!

remember, in the 4 billion years that life has thrived on earth, 3 billion of that stretch of time was dominated by mute, deaf and blind one-celled microbes, and of the last billion, over 99.99% had to elapse before we became capable of sending signals, much less leaving the planet. if earthlings are typical of the intelligent races in the galaxy, the law of averages eliminates half our prospective neighbors as too young to join the "trek wars" fan club, since they're still too busy pulling themselves out of the ooze. and the other half, sadly, may already be dead.

next rant: space travel

all that's missing are the droids

today's addition to the garmin nüvi gps custom vehicle icon fleet: star wars landspeeders: (click to download)

these landspeeders are available in both new and pre-owned models. (one's from a kid on tatooine who hardly used it!) so come on down — you won't find deals this crazy in any other galaxy!

NOTICE: these custom icons that i make freely available are not for resale!

previously posted custom icons include tron lightcycles, several star trek shuttlecraft, a star wars tie fighter, the 1966 tv batmobile, even more batmobiles, speed racer's mach 5 and the beatles' yellow submarine.

all that's missing are the trails

today's addition to the garmin nüvi gps custom vehicle icon fleet: tron lightcycles, in red and blue: (click to download)

NOTICE: these custom icons that i make freely available are not for resale!

previously posted custom icons include the several star trek shuttlecraft, a star wars tie fighter, the 1966 tv batmobile, even more batmobiles, speed racer's mach 5 and the beatles' yellow submarine.

not for resale

i see that my generosity is not to go unpunished:

apparently the warning in the readme file supplied with my icons is not explicit enough. apparently this seller can't follow his own advice: "please read ebays policy carefully ..."

the concept of copyright itself is quite simple: if you didn't create it, you can't sell it — not without documented permission from the creator.

and while i may be the creator of these icons, even i can't sell them — not without risking the wrath of the likes of dc comics, warner bros., paramount pictures, george lucas, the beatles and any other holders of copyrights and trademarks attached to the sources of my creations.

so my advice to anyone contemplating making a buck or a pound off my icons — don't. i've already filed an infringement notice with ebay.

just be happy i'm giving them away for free to my fellow gps enthusiasts and not keeping them to myself. let sleeping dogs lie. it's not worth the £1.99.

the force missing all is that is

the latest addition to the garmin nüvi gps custom vehicle icon fleet: a star wars tie fighter: (click to download)

NOTICE: these custom icons that i make freely available are not for resale!

previously posted custom icons include the several star trek shuttlecraft, the 1966 tv batmobile, even more batmobiles, speed racer's mach 5 and the beatles' yellow submarine.