What about All these People? Drought, Population, and Writing Scifi

Recently, the UN changed its estimates for the world population by 2100.

Credit: Scientific American

Like it says, the revision is for Africa. The estimate has doubled from 2 to 4 billion.

Overpopulation is a key issue in The Pathfinders (working title). How do we fund or justify interstellar travel, against a backdrop of overwhelming need? Population is one thing, climate change is another. Both are intersecting.

Climate Civil Wars
There's good reason to believe the Syrian Civil War is a water war. Thomas Friedman gave his assessment of this in the New York Times:

"This Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when an extreme weather event, the worst drought in Syria’s modern history, combines with a fast-growing population and a repressive and corrupt regime and unleashes extreme sectarian and religious passions, fueled by money from rival outside powers..."
It is perilous to analyze a recent conflict, more so a current one. Historians are often uncomfortable with this, because we simply don't have the sources yet. We certainly do not have the benefit of detachment.

Bearing this in mind, let's try. Here are some factors that can trigger climate civil wars:

- Underdeveloped, growing population (lots of young, angry, uneducated men)
- Poor water access
- Shit government

- Neighbors with these problems, too.

There are many places in Asia and Africa that already match these criteria. Global warming and increasing population will aggravate these. Religious fundamentalism has already been fueled in particular by the first. It will be interesting to see if decades from now, historians decide to attribute recent religious extremism partly to climate change. It is of course, too early to tell.

What does this have to do with my book?
The dislocation climate change will bring is important to the book. In part, because it's expected. I can't write about 2050, unless I try and depict 2050 as best we can predict it. "Cli-Fi" is also in right now.

Secondly, war means action scenes! If I can have a stealth Abrams fight an exo-suit, I will. Writing needs to be fun. For me, that's Chinese aircraft carriers and US drones-on-the-ground.

Thirdly - I wanted to explore a conflict it can create, over the use of space. One camp wants resources committed to getting people off the planet. The world's powers are building orbitals as new, stable, living spaces. The other camp wants to send expeditions to the nearest stars.

How do you fund exploration and science, during a challenge as great as a World War? 

Or can we? World War optimism.

Navin Weeraratne

Won a Short Story Competition!

Won a competition run by Lexicons, a body that promotes Science Fiction and Fantasy writing in Sri Lanka. The contest is once a quarter. Last time I got my ass handed to me, but this time things went better.

Full disclosure: my wife runs Lexicons. She's not one of the judges though, and the submissions have their names removed.

Here's the story:
http://lexiconwordart.blogspot.com/2014/11/project-scrybe-iii-winning-entry.html

Astronomy at 550 AU
I wrote this story mainly explore a neat idea I bumped into recently. Gravity warps space, and so bends the path of light. Light passing around a body will converge at a point. This is a good place to put a telescope. We already use gravitational lensing, it's nothing new.

Light passing near the sun, converges 550 AU away. What if we placed a telescope, there? It's a tremendous distance (about 10 times Pluto's distance), but the sun itself would act as a lens. Such a telescope would be staggeringly powerful. Not only could it identify the gases atmospheres of Earth-like worlds, but even show us their surfaces!

The idea was pioneered by Von Eshelman at Stanford. Physicist Claudio Maccone is probably its biggest champion. He's suggested a mission to 550 AU, named FOCAL. For more information about him and FOCAL, there is an excellent link here.

Gravitational Lensing. Credit: Martin Kornmesser & Lars Lindberg Christensen

Making the Solar System feel Huge
I also experimented with creating a sense of deep space and deep time. Deep time is quite straight forward - names get strange and you add a few centuries here and there. There's a bit of extrapolating ahead (have the Jovians been terraformed? What's the post-Singularity like?), but nothing too taxing. Most of it, you won't use.

Deep space was tougher - I was dealing with just our solar system. Generally, we treat it as it were relatively small (and it is). However, we don't think much about how truly distant the planets are they from each other.

Then, there are Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. How often do we consider them, when we think about the solar system? How many people even know about them? Even within the Oort Cloud, bodies are (on average) as distant from each other, as the Earth is from the Sun.

There's plenty of space in the solar system to found nations and set up empires. In "The Wardens," I tried to convey this.

Parting Thoughts
I don't think I'll revisit the world in "The Wardens," but it was fun to write a short story again. I used to do a fair bit when I was younger, and I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed it.

Navin Weeraratne

Interesting Links

In the process of researching a book, one learns a great deal. I'm going to share the most interesting links (to me at least), every so often. 

The Golden Record of the Voyager Probes
This site has all the content that we've sent off on Voyagers 1 and 2. Listen to Bulgarian folk music (or perhaps a war song. I can't tell, but Izlel Je Delyo Hagdutin, track 23, is incredible).  See a picture of a man grilling fish (picture 80). Check it out, you won't be sorry. 

China's Space Plane Program (PDF)
A study from 2011. It covers the suspiciously military-seeming nature of Chinese space planes. It looks at current projects like the Shenlong "Divine Dragon", and where they could go.

Picture Credit: Paviavio

Ford Class Aircraft Carriers
They have stealth features, carry drones, and are expected to mount lasers. These are to remain in use till 2110. Important to bear in mind for near-future writing. 

Picture Credit: DefenseTech.org

The Pion Rocket

What propulsion should we use to reach the stars?

The Pathfinders begins with the organizers of humanity's, first, interstellar colony program. The propulsion they choose determines everything. Travel time, payload, and therefore scope.

I sat down today to plan the chapter where they go over their options. Personally, I'm a fan of light sailing Von Neumann probes. However I didn't want my characters to have it that easy. In the setting, the year 2050 is relatively constrained. Von Neumann research is banned, and AIs are not trusted. With these easy answers removed, what would the characters pick?

In my mind, I already had the answer: antimatter. I picked it because fuel is a core problem of interstellar travel. You're going to need a lot of it. Stopping on arrival, means even more fuel. You'll need fuel just to carry the fuel you'll need, in order to slow down.

What kind of quantities are we looking at? Consider Project Daedalus, a plan by the British Interplanetary Society. It's destination, Bernard's Star, is 6 light years away. Daedalus would have been a nuclear fusion pulse rocket. It would fuse deuterium pellets 250 times a second, for four years. It's payload was 450 metric tons, it's fuel, 50,000 metric tons. It was to do a flyby - it didn't have enough fuel to slow down.

Source: British Interplanetary Society 

Both fusion and fission rockets have dreadful efficiency. A fission rocket converts 0.1 percent of its fuel into energy.  A fusion rocket could do 0.3 to 0.9 percent. You can see how this leads to staggeringly high fuel loads.

Antimatter though, converts 100% of its mass into energy. You cannot get better than this if you're carrying fuel. Here's an online calculator you can use to see just how much energy is packed into antimatter.

Source: EdwardMuller.com

So antimatter fuel is the best stuff ever, with 100% conversion! Or is it? 

Turns out that I was quite wrong. Antimatter will give you 100% conversion to energy - only if it's a positron colliding with an electron. With other particles, other products are released as well. 100% conversion isn't even desirable. What it is, are a mass of high energy x-rays. These can't really be guided out an exhaust. X-rays can be bent, but there is nothing practical about it.

Beamed Core Antimatter Propulsion
A bit of Googling, and I started papering over the gaps in my layman's knowledge. There are a few antimatter engine concepts out there. What stood out to me, was beamed core propulsion.

Beamed core involves colliding protons with anti-protons. The products are not pure energy. Instead, you also get a bunch of pions, both charged and neutral. With beamed core, a powerful magnetic nozzled forces the charged pions out the exhaust.

Source: Keane and Zhang

Hence, the pion rocket.

The requirements for the magnetic nozzled involved seemed beyond our technology. Then in 2012, a high school student and his mentor solved this problem.

They downloaded some simulation software from CERN, and ran some numbers. They then designed a magnetic nozzle that worked with a much weaker magnetic field. The design not only solved this, but raised the exhaust velocity from a predicted 0.3c, to 0.69c.

You can read their original paper here, It's quite layman friendly.

So What Are The Numbers? 
Part of the challenge with writing hard science fiction, is that you need to get your Science straight. This is that much harder if you're just a layman, like me.

Now that I had cleared up the propulsion, I needed to flesh out the details. What was the efficiency, for mass converted into thrust? How much fuel would be carried by a pion rocket to Alpha Centauri?

I found one reference to a reference, for 11% efficiency. It's not something I could use, so I have to give up on that front (for now). However, after more trawling, and I found this lovely chart on NextBigFuture.com:

Source: NextBigFuture.com

It shows that a 1 metric ton of Antimatter, gets 1 metric ton of cargo, up to a tenth the speed of light. Those are fantastically easy numbers to work with. Even better, 0.1c is the speed of the colony ships.

Making Antimatter
Even at ton for a ton, a hundred ton probe still needs a hundred tons of antimatter. We produce antimatter routinely, in particle accelerators. However, the amounts are depressingly small. It is estimated that CERN could produce a single gram of antiprotons - in a hundred billion years.

However, this antimatter is produced a byproduct. What if a facility was built, specifically to produce it? Scientist and Scifi writer Robert Forward tackled this question. Forward determined that production of antimatter could be scaled from one part in 60 million to one part in 10,000.

Cribbed from the excellent space travel blog, Centauri Dreams:

"Where will we get the energy to run these magic matter factories? Some of the prototype factories will be built on Earth, but for large scale production we certainly don’t want to power these machines by burning fossil fuels on Earth. There is plenty of energy in space. At the distance of the Earth from the Sun, the Sun delivers over a kilowatt of energy for each square meter of collector, or a gigawatt (1,000,000,000 watts) per square kilometer. A collector array of one hundred kilometers on a side would provide a power input of ten terawatts (10,000,000,000,000), enough to run a number of antimatter factories at full power, producing a gram of antimatter a day." - Forward 


Farming Antimatter
Antiprotons have been discovered in space in the Earth's magnetosphere, specifically the Van Allen radiation belt. It's formed by cosmic rays smashing into the belt - and is a self-renewing resource.  Jason Bickford writes that we can expect the same at other planets in our solar system, that have magnetospheres. Jupiter stands out here - and here's his paper on it.

Whether it's manufactured in sunward factories or mined from planetary magnetic fields, there will be nothing easy or cheap about obtaining antimatter for deep space missions. Especially if tons and tons of it are needed.

The alternative is of course go fuel-free: solar sails pushed by lasers or microwaves. However, I need things to be a bit challenging for the characters. Antimatter for pion rockets will be what they're after. Let's see how challenging this is going to be for them. 

Source: Madmaxz.com

The EmDrive - To Use or Not?

Picture Credit: Peswiki

When I was finishing Burning Eagle, I came across the EmDrive. It's a device that allegedly produces thrust with nothing but microwaves. No propellant necessary: just a power source is needed.

The creator, Roger Sawyer, has been ridiculed since building the device in 2006. The system appears to be a reactionless drive (what the hell is it pushing against?). If this is so, then the EmDrive breaks the conservation of momentum. You can see why this has not sat well with the scientific community.

In 2008, a Chinese group tried replicating his experiment, and reported success. However, no one took them seriously. This was the state of things at the time of my writing. I had to make a decision: would the Atlantis freezer ship be kitted with anti-matter engines - or an EmDrive?

I went with anti-matter: no one was questioning the science behind it. The EmDrive was simply too hot to handle.

Then, just a couple of days ago, NASA announced it had conducted a similar experiment. The results were positive.  There are still questions (the control showed thrust, as well as the experiment. How does that make any sense?), but NASA's involvement has given the EmDrive, street cred. More experiments will follow, and the matter will be settled, either way.

My problem though, is that it impacts my new book, The Pathfinders.

The Pathfinders is about the first interstellar colonies of the Burning Eagle universe. Occurring before the Hedrons were found, interstellar travel is at the book's core.

I had planned for the colony ships to use anti-matter. Now, I'm not so sure. The EmDrive is too much to ignore, but too little to use. If I leave it out, I risk publishing a dated book. If I use it, the book could end up pseudo-science rubbish.

One possibility is to write both - chapters dealing with both anti-matter, and EmDrive systems. Then I can put off the decision till the book is finished. This will come with its own challenges, but it puts off the final decision.

Either way, it will be interesting to see how the EmDrive pans out.

Picture credit: Wired