Peter Cawdron's Blog, page 9

Fermi’s Paradox, really?

In the 1950’s, Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi proposed a paradox by asking, where is everyone? His reasoning was simple, given the sheer size of the universe, what are the chances we’re alone? If we’re not, where is everyone else? We should look out into space and see signs of intelligent life around other stars.

Conservative estimates put the number of galaxies in the visible universe at around a hundred billion, and the number of stars at 10^24. The problem with both of these numbers is we have no way to appreciate them in every day life. They’re simply too large to hold any meaning. But hold a grain of sand out at arm’s length, and you’re blocking the light from 10,000 galaxies!

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Astronomer Frank Drake came up with the first methodical way of estimating the possibility of life elsewhere in our galaxy (remembering ours is just one of at least a hundred billion). He arrived at the conservative figure of 10,000 other civilizations, while Carl Sagan thought the number could be as high as a million.

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Some estimates for the entire universe end up with absurdly large numbers like “ten million billion” alien civilizations! The bigger the numbers being spit out of our estimates, the more perplexing it seems that we don’t see evidence for any other intelligent life in outer space. Fermi’s Paradox is a head scratcher. Or is it?

There’s a problem with Fermi’s Paradox. We’re not actually sure it’s a paradox.

Think back to the numbers we just looked at—10,000 galaxies, containing trillions of stars, all obscured behind a single grain of sand. If just one of those galaxies contained life, we wouldn’t know it. We can’t see any of those galaxies with any clarity.

There’s a case to be made that WITHIN our galaxy we don’t see any other intelligent life, but beyond our galaxy, our ability to look for life is non-existent. It’s a bit like someone standing on the shores of Greece saying, “I see no evidence for Egypt.”

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Fermi’s observation isn’t really a paradox. Look at how little we’ve actually searched. Even our most advanced planet-hunting space telescope has only focused on a tiny patch of our own galaxy. It’s no surprise we haven’t found life. Honestly, it would be a surprise if we had.

Remember, there are roughly a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, but again, numbers like this are meaningless without context.

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Ah, that really doesn’t help.

Just how big is a hundred billion? Well, a million seconds pass in 12 days, a billion seconds in 34 years, a hundred billion seconds pass in well over three millennia.

Is there life in outer space? Yes. Earth itself is proof of that.

Is there any other life in outer space? Well, we’ve just started looking. We really cannot say one way or the other, but we have no reason to think there isn’t. Fermi’s got us looking, and that’s a good thing, but don’t underestimate the magnitude of the challenge.

 

 

How accurate should science fiction stories be?

As accurate as a speedometer.

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There’s a difference between accuracy and precision.

Accuracy is a relative term that’s situation appropriate. When it comes to speedometers, it’s enough to know I’m driving at about 60mph. I don’t need to know that I’m traveling at precisely 59.945mph or 61.232mph. Either approximates to 60mph, one’s slightly faster, the other slightly slower, but by margins that are meaningless.

The same principle holds true when it comes to science fiction. If my protagonist is orbiting a planet in his spaceship, it’s entirely accurate to say he’s traveling at tens of thousands of kilometers an hour. There’s no need for precision—and this is the point—there’s no need to be slavishly precise, just accurate.

How accurate are these three darts?

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Well, it depends. Strictly speaking, only one hit the bullseye. The other two missed. If I threw them from five feet away, they’re not bad. If I threw them the length of a football field they ALL are astonishingly accurate, although only one of them is precise.

The point is… stories can be accurate without being precise.

In the movie Alien Covenant, there are a lot of heart-pounding moments, but there are a few scenes where darts weren’t even thrown at the board, they were simply dropped on the ground. Exploring a strange alien spacecraft without any kind of biological protection is absurd. At least try to throw a dart at the board, please.

When it comes to the prospect of finding any kind of alien life, be that microbes, plants or animals, we are astonishingly concerned about biosecurity—and not just because we could be infected, we could contaminate an ecosphere with an invasive Earth-species that overwhelms that environment.

[image error]The Cassini space probe launched from Earth in 1997 (which is accurate, although if you want to be precise, it launched on October 15th of that year)

Cassini spent almost seven years drifting toward Saturn, arriving in July of 2004. Since then, it has heralded an astonishing amount of scientific data, and revealed that at least one of the Saturnian moons is habitable. There’s a remote possibility that Enceladus could harbor life. As far as we can tell, it’s got the right conditions for life to evolve, but we have no evidence of life.

By the time Cassini’s mission ends, it will have spent twenty years in space, and still we’re not taking any chances on Earth microbes hitchhiking to one of the moons of Saturn, so we’re going to crash Cassini into Saturn.

Think about how absurdly small the chance is that we could infect life on Enceladus. For that to happen, Earth microbes would need to survive…

An alcohol wash (that doesn’t leave them drunk)
Baking at upwards of 120C for 30 hours
Sterilization with ultraviolet radiation

And that’s before launch… Once in space, temperatures can vary from hotter than your oven to colder than any point on Earth. What are the chances microbes could survive that? What are the chances Cassini would accidentally hit Enceladus? What are the chances anything could survive the impact? What are the chances frozen microbes from Earth scattered across the surface would affect life several miles beneath the ice? Well, a fair answer would be absurdly small but not zero, and so we’re not going to risk it.

Now, ask yourself what measures someone would take when finding a crashed alien spacecraft on another planet? Is wearing a spacesuit really too much to ask? Oh, and the irony is… the original Alien movie got this right.

It’s not hard to make science fiction accurate, and it doesn’t require anything like the precision we see in real life, just a little common sense.

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Science fiction isn’t hard

The great shame of modern science fiction is that it’s often lazy, treating science loosely, and perhaps that’s partially because we’ve called plausible science fiction, “hard.”

Science fiction is not “hard” it’s simply science + fiction.

Fiction is fictitious. By definition, it’s not true. Therefore it shouldn’t surprise us if some elements of a story aren’t entirely correct. One could nit-pick at even the “hardest” of “hard” science fiction stories and find fault, but science fiction should, at the very least, make an effort to incorporate actual science. Lasers and spaceships are not enough.

I don’t mean to say stories should be exacting in every detail and slavishly correct. Science itself is not settled. Science is not fixed. We know more about Mars today than we did yesterday, and tomorrow, we’ll know even more. Does that negate what we know today? No, it builds from and extends our knowledge. The same is true of science fiction. We can give fiction the same breathing space we give science, while still expecting to be entertained in a plausible manner.

By making one category of science fiction “hard” we’ve discouraged some writers from even trying, which is our loss, and leads to movies like Alien Covenant.

The Alien franchise has some astonishing stories in its history, but all too often, follow up movies are forgettable because simple science is ignored.

Minor spoilers for Alien Covenant follow.

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Movies like Prometheus and Alien Covenant appear to have given up on basic science, which is somewhat paradoxical as the lengths they go to in terms of set design, costumes, stunts and special effects are simply astonishing.

How have we got to the point where the science in science fiction is ignored?

All stories need tension. Alien Covenant achieves this in part by having the “away team” land in the middle of a storm. Communication is poor, so the interstellar spaceship has to descend into the storm at the risk of breaking apart. Problem is… the spaceship never actually orbits the planet. It’s ALWAYS hovering somewhere overhead. The oversimplified computer graphics even show it descending vertically like a helicopter.

The irony is… they didn’t need to come up with such a contrived scenario. Just let the spaceship orbit the planet, as spaceships are wont to do, and it’ll be out of contact with the ground crew roughly half the time, with communication strained when the craft is low on either horizon. Hey, a little bit of plausibility suddenly sneaks in and strengthens the story, rather than weakening it.

Also, the periodic nature of orbits could have been used to drive more tension, as there’s nothing the ground crew can do but wait for the next pass. Ah, but instead, we get some mumbo jumbo about the ship breaking apart in a storm.

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A lot of the time, it’s not just science that’s ignored, it’s common sense, like walking around on an entirely new planet covered in rich plant life (and presumably microbes), without wearing a spacesuit. What could possibly go wrong?

Devices should make sense. A life support systems that cremates someone when it fails probably isn’t going to get off the design board, let alone into production on a starship. In the same way, Prometheus had a super-duper advanced fully automated medical system that couldn’t operate on women. WTF?

Another scratch-your-head moment came when, after tracking a mysterious signal across the depths of space, the landing shuttle inexplicably touches down eight kilometers away from the source, and at a considerably lower altitude. A perfectly good flying machine is left sitting on the rocks while the crew have to climb a mountain.

How did no one at least think of flying over the site of the signal to have a look? Perhaps seeing a derelict alien spacecraft would have given pause for thought.

The first two alien movies are legendary, but not just because they were ground breaking, they were plausible. In Alien, our intrepid explorers wear spacesuits while investigating the ruins of a crashed extraterrestrial craft, and the acid from a face hugger eats through the helmet, allowing it to get to poor Kane.

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In Alien Covenant, people stroll into a similar crashed alien spaceship like they’re exploring a new shopping mall. Oh, look… over here everybody. Macy’s has a sale on…

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As if wandering around an alien biosphere without a spacesuit isn’t dumb enough, the crew of the Covenant wander into the crashed spaceship wearing nothing more than beanies to ward off the cold. In the future, it seems biosecurity protocols don’t extend beyond Earth.

It’s not hard to make science fiction plausible. Alien did it. Why can’t Alien Covenant?

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One thing Alien Covenant did really well, was to portray some old-fashioned anatomical studies by the stranded Michael. Various dissections, and aging sketches conveyed a sense of study and scientific consideration (that took a rather macabre turn later in the story).

Movies like Prometheus and Alien Covenant spend millions on sets and special effects, and labor over details with meticulous care. If only they paid as much attention to the script we’d end up with something as iconic as the original

Killer openings

I know a lot of people rave about killer opening sentences or paragraphs, but honestly, I think it is highly overrated.

The purpose of the opening chapter of any book is to establish character, not plot. Remember, the plot IS the characters in action.

In Mars Endeavour (being republished as Retrograde by John Joseph Adams Books), I use the opening chapter to introduce the reader to life on Mars. The book starts after midnight, after a long day of work, with a bunch of Chinese scientists playing cards with a couple of American scientists. There's banter. There's personality. There's no action.

Rather than "a strong opening sentence" I went for a strong closing sentence to the chapter, with the final words being, "They just nuked Chicago."

The effect of this (I hope) is the reader has begun to relate to the people in the story, and thus care about them, so when they learn about Chicago it's meaningful.

My advice to writers is... forget about a killer opening sentence. Think about a killer closing sentence to your first chapter. Don't rush your plot points. Keep the characters first and foremost in your story.

Cheers,
Peter

Why search for life in outer space?

Recently, a reader asked me, “Is there a particular reason why so many of your books are first contact stories?”

Great question. I’m fascinated by the concept of First Contact with extraterrestrials for a number of reasons…

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Feeling lost? You’re right here!

1. Finding life elsewhere will profoundly change the way we see reality

Regardless of whether the life we find is intelligent, originating from beyond our solar system, or microbial on Mars, on Europa around Jupiter, or on Enceladus in orbit around Saturn, the evidence of life arising independently of Earth will change our perception of ourselves.

For thousands of years we’ve been self-centered. All the world’s religions place Earth at the center of the celestial sphere. Copernicus and Galileo were criticized for suggesting otherwise, but they were right. Religion declares that Earth is special/unique. There can be other worlds, but Earth is the center of creation, or so we’re told. To find life arising spontaneously elsewhere will overturn thousands of years of self-importance.

Is there life in outer space? Undoubtably, as that’s where Earth itself is! Earth floats in space like a cork on the ocean. Our planet is proof life can thrive in deep space.

Is there any other life in space? That’s the question we’re looking to answer. Naysayers dismissing this idea are short sighted—like those in the 1400s that refused to believe an entire continent lay to the west of Europe. As persistent as the belief was that there were only scattered islands and mythical lands, the Americas lay waiting to be discovered. Columbus himself died thinking he’d opened up a route to Asia, never realizing he’d discovered the American continent.

The observable universe contains at least 200 billion galaxies and upwards of 10^24 star systems, more than all the grains of sand in all the deserts and on all the beaches on Earth. Out of these we have conducted a cursory survey of just one (our own). When we look at planets around other stars, we’re staring at mosquitos buzzing past a porch light at a distance of a hundred yards. Our ability to see exoplanets is extraordinary, but doesn’t really tell us too much about them (yet).

We’ve detected 3,475 planets out of an estimated ten trillion planets in our galaxy alone. Our effort so far is like examining a cup of sea water looking for whales. We’ve got a long way to go, but to say there’s no life elsewhere is the height of arrogance and hubris. Given time, the odds are such attitudes will be proven wrong.

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A replica of the Santa Maria

2. First Contact will mark a dividing line in history.

There have been dozens of turning points in the development of civilization, from slow burning activities like the invention of agriculture and writing, to fast-acting inventions like Gutenberg’s printing press, Galileo’s telescope, Newton’s mathematics, etc, but none of them have transformed society as much as First Contact will simply because any alien species that can reach out to us will be tens of thousands of years more advanced than us.

Imagine teaching a bronze-age people like the Egyptians or the Babylonians how to build their own iPads, or a Mars Rover, and you get an idea of just how rapidly and radically humanity will change.

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Building the pyramids

3. They’ll provide a counterpoint to our intelligence.

At the moment, we are unmatched on Earth. We can do whatever we want without critique from anyone beyond those that care enough to study cause/effect, but it’s too easy for scientists to be dismissed. I’m sure there will be resistance to change, but having an independent point of reference beyond ourselves will (I hope) allow us to see our own shortcomings more clearly and change accordingly (this is the basis behind the ending to Anomaly).

Think about how our culture has changed from slave-owning days, or from when women couldn’t vote, and consider that we’re still in transition, still moving toward equality. Too often, people exploit each other for monetary gain, for ideological reasons, or out of petty selfishness—all that will be exposed as shallow and immature.

Astronauts commonly refer to the Overview Effect, where just the act of seeing Earth from orbit provides an overwhelming sense of our own personal insignificance in contrast to the sheer importance of life on our planet. Imagine if we could all experience that.

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Earth rise over the lunar surface

4. First Contact will help us see beyond the moment.

All too often, we’re consumed with our daily affairs and we forget just how astonishing it is to be alive. We’re like an insect crawling through the grass, not seeing the splendor of the garden around us. In reality, life is an astonishing privilege.

Carl Sagan said, “We are made of star stuff.” Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “We are the universe considering itself.” We are quite literally the universe brought to life. When I look at the stars at night, I wonder who’s looking back. Our lives are incredibly short. We’re like mayflies living for a mere five minutes. We should spend that time enriching our understanding and, from that perspective, enriching the lives of others.

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We are made of star stuff

Thank you for supporting independent science fiction.

How relevant are reviews?

How relevant are reviews?

Book reviews are of critical importance for writers as they provide an independent assessment of a novel for potential readers, the problem is… they’re often bipolar.

Here are two reviews for my novel Mars Endeavour—one star and five stars.

The high rating for this book on amazon is incomprehensible. The writing feels like it was done by a fifteen-year old in a creative writing class
I rarely write reviews… You know a good story when it holds you and gives you an emotional reaction and maybe even a physical one, a slight increase in the heart rate, tension in the stomach as you turn the pages

So who’s right? Serious question. Which review should you believe? And why?

You see, the problem is most reviews are polarised—they represent the extremes rather than the norm.

When less than 1% of readers leave a review online, the result invariably represents the outer edges of a distribution curve rather than the sentiment of the majority. It seems, only those that either love or hate a book will bother to comment on it.

Looking at a classic distribution curve, it’s clear reviews catch only those on the fringes.

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With 99% of readers not providing any rating, we never get to see what the majority of people think about a particular book.

The problem is two-fold.

Not enough ratings/reviews are left by readers.
There’s no way to know who to believe. The naysayers or the enthusiasts?

I’d like to propose a solution, and I dearly hope someone from Amazon considers this as I think it would work—personalize ratings.

At the moment, reviews on Amazon appear something like this.

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But what if Amazon also included a personal rating? Where a comparison is made between books you’ve rated in the past, and what those that agree with you back then think about the book you’re currently considering.

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Your personalized rating would be the intersection between these groups.

In other words, predicting whether I’ll enjoy a novel by matching my past reads with other readers that share similar likes/dislikes.

It really doesn’t matter how the other readers have rated other books, so long as we roughly agree. If we all rate the (hypothetical) novels…

Cars on Mars with three stars,
Loons on Moons five stars, and
Guns on Suns one star.

The question as to whether I’ll enjoy the fourth book in the series, Who goes to Pluto? is highly likely to be similar to those that rated Cars, Loons and Guns in a similar manner to me. It could potentially look something like this…

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Or conversely…

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With hyperlinks taking me directly to those reviews of this book by readers that rated other novels in the same way I did.

In both circumstances, the reviews are now tailored to be more applicable to my previous likes and dislikes, still giving me the choice to consider or reject reviews as I see fit, but ensuring I have a more accurate assessment of whether I’m likely to enjoy a particular novel.

This approach encourages readers to rate lots of books as the more books they rate the more accurate the predictions about future reads will become.

This would also be an effective means of dealing with both troll reviews and fake reviews, as they’re taken out of the equation.

Some other points to consider are “liked reviews” should count toward the personalized review rating. Also, it might be impractical to get a 100% match on “books other readers have rated the same as me,” so there may need to be a tolerance of 1-2 stars applied, but I suspect this would ensure reviews are relevant to readers and provide them with an accurate assessment of whether they’d enjoy a particular novel. There may need to be a minimum threshold of 10 comparative reviewers to ensure accuracy.

In essence, this would shift the focus from trusting random reviews to trusting in similar, like-minded reviewers. To my thinking, this approach would ensure reviews were relevant and remove confusion/uncertainty over whether someone is likely to enjoy a particular book. It also increases the level of difficulty for those gaming the system unfairly.

Do you agree?

Do you have any other ideas?

Feel free to comment below.

 

 

SETI & the Technological S-Curve

Over Christmas, I was reading Carl Sagan’s novel CONTACT and enjoyed his thoughts on SETI—the search for extraterrestrial life. One of the points Sagan makes is that any alien intelligence would be far more advanced than humans and should have already colonized the galaxy.

Sagan’s reasoning is based on the fact that we have emerged rapidly as a technological/scientific civilization.

Within 10,000 years, we’ve gone from pushing rocks around the desert to build extravagant tombs to walking on our moon. Taking a longer view, our recent progress is even more impressive. For at least 1.8 million years, we have been using stone implements, hand-held axes that remained largely unchanged for 99% of that time. In essence, we were at a technological stand still until some point in the last 10,000 years. “We” stalled for longer than Homo sapiens have existed as a species! Then, in what equates to less than 1% of our tool-using history, BOOM… we’re walking on the Moon. That’s quite extraordinary.

And our progress continues to advance at an astonishing pace. In the last hundred years or so, we’ve banished such insidious diseases as smallpox and polio that plagued our species for thousands of years. We’ve travelled into space, explored the depths of our oceans, invented computers, cured diseases, transformed our economies, and in the midst of all this it is easy to see our progress as unrelenting, almost inevitable, but the truth is far different.

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Although our progress may seem exponential and always positive, it is actually the result of overlapping technologies following what’s described as an S-curve of efficiency. Steam gave way to oil, as an example, while propeller aircraft gave way to jet engines. As one technology reached its peak, another newer technology took over, propelling us still further on. But is such technological growth sustainable? Are there physical limits?

Ah…. this is where the concept of SETI comes into the discussion. For over fifty years, we have wondered, “Where are they?” By our reckoning, the heavens should be buzzing with extraterrestrial activity, but all we hear is silence. Why? If we can progress so rapidly, why couldn’t anyone else? And given our rapid growth over what is an astonishingly small period of time, other intelligent species should have already had a good headstart on populating the galaxy, but there’s no one out there. Why?

One possible answer lies with the S-curve of engineering efficiency. There’s no way a steam powered car could ever outrun even a modest modern car, or a propeller plane a jet. Once these technologies reached their limit, they had to be superseded or the peak of efficiency would never increase.

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The lower portion of the curve marks how our learning grows, and we begin mastering the technology and improving its efficiency, but eventually every technology reaches its limits—the point where no more efficiency can be gained.

When it comes to the universe at large, there’s two very pertinent limits. On the sub-atomic scale, the Planck length. On the large scale, the speed of light. It may be that these physical constraints simply cannot be overcome by switching from propellers to jets (or whatever the equivalent may be).

Breaking the speed of light is not simply an engineering problem as breaking the speed of sound was. As much as I love a good scifi book/movie, anyone that tells you the speed of light will one day be breached really doesn’t understand what they’re talking about. The speed of light is the speed of reality.

E = mc2 is the most famous equation in science, but it’s not the only way Einstein and the scientists that worked with him understood this principle. They also thought of it as m = E/c2. In Einstein’s words, “It appears far more natural to consider every inertial mass as a store of energy.” In other words, we can no more travel faster than the speed of light than light itself can travel faster than the speed of light.

What’s more, even if we could travel close to that speed, impact with dust particles, even with individual atoms scattered within the vacuum of space would be disastrous. At 99% of the speed of light, a single gram of “stuff” out there would generate the kind of energy unleashed at Hiroshima.

Stars are really far apart. Four light years is a deceptively simple way of saying 2.469e+13 miles. Travelling between stars requires enormous patience at sub-light speeds, and is grossly impractical, especially when you consider that whatever energy you put into starting your journey also has to be put into stopping at the other end.

Just as we’re currently struggling to justify a “space economy” any advanced alien civilization would struggle to justify an “interstellar economy.” There’s no doubt it could be done, but it is anything but routine. Any colonies would be effectively in a state of permanent isolation. Rather than being the nirvana of space travel, interstellar colonization may simply be a pipedream for all advanced civilizations.

The physical limits of technology is an interesting way to consider SETI, and may help explain the silence we observe. We may be bound to these islands in the sky we call stars.

Given the resourcefulness of humanity, I have no doubt we’ll one day develop generation ships, or automated ships that can grow-humanity-on-demand once they find a suitable planet, but the pragmatist in me outweighs the romantic. Such voyages will be extremely risky and highly long term propositions that may have minimal practical benefits, and perhaps that’s why we don’t see ET everywhere we look. They may be the exception rather than the norm. Perhaps there are dozens, even hundreds of advanced alien civilizations out there, but they’re isolated in far-flung regions and are unable or unwilling to venture between stars.

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Free Porn!

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Yes, free porn… although perhaps not in the traditional sense of the phrase.

Alien Space Tentacle Porn has been banned by Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Amazon Marketing Services. Why? Because they judge it by it’s title (even though it’s got a great cover), and not by its content or the numerous reviews that highlight it as scifi comedy.  This Christmas, I’m giving away free copies of Alien Space Tentacle Porn, so what are you waiting for? Go grab a copy.

Please, retweet, forward this post to a friend, post on Facebook, whatever, get the word out. What’s not to love about a little free porn?

Here’s what readers have said about Alien Space Tentacle Porn

This is awesomely funny … Don’t let the title discourage you, it’s not actually pornographic 
This is my fourth or fifth book by Peter Cawdron, so I knew I was in for an enjoyable read. This was a First Contact story with a twist, and some welcomed comic relief. 
From alien encounters to crazy conspiracies. It’s truly the perfect Christmas present 
I did not expect the story I got. Do you know how rare that is after five decades of reading? 

Writing is an art. It takes months, sometimes years for an idea to come to fruition as a book, but it starts with a conceptual decision, a central idea. Books like Galactic Exploration are unabashed reboots of classics like Star Trek. The clue is right there in the title: Galactic/Star Exploration/Trek. Alien Space Tentacle Porn is my take on an off-the-wall reboot of Men In Black. It’s equal parts funny and serious, and is just a tad disconnected from reality… or is it? That will be for you to decide.

From December 21-25 of 2016, Alien Space Tentacle Porn is free on Amazon, so why not finish the year with a bang.

I love this zany story. I hope you do too.

If you grab a copy, be sure to leave a review on Amazon and GoodReads. Your opinion of this story counts far more than mine.

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Good clean fun

 

 

 

 

Mars: The Lonely Planet

Ralph Kern interviews Peter Cawdron about Mars: The Lonely Planet.

Mars: The Lonely Planet

Thanks for joining us here at SFFWorld for the next interview on the themes, technologies and events which feature in an author’s work.

In this interview, I’m joined by Peter Cawdron, the international best-selling author of twenty science fiction novels, novellas and short stories. So far, his stories have taken us on odysseys through the plains of Africa, out to Saturn and far beyond the plane of the Galaxy.

Today though, we’re going to focus on our closest neighbor where his next novel, Mars Endeavour is set.

So, let’s start at the beginning, Peter. To the glance, Mars is a barren desert. If I were to pick any destination to visit in the Solar System, just why would I want to go there?

You wouldn’t. If you could choose any destination in the solar system, there’s lots of other places that are far more visually spectacular, places that are potentially better science targets, like Europa around Jupiter or Enceladus around Saturn. The problem is distance.

Mars varies between roughly 40 million and 225 million miles away depending on the orbit, whereas Saturn is 750 million miles away at its closest approach, reaching up to 1.2 billion miles. It’s not just that it’s 18xs the closest approach of Mars, but that the need for fuel and the difficulty of such travel increases exponentially. Getting humans to Mars will be extremely difficult. Getting humans to any of these other tantalizing locations borders on absurd by comparison.

When it comes to travel, there’s a concept known as payload fraction . For aircraft, this is around 50%. For spacecraft, it’s well over 90%. The Saturn V that put humans on the Moon was rated at 95.7% meaning the crew and Lunar Module, etc, accounted for less than 5% of the launch mass. When you look at a space rocket sitting on the launch pad, MOST of the mass won’t leave Earth—it’s mainly fuel needed to simply escape Earth’s gravity well. To get anywhere in the solar system, we’re going to need to build and/or fuel a spacecraft in orbit, in much the same way we’ve built the International Space Station. And as you can imagine, the cost and difficulty in doing that is going to be insane.

So if we could go anywhere, we probably wouldn’t settle primarily on Mars as there’s far more interesting targets elsewhere, but Mars gives us the opportunity to build an outpost. And thanks to the abundance of perchlorates on Mars, mining rocket fuel should be possible, meaning Mars may become the stepping stone for humans to reach Europa and Enceladus.

Mars is kinda like a gas station on the way to Disneyland. Mars has lots of interesting science targets, but none quite as rich and promising as the moons of the gas giants.

Percholrates found on Mars can be converted into rocket fuel

You can continue reading this interview on SFF World…

 

 

 

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Mars Endeavour

Recently, I launched a novel called Mars Endeavour that takes a realistic view of life within a colony on the fourth planet. The tagline for the story is, “NASA prepared us for every eventuality on Mars—they never prepared us for what could go wrong on Earth.”

In the course of writing the novel, I was privileged to get feedback from Dr. Andrew Rader, who works in the US space industry. Dr. Rader was kind enough to write the foreword for this novel, and I’ve reproduced it here for your enjoyment.

Foreword by Dr. Andrew Rader

As a scientist, engineer, and Mars enthusiast, I was thoroughly delighted with Mars Endeavour. Throughout the book, Peter pays a great deal of attention to scientific and engineering detail while at the same time telling a compelling and plausible story, placing Mars Endeavour amongst the ranks of classic hard science fiction titles like Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001:A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous with Rama, and Hammer of God.

Image credit: NASA

Although no dates are given, the level of development in Mars Endeavour suggests a timeframe that would be achievable within about the next 50 years or so, assuming a sustained human effort aimed at Mars. Mars is the only other world that we have the technology to reach today which possesses the full spectrum of resources necessary to support long term human settlement. Humans to Mars is a goal that we can achieve with existing and near-term technology, and (I would argue) is the primary purpose of sending humans to space. The effort of sending humans to Mars, even in the large scale portrayed in Mars Endeavour, is fundamentally an engineering challenge. Unlike many of the challenges we face on Earth, there are no scientific breakthroughs required for the human exploration or settlement of Mars – only engineering effort and widespread dedication to the goal.

Image credit: NASA

In Mars Endeavour, Peter lays out a highly realistic vision of what life in a Martian settlement would be like. Great effort has been made to capture what it would be like to live on and explore the Red Planet, in terms of base construction, robotics, in-situ resource extraction, Martian geography, surface features, extravehicular activity, and crew interpersonal relationships in relative isolation. The base is built within naturally occurring lava tube caves for ease of construction. Such caves also exist on Earth, but with the lower gravity on Mars (38% of Earth’s), they should be much larger on Mars. Subsurface conditions within a lava tube cave would be significantly more benign than on the surface, in terms of temperature variations (swings of up to 150 °F or 80 °C in a day/night cycle), shielding from radiation, and protection from dust storms. These underground environments are also a likely potential habitat for past or present Martian life, making them excellent targets for exploration.

Image credit: NASA

Mars is one of the best candidates for off-Earth life in our solar system, along with some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. It seems clear that Mars was once a much warmer and wetter place. Billions of years ago, Mars had a thicker atmosphere, and by virtue of the greenhouse effect, this higher pressure and temperature may have supported surface oceans and an Earth-like environment. As described in Mars Endeavour, the surface of Mars is a very old environment. Considering that environmental changes probably took place over millions of years, that liquid water still persists under the Martian surface, and that we find life even in the harshest and most isolated environments on Earth, it is likely that there may yet be pockets of existing Martian life to be found today.

Image credit: NASA

Finding life on Mars would have extremely broad implications, especially if life on Mars had a different origin from Earth life. Do all worlds with a friendly environment develop life? We know from recent planet-finding missions like the Kepler Space Telescope that planets are extremely common, and many of these seem to be about the right distance from the Sun to support liquid surface water. Indeed, there seems to be at least eight billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone—one for each human on Earth. So a question arises—do most or all planets capable of supporting life develop life, or is Earth a rare phenomenon? We currently only have decisive experimental results for a single planet: Earth. A single 1 out of 1 result is statistically meaningless, but finding even signs of extinct microbes on Mars could indicate that life is abundant throughout the entire Universe, and we are probably not alone.

Image credit: NASA

Establishing branches of human civilization on other worlds would not only sustain our species in the case of disaster, but it might go a long way towards preventing it. Human spaceflight and sustainability engineering are just two sides of the same technology. I can’t think of any project that would have greater leverage than going to Mars in terms of teaching us about zero-waste living, energy and resource conservation, and closed-cycle life support. The mere act of sustaining humans on another world would dramatically impact our water, energy, and food production, and recycling. Although at first many supplies would have to be sent from Earth, there would be a huge incentive to produce as much as possible locally. Providing for people on Mars is a logistical challenge not so different from providing for people in harsh environments on Earth.

Image credit: NASA

Whereas Andy Weir’s The Martian captured what it would be like for an individual to live through a small-scale disaster on another world, Mars Endeavour expands the scale to tell the story of a multi-planet catastrophe in a compelling and realistic way. How would people in a fledgling colony on another world react to a life-threatening disaster? Would they split into national factions, or come together in commonality and shared mutual interest? Above all, Mars Endeavour is a human story about how we react to a crisis: as cultures, nations, groups, and individuals. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Andrew Rader, PhD Aero/Astro Engineering

Author, Leaving Earth & Epic Space Adventure

Twitter: @marsrader

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You can find Mars Endeavour on Amazon for only 99c during the month of September

 Mars Endeavour is available exclusively on Amazon