Final Frontier

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Star Trek was right -- there is only one final frontier, and that is space...

Human beings are natural explorers, and nowhere is this frontier spirit stronger than in the United States of America. It almost defines the character of the US. But the Earth is running out of frontiers fast.

In Brian Clegg's The Final Frontier we discover the massive challenges that face explorers, both human and robotic, to uncover the current and future technologies that could take us out into the galaxy and take a voyage of discovery where no one has gone before... but one day someone will. In 2003, General Wesley Clark set the nation a challenge to produce the technology that would enable new pioneers to explore the galaxy. That challenge is tough -- the greatest we've ever faced. But taking on the final frontier does not have to be a fantasy.

In a time of recession, escapism is always popular -- and what greater escape from the everyday can there be than the chance of leaving Earth's bounds and exploring the universe? With a rich popular culture heritage in science fiction movies, books and TV shows, this is a subject that entertains and informs in equal measure.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. ix)
• 1 New Pioneers (p. 1)
• 2 Space Opera (p. 10)
• 3 Seeing Further (p. 29)
• 4 Escaping the Well (p. 42)
• 5 Backyard Explorers (p. 70)
• 6 Frontier Colonies (p. 105)
• 7 The Red Planet (p. 124)
• 8 The New Gold Rush (p. 168)
• 9 Probing The Galaxy (p. 196)
• 10 Breaking The Light Barrier (p. 244)
• 11 Frontier Spirit (p. 259)
• Notes (p. 265)
• Index (p. 279)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

1. NEW PIONEERS The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever. --Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in a letter to an unidentified recipient (1911) As most of us get on with our day-to-day lives, the concept of being a pioneer seems entirely alien. The closest we get to pioneering may be the choice of a different recipe for dinner, trying out that edgy new show, or being the first person from our town to visit an obscure foreign country. Yet the urge to boldly go where no one has gone before is a fundamental part of the human spirit--however much it has become a cliché, and however watered down it may be in reality. There will always be those who are prepared to risk everything to open a new frontier, whether they will be regarded as heroes or candidates for a mental health assessment. In history, many of those people who have ventured out across the world were looking for riches or territory to claim. Others simply wanted to be the first to a new location--or to expand the sum of human knowledge. To boldly know what no one has known before. Yet they have all shared an inability to stick with the status quo. They all had a very human urge to push the boundaries. And what greater frontier to open up than the very limits of the Earth, taking us into space? GO WEST, YOUNG MAN! Of all the people on the Earth, it is arguable that none has had as much of that frontier spirit, that urge to "Go West, young man!" and be a true pioneer, than the settlers of North America. This was encouraged by a unique opportunity. The first Europeans to reach America faced a vast and largely unexplored land that lacked the out-and-out hostility of the Australian outback, but instead always offered the promise of a new, potentially wealth-creating vista ahead. In part this spirit also seemed to reflect the kind of individuals who were prepared to take on the dangerous leap into the unknown that was involved in crossing the Atlantic and entering a new world. You didn't make such a huge break with everything you knew and understood if you were an unadventurous stay-at-home person. For some, the frontier was the only hope of an independent future where they would have more freedom to practice their particular beliefs. For others it was, rightly or wrongly, a huge opportunity and an adventure. (I am well aware that these new "unexplored" lands were often already, if sparsely, occupied. But for the purposes of identifying the pioneering drive, this was not then an issue.) Although I am sure there is no such thing as a "frontiersman gene," there seems to be some kind of inbuilt tendency to want to be a pioneer that was part of the forging of the American spirit. But what has happened to that tendency in a modern, interconnected world? It would be sheer ignorance to say that there is no opportunity for exploration left anywhere on our planet today. There are territories where human beings have only scratched the surface. There are vast sections of the oceans in particular that have still to be explored, and still some regions of the Earth that are relatively lightly known. What's more, there is always the second level of exploration where we go from simple discovery to a more detailed understanding. As Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg has pointed out, the loss of "terra incognita" from medieval maps does not mean that there is nothing more to discover: "In the middle ages Europeans drew maps of the world in which there were all kind of exciting things like dragons in unknown territories. Nobody knew what was at the Antipodes." Yet the world without "here be dragons," Weinberg argues, is not a boring place. He believes that it is better to know those fundamentals, and still to have lots of interesting detail to explore. "If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence ... That's an outstanding problem that has been with us for almost two centuries and we're not very close to a solution." Weinberg is drawing a parallel between exploring the world and knowing more about physics, but his point that there is plenty left to discover after the basic pioneering has finished continues to apply to our actual world, bereft though it may be of dragons. Even so, having a true frontier to open up, one that is genuinely new and more alien than anything we have ever explored before, will always be an attraction. The sea may be huge, but it has not got the possibility of setting up permanent colonies that goes hand in hand with the frontier. And as the Earth's unknown territories have one by one been crossed off the checklist, it is natural enough to turn our eyes upward, to look out to space, where there is enough room for pioneering to last the whole lifetime of a species and more. MORE THAN SCIENCE At the moment we tend to think of space exploration as a purely scientific endeavor--and it certainly can be that. But it is a mistake, not surprisingly one that is often made by scientists, to assume that scientific discovery is all that matters. The frontiers of space are just as susceptible to those other reasons for pioneering as opening up land-based frontiers ever were. As we will discover, manned missions into space rarely make sense from a simple cost/benefit analysis of their scientific worth. They have always been, and always will be, more about the other aspects of pioneering than anything else. Science is a secondary aspect of reaching out beyond our atmosphere. This is certainly true of our experience to date. The first, tentative steps into space were the result of political posturing. The USSR got the first satellite into orbit and put the first human being into space. In response, the United States had to find an opportunity to produce the true pioneers, making the first Moon landing a hugely attractive proposition. Yes, there was some scientific work done in the process. We learned a lot from the Apollo landings and their precursor missions. But the whole context of the race to the Moon, and the way that lunar flights ceased after Apollo 17 in 1972--only the sixth manned landing on our natural satellite, and remaining our last visit with a crew to this day--made it clear that it was all about getting there first, rather than any drive for scientific discovery. Since then, the human race has hardly done a lot to push back the frontiers of space as far as human exploration goes. Robotic substitutes like the Mars rovers and the Voyager missions reaching the far extremities of the solar system as this book is written, have certainly opened up aspects of our solar neighborhood for us as never before. And telescopes, particularly space telescopes like the Hubble and Planck satellites, have done wonders for us in terms of the kind of remote exploration made possible by the steady progress of light across the universe. But we haven't been out there, pioneering as human beings. EXPENSIVE EXPANSION The clear difference between spreading out across space and the opening up of the Western frontier in the United States is the horrendous overhead of breaking out of the prison formed by the gravity well of the Earth. At the moment, this is an incredibly expensive business. According to NASA it costs around $10,000 to get a pound of material into space. Given an average weight for an American adult of 180 pounds, that is $1.8 million per person--and that's without the far greater weight of all the support equipment and resources necessary to keep that person alive. It may have been hard and dangerous to become a prospector in the American West in the nineteenth century, but you didn't need to be a multimillionaire to do it. One of the prime movers in getting pioneers out to explore and tame this final frontier is going to be finding ways to reduce the cost of getting a human being into and around in space. This is both about finding new technologies to get us away from the Earth but also about thinking laterally and realizing that not everything involved in a mission has to come from Earth in the first place, making use of resources that are already out there. If we can justify the expense, the reasons for getting to the new frontier remain the same as they ever were. As is clear from the current Chinese space program, politics remains a very significant driver. It may be less so in the United States at the moment--since the fall of the USSR, there really hasn't been the concept of a space race--but as Chinese activity builds it may be that once again the U.S. government will feel the need to flex its muscles and make it clear who has the technological supremacy--and in principle also who has a military foothold in locations where gravity alone has the potential to turn a lump of rock into a more powerful weapon than a nuclear bomb. However, if the price is right, we will see all the other traditional drivers for pioneering coming into play. Ever since the early days of science fiction there has been the concept of the space miner--the deep-space equivalent of the forty-niner, who scours space, typically cruising around the asteroid belt, prospecting for rare minerals, or even water. With cheap enough spaceflight, the only real difference between the spacer and the early prospectors is that we put a higher value on human life these days. Space mining would be extremely hazardous, so on top of the energy costs will come safety costs too. That is unless we are prepared to accept that those who volunteer for such jobs would be prepared to take on significantly higher risks than we allow on the surface of the planet. In return, such miners could expect much greater rewards for their effort than anyone undertaking a similar job back on Earth. And then there are those who seek a better life. A LIFEBOAT FOR THE WORLD Our population is rising. Developing nations are rightly looking at the vastly greater consumption per head of the West and want the same for themselves. More cars. More travel. More possessions. More energy consumption, burning yet more fossil fuels. And the rest of us show no sign of slowing down our frantic consumption. However, it is clear that the Earth's resources and space are both limited. One of the biggest drivers to explore the new frontier has always been the opportunity to build your own homestead, to establish personal space for an individual or a family away from the overcrowding and oversight of the city. In the very long term, if the human race still exists for long enough into the future, we will need to get out into space to continue to thrive. As astronaut John Grunsfeld, a veteran of five space shuttle missions, put it at the Humans 2 Mars Summit at Washington, D.C., in May 2013: "Single-planet species don't survive. That's a pretty sound theorem--just look at the dinosaurs. But we don't want to prove it." In a sense, Grunsfeld's words are a truism. Given we only know of one inhabited planet, then inevitably any species that has died out will show that "single-planet species don't survive." To be fair to the dinosaurs, they managed to stay around for over 160 million years more than we have so far. In sheer survivability terms, we have a long way to go to catch them up. But any planet has a limited lifetime, and should the human race survive long enough, there will come a point when we need to get beyond being a single-planet species if we are to continue our existence. (I ought to stress "should the human race survive long enough." A more accurate truism is that species don't last forever. It is hard to imagine the human race would still exist unchanged after millions of years.) In about 5 billion years the Sun will expand to become a red giant, flowing out into the solar system as it fluffs up to occupy a volume that is bigger than the Earth's current orbit. The Earth could in principle survive this, as it will have drifted out from the Sun by then and won't be eaten up, but it will not have been inhabitable for billions of years. This is because the Sun is gradually becoming hotter. We only have another billion years or so to go before it is beyond our ability to survive on the Earth. If human beings, or more likely our distant descendants, still exist in a billion year's time, we will need to have left the Earth to live on the final frontier whether we like it or not. Physicist Stephen Hawking, never one to avoid a dramatic headline, has suggested that we have a shorter-term imperative to get out into space if we want to continue surviving as a species. "We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history," Hawking commented in an interview. "Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million." The scientist believes we will soon render the Earth uninhabitable, making manned space exploration essential. THE ULTIMATE FRONTIER It isn't necessary to go to such drastic extremes and conjure up dystopian scenarios, though. That same drive that pushed settlers across America is likely to see colonists taking on the solar system, and perhaps beyond, on a shorter timescale than our ability to render the Earth uninhabitable. Whether we are talking of free-floating, constructed living environments in space or taking on the Moon or Mars, the pressures of life on Earth are likely to make it more and more likely that some will move away from our home planet within centuries or even decades. These first brave explorers (some might say foolhardy) may not survive. Many of the early Europeans who left for new territories to the East and West didn't. But they will have opened the way for larger-scale colonization to come. In the short period of time that humans have been taking a scientific view, our picture of the universe has expanded immensely. Until a few hundred years ago, the usual idea of the universe was simply the solar system. The scale they imagined stopped around the orbit of Saturn--less than a thousandth of a light-year across. As our astronomical equipment has improved, so has our awareness of the scale of habitat that surrounds us. Until the early twentieth century the Milky Way, around 100,000 light-years in diameter, was considered to be the whole universe. We now know that our nearest neighbor among large galaxies, the Andromeda Galaxy, is 2.5 million light-years away, and the universe itself is at least 90 billion light-years across, featuring an uncountable number of planets and other smaller bodies. Even with the limited understanding of the ancient Greeks, though, the possibilities of greater stretches of frontier, waiting to be conquered, proved an attraction. According to the first-century Greek historian Plutarch, Alexander the Great was told by his friend Anaxarchus that there were an infinite number of worlds out there, causing Alexander to begin crying. When asked why he was crying, Alexander replied: "Do you not think it a matter worthy of lamentation that when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one?" The idea of space as the ultimate goal for exploration--and, yes, perhaps conquest--is nothing new. The kind of exploration of the final frontier that we can look forward to has yet to happen in reality. The cost of getting up into space has held us back. But the difficulties involved have not been able to suppress the exuberant human imagination. In novels, short stories, movies, and TV shows, the whole business of space pioneering has been examined and critiqued for decades. Science fiction is not and never has been a good predictor of the future, but it is both the nursery that has nurtured the ideas of space travel and the inspiration for some of the best real ideas in the field. So where better to start than on the frontier of this speculative art form? Copyright © 2014 by Brian Clegg Excerpted from Final Frontier: The Pioneering Science and Technology of Exploring the Universe by Brian Clegg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

British science writer Clegg (Extra Sensory) reveals the technological and social challenges we must deal with in order to launch ourselves farther into the universe. Throughout history, explorers have sought knowledge, riches, and new lands to claim, but Clegg warns that this final frontier will demand far more of us than any previous exploration. Humans will need to develop more efficient technologies for everything from getting out of Earth's gravity well to turning space-based resources into building materials, fuel, water, and breathable air. We'll also need to create-and sustain-long-term political and social interests in space exploration to ensure the funding that can make it a reality. Clegg offers potential ways to make exploration "pay," including space tourism, mining, and Mars One, a reality TV show-based scheme to get humans on Mars-an idea that's equally disturbing and tantalizing. Clegg sets his book apart from others through his thoughtful survey of fictional space exploration in books, films, and television, providing examples of adaptations and threats-both social and technological-that we'd face in space. Covering a wide range of topics from space elevators and solar sails to space arks and hardscrabble "frontier" colonies, Clegg offers readers much to think about. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

Final Frontier is an engaging executive summary of humankind's past attempts at local (our backyard) "space" exploration and of the future prospects for much more challenging and difficult attempts at extending the range of "what is really practically possible." Prolific science writer Clegg, e.g., Gravity (CH, Jun'13, 50-5650), is able to weave a good deal of physics into his account. He has the rare ability to make the physics flow with the narrative and to do it in a way that is clear to someone with a modest physics background. Starting with Sputnik and concluding with a discussion of probes of the galaxy, he uses the physics as a tool to make reality checks on the speculative but uses conjectures to illustrate what may be possible. Even solar system exploration with more than probes, e.g., colonies, is filled with difficult challenges, including the amount and cost of material and the dangers of radiation. Further explorations, even to the closest stars, are much more complex. For example, time dilation and special relativity play a key role. At the end of the book, he provides a thoughtful examination of the purpose of these endeavors. This fine work belongs in all college libraries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Kenneth L. Schick, Union College (NY)

Kirkus Book Review

Although it's a clich, space actually does remain the last frontier, according to British science writer Clegg (Extra Sensory: The Science and Pseudoscience of Telepathy and Other Powers of the Mind, 2013, etc.) in this imaginative account of how to rekindle the thrill of the Apollo program and launch further pioneering voyages.In the United States, the exhilaration of beating Russia to the moon in 1969 evaporated quickly. The space shuttle (now retired) and the International Space Station generated only modest national attention. Clegg has a low opinion of the space station as a means of exploration, regarding it as entirely focused on the Earth. He makes an exciting case for looking beyond to the moon, planets and starsand for doing this sooner rather than later. Transportation remains an obstacle, with rockets burning chemical propellants that are expensive, heavy and unlikely to improve greatly. However, futuristic technology should overcome this: nuclear fission and fusion rockets, solar sails, ion thrusters and mass drivers. Once in space, humans must survive for months (going to Mars) or millennia (to the stars). Clegg explains how, adding that space and other worlds will provide resources (hydrogen, water, perhaps fuel) and profits from mining. For the near future, money remains the greatest barrier to exploration. Clegg's suggestions for alternative financinge.g., space tourism, private enterprise, a media-driven reality showseem dubious compared with the impetus behind Apollo: beating a hated superpower rival to the punch.Readers will enjoy Clegg's lively, enthusiastic account of the technical barriers to exploring the universe, but for the first steps, they should follow the news from China, the only nation with an active manned space program. Angry at being excluded from the ISS by the U.S., China would love to deliver some kind of payback. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.