Ordering pizza from Pluto

I wrote this article back in July 2015, when the New Horizons space craft finally made its close encounter with Pluto. It launched in Jan 2006 and arrived at Pluto in July 2015. This article from NASA gives a detailed recap of the New Horizons mission. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/new-horizons/in-depth/ What I talked about then is just as true now.

Like everyone else even remotely interested in space, the Universe and everything, the close encounter with Pluto has my mind completely boggled. Water ice? On Pluto? That is going to have huge ramifications. I'm all agog waiting for  the scientists to produce their theories which may well have implications on the development of life on Earth.

Since I'm not a scientist, I'll wait and see. But the encounter with Pluto does raise another point, often ignored in science fiction. It takes over four hours for data to transmit from the New Horizons ship back to Earth. Let's extrapolate on that. Imagine you're a crew member on the New Horizons ship and you have an attack of the munchies. You ring Earth, a copy of the Domino's flyer from ten years ago in your hand.

“Hi, I’d like to order the peperoni, please. With anchovies, no pineapple.” (Wait nine hours)
“Sure. Would you like garlic bread with that?”
I think your pizza might be cold before it was delivered.

Real time conversations are even more of a problem in space opera if you’re planet hopping. If light can take years to go from one star to us, how long would it take any other type of signal? (We’ll leave out sound waves, which don’t move through a vacuum.) Answer – same as light. About 300,000km per second. Sure, that’s fast. But having a conversation with someone, say, four light years away is going to be a tad tedious.

And yet, so often space opera ignores this fact of physics and has folks chatting from spaceship to planet, or planet to planet, as though they were using Skype back in the 21^st Century on jolly old Earth. A case in point is the famous scene in The Empire Strikes Back, where Darth Vader’s Executor is chasing the Millenium Falcon through an asteroid field. Admiral Piett was delighted to be able to tell Vader the Emperor was on the line, so the star destroyer could be moved out of the asteroid field in order to send a clear signal. And then they had the little chat, the Emperor’s ominous figure dwarfing Vader, down on one knee, while he plotted betrayal.

Now, let’s think about this. The Emperor is on Coruscant, Executor is down in the Imperial boondocks, messing around near Hoth. I’m not suggesting the exchange was impossible. No, let’s put that another way. It’s impossible without some sort of futuristic device. Even within our own solar system, it takes anywhere from 3.4 – 21 minutes (depending on how close the planets are to each other) for a a signal to go from Mars to Earth.

It’s a known problem, though. Ursula Le Guin was the first to dream up a device which could enable people on different planets to converse in real time. She called it the ansible. The name has wheedled its way into the genre, rather like ‘hyperspace’. Elizabeth Moon wrote a whole series of books (the Vatta saga) around a company which specialised in setting up ansibles in orbit around inhabited planets, and maintaining them. And the subsequent danger when the ansibles were sabotaged, a bit like taking down the telegraph line across America in the Old West.

I don’t call them ansibles, but since my books involve much planet-hopping, I had to come up with something, which I suppose is an ansible by any other name. A multi-dim transmitter is a device which uses one of the many dimensions of space, a dimension which is not available to physical entities like ships, to transmit a signal from one place to another. They can be fitted to ships, but they are expensive.  Needless to say, if you don’t have access to an ansible or its equivalent, you can’t have a real-time conversation over a long distance.

I took a moment to explain the ability to have a real-time interplanetary conversation in my latest book, The Search for the Crimson Lady. 

"She still marveled at the fact that almost instantaneous communication was possible over a distance of light years, provided the sender and the recipient both had satellites with shift space capabilities. Still, it made sense. Transferring simple transmissions had been the first breakthrough in the early days of space travel."

 Decent communications is just one of the many things we'll have to find a solution for before Humanity ventures into space.

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For space nuts, it's an exciting time to be alive

NASA photo of Pluto

It has been an exciting week for space nuts. In some respects the biggest news-grabber was the discovery of “Earth 2.0”, a planet orbiting a yellow dwarf star a little larger than our sun, in the Goldilocks zone. It's fourteen hundred light years away, so we won't be visiting soon, but although I'm not quite as excited as some, the discovery adds weight to the already impressive argument that we can't possibly alone.

Personally, I'm much more excited about the data from Pluto.

I'm not a scientist, just an interested spectator. I was expecting a barren, frozen rock rather like our own moon, swinging around the distant sun in its wildly eccentric orbit that sometimes means Pluto is closer to the sun than Neptune. I was wrong. Frozen, sure. But just a rock? Uh-uh. Pluto has an atmosphere. Pluto is not covered in impact craters – which means it is geologically active. Pluto has canyons, and Pluto has solid, water ice mountains as high as the Rockies. All this on a sphere smaller than Earth's moon. Exactly what size is one of the many things NASA's New Horizon probe has been able to calculate, as reported here. And that's one of the things that interests me. Our moon has negligible atmosphere; Pluto's can be measured. It seems that heart-shaped thing is a glacier. There may be organic molecules on the surface. This article on Space.com gives a great, potted explanation of what has been discovered so far.

The reason I find all this so fascinating is mainly because of the water ice, and the organic molecules. It has been speculated that Earth's water came from asteroids. Pluto is the largest known object in the Kuiper belt, the source of comets and asteroids. Perhaps just such a body collided with the early Earth, contributing its water and its organic molecules to the primordial mix?

I watched and rewatched the footage which Voyager sent back to Earth during its encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune back in the eighties and nineties. Until now, that data was all the scientists had to play with. They learned so much about the outer planets from that data and it still forms the basis of many of their theories. The New Horizons mission has answered some questions and raised many others. The Dawn comet mission is set to send back more data as the host comet plunges towards the sun. And Kepler continues to discover more exoplanets. Meanwhile, work is proceeding on the James Webb space telescope, set to replace Kepler. Who knows what it will discover?

It's an exciting time to be alive.