Lost In Space

While waiting for I Work On A Starship to arrive, I started rereading Stephen Baxter's Manifold Space, which starts off by asking where is everybody? Meaning, the universe is a big place, there ought to be life out there somewhere, so why haven't we seen any evidence of an advanced civilization from another star?

Space Battleship Yamato

Then Roberta's book arrived, and I started reading it, and it, and several other ideas gelled* in my head, and it suddenly came to me. We haven't seen anybody, because anybody who has escaped the gravity well of their sun isn't going to want to get trapped in one again.

Interplanetary Transport Network

There is something called the Interplanetary Transport Network which is a really just a way of navigating the solar system using little or no power. It doesn't get talked about much because these pathways are really slow. Suitable for unmanned probes, but not really suitable for humans with their gnat like attention spans.

However, barring the development of a warp drive it is our best bet for actually going someplace. A vessel carrying people and using these paths would need be able to sustain it's population indefinitely. The best way to do that would be to make it big enough to contain a complete ecology. We could build such a vessel if we wanted to. It would no doubt need to be assembled in orbit. Parts could be launched from Earth, or possibly fabricated on and launched from the Moon. Getting the biology of the ecosystem would be the bigger challenge. We have had only limited experience with biological systems that have been completely cut off from the Earth. But suppose we got one built and got the ecology running.

Once such a vessel is launched, it would really have no reason to visit the surface of a planet, or even remain in the neighborhood of the sun. Asteroids could provide all the raw materials needed, and would not require descent into a gravity well from which there may well be no escape.

So starships may cruise by a star just to see if there is anything interesting in the neighborhood, but it would be foolish to stay.

* Contributing ideas:

• The Madness Season by C.S. Friedman. She posits the existence of longships: large spaceships made of rock, or perhaps hollowed out asteroids, that do not slow down when they approach a star and planets. Their velocity is not that high. Skimships (small ships capable of large changes in velocity) act as shuttles, decelerating when they depart the long ship to land on a planet, and then accelerating after leaving the planet to meet up with the longship again. This limits the time you can transit between the longship and the planets. It makes a sort of sense, changing the velocity of a three mile long asteroid would take a great deal of energy. Let the little ships do the hard work. They would be much more fuel efficient for these kind of maneuvers.
• Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke gives us the idea of a starship simply using our Sun as an accelerator, much like we use the planet Jupiter to slingshot our probes that are on their way farther out. Also, no stopping to chat or even slowing down for a look-see.
• Space Battleship Yamato (pictured above) and The Matrix give us the idea of using old war surplus miltary hulls as space ships. Never mind the problem of getting all that mass into orbit, and never mind that The Matrix wasn't set in outer space, they are water tight (especially submarines) and so are also air tight. And all that steel would make good radiation shielding, important if you are going anywhere outside of Earth orbit. If you are following Roberta's story, you already know that Lupine means wolf. The British had a destroyer named Seawolf, and both the British and the US had submarines with that name.

Update: June 2015. Replace pictures that Blogger lost.