Apocalypse in Science Fiction

One of the most reoccurring themes in science fiction is the end of the world, or at least the end of civilization. It is not surprising since there are many ways that this could actually come about. Also, prophets have been predicting catastrophic disasters from the time men learned to speak to each other. Two popular ones lately are global warming and an asteroid strike. So we have a choice of drowning when the ice caps melt or being smashed to atoms by a big rock.

For a while, when a few people caught bird flu in Asia, pandemics were all the rage. In the latter half of the twentieth century, everyone was betting on an all-out atomic war, but that fizzled when the cold war ended. Recently, I read article about a scientist who said we could all die from a burst of gamma ray radiation from a nearby supernova explosion. As the clock struck midnight ushering in the year 2000, all the computers were supposed go mad because they only had the last two digits of the year and could not distinguish between the twentieth and twenty-first century (which to some people did not start until 2001 anyway.)

Anyway, science fiction authors love to write about Armageddon of one sort or other. Here are some of my personal favorites. There are two by John Brunner. The first is Stand on Zanzibar where civilization is brought to an end because of overpopulation. Overpopulation as threat seems to be no longer in vogue. I guess because there are so many ways of dealing with overpopulation. For example, nuke the excess or give everybody a gun and give them leave to hunt and kill everybody they hate.

The second book by Brunner is The Sheep Look Up which is about pollution. We are pretty certain that is the most likely end that we face.

There are many atomic war novels. These were especially popular during the cold war years. The funniest was the movie Doctor Strangelove, where a deranged general starts world war three because of his erectile dysfunction. I also like the novel On the Beach by Nevil Schute, which was also made into a good movie. In this novel, the last people on earth after an atomic war are living in Australia waiting to die from the radioactivity produced by all those hydrogen bombs going off. Probably my all time favorite about a post apocalyptic world is Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller where a monk finds an artifact from our civilization after civilization has gone back to the dark ages.

One of the more interesting ways that the human race comes to an end is a little known book called The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock. In this short novel, bigotry runs wild so that everyone kills everyone else that is different from himself or herself. It's a real chiller. I got goose bumps reading it.

Invasions by aliens is another possibility that could end the human race. My favorite is Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, where the invaders look like elephants.

An old movie that's fun is When Worlds Collide where a group of scientists and a chosen few race to build a spaceship to escape from a collusion between earth and another planet. The one thing I never quite understood was where the planet they were headed for was located

I liked the TV miniseries The Stand by Stephen King as the survivors of a pandemic meet up at the cabin of an old woman and go fight the devil in Las Vegas.

Of course there are many more great science fiction novels and stories about the Apocalypse, but those were some of my personal favorites, because they each have a slightly odd slant to the end of the world.

I have written one novel about Armageddon myself. It is called Morgaine and Armageddon and has a lot of stuff in it based loosely on The Book of Revelations of the Christian Bible.

Faster than Light Travel

One of the most prevalent themes in science fiction is the galactic empire. Star Wars and Star Trek (and all their spin-offs) take place in a galactic empire; Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is about the decline and fall of a galactic empire. My own novel Pawns of Tomorrow and its sequel Knights of Tomorrow are about a galactic empire based on a chess game. While writing these stories, I did research about our own Milky Way galaxy. What I found out was that a galaxy is a hell of a big place.

To illustrate: The NASA space probe Voyager 2, traveling at approximately 93,000 mph, took twelve years to travel to Neptune. If this same space vehicle were to travel to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, it would take it over 370 years to reach it. Okay, but that's reality. Let's assume that we have a starship capable of faster than light travel (impossible according to some scientists). How much faster? Let's say it can reach Proxima Centauri (4.22 lightyears away) in four days. Pretty fast huh. That's one lightyear a day or fifteen lightdays per hour. Okay, now let's say we want to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. The galaxy has an estimated diameter of 100,000 lightyears. The trip would take 100,000 days or almost 3,000 years.

In galactic terms, 100 lightyears or even a 1000 lightyears is in the neighborhood. As a result, even with FLT (faster than light) speeds, our empire could not be very large. Even then, travel from one star to another would take a lot of time, a hundred days (over three months) to go to a stellar system a hundred lightyears away, a thousand days (over three years) to go to a system a thousand lightyears away.

But interstellar travel may not be possible. As mentioned above, the speed of light (186,000 miles a second) is supposed to be a cosmic speed limit. But is it really? Under the special theory of relativity, a slower-than-light particle with nonzero rest mass needs infinite energy to accelerate to the speed of light, although special relativity does not forbid the existence of particles that travel faster than light at all times.

Some physicists think that unusually distorted regions of space-time might permit matter to reach distant locations faster than what it would take light in the normal or undistorted space-time. This would allow a starship to travel long distances a faster than light speeds through a wormhole, if such things exist or could be manufactured.

My own thoughts about this cosmic speed limit (which doesn't mean much) is that perhaps it is an illusion. Here's why I say this. Let's say that my spaceship accelerates to some speed where relativistic effects are supposed to occur. I measure the speed of light; it is still 186,000 miles a second. I measure the length of my spaceship in the direction of travel. It has not changed. Now, according to the theory of relativity, my friend on earth has equipment for measuring my spaceship. His measurements show that my spaceship has shrunk in the direction of travel and that my mass has increased.

On the other hand, since from my point-of-view it is the earth that is moving away from my spaceship at near light speed. (Einstein postulates that there is no absolute frame of reference. This is why it is called the Theory of Relativity. All measurements are relative to the location of the observer.) So, I take the same measurements and find that it is the earth that is shorter and has more mass. Hence, I see no reason why I cannot accelerate my spaceship more. I would really like a refutation of my premise. Please free to comment.

The Buzzard Ramjet

As I pointed out in a previous post, the stars are very far away. Astronomers use light-years as a unit of measurement of the distance between stars. Since light travels at 186,000 miles per second, a light-year is 586, 569, 600, 000 miles. The nearest star is around four light years away, 2, 346, 278, 400, 000 miles. The fastest current spacecraft can travel at 158, 000 mph. It would take over 1600 years for it to reach the nearest star. Does such distances mean that spacecraft human or robotic will never launched to another star system? It does seem daunting. But technologies have been proposed which might make such a trip possible.

In 1960, Robert Bussard, a physicist suggested a spacecraft designed as shown in the illustration. The way that it would work is that the scoop in the front takes in hydrogen which is fed to a nuclear fusion reactor to supply a high-speed exhaust. In this manner the vehicle would avoid having to carry a large amount of fuel which would add to its mass. A typical region of interstellar space contains about one atom per centimeter.

The Buzzard Ramjet as it is called has major problems as far as implementation with our present technology. One is that the scoop would need a frontal collecting area of 10,000 square kilometers. A 10, 000 km² scoop made of the thinnest Mylar would weigh 250, 000 tons. One way around this problem is to ionize the hydrogen ahead of the spacecraft using a powerful laser, allowing a relatively small collector which generates a powerful magnet. In this manner the scoop could be mesh. However, there are additional problems. For additional details, see David Darlings Interstellar Encyclopedia. It also suggests possible solutions.

Another web site with good explanation of the Buzzard ramjet is Nation Master Encyclopedia. In this article is says that spacecraft accelerating at 10 m/sec² could reach 77% of light speed in one year. Once it reached that speed, propulsion would no longer be need until it approached its destination, at which time it would need to decelerate.

Seattle Science Fiction Museum

My daughter lives in Seattle, Washington. One of my favorite things to do when I visit her is to go to the Seattle Center, which contains a science museum, the space needle, an IMAX theater and above all the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. The fun starts even as you approach the building, which looks as though it was built by aliens. Also, if you arrive by monorail, the track goes through the building.

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame is one of the two public science fiction museums in the world (along with Maison d'Ailleurs, a science fiction museum in Yverdon-les-Bains (Switzerland). The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame was founded by Paul Allen and Jody Patton and opened to the public on June 18, 2004. Members of the museum's advisory board include Steven Spielberg, Ray Bradbury, James Cameron, and George Lucas. Among its collection of artifacts are Captain Kirk's command chair from Star Trek, the B9 robot from Lost in Space, the Death Star model from Star Wars, the T800 Terminator and the dome from the film Silent Running. The X Prize trophy is currently on display in the museum's lobby.

The museum is divided into several galleries with a common themes such as "Homeworld," "Fantastic Voyages," "Brave New Worlds" and "Them!" Each gallery displays related memorabilia (movie props, first editions, costumes and models) in large display cases, posters, and interactive displays to sketch out the different subjects. "From robots to jet packs to space suits and ray guns, it's all here."

The Hall of Fame was founded as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1996 by the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society and the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. There you will find listed all your favorite authors of the past and some present and other notables in the world of science fiction.

One of my particular favorites in the museum is the case that contains copies of some of the old pulp magazine that were prevalent from the 1920s to the 1950s. I cut my SF teeth on those magazines.