Demolisher of myths / Review of ‘The Relativity of Wrong’ By Isaac Asimov
- 08 April 1989
- From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
- JOHN EMSLEY
Asimov also disposes of another popular myth – that one day we will journey to the stars. Here he is tampering with something that might have been better left alone. He quietly knifes the idea in the back, and thereby murders much popular culture on which today’s young people are raised. Space travel is possible between the planets of the Solar System, but that is all. Whatever probe we launch from planet Earth into the cosmos will get nowhere. It will slowly come to rest between here and the next star. A manned spacecraft would suffer the same fate.
Only if we use antimatter as a fuel can we make a return trip to the nearest star, and that form of energy is likely to remain forever beyond our grasp. In any case, the effort would never justify the visit; our intrepid voyagers, or their descendants, would not arrive back before AD 50 000.
Because we can never visit another star, so we can never be visited by aliens from another Solar System. Another chunk of popular science folklore bites the dust. Space travel is a meaningless phrase. Star Wars, Star Trek, and a lot of science fiction suddenly seems merely silly. Asimov you’re a spoilsport!
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12216594.200.html
The above is not the actual essay where Asimov accuses certain science fiction writers like Roddenberry and George Lucas to only pick on some of the best writers of thousands who have used the device of “suspension of expectations” to peddle their tales involving rapid travel through space. Though the writers vary in their ease of such travel. Many argued that such travel will come with travail, like spice addiction in the Navigators in Dune, or being frozen in Aliens, or even having everyone you know die because it takes so long. BUT still you could DO it. In others all you had to say was, “Make it so” or “Engage” and off you went to distant worlds filled with interesting, sometimes intellegent, sometimes hostile Life Forms
Why is this interesting?
Well one the original essay is in a book where Asimov argues that there are different degrees of being wrong.
Two he is pointing out that the space travel idiom was not just wrong but really really wrong.
Three that myth of space travel has an immense impact on our culture.
BUT, most important for me, it speaks to why the “environmental movement” still struggles to try to save the planet when it is pretty much on the way out of existence right now. Amazingly enough just 10 years earlier Asimov was actually expousing the opposite view. He said then:
Faster than Light
One other impossibility that equals it (time travel..note added) as a science fiction essential is “superluminal” (“faster than light”) travel. Without superluminal travel, science fiction writers are confined to the Solar system. It is only routine superluminality that makes galactic empires, and such things as interstellar warfare, really practical.
There is this difference between time travel and superluminal travel, however. I imagine that most people are willing to think of time travel as essentially fantasy, but to consider superluminal travel as fantasy seems to annoy, and even enrage, a large fraction of the s.f. readership. Why isn’t superluminal travel possible? What is so magic about the speed of light? Surely, if you keep accelerating long enough and hard enough, you are bound to “break the light barrier.”
AND WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN ELIGANT MATHMATICAL PROOF THAT YOU CAN NOT GO FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT. AND HE CONCLUDES THE MATHMATICAL DISCUSSION BY SAYING:
Please note, however, that the mass has been increasing at a faster and faster rate as the speed increases.
The more mass an object has, the less it can be made to accelerate in response to a given force. A force applied to an object moving at 260,000 kilometers per second (and therefore with twice its rest mass) will produce only half the acceleration that that force would have produced if it had been applied to the same object when it was at rest. As an object speeds up under a constant force, its mass increases ever more rapidly and its speed increases ever more slowly. The mass increase predominates, so that momentum and kinetic energy continue to increase more rapidly even though speed increases more slowly.
By the time we reach a speed of 290,000 kilometers per second (97 percent of the speed of light), the mass of the moving body is 3.892 kilograms, almost four times the original mass. At 295,000 kilometers per second (98.3 percent of the speed of light—if that is taken at the slightly incorrect 300,000 kilometers per second figure), 5.52 kilograms; at 299,000 kilometers per second (99.7 percent of the speed of light), 12.22 kilograms; at 299,999 kilometers per second (99.9997 percent of the speed of light) 383.5 kilograms.
At the speed of light itself, if that could be reached, the mass would be infinite—as would be the momentum and the kinetic energy.
A faster speed is impossible because neither mass, momentum, nor kinetic energy can be more than infinite. Besides, at infinite mass, no force, however great, can produce any acceleration, however small, so the speed cannot increase. —So the speed of light is the limit that cannot be passed.
AND YET HE CONCLUDES THE PIECE BY SAYING:
Ways of evading that limit (tachyons, black holes, hyper-space) have been suggested, but all involve phenomena concerning which we
can only speculate, and in favor of which there is no observational evidence whatever. Nevertheless, superluminal travel cannot and will not be abandoned in science fiction. Certainly, I will never abandon it.
SORT OF ENDING WITH A TEHEE TEHEE AS HE DID MANY OF HIS ESSAYS.