Is the human epic of space conquest just the biggest fraud of all?

Space is big right? What if all those books, movies and stories are just so much bunkum anyway? At best epics that could never be. Surely not???

No Thrust? No Trust!

I guess you could have missed seeing the latest failure of the NASA/Boeing launch to the ISS. This time it was the thrusters, but it could have been anything else, given the sad and even tragic history of its efforts so far.

If you’ve bought into the story, you’re just going to point to the bit about space, technology, human exploration being hard. Like you got to understand that when the story has been written (if ever), it will have taken millions, billions, trillions even of committed scientists and engineers, wrestling with the impossible in a medium, space, which was actually never designed to be inhabited by humans. Like all that radiation stuff, quality defects, softening bones, withering neurons. And that’s only on the short hops to the nearest objects which are so close as to be childishly simple (asteroids, the Moon).

That’s the story about the latest kerfuffle, namely rocket thrusters. If Musk had been in charge of the show, he would have fixed it in a flash over dinner with his genius babies and mutant ninja turtles made out of neural-links. The history of science fictions makes it shockingly clear that man’s destiny is in the stars and we’ll be there in a jiffy. If not, it will just take us a couple of light-ultra-years longer.

Lunar Landing a Hoax?

Not so fast apparently. It’s 50 years since we visited the moon and we didn’t even get to find out if the flag we left on the surface is still intact, or even exists any longer.

Yeah, so it’s not just thrusters on a baby jet; nor having working neurons on a short hop to Mars, or even an operational expedition to trillions of exoplanets out there. Basically, it’s all going to be very, very hard.

Maybe not just hard, but impossible. Something that even 1 Musk, and gazillions of Musks can never get to no matter how many Grimes-mothers put their heart and soul into it.

We might just have fooled ourselves into the ultimate collective delusion; that there’s tons of stuff out there that we can never ever get to or achieve. That these outer space vehicles and communities are just plain impossible, and are made of the same stuff as angels, wine that turns into water, and miracles for the asking.

Is true space exploration actually beyond human and AI capabilities?

Nothing in Space is Remotely Possible!

There’s a couple of possibilities here, all bleak at best. The first is that this is all achievable in theory but in actuality never will be because it’s just too hard, even for the biggest, baddest, smartest aliens that could ever have existed. So don’t give it another thought, just too much of a waste of our valuable Earth-time.

But there’s another possibility, but it might even be worse. That is that we can develop a new form of organization that can put things together that even Musk’s cannot. This form of organization started off as multicellular thingies that made the leap to teams, and communities that can develop capabilities that allow us to do the really hard stuff.

Then we developed super-organizations that could make all these things that can use social workarounds for impossible things to happen. You know, public companies that on a scale of smarts kick off at several trillion for the good stuff. So public-neural ?and way, way smarter companies with unimaginable capabilities and visions.

So far though, the Musk approach hasn’t worked out, and that path just doesn’t look good. So, we’ve wheeled out the public companies (Boeing etc.) and Uncle Sams, and that hasn’t worked out either, not so far anyway.

Maybe multi-Musk and Uncle Sam-I-Am (the full-scale version of human intelligence and other-worldly organizational forms (Dyson Spheres wrapped around super-galaxies).

AI Just for Fun?

But this little thought experiment might be telling us something important. That might just be that AI is not capable under any scenario, including nontangible post-galactic organization forms such as neural companies writ large). How about getting an ion-thrust engine cluster with trillions of thrusters to work – reliably? My penny worth. It can’t be done. Not in this universe or any other I can imagine.

So far, we have thrown a lot of mud at the wall and only one mud pie seems to be sticking, for some, probably very good reasons, most of them existential (i.e. it was never designed to that).

I’ve always been a fan of space travel, science fiction, going above, beyond and through to who knows what? All these ideas excite and impassion me. But what if it’s all wicked fragments of overwrought imaginations? What if it’s impossible to actually get a space traveler through even only to Mars? Especially when that tiny step is nothing in the realm of real distance, time and capability?

Until recently my mind was still there. But the Boeing/NASA debacle has an unnerving meme. What’s more it has raised the bar. Now it’s clear that we humans might still be able to get to Mars, but anything much bigger, say journeys to “nearby” exoplanets will be impossible. But we might be fooled into believing in the larger aim simply because the smaller one was doable while everything else just wasn’t.

And that’s just what we’re finding out now.

Bigger Toys

I’ve been an interested observer of the James Webb Telescope ever since we hoisted it on its own cosmic petard. It’s an amazing piece of gear. Most people just don’t understand how incredibly complex this is. Yet it not only works but works incredibly well. Doesn’t this negate any idea that humans’ can’t do the really big stuff?

Here’s the rub. No matter how big and complex the JWT happens to be, it doesn’t even begin to count when you look at objects out there which we write about as the future of mankind. How big is the JWT when compared with an average-size Dyson Sphere? Incomparably tiny. How big is an average Dyson Sphere when compared with a galaxy-sixed black hole? Again, incomparably tiny.

If humans so desire to enter the true world of cosmic sizing we’re in a totally different universe of hurt. One in which the size and complexity of an ion-thrust cluster doesn’t now compute at all. Sure, we might indeed be able to make one of these things work even if a trillion times the size of the one up there that isn’t yet working.

But what if we want to build one of these clusters that is the size of a small universe made up of Dyson sphere size ion-thruster clusters? You know, the ones that sci-fi authors have us building in our spare time. Now that’s different!!

The things that authors want us to build now can – impossibly at that - be made to work in near space suitable for a jaunt to Mars. But if we want to build real-red-blooded cosmic monstrosities we are orders of magnitude in the far distance. Dyson spheres are so far from being in the same range that they are totally incomparable in terms of mini-tudes. We can deal with Mars-size journeys. The things that the promoters want us to do in sci-fi are totally impossible. Why even pretend?

The NASA/Boeing ion thrusters aren’t even toys in the worlds of cosmic size and complexity. Remember the old verse:

“Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'me, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum ”

Is space travel the ultimate Ponzi scheme?

If so, what about everything else?

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