The Maddest Scheme

Some Space Projects are Just Crazy

ONE often comes across schemes for bold manned space voyages. Some are brilliant, some are absurd, some obey the laws of physics and some blithely ignore them. I know of only one that cannot be faulted from the point of view of strict science, but at the same time raises serious questions about the sanity of anyone who would pay for it or embark on it. It was the brainchild of Robert Page Burruss, an engineer who worked in the Apollo programme, and it appeared in the autumn 1987 issue of The Futurist. Sorry for the time-lag in reporting, but Burruss's project is one that I have been sceptically brooding about for many years.

Great galaxy in Andromeda (M31), some 2.2 million light years away

Not intended as a joke or a spoof, it was entitled ``Intergalactic Travel: The Long Home from Home''---yes, that is correct: intergalactic, not interstellar. We will be leaving the Milky Way behind. Exactly why Burruss thinks it might be a good idea to travel to another galaxy when there are hundreds of billions of stars to visit in this one, he does not make clear. But anyway, his target is the great galaxy in Andromeda (M31), some 2.2 million light years away. In a ``worldship'' a thousand miles wide, half the diameter of the Moon, up to 50 billion people (eight times the current population of Earth), will embark on a voyage of up to 10 million years, hundreds of thousands of generations, a period five times the past age of the human species! This is not exactly a ship that one could build in one's back yard, but rather somewhere far off in the solar system where engineers would labour for thousands of years. Half the ship's mass will comprise 500 billion tons of antimatter fuel for an acceleration period of 50,000 years. Now it might be wise to recall that the current estimated price of antimatter is $300 billion per milligram. If built today, the fuel costs alone of Burruss's world ship would be a dollar sum of 34 digits! True, Robert L. Forward has shown that this price tag may eventually come down through mass production to $10 million per milligram, but this still gives us a 29-digit dollar fuel bill for Burruss's worldship. I don't think I'll get my cheque book out yet. Surprising to relate, the design of the worldship, although of vast dimensions, is highly conservative. Its cruising speed will be only 40 per cent of the speed of light, too slow for relativistic effects to become strong. For each hour on Earth, the crew will age a full 55 minutes. Surely for the money being spent one could do better than that. And the ship's interior does not rotate, so there will be no artificial gravity. This would seem to ensure that on arrival at M31 the crew would no longer be human, But the project may not be necessary at all. If we want to be among the stars of M31, then we can do it free of charge. M31 is moving towards us at 75 miles per second. All we have to do is wait six billion years for it to arrive.