Where no man has gone before

Faithful readers will recall my post last September, in which I discussed the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. I mentioned in passing the possibility that the particle collisions for which the collider is intended might result in creation of tiny black holes that would drop, one by one, like fish food in an aquarium, to the center of the earth where they would merge, forming an increasingly large black hole with ultimately unpleasant consequences for the property value of your beloved home and garden.

You've probably noticed that you and I are still walking around on terra firma, drinking beer and following the Mariners' disappointing season, just like we do every year, with little to suggest that our earth is being gutted out from within. Don't get cocky. There was a malfunction in the collider last fall that caused it to be shut down for repairs before any actual particles collided. October 2009 is the new projected start-up date. Don't renew your magazine subscriptions for more than one year.

But these pleasantries are but preface to my real news. Good news. Involving space travel. In fact, involving interstellar space travel.

While NASA pokes around trying to decide -- after nearly 40 years -- whether it wants to land men on the moon again, some of us are getting impatient. We're watching our lives trickle away with no progress being made in reaching out not merely to the moon, or to Mars and other planets, but to the stars themselves. One big problem facing us fans of interstellar travel is the distance. Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighbor, is 4.1 light years away. That's an 8.2 year round trip just for a light beam, and a somewhat longer journey for current spaceships that use rocket fuel and take several days just to blast themselve to our own moon.

In the absence of "warp speed, Mr. Sulu," or other attempts to defeat Einstein's theories by bending space and/or time, that 8.2 years is an absolute minimum for a round trip to the nearest star (or for a one way trip with a confirmation message back to earth). But even to approach that minimum duration, we'd need to approach the speed of light. How to do it?

Researchers (as reported by Daniel H. Wilson, MSNBC) suggest that the techniques used to achieve the very high speeds reached by protons in the LHC could be used to propel a small (perhaps eleven pounds), unmanned "spaceship" to speeds close to that of light. The "engine" would be a silicon chip with thousands of nanoparticle accelerators etched upon it -- the entire "engine," including fuel source, would be about a centimeter in thickness, with a surface area of about the size of a postage stamp. The engine would be a tiny version of the LHC, which itself is a circular tunnel about 17 miles in circumference.

The particles, once accelerated, would be propelled from the spaceship at very high velocities. Each particle expelled would thrust the spaceship in the opposite direction. Because the spaceship would experience no frictional resistance in space, its velocity would gradually approach the speed of light. (Never quite reaching that speed, however. Relativity equations show that the mass of the spaceship would approach infinity as its speed approaches light, requiring greater and greater thrust -- ultimately infinite thrust -- to increase its speed further.)

As you will agree -- those of you have stuck with me this far -- this is a very cool concept. The concept is akin, I suppose, to ion propulsion, which has been discussed for years as a means of approaching the speed of light. But because of the miniaturization now possible, we could launch a tiny unmanned spaceship with extremely small fuel requirements.

I suspect, however, that none of us reading this post will see such a launch in our lifetime -- for budgetary reasons as much as for technical obstacles. But it's nice to know that we are developing the technology that will one day give our descendents some interesting opportunities for exploration outside our already too crowded solar system.

This entire discussion assumes, of course, -- and assumes optimistically, I suppose -- that our earth doesn't collapse in upon itself as a result of the LHC start-up in October.

Live long and prosper.