Arthur C. Clarke

3001: THE FINAL ODYSSEY
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Chapter 9: Skyland

One of the main problems of getting around in Star City would be caused by the sheer distances involved: if you wanted to visit a friend in the next Tower (and communications will never completely replace contact, despite all advances in Virtual Reality) it could be the equivalent of a trip to the Moon. Even with the fastest elevators this would involve days rather than hours, or else accelerations quite unacceptable to people who had adapted to low-gravity life.

The concept of an 'inertialess drive' - i.e. a propulsion system that acts on every atom of a body so that no strains are produced when it accelerates - was probably invented by the master of the 'Space Opera', E.E. Smith, in the 1930s. It is not as improbable as it sounds - because a gravitational field acts in precisely this manner.

If you fall freely near the Earth (neglecting the effects of air resistance) you will increase speed by just under ten metres per second, every second. Yet you will feel weightless - there will be no sense of acceleration, even though your velocity is increasing by one kilometre a second, every minute and a half!

And this would still be true if you were falling in Jupiter's gravity (just over two-and-a-half times Earth's) or even the enormously more powerful field of a white dwarf or neutron star (millions or billions of times greater). You would feel nothing, even if you had approached the velocity of light from a standing start in a matter of minutes. However, if you were foolish enough to get within a few radii of the attracting object, its field would no longer be uniform over the whole length of your body, and tidal forces would soon tear you to pieces. For further details, see my deplorable but accurately-titled short story 'Neutron Tide' (in "The Wind from the Sun").

An 'inertialess drive', which would act exactly like a controllable gravity field, had never been discussed seriously outside the pages of science fiction until very recently. But in 1994 three American physicists did exactly this, developing some ideas of the great Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov.

'Inertia as a Zero-Point Field Lorentz Force' by B. Haisch, A. Rueda & H. F. Puthoff (Physics Review A, February 1994) may one day be regarded as a landmark paper, and for the purposes of fiction I have made it so. It addresses a problem so fundamental that it is normally taken for granted, with a that's-just-the-way-the-universe-is-made shrug of the shoulders.

The question HR&P asked is: 'What gives an object mass (or inertia) so that it requires an effort to start it moving, and exactly the same effort to restore it to its original state?'

Their provisional answer depends on the astonishing - and outside the physicists' ivory towers - little-known fact that so-called 'empty' space is actually a cauldron of seething energies - the Zero-Point Field (see note above). HR&P suggest that both inertia and gravitation are electromagnetic phenomena, resulting from interaction with this field.

There have been countless attempts, going all the way back to Faraday, to link gravity and magnetism, and although many experimenters have claimed success, none of their results has ever been verified. However, if HR&P's theory can be proved, it opens up the prospect - however remote - of anti-gravity, 'space drives' and the even more fantastic possibility of controlling inertia. This could lead to some interesting situations: if you gave someone the gentlest touch, they would promptly disappear at thousands of kilometres an hour, until they bounced off the other side of the room a fraction of a millisecond later. The good news is that traffic accidents would be virtually impossible; automobiles - and passengers - could collide harmlessly at any speed.

(And you think that today's life-styles are already too hectic?)

The 'weightlessness' which we now take for granted in space missions - and which millions of tourists will be enjoying in the next century - would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. But the abolition - or merely the reduction - of inertia is quite another matter, and may be completely impossible.^[1] But it's a nice thought, for it could provide the equivalent of 'teleportation': you could travel anywhere (at least on Earth) almost instantaneously. Frankly, I don't know how 'Star City' could manage without it...

One of the assumptions I have made in this novel is that Einstein is correct, and that no signal - or object - can exceed the speed of light. A number of highly mathematical papers have recently appeared suggesting that, as countless science-fiction writers have taken for granted, galactic hitch-hikers may not have to suffer this annoying disability.

On the whole, I hope they are right - but there seems one fundamental objection. If FTL is possible, where are all those hitchhikers - or at least the well-heeled tourists?

One answer is that no sensible ETs will ever build interstellar vehicles, for precisely the same reason that we have never developed coal-fuelled airships: there are much better ways of doing the job.

The surprisingly small number of 'bits' required to define a human being, or to store all the information one could possibly acquire in a lifetime, is discussed in 'Machine Intelligence, the Cost of Interstellar Travel and Fermi's Paradox' by Louis K. Scheffer (Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 35, No. 2, June 1994: pp. 157-75). This paper (surely the most mind-stretching that the staid QJRAS has published in its entire career!) estimates that the total mental state of a 100-year-old human with a perfect memory could be represented by 10 to the 15th bits (one petabit). Even today's optical fibres could transmit this amount of information in a matter of minutes.

My suggestion that a Star Trek transporter would still be unavailable in 3001 may therefore appear ludicrously shortsighted a mere century from now^[2] and the present lack of interstellar tourists is simply due to the fact that no receiving equipment has yet been set up on Earth. Perhaps it's already on its way by slow-boat...