Making Starships and Stargates The Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes James F. Woodward Making Starships and Stargates The Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes With illustrations by Nembo Buldrini and Foreword by John G. Cramer James F. Woodward Anaheim, California USA SPRINGER-PRAXIS BOOKS IN SPACE EXPLORATION ISBN 978-1-4614-5622-3 ISBN 978-1-4614-5623-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-5623-0 Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London Library of Congress Control Number: 2012948981 # James F. Woodward 2013 This work is subject to copyright. 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Cover illustration: Going Home, designed by Nembo Buldrini Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) This book is dedicated to all those whose lives have been affected by my seemingly quixotic quest to find a way around spacetime quickly, especially Carole and the cats. Foreword When I arrived in Seattle in the mid-1960s to assume my new faculty position at the University of Washington, I remarked to one of my new Physics Department colleagues that the magnificent views of Mt. Rainier, available from many parts of the city, gave Seattle a special and unique flavor and ambiance. “You know,” he said, “Rainier is dormant at the moment, but it’s still an active volcano. It erupts every 5,000 years. The geological record shows regular thick ash falls from Rainier and giant mud flows down the glacier-fed river valleys, where a lot of people live now.” “Really,” I said. “When was the last eruption?” “Five thousand years ago,” he said with a quirky smile. That anecdote provides a good analogy to our present situation, as residents of this planet. All of our “eggs,” our cities, our people, our art and culture, our accumulated knowledge and understanding, are presently contained in one pretty blue “basket” called Planet Earth, which orbits in a Solar System that is configured to hurl very large rocks in our direction at random intervals. Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter lies the Asteroid Belt, a collection of large rocky leftovers from the formation of the Solar System. Within the Asteroid Belt there are empty bands known as the Kirkwood Zones, broad regions in which no asteroids are observed to orbit. The Kirkwood Zones are empty because when any asteroid is accidentally kicked into one of them, orbital resonances with Jupiter will propel it chaotically into a new orbit, sometimes one that dives into the inner Solar System and has the potential of impacting Planet Earth. Thus, our planetary system has a built-in shotgun that, on occasion, sends large rocks in our direction. Meteors come in all sizes, and it is estimated that a total of about 14 million tons of meteoritic material falls upon Planet Earth each year, much of it from the debris of asteroids and comets. About 65 million years ago a large rock, probably an asteroid, impacted Earth in the vicinity of the Yucatan Peninsula, creating the Chicxulub crater, 180 km wide and 900 m deep. Some three quarters of Earth’s species became extinct during the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact, including the dinosaurs. This is one of the more recent examples of the approximately 60 giant meteorites 5 or more kilometers in vii viii Foreword diameter that have impacted Earth in the past 600 million years. Even the smallest of these would have carved a crater some 95 km across and produced an extinction event. The geological fossil records show evidence of “punctuated equilibrium,” periods in which life-forms expand and fit themselves into all the available ecological niches, punctuated by extinction events in which many species disappear and the survivors scramble to adapt to the new conditions. Life on Planet Earth may have been “pumped” to its present state by this cycle of extinction and regeneration, but we do not want to get caught in the next cycle of the pump. We, as a species, need to diversify, to place our eggs in many baskets instead of just one, before the forces of nature produce another extinction event. The basic problem with such “basket diversification” is that we reside at the bottom of a deep gravity well, from which the laws of physics make it very difficult for us to escape. The only escape method presently in use involves giant chemical rockets that burn and eject vast volumes of expensive and toxic fuel in order to lift tiny payloads out of the gravity well of Earth. And even if we can escape most of Earth’s gravity well, things are not much better in near-Earth orbit. The Solar System, outside Earth’s protective atmosphere and shielding magnetic field, is a fairly hostile place, with hard vacuum and the Sun’s flares and storms sending out waves of sterilizing radiation. And human biology seems to require the pull of gravity for a healthy existence. A micro-gee space station is an unhealthy place for long- term habitation, and astronauts return from extended stays there as near-invalids. The other planets and moons of the Solar System, potential sources of the needed pull of gravity, are not promising sites for human habitation. Mars is too cold, too remote from the Sun, and has a thin atmosphere, mostly carbon dioxide with a pressure of 1/100 of an Earth atmosphere. Venus is much too hot, with a surface temperature around 870 F and an atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide, with pressures of about 90 times that of Earth. Moons, asteroids, and artificial space habitats may be better sites for human colonies, but they all have low gravity and other problems. To find a true Earth-like habitat, we need to leave the Solar System for the Earth-like planets of other stars. But if escaping Earth’s gravity well is difficult, travel to the stars is many orders of magnitude more difficult. Fairly optimistic studies presented at the recent 100 Year Starship Symposium in Orlando, Florida, sponsored by DARPA and NASA, showed conclusively that there was little hope of reaching the nearby stars in a human lifetime using any conventional propulsion techniques, even with propulsion systems involving nuclear energy. The universe is simply too big, and the stars are too far away. What is needed is either trans-spatial shortcuts such as wormholes to avoid the need to traverse the enormous distances or a propulsion technique that somehow circumvents Newton’s third law and does not require the storage, transport, and expulsion of large volumes of reaction mass. In short, the pathway to the stars requires “exotic” solutions. This brings us to the work of James Woodward. Jim, armed with a thorough theoretical grounding in general relativity and a considerable talent as an experimental physicist, has pioneered “outside the box” thinking aimed at solving the propulsion problem and perhaps even the problem of creating exotic matter for wormholes and warp drives. His work has included investigations in general relativity as applied to Mach’s principle and experi- mental investigations of propulsion systems that propose to circumvent the third law need Foreword ix to eject reaction mass in order to achieve forward thrust. This line of inquiry has also led to a plausible way of satisfying the need for “exotic matter” to produce wormholes and warp drives. The book you hold may offer the key to human travel to the stars. Let’s consider the problem of reactionless propulsion first. Woodward extended the work of Sciama in investigating the origins of inertia in the framework of general relativity by consideration of time-dependent effects that occur when energy is in flow while an object is being accelerated. The result is surprising. It predicts large time-dependent variations in inertia, the tendency of matter to resist acceleration. Most gravitational effects predicted in general relativity are exceedingly small and difficult to observe, because the algebraic expressions describing them always have a numerator that includes Newton’s gravitational constant G, a physical constant that has a very small value due to the weakness of gravity as a force.