Red Zone - 15

A Novel

8

“You wanted to talk to me, Cadet?”

“Yes, I do not think my paper deserved such a poor grade. I think the mathematics was fine, and the conclusions followed from it.”

“Well fine if you don't count two sign errors which miraculously canceled each other out, but which, as a result, turned two complex systems into an 8 variable system that you said could not be solved, when, in fact, the two-tensor version has been solved, repeatedly. Sometimes by cadets.”

He flushed.

“But that's not why you got the poor grade.”

“What was the reason?”

“You do not seem to understand what this course is trying to teach.”

He hung his head in shame.

“No excuses, sir.”

“That will get you a long way in drill, but not very far with either me or with the principles of physics.”

“What exactly am I missing?”

“We didn't go over X-tensors, attractors, and their application to social dynamics in great detail for amusement.”

“I am still not understanding.”

“There is a mathematics to human interaction with the outside, that mathematics is embodied in econology. Econology is about minmaxing desired results within expected equilibria. It's like the way people used to run around saying 'room temperature superconductor' whenever there wasn't enough gain for the pain. Amazing what you can do when you have impossible physics to sweep problems under the rug. Perpetual motion! Room temperature superconductor! Carbon sequestration! Pure Free Markets! Cold Fusion! And so on.” Each exclamation point was more like a parody of excitement than the real thing. The contempt is shown through with each example.

“I thought I avoided that.”

“You invoke four new interacting technologies, none of which ignite the other. There is no way that such an interaction will occur as the solution to an arbitrary and isolated problem in astronautic design. And you have no idea if any of them are implausible. You aren't getting the very basic way of it. You're wayless.”

Deeshandir hung his head in shame.

“I would like to know how I can improve my standing.”

“You mean get better grades? Do better work. There's no mystery there.”

“No, I mean I would like to know what it is I don't understand.”

The professor, his cheekbones taut, face then, hair black and curly with piercing green eyes, bored straight into him with a stare.”

“I'm going to take you at your word cadet. Let's step back.”

The professor rose from his chair and moved away from his desk. The classroom view screen descended, an archaic two-dimensional one, rather than the CAD screen that was in three dimensions.

Let's start with the history of space flight. What are the epochs.”

“The first was a rocket. From 1940 through 2040.”

“Why the rocket first?”

“One technology does all: launch, lift, land, maneuver, return.”

“And.” There was a note of exasperation.

“Extension of other common technology: turbine, combustion, materials engineering from other kinds of flight.”

“And.”

“The cross effects were within their understanding of manageable.”

“Tell me what you mean by that.”

“Well even a small atomic launch would have caused tremendous fallout, and a gun to orbit, as Verne had proposed, would have required acceleration that they could not have absorbed without breathable liquids.”

“So....”

“Ignition is low, their problems solved are many, and advances in other areas advance this goal.”

“Why didn't atomic or nuclear arrive earlier?”

“Fallout, and....”

“Goal fixation. Read the papers again, they are always talking about interstellar travel, walking straight past the planets.”

“Because terraforming seemed to have only two, perhaps three, real targets: Moon, Mars, and possibly Venus.”

“So, what came after rocketry?”

“Chemical rockets were a dead end, their specific thrust is low, their efficiency poor, and almost tangentially connected to advanced flight, ramjets, scramjets and so on.”

“Ignition giveth, ignition taketh away.”

“They talked about lock-in.”

“Were they locked in?”

“No, their econological parameters were wrong. Rockets are for good low orbit, not for even interplanetary travel.”

“But if you want the high ground, good enough.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And their brute force was?”

“Lift and throw. Multi-stage. No problem that can't be solved with a better engine and breaking the mission into more pieces or making the payload smaller.”

“So, I repeat, what came after rocketry?”

“Ulam-Dyson. Pulse nuclear, based on Orion and others.”

“Why not earlier, Orion was plausible in 1960.”

“Because it needed cheap launch to orbit.”

“Which was?”

“What we still use: magnetic acceleration.”

“Which depends on?”

“High-temperature superconductors, investment in the first launches.”

“No.”

“What, sir?”

His professor sighed. “A change in econology: the goal. Ceres, Ganymede, Calisto, Europa. The new worlds of ice. Only when humans realized they had to colonize the sea to get enough energy, materials, food, stability, does it seem reasonable that terraforming means, aquaforming.”²

“Only when they realized that the dying ice shelf of Antarctica was a basic ecosystem.”

“When there was a sustainable surplus.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, the pulse drive era.”

“Yes sir, roughly 2080 to 2180.”

“Why then?”

“The Great War pushed fusion to practicality, there was a desire to escape from the inner diaspora.”

“Why fusion, after almost a century of research?”

“Econology again, they realized that low temperature, low density, low radiation, low pressure ruled out virtually every form of fusion.”

“Not quite correct.”

He looked at his professor blankly.

“Because they wanted to just swap fusion into a non-fusion system. Take out coal, plug-in hydrogen. When they realized that they needed a fusion econology, not just econological fusion, life changed.”

“Fusion doesn't work the way they wanted, sir.”

“That's right, it is a better form of propulsion than power. Stars use it that way. So. Pulse drive to the planets. Does it work?”

“Only partly.”

“We still use pulse.”

“It is cheap and simple, sir.”

“So, the pulse isn't a one-technology solution, it requires several supporting technologies. What caused ignition, what was the knowledge avalanche waiting to happen?”

“So, you are asking what the pieces have in common: superconductor, fusion, materials, nanotechnology, quantum computing, deep power grids from tides, ecological engineering, sir.”

“Yes.”

“Xaotic dynamics, turbulence, a natural feel for quantum mechanics. The Gödel 3 out of the Boolean 2.”

“One word.”

“Quintessence: the power of ubiquity. Replacing the percussive manner of thinking that dominates the internal combustion age. Only the pulse itself is percussive. Well at first, eventually it becomes essentially continuous.”

“Good. What comes next?”

“Well modern fusion drives... but... I don't see a principle.”

“Then let’s go back to low explosive chemical energy. What came first?”

“The firecracker, the simple rocket, Greek fire, the gun.”

“Low explosion. Create a flame front avalanche.”

“What comes next?”

Blank pause.

“What comes next is harnessing cyclical dynamics. Stop me when you've heard this one before: The. Wheel.”

“The Watt-Newcomb engine.”

“Yes. Even though the parts had existed for centuries.”

“But as parts. Yes, Sir.”

“So, cycles: when waste is used to push the system along. What comes next?”

“Flow. The turbine. Everything is used immediately, rather than cyclically.”

“Which was invented?”

“In old China and reinvented for water power.”

“So...”

“Modern drives rely on absorbing rather than recycling the breaking radiation. Core and tube designs with the x-rays from the core heating the real power generator, or drive…”

“The wheel.”

“Yes sir.”

“Pulse, wheel, flow.”

“Is this universal?”

“No, these are expressions of the basic econological lagrangian of the system. The system evolves and manifests. It's conservation laws appear at points of symmetry, it's radicals at points where the symmetry breaks.”

“I will need to go back and do those out, won't I?”

“Don't make stupid sign errors. State the Lagrangian. Realize when the movement is continuous and uses Noether, and when it is discrete and uses Ward–Takahashi identity. These are basic tools.”

“Yes, sir. I thought I had done this correctly.” He stared blankly at the screen which had slowly become filled with notes, sections, and images. There was a picture of the first pulse ship, a picture of the large sail, and ion freighters. Timelines, and names had filled in at various places.

“Different drives for different purposes, massive heat generation to warm the ice of the Jovians moons. Massive floating cities in the atmospheres of the gas giants.”

“And?”

“They need to do econologicaly unstable activities anywhere but the garden world.”

“The irony is, that as the econological band gets narrower on earth, technologies that are too dangerous become attractive in space.”

“I suppose, but then there is no global warming in space.”

“Exactly.”

“So, drive era, 2180-2250, roughly.”

“Yes.”

“Why did it end?”

“Colonization is endemic, beams become more practical, as an outgrowth of slow solar sails, and electro-weak-coupling technologies. Neutrino capture and so on.”

“Our first semester was devoted to a few basic ideas, one of them is generate in place, move in space.”

“Modern commercial craft are powered from large efficient stations. Yes, Sir.”

“So now do you see the problem? No ignition: rockets were about the wheel applied to combustion, they were an apex technology because there's no point to a combustion ramjet, the flow version of combustion, in space. Pulse was like going back to the bottom of a curve. Then came recapture drives, now flow.”

“So, you are saying that we are at the apex of fusion?”

“Exactly.”

“So, what is wrong with my anti-matter proposal?”

“No ignition Deeshandir, no ignition.”

His eyes closed, and he visualized again the problem.

“I don't have a solution.”

“Until a few minutes ago, you didn't even understand the problem. You were thinking like a consumer, not a physicist, not an engineer.”

“What is the difference?”

His professor opened and closed his mouth to produce a sound, not unlike a dog about to eat something.

“A physicist, turns simple insoluble problems, into complex hard problems solvable by geniuses.”

“And an engineer?”

“Turns complex problems solvable by geniuses, into complicated problems solvable by brute force. If you want it built, then all problems should be based on linear improvements of parts we already have, not on four Thomas Edisons dropping out of everywhere and into the here. You didn't have a solution, because you did not look at the problem.”

“What is the problem?”

“The problem is that there isn't a large enough problem, that makes the next step necessary, or at least obsessively desired. Not enough surplus to justify disrupting the equilibrium. Too much pain, not enough gain.”

“So, I have to make do with what I have.”

“Exactly, cadet. Now, go back, do out the Lagrangian of the essential technological area, tease out the symmetries, and look for where one is just aching to be broken and penetrated.”

“Thank you, sir.” He winced a bit at the sexual imagery.

“Cadet you are one of the best students.”

“Then why the poor grade sir?”

“Do you know the difference between history and politics?”

“No sir.”

“History doesn't grade on the curve. Politics does, but it's a wicked curve to be on. You don't want to go there.”

“But warfare does, with all due respect, sir.”