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Colin Powell was known for desperately shutting
Ronald Reagan up whenever Reagan started talking about how an alien invasion
would unify all of Earth. While I'd always taken Reagan for a dunce, the
release of many of his articulate and nuanced personal letters (and the
revelation that he wrote some 100 of his own Great Communicator speeches) has me
reevaluating his intelligence -- and even some of his politics. Reagan
might simply have been commenting, with as much wryness as he could muster (not
much he was a sunny personality if nothing else) about how elusive species unity
really has been, and how it might only be achievable by appealing to Us vs. Them
motives that have hitherto only motivated us to unite against other human
beings. Powell, ever practical, was mainly worried about how Reagan's
loose talk, loosely quoted, might cause a repeat of the event touched off by
Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast.
Clark probably needs better handling as well -- look
at how people jumped all over Dan Quayle for his loose talk about Mars
missions (and even all over Al Gore, if memory serves.) Look at how Jerry
Brown got trampled as "Governor Moonbeam" starting with his idea that California
should launch its own satellites. (Is having state-level space programs
such a dumb idea? Maybe all these stupid launch restrictions should be
turned into a states-rights issue.)
It's too bad, but political figures really
do have to watch themselves on the perpetual Giggle Factor that space
suffers from. The spin-off ratio from scaling up funding of SETI programs
(even in the humanities, as they contemplate what non-humanity might mean) would
probably be higher than for the rest of the space program, even if SETI never
found any ETI, but you won't see a smart pol step up to that plate in full
public view, even with 15 astronauts and 12 Nobelists clustered around the
podium.
-michael turner
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, October 06, 2003 3:05
AM
Subject: Beam Us Up, General
Clark
At least Clark has some concept of science.
Beam Us Up, General Clark
October 5, 2003
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Weird things certainly happen during election season, but
it's
doubtful that even the most hardened seen-it-all
pundit would have dreamed
that Einstein's theory of
relativity would turn up as an issue in an
American
presidential campaign.
Yet last week a leading Democratic
candidate, Gen. Wesley
Clark, expressed the hope that spaceships might one
day be
engineered to go faster than the speed of light, a staple
of
science fiction.
In a discussion of NASA's future at a recent
gathering in
New Hampshire, General Clark ventured a look into the
far,
far future. "I still believe in E=mc2," he said, according
to
Wired.com, "but I can't believe that in all of human
history, we'll never,
ever be able to go beyond the speed
of light."
Saying he had argued
with some physicists and friends about
the idea, the general described it
as "my only faith-based
initiative."
Soon afterward, The New York
Post pictured the general in a
"Star Trek" uniform, pointing out that such
a proposition
would violate the laws of physics.
If we could go
faster than light, Einstein once said, we
could send a telegram into the
past, and everyone knows
time travel is impossible.
Or do they?
In recent years, time travel has become a serious topic
in
theoretical physics, debated at conferences and explicated
in popular
books like "Black Holes and Timewarps," by the
Caltech theorist Kip S.
Thorne, and "Time Travel in
Einstein's Universe," by the Princeton
astrophysicist J.
Richard Gott. Last year, the topic came up at
a
60th-birthday symposium in honor of Stephen Hawking, the
Cambridge
cosmologist and author.
So don't be too quick to consign the general
to a Star
Fleet command, a few physicists suggested last week.
Einstein's special theory of relativity, which he
propounded from a
patent office in 1905, did establish the
speed of light - about 186,000
miles per second - as the
cosmic speed limit for matter and information.
But the general theory of relativity, which Einstein
published in
1916, holds out the possibility of a loophole.
That theory describes
gravity as the bending of space-time
by matter and energy. Space-time, the
theory maintains, can
be bent into wormholes and other shapes that could
provide
shortcuts through space and time, allowing a traveler to
beat a
light beam that took a route through regular space.
"This weirdness of
space allows in principle for the
possibility of time travel," said
Lawrence M. Krauss, an
astrophysicist at Case Western Reserve University,
and the
author of "The Physics of Star Trek."
One of the first to
realize that Einstein's universe had
room for such strangeness was the
mathematician and
logician Kurt Gvdel, who wrote a paper about it in
1949.
Wormhole travel was featured prominently in the
movie
<object.title class="Movie"
idsrc="nyt_ttl"
value="155654;156934">"Contact,"</object.title>
starring
Jodie Foster and based on the novel of the same name by
the
astronomer Carl Sagan.
Nobody knows whether such things are
actually possible in
the real world. One obstacle is the "grandmother
paradox,"
which raises the theoretical possibility of going back in
time
and killing your own grandmother. And the resources
required to build a
wormhole, even if possible, would be
gargantuan, physicists say. "It's
expensive," Dr. Gott
said, "but that is a question for politicians."
Describing faster-than-light travel as a faith-based
initiative was
accurate, Dr. Krauss said. "At this point
the details are not known, so in
some sense it is all a
matter of faith," he acknowledged. "But I wouldn't
bet on
it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/weekinreview/05OVER.html?ex=1066376201&ei=1&en=22694d9640b14333
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