Imaginary Worlds - How to Go to Infinity and Beyond

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

These ships feel like old friends – The Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon, Battlestar Galactica, Serenity, The Rosinante. But would any of them actually work in space? I talk with NASA astrophysicist Jessie Christiansen, JPL planetary scientist Kevin Hand and Boeing engineer Eric Primm talk about how we would get to the stars, what those ships would actually look like, why the Millennium Falcon probably couldn’t have made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs, and whether the X-Wing fighter should be a drone. This week's episode is sponsored by Express VPN. We’re proud to be featured on Podurama this month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Command engine start. Two, one. Back in 2021, I was pretty riveted by this story. Science fiction became science fact for actor William Shatner today. At 90 years old, Star Trek's Captain Kirk became the oldest person to travel to space. Okay, he was actually Admiral Kirk by the end. But anyway, putting that aside, this really was an amazing moment. Science fiction becoming science fact. It was a feel-good story,

as they say in the media. But when he came back to Earth, I was surprised by how emotionally shaken he was. I mean, I didn't expect him to be the swashbuckling, galaxy-hopping James T. Kirk, but this was his reaction to seeing outer space with his own eyes. So quickly, 50 miles, and you're in death. This is life. This is life, and that's that. 50 miles. And you're just in black. And you're in death. Yeah. The moment. This is life. This is life, and that's death. And in an instant, you go, wow, that's death.

That other voice is Jeff Bezos. Shatner went to space on his rocket, Blue Origin. When Shatner is talking about seeing death in space, Bezos is nodding and smiling sometimes. And at one point, he interrupts Shatner to grab a bottle of champagne. You want a little of this? Okay. As Bezos and the rest of his team are celebrating, Shatner looks away.

This video went viral. The headlines used words like cringe and awkward. And I wondered in that moment if Bezos could see the difference between Shatner, the person in front of him, and Shatner, the cultural icon. Because Jeff Bezos is a huge Star Trek fan. In fact, he begged Paramount to put him in the franchise, and he got a one-second cameo as an alien under heavy makeup in the 2016 film Star Trek Beyond. And of course, Elon Musk and Richard Branson, these other billionaires who are pushing into space, they're also big sci-fi fans. Of course, a lot of scientists have also been inspired by Star Trek. Eric Prim is an

engineer at Boeing, and he's written about spacecraft design in movies and TV shows. Some of my fondest memories are watching Star Trek The Next Generation with my father and thinking that when I grew up, this is what the world was going to be like, my naive little sense. But looking at science fiction, looking at space and particularly spaceships, we can, for lack of a better term, surpass the boundaries of our home. We can grow. We can be more than just the planet-killing species we currently are. In previous episodes, I have looked at the disconnect between science fiction

and science fact, whether it's AI, the internet, or the metaverse. And generally speaking, I don't believe that science fiction should be in the business of predicting new technology. I think sci-fi is better at asking deep questions about who we are and what new technology could reveal about ourselves. But Eric Prim thinks that science fiction about space travel does have a role to play in pushing science forward, whether it's Star Trek or The Expanse, which we'll talk about later. As technology catches up, as technology evolves, it's possible that we will get these ships someday. And hopefully there's some kid out there watching The Expanse and they think, man, maybe I could build that. Maybe I could design it. Maybe I could be the one that

figures out how we are able to shake off this world and get out there into the solar system. Science fiction has also been a big inspiration for Jessie Christensen. She's an astrophysicist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. In fact, science fiction is so alluring, she feels frustrated by the limits of our current technology. Like in 10,000 years, I think humanity will be a space-faring species. Right now, we need to keep the hope alive that we will be an interstellar species, because I believe we will. There's this saying that we're the generation that's born too late to explore Earth, but too soon to explore space. saying that we're the generation that's born too late to explore Earth, but too soon to explore space. So even if we don't think the physics is on our side in this particular case, coming up with

ideas to how to do it and what it would look like and telling stories about the kinds of adventures that you would have, I think that's just an outlet for a deep well of need inside us. So if we do become a spacefaring species, what would we travel in? What would happen if you put not William Shatner in space, but the Enterprise? Does that design make sense? If not, what famous ships from TV shows and movies would work in deep space? The answers might surprise you. We'll lift off after the break. I mentioned before that a lot of scientists have been inspired by science fiction,

and that relationship goes both ways. It's becoming increasingly common for Hollywood studios to hire scientists as consultants on their projects. Kevin Hand is a planetary scientist at JPL, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He's consulted on several TV shows and movies, like Thor and Avatar. Let's see, on Avatar I helped out a bit with the instrumentation used on Pandora to look for life. He also consulted on the Foundation series for Apple TV, which is based on the novels by Isaac Asimov. The creators of the show wanted to know how their big ships could jump in space and time. Kevin suggested two rotating rings at the center of the ships.

two rotating rings at the center of the ships. And so the way they work is that you've got at the center these two rotating rings that generate the warp in spacetime. With that warp in spacetime created, then you can do the jump. And that's contrast with, say, as much as I love the Millennium Falcon, classic spacecraft that many of us know and love, when you think about it going warp speed, it speeds up like a race car would. And eventually you get streaming of the lights and you're going very fast. You did it! You did it!

That to us makes sense, right? If we want to go very fast, we speed up, we accelerate. Whereas the reality is, if you are going to jump through space and time, you're not actually going to bother accelerating. You're just going to create that warp in space so that you can jump through space and time. I think Star Wars is interesting to look at because for a lot of people my age, and the age of many scientists and engineers out there, these ships captured our imaginations as children.

Eric Prim was a Star Wars fan growing up. But today, as an engineer, the design of the Millennium Falcon kind of bugs him. as an engineer, the design of the Millennium Falcon kind of bugs him. The Millennium Falcon, it looks good, but it has kind of a gap in the middle. It's got squared edges. Those would really create drag. With those squared edges, it might not have been able to make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. Sorry, Han. Also, the Millennium Falcon, like a lot of ships in Star Wars, can easily go from the surface of a planet to outer space and back again. That happens all the time with the Mandalorian.

Let's see what she's got. That's one thing that always sticks in my craw because there is, in space, there's no friction. As soon as you enter the atmosphere, there is a large amount of friction. That's also Jesse's pet peeve. Whenever they take a spaceship into Earth's atmosphere to like land it, that's when I get taken out. And I'm like, no, no, no, don't take them into an atmosphere. Kevin says that is a common mistake in science fiction. They imagine that spaceships could be like fighter jets that don't have any altitude limits. One of the things that is a sort of standard flaw is,

does this spacecraft really need to look anything like an airplane? That is kind of where spacecraft design often goes wrong. Take the X-Wing fighter. Lock air spoils in attack position. You know that cool moment when the X-wing opens its wings to go into battle? Eric says, I love the X-wing, don't get me wrong, but we don't need wings in space. Like, for me, the X-wing should be drones, right? A drone fighter would be easier to maneuver,

it would be lighter to store in your space hangar, and you wouldn't put the lives of your crew at risk. It's extremely risky to have humans piloting your fighter aircraft, especially in space. Another thing that bugs Eric about the ships in Star Wars, they have a lot of windows. I mean, think about the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. It looks like a bomber from World War II. And when Eric looks at all those windows, he winces. In space, everything is moving really fast.

If there's any little bit of dust or junk or a micrometeorite, it has a chance of puncturing through. A fleck of paint can do damage at the speeds we're talking. The idea that a speck of debris could smash open your cockpit window is disturbing and very different from a movie like Infinity War, where Thor, when he's floating in space unconscious, accidentally smacks up against the giant windshield of the Guardians of the Galaxy spaceship. Whitebird! Whitebird! Get it off!

But Jesse says we shouldn't write off glass entirely. So think of the things we've built, right? Like the shuttle has glass, the International Space Station has a cupola that everyone's taking those gorgeous pictures of Earth out. We're human. We want to see, we want to explore. The whole point of building these spaceships

is so that we can see new places and go new places. We understand the physics involved in making that glass thick enough and, you know, robust enough. Is it a failure point? Yes. Is it something that we want? Yes. To that point, according to Star Wars canon, what looks like glass in those ships is actually a fictional material called transparasteel. Star Trek invented its own version of super strong glass called transparent aluminum. A lot of ships in

Star Trek have windows, including the view screen on the bridge. Although in some versions, the view screen is a digital display. Either way, Kevin says the idea of the bridge itself is an anachronism. That comes from the way Navy ships are operated. You've got a bridge high up where you can see out and look upon the sea. And it's majestic from the standpoint of how to think about our exploration of the stars. And it works well for TV and film. about our exploration of the stars and it works well for TV and film. Fast forward centuries from now, any central command area within a spaceship is almost certainly going to have a robust centralized command center as opposed to an exposed exterior command center. In other words, if you put your command center perched on top,

In other words, if you put your command center perched on top, it's vulnerable to getting hit by debris or enemy fire. In Star Trek, they have force fields that protect them. But the vulnerability of those shields is a storyline in every version of Star Trek going back to the beginning. Can we take it, Mr. Scott? That's problematical, sir. The shields are down. We cannot survive another hit. Assuming we don't develop protective force fields, it makes more sense to design future spacecraft

like a combination of submarines and aircraft carriers. You know what show got that right? The reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Condition one is set. All decks report ready for action, sir. Very well. Battlestar Galactica, I think, really kind of gets that with burying everything in the center of their ships. Again, Eric Prim. In kind of my ideal design, I would start with Battlestar Galactica and I would put all the human occupied spaces in the middle. Obviously the hanger would have to hang off the side so they can get the drones out. And then I would pack all the supplies around the human side so that between space,

there was also kind of sacrificial layers of compartments in order to protect, in the case of hull punctures. Once we're out in space, we only have the atmosphere that we're bringing with us, right? We can't afford to lose any of that. And so protecting that atmosphere, keeping it inside the ship, is going to be pretty much paramount safety-wise. The Battlestar Galactica is a bulky-looking ship. The most memorable part are the hangar bays, which look like handles off the sides. The most iconic ships in sci-fi are often made of basic geometric shapes.

The X-Wing, of course, has the X-Wings. The Star Destroyers look like giant triangle wedges. The Borg ship is a cube. And the original Enterprise looks like a flying saucer on top of a flashlight with tail fins. I asked Jessie which geometric shapes would make the most sense in space. Well, that's the cool thing about spaceships, right? You don't need to think about air resistance, for instance. You don't have to build them aerodynamically like a plane, right? You know, they're in the vacuum of

space. They're going to go in the direction they go and there isn't air or matter to slow them down. So you can get really interesting and funky with your shapes. In terms of what's the easiest, so if you think about things that are easiest to maintain pressure and easiest to maintain temperature in, something as simple as a sphere, right? A sphere is like equal pressure in all directions, equal temperature in all directions. You can build something really, really simple. I mean, theoretically, then, is the most realistic ship in Star Wars the Death Star? I mean, realistic in the sense that it's straightforward to build in a way that could survive in space. Yeah, you could get a planet, a solar system wide fleet together and build a Death Star.

That's no moon. It's a space station. It's too big to be a space station. More realistically, the ships in 2001, A Space Odyssey Odyssey could give us a sense of what future ships could look like. The crew of Discovery One consists of five men and one of the latest generation of the HAL 9000 computers. The ship where most of the action takes place is Discovery One.

It has a huge sphere at one end, which is where the astronauts spend most of their time. And then there's a long tail leading to the engines. Almost all of these ships, you're going to build in space, right? Like this is not something you build on the ground and then try to launch. So again, you're really unconstrained by things like air resistance and even gravity, right? Like once you're assembling in space, you can put things together in ways that don't make sense on the ground, right? Like there's nothing you could put this spacecraft down on. It doesn't have, you know, a landing gear

or even a bottom. But Jesse says there might be a problem with the design of Discovery 1 or the Enterprise. The engines are connected to the rest of the ship by a very long, thin material. That could make them vulnerable to being snapped off. The ship's engines are connected to the rest of the ship by a very long, thin material. That could make them vulnerable to being snapped off. Like even in the vacuum of space, big things moving fast have inertia.

And whenever you have to change the speed of your ship in space, the occupants will feel inertia and the materials of the ship will feel inertia. So thin bits can be worrying depending on how the ship slows down. Anthony Comegna, MD, PhD These big ships that we'd build in space would have smaller shuttles inside them that could land on planets or go to other ships. But they would have their own challenge in slowing down. Dr. In order to talk about the speeds that we're talking about, you have to be going incredibly fast, just mind-bogglingly fast, right? It's something that the human brain has trouble with. But if you need to turn around,

you either have to slow down from that incredible speed, which is going to take a long time, and then pivot, or you need to do like an incredibly large arc in space, right? There's no U-turns in space at speed. She says there are two shows that do a good job of dealing with this issue. And in both shows, space travel is seen as kind of grimy and unglamorous. The first ship she's thinking about is Serenity from the show Firefly,

which was a beloved but short-lived show that was like a western in space. So one of the things I liked about the Fly Fly design with these two engines is each engine could go forwards or backwards, so you could kind of get more of a spin. The other show is The Expanse. In The Expanse, humans have colonized the solar system, and they're fighting each other over power and resources in space.

The Expanse did a really good job of dealing with the fact that you need to decelerate in space. It's a plot point in some of the episodes that if you decelerate too fast, you can die. Eric is also a fan. Oh yeah, yeah, I really liked the Expanse. One of the things that I always loved was they flipped the ship to slow down. They actually flipped the ship and they point their engines at their destination and fire the engines so that it slows down. Slow the Rossi down.

Flip and burner. Hard as you can without that missile catching us. We are dead if I slow down. It's a risk we got to take. By the way, Jeff Bezos was also a huge fan of the Expanse, and he even saved it from cancellation by moving it to Amazon Prime. The main ship in the Expanse is called the Rocinante. It's a beloved ship for fans because the crew becomes a found family. And like Battlestar Galactica, the control center is in

the middle, full of a lot of screens. It's not a bridge or a cockpit. But off the top of my head, I can't remember what the Rocinante looks like from the outside. I just remember it being blocky. Kevin says that's actually pretty realistic. Take a look at the International Space Station. The International Space Station is kind of a capsella of construction. I think capsella has long gone out of business, but at least when I was a kid, it was a variation on Legos where you had these little components that you stuck together. And our construction of craft in space so far in terms of larger things has been with that kind of modularity. And the International Space Station, as amazing as it is,

is not so much a reflection of one singular coherent design, but rather a need to allow for modularity as the space station grew. You know, eventually humanity, God willing, we survive long enough, eventually we will be able to build singular, coherent spacecraft, but there will be a period of just strapping modules one onto

the other. At NASA, Jesse's job is to find planets deep in the galaxy that we haven't learned about before. She can really only do that through data analysis, not even telescopes. But she certainly thought about how we could get to these planets. The only way we get there without breaking the laws of physics as we know it is generation ships. So you build a ship that's big enough that you can have tens

or hundreds of generations of people live on it, because it's going to take you tens of thousands of years to get there. So whenever I see a generation ship in science fiction, for instance, I'm like, yes, okay, we're there. We're good. That's another reason why she likes the Expanse. They have a generation ship that's so big, the characters call it the behemoth. It looks like a giant cylinder with a needle on top. And it's an incredible ship when you see it realized. And like, for instance, one of the things that's really cool about it is it creates its own gravity by spinning. And one of the cool things they've discovered with astronauts who spend a long time in space is, turns out, humans actually need gravity.

It's important and vital for the function of life. So the behemoth, it's like a big barrel. And at some point in the show, in the expanse, they started spinning to create gravity. And this visual of this huge ship just slowly starting and starting to spin up until it can get to almost the equivalent of one Earth gravity is super cool. And you know, as a scientist watching it, you're like, yes, that's exactly what you would need to do. That's so cool. Video games have also been pretty thoughtful in depicting what space travel might look

like in the future, like in Halo or Mass Effect. In the Mass Effect games, humans travel across the galaxy in ginormous ships, which can carry thousands or millions of passengers. Look at the size of that ship. The Ascension, flag ship of the Citadel fleet. Citadel Control, this is SSV Normandy requesting permission to land. Stand by for clearance, Normandy.

Eric enjoyed playing Mass Effect. I like those a lot. I believe that those are going to be necessary if we really want to travel distance. The Citadel in Mass Effect is not just a space station with a landing dock. It's a planned community with restaurants, bars, government offices, apartments, casinos. They're also talking aliens that are living and working among the humans. But putting that aside, Eric says the mundane aspects of these ships are fairly realistic. We'll need recreation. We'll need a variety of recreation, too.

We'll need all kinds of medical support. We'll need psychiatric support. We'll need food care. We'll want things for dating. We'll want religious services of a variety of denominations because what is it they say in the army for like one soldier, you need like five support people. I mean, it's going to be the same thing in space, but probably even more. When he was talking about making space travel feel comfortable and familiar, I thought about a scene from the last season of Picard. The crew of the next generation goes on board a replica of their outdated enterprise, which is at a starship museum.

It wasn't until this moment, reunited with all of you, I realized what I've missed most. The carpet. Yep, the Next Generation bridge had a red and gray carpet, which I always liked. I found it very homey. But when I was talking to Eric, I joked about the carpet from The Next Generation, thinking that would not be in a future spaceship. But he says it's a smart idea. Carpets and all of that would be necessary for our psychology. It would be necessary for trying to distract from the fact that we are living inside of a building for years, decades, maybe centuries on end.

Of all the things that I was thinking about in terms of space travel, I never thought carpeting would matter. But there is the old saying, wherever you go, there you are. The fact is, none of us will live long enough to see humanity take this journey. And as you heard, everyone I talked with has concerns that we could even last that long. But they think it's important for us to keep fantasizing about space travel, and not just to inspire future astronauts, scientists, or engineers. Until we're ready to fly people out into the galaxy to go exploring, what might get us there is thinking about ourselves as explorers, instead of just thinking about ourselves. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Eric Prim, Kevin Hand, and Jessie Christensen, who is such a fan of spaceships. When she and her

husband got married, and they were labeling the tables... Our wedding plan for where everyone would sit is an armada of science fiction and real spaceships. And my husband and I were in the TARDIS and then everybody got their own spaceship. Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Millennium Falcon. And I remember my friends who were on the Cylon ship being like, wait, are we the baddies? As you have described. If you liked this episode, you should check out my 2017 episode about the Expanse or my 2018 episode which was called Living in Space.

In that episode, I looked at the history of the O'Neill Cylinder, which is a spaceship design that shows up in a lot of films, like Interstellar. There were so many ships out there in sci-fi that we weren't able to cover. Let us know what are some of your favorites and why on our social media pages.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, please give us a shout out on social media or leave a review wherever you get your podcasts that helps people discover imaginary worlds. The best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either free imaginary world stickers,

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