How
long? Admittedly,
this is not what I had wanted to write. Semester ending plans for completing
one of two books in my hopper had crystallized. Unwritten chapters sensed
release like a gang of bees from my fingertips. Then came this op ed that
caused me to push away my book for another day.
Here are a few snippets:
N. Y. TIMES
July 24, 2012
Alone in the Void
By ADAM FRANK
Rochester
SOMETIME this year Voyager 1, a probe sent from
Earth 35 years ago, will cross a threshold no human-fashioned object has reached
before. Passing through a sun-driven shock wave at the edge of the solar
system, it will reach the icy dominions of interstellar space... Still, after
three and a half decades of hyper-velocity spaceflight, it will take another
700 centuries for the craft to cross the distance to the nearest star.
Short of a scientific miracle of the kind that has never occurred, [my
emphasis] our future history for millenniums will be played out on Earth and in
the “near space” environment of the other seven planets, their moons and the
asteroids in between... Like it or not, we are probably trapped in our solar
system for a long, long time.
Simply say “warp drive” to just about anyone and
see if they know what you mean… How many people would be surprised to know that
warp drive isn’t even a coherent concept, let alone a near-future technology?
The truth is we propel ourselves into space using
much the same physics as the Chinese played with when they discovered what we
came to call gunpowder more than 1,400 years ago. Blowing stuff up under us is
just about the only way we know how to travel through the void.
… While our children’s children’s
great-grandchildren will live with ever more powerful technology, they will
also live ever more intimately with ever more billions of others in this, our
corner of the cosmos. Looking back and forward, my bets are now on that same
human genius, ambition and hope to rise to the occasion...There will be nowhere
else to go for a very long time.
Adam Frank,
a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, is the
author of “About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang”
and a co-founder of NPR’s “13.7 Cosmos and Culture” blog.
Fond of the New York Times as a liberal voice that
seldom escapes that particular box, I contrast what I read with insights that
are more empirical. In this case, my personal experience trumps Adam Frank’s
perceptions.
By Frank’s reckoning, I have witnessed what Voyager 1 won’t
see for another 70,000 years. (…it will take another 700 centuries for the craft
to cross the distance to the nearest star.)
Indeed, when I
saw a flying saucer while at Smith Mountain Lake not far from Gretna, VA, I
witnessed a craft that had flown here, apparently, from another star or planet.
Had it been flying more than 70,000 years to arrive on Earth?
I don’t think
so. That’s because I saw it come, then go.
Then I saw it
come and go again.
Calculating its
speed wasn’t difficult. Even a non-astrophysicist like me can figure the time
it takes to snap one’s fingers and to note how far an object has traveled in
that short span.
Hardly the best
measure, I agree, but I did it. The craft was, by my calculation, zipping along
faster than the speed of light. Or, as Adam Frank would refer to it, at “warp
drive”.
[…How
many people would be surprised to know that warp drive isn’t even a coherent
concept, let alone a near-future technology?]
But that
isn’t all. According to Adam Frank, …Blowing stuff up under us is just about the only
way we know how to travel through the void.
My eyes have
showed me that there are ways that are much more efficient. We just don’t know
what they are. When the craft I saw stopped and perched seventy feet from me at
a height of a little less than that, I noticed that, as it came, it didn’t make
a sound.
When it zigged,
that zagged to leave, there was no noise, no sonic boom, no trail of smoke that
issued from its exhaust. Actually, it didn’t have any wings either.
Nor was it a
missile. It looked and acted like a flying saucer from the Jetsons.
Although I am
open to his astrophysical explanations about what I viewed, I will gladly yield
to a more mundane lie detector test to assure Adam Frank that I did see what I
saw and that my report is clear and true. In fact, I’ll invite him to chew the
fat about the impact my sighting has had on my cosmological perspective.
The word
‘stretched’ comes to mind. To that end, I will send this piece to him if I can
find his Rochester address. Of course, I’ll send it by snail mail, fitting in
light of his comment that:
There will be nowhere else to go for a very long
time.
B. Koplen
7/24/12
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