Poets in Space

Is there a use for poetry in space?

Can the language of apogee, perigee, declination, right ascension, thrust vectors, newtonian mechanics and lagrangian points harbour those for whom words are a means to an artistic end? And not a means of requesting more oxygen be let into somewhere from a valve to ensure the survival of pocket humanity against the vast all but emptiness of space.

Space loves capital punishment, and is the harshest of hanging judges. Who can need beautiful wordsmiths where a single mistake of prosaic human or engineering frailty results in certain death.

Everything is checklist, double checklist, instruction manual and zero gravity suction lavatory. The incredible Commander Hadfield took beautiful photographs and sang a little Bowie, but if he had started declaiming Homer while bowing on a lyre, his fellow astronauts would have bundled him out of the airlock faster than you can say “tin can”.

Yet, when humanity does colonise the stars and planets, the arts will have to play a part. A society will surely go mad without them, without an outlet to perform and express. The all encompassing sterility of space must have an antidote; steel domes and plastic furniture won't be enough.

And so, in addition to the square jawed heroes, science nerds, brilliant women, engineers, doctors and folk who's hair looks good in zero gravity, so there will need to stained trouser artists, dusty sculptors, and lank haired writers in tweed jackets with elbow patches. And the poets, space berets and polo necks, astro beatniks, will have to go to.

It seems strange to think of it, but it is true. Mars needs poets.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05.04.14

The Planet of the Artists

I read now that the Mars One colonization project – a one way trip to found a new society on Mars, essentially – has now found a producer for the reality TV programme that is going to be constructed around it.

While the whole thing smacks of an eccentric rich Dutchman's idea of highly publicised group suicide to some, there is no doubt that sooner or later someone is going to have to try and colonise another world in that very fashion...what kind of people will they be? Will they be scientists, dry, practical yet crackling with mechanical invention? Or oridinary people, drawn by inducements to leave an overcrowded Earth for our real life future “Off-World Colonies” on plasma rockets of shining silver?

Or perhaps, the technology to send people extraterrestrial will become available to artists.

What could a planet settled by artists, and a society begotten by artists be like? Peaceful with an intense co-operation and indeed socialism in the Martian wind? Or competitive, talents of all kinds striving to out-do each other in the new world they created?

Movements will divide up the five continents after the devastating war between the conceptualists and the realists. Sculptures cast their new style idols high above the inconceivable red landscape, organic forms in brass and bronze glinting in the reduced sunlight, so high that across the Straits of Da Da the Island of the Photographers can see them plain. The photographers document themsevles, document themsevles taking pictures of each other, feedback in the lenses choing to eternity.

The photographers forget to feed themsevles, so intent with their documentation and display thereof are they. They rely on food-drops from the poets, who make edible books out of their poetry because on mars paper is not only edible but a delicacy...the future poet of Mars thinks that his words are literally and doubly so food for the soul and so should be distributed free from sub orbital space capsules.

How does a poet know how to build a space capsule? They have made lyrical the instruction manuals and their iambic factory workers can cope with this form of industrialisation.

The land of the architects, which on the southern shore of one of Lowell and Schiaparelli's canals, which are really real but highly misunderstood, is one of holes. For reasons of contrariness, all land above 5 metres in height is levelled with powerful instruments, and vast holes are dug, holes that are in the shape of buildings that aren't there...a Chrysler building made of nothing, a Palace of Knossos in insolid air, Eiffel Tower up not down, girder shapes etched in the rock, into the depths.

Of course, these architectural spaces being sacred, their creators don't dwell in them and live in crude tents in the super-dry terraformed atmosphere, throats coated in sand so they can't speak.

Finally there is the Continent of the Painters, a community engaged in an endless project – to reproduce in entirety the night sky on the ground in utter exactitude. It is a beautiful wonder, and to avoid spoiling it, they live underground, deep enough so their rabbit digging does not fracture the art. They painted the land black, and picked out stars in titanium oxide white, Tio2, tinting them occasionally yellow or red to match in utter exactitude the tints of Capella, Betelgeuse and the rest. The poets don't feed them because they don't like their slavish copying of nature; they have learned and evolved to subsist off their own paint.

The project never finishes, because every new comet, meteor and nova has to be added in, streaking the blackscape in more white and making the painters scream “THIS MASTERPIECE OF CREATION SHALL NEVER BE FINISHED”

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14.03.04

The Intergalactic JCB

The thousand different shades of green I can see outside the window are quite breathtaking, as I daydream away over this keyboard wondering when inspiration might find its way in to my fingers.

There are no diggers working away anywhere in my vicinity thank the stars, but for some reason I have a vision of one visible between the birch trees, a savage looking JCB digging up the bowling green, scattering brown earth and burnt umber onto the palette. It shakes its jaws and more lightweight matter is dispersed into the damp atmosphere.

And then it came to me. Instead of having a mere artisan JCB digging in the dirt, could you have a more sophisticated intra dimensional digger, carving its way through space time? Tunnelling like the Eurostar to the galactic destination of your choice?

It would require colossal energy, perhaps akin to that of a Black Hole, perhaps even powered by one, to operate, and would have jaws the size of a medium sized asteroid. Its teeth however are as small as quarks, and move like a quantum chain saw as they slice the fabric of space apart.

The more it digs, the more it sinks into a well in space-time of its own creation, a relativistic jet of super energetic matter indicating where it once sat on the surface of the universe. The navigating entity, man or machine, uses complex multi dimensional spinor mathematics to plot a path through the rent in space, and although the process takes forever relative to the machine, it takes place out of time and thus to observers takes no time at all before it carves its way back to the surface again, at the chosen destination in whichever galaxy, or indeed universe, of choice.

The passengers are now ready to embark in the shuttle vehicle, to fall out of our space, only to re-emerge to here knows when, to see wonders beyond imagination.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 01/10/2013

A Journey to Andromeda...

I've been imagining a fascinating experiment in human psychology.

Endurace type events have always been an obesession of mine. Long distance running. Cycling. Nordic Skiing. The idea of walking the entire coastline of Britain, waterproof clad, relishing the rain.

So, watching a cosmological Horizon on BBC4, a programme going boldly to the outer edges of my knowledge - about a five second jouney - I was inspired to imagine another such voyage.

A journey from here to the Andromeda galaxy, 2.25 million light years away. I'm making assumptions like no one has assumed before here; that perhaps the people at the British Interplanetary Society can come up with a working design that would get us there within, say, ten million years or so, that ayone would want to make such a journey, and that they could survive it.

Allocate those a variable, x,y and z. Matrix them, forget about them. It can be done. I want to put someone in a spaceship, alive and conscious the whole time, for ten million years. Face fixed forwards perhaps, contemplating the doppler shifted stars at insane velocities, Plato's cave in space.

Could you stand it, fed and watered, somehow entertained, for ten million years. If the sanest person on Earth started the journey, how far beyond the bounds of madness would they have reached after a mere ten years? Suicide could not be allowed to be an option, so restraint and feeding tubes may have to be employed. Would the brain evolve into a new lifeform in its own right? Would it discard the body, would the body discard the brain?

Would the endless dark of intergalactic space be enough to drive you mad without everything else.

If anyone could do it, I envy them. Life isn't long enough to take in these feats, and that makes me sad. I doubt I'll be around to confirm extraterrestrial intelligent life exists, and that makes me sad too.

Doctor Manhattan says it best. When we die, the Universe doesn't even notice.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26/09/2013

CONCEPTS - More thoughts on super fast space travel

I spend a lot of time travelling through space (inner) considering methods of travelling through space (outer).

I was reading about relativistic jets, the beams of energetic particles emitted from the poles of objects like neutron stars and the supermassive black-holes found at the centre of galaxies - the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 has a particularly fine example.

Consisting of streams of electron-positron or electron-ion matter marshalled into energetic jets by tightening magnetic fields around a black-hole's accretion disc, or by frame-dragging, a "way out there" phenomenon associated with super massive objects sitting in space time.

These jets move at anything up to tiny fraction below the speed of light, and so it occurred to me, you could out a craft in these jets, suitably heavily shielded against the tremendous energies and ration involved, and surf the jet to a phenomenol speed in a guaranteed constant direction. In my notebook, I even drew a picture of this thing happening! As a three year old physicist would.

The other idea I threw into the space above my head, was a craft employing a generator that projected a major stream of Higgs Particles at a point in space, to generate a super massive singularity ahead of it in space-time. The craft can then fall towards it's self created gravity well, and when sufficient acceleration is gained, it can then project the stream to a further point to keep its momentum up.

Yep, this probably violates every newtonian law of motion under the sun, but this isn't newtonian space! And in my space, perhaps these things can work!

CONCEPT - Sailing the interstellar wind

I was in a reflective mood the last couple of days, so I day dreamed myself out of the solar system, and set myself adrift on the winds of deep space; a silent lonely drift, but a perfectly peaceful one where you could enjoy the beautiful universe undisturbed for all eternity.

It is the case that as I write, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are in the process of crossing the Heliopause, the point at which the solar wind is overcome by the prevailing forces produced by the the stars and cosmic rays. Although arguments continue as to what degree if at all the craft have finally crossed it, this is regarded as the edge of the solar system, the beginning of deep, endless space.

And how would I like to explore it.

Of course, I cannot, but I dreamed up a vehicle that could. It would perhaps launch and journey outward like a Voyager, designed to produce high end science of whichever solar system bodies it encounters, and powered by an ion drive for long term thrust.

But as it crossed the Heliopause, marked by a change in "wind" direction and an increase in galactic cosmic rays, the nature of the craft would change. A set of gigantic, charged particle sensitive sails would emerge, thrust would be turned off, and the craft would use the gentle thrust of the prevailing radiation to sail down stream, out into interstellar space. It would feature a longer lasting nucelar power source than the Voyagers, enabling a more powerful transmitter to be used, enabling earth to remain in contact longer with the craft and perhaps the sails could be used to harness the power of cosmic rays and the solar wind to provide a little extra power.

And on and on, until the end of time, shall the interstellar ship sail upon the galactic trade winds, perhaps with my ashes upon it. Who knows?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28/04/13

Playing Tennis on the Moon

I've been having the most vivid dreams as of late, often rather nightmarish, often downright strange, but last night's was pure fun for a change.

For some reason, to commemorate the London 2012 Olympics, the LOCOG people were inviting people to go to an olympics base on the moon for £20. You had to wear black tie for some reason, and of the journey itself, I remembered nothing because "the human mind could not comprehend it." The lunar base itself had no windows - perhaps it was all a Capricorn One type illusion - and was all metallic inside.

I played a game of tennis with a lunar resident, a long legged female tennis player, and despite the low gravity, the game was dead slow, with the tennis balls barely bouncing. I could barely hit the ball over the net. Recognising this disaster, I was invited to play Moon Pool, which involved a triangular table, with holes around the pointy end rather reminiscent of bar billiards. Hanging over the table was a basket ball net, under which was a netting bag filled with fruit and mushrooms. This, apparently, was for "Fruit Basketball".

Fruit Basketball!!! Shades of Zig and Zag.

This has got me wondering however. We are constantly reminded how astronauts on long missions must constantly exercise in order to maintain musculo-skeletal integrity and vascular performance; to this end they spend hours a day in space on boring looking treadmills and similar devices. I remember Skylab had a primitive sort of hand cycling device.

This is just not going to be stimulating enough in the long run - the long mission astronauts of the future will want to play more competitive sports. I figured some sort of variant of squash or handball would be a possible option - doesn't require a huge amount of space, and would probably be enhanced by playing in a weightless situation. Badminton's a non starter, so is volleyball, but no doubt it would still be a spectacular sport for the naturist astronauts of the future. Darts would be cool in zero g, but not very strenuous, and hey, watch those windows and vital systems.

Perhaps you could play ping pong, but in a sort of square tunnel with a net all the way round. That might just work!

Black Hole Space Travel

I've been thinking about this concept a lot, during the long draggy hours at work, another far out sci fi idea to throw into the maw of my imagination, to be be chewed up and spat out.

It's not the normal view of black hole space travel, which posits them as a sot of wormhole short cut from one place in space time to another. My admittedly very limited research into black holes doesn't lead me to think this is a likely conclusion. But I was wondering if they could be used as a potential gravitational slingshot mechanism, like Voyager 2 and the major planets.

You would have to get in close, because as far as I can make out the sphere of influence of a normal black hole's gravity is not as wide as you might think. But as you get in close, you have to maintain practically the speed of light to maintain a stable orbit around the event horizon. So it makes me wonder if you could use ordinary black holes to accelarate interstellar travel up to near close to light speed, and whether there are enough black holes around to make this practical.

Just throwing something out there...