Les Johnson - Going Interstellar

Figure 8. A possible roadmap for developing solar sail propulsion from that we can build today to that which will be required to take us to the stars. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

Forward further proved that we could slow down and rendezvous with a target star’s planets by having a detachable inner sail that uses laser light reflected from the outer ring (of the sail) to slow it down. This same approach could be used to send spacecraft to virtually any nearby star system with commensurately longer trip times—though they will be measured in decades rather than millennia.

So how do we get from where we are today, flying solar sails that are only a fraction of the size required for true interstellar travel, to those that will give us the stars? First of all, we start flying them for more near-term exploration of our own solar system. As the technology matures, we build increasingly large and lighter-weight sails, eventually crossing the threshold to use beamed energy to augment their sunlight provided thrust. Figure 8 shows one strategy for getting from here to “there.”

Solar and laser-driven sails can give us the stars. But, as with virtually every other propulsion system that might enable the greatest voyages in human history, their sizes will be immense and pose engineering challenges we cannot yet imagine. But what could be more fitting for the future explorers than journeying to the stars using the only other thing in the universe that already makes such trips with regularity—light! Just remember when you are next out stargazing that the light you see from the distant starts has been traveling for years, decades, or even millennia before it touched you—yes, before it gently pushed you—into thinking about taking such a journey yourself.

Everybody loves a good mystery. In this one, Sarah Hoyt sets us up with a secret hidden within the nursery rhymes preserved for kids on a multigenerational starship. Why, one goes on to wonder, would anyone need to hide information on a starship anyhow?

Sometimes I wonderwhat would have happened if I hadn’t been twenty and faced with the oldest problem a girl could have. I was being courted by two men and I didn’t know which I preferred.

Except that courted might be too strong a word, since there was very little about it that was romantic. We’d grown up together, were of similar status and background, and each of us was licensed to enter into a marriage producing two children. Still, I had two men who wished to marry me.

And I didn’t know which one to pick. They’d both been my friends forever and whichever way you looked at it, none of us was going to set the ship on fire, as the saying went. Which was a good thing, since rumor had it that this was what Ciar’s parents had planned to do before they were captured and executed. Not that I knew for sure or that Ciar knew anything about his parents. He’d been born from a surrogate years after they’d died and he’d been brought up in a creche for children who’d been created from stored ova and sperm—to continue the lines of people who’d been executed or died before having children. But there was a rumor about his parents, that they’d been dangerous subversives. I’d always thought it had been used to explain Ciar’s tendency to get into all sorts of trouble.

Ennio, my other suitor, and I had grown up with our parents. Ciar didn’t seem to envy us. And his parents didn’t come up beyond the occasional joke among the three of us.

At twenty Ciar was a linguist and Ennio was a teacher’s assistant second class, with a nice space in the bachelor quarters, and a cozy if unexciting job maintaining and programming the educational computers. Which he was doing right now—the maintaining part—halfway under one of the brightly colored terminals in classroom 3A, for the beginners’ class.

His voice emerged muffled from beneath the terminal—a bulky, padded unit, designed to withstand the clumsy movements of toddlers. “What I want to know,” he said, as his upper body moved, indicating that he’d somehow twisted one arm up inside the machine, “is how much they feed these kids that they can afford to shove half their nutritional allowance—” he paused and grunted—“inside these machines, around the sensi-screens.”

Ciar laughed. He was lying across two of the terminals, staring at the ceiling, his straight black hair falling back from his face with its aquiline nose and sharp blue eyes. His status was about the same as Ennio’s. He worked as a third class linguist. Most of his days were spent deep in the archives of the language department which was translating all the documents we’d brought from Earth into the language we spoke now. Though no one ever said how many generations had passed, it stood to reason there had to be many, since my grandfather’s grandfather had been born aboard. They’d brought aboard, originally, people from many countries. Even though they’d made English the official language, many words and some structure had ported over from the languages of the other people on the ship.

So, the administrators wanted to make sure all our records, all our history and all our scientific knowledge stayed understandable, for when we landed.

Ennio emerged from under the terminal, a sticky lump of some unidentified substance in his hand. “It should work now,” he muttered, as he walked across to drop the lump in the disposal chute before washing his hands in the little sink in the corner, which, being set for toddlers, he had to bend almost double to use.

“I could help you,” I said. I hadn’t qualified for intellectual work, as the men had. Not that my IQ tests were inferior to theirs, but I had failed what Ciar called the restlessness test. He said that forced to endure the jobs he and Ennio performed, mostly confined to a single room or a suite of rooms day after day, I would have gone quietly insane. Which I supposed was why I’d been apprenticed to the maintenance crew, where every day brought something new. One day I might be repairing agricultural machines and the next working to remove the socks some toddler had flushed down the toilet on division D before they made all toilets on division F fountain to the ceiling. “I repair machines all the time.”

Ennio wrinkled his nose at me, his mop of reddish-brown hair standing up from being cut so short. There was a fad onboard for longish hair, so of course Ennio wore his almost too short. “This is hardly repair,” he said. “Just clean up.”

The terminal powered up when he tried it and he said, “Right. Now to reprogram it with all the nursery rhymes again.”

Ciar sat up, curious. “Nursery rhymes? You teach them those?”

“At this age it’s the best way to get them to read. I just need to make sure they come up and match the sound,” he said, picking things on the screen, till the screen displayed a series of lines, which were sounded out, aloud, in a babyish voice.

The big ship sails on the vacuum oh, the vacuum oh, the vacuum oh,Oh the big ship sails on the vacuum oh,It will not sail on forever.The captain said it will reach Alpha Centauri ohWhen ten generations are over.The big ship will reach Alpha CentauriWhere our new home will be.It will reach Alpha Centauri when ten generations are over.We will all live in Alpha CentauriIn the world most like Earth.We will all live in Alpha CentauriAfter the eleventh generation’s birth.

He pushed a few buttons and went on to another screen, where a comical owl hooted, flew away, and then the rhyme flashed: