UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

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Traveling in Time

Most of us have dreamed of traveling through time, backward or forwards, faster than those around us. And surprisingly, recent work has shown us that time travel is far more than just a dream. In fact, a number of researchers have explored, and are currently exploring, the legitimacy of time travel. While they haven’t quite gotten to the point where they are able to time travel themselves—these researchers have found some concrete science backing it up.

This past June, I met with James Beacham, a particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), at Brain Bar Budapest, a festival focused on science and the future, to talk about the ways in which time travel has enraptured humanity and discuss both the logistical and technical potential of time travel.

Beacham began by outlining the ways that, according to Einstein’s theories, time travel is technically possible through a number of different methods.

“If space can be bent, then spacetime can be bent.”

One proposed method of time travel is via wormholes. “We know that space can be bent. If space can be bent by, say, gravity, then spacetime can be bent,” Beacham said. To clarify, space is the three-dimensional body in which all things in the universe move. Spacetime, however, is the combined concepts of space and time into a four-dimensional continuum. You may have even seen spacetime portrayed as a fabric, manipulated by energy. If spacetime can be bent, Beacham continued, it’s theoretically possible that time can be bent.

Making Time Travel A Reality

This concept of bending spacetime sprung from Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, which introduced the idea that wormholes could, in theory, act as a bridge between two points that would otherwise be very distant. Because of spacetime’s flexibility, a wormhole could link two different points in its fabric.

Recently, evidence for this theory has moved beyond the strictly theoretical. A couple of years ago, scientists built what they described as a “wormhole.” Their model, however, created a portal for magnetic fields. As Smithsonian outlined, “if another magnetic field travels through the wormhole, it appears to leave space altogether, only showing up at either end.”

So it doesn’t exactly teleport particles (or people) across spacetime, but it does highlight the continual advances that are being made in our ability to manipulate the various fundamental forces in our universe, and ultimately, the manipulation of this force is an important step towards creating a simplified wormhole that would allow us to send electromagnetic waves through an invisible tunnel. Perhaps, one day, we will be able to manipulate spacetime in a similar manner.

So while wormholes remain theoretically possible and important steps are being made, wormholes in spacetime, specifically, have yet to be observed or created.

Another potential method of time travel is time dilation. Einstein’s theories predicted that time passes differently throughout the universe. We now know this to be true—clocks tick slower on the International Space Station (ISS) than they do here on Earth, for example. This happens because time moves slower for objects that are near strong gravitational fields (such as Earth) than for objects further from these fields, like the ISS.

So by spending time off Earth’s surface and returning at a later point, a human could, in a sense, fast forward through time. If you could get close to a black hole, because there are such strong gravitational forces in the vicinity, time would slow to a mesmerizing degree. Thousands of Earth-years might pass by while only a few seconds tick by near a supermassive black hole.

Time dilation also comes into play where speed is concerned. If we were to, say, travel at 95% of the speed of light, time would slow down dramatically. So again, thousands of Earth-years could pass by in what the traveler experiences as just a few moments.

And this is just the beginning, as there are a number of different ways in which we could make time travel into a reality. Scientists from various disciplines are investigating different methods for us to make more dramatic jumps through time, like using circulating light beams, which can be created through the use of gamma and magnetic fields to twist space and cause time to be twisted. Other methods include quantum tunneling and hypothetical cosmic strings.

Of course, just because something is theoretically possible doesn’t mean it’s technically feasible. At least, not yet. We can’t make wormholes, and we can’t travel near the speed of light. But there is hope that we could achieve these things in the very near future. “We could possibly address things about time travel and understand the basic nature of time with the research that we do now. Or at least, in the next 50 to 100 years,” Beacham said.

Yet, we must acknowledge the possibility that moving back and forth through time may be contrary to the laws of physics. Still, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. As Stephen Hawking famously wrote in his autobiography, “Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.”

Sailing Through Space

We’re all familiar with the idea of solar sails to explore the Solar System, using the light pressure from the Sun. But there’s another propulsion system that could harness the power of the Sun, electric sails, and it’s a pretty exciting idea.

A few weeks ago, I tackled a question someone had about my favorite exotic propulsion systems, and I rattled off a few ideas that I find exciting: solar sails, nuclear rockets, ion engines, etc. But there’s another propulsion system that keeps coming up, and I totally forgot to mention, but it’s one of the best ideas I’ve heard in awhile: electric sails.

Artist concept of a solar sail demonstration mission that will use lasers for navigation.

Credit: NASA.

As you probably know, a solar sail works by harnessing the photons of light streaming from the Sun. Although photons are massless, they do have momentum, and can transfer it when they bounce off a reflective surface.

In addition to light, the Sun is also blowing off a steady stream of charged particles – the solar wind. A team of engineers from Finland, led by Dr. Pekka Janhunen, has proposed building an electric sail that will use these particles to carry spacecraft out into the Solar System.

To understand how this works, I’ll need to jam a few concepts into your brain.

First, the Sun. That deadly ball of radiation in the sky. As you probably know, there’s a steady stream of charged particles, mainly electrons and protons, zipping away from the Sun in all directions.

Visualization of the solar wind encountering Earth’s magnetic “defenses” known as the magnetosphere. Clouds of southward-pointing plasma are able to peel back layers of the Sun-facing bubble and stack them into layers on the planet’s nightside (center, right). The layers can be squeezed tightly enough to reconnect and deliver solar electrons (yellow sparkles) directly into the upper atmosphere to create the aurora.

Credit: JPL

Astronomers aren’t entirely sure how, but some mechanism in the Sun’s corona, its upper atmosphere, accelerates these particles on an escape velocity. Their speed varies from 250 to 750 km/s.

Solar Wind Power

The solar wind travels away from the Sun, and out into space. We see its effects on comets, giving them their characteristic tails, and it forms a bubble around the Solar System known as the heliosphere. This is where the solar wind from the Sun meets the collective solar winds from the other stars in the Milky Way.

In fact, NASA’s Voyager spacecraft recently passed through this region, finally making their way to interstellar space.

The solar wind does cause a direct pressure, like an actual wind, but it’s incredibly weak, a fraction of the light pressure a solar sail experiences.

This artist’s concept shows the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering the space between stars. Interstellar space is dominated by plasma, ionized gas (illustrated here as brownish haze), that was thrown off by giant stars millions of years ago.

Credit: NASA.

But the solar wind is negatively charged, and this is the key.

An electric sail works by reeling out an incredibly thin wire, just 25 microns thick, but 20 kilometers long. The spacecraft is equipped with solar panels and an electron gun which takes just a few hundred watts to run.

By shooting electrons off into space, the spacecraft maintains a highly positive charged state. As the negatively charged particles from the Sun encounter the positively charged tether, they “see” it a huge obstacle 100 meters across, and crash into it.

By imparting their momentum into the tether and spacecraft, the ions accelerate it away from the Sun.

The amount of acceleration is very weak, but it’s constant pressure from the Sun and can add up over a long period of time. For example, if a 1000 kg spacecraft had 100 of these wires extending out in all directions, it could receive an acceleration of 1 mm per second per second.

In the first second it travels 1 mm, and then 2 mm in the next second, etc. Over the course of a year, this spacecraft could be going 30 km/s. Just for comparison, the fastest spacecraft out there, NASA’s Voyager 1, is merely going about 17 km/s. So, much faster, definitely on an escape velocity from the Solar System.

One of the downsides of the method, actually, is that it won’t work within the Earth’s magnetosphere. So an electric sail-powered spacecraft would need to be carried by a traditional rocket away from the Earth before it could unfurl its sail and head out into deep space.

I’m sure you’re wondering if this is a one-way trip to get away from the Sun, but it’s actually not. Just like with solar sails, a electric sail can be pivoted. Depending on which side of the sail the solar wind hits, it either raises or lowers the spacecraft’s orbit from the Sun.

Strike the sail on one side and you raise its orbit to travel to the outer Solar System. But you could also strike the other side and lower its orbit, allowing it to journey down into the inner Solar System. It’s an incredibly versatile propulsion system, and the Sun does all the work.

Although this sounds like science fiction, there are actually some tests in the works. An Estonian prototype satellite was launched back in 2013, but its motor failed to reel out the tether. The Finnish Aalto-1 satellite was launched in June 2017, and one of its experiments is to test out an electric sail.

We should find out if the technique is viable later this year.

The HERTS Mission

It’s not just the Finns who are considering this propulsion system. In 2015, NASA announced that they had awarded a Phase II Innovative Advanced Concepts grant to Dr. Pekka Janhunen and his team to explore how this technology could be used to reach the outer Solar System in less time than other methods.

The Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System, or HERTS spacecraft would extend 20 of these electric tethers outward from the center, forming a huge circular electric sail to catch the solar wind. By slowly rotating the spacecraft, the centrifugal forces will stretch the tethers out into this circular shape.

Artist’s illustration of NASA’s Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System. Credit: NASA

With its positive charge, each tether acts like a huge barrier to the solar wind, giving the spacecraft an effective surface area of 600 square kilometers once it launches from the Earth. As it gets farther, from Earth, though, its effective area increases to the equivalent of 1,200 square km by the time it reaches Jupiter.

When a solar sail starts to lose power, an electric sail just keeps accelerating. In fact, it would keep accelerating out past the orbit of Uranus.

If the technology works out, the HERTS mission could reach the heliopause in just 10 years. It took Voyager 1 35 years to reach this distance, 121 astronomical units from the Sun.

But what about steering? By changing the voltage on each wire as the spacecraft rotates, you could have the whole sail interact differently on one side or the other to the solar wind. You could steer the whole spacecraft like the sails on a boat.

In September 2017, a team of researchers with the Finnish Meteorological Institute announced a pretty radical idea for how they might be able to use electric sails to comprehensively explore the asteroid belt.

Instead of a single spacecraft, they proposed building a fleet of 50 separate 5-kg satellites. Each one would reel out its own 20 km-long tether and catch the Sun’s solar wind. Over the course of a 3-year mission, the spacecraft would travel out to the asteroid belt, and visit several different space rocks. The full fleet would probably be able to explore 300 separate objects.

This image depicts the two areas where most of the asteroids in the Solar System are found: the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the trojans, two groups of asteroids moving ahead of and following Jupiter in its orbit around the Sun.

Each spacecraft would be equipped with a small telescope with only a 40 mm aperture. That’s about the size of a spotting scope, or half a pair of binoculars, but it would be enough to resolve features on the surface of an asteroid as small as 100 meters across. They’d also have an infrared spectrometer to be able to determine what minerals each asteroid is made of.

That’s a great way to find that $10 trillion asteroid made of solid platinum.

Because the spacecraft would be too small to communicate all the way back to Earth, they’d need to store the data on board, and then transmit everything once they came past our planet 3 years later.

The planetary scientists I’ve talked to love the idea of being able to survey this many different objects at the same time, and the electric sail idea is one of the most efficient methods to do it.

According to the researchers, they could do the mission for about $70 million, bringing the cost to analyze each asteroid down to about $240,000. That would be cheap compared to any other method proposed of studying asteroids.

Space exploration uses traditional chemical rockets because they’re known and reliable. Sure they have their shortcomings, but they’ve taken us across the Solar System, to billions of kilometers away from Earth.

But there are other forms of propulsion in the works, like the electric sail. And over the coming decades, we’re going to see more and more of these ideas put to the test. A fuel free propulsion system that can carry a spacecraft into the outer reaches of the Solar System? Yes please.

I’ll keep you posted when more electric sails are tested.

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