Table of Contents

- The Truly HARD Science in Kill Before Dying—and the Rest of the Tau Ceti Universe by Dr. Travis S. Taylor

- The Galactic Internet (And We’re Still Using Dial-up) by Les Johnson

- Honorverse Analytics: Why Manticore Won the War by Pat Doyle and Chris Weuve

- Chimeras: Science and Science Fiction by Dan Koboldt

- Robert E. Lee and Decisive Battle: How Lee's Strategic Thinking is Portrayed in The Day After Gettysburg by J.R. Dunn

- Bug-Eyed Monsters Versus the World Builders by William Ledbetter

- Stasis: The Future of Suspended Animation by Philip A. Kramer

- Graphene—Not Just Another Miracle Material by Les Johnson and Joseph Meany

- Seeing Inside Your Head: From MRI to Telepathy? by Robert E. Hampson, Ph.D.

- Right Hand, Human Brain: The Mysteries of Handedness by Benjamin C. Kinney

- Grid Wars by Jim Beall

- Nuclear Fission Power in Space by Andy Presby

Baen Books

Free Nonfiction 2017

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

The Truly HARD Science in Kill Before Dying—and the Rest of the Tau Ceti Universe © 2017 by Dr. Travis S. Taylor

The Galactic Internet (And We’re Still Using Dial-up) © 2017 by Les Johnson

Honorverse Analytics: Why Manticore Won the War © 2017 by Pat Doyle and Chris Weuve

Chimeras: Science and Science Fiction © 2017 by Dan Koboldt

Robert E. Lee and Decisive Battle: How Lee's Strategic Thinking is Portrayed in The Day After Gettysburg © 2017 by J.R. Dunn

Bug-Eyed Monsters Versus the World Builders © 2017 by William Ledbetter

Stasis: The Future of Suspended Animation © 2017 by Philip A. Kramer

Graphene—Not Just Another Miracle Material © 2017 by Les Johnson and Joseph Meany

Seeing Inside Your Head: From MRI to Telepathy? © 2017 by Robert E. Hamspon, Ph.D.

Right Hand, Human Brain: The Mysteries of Handedness © 2017 by Benjamin C. Kinney

Grid Wars © 2017 by Jim Beall

Nuclear Fission Power in Space © 2017 by Andy Presby

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eISBN: 978-1-62579-596-0

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The Truly HARD Science in Kill Before Dying—

and the Rest of the Tau Ceti Universe

Dr. Travis S. Taylor

Setting the Stage

When I was in high school way back in the mid-1980s I had developed this theory of the universe. I had read all the Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov I could get my hands on. I’d finished Contact and other nonfiction works by Carl Sagan. I’d read just about everything that Stan Lee had put his fingers into. Lucas and Spielberg couldn’t put out anything without my having stood in line to see. There were no reruns of Star Trek, Space 1999, Battlestar Galactica, the Six Million Dollar Man, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and a myriad of other fun shows that I hadn’t seen two zillion times. And at the time I was getting up every morning before school at five-thirty so I could tune in my thirteen-inch color picture tube television set to the brand new local Fox channel that I had to use three coat hangers and some aluminum foil on in order to pick up the signal for Robotech. There was a common thread in all of these shows, and that was some method for faster than light space travel, energy shields, directed energy weapons, powered armor (Starship Troopers, Robotech, and Iron Man), transporters, and amazing technologies yet to be considered possible by mainstream scientists. Back then even the idea of planets around other star systems was still in question. This was back before we’d actually proven there were planets orbiting about pretty much every star there is in the universe.

In fact, I had recently won the Alabama State Science Paper Competition and there was some old guy scientist as the keynote speaker there talking about how we’d never see these nonsense fantasies of science fiction in his lifetime. There was no reason for aliens to exist, he had claimed. And to act like he knew something we didn’t he claimed that even Einstein’s Special Relativity shows us that we can never go faster than the speed of light. Which by the way isn’t what it says—but I digress, and I didn’t fully understand that back then, anyway. He went on and on talking about the things that a serious scientist or engineer should be thinking about. I didn’t understand where this guy was coming from at all. I mean, I certainly couldn’t imagine any aged scientist who’d spent his life studying the amazing universe coming to the conclusion that it was mundane and not like the books, movies, and television programs told us it would be. Where was the imagination? I didn’t understand how anyone so educated could be so dumb. I just didn’t understand how this guy was a “learned” man.

What I did understand, though, was that Einstein had other theories, such as general relativity, that allowed certain loopholes. So, I asked this keynote gray-bearded, so-called authority about wormholes, and he acted like I was speaking in tongues. I said to myself then that this old guy was wrong and that he might not see it in his lifetime but we’d see it in mine!

I digressed. I mentioned up front that back then I had this theory of the universe. I called this theory the Knot Theory. Of course, quite arrogantly and presumptively, I called it the Taylor Knot Theory. After all, it was my theory as far as I knew. I’m sure caveman Ooog thought the wheel was his invention until he saw caveman Uuuuggg with one of them connected to a forked tree limb attempting to create the first wheelbarrow. And likewise, I’m certain, they must have spent years in a heated patent rights infringement lawsuit that is still disputed to date like the great radio controversy between Tesla and Marconi. By the way, Tesla invented it (transfer of information through radio I mean).

Me and digressions, again. So I had this theory: The Taylor Knot Theory of the Universe. I recall I used to describe this theory as below.

The universe is made up of something. After all, what do we call the emptiness between the stars and planets and atoms and all things? We call it space. We call it a “something.” If it were a “nothing,” then we wouldn’t know it was there to call it “something.” Therefore, from this perfectly infallible logic, space isn’t emptiness made of nothing. It is actually made of something.

I decided that this “something” was a form of energy along long filaments or sheets that looked like the piles of yarn and cloth scraps in my mom’s sewing leftovers box. There were open-ended strings, closed-up loops of strings, sheets and swatches of materials of different colors, shapes, and sizes. There were strings hanging from sheets and strips tied around other strings and strips, and every other mish-mash combination of materials and colors you could imagine. Looked just like a universe to me. The knots were always the most interesting to me. Where strings would get looped up on one another and knotted up or where they were tied intentionally there would be a hard point in the pillowy soft pile of material. I imagined these knotted up locations were the stars and planets and particles and the spaceships and us and all the other fun solid stuff in a magical universe filled with aliens and spacefold generators. And to top it off, using cloth and strings to describe the universe fit my romanticized view of it perfectly, just as Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, or Mrs. Which might have explained it.

A few months later, after the science paper competitions, fairs, graduation and such, I was in my first year in undergraduate school studying physics and engineering at Auburn University. I often had long philosophical, “I’m smarter than you are,” conversations at the Engineering Dorm where I mostly hung out and drank a nondescript beverage from a nondescript red plastic container. There were some kids there much smarter than me, and that pushed me to get smarter. I recall explaining to one of them that I had it all figured out and that what we needed to do was to create some sort of “tuning fork” that we could touch the pile of strings and strips that make up the universe and absorb all the “vibrations” that made up the knot that made up a spaceship. Then we could touch the universe somewhere else with the tuning fork and transfer the knot and, voila, we’ve jumped from one place to another in space instantaneously. I didn’t know it then, but I just described quantum entanglement teleportation—well, sort of.

It is at this point where I usually had to back up and explain with some handwavium and unbelievium, “Oh, yeah, umm, the strings and such are all oscillating, yeah, that’s it. And, the knots are actually a, um, superposition, yeah that’s the word, of these vibrations, er, oscillations, wrapped up on each other that causes stuff and things.” And I meant actual “stuff” and “things” not just the general “stuff” and “things.” As you can see, this was a very well thought out theory and was very detailed in its intricacy. I was certainly on my way to Stockholm!

Then I had Fourier Series and Fourier Transform Theory and Applications in various classes and the Taylor Knot Theory continued to evolve and grow. Each string or strip could be represented as a sinusoidal oscillation or a series of sinusoids added together. I learned that you could take any function and represent it with an infinite series of sinusoids of various amplitudes and frequencies—that is, if you did the math correctly. I was beginning to see the strips and strings as a series of energy oscillations in a sea of Fourier Series at all frequencies and amplitudes (note that I just described the Dirac quantum sea or Feynman’s vacuum energy fluctuations . . . the beloved Zero Point Energy used in SF so often).

I even had a favorite demonstration for space folding. I stole it.

I can’t actually count the number of times, because they are too numerous, that I took a string and tied knots on each end and called one knot “point A” and the other knot “point B” and explained to folks that the shortest distance between points A and B wasn’t along the straight line of the string but rather through a fold. Just as the three Mrs. Ws had explained in A Wrinkle in Time, I would explain that if you fold the string so you can touch the two knots and then jump from one to the other you could seemingly travel this great distance along the string almost instantaneously.

I thought I was so smart.

And it was a great parlor trick explanation of some bigger ideas that always wooed and wowed the lesser savvy non-SF readers amongst us. The fellow anointed SF geeks in the room would simply smile and nod knowingly as they looked over their red plastic beverage containers and assembly language coding textbooks. And as I took more and more technical classes my metaphorical philosophical description of the universe got more and more complicated.

I added quantum physics in there and stated that the strings had to be limited in length based on rules of quantum physics. The so-called oscillations on the strings and strips and sheets were various manifestations of time, distance, energy, light, gravity, and matter in quantized increments—Planck masses, and Planck lengths, and Planck seconds, and so on. The length of the strings or perhaps their amplitudes and polarizations were what determined what color light would be generated by the oscillation or what type of particle/knot could be tied up in it. It was a super-science buzzword frenzy of a good time.

Years went by before I became smart enough to realize that I had created a fairly good metaphorical explanation for a theory that had been around—with much more mathematical scientific rigor than I had applied—since the 1960s. I was talking about string theory. And then later I realized I’d been talking about membrane theory. Just for fun, go to the Wikipedia page on string theory and scroll down to the section on branes (short for membranes). You’ll see a graphic there that doesn’t look too dissimilar from the mish-mash of cloth and strings idea I described so many years ago. The picture is of two membranes, or “sheets,” that are made up of strings and connected via strings. As it turns out. the gist of this theory was generated by smart folks as far back as 1984—a couple years before I had it in my head. And who knows, I probably read it, saw it, or heard of it somewhere somehow, and subconsciously—or is it unconsciously—“came up with it on my own.” Damn. So much for going to Stockholm.

But I still like the idea. I still pat myself on the back for Taylor’s Knot Theory from time to time. But that is usually just before I scold myself for not doing the math and writing a paper on it. Many times nowadays I find myself putting ideas into my fiction and saying that I’ll get around to writing it down soon. Sometimes soon comes and sometimes it doesn’t.

In the end, it was a good idea. At the heart of it the idea that the universe is made up of something—and there’s nothing wrong with oscillating strings, strips, and sheets of quantum vacuum energy—is elegant, simple, and powerful all at once. It’s just when we attempt to do the math that we realize how complicated things can get. But the idea can be used to show all sorts of fun consequences within and without our universe. The four known forces of nature can be unified into one field theory and by doing so might enable such things as transporters, faster than light travel, shields and on and on. All of that assumes, of course, that we can someday prove it to be an accurate description of the universe and not just mathematical nonsense and exercises in futility.

The current issue with string and membrane theory is that they are so metaphorically mathematical it is difficult to point to direct experiments to prove, disprove, or adjust them based on real world data—any real world data. Hopefully, all that will change with time but for now it is shrouded in the “magic” of the sufficiently advanced. But in just a few short decades the magic shroud might be retracted more and more and we might be able to see the science up close and personal. And when we can do that, the romantic era of SF that I, we, have all longed for will start to manifest more quickly. I’d say we are very close now to the tipping point into that realm of fun, but we aren’t quite there yet. We’re close. So dang close, we are. (My attempt at channeling Yoda’s southern cousin, Soder).

As a scientist I have to deal with finding the experiments and math and the devil within the devil within the details. But as a science fiction writer I get to also speculate on what pulling back this magic shroud will enable for humanity. And it is the Taylor Knot Theory that is at the very heart of all the books in the Tau Ceti Universe. I’ve been doing this for many books now. From the very start of the series as I created this universe my knot theory was the key driving technology for the story. Well, I guess I have to own up to it and just quit calling it my knot theory and call it as it really is, Quantum Membrane Theory. But from the start my plan was for Quantum Membrane Theory to be at the very heart of the universe and the story and to be new to the universe in that it would be a disruptive technology and change the way things had been done for many years prior. And thus, the stage was set for the Tau Ceti Universe.

The Cool Stuff

So years ago I was asked to write a short story for an anthology called Future Washington. In that short story, called “Agenda,” I introduced a president who was being accused of having ties with a solar system-wide terrorist but clearly it was all an opposition party lie to sway an election. Or was it? In the end we are introduced to quantum teleportation technology and discover the truth behind closed Oval Office doors.

I enjoyed writing this story so much that I proposed it as a book called The Tau Ceti Agenda. Baen books promptly wrote me up a contract for one book. I started writing the prologue for TCA and enjoyed creating the backstory for the story so much so that somewhere around forty thousand words I called Toni Weisskopf at Baen Books and said, “Um, Toni, the prologue to TCA is already forty thousand words and I’m not done with it. I don’t see how I can finish the story in less than two hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand words.”

“We can’t have one book that long!” she exclaimed.

“Then what do I do?”

“Better make it three books.” She said.

So there you have it. One Day on Mars, The Tau Ceti Agenda, and One Good Soldier were born. I had my start on a trilogy. And it was a fun trilogy filled with quantum membrane teleportation of individuals and large spacecraft over vast distances, large directed energy weapons, Pluto-sized facilities with giant mass driver rail guns, powered armor suits the likes of which might impress Heinlein and Stan Lee, mecha fighters and tanks that transformed into various forms, giant kilometers long supercarrier spaceships with hyperspace Krasnikov vortex generators for FTL, a new weapon of mass destruction I called “gluonium bombs” based on the force that binds quarks together, longevity, immunoboost and other fun medical technologies, and artificial intelligences. My favorite is the direct-to-mind computation, communication, and display. And I placed all this fun stuff on a backdrop of civil war, awesome fighting mecha jocks, and badass armored space Marines.

Now on to the new trilogy.

I have to start with mecha though. Why? Because so many wise old military and military SF fans, and writers, will argue until they are blue in the face that mecha is silly and has zero military utility. Their argument is usually something like, “If I already have a tank, what is the purpose of turning it into a walking robot? Or if it is a plane why turn it into a walking robot when I can just fly over and drop bombs and such? And besides, with that much weight on a foot it would sink up into the ground!”

Well, this argument is so archaic and unimaginative it is reminiscent of the old gray-beard scientist guy that was keynote speaker at my science paper competition all those years ago. The sinking into the ground statement, which I’ve heard countless times, assumes modern day technology extrapolated in the future. Certainly, lighter weight materials will be invented, or some sort of propulsion augmentation to offset the mass could be developed. This one is just an excuse not to think.

The argument for mecha that transfigures/transforms is simple. It can be explained as changing the envelope of performance of a system. The battle for Fallujah in the Iraqi War in 2004 is a perfect example of how mecha would have been useful. We had many troops in positions about the city with massive insurgency resistance pockets spread about the civilian population. The Marines used M1A1 tanks but had a shortage of them and needed more. The tanks they needed were many days travel away. It was March, and most references describing the battle say they were told that more tanks wouldn’t arrive until April.

Had those tanks been able to transform into flying vehicles and fly to the city even at a modest small aircraft speed, many lives might have been saved and the outcome of the battle might have been dramatically different. This transfiguring tank would have been a very good use of mecha, if only for transport needs. Imagine taking the only method of travel for the tanks, rolling tracks, and adding two more: 1) walking bot and 2) flying tank.

I always smile and nod, I used to argue, when I hear folks speak in absolutes about how one thing or the other is stupid or not. Mecha is a new performance and operating regime for current vehicles. There is always utility in expanded operating envelopes.

One of the technologies used often is immunoboost, which I don’t really dive into until books four and five of the trilogy. (And I should quit calling it a trilogy, I guess.) The idea behind the immunoboost is that it is a mixture of all things that will drive the body into overdrive and heal hundreds of times faster than normal. To aid the process are swarms of nanomachines mixed into the drug. Imagine a biomechanical mixture of adrenaline, stimulants, megadose vitamins, stem cells, super anitvirals and antibiotics, hormones and steroids, and a zillion little machines programmed to return the human anatomy to optimal configuration. Now I don’t really explain how the nanomachines were constructed. We can build rudimentary ones now and these books take place three hundred years or so in the future. There are liable to be picomachines or even smaller ones by then.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is very predominant in this universe. Think about how often you ask Google or Siri questions that are almost instantly answered that make you much more proficient at whatever it is you do. Now imagine that search, database, and algorithm deriving and solving power evolved for three hundred years and installed onto a quantum computer. Now imagine you completely remove the tactile and audio interface requirements— they can still be there, but they are superfluous. Imagine that the AI is installed on a tiny quantum computer that is then injected underneath the skin and bone just behind the ear and there is a direct-to-mind or DTM mind machine interface. You can privately converse with the AI just by thinking to it and it will think back to you in your respective “mindvoices.” And, any information and data can be relayed and displayed inside your mind and in front of your eyes in a private heads up display. This is actually what I believe will be one of the next big sweeping changes for humanity. The smartphones have made a major impact on our lives, but imagine in a few years that we can migrate the smartphones into our minds directly and remove any needs for exterior interfaces.

In the first three books, the giant supercarriers and the mecha only have structural integrity fields (SIFs) and not energy barrier shields. The idea behind these shields is that the materials the vehicles are armored with are some sort of metamaterial that uses external electromagnetic fields to align the molecules into a superdense configuration that increases the strength and hardness of the surface of the material. There are actually experiments going on today where we are using just this method in an attempt to create better armor systems. They are still very much in the early research phase. But in Trail of Evil and now in Kill Before Dying, I extrapolated the ideas of controlling and manipulating quantum fields around an object in such a way that any energy or matter incident on the field has its position vector randomly distorted and therefore “bounced” away from the barrier. I don’t know how we would build such a thing yet, but this is physically possible. I believe in these books that this is the first description of a barrier shield that is scientifically realizable and not pure handwavium and magicum. This piece of the story could someday become important.

Along the same lines as the barrier shield are the aliens’ Big Blue Beams of Death from Hell, or the BBDs for short. The beams are some form of very large directed energy beam that can turn corners and track to a target. That’s right, a directed energy beam that turns around corners and is steerable. I can imagine some eyes rolling, but I’ll explain how such beams might work.

Ever shined a laser beam into a swimming pool or other container of water? The beam is in a straight line at first. Then, when it hits the water, it is bent. This is due to the change in index of refraction between the air and the water. Well, vacuum space has an index of refraction of one. But near large gravitational masses like stars or black holes, spacetime is squished into a more dense region of space and the index of refraction is larger than one. Indexes of less than one can be created in a few other phenomena where quantum events and/or large electromagnetic fields are present. Now imagine emitting a beam or wavefront that travels in front of your BBD that alters the spacetime just ahead of the beam’s path in order to steer it as needed. This is possible—and in very small ways can be accomplished with technology we understand today. It’s just that nobody has yet thought to use in such a manner, I suspect.

I could go on and on about the fun stuff this universe has allowed me to create. Kill Before Dying was so much fun to write that, once I finished it, I just kept on going and am working on book six. Bringers of Hell is the working title. One of my favorite technologies that I developed in Kill Before Dying is the random quantum membrane teleportation sequence applied to the spacefighter planes. Imagine being in a dogfight and the enemy fighter planes randomly disappear and reappear in different spatial locations every few seconds. You’d never be able to target something like that! So, I added this concept to the mecha fighters because the enemy they were fighting was so overwhelmingly fast and powerful. In this case Mother Necessity kicked in and sparked a really fun invention.

A major technology used in all the books, and ever improving from book to book, is that of the armored environment suits, also known as powered armor. These suits have exterior metamaterial armor, sensor platforms ranging from radio to quantum, weapons systems, and they have jumpboots that use thrusters to kick them very long distances or to great heights. The suits have near frictionless servo systems and actuators that enhance strength and speed of the wearer as well.

The interior of the suits is something I spent a lot of time thinking about. I have personally conducted experiments where I have built and tested armored suits and I’ve worn spacesuits before. After spending four hours in an armored suit, I realized that the human mind and body have a tendency not to like being trapped inside a container. One can’t scratch anything and going to the bathroom becomes troublesome. Simple diapers in the case of the latter would cause health issues over prolonged use, and in some cases our armored e-suit Marines, AEMs, are in their suits for days and days.

So, I added an interior organic goop layer called “organogel” that absorbs sweat, blood, waste, and so on and moisturizes and maintains the skin for comfort during use. The organogel is also a first line of first aid. The gel fills and seals any traumatic injuries until such time as medical attention can be acquired.

In Kill Before Dying, the suit turns out to be a lifesaver in several instances. Also, I managed to add to the suits a version of the quantum barrier shield, so now they have energy barrier protection as well as armor.

"And how is such a thing powered?" you might ask. While not saying it here and within the books specifically, it is continuously implied throughout the books that quantum vacuum energy or zero point energy is used to power pretty much everything. After all, the quantum vacuum energy is nearly an infinite source if we can just learn to tap into it. There are experiments currently being conducted and planned for the future at various energy research labs across the globe where extraction of energy from the very fabric of spacetime is being tested. Sooner or later they will be successful.

What the Future Brings

So years ago I was asked to write a short story for an anthology called Future Washington. And many years later we have the fifth novel based on the story. Kill Before Dying was one of my absolute favorite novels to write, from the opening scene to the climactic and pivotal battles to the underlying hidden story within the overarching story. And with each new book there are new twists and fun and exciting new technologies to ponder and wonder over. Whether I got it right in these books or not, whatever the future brings will be more exciting and interesting. I can’t wait until we have powered armor suits, mecha space fighters, giant supercarriers, and galactic space travel. Until then, well, I guess I’ll have to settle for reading about it and writing about it in the Tau Ceti Universe.

As it goes so far, I’d say that in One Day on Mars there was a Tau Ceti Agenda that was then thwarted by One Good Soldier and his family. But little did they know that the bad guys had left behind a Trail of Evil and our heroes then swore that it was an evil that they must Kill Before Dying.

The Galactic Internet

(And We’re Still Using Dial-up)

Les Johnson

Is there somebody out there trying to make contact? If so, then how might we find them?

(Multiple galaxy image courtesy of NASA.)

Ask any science fiction fan or science junky about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, and you will immediately get their attention. After all, as we read about a universe filled with aliens and a hopeful vision of humanity’s future among the stars, how can we not think about who else, or what else, might be out there? Within our galaxy alone there are at least 100 billion stars; within the universe there are an estimated 100 billion to 200 billion galaxies; giving a staggering total of about one billion trillion stars in the known universe. Surely, the argument goes, among that many stars there evolved other life forms like us who develop technology, explore space and seek to find others like themselves. If only a small fraction of them are communicating across the vast interstellar and intergalactic distances, then might we be able to hear them? Might we be able to decipher what they are saying and join in a conversation with them?

Thus was born SETI. The idea of listening for signals from distant civilizations goes back to the 1800s and early 1900s when astronomers thought that beings on other planets in the solar system might be using this newfangled discovery called radio. Various attempts were made to listen for signals from Mars and elsewhere and, as we now know these planets are likely lifeless, none were received.

Modern SETI began in the 1960s with astronomer Frank Drake’s Project Ozma (named after the Land of Oz in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series). Drake used existing radio telescopes to see if anyone in a few nearby stellar systems were broadcasting into space. No signals were detected. SETI continued in fits and starts with funded, canceled, and sometimes restarted projects like The Big Ear at The Ohio State University Radio Observatory, NASA’s Project Cyclops, Suitcase SETI, the Megachannel Extra-Terrestrial Assay (META) and Billion-channel Extra-Terrestrial Assay (BETA), and today’s Breakthrough Listen. Aside from a few spurious signals that were later shown to be either terrestrial in origin or produced by known natural sources beyond Earth, the result was again the same: no promising extraterrestrial signals have yet been received.

There may be a very good reason for this that has absolutely nothing to do with the existence of extraterrestrials or whether or not they use radio. It’s a matter of physics and practicality. For a radio signal to be heard at the Earth from a source as close as the nearest stars, the transmitter would have to be broadcasting with at least a few megawatts of power and it would have to be pointed in the right direction. That’s certainly possible, and we’ve even sent our own message. In 1974, the Arecibo Radio Observatory broadcast such a signal—but for only a few minutes and toward one particular and very small region of the sky. Even if someone is out there listening, what’s the probability they will be listening at the right frequency, at the right time and at the right place when the short duration message arrives? Approximately zero. For this reason it is assumed that anyone wanting to be heard must broadcast continuously, at high power, across the entire sky and for extremely long periods of time—think hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.

What would be required to establish a viable, radio-based interstellar communications system that was not just a shout in the dark? (And, if you listen to luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, shouting in the dark while in the middle of the jungle might not be such a good idea. Who knows who or what will hear you and how they might react?)

You would want to be selective in where you are broadcasting and listening. Setting up megawatt or gigawatt transmitting systems that blare our message across wide swathes of sky indiscriminately is a waste of energy. All you have to do is look at the history of telecommunications here on Earth and you will see the trend away from high power, wide area broadcast stations to targeted, narrow bandwidth yet highly efficient and very information-dense transmission options using cables and now optical fibers. To do otherwise is a waste of resources and primitive. Shouting across the full sky might be the best way to see if anyone is out there, but the identification phase is only the first step. And that first step is finally being taken in earnest with the Breakthrough Listen Project. Their stated goals include listening for such shouts from among the one million closest stars and even for shouts from some nearby galaxies. They are even planning to look for optical transmissions, not just radio.

Once you find out that ET is living around a specific star, then you will want to target your energies, literally, and set up your two-way communications to be as efficient and information-dense as possible. You will therefore most likely concentrate your future efforts only on where ET resides.

What if intelligent, tool-using life is common throughout the universe? What if technological civilizations like ours often arise from their own Dark Ages and find others with whom they wish to communicate? How would they efficiently communicate with each other? They would be unlikely to shout their calls across the whole sky for anyone or everyone to hear for both Stephen Hawking’s reasons and out of sheer practicality. How, then, would one set up a targeted, energy efficient communications network among these civilizations? For a possible answer, let’s look to one of our favorite sources: Albert Einstein.

Einstein gave us an understanding of the universe that’s counterintuitive in many ways and, unfortunately, placed some obstacles in our path that appear insurmountable. For example, that whole speed of light “speed limit” thing. His theories have been tested and retested and each time they come out stronger than before. Relativity, with its embedded understanding of space-time, appears to be here to stay. And that’s a good thing. It may give us a chance to get up close and personal with extrasolar planets and establish or connect to an interstellar communications network that my friend and colleague Dr. Claudio Maccone calls “The Galactic Internet.”

But first, as with all good scientific theories, we need to establish some background. Before Einstein, we were limited in our understanding of the universe to the theories of physicists like Isaac Newton and mathematicians like Euclid. In their worldviews, and, quite frankly, our modern “everyday” worldview, the universe is thought to be essentially flat and unchanging. It is a universe where drawing two parallel lines out to infinity continues forever without the lines ever growing closer together, crossing or diverging away from each other. It is a universe where one can continue accelerating forever; and where we can accelerate to many times the speed of light by simply adding more energy. And, it is a universe where time is independent of spatial coordinates (by “spatial coordinates,” I mean things like length, width and depth). It is also incomplete. (I will not say “wrong.” It just does not accurately predict what happens on a Solar-system-wide, interstellar or intergalactic scale. Newtonian physics often works very well in our everyday lives, where we do not travel at speeds close to the speed of light nor do we encounter ultra-dense matter like black holes.)

Let’s go back to that whole parallel line thing and consider light instead. To make it simple to visualize, imagine shining a laser beam across the room using your favorite laser pointer. To make it interesting, let’s fill the room with carbon dioxide fog from some evaporating dry ice so that you can actually see the laser light beam as it crosses the room like the Enterprise’s phasers when Captain Kirk is dueling with the Klingons. The light is not propagating through nothing to get across the room, it is crossing a room filled with air, and in this special case, water vapor and carbon dioxide. If we evacuate all the air (and dry ice fog), we may not see the laser beam but we can see the spot it produces on the opposite wall. And you can be sure the light traveled in a straight line from the end of the laser pointer to the spot on the wall. What did the light beam propagate through if all the air was removed? It moved through space-time, the stuff from which the universe is made. The light beam follows a straight line, not exactly in space, but in space-time.

But what is this stuff called space-time? To be blunt, from a physical, “can I touch it?” point of view, we have no idea. But, if we use one of the greatest abstract ideas ever created by the mind of humans, mathematics, we can describe its properties and then theorize how it behaves in ways that are testable in our so-called real world. By combining time into the description of space, creating a theory of space-time, and then using that theory to observe and predict how a universe made from it might work, Einstein was able to come up with theories that accurately describe how our universe works. Whatever space-time might be, it has properties that are mathematically predictable and physically testable—and we live within it.

When you treat space and time as space-time, interesting things begin to happen. For one thing, we now believe that the stuff we call matter either bends and distorts space-time or is actually distorted space-time and only appears as matter to our senses. (Take some time to think about that one; it might cost you some sleep or cause you to dig up a Pink Floyd song from your playlist.) For the sake of this article, let’s say that matter bends space-time and the more massive an object is, the more it bends. The best description I’ve heard to visualize the effect is that of a bowling ball sitting on a rubber sheet. The ball causes the rubber sheet (space-time) to stretch under the weight of the ball. The heavier the ball, the more stretched the rubber sheet becomes. If we instead consider a planet or a star instead of a bowling ball, then you can see how matter affects the local shape of space-time.

When we now think of our parallel lines or laser beams, we still need to require it to follow a straight line through space-time. But we now know that space-time can be bent by matter and, when that happens and the parallel lines or laser beam traverse the bent space, they too will appear to bend. If there is enough mass to radically distort the local structure of space-time, then the lines may actually cross all-the-while they are moving parallel to each other through their local space-time. Yikes!

As a science fiction reader, you probably aren’t unaware of this. You’ve read about how black holes, which are extremely dense and massive, distort space-time and bend it so much that they cut themselves off from the rest of the universe and create a singularity. For the topic at hand, we will not consider that singularity part but the radically bent space-time that does not cut itself off from the rest of the universe and is merely distorted. Light passing near this distorted space-time is bent but continues on, back out into deep space and away from the mass-bent space-time and, perhaps, toward us and our telescopes. The light that reaches us from near one of these gravitational space-time distortions has been bent. And this means it can act to magnify objects from which the light emerged. To understand how, think about a magnifying glass.

In an unrelated process called refraction, light that passes through a lens is bent by the lens and can be focused, providing magnification. This can be seen in Figure 1. The magnifying glass is thicker at the middle than at the edges. Light rays that pass through the lens are brought closer together until they cross at the focus. As you can see in the figure, all of the information and energy contained in the light beams that enter the lens from the left are concentrated at the focus. This is how eyeglasses work, how telescopes gather light from distant objects and magnify them so you can see them, and how we might be able to image planets around other stars. When a massive object bends space-time to act as an optical lens, it is called a gravity lens.

Figure 1. A convex lens like that found in a magnifying glass bends light rays so they converge, or come together, at a focus. This results in the image being magnified and made easier to see.

Astronomers validated Einstein’s prediction about gravity lensing by observing distant galaxies that are gravitationally distorted by massive objects between us and them—usually supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies—and finding what are now known as Einstein crosses. The Hubble Space Telescope captured one such Einstein cross in Figure 2. In this image, several galaxies in the MACS J1149.6+2223 galaxy cluster create magnified images of the galaxies behind them. A large cluster galaxy bent the light from a supernova from an otherwise invisible (blocked by the galaxy in front of it) background galaxy into four separate images. Voila! One of nature’s magnifying glasses at work.

Figure 2. Einstein crosses have been observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. In this Hubble image, the light from an exploding supernova in a background galaxy was magnified and split into four yellow images (arrows) to form the Einstein cross. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

The key thing here is that any mass distorts and bends space-time. The Earth does. The Moon does. And, importantly, the Sun does as well. Given that the Sun is over 330,000 times more massive than the Earth, it can significantly distort space-time—but let’s stop calling it distortion. That is like saying that your contact lens distorts the light reaching your eye. While this may be strictly true, it is a useful distortion. For this reason we say your contact lens focuses the incoming light. So also does our Sun focus the light coming from distant objects.

Since 1992, scientists have found thousands of planets circling other stars. These exoplanets come in all sizes and are around many different types of stars. But they all have in common the fact that they are too far away and too dim, as compared to their parent stars, to see directly[1]. Recall that the only reason we might be able to “see” them at all is because they will reflect a very small portion of the light from their home star from their surface, through space, and into our telescopes. Imaging this very dim light is a huge problem. It is just not feasible to launch a primary lens or mirror big enough to capture enough light to focus onto a camera to form an image.

But we may not have to. Nature has given us a big lens, the Sun, which might just do the heavy lifting for us. If the Sun is aligned between our future, deep-space version of the Hubble Space Telescope and the extrasolar planet we wish to image, then it can conceivably capture and bend enough light into a focus for our telescope to see its image. The catch is that the Sun’s gravity lens focus is about 550 Astronomical Units (AU) away and it isn’t a point, but a region that extends well beyond 550 AU. An AU is the Sun-to-Earth distance or about 93 million miles. For comparison, the farthest we have yet sent a spacecraft is about 138 AU—reached by the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. If we can get out there with a telescope, then it is feasible to use that telescope to image many of these newly-discovered exoplanets so that we can see if they have oceans, continents and whether or not someone has the lights on during the night. Now that would be exciting!

But what does this have to do with a Galactic Internet?

Gravity lenses focus more than just light. They focus all forms of electromagnetic radiation, including radio. Including radio.

Dr. Claudio Maccone, Technical Director, Scientific Space Exploration, International Academy of Astronautics has written a technical monograph on the subject in which he looked at building such radio bridges between the Sun and Alpha Centauri. A spacecraft stationed approximately 51 billion miles on the far side of Alpha Centauri in direct line with both stars and a radio at our Gravity Lens region should be able to communicate with each other using a few tens of watts. (Compare this to the billions or trillions of watts that some estimate will be required for conventional interstellar radio communications.) Maccone has also calculated the gravity lensing regions of other nearby stars and examined the requirements for forming similar radio bridges between them: Sun-Barnard Star, Sun-Sirius, and, fantastically enough, Sun-Andromeda Galaxy! In all cases, the power requirements are significantly less than one would expect from traditional radio strength-over-large-distance losses and would not have the stringent pointing requirements that might be needed for the latest “hot topic” in space communications, optical laser links.

It is easy to now imagine that multiple sentient species have set up such radio bridges between their star systems to allow for easy radio communications at relatively low power. There could be bridges between Alpha Centauri-Sirius and Sirius-Barnard’s Star and we would never know it unless we were in the line of sight of these bridges and had our receivers appropriately placed at the Sun’s Gravity Lens—a highly unlikely scenario due to the distances involved and the propulsion intense requirements to align the spacecraft. Our SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) searches could never detect the signal because it is far too weak without the gravity lensing effect to enhance it. Our neighbors could be chatting away and we will never hear them . . .

This would not be the case if the sentient being on the other side of the link is trying to communicate with us—purposefully aligning our node with a cooperative alien’s node should be relatively easy. All we have to do is get their attention and put our transmitter/receiver at 550 AU.

The first step toward taking advantage of this fantastic opportunity provided by nature is getting there. 550 AU is a very long way from home (51,150,000,000 miles, approximately), which is four times farther than Voyager has traveled since its 1977 launch. We clearly need a better method of deep space propulsion. Then we need to fly there with a telescope capable of imaging many of the recently-detected extrasolar planets to see if any of them harbor intelligent life. From there, well, we’ll have to see what the next logical step might be.

[1]Astronomers are working on other ways to image distant exoplanets. One of the most promising has nothing to do with gravity lenses. Instead, an occulting shade will be placed between the observing telescope and the exoplanet to block out the light from the planet’s parent star in much the same way we use our hands to block the light of the Sun when we are facing toward it. By blocking the bright starlight, it should be possible to see an exoplanet. In theory, a telescope at the solar gravity lens will be capable of significantly better imaging than a star shade.

Suggested Reading

- For more information about Claudio Maccone’s work on using the solar gravity lens for imaging exoplanets or as a radio bridge into the Galactic Internet, and if you are mathematically inclined, then you should check out his book, Deep Space Flight and Communications: Exploiting the Sun as a Gravitational Lens.

- To learn about SETI, please visit the SETI Institute or the Breakthrough Listen pages.

- Some have thought about reaching the Solar Gravity Lens and the science we might do from there and along the way. Most recently, a group of scientists and engineers met at the Keck Institute for Space Studies at Caltech and discussed options for possible future space missions that might reach 550 Astronomical Units or farther. You can learn about the study by visiting the Science and Enabling Technologies to Explore the Interstellar Medium homepage.

- A somewhat dated, but still relevant study for the propulsion options available for reaching the Solar Gravity Lens can be found in this summary conference paper: Interstellar Exploration—Propulsion Options for Precursors and Beyond.

Honorverse Analytics:

Why Manticore Won the War

Pat Doyle and Chris Weuve

Pat and Chris are members David Weber’s Honorverse consulting group, BuNine. Both are defense professionals who use their day-job expertise to help David flesh out the background worlds and ways of the Honor Harrington series novels. The analysis below is an example of the sorts of briefs and articles BuNine prepares for David as he continues his imaginative journey exploring the Honorverse and bringing his stories to millions of readers.

The War Manticore Shouldn’t Have Won

The war between Haven and Manticore in David Weber's Honorverse series is, on the surface, a David-versus-Goliath matchup. The People’s Republic of Haven consisted of some three hundred star systems and was, by any reasonable measure, the dominant force in its section of the galaxy. Manticore, on the other hand, started the war confined to two star systems, with only a handful of additional systems aligning with it to stand up to the Peeps. It seems as if this should be an easy Haven victory.

Like any good (fictional) David and Goliath matchup, though, the question isn't whether David wins, it's how and why. The authors (both graduates of the U.S. Naval War College) will attempt to shed light on that question by applying some of the analytic concepts learned in our professional study to the Haven-Manticore war.

To answer the how and the why of Manticore's victory, we will first recap the situation in which the combatants find themselves at the beginning of the war, and then we will look at the situation through the lens of two important concepts defense professionals use in their analyses: "Center of Gravity" and "Elements of National Power."

Two quick notes up front: First, in this essay we will ignore the Mesan Alignment and the developing conflict with the Solarian League. As any Spiderman fan knows, with great power comes great responsibility, and in this case responsibility includes neither giving up spoilers nor nailing David Weber's feet to the floor by answering questions which should not get public responses yet.

Second, over the course of the twenty-plus years covered by the main Honorverse books, a lot happens. The People's Republic of Haven becomes the Republic of Haven, the Star Kingdom of Manticore becomes the Star Empire of Manticore, and the Manitcore-led Alliance grows, then splinters a bit (even if it does not actually fail) before rallying. The war itself was fought in two very different phases separated by a ceasefire. These changes, while important to the story, do not affect a strategic analysis of the situation. In this essay, therefore, we will use "Haven" to refer to the (People's) Republic of Haven in all of its incarnations, and "Manticore" to refer to the growing Manitcore-led alliance encompassing both the Star Kingdom and the Star Empire.

The Interstellar Situation at the Beginning of the War

Before we jump into an examination of Center of Gravity and the Elements of National Power, it's worth a brief refresher in some of the salient characteristics of this universe, in other words, how this universe works. This can be broken down into three areas:

1) The physical, astrographic description of the situation;

2) the salient characteristics of communication of this universe; and

3) a brief look at the combatants themselves.

Astrography

The first salient feature of the Honorverse at the beginning of the war is astrography. Looking at the map below, a couple of things jump out. First, Manticore is small. Starting the war with just the Manticore binary system (with three inhabited planets) and the Basilisk system, Manticore is surrounded by larger neighbors. Grayson, Erewhon, and other allies add but a handful of systems. Haven, on the other hand, is huge—the second largest political entity in human space, with the second largest military.

Illustration 1, used by permission of the authors.

The size disparity between the two star nations goes beyond just resources. It also effects what is known as strategic depth, which is usually viewed as the ability to trade space for time. Think for a moment about the disparity between Israel (a country with no strategic depth) and Russia (a country with a lot of strategic depth, as Napoleon and Hitler discovered). At the beginning of the war Manticore has virtually no strategic depth, as the vast majority of both its population and its economic wherewithal is concentrated in the Manticore home system. Haven, on the other hand, has lots of strategic depth—it can and does lose star systems over the course of the war with little decrease in its own warfighting capability. Worth noting, though, is that strategic depth is a more nebulous concept in the Honorverse than in our own universe. Even leaving aside the hyperbridges, the nature of hyperspace travel in the Honorverse has the effect of making space non-contiguous, by which we mean that you can get from point A to point C without going through point B. In theory, then, the Royal Manticoran Navy could appear above Nouveau Paris without warning, just as a Havenite Fleet could do the same at Manticore.

While there is nothing physically preventing such an attack, there are practical considerations. First, targets of value are likely to have defenses, and rash concentrations of force to take out defenses would create weaknesses for the other side to exploit. We see this discussion time and again in the series—Manticore maintains a large homefleet to protect the home system, and generally resists the temptation to deploy those ships elsewhere. Second, while space is non-contiguous, it is does embody time and distance. A force might bypass nearer systems and strike deep at the enemy's heart, but it will spend months doing so, with refit and resupply consequently being further months away. The war was fought along moving fronts not because the fronts could not be bypassed (they often were), but because refit and resupply requires bases close to the action, which in turn limits the effective radius of fleet action. Finally, while Manticore lacked strategic depth, Admiral Caparelli and his senior commanders (Jim Webster, Hamish Alexander, and later Honor Harrington herself, among others) were well aware of the danger and worked hard to make sure Haven never got the chance to strike a knockout blow, or at least that the Havenite leadership would never be so confident of success that it was willing to risk the outcome of the war on one throw of the dice. When desperation then forced Haven to make that throw anyway, the carnage—and the outcome—ably demonstrated why such a tactic was considered a desperate measure.

Second, Manticore is connected. Thanks to the Manticore Wormhole Junction, Manticore has direct or indirect lines into the Solarian League, the People's Republic of Haven, the Silesian Confederacy, the Andermani Empire, and, later, the Talbot quadrant. Manticore thus enjoys robust trade possibilities (including user fees for foreign hulls wishing to transit the Manticore Wormhole Junction) as well as interior lines of communication. The Manticore Wormhole Junction is a force multiplier, allowing the Royal Manticoran Navy to be efficient with its deployments and to respond rapidly to attack. As we shall see, this is a source of great strength—and potentially fatal weakness.

Third, Manticore potentially has other worries. The Andermani Empire, while smaller than Haven, is much larger than Manticore, and has something of an opportunistic (if not outright predatory) reputation itself. And while the Silesian Confederacy isn't much of a military threat to Manticore, its proximity and anarchic state makes it a military sump, drawing off resources Manticore can ill-afford to lose.

Communication

The second salient feature of the pre-war Honorverse is the nature of communication and the movement of information. In our modern world, information movement is near instantaneous. Long-distance communication via satellite and fiber optic cables is usually fast and trivial, and we benefit from a variety of resources which make it possible to gather information across global distances in near real time.

Not so in the Honorverse, where communication between star systems is limited to the speed of the fastest ship. News, orders, personnel, cargo—all travel via spacecraft, at roughly the same rate. The one significant exception to this are hyperbridges like the Manticore Wormhole Junction, which "shortcut" hyperspace and allow much faster travel. (This does not include the Manticoran FTL comms, of course, but those are limited to intrasystem usage.)

Overall, then, from a communication standpoint the Honorverse is a lot more analogous to the mid-19th century than our current time. In the 19th century, telegraphs allowed for rapid communication on land, somewhat akin to the FTL comm, but long-range communications with other continents required ships. National leaders would send their navies to sea, without the ability to collect information once they were gone. This is much more akin to the Honorverse than our present days of long-range radio, transoceanic cables, and spy satellites.

The Combatants

The table below is a quick summary of some of the characteristics of the three major combatants—Haven, Manticore, and Grayson[i]—at the start of the war. It describes three very different star nations:

1. Haven: The 800 pound gorilla, with a history of success hiding some severe structural problems

2. Manticore: Small, but feisty, wealthy, extremely competent, and diligent in its preparations for the coming war

3. Grayson: Backwards now, but with lots of potential

Illustration 2, used by permission of the authors.

Two things are worth noting about the above table. First, it does not actually capture the effect of the Manticore Wormhole Junction, except indirectly. The Junction is a topic we'll discuss in some detail below. Second, the rows in the above table are not independent of each other. Manticore's large economy, for instance, facilitates a large well-equipped navy, a first-class educational system, and a robust research and development program. Likewise, Haven's problematic educational system serves to hinder both its technological prowess and the quality of its navy. Grayson arguably has a lot of infrastructure potential precisely because it is technologically backwards; its manpower-intensive brute-force approach at the beginning of the series means there is a lot of potential to be tapped once Manticoran efficiencies are adopted. And, of course, Grayson has a couple of technological tricks of her own to share.

Analysis of the Problem

Analyzing military operations is an art, not a science, and the exact tools used require a little practice. It's the basis of an entire masters degree program at the Naval War College, for example, with operational art being the subject of its own class of full-time study for a couple of months. In this example we are leaving out a lot of the standard analysis; what we are doing, therefore, should be viewed as an introduction to the topic and not the last word. (Thankfully, real lives are not at risk in this example.)

Center of Gravity

The first concept we will look at is called center of gravity. A combatant's center of gravity (COG) can be defined as "The source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act. See also decisive point."ii The same source defines "decisive point" as "A geographic place, specific key event, critical factor, or function that, when acted upon, allows commanders to gain a marked advantage over an adversary or contribute materially to achieving success." Not all decisive points are COGs, but all COGs are decisive points.

Determining the center of gravity for both oneself and one's opponent is one of the most important considerations of a strategist. As a primary source of an opponent's strength, his COG is potentially an important target. COGs are not strictly an Achilles heel; a COG is not necessarily a vulnerability. Strictly speaking, it's not necessary to attack an opponent's center of gravity to defeat that opponent, but it is often the most direct path to achieving that goal. The enemy is, of course, thinking the same thing about you. The center of gravity might change over time, so the process of analyzing the COG—like that for all strengths and weaknesses—should be continuous.

Manticore is a good example of why a combatant's center of gravity is sometimes not immediately obvious. There are really only two possible candidates for the Manticoran COG: the Manticore home system itself, and the Manticore Wormhole Junction. Both are critical to the war effort, with the home system encompassing the bulk of Manticoran production and technological expertise, and the junction providing strategic communication and mobility to the military, as well as being a substantial source of revenue.

There is a better case, though, for the Manticore Wormhole Junction as the center of gravity for Manticore. Most of Manticore's strategic advantages come directly or indirectly from control of the Manticore Wormhole Junction. You could imagine Manticore building its infrastructure elsewhere (Basilisk, or now Talbot), and still being able to compete with Haven in the war. It's hard to imagine Manticore being competitive with Haven without the junction.

Determining the COG for Haven is more difficult. There are more competing options and, unlike Manticore, many of them are not tied to specific places. With Manticore the difficulty came from deciding between two strong candidates; with Haven the problem is a plethora of lesser candidate COGs. This illustrates another attribute about COGs: sometimes they can be quite ill-defined. Possible candidates include:

1. The capital, Nouveau Paris

2. The regime itself

3. The PRH/ROH Navy

4. Haven's sheer size

5. Grayson: Backwards now, but with lots of potential

In the end, the best candidate for the Havenite center of gravity is the sheer size of the star nation. Historically Haven steamrollered its opponents, as it tried to do to Manticore. As a straight-up fight between equal-sized entities, the Haven-Manticore war would have ended sometime in book two, and David Weber would now be working on the twentieth book in his Apocalypse Troll series.

This is not, to say, however, that the other factors are unimportant. The PRH put a real emphasis on regime survival, against both internal and external enemies, and Nouveau Paris itself was both an important symbol of the regime and the place where an uprising or coup could result in the leadership being strangled in their own beds. (Okay, Oscar Saint-Just wasn't exactly strangled.) The Havenite Navy in particular could be viewed as the Havenite center of gravity. You can imagine Haven building the large navy necessary to engage in the war by drawing upon an empire of its size, but it's hard to imagine it having a navy of that size without the empire coming first.

Elements of National Power

Another important concept worth considering when analyzing how and why Manticore won the war is that of the Elements of National Power. These elements describe the tools that a nation has at its disposal in achieving its strategic objectives vis-a-vis foreign powers. In American usage this is usually abbreviated as DIME, for Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic. Of course, like all acronyms, there has been a tendency to add to the list over time, but for our purposes DIME is sufficient. Like many things in life, the lines between these elements often blur, and specific activities may fulfill multiple objectives at the same time.iii

The Diplomatic element covers all of the activities designed to achieve strategic goals through the use of political interactions at the governmental level. This can include treaties, alliances, coalitions (less formal and encompassing than alliances), and lesser diplomatic activities. Diplomacy has sometimes been characterized as saying "nice doggy" while looking for a rock, which only covers part of it.

Before and during the war, Manticore employed a multi-pronged diplomatic effort. Manticore sought allies in its local neighborhood while attempting to convince the Solarian League (and the Andermani Empire) to at least maintain neutrality in the conflict. It worked hard to build an alliance structure; the process of doing so involved not only diplomats but military-to-military contacts.

Haven's diplomacy was, by and large, more ham-fisted. Haven was more inclined to use covert action than diplomacy.

The Informational element of national power is in many ways the least well defined. It includes deception activities, strategic communications (basically, getting your message out, and rebutting your opponents), intelligence activities, and the like. The target can be the enemy military or the leadership, the enemy's population or your own. Oftentimes it overlaps with military and diplomatic activities.

Manticoran information activities during the war include the excellent work of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the diplomatic efforts of Admiral Webster and other efforts in the Solarian League to engage Solarian media outlets and highlight the abuses of the current Havenite regime, and the interaction of the Manticoran government with its own press. These policies both engendered support for the war at home and benefited Manticore abroad. Haven's efforts, on the other hand, consisted mostly of internal propaganda efforts, often focused on support for the regime as much as support for the war. (You do not need political officers if your concern is simply the war.)

The Military element of national power is much more obvious, and we will largely skip it, as it's well covered in the novels and fairly straightforward. We will note, though, that the logistics, training, and supporting infrastructure is often as important as number and classes of starships.

One point about the military element should be emphasized, though, even though it is mentioned in the novels: Manticore has the military wherewithal it does because King Roger Winton III saw the war coming decades before it actually broke out and made winning the war a priority. He worked hard to instill a warfighting culture in his military, and he leveraged the economic benefits of his star nation to establish the long-term military research program that began really paying off in the final years before the war started. King Roger understood both that this war would be different (see the forthcoming House of Lies for more discussion of this), and that the Star Kingdom's military element of national power was inadequate to the task expected of it—and he took the steps necessary to correct the deficiencies. More than any other single person, King Roger was responsible for Manticore's victory, despite being in the grave for four decades at the time of the war's conclusion.

The Economic element involves resources and the use thereof. This includes ongoing budgets, access to raw materials, physical infrastructure, and a host of other activities involved when the government says "build, equip and man a ship." Manticore and Haven were both economic powerhouses, with one important difference. Haven achieved its economic status through aggregation of hundreds of star systems, some of very low productivity. Its per capita production capability was relatively low. Manticore, on the other hand, had a relatively small but extremely productive population. This meant that Haven had to always use the vast majority of its economic production to satisfy internal needs, whereas Manticore could devote a lot higher percentage of its resources to the war.

Summary

Weaving the above threads together, then, Manticore's victory over Haven can be summarized as follows:

1) Manticore was able to successfully use its center of gravity, the Manticore Wormhole Junction, in a myriad of ways. These include as a source of revenue, a method of communication, and as a force multiplier for the navy. It provided Manticore with interior lines, enabling it to optimize the redeployment, refit, and resupply of its forces, and to respond to crises in a timely manner. Haven, in contrast, had no such boon, and had to do everything the hard way.

2) On the diplomatic front, Manticore was able to build an effective alliance structure through the use of technological and economic incentives, and by effectively making the case that they and other local powers needed to "hang together lest they hang separately." With regard to the Andermani Empire, Manticore was initially able to convince New Potsdam to remain neutral, and was eventually able to convince them to look favorably upon the cause. Haven had no comparable diplomatic effort, although in fairness they did not really need one.

3) On the informational front, Manticore successfully used the variety of tools lumped under the term "informational" to their advantage. The Office of Naval Intelligence proved itself to be one of the galaxy's best intelligence services (behind only the Andermani). Manticore's information campaign in the Solarian League neutralized Havenite advantages (largely based on an out-of-date reputation) and on occasion moved Haven to the defensive by promulgating the human rights offenses of the new regime. Domestically, Manticore kept its population informed and behind the war effort. Haven's interstellar efforts, by contrast, were largely limited to damage control and its domestic efforts to controlling access to information.

4) On the military front, Manticore successfully leveraged its economic and technological advantages (the latter the result of specific preparations made for the coming war) to provide a navy without peer. Coupled with the aforementioned interior lines provided by the Manticore Wormhole Junction, Manticore was able to punch FAR above its putative weight class. Pound-for-pound the Royal Manticoran Navy was without equal anywhere in the galaxy, and even the resurgent Havenites or the Andermani would need a greater than two-to-one advantage to best the RMN. The Republic of Haven Navy was no slouch itself, eventually developing into the second most powerful star navy.

5) On the economic front, the salient features of the Manticoran economy which differentiated it from the Havenite economy—high productivity, a highly skilled workforce, a large merchant marine, and a steady income stream from Manticore Wormhole Junction transit fees—allowed Manticore to use its economic might much better than Haven could use the Havenite economy. The great irony of the situation, of course, was that these features were exactly what made Manticore such an attractive target to begin with.

Conclusion

As mentioned in the beginning, in fiction a David-versus-Goliath matchup usually results in a victory for David, because otherwise a David-versus-Goliath matchup would be pretty boring. One element that makes the Honorverse interesting to the authors is not the outcome per se, but how we get there—not the destination, but the journey. In this case, it has given us the opportunity to practice our craft, put our lessons to work, and hopefully share a few things you might find interesting.

Footnotes:

[i] Excluding Grayson at this point was more confusing than including it.

ii. Joint Publication 1-02 Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 8 November 2010 (As Amended Through 15 February 2016)

iii. DIME should not be confused with PMESII (Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, and Information), which is a related concept designed to describe national attributes. DIME describes what you do; PMESII describes what you are.

Chimeras: Science and Science Fiction

Dan Koboldt

Chimera of Arezzo. Photo by Sailko via Wikimedia Commons

Greek mythology provided us with a host of terrifying monsters. Many of those were the issue of Echidna, who was a frightening beast herself: half beautiful maiden, half fearsome snake. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, this “mother of monsters” gave birth to several memorable creations: a three-headed dog (Cerberus), a half-woman, half winged lion (the Sphinx), and a many-headed serpent (the Hydra).

Hesiod also credits Echidna with giving birth to another frightening beast. In The Iliad, Homer describes it as “a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire." There’s something inherently fearsome about this unnatural animal mashup, which Homer called the Chimera. Merely sighting her was a bad omen that heralded storms, shipwrecks, and natural disasters.

The word chimera has since been applied to anything composed of disparate parts, things that were not meant to go together. In modern times, we use chimera to describe an organism that’s composed of cells from two or more distinct individuals. Usually, this is the result of a laboratory experiment, i.e. mixing cells from one species with another. Researchers have been doing this for decades, albeit with limited success.

Chimeras in Nature

However, a few types of natural genetic chimeras already exist, and bear mentioning here. First, genetic chimerism is prevalent in certain animal species. Marmosets, for example, typically give birth to fraternal twins, and recent research has shown that many are twin chimeras. This is also a frequent occurrence when cattle have twins.

Pan pipes. Image courtesy

Wikimedia Commons

Why Pigs and Cows?

Researchers have created inter-species chimeras before. Studies of chimeric engraftment in mice and rats provided insights into some of the key requirements for successful chimera formation, such as matched developmental timing. Although rodents are important research animals, they’re obviously quite different from humans from an evolutionary and physiological standpoint.

Cattle and pigs share a number of similarities to humans when it comes to embryo development. Furthermore, thanks to their agricultural importance, assisted reproduction models for these animals are well established (it may not get the same media attention as biomedical technology, but agricultural biotech is a $25 billion industry). In other words, we’ve devoted a lot of time and resources to breeding better cows and pigs, so we know a lot about it. All of these factors make cattle and pigs a desirable target for human-animal chimera research.

Human chimeras are less common, but can arise a few different ways. Women who carry a child can have cells containing fetal DNA in various parts of their bodies, effectively making them chimeric individuals. Bone marrow transplants, which are sometimes necessary in leukemia patients, effectively create a human chimera. Perhaps the best-known form of human chimeras arises during a twin pregnancy, when two zygotes fuse together (during early development) and are born as one person.

This quirk of biology has also been explored in science fiction. The CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode “Bloodlines” involves a rape suspect whose saliva DNA didn’t match the sample he left during the crime, owing to the fact that he was a twin chimera. The science fiction television series Orphan Black focuses on Sarah Manning, who discovers that she has several living genetic clones. In season 3 (spoiler warning; skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t watched it) we learn that the source of DNA for both male and female clones was Kendall Malone, a chimera of male/female twins.

Most cases of natural human chimerism probably go unnoticed unless they cause medical problems (i.e. multiple blood types). However, chimeras can be problematic to DNA testing, which is increasingly utilized for medical, legal, or forensic reasons. In 2002, a woman named Lydia Fairchild was denied public assistance by the state of Washington because a DNA test showed that she was unrelated to her children. She was not only denied benefits, but also charged with illegal surrogacy and welfare fraud. Fortunately, a study came out in the New England Journal of Medicine that same year that documented a case of a woman who had a different blood type from her three sons due to genetic chimerism. Fairchild’s lawyers demanded more testing, and eventually proved that she, too, was a human chimera.

Chimeras in the Laboratory

The most interesting types of genetic chimeras might be the ones we can create in a laboratory setting. This type of research has drawn considerable attention following the January 2017 report by the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (La Jolla, California), in which scientists described a method for engrafting human pluripotent stem cells into pigs and cattle.

The method takes advantage of some sophisticated new molecular biology tools that have been developed over the past decade. To engraft part of animal A into an embryo for animal B, you generally need pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) from animal A. PSCs are undifferentiated, meaning that they haven’t yet matured into a specific type of cell. Thus, they can divide continuously, and their descendants can differentiate (specialize) into all of the different types required to make an entire organism.

Until recently, the only way to obtain stem cells from humans was from fertilized eggs, i.e. human embryos. As you can imagine, research using human embryos comes with a number of ethical and legal challenges. In the last several years, however, researchers have developed methods to “reprogram” differentiated cells, such as skin cells, into pluripotent form. These induced pluripotent stem cells have the limitless potential required for chimera formation.

Another breakthrough technology utilized in this study is CRISPR/Cas9, which I’ve already written about (see The Near Future of Human Genome Engineering). Essentially, CRISPR/Cas9 makes it possible to make specific changes to the DNA of living cells. Often, it’s used to “knock out” (disable) a specific gene in an experimental organism, to examine the effects on that organism.

This technology also provides a means to grow a specific organ in one organism using the stem cells from another. Basically, you use CRISPR/Cas9 to disable, in animal A, a gene that’s required to form a specific organ. Then you create a chimera of animal A and animal B. If that specific organ grows, it theoretically should comprise only cells from animal B. This is important because regenerative medicine—growing new organs from a patient’s own cells—is one of the most promising applications of genetic chimerism.

Image by Dan Koboldt, used by permission.

The Salk Institute researchers found that human cells made a relatively small contribution of cells in the living animal. Even so, their study demonstrated that chimeras of humans and pigs/cows are indeed possible.

Reaction to the Chimera Study

As you might expect, the Salk Institute study caused considerable excitement among researchers and the community at large. Human-animal chimeras have a number of compelling uses in research and medicine. They can be used to study processes of development, for example, or to create experimental models for hard-to-study human diseases. They might one day even provide a means to grow new organs from a patient’s own cells, which would dramatically improve the outcomes of organ transplantation.

However, chimera research involving humans, also brings ethical, legal, and social issues into intense focus. Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of human-animal chimeras. There are few laws that govern their use, particularly for privately funded research. It’s not hard to imagine how such a technology could be exploited for nefarious purposes. That’s true of many new molecular technologies, such as assisted reproduction, cloning, and genetic engineering.

What Does Our Genetic Future Hold?

The technothriller Next (2006) by Michael Crichton was the last novel published in his lifetime. It explores a near future dominated by massive privatized genetic research and corporate greed. In it, Henry Kendall—a researcher at a biotech company—is startled to realize that he has a part-human, part-chimpanzee son illegally created at a research facility where he worked. Meanwhile, another character, animal behavior researcher Gail Bond, raises a parrot whose human transgenes give it near-human speech abilities. In the world of Next, genetic technologies have run riot, with little supervision or restriction. It fits the theme of many Crichton novels, doesn’t it? Humans use newfangled technologies to tamper with things they don’t fully understand. We all know how that went in Jurassic Park.

As a scientist, I’m equal parts wary about the misuse of new genetic technologies, and thrilled about their potential to improve human lives. It is possible that we’ll end up like the Tleilaxu in Frank Herbert’s Dune novels—exploiting reproductive and genetic technologies for profit alone. Yet I prefer to think that we’ll be more like House Atreides: using our newfound powers in responsible ways, to make the world a better place.

Robert E. Lee and Decisive Battle

How Lee's Strategic Thinking is Portrayed in The Day After Gettysburg

J.R. Dunn

Robert E. Lee has a reputation, in many ways deserved, as one of the greatest of American military commanders. No other general of the modern period—possibly excepting George Washington—accomplished more despite holding such a poor hand. Utilizing only interior lines and the difficult geography of northern Virginia, Lee succeeded in keeping the might of the industrial north at bay for nearly four years. He defeated several separate armies sent against him. He gained some of the most crushing victories ever witnessed on the North American continent. He not only defeated but utterly humiliated the Union commanders opposing him—many of them his former classmates. He staved off the defeat of Confederacy longer than almost anyone thought possible.

But he didn’t stave it off long enough. Avoiding defeat was Lee’s major strategic goal. All that he needed to do was to keep the Confederacy intact long enough for exhaustion to take the Union out of the war. It is there, on the strategic level, that Lee failed. Though a master tactician—one of the most skilled on record—Lee was no strategist.

The strategy for winning the Civil War and gaining southern independence was straightforward: hold northern forces off by defeating any attempt at invasion of the southern heartland while at the same time keeping the north off-balance by continual raids, feints, and threats against high-value targets. Such a strategy would have forced the north to tire itself out while preserving southern assets.

Instead, Lee carried out a continual series of invasions of the north that wasted southern manpower and resources and finally left the South so exhausted that defeat was inevitable.

Why? What was Lee thinking? What encouraged him to adapt a strategy in many ways the exact opposite of what was called for?

The answer is in no way obscure. Like many nineteenth-century commanders—and for that matter, many from both preceding and following centuries—Lee was a disciple of the doctrine of decisive battle, the theory that wars can be won with a single crushing victory that annihilates an opponent’s military assets and fatally undermines his will to continue battle.

Decisive battle had its origins in the warfare of the eighteenth century. It’s true that there have been no lack of decisive battles in previous history—Guagamela (331 BC), Philippi (42 BC), and Manzikert (AD 1074), just to mention three, clearly and permanently settled the issues that triggered them—but it required the Enlightenment and the onset of rationalism for decisive battle to become a doctrine. Something that both generals and politicians planned for, sought out, and based their strategies on.

The early eighteenth century marked the peak of the short-lived “star fortress” era. European wars during these decades were fought over the possession of star-shaped border fortresses secure from conventional artillery and infantry attacks. Engineers such as Sébastian le Preste de Vauban reduced these fortresses through prolonged sieges in which sappers laboriously (and usually under fire) dug their way to the fortifications. When the outlying bastions were reached, the fortress surrendered, often ending the war at the same time.

This relaxed and relatively bloodless epoch was ended with the mammoth victories of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim (1704) and Ramillies (1706)—truly “decisive battles” in anybody’s book. A half-century later Frederick the Great fought titanic battles of near-annihilation at Leuthen (1757) and Rossbach (1757).

But it was with the campaigns of Napoleon that decisive battle achieved the status of a mature ideology—a widespread school of thought that affects the thinking and behavior of both adherents and opponents whether they are consciously aware of it or not.

Napoleon essentially took mass mobilization, the great martial innovation of the French revolutionaries, and dropped it on top of Europe. Utilizing the vast manpower of France—along with the “liberated” European states—Napoleon totally rearranged the structure of European politics. His victories—Austerlitz (1805), Jena-Auerstadt (1806), and Wagram (1809)—were the stuff of legend. For the first time since Alexander, a single military genius made it incontestably clear how much could be accomplished by mere force of arms.

Napoleon became the dominating military figure of the nineteenth century. Apart from the bizarre “geometric” tactical theories of Antoine-Henri Jomini—of which it can be said that no one ever used them twice—Napoleon’s methods set the pattern for a century of warfare. (Carl von Clausewitz, for his part, remained untranslated and not well known until late in the century.) Napoleon’s example dominated the thinking of such figures as Otto von Bismarck and Helmuth von Moltke, not to overlook his nephew Napoleon III. All paid serious attention to, and in many cases patterned themselves after Bonaparte.

And that was a problem. Because, as is true of most legends, that of Napoleon Bonaparte failed to fit very well with the facts. His “decisive battles,” were, in truth, not very decisive at all. The magnificent, brutal spectacle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805) may have broken up the Third Coalition, forced Great Britain off the Continent, and left the rulers of Europe cowering. But that interlude lasted only months before the Fourth Coalition was formed and the troops were once again on the march.

No matter how many near-cosmic victories Napoleon achieved, they would never overcome his political problems. Napoleon had insulted, cheated, and outraged every royal house in Europe. He had crushed the remnants of feudalism everywhere but in Russia, and threatened to do the same to the royal absolutism that the European monarchs had spent centuries perfecting. He had helped unleash and channel forces that have not exhausted themselves to this day. A man responsible for actions on such a scale automatically has a price on his head, a price that can be paid only through his personal destruction. The sole method of avoiding this was through exquisite diplomatic tact and political acumen, both of which Napoleon lacked. The Napoleonic legend obscured the truth revealed by Clausewitz’s great insight that war is simply an aspect of politics, and that politics must always remain dominant. Most of Napoleon’s disciples—excepting only Bismarck—also overlooked this, and paid the price. (Ironically, the actual “decisive battle” of the Napoleonic era was Waterloo, the one that brought it an end—and largely because it undermined Napoleon politically to a point where he could no longer survive.)

Robert E. Lee was as much a captive of the Napoleonic mystique as any other officer of his era. He received his military education at West Point little more than twenty years after Napoleon’s death. He gained his baptism of fire under General Winfield Scott, whose march on Mexico City was the most Napoleonic gesture ever made by an American commander. We can all recall Lee’s words—largely taken from the record—quoted in the film Gettysburg, in the scene when Lee and Longstreet are arguing over the attack that was to culminate in Pickett's Charge, revealing that his thinking concerning attacks on the strategic center were strongly influenced by Napoleon.

For the first years of the Civil War, the Napoleonic example served Lee well. He was opposing generals cast from the same mold, and, being a superior tactician to all of them, generally swept them aside. Lee’s early victories—Second Bull Run (28-30 August, 1862), Fredericksburg (11-15 December, 1862), and Chancellorsville (30 April—6 May, 1863)—sit high among the most crushing victories on the record. Bull Run and Chancellorsville ended as routs, while Fredericksburg was a massacre so complete as to weigh heavily on Lee’s own spirit.

Did Lee face incompetent or overconfident opponents? Of course—but so did Napoleon. Did luck play a large role? (After all, it was one lucky cannon shot that left Hooker concussed and confused at Chancellorsville.) Very true—but it was Napoleon who asked of his candidates for marshal, “Is he lucky?”

But even with victories outmatched only by those of the emperor himself, Lee was stymied. He found himself in the same predicament as Napoleon sixty years before. The “decisive” battles were simply not decisive enough. No matter how many blue-clad corpses were left at Marye Heights, the Union could simply train more in their thousands—many taken from the constant flow of European immigrants—and send them south. Abraham Lincoln was adamant that the United States would not be divided. (And rightly so, despite the many constitutional arguments attempting to validate the concept of secession. It’s often overlooked that the Confederacy would not have been the last of these. North America might today hold a half-dozen republics—on the Pacific coast, in Texas, and in the Southwest, among other pathetic statelets. Think of the United States transformed into a New World Balkans. Then think of that situation in a twentieth-century world overrun with demented dictators and bloody ideologies.) Between Lincoln’s iron will and the endless resources of the Union, no victory was ever going to be large enough.

As in the case of Napoleon, Lee was facing a political problem for which there was no military solution. His only hope was to grind down the Union forces until a political solution at last opened up. But his strategy of repeated invasions of the north in search of that final, decisive Armageddon rendered such an outcome impossible. The victories became less stunning, the advantages less clear, and eventually the tide turned inexorably against the Confederacy. Like Napoleon, Lee never found the key to his strategic conundrum.

Ulysses S. Grant, on the other hand, was the farthest thing in the world from a Napoleonic figure. Grant was a competent tactician—though in no way the equal of Lee. But it was as a strategist that Grant outdid Lee, along with every other American commander of his era.

Doctrine played no role whatsoever in Grant’s method of waging war. Grant was a nearly pure pragmatist, his method of warfare constructed not from theory but from his own rough practice as a soldier. Grant built his campaigns as an artisan—and one accustomed to using second-rate materials at that. Rather than consider battle as the ultimate goal of any workable strategy like most other general officers of his generation, Grant viewed it as one solution among many. Grant’s toolkit also contained marches, maneuver, feints, and sieges, all of which could be utilized as the situation required. Generally, it was only after confusing and overwhelming his opposition with a selection of these tactics that Grant committed to actual battle. Grant was like a boxer who tired out his opponent with fancy footwork before moving in to trap him on the ropes and pound him into submission.

This can be seen clearly in the Mississippi Valley campaign. Grant spent months on marches, probes, and feints—even engineering work—without actually closing with Confederate forces. Only when he was ready did he finally plunge across the river deep behind enemy lines, leaving a thoroughly confused General James Pemberton to flail around trying to cut supply lines that didn’t exist. After throwing back General Joseph Johnston’s troops attempting to relieve Pemberton at Jackson (May 14, 1863) and punishing Pemberton himself at Champion Hill two days later, Grant chased the Confederate forces into Vicksburg and settled into a two-month siege. (In the process he completely abandoned Jackson, Mississippi’s state capital—an unheard-of move at the time. But the city played absolutely no further role in his plans. So why bother to hold it?)

Vicksburg finally surrendered on July 4th—a day after the fighting ended at Gettysburg. At a fraction of the cost in casualties to the Army of Potomac in Pennsylvania, Grant had obtained what most historians consider to be an even more critical victory. (Seizing Vicksburg effectively cut the Confederacy in two, opened up the Mississippi to full exploitation by Union forces, and created a base area from which Sherman was to invade the southern heartland a year later.)

When Grant headed east to take command of the Army of the Potomac, he brought his bag of tricks along with him. So novel were his methods, so different from the accepted military principles of the day, that it’s unlikely that any commander on either side would have been able to handle them. Despite his tactical mastery and unmatched skill as a commander of men, Robert E. Lee was no exception. Along with everyone else, Lee was taken aback when, following the unquestionable Confederate victory in the Battle of the Wilderness (May 4-7, 1864), Grant’s troops, instead of retreating across the Potomac like those of McClellan, Burnside, and Hooker before them, turned south toward Richmond. In a real sense, the war ended at that moment. Everything afterward can be viewed as an epilogue.

How does all this come into play in The Day After Gettysburg? Often overlooked as regards Alternate History fiction is the fact that, whatever the changes in the historical record, the personalities and mindsets of the major figures—the “icons,” as critics call them—remain the same. Robert E. Lee is not going to be transformed into a heartless brute and Ulysses Grant will not be transformed into a wild-eyed gambler.

It’s also the case here. Lee’s decision to remain in Pennsylvania has a political basis, but is also underwritten by his confidence in his strategic vision. His dedication to decisive battle (though he might not recognize the terminology) has paid off with enormous dividends. Lee has repeatedly destroyed the armies sent out to challenge him. He has defeated every last Union commander he has gone into the field against (Antietam [September 17, 1862] being only half an exception). Though well aware of the dangers of remaining so deep in enemy territory with no possibility of relief or reinforcement, Lee can look back on an almost unbroken record of victory. The tantalizing possibility exists that one more such triumph may be in the wings, perhaps the victory at last, the one that will utterly destroy Union hopes and finally give the South its independence.

So, while he may have his doubts—particularly in his inability to grasp exactly what Grant is up to—he remains well behind Union lines, convinced that the rolling hills of Pennsylvania will not become for him what Russia was for Napoleon.

As for Grant, he enters into battle with his actual plans perhaps incomplete and inchoate, but with a clear vision of his goal unblinded by doctrine or ideology, certain that his talent for innovation and ability to select the right tool for the circumstances will lead him to victory. So the stage is set for the climacteric of the greatest struggle ever seen on the North American continent, in Pennsylvania in 1863 as it was in Virginia 1865.

The Napoleonic legacy continued into the twentieth century, as found in the U.S. Army’s obsession with striking the enemy’s center of mass, which led to appalling casualty levels on battlefields as separate as Monte Cassino (1943) and Okinawa (1945). (The military historian Victor Davis Hanson believes that General Simon Bolivar Buckner might well have become the first American general court-martialed for incompetence for his performance on Okinawa, had he not been killed by a Japanese sniper.) But as it stands today, the Revolution in Military Affairs, along with the innovations in tactics and strategy of such figures as John Boyd, have created an American military that is unmatched on the conventional battlefield. The emphasis on maneuver, feints, speed, and overall innovation that comprises current doctrine resembles that of no other previous American commander more than Ulysses S. Grant.

Acknowledging Lee’s shortcomings does nothing to downgrade his legacy. As long as this country exists, Lee will stand as an example of the nobility, largeness of spirit, and humanity that an American commander must possess. But it is Grant who must get the credit for creating the American way of war.

Works Consulted:

J.F.C. Fuller, Grant and Lee. A Study in Personality and Generalship (1936)

J.F.C. Fuller, The Generalship of U.S. Grant (1927)

Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs (1886)

James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom. The Civil War Era (1988)

Alan T. Nolan, Lee Considered. General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (1996)

Bug-Eyed Monsters Versus the World Builders

William Ledbetter

I've loved science fiction for almost as long as I can remember, at first just watching old black and white movies like The Blob, Earth Versus the Flying Saucers and The Day the Earth Stood Still on Nightmare Theater, then eventually discovering books and never looking back. It's from that position of love that I'd like to challenge your thinking on one of our most powerful and enduring visions: humans colonizing and adventuring on worlds already filled with exotic alien lifeforms. I do think we will find them, I just don't think we will live on those planets.

I'd read plenty of science fiction before stumbling across Dune when I was a freshman in high school, but it was the first book that truly transported me to new and wondrous worlds. I was stunned by the vast and unforgiving desert world with its titanic sandworms, mysterious sand trout and the human Freman who had learned to live there. As I continued to gobble up science fiction, I grew to realize that my favorite fictional worlds are those that don't exist simply as an exciting backdrop for human adventures, but seemed to have a life and history of their own. So quickly added to that list were worlds like Harry Harrison's Pyrrus from Deathworld, where the entire planetary ecosystem acts as a rapidly evolving immune system to expel the human virus, the intelligent world Solaris and even the thread ravaged world of Pern. And like all fans of this greatest of genres, I was charmed, transported and awed.

But like the humanity portrayed in Childhood's End, we have to grow up. As our tools get better and we explore real alien worlds, we expand our understanding and sometimes learn that our exciting imaginary worlds don't often match up to reality. I remember watching for hours as space-suited astronauts constructed the International Space Station. This was science fiction made real. Humanity was building our first real home in space! Yet most of my friends, many of whom were huge space and science fiction fans, found the process mind numbingly boring. For the population at large, shuttle launches became no more exciting than airliners taking off, and even robotic probes reaching Ceres and Pluto were only momentary exciting news blurbs. Thanks to our amazing rovers and orbiting spacecraft, we found that with no canals, no Barsoom or ancient sandship-riding civilizations, even Mars has become boring to the average Joe.

Even taking all of that into account, some of us humans have to know what is out there. We want to see it. We are born to wander and hardwired to not rest until we see what is beyond the next hill. So if our civilization survives long enough, we will go. It's only a matter of when and where.

Statistically, considering the number of planets estimated in just our own galactic arm, Earth analog worlds should be out there, but as our human species matures and spreads through the galaxy, I suspect that reality or our needs will force us to bypass them for something more mundane and practical. Space is vast, so the chances of any of those worlds being closer than a hundred light years away are also statistically slim. That means first we will need to develop equipment capable of confirming all of the critical factors like atmospheric composition, liquid water availability, correct temperature range, mass and gravity range of planets that far away. This will probably require something equivalent to a huge optical interferometer array spread across the dark side of the moon.

Once we do find a candidate world, we have to get there. Baring the development of FTL drive technology, we'll have to rely on sub-lightspeed solutions like sleeper ships, generation ships or robotic seed ships that carry only the DNA needed to construct human colonists upon arrival. These methods are well explored in science fiction and are plausible means to accomplish the task, but they all carry the same inherent weakness: a need to build ships that can function reliably and independently in the cold, radiation-heavy vacuum of interstellar space for hundreds of years. This is glossed over in most fiction and might not sound like a serious problem, but my non-writing job is to help design mechanical systems for the military and I can assure you that it will be a big issue. Probably the best fiction I've read that addresses this problem is a novel called Exit Earth by Martin Caidin, published by Baen in 1987. The ark built in this story starts breaking almost immediately and becomes the potential colonists’ primary survival issue.

These are some huge obstacles to overcome, but I believe in human ingenuity and determination, so let's say we build ships with FTL drives or AI babysitters, controlling nano-scale robots that continuously refresh and rebuild the systems on a long haul ship, and stipulate that humans eventually arrive at a new extra-solar world teeming with strange and wonderful life. This is where I suspect we will deviate wildly from science fiction. We will study it of course, probably for centuries, but we won't colonize this world for several reasons. Primarily we won't need it for a place to live.

Long before humanity is capable of spreading through the Milky Way we will colonize our own solar system, but living on Sol's other planets isn't really a good option. Thanks to the earlier mentioned robotic probes, Mars, Venus and our moon have transformed from exotic worlds inhabited by mysterious and sometimes scantily clad aliens to the more familiar and uninhabitable dead or toxic hells. One of the most tired and overused tropes in modern science fiction is that we will need to find another world to colonize because an eco-disaster is rendering Earth uninhabitable. Let's say that the worst actually happens; our atmosphere becomes unbreathable, the ice caps melt causing sea levels to rise and swamp all the coastal cities and ozone depletion increases the radiation reaching us here on the ground. Even then, Earth will still be a paradise for human life compared to every other planet in our solar system. We would still have our protective magnetic field, the gravity will still be perfect, the temperature—even if we get an ice age or greenhouse effect—will still be better than any other planet in our system. Terraform Mars? Sure, we could do that, but it would probably take centuries to get a shirtsleeve environment on Mars, and even then radiation would always be an issue. But if we have the technology and resources to terraform Mars, then I suspect terraforming a sick Earth by shoving her environment back on track would still be far easier.

Of course humans are a stubborn and determined lot, so we will no doubt eventually build cities on Mars and Luna, probably other bodies in the solar system too, but they will not be easy or hospitable places for us to live. As a matter of fact, I suspect that these colonizing efforts will be hard lessons for us. Our best options for living away from Earth will be to build our own small worlds.

This will not be an easy or quick transition either, but it has the best long term potential. We're a race of engineers and are very good at modifying our environment to suit our needs. We've been doing it since we first overlapped pine boughs or animal skins to form a shelter to keep the rain out and heat in. Of course we don't always get everything perfect the first try, but we learn from our mistakes and make changes in the next version. Look at the design of automobiles as an example. A Tesla sedan is an entirely different animal than the Model T Ford, but they are still both cars. They still both carry people down the road to visit the grandparents or get a daughter to soccer practice. The differences between the two are just a matter of degree and have been introduced over a hundred years of fine tuning. With lessons learned from our experience with the ISS, we will eventually build larger space stations, then the first small habitat, then larger ones, and we'll do it by constantly adding layers to our knowledge base. This is what we do. This is how we design and build.

Every time I discuss this, especially with people who have never considered the possibilities or encountered the topic before, I get the same response; "I don't want to live in a tin can floating in space, I need to live on a planet, with wide open spaces with wind on my face and clouds above!" Even the first of these huge habitats like those described by Gerrard K. O'Neil will have lengths and diameters measured in miles or even dozens of miles and as we get better at building them they will only get larger. They'll be so large that standing on the inside surface of this can and looking up will be reminiscent of looking out the window of an airliner and seeing wispy clouds and beyond them lakes reflecting sunlight, squares of cultivated fields, long snaking rivers and roads, all made dim and indistinct by distance. You'd live like those in the tropics, with open air houses, comfortable shirt sleeve weather, sidewalk cafes, parks and lakes for sailing and swimming. Gravity would be Earth normal, supplied by the cylinder rotating so slowly, even the most sensitive inner ear couldn't detect the movement. The outer shell of these habitats would be twenty to thirty meters thick, filled with soil and water so would provide good radiation shielding. By the time we're capable of building such huge structures we'll probably also have the power systems able to generate artificial magnetic fields around the colony, giving us at least as much protection as we have on Earth. Doing that on planetary scales to protect Mars and moons would be much harder.

We are only biased toward planets because that is what we know and most of us would have a hard time imagining that there is a better alternative. But children who grow up in huge space habitats will not be saddled with the planetary bias that we have. It will be their natural environment. They might not think a planet is the best home for a space faring race. Gravity wells are a huge problem. We may eventually develop things like space elevators or even gravity manipulation that would make it less so, but mining minerals and growing food to ship into space seems counterproductive. These future tin can children will see the sense in being able to move their home out of harm's way or into orbit around Saturn where they can easily harvest ices and gases or eventually even move to another star system.

Future potential colonists will also need to consider some critical ethical issues. If we find a planet that already has a thriving ecosystem—life that has evolved there and is perfectly adapted to that world—would it be ethically acceptable to introduce ourselves and other Earth evolved biota into that system? Even if none of the life is intelligent? Chances are, we would not be able to use the flora and fauna on the new world for food. Our only options would be to bring our own food crops and animals with us and probably adjust their biology enabling them to live on the new world, or bioengineer ourselves—including the millions of necessary microorganisms that live inside us—so the local biology will be compatible. Or of course we could modify the new planet's biology to fit us instead. In all of those cases, either introducing new organisms or modifying the existing ecosystem would interrupt or destroy the local biology.

I'm a big believer in technological solutions, so that far into the future we might become wizards of biology and be able to tweak things so that two separate ecosystems can live side by side in harmony, but I suspect by that point if we even still desire to live on a planetary surface, we will be more likely to find what I think of as "blank slate" worlds that have the requisite size, location, water etc., then terraform them. This sounds like the optimal solution for humans moving to extra-solar worlds, since we could tailor make them to our exact requirements without destroying other biospheres. While we do that, the human populations will of course live in huge orbital habitats as the dead world is slowly brought to life. We humans are stubborn and contrary, so there might always be those throwbacks among us who prefer to live on a planet, but the largest percentage of humanity will live in space, in giant houses of our own design, and when those terraforming projects are finished, they might leave a few hardy and adventurous people behind, but the rest will move on.

So regardless of where we go in our distant future, we will be building our homes to order, either as vast colonies free to drift among the stars or terraformed marvels that will indeed be new Earths, but like so many of our cool-yet-wrong visions of the future given us by science fiction, we will most likely not be taming worlds filled with alien monsters.

Stasis: The Future of Suspended Animation

Philip A. Kramer

Introduction

Since the beginning of recorded history, humanity has fought against the ravages of time. Often time passes at a snail’s pace and separates us from where and when we want to be. At other moments, it is gone before we can appreciate it, leaving us longing for the irrecoverable past. Eventually, time runs out, and even the luckiest of us succumb to age. But it is not in human nature to give up without a fight, even if it means standing our ground against time itself.

Ancient cultures preserved their dead, embalming the bodies with herbs, spices, salts, vegetative matter, or clays, and drying the bodies before burial. Many believed that, in doing so, the fragments of the soul would remain together, giving them life after death, and perhaps a body to reclaim one day. Embalming practices continue to this day, but with chemical fixatives. But perhaps the most impressive instances of human preservation were those that occurred unintentionally, such as the Tollund man, the La Doncella Inca Maiden, and Ötzi the Iceman, who were found centuries to millennia after their deaths [1]. While the appearance of life is convincing, it is a poor facsimile. But for some divine intervention, these bodies will not return from death.

Suspended animation achieved by scientific means, on the other hand, just might work.

Suspended animation is a growing area of research that seeks to make death itself reversible, to restore activity to a silent brain, and make a stopped heart beat again. With this technology, organs can be preserved for transplant, lethal injuries can be repaired while a patient lays frozen in time, and our genetic legacy can be carried into the future.

Stasis in Fiction

Image courtesy Jody Lynn Nye. Visit website here.

Suspended animation is otherwise known as stasis, but stasis has a wider definition in science fiction. Some think of the temporal field projected by a starship to freeze an enemy ship in space. That degree of temporal manipulation is far beyond us, and one I am not qualified to talk about. Instead, I will discuss the biologist’s version of stasis; the technique used to slow or even stop all signs of life, and eventually start it up again. This has been a tool used for decades by science fiction writers. With it, some of our favorite characters have reached distant worlds, visited the future, or been saved from deadly injuries.

The most common methods of suspended animation today are desiccation and cryopreservation. Desiccation is attractive to science fiction writers for its dramatic visuals: a body shriveling until it is nothing more than a fragile husk to be rehydrated later. Liu Cixin, the author of The Three Body Problem, uses this desiccation method for a race of aliens based out of Alpha Centauri, who must endure a long transit to Earth. Cryopreservation, however, is the most popular form of stasis in fiction, whereby individuals enter a specialized pod which preserves them in a cryogenic slumber. Stasis pods have been used in fiction to preserve the injured on battlefields or by cryogenics companies that promise to transport the deceased or terminally ill to a future where they can be revived or cured or their consciousness digitized (e.g. Dennis E. Taylor in We are Legion and Lois McMaster Bujold in Cryoburn). I have seen humanity outlive global catastrophes by preserving their genetic legacy on an orbiting space station (e.g. Neal Stephenson in Seveneves) or by waiting out the apocalypse in stasis in an underground facility (e.g. Hugh Howey’s Shift Omnibus). Stasis has been used for dramatic effect by suspending characters for decades only to have them wake to a vastly different reality (e.g. Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye in The Death of Sleep and Darren Wearmouth and Carl Sinclair in Sixth Cycle). But science fiction writers did not dream up suspended animation on their own. It already exists in nature.

Suspended Animation in Nature

Many organisms have evolved a suspended animation technique of their own. From the smallest of bacteria to large, multicellular amphibians and mammals, stasis helps sustain life through drought, and freezing temperatures. Cryptobiosis is the term used to describe this biological adaptation, and it is characterized by a dramatic decrease in the metabolic rate of the organism [2].

Many small organisms can survive for years in a desiccated state. These organisms have evolved to survive harsh climates or wait out food and water shortages. The simplest of organisms, bacteria and fungi, can produce spores capable of being revived after millions of years, while some plant seeds can be sprouted after a thousand years of dormancy [3,4]. These organisms purposely dehydrate, removing as much water as possible from their cells. Without water, there can be no life.

Perhaps the best example of this is the tardigrades, water bears, which can lose nearly all of their water, survive the vacuum of space, radiation, and extreme cold, and live again once rehydrated [5,6]. Some complex organisms can achieve a similar state of suspended animation. You can order the dry eggs of some crustaceans, Triops and brine shrimp, and hatch them in water months later. The African killifish, a vertebrate used frequently in aging research, has a short lifecycle due to the frequency of drought. It can lay eggs in the bottom of dry pools. The African killfish then hatch after the rains return months later.

Hypsibius dujardini, image by Willow Gabriel; Triops image by Steve Jurvetson; Killifish image by Andreas Wretström, all courtesy Wikicommons.

Rather than remove water entirely to achieve suspended animation, it can be frozen. All it takes is cold temperatures, and a site of nucleation, and a lattice of water molecules will form, encasing cells in a tomb of crystalline ice.

Microorganisms and small, multicellular organisms can live indefinitely while frozen, often without any evolutionary adaptations. This has some people worried. If global temperatures rise, the permafrost will melt, potentially releasing many ancient and deadly bacteria and viruses. Plagues thought long burned out could be lying in wait beneath the ice.

Larger organisms are another matter. Because of the complexity of their organ systems and the fragile nature of many of their cells, multicellular organisms have had to evolve a defense against the cold to avoid freezing completely. Many frogs, for example, have evolved to survive entire winters frozen almost solid (two-thirds ice) [7]. Heart and brain activity stop, and do not start again until the first spring thaw [8,9]. Nucleating proteins in their blood allow small ice crystals to form outside their cells, preventing cell damage. The formation of this ice also draws water from cells, but the frog combats this by producing large quantities of glucose. When taken up by cells, the glucose prevents them from dehydrating during the freezing process. Some other species, like some fish, plants, and insects, have antifreeze proteins, or other protective molecules that interfere with the formation of crystalline ice [10].

They aren’t the only creatures who’ve shown remarkable adaptation to the cold. The arctic fruit fly, Chymomyza costata, can survive being dropped into liquid nitrogen (-321˚F). Interestingly, Drosophila melanogaster, the average fruit fly can survive freezing with supplementation of a particular amino acid present in their arctic cousins [11].

Arctic Ground squirrel image by DJ Kast, courtesy Wikicommons; Wood frog image by Brian Gratwicke, courtesy Wikicommons. Dwarf lemur image by David Haring, courtesy Duke Lemur Center.

Other arctic species, such as the arctic ground squirrel, can also survive sub-freezing temperatures. No ice forms within the body of the squirrel, yet its core body temperature can fall below freezing during its winter hibernation. It achieves this by using a super cooling technique, giving ice crystals no place to form. You have probably seen super cooling at work when pulling out a bottle of water from the freezer. By all rights, the water should be frozen, but it isn’t, however, slight impurities or even bubbles can give ice the surface it needs to begin forming. The arctic ground squirrel cleanses its body of nucleators, preventing ice formation. During this time, there is no heart or brain activity, however, it needs to wake several times during the winter, increase its body heat, and then begins to slumber again. It is believed these brief periods of revival are necessary to perform necessary biological activities and maintain electrolyte equilibrium within its cells [12].

Cold temperatures slow down biological processes so well, lowering the thermostat can effectively prolong the life of many organisms. In the lower, warmer regions of the Baltic Sea, the Arctic clam can live thirty to one hundred fifty years, but in the colder north, it can survive for over five hundred years [13]. I was recently at the 2017 AGE meeting in New York, listening to a lecture by Steve Austad from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Austad and his colleagues have discovered a remarkable stress resistance in this ocean quohog. If they submerge quohogs in a bath of hydrogen peroxide with related species, the arctic clam will always survive the longest [14]. The creature’s remarkable stress response, and its protein stability, might be why it can live so long in water that often falls below freezing. Extraordinarily, the Greenland shark, also a resident of these cold waters, can survive just as long as the arctic clam [15]. Somewhere out there, there is a heart that was beating at the same time as Shakespeare’s.

Image modified by Philip A. Kramer from original by Julius Nielsen at http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37047168. Text from A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare.

To the lesser extremes of cold, many animals have learned to hibernate, a process referred to as torpor. Many bears, rodents, and even a primate (dwarf lemur), are able to reduce their core temperature and suppress their metabolic activity, respiration, and heart rate for months, eating little to nothing at all during that time [16].

Unfortunately, humans were not built for such things. We evolved to use our wits to circumvent these environmental extremes. We learned to make fire when it was cold and to preserve our food and carry our water when both were scarce. We are so good at surviving harsh environments, we even figured out how to travel to our Moon and back. So now, medical doctors and researchers are trying to replicate the biology of these unique organisms to make suspended animation possible for humans.

Modern Applications

While humans have not evolved to survive cryostasis, examples populate the web of men and women falling beneath the ice of a lake, or getting lost in a winter storm. Many die, but some die and return to life.

“You aren’t dead until you are warm and dead,” goes the increasingly common saying. Some survivors have come back to life hours after their hearts have stopped beating [17]. Now, many researchers and medical professionals want to do it on purpose. Their hope is to give critically injured or severely ill patients a few more hours of life so doctors can implement other life-saving interventions.

In contrast to the norms of science fiction, where ice crystals form around the edges of the stasis pod window and its occupant is solidified in ice, modern medicine can only achieve a suppressed animation. Therapeutic hypothermia is a technique wherein doctors carefully decrease core body temperature to about 85-93 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature most would still consider warm to the touch. Nevertheless, such a small temperature change vastly decreases the respiration rate, heart rate, and metabolism of cells. Without sufficient oxygen, brain cells can die within five minutes, however, when cooled, the cells do not require as much oxygen, allowing them to survive for much longer periods of deprivation. Therapeutic hypothermia has already shown positive results in reducing the damage caused by injury, strokes, or heart attacks [18]. Drugs that suppress shivering are required while doctors reduce the body temperature with icepacks, cold blankets, and even cold IV fluids. So far, fourteen days is the longest in which doctors have maintained patients in mild therapeutic hypothermia and with no ill effects [19]. Shorter duration hypothermia at temperatures approaching fifty degrees Fahrenheit are in clinical trials. This procedure, emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), requires the infusion of large amounts of cold saline directly into the aorta. One day doctors hope EPR will buy time for critical surgical interventions on patients suffering from traumatic injury, stroke, or heart attacks [20].

While ultra-cold preservation of entire human bodies may not be available in the near future, modern medicine is already doing it with human cells and tissues. Cord blood, bone marrow, and some ovarian and corneal tissues can be frozen and stored for years before thawing and transplantation [21,22]. Hundreds of cell lines sit on liquid nitrogen in biotech companies, waiting their revival for medical research. Millions of sperm and egg specimens wait for the day they can finally meet and make a human life. All of these life-saving (and life-starting) applications use single cells capable of surviving years of cryostasis.

In transplantation medicine, large tissues and organs are much more difficult to preserve. This has led to an entire industry of coordinators, linking potential donors with recipients. Often they will keep a brain-dead donor on life support, to act as an incubator for an organ until the recipient arrives at the hospital and is prepped for surgery. Placing the organs on ice, or even perfusing them with cold buffer, has significantly extended their viability. These organs have not been successfully frozen and then transplanted, but great strides are being made in the field recently [23]. A lack of availability and long-term tissue and organ preservation leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths each year in the U.S. for those in end-stage organ failure [24,25].

So why is cryopreservation so difficult? Why can’t we press the pause button on life as easily as science fiction writers make it sound?

Challenges of Suspended Animation

Without a dramatic decrease in temperature, biological processes remain active, causing problems for long-term stasis. To place cells, tissues, or even an entire human body in stasis for any lengthy period required freezing temperatures. But this comes with its own set of challenges.

While occasionally there are examples of people falling into a frozen lake and being revived hours later, there are no examples of people freezing solid and returning to life [26]. Ice crystals are to blame for that. Even those individuals who survived this accidental suspended animation suffered severe frostbite in their extremities where ice crystals formed in their tissue [27]. You can see this same process occur in meat, vegetables, and fruits that you’ve pulled from your freezer. Vegetables and fruits will have lost their firmness, and meats will be tenderized to a degree.

Membranes, water insoluble lipid barriers, make each of our cells single, viable entities. When these membranes are disrupted, critical electrochemical gradients are destroyed, and cells can no longer dictate what enters and exits. Death quickly follows. The challenge of cryostasis occurs when water arranges itself into crystalline ice. This ice can pierce membranes. Even if membranes remain intact, ice can shear DNA and proteins and displace solutes, artificially concentrating them to toxic levels. An osmotic imbalance can also disrupt electrochemical gradients in cellular organelles, like the mitochondria, which uses a proton gradient to drive the synthesis of ATP, a molecule used by the cell to carry out most enzymatic processes.

Diagram by Martin Chaplin, courtesy Creative Commons.

There are 17 different phases of ice, but most of them only form at the extremes of temperature and pressure that are not compatible with life [28]. Ordinary ice (Ice Ih), like the kind in your freezer's ice tray, is crystalline, and forms when water molecules arrange themselves in a hexagonal shape during a slow freeze. To prevent this dangerous arrangement of ice crystals, suspended animation technology seeks to create a different kind of ice, the kind that forms in space or in extremely low temperatures and pressures. This ice is amorphous, non-crystalline, and does not have the damaging properties of crystalline ice [29]. The process used to make amorphous ice in biological tissues is called vitrification [30].

Cryoprotectants, can facilitate this vitrification process by preventing the formation of crystalline ice. Some cryoprotectants, such as dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO), can get inside cells and tissues and prevent these ice crystals from forming [31]. But they aren’t nontoxic. One method may be to combine cryoprotectants into a cocktail, gaining their advantageous effects but diluting their dangerous ones.

This brings us to the thawing and resuscitation process. Surprisingly, thawing may be more deleterious than the act of freezing. Doctors grapple with this challenge daily when performing medical research or storing cells for therapeutic use. Even with the most effective cryopreservative solutions, huge percentages of cells are lost during the thawing process. This has cost the medical industry millions in lost revenue by drastically depleting the number of cells they can recover for research and treatment purposes.

Dr. Brian Hawkins, a commercial cryopreservation expert, tells me that there are two major stages of cryo injury. The first occurs during the freezing process itself and can be observed as a large amount of cell death immediately upon thaw. This stage may largely be due to mechanical injury and necrotic cell death, as cells are physically damaged by ice crystal formation or osmotic stresses. The second stage takes place over the following twenty-four hours, wherein cells irreversibly damaged by the freezing process are unable to return to normal function and execute programmed cell death. While the exact causes of cryopreservation-induced delayed onset cell death are still unclear, one potential cause is dysfunctional mitochondrial metabolism and the excessive generation of reactive oxygen species. Oxidant stress can induce a cell death pathway, known as apoptosis, which causes DNA to fragment and the cell membrane to lose its integrity.

“Cryopreservation research historically focused on the physical stresses of freezing, such as ice formation, membrane biology, and solute toxicity,” Hawkins says. “Only recently have scientists started to investigate the biology of low temperature stress at the cellular, proteomic, and genomic levels, as well as the complex biochemical processes needed to keep cells alive during freezing. This is especially true with regards to cellular metabolism and mitochondrial function.”

Dr. Hawkins and his colleagues aim to provide researchers and physicians with the tools required to more efficiently preserve cells, tissues, and organs, and to mitigate cell injury and improve survival in the clinic.

To further complicate our progress toward suspended animation, not all cells are equal. Some, by nature of their unique shape, function, and metabolism, are extremely susceptible to the cold stress. For example, research shows that many hibernating animals lose a huge percent of their neuron’s dendritic spines, which might prove detrimental to the complex thought processes in humans [32]. One of my first jobs in the medical field was to process blood donations into a number of components. Later I worked in a hospital blood bank, typing patient blood and delivering the matching units of blood to nurses. It always struck me that each component of the blood could only be preserved at a certain temperature. Red blood cells could be stored in the refrigerator, but platelets had to remain at room temperature. I learned later that platelets stored at lower temperatures were far more likely to activate, which could be deadly in patients experiencing hypothermia [33]. This disparate effect of cold on different cells in the human body makes suspended animation a challenge.

Future applications

A common thread in suspended animation techniques is the suppression of metabolism. One researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center decided to suppress metabolism directly to see if this could induce a state of suspended animation [34,35]. And it worked. Dr. Mark Roth exposed mice to low concentrations of a highly toxic gas, hydrogen sulfide, and they slowed their breathing, heart rate, and lay in a near-death state for hours. After removing the gas, the mice returned to normal with seemingly no ill effects. This gas inhibits the mitochondrial respiration, and while it does not decrease temperature directly, Roth discovered that the core body temperature of the mice also plummeted during the suspended animation. This gas has been shown to be produced endogenously in some hibernating mammals and protects their organs during hibernation [36,37]. Could this be the key to making non-hibernating animals hibernate? Maybe, but it has yet to be validated in larger mammals.

Whatever the technique, suspended animation will make its first appearance on the battlefield or in ambulances, where trained medics infuse a cocktail of anti-shiver, metabolic suppression agents, or additional drugs. This field treatment will help sustain critically injured patents or soldiers using therapeutic hypothermia or emergency preservation until they can be transported to an operating room.

But what happens if the ambulance arrives too late, and the patient dies? Cryogenics may be the answer. Several companies offer cryogenics services. On their websites, they advertise the wonders of the technology: see the future, reunite with family, a fresh start, awaken to a cure, or be revived from whatever killed you. To my knowledge, no cryogenics company can get away with dunking you in liquid nitrogen while you are still alive. Many people willingly participate in this service. They participate despite knowing that future may be very far away. The challenges of reviving a person frozen in this manner will not be easy. First, future technicians would have to repair the problem that resulted in the death of the individual, then they would somehow have to stitch up all the membranes that were ruptured, counteract the oxidative stress, mitochondrial injury, and repair the damaged DNA. Some companies, like the Cryonics Institute, are using whole body vitrification with a cryoprotectant mixture to prevent some of physical damage caused by ice. It may take sophisticated genetic manipulation or the development of more non-toxic cryoprotectant mixtures to make cryostasis a feasible option. This does not bode well for all the people currently frozen. It might be just as likely that high resolution imaging technology will come first, technology capable of scanning the frozen brain and translating it into an in silico model of a brain capable of replicating thought patterns. Either way, when they come out of cryostasis, they may not be the same person as when they went in.

The most anticipated future application of suspended animation technology for space enthusiasts is to send people to distant planets. Right now, there is already a company leading the charge. Over the past few years, SpaceWorks Enterprises, Inc., has received funding from NASA’s NIAC program to get a feasible mockup of a real-life stasis pod running [38]. It is a technology many believe will help get the first astronauts to Mars. Their plan: to keep astronauts in a torporlike state for periods of two weeks to a month. A trip to Mars will take much longer than that, so they intend to have astronauts sleep in shifts. Sound like science fiction? Well you aren’t wrong. SpaceWorks was a consultant for the recent sci-fi movie Passengers, staring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt.

Image courtesy SpaceWorks.

When I reached out to SpaceWorks for this article, Dr. John Bradford, the President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of SpaceWorks, was happy to answer my questions. When I inquired about his research in human hibernation, he pointed out that they can’t actually make people hibernate and prefer terms like “human stasis,” “torpor inducing,” and “metabolic suppression.” That said, Bradford admits that they are looking to animals that can hibernate as a source of understanding and inspiration.

“Bears are a great model since their core temperature doesn’t drop to the extreme conditions most hibernators experience,” Bradford says. “They can be in torpor for four to five month periods.” He suggests that in the future, with gene therapy or modification, humans could one day achieve a state of hibernation.

SpaceWorks is still evaluating how long people might be sustained in a low metabolic state. They have a lot of data from current Therapeutic Hypothermia practices, and can try to evaluate what’s happening to the human body over the course of 2-4 days. “Longer periods of up to 14 days have been achieved, but data there becomes much more limited,” Bradford says. SpaceWorks highlights some of the challenges they face in a recent paper describing their proposed method [39]. The most immediate obstacles are bleeding, clotting, infection, and electrolyte imbalances, not to mention the preventing the bone loss and muscle atrophy associated with long-term microgravity.

While they hope to achieve months at some point in the future, Bradford states that even a couple of weeks of suspended animation could solve many medical and engineering challenges of space exploration. “With this technology, a variety of new options can be introduced and applied that address major human spaceflight medical challenges and risk areas such as bone loss, muscle atrophy, increased intracranial pressure, and radiation damage. System-level engineering analysis has indicated significant mass savings for both the habitat and transfer stages. These savings are due to reductions in the pressurized volume, consumables, power, structures, and ancillary systems for the space habitat.”

While this may prove feasible for traveling to Mars. The nearest star system is four point three light years away. The recently discovered seven earth-sized planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system are forty light years away [40]. To reach them will take many lifetimes. So unless huge leaps are made in propulsion systems, stasis technology will need to reduce metabolic activity and all biological functions to undetectable levels, without harm to the astronaut. The alternative is a bulky generation ship, where many generations of people live and die. The unpredictable nature of people, culture, politics on such a ship reduces the likelihood of mission success. Bradford believes stasis is “the key enabling technology that will ultimately permit human exploration to Mars and beyond.”

So far, humanity’s fight against time is a losing one. We still have a lot to learn. Perhaps the greatest instructor will be Mother Nature, who has had a billion years of trial and error to bring about life and keep it living throughout environmental extremes. One thing is certain, if we hope to visit the future, prevent death from injury or disease, or spread across the galaxy, we will need to make huge leaps in suspended animation technology. For scientists and science fiction writers, that future can’t come soon enough.

References.

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Graphene—Not Just Another Miracle Material

Les Johnson and Joseph Meany

Carbon composites, carbon nanotubes, buckyballs—if you follow science news, you are bound to have read about these “wonder materials” and the promise they hold for finally enabling the science-fictional devices we fans have been reading about for decades. From space elevators to impenetrable body armor, there are abundant speculations that these dream devices will transition from science-fiction to science-fact within the foreseeable future. The announcement of each new wonder material brings with it abundant opportunities to realize far-flung hopes and fantasies. The 19th and 20th centuries gave us many wonder materials to transform our world. Many elements were found in the 19th century for the first time; aluminum began as a wonder material before eventually evolving into the abundant commodity it is today. Around the turn of the 20th century, plastics were invented for the first time and have come to irreversibly change the face of this planet. Liquid crystals shook up chemists by establishing that molecules can be liquid but still have order like normal solid crystals. High explosives and nuclear weapons changed politics forever. Now, there is another material that needs to be added to the list. One that has been all around us since our discovery of graphite (though we didn’t realize it), and is rapidly advancing from a topic within fundamental research to a material used in commercial products: graphene.

What would you think if I told you that hidden in ordinary graphite, the “lead” used to make pencils, is a material more than three hundred times stronger than steel and capable of carrying current nearly as efficiently as a superconductor? What if I told you that its discoverers initially isolated it using not much more than Scotch™ Tape and a tenacious graduate student? The flaky structure of graphene and graphite allowed them to be pulled gently apart, like pancakes off a stack.

The material, graphene, has an interesting and unique two-dimensional structure—it’s planar. Most molecules are three-dimensional in nature, having bonds that pop up and down, left and right. Carbon, in diamond, extends out in all directions (Figure 1). That is why it forms nice pretty stones for jewelers to shape, with cleavage lines according to the way each bond forms. Carbon’s four available bonds send out differently in graphene, where they only send out left to right. The atoms in graphene are bound to a flat surface (Figure 2).

Figure 1 Adamantane, which is a single unit of diamond, is a cagelike molecule where carbon (black balls) extends in all directions. Extending adamantane out by replacing the hydrogen atoms (white balls) with more carbon, a diamond forms. Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20310245

Figure 2 Graphene consists of only carbon atoms (black balls), bonded together in a flat ring shape, forming a single-atomic-layer thick sheet. Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graphen.jpg

It is this monoatomic layer of carbon atoms that gives graphene its interesting and potentially very useful properties. Before we delve into the many applications of graphene, we should first relay the story of its discovery, which led to its discoverers being awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2004, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) turned the world upside down when they announced the discovery of the material that had long-been anticipated, but was considered by some experts impossible to isolate and analyze. Critics were stunned that the material could, in fact, exist and that they had found it in ordinary graphite. Like most academic researchers, the Geim group at Manchester had graduate students. Graduate students in a science department are often the unsung heroes of scientific research. They are the ones to take direction from their professors and perform the tedious, time-consuming work which is occasionally punctuated by the famous “aha!” moments of science after much crucial head-scratching. In this case, one of Geim’s graduate student (not Novoselov’s) was given the task of isolating a thin piece of graphite from a solid graphite slab—which he did, by polishing it to ever smaller sizes until only a fleck remained. They weren’t looking to make graphene. They wanted a small enough piece of graphite that could be used in research they hoped would lead to a new form of transistor. The polishing approach didn’t work well and caused Geim to think of alternative approaches.

A research colleague suggested they try using everyday office tape, sticking it to the surface of a brick of graphite and then pulling it away. Some of the graphite brick stuck to the tape and cleaved away from the brick to remove the impurities on the surface leading to two new pristine exposed sample surfaces that might be suitable for research. Only, instead of looking at the graphite brick surface that remained after taping and pulling, they decided to look at the graphite that had been pulled away. Repeated cleaving of this sample yielded thinner and thinner samples. They found not just dirt and debris stuck to the tape, but very small samples of an interesting form of graphite that, when placed under a sufficiently powerful microscope, was found to be a single layer thick sheet of carbon—they had finally isolated graphene.

Amazingly enough, you can repeat this process at home using a pencil and paper. Write yourself or your significant other a note and then use sticky tape on the penciled notes. When you remove the tape, you will also remove a thin layer of pencil lead (graphite) from the paper. If you were to look at this layer of graphite under a powerful microscope, then you would see that it also contains small scattered flakes of individual graphite plates, or graphene. Unfortunately, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov already won the Nobel Prize for doing similarly so you can forget about your trip to Stockholm.

After graphene was isolated, Geim, Novoselov and other researchers around the world began looking at its physical and electrical properties. One obvious barrier came as they needed to search for other ways of making it. For any new material to be useful on an industrial scale, there must be a way to mass produce it. Using rooms filled with graduate students, piles of graphite, and lots of Scotch™ Tape is simply not going to produce graphene on a scale to be truly useful. Fortunately, researchers have found other ways to mass produce graphene and several companies are now selling it. Once it was shown possible to fabricate flaked graphene, the flood gates opened and people began making it all over the world. The popularity of graphene research is difficult to properly describe qualitatively. With the one-two punch from buckminsterfullerenes appearing in the late-1980s and the carbon nanotubes appearing in the mid-1990s, there was finally an abundance of funding pouring in to research unusual forms (allotropes) of this previously passé element. While many scientific discoveries are wrongly described as inevitabilities of their time, graphene research was already tantalizing enough around the turn of the millennium that attempts to isolate (and more importantly, characterize) graphene had already been underway for more than a decade before Geim and Novoselov stepped into the ring. Geim says that their primary contribution to the field was not, in fact, the Scotch™ Tape method. Rather, he asserts that the discovery of the Quantum Hall Effect within the graphite and graphene flake transistors led to the explosion in funding for the material. This explosion was rapid and permanently transformative.

In the time between 1986 (when “graphene” as a term was coined) and 2003, barely 800 academic papers had been published which mention the word within its text, much less focus on it as a topic (Figure 3). This number expanded to a rate of thousands of papers per year in the late-2000s, to literally tens of thousands of papers per year in the early- to mid-2010s. Soon, with this rate of growth expanding at an exponential rate, we will reach a point where more articles are written in a single year about graphene than have ever been written in all the years previous, combined. Manufacturers are not sitting idle.

Figure 3 Number of academic publications referencing “graphene” in their text, per year, between 1986 and 2016 as indexed by SciFinder. Credit: Joseph Meany

To understand the hype, consider some of the potential graphene applications being touted or in development. Let’s begin with its mechanical strength - nothing beats graphene. Mechanical engineers rate the relative strength of materials in Pascals, named in honor of the French physicist, Blaise Pascal. Structural steel has a strength of about 400,000,000 Pascals. Kevlar 375,700,000 Pascals. Graphene? 130,000,000,000 Pascals. If you got lost in all the zeros, here is the bottom line: graphene is at least 325 times stronger than steel by weight. It is also exceedingly lightweight. One square meter of graphene weighs 1000 times less than a one square meter piece of notebook paper! We will talk about the applications of this strength a little later.

Graphene is not a superconductor, but it is close. A superconductor is material that conducts electrical current with one hundred percent efficiency; there are no losses that cause heating, thereby allowing lossless power transmission across them. The problem is that most superconductors must be kept very cold to work and they typically cannot exceed some current limit without losing their superconducting properties. Graphene can carry electrical current at room temperatures with an efficiency much better than copper, the industry standard, or even silver, one of the best room-temperature conductors ever discovered. If a method of mass producing graphene wires can be found, major improvements in the efficiency of appliances, electronics, and even the power grid can be attained. When circuitry efficiencies can be enhanced in this way, it means that even paltry gains in energy production by renewable resources can have a massive economic benefit.

One of the most vexing problems facing the electronics industry today is energy storage. Battery technology hasn’t significantly changed in the last hundred years. Though efficiency has improved, storing electrical power in chemical batteries is perhaps the number one limitation facing both the portable electronics industry as well as utilities, who are looking for more efficient ways to generate, store, and distribute electrical power. Graphene has the potential (pun intended), to enable a different sort of battery, a capacitor, to store huge amounts of energy and release it quickly on demand—making it a supercapacitor.

A typical capacitor consists of two conducting plates separated a distance, d, by some sort of nonconductor, or dielectric (Figure 4). As the voltage difference between the plates increases, more energy is being stored. If the area of the conducting plates can be increased within a given volume, the capacitor can store more energy – making it a better battery. This is where graphene comes into use. Recall that graphene is conducting and very, very, thin. A capacitor consisting of multiple, stacked graphene plates can be packed into a very small volume, creating a high-energy density, high-power battery or supercapacitor. Graphene’s flexibility would allow manufacturers to make supercapacitors flexible—a massive hurdle in the way of making tablets and phones as thin as paper!

Figure 4 A capacitor stores energy in the electric field generated between two conducting places separated by a non-conductor, or dielectric. Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parallel_plate_capacitor.svg

Thanks to graphene’s structural strength and electrical conductivity, it is likely that cell phone manufacturers will soon be making their devices with transparent graphene screens that are much more scratch and break resistant than today’s state-of-the-art. Inside the cell phones will be graphene supercapacitor batteries and graphene wire traces instead of silver or copper. There is substantial effort being made to dope graphene with other atoms or molecules so that it can have semiconducting properties, making its use in portable electronics even more ubiquitous. This would be a boon for the world’s computer manufacturing industry, no longer needing to rely on mined heavy metals from politically sensitive locations and countries.

More mundane terrestrial uses of graphene are as structural reinforcement. We already discussed the mechanical strength of graphene when compared to steel and Kevlar so we should not be surprised to learn that among the first commercial applications of graphene are graphene-strengthened shoes, tennis rackets and automobile tires – all are items which tend to wear our or break easily. Next will be graphene-laced paints to provide additional strength to buildings and make them less susceptible to damage from debris during storms, or even hurricanes. A company in the UK has recently released an early version of graphene-based paint, a paint they are claiming helps with a building’s temperature regulation. While this is only a small step to the possible futures for graphene within home improvement, small but tangible increments are what will allow for consumers to grasp the true nature of this wonder material and drive the investment money into more research and development projects for even better products.

But is graphene only going to impact those rich enough to afford fancy belongings? After all, access to clean drinking water is a global concern and in some areas a true crisis. Graphene oxide, made from graphene by adding oxygen in various spots all over the graphene flake, has been shown able to filter polluted water, allowing only drinkable water to pass. Companies like Lockheed Martin are experimenting with graphene filters for use in water desalination plants and they claim to have a graphene-based process that is hundreds of times smaller and uses 99% less energy than conventional (non-graphene) approaches. The benefits of graphene will extend well beyond the high-tech world and into solving some of the most practical, and vexing, problems facing the world’s poor.

Graphene research occasionally takes detours into the realm of the bizarre. One group of Italian researchers decided to see if spiders who ingested graphene would produce stronger silk. They sprayed a group of spiders with a mixture of water, carbon nanotubes and small graphene particles. They then measured the strength of the silk the spiders produced and compared it with unsprayed spiders. The result? The strength of the silk increased dramatically—making it more than three times stronger than natural spider silk—even stronger than Kevlar. What about the spiders? Though some produced this super silk, several did not. They simply died. Think about it though, if an organism were selectively bred with an inherent resistance to graphene toxicity and a specific ability to produce super-strength graphene-enhanced natural silk, one could foresee a farming operation akin to the way that silkworms are used to create natural silk thread today. These threads may not be the lightweight tension cables of the future, but cloth spun with graphene has potential antibacterial properties.

This brings up the question of safety. Is graphene safe? Are we isolating and creating a super material that will become another asbestos? The answer is that graphene is safe for humans, with some caveats. Environmental protections today are far better than they were in decades past and there is already research being done to determine graphene’s toxicity. To date, it looks like graphene is relatively benign, unless you ingest or breathe it. Workers manufacturing piles of graphene flakes will still need the same protections they use around other fine particles. As with asbestos, a buildup of graphene in the lungs could cause long-term scarring and damage. As far as the environment goes, graphene seems to not have any long-term detriment to the environment, although research within that area is still weak. Fortunately, environmental persistence research performed for carbon nanotubes crosses over and is applicable to graphene! It has been found that in the environment, graphene can react with oxygen in the air to become pitted and malformed; this causes graphene to transform into graphene oxide, and graphene oxide can be broken down by microbes in the environment. In this way, graphene flakes are eventually chewed up and spit out by the bacteria, returning to the air as carbon dioxide. Early research shows that when certain molecules are added onto the graphene flake, they can make the flake deadlier than a bare, unreacted flake. It is important to note, though, that this research is still early and the reasons why the new molecule makes a difference is still unknown.

So, aside from soon being in just about every consumer product we buy or touch, how is graphene going to enable the science fictional future so many of us envision?

Let’s talk space elevators. I (author Johnson) am not personally a fan of space elevators (to learn why, check out my Baen essay, “http://www.baen.com/spacetethers”) but should one be built, it is likely to be made in part from graphene and related materials. Imagine catching an elevator from the surface of the Earth and taking it up 22,000 miles to Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO). This would give us a way to carry people and cargo to space without the use of a rocket and at an incremental cost of electricity so low as to be nearly inconsequential (Figure 5). This idea, commonly referred to as a space elevator, or elevator to space, has been a dream of space advocates for decades. One of the most significant challenges to building a space elevator has been one of materials science: we simply did not have any materials strong enough to sustain their own weight in lengths approaching tens of thousands of miles. Now, thanks to Geim and Novoselov, we might.

Figure 5 Space elevators would can carry cargo and people from the surface of the Earth all the way to geostationary Earth orbit. Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nasa_space_elev.jpg

Graphene might also be a useful material for extremely large solar and laser sails. Solar sails are large, lightweight reflective fabrics attached to a spacecraft that provide propulsion by reflecting sunlight. Traditional nautical sails reflect wind, consisting of air molecules but solar sails reflect sunlight, which is made of light particles called photons. Like reflected air, sunlight transfers some of its momentum to the sail, causing it, and the spacecraft attached to it, to move. Solar sails are useful because they require no fuel and derive all their propulsion by reflecting light. The larger and lighter weight the sail, the more useful it is as a propulsion system. Current technology sails are less than 1000 square meters in area and weigh about ten to fifteen grams (about a tablespoon of butter) per square meter (about the size of half a door).

If we could build very large solar sails, perhaps square kilometers in area, and keep them lightweight, then we would have the materials we need to create truly solar sail propelled spacecraft. These craft would be capable of carrying humans throughout the inner solar system, or sending our robotic probes beyond the outer edge of the solar system. This is, of course, where graphene might come into play. Using graphene, it should be possible to build sails that are tens, if not hundreds, of square miles in area without incurring a damaging tear. Once deployed, these massive sails could easily undergo the mechanical stresses induced by being accelerated using sunlight or a combination of sunlight and laser light. The catch? Graphene is not reflective, so some sort of coating will have to be applied for this to work. The coating will inevitably make the sail more massive, but not significantly so. A realistic goal for researchers to strive for would be between 5x – 10x the weight of a bare graphene sail.

Graphene might also be used to make a lightweight, extremely tough body armor for soldiers and police. Both already use vests made from Kevlar to stop bullets and shrapnel, but these vests tend to be heavy and bulky. They also don’t provide full body protection because making and wearing a complete set of body armor is currently impractical. Police can’t do their work properly if they are dressed like medieval knights! But it might not be so with graphene. Recall that graphene is both two hundred times stronger than steel and weighs very little. A single layer blanket of graphene laid across a football field would weigh about one gram! With materials like this, full body armor suddenly becomes both possible and, most likely, inevitable. Watch out, Iron Man! While adding graphene to other materials to make it a composite, the composite does not directly take on the properties of graphene when it is introduced into the mix. Hopefully someday, we will move toward materials which can fully leverage the superlative nature of graphene’s properties.

Other potential applications of graphene include:

- Precision electrodes for creating and testing human neuron-to-computer interfaces without many of the side effects of state-of-the-art approaches. This could lead to cures for many neurological disorders, human thought-to-computer control for those that are physically disabled or fighter pilots trying to reduce the time to send commands to their aircraft by a few extra fractions of second.

- Lubricants to replace conventional graphite, extending the life and improving the performance of just about any type of machine, from next-generation turbines to skate boards. Mixing graphene with other materials, such as little balls of nanodiamonds, has proven to create interesting results. It seems that friction can be reduced almost to zero when graphene sheets are wrapped around the little nanodiamonds. The whole field of tribology is focused on the study of friction, and nanomaterials have opened up a wellspring of new research opportunities to try to control or minimize friction.

- Solar cells produce electricity when they interact with sunlight. Researchers in China have created graphene cells that can generate electricity from rainwater with an efficiency of just over six percent. With testing, these efficiencies will improve, potentially providing a way for regions of the world where solar power is impractical to generate power on rainy days, supplementing what they are able to do when the sun is not shining.

With so many potential commercial products being conceptualized and even prototyped, it should come as no surprise to learn that graphene-related patents are being filed by the thousands. In 2014 the patent office in the United Kingdom published a report that described the “gold rush” toward patenting just about every possible graphene application (Figure 6). As you can see in the data, the number of graphene-related patents filed is increasing yearly. This is a clear indication of where countries, companies and universities are investing their research and development funding – in graphene research!

Figure 6 The number of graphene patents filed each year is increasing rapidly. Patent filings are often an indication of the amount of money being invested in a technology. (Image courtesy of the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office.)

Graphene has been around for centuries, undetected, literally under our very noses, until 2004. The potential applications are many, cross many disciplines and fields of study and may very well change just about every aspect of our lives. It is THE wonder material of the 21st Century. And it is coming, soon, to touch your life in big ways and in the very small.

Seeing Inside Your Head: From MRI to Telepathy?

Robert E. Hampson, Ph.D.

As a young graduate student, I was fascinated with the idea that someday we, as scientists, would figure out a way to read signals in the brain with enough resolution to be able to operate computer interfaces directly with our brains. The computer interface helmet in James P. Hogan's The Genesis Machine and the immersive virtual reality in Real-time Interrupt were just the type of brain-to-machine interface that inspired me to enter the field of neurophysiology. Much more recently, Mary Lou Jepsen, former CEO at Intel, Google[X] and more (https://www.opnwatr.io/about-us), suggests that one of her patents may even go a step further and provide machine-assisted telepathy in the form of sensors embedded into a wearable hat. Unfortunately, the biggest hurdle in brain-to-machine or brain-to-computer interfacing (commonly referred to as BCI) is the ability to pick up signals from deep inside the brain. EEG signals from the brain surface are easy. Memory signals from hippocampus, and deeper are much harder to separate from background. What we need is some good way to look inside the brain and be able to decipher the activity that corresponds to specific thoughts and intentions.

Looking inside: X-Ray

Since the discovery of X-Rays in 1895 by William Roentgen, scientists have had the ability to look inside the human body and see the skeleton. High-energy photons coming from an X-Ray source or emitter (usually a variation of a cathode ray tube) turn photographic film dark, or activate the pixels of a charge-capture device (CCD) camera. The calcium and phosphorus of bone blocks and/or deflects the X-Rays, allowing bone to appear as a white "shadow" on the otherwise black photographic image. Thus the familiar white bone on black background image that most people commonly associate with X-Ray is a negative image, and the primary details of bone and joints are literally "holes" in the image!

X-Ray, however, is a flat, 2-Dimensional image: Photons travel in a straight line from emitter to detector (or film). The incorporation of rotating emitters and detectors as proposed by William Oldendorf in 1961 allows Computed Tomography (CT—originally termed Computerized Axial Tomography, or CAT scan) to compile a series of 2-D images into a 3-Dimensional representation of the body. With CT, physicians can effectively look inside the body and easily find broken bones, kidney and gall bladder stones, calcium deposits, or foreign bodies. What they can't see is any detail of muscles, blood vessels, intestines . . . or brain.

Visualizing "Soft Tissue"

For many of these "soft tissue" systems, it is possible to add a high-density contrast agent (such as barium) that allows visualization of blood vessels or the lining of the stomach and intestines; however, there is a limit to how this technique can be applied to the brain, since visualizing brain function requires a different approach than simply looking at physical features! One way to map brain function is simply to provide a chemical (e.g. a dye) that will be taken up by active brain cells—thus, the more active the brain area, the more dye will be present. It's the same principal as a contrast agent for visualizing the circulatory or digestive systems, but instead of structure, it reveals which brain regions are active.

The most common "dye" based scanning agents for brain are radioactive isotopes that can be detected using fluoroscopy or Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Like CT, PET rotates detectors around the person being scanned and builds a 3-D image of where the isotope builds up in the body. Unlike X-Ray techniques, isotopes produce their own photons or positrons (anti-electrons), so no emitter device is required, just detectors. To image active brain areas, PET often utilizes "deoxyglucose," a form of glucose that is taken up by brain cells, and broken into component molecules that remain in the cells for hours. The molecule is tagged with an isotope such as fluorine-18 (18F) which emits positrons for just a few hours, and decays overnight.

PET scans are often used in cancer diagnosis, since cancerous cells utilize much more glucose than normal cells; brain cells consume even more glucose, yet even among brain areas there are detectable differences. For example, when a subject is reading, the visual and language areas "light up" due to increased blood flow and glucose utilization. In this manner, doctors and scientists can gain an understanding of how brain areas are involved in different brain functions, but it still does not help with understanding the content or contributions of those activities.

Mapping Structure and Function: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)

The current "state of the art" in brain imaging utilizes a technique originally developed for organic chemistry to characterize and identify chemical composition. As an undergraduate in chemistry, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance was a technique I used to count hydrogen atoms in organic molecules. A powerful magnetic field is used to align the position and direction of spin of the hydrogen atoms, then a radio signal causes the hydrogen to "energize" and "flip" its spin to the opposite direction. When the spin "relaxes" to the original direction, energy is released, and can be detected in a manner similar to the imaging techniques above. The addition of tomography (i.e. the 3-D arrangement of detectors and computer reconstruction) and tuning the system to the resonance frequencies of the hydrogen in water molecules gave us MRI and a whole new way to visualize the soft, water-containing tissues of the body.

Within the brain, the ability to see the non-bony structures has revolutionized the fields of neurology and neurosurgery. Now doctors could see the "holes" left by strokes, or the damage due to concussion. Epilepsy patients could be scanned for the presence of abnormal structures that might cause seizures, and surgeons had new tools to precisely target their operations. Furthermore, additional tunings of the MRI resonant frequencies has provided such unique tools as Diffusion Tensor Imaging which allows tracing the projections of brain cells to assist not only in understand the connected networks of the brain, but also the types of damage produced by concussion and traumatic brain injury. Tuning the MRI to the resonant frequency of oxygen allows a much more precise measurement of blood flow and metabolic activity than PET scans, and provides the first great imaging tool for understanding the content and of information within the brain!

Functional MRI (fMRI) is a tool that allows near real-time identification of which brain regions (and cells) have high blood flow and consuming oxygen. fMRI maps the Blood-Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) signal which indicates highly active clusters of brain cells in volumes of less than one cubic millimeter. While this volume is still larger than the size of individual neurons (~0.005 mm^3) and does not have the precision of electrophysiology recording probes (~0.01 mm^3), this resolution is more than sufficient to identify different timing and intensity of activity in various brain structures and decipher networks of connected brain areas. Furthermore, fMRI allows a look at the whole brain's activity in small time intervals; electrical recordings to date can identify only a thousand or so neurons (hence a volume of only a few mm^3) at a time.

Can fMRI be used to "read" the brain? Dr. Jack Gallant at the University of California at Berkeley thinks so! In a study from 2011 (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140717-i-can-read-your-mind), Gallant and his team showed various pictures to subjects while in the MRI scanner and recorded the fMRI signals associated with each picture. He then had the subjects "daydream" and imagine a scene using those pictures, and matched the new fMRI signals to the previously recorded signals. While the reconstruction was not up to "movie" standards, the team was certainly able to detect a roughly timeline of imagined images from the brain signals alone! (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982211009377)

Reading the Brain

So, is fMRI the solution to being able to "read" brains and create computer interfaces? Not exactly.

In the first place, MRI machines are big! It is common practice to build hospital and research facilities to fit the MRI machines, and not build machines to fit the facilities. Second, the magnets required to create the fields are intense, and no magnetic materials are allowed in the facility. Finally, despite the successes with fMRI, the process is rather slow. It can be used in "real-time" to track activity changes, but the resolution of those changes is in tens of seconds to minutes. From my own research using direct electrical recording of neurons, we know that the actual "codes" associated with memory last only milliseconds.

With respect to the portability issue, Mary Lou Jepson has a solution (and a patent) for a "wearable MRI" that uses infrared light sensors sewn into a knit cap (https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/07/this-inventor-is-developing-technology-that-could-enable-telepathy.html). While at least one claim—that the device utilizes the same blood flow signals as MRI—is true, the Open Water device is not MRI at all, but a technology known as functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). fNIRS takes advantage of the fact that the skull and most brain tissue are essentially transparent to infrared light. IR emitters on the skull can project through the scalp, bone and brain tissue, with the signal blocked primarily by the iron-hemoglobin of the blood. fNIRS tracks blood flow similar to fMRI, and it can respond faster (0.1-1 sec) than fMRI. However, the sensors are limited in coverage, and to provide the same 3-D imaging as fMRI for a single brain would require more fNIRS sensors than currently exist in the U.S. Still, the technology is a step in the right direction, although it's applicability as a machine-based "telepathy" is still quite a few years further in the future!

Another promising technology is Magnetoencephalography (MEG). Encephalography is the science of recording brain signals, and its more familiar cousin, electroencephalography (EEG), is well known in neuroscience, neurology and neurosurgery. EEG records signals from all over the brain, and its biggest drawback for developing interfaces is that it is difficult to precisely identify where a signal comes from without actually implanting an electrode next to the area of interest. While this is commonly done for disease diagnosis and treatment, it is not a desirable technique for a person wanting to control their home automation!

MEG on the other hand is "noninvasive" and does not require wires or electrodes. Rather, it records the minute magnetic fields produced by the electrical nerve impulses, and can localize those signals to volumes of less than 0.10 mm^3 within the brain. Like MRI, however, it currently requires room-sized devices and liquid helium cooling for the detectors! Still, medical device technology is building more sensitive, less "delicate" detectors, and MEG may very well become the alternative to electrophysiology with wire electrodes within the next 10 years.

Seeing Clearly

For purely scientific purposes in the laboratory of being able to identify single brain cells and map connections within the brain, there is a relatively recent technique known as "Clarity" which renders the brain (after death) perfectly transparent and visible to researchers. A series of treatments causes the proteins and pigments in brain tissue to lose the ability to block or absorb light, while at the same time preserving its structure and all of the connections. Special dyes can be introduced prior to the procedure to ensure that particular clusters of cells will be fluorescent, or visible in particular wavelengths of light. Thus, only normal cells (or even abnormal cells) will show up in an otherwise transparent brain. Moreover, the dyes can be introduced to only the cells that are connected to each other, allowing specific clusters and networks of brain cells to be visible in the Clarity preparation. This new tool is essential to researchers' understanding of how the brain forms its functional networks, and while it is not a tool for reading the intact human brain, the knowledge gained from Clarity can be added to the information from fMRI, MEG and fNIRS to better decipher the information content recorded using those techniques.

The Brain is not a Computer, How Can We Interface It?

A recent publication by Psychologist Robert Epstein created quite a stir among folks who know my research by stating that the brain is not a computer, that it does not "represent" or "process" information, and that there is actually no such thing as "memory" (https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer). While at least one part of Dr. Epstein's premise is accurate—the brain is not computerlike—the rest of his statements are true only within the very limited context of his effort to encourage readers to not use computer analogies for brain function. My own response is that Dr. Epstein clearly does not know (or listen to) many neurophysiologists. The article used the analogy that nowhere in the brain is there a "picture" of a one-dollar bill, and subjects asked to draw from memory were unable to do so. Shortcomings of that experiment were that a confounding variable is the ability of the subject to draw from memory (which is highly variable—hence why fine artwork is prized) and that the experiment tested no one with eidetic of "photographic" memory. In science, an experiment with more than one variable out of control (in this case, drawing ability) is invalid, and the conclusions suspect. In contrast, I present the work of many hippocampal physiologists for the past 50+ years that have shown that neurons in hippocampus represent position and orientation in space (http://www.memoryspace.mvm.ed.ac.uk/memoryandplacecells.html). For many years, despite profoundly consistent "Place Cell" results, it seemed counter-factual, since there certainly could not be any "Cartesian mapping system" in the brain . . . until 2005, when researchers in the laboratory of Edvard & May-Britt Moser discovered "grid cells" in the Entorhinal Cortex (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Grid_cells), a brain region which provides input to the "Place Cells" of the hippocampus! These cells fire as an animal moves through the environment, and they represent a hexagonal "grid" that serves as the basic mapping unit on which Place Cell firing is organized.

With respect to memory, my own research has identified neurons which are active in response to particular combinations of the information within a behavioral memory task. Those neurons not only represent the information within the task, they can be electrically activated to influence memory behavior (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3141091/). If the brain did not represent and process information, it would not be possible to construct brain-machine interfaces, and yet scientists have demonstrated brain-control of a robotic arm (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-prosthetics-mindcontrol/mind-controlled-robotic-arm-has-skill-and-speed-of-human-limb-idUSBRE8BG01H20121217), simple controls for video games (http://neurosky.com/) and little furry ears that twitch when the wearer thinks happy thoughts (http://neurowear.com/projects_detail/necomimi.html)!

The secret to effective BCI is a better understanding of how brain cells work within specific contexts such as memory, faster, more precise tools for imaging the ongoing transformation of that information (such as the signals that represent information content within brain networks, and faster, more precise tools for imaging that content. Brain imaging appears to be following an exponential function of improvement, and the current techniques show great promise for "wearable" interfaces in the next 5-10 years.

It probably will not be telepathy as proposed in science fiction and fantasy alike. However, when the interface is good enough that an essay such as this can be dictated by thought and not typing, it will be the next best thing!

Right Hand, Human Brain: The Mysteries of Handedness

Benjamin C. Kinney

When Luke Skywalker loses his right hand, he chooses to get a robotic hand rather than learn to swing a lightsaber left-handed. He's lucky to live in a universe where a prosthesis can perfectly replace a human hand. After Jaime Lannister suffers a similar loss in A Song of Ice and Fire, the Kingslayer struggles for years to learn how to fight with his left. In all the other worlds of our fiction, the right hand remains the default choice to swing a sword, whether it's made of iron, laser, or dragon-steel. Hand dominance is such an integral part of human life, it's a rare writer who creates an alternate world full of humans or as-good-as-humans who use both hands equally. It's good that nobody writes those worlds, because humankind without handedness would be a completely different creature.

About nine out of ten people prefer to use their right hand, and that ratio has remained unchanged across continents and millennia; everything from Neolithic cave art to the Dutch masters shows that about ninety percent of humans use their right hands to hold tools and weapons. The ubiquity for right-handedness go back at least to Neanderthals, if not further. However, birds and monkeys and other animals have a fifty-fifty split; each individual has a preference, but lefties are as common as righties. We don't know for certain why humans are so uniquely asymmetrical, but we think it's a side effect of the evolution of language, which is specialized in the left hemisphere of the brain. Speech and manual dexterity both require fine motor skills, so as the left side of the brain became the primary site for language mechanisms, so too did it become the dominant hemisphere for movement control. Most nerves cross in the brainstem, so a movement-control advantage for the brain's left hemisphere means right handedness.

Just as we don't know why most humans are born right-handed, we don't know why some are born left-handed. Hand dominance must be genetic, since the ten percent ratio persists even in cultures that forbid left-hand use. But if left-handedness provided some evolutionary advantage (or disadvantage) to the individual, we'd expect to see that ratio vary across the millennia. However, left-handedness can't arise from simple inheritance, since less than half of left-handers comes from families with many left-handers. Besides, only about half of left-handers have a family history of left-handedness. If it's not simple genetic inheritance, what else? Once again, we can only guess, but our best hypothesis is a population-level evolutionary pressure that favors the ten percent ratio. Perhaps a group of humans does best when most of its members move alike, with just enough exceptions to provide variety.

Figure 1. When you recruit equal numbers of "right-handers" and "left handers," it becomes clear that the so-called "left-handers" include ambidextrous and weakly-right-handed individuals. Courtesy Hervé et al. 2006, NeuroImage.

Of course, we could better understand why left-handers existed if we knew what left-handedness meant. It turns out that handedness falls into two groups, and neither of them is "left-handed." The two true groups are right handed and not right handed. The vast majority of humans are strongly right-handed, but the others aren't just a mirror reversal: instead they're broadly spread across the spectrum, from weakly right-handed to ambidextrous to left-handed. Few left-handers prefer their left hands as consistently as righties do their right.

Every time we try to improve our understanding of handedness, the answers recede, only to be replaced by more questions. Why does Luke Skywalker have handedness at all, despite being born in a galaxy far, far away? What makes a human like Matt Murdock left-handed? What are left-handers? For something so fundamental to our everyday lives, handedness is a mystery. But it's the good kind of mystery: the kind where even if we don't get answers, every new question tells us more about the human experience.

The further we follow this rabbit hole, the more we learn about the brain, and the rabbit hole goes deep indeed. For example, right hand dominance doesn't mean your right hand is better at everything. Jaime Lannister's right hand could wield his sword with greater strength and precision, but his left hand was probably better at holding his shield, and not just because of practice. According to a modern idea called the "dynamic dominance hypothesis," each side of the brain is better at different kinds of movements. If you're a righty, the left side of your brain (and thus your right hand) is better at precision and speed, but the right brain (and left hand) are better at stabilization and responding to surprises. When you tuck a package into your left elbow while you unlock your door with your right hand, you're doing that not only because your right hand is nimbler with the keys, but also because your left arm is better at balancing the packages.

If you're a writer, the dynamic dominance hypothesis can help you better depict what happens after a brain injury. Strokes and physical injuries often affect only one side of the brain, and an uninformed writer might make the character slow, clumsy, or paralyzed on the opposite side of the body. But in the real world, the consequences get more complex. For a righty, the right hand is good at speed and precision because it has a better connection to the speed-and-precision mechanisms on the left side of the brain. When you do delicate work with your left hand, you use the same left-brain speed-and-precision mechanisms. That means if a character gets an injury to the left side of their brain, their right hand would get paralyzed or weakened—but they'll get worse at precision movements with both hands. In other words, one part of your brain has the precision control mechanisms; your dominant hand has a better connection to that machinery, but both hands use the same mechanism.

Figure 2. The Ebbinghaus illusion. The two blue circles are identical, but to most people, the one on the right seems larger.

Now that we've broken down the myth that handedness means your dominant hand is better, let's see how far it goes. Beside this text you'll see an image called the Ebbinghaus optical illusion. You may have seen it before: the blue circle in the middle seems larger when surrounded by small circles, even though the two blue circles are identical. But if you make a person reach out and pick up those blue circles, you can watch how their fingers respond to the illusion. (Every time you pick something up, your fingers start "pre-shaping" at the start of your reach.) As it turns out, your fingers aren't affected by the illusion. That is, your right hand isn't affected by the illusion . . . regardless of whether you're a lefty or a righty.

How is that possible? Because the human brain has multiple asymmetries for movement control. This one is about the split between vision-for-perception and vision-for-action. Vision-for-perception is about names and identities; it helps you distinguish pliers from wire strippers, and thus know which one to request and where to look in the toolbox. Vision-for-action is about where your hands go; it helps you figure out the exact position of those pliers, so you can wrap your fingers around them for a sturdy grip. Vision-for-perception is the conscious side, full of abstractions and ideas, and susceptible to optical illusions. Vision-for-action deals in real spatial coordinates and is unaffected by optical illusions. Some parts of this illusion-proof vision-for-action-system are specialized to the left side of the brain, regardless of whether you're a lefty or a righty. These two asymmetries are unrelated: if you're left-handed, movement-precision might flip to the right side of your brain, but the left side stays specialized for vision-for-action.

Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation preferred his left hand, but he could perform equally well with either hand. Can we too someday surpass the limitations of handedness? In the real world, technological advances have let us surpass the apparent limits of human biology again and again. Our capacities already outstrip anything imaginable a century ago, especially in the physical domain, and we break new athletic records every year. (Nutrition alone contributes greatly to this—in World War I, Nordic soldiers were famous for being short.) In 2017, we can already see the first glimmers of human genetic modification and cybernetics. These technologies promise new frontiers in human modification, but in my opinion, none of them will eliminate handedness from humankind. To understand why, let's delve into the possibilities of cybernetic enhancement.

The first human cyborgs already exist. Not just people with cochlear implants or pacemakers, but paralyzed patients with chips implanted in their brain so they can use their thoughts to control a computer or a robotic limb. Right now these brain-machine interfaces are in early-stage clinical trials; control is clumsy and slow, but with the added insight from years of primate research, we understand the basic principles. A fully functional cybernetic prosthesis has to understand both the goal of your movement and how you want to execute it. Goal without execution would feel like having a button-controlled servant: I can tell it to turn on the light switch, but it won't seem like I'm the one doing it. A useful tool, but not a Luke Skywalker-level space opera prosthesis that works as deftly as a biological hand. Both kinds of information—goal and execution—are part of the brain's movement control systems. Every fold and valley of the brain are involved in movement, with all the handedness it entails.

The brain is not a computer; the metaphor is useful, but limiting (for further discussion, see my article in Clarkesworld here). Rather than a general-purpose Turing machine, the brain is better viewed as a system evolved to control the movements of the human body, to produce actions that improve our ability to survive and reproduce. That's why handedness is tied to language, and to optical illusions; the brain is all one system for movement, from finger control to the lip-movements of speech, and even down to the memories that help us select which actions to take. And if the whole brain is a movement system, to change the way we move means changing the whole brain. We humans are a product of our specific evolutionary history, with all the pressures and trade-offs along the way. A brain of different function would experience the world in a completely different way.

To eliminate handedness would require rewiring the entire brain. We'd have to rebuild our language faculties from a mostly-one-hemisphere activity to one distributed across both hemispheres—which is as implausible as redesigning an engine to be evenly distributed across the entire car. We'd have to change up how the vision-for-action mechanisms separate out from vision-for-perception, which would mean a top-to-bottom rebuild that includes all four lobes of the brain. Despite the immensity of these challenges, with sufficient space-opera level technology we might someday be able to let people use either hand with equal dexterity and stability. But to change a living brain so drastically is the same as destroying it and replacing it.

I believe even ancillaries present an optimistic case. If future humans radically rebuilt brains or developed vat-grown soldiers to be perfectly ambidextrous, those soldiers would have brains organized in a way wholly unlike the brains of modern humans. We might call these vat-grown creations "humans" for ethical reasons, and they might be able to act like us on the outside, but their consciousness and experience would probably be drastically different from the humans of the early twenty-first century.

As future humans gain technological control over the design of their brains, we might all choose to leave behind the evolved brains of old, and become something new. Perhaps our descendants will have drastic genetic modifications, or be artificial intelligences created from whole cloth. They might still have language, creativity, memory, social coordination; even if their minds are unlike ours, once you're free from the constraints and history of evolution, there are many possible mechanisms to produce a behavior. At that point, they'd no longer have any need for handedness. But until that possible day when we can carve away the legacy of evolution and craft ourselves anew, our brains will remain saturated with the causes and consequences of handedness.

Data was built to emulate humans, but Dr. Noonien Soong created a humanlike mind from scratch, rather than reinventing the human brain. As a result, Data lacked true handedness. If we tried to emulate his movements, our struggles would outmatch all his difficulties with human emotions. Unless we decide to tear down the scaffolding of evolution and start our species anew, no amount of genetic or cybernetic modification will take away the differences and similarities between right-handers and left-handers, or eliminate the influences of dynamic dominance and optical illusions. Real hand dominance, with all its complexities, arises from the very heart and bones of the human brain. Even in a galaxy far, far away, to think and act like a human means to have handedness.

Grid Wars

Jim Beall

The grid, acclaimed by some as “the supreme engineering achievement of the Twentieth century” (1), was actually born on September 4, 1882, when Thomas Alva Edison closed a switch, sending electrical power from a building at 257 Pearl Street to fifty-nine customers in downtown New York City. (2) That initial service area covered about one-quarter square mile in area and was chosen because, in addition to residences and businesses, it contained influential newspapers and major financial institutions whose support he would need to expand operations. The power was generated by a coal-fired engine driving a massive, twenty-seven-ton dynamo developed by Edison. He named it "Jumbo" after the famous elephant displayed by P. T. Barnum for the first time in Madison Square Garden five months earlier less than four miles away. (3)

Jumbo the Elephant

Jumbo the Dynamo

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Imagine courtesy National Park Service, Public Domain

The electric power service met with such success that Edison was able to expand Pearl Street Station operations (eventually bringing on line five more boilers and "Jumbo" dynamos) to supply a full square mile of downtown Manhattan. Led by multi-millionaire J. P. Morgan himself, wealthy individuals outside of that tiny service area paid Edison handsomely to personally wire their luxurious residences and place generators on their property to ensure they had electricity. Crowds would congregate at night at the border fences to marvel at the illuminated estates glowing like beacons in the surrounding darkness.

Edison worked hard to promote his new service. Inspiration came from an unusual source: P.T. Barnum. The Brooklyn Bridge, which opened on May 23, 1883, was one and half times the length of the next largest suspension bridge in the world, and its size created much public concern concerning its safety. Soon after the bridge opened for traffic, a fear-caused panic led to the death of twelve people on the span. Barnum offered, and was allowed, to march Jumbo and twenty other elephants (and seventeen camels) across the bridge in an effort to put everyone's mind to rest as to the bridge’s structural soundness. The huge positive public reaction to the Brooklyn Bridge crossing led to Barnum parading elephants across more new bridges, including the iron Stratford Avenue Bridge at Bridgeport, Connecticut four years later. (4)

Source: Twenty-One Elephants (text by Phil Bildner, illustrated by LeUyen Pham; Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, 2004). Courtesy of Phil Bildner.

Edison, taking a leaf from Barnum’s playbook, marched a 400-strong contingent of Edison Electric Lighting Company employees through the dark streets of New York City as part of a Presidential campaign torchlight procession. Instead of torches, however, each wore a helmet topped by an incandescent bulb powered from a cable with electric wires running up one sleeve, out the collar, up the neck, and onto the bulb-helmet. The power for the cable came from the center of the formation: a complete horse-drawn, coal-fired, electric plant.

Source: The Thomas Edison Papers, http://edison.rutgers.edu/parade.htm

With free publicity from the New York Times (their premises now bright from electric lights) and capital from investors, Pearl Street Station was soon running at full capacity. Adding additional "Jumbos" would not allow additional expansion because voltage dropped off quickly with distance from the direct current (DC) generators. New stations were needed for areas farther than about one-half mile from 257 Pearl Street. Meanwhile, other towns and cities also became eager for electricity, and the obvious person to turn to was Edison. In fact, by 1887, he had opened 121 power stations.

The Current Wars Begin

New electrical entrepreneurs emerged and customers were free to contract with any of them such that multiple power lines were often run to the same building. While Edison's first service area was largely via underground conduits (5), those incurred permitting/construction delays and additional costs which made overhead lines simpler in the short term. Combined with urban density, this led to bewildering and dangerous scenes such as that shown in the following image from the streets of New York.

New York City street scene during the Blizzard of 1888.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. (6)

The most threatening competition to Edison and J. P. Morgan came in the form of a new way to provide electricity: alternating current (AC). Chief among those advancing AC were engineer/entrepreneur George Westinghouse partnered with theorist/inventor Nikola Tesla.

The showdown between AC and DC has been called "The War of the Currents" and saw many more stunts and flamboyant personalities. J. P. Morgan would throw vast sums at various investments and schemes (including wireless power transmission by AC power rival Tesla). The genius, cigar chain smoking, hunchbacked dwarf Charles Proteus Steinmetz would figure out the math of AC motors and also invent and demonstrate a device that spectacularly blew apart wood billets with man-made lightning. (7) Edison would clandestinely assist New York dentist Dr Alfred P Southwick in his development of the electric chair in efforts to convince the public that AC was too dangerous for normal use. (8) The first electrical execution was of murderer William Keller on August 6, 1890. Some members of the public did protest on the grounds of inhumanity, but it did little to stop the spread of AC power distribution.

Image source: New York Herald, August 7, 1890, courtesy of New York Public Library.

Despite all those large personalities, it was little known (outside of electrical engineering circles) William Stanley, Jr. who would decide the winner of the War of the Currents. (9) He would do so with the equally unimposing device below:

A transformer. (10) Image courtesy Richard Warren Lipack, Wikimedia Commons.

Electricity is best generated and used at relatively low voltages (100 volts or so), but electrical power transmission losses are far lower at much higher voltages. (11) As noted above, voltage drops and transmission losses limited DC grids to about one half-mile distance from each power plant. In effect, Edison's vision was for the nation to be a patchwork quilt of power plants each serving a tiny independent grid around it. Additionally, industrial loads such as electrical trolleys and other large motors that required higher voltages would have their own generators and wires.

In contrast, the AC approach pushed by Westinghouse allowed large power plants to generate great quantities of power, use transformers to convert (12) the power to high voltage for efficient transmission, and then use additional transformers near the consumer to reduce voltage again. Stanley's first demonstration was on March 6, 1886, when businesses and streets in Great Barrington, Massachusetts were lit with lamps at different candlepower settings from a generator almost a mile away via an AC line. Stanley's dream was to found an electric power company of his own to compete with Edison and the others, but he would eventually put that aside and concentrate on building and improving transformers. (13)

The Aftermath of the First Current War

Within just a few years, it became clear that DC utilities made far less money than AC ones. With DC it was harder to add customers without dropping voltage, and the smaller boilers were inefficient and more costly to operate. Even though Edison's Pearl Street Station was initially a sole supplier, it took two years to turn a profit. If any lingering doubts remained among the general public and the investor community as to the superior approach, the first Westinghouse's Niagara Falls hydropower generators settled it in 1896 when they began supplying AC power to Buffalo, New York, twenty-five miles away. (14)

It did not take long for J. P. Morgan to conclude that DC had lost, and that AC was the future. He did not like losing money and Edison was forced out of the control of his own company. The financial titan then proceeded to play far dirtier than Edison (who had publicly electrocuted stray animals and even a circus elephant with AC) ever had. (15)

Morgan sent in the lawyers.

With his bottomless pockets (16), he threatened to tie Westinghouse, Stanley, and everything and everybody else up in patents litigation until all but he were broke. In the end, mergers and deals left Morgan's General Electric (Edison's name was dropped) controlling about seventy-five percent of the electricity market and Westinghouse most of the rest, with nearly all of it AC. (17)

As the decades passed, the price of electricity dropped at an astonishing rate. Edison's first bill (18) went to a brass and copper company in early 1883 for a few cents over $50, equivalent to approximately $1100 in 2017 dollars! As the first provider, Edison obviously had no competition, and so set his prices to compete with gas-piped lighting. Initially, demand vastly outstripped supply as more and more communities became electrified and businesses replaced expensive on-site boilers (and other sources of mechanical power) with more efficient electricity. As the twentieth century began, demand continued to expand as new devices appeared, such as elevators, trolleys, and large industrial motors. Meanwhile, economies of scale inherent in large AC power stations and transmission (along with related technological advances) brought down costs on the generation side. The cumulative result was that by 1920 the price of electricity had fallen to one-fifth of what it had been at the dawn of the century. (19)

To get a sense of the effect that electric motors had on industrial operations, one need only compare large scale pre-electric manufacturing with the electrified conditions that replaced them. The earlier method was to have a large steam engine whose main shaft was connected to several other shafts that traversed the ceiling above the working floor. These secondary shafts would have a great many pulleys mounted on them, each driving a belt dropping to an individual machine on the working floor. The result was a loud, congested, and dangerous working environment. Here’s a video that gives a glimpse of the old, belt-driven process.

The introduction of electric motors completely changed manufacturing techniques which, in turn, changed the layouts of factory floors and greatly improved working conditions. In addition, overhead electric lights ensure good working visibility, and electric fans enhanced ventilation.

Affordable bulk electricity did far more than simply revolutionize factories via the introduction of motors. Perhaps one of the greatest involved the most common metallic element in the Earth's crust (8%) but whose refining had always been so difficult and costly that it was mostly used in expensive jewelry. In its pure form it is a shiny, "ghostly" light metal that does not tarnish: aluminum. When the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers needed a "perfect" material for the apex of the Washington Monument, the performance requirements and the desire to be impressively unique made aluminum by far the best choice. Indeed, the nine-inch, 100 ounce pyramid casting was, in 1884, the largest piece of aluminum in the world. (20)

Image courtesy National Park Service.

Photo from the 1934 repair. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Niagara's very first power delivery (contract amount of 1,500 horsepower) began in 1895, a year before Buffalo got its long-distance power from the same generator, to the Pittsburgh Reduction company. The founder of the company was inventor Charles Martin Hall, who had perfected and patented the revolutionary electrolysis process still used today to refine aluminum. For that, however, he needed electricity and plenty of it. Westinghouse had all of Niagara Falls to work with, and more generators were soon brought on line. Bulk electricity allowed Hall and The Pittsburgh Reduction Company to produce lots more aluminum. (21)

The price of aluminum dropped and its availability improved dramatically over the next few years. In fact, the availability improved so much that, unable to find any automobile engine manufacturer able to meet their performance requirements (at least 8 horsepower and no more than 180 pounds), Wright Brothers' "mechanician" (as he called himself) Charlie Taylor turned to Pittsburgh Reduction for a block of aluminum and machined an engine himself with an aluminum crankcase. It weighed 178 pounds, produced twelve horsepower, and was what powered the Wright Brothers into aviation history. Continued improvements in aluminum accessibility and price due to cheap bulk electricity from the grid would fuel the vast expansion of aviation in the decades to come.

Wizards and Politicians

Increasingly enormous quantities of electrical power were demanded by residences, businesses, and all sectors of industry. The need for massive central power stations led to damming great rivers, and building numerous and increasingly large fossil fuel power plants. (22) The selection of sites for new industrial facilities, including the locations of Oak Ridge and Hanford by the Manhattan Project during World War II, were based on access to electrical generation capacity. The total quantity of electrical power generated in the United States in 1902 (the first date of reliable statistics) was about 6 gigawatts. Look at how production grew:

Source: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, US Census, Table Series S 32-43

In popular culture during this period, electricity progressed from magic (Edison was labeled the Wizard of Menlo Park, while Steinmetz was called the Wizard of Schenectady) to science fiction "handwavium."

The Daily Graphic, November 15, 1879

Courtesy Thomas Edison Papers,

http://edison.rutgers.edu

Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, 1911

Source: Author's Collection

Inventors produced devices that sound like bad fiction but were quite real. Two examples below are Gustave Trouvé's 1881 asymmetrical tricycle (23) and the combined gasoline vapor and electricity chandeliers (the "candles" in the photo are actually ceramic jets with gas and wires both running down the common supply tube from the ceiling). (24)

Source: Jacques Cattelin,

Wikimedia Commons—Public Domain

Maymont Chandelier

Source: Author's Collection

Science fiction authors' handwavium uses for electricity included powering weapons, spaceships, and galactic empires. Jules Verne's Nautilus was powered by electricity, for example, while Britain's best-selling pre-WWI author Marie Corelli repeatedly cited the “Electric Principle of Christianity" in her break-out novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). The use of electrical power from hydro generators and fossil fuel soon became so pervasive and commonplace, however, that authors shifted to other and more exotic sources (e.g., nuclear generation).

As power plants grew in size, the largest and most efficient generators let their owners out-compete others. This led to the number of providers in an area dropping through mergers or takeovers, and industry consolidation began to trend towards geographical monopolies. With memories of the railroad monopoly abuses of the 1870s, the governors of Wisconsin and New York in 1907 signed into law measures to establish regulations on the electric industry within their states. By 1914, forty-five of the forty-eight States had established some form of government oversight of electric utilities.

The continued growth of the electrical industry led to perhaps an even faster growth in laws, regulations, and governmental oversight bodies. Municipalities created their own generation facilities; public utility commissions regulated rates of return; and the Federal Power Commission (FPC founded in 1920, replaced by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, in 1977) regulated interstate electrical matters. Others include the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). All of these organizations required staffing with full-time engineers, bureaucrats, and political appointees.

The cumulative effect is that the difficulties faced by Edison in 1882 in getting local government permission to dig up streets around Pearl Street Station for underground conduits have been dwarfed by the impacts of the maze of local, State, and federal bodies, regulations, and laws that have to be negotiated to build a new power plant, lay a new transmission line, etc. (25) This plays a major role in the decision-making of electric utility companies, who themselves established departments to deal with the regulators.

The Dawn of Grid War Two

More recent inventions and technological advances suggest that a second War of the Currents may have begun, some even use phrases like "Edison's Revenge." (26) Four major contributors to this situation are:

1) High Voltage DC (HVDC) power transmission,

2) Solid state devices for DC—AC conversion,

3) DC device proliferation, and

4) New sources of distributed DC generation.

As noted earlier, AC prevailed over DC in the nineteenth century because AC could be cheaply transmitted at high voltages over great distances and then distributed locally at useful lower voltages because of William Stanley's transformers, while DC had no such equivalent device. There are several theoretical advantages to DC transmission but the advantages are small (27) unless the distances are very great (even a hundred miles is not far enough) or includes a submarine cable (the water adds significant impedance to the constantly varying AC). The first inventions that accomplished this conversion (e.g., the "mercury-arc valve") were used in several high voltage direct current transmission projects in other countries, perhaps most notably the Cross Channel Project between England and France. There were enough challenges that such lines remained few and special purpose.

The invention of the transistor in 1947 by Bell Labs led to many more solid-state devices. These electronic components would become the heart of equipment much more useful for changing DC to AC (inverters) and from AC to DC (rectifiers). Combined with great distances, power, and voltages, Ultra-high voltage DC transmission lines have been built in many places around the world. The most favored applications have been to transmit power from distant mines (avoiding coal transport while keeping the combustion distant from cities) and hydropower sites. (28) Below are a few examples:

(By comparison, U.S. typical AC lines are 345 kV or 500 kV)

Due to geographical factors, China, in particular, is pushing Ultra HVDC lines, with many more projects still under construction. Three-quarters of China’s coal deposits are in the far north and northwest of the country, while four-fifths of its hydroelectric power is in the southwest. Most of the country’s people, however, are in the east, 2,000 km or more from these potential energy sources. One HVDC line in the U.S. is the 1,362-kilometer Pacific DC Intertie sending Columbia River hydropower from Oregon to Los Angeles. In operation since 1970, it has been modified and upgraded several times. It presently operates at 500 kilo-Volts with a capacity of 3,100 megawatts.

Wind turbines and photovoltaic (PV) solar panels have become two of the most significant contributors among new technologies to produce electrical power. One especially attractive application of solar PV is to recharge DC devices directly, without connecting to the grid at all.

The Rural Electrification Act (REA) of 1936 was one of the many New Deal measures signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression. By then towns and cities mostly had electricity, but farms and rural communities did not. The mission of the REA was to connect such remote areas to the grid, but the Depression and World War II both slowed efforts. Fueled by the post-war economic expansion in both the national economy and government budgets, all but a statistically few U.S. households were connected to the gird before the end of the 1950s.

Ample and largely dependable electrical power revolutionized American lifestyles with refrigerators, air conditioning, stoves, etc. Even house designs changed, as window area and natural light diminished in importance. Tall buildings became more feasible as apartment houses, due to reliable elevators and other building support services. Electricity had progressed from fantasy magic, to science fiction handwavium, to ultra luxury, to commonplace tool, to absolute necessity.

U.S. warship designers followed a similar path, including dependence on electricity, in effect creating individual ship-wide grids. When the author's USS Long Beach (CGN-9) was berthed alongside USS Chicago (CA-136) in the mid-1970s, the engineering departments traded propulsion plant tours. Both ships had similar armament and other capabilities, but the refurbished late-WWII cruiser still retained a lot of legacy steam-powered machinery, enabling it to operate and drive through the ocean without electricity (though radars, etc. would not work). Without electricity, the author's much more modern nuclear cruiser was dead in the water and unable to operate almost anything at all. With the need for artificial gravity and life support, space dreadnoughts might have it even worse.

The Grid Spawns Visionary Fiction

Authors had long used earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, meteor strikes as mega-disaster events. A new catastrophe began appearing in fiction: loss of the grid.

Post-apocalyptic fiction was hardly new. H. G. Wells' 1895 novel, Time Machine, premised a future knocked back to pre-civilization technology due to war. Even post-nuclear war rebuilding from low technology was not new, starting perhaps with Nevil Shute's 1957 novel, On the Beach, inspired by the Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb test gone wrong at Bikini Atoll in 1954. Innumerable other stories since have been written along similar lines.

Loss of grid plotlines differed, however, as many times only electricity was affected. The transition perhaps began with Warday, the 1984 novel by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, in which the story highlighted the first damage from nuclear bomb electrical magnetic pulse (EMP) effects, but then separate, limited nuclear missile attacks followed with the more "traditional" destruction. More recently, William R. Forstchen's 2009 novel, One Second After, concentrated on how people in the U.S., deprived of the grid by EMP attack, would struggle to survive and rebuild. (29)

Improvements in PV and wind now allow many who are isolated to have electricity without the grid. Some, in fact, erect their own wind and PV generators and actively avoid the grid (living "off-grid") while still managing to have electricity for refrigeration, television, and devices. The increasing portability of solar chargers, packable wind turbines, and rollable PV sheets allow even backwoods campers ways to have electricity almost anywhere. The massive surge in the availability of such devices may change how such grid loss scenarios would progress.

The Grid and the Green Duck

Both wind turbines and PV arrays can also add power to the grid, but these pose challenges, as well as opportunities. When they are in large enough groups, like wind farms or solar fields, they perform like more traditional power plants under optimum conditions of wind and sun. At other times, such as calm or night (or even in overcast conditions), they produce little or no electricity. The ratio of nameplate production to actual production is called the "capacity factor" of a power plant. For the last three years, the capacity factor for U.S. utility scale wind and PV solar facilities has averaged about thirty-four percent and twenty-six percent, respectively. Domestic nuclear plants, by comparison, averaged ninety-two percent during the same period. (30) When PV and wind are on-line, they provide the cheapest marginal cost power because the plants have already been built and the fuel is free.

When wind and PV solar are not available, however, customers either have to go without electricity or have it be provided by another source, such as fossil fuel plants or batteries. This situation has been well covered in many other places, but one aspect may come as more of a surprise. Specifically, a service area (or country) that is heavily reliant on wind and solar may end up with higher emissions than a comparable one that is less dependent! For example, Germany's emissions went up in 2015 due to small, less efficient fossil plants having to step in over and over again to supply the grid when wind and solar generators failed to meet demand due to weather (or lack of it). (31) If more of the base load is normally supplied by larger, more efficient fossil plants, the need for smaller, dirtier, and more expensive generation may be less frequent.

When weather conditions are optimum, however, these same renewable sources present an entirely different problem! Spot prices for electricity change constantly based on supply and demand. When generation changes constantly due to cloud cover or wind shifts, price volatility can become extreme. With full sun and/or strong winds, the price can drop to zero or even turn negative, meaning that grid operators have to pay someone to take the power. (32) These effects are very disruptive to markets. It provides a disincentive to utility companies considering the expense of building a new plant that might be needed to support area growth.

Extensive use of solar and wind to power the grid has revealed still another challenge named after a waterfowl: The Duck. It is a very large bird, indeed.

(Jumbo) the Duck

Mallard the Duck

Source: CAISO ( 33)

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Grid planners at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) noted in 2013 a looming challenge. Using both historical and projected load data, they calculated the daily total electricity demand and subtracted from it the power produced by renewable generation (mostly solar). What they found was that renewable generation would rapidly push conventional generation off-line as the sun rose. Then, as the sun set, the need for that same conventional generation would return even more quickly, rising as much as 13,000 MW in three hours. The effect was made even more severe because the peak total demand period was during and after sunset.

Under-generation means brown-out/black-out risks, while over-generation means excess power requiring paying others to take the power or emergency shutdown of plants that would somehow need to get back on line a couple hours later. The Duck was predicted to keep growing larger, which CAISO recognized meant that mitigation measures needed to be found and implemented. Some of the ones proposed were finding/building/adding more flexible generators, increasing energy storage capabilities, and incentivizing customer habit changes. How effective they will be remains to be seen. California is hardly alone with this type of problem. (34) Basically, as grid penetration by solar increases, balancing generation and load becomes vastly more difficult with existing technology.

Conclusion

The grid has dramatically improved quality of life and continues to do so, as long as it is operating. Along the way it has generated not just electricity, but controversy—and oftentimes flat-out conflict. Over a century has passed since the first War of the Currents ended. But now the fight is over distributed DC versus central AC all over again. I don't know what Edison or Westinghouse or Tesla would make of it, but I'd bet anything J. P. Morgan would figure out how to make another fortune out of it.

Footnotes:

1,) The National Academy of Engineering, Constable and Sommerville, 2003. Reissued in book form as, A Century of Innovation: Twenty Engineering Achievements that Transformed our Lives. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10726

2) The switch itself was located in the in the office of J. P. Morgan, his first primary investor.

3) Edison was one of the early adopters of "Jumbo" as a brand naming device. Barnum's publicity campaign had begun even before the elephant got to the Garden. Crowds gawked as multiple teams of horses, two pusher elephants, and hundreds of men struggled to move Jumbo's enormous travel crate—with trunk sticking out and waving—up from the pier and down the five kilometers through the city to Madison Square Garden. The shows with Jumbo consistently sold out the 10,000-seat arena.

4) Web searches often misidentify photographs from the 1888 event on the Stratford Avenue Bridge as the Brooklyn Bridge one in 1884.

5) Getting permission to dig up the streets of New York City for 100,000 feet of wiring was probably the greatest challenge. In fact, Edison's proposal was initially rejected.

6) The heavy snowfall downed lines which, especially in the case of AC, led to several injuries and deaths.

7) Steinmetz, called "The Father of Electrical Engineering," built the lightning device simply to enable him to design and test lightning arrestors for transmission lines. Among his many textbooks and other publications is a book on relativity: Four Lectures on Relativity and Space, last published by Merchant Books in 2006. The author is unaware of any works on electrical current theory by Albert Einstein.

8) The accidental electrocutions during the Blizzard of 1888 were factors that led Southwick to investigate of deliberate use of the electricity in capital punishment.

9) In many ways, William Stanley's son Harold is far better known than his inventor/engineer father. In 1935, Harold Stanley would join with J. P. Morgan's grandson, Henry Sturgis Morgan, to found the financial firm of Morgan Stanley.

10) The original 1885 Stanley prototype transformer is at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, MA. The image above is a scale model about one-fifth size presented as a memento to all the attendees of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) meeting in 1911 honoring Stanley in Pittsfield.

11) Electrical power is equal to voltage (V) multiplied by current (I), while transmission losses are proportional to the square of the current (I squared). Thus, for a given power raising voltage by a factor of ten would also reduce current by ten which would, in turn, reduce associated transmission losses by ten-squared, or one hundred.

12) Engineer Stanley originally used the word "converter" for his device, but reportedly was persuaded by politician Senator Hosmer to call it a "transformer." As they say, the rest is history.

13) The principle behind the transformer—induction—was first discovered by Michael Faraday in 1831. Frenchman Lucien Gaulard and Englishman John Gibbs designed a transformer, but Stanley concluded it was not commercially useful and devised a different design that he patented. While further improvements and refinements were made, all transformers today are essentially based on Stanley's design.

14) The original Westinghouse generators at Niagara remained in operation until 1961!

15) The story of "Topsy," the circus elephant, is both sad and grim. In short, blamed perhaps unfairly for more than one death, "Topsy" was executed in 1903 by electrocution. The spectacle was filmed and can be found easily on the web. The author declines to provide a link.

16) Morgan and the Rothschilds would lend $65,000,000 in gold to the U.S. Treasury to settle the nation-wide financial crisis called, "The Panic of 1893." In 2017 dollars, that's about $1.7 BILLION!

17) Con Edison in New York City did not completely end DC service until November 14, 2007. See: http://legacyold.coned.com/newsroom/news/pr20071115.asp

18) For one thing, there was no device designed able to both measure and total current flow over time until 1882, and then they had to be manufactured and installed.

19) Prices before 1900 were higher still, with Edison charging about five dollars a kilowatt for the first customers of Pearl Street Station. Rates would continue to fall until the Depression, but more slowly as the most convenient hydropower locations became fully tapped such that new demand increasingly had to be met by burning coal.

20) Before the cap was installed on top of the Washington Monument, it was put on public display at Tiffany's in New York City. Per the New York Times (November 25, 1884), it was even placed on the floor so that visitors could step over it and say they had stepped "clear over the top of the Washington Monument," which would be the tallest building in the world upon completion later that month. A replica cap was made in the same foundry exactly one hundred years later and exhibited at Tiffany's again the same way! See: http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/9511/binczewski-9511.html

21) Charles Martin Hall's company would be renamed Aluminum Company of America, then Alcoa. Hall died childless and left much of his significant estate to his alma mater, Oberlin College, where his aluminum process searching began. Oberlin memorialized Hall with a life-sized statue. Because the statue was made out of aluminum, it was so light that a favorite student prank was to relocate it about the campus. Today it is solidly affixed to a granite block but remains a student favorite. It is frequently clothed and decorated, and even has its own Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/243125215505/

22) The 7,079 MW Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington State opened in 1942, and remains the largest power station in the United States. Some dams have been decommissioned, but over 80,000 remain.

23) Gustave Trouvé's tricycle was the first electric vehicle ever seen in public.

24) The Gilded Era estate of Maymont (completed in 1893) is located in Richmond, VA, and is open to the public for docent-led tours. The mansion has twenty-two combined gas/electric chandeliers and thirty-six wall sconces of a similar design. See: https://maymont.org/

25) For a hint at today's regulatory complexities, consider the South Texas Nuclear Project Electric Generating Station that first went on-line in 1988. One of the several documents associated with obtaining and maintaining an Operating License from the NRC is the Updated Final Safety Analysis Report (UFSAR). It is frequently revised, but a quick count of one version came to 7477 pages.

26) One example: "Edison's Revenge: The Rise of DC Power," MIT Technology Review, April 24, 2012.

27) UHDC line losses are estimated at a little under three percent per 1000 kilometers, compared with about four point five percent for AC. Another HVDC advantage is the its required right of way width is narrower than an equivalent AC transmission line. This smaller environmental footprint may well become an increasingly important factor in the future.

28) Other valuable uses of HVDC include connecting AC grids with different characteristics, such as frequency. That is, 60 hertz and 50 hertz grids cannot tie together directly, but can be linked if an HVDC line is used as a connector.

29) The television series Revolution (2012) which ran for two seasons went further still with a near-future Earth suddenly having to adapt not just to loss of the grid, but to the end of all electricity.

30) Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_6_07_b

31) See: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601514/germany-runs-up-against-the-limits-of-renewables/

The charts and other data cited by the article can be found here:

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/478/dokumente/pi-2016-09_uba-emissionsdaten_fuer_2015_zeigen_notwendigkeit_fuer_konsequente_umsetzung_des_aktionsprogramms_klimaschutz_2020.pdf

32) See: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601221/texas-and-california-have-too-much-renewable-energy/

33) With permission of California Independent Service Operator Corporation. Original source Figure 2 at: https://www.caiso.com/Documents/FlexibleResourcesHelpRenewables_FastFacts.pdf

34) For example, Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) may have it even tougher. Instead of The Duck, they have "Nessie"! See: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/hawaiis-solar-grid-landscape-and-the-nessie-curve

Nuclear Fission Power in Space

Andy Presby

What do the Starship Enterprise’s impulse drives and the Epstein Drives that permitted human colonization of the Solar System in The Expanse have in common? They both rely on nuclear fusion reactors, and we don’t know how to build either of them yet. What we can (and have) built, tested, and in a few cases flown in space are nuclear fission reactors.

Of course, we already have deployed nuclear power systems that rely on the natural decay of a radioactive element to release energy. The U.S. has a long history (particularly NASA) of successful uses of radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs) in many of its famous missions, most recently the Curiosity rover currently operating on Mars.

Experience since the dawn of the Space Age shows that Star Trek was prophecy: budding starship captains (and spacecraft engineers) everywhere want “more power.” Nowhere is this trend more evident than in exploratory spacecraft; compare the electrical power provided by Mars Sojourner rover’s sixteen-watt solar power system[1] to the Mars Expedition rovers’ 140 watts.[2]

The Solar Option

The first question I often hear is “solar power works great in space, so why bother with nuclear reactors?” It is true that the space environment near the Sun is flooded with free power. There is after all a nuclear fusion powered energy source conveniently placed at the center of our Solar System that provides about 1,373 watts per square meter in Earth orbit.

The first problem with solar power is that the farther you get away from the Sun the dimmer the light gets and the larger the solar panel needs to be to generate the same amount of power. The total power level required for a mission may also make solar power unattractive, even closer in to the Sun. Solar panels are relatively light, but this must be balanced against the tremendous size of the structures required to collect large amounts of power. For instance, it takes an array of over three hundred square meters to provide one hundred kilowatts of energy in Earth orbit. Large arrays may be difficult or impossible to fit in current launch vehicles and may cause mass increase on other spacecraft subsystems such as attitude control. Spacecraft engineers have a long history of developing clever low power solutions to design problems but it is still possible that future designers will need higher power levels in Earth orbit for active sensing, communications, or directed energy applications. The Strategic Defense Initiative, for example, generated a number of proposals for communications platforms, sensor systems, and weapons platforms that couldn’t have been reliably solar powered.[3]

For all these reasons spacecraft designers tend to need a power source besides solar panels if the mission calls for high power sensors like RADAR and LIDAR, high data rate communications, or high power electric propulsion systems; particularly if the mission takes the spacecraft beyond the asteroid belt.

High Power Electric Propulsion

Let’s look at high power electric propulsion a little more closely. Chemical propulsion, which is used almost exclusively now, works by burning fuels in a reaction chamber and exhausting the products out of a nozzle. The fuel acts as both a source of energy and as the reaction mass to achieve rocket thrust through conservation of momentum. Electric propulsion, in contrast, works by using electrical power from the spacecraft’s power system to accelerate a propellant.

The advantage of this technique is that it permits much higher propellant exhaust velocities than chemical propulsion. This can result in using less mass to achieve the same change in spacecraft velocity thereby freeing up more spacecraft mass for payload. The tradeoff is that electrical propulsion systems typically have lower thrust to weight ratios than their chemical cousins. This makes their trip times sensitive to the local gravity field and propulsion selection dependent on where the system will be used.

Electric propulsion performs very well in deep space and is especially useful outside of the sphere of influence of a planet where it runs for long times to build up velocity changes slowly. Electric propulsion can generally get more payload mass to a distant destination faster than chemical propulsion as long as you have a compact power source that can produce the needed power for a long enough period of time.[4] That “compact power source” gets harder and harder to get with solar panels the further you get from the Sun as we discussed above.

More Power, Scotty!

There are a number of at alternative ways to get more power on a spacecraft. Neglecting fusion and antimatter reactions (sorry Scotty) in favor of technologies which have been used to provide power outside of a laboratory; there’s solar, chemical, radioisotope decay (as used in most NASA spacecraft that have gone to Jupiter or beyond), and nuclear fission. Of these, nuclear fission power appears to be the technology best able to reliably offer higher power levels for long mission durations.[5] The increased power and operational lifetime possible with nuclear fission create new opportunities for those willing to pay the large development costs associated with nuclear fission power sources for space applications. Yes: there’s always a catch. In this case it’s time and money.

Nuclear Fission 101

Nuclear fission is the act of splitting an atom. The amount of energy available in a soda-can sized mass of nuclear fission fuel contains roughly the same amount of energy as fifty fully loaded space shuttle external tanks.

Fission reactions release generally a million times more energy than chemical reactions.

Generic Fission Reaction. Image courtesy of the author.

The figure illustrates several things which are important to a reactor designer. First, note the use of a neutron at the left side of the figure to provide the initial energy to encourage the fuel nucleus to split. The neutrons are necessary to create an unstable compound nucleus which subsequently splits into the various products at the right of the picture. Second, the fission produces a cascade of particles. Each of these particles carries some of the energy liberated a time after the fission event and some of them are radioactively unstable themselves and decay a short time after fission, releasing additional energy. The energy distribution is important in determining how best to extract useful power from a reactor and it is primarily dependent on the choice of nuclear fuel nucleus.

Uranium-235 is the fuel of choice for space reactors because the resulting reactor is relatively easy to control, is relatively stable with a 700,000,000 year half-life (meaning it takes that long for half of a given mass of it to decay), and available in national stockpiles. The primary disadvantage of this fuel is that it is hard to obtain. The most naturally occurring uranium is U-238 isotope. Only about three quarters of one percent of natural occurring uranium is U-235.

Eighty-six percent of the energy liberated appears as the kinetic energy of the two smaller atomic nuclei created by splitting the uranium atom. These are called fission products. These products will only travel a short way inside the reactor and will transfer their energies into random particle motion (aka “heat”) as they slow down inside something. That is to say, most of the energy of the fission products is rapidly turned into heat in the fuel and this is the thermal power that the reactor passes to the rest of the system for conversion to electricity.

The fission products might deposit their energy locally but the other reaction products are not so well-behaved. Neutrinos interact weakly with matter and leave the reactor, representing the first of many energy losses that cannot be used to produce useful work, passing instead out into the environment. Gamma radiation is more interactive than the neutrinos. This is both a blessing and a curse to the designer. The energy of the gamma rays is not necessarily lost and can subsequently be salvaged. However, it is impractical to provide enough dense shielding to stop all of the gammas inside the reactor where they can be converted to heat. Hence, some always leak out of the core, making external radiation shielding a necessity.[6]

The neutrons released in fission are necessary to sustain and control the reaction. That’s why you hear about “chain reactions” all the time when referring to nuclear fission devices. Every fission event must produce at least one new neutron which goes on to split another atom and continue the reaction. Such a reaction is called “self-sustaining”. The fission of U-235 creates between two and three neutrons on average. The situation is further complicated by the energy of the neutrons produced, the fact that some neutrons always leak out of the reactor, and the necessary presence of materials other than the fuel that absorb neutrons but don’t produce any. These combine to ensure that significant numbers of the neutrons produced do not go on to produce new fission events but are lost from the reactor. This represents another source of lost energy and dangerous radiation that has to be shielded against.

Harnessing fission power means taking care of a number of tasks: capturing the power that comes out of that fission fuel, converting it into useful work, protecting nearby people and equipment from the radiation generated, and keeping the whole contraption from melting itself. It is important to remember that “useful work” could mean a number of things. Most commonly it means electrical power or rocket thrust. A generic space nuclear fission reactor consists of these five basic components diagrammed below.

Functional block diagram of a space reactor power system. Image courtesy the author.

The Fission Power Harvest

The reactor generates nuclear fission power by splitting atoms, captures it as heat, and passes it on for subsequent conversion into useful work. Nuclear reactors are classified according to which group of neutrons they rely on to cause fissions: fast or thermal. A fast reactor relies on the fast neutrons that are emitted directly from the fission process itself to go on and cause other fissions.

A thermal reactor contains some material, called a moderator, to slow fast neutrons down to thermal speeds in order to cause fissions. The tradeoff here is that fast reactors require more U-235 molecules in them than thermal reactors but do not require any moderator. The general consensus in the space nuclear power community historically has been that fast reactors are usually smaller and lighter for a given power than thermal reactors.[7] This is enough information to conceptually examine a nuclear reactor for space applications.

Diagram of a generic space reactor. Image courtesy the author.

The core consists of a quantity of highly enriched uranium-235 packaged in a suitable form known as a fuel element. These elements are fabricated from high temperature structural materials to ensure that the precisely determined shape of the core is maintained during thermal expansion and contraction as the reactor changes temperature. The core is wrapped in a neutron reflector, such as beryllium, which is used to reflect some fraction of the neutrons that escape from the core back in to it so that they are not lost. Movable control drums surround the core serving as selectable neutron absorbers or reflectors. The reflector side acts like the rest of the static neutron reflector: increasing the number of neutrons available for fission in the core. The absorbing side is made of a material which is good at absorbing neutrons, like boron-carbide.

Exposing the core to this side of the control drum allows neutrons to escape until the fission reaction is no longer self-sustaining and the rate of fission drops. The final element in the figure is the coolant that takes the thermal power from the fuel elements and moves it to the electrical conversion equipment. Many different types of coolant are possible; liquid metals have historically been used in U.S. and Russian systems.[8]

Nuclear fission occurs in the fuel elements and they are consequently the hottest elements of the system. Higher temperatures mean higher efficiencies so the system’s overall performance is largely dependent upon making the hottest fuel elements you can. The complexities of nuclear fuel material engineering are many. Fuel elements are required to contain sufficient inventory of fissile fuel to run the reactor, maintain the proper shape, transfer heat to the coolant, contain dangerous gases that build up during fission, and do so reliably for the design life of the core. This represents a challenging set of material properties.

Many have already been conceived and even gotten through some stage of development, however. The table below gives a listing of fuel materials, the space reactor program that they were associated with, their flight status, and the operating temperature of the fuel in the proposed application.

Fuel forms from previous space reactor programs. Table compiled by the author from various sources.[9]

All the fuels in listed above were designed for used in space-based fission reactors. But what would they have been used for? The short answers are propulsion and power. All of the fuels above were intended to be used in systems to either propel a spacecraft directly or provide electrical power for its use.

Nuclear Thermal Rocketry[10]

The basic nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) replaces the chemical heat source of a traditional rocket engine burning some chemical fuel with a nuclear reactor as shown below. This device works in all other ways like any other rocket. The action-reaction principle means that you can generate thrust by burning some “fuel” to create a hot gas called “propellant” and direct it out the back using a nozzle. In a traditional chemical rocket, the fuel and propellant are the same stuff and the two words are often used interchangeably. A nuclear thermal rocket changes that a little. The fuel that a nuclear rocket converts into heat is the nuclear fuel in its core. This is different from the propellant, which is kept in a separate tank and is different stuff. That propellant also does double duty to as reactor coolant. So when you run out of propellant, you’ve run out of coolant and must shut down the reactor to avoid melting it. Of course, the exhaust is very hot like chemical rocket exhaust and has the added danger of being potentially radioactive so we would have to be careful how, when, and where we used these. The best thing about NTRs is that the nuclear fission reaction can make much hotter exhaust gas than a chemical rocket. That means much better fuel economy, the need to carry less propellant, and the ability to carry more payload to your destination.

The most straightforward nuclear thermal rocket is for propulsion only and is illustrated below. It does not generate electricity to power the spacecraft’s lights, life support, or phaser banks so the primary power conversion apparatus is the nozzle. There is, hidden in the diagram though, one secondary piece of power conversion equipment; the turbine that uses hot coolant to drive the pump to get the coolant out of its tank. Since there’s no electricity there is no need for electrical power distribution equipment. The expelled propellant cools the reactor too and removes most of the need for radiators.

Generic nuclear thermal rocket schematic. Image courtesy of author.

The Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) program of 1955 to 1972 marked the only known United States NTR experiment. These engines were actually built and tested on the ground. None ever flew.

Over twenty-three different reactor designs were tested over the seventeen years of the program. They achieved an impressive variety of feats. The peak temperature they operated at was a little over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A single test engine was restarted twenty-five times to prove its reliability. One NERVA test engine ran continuously for an hour. Compared to the space shuttle’s main engines, thought by many to be the current state of the art in reliable reusable rocket engine technology, the NERVA was nearly twice as efficient in its use of propellant. That meant that a vehicle using a NERVA engine could do the same mission with roughly half the mass of propellant required by a vehicle using the space shuttle’s main engines. While some of that “saved” mass would have had to go to the heavier nuclear engine the bulk of it would be payload.

This means that more people, equipment or cargo could be carried. Unlike other advanced rocket propulsion ideas, like the ion engines flown by NASA on Deep Space One mission, NTRs combine thrust levels comparable to chemical rockets with better fuel mass efficiency. That is why one of the primary reasons these engines were originally conceived to act as the “upper” or final stage for the Apollo missions to the Moon.

Space Nuclear Electric Power Systems

Nuclear reactors on earth are largely used for electrical power generation and similar applications have long been envisioned in space. This involves using a nuclear heat source to drive a dynamic, thermoelectric or thermionic conversion system. The general layout of such a system is shown below.

These systems are “closed cycle” meaning they cannot count on coolant ejection to carry away waste heat like a nuclear thermal rocket. Thus, generating a megawatt of onboard power typically requires at least four megawatts of thermal power from a reactor. This considerable waste heat rapidly comes to drive system mass as desired electrical power level increases.

Generic space nuclear electric power system. Image courtesy the author.

One big point to understand about space nuclear reactor power systems is that keeping them cool rapidly becomes the dominant engineering problem that needs to be solved as you start building bigger and bigger plants. What do I mean by that? The key idea is efficiency. The system produces electrical power by converting a fraction of the heat coming off the reactor into electricity. There are physical limits to how big that fraction can be. And it’s not as big as a spacecraft engineer might like it. We might get up to twenty-five percent of the heat of the reactor converted into electricity, but the rest is just plain old heat—the kind that melts things and generally messes up your gear so you must get rid of it. Unlike the nuclear thermal rocket, which dumps the vast majority of its heat out the nozzle, a space nuclear electric power system needs to get rid of heat some other way. The only way to do so in space is to radiate the heat away from the spacecraft with large flat structures that often look a lot like solar arrays. These radiators tend to limit how big you can make a nuclear electric power plant in space. The wonderful thing about nuclear power plants for space is that they scale can up to high power levels very well. In other words, a pretty small reactor can provide a large amount of power for a long time. There’s always a downside though and in this case it’s the radiators mentioned above. As you make the reactor more and more powerful it requires larger and larger (hence heavier and heavier) radiators to keep it cool. This makes advanced radiator technologies a key research area before these systems could be built at higher power levels.

To the best of my knowledge, the only nuclear fission reactors ever flown by any nation have done so to generate electrical power using a method similar to that diagrammed above. The Soviet Union flew thirty-three spacecraft powered by nuclear reactors between 1965 and 1988. These reactors were used to generate electrical power for surveillance satellites with on-board radars.[11]

The only American space nuclear reactor yet flown was SNAP-10A (launched on 3 April 1965). It was a very low power test reactor which produced around 600 watts of electricity. This reactor used a thermionic power conversion which was only one percent efficient. Though a failed voltage regulator in the spacecraft the SNAP-10 was aboard cut the mission short, the test achieved its objective by demonstrating safe reactor operation in space without undue risk to people or biospheres on Earth.[12]

The Fission Future

The technologies described above could enable the sorts of human presence in space that generations of science fiction authors (and many other people) have dreamt about. Nuclear thermal rockets can make the twenty-four hour commuter flights to the moon from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a routine reality and help start a lunar oxygen mining industry to transport propellant and life support gases to low Earth orbit in meaningful quantities.[13] The same rockets can be used to halve the trip time of human missions to Mars: getting astronauts there in three not six months. That means less radiation exposure and less exposure to a weightless environment.[14] More advanced designs combine the functionality of a space nuclear power plants and nuclear thermal rockets to produce a “bimodal” system that can provide both high levels of thrust and electrical power for life support, high data rate communications, powerful science sensors, and keeping cryogenic propellants cold. Even more advanced “trimodal” systems add oxygen “afterburners” to get even more impressive thrust for short periods: making the spacecraft more flexible and enabling missions to the asteroids or the moons of Jupiter.[15]

So at the end of it all, where are we? Well, first I have to be honest: we’re nowhere near the performance of Scotty’s impulse engines or even the Epstein Drives from The Expanse. Unlike those admittedly even more promising fusion technologies, however, the human race has built (and in some cases flown) real hardware based on everything mentioned above. The technology we covered here would be more capable than the propulsion and electric power systems flying on spacecraft today in just about every way. We do not need fundamental breakthroughs in basic physics to know that we can safely control fission reactions and get useful work out of them in machines we operate on a daily basis today in powerplants and naval vessels across the world. We don’t need to invent a reverse-polarized handwavium generator or discover new types of energy to build these things. There’s not even any unobtainium plumbing in anything I’ve mentioned above. There’s just good old-fashioned engineering, a good deal of money, and plenty of will. This gives me for one a great deal of hope for the future of the human adventure in our solar system.

1 NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mars Microrover Power Subsystem Website. 24 June 1997, 10:00 UTC. Available at: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/roverpwr/power.html. Accessed 2 April 2017.

2 NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mars Expedition Rover Mission Website. Last update unknown. http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft_rover_energy.html. Accessed 2 April 2017.

3 J. Dearien and J. Whitbeck,”Advanced Multimegawatt Space Nuclear Power Concepts” in Thermal-Hydraulics for Space Power, Propulsion and Thermal Management System Design, W. Krotiuk, ed., Progress in Astronautics and Aeronautics, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., Washington, D.C., 1990, Vol. 122, pp. 41-46.

4 R. H. Frisbee, “Advanced Space Propulsion for the 21st Century”, Journal of Propulsion and Power, Vol. 19, No. 6, pp. 1129-1154.

5 J. A. Angelo and D. Buden, Space Nuclear Power, Orbit Book Company, Inc., Malabar, FL, 1985, pg. ix.

6 S. K. Borowksi, “Comparison of Fusion/Antiproton Propulsion Systems for Interplanetary Travel”, NASA-TM-107030/AIAA-87-1814, NASA Lewis Research Center, July 1987, pg 3.

7 M.S. El-Genk, Notes from Space Nuclear Power Systems and Static Energy Conversion Technologies, Short Course on Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion Systems, Albuquerque, N.M., 7-8 February 2004, pp. 47-49.

8 J. A. Angelo and D. Buden, Space Nuclear Power, Orbit Book Company, Inc., Malabar, FL, 1985, pg. 36.

9 This table compiled from the following sources:

J. Dearien and J. Whitbeck,”Advanced Multimegawatt Space Nuclear Power Concepts” in Thermal-Hydraulics for Space Power, Propulsion and Thermal Management System Design, W. Krotiuk, ed., Progress in Astronautics and Aeronautics, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., Washington, D.C., 1990, Vol. 122, 41-46;

J. A. Angelo and D. Buden, Space Nuclear Power, Orbit Book Company, Inc., Malabar, FL, 1985;

S. S. Voss, “TOPAZ II System Description”, LA-UR-94-4, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, 1994;

A. Kirpich, G. Kruger, D. Matteo, and J. Stephen, “SP-100 Space Reactor Power System”, in Thermal-Hydraulics for Space Power, Propulsion and Thermal Management System Design, Progress in Astronautics and Aeronautics, W. J. Krotiuk, ed., Vol. 122, pp. 29-39.

10 J. A. Angelo and D. Buden, Space Nuclear Power, Orbit Book Company, Inc., Malabar, FL, 1985, pp. 178-185.

11 Wikipedia contributors. US-A. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. March 27, 2017, 15:24 UTC. Available at:https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=US-A&oldid=772483967. Accessed April 2, 2017.

12 J. A. Angelo and D. Buden, Space Nuclear Power, Orbit Book Company, Inc., Malabar, FL, 1985, pp 167-168.

13 S. K. Borowksi, S. W. Ryan, L. M. Burke, D. R. McCurdy, J. E. Fittje, C. R. Joyner, “Robust Exploration and Commercial Missions to the Moon Using LANTR Propulsion and Lunar Liquid Oxygen Derived from FeO-rich Pyroclastic Deposits”, GRC-E-DAA-TN43359, AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum 2017; 10-12 Jul. 2017; Atlanta, GA; United States. Access on NASA Technical Reports Server 12 December 2017. Available at: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20170009140&hterms=AIAA-97-2956&qs=N%3D0%26Ntk%3DAll%26Ntx%3Dmode%2Bmatchallany%26Ntt%3DAIAA-97-2956

14 S. K. Borowksi, D. R. McCurdy, T. W. Packard, “Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP): A Proven, Growth Technology for “Fast Transit” Human Missions to Mars”, NASA-TM-2014-218104/AIAA-2013–5354, NASA Glenn Research Center, October 2014, pg 1.

15 S. K. Borowski, M. L. McGuire, L. M. Mason, J. H. Gilland, T. W. Packard, “Bimodal” Nuclear Thermal Rocket (BNTR) Propulsion for an Artificial Gravity HOPE Mission to Callisto”, AIP Conference Proceedings, 654, pp. 829-836.