Atlantis Dispatch 003:
in which ATLANTIS contemplates a new timescale for InterPlanetary immortality
M87 Supermassive black hole in polarized light. Courtesy EHT Collaboration. Sprinkles available upon request.
April 6th, 2021
…begin transmission…
Percy’s still exploring Mars, and while we’re waiting for Percy’s drone, Ingenuity, to fire up its propellers in the thin, Martian atmosphere, Atlantis decided to take a little breather, in Earth’s comparatively thick air, to think about time.
In our last transmission, we left you on a Venetian vacation looking out to Europa’s frozen ocean. Perhaps you might have wondered how long it would take to get there. Well, Europa is literally (and figuratively) pretty far out: 390.4 million miles. By comparison, Mars is less than half of that, a mere 158.2 million miles away. It took Percy seven months and 300 million miles of space travel to get to the Red Planet. To get to Europa with a human crew, it would take six to ten years. Six to ten years?!? That’s like a tenth of your life flying around in the interplanetary ether! We get it — it’s a long haul. Being a space nomad is far from #vanlife. Like, no planetary pubs, comet campouts, or dark cloud dance parties to break up your journey and quench your adventuring soul.
So, if you’re dreaming about Europa, you might find yourself tempted by other modes of transportation than those currently available (like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy or NASA’s faster, and more expensive, Space Launch System). Maybe you’re already dreaming of wormholes and warp drives and time machines and all of that. After all, not even Bowie, our favorite musical cosmonaut, was thrilled to spend eternity floating in his tin can.
Well, don’t go all quantum mechanics just yet! Instead, try noodling on a new kind of time travel, one that won’t kill you, at least not directly. Consider it this way: your lifespan is short, perhaps too short to sign up for a crewed Europa mission. It’s almost as though the distance we can travel is proportional to the time we live. We only live so long, travel so far — sort of sounds like a sad country ballad. What’s an aspirational space nomad to do? Wait! What if you shifted your sense of time to a different scale?
Ever the idea architect, SFI External Professor Sara Imari Walker offered a small hint at how we might do this. “As scientists,” she tweeted, “we need to start thinking about how to solve the hard, open problems on timescales longer than a single generation. Too much short-term thinking means it will take even longer for the future to get here.”
OK then, Atlantis, what timescale do we need for planetary exploration? In order to figure that out, it might be helpful to understand a bit about the great variety of timescales we already occupy down here on Earth.
Imagine you are a housefly. As you may know, you aren’t going to make it to next month, let alone Mars: your lifespan is only twenty-eight days. But as SFI Professor Geoffrey West explains, as living organisms increase in mass, their lifespans increase proportionally. In other words, different sizes of living things operate on different timescales that are relative to their mass. It turns out this is a lawlike pattern, a power-law, in fact: the bigger, the longer.
So all we need to do is eat a bunch of Krispy Kreme donuts, bulk up, and earn more time to fly, right? Sorry, no. But there is a way! It turns out that scaling laws also show up in complex organizations, like businesses and cities. The trick is to get out of your own individual organism a bit, and find yourself enmeshed, as you already are, in some kind of complex big deal, like, say, a scientific endeavor, and put those laws to work!
Maybe if we inhabit timescales appropriate to the complex scientific ventures that take us to places like Europa, we could look beyond our own short-term selves. Maybe, just maybe, contributing to projects, the conclusions and successes of which you’ll never witness, is the MOST rewarding thing to do – the best and easiest way to transcend your mortality.
But what is the lifespan of a scientific enterprise that would allow us to boldly go where no man has gone before? What kind of energy sources would be needed to survive the whole long journey and beyond? Let’s be real, it’s a hard problem. Even NASA needs some help with the question. They’ve been trying, for a while, to launch a probe to that oceanic moon, but the Clipper Mission (to investigate Europa’s deep waters) keeps falling apart.
So scale up your thinking, reader, if you want to get involved in a Europa mission that will last longer than you will. Otherwise, there’s always #vanlife. At least you can stop for a donut. Seriously, it’s ok. Do it. Go ahead, have a donut. After all that long-term thinking, you deserve it.
Tune in next time, when Atlantis contemplates sentimental space litter...