Ben Bova - Crazy Ideas

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Crazy Ideas [Editorial]Crazy Ideas [Editorial] Ben Bova ========== During the

height of the American involvement in Vietnam, when President Lyndon Johnson

had sent half a million American troops to South Vietnam and enough bombs

were being dropped to make that whole nation resemble the bottom of a

shake-and-bake bag, Senator Barry Goldwater reminded an audience of his

ill-fated 1964 campaign. “Remember me?” he asked his listeners. “I’m the nut

who wanted to send the Army into Southeast Asia and bomb Hanoi.” Ideas that

are first considered eccentric, unacceptable, or even crazy have a way of

becoming commonplace, sooner or later. One of the causes of Future Shock is

that nowadays, the crazy ideas become Standard Operating Procedure sooner,

rather than later. Back when I was a lad (a sure sign of advancing, age, that

phrase) nothing was crazier than wanting to fly to the MOON. Well, maybe

there were a few things crazier than that: atomic power, death rays,

artificial hearts, thinking machines, airplanes that could fly as fast as

four hundred miles per hour. Now they’re all as normal and as American as

pizza pie. Science fiction, abounds with crazy ideas. Not too long ago, in

Analog, Wade Curtis suggested that coastal cities could have plenty of fresh

water practically free, if they would just arrange to have an iceberg towed

to their shorelines. The average iceberg represents enough fresh water to

last a fair-sized city for months. Crazy idea. But the US Army’s Cold Regions

Research and Engineering Laboratory, in New Hampshire, in harness with the US

Geological Survey’s Ic£ Dynamics Project at the University of Puget Sound,

Washington, has produced a report that shows maybe it isn’t so crazy after

all. The two authors of the study are Wilford F. Weeks, Army, and William J.

Campbell, USGS. They concluded that a ship with approximately two-thirds the

propulsive power of the carrier Enterprise could tow from Antarctica to

Australia or southern South America an iceberg thai would be big enough to

irrigate six thousand square miles of land. Such an iceberg would be worth

more than one billion dollars. The cost of water from a large, modern

desalination plant is estimated to be about 19 cents per cubic meter (264.2

gallons). The price of fresh water from the melting iceberg would be 0.8

cents, they calculated. Crazy idea. And, of course, it is only in

science-fiction stories that you find spacecraft that go faster than light,

that utilize crazy things like space warps to get around the light-speed

barrier. It’s also the science-fiction “nuts” who talk about alternate

universes and other dimensions of space/time as if they really

existed. ========== Well now… astrophysicists have gone ga-ga over black

holes, the potholes in space left when very massive stars or whole galaxies

collapse. Theorists have speculated that the collapsing star might actually

dig a “wormhole” through space/time and emerge else-where/elsewhen in the

universe as a white hole—and perhaps that’s what the quasars are. Sounds

suspiciously like a space warp to me! Those wormhole tunnels might be just

the thing for starships to use as shortcuts from one part of the universe to

another. And, in fact, we’ve already had science-fiction stories in which

“collapsar” space warps are purposely made by human scientists and engineers,

who can’t poke around looking for natural wormholes when they’re in a hurry

to take a shortcut to Betelgeuse. And the theoretiker physicists are also

muttering to each other, not about the possibility of alternate universes,

but about the absolute necessity of postulating them, in order to save the

foundations of physical theory! Seems that the uncertainty principles of

modern physics lead to an unpleasant paradox. Theoretical considerations tell

us that for any given decision-point in the universe—say, whether or not

you’ll blink your eyes before you finish this phrase—there’s a fifty-fifty

chance for the decision to go either way. Yet in our real world, you either

go a hundred percent one way or a hundred percent the other. You either blink

your eyes or you don’t. There must be, the theoreticians conclude, a universe

in which the other decision holds true. For every decision-point in this

universe, there is an alternate universe in which the decision went the other

way. There must be googols of universes! Some exactly like ours, right up

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Ben Bova - Crazy Ideas

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