First powered flight on another planet !

Even as this pandemic ravages this planet, humans continue to make progress. On Monday the 19^th of April, 2021, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter achieved the first powered and controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity is a small, lightweight, drone-like helicopter that was carried on the Perseverance rover. They launched from Earth together in July 2020 and landed on Mars on Feb. 19, 2021. To me, this is one of those historic moments, when the entire civilization can be proud that humanity’s quest for searching life beyond our own shores is slowly bearing fruits. Even as a vast majority of us are fighting one of the worst pandemics in recent memory, our thirst for science and the discoveries it affords us has not been extinguished. And just like that, humans can now fly on other planets!

Ingenuity’s initial flight demonstration was autonomous – piloted by onboard guidance, navigation, and control systems running algorithms developed by the team at JPL. It had to be this way, because data must be sent to and returned from the Red Planet over hundreds of millions of miles using orbiting satellites and NASA’s Deep Space Network, and hence Ingenuity cannot be flown with a joystick, and its flight was not observable from Earth in real-time. While this may sound very disappointing to sci-fi fans, this technological demonstration will help humans create new missions to Mars and other places in the solar system using not just rovers, but helicopters as well. We are informed that humans are already planning similar flying crafts to be deployed on one of the largest satellites of Saturn which is popularly called Titan. Achieving flight on another planet means that our approach to planetary exploration will change.

According to NASA Associate Administrator for Science (https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-succeeds-in-historic-first-flight) “Now, 117 years after the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first flight on our planet, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has succeeded in performing this amazing feat on another world,” Zurbuchen said. “While these two iconic moments in aviation history may be separated by time and 173 million miles of space, they now will forever be linked. As an homage to the two innovative bicycle makers from Dayton, this first of many airfields on other worlds will now be known as Wright Brothers Field, in recognition of the ingenuity and innovation that continue to propel exploration.”

Ingenuity’s sole mission is to demonstrate that flight on another planet is feasible. This first flight was full of unknowns. The Red Planet has a significantly lower gravity – one-third that of Earth’s – and an extremely thin atmosphere with only 1% the pressure at the surface compared to our planet. This means there are relatively few air molecules with which Ingenuity’s two 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter-wide) rotor blades can interact to achieve flight. In the early morning of April 19, Ingenuity spun up its rotors, climbed to a height of three meters where it hovered for about 30 seconds, performing a rotation while doing so, and then safely landed back on the surface of Mars. The helicopter contains unique components, as well as off-the-shelf commercial parts that were tested in deep space for the first time with this mission.

It’s incredible to see how much technology has changed in just over a century and a half. From coal-burning steam-powered engines and using whale oil to landing on other planets and flying through their thin atmosphere. What will the next century look like? Will we finally break the light speed barrier and visit nearby stars and hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered?

“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people” – Carl Sagan.

I return to my favourite theme of the Universe and all of creation. Somewhat grand with a hint of vagueness in restarting my outpouring of thoughts, the act of focusing my consciousness on the grandest stage of them of all. How did material complexity, then single-cell life, then animals and consciousness emerge from chaos? We still don’t how many universes are there? Is everything the result of a meaningless cosmic sneeze, or of an intentional First Cause?

As Robert Lanza puts it – “You’re not an object — you are your consciousness. You’re a unified being, not just your wriggling arm or foot, but part of a larger equation that includes all the colors, sensations and objects you perceive. If you divorce one side of the equation from the other you cease to exist. Indeed, experiments confirm that particles only exist with real properties if they’re observed. Until the mind sets the scaffolding of things in place, they can’t be thought of as having any real existence — neither duration nor position in space.”

As the great physicist John Wheeler said, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” That’s why in real experiments, not just the properties of matter — but space and time themselves — depend on the observer. Our consciousness isn’t just part of the equation — the equation is us (I guess).

I am greatly moved, almost emotionally, by one of Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin's most famous paintings – “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” Our quest to understand who we are is in part a quest to understand the destiny and purpose of our origin and existence. For the forthcoming few weeks, I shall be focusing my attention on these aspects before moving on to more humdrum issues requiring focused thought.

FTL – Finally a possibility in mainstream science

Every now and then, a piece of news begs you to stop, rise above the mundane world of everyday life and reach for the stars and this month… it literally made it possible to reach for the stars – well almost, at least in theory!

Finally two physicists at Baylor University, US, have stumbled upon an idea that may turn traveling at the speed of light from science fiction to real science, just like the warp speed at which spacecraft travel in the fictional TV and film series ‘Star Trek’

Dr. Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Dr. Richard Obousy, a Baylor post-doctoral student, theorize that by manipulating the space-time dimensions around the spaceship with a massive amount of energy, it would create a “bubble” that could push the ship faster than the speed of light.

To create this bubble, the Baylor physicists believe manipulating the 11-dimension would create dark energy. Cleaver said that positive dark energy is responsible for speeding up the universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.

“Think of it like a surfer riding a wave,” said Cleaver, who co-authored a research paper with Obousy about the new method. “The ship would be pushed by the bubble and the bubble would be traveling faster than the speed of light,” he added.

The method is based on the Alcubierre drive, which proposes expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship.

According to Wikipedia - Alcubierre drive - also known as the Alcubierre drive or Warp Drive, is a speculative mathematical model of a space-time exhibiting features reminiscent of the fictional "warp drive" from Star Trek, which can travel "Faster-than-light".

In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method of stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand. The ship would ride this wave inside a region known as a warp bubble of flat space. Since the ship is not moving within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at high velocity through flat space-time. Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble. Thus, the Alcubierre drive does not contradict the conventional claim that relativity forbids a slower-than-light object to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds. However, there are no known methods to create such a warp bubble in a region that does not already contain one, or to leave the bubble once inside it, so the Alcubierre drive remains a theoretical concept at this time.

The ship would not actually move, rather the ship would sit in between the expanding and shrinking space-time dimensions. Since space would move around the ship, the theory does not violate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which states that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object faster than the speed of light.

String theory suggests the universe is made up of multiple dimensions. Height, width and length are three dimensions, and time is the fourth dimension. Scientists believe that there are a total of 10 dimensions, with six other dimensions that we cannot yet identify. A new theory, called M-theory, takes string theory one step farther and states that the “strings” actually vibrate in an 11-dimensional space. It is this 11th dimension that the Baylor researchers believe could help propel a ship faster than the speed of light.

Gee – the only thing left to invent now is “inertial dampening” and “shields” J I wonder what Zefram Cochrane would have thought of this…

So…the theory is there. Implementation waits the perception of our current technologies in higher dimension. Accelerating masses generate gravitational radiation in higher dimension. That side of the universe in completely dark for us as we cannot perceive anything beyond the three spatial dimensions and one forward moving time dimension.

The theory of relativity predicts that masses being accelerated should emit ``gravitational radiation’’ in the same way that charged particles (like electrons) emit electromagnetic radiation when they are accelerated.

Simply put use of gravitational wave in higher dimensions easily produce thousand time faster speed than light. The waves and radiations that we can perceive are designed to explicitly manifest themselves in 3-d spatial environments. Gravity radiation is what runs the chilled universe, the Hyperspaces and zillion universes held by the chilled platform universe.

I think this piece of theoretical work has important connotations for humanity and its future and I for one would closely follow any developments – theoretical or experimental in this field…