Pat Kane: Scots need to plant a flag in space, the technological race is one we should not miss

This one, titled Breakthrough Starshot and launched a few days ago, doesn’t involve space people – or “spam in the can”, as the old rocketeers would say. But it does involve three particular bits of technology – one of which has a rather splendid kilt on it.

The first bit of tech is something called a “solar sail”, which catches radiation (usually from sunlight, but read on) to generate propulsion. The second bit is an extremely miniaturised satellite, attached to the sail. It will measure everything a bulky box could, but from something the size of a silicon chip. The third bit is an earth-bound laser that can fire radiation directly into these sails. This will speed them up so much that they will get to Alpha Centauri, our nearest star neighbour, in about 30 years.

For the pop-science geeks among us, unalloyed pleasure. And there is something unavoidably moving about Hawking’s soaring, passionate pleas that we should explore our universe. As you listen to his familiar metallic rasp, the line from Hamlet comes to mind: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.”

Hawking is dead serious about the (very) long-term need to establish human life on other planets. “Earth is a wonderful place, but it might not last forever,” he warns – meaning possible asteroids, solar flares or our own environmental hamfistedness could destroy the planet.

“Sooner or later we must look to the stars,” he concludes. “Today we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos – because we are human, and our nature is to fly.”

I’m happy to fly with the likes of Hawking – and always have been. I’m from a generation that was glued to the telly coverage of each Apollo space mission.

Politically, I know my enthusiasm for space treads a fine line. Five American flags are still fluttering on the moon, say Nasa. That’s a sign that the history of space exploration can be as much about projecting national power as it is pure discovery. Emerging nations like India and the UAE already have their Moon and Mars missions planned. It’s a lovely irony that, as Nasa tells us, the US flags are now bleached completely white by ultraviolet rays. The operations of the universe has literally turned them into flags of truce.

And what about the cost of this dallying with the cosmos, in a world where billions starve and toil? The Hawking mission is funded by two tech Midases, Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg, as are many other space-rocket ventures (Jeff Bezos of Amazon is also in the game).

It wouldn’t be difficult to draw strong lines here. Tie together the deregulation of capitalism, the growth of undertaxed oligarchs and the rise of private space exploration. Having wrapped the planet in their networks, safely extracting their digital rent, the technorati are now bored and want new territories to map and plunder.

I know and understand all the suspicions. And yet… outer space is bigger than any of our agendas. I was asked the other day, as a solid atheist, if there was anything in which I invested absolute belief. The honest answer was that I believe in the sheer complexity, and creative power, of our physical universe.

And that given the universe’s unthinkably large scale, there must be other vital natures out there that have emerged from conditions like ours. It feels like we do our duty to the universe that birthed us by trying to find those natures, and connect with them. Yes, there is a side to the current space fever which is rawly capitalist. We can watch commercial rockets land on their legs like Gerry Anderson animations. Or listen to ravening reports of the mineral wealth to be extracted from passing asteroids. Or gawp at Richard Branson’s space tourism ambitions for plutocrats. But the Milner/Hawking projects are much more purely inquiring and searching. Their other multi-million-pound investment is a straightforward scanning of the heavens for indications of life and intelligence.

Again, it’s easy to traduce all this. Having choked and disordered this planet, capital’s overlords now want to find other worlds to execute their “hairy audacious goals”. The electric car-maker Elon Musk set up his enterprise SpaceX in 2002 for the explicit purpose of “making humanity a multiplanet species”, with Mars his first target. But as Hawking says, don’t all humans – not just the titans of tech – have the capacity and desire to “boldly go” (as the Trekkies would say)?

“Gravity pins us to the ground, but I just flew to America,” said Hawking at his press launch. “I lost my voice, but I can still speak thanks to my voice synthesiser. How do we transcend these limits? With our minds and our machines… The limit that confronts us now is the great void between us and the stars. But now we can transcend it.”

Let’s grant that this is inspiring, at least to some. And, believe it or not, it’s very easy to put a kilt on all this. Scotland’s space industry – mainly about sending micro and nano satellites into space, as a cheaper option for companies needing global data reach, and centred in Glasgow and Dundee – is already burgeoning.

Four Scottish sites are bidding to be chosen as the UK’s first commercial spaceport (Prestwick, Leuchars, Campbeltown and Stornoway) with the decision to be made in Westminster later this year.

Within this community, the academics are watching the Breakthrough Starshot initiative with interest – and a wee bit of “haud on”. I was glad to receive a 1993 paper from Glasgow’s Colin McInnes, asking 'How efficient are laser driven interstellar spacecraft?'

And another 2010 paper, jointly with Strathclyde’s Malcolm Macdonald, entitled Technology Requirements of Exploration Beyond Neptune by Solar Sail Propulsion. Its ultimate destination isn’t Alpha Centauri, but the “Oort cloud” – the Oort cloud! – that marks the edges of our solar system.

It turns out that Scots astrophysicists and engineers – right under our noses – have been theorising and planning missions with solar sail technology for over 15 years. If he hasn’t already, I would suggest Mr Milner gives them a call.

But if he does, he may hear them ca’ canny. Dr Macdonald wondered to me about the laser beams that will power the satellites from earth. If they get that powerful, do they become an extremely dangerous weapon, if pointed the wrong way? And if the craft are hurtling so fast past Alpha Centauri, what data will they even manage to record when they get there?

“I’d also suggest the value of such visions is not the end goal,” writes Macdonald in his email, “but the journey we travel to realise them – and the technology spin-offs that we get as a result.”

There’s all the possibilities and ambiguities of primary science, encased in Hamlet’s nutshell there. New energy distributor – or lethal weapon? A Mars settlement as a new market and exploitable territory? Or as a spur to sheer human ingenuity (the theme of Matt Damon’s The Martian a few months ago)? Something which could break new ground for us all, back on Earth?

It’s tough times, people are struggling, and future visions can seem like an indulgence to many. But wouldn’t it be better for Scots to find some local purchase on, maybe even investment in, these mighty forces of technology that buffet and transform everyone?

It seems Scotland will have to wait a while longer for the full sovereignty that could help bring society and technology into a better relationship. But in the meantime, c’mon! We know how to make solar sails that could propel us to the stars! Isn’t that amazing? Macdiarmid: “He canna Scotland see wha yet/Canna see the infinite,/And Scotland in true scale to it”. The infinite is in our engineers’ hands. Let’s explore. See http://www.breakthroughinitiatives.org.

Pat Kane is a writer and musician (www.patkane.today)

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