Seeing the Rainforest for the Trees

This is one result that I should have seen coming.  Of course forests of all types are largely expanding.  They are not going through a managed expansion; rather they are passing through an unplanned reoccupation of marginal abandoned lands.  On top of that they are adding tons of fiber per acre each and every year.

 

I already was aware of just how vigorously the north eastern forests of North America have been recovering. The only missing links were locals burning brush and encouraging the growth of valuable fruit and nut trees.

 

The same effect is been felt world wide as the human populations urbanize and abandon marginal lands for superior productivity using modern equipment.  Again, forest husbandry is not taking its place as yet.

 

So if we force ourselves past the propaganda, we find persistent worldwide forest recovery and a broad general advance in total global forestry.  This is an excellent base from which to launch good husbandry initiatives.

 

Seeing the Rainforest for the Trees

 

While geographer Alan Grainger has upset conventional wisdom by suggesting the world’s tropical forests are not shrinking, he sees his research as a clarion call.

By: Matt Palmquist  |  January 30, 2008  |  02:58 AM (PST)  |  

Grainger

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science_environment/seeing-the-rainforest-for-the-trees-150

Dr. Alan Grainger, a senior lecturer in geography at the University of Leeds, is an internationally renowned expert on tropical deforestation. He earned his doctorate from Oxford in 1987 for producing the world's first global computer simulation model of the tropical forests, and wrote a seminal book on the subject in 1993 called Controlling Tropical Deforestation.

But his most recent publication, in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, challenges everything we thought we knew about the subject. Grainger spent more than three years combing through all available United Nations statistics, stretching back 30 years, and discovered that the data, in defiance of conventional wisdom, didn’t show that the world’s forests were shrinking.

Grainger first examined data published every 10 years by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization since 1980. FAO's Global Forest Resources Assessment in 2000, for example, showed that all tropical forest area fell from 1,926 million hectares to 1,799 million hectares between 1990 and 2000 — one hectare equals 2.47 acres. Ten years earlier, however, FAO’s report had said that tropical forest area plunged from 1,910 million ha to 1,756 million ha for the same 90 countries between 1980 and 1990. Grainger used data from FAO’s latest report, published in 2006, to show that in a few countries, such as Gambia and Vietnam, forest area has actually expanded since 1990, as the reforestation rate has exceeded deforestation.

To gather the kind of accurate, consistent data scientists need to chart the actual transformation of the tropical forests, Grainger calls for the establishment of a World Forest Observatory to conduct annual surveys of the forests. Grainger discussed his vision for such a group — and the surprising findings in his most recent study — with Miller-McCune’s staff writer Matt Palmquist.

Miller-McCune: It would seem logical that with better satellite imagery over the years, we might be able to see “more forest” than in the past. What did you expect to find before you actually began delving into the data? Did the levels of discrepancy surprise even you?

Grainger: I had no expectations before I began my study. The disparities between forest area trends in FAO's Forest Resources Assessments

For the benefit of your readers it may help to point out that there are two time series in my paper. The first deals with all tropical forest and comes solely from FRA statistics.

The second deals only with tropical moist forest and uses estimates from various sources. For the period between 1990 and 2000, these include estimates based on pan-tropical satellite surveys. These are slightly higher than those based on expert assessments up to 1990. It is indeed logical to expect, as I say in my paper, that some of this "rise" is due to the use of more accurate remote-sensing techniques.

Miller-McCune: What’s your explanation for the lack of a net long-term decline? Is reforestation happening more quickly than we thought?

Grainger: Before I answer this question, I should point out that tropical rain forest is just one of the two main types of tropical moist forest which occurs in the humid tropics. All tropical forest, meanwhile, includes both tropical moist forest and tropical dry forest, which is found in the dry tropics. Most tropical moist forest has a closed canopy. There is some “closed forest” in the dry tropics, but much of it is open forest, with a relatively open canopy. Such forests are often referred to as savannah woodlands.

The only inference I can reliably make from the first time series, for all tropical forest, is that inconsistencies between the different trends raise questions about the presence of long-term decline. The size of the difference between the FRA 1990 and FRA 2000 trends, however, suggests that the errors involved could be of the same order as the amount of forest said to be cleared in each 10-year period. I identify various sources of error which may be involved. One is the error associated with estimates of the area of open forest, which accounts for 40 percent of all tropical forest and is not surveyed very frequently. To remove these latter errors, I produced a second time series for tropical moist forest only, and this is the series that shows no apparent long-term decline.

Considerable errors are associated with this tropical moist forest time series, too. Just as these errors may obscure deforestation, so it seems logical to hypothesize that natural reforestation is taking place on a wider scale than previously assumed. I am careful in my paper to show, by means of various references, that others have been studying this phenomenon for about 10 years on a sub-national scale. I also cite pan-tropical estimates that natural reforestation is equivalent to between 10 and 20 percent of deforestation on an annual basis. What I infer from the second time series is that the actual proportion may well be higher than this.

Miller-McCune: In general, what has been the response to your findings from your peers who study this issue?

Grainger: Since publication, responses from colleagues have been positive. I'm sure that some will want to raise questions about the study, but that is how science works. However, I have been extremely careful about making statements and inferences, as it is difficult to be too definite when such large errors are involved.

In retrospect, one could view my paper as questioning the validity of previous statements by others that have been too categorical. When I submitted the paper, I hoped it would persuade colleagues who use FAO data to pay much more attention to their quality than many of them have done in the past. Analyzing data quality is an essential scientific practice, and I am surprised by how little attention has been paid to this in previous studies. I also hope that editors of scientific journals will insist on this when papers are submitted for review. That many have not done so in the past is also surprising.

This is why I recommend at the end of my paper that all researchers who have used FRA data should check the findings of previous studies to see how they have been influenced by errors.

Miller-McCune: Do you think we’ll see researchers looking back at and revising their previous studies?

Grainger: I cannot predict the overall effect of this re-evaluation but it will be considerable, as FRA data have been used extensively in global change and land change sciences. Forest area estimates have been used directly to model trends in biodiversity. Climate change and land change studies have used estimates of deforestation rates. With regard to climate change, if the actual scale of natural reforestation does prove to be very different from that assumed until now, then this will have an impact on carbon budget calculations.

I say in my paper that re-evaluating previous studies that used FRA data deserves to be the subject of a separate paper. I think that was rather over-optimistic. In reality, owing to the scale of the task, it will take many years of research and several Ph.D. projects. My own paper is the result of years of research in itself, but I'm afraid that the consequences of its findings could keep others busy for far longer.

Of course, this would not have been necessary if we had not blundered into the practice of global change and land change sciences. If instead we had developed them in a systematic way, then we would never have ignored the importance of analyzing the quality of our data. There are many reasons for this haphazard approach, not least the compartmentalization of natural sciences from social sciences, and their mutual neglect of the crucial overlap area between them, which is the province of global change and land change sciences.

Miller-McCune: It would seem, on the whole, that your findings could be seen as encouraging: After all, we have more tropical forest than we thought we did. Are you at all concerned that this study might lead lawmakers or scientists to treat this problem with less urgency — that is to say, dismissing the declining rainforests as just another “green myth”?

Grainger: I am afraid that I do not find the situation encouraging at all. My findings are actually a condemnation of the world's inability to monitor long-term trends in these marvellous forests with any degree of accuracy. I have called for a long-term global monitoring program for tropical forests for 25 years, so my own efforts have clearly failed.

But the implications of this are far wider. Back in the 1980s, it seemed entirely self-evident to me that if we were to practice a true global change science, then the whole planet should be our laboratory and we should collect data on a global scale. While this view may well have taken hold in atmospheric research, the fact that many of my colleagues still depend on national forest statistics suggests that this is far from the case for terrestrial studies.

I fervently hope that my findings are not used to substantiate the argument that stories of declining tropical forests are just a “green myth." I go out of my way in the paper to state quite firmly that my findings do not show that deforestation is not happening. They merely show that we have not been able to measure forest change with sufficient accuracy.

Miller-McCune: In your mind, how would a World Forest Observatory actually work? What would be the monitoring technique?

Grainger: A primary aim of the World Forest Observatory will be to survey all tropical forests in the same year. This will reduce many of the correction errors I identify in my paper. The more frequent pan-tropical monitoring is, the easier it will be to estimate the true extent of natural forest regeneration. This is obscured when monitoring is infrequent.

I see the WFO bringing together under one umbrella the leading teams around the world who are already engaged in monitoring tropical forests using satellite remote sensing methods. Their work will naturally be complemented by extensive collection of ground data. The governing body of the WFO will channel the additional funds that these teams will need to expand their existing efforts, and ensure that all teams use the same approach for monitoring.

Miller-McCune: What would be the first steps toward effectively creating such an organization?

Grainger: At the end of my paper, I refer briefly to the institutional challenges of establishing a feasible global monitoring system for tropical forests.

I am convinced from this analysis that the World Forest Observatory must be a non-governmental initiative — somewhat like the Forest Stewardship Council

I see the work of the World Forest Observatory running in parallel with FAO's Forest Resources Assessments. FAO will continue to collect statistics from its member states as it has always done. The World Forest Observatory could easily take over the parallel remote sensing survey, commissioned from outside scientific bodies, that was included in FRA 2000 and is planned for FRA 2010.

Miller-McCune: Are we likely to see such an institution mandated in the next version of the Kyoto Protocol?

Grainger: A very interesting question. It is quite clear that if developing countries participate in this international agreement, and a Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation scheme is introduced, a very precise and accurate global forest monitoring system will be essential.

We have the technology and the scientists to design and implement such a system.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has done marvellous work in advancing global change science and presenting the results of this to governments. Yet why is it that every time it releases a report we see negotiating sessions stretching long into the night? It is because of the IPCC's hybrid structure, by which government representatives have the right to challenge how scientific findings are summarized in the Policymakers' Summary. I do not question the rights and wrongs of this, I simply use it as an example of how the relationship during science and government is by no means simple.

One important lesson from all of this is that global change and land change scientists must become far more aware of how their work, and even the data they use, is institutionally framed. Another lesson is that conflicts between the credibility of scientific data and the sovereignty of member states, which is fundamental to the whole U.N. system, suggest that the U.N. urgently needs to re-evaluate the role of science in its operations.
 

Peat and Repeat

This is a great article on the subject of peat.  What I have learned and discovered over the past two years is that:

 

1          Almost every acre of land surface holds ten tons or more of carbon, usually in living form.  Amazingly it has been discovered that this also includes the deserts.  Unfortunately, when this living material dies, it is either consumed or reconverted back into CO2.  This includes the tropics and particularly the tropics.  All that carbon mass is reduced so fast that tropical soils are worthless in less than a year in most cases.  And yes it is all put into the atmosphere as CO2.

 

2          The only way that nature has to store carbon outside the permanent soil bank is to toss it into a swamp were a non reducing environment predominates.  Therefore every wetland is a carbon sink.  The recent surprise was the recognition that the boreal forests do a better job than tropical rainforests, though that was more a belated recognition that a tropical rainforest is a living organism not meant to store anything.

 

In the meantime, agriculturalists have often processed wetlands into working fields.  There is nothing wrong with that so long as one is able to build these fields on top of the peat itself.  There is normally a natural wetting and drying cycle associated with these lands to begin with.  It is not clever at all to fully drain such a wetland because it will swiftly consume itself and one is often left with a sandy bottom and little soil.

 

In fact, during the early settlement of Ontario, the smart and connected homesteaders grabbed all the bottom lands for their farms.  The unconnected were forced to farm the uplands above the rivers and wetlands. The wetlands swiftly disappeared and turned into sand and stone.  The uplands prosper to this day.  The folk explanation was that the soil washed down river.  The truth was that simple draining allowed the black soils to turn into CO2.

 

This also happened on the sod breaking of the Great Plains.  Crops with six inch root systems do not support and replenish two feet of soils, so that soil evaporates.  Again the folk explanation was that it washed downriver.

 

My argument is that we are still amateurs in the proper husbandry of wetlands.  Wetlands need to be properly diked for water level management and carefully leveled to accommodate a variety of crops.  This also preserves the sequestered carbon and maintains it as a living interface.

 

I do not know what the palm plantations are all about but draining swamps is certainly unconvincing.  Particularly when a palm puts down deep tap roots often in sandy soils.  That is why they show up on barren sandy islands and desert oasis.

 

I think that we can all agree that draining peat lands is simply stupid since it merely lowers the land level and forces the operator to repeat the process until the bottom is reached and the land becomes possibly idle.

 

The best natural crop would likely be cattails because it would allow flooding and possible regrowth of the underlying surface peat it the cattails can properly coexist which seems likely.  At least cattails would represent a possible restorative rotation for the wetland it other crops are been also produced.

 

As you can see, we have just begun to think this through and to explore our options.  There are millions of hectares world wide, not least the biggest single resource of potentially productive wetlands.

 

I have already posted on the boreal forests.  There a natural husbandry system based on cattail filled wetlands harvested for their fodder can by integrated with cattle husbandry quite easily.  Even the roots can go to the feed cycle if no other market is developed.  Thus we ample open woodland for the cattle to forage in the summer and supplemental winter fodder.

 

We can do better than that by domesticating the natural grazers in the same environment.  Moose in particular are quite successful summer grazers and providing a winter supplement should permit a fattening cycle until spring as well as predator protection.  We can do the same with deer and caribou.

 

The reason the boreal forest have never been farmed was the lack of a convenient fodder crop.  Cattails and modern harvesting equipment solves that problem.  It can also be operated in the peat filled bogs without loss of carbon.

 

I make it sound almost easy, but of course it is not during the early stages.  It takes effort and equipment to prepare cattail meadows with water control.  We have to figure out how to do all that cheaply and efficiently.  Then the harvesting equipment must be also produced and perfected.  However, once that is in place and it is working it should be satisfactory as a ongoing sustainable business.

 

Peat and Repeat: Can Major Carbon Sinks Be Restored by Rewetting the World's Drained Bogs?

 

Bogs, swamps and mires help keep 500 billion metric tons of carbon out of the atmosphere, so preserving peatlands is emerging as a new priority

By David Biello  

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=peat-and-repeat-rewetting-carbon-sinks&sc=DD_20091208

BOREAL PEATLAND: Remaining boreal forests in Canada store some 208 billion metric tons of carbon, or 26 years worth of global emissions from burning fossil fuels.

The logging of palm trees grown atop the decaying peatlands of Borneo and Sumatra helps drive the economy of Indonesia, and this fact alone is starting to make the nation a top global priority for efforts to mitigate the warming climate. The problem is three-pronged: First, cheap pulp and paper produced in Indonesia winds up in the glossy coated products we know as junk mail, luxury shopping bags or children's books. Then, once the original trees are gone, palm oil plantations are often planted in their place. Finally, and most importantly from the perspective of the global climate, all of this is happening on top of peat—essentially dead plants that have remained wet under swampy conditions—which is drained as a result of all this activity. Globally, such degraded peatlands emit nearly three billion tons per year of carbon dioxide that was previously locked up in the decaying matter, or roughly 6 percent of all such greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.

"Peatlands only cover about 3 percent of the Earth but they accumulate more carbon than tropical rainforests," says biogeochemist Nancy Dise of Manchester Metropolitan University in England. "In terms of sitting there kind of quietly year after year packing away massive amounts of carbon, nothing tops these peatlands."

In fact, such peatlands store as much as 500 billion metric tons of carbon—or twice as much as is incorporated into all the trees in all the world's forests—roughly 1,450 metric tons of carbon per hectare. And the United Nations Environment Programme estimates that reducing global deforestation, especially that occurring on top of peatlands, could restore some 50 billion metric tons of CO2, or nearly two years of global emissions. Although peatlands do emit methane—a potent greenhouse gas—this is more than outweighed, in terms of the overall balance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, by the carbon dioxide they sequester.

Drainage of peatlands and their deforestation actually makes Indonesia the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, behind China and the U.S. The country's emissions of CO2 from peat degradation—1.9 billion metric tons per year—are 1.5 times larger than those from all of its fossil fuel burning.

But with the world's growing demand for cheap paper products and thirst for palm oil, can the peatlands of Indonesia and far beyond be saved? And what will happen in the peatlands of Canada's far north as development of the unconventional fossil fuels known as tar sands takes off there?

In the bog

Belts of land where peat forms circle the globe in its boreal regions—in Canada and Russia, primarily, but also Alaska and Scandinavia. It also forms in the tropics—Indonesia, Brazil and the Congo—and in the far Southern Hemisphere where there is land—Chile, Argentina and various Southern Ocean archipelagos. The key is humidity, which is, of course, linked to the global climate and weather patterns. "Peat is conserved because of humid conditions," explains peat scientist Hans Joosten of the University of Greifswald in Germany. "Peatland is 95 percent water. This means that peat is wetter than milk but you can walk over it. It's the closest you can get to Jesus Christ."

That water is the key to the formation of the peat itself, which is a product of submerged plants that cannot be decomposed by microbes quickly. "Oxygen travels about 10,000 times slower in water than air. So the oxygen won't dissolve fast enough for the aerobic microbes to be able to use it to chew up all the organic carbon that's there," Dise says. But once that water is drained away, she adds, "the bugs that use oxygen have a party. They've got carbon, oxygen, they've got a few nutrients. They take carbon that's been sitting there for hundreds or thousands of years and they metabolize it, like you eating a ham sandwich. It turns into CO2."

And the primary thing humans do to peatlands is drain them, often by cutting canals—65 million hectares of peatlands worldwide have been transformed this way. In the Netherlands a millennia or more of drainage has taken land that ranged from five meters above to 10 meters below sea level and necessitated the development of such Dutch technologies as polders (low-lying patches of land encircled by embankments) and windmills to keep or pump the water out. In essence, ditches are cut into the peat in order to drain it for conversion to farmland, to float out logs or for other human activities. The peatland subsides and the ditches become shallower. To continue draining, the ditches have to be dug deeper and the cycle begins anew. "They call this the Devil's circle of peatland exploitation," Joosten notes, and it is occurring globally, including millions of hectares drained in Russia and Scandinavia to boost forest growth.

The other problem with drained peatlands is that they burn (peat can be used as a fuel directly and is often "mined" for that purpose). "If you have drained peat laying there and it is not water-saturated anymore, then it burns for months," Joosten says. And that's exactly what's happening from Belarus to Indonesia, billowing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Peatlands for pulp, paper and palm oil

The peatlands of Borneo, Java, Sumatra and other islands of the Indonesian archipelago are central to the economic development of that country, from illegal loggers cutting canals to float out wood growing in peatlands to major pulp or palm oil concessions granted to international conglomerates. The peatlands are also among the last reservoirs of relatively untouched forest in the nation, where tigers live and other uncatalogued biodiversity still thrives. But the Indonesian government intends to at least double such development in the next decade, according to official figures.

The trees harvested from this land go into the pulp and paper mills, either for export directly to the U.S. and Europe or to China, where the pulp or paper is processed again into inexpensive paper products that are then also exported to the developed world. Much of thepalm oil—a cooking oil but also a key ingredient in everything from cosmetics to cookies—gets shipped to Europe. "Just like China launders Indonesian pulp, Europe launders Indonesian palm oil," says Lafcadio Cortesi, forest campaign director at the Rainforest Action Network, a San Francisco–based environmental advocacy group.

Joosten adds that "as a result of palm oil, five times more CO2 is emitted [in Indonesia] than can be saved by burning biofuel in the West," even though the Netherlands, among other European countries, offers subsidies for burning more palm oil as fuel in power plants as part of its efforts to combat climate change. The UNEP estimates that burning palm oil releases three to nine times more CO2 than even burning coal.

"These areas are carbon gifts or carbon bombs," Cortesi says. "The pulp and paper industry and [the] palm oil industry are currently making them carbon bombs."

Climate change

It remains unclear what impact climate change will have on peatlands, though. When untouched, the ecosystems are relatively resilient to change thanks to shifting species composition and other feedback mechanisms that can help the peatland cope with changing conditions, Manchester's Dise says.

Plus, whereas warmer temperatures may encourage the release of more methane—an even more potent greenhouse gas—and drive drying of peatlands in some areas, it may also allow new peatlands to form in the northern latitudes. "In the north there is a lot of land that could sequester much more peat," Joosten notes. "It is not necessarily so that climate change could work out negatively for peatlands."

Efforts to reduce deforestation under a global climate treaty being negotiated in Copenhagen next week might also help prevent further loss of existing peatlands. "Any effective and affordable response to climate change should include preserving the world's remaining, carbon-rich old-growth forests," says Steve Kallick, director of the Pew Charitable Trust's Environment Group's International Boreal Conservation Campaign—including the vast northern forest that sits atop peatlands.

But what is sure is that human activity at present is largely working out negatively for peatlands, whether they are the ones transitioning to desert as a result of overgrazing in Mongolia or the 1.6 million hectares of boreal forest and peatlands in Canada that have been destroyed in pursuit of tar sands. In Alberta the development of such tar sand deposits of fossil fuel require the destruction of the overlying boreal forest and peatlands. A report from Global Forest Watch Canada estimates that the current destruction adds 8.7 million metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere every year, in addition to the 36 million metric tons released by tar sands production directly.

"Keeping that carbon in place by protecting boreal forests is an important part of the climate equation," says climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria. "If you cut down the boreal forest and disturb its peatlands, you release more carbon, accelerating climate change."

Saving peatlands

Of course, Canadian provinces, including Ontario and Quebec, have protected nearly 130 million hectares of such boreal forest and peatlands, including the Hudson Bay Lowlands. Protecting all of the boreal forest in just Ontario would save 49 billion metric tons of carbon—or roughly 250 years of Canada's annual emissions of more than 202 million metric tons. All told, remaining boreal forests in Canada store some 208 billion metric tons of carbon—71 billion tons in the trees and 137 billion tons in the peat, or 26 years worth of global emissions from burning fossil fuels.

And U.S. companies ranging from PAK 2000—a New Hampshire–based packaging maker—to office supply chain store Staples have either cut ties with Indonesian pulp and paper producers or put in place voluntary safeguards to eliminate procurement from such places. U.S. paper companies have also filed a dumping complaint with the U.S. Department of Commerce objecting to cheap Indonesian pulp and paper products.

Of course, similar livelihoods would need to be found for developing countries such as Indonesia and the developed countries of the world largely became affluent doing the kinds of things—such as draining peatlands—they are now trying to prevent. "The Netherlands has gained its prosperity because of peat," Joosten notes.

But the Netherlands is part of a new effort to actually rewet some of the drained peatlands and thus restore them to function as carbon sinks, an effort covering thousands of hectares in Europe and the U.K. and even Indonesia, although not draining them in the first place is a lot easier than rewetting a canal-strewn landscape. "We are not able to rewet the centers of these mini domes in Indonesia," notes Joosten, who is involved in many of the rewetting projects. "You can only rewet a small part by damming the canals." Even the U.S. Geological Survey has similar projects to create "carbon farms" by increasing such wetlands in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta in California.

But if drainage is reduced or reversed, already drained peatlands continue to decompose and emit carbon dioxide. "Even if you reduce the rate of peatland drainage, you still increase the emissions from peatland drainage," Joosten says. "It's not only the ones draining now but also peatlands you have drained before. It is a cumulative process."

Plus, in an effort to prepare for looming regulations on greenhouse gases, peatland deforestation and drainage is actually being accelerated by everyone from villagers to major companies so that, in the future, such areas can make sure they have enough degradation to qualify for any funds made available down the line to prevent further damage.

Perhaps preserving peatlands in the first place should be a priority. "The peatlands are keeping us from a lot of trouble, storing a massive amount of carbon for us," Dise says. "Anything we can do to mitigate or lessen or halt the loss of those peatlands we should do. That means stopping converting them to plantations for things like rice or oil palms."

Star Ships

This is fairly decent discussion on the present thoughts of science on interstellar transits.  My own thoughts on the issue I will now outline.

 

Firstly, local movement will be conducted through the magnetic exclusion vessels or arks that take advantage of the persuasive magnetic field throughout the solar system.  These vessels will be powered by fusion devices and move by generating directed magnetic fields.  This was discussed and written up in my article ‘Reverse Engineering an UFO’.

 

The problem of course is that these craft are Newtonic and will usually travel under acceleration of one gravity.   That is ample to completely explore the solar system, but is immediately annoying if we wish to go further.  Now we need a craft able to cross light years and retain the ability to return and communicate simultaneously if possible.

 

A lot has been said regarding our options but most suggestions are simply science fiction and should stay there.

 

Yet the one option that intrigues because it not excluded explicitly by the mathematics of a three manifold is the well labeled worm hole.  Effectively, two points in space are simply connected and local curvature is adjusted to create a worm hole for objects passing through.  Time has not changed, and we are not adjusting the content of the universe in any manner.  Their nature suggests that they need to be created well away from the local curvature of a solar system.

 

In the best of all imagined worlds, it would be nice to create such a worm hole from one end, then pull the enlarged worm hole around one’s craft and emerge on the other side of a collapsing wormhole in another star system.  No time duration would be experienced.  Such a device should work well with the expected configuration of a magnetic exclusion vessel.

 

Therefore a putative starship can travel from the edge of one solar system to the edge of another without any logistical problems caused by long duration voyaging.  Once arrived, it can immediately use its magnetic bottle to travel at one G in system to explore.  That is a pretty good starship, particularly if it is built to be a large transport something like the original Ark of biblical telling (see related posts – this has nothing to do with religious interpretation).

 

The existence of wormholes is an important question in physics not yet addressed, but as you can see, an important one that determines if we explore the universe or ever build starships.  I do not expect an alternative to emerge and the wormhole is also an elegant solution to faster than light travel.

 

November 30.2009

Technology for Starships, Closer Stars and Bigger Civilization

Science Fiction author and blogger Charlie Stross has an article about the myth of the starship

Yes, I think human interstellar exploration (and yes, maybe even colonization) might be possible, after a fashion. But to get there, we're going to have to master at least two entire technological fields that don't yet exist, even before we start trying to blast compact disc sized machines up to relativistic velocities. And that's without considering the difficulty of how to cram an industrial infrastructure capable of building more of itself, of a machine capable of surviving in deep space — the equivalent of those 300,000 NASA technicians and engineers — into the aforementioned CD-sized machine ... 

If we succeed in doing it, it's going to look nothing like the Starship Enterprise. Or even New Horizons. The whole reference frame we instinctively assume when we hear the word "ship" is just so wrong it's beyond wrong-ness.

(There's an alternative to shipping around uploads via laser that merits investigation: if we can do uploading, and if we can make memory diamond — which would seem to be a reasonable expectation of a mature machine-phase nanotechnology — then the 80g payload of the reference starwisp ought to be sufficient to carry about 2 x 10^24 bits, which corresponds to 20,000 stored uploads per "passenger ship". This might well be energetically cheaper than using a laser to transmit uploads, giving us an unexpected long-haul corollary to Tanenbaum's law.)

Stars and Other Solar Systems Could be Closer Than We Currently Think

NASA Infrared survey could find brown dwarf stars that are closer Alpha Centauri.

My article was mentioned in the 114th comment in the Charlie Stross article thread

NASA's wide field infrared survey project was examined in more detail as well

Universe Today: There have been microlensing events with suggests that Brown Dwarf stars are far more common than previously believed.

Michael Werner, Spitzer's project scientist at JPL: "It's clear now that brown dwarfs are about as common as all other kinds of stars put together," 

Relying heavily on data from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory-based Spitzer space telescope, astronomers for the first time have observed "baby" brown dwarfs in the earliest stages of formation. 

Brown dwarfs are dim celestial objects that seem to be neither fish nor fowl. But it turns out they begin life more like stars than planets, according to a recent paper by a team based at the Centro de Astrobiologia in Madrid. 

Astronomers thought that brown dwarfs had to be part of the process of star formation, but the newest images suggest that brown dwarfs can be formed through a completely independent process. Like stars, they are formed through gravitational collapse. 

Brown dwarfs lack the signature feature of stars: they can't convert hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion. They are too small and too cool to ignite nuclear fusion

.

Even without Brown Dwarf systems there are large planetoids in the Oort comet cloud and in the Kuiper belt. Fusion powered ships and colonies could be set up throughout the Kuiper belt and Oort comet cloud. 

Winterberg's advanced deuterium rocket was designed specifically to leverage the common deuterium resources that are available all over space (our solar system and other solar systems). Comets, asteroids and planets are deuterium gas stations for fusion space ships.



Relatively Near Term Interstellar Enabling Space Technology 

1. Mach effect for space propulsion would be huge and may only require better bulk dielectrics. It would enable speeds up to close to the speed of light and could enable faster than light wormhole travel.

Where does the kinetic energy of a Mach-drive vehicle come from?" 

Simple, it's the cosmological gravity/inertia or gravinertial field created by the rest of the mass/energy in the universe. This idea is at the heart of Mach's principle as stated by Ernst mach in the late 1800s. In other words when an M-E drive accelerates itself and anything attached to it, the momentum and energy books for this acceleration step are balanced by subtracting the equivalent energy from this cosmological gravinertial field, which IMO, simultaneously lowers the overall temperature of the causally connected universe. So the Mach drive is just an electric motor that has replaced the driving electric and magnetic fields with the gravinertial field as the intermediating agent.

2. Speculation on combining mach effect propulsion and IEC fusion

3. Winterberg's advanced deuterium fusion rocket design

Winterberg's design to obtain a high thrust with a high specific impulse, uses propulsion by deuterium micro-bombs, and it is shown that the ignition of deuterium micro-bombs is possible by intense GeV proton beams, generated in space by using the entire spacecraft as a magnetically insulated billion volt capacitor. The design could have exhaust that is 6.3% of the speed of light. A multi-stage fusion rocket could achieve 20% of the speed of light with exhaust at that speed.

There are several near term nuclear fusion candidates for more energy production and for space travel.

Fusion propulsion if IEC (Bussard) fusion works

Cheap energy from nuclear fusion would also rapidly boost the GDP of civilization by many times.

4. 60 Tesla superconducting magnets could allow tests of gravitational field propulsion

5. 32 Tesla YCBO superconducting magnet project targets 2012

Larger and richer Interplanetary Civilization Can Afford Interstellar Projects

Here is a projection of how if we transition to rapid economic growth we can be a Kardashev 2 civilization within 250 years.

100 Years of growth at the Above Mentioned Growth Rates

3%                 18.7 times larger

4%                 48 times larger

5%                125 times larger 

10%             12528 times larger  (China level growth rates of the last 35 years)

20%        69 million times larger  (Fast growing company or mutual fund)

30%       191 billion times larger

50%  271,000 trillion times larger

At the sustained levels of 20%, 30% and 50% annual growth the civilization would progress to and exceed Kardashev Level 2, capturing and using all of the energy (or the equivalent) energy of the Sun. 

The Risk of Superweapons

I think there will be a need to be in spaceships and to be highly mobile most of the time. This would be a precaution against advanced super weapons. I think future technology will make it relatively easy to blow up a star. Powerful kinetic energy weapons will also provide a stronger offense than defence (if you can fly around a solar system willy-nilly in millions of interplanetary ships and can get up to 10% or even 1% of light speed easily then there is a lot of kinetic energy). Therefore, it will be safer to live in spaceships when there is advanced technology all over (common and cheap nuclear fusion, molecular nanotech etc...). Space colonies without propulsion is fine if you knew with certainty that things would be peaceful, but even if your civilization is peaceful you do not know about unknown neighbors or about internal radicals. 

(Some ideas that I have seen about novaing a star - a sufficiently large gamma ray laser or anything else that could cause unusual hot spots in a star that disrupt the mechanics inside in a way that cause it to nova.)

Defences will improve. A more near term example, is a suggestion that I have for re-inventing civil defense against nuclear weapons on earth. However, even if you can make something able withstand powerful forces, the offensive weapons will improve too and you might need to run away quickly and advanced civilizations would be prudent to maintain that ability.