As the 21st century's first decade begins to set, the much beloved genre of science fiction stands on its last legs. Its fate, however, is not a result of low viewer ratings or a decline in popularity, but rather its nomenclature. The "fi" in "sci-fi" cannot accurately describe its content anymore.
As humankind progresses and technology advances to startling new levels, the line between what is real and what is dreamed of fades proportionately. Best documented in intergalactic thrillers and epic space sagas, the curiosities and anxieties about the technology and circumstances of the future have captivated the world for nearly half a century.
But how much "fiction" now remains in them? Not as much as people think.
While conversing with Wyatt Norman, who works with petroleum and other resource-mining companies, he mentioned that many of the corporations he has consulted with are beginning efforts to jump on board the hydrogen energy project. Seeing as how hydrogen populates the atmosphere rather abundantly and resides in most of the essential life-supporting molecules, there seems to be no shortage of it. However, with the scare caused by global warming and the many other environmental concerns, he said that mining for hydrogen on earth presents many legal problems.
So, why not go up, way up? No one can hear you scream in space, and it turns out space is not as empty as it seems. Billions upon billions of cubic liters of gas call space their home. Thus, the first space-based mining operation could have its beginning.
A new problem arises, though. Once the gas is obtained, how do you move it? The answer may surprise some - teleportation.
In the October 2006 issue of "Nature," Eugene Polzik, working with a team at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, claimed to have teleported a visible object about half a meter's distance. Prior to his breakthrough, only single atoms or subatomic particles, objects that are practically invisible, had been teleported with success.
"In free space, [teleportation] could be over tens or hundreds of meters," added Polzik in an interview with the Institute of Physics Publishing.
This sheds new light on the increasing interest in returning to the moon or launching a mission to Mars, as both possess considerable reserves of resources, not only hydrogen.
In the last decade, however, science fiction movies such as "Armageddon," "Deep Impact" and "The Core" dealt not with the enrichment and prosperity of Earth, but the near-destruction of it. Nevertheless, the other side of the glamorous films and space operas, those of an interplanetary apocalypse, similarly present more fact than we may be comfortable with.
As of yesterday, NASA's Near Earth Object Program had identified 874 potentially hazardous asteroids, asteroids that will miss us by less than one-twentieth of the distance between the Earth and the sun. The nearest miss this month, on July 4 by an asteroid 130 meters in diameter, did so by a margin of about one-fiftieth the Earth-sun distance. Last fall semester, another asteroid passed between us and the moon, one-three-hundred-and-ninetieth of the distance required to be "potentially hazardous."
So, the question arises, will one of these interplanetary gems finally hit home? After all, it has happened before, and as our moon can testify, impacts are not rare events. As University of Texas Professor Karl Gebhart tells his AST 309 class, the most likely cause of death on Earth is by an asteroid impact. According to statistics, which assume that the Earth's population will continuesto grow, when an asteroid does hit Earth, more people will be wiped out than have ever died before, therefore increasing the probability of death by space rock to 1 - a chance of 100 percent.
Another strange tale Gebhart recounts revolves around the ever-popular particle accelerator. When particles smash into one another at extreme speeds, they sometimes create microscopic black holes. These black holes, which can silently drift past the laboratory's barriers, could conceivably gather matter and settle to the center of the Earth. The black hole, now much bigger due to the extra mass it has accumulated, would eventually engulf our planet from the inside. The whole process would take somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes.
That doesn't leave much time for an end-of-the-world speech.
Although neither we nor our grandchildren may ever live to see these momentous or cataclysmic events, the mere fact that they are even plausible speaks volumes toward the advances of our own discovery and innovation. Science fiction will have to stretch much further to bemuse fans because of our daily progress, as the facts of science replace the fictions.
Kennedy is a history and Euopean studies junior.
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