If you’re looking for aliens visiting Earth, what might they look like?

I don’t believe stories about aliens capturing isolated nutters and probing them on their spaceships before bringing them home, but who don’t bother to make their presence known to anyone else. That makes no sense. I theorized many years ago that perhaps the main reason we don’t see aliens visiting is that by the time a civilization gets to the technology level that permits interstellar travel, they are most likely to eradicate themselves via high-tech weaponry, nanotech accidents or some other tech-enabled extinction route. I suggested that almost all civilizations would become extinct within 300 years of discovering radio.

I also wrote a blog about how genetically engineered fairies would make ideal space travelers, since they could be made very small, and therefore only need small and cheap space ships, but thanks to electronic brains or use of external IT as brain space, be just as smart as real people, and have wings to fly around zero gravity spaceships.

Fairies will dominate space travel

Extending that thought to what aliens might look like, they would likely have the same capability in genetic engineering, and face the same engineering constraints, so would likely come up with a similar solution.

Miniaturization could go much further, and it’s possible in principle to make tiny capsules, microns across, that contain all the data needed to make a human or android body, and a few nano-fabricators that could do the building of other fabricators that make the infrastructure, robots, androids and organisms once they land on another planet. Maybe an advanced civilization might have the technology to make small wormholes through which to fire these tiny capsules in many directions so as to rapidly explore and colonize a galaxy. Given reasonably expectable morality, they wouldn’t want to geoengineer planets that are already inhabited, so the capsules would only activate if they land on uninhabited planets.

So, given these two quite likely technology capabilities for an interstellar space-fairing civilizations, aliens would either be in a micron-sized capsule or two that could be anywhere on the planet, and therefore highly unlikely to ever be found… or they might look like fairies.

Many people through history claim to have seen fairies of various descriptions, and usually they have magical powers. Via Arthur C Clarke, we of course know that any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic. So, although I don’t believe they exist or existed, and think that those who claim to have seen them probably have poor eyesight or overly vivid imaginations or are drugged or pissed, or hallucinating, there is a small but finite possibility that they have existed and were visiting aliens.

Maybe fairies, pixies and other magical tiny people were simply aliens from different star systems.

 

Interstellar travel: quantum ratchet drive

Introductory waffle & background state of the art bit

My last blog included a note on my Mars commute system, which can propel spacecraft with people in up to 600km/s. Unfortunately, although 1000 times faster than a bullet, that is still only 0.2% of light speed and it would take about 2000 years to get to our nearest star at that speed, so we need a better solution. Star Trek uses warp drive to go faster than light, and NASA’s Alcubierre drive is the best approximation we have to that so far:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

but smarter people than me say it probably won’t work, and almost certainly won’t work any time soon:

https://jalopnik.com/the-painful-truth-about-nasas-warp-drive-spaceship-from-1590330763

If it does work, it will need to use negative energy extracted via the Casimir effect, and if that works, so will my own invention, the Space Anchor:

How the Space Anchor works

The Space Anchor would also allow space dogfights like you see in Star Wars. Unless you’re a pedant like me, you probably never think about how space fighters turn in the vacuum of space when you’re watching movies, but wings obviously won’t work well with no atmosphere, and you’d need a lot of fuel to eject out the back at high thrust to turn otherwise, but the space anchor actually locks on to a point in space-time and you can pivot around it to reverse direction without using fuel, thanks to conservation of angular momentum. Otherwise, the anchor drifts with ‘local’ space time expansion and contraction, which essentially creates relativity based ‘currents’ that can pull a spacecraft along at high speed. But enough about Space Anchors. Read my novel Space Anchor to see how much fun they could be.

Space anchors might not work, being only semi-firm sci-fi based at least partly on hypothetical physics. If they don’t work, and warp drive won’t work without using massive amounts of dark energy that I don’t believe exists either, then we’re left with solar sails, laser sails, and assorted ion drives. Solar sails won’t work well too far from a star. Lasers that can power a spacecraft well outside a star system sound expensive and unworkable and the light sails that capture the light mean this could only get to about 10% light speed. Ion drives work OK for modest speeds if you have an on-board power source and some stuff to thrust out the back to get Newtonian reaction. Fancy shaped resonant cavity thrusters try to cheat maths and physics to get a reaction by using special shapes of microwave chambers,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster

but I’d personally put these ‘Em-drives’ in the basket with cold fusion and perpetual motion machines. Sure, there have been experiments that supposedly show they work, but so do many experiments for cold fusion and perpetual motion machines, and we know those results are just experimental or interpretational errors. Of the existing techniques that don’t contradict known physics or rely on unverified and debatable hypotheses, the light sails are best and get 10% of light speed at high expense.

A few proposed thruster-based systems use particles collected from the not-quite-empty space as the fuel source and propellant. Again, if we stretch the Casimir effect theory to near breaking point, it may be possible to use virtual particles popping in and out of existence as propellant by allowing them to appear and thrusting them before they vanish, the quantum thruster drive. My own variant of this solution is to use Casimir combs with oscillating interleaving nano-teeth that separate virtual particles before they can annihilate to prolong that time enough to make it feasible. I frankly have no idea whether this would actually work.

Better still would be if we could use a form of propulsion that doesn’t need to throw matter backwards to get reactionary force forwards. If magical microwave chambers and warp drives are no use, how about this new idea of mine:

The Quantum Ratchet Drive

You can explore other theoretical interstellar drives via Google or Wikipedia, but you won’t find my latest idea there – the Quantum Ratchet Drive. I graduated in Theoretical Physics, but this drive is more in the Hypothetical Physics Department, along with my explanations for inflation, dark matter and novel states of matter. That doesn’t mean it is wrong or won’t work though, just that I can’t prove it will work yet. Anyway, faint heart ne’er won fair maid.

You have seen pics of trains that climb steep slopes using a rack and pinion system, effectively gear wheels on a toothed rail so that they don’t slip (not the ones that use a cable). I originally called my idea the quantum rack and pinion drive because it works in a similar way, but actually, the more I think about it, the more appropriate is the analogy with a ratchet, using a gear tooth as a sort of anchor to pull against to get the next little bit of progress. It relies on the fact that fields are quantized and any system will exist in one state and then move up or down to the next quantum state, it can’t stay in between. At this point I feel I need another 50 IQ points to grasp a very slippery idea, so be patient – this is an idea in early stages of development. I’m basically trying to harness the physics that causes particles to switch quantum states, looking at the process in which quantum states change, nature’s ‘snap to grid’ approach, to make a propulsion system out of it.

If we generate an external field that interacts with the field in a nearby microscopic region of space in front of our craft then as the total field approaches a particular quantum threshold, nature will drag that region to the closest quantum state, hopefully creating a tiny force that drags the system to that state. In essence, the local quantum structure becomes a grid onto which the craft can lock. At very tiny scales obviously, but if you add enough tiny distances you eventually get big ones.

But space doesn’t have a fixed grid does it? If we just generate any old field any which way in front of our craft, no progress will happen because nature will be quite happy to have those states in any location in space so no force of movement will be generated. HOWEVER… suppose space did have such a grid, and we could use interaction of the quantum states in the grid cells and our generated field. Then we could get what we want, a toothed rail with which our gearwheels can engage.

So we just need a system that assigns local quantum states to microscopic space regions and that is our rack, then we apply a field to our pinion that is not quite enough to become that state, but is closer than any other one. At some point, there will be a small thrust towards the next state so that it can reach a local minimum energy level. Those tiny thrusts would add up.

We could use any kind of field that our future tech can generate. Our craft would have two field emitters. One produces a nice tidy waveform that maps quantum states onto the space just in front of our craft. A second emitter produces a second field that creates an interaction so that the system wants to come to rest in a region set slightly ahead of the craft’s current position. It would be like a train laying a toothed track just in front of it as it goes along, always positioning the teeth so that the train will fall into the next location.

We could certainly produce EM fields, making a sort of stepper linear induction motor on a mat created by the ship itself. What about strong or weak nuclear forces? Even if stuck with EM, maybe we use rotating nuclei or rotating atoms or molecules, which would move like a microscopic stepper motors across our pre-quantized space grid. Tiny forces acting on individual protons or electrons adding up to macroscopic forces on our spacecraft. If we’re doing it with individual atoms or nuclear particles, the regions of space we impose the fields on would be just ahead of them, not  out in front of the spacecraft. If we’re using interacting EM fields,  then we’re relying on appropriate phasing and beam intensities to do the job.

As I said, early days. Needs work. Also needs a bigger brain. Intuitively this ought to work. It ought to be capable of up to light speed. The big question is where the energy comes from. It isn’t an impulse drive and doesn’t chuck matter out of a rocket nozzle, but it might collect small particles along the way to convert into energy. Or perhaps nature contributes the energy. If so, then this could get light speed travel without fuel and limited on-board energy supply. Just like gravity pulls a train down a hill, perhaps clever phase design could arrange the grid ahead to be always ‘downhill’ in which case this might turn out to be yet another vacuum energy drive. I honestly don’t know. I’m out of my depth, but intuition suggests this shows promise for someone smarter.

 

Mars trips won’t have to take months

It is exciting seeing the resurgence in interest in space travel, especially the prospect that Mars trips are looking increasingly feasible. Every year, far-future projects come a year closer. Mars has been on the agenda for decades, but now the tech needed is coming over the horizon.

You’ve probably already read about Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans, so I won’t bother repeating them here. The first trips will be dangerous but the passengers on the first successful trip will get to go down in history as the first human Mars visitors. That prospect of lasting fame and a place in history plus the actual experience and excitement of doing the trip will add up to more than enough reward to tempt lots of people to join the queue to be considered. A lucky and elite few will eventually land there. Some might stay as the first colonists. It won’t be long after that before the first babies are born on Mars, and their names will certainly be remembered, the first true Martians.

I am optimistic that the costs and travel times involved in getting to Mars can be reduced enormously. Today’s space travel relies on rockets, but my own invention, the Pythagoras Sling, could reduce the costs of getting materials and people to orbit by a factor of 50 or 100 compared the SpaceX rockets, which already are far cheaper than NASA’s. A system introduction paper can be downloaded from:

Click to access pythagoras-sling-article.pdf

Sadly, in spite of obviously being far more feasible and shorter term than a space elevator, we have not yet been able to get our paper published in a space journal so that is the only source so far.

This picture shows one implementation for non-human payloads, but tape length and scale could be increased to allow low-g human launches some day, or more likely, early systems would allow space-based anchors to be built with different launch architecture for human payloads.

The Sling needs graphene tape, a couple of parachutes or a floating drag platform and a magnetic drive to pull the tape, using standard linear motor principles as used in linear induction motors and rail guns. The tape is simply attached to the rocket and pulled through two high altitude anchors attached to the platforms or parachutes. Here is a pic of the tape drive designed for another use, but the principle is the same. Rail gun technology works well today, and could easily be adapted into this inverse form to drive a suitably engineered tape at incredible speed.

All the components are reusable, but shouldn’t cost much compared to heavy rockets anyway. The required parachutes exist today, but we don’t have graphene tape or the motor to pull it yet. As space industry continues to develop, these will come. The Space Elevator will need millions of tons of graphene, the Sling only needs around 100 kilograms so will certainly be possible decades before a space elevator. The sling configuration can achieve full orbital speeds for payloads using only electrical energy at the ground, so is also much less environmentally damaging than rocketry.

Using tech such as the Sling, material can be put into orbit to make space stations and development factories for all sorts of space activity. One project that I would put high on the priority list would be another tape-pulling launch system, early architecture suggestion here:.

Since it will be in space, laying tape out in a long line would be no real problem, even millions of kms, and with motors arranged periodically along the length, a long tape pointed in the right direction could launch a payload towards a Mars interception system at extreme speeds. We need to think big, since the distances traveled will be big. A launch system weighing 40,000 tons would be large scale engineering but not exceptional, and although graphene today is very expensive as with any novel material, it will become much cheaper as manufacturing technology catches up (if the graphene filament print heads I suggest work as I hope, graphene filament could be made at 200m/s and woven into yarn by a spinneret as it emerges from multiple heads). In the following pics, carbon atoms are fed through nanotubes with the right timing, speed and charges to combine into graphene as they emerge. The second pic shows why the nanotubes need to be tilted towards each other since otherwise the molecular geometry doesn’t work, and this requirement limits the heads to make thin filaments with just two or three carbon rings wide. The second pic mentions carbon foam, which would be perfect to make stratospheric floating platforms as an alternative to using parachutes in the Sling system.

Graphene filament head, ejects graphene filament at 200m/s.

A large ship is of that magnitude, as are some building or bridges. Such a launch system would allow people to get to Mars in 5-12 days, and payloads of g-force tolerant supplies such as water could be sent to arrive in a day. The intercept system at the Mars end would need to be of similar size to catch and decelerate the payload into Mars orbit. The systems at both ends can be designed to be used for launch or intercept as needed.

I’ve been a systems engineer for 36 years and a futurologist for 27 of those. The system solutions I propose should work if there is no better solution available, but since we’re talking about the far future, it is far more likely that better systems will be invented by smarter engineers or AIs by the time we’re ready to use them. Rocketry will probably get us through to the 2040s but after that, I believe these solutions can be made real and Mars trips after that could become quite routine. I present these solutions as proof that the problems can be solved, by showing that potential solutions already exist. As a futurologist, all I really care about is that someone will be able to do it somehow.

 

So, there really is no need to think in terms of months of travel each way, we should think of rapid supply chains and human travel times around a week or two – not so different from the first US immigrants from Europe.

Quantum rack and pinion drive for interstellar travel

This idea from a few weeks back is actually a re-hash of ones that are already known, but that seems the norm for space stuff anyway, and it gives alternative modus operandi for one that NASA is playing with at the moment, so I’ll write it anyway. My brain has gotten rather fixated on space stuff of late, I blame Nick Colosimo who helped me develop the Pythagoras Sling. It’s still most definitely futurology so it belongs on my blog. You won’t see it in operation for a while.

A few railways use a rack and pinion mechanism to climb steep slopes. Usually they are trains that go up a mountainside, where presumably friction of a steel wheel on a steel rail isn’t enough to prevent slipping. Gears give much better traction. It seems to me that we could do that in space too. Imagine if such a train carries the track, lays it out in front of it, and then travels along it while getting the next piece ready. That’s the idea here too, except that the track is quantized space and the gear engaging on it is another basic physics effect chosen to give a minimum energy state when aligned with the appropriate quantum states on the track. It doesn’t really matter what kind of interaction is used as long as it is quantized, and most physics fields and forces are.

Fortunately, since most future physics will be discovered and consequential engineering implemented by AI, and even worse, much will only be understood by AI, AI will do most of the design here and I as a futurist can duck most of the big questions like “how will you actually do it then?” and just let the future computers sort it out. We have plenty of time, we’re not going anywhere far away any time soon.

An electric motor in your washing machine typically has a lot of copper coils that produce a strong magnetic field when electricity is fed through them, and those fields try to force the rotor into a position that is closest to another adjacent set of magnets in the casing. This is a minimum energy state, kind of like a ball rolling into the bottom of a valley. Before it gets a chance to settle there, the electric current is fed  into the next section of coil so the magnetic field changes and the rotor is no longer comfy and instead wants to move to the next orientation. It never gets a chance to settle since the magnet it wants to cosy up with always changes its mind just in time for the next one to look sexy.

Empty space like you find between stars has very little matter in it, but it will still have waves travelling through it, such as light, radio waves, or x-rays, and it will still be exposed to gravitational and electromagnetic forces from all directions. Some scientists also talk of dark energy, a modern equivalent of magic as far as I can tell, or at best the ether. I don’t think scientists in 2050 will still talk of dark energy except as an historic scientific relic. The many fields at a point of space are quantized, that is, they can only have certain values. They are in one state or the next one but they can’t be in between. All we need for our quantum rack and pinion to work is a means to impose a field onto the nearby space so that our quantum gear can interact with it just like our rotor in its electrical casing.

The most obvious way to do that is to use a strong electromagnetic field. Why? Well, we know how to do that, we use electrics, electronics and radio and lasers and such all the time. The other fields we know of are out of our reach and likely to remain so for decades or centuries, i.e. strong and weak forces and gravity. We know about them, and can make good use of them but we can’t yet engineer  with them. We can’t even do anti-gravity yet. AI might fix that, but not yet.

If we generate a strong oscillating EM field in front of our space ship, it would impose a convenient quantum structure on nearby space. Another EM field slightly out of alignment should create a force pulling them into alignment just like it does for our washing machine motor. That will be harder than it sounds due to EM fields moving at light speed, relativity and all that stuff. It would need the right pulse design and phasing, and accurate synchronization of phase differences too. We have many devices that can generate high frequency EM waves, such as lasers and microwaves, and microwaves particularly interact well with metals, generating eddy currents that produce large magnetic forces. Therefore, clever design should be able to make a motor that generates microwaves as the rack and the metal shell of the microwave containment should then be able to act as the pinion.

Or engineers could do it accidentally (and that happens more often than you’d like to believe). You’ve probably already heard of the EM drive that has NASA all excited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster

It produces microwaves that bounce around in a funnel-shaped cavity and experiments do seem to indicate that it produces measurable thrust. NASA thinks it works by asymmetric forces caused by the shape of their motor. I beg to differ. The explanation is important because you need to know how something works if you want to get the most from it.

I think their EM drive works as a quantum rack and pinion device as I’ve described. I think the microwaves impose the quantum structure and phase differences caused by the shape accidentally interact and create a very inefficient thruster which would be a hell of a lot better if they phase their fields correctly. When NASA realizes that, and starts designing it with that theoretical base then they’ll be able to adjust the beam frequencies and phases and the shape of the cavity to optimize the result, and they’ll get far greater force.

If you don’t like my theory, another one has since come to light that is also along similar lines, Pilot Wave theory:

https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-a-weird-new-idea-about-how-the-impossible-em-drive-could-produce-thrust

It may well all be the same idea, just explained from different angles and experiences. If it works, and if we can make it better, then we may well have a mechanism that can realistically take us to the stars. That is something we should all hope for.

How the Space Anchor works

This is just an extract from my sci-fi book Space Anchor, about the adventures of Carbon Girl and her boyfriend Carbon Man. However, the Space Anchor itself is based on the Kasimir effect and warped space time, so has some similarities with NASA’s warp drive, but will be a lot easier to make and require very little energy. If their’s works, so will this. The space anchor will arrive first, and the most likely route to NASA getting their warp drive is using my space anchor to find another civilisation that already has a warp drive and buy one. Anyway, both remain scifi for a few decades. Just as well really. The Warp drive NASA are playing with will be used first as a weapon system to make ultra-high-lethality kinetic weapons. Let’s hope it doesn’t work. Looks pretty though, I’ll give them that.

From Space Anchor:

It was just a routine chat. G’din debriefed the General on the last trip, mapping out space currents. That often took him near planets and moons, and often meant he’d had to dodge asteroids. This one had been an unusually bad trip with several near misses.

Unfortunately, it was moving mass that created the ripples and currents in the space time fabric that the space anchor used. Without it, they’d have no means of ever getting much further than the solar system. Other techniques such as warp drives were still just science fiction. Nobody had any serious means of getting the speed without carrying massive engines and huge quantities of fuel. The space anchor cheated. The C14 didn’t use much fuel at all, and had fairly basic engines for local travel near Earth. The anchor locked on to the local space time fabric itself. There was no matter there, but it used stacked graphene Kasimir combs, each couple of combs interleaved to create a chamber where virtual particles could appear as the slats separated and be immediately separated from one another as the slats interleaved. High speed waves travelling along the combs opened and closed the gaps rapidly. The combs essentially harnessed the virtual particles’ fundamental need to annihilate by trying to physically prevent them from doing so. Creating a temporary barrier between them simply delayed their annihilation, creating a quantum annihilation pressure. Each frustrated annihilation only caused a tiny force measured at macro scales, but there were a lot of layers in the graphene stacks, and it added up nicely. Even though their lives were short, the strong forces the quantum annihilation pressures generated effectively locked the anchor onto that piece of space. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it absolutely won’t let you steal it away. That would make holes in space time. Nature doesn’t allow holes in space time any more than it allows a tree in a forest to be replaced by an error message saying “tree not found”.

So the space anchor behaved exactly like an anchor should. It stayed where it was put, relative to the local space time. In future space battles, it would undoubtedly be useful for fighters to make rapid turns without using all their fuel. For now, thankfully without those space battles yet, they were happy to use it to make trips faster and shorter.

If the region of space at the anchor was expanding differently from the region where the ship was, which of course was the general idea, the anchor would create a huge force to pull the ship. So, just like a yacht using differences in the winds, the space anchor allowed the C14 to accelerate and brake. Like wind, vacuum energy was free and didn’t need fuel to be carried. The tether was long, but that wasn’t a problem in space. The trouble was, just like wind, it isn’t easy to spot a space current from far away, it is much easier to detect it by being there. Astro-physicists knew where to look for the best chance of finding stronger currents of course but the mapping was still needed. The forces had to be measured, the streams plotted. They had to know where they were, how strong they were, how they behaved. It was very new science and technology. Space-time turbulence had been discovered that could cause very severe vibration when an anchor was being used, although if the anchor was switched off, it would instantly become smooth again and the ship would coast.

One day, space travel would all be easy, but just a few decades in to manned interplanetary travel, it was still anything but routine.  Only a few ships were equipped with space anchors, they were not easy to make and were expensive. The C14 had the first one, since G’din had invented it, and it was still be best equipped ship to do this kind of work. It had three anchors now, improving manoeuvrability – on a good day, G’din could swing it around like a gibbon in the woods.

Space research, tourism, asteroid mining companies and of course the military of many countries all wanted the technology too. But without the other stuff – the Higgs filters, Heisenberg resonators and carbon fur, the anchor was as dangerous as it was useful, and few organisations had ships made out of the materials that could resist even the minor impacts. Most would be riddled with holes on the first trip. So only G’din and the military had them so far, the rest could wait till it was safer.

Fairies will dominate space travel

The future sometimes looks ridiculous. I have occasionally written about smart yogurt and zombies and other things that sound silly but have a real place in the future. I am well used to being laughed at, ever since I invented text messaging and the active contact lens, but I am also well used to saying I told you so later. So: Fairies will play a big role in space travel, probably even dominate it. Yes, those little people with wings, and magic wands, that kind. Laugh all you like, but I am right.

To avoid misrepresentation and being accused of being away with the fairies, let’s be absolutely clear: I don’t believe fairies exist. They never have, except in fairy tales of course. Anyone who thinks they have seen one probably just has poor eyesight or an overactive imagination and maybe saw a dragonfly or was on drugs or was otherwise hallucinating, or whatever. But we will have fairies soon. In 50 or 60 years.

In the second half of this century, we will be able to link and extend our minds into the machine world so well that we will effectively have electronic immortality. You won’t have to die to benefit, you will easily do so while remaining fully alive, extending your mind into the machine world, into any enabled object. Some of those objects will be robots or androids, some might well be organic.

Think of the film Avatar, a story based on yesterday’s ideas. Real science and technology will be far more exciting. You could have an avatar like in the film, but that is just the tip of the iceberg when you consider the social networking implications once the mind-linking technology is commoditised and ubiquitous part of everyday life. There won’t be just one or two avatars used for military purposes like in the film, but millions of people doing that sort of thing all the time.

If an animal’s mind is networked, a human might be able to make some sort of link to it too, again like in Avatar, where the Navii link to their dragon-like creatures. You could have remote presence in the animal. That maybe won’t be as fulfilling as being in a human because the animal has limited functionality, but it might have some purpose. Now let’s leave Avatar behind.

You could link AI to an animal to make it comparable with humans so that your experience could be better, and the animal might have a more interesting life too. Imagine chatting to a pet cat or dog and it chatting back properly.

If your mind is networked as well as we think it could be, you could link your mind to other people’s minds, share consciousness, be a part-time Borg if you want. You could share someone else’s sensations, share their body. You could exchange bodies with someone, or rent yours out and live in the net for a while, or hire a different one. That sounds a lot of fun already. But it gets better.

In the same timeframe, we will have mastered genetics. We will be able to design new kinds of organisms with whatever properties chemistry and physics permits. We’ll have new proteins, new DNA bases, maybe some new bases that don’t use DNA. We’ll also have strong AI, conscious machines. We’ll also be able to link electronics routinely to our organic nervous systems, and we’ll also have a wide range of cybernetic implants to increase sensory capability, memory, IQ, networking and so on.

We will be able to make improved versions of the brain that work and feel pretty much the same as the original, but are far, far smaller. Using synthetic electronics instead of organic cells, signals will travel between neurons at light speed, instead of 200m/s, that’s more than a million times faster. But they won’t have to go so far, because we can also make neurons physically far smaller, hundreds of times smaller, so that’s a couple more zeros to play with. And we can use light to interconnect them, using millions of wavelengths, so they could have millions of connections instead of thousands and those connections will be a billion times faster. And the neurons will switch at terahertz speeds, not hundreds of hertz, that’s also billions of times faster. So even if we keep the same general architecture and feel as the Mk1 brain, we could make it a millimetre across and it could work billions of times faster than the original human brain. But with a lot more connectivity and sensory capability, greater memory, higher processing speed, it would actually be vastly superhuman, even as it retains broadly the same basic human nature.

And guess what? It will easily fit in a fairy.

So, around the time that space industry is really taking off, and we’re doing asteroid mining, and populating bases on Mars and Europa, and thinking of going further, and routinely designing new organisms, we will be able to make highly miniaturized people with brains vastly more capable than conventional humans. Since they are small, it will be quite easy to make them with fully functional wings, exactly the sort of advantage you want in a space ship where gravity is in short supply and you want to make full use of a 3D space. Exactly the sort of thing you want when size and mass is a big issue. Exactly the sort of thing you want when food is in short supply. A custom-designed electronic, fully networked brain is exactly the sort of thing you want when you need a custom-designed organism that can hibernate instantly. Fairies would be ideally suited to space travel. We could even design the brains with lots of circuit redundancy, so that radiation-induced faults can be error-corrected and repaired by newly designed proteins.

Wands are easy too. Linking the mind to a stick, and harnessing the millions of years of recent evolution that has taught us how to use sticks is a pretty good idea too. Waving a wand and just thinking what they want to happen at the target is all the interface a space-fairy needs.

This is a rich seam and I will explore it again some time. But for now, you get the idea.

Space-farers will mostly be space fairies.