SpaceQ

A short story on rocket science, quantum gravity, and the future of space exploration.

This is a Sci-Fi story based on my thoughts and dreams.

Pale Red Dot

“Eureka!” This is the word that has been echoing in time for 2000 years, originally from the lips of an Ancient Greek, Archimedes, upon one of his many discoveries.
So many secrets about the world have since then been discovered, so many revelations, but also so many questions have sprung open. In the journey to understand the universe, we found ourselves more lost every step of the way. It is almost the year 2200, humanity has outstandingly survived the perils of life, and has grown stronger together through wars, famine, and disease. This species that can be so destructive to itself, has shown great versatility, and has pushed the limits of science against the will of nature. Man has finally left his birthplace, slowly bidding goodbye to where nature placed him. For a long time, everything we found was sourced from here on Planet Earth, the only home we have ever known. All the satellites, the observatories, the interferometers and accelerators, were built and launched from this singular planet.
Almost only a century ago, we launched the first settlement to Mars, a dream shared by many, by those who wished but never saw it come true, and by those who made it a reality. Elon Musk was one of those dreamers. Unfortunately his body gave up on him before he witnessed the fruits of his labor, but it was only through his efforts and persistence that made the “Eagle 1” rocket ship blasted off in 2077 with a crew of 50 astronauts to a land where no man or woman had ever set foot. A historical moment indeed, celebrated beyond borders and nations. Extraterrestrial borders and nations that is. And as any other ventures into the unknown, humanity had to face many hurdles along the way to outer space. Many people their lives, so many fatal malfunctions and human errors have been made, but so much has been gained in return. It wasn’t long until Boeing introduced its 777M spacecraft model, the first commercial vehicle to outer space. Flights were booked in the hundreds, and a trip from Berlin to Musk became just another entry on the flight log. The first three settlements; Musk, Sagan and Bryce, are today home to more than a million human, after so many Earthlings showed great enthusiasm, curiosity, and a sense of adventure to an unprecedented lifestyle despite the fear and uncertainty. The Martian experience was one of the greatest achievements and investments in the history of mankind. The environment of this planet was ideal for making it function as a super-sized battery, one that fed off power to itself and its sister home Earth. So many triumphs were celebrated and Champagne bottles popped. So much researches has been done and so many questions answered. The imagery will forever be stuck in the memories of human kind, similar to the Apollo 11 moment or LIGO’s discovery of gravitational waves, brief episodes of success and pride to be a human being.

Yet so far

The Martian night sky has become a reverie to many, as the Earth and the moon blend with the stars and galaxies in their background. Just another tiny dot among a million other. Some might feel a bit of discomfort and longing to go back. Others realize that the big step they have taken is minuscule in the grand scale of the cosmos. How will we ever achieve interstellar travel and reach the stars? Have we reached the limits of human capability?
Science is an endless process of discoveries, we just need to figure out how to exploit it for our own use. How can man overcome the natural boundaries we are damned with.
If we were to live forever, it might take us tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest star, but it would be a journey to remember. But this is not who we are, nature can be cruel, and we must reach the stars before we reach our death. The nearest star to us is called Alpha Centauri, it is around 4.36 lights years away from us. With our current technology and space-crafts, we need more than 90,000 years to reach it. The challenge is seemingly becoming more difficult as we advance. It took us hundreds of years to build ships and cross the ocean, a thousand more to reach the moon. Will it take us another thousand year for the next big journey to cross interstellar space to the stars? We have mastered the art of rocket science, and achieved unprecedented speeds that allows us to travel around the Earth in a matter of minutes. But no matter how fast our rockets become, they will always be bound by the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit. We are so far from even reaching 0.1% of this tremendous speed. It seems that nature is giving us a hint that to reach the stars, one must think outside the box of rocket science. And it was true, the answer to this problem is beyond conventional space travel. The answer does not lie in the process of going to the stars, but in the stars coming to us.
A bizarre idea, unrealistic and incomprehensible to many, but it all originated long time ago with the birth of our “modern” view of gravity, this fabric of spacetime that can be bent and curved leading to new paths and roads in space. We always knew that, in principle, we can manipulate this structure, but can we master it for our use?
During our colonization of Mars, scientists had to understand the most intricate details about the journey, the rocket ship itself, the materials used, the fuel, the weather conditions and so many countless parameters that can be fatal if misunderstood.
Spacetime is such a system, and similar to a rocket ship, it is made of parts that have perplexed us for centuries. The understanding of the details of the parts of spacetime can be encapsulated in a theory called Quantum Gravity, an attempt to grasp the smallest scales of space itself. For so long we have been searching for the answer, and just like the journey to Mars that was so doubtfully awaited for, we have once again found the next piece of this natural puzzle. Gravitons, as many call them, were finally found in 2143, following the success of a theory of quantum gravity that was published in the famous paper of 2138, both of which won the Nobel prize in physics. They are the basic structure of spacetime, the quanta of gravity as the photon is to light. The discovery of the photon two centuries ago was so crucial to human progress, revolutionizing the way we see the world and the universe, as almost everything we see around us today is light and electromagnetic waves. Navigation and communication via satellites, X-rays and MRI and many other medical tools, are based on the understanding of electromagnetism and the quanta behind it, the photon. The discovery of the graviton took us to a whole new level. Scientists all around the worlds, both the Earthlings and the Martians, started attempting to exploit the graviton for our benefit. And just like the field of quantum information theory that boomed in the 21st century, giving birth to our modern quantum computers and technology, quantum gravity was the highlight of the 22nd century and gave birth to SpaceQ, a sister company of SpaceX, and the first interplanetary collaboration for quantum space travel.

GRAVITON FUELING

We have shaped the world in every corner. But we wanted more than planet Earth and the solar system. We wanted to shape the entire universe, spread out into a world that knows no end, and claim it as ours. Our tenacious intellect has made us so powerful we have split the atoms apart, reshaped nature, and opened new roads that transcends the concept of space. Our understanding of the quantum nature of gravity has granted us a valuable key to open up a portal to interstellar space. Through the manipulation of Gravitons, via a process called “Graviton Fueling”, we are now capable of “fueling” the gravitational field based on our needs; bending, contracting and stretching spacetime depending on our destination. By doing that, not only can we shorten spacetime distances between points, we can literally bring points closer to us without us or them moving. The journey to Mars’ colonization took us approximately 6 months using the now old technology of rocket ships. With graviton fueling, we have brought Mars almost 70 million kilometers to us, nearly half of its original distance with unfueled gravity, making the journey only 3 months long.
But how will this help us reach the stars? What are 3 months’ worth in a cosmic journey? An expedition to the stars would require reducing a journey of a trillion kilometer to a million kilometer. The answer to all of this depends on how much we fuel gravity.
When SpaceQ underwent the first test of graviton fueling in 2170, it was done for a journey of the newly designed space vehicle for that purpose: Pegasus1, which traveled from Brownsville, Texas, through the Nevada desert to Vernon, almost a 3000 kilometer journey.
For technical reasons, NASA allowed a maximum threshold of 40 percent of gravity to be fueled for this journey, a percentage that depends on the proper distance between the locations, claiming that otherwise spacetime could “overload” and rupture, which would be a “calamity” according to a NASA spokesperson. Fortunately never have a “calamity” happened, and scientists are in an ongoing study of quantum gravity to understand the stability of the gravitational field and how much we can fuel it before it ruptures. And so SpaceQ fueled the gravitational field between Brownsville and Vernon for 25 days before the journey to reach that threshold.

Pegasus1 was launched on the 21st of July at 8:00 am from Brownsville. It arrived to Vernon on the same day, at 8:06 am.

A moment of silence scattered among the crew, the people, and even those on Mars who were watching the livestream, which also uses the graviton fueling technology to receive Planet Earth data in a matter of seconds. One could only hear the sound of tear dropping happiness that fueled the dying hope of interstellar travel. Pegasus1, arrived in a mere 6 minutes and traveling at a speed of only 2000 Km/h. Vernon was brought roughly 2700 Km to Brownsville, that’s 93% of its original distance.
The last SpaceQ mission was the interplanetary one to Mars, it took 3 months, and was done by fueling gravity for 140 days, reaching a threshold of only 5%. Another fueling dock is expected to open on Mars by the end of this year, this means that 5% can be achieved almost twice as fast. At this rate, scientists believe that Alpha Centauri will be the new rising Sun we wake up to in the next 100 years.

Interstellar Civilization

A new century awaits us, the stars awaits us. We are more than 10 billion minds today, men and women, spread across the solar system, fit and buckled up to represent our species to whoever and whatever we encounter out there. Despite our differences, the vile times and our flaws, we share the same big picture, inspired by the stories told to us, the dreams of those who are gone, and all the Eureka moments that we will carry on in our hearts, that spark our incentives, and shows our relentless determination as we slowly become an interstellar civilization.