Last week the European Space Agency successfully landed the Philae probe on to the surface of Comet 67P. This signifies a true milestone moment in our lives. Yes it is the first time that we have made physical contact with a comet. Yes it is only the 5th celestial body that mankind has landed upon. Yes it is a phenomenal scientific achievement, but most importantly, it demonstrates that the future is finally coming.
Back in January 2007 I wrote that we were in fact living in the future. I went on to discuss the wonders promised to us as children by the science fiction that we all watched so avidly. The promises of space travel, of bases on the moon, hover boards, warp coils, new alien friends (and enemies) and a life made so simple by technology that we no longer had to work, but could instead spend our time going boldly where no-one has gone before. We had passed the coming online date for Skynet (4th July 1997) and survived Judgement Day (29th July the same year). Marty and Doc Brown were only 8 years away from bringing hover boards to the masses, before Virgin Galactic’s first commercial sub-orbital flights flew by the end of 2008 (for £150k per seat). All this making way for Star Trek’s Zefram Cochrane to make his historical warp drive flight in 2063, prompting first contact and forever opening up the stars for mankind.
Now jump forward to November 2014 and if we are honest, not a lot has changed. We have put a more technologically advanced rover on Mars – without crashing it. We have phones that are thinner, faster, have better screens, longer battery life and better cameras. We have cars that are powered by hybrid engines so efficient that there is almost no energy lost to making sound, or indeed any form of driving excitement. TV’s that are higher in resolution and plugged in to the internet, meaning you can watch pretty much anything you want, at any time, in glorious 4K and Dolby digital surround sound. However none of these are truly ground breaking developments, instead being mere tweaks to existing technology.
The closest we have to Skynet is Siri from Apple, who at her worst can simply refuse to call “home”, “set a timer”, or marry you (seriously… who asks their phone to marry them??). We are now less than a year away from Marty and Doc’s Future Day, but hover boards are no closer now than they were in 2007. Virgin Galactic have still not flown any commercial flights, claiming, until the recent accident, that the first commercial flights might take place by February, or March of 2015 (while the ticket price has sky rocketed (groan) to $250,000).
As for Warp drives, we have, if anything, taken a step backwards. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet in 2011, we are now entirely reliant upon the Russian Suyuz platform for transport to the ISS and other Space related missions. This move to a reliance on soviet technology from the 60’s, rather suggested that the likelihood of warp speed being achieved within 49 years would seem to be something of a longshot… until last week!
Back in 1998 Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer brought us the sci-fi action film Armageddon, in which Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck make a heroic mission to save Earth from a planet killer asteroid. Cue a heady mix of Michael Bay style explosions, slow-mo helicopters flying into the sunset and meaningful looks, all set to a good old fashioned American rock soundtrack. Now while I fully appreciate that a comet and an asteroid are different things, the differences are not that great – a comet is much like an asteroid, but may have more ice and other compounds that can develop a fuzzy, cloud-like shell called a coma, as well as a tail. So the landing of Philae on Comet 67P is as close as damn it the same thing.
There are of course some other fundamental differences between the missions. In the film the path of the asteroid gives it just 18 days till it reaches Earth, whereas planning for the Philae landing took a little over 25yrs, with the probe taking 10yrs to reach the comet – in its defence it did need to travel 4 billion miles to get there! In the film they send two ships to the asteroid, in order to increase the chances of success, whereas the Rosetta craft was on a solo voyage, so any issues could potentially have meant failure for the whole mission. Most importantly the mission in the film was to destroy the asteroid and thereby save mankind, while the Rosetta mission’s objective is to study 67P and hopefully gain further insight in to the origins of the solar system and life itself.
There are equally numerous similarities between the missions. Both had to use a gravity assist, or slingshot manoeuvre, to reach their target – the shuttles in the film perform the manoeuvre around the moon, while Rosetta used four gravity assist manoeuvres (including one just 250 km from the surface of Mars) to accelerate throughout the inner Solar System and match the velocity of 67P. Both had technical issues due to landing away from their target landing zones – the Freedom over shot its landing zone in the film, resulting in a harder drilling surface than planned. Philae bounced twice, causing it to come to rest about a kilometre away from its original touchdown, slightly in the shade of a rocky outcrop, limiting its ability to recharge the batteries.
So what is the significance of this washing machine sized little robot, sitting in the shade of a comet, out in the silence of space and why does its similarity to a sci-fi film represent our move into the future? Our goal as a species has always been to explore, to adventure beyond the known and to push our understanding of our world and the surrounding heavens. From the sailors who crossed the oceans, to the adventurers who climbed the mountains, or ventured to the poles. From the explorers who mapped the globe, to the astronomers who mapped the stars. All of these people have driven our species forward and enriched not only our knowledge, but our excitement and hunger for adventure. 42 years ago Apollo 17 returned from the moon and since then, far from taking any further giant leaps, we have shuffled along in the relative safety of our upper atmosphere and the ISS. Instead the role of explorer has been handed over to probes and rovers, with Curiosity (and friends) on Mars, Messenger in orbit around Mercury and Voyager 1 taking us out of the solar system and off into interstellar space.
It is through the actions of these mechanised explorers that we are finally beginning to realise some of the promises of the fiction from our youth. We can finally begin to believe that Zefram Cochrane, or at least somebody similar, might actually achieve our wildest dreams and take us out of our solar system and it might even happen within our lifetime. If that is the case and we take the premise that the bringing of science fiction into science fact heralds the dawn of the future, then I don’t think I can think of a more fitting group of ambassadors for humanity.
So as Philae sleeps in the shadows of 67P, Curiosity drives around the mountains of Mars and Voyager 1 heads out into the great unknown at a mind bending speed of 11 miles per second, I can’t help but be incredibly jealous of them. Yes they have a terribly lonely, cold and silent life, but that is the life of the explorer and if space really is the final frontier, then these guys are on a mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before and that is exciting for all of us.
Stay Groovy all. DG.x