Crazy Ideas [Editorial]Crazy Ideas [Editorial] Ben Bova ========== During theheight of the American involvement in Vietnam, when President Lyndon Johnson
had sent half a million American troops to South Vietnam and enough bombs
were being dropped to make that whole nation resemble the bottom of a
shake-and-bake bag, Senator Barry Goldwater reminded an audience of his
ill-fated 1964 campaign. “Remember me?” he asked his listeners. “I’m the nutwho wanted to send the Army into Southeast Asia and bomb Hanoi.” Ideas that
are first considered eccentric, unacceptable, or even crazy have a way ofbecoming commonplace, sooner or later. One of the causes of Future Shock is
that nowadays, the crazy ideas become Standard Operating Procedure sooner,
rather than later. Back when I was a lad (a sure sign of advancing, age, thatphrase) nothing was crazier than wanting to fly to the MOON. Well, maybethere were a few things crazier than that: atomic power, death rays,
artificial hearts, thinking machines, airplanes that could fly as fast asfour hundred miles per hour. Now they’re all as normal and as American aspizza pie. Science fiction, abounds with crazy ideas. Not too long ago, inAnalog, Wade Curtis suggested that coastal cities could have plenty of freshwater practically free, if they would just arrange to have an iceberg towedto their shorelines. The average iceberg represents enough fresh water to
last a fair-sized city for months. Crazy idea. But the US Army’s Cold RegionsResearch and Engineering Laboratory, in New Hampshire, in harness with the USGeological Survey’s Ic£ Dynamics Project at the University of Puget Sound,
Washington, has produced a report that shows maybe it isn’t so crazy afterall. The two authors of the study are Wilford F. Weeks, Army, and William J.
Campbell, USGS. They concluded that a ship with approximately two-thirds thepropulsive power of the carrier Enterprise could tow from Antarctica toAustralia or southern South America an iceberg thai would be big enough toirrigate six thousand square miles of land. Such an iceberg would be worthmore than one billion dollars. The cost of water from a large, moderndesalination plant is estimated to be about 19 cents per cubic meter (264.2gallons). The price of fresh water from the melting iceberg would be 0.8cents, they calculated. Crazy idea. And, of course, it is only inscience-fiction stories that you find spacecraft that go faster than light,
that utilize crazy things like space warps to get around the light-speedbarrier. It’s also the science-fiction “nuts” who talk about alternate
universes and other dimensions of space/time as if they really
existed. ========== Well now… astrophysicists have gone ga-ga over blackholes, the potholes in space left when very massive stars or whole galaxiescollapse. Theorists have speculated that the collapsing star might actuallydig a “wormhole” through space/time and emerge else-where/elsewhen in theuniverse as a white hole—and perhaps that’s what the quasars are. Soundssuspiciously like a space warp to me! Those wormhole tunnels might be justthe thing for starships to use as shortcuts from one part of the universe to
another. And, in fact, we’ve already had science-fiction stories in which
“collapsar” space warps are purposely made by human scientists and engineers,
who can’t poke around looking for natural wormholes when they’re in a hurryto take a shortcut to Betelgeuse. And the theoretiker physicists are alsomuttering to each other, not about the possibility of alternate universes,
but about the absolute necessity of postulating them, in order to save thefoundations of physical theory! Seems that the uncertainty principles ofmodern physics lead to an unpleasant paradox. Theoretical considerations tellus that for any given decision-point in the universe—say, whether or notyou’ll blink your eyes before you finish this phrase—there’s a fifty-fiftychance for the decision to go either way. Yet in our real world, you eithergo a hundred percent one way or a hundred percent the other. You either blink
your eyes or you don’t. There must be, the theoreticians conclude, a universein which the other decision holds true. For every decision-point in thisuniverse, there is an alternate universe in which the decision went the other
way. There must be googols of universes! Some exactly like ours, right up