 So, this is a, I put up sort of four topics as, you know, get something up on the wall. I hadn't quite expected to get quite so many votes for this one. So, now I have to talk about it. The observation that drives it is that three things have happened in the last 12 months that make a, represent to my mind, a larger amount of progress in space travel than has happened in the last 40 years. So, it's sort of interesting now to look at what these things mean and discuss the context. So, it's more the point. I haven't got any sort of presentation prepared. Oh, if someone should do some live Googling. So, the three are, firstly, the Falcon 9 successful landing. So, this is something that Elon Musk's point is that to enlarge space travel, at least as a profitable venture rather than as a sort of nation-state conflict one, which is what's happening in the 60s, the costs have to come down drastically. And so, the problem right now is you're looking at a 30 to 35 million dollar launch for a inertia launch. That will get you 10 tons, I think, of payload into orbit, but it's still a very large amount of money and it's a non-reusable vehicle. Musk's example is if the wooden ships of the 18th century and 17th century were not reusable, if they were one way or even a two there and back again and then throw it away, the United States wouldn't exist. Getting the costs of the vehicles down is so important that it drastically changes the outcome. We can't prove that US wouldn't exist, but it seems a reasonable claim if you're having to incur the cost of a ship for each voyage and not get it back the way financing worked, you had to put out the cash, but you got it back, or most of it back at the end. If you were bottomary, it's the financing mechanism. But if you were having to replace the ship every voyage, then the costs would have just stopped all of the European colonial project from occurring. Maybe the world would be a better place, but importantly the US wouldn't exist. So, Musk has been working on a reusable vehicle that actually really is relatively cheap. The space shuttle was an attempt, but the space shuttle had about a $30 million, I forget which year, I think it was year 2000 with the numbers I'm quoting, about a $30 million sort of mission per launch cost and could only lift about a third of what an inertia, an inertia was at and via. Hello. Shell versus the fuel? For what? For cost of fuel versus just the engine. Do you mean the space shuttle or the Azure or the Falcon? Even for the Falcon. I mean, 90% of it is going to burn down. So, in the space shuttle's case, the problem is just that they were having to rebuild the entire vehicle. So you've got a vehicle that's expensive to build and they're having to rebuild it. Yeah, how far down can you get? Don't know. Even the Falcon 9 suggests that you can do significantly better than even an inertia with what SpaceX is already doing, even their first launch, let alone how they refine that over time. So deep space, the relevance of getting to Earth orbit is our atmosphere. If we did not have an atmosphere, if we were the moon, then one of the launch options is to go off like a rocket sled or a railgun into escape velocity. So you leave the launch facility at escape velocity and then use some sort of very gentle thrust over dozens of orbits. So this thing is not to get you into your final position, but it's to get you into an escape velocity so you can then start applying gentle thrust. You can't do that on Earth because of the atmosphere. Therefore, getting above 60 kilometres at least and ideally 100 remains a really important piece of the puzzle. If we don't have a solution for that, then we do not have a solution for interplanetary, let alone interstellar. And so, yeah, the Falcon 9 is this first demonstration of a vertical rocket that can land vertically, refuel and launch again. Now, there's cycling costs that will come down, but, yeah, the shuttle was built to assume that you'd sort of throw half the machine away. So that's a big step that you've got now a vertical vehicle that can in fact land vertical and cycle within, I forget the time, it's quick. It's a couple of weeks into another launch. Means that we get the cost of getting out of the atmosphere down drastically. So that sort of starts to rejig the economics for space at all. Yes, we'll stick initially to low Earth orbit. Mars wants to put, I forget the number, some very large number of communication satellites up to do blanket broadband from handheld devices. And so that's low Earth orbit. But it means clearing the atmosphere. It means solving that first really nasty problem. Getting to Mars and let's put human travel to one side that adds a whole lot of other complications that we don't have good answers to. But dealing at the moment with robotic probes. The problem has always been how do you, like, do you build, do you launch a bunch of things with fuel into low Earth orbit and then assemble in orbit? And that's sort of the space station program is part of that. Do you do Mars direct, the Zubrin model, which looks like a yes now. Do you do the orbital bus? This is Buzz Aldrin's design, which is pick a harmonic orbit that sort of fluctuates between Earth and Mars. So build a gigantic bus. And importantly, you have to put it out there once, but you don't have to keep relaunching it. This matters for human spaceflight because you need a very large bulk to protect from radiation. So build a gigantic bus that's passively shuttling between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Maybe very small amounts of thrust required. And then you're building a small craft to get to and from here and a small craft to get to and from at the Mars end. Those two approaches, Mars direct versus the bus. There's arguments both ways. Hello. Ah, so you're talking, conjunction you're talking six months, opposition you're talking 18. And so, yeah, it depends where the, meaning, conjunction meaning where Earth and Mars are at the time that you... So this is the sort of mission profile that NASA's been talking about forever. And it's those are the sort of unavoidable numbers if you're using chemical rockets. And so that's the second big change this year is the paper that's just come out about the... So far, obviously impossible EM drive. And yet the researchers who came up with it have managed to get that paper through peer review. No one has reproduced it yet. And no one knows how on Earth it works, Earth or anywhere else. It seems obviously wrong. It's just a resonator with an EM field. And yet somehow it's joining thrust. That shouldn't be possible. So let's assume for the sake of argument that somehow it does work because there's a whole lot of stuff that we don't know about the universe. But I know this is a very convenient pretense. Assuming that it does, then that changes the economics and the physics and engineering for getting to and from Mars. The same orbit can now be done in months. Think 70 days, not 200. And so because you can continually apply thrust through half of the transit and continually apply reverse thrust to the other half rather than coasting most of the way. So you're not carrying fuel. You're carrying these dodgy resonators. But they're much smaller and they're much lighter. And so, okay, how do you power it? Fine, you have a fuel cell or something. You still have to solve the problem of energy. However, if you could hypothetically solve the problem of how to provide a continuous electrical supply over centuries or millennia then you're no longer talking how to get to Mars. You're talking about how to get to Proxima Centauri. In other developments last month, there's a property that's been observed for some time in synthetic diamonds. If you put a synthetic diamond in a structure I don't yet understand in a field of alpha radiation, it generates a DC current. So, okay, so far so good. So if you were hypothetically to make the synthetic diamond out of carbon-14 which has about a 4,500 year half-life then you've got something that is small, fully robust. It's the hardest thing to learn to mankind. It has no emissions, no radiation, requires no maintenance. It just delivers DC around the clock. Half-life of 5,000 years will be at 10% of its initial capacity in 50,000 years' time. Give or take, again, there are issues. You've got something that on the face of it looks like it could be a viable power supply to keep operating for very long periods of time. There's a bunch of other problems. We can't put human beings on it. We can't communicate. We haven't yet got technology that would work over the distances involved. Oh, but it is because of all the graphite-moderated reactors. The UK alone is sitting on 140,000 tonnes of radioactive graphite. The surface of every single one. So it's got to be stored. Carbon-14 is fairly harmless. A few centimetres of air is enough. But if it's in a powder form, you can breathe it, then you don't have a few centimetres of air. So it's so widespread that it's used for carbon-dating. It's very long half-life is the basis of carbon-dating. But if you've got 140,000 tonnes of carbon-14, or graphite rods, whose outer surface is covered in carbon-14 because of bombardment of alpha particles, then you've got to store the whole lot as though it was a hazardous, productive waste. And you've got to do so for 50 to 100,000 years. So someone's gone, huh. Well, it's only on the surface. So you've got your synthetic diamond machine. You've got your graphite rod, which is coated with, or whose surface is now carbon-14. Just heat it. Vaporize the surface carbon. And what you're vaporizing is carbon-14. Run it through your synthetic diamond process, which works the same way for whichever, there may be minor differences in settings for the heavier isotope. You've now got a diamond made of carbon-14. So it's a standing source. You now cap it in carbon-12 diamonds so that it doesn't emit harmful radiation. You've now got a diamond, which is a 50,000-year DC source. Now you have something that could theoretically power the currently theoretical and unproven EM drive. So it just struck me during the week that in the last month, like, whoa, two sort of game-changing ideas have appeared, one of which looks practical, one of which looks impossible, but has survived peer review. So that was really the observation, that these two things together for the first time give us what looks like a viable interstellar spacecraft. I haven't done the numbers, but different to Voyager and the other ones. You'd have consistent thrust. And so, yeah, the first century would be a bit slow. But, you know, it would continue. So two things. One, I did set aside human travel. Getting human beings... Human civilizations don't exist. Sure. And so that's a set of problems that have to be solved, but the good news is that your power supply doesn't get harmed per radiation, it gets helped by it. So it's sort of, again, turn the radiation problem on its hand to fine, use synthetic diamonds that are arranged to turn radiation into a power source, and the more of it you get, the better you are. You've still got a shield, your navigation control system. Yes. How you run your oscillator and how you deal with steering, because once you've got thrust, you need steering. So, yeah, these are not solved. It just struck me as fascinating that we've got these two apparently fundamental motivations appearing in a single month this year. So... Well, it depends on the application. It's important about things like pacemakers. This would be a fantastic application, because it's not that the battery is expensive, it's that the process of installation is expensive. Cutting someone open is disruptive and costly, and dangerous. Yeah, who cares? The application is where delivery is expensive, so getting a power source into low earth orbit and above. Where installation is expensive, surgical applications are obvious. There may be other IoT-like things where solar panels are impractical, where you need a very small amount of power. Think all of the sigfox stuff. These are radio transmitters a lot, but they live on one coin cell for five years. They demonstrate the existence of a market for sensors that need very, very small amounts of power. But if you sort of go up one step above that, okay, we can deliver 10 times as much power in a thing that will allow the size of a small amount of coin cell, it'll operate for the service life of the device, and it leaves no damaging waste. Unlike a coin cell. So, I mean, putting aside the radiation problem, how do we compare with sort of the already used nuclear batteries? They're hard to make out of waste. How do you fund the use of the graphite? Well, currently the UK is incurring a massive cost in storing this stuff. So, there's almost a, please pay us to take it away. Find a way to turn it into, it doesn't. So, right, so a fair question then is what happens to the graphite. If you take away 85% of the, 90% of the carbon-14 on the surface of the graphite rod, you still have a radiation problem, but it's a much cheaper one to store. You can't go and stick it in a public tip, but the costs of failures are much lower, therefore the protective costs are much lower. Because it's much less dangerous. It's much less dangerous. It's something that, for example, I don't know the numbers, but at some point you get to something that could safely enter a water system, could safely end up in a water stream, right? In small numbers. Whereas the current graphite, the stored graphite, if it does that, you've then got a sort of unusable water supply for years, decades, centuries or longer. And so by taking the risks down, the protective costs come down. So there are direct ways to fund it in a way that doesn't apply to plutonium. I mean, plutonium is just nice. It's the common choice, right? You look at most spacecraft, they've got a black thing hanging out one side, most long-way in spacecraft, which contains plutonium, radioacetylate generator, but every time you put one of those in a spacecraft, in a rocket, you are risking catastrophe. Whereas if you've got carbon-14 diamonds, okay, it's a problem, but it's a much smaller one. So anyway, does that make sense? Are there other people who are interested in, I think, another 10 minutes? And I've lost my phone. Really? No? Thoughts, comments, counter-arguments, Jeff. What are you doing with the construction of space elevators? I haven't been paying close attention, but that's a really good question, because that's the other way to get cargo lifts. You can't use it for human beings because of the then-owned radiation belts. You'll spend two weeks, you'll be baked. But for cargo, it's a simply cheaper one. The problems there are, recent work suggests that we can't produce the ribbon in a way that's robust. Its tensile strength is fantastic, but there's no way to protect 35,000, 37,000 kilometers of ribbon. Carbon nanotubes established in a basicer tape, whether it's this wide or this wide, I can't recall, but it's basically a long, thin tape that's actually almost 40,000 kilometers long. So all the way to the stationery, and then a bit further, to sort of be here at the other end. See, it's not that the tensile strength is fine, but to build a thing that's robust to, again, the atmosphere. You've got to survive birds, aircraft, terrorists, and just mechanical wear. Hey, it's a big deal. Have you read the Mars trilogy? That came out, right? They built space elevators to make the thing cheaper, and then you had terrorist activity, freedom fighter activity, where they caused the thing to come down. It's about the same as the diameter of the planet, as with Earth, and so you've got a thing landing at several hundred times the speed of sound. Yeah, the devastation is horrific. And so the same thing applies to a terrestrial one. Mama, coming down there, let's say, catastrophic failure. How are you going to disassemble them? I think the problem if you have a catastrophic failure is that you're not going to disassemble it. It's going to disassemble for yourself. It's going to disassemble for you, Probably on Singapore, of course. The likely place for a ligature that way to hit the ground is the equator. Well, we're not that far from it. We're within range of... And even if not, you suddenly get a tsunami in the strait, right? So it's a... Yeah, don't know. Work continues, but the answer to the moment appears to be there's no way to protect the thing for operational use. Yes, we can build the... The tennis ice rink is fine, but a viable cable, no. This is kind of probably a new question, but why don't we have a man-based aluminum yet? Why bother? That's actually important. The terrestrial environment has limited resource capability. We can't... We didn't... ...near-end conversation project. Probably worked because there were resources that were made available by... ...same with applying to moon or Mars or that sort of project, three of these candidates at an edge case, the answer is, is there any hope of some sort of a return? And this applies even if you don't believe in capitalism. Even if it's nation-stakes, it's got to be a return. It's got to be a security. It's got to be a way to cover the resources that were invested. Otherwise, it's not going to happen. So Mars case... I think in Mars case there's a couple of things. One, there are resource options, although it's not clear that it's cheap. The asteroids are a bit of it because you don't have to get your resources out of gravity well. Anything you're trying to bring from Mars to Earth? It's a rather expensive proposition. Unless they sort of find diamonds the size of buses. And want to bring those back. It's kind of a bit of diamond. I know that there are options of all those kinds, but that's now a distiller, that's not sort of solar system. I think that the argument for Mars actually is both the sort of scientific engineering byproducts as with the Moon race, but also what we get to learn about ecosystem engineering, which for the reasons we were just discussing, I now believe is inevitable. I don't think it's possible now to avoid geoengineering. To avoid geoengineering. And so it would be nice to have an environment where we can experiment without putting the entire species at risk. Now that problem is centuries away, but the whole thing, this takes time. And so starting down that path improves our ability to build and control living environments for human beings and what human beings depend upon and in ways that are not sort of happening inside our own biosphere. So they're fake. If you look at the biosphere project in the 70s and 80s, yeah, like the thing got invaded. You put a bunch of scientists in a closed system for two years. Well, that's great, except that concrete was leaching, or cementing the concrete was leaching into the system and poisoning it. So they had to pump oxygen in to prevent the crew from dying. And then they had a political problem and so someone actually broke into the facility. So I mean, you know, when you've got actual human beings actually in transit to Mars or living on Mars, all that sort of fake test goes away and you're now dealing for real. You build assistant works or your crew dies. And so what we learn doing that, we can't learn any other way. And so it's valuable from that perspective. And then a longer term, it gives us a control environment to experiment in ways that we can't afford to experiment on Earth. So those are the arguments. How we turn that into returns that governments will invest in? Your question? Governments or corporations? It's less obvious. But Musk can see it as essential. If anyone can work it out, he's likely. Are those stunned silence? Does this make sense? Am I completely off my rocker? Hi. I don't see the point. It gives us some of the benefit in terms of learning about a biosphere, learning about how to control rather an environment for human beings. It doesn't give us, over a long enough period, it doesn't give us a control environment to experiment on in the way we can't experiment on the moon's atmosphere because it hasn't got one. Mars is a bit small, but it's got one. The resource exploitation maybe. But a base for the basis sake I don't think has the same strengths. Yes, if someone determines that there's a resource reason for doing so, then it's much cheaper to get stuff off the surface of the moon and into trans-Earth orbit because you can do it with a gun, like a rail gun. Meaning you're not into merely lunar escape orbit, lunar escape velocity, but also into trans-Earth. So you don't even need a propulsion system. You just fire it and then recover it in Earth orbit. If someone finds resources that are worth recovering at that expense, which it's expensive, but maybe. But as a, because it's there, I think it's, maybe wrong. It feels like too simple. Like we've cleared level one. Is it necessary to build a base there before we do a Martian base? I'm not convinced. I think Mars is a better bet because it has an atmosphere, gravity that human beings are better suited to the appearance of more resources and importantly the ability to manufacture the fuel for return journeys, which the moon doesn't obviously have. And so it means that on a single mission basis, the costs are obviously higher. On a sort of 10, 20 or 100 mission program, the costs are potentially lower for Mars and for the moon. So this is a somewhat important option. The asteroid mining thing mixed. It feels like a science project. On the other hand, I mean there's asteroids made of metals that are really, really valuable on Earth. So maybe, but I don't know. I don't know how you prospect at an industrial scale in asteroids you've got to fly in a spacecraft. Maybe in those years. Given time, yes. And so the question is this century really. Ideally this generation. Where are the incentives to start? And what can be achieved that's worthwhile at least within a human lifetime? Planning on a scale beyond that is somewhere between impossible and delusional. So Mars looks at the better option. Cool. Anyway. No other questions, comments, thoughts? We'll get to end early. Huh? Not yet willing to embrace sci-fi. At least not that way. Yeah, okay, so the similarity of the title. This was about travel, not about the movie. Yeah, what will we discover? I don't know. I have a few years before somebody managed to teleport for a single full time. Well, yeah, and so even that there's an argument about what they did or didn't achieve because you're now making specific assumptions about the nature of matter in interpreting the experiment. And the experiment doesn't allow us to determine the correctness of one interpretation of another. So you're like, yes, probably they did. And on one interpretation they did, yes. But is that, you know, does it allow us to move an apple or a persatric, a puppy from one side of the room to another? It was a corgi. Right, I mean, you know, these are research areas and I would suggest that as part of understanding fundamental physics that research should continue, but it doesn't, I don't think has foreseeable impact. That's not to say it won't have, but it means that it's so remote that I can't point at a plausible path. So that's the, I guess, cool. All right. Thank you for your attention. It's fine for me to do it.