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Title: Interstellar Travel and Multi-Generational Space Ships (Apogee Books Space Series) by Yoji Kondo, Frederick Bruhweiler, John Moore, Charles Sheffield, Forward Robert, Dyson Freeman ISBN: 1-896522-99-8 Publisher: Apogee Books Pub. Date: June, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Symposium papers, of varying quality
Comment: This book brings together papers delivered at an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium in 2002. Several presentations address physics and engineering solutions to the problem of interplanetary flight, with an emphasis on propulsion concepts. Others address social, cultural, psychological, and genetic dimensions of "generation ships" in which human societies would exist within large vehicles during voyages lasting hundreds of years. The final paper, by physicist Freeman Dyson, suggests that life and intelligence might exist on the icy bodies of the outer solar system.
The quality is very uneven. The science and technology-based papers are the most useful, though many of these ideas have appeared elsewhere. The philosophical commentaries are not very original. This topic deserves a more thorough study, written as a unified whole.
Rating: 1
Summary: Just a Collection of Speeches
Comment: Interstellar Travel and Multi-Generational Space Ships is a collection of speeches presented at some obscure symposium that lasted a single day.
As a result, this book lacks the continuity one would expect from a real book and is full of repetitions. The speeches themselves are only a few pages in length so no concept is really developed. There isn't much breadth or variety either. The speeches usually are either a "motivational" sermons or a focus on a propulsion scheme. However, there is about fifteen pages devoted to necessary genetic variation in the small population of an interstellar crew.
You will have plenty of back-of-the-envelope calculations involving some rather fanciful concepts. One had a 560 kiloton lens 1,000 km wide and a 43 quadrillion watt earthbound laser. Absent in these ideas were hindrances such as interstellar debris, radiation, navigation, etc.
I thought that serious study had gone into the idea of interstellar travel. It is apparent that the work involved is little more than intellectual doodling done during semester breaks or between class lectures.
After reading this book, I have gained little sense of the feasibility of traveling to the stars.
Rating: 5
Summary: It's an extraordinary book.
Comment: This remarkable AAAS symposium represents the present best thinking of the best minds of this generation on what is arguably the single most urgent question facing our species. ("How shall we outlast our star?") Dr. Kondo and his associates combine impressive scientific and technical expertise with extraordinary prose skills to explain in clear simple terms why we must go to the stars, how we'll probably go about it, and some of the ways doing so may change us. It is of incalculable value to anyone interested in the future of the human race.
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