🦺 Electromagnetic Propulsion in Space Exploration

Welcome to the 24th edition of Safe For Work. A special tribute this week to our very own Matt Cantor’s beloved family dog. Space exploration and the future of cremation imagined at the end of the 22nd century.

I’m writing this here because I know that I will never say it aloud to anyone while I’m alive. I’m writing this because if I don’t, it’s very likely that the information will exist nowhere at all after I’ve died-- or at least nowhere that any other human being will ever be able to access it. And I think it’s important that a person should know about this someday-- or at least it’s important that it should be possible.

This past weekend, my family and I had to put down my childhood dog, Quark.

He was seventeen years old-- an Italian Greyhound, which is a small dog, which means that they sometimes live a bit longer than larger dogs, but even so, seventeen years is a long time. It wasn’t a sudden death. It wasn’t traumatic or horrid. One day, he just fell down, and he didn’t want to get up again, and we decided it was better to just let him stay how he wanted to be. The cremation took place the next day, a few miles from the vet.

What’s the true nature of the universe? Every last little part of it is alive, and always has been, and we’re just stupid-and-a-half for all the moments that we haven’t been thinking so. It’s so obvious.

Let me teach you something about fish that you already know, which is that they like to eat crackers. Have you ever seen an electron go swimming? Sometimes when you’re sitting out in a boat with a box of crackers, you can drop bits of crackers into the water, and a fish will come up to your boat to give your cracker-bits a little nibble, and then they’ll go swimming away again. Electrons go swimming with the current, and they hum and they sing as they swim, and how can they not be alive?

You’ve got to just see it. You’ve got to get it. If you drop crumbled-up bits of ions into the sea, the electrons will come swimming up to take little nibbles, and if you get enough electrons to come and swim for you, they might even start to push your boat along. They’re sweet little things, but they don’t always make the best pets.

Dogs are better, I think-- but that’s just my opinion. I’ve thought this past week about starting an ant-farm, or letting little photons stream through a prism in the window, but at the end of it all, just waiting a while and then getting another dog is what seems best. Or, I don’t know. It’s not going to be easy to replace Quark. Maybe “replace” is the wrong word, and it’s because I’m trying to replace him that nothing is easy.

Let me teach you something about rockets that you already know, which is that they don’t tend to come back very often-- at least some parts of them. You saw the launch this past week?-- when you’re reading this, whenever it is, whoever you are, it probably won’t have been this past week anymore, the launch of the Atalanta Mission. Maybe it was years ago. Centuries. Maybe you aren’t even human anymore-- or I wouldn’t be able to easily recognize you that way. Maybe you’ve replaced us. Maybe “replace” is the wrong word.

For the record, then, the Atalanta Mission to Sirius cleared the launchpad on June 20th, 2195. Its mass at launch was 8,591,283.54 kilograms, which was .02 kilograms more than on the blueprints.

For the record, if the rest of the history has been lost, there had been plenty of missions to plenty of places before this one. Plenty of uses of the XJ-55 Ion Thrusters to get plenty of things moving. And unless the future takes a turn that nobody is expecting-- or at least not me-- there will be plenty of missions after this one, too, which use my technology. For the record, in the next five months, there are launches to Cassiopeia, Spica, and Betelgeuse. I would have had plenty more chances after this one to send Quark’s ashes somewhere-- out there.

But no, it had to be this one. Sirius. The “Dog Star”-- it had to be this one, right? Obviously.

For the record, the ashes are tucked into the corner of the second-deck cryobay. They just look like dust-- I snuck them in there when I was doing some last-minute checks on some wiring. When the crew awakens in a few thousand years, they probably won’t notice the ashes there, and if they do they’ll probably just think-- again-- that it’s dust, and they’ll probably just get rid of them-- and that’s fine. That counts as scattering, right?

It doesn’t really matter either way. Even I’m sort of feeling like it’s an empty gesture. It’s mattering more to me that you know about it than it actually meaning anything else. Even if his ashes are swept away into the garbage he’s still out there. He’s still alive-- Quark. Sailing in my electric wind. Of course he’s alive, because the universe is alive-- that’s the thing you need to realize. I need you to realize it. Everything that made him alive is still buzzing and humming.

The reason that we named him “Quark” was because he would always follow us around the house. Me or my brother or my mom or my dad-- always one of us, right at our heels-- from the very moment he came home as a puppy. Always wanted to have a buddy. That’s why we called him “Quark”-- because that’s how quarks are.

They always have a buddy. They always come in twos. Take a glance at them in a particle-accelerator and see for yourself. Every quark always has a buddy.

And that’s not all. Let me teach you something about quarks which I bet you don’t know.

You reach down and you grab hold of them and you pull them apart-- as hard as you can, you pull them apart, and as you’re pulling, they’ll pull back-- try it and you’ll see. They’ll pull back towards each other-- they’ll try to stay together, and the farther apart they get, the harder they’ll pull, desperately trying to hold on. Tell me they’re not alive.

Or hey, that’s not enough for you? Sure. Fine, then. Keep pulling. Pull so hard that the poor little quarks simply can’t keep hold of each other’s hands anymore, no matter how hard they try. Rip them apart. You monster. But oh-- look at that! What’s happened? Well isn’t that just the strangest thing?

E=mc squared, right? Energy is matter is energy is matter, right?-- and you just poured so much energy into those quarks to pull them apart that they’ve both gone and created a new pair of quarks to hold hands with instead of each other. Anything, rather than be alone. Don’t you understand? Can’t you see it?

He’s out there. Right now. For me. For you, too, he’s probably still out there, unless this letter has gone a lot longer than I expected without being read. My Ion Engines are slow burners, but they burn long. It’ll be thousands of years for those ashes to get where they’re going. Farther and farther away. And even just right now I can feel it: him pulling back towards me. That’s my Quark. He’s pulling back towards his buddy. But my engines are winning. They’ll keep winning, pushing us farther and farther apart-- farther and farther, farther and farther.

Until, well… you now, know, what will happen. E=mc squared. One day, the two of us will be far enough apart that the energy will snap into a new pair of somethings for us to hold onto. I don’t know what. I don’t think anyone knows what-- this would be the first time in history, I think, that two things who love each other have been so far apart. The first time in history that two things who love each other so much have been replaced.

Or no-- “replaced” is the wrong word. Repaired.

See you next week as we dive into July’s theme of safety underwater and in outer space. We kick it off with a Shark Week warmup inspired by electroreception. Stay safe.