Phase III – Stealth Is.

But if NASA and DARPA – the agency responsible for some of the early innovations that led to the Internet – have their way, in the next 100 years, a spaceship would stand ready to visit another star.

The two agencies have teamed up on a 1 million-dollar project called the 100-Year Starship Study to begin contemplating technologies and organizational strategies to make the mission happen.

For three days, scientists from universities, NASA centers and private institutions will discuss the merits of fusion versus nuclear thermal propulsion, as well as the social and psychological implications of sending humans on a one-way mission to the stars.

Religious and philosophical aspects of interstellar travel will also be discussed.

“The 100-Year Starship is about more than building a spacecraft or any one specific technology,” Fox News quoted DARPA officials as writing in a statement.

“Through this effort, DARPA seeks to inspire several generations to commit to the research and development of breakthrough technologies and cross-cutting innovations across myriad disciplines,” they added.

But a note to would-be space travellers: It’s too soon to sign up for the trip.

“Neither DARPA nor NASA are actually building a 100-Year Starship,” DARPA officials wrote.

Computers, by comparison, must trudge through information one bit at a time, channeling each bit back and forth between connected, but discrete, processor and memory units. The more complicated the task, the more bits of information the computer needs to shift back and forth between its distinct components.

Some people may object to the use of the word “trudge” to describe the way a computer goes about making sense of information, but compared to the efficiency of the brain there’s just no other way to describe it. Sure, modern computers may go through impressive amounts of information at impressive speeds, but that’s due in no small part to the enormous quantities of power that this process requires.

Consider, for example, that Watson needed 16 terabytes of memory, 90 powerful servers, a total of 2880 processor cores, and mind-boggling quantities of electrical power just to wrap its big computery head around the concept of wordplay. The idea of fitting all that hardware inside a space as small as your head (no offense) and making it run on 10 watts of power has long been the stuff of fantasy.

But all that could soon change in a big way, thanks to developments in the field of cognitive computing. Today, a team of scientists led by IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha have announced the creation of two demonstration chips that not only store and process information in close parallel, the way a human brain does, but actually possess “neurons” and “synapses” (the artificial neurons and synapses numbering in the hundreds and thousands, respectively) that will soon be capable of forming, strengthening, and breaking connections on the fly. What’s more, it does it all with about 1000 times less power than your conventional computer.

The architecture behind these microchips flies in the face of everything we know about today’s step-by-step, sequential methods of computing. The researchers have called the design a “neurosynaptic core.”

The public probably won’t see these neurosynaptic cores in its technology for at least another ten years. (DARPA, on the other hand, which has funneled over 40 million dollars into the cognitive computing project, may be an entirely different story.)

The experiment, called Mars500, is going down in a windowless isolation chamber within the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, with a team composed of three Russians, a fellow from France, one from China, and an Italian-Colombian. Communication is delayed just as it would be if the team was traveling further and further away from Earth for real; email and video messaging are the prime ways to exchange words even though the simulator is surrounded by a team of researchers, unseen by those inside. The team eats the kind of meals you’d find on the International Space Station and typically only enjoys showers weekly.

But you may still have your doubts. Allow me to put things in perspective. Imagine it’s 1995: almost no one but Gordon Gekko and Zack Morris have cellphones, pagers are the norm; dial-up modems screech and scream to connect you an internet without Google, Facebook, or YouTube; Dolly has not yet been cloned; the first Playstation is the cutting edge in gaming technology; the Human Genome Project is creeping along; Mir is still in space; MTV still plays music; Forrest Gump wins an academy award and Pixar releases their first feature film, Toy Story. Now take that mindset and pretend you’re reading the first page of a new sci-fi novel:

The year is 2010. America has been at war for the first decade of the 21st century and is recovering from the largest recession since the Great Depression. Air travel security uses full-body X-rays to detect weapons and bombs. The president, who is African-American, uses a wireless phone, which he keeps in his pocket, to communicate with his aides and cabinet members from anywhere in the world. This smart phone, called a “Blackberry,” allows him to access the world wide web at high speed, take pictures, and send emails.

It’s just after Christmas. The average family’s wish-list includes smart phones like the president’s “Blackberry” as well as other items like touch-screen tablet computers, robotic vacuums, and 3-D televisions. Video games can be controlled with nothing but gestures, voice commands and body movement. In the news, a rogue Australian cyberterrorist is wanted by world’s largest governments and corporations for leaking secret information over the world wide web; spaceflight has been privatized by two major companies, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX; and Time Magazine’s person of the year (and subject of an Oscar-worthy feature film) created a network, “Facebook,” which allows everyone (500 million people) to share their lives online.

Does that sound like the future? Granted, there’s a bit of literary flourish in some of my descriptions, but nothing I said is untrue. Yet we do not see these things incredible innovations, but just boring parts of everyday life. Louis C. K. famously lampooned this attitude with his “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy” interview with Conan O’Brian. Why can’t we see the futuristic marvels in front of our noses and in our pockets for what they really are?

Jean Baudrillard, an impenetrable post-modern French philosopher who lived long enough to see his predictions in Simulacra and Simulation come true, described our current situation as hyper-reality. The present is overloaded with information and everything becomes meta-ironic-underground-mainstream-old-retro-cool faster than we can process. As all the sources of meaning get their wires crossed, the past is mined for the Next Big Thing because we know what worked once before, where as no one has any idea what the future actually holds. Patton Oswald describes the phenomenon as “Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was–Available Forever.” The past can become new because we didn’t have enough time to understand it’s value the first go around.

Hawking has since argued that we must do this within two centuries or else face extinction. He was no doubt encouraged by US President Barack Obama’s announcement in April this year of a new initiative to send people to Mars by 2030.

Hawking, Obama and other proponents of long-term space travel are making a grave error. Humans cannot leave Earth for the several years that it takes to travel to Mars and back, for the simple reason that our biology is intimately connected to Earth.

To function properly, we need gravity. Without it, the environment is less demanding on the human body in several ways, and this shows upon the return to Earth. Remember the sight of weakened astronauts emerging after the Apollo missions? That is as nothing compared with what would happen to astronauts returning from Mars.

One of the first things to be affected is the heart, which shrinks by as much as a quarter after just one week in orbit (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 358, p 1370). Heart atrophy leads to decreases in blood pressure and the amount of blood pushed out by the heart. In this way heart atrophy leads to reduced exercise capacity. Astronauts returning to Earth after several months in the International Space Station experience dizziness and blackouts because blood does not reach their brains in sufficient quantities.

Six weeks in bed leads to about as much atrophy of the heart as one week in space, suggesting that the atrophy is caused by both weightlessness and the concomitant reduction in exercise.

Other muscle tissue suffers too. The effects of weightlessness on the muscles of the limbs are easy to verify experimentally. Because they bear the body’s weight, the “anti-gravity” muscles of the thighs and calves degenerate significantly when they are made redundant during space flight.

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Arguably the most fearsome effect on bodies is bone loss. Although the hardness and strength of bone, and the relative ease with which it fossilises, give it an appearance of permanence, bone is actually a living and remarkably flexible tissue. In the late 19th century, the German anatomist Julius Wolff discovered that bones adjust to the loads that they are placed under. A decrease in load leads to the loss of bone material, while an increase leads to thicker bone.

It is no surprise, then, that in the microgravity of space bones demineralise, especially those which normally bear the greatest load. Cosmonauts who spent half a year in space lost up to a quarter of the material in their shin bones, despite intensive exercise. Although experiments on chicken embryos on the International Space Station have established that bone formation does continue in microgravity, formation rates are overtaken by bone loss.