THE THIRD DIMENSION TAKES ENERGY

            THE THIRD DIMENSION TAKES ENERGY
           
The third millennium will take a more sophisticated understanding of energy than we have yet dreamed. Let's not make more war of it than is absolutely essential.

Seeing smooth round river rocks on Mars, in those dry river beds, brings back memories of some dry spells on Earth. Yet the dry spell on Mars was a death sentence for everything that lived on that planet. The desiccation of Mars was total catastrophe as essentially all the free water on Mars evaporated into the cruel merciless vacuum of space.

That's why interstellar flight is a must do, must have.

We see the thin atmosphere of Earth from mountain tops, airplanes, from orbit and the Moon. We know down deep that it is fragile, and perhaps has a finite lifetime. There is no measure yet of how fast the Earth's fluid environment is disappearing. It may last a hundred million years or more. It may not. It is not disappearing at any measurable rate yet, though techniques for accurate measure of Earth's atmospheric pressure were only recently devised, and statistical records will have to be kept for hundreds or thousands of years, most likely. Or, terribly, we might find the atmosphere is disappearing measurably decade by decade. It is important to know.

That's why interstellar flight is a must do, must have. That's why the discovery, or rather, probably correct inference, that planets exist at other star systems in the Goldilocks zone actually exist. There is hope to plant Earth's concepts of life on other planets at other star systems. And we have not yet given up hope for finding some habitable zones on Mars or other objects in this Star system, the Solar System- though it looks pretty grim. After all, every place on Mars is bleaker and less life supporting than the worst of places on Earth except the spots of volcanic lava here and there on Earth.

We are reminded too, of Mars, by the Grand Canyon and other great eroded valleys. Clearly, water was deeper at some distant time in the past, or the Earth was lower. For instance consider those fossils found in the highlands in England that were believed to have been deposited there when England was under water, before it rose and became dry land. Perhaps that was not what happened at all. Perhaps England was the same height fifty million years ago and the oceans were deeper.

These questions will be given increasingly firm answers as time goes by in future generations among human beings. There is a lot of time, considering the rate of progress of science, chemistry, physics, flight and planetary geology when solutions are sought through organized peaceful cooperation-and corporations or their equivalent, institutes.

On the problem of lift in gravitational fields, some minute progress comes from magnetism, for minute payloads can be levitated a few centimeters. That's like an ancient lizard losing a scale and seeing it waft up into the air by a breeze- it takes a moment to figure just where that scale came from and why it is not where it is supposed to be.

Progress in interstellar propulsion looks bleak too, because the distances are so astonishingly vast. The best we can offer is that expertly controlled fusion and some means of locomotion large distances rapidly in the peculiar sophistication of the interstellar space-time environment will be discovered.

The author believes that the dimensionality of macroscopic space time, like that in which spacecraft, asteroids, planets and stars move, is a two dimensional manifold with a time/frequency domain and relativistically curved space-time around gravitational objects. That's why orbits of planets around stars and other similar systems of loose objects are planar unless energy is introduced from some outside source such as a passing star.

If space is two dimensional then the problem of traveling to another star system is different from the concepts we have of traveling in the three dimensional artificial coordinate systems we devised through assumptions made on the basis of architectural works.

If these ideas are true, then we are constructing three dimensional objects in which two of the dimensions are natural, and the third dimension is a venture into probability space, which always requires extra energy to develop.

We already see considerable extent into the third dimension, in ocean depths, atmospheric depth and mountains on the two dimensional surface of Earth. Life attained three dimensional motion long ago in the oceans and then crawled out on land and stood in the third dimension on legs, eventually flying in all three dimensions as birds. So there is plenty of precedent. It's just that the fundamental rules are slowly emerging now that atomic energy and space flight, cosmology and love have been coordinated.

Just remember that it takes energy to venture into the third dimension. Otherwise we'd not have got past lichens.

Like on Mars.