The wild blue yonder
This is my story.
Now, this is my story.
I come from the outer reaches of Andromeda.
Imagine: planet Earth,
the Solar System, the Milky Way...
your galaxy.
I come from another galaxy.
A blue one. Way, way beyond your world.
Where I come from,
is the Wild Blue Yonder
Our star was dying.
It was like an ice age, but much more severe.
We had to move, we had to leave.
Whole armade of spaceships set out
and they all dispersed into the universe.
I don't know where they are.
I guess they're all lost.
A few made it to your planet,
planet Earth.
A few of us arrived earlier.
It was a few minutes of our time
but on the Earth time it was a hundred years too early.
They came in out of the sky and man!
Were they greeted!
What happened to them after
that - I don't know.
But it was not all great on this planet.
We got homesick
and desperate.
One of us tried to commit suicide.
He was spared.
You know, our great-great...-grandfathers
were fine scientists.
But the journey was long and boring.
And when we got here
hundreds and hundreds of years later
those of us who arrived here
just sucked.
I came in with the third group.
And we had a lot of big plans.
We knew we had to make a big impression,
so we decided to build this capital city,
one that would rival D.C.
This...
this looked great, because
two train lines
converge right here.
Over here, we made this to be the mall,
the main shopping center.
And over here was to be the supreme court.
And over here was to be congress.
And down there the pentagon.
And way way way at the end there...
was the great Andromeda memorial.
But the whole thing sucked.
Nobody came, nobody settled,
nobody shopped.
You see aliens as
these technologicaly advanced superbeings,
who destroy NYC in two minutes flat.
Well, I hate to say this,
but we, aliens, all
suck.
Look.
The failures.
Look. D.C.
I guess we're just failures.
This whole thing makes me sad.
Really makes me sad.
Our only success story was the man who
used his knowledge of the sky
and flying machines.
He became chairman of the strategic
planning commitee at the pentagon.
With great respect it might be said
that aviation itself served very small part
in the result of the WW I conflict.
However, it then proved itself,
that is, it was easily recognised
that with proper equipment and another time
aviation might become
a real instrument of military warfare.
First, I thought I was going places,
as I was accepted into CIA,
but I found nothing there, but a bunch
of people only interested in their careers.
I never got promoted. I kept trying to tell them, that
l knew some things, that I knew quite some things
but they wouldn't listen.
And that made me very angry.
So now, I stand before you,
ready to tell all.
I was involved in the Rosswell recovery.
When that thing landed 50 years ago,
they didn't know what it was
so they stashed it in some silo
underground, and they kept lying
that it was just some media invention.
Now comes this.
50 years later they dig it up.
And they decide, with the help of advanced technology,
that they are going to take another look.
That was a big mistake.
They should not have done that.
From the start, that convoy had a very ominous feel to it.
They shut out the world.
No press, no tv cameras,
no photos. This film is the only record
which they made for their secret files.
What happened there had
a far reaching consequences
and you don't even know about it.
Everything was hermetically sealed.
Man, it was ultra-clean in there,
toxic waste outfits for the men,
even the truck was sealed in plastic.
They had a hunch that something
dangerous might be lurking.
What they didn't know was that it
came from our planet.
It was one of our probes we sent
ahead of our armade.
But there was microbic life
attached to it.
Life that was unknown on planet Earth.
And what they also didn't know
was that while they filmed this here
something was seeping out.
Invisible. Secret.
Potentionally lethal.
Seeping into the few patches of bare skin.
And these scientsts would
carry it out into the world.
They scrambled the quarantine
and they barely succeeded
And there was panic.
So they hatched the secret plot.
They sent out a group of astronauts.
Their mission: find a hospitable place
out there for human habitation.
Like something, anything
that could be the alternative to Earth.
The astronauts were told that
the mission would extend
to the boundaries of our solar system.
But noone could have foretold them
larger, more ominous voyage have they had.
It would turn out to be some sort of
a one-way ticket.
And this is the film record transmitted
back to Mission Control.
It has been kept locked away
all these years.
As time dragged on they were
still cautiously orbiting planet Earth
The mission was going nowhere.
They needed a way to reach further.
The ground crew encouraged this
even thought the spread
of the alien microbes turned out
to be not such a big deal.
It was mostly contained.
Still. They wanted the
astronauts to keep going.
To find the safe heaven
just in case.
They were in for a rude awakening.
They didn't know how
hostile it was out there.
See, I could've told them.
I know all about it.
The astronauts decided
to send out a space probe
to explore the outer fringes
of the solar system.
It could radio back images
from the planets it encountered.
They named the probe Galileo.
They waited weeks.
They waited months.
And then these images came back.
Images that proved that there was no
hospitable place anywhere nearby.
It was clear now that there
was nothing nearby.
On the ground they knew they
needed a bolder plan
a trip beyond our
immediate horizonts.
For the mathematicians it was
only a question of a different trajectory.
The potential energy doesn't
change, that is the zero.
This velocity thing says that this
derivative comes out to be vdelta v.
It just required the gravity assist from Venus
and a fly-by of Jupiter.
It looked doable.
If we look at our
standard v equation
the key is going to be getting the right
v infinity of Venus.
We are still going to need enough
performance from the spacecraft
so that we can go below the orbit of Venus.
And also that the v infinity of Venus is high enough
that when we have to come up with the velocity needed
to get us on up to Jupiter that that will work.
I guess we could use this
to look at leaving the solar system.
For example this is the Sun.
The Earth is going around it.
Instead of thinking of this being a fixed
plane with the Sun in the center
and the Earth going around.
Let's just draw an axis
and rotate the plane with the Earth
so now the Earth looks like it is fixed.
Now we are working in a rotating system.
In this rotating system
if we have a little spacecraft,
an intender or whatever.
Moving around, it has got
some velocity in the rotating system.
And it's got potentional energy with respect to Earth and
potentional energy with respect to the Sun.
The Jacobi constant is equal to
one half the rotating velocity squared,
and I believe by convention it's all minused
so we get a negative sign on a kinetic energy,
and we have the gravitational constant of
the Sun divided by our distance from the Sun
and the gravitational constant of
the Earth divided by our distance from the Earth.
Whenever we come by the Earth, no matter which
direction we come in or which direction we fly by
we are going to end up with exactly the same velocity.
And the key then is to use other planets...
That's the wrong symbol.
That would be Mars
and it's in wrong place so we will
use Venus.... use other planets to
change what the Jacobi
constant is to a new value.
It's playing games with the Jacobi constant and
that's where the tour starts to get interesting.
On board, however, the shifted trajectory was
accepted as just an extension of their flight-plan.
The life carried on.
Day in, day out. Draggery set in.
As you get further and further away
you don't have a sun
you don't have a sunrise anymore
there's nothing you can look at and see
other than points of light.
There's no sense of being
close to anything.
So you are truly an island.
You begin to accept
the different life.
Frankly speaking, my hunch is they
believed it wouldn't be that far.
Because if you could go to sleep, wake up on
a sleeper train pulling into your destination the next morning.
I could've told them.
I know all about it.
We travelled all the way from
the outer reaches of the
Andromeda Galaxy.
Do you have any clue of how far that is?
No you don't.
Let's get this clear from the start.
The closest star to this planet,
or should I say speck of dust,
is only 4.5 light years from here.
And may I say that Alpha Centauri is
a couple of million degrees hot
which, i don't want to exaggerate, could be unpleasant.
Now, how fast is the speed of light?
Using conventional fuel,
l mean rocket fuel
to accelerate to 30% of
the speed of light wouldn't take
all the fuel tanks on the planet Earth, that are
equivalent to, say, the Rocky Mountains.
It would take all the mass in
the Universe visible to the naked eye.
That's the Earth, the Sun, the Solar system
the Milky way, all the stars in your galaxy,
all the stars in the surrounding galaxies.
Now, how fast have you gone so far?
Fastest speed acheived to day was by
your Voyager space probe, which accelerated to
about 55 000 miles per hour and is
currently heading our of your solar system
into deep space. Now...
let's suppose, that that is a spaceship,
you are an astronaut
on that ship and you are headed
towards Alpha Centauri, which, I remind you
is 4.5 light years from here.
Now, let's assume you started your
voyage 20 thousand years ago
this is the time of cromagnon man,
paleolithicum, cavepainting
in the south of France. You're hunting
bison, rhino, wooly mamooths.
And you're speeding along at 50 000 miles per hour
for another ten thousand years.
Now you're in neolithicum, mankind
begines agriculture, domesticating animals
sheep, goats, horses, pigs...
Now, when I say pigs, i mean
breeding domesticated pigs.
This was mankind's first heart sin. Why?
Because in order to breed animals you have to become
sedentary, this begats settlements, which begat towns
which begat cities, which begat all the
problems that will be mankind's destruction.
Breeding dogs is not a sin because they all
go with you on your nomadic hunts.
But pigs, that was the sin.
I've diverted.
The ship continues on it's way for another
6000 years. Ancient Egypt, pharaohs, pyramids
few thousand years more
past ancient Greece, ancient Rome
and into the middle ages and more
heart sin. An italian poet decides
it would be a good idea to climb
a mountain just for the fun of it.
The Swiss didn't do it, the sherpas
didn't do it, until bored 19th century
english man paid them. And they
robbed the mountains of their dignity.
That was a sin.
The ship moves on...
Declaration of Independence
World War I, communism,
World War Il, Marylin Monroe
Elvis Presley, to the present day.
Now, how far have you gone?
You have accomplished just 15%
of your journey to the Alpha Centauri.
You have in procreating gone
through 500 generations.
How could you have avoided
inbreeding, rebellions, murders?
Would you not just became grotesquely
maldeformed freaks
with no idea of where you came from or
why you began the journey to begin with.
And might I add, that the closest star
which might be considered non-lethal
is not 4.5 light years from here.
It's more like 200 000.
By now the spaceship was
surrounded by deep black space.
And knowing that, as I said, madness,
rebellion and murder might set in our astronauts,
trying to prevent that, devised a way
to read each other's mind.
Like this, they were able to
maintain their equilibrium.
Order had to be enforced. And that's
what we had to do as well.
And now here they are, doing
the very same voyage we had done
only in reverse.
Now, these images came much later from the ship.
Battery power was running low.
And the first signs of chaos became visible.
Something had to be done to drastically
increase the speed of their voyage.
It was a rogue mathematician who kept
the secret of a breakthrough invention to himself.
You just want to keep it to yourself for a while
because for a while you are the only
person on Earth who knows something.
And that little secret is just so exciting.
But then, of course, you want people to
know and you want people to start using it.
It was something that was kind of
hard to grasp, I believe, because
I've been looking for them for so long
and all of the sudden, it happened.
And moreover, the theory just really
started rolling, looking at asteroids
comets and how all the solar system is
controlled in many ways by these chaotic tunnels.
And this is how the chaotic transport can occur.
So in this particular image is an artist
conception of some of these gravitational tunnels
that are in our Solar system,
that connects our Solar system.
And this is a step forward from the Copernican
view of the Solar system, where
in this image you can see that the orbits of the planets all
around the Sun, except they are all separated
they are all in this very classical
conception of the Solar system.
And now, 500 years later, our picture
of the Solar system is
slightly different. I'm using an image from the
Shatrian cathedral's floor,
actually it has even more antiquity
origin of erm, erm, the labyrinth,
which shows that the whole Solar system is
really integrated. And this integration
even though this picture, of course, is very nice and even,
but actually, these are generated by chaotic orbits.
That is what I call a chaotic transport.
And I was the first, really, to discover
mathematically by Poincare.
So let me show you how are these tunnels generated.
So you start off looking from the Sun
towards the Earth, and here is the Moon's orbit.
And one of these large orbits, it
is actually larger that the Moon's orbit,
what we call halo orbit around
the L2 Lagrange point of the Earth.
And it is the gateway that is invisible,
so each time you look at the Sun
or look at the Moon
you're actually looking at these gateways.
They're invisible and they provide
this free transport through
these huge huge tunnels.
Now, this little animation will show you
how the tubes of the Earth
and tubes of the Moon interact
to provide this low-energy
transport. So that we can actually conceive
of putting a space station around the
Moon's Lagrange points either in L1
or L2, where it is very easy for astronauts
to get to the Moon
and also to come back to the Earth.
But at the same time, they can service missions deep
in space, so for example
in this case we're going to look at how
from the L1, the Luna L1,
station go to the center spacecraft to the Sun-Earth L2
which is 1.5 million kilometres.
And from there you can actually deploy
and have it go to Mars and so on.
So the yellow dot represents
one of these space stations.
And so, as we pan out, we see that the Moon's
tubes, the red tubes, are like the offrames
that allow you to leave and the blue tubes
allow you to get on to the next gateway at L2
And here it extends out to space.
And here's the Earth's
onwrap, the Earth going to L2 and when these
tubes intersect that is when you get the free transport.
But from here you can also deploy to the other
parts of the Solar system
and so this offers opportunities
that we don't have from
just looking at Keplerian orbits.
And the same way in the future
using string theory, we are going to have
much more powerful tunnels,
tunnels that will allow us to, perhaps,
go through the spacetime.
And that then, is the possibility of going to
the stars and to the galaxies.
Now, let me jump.
And so here is the conception,
like an artist conception, first of just
a gravitational tunnels that we're working with
but eventually, instead of planets
it will be tunnels
between galaxies.
By utilising chaotic transport,
the astronauts found a shortcut.
The direct route to my planet.
It makes me angry.
Or I should rather say upset that
we didn't even know about this.
Soon, they would be at the doorstep
of the Wild Blue Yonder.
It was already in their sights.
There it lay - covered by
a crust of ice.
They made preparations for landing.
What makes my planet
so different and beautiful
is the sky there.
The sky is frozen.
Just thinking about it makes me homesick.
Leaving the ship behind, they cut through the ice.
And found themselves descending into
an atmosphere of liquid helium.
And what makes it even worse for me
is to be so far away, watching human
beings exploring my world.
And I could take in these images raw
just as they were recorded by the camera.
And I can hear the sound of
the Wild Blue Yonder.
This was home to me.
I should also tell you that the other thing
that makes my planet so beautiful
is its wild life.
The creatures would always speak to you.
They try to make contact.
And now they're sad,
because they're left alone.
And here I see that your astronauts either
ignored them or rejected them
or did not treat them with respect.
After the first day of the exploration
they began to warm up to the idea
of a colony on this planet.
Sure it looked inhospitable.
But compared to what they saw
from the Galileo space probe
it seemed to be
a reasonable solution.
But what would the colony look like?
Digging tunnels or caverns underground,
building a big dome, some sort of protection
from the chaotic flow of particles?
Oh well, in all these systems, it turns out
that if you look around us, the Universe,
chaos is not a negative thing.
It actually allows us to conserve
energy in many ways.
And so, in this particular...
in the superhighway concept, chaos
is extremely important, because
that is what generates this very free
and inexpensive transport.
Part of the puzzle with space travel is really
the colonisation of space.
And in the mid 20th century our concept of
how that would happen
might be that we would build a large force field,
a dome of some type, over some planet
or some floating island, underneath which
would be giant amazon-type forest.
A jungle of some sort.
But the jungle is not really where human beings,
at least not humans today, want to live in.
So the ideal environment might be
something like
a shopping mall in space.
Because you have everything from stores
you can shop at, places to go gym and aerobics,
bars, entertainment.
You could shop all day long
or there would be working places.
So this might be, for the future, the perfect
space colonization paradigm.
A shopping mall?!?
I could've told them.
We had a similar plan,
but you saw it didn't work.
Where are the shoppers, if I may ask?
Where are they?
It makes me so sad thinking of all that merchandise
sitting there unsold.
And what makes me even more sad
is that my planet started dying
hundreds of years ago
and here they are: seeing this as
a potentional replacement for Earth?
They began to map out
specific suitable locations.
On the second day they ventured down into
the low-ceiling basements of my planet.
They hoped to find the ideal place to install sewer pipes,
electric cables
and an air supply system.
And after they were done with the cellars
they consulted their compasses
which led them to explore
our big valley and the sky above it.
And this area we used to call the Cathedral.
The Blue Cathedral.
Now, it was time to return home.
Back to planet Earth.
What they knew was that they can
use this portal as a tunnel of time.
This was a difficult process and it took patience.
Each astronaut would, in turn
have to pass through this tunnel.
And by doing so, have to dissolve
into particles and subsequently, into pure light.
Now, back in their world,
it took time for the
astronauts to reassemble
and morph back into human form.
They believed that they were somehow
back on Earth.
And that they were only 15 years older.
But their existence back here
was just an illusion. What really
happened was this: they had not been out
there for 15 years. They
had moved so fast through
the tunnel of time that it actually became a different,
a parallel voyage and on Earth 820 years had passed.
They began to see their planet in a different light
with a different possibilities.
We had an ambition that then,
when lot of humanity will be living
outside of planet Earth,
they would be working
in other places, maybe Mars, maybe
they will be working on asteroids,
that we will have already moved to the vicinity of Earth,
so we can mine them and we can take care of their resources.
And then the Earth will become more of
a protected national park, of sorts, of humanity.
Humanity will preserve our planet
as a pristine protected area
for humans to come,
perhaps to spend vacation.
You spend 6 months working in some other place
and after you gather enough money
you could come and spend some vacation
on a nice beach on planet Earth.
And when they made it
back 820 years later
this Earth had no people left.
It was waiting there as a national park.
This plateau was their landing site
as there were no more airfields
no towns, no bridges, no dams,
no money, no banks, no time and no breath.
It had returned to its pristine beauty.
It was prehistoric again.
And this is what it looks like.
English transcript and corrections by
Cmelaj (at gmail) and Likkle Lucy
Thanks to Greg from Voku squat, Berlin, for showing us this film.