Outside the Box

By Robert Gounley

Welcome to the 21st Century.

In the 1950s, this would have been the opening line for a bad science fiction movie. The narrator would then sonorously intone to forecasts of the world future generations would live in. It would be scrupulously clean and efficient. Computers would do the day-to-day planning and robots would do the physical labor. Freed of the need to work, Mankind would pursue loftier goals, like exploring space. By the 21st Century, we would be reaching out to the stars.

The present reality does not glow nearly so brightly. Robots have yet to make a great impact on most of our lives. The computers are cool, but most of us see them not as a tool for leisure but as a means to get us to do more work. We are exploring space, but astronauts have not ventured beyond low-Earth orbit since the 1970s. Meanwhile, unmanned spacecraft get to visit all the really interesting places. (Why do computers get to have all the fun?)

Current trends promise only slow incremental improvements. However, that is the way things have always appeared until a new and unexpected scientific discovery shakes up all our preconceptions. Two hundred years ago, thoughtful men believed that the American West could not be fully settled in less than a 100 generations; the railroad made that possible in two. Might someone willing to look outside the box of conventional thinking find a way to open up space for everyone?

Pose that question to a room full of space activists and you'll get a single thunderous affirmation followed by rancorous debate over which technology has the greatest potential. Unanimity will return when someone observes that SOMEONE should be funding unconventional and far-out ideas in hope that one of them turns out to be a winner.

Surprisingly, someone is doing precisely that. Founded in 1998, the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) looks beyond the near-term or the incremental. They apply seed money to revolutionary ideas with the potential to "leapfrog" conventional methods. Ideas that have long appeared in pages of science fiction stories -- space elevators, interstellar travel by ultra-light solar sails, and human habitation on Mars are receiving money for study.

However, their charter is surprisingly free of restraints that make other programs appear stultifying. In spite of the name, NIAC is functionally independent of NASA. Ideas too unconventional to get attention elsewhere can be submitted there.

The funding is small -- only five million dollars a year -- and its spread out over about a hundred different projects. While the money applied to any individual study may be tiny, it is still vastly more than if NIAC did not exist at all.

Their website (http://www.niac.usra.edu/) proclaims, "Don't let your preoccupation with reality stifle your imagination". In time, reality will have its day, but wouldn't it be wonderful if even one idea in hundred could prove itself and move humanity just a little closer to the stars? Perhaps someone will invent the equivalent of a locomotive to open up the solar system.

Who knows? Maybe the 21st Century will start to look a little more like the 21st Century.