Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Richard Cruz asks What are some science fiction themes that are now considered engineering challenges vs. theoretical ones? What is the concept of an engineering challenge in this context?

An engineering challenge is a problem where we devise a way to accomplish something, even if it is enormously difficult or expensive.

For example, could we send a manned mission to Mars? We probably do have the technology to do this right now. A great deal of thought has been given to this problem, and we’ve sent numerous robots to the planet. Sending humans would be an engineering challenge.

Sending a probe to the closest star would be a significantly more challenging engineering task. You would probably need a new type of propulsion, such as a nuclear rocket or a solar sail. We’ve never used these methods of propulsion before, but we have an idea of how they could work. We would also need to figure out how to send messages back to Earth.

Something like Star Trek teleportation or traveling via wormholes only has the vaguest theoretical explanations. We aren’t really even sure that it is possible, especially at a large scale. We would have no idea even where to begin with something like this.

We are now past the days of early space exploration. What SpaceX and other companies are now doing is trying to reduce costs. It is working on perfecting the engineering, no longer trying to prove the validity of space flight in theory.