<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image">Donald Petit/NASAAstronauts at the International Space Station took this long exposure image.</div></div></div>SPACE, as Douglas Adams pointed out in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", is big. Really big. It is so big, in fact, that even science fiction struggles to make sense of it. Most sci-fi waves away the problem of the colossal distances between stars by appealing to magic, in the form of some kind of faster-than-light hyperdrive, hoping readers will forgive the nonsense in favour of enjoying a good story.
But there are scientists, engineers and science-fiction writers out there who like a challenge. On October 22nd a small but dedicated audience gathered at the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in London to hear some of them discuss the latest ideas about how <keyword id="1274004" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="interstellar">interstellar</keyword> travel might be made to work in the real world. The symposium was a follow-up to a larger shindig held earlier this year in San Diego.
Starship research is enjoying something of a boom. "A few years ago, there was only one organisation in the world working on interstellar travel," Jim Benford, a microwave physicist and former fusion researcher, told the conference. "Now there are five." The following day many of the speakers at the event would visit the British Interplanetary Society (BIS, the venerable organisation of which Dr Benford spoke) to discuss design details for a starship named Icarus.
Starship research has always been a small field, full of iconoclasts and dreamers fitting the activity around their "proper" jobs. Serious work in the field dates back to 1968, when Freeman Dyson, an independent-minded physicist, investigated the possibilities offered by rockets powered by a series of nuclear explosions. Then, in the 1970s, the BIS designed Daedalus, an unmanned vessel that would use a fusion rocket to attain 12% of the speed of light, allowing it to reach Barnard's Star, six light-years away, in 50 years. That target, though not the nearest star to the sun, was the nearest then suspected of having at least one planet.
<h3>How final a frontier?</h3>
After Daedalus, interest flagged. Lately, though, several developments have given the field a shot in the arm.
The internet has made it easier for like-minded dreamers to get in touch. Astronomers have discovered thousands of alien planets (including, possibly, one around Alpha Centauri B, which at 4.4 light-years away is part of the star system that actually is closest to the sun), and this exoplanet boom has caught the public's imagination, as well as giving starship researchers a list of destinations. The rise of the private space industry, which aims to slash the cost of getting into orbit, brings hope that the sort of orbital infrastructure which would be needed to build a starship might one day be developed. And the involvement of DARPA, an arm of the American defence department, which is sponsoring a long-term project to develop the sorts of technology a starship might require, has brought money and attention.
The chief problem, as Adams noted, is distance. During the cold war America spent several years and much treasure (peaking in 1966 at 4.4% of government spending) to send two dozen astronauts to the Moon and back. But on astronomical scales, a trip to the Moon is nothing. If Earth--which is 12,742km, or 7,918 miles, across--were shrunk to the size of a sand grain and placed on the desk of <keyword id="425741" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="The-Economist">The Economist</keyword>'s science correspondent, the Moon would be a smaller sand grain about 3cm away. The sun would be a larger ball nearly 12 metres down the hall. And Alpha Centauri B would be around 3,200km distant, somewhere near Volgograd, in Russia.
Chemical rockets simply cannot generate enough energy to cross such distances in any sort of useful time. Voyager 1, a space probe launched in 1977 to study the outer solar system, has travelled farther from Earth than any other object ever built. A combination of chemical rocketry and gravitational kicks from the solar system's planets have boosted its velocity to 17km a second. At that speed, it would (were it pointing in the right direction) take more than 75,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
Nuclear power can bring those numbers down. Dr Dyson's bomb-propelled vessel would take about 130 years to make the trip, although with no ability to slow down at the other end (which more than doubles the energy needed) it would zip through the alien solar system in a matter of days. Daedalus, though quicker, would also zoom right past its target, collecting what data it could along the way. Icarus, its spiritual successor, would be able at least to slow down. Only Project Longshot, run by NASA and the American navy, envisages actually stopping on arrival and going into orbit around the star to be studied.
But nuclear rockets have problems of their own. For one thing, they tend to be big. Daedalus would weigh 54,000 tonnes, partly because it would have to carry all its fuel with it. That fuel itself has mass, and therefore requires yet more fuel to accelerate it, a problem which quickly spirals out of control. And the fuel in question, an isotope of helium called {+3}He, is not easy to get hold of. The Daedalus team assumed it could be mined from the atmosphere of Jupiter, by humans who had already spread through the solar system.
A different approach, pioneered by the late Robert Forward, was championed by Dr Benford and his brother Gregory, who, like Forward was, is both a physicist and a science-fiction author. The idea is to leave the troublesome fuel behind. Their ships would be equipped with sails. Instead of filling them with wind, an orbiting transmitter would fill them with energy in the form of lasers or microwave beams, giving them a ferocious push to a significant fraction of the speed of light which would be followed (with luck) by an uneventful cruise to wherever they were going.
Without fuel, the ships could be small, and therefore easy to accelerate. They might even be able to stop at their destinations by employing the solar wind of the target star to slow themselves down, using a second, so-called magnetic sail. The basics of the technology already exist: microwave sails have flown in laboratories. And the transmitter could be reused, which would make such ships cheaper than one-shot nuclear rockets.
<h3>Because it's there</h3>
"Cheaper", though, is a relative term. Jim Benford reckons that even a small, slow probe designed to explore space just outside the solar system, rather than flying all the way to another star, would require as much electrical power as a small country--beamed, presumably, from satellites orbiting Earth. A true interstellar machine moving at a tenth of the speed of light would consume more juice than the entirety of present-day civilisation. The huge distances involved mean that everything about starships is big. Cost estimates, to the extent they mean anything at all, come in multiple trillions of dollars.
That illustrates another question about starships, beyond whether they are possible. Fifty years of engineering studies have yet to turn up an obvious technical reason why an unmanned starship could not be built (crewed ships might be doable too, although they throw up a host of extra problems). But they have not answered the question of why anyone would want to go to all the trouble of building one.
Ian Crawford, an astronomer at Birkbeck College, London, pointed out that sending a robotic probe to another star would be much better, scientifically, than studying it through telescopes. He even presented a checklist of the instruments such a mission should carry, and of the questions--in stellar physics, planetary science and general astronomy--it could be designed to answer. But for many of those attending such conferences, "because we can" would be reason enough to try.
Several speakers at the RAS agreed that a starship would not be feasible until such time as human beings had spread through most of Earth's solar system, and possessed an economy able to command the resources of more than one planet. Whether that day will arrive is an open question. Gregory Benford said that Thomas Jefferson, America's third president, guessed it might take a thousand years for the American frontier to advance to the Pacific Ocean. Humans are bad at prediction, Dr Benford argued, and often things thought on the edge of possibility happen faster than anyone would have believed.
Of course, the past is not necessarily any guide to the <keyword id="23644" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="future">future</keyword>, and the magnitude of the problems involved in space exploration dwarf any earthly analogy. Gregory Benford may be wrong. But he and his fellow starship designers are, by necessity, an optimistic bunch.
Click <a href="https://subscriptions.economist.com/nwcd">here</a> to subscribe to The Economist

Here Are The Latest Ideas For How Interstellar Travel Would Work

Interstellar Travel: Starship Troupers

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">Francis BoulleFrancis Boulle in Ghana</div></div></div>Viewers of Channel 4's "Made in Chelsea" will know 27-year-old Francis Boulle as a popular member of West London's rich and partying jet set.But the reality TV star has spent the past three years mining for gold in Ghana - far away from SW3 - and has big plans for other projects, including a huge agricultural operation in the country.Boulle sat down with Business Insider to discuss his extremely bullish view on the gold and silver market, the future of currencies and how his television profile has affected his ability to raise capital.Below is a transcript of the interview, edited for clarity: Business Insider's Ben Moshinsky: Could you talk about your fascination with gold? What are you doing in that industry?Francis Boulle: I really started to become interested in gold when I was at school studying for my economics A-level. I suppose it was then that I began to understand the place of gold in society, as a store of value and as this natural hedge against the government the sanctioned debasement of currencies - I was actually also studying the collapse of the Weimar republic at the time, so the inevitable consequences of governments trying to print their way out of debt was pretty very fresh in my mind. And I think when you learn more about the history of gold in international trade and its roots as this amazingly elegant solution to "the problem of the coincidence of needs" in the barter system you begin to understand how important gold really has been to mankind. Gold is the original money, as it facilitated the indirect exchange of goods via this non-perishable, fungible, and homogeneous metal which doesn't lose any value regardless of how many times you divide it. All of these commodities were competing for the crown of being the most suitable thing to be considered money and gold was the clear winner.After finishing my A-levels I went to Edinburgh University to study philosophy and economics in 2007, just as the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit and we saw the credit-based system collapse. This caused one of the biggest bull runs in gold and silver in my lifetime and I began to pay close attention. I started to become a bit obsessed and began studying economic history in great depth and slowly got to grips with the mechanics and history of our banking and monetary systems. It was ultimately through this study that I began to truly understand the gravity of the systemic flaws in our current system and how vulnerable it really is to collapse - but I was also kind of amazed when I started to speak to people in the economic, political and financial spheres, how unaware most of them were about this.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Francis BoulleBoulle's gold</div></div></div>BM: What is the most concerning thing about that?FB: Just looking at fiat currencies for example and their significance in our current financial system. Fiat currencies - like the Dollar or Sterling - created by governments and central banks and are backed by absolutely nothing, they are ultimately worthless but are attributed a type of illusory value based on the blind faith in them by the masses and through government taxation. But throughout history there have been thousands and thousands of these fiat currencies and all of them, every single one, has collapsed to absolute zero and became totally worthless. Not a single fiat currency has survived, and there is nothing special or uniquely different about the fiat currencies that we use today. But what's really poignant is that for the first time in history, the entire world is now using fiat currencies. When these types fiat currencies have collapsed throughout history, all the way back to collapse of the Roman Denarius which ultimately led to the fall of the Roman Empire, people have always reverted back to things that hold value, and ultimately they go back to using gold and silver as money.Unless governments start acknowledging this, which is doubtful, I think there is a genuine probability that we will, in our lifetime, see some kind of global currency crisis on a truly unprecedented scale. Unprecedented because the whole world is using fiat currency but also largely because we've never before seen this level of global public and private debt. Before Nixon reneged on the Bretton Woods system in 1971, gold had acted as a kind of hand break on credit expansion in an economy, prohibiting wasteful governments from printing money to their hearts' content. Since the Nixon shock however, we have been living in a totally fiat world, and governments have been able to accumulate colossal levels of debt. Just look at the USA for example, which I think is now the greatest debtor nation in the history of the world with a national debt of over $20 trillion dollars and the <keyword id="6354868" type="COUNTRY" weightage="60" keywordseo="UK">UK</keyword> with national debt of £8.6 trillion at the end of last year. But also the private debt levels are arguably the biggest problem, if you look through history to major economic collapses, they are often preceded by a period of boom time that are often perceived to be some kind of economic miracle. But they are all characterised by soaring private debt levels relative to GDP, the Roaring Twenties for example or the Japanese Miracle in the 80s. It's almost like these soaring levels of private debt act as a drag on the economy tipping it in to crisis. I think the private debt to GDP ratio in the USA is around 150% now but it's even higher in China at around 200%. When the US financial crisis hit in 2008 private debt to GDP ratio was at around 170%, so I think it's very possible we will see a crisis in China in the near future.But we are also in this situation where our banks are insolvent and are being bailed out by central banks, who are also insolvent, and then who is going to bail out the central banks? The Bank for International Settlements (BIS)? It can't really carry on like this - it has to come to a crunch point. And once faith is lost again in fiat currencies, I think we will essentially see a major a transfer of value and purchasing power from those that are holding the collapsing currencies to those holding hard assets, be it gold or silver or other hard assets. It's a bit like a game of musical chairs, if you don't protect yourself by holding some hard assets, you could end up sitting on the floor.But I think as much as something like this would cause significant global disorder, it should also be understood for the huge opportunity that it represents to those who educate and prepare themselves. If you have aligned yourself with it and your timing is right, you can absorb a lot of that value lost from the failing currencies and become very rich.BM: But in that world, what's the point of being wealthy if the dollar becomes worthless?FB: To be wealthy just means to own things of value, be it land, commodities, jewellery, antiques, classical art or indeed gold and silver. Currency is just a means of exchange. I'm not necessarily suggesting the dollar is suddenly going to become worthless next week. I think most likely things will come to a crunch point and the powers that be, the Bank for International Settlements for example, will meet in secret and we will all wake up one morning to gold having been repriced significantly higher, perhaps they will even begin to issue some type of new global reserve currency combining special drawing rights. Maybe they will even involve gold somehow. It's difficult to predict exactly how it will play out, but what I do think one can confidently predict is that in these types of scenarios gold and silver will positively benefit.So I guess in light of all this and a number of other quite compelling reasons, I decided to align myself with what I saw as the significant upside potential in precious metals and sought to become an expert in the processes of gold exploration and extraction. I went out to Ghana four years ago with the idea of packaging up some gold properties to begin to structure a West African gold play for an eventual IPO. I had options on three prospective 'greenfield' licences or licences with no geological work on them, put together a good team of advisors and exploration geologists and came back to London to do a bit of a road show presenting to various mining investors, but I found there was not much appetite at that time for these types of less-developed assets. <div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Francis Boulle</div></div></div>They were much more interested in production and more developed properties, so I ended up mothballing the exploration and focusing on extraction. We bought some excavators and built some processing plants and started large scale alluvial mining in Ghana. So that's what I have been doing for the past three years. Obviously the gold price has taken a battering and this has led to me having to be very hands-on and having to run a very lean, efficient mining operation. Pretty much anyone can run a mining operation in a boom time, but when there's a downturn you really have to cut back and tighten the belts operationally and personally to survive. The reality is that it has been a game of survival rather than victory for most miners these past few years and I very nearly lost my shirt several times. But I hope that, coming out of the tough downturn, having had to be extremely efficient and lean to survive, you can take those lessons forward when the price comes back and pass back that value to your shareholders.In the long term, I'm obviously very bullish on gold and silver. I think there are some incredible opportunities in gold and silver going forward. If you look at the fundamentals, it's a no brainer. But also looking at historic bull markets in gold and silver, from technical analytical perspective, these things go on for years and we're really just at the beginning. If you look at the 50 and 200 daily-moving-average (DMA) for example, which act as kind of supports in the bull market, we still haven't broken below the 200 DMA and I think this is going to go on for years to come, I think the dips below the 50 DMA should be bought.BM: Do you have an end price for gold?FB: Well gold is currently priced in dollars. In theory if a dollar becomes worthless then continuing to price gold in dollars would be an exercise in futility, so I don't think we will be pricing in dollars when that happens. I can't give you an end price for gold in dollars, I think we need to think in terms of purchasing power. What will an ounce of gold buy you? What will be its real purchasing power? Who can say exactly but I think it has to be many multiples to its current purchasing power.BM: In that scenario, there's still going to have to be something other than gold that's exchangeable as money...FB: I think financial technology and innovation will present some viable solutions to these problems, be it bitcoin or some sort of blockchain ledger system involving gold perhaps.BM: What other stuff are you looking at from a business angle?FB: I've been focusing on gold but the recent downturn has led me to explore other sectors. One of the most exciting to me is the African agriculture sector. Africa has huge potential for agricultural development. It has the largest amount of unexploited arable land in the world, which is still incredibly cheap to acquire. I'm currently conducting a feasibility study for a 2,000 hectare agricultural project in Ghana, I'm very excited about how this is progressing.I have also been working on some solar projects, in Ghana but also other parts of Africa. I think there is huge potential for African renewables particularly solar. So I suppose to speak in general terms I'm most focused on agriculture, gold and renewables.I also think Bauxite has got some way to go up as well. There's shrinking supply and demand still seems to be quite buoyant from Chinese alumina producers. No-one really knows what's happening with oil. Eventually it will have to go up. I think we've had something like the lowest level of new discoveries in 70 years, something like a tenth of the average. So we will have a rally sooner or later but I think new opportunities in oil and gas will begin to reveal themselves in the next few years.BM: What sort of investor appetite have you had for those projects?FB: There is a huge amount of appetite from investors for agriculture in Africa but the feasibility studies and plans need to be bankable. But I think there is huge potential here and I am very excited about our project in particular. The potential for renewables in Africa is massive, but the current issue here is the integrity of the PPA's (Power Purchase Agreements) and the ability of the off-takers/utility companies to pay you for the power produced. There's a lot of money to be raised for good quality mining and gold properties. As we see gold continue to rally, we'll see more capital come into less developed assets and greenfield exploration, which has been nascent for some time now. But I think more likely in the short term we will see rollups or consolidation of distressed assets that the juniors have been unable to maintain in the downturn. BM: How does your television profile help or hinder what you do in business?FB: I think ultimately in business, maybe more particularly in mining, it doesn't really matter who you are as long as you deliver and create value for your shareholders. As long as you find that gold in the ground and you can perform, it's not going to be hard to find investors. But I think in many cases, especially with institutional investors, my media profile has been seen with some distaste. So I think the reality is this just makes it all the more important for me to prove myself and what I know. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/krugman-financial-markets-arent-taking-trump-seriously-2016-8">KRUGMAN: Financial markets aren't taking a Trump victory very seriously</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="RrNXdtNTE6A2yVb-FAhQwFsUcSxyV1lf" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

Made in Chelsea's Francis Boulle: We face a currency crisis 'on a truly unprecedented scale'

The world of <keyword id="6355109" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Economics">economics</keyword> is in meltdown mode over <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/thomas-herndon-michael-ash-and-robert-pollin-on-reinhart-and-rogoff-2013-4">a new paper</a> claiming professors <keyword id="218382" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Ken-Rogoff">Ken Rogoff</keyword> and Carmen Reinhart were using improper data to make the case that large public <keyword id="44647" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="debt">debt</keyword> is a terrible idea for economic growth.
Their full response is below.
Here are their main points:
<ul>
<li>We were only arguing association, not causality.</li>
<li>Herndon, Ash et. al. (the critique's authors) still ostensibly got the same growth results for given levels of debt.</li>
<li>The authors argue that a 1% growth differential between countries of high and low debt levels is small. That is "utterly misleading." </li>
<li>They have published a separate paper, with Vincent Reinhart, that addresses some of the data the authors accuse Rogoff and Reinhart of leaving out. </li>
</ul>
<div>The statement does not explicitly take on a charge in Herndon, Ash that they mis-entered some of their data into Excel. </div>


We literally just received this draft comment, and will review it in due course. On a cursory look, it seems that that Herndon Ash and Pollen also find lower growth when debt is over 90% (they find 0-30 debt/GDP , 4.2% growth; 30-60, 3.1 %; 60-90, 3.2%,; 90-120, 2.4% and over 120, 1.6%). These results are, in fact, of a similar order of magnitude to the detailed country by country results we present in table 1 of the AER paper, and to the median results in Figure 2. And they are similar to estimates in much of the large and growing literature, including our own attached August 2012 Journal of Economic Perspectives paper (joint with Vincent Reinhart) . However, these strong similarities are not what these authors choose to emphasize.
The 2012 JEP paper largely anticipates and addresses any concerns about aggregation (the main bone of contention here), The JEP paper not only provides individual country averages (as we already featured in Table 1 of the 2010 AER paper) but it goes further and provide episode by episode averages. Not surprisingly, the results are broadly similar to our original 2010 AER table 1 averages and to the median results that also figure prominently.. It is hard to see how one can interpret these tables and individual country results as showing that public debt overhang over 90% is clearly benign.
 
The JEP paper with Vincent Reinhart looks at all public debt overhang episodes for advanced countries in our database, dating back to 1800. The overall average result shows that public debt overhang episodes (over 90% GDP for five years or more) are associated with 1.2% lower growth as compared to growth when debt is under 90%. (We also include in our tables the small number of shorter episodes.) Note that because the historical public debt overhang episodes last an average of over 20 years, the cumulative effects of small growth differences are potentially quite large. It is utterly misleading to speak of a 1% growth differential that lasts 10-25 years as small.
By the way, we are very careful in all our papers to speak of “association” and not “causality” since of course our 2009 book THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT showed that debt explodes in the immediate aftermath of financial crises. This is why we restrict attention to longer debt overhang periods in the JEP paper., though as noted there are only a very limited number of short ones. Moreover, we have generally emphasized the 1% differential median result in all our discussions and subsequent writing, precisely to be understated and cautious , and also in recognition of the results in our core Table 1 (AER paper).
Lastly, our 2012 JEP paper cites papers from the BIS, IMF and OECD (among others) which virtually all find very similar conclusions to original findings, albeit with slight differences in threshold, and many nuances of alternative interpretation.. These later papers, by they way, use a variety of methodologies for dealing with non-linearity and also for trying to determine causation. Of course much further research is needed as the data we developed and is being used in these studies is new. Nevertheless, the weight of the evidence to date –including this latest comment -- seems entirely consistent with our original interpretation of the data in our 2010 AER paper.

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Here Are The Latest Ideas For How Interstellar Travel Would Work

Business Insider

Interstellar Travel: Starship Troupers

The Economist

Made in Chelsea's Francis Boulle: We face a currency crisis 'on a truly unprecedented scale'

Ben Moshinsky

REINHART AND ROGOFF FIRE BACK: Critique Of Our Work Still Confirms What We've Found On High US Debt

Rob Wile

FED VICE CHAIR FISCHER: 'We should also expect spillovers when monetary policy is tightened'

Sam Ro