MacTimes Network Headline News | Software Updates | Feature Content iMac Store More MacMall specials... Desktops Notebooks Handheld devices Monitors Graphics Software A The Event Horizon Mac OS X and FTL Travel: Zefram Cochrane's Dream By John Martellaro, Contributing Editor and Columnist January 6, 1999 January 1, 2069 On April 5th, 2063, or so the legend goes, Zefram Cochrane was the first human to travel faster than the speed of light. Here is the story of how he did it. The Rise of Turlan It all started in the spring of 2000 when the fallout from the Y2K bug was becoming apparent. While banks and other large corporations had spent billions of dollars fixing their old Cobol software so that they could conduct business transactions in the 21st Century, other smaller and underfunded companies and government agencies had failed to realize the impact of the Millennium change. Merchants who had committed to using PCs to conduct business, hospitals, county governments responsible for street lights and stop lights, and electric power companies all thought they had comfortably solved their Y2K problems, but they hadn't. On January 1st, 2000 the world didn't end. Most business was conducted as usual. But the widespread deployment of PCs in the 1990's meant that somewhere, sometime, someone was always being subjected to the inconveniences of poorly written PC software. The U.S. didn't go dark and silent at midnight Dec 31st as some doomsayers predicted, but for the first few months of 2000, it was impossible to avoid irritating little incidents. Young mothers would check their mail and find solicitations from AARP. Some, not all, gas pumps stopped working. It was Russian Roulette figuring out which merchants could accept which credit cards. Occasionally, there would be newspaper articles about people whose 401(k) account now read -$1.2M and their bank was suing for payment. Occasionally, hospital test equipment failed. There was no global, systematic failure. The effect was like a personal computer with a flaky RAM chip. Most of the time, things worked. But occasionally, just when one thought his troubles were over, the system would do something bizarre. In the Y2K case, people eventually lost confidence in the system as a whole. Frustration set in. Because communication was so good and because the media desperately needed to validate their predictions, a few thousand incidents a day all across the U.S. were fanned into the flames of a National Crisis. Even though, at any given time, most Americans were only slightly inconvenienced, it appeared on the Internet and Television as if the infrastructure of the U.S. were falling apart. Out of the grousing, out of the national obsession with the failure of technology, arose one mister Turlan McKenzie. McKenzie, a former mayor of Ft.Walton Beach Florida, realized that the near conviction of President Clinton in the U.S. Senate and the subsequent shocking resignation of Vice President Gore had gravely damaged the Democratic party. But the Republican party, strangled by the religious right, was showing signs of selecting a presidential candidate who could not win a National election against any Democrat. McKenzie, assisted by the Governor of Minnesota and propelled by the Y2K hysteria, formed the "AntiTech" Party and rose to national prominence almost overnight. By June of 2000, under overwhelming duress, the Federal Election Commission was forced to admit him as a qualified presidential candidate. On November 7th, 2000 Turlan McKenzie became the President Elect on a platform of anti-politics, anti-technology and a return to "modern, moral pragmatism." The AntiTech Wars President McKenzie had a strong effect on Government funding for computer science and related technologies. He forced the dismantling of some internet worked FBI and local government computer systems and shut down the IRS, forcing the issue of a national sales tax. Funding for advanced technology was cut drastically, except for basic science and solar energy research. McKenzie pushed the notion of a simpler life and encouraged people to go "off-grid" with solar energy system so that they could regain control of their lives. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley and other high tech corporations saw their future existence being threatened. President McKenzie took no explicit action to undermine high-tech and computer companies; instead through a clever series of National ads and fireside chats, he capitalized on the Y2K paranoia and encouraged Americans to turn away from the "regimented, shallow, computer life." Soon, there were street fights in all the larger cities and an alarming number of public lynchings. Anyone who claimed to be a computer programmer or who was caught carrying a computer device on their person was subject to attack by the AntiTech Evangelists League. (ANGEL). A whole generation of technologists went underground. Microsoft, Intel, and Apple were unable to conduct further business after the bombings in September of 2001 and had to shut down. Bill Gates was killed by one of those bombs on September 17th when he turned on his PC. Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were luckier and were last seen somewhere in Pakistan. IBM, and most other high tech companies whose headquarters were in more isolated areas survived by erecting massive electrified fences and posting armed guards. In 2005, the evacuated International Space Station, unable to resist a decaying orbit, burned in over west Texas killing 41 people near Pecos. In 2007, most of the Internet was shut down. In 2008, Turlan McKenzie's Vice President Charlton Heston, at the age of 85 was elected president of the U.S. and continued the tradition of the AntiTech party. Heston's major contribution was the restoration of civil order - no one was shooting at computer users or bombing computer companies. But the damage had been done, and little progress was made by computer companies during his years as president. They struggled to survive and sold their goods mostly overseas. Deprived of R&D revenue from the former, massive consumer sales, PCs changed very little for 25 years, And so it went until February 9th, 2030 when Zefram Levar Cochrane was born near Laramie Wyoming. The Life and Times of Zefram Zefram Cochrane grew up in a relatively deserted region of Wyoming. Isolated from the AntiTech turmoil on the east and west coasts, young Zefram was raised by his mother Lisa, a former systems analyst for the Hughes-Raytheon Corporation. His father was killed on Halloween, 2029 while traveling in Denver -- a road block of ANGELs caught him with an old PalmPilot locked in his glove compartment. Lisa Cochrane had spent her early years entranced by amateur astronomy and encouraged Zefram to follow in her footsteps. The old Celestron Ultima 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope had been hidden away for years because of its internal computer, but young Zefram's love for observing the stars encouraged Lisa to dust it off and let young Zefram use it - but well hidden on their 10 acre ranch, far from ANGELs and prying Government eyes. When Zefram was 15, he realized that he couldn't do much more with his telescope unless he had access to some computing power. He was lucky to fall in with some Indian friends in high school who had set up a computing research laboratory back on the reservation. American Indians had found that their relative isolation and moderate freedom from U.S. Government laws allowed them to excel in computer science, and all the major advances in that field were being made by them. Zefram spent every weekend on the reservation learning how to connect computers on a network and do distributed computing. Zefram's friends had set up a network of 32 400 MHz G4 Macintoshes running MacOS X Server. It was a miracle that, 45 years after they had been manufactured, they were still working. The Macs had been found in a warehouse in Cheyenne, apparently overlooked by search and destroy ANGELs. While 45 years old, they only had accumulated a few thousand hours of CPU time and were humming along nicely. Zefram learned computers well. Zefram Cochrane entered the University of Wyoming on a full scholarship in the fall of 2048 having graduated from high school first in his class and scored 1600 on his SAT. He elected to major in physics since the school had no formal astronomy degree available. During his undergraduate years, Zefram learned fundamental physics. Fortunately for him, the AntiTech Party had succeeded in obliterating most of the quasi-scientific thinking, so Zefram had never been exposed to "New Age" journalism. Moreover, he had never even seen, never mind played, a PC computer game. Fundamental research, however, in electromagnetism and solid-state physics was condoned -- to the extent its fruits allowed farmers and ranchers to get off the grid and become self-sufficient. So Zefram's scientific training was unhindered by unrealistic speculation and shoddy scientific technique. He immersed himself in Maxwell's equations and quantum electrodynamics and graduated with honors in the spring of 2052 In September 2052 Zefram entered graduate school at the University of Colorado in Boulder. By the time he started working on his Ph.D. dissertation in physics, we was an expert in using computers, in a distributed processing mode, to simulate the effects of matter moving in a curved space metric. He had much better access to computing equipment because, in the Presidential election of 2048, the New-Republic party had succeed in regaining the Presidency and the Senate on a platform of personal freedom and economic growth. A generation of Americans had grown weary of a stagnant economy and radical anti-intellectualism, and the AntiTech party was weakening. New computer companies were starting up right and left in 2049, and by the time Zefram got to graduate school, they were receiving shipments of Krell computers with 12 GHz processors and 64 terabytes of RAM. He got to work. Lisa Cochrane (who was born in 1995) dreamed of a future in which there would be a steady technological development in space travel. She speculated that a space station would lead to the routine manufacturing of space faring vessels in near-Earth orbit -- which would in-turn lead to the colonization of the Moon. Once mankind learned how to live and work in near-Earth space, routinely moving scientists and engineers between the Earth and the Moon, she surmised that we would build spaceships that would take men and women to Mars and the moons of Jupiter. After 50 years of steady technical development, it was taken as faith that someone would eventually refine the technology and make the transition to sub-light speeds and interstellar travel. Zefram looked around and saw that in the year 2053, 84 years after Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, mankind was no closer to leaving the planet -- let alone traveling to the stars. No missile had even left the surface of the earth since 2002. So Zefram, never a very patient fellow, decided that the only way human beings would ever travel to the stars would be if a computer taught us how to do it. Zefram did what no other human before his time was able to do -- set up a distributed computing environment in which he could simulate, at the quantum level, the interaction of matter with space. He knew he couldn't brute-force the math because it just got too complex at the quantum level. The days of Einstein, in which one could "dream up," via deep insight, a mathematically sophisticated model of Nature and then test it in "Thought Experiments" were long gone. After four years of 12 hour days, Zefram found what he was looking for. His simulations showed him how to generate, with sufficient focussing of electromagnetic energy, a space-time shear (later called a warp bubble) that could negate the mass of the system inside that created it. Emancipated from the correct but limited Einsteinian depiction of relativistic time and space, Zefram Cochrane learned how to accelerate an inertialess object through sub-light speeds and beyond to many times the speed of light. On paper, that is. Zefram Cochrane received his Ph.D. in computational physics from the University of Colorado in 2056, the year Lisa Cochrane died of cancer. Burned out, depressed, and feeling a little confined, he moved to Eagle Colorado where he waited tables and operated ski lifts by day at Vail and listened to rock music and drank himself into a stupor most every night. On March 11th 2057, it is said, he met Jason Forrest at the Red Lion Inn in Vail and started talking about interstellar flight. Forrest, himself a graduate of the University of Montana in physics, told Zefram about some friends of his in Montana who were in possession of an apparently functioning Titan II missile in an old Air Force missile silo. They weren't quite sure what to do with it. Zefram, however, was. First Contact Cochrane and his friends spent the next six years in Montana putting the meat on the bones of his Ph.D. thesis. They worked hard and consumed significant quantities of beer in the process. Finally, on April 5th, 2063 Zefram Cochrane climbed into a small ship called Phoenix on the top of a 100 year old Titan II ICBM and let it rock and roll. With the help of some computers, his knowledge of distributed processing and how to mathematically simulate the quantum mechanical behavior of atoms in super-strong electric field, Zefram Cochrane bypassed a hundred years of slow and boring rocket propulsion development and achieved what he later termed "Warp 1.03". The warp signature lit up the solar system. Mankind has never been the same since. John Martellaro John Martellaro is a Senior Staff Software Engineer for Lockheed Martin Astronautics. He received his B.S. in Astrophysics from Indiana University and an M.S. in Physics from the University of West Florida. Along the way, John has worked for NASA, done combat modeling for the Army, researched the electromagnetic properties of materials, and worked in advanced computer graphics for Lockheed Martin. His passions are Macintosh, Unix, Perl, astronomy, and skiing. Favorite writers? Harlan Ellison and Robert X.(PBS. Triumph of the Nerds) Cringely. John also writes the column "Utopia Planitia" at the esteemed Website MacOPINION. Read it! This article Copyright 1998, John Martellaro and the MacTimes Network. All rightsreserved. All other content copyright Š1997, 1998 MTN Publishing. All Rights Reserved. If you wish to reproduce any portion of this site please email copyright@mactimes.com.