Cat Powered Space Flight

 

Hershey is a dear soul, if you were to embrace that creatures besides human beings possess souls. To avoid lurking nit-pick readers out there disclaiming my discussion even before it leaves the launch pad, let me rephrase my homily to, Hershey has a pleasant disposition; then, all of that in order to add my addendum; until she has to travel in a cat carrier to the vet. On such occasions we are gifted with the joy of hearing her protest the entire trip there and back; to the tune of 96 per leg of the trip, and yes I counted. So I checked the mileage and found the Vet clinic is 3.51 miles from our house, or 7.02 miles round trip. Divided by 192 meows, that comes to 27.35 meows a mile. It was noted that no amount of assurances dissuaded poor little Hershey from that tempo. She was upset with our taking control, and her auto-pilot-mewer was letting us know about it. It was then that it dawned on me. Such an incessancy of noise could be used for the forces of good rather than just tolerated as evil upon my ears. How about using a cat for inter-planetary space travel?

  It’s been discussed in scientific circles that light and sound waves behave pretty much the same in space. In our earthly atmosphere the two main differences between sound waves and light waves is in velocity. Sound waves travel through air at the speed of approximately 1,100 feet per second; light waves travel through air and empty space at a speed of approximately 186,000 miles per second, so yeah, light is faster. The second difference is that sound is composed of longitudinal waves (alternate compressions and expansions of matter) while light is composed of transverse waves in an electromagnetic field. Although both are forms of wave motion, sound requires a solid, liquid, or gaseous medium; meaning for this discussion space is a vacuum, and since sound needs a medium to propagate, ( air, water, something material) it couldn’t be used in space as we know sound; so let me do a slight of hand and accept what we call sound is electromagnetic waves so we can return to the notion that in space, they’d behave pretty much like light.

  Just asking ‘what is light energy’ opens up to a flood of other questions with trying to narrow down the context of the question. In photometry, luminous energy is the perceived energy of light. It can also be defined as the electromagnetic radiation of visible light. Since light itself is energy, another definition is relevant: light is nature’s way of transferring energy through space. Light exerts a physical pressure on objects in its path. Just as the electromagnetic energy of a cat’s meow. This is explained by the particle nature in which photons strike and transfer their momentum. electromagnetic pressure is equal to the power of the light beam divided by the speed of light. The effect of light pressure is negligible for everyday objects. For example, you can lift a coin with laser pointer, but it would take 1 billion of them to do it. But electromagnetic pressure can cause asteroids to spin faster by working on them like wind pushing a windmill. So we can gather up a herd of cats…I know cats don’t travel in herds, but what do you call a large number of cats? Get them all jazzed up in cages on your nifty spacecraft from Walmart, attach microphones taped near the front of the cages and then broadcast their mewing behind your box-top rocket as thrusters into space and presto….Alpha Centauri here we come.

  Pressure makes me think of desperate things. Because I know I’d volunteer Hershey to any experiment along these lines after a short trip to the vet; let the chips fall where they may.