(Don’t worry, I’m not asking that in the quasi-philosophical manner that sends anyone familiar with relativistic physics screaming for cover.)

On the surface of the planet Earth, there is Something. Lots of somethings, actually; rock and water and dirt and metal and air and loads more besides. By contrast if you were to go out into interplanetary space you would find Nothing. Or at least, almost Nothing; even the hard vacuum of intergalactic space has trace elements of Something in it – a few particles of hydrogen/helium per cubic metre, electromagnetic radiation, possibly even dark matter/dark energy if no better culprit can be found for their effects on the universe – but in general you’d have to work very hard to find somewhere with less Something than outer space. If you get into a rocket and blast off into the heavens, you will at some point transition from the Something-rich environment of Earth to the large quantity of Nothing that makes up outer space.

But at what point does this happen? When exactly can you say that you’ve gone from Something to Nothing? What, in other words, is the precise boundary which separates the Earth and its atmosphere from space? It’s a complex question because – as with so much in our imperfect universe – such a boundary does not exist in physical terms. There’s no concrete point at which the Earth’s atmosphere stops and the vacuum of space takes over. All there is are¹ successively thinner layers of gas, gradually dwindling away to nothing as the particles inside the atmosphere hit the upper bounds of their Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and escape into space. So while space may indeed be nothing we’re going to have to find some other way of defining it that doesn’t involve its notable lack of content.

Now, when you look at a diagram of the various atmosphere layers it seems as though trying to point at a particular part of it to say “This is where space starts,” would be about as accurate as a game of Pin The Tail On The Donkey. However, we’re human beings and we like to separate things into clearly delineated spheres of influence even if it makes little practical sense, and as it turns out such a boundary between the Earth and space does indeed exist. Remember Spaceship One? That thing is only a spaceship in the most technical sense of the word, but it does qualify. Spaceship One goes up above the 100 km Kármán line where it lingers for just a few minutes before retreating back towards the Earth’s welcoming embrace, and that 100 km altitude just happens to be the point where we’ve decided that the atmosphere gives way to space, which is why it’s called Spaceship One instead of just One.

100 km sounds like the sort of number that somebody arbitrarily selected because it sounds good, but there’s actually a pretty decent reason why it was chosen as the boundary: 100 km is the point where it becomes physically impossible for fixed-wing aircraft to operate, and so rockets have to take over. Aeroplanes generate lift by flying into a thick body of air with their wings at a given angle of attack; the air flowing on either side of the wing will create a lift force as a byproduct that is sufficient to keep the plane in the sky. However, the amount of lift you get for a given aeroplane is directly proportional to both the speed it’s travelling at and the density of the air it’s flying through – and as you ascend upwards towards space the atmosphere gets progressively thinner and thinner. The higher you fly, the faster you have to go in order to generate enough lift to stay airborne.

The Kármán line is born from the logical conclusion that if you keep going up you’ll eventually hit an altitude where the airspeed required for an aeroplane to stay in the sky will match the velocity required to orbit something around the Earth. At that point you don’t need wings any more; the pilot of our hypothetical aircraft could clamber out of their cockpit and saw the wings off, and the aircraft would just keep on going. Except you couldn’t call it an aircraft any more, because it’s no longer reliant on having a thick soup of atmospheric gases around it to fly. It’s made the transition from aeroplane to spaceship, and so 100 km was selected² as the dividing line between aeronautics and astronautics; the demarcation boundary between the Earth and space.

Of course there’s no such thing as an aeroplane that can fly at 100 km altitude. Jet engines conk out long before they ever get that high, and ramjet engines are still in development (and are likely to be so for a long while to come). The only winged craft that have made it to 100 km are rocket-powered spaceplanes that then glide back down to Earth, so strictly speaking the Kármán line is very much a theoretical boundary rather than a practical one. In practice airplanes are stuck muddling along at altitudes of 20-30 km or so, and above that is the domain of rockets punctuated by an occasional high-altitude balloon flight. Still, if you’re going to have these boundaries you may as well make them scientifically unassailable, and the nice thing about Kármán is that it doesn’t matter how high-tech planes get in the future; they’re still going to be physically unable to function as planes past 100 km, making the Kármán line a very robust point at which to set the defining line between the Earth and space. Aeronautically speaking, anyway.

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Darren asks:

This pops up in video games relatively frequently, and I’ve often wondered:  would it actually be possible for an organism to evolve in (or evolve the capability to survive in) the vacuum of space?  If it’s possible at all, what qualities would they need to have (or what qualities would be especially beneficial) and how complex could such organisms realistically become?

As you’ve touched on, the answer to this one depends on two things.

1)     What you mean by “vacuum”.

2)      What you mean by “organism”.

As it stands each one could potentially describe a rather large number of variable states, so we’re going to have to narrow down a bit.

First I should make it absolutely clear that the chances of something that we’d recognise as life evolving in situ in the vacuum of space are bugger-all. There’s simply too many missing elements that we regard as being necessary for life to evolve in the first place; no gravity, very little energy, no nutrients, none of life’s basic building blocks, nothing.  It’s kind of like saying “Can life evolve out of nothing inside a blast furnace?” Well no, probably not. Organisms which start out in more temperate environments can evolve to tolerate very high temperatures (as covered in my extremophiles post), and this is the great power of evolution: it’s a gradual, iterative process in which organisms can adapt to live in just about any kind of environment imaginable, but they need to begin that process in a place which is conducive to life forming in the first place.

So here we’re covering the second case, in which we start out with some bacteria or something swarming and multiplying inside a primordial ooze. If we were vengeful gods (or the typical consumer of Maxis games) and we could somehow tinker with the evolution of this bacteria over hundreds of millions of years, could we end up with something capable of living in a vacuum? And if so, how complex could we make it? In order to save time I’ll just assume I can give our little super-organism any attribute exhibited by currently existing lifeforms; what would it take to make its survival possible?

For the vacuum, we’ll consider a single factor that determines how hostile the environment is: is there a large quantity of harmful solar radiation present that could do awful things to a cell directly exposed to it?  For the organism, we’ll simply deal with the hardiest forms of life currently known to man, the various genii of extremophiles. As for what that organism is going to need to make it go, I’ll be using Wikipedia’s definition of life here. Most of it can be taken for granted (in that anything we recognise as life will have these attributes by default) but the three things we have to cover from that list are:

Metabolism. Our vacuum-dwelling organism needs to eat something to sustain itself.

Growth. It needs to take the resources it metabolises and use them in anabolic processes to grow itself. The rate of growth needs to at least match the rate at which bits of the organism are dying off, otherwise the organism as a whole will gradually shrink and eventually die.

Homeostasis. Its vital systems need to be stable and self-correcting inside the parameters of the environment it’s going to be living in. Because this is vacuum that environment is potentially very very demanding, with the temperature in particular undergoing rapid and extreme changes on a regular basis.

I should probably stress at this point that I’m a physicist, not a biologist. I understand everything I’ve told you so far because they’re fairly simple physical systems; energy intake during metabolic processes needs to equal energy spent to grow the organism, and so on. I don’t need to know the actual mechanisms behind “metabolism” or “growth” to tell you this, since even biological entities have to follow the conservation laws. However, your mileage may vary considerably when applying the following hypothetical scenario to actual biological processes since there’s almost certainly a huge amount of fine detail that I’m going to be ignorant of. What I’m saying here is, don’t actually try to grow a vacuum-dwelling super-organism based on what I’m about to tell you because you’ll probably come a cropper. It’s an interesting thought experiment and nothing more.

Metabolism and growth are intimately linked, so we’ll start with both of those at the same time. You’re not going to grow as an organism if you’re not metabolising enough matter to do so. Sadly for our prospective vacuum organism you have to metabolise something physical – for example, plants do not feed on sunlight directly but instead use the energy absorbed from sunlight to power a photosynthetic reaction that extracts carbon from CO₂ and oxygen from H₂O and fixes them together to form a healthy nutritious sugar. Without the carbon dioxide and the water the sunlight isn’t all that helpful; it powers the metabolic process but does not feed the organism itself. Other organisms have evolved that have substituted in other power sources to power metabolism instead of sunlight – this one uses actual honest-to-god decay radiation from natural deposits of uranium – but no matter what you use you still need something to process from the outside environment.

This is probably the primary reason why vacuum dwelling lifeforms in deep space are impossible¹. There’s simply not enough raw materials out there for them to live on. Life is pretty much confined to planetary surfaces. Moreover, most forms of life require oxygen if they want to evolve anywhere useful. Wikipedia’s pages on aerobic vs. anaerobic respiration are complete garbage written by morons. Fortunately I can use my doctor skills to check sources that aren’t Wikipedia² and I can tell you that while anaerobic respiration (metabolic processes that do not use oxygen) is fairly common at a low level within microbes and even as a temporary measure within more complex organisms (human muscles when sprinting), the amount of energy it provides is tiny compared to aerobic respiration which does use oxygen. Aerobic respiration is absolutely necessary if we want to build a complex organism, as the metabolism requirements will be so large that only supercharged oxygen molecules (which are very good electron acceptors in terms of generating energy) can fulfil them.

So this basically rules out any organism more complex than a microbe (unless they can get their oxygen from a non-atmospheric source such as an abundant supply of water, but that’s outside the scope of the question). It’s possible that alien life might evolve a decent method of respiration that does not involve oxygen, but even if it did it’d be drastically, drastically different from what we’d recognise as “life”. Since we’re now dealing with microbes there is some good news, and that’s that microbes have continually surprised us with their capacity to live and thrive in hostile environments. We’ve already seen how extremophiles have adapted to hot, cold, acid, alkali and even radioactive environments, but the thing that immediately sprang to my mind when I read this question was the curious case of the Streptococcus mitis bacteria that was (allegedly) inadvertently sent to the Moon on one of the Surveyor probes.

This bears some explanation because it’s one of the more astonishing events in astrobiology, yet it gets almost no discussion outside of academic circles — prior to me looking up that article the only reason I knew about it was an offhand piece of trivia in a Bill Bryson popular science book. Surveyor 3 was sent up to the Moon to gather scientific data and scout things out for a future lunar landing back in 1967, and it spent two and a half years sitting on the lunar surface doing precisely that. Surveyor 3 was a machine probe, not a life-bearing spacecraft. It had precisely no provision for keeping any hitchhiking microbial life alive during that thirty-month stint on the Moon. So when the Apollo 12 astronauts retrieved one of the cameras from Surveyor 3 in 1969 and brought it back to Earth, NASA scientists were rather surprised to discover about 200 spores of Streptococcus mitis hidden away inside the camera lens mounting.

Now, to be fair, there’s actually two ways this could have happened. Either common Strep. bacteria managed to survive two and a half years in an environment that is completely inimical to Earth life, or else they somehow got onto the camera at some point between the Apollo 12 astronauts retrieving it from the lunar surface and the camera being checked back on Earth. This is a debate that has sadly devolved into the scientific equivalent of “NO UR A POOPYHEAD!” Modern sceptics assert that it was sloppy procedure in the NASA clean room that lead to contamination of the camera, while the actual crew that found the bacteria cling to certain abnormalities in the way the Strep. was subsequently cultured that point to the camera bacteria being in a state of dormancy when they were recovered, which they wouldn’t have been if they’d just come out of a filthy, smelly human body. Since the original camera parts have long since been contaminated by being put on display in a museum there was no possible way to repeat the tests independently and find out for sure. If it’s true, though, then it does point to bacterial life forms being able to survive for short periods in the vacuum of space.

Unfortunately that’s not quite good enough for the purposes of our question. If the Strep. really did survive up there then it did so in a state of hibernation, shutting down nearly all active biological processes and effectively becoming inert. We want something that can live in a vacuum environment – bacteria may be able to cope in a deoxygenated environment through anaerobic respiration assuming they have a sufficient quantity of nearby raw materials, but can they deal with all that vacuum implies? This is the homeostasis part of the question: we have to set the parameters of the environment and then determine what qualities our vacuum organism would need to survive in them. I’m going to use the surface of the Moon as my touchstone here; having no atmosphere it is an almost pure vacuum and so it is exposed to all that space can throw at it including sunlight, cosmic radiation and meteorites. The things we have to consider are:

Temperature. It can get pretty cold in a vacuum, with lows in deep space approaching just a few degrees above absolute zero (or -273^oC) but without an atmosphere around to filter out sunlight getting hit with the full whack of it can easily heat up the surface of the Moon to over 100^oC at the equator. If you’re on part of a rotating body that alternately flits in and out of sunlight then you end up being chilled and cooked in equal measure. Extremophiles exist which live and thrive in high temperatures, and extremophiles exist which can live and thrive in low temperatures, but I’m not aware of any extremophile which can do both at once, and certainly not over a temperature range of about 250 degrees. If we could pick and choose both attributes and give them to our vacuum organism, the next thing it would have to deal with would be…

Radiation. There’s no atmosphere to filter sunlight’s UV content out, either, so our vacuum organism has to be resistant to ionising ration to boot. This is a somewhat easier condition to deal with since radioresistant extremophiles soak the stuff up like a sunbather on a hot day at the beach with nary an ill-effect in sight.

Low pressure. Not so much of a problem for certain extremophiles; this zombie microbe in particular has no problem thriving in low pressure environments (and is radioresistant to boot).

If there is a condition that would give pause to the concept life in a vacuum, then, it would appear to be the temperature range such an organism would have to endure. Still, while complex life wouldn’t have a chance in a vacuum (these adorable little water bears notwithstanding), an extremophile-type organism that could cope with it is far more plausible. It’s also worth remembering that the high- and low- temperature extremophiles are niche organisms specifically evolved to survive in a specific temperature range – in other words, the reason they can’t deal with lower/higher temperatures is because they’ve never had to. Just because an organism that can deal with both doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it’s not possible.

To sum up, then:

• Complex lifeforms cannot survive in a vacuum because they cannot derive the required amount of energy from their local environment to support their large cell structures.

• Certain forms of microbial life would be able to survive in a vacuum in the short-term, but I have significant doubts about their ability to do it over a long-term period in which the environmental parameters of the vacuum are fluctuating widely.

• It might be possible for a hypothetical microbe with all the right qualities to survive indefinitely within a vacuum. It’d certainly be foolish to rule it out just because we haven’t seen it yet; fifty years ago scientists thought the extremophile life was impossible, but today we know there are hundreds of the bastards.

Honestly though, those tardigrades scare the willies out of me and if anything is going to be able to survive long-term – if not thrive — in a vacuum environment it’s going to be them.

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1. I’m not ruling out the possibility of life somehow hitching a ride inside a comet or asteroid as these would provide some raw materials that could be metabolised and which would keep the organisms alive for a time.
2. This is a joke, in case you’re wondering. I’m not actually going to have my sole source be a GSCE Bitesize revision page for all that it’s probably broadly correct. No, I also used the TalkTalk web… encyclopedia… hang on a minute. Seriously though, the web doesn’t appear to have a single good explanation of anaerobic respiration for idiots (i.e. me) and if any biologists are reading you should probably get right on that. Meanwhile I did ask a biologist friend if I understood it correctly and he said I was in the right general area, so that’s going to have to do.

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Innokenti asks

Weapons in space. I imagine Sci-Fi shows lie to us lots about the sort of stuff that might be effective in a space-battle. For example as I understand nukes would only be of minimal use out there in space.

What are the most efficient weapons for space-battles though? (Assuming largely human technology of near-future imagination rather than magic alien energy shields and stuff.)

Yes. Yes they do lie to you, in the same way that spaceships don’t actually handle like jet fighters in a vacuum what with having no atmosphere to react against. Space combat, if it ever happened, would likely be ridiculously crude and nasty thanks to the Newtonian nature of space. Things are whizzing around very quickly making them hard to target, but at the same time you can accelerate a projectile up to unheard-of velocities thanks to not having to worry about any of that pesky atmospheric drag. Most current theories about space weapons involve adaptations of current Earth-based weapons systems, but they all carry certain advantages and disadvantages inherent in their design.

Real examples of weapons in space.

There is one! Back when the Cold War was in full swing the Soviets decided it would be a good idea to mount a 23mm anti-aircraft cannon on Salyut-3 (a space station) to defend against “US space-based interceptors”, with integrated rocket boosters to cancel out the recoil thrust that might have resulted in de-orbiting the space station. It wasn’t the most elegant of space weapons since it could not track a target independently, instead requiring the entire space station to be oriented towards the target. There are conflicting reports on whether it was ever used; it was certainly never used while there were cosmonauts on board due to the inherent risk of firing high-explosive cannon shells via an untested system in a vacuum, but it may have been test-fired after the cosmonauts left. Barring any of the top-secret weapons programs so enamoured of Hollywood, this remains (to my knowledge) the only actual example of the weaponization of space.

Anyway, you wanted to know about current or near-future weapons systems that might be adapted for space use. This means we’re talking bullets, missiles or (mirroring current developments in the way high-technology nations fight wars) drones of some kind. However, thanks to the ranges at which a space engagement would be fought and the speeds at which spaceships travel, there are some quirks involved with each one.

1) Conventional high explosives are now pretty much useless.

High explosives are “high” because they have what is called a high brisance; essentially the rate of expansion of the explosive gas. If this is very high it’ll compress the atmosphere around it and force it outwards in a highly destructive shockwave that does most of the damage – it’s like being hit by a solid wall of air moving at the speed of sound, which is easily enough to knock down buildings and rip limbs from their sockets. But in space, of course, there is no atmosphere; no medium through which the explosive can transmit its destructive force. All it’ll have left will be the force of the explosive gas itself which, while considerable, will diminish considerably over distance thanks to the inverse square law. This means that most conventional explosives – including nukes – are much less effective in space. There are two ways you could adapt an explosive to make it more useful:

Use it as the explosive force for some kind of flak or fragmentation shell. This at least alleviates the problem of having your destructive force dispersing uniformly into an expanding sphere by transferring it to discrete fragments or projectiles which concentrate the kinetic energy of the explosion. Unfortunately I doubt you’d get a whole lot of velocity out of a high explosive burst, so the fragments themselves still wouldn’t pack that much of a punch. Much like real-world flak this would be useful for area denial and little else.

Shape the explosion so that it is focused in one direction. Shaped charges are all the rage these days, and if you got your shaped charge in contact with an enemy spaceship there’s no reason why it wouldn’t do just as much damage to it as a High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) shell would to an Iraqi T-55. This too has a drawback, though, and it’s that if you have to score a near-hit with a shaped charge to do any damage, you may as well take out the explosive and make your shell a solid lump of metal instead. This brings us to…

2) Bullets are now absurdly deadly.

Or at least, their lethal potential is now drastically increased. A regular gun you could buy in a shop in the US would work just fine in the vacuum of space – the primer and cordite explosive used to accelerate the bullet come with their own oxidiser, so lack of oxygen would not be a problem. The bullet would also leave the barrel slightly faster too what with it not having to force its way through any atmospheric gas. However, a regular gun is not going to be significantly more lethal in space than on Earth. If whatever you’re shooting at is armoured in any way then the bullets will still bounce off. Bullets do most of their damage via kinetic energy, or

Which is about the zillionth time I’ve used this equation. There’s a maximum velocity achieveable by gunpowder weapons (details of why are in my post on light gas guns), and so there’s a hard ceiling on the potential kinetic energy of a normal bullet. We’re not too concerned about this on Earth because honestly the guns we have kill people pretty good, but if you took even the anti-aircraft cannon they mounted on Salyut and tried to kill a spaceship with it you’d run into a big problem: namely that spaceships move really fast. We’re talking relative velocities of at least several kilometres per second. Unless it’s coming towards you, the spaceship will be able to simply outrun your bullets, and even if they were they would be an incredible pain in the ass to target. Consider that Goalkeeper/Phalanx CIWS systems have trouble shooting down incoming anti-ship missiles — which are moving a lot slower than our hypothetical spaceship — and you have some idea of the scale of the problem.

The “good” news is that even future spaceships will likely not mount a huge amount of armour plating without some kind of revolutionary new engine system that renders all that extra mass irrelevant. If you scored a hit with even a simple kinetic slug you’d do an awful lot of damage; micrometeoroid impacts are a big problem for orbiting satellites, and those are just tiny chunks of rock a few millimetres in diameter. The trick, both to ensure a hit and to ensure that hit scores a kill, is to make your projectile go as fast as possible. This is something that gunpowder weapons simply aren’t capable of so you’d need to chuck out that system and replace it with a functioning railgun system or something, but it’s certainly theoretically possible. Even then, though, at the engagement ranges spaceship battles are likely to take place at (thousands of kilometres at the very least) it would be trivial for your target to take evasive action if they saw you coming. So you either have to blanket space with a lot of projectiles, or else make your projectiles guided in some way.

3) Missiles are a middle-of-the-road approach.

When I talk about space missiles, I’m not talking about what you’d normally conceive of as a missile, with the rocket booster that constantly burns to provide thrust. This would be redundant and silly on a space missile, since if you had the tech to accelerate a kinetic projectile up to several km/s as in 2) it’d be far easier to launch the missile that way rather than relying on chemical fuel rockets. No, a space missile would consist of a very sparse maneuvering system for making course corrections along with a guidance package to make sure it hits the target. It’d have more in common with the ubiquitous idea of the “killsat” – a satellite designed to take out other satellites by colliding with them – than it would a conventional missile. The advantage of this design would be that your chances of hitting the target increase exponentially once you make the projectile guided. The disadvantages would be exactly the same as those of regular missiles: they would need some sort of active sensor system in order to track their target that the target would see coming several thousand kilometres away.

4) Manned space fighters are not going to happen.

Sorry, but there aren’t going to be any Starbucks or Apollos flying around in the space battles of the future. While it might seem like a neat idea to get in an X-Wing and go gallivanting around the galaxy, if you actually put a human in a military space vehicle all you would be doing is introducing a massive weak point and drain on the resources of the spacecraft. Humans need food, water, oxygen, heat, and all those other little amenities we take for granted here on Earth, and any manoeuvring the spacecraft did would be limited by the requirement to not kill the people inside through excessive G-forces. All this, and a human wouldn’t actually add very much to the spacecraft. Like jet airliners modern spacecraft are all flown by computers these days anyway (yes, even the Space Shuttle) so there’s no real need to have humans on board.

5) Drone fighters almost certainly are.

That thing in the picture? That’s a Predator drone, one of many which can be found flying over Afghanistan and Iraq looking for “terrorists”. At first Predators were simple reconnaissance craft that were supposed to guide vehicles driven/piloted by actual live humans to their targets, but eventually some bright spark came up with the idea of arming Predator drones with Hellfire missiles. Now the Predators hunt all on their own, with the only human intervention coming in the form of a control signal from a trailer park near Las Vegas, Nevada.

That, if anything, is the sort of weapon that is going to be fighting a space war; an autonomous computer-controlled spacecraft capable of deploying subsidiary weapons systems on its own say-so¹. Solving the problem of true autonomy is a significant hurdle, but if an AI can be developed which is capable of running a spacecraft on its own with very little intervention from Earth beyond broad strategic directions then drone spacecraft would be by far the best option for fighting in space. They can move faster, react quicker and are actually capable of targeting other spacecraft moving at several km/s with a fair chance of scoring a hit. A drone fighter wouldn’t look like a Predator; instead, it’d resemble a militarised version of a space probe since aerodynamics and armour would be completely irrelevant in space. At its most basic level the drone would simply attempt to collide with an enemy spacecraft, much like the guided “missile” concept above. There’s more potential in it than that, though; you’d need to launch the drone from somewhere and that somewhere would probably be a larger drone mothership which would be the actual military asset, the smaller drones fulfilling a role similar to cruise missiles on Earth.

Wars in space would therefore take place with a minimum of human intervention. You would need the long-term strategic planning capacity of the human brain, but past that everything would be in the hands of the machines. It would be a war fought by remote control, where the combatants and casualties have no first and last names but merely a make and model. We’re moving in this direction in our enthusiastic pursuit of atmospheric combat at the bottom of a gravity well, so I see no reason why we wouldn’t apply the same technology and the same concepts to space.

Of course, this assumes that the human race would ever get around to fighting a space war. Right now we can’t even be bothered to go to the Moon; interplanetary war seems at least a couple of centuries beyond us. By then technology will have likely changed beyond all recognition, so all of what I just wrote was complete bollocks. I just hope it was entertaining bollocks, is all.

1. Predator drones don’t quite have this level of autonomy because it makes people a bit nervous, but they could if the US military didn’t have a problem with a machine making a wrong call and incinerating a bunch of civilians with an erroneously-targeted Hellfire missile. Oddly enough it’s A-OK when human pilots do this, as if having your bloody violent death dispensed by an actual person is somehow a more palatable idea for Western civilization to swallow.

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