I’m surprised how much space travel there is in current
science fiction. In the time of Jules
Verne and as late as Hugo Gernsback, space travel was a wild idea. Just thinking about it required unusual
imagination. Today’s space ship stories
are not astounding or amazing. They’re
products of aficionados demonstrating the fine points of what’s possible within
an elaborate set of constraints. That’s
not to say these stories aren’t entertaining and original. Freedom from terrestrial
challenges expands the boundaries of literature. Unusual human dilemmas are explored, often revealing
beauty. The imaginative parts of modern science fiction stories are more likely
to be in the bots, clones, reality simulations and plot twists while the space
ships, alien planets and hair-raising interstellar car chases are just the
assumed background. But the original thrill
of space travel was the stunning wonders of distant worlds that were simply
incredible at the time they were written.
That is gone. We know too much
now about those distant worlds.
A lot of what we know now tells us how barren and hostile to
life space and other planets are. This
raises some huge problems, so huge that I believe that the biggest lesson to be
learned is that we should forget about space travel. We are inseparable from earth.
The first problem is living in space, whether in spacecraft
or on alien planets. Human experience in space after fifty-odd years is limited
to encapsulating a few persons in vessels filled with things brought along or
hoisted up from earth, at enormous expense.1 A sustainable presence on other planets would
require huge efforts to either supply them from earth or find ways to create
and maintain a human-friendly environment using indigenous materials. No, we can’t assume the atmosphere will be
breathable on any planet within reach – I still see that in recent stories. Earth is turning out to be a very unusual
planet. A recent article by John Gribbin2
shows just how unusual. There’s only a small
band within the galaxy where conditions are just right to allow life as we know
it to start. Either it’s too hot with
radiation from huge and exploding stars toward the center, or it’s unlikely
that rocky planets could form because of the low density of necessary materials
beyond our goldilocks belt. And the particular size and orbital distance
of our single big moon is very unusual, having resulted from the collision of
early earth with another early planet that blew the moon out of the resulting
kinetic blob. It stabilizes earth, and
the way the separation occurred affected both the earth and the moon’s
composition, which has been important to the formation of life on earth. Those unique conditions eventually led to
extensive photosynthesis that produced an oxygen atmosphere. Maybe the reason for Fermi’s paradox isn’t so
paradoxical after all: the calculations of how many life-supporting planets are
out there are based on wrong assumptions.
But there are over 100 billion stars in our galaxy3,
and at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe4,
you say, and even if improbable for any given star, a few of them must have
conditions similar to ours or favorable to some kind of life. OK, but the nearest star is over four light
years away. We should call these
distances radio years, because that’s how long it would take for any
communications signal to get there, not to mention actually going there. And that’s one-way. So let’s draw a circle around the area where
we could have sent a signal and then gotten an answer since, say Plato’s time. That would be a distance of about 1,200 light
years. That’s about one percent of the
distance across our own little galaxy. A
sphere with this radius is about one-tenth of one percent of the galactic
volume. Even if we did receive a
red-shifted peep from a civilization over the infrared rainbow in the next
galaxy over, we couldn’t communicate with it.
Even if we learn how to govern ourselves, given genetic drift our
species will likely be gone before our galactic neighbors’ smart phones could
even ring with our call back. This
really goes beyond the problem of finding a planet we can colonize. It means that the part of the universe that
is effectively available for communication or even to see what is happening
right now is very, very small.
Some efforts have been made to build a closed system in
which a few “terranauts” could live without a welcoming atmosphere. It was a huge effort and no matter what they
tried it didn’t work.5
It’s one thing to do it where you can just call things off and open the doors,
or go on bottled oxygen until you can de-orbit, and another in a place where
you can’t breathe, and are bombarded by radiation outside your shelter.6
Some authors celebrate the prospect of “terraforming” on
Mars and other planets, to make them habitable.
We hear this hubris as it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we can’t
even reliably prevent earth from becoming uninhabitable. We can’t even terraform earth! Can we really manage the stable
transformation of a whole other, very distant, planet, which has hard physical
reasons for being like it already is?
A related problem is cost, in energy and effort. In writing
about space travel, we don’t appreciate the enormous distances to other
planets, other stars, other galaxies, and the difficulties in getting there and
back, and even communicating. Even Mars, the second closest planet to earth, is
really far away. It takes months to get
from Mars to Earth using any foreseeable technology7,
and a lot of energy. Maybe we could find
ways of building expendable boosters on Mars and harvesting solar energy to
escape Martian gravity. Of course it would take a bit longer during the times
when Mars is on the other side of the sun.
By the time you figure out the costs of getting everything you need
there, and then getting what you want from Mars or even the much closer moon,
and down to earth through the atmosphere to where you need it, and cleaning up
after yourself, you will have to wonder if it wouldn’t be better to go
somewhere else. O. Glenn Smith, former
manager of shuttle systems engineering at NASA’s Johnson Space Center,
estimates that pioneering for establishment of a small Mars colony would cost
over $2 trillion.8
This
doesn’t include maintaining the colony once established. NASA has yet to
produce a cost estimate for the first human launch to Mars. Maybe then we go to Venus, the closest planet.
No, there’s a bit too much atmosphere there. Well, how about the other planets? Well, they
are even farther, son, much farther. Setting
sail into the emptiness of space to colonize a planet is not the same as
crossing an ocean propelled by the wind to a place where you’ll find arable
land, game and native peoples ready to exploit.
But let’s say, in the spirit of supreme imagination, that
the practicalities of cost and energy cited above can someday be overcome by
new technologies. Why do we have to actually send our frail human bodies out
there? Is it to extract precious metals
or some other rare substance? Is there
anything we need that much, that we don’t have or can’t make? Maybe, despite the costs and harsh conditions,
we need to go out there just because it’s there, to explore, to understand the
universe, satisfy the deep fundamental drive of curiosity that gives basic
science its true value.9
But it’s increasingly clear that exploration can be done robotically, and
better, with extensions of ourselves, long-distance tools. It doesn’t require our bodies to go there. Not only are robotic space probes doing
things science fiction never imagined, but earth and orbital observatories are
discovering things about the very origins of the universe that no “boots on the
ground” of a cold dead or molten metal planet could ever beat. You can’t travel
to the big bang, but through ingenuity we’ve been able to examine the sudden
release of photons shortly after it banged (the cosmic microwave background)
and learn an awful lot about how our whole universe is happening.
In the hubris of the terraforming and colonizing ideas is a
clue to the underlying drive for moving out to other planets. It is the drive
for conquest, expansion of our territory, the allure of the frontier. Space is
said to be the high frontier. For years,
Captain Kirk and his successors told us it was the final frontier. I’m amazed
at how glibly terraforming and space colonization are presented in serious
future speculation. It reminds me of the
smart-alecky veterans of Alamagordo, looking up from their slide rules to
pronounce that soon nuclear energy would be too cheap to meter. Colonization of other worlds has come to seem
an inevitable goal of humanity. Expansion of the human intellect throughout the
universe is seen as an ultimate goal of our species, whether by human beings or
human-invested artificial intelligence.10
Sorry folks, but colonization is not a fundamental human desire. It’s cultural, not uncommon in humans, but by
no means universal. The particular
strain of this cultural malignancy at work here is the western tradition of
endless manifest destiny, always subduing new lands and whatever natives happen
to be in the way, for the right, white, and good.
And there’s a more fundamental reason why space travel
doesn’t make sense. The only good reason to escape the earth is that we’re
making a mess of it. Maybe it would be
better to clean up the mess. Because we are
inseparable from the earth. Everything in our bodies moves in cycles from the
earth into our bodies and out again. We
are part of it. It is part of us,
inevitably and forever. If it dies, we
die, and as much as we’ve learned that’s screaming this at us, we can’t seem to
wrap our little heads around it.
Building our future stories on fantasies of conquest and
escape smacks of futility. Good science
fiction was never escapism. It is expansive imagination. It is the wrong time
for fantasies of conquest and escape. Space
travel was expansively imaginative in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Forget it.
Whenever I see yet another story about space travel and space
colonization, I imagine Jules Verne yawning.
No, we don’t need to confine ourselves to pristine, eco-friendly little
comfort zones or exploring the ocean instead of space. Plenty of the best science fiction has been
focused on technological marvels, and horrors, other than space ships and
planetary conquest. The fertile unknown
is all around us, waiting to be explored.
We are threatening this earth, our milk and our breath, and
the more we turn away, the worse it will get. There aren’t fertile planets and alien
civilizations within reach ready for us to conquer and colonize. Space does not
beckon us. Fleeing into space will kill us. If we turn our imaginations away
from our earth to fantasies of escape and conquest now, when the earth beneath
our feet is eroding, acidifying, melting and burning because of our errors, we
betray our history and our progeny. There may be no one left to learn the
lessons of our errors from their history.
[1] Costs
for cargo and crew transportation to and from the International Space Station
are about 50% of its annual budget, which varies from $3 to $4 billion per
year. The crew varies from 3 to 6
persons (AUDIT OF COMMERCIAL RESUPPLY SERVICES TO THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE
STATION, NASA Office of Inspector General, April 26, 2018).
[2]
Scientific American, October 2018. See
also Gribbin’s book Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique (2011).
[5]
See Wired Magazine’s October 2016 article on the Biosphere projects and T.C.
Boyle’s 2016 novel The Terranauts exploring what went wrong (https://www.wired.com/2016/10/terranauts-tc-boyle-novel/).
[6]
See https://phys.org/news/2016-11-bad-mars.html.
“Prolonged exposure to the kinds of (radiation)levels detected on Mars could
lead to all kinds of health problems – like acute radiation sickness, increased
risk of cancer, genetic damage, and even death.” Most planets, including Mars, will not have
strong magnetic fields that shield its surface from radiation from its
star.
[7] https://www.space.com/24701-how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-mars.html.
This article discusses current propulsion technologies. It also mentions possible advanced
technologies which can move small space probes, not bulk material carriers,
much faster, but with complex technology and huge energy inputs.
[9] In
1969, when asked by a congressional committee what value for national defense
would accrue from basic science funding, Robert Wilson, director of Fermilab,
answered that “it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except
to help make it worth defending.” (https://history.fnal.gov/testimony.html)
[10] See
Bostrom, N., Superintelligence – Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), p.
101 and ff. and Kurzweil, R, The Singularity is Near (2005).
No comments:
Post a Comment