The Designer's
Galaxy
One
way to keep one's sanity inside a terraforming
discussion is to remember why one wanted to set sail for space in the first
place. Perhaps the most compelling reasoning for grabbing a toehold beyond
Earth was articulated by Greg Allison within these pages a few months ago: survival, not just of we the "smart monkeys"
but of Earth's complex and explosive ecology.
"If
you've got an endangered species, you don't want to have just one little plot
of it someplace,' says David Grinspoon. "All life on
Earth is that endangered species. If we get to that stage where we'll be moving
from one celestial body to another, we'll have a pretty good crack at outliving
the Sun. We may be manning the lifeboats, but in those lifeboats there will be
all the species of Earth coming with us (well, maybe not the mosquitoes)."
We
space enthusiasts have felt this push for a long time. Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky, the Russian space visionary, began to
build out a sensible strategy for populating the galaxy while the Wrights were
still building bicycles. By the middle of the 1920's he "had it down to a
science" (engineering details to be worked out later, of course). A liberal
translation goes like this:
- Build,
test and fly winged airplanes powered by rocket engines. [Sound familiar,
X PRIZE fans?]
- Bit by
bit, fly these faster and higher. [We now call it: "Build a little; test a
little."]
- Drop the
wings and create true rockets with reaction control systems.
- Learn to
splashdown from orbit into the cushioning ocean. [Alan Shepard became Tsiolkovsky's test pilot in 1961.]
- Get up to
Mach 25 and orbit the suckers.
- Incrementally
extend your mission durations.
- Learn how
to grow plants in zero-G to make atmosphere.
- Get your
crews comfortable working outside in pressure-suits.
- Put your
EVA skills to work making closed-cycle orbiting plant nurseries.
- Build
town-sized space stations in various Earth orbits.
- Harness
the Sun to heat your habitats, nurture their plants and push your around
the Solar System.
- Expand
your operation to the Main Belt of asteroids, using their resources to
replicate your large habitats. Encourage big, diverse groups of people to
live there.
- Populate
the rest of the Solar System -- and as much farther out as you can get --
changing planets as needed. [OK, so there's the "T" word, finally.]
- Now -- as
a consequence of the god-like powers you've obtained -- work on changing
humans to live more personally fulfilling, socially responsible lives.
- Give in
to population pressure and expand Humanity's range to other stars; spreading
Earth's spawn geometrically.
- Leave the
Sun behind entirely -- sometime well before it burns out.
So
now you have it: a sixteen-step program to an infinite future for the seed of
Humankind. Note how late in the game terraforming
appears. Almost a century ago, Tsiolkovsky's stunning
intuition showed that long before you get to the level of engineering required
to transform whole worlds, you already have everything you need to prosper in
space without such worlds! And there are very good reasons not to automatically
gravitate to planets.
Planet
Problems
Implicit
in this notion of planned planetary engineering is that you have to start with
something the size of a whole world. But why do that?
Students
and followers of Gerard K. O'Neill (yes, this author is one such) have
conducted thousands of gentle, loving interventions for the past three decades,
trying to help our colleagues get past their inborn "planetary
chauvinism." Just because you evolved on
a planet does not necessitate that you continue to live on one. And there are
some profoundly good reasons not to do so. Like that big honkin'
"gravity well" that you have to expensively and dangerously blast your way up
out of each time you need to go someplace. And the bigger the
planet, the worse the penalty.
It's
tough to scale your engineering efforts to alter an existing world, making it
ecologically dynamic yet stable enough for biology (like Earth's beneficial disequilibrium).
But in building ever-larger individual contained habitats, you may likely learn
the environmental and construction technologies to do so. Along the way, you
end up creating a whole host of custom-designed mini-worlds in wide a range of
shapes, sizes, climates, gravity levels and life-styles associated with these
factors.
Importantly,
a widely distributed, de-centralized society is much more resilient to (likely
completely immune from) acts of senseless terrorism -- even if such acts are
perpetrated on a planetary scale: say a diverted retrograde comet; a doomsday
bio-weapon; choose your own personal nightmare...
And
after all, planets are not common, not easy to travel to, and not really all
that nearby.
Enticing
as it may be, Mars is still on the order of 100 million miles away. And it's a bitch of an environment to work
in: dusty, cold, windy, dry... Much closer are the Near Earth Asteroids; easier
to get to than the Moon, much richer in materials too. Planetary geophysicist Dan Durda says it this way: "By the time you pull all the
metals, the rich organic molecules, all the useful volatiles like water, the
oxides (for re-entry shields) out of the surface of an asteroid, the slag (the
garbage) you have left over has about the same composition as the lunar
soil." And you, or your teleoperated robot, can work your way around most any
asteroid with your fingertips. There's no deep "gravity well" to climb out of.
Way to Go
Let's
face it: space settlement -- whether upon the surface of a terraformed
sphere or within an engineered one -- is the living embodiment of
"disruptive technology." If we go (and I
say we must) we will change the Solar System and it will change us.
Easy
for writers, like yours truly, to sit back and poke irony; hard to "put yer nickel down and bet". So I say this: Go on, inflame
your colleagues. Debate terraforming all you want. Challenge and duel to your
heart's content. But at the end of the night -- and
particularly the next morning when it comes time to approach the bankers and
the venture capitalists -- let's do what works.
And
what works is what takes the least work: Asteroid/comet resources in near Earth
orbits. The use of solar energy and electro-tether technology
-- and a little bit of nuclear power -- to launch ourselves into a
Hydrogen/Oxygen economy, which then would drive higher-order materials
processing. And Humanity would get lots and lots of cheap,
free-floating, scalable, designer settlements in interesting, useful orbits.
Argue about modifying and colonizing whatever mud-balls you want as soon as the
technologies truly become available.
But
if you want to widely populate space soon, do this first. The way Tsiolkovsky, O'Neill and, perhaps, God (or at least the
physics of the Universe) intended.
Dave Brody has
been a Life Member of the National Space Society since 1982. He is currently IMAGINOVA's Executive Producer and Director of Media; the
views expressed herein are entirely his own.
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