I want humanity to spread to the stars
I consider myself a futurist. I enjoy looking at not just the big picture, but also the long picture. I ask questions like, “Where will humanity be in another millennium?” I admit the chances of living to see any of it are slim (but not none!), but it fascinates me nonetheless. Just like others may love studying ancient history, I love imagining the possibilities of the future. It’s hard to say whether this is because I’ve read a lot of science fiction, or that I read a lot of science fiction because I am predisposed towards thinking about the future. I suspect there may be a feedback mechanism at work. But either way, that’s what I care about.
So you can imagine my chagrin when humanity does something really shortsighted, like creating false propaganda to confuse the issue of global warming so that corporations can save money while the planet dies, polluting space for a very temporary military propaganda boost, or cutting funding to vital Earth-facing satellite missions. So few people really think about the long term consequences of their actions. And of the ones who do, many aren’t moral enough to care about the consequences that will only become a serious problem after they are no longer around anymore.
My biggest concern, in the long view, is if humanity will develop technologically to the point where we can begin colonizing space. There are all sorts of obstacles in the way: those who don’t understand the ultimate importance of spreading our kind across the stars; global warming, which could destroy us (or at least cause us to focus all of our effort inwards) before we truly make it into space; catastrophic warfare (admittedly less likely since the end of the Cold War, but a potential political destabilization of nuclear-armed Pakistan could cause problems); and, of course, worldwide disaster.
The problem with only living on Earth is that we are putting all of our eggs in one basket. Just looking at the archaeological record, we can identify all sorts of massive extinction events — asteroid impacts, runaway global cooling, supervolcanoes — that we simply wouldn’t be able to survive. Yes, we have put a few humans into space, but that is but the first step. It only really counts when humanity is able to survive the total loss of the Earth. I’m placing my bets on a Lunar colony as the first to allow this fall-back scenario, but who knows, maybe Mars, despite its increased distance, will ultimately prove more suitable for large scale human habitation.
And then once humanity has colonized other worlds in this solar system, we would spread out to the stars. The technology for that doesn’t yet exist, but there’s nothing that makes it impossible. A large enough ship using a nuclear pulse drive for propulsion could make it to nearby star systems without having to break the speed of light barrier (something we not only do not currently know how to do, but most scientists think is forever impossible). And from then on, humanity would simply leapfrog amongst the stars, with each new colony sending out its own colony ships as soon as it develops enough to be able to construct and fill them.
Given all of this, you can imagine my excitement when I watched Tom Cruise’s appearance on Jay Leno’s The Tonight Show a few years back. He was saying many of the same things I’m saying now, such as it is important that humanity spread to the stars lest one calamity here on Earth end it all. I had only ever heard scientists and sf authors talking like this, never a highly visible pop culture figure like Tom Cruise! It had me leaning forward in my chair, hanging on his every word. I didn’t care if the audience (and Jay) was looking at him really weird.
And then it hit me; Tom Cruise is a Scientologist. FSM dammit. While I don’t doubt his belief in the importance of these ideas, he didn’t arrive at them organically; they were brainwashed into him by a religious cult. It left me thinking: Scientology would actually be pretty cool if it were a non-profit philosophy with all of the Xenu crap stripped out. But, alas, it is a for-profit cult religion with scientific overtones. What a waste.
What we need is a public figure who, unlike Tom Cruise, isn’t tainted with the prospect of all of his notions coming from a cult religion. We need someone like Al Gore — actually, someone very much like Al Gore, because he’s made lots of public awareness progress on the global warming front. But we also need someone who emphasizes the importance of establishing a permanent presence in space. Increasing funding to NASA may not even be the best way; it may make more sense to use efficient private or public-private corporations.
But unfortunately for humanity, Al Gore isn’t going to be in a position to do much for these causes. As I write this, the 2008 Iowa caucuses are less than an hour away, and Al Gore hasn’t declared his intent to run for the presidency. I had maintained some hope that he would go for it, but now, on the eve of the official start of the election season, it’s sinking in that Al Gore really isn’t running. We need more people like him, people who don’t shy away from looking at the long view and making decisions accordingly. Future humans will thank us for it.
January 3rd, 2008 at 23:25
Meat is too fragile and, as a result, too expensive to transport around. Once we give up being meat it will be much easier to spread across the universe. Unless we do real space travel will remain so fantastically dangerous (and expensive) that mankind will not be able stomach it.
Organized religion has long been a tool to control the masses. Reality is a rather hard and complex place… and a lot of people would rather only deal with the readers digest version. Perhaps those of us who do not partake are too critical and too eager to dismiss its uses and advantages. After all.. your example makes it clear that Scientology, of all things, has done *something* right.
NASA as a public institution? What a joke. Head down to KSC and find some people working on the shuttle. Ask who they work for… When they answer ‘USA‘ they don’t mean the United States of America.
Space exploration, like much of Science, *should* be publicity funded. Space shouldn’t be the domain of private interests, it should be the heritage of all man. Such pursuits are for the benefit, and necessary for the survival of, all our descendants. Besides, beyond a few niche areas the profits simply aren’t there for private parties to bother funding it.
But the situation we have now with space exploration is possibly the worst of all worlds. We have the clumsy inefficiency and non-accountability of an enormous public program, and the private hording of benefits (inventions, trade secrets, experienced personnel,and the simple consolidation of wealth) of private programs.
Alas, I have no solutions… but I understand that the first step is admitting that there is a problem.
January 3rd, 2008 at 23:32
I think you overestimate the difficulties of transporting meat. There are many ways to get around it:
Shielding the starship from cosmic rays, either with some as-of-yet-uninvented technology, or just doing it the old-fashioned way using thick metal. Then, just be sure to have your starship accelerate at around 1g (which is definitely fast enough to get us places within human lifetimes), and the inhabitants wouldn’t really feel any different than living in, say, an apartment building.
Don’t transport meat, transport the ingredients to make meat. Why not just send frozen/suspended fertilized embryos and the exowombs to raise them in? As a bonus, you don’t have to store any food for use en route.
Or, just cryogenically freeze people and unfreeze them at the destination.
Yes, I agree with you that humanity can and will escape the shackles of meat, but there’s no reason we can’t travel to the stars before that time comes.
January 4th, 2008 at 17:14
The phrase “escape the shackles of meat” sounds like something from a movie. I don’t know about you, but I’m rather attached to my fleshy bits, at least as long as they’re still functioning fleshy bits.
January 4th, 2008 at 20:02
“I think you overestimate the difficulties of transporting meat.”
It’s not that meat is so difficult to /transport/… it’s difficult to /keep alive/ while transporting it. Man has never lived for an extended period without extensive dependence of the 6*10^24 kilogram life support system that we call planet Earth.
Healthy people routinely die when they get lost away from the support structures of modern life, even under fairly favorable conditions. Keeping so safe and sound enough on earth that we can spend our days working about things like art and traveling to the stars is actually very hard, but are able to step up to that challenge by standing on the shoulders of thousands of years of civilization and a support system of millions other people.
It’s not that I think it would be impossible to build a microcosm of earth and send it on a far away journey, although nothing has proven it possible either. But rather, I see it as an exceptionally hard problem so much harder than anything we have yet done that it is difficult to applicate how hard.
I too find myself attached to my fleshy bits but it’s hard to deny that they are a liability. Go give your toe a good stub and savor the useless yet excruciating pain for a while if you don’t agree… or spend a fraction of a second in the hard vacuum of space. ;) Yet, my attachment to my flesh isn’t really relevant for interstellar travel: At the current rate of things it’s unlikely that any of *us* will live long enough to see such travel happen, and if we do live that long the technology that kept us around would likely be sufficiently advanced to change the rules for meat, if we’re still meat at all. In any case, I expect that out interstellar traveling descendants will be as attached to whatever they are made of as we are… and it’s really only their own opinion that counts.
January 5th, 2008 at 00:53
Humanity doesn’t have a future. The singularity intelligence does.
January 10th, 2008 at 00:15
Cyde, have you by chance read Charles Stross’s Accelerando?
January 10th, 2008 at 10:08
No, I haven’t. Is that another book I should add to my list of things to read?
January 10th, 2008 at 23:32
Well, think about it. It’s science fiction, though quite a bit different from the science fiction I typically read (I read it on a friend’s recommendation). It takes place in humanity’s near future as computing technology improves, and … I don’t want to say too much about it here to avoid spoilers. But I could tell you more over e-mail or something, if you like. It’s a vision of the future that’s quite different than what science fiction usually portrays, but it seems quite relevant to your post.