The High Frontier, Redux
(I am currently suffering from a bad cold, and it's screwing with my ability to think straight. So rather than risk damaging my real work in progress, I decided to tidy up some thoughts I've been kicking around for a while, and bolt together this essay. Which will, I hope, begin to highlight the problems I face in trying to write believable science fiction about space colonization.)
I write SF for a living. Possibly because of this, folks seem to think I ought to be an enthusiastic proponent of space exploration and space colonization. Space exploration? Yep, that's a fair cop — I'm all in favour of advancing the scientific enterprise. But actual space colonisation is another matter entirely, and those of a sensitive (or optimistic) disposition might want to stop reading right now ...
And I don't want to spend much time talking about the unspoken ideological underpinnings of the urge to space colonization, other than to point out that they're there, that the case for space colonization isn't usually presented as an economic enterprise so much as a quasi-religious one. "We can't afford to keep all our eggs in one basket" isn't so much a justification as an appeal to sentimentality, for in the hypothetical case of a planet-trashing catastrophe, we (who currently inhabit the surface of the Earth) are dead anyway. The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern.
Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive.
Here's a handy metaphor: let's approximate one astronomical unit — the distance between the Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon — to one centimetre. Got that? 1AU = 1cm. (You may want to get hold of a ruler to follow through with this one.)
The solar system is conveniently small. Neptune, the outermost planet in our solar system, orbits the sun at a distance of almost exactly 30AU, or 30 centimetres — one foot (in imperial units). Giant Jupiter is 5.46 AU out from the sun, almost exactly two inches (in old money).
We've sent space probes to Jupiter; they take two and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics. Neptune is still a stretch — only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has made it out there so far. Its journey time was 12 years, and it wasn't stopping. (It's now on its way out into interstellar space, having passed the heliopause some years ago.)
The Kuiper belt, domain of icy wandering dwarf planets like Pluto and Eris, extends perhaps another 30AU, before merging into the much more tenuous Hills cloud and Oort cloud, domain of loosely coupled long-period comets.
Now for the first scale shock: using our handy metaphor the Kuiper belt is perhaps a metre in diameter. The Oort cloud, in contrast, is as much as 50,000 AU in radius — its outer edge lies half a kilometre away.
Got that? Our planetary solar system is 30 centimetres, roughly a foot, in radius. But to get to the edge of the Oort cloud, you have to go half a kilometre, roughly a third of a mile.
Next on our tour is Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. (There might be a brown dwarf or two lurking unseen in the icy depths beyond the Oort cloud, but if we've spotted one, I'm unaware of it.) Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away.A light year is 63.2 x 103 AU, or 9.46 x 1012 Km. So Proxima Centauri, at 267,000 AU, is just under two and a third kilometres, or two miles (in old money) away from us.
But Proxima Centauri is a poor choice, if we're looking for habitable real estate. While exoplanets are apparently common as muck, terrestrial planets are harder to find; Gliese 581c, the first such to be detected (and it looks like a pretty weird one, at that), is roughly 20.4 light years away, or using our metaphor, about ten miles.
Try to get a handle on this: it takes us 2-5 years to travel two inches. But the proponents of interstellar travel are talking about journeys of ten miles. That's the first point I want to get across: that if the distances involved in interplanetary travel are enormous, and the travel times fit to rival the first Australian settlers, then the distances and times involved in interstellar travel are mind-numbing.
This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary. But to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous amounts of cheap energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand. And in the absence of (c) you're not going to get any news back from the other end in less than decades. Even if (a) is achievable, or by means of (b) we can send self-replicating factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more speculatively find some way to transmit human beings there, they are going to have zero net economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us money).
What do I mean by outrageous amounts of cheap energy?
Let's postulate that in the future, it will be possible to wave a magic wand and construct a camping kit that encapsulates all the necessary technologies and information to rebuild a human civilization capable of eventually sending out interstellar colonization missions — a bunch of self-replicating, self-repairing robotic hardware, and a downloadable copy of the sum total of human knowledge to date. Let's also be generous and throw in a closed-circuit life support system capable of keeping a human occupant alive indefinitely, for many years at a stretch, with zero failures and losses, and capable where necessary of providing medical intervention. Let's throw in a willing astronaut (the fool!) and stick them inside this assembly. It's going to be pretty boring in there, but I think we can conceive of our minimal manned interstellar mission as being about the size and mass of a Mercury capsule. And I'm going to nail a target to the barn door and call it 2000kg in total.
(Of course we can cut corners, but I've already invoked self-replicating robotic factories and closed-cycle life support systems, and those are close enough to magic wands as it is. I'm going to deliberately ignore more speculative technologies such as starwisps, mind transfer, or AIs sufficiently powerful to operate autonomously — although I used them shamelessly in my novel Accelerando. What I'm trying to do here is come up with a useful metaphor for the energy budget realistically required for interstellar flight.)
Incidentally, a probe massing 1-2 tons with an astronaut on top is a bit implausible, but a 1-2 ton probe could conceivably carry enough robotic instrumentation to do useful research, plus a laser powerful enough to punch a signal home, and maybe even that shrink-wrapped military/industrial complex in a tin can that would allow it to build something useful at the other end. Anything much smaller, though, isn't going to be able to transmit its findings to us — at least, not without some breakthroughs in communication technology that haven't shown up so far.
Now, let's say we want to deliver our canned monkey to Proxima Centauri within its own lifetime. We're sending them on a one-way trip, so a 42 year flight time isn't unreasonable. (Their job is to supervise the machinery as it unpacks itself and begins to brew up a bunch of new colonists using an artificial uterus. Okay?) This means they need to achieve a mean cruise speed of 10% of the speed of light. They then need to decelerate at the other end. At 10% of c relativistic effects are minor — there's going to be time dilation, but it'll be on the order of hours or days over the duration of the 42-year voyage. So we need to accelerate our astronaut to 30,000,000 metres per second, and decelerate them at the other end. Cheating and using Newton's laws of motion, the kinetic energy acquired by acceleration is 9 x 1017 Joules, so we can call it 2 x 1018 Joules in round numbers for the entire trip. NB: This assumes that the propulsion system in use is 100% efficient at converting energy into momentum, that there are no losses from friction with the interstellar medium, and that the propulsion source is external — that is, there's no need to take reaction mass along en route. So this is a lower bound on the energy cost of transporting our Mercury-capsule sized expedition to Proxima Centauri in less than a lifetime.
To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon in order to move a capsule of about the gross weight of a fully loaded Volvo V70 automobile to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime. That's the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force.
For a less explosive reference point, our entire planetary economy runs on roughly 4 terawatts of electricity (4 x 1012 watts). So it would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of half a million seconds — roughly 5 days — to supply the necessary va-va-voom.
But to bring this back to earth with a bump, let me just remind you that this probe is so implausibly efficient that it's veering back into "magic wand" territory. I've tap-danced past a 100% efficient power transmission system capable of operating across interstellar distances with pinpoint precision and no conversion losses, and that allows the spacecraft on the receiving end to convert power directly into momentum. This is not exactly like any power transmission system that anyone's built to this date, and I'm not sure I can see where it's coming from.
Our one astronaut, 10% of c mission approximates well to an unmanned flight, but what about longer-term expeditions? Generation ships are a staple of SF; they're slow (probably under 1% of c) and they carry a self-sufficient city-state. The crew who set off won't live to see their destination (the flight time to Proxima Centauri at 1% of c is about 420 years), but the vague hope is that someone will. Leaving aside our lack of a proven track record at building social institutions that are stable across time periods greatly in excess of a human lifespan, using a generation ship probably doesn't do much for our energy budget problem either. A society of human beings are likely to need more space and raw material to do stuff with while in flight; sticking a solitary explorer in a tin can for forty-something years is merely cruel and unusual, but doing it to an entire city for several centuries probably qualifies as a crime against humanity. We therefore need to relax the mass constraint. Assuming the same super-efficient life support as our solitary explorer, we might postulate that each colonist requires ten tons of structural mass to move around in. (About the same as a large trailer home. For life.) We've cut the peak velocity by an order of magnitude, but we've increased the payload requirement by an order of magnitude per passenger — and we need enough passengers to make a stable society fly. I'd guess a sensible lower number would be on the order of 200 people, the size of a prehistoric primate troupe. (Genetic diversity? I'm going to assume we can hand-wave around that by packing some deep-frozen sperm and ova, or frozen embryos, for later reuse.) By the time we work up to a minimal generation ship (and how minimal can we get, confining 200 human beings in an object weighing aout 2000 tons, for roughly the same period of time that has elapsed since the Plymouth colony landed in what was later to become Massachusetts?) we're actually requiring much more energy than our solitary high-speed explorer.
And remember, this is only what it takes to go to Proxima Centauri our nearest neighbour. Gliese 581c is five times as far away. Planets that are already habitable insofar as they orbit inside the habitable zone of their star, possess free oxygen in their atmosphere, and have a mass, surface gravity and escape velocity that are not too forbidding, are likely to be somewhat rarer. (And if there is free oxygen in the atmosphere on a planet, that implies something else — the presence of pre-existing photosynthetic life, a carbon cycle, and a bunch of other stuff that could well unleash a big can of whoop-ass on an unprimed human immune system. The question of how we might interact with alien biologies is an order of magnitude bigger and more complex than the question of how we might get there — and the preliminary outlook is rather forbidding.)
The long and the short of what I'm trying to get across is quite simply that, in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic — magic tech that, furthermore, does things that from today's perspective appear to play fast and loose with the laws of physics — interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non-starter. And while I won't rule out the possibility of such seemingly-magical technology appearing at some time in the future, the conclusion I draw as a science fiction writer is that if interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern of historical colonization drives that are followed by mass emigration and trade between the colonies and the old home soil.
What about our own solar system?
After contemplating the vastness of interstellar space, our own solar system looks almost comfortingly accessible at first. Exploring our own solar system is a no-brainer: we can do it, we are doing it, and interplanetary exploration is probably going to be seen as one of the great scientific undertakings of the late 20th and early 21st century, when the history books get written.
But when we start examining the prospects for interplanetary colonization things turn gloomy again.
Bluntly, we're not going to get there by rocket ship.
Optimistic projects suggest that it should be possible, with the low cost rockets currently under development, to maintain a Lunar presence for a transportation cost of roughly $15,000 per kilogram. Some extreme projections suggest that if the cost can be cut to roughly triple the cost of fuel and oxidizer (meaning, the spacecraft concerned will be both largely reusable and very cheap) then we might even get as low as $165/kilogram to the lunar surface. At that price, sending a 100Kg astronaut to Moon Base One looks as if it ought to cost not much more than a first-class return air fare from the UK to New Zealand ... except that such a price estimate is hogwash. We primates have certain failure modes, and one of them that must not be underestimated is our tendency to irreversibly malfunction when exposed to climactic extremes of temperature, pressure, and partial pressure of oxygen. While the amount of oxygen, water, and food a human consumes per day doesn't sound all that serious — it probably totals roughly ten kilograms, if you economize and recycle the washing-up water — the amount of parasitic weight you need to keep the monkey from blowing out is measured in tons. A Russian Orlan-M space suit (which, some would say, is better than anything NASA has come up with over the years — take heed of the pre-breathe time requirements!) weighs 112 kilograms, which pretty much puts a floor on our infrastructure requirements. An actual habitat would need to mass a whole lot more. Even at $165/kilogram, that's going to add up to a very hefty excess baggage charge on that notional first class air fare to New Zealand — and I think the $165/kg figure is in any case highly unrealistic; even the authors of the article I cited thought $2000/kg was a bit more reasonable.
Whichever way you cut it, sending a single tourist to the moon is going to cost not less than $50,000 — and a more realistic figure, for a mature reusable, cheap, rocket-based lunar transport cycle is more like $1M. And that's before you factor in the price of bringing them back ...
The moon is about 1.3 light seconds away. If we want to go panning the (metaphorical) rivers for gold, we'd do better to send teleoperator-controlled robots; it's close enough that we can control them directly, and far enough away that the cost of transporting food and creature comforts for human explorers is astronomical. There probably are niches for human workers on a moon base, but only until our robot technologies are somewhat more mature than they are today; Mission Control would be a lot happier with a pair of hands and a high-def camera that doesn't talk back and doesn't need to go to the toilet or take naps.
When we look at the rest of the solar system, the picture is even bleaker. Mars is ... well, the phrase "tourist resort" springs to mind, and is promptly filed in the same corner as "Gobi desert". As Bruce Sterling has puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach." In other words, going there to explore is fine and dandy — our robots are all over it already. But as a desirable residential neighbourhood it has some shortcomings, starting with the slight lack of breathable air and the sub-Antarctic nighttime temperatures and the Mach 0.5 dust storms, and working down from there.
Actually, there probably is a good reason for sending human explorers to Mars. And that's the distance: at up to 30 minutes, the speed of light delay means that remote control of robots on the Martian surface is extremely tedious. Either we need autonomous roots that can be assigned tasks and carry them out without direct human supervision, or we need astronauts in orbit or on the ground to boss the robot work gangs around.
On the other hand, Mars is a good way further away than the moon, and has a deeper gravity well. All of which drive up the cost per kilogram delivered to the Martian surface. Maybe FedEx could cut it as low as $20,000 per kilogram, but I'm not holding my breath.
Let me repeat myself: we are not going there with rockets. At least, not the conventional kind — and while there may be a role for nuclear propulsion in deep space, in general there's a trade-off between instantaneous thrust and efficiency; the more efficient your motor, the lower the actual thrust it provides. Some technologies such as the variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket show a good degree of flexibility, but in general they're not suitable for getting us from Earth's surface into orbit — they're only useful for trucking things around from low earth orbit on out.
Again, as with interstellar colonization, there are other options. Space elevators, if we build them, will invalidate a lot of what I just said. Some analyses of the energy costs of space elevators suggest that a marginal cost of $350/kilogram to geosynchronous orbit should be achievable without waving any magic wands (other than the enormous practical materials and structural engineering problems of building the thing in the first place). So we probably can look forward to zero-gee vacations in orbit, at a price. And space elevators are attractive because they're a scalable technology; you can use one to haul into space the material to build more. So, long term, space elevators may give us not-unreasonably priced access to space, including jaunts to the lunar surface for a price equivalent to less than $100,000 in today's money. At which point, settlement would begin to look economically feasible, except ...
We're human beings. We evolved to flourish in a very specific environment that covers perhaps 10% of our home planet's surface area. (Earth is 70% ocean, and while we can survive, with assistance, in extremely inhospitable terrain, be it arctic or desert or mountain, we aren't well-adapted to thriving there.) Space itself is a very poor environment for humans to live in. A simple pressure failure can kill a spaceship crew in minutes. And that's not the only threat. Cosmic radiation poses a serious risk to long duration interplanetary missions, and unlike solar radiation and radiation from coronal mass ejections the energies of the particles responsible make shielding astronauts extremely difficult. And finally, there's the travel time. Two and a half years to Jupiter system; six months to Mars.
Now, these problems are subject to a variety of approaches — including medical ones: does it matter if cosmic radiation causes long-term cumulative radiation exposure leading to cancers if we have advanced side-effect-free cancer treatments? Better still, if hydrogen sulphide-induced hibernation turns out to be a practical technique in human beings, we may be able to sleep through the trip. But even so, when you get down to it, there's not really any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don't exactly scurry to move our families there. Rather, crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take their leave. After all, there's no there there — just a howling wilderness of north Atlantic gales and frigid water that will kill you within five minutes of exposure. And that, I submit, is the closest metaphor we'll find for interplanetary colonization. Most of the heavy lifting more than a million kilometres from Earth will be done by robots, overseen by human supervisors who will be itching to get home and spend their hardship pay. And closer to home, the commercialization of space will be incremental and slow, driven by our increasing dependence on near-earth space for communications, positioning, weather forecasting, and (still in its embryonic stages) tourism. But the domed city on Mars is going to have to wait for a magic wand or two to do something about the climate, or reinvent a kind of human being who can thrive in an airless, inhospitable environment.
Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!
Comments
Charlie, I essentially agree with you on all of your points, though I'm not sure that will prevent us from colonizing.
Leaving aside ideological arguments -- only 3 of the original 13 colonies were founded for ideological reasons, and they got their funding because investors were stupid. Despite what our national mythos might have us think...
And barring FTL -- which is the only way we'll get the traditional interstellar colonialism of SciFi and Space Opera.
The only way I see interstellar colonization happening is via seedships. Leave out the human you postulated in your trips, just send self replicating machines with instructions on how to recreate earth life and humans to target stars. They can take a couple centuries, however long your machines last, it doesn't matter. Even then, I think antimatter would be the only power source that's reliable, unless you could count on Earth to beam power to a ship for a century or two -- not something I'd place my faith in.
So you'd load up your ship with enough energy to crack open a planet's crust and send it out, never to hear from it again unless you happen to be immortal. Once there, the ship would get to work, mining the target solar system, doing terraforming as needed, building industry and settlements, and only then creating the colonists. Perhaps we'll have tech to digitize human minds, in that case we might have some actual people from earth to resurect into new bodies. Otherwise robots are raising them from scratch.
Of course, the catch here is that to do this we need a post-scarcity economy and AI of some form or another. Which means that we could be doing a lot more interesting things back in the Solar System.
If interstellar colonization does happen, it will be as an afterthought of some eccentric post-humans.
As for colonization in the solar system, we'd need to discover some economic rationale that's not there right now for it to happen. We could make colonies on the Moon or Mars within the next century, if there was something to justify the cost. Giant self contained cavern cities if nothing else. Or we might be able to terraform Mars over the course of a few centuries. That would make colonization much more practical, even if there's no Earth-Mars joint economy, some people would settle on a terraformed Mars. Of course, that raises the question of who would terraform Mars which brings us pack to post-humans with time on their hands...
Posted by: Andrew G. | June 16, 2007 5:00 PM
The assumption of decelerating at the destination is a killer. It squares the mass ratio. Hence one thinks of (1) what can usefully be done at the destination if there is no deceleration of the entire payload; and (2) can one decelerate without rocketry?
Two useful links:
Starflight without Warp Drive
and
Hydrogen Ice Spacecraft for
Robotic Interstellar Flight
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | June 16, 2007 5:07 PM
Typo: "Mars is a good way further away than Mars". ITYM "than the Moon".
Good piece - pretty much in line with what I've been thinking, though you've actually done the 1st-order approximation of the math.
The only reasons I see for putting humans on Mars, at least until we have a major technology breakthrough, are PR and politics. I'd rather spend my money elsewhere.
Posted by: Hildo | June 16, 2007 5:12 PM
But, But, you miss the essential purpose of interstellar travel. Obviously, it's to find new life forms, hover in front of rural individuals, occasionally abducting them and probing their nether orifices. Of course this might be achieved by robotic probes but that would take all the fun out of it.
Posted by: monopole | June 16, 2007 5:36 PM
Andrew G: are you including the failed colonies in that count? Not just Roanoake, but things like the Darien scheme?
Hildo: typo fixed, thanks.
Personally I'd rather see the money spent on manned Mars expeditions than on aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. The weapons will either soak up huge amounts of cash and do nothing, or they'll maim and kill huge numbers of people for no reason that will make sense even fifty years later[*]; whereas the first Mars expedition, however over-budget and uneconomical, will be one of the landmarks of history. (Yes, I do have a romantic streak, however tightly I try to keep it reined in.) Unfortunately I fear it's not an either/or choice between weapons and space at this point in time.
[*] I will concede that it is possible to make a case for some wars being morally justified, but I don't see any on the horizon as remotely unequivocal as, say, the struggle against Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. And certainly not enough to justify the delta from peak cold war US military spending to current US military spending — which, even if you set aside the ongoing costs of the Iraq occupation, is about equal to a gold-plated crewed Mars exploration program every 18-24 months.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 6:15 PM
typo: setting the Gobi Desert -> settling the Gobi Desert?
Posted by: Stephen | June 16, 2007 6:52 PM
Stephen, that's Bruce's typo. But I'll fix it anyway ... :)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 6:54 PM
Charles,
I enjoyed reading the essay. The metaphor alone puts so much into perspective. Maybe my optimism got the better of me when starting the thread over at Asimov's, but it still made for some fun speculation.
Posted by: b | June 16, 2007 7:31 PM
Charlie: If you count all the colonies, rather than just the ones that were around in 1776, there were far more both economically and ideologically motivated ones. For instance, Puritans also settled in the Bahamas in an attempt to do what they did in New England. And Plymouth Colony destroyed the colony of Merrymount, basically because the founder was trying to set up a society the opposite of their own. There's a big list...
I completely agree with you about military vs. space spending. I'd far rather see a moonbase or mission to Mars than a war and bloated military. Even half of the world's military budgets could do amazing things in space. And space programs could support the same industries and create jobs like the military does. Research spin-offs would be even more beneficial to the economy if anything. Just imagine the uses the technology put into autonomous robotic exploration of Mars would have on industry here on Earth. Exploiting and colonizing the Arctic and Antarctic would be childsplay compared to Mars...
Posted by: Andrew G. | June 16, 2007 7:33 PM
I think expansion into interplanetary space is much more plausible than colonization of solar planets; the easy availability of energy might be an economic enabler. The North Sea, I think, is a red herring--space habitats will necessarily have controlled environments. There are major, and difficult engineering problems, mostly to do with life support, and these aren't resolved yet, but, granted a space elevator technology, it's a fairly plausible thing to do, and there will be people who want to go. This also touches on the reason that space is different from earth's oceans; earth's oceans are full of life. But perhaps, eventually, interplanetary space will also be full of life. As for interstellar travel, I wouldn't rule out a magic wand; we've already discovered many magic wands; the physical world seems to have back doors. On the other hand, we don't have that wand yet, and you're right--it's not going to be done until we have it.
"We live in extremely interesting ancient times."
Posted by: Randolph | June 16, 2007 7:42 PM
I've always thought the same about the distances, and when seen it put in Earthly perspective-terms really shows it. That's why I don't believe in UFO's or even SETI at this point. The distances are daunting!
- most folks have no idea of this, in fact, most layfolk see little difference between stars and planets, at least in their daily lives, and think we know all there is to know!
Posted by: michael c | June 16, 2007 7:51 PM
Randolph, I figure space colonies are technically feasible -- subject to issues like how to avoid being slowly fried by high energy cosmic radiation -- but there are other social problems. Imagine you get the offer of a chance to emigrate to a frontier city. (Yes, it's going to be an intensely urban environment, even if there are arms and parks there. Urban equals high volume to surface area ratio, and the surface is where you intersect with the hostile environment, so you want to keep it as small as possible compared to the habitable volume.) The problem is, your ticket is going to cost you $25,000. (Going by the more optimistic cost estimates for getting into orbit via a space elevator, plus some subsequent rocket travel.) Do you take it? Well, when moving to a new city, one of the first things you ask is, "what are the neighbours like?" Now imagine that you don't know the answer to that question for sure (because the city is as far away as Antarctica) and the cost of a round trip to see if you like it is $50,000. What do you do?
Small introverted city-states could go anywhere. They could turn out to be as laid back and civilized as Amsterdam, as uptight and draconian as Singapore, or as dangerous and violent as Mogadishu. And unlike on Earth, you can't walk away. Walking out and becoming a refugee is not an option if things turn to shit. You're potentially in a backs-to-the-wall situation.
Circumstances, social expectations, and communications bandwidth may moderate this picture, but it's altogether too much like throwing yourself on a raft in the middle of the Pacific for a five year voyage with a bunch of strangers for my liking.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 7:54 PM
Charlie, well, yes, but you're not 20 any more--younger people have fewer ties and are more willing to break the ties they have. There will after all be reporting and correspondence from space cities, as well as trade--they won't be complete unknowns. Broadly, I think the pattern will be similar to the conquest of North America; first small groups, then expansion and, if travel becomes cheap enough, actual migration. At least it will not be actual conquest; as far as we know there are no natives to object (unless interplanetary space is full of energy creatures). I can easily imagine the second wave of immigrants being refugees--that was after all the big drive behind post-1850 immigration to the USA, as indeed it is the drive behind Mexican immigration to the USA at this time.
Posted by: Randolph Fritz | June 16, 2007 8:19 PM
In Phoenix and Vegas we have colonized the desert.
The reason that Mars or the Moon might make sense is the same reason that these artificial cities are growing by leaps and bounds to this day. That's politics. Why today do people flee perfectly good hometowns with much more livable environments in Massachusetts or Illinois to move to Phoenix? Why did thousands of Mormons journey to Salt Lake? For the same reasons, others will someday flock to the moon.
The distance from meaningful political control, like America's 1800's distance from control will be the draw. Maybe they are pirates or a religion or prisoners or eugenics freaks, but $10 million/family will seem cheap to them. Also expect that we would not like it at all. Imagine the anger at Osama sitting up there in the moon broadcasting taunts, untouchable by anyone.
If the world could credibly agree not to ever interfere at all with the North Atlantic or Gobi the same inrush would happen there.
Posted by: Josh | June 16, 2007 8:26 PM
Josh, I hear where you're coming from and raise you Jonestown.
On the plus side, if we see "Osama sitting up there in the moon broadcasting taunts, untouchable by anyone", then he and his followers can't touch us. We get to regain some of the sense of space we've lost from our home world over the past two centuries. (Back then, a month's wages and 48 hours would get you across the English home counties, or maybe Massachusetts, by stage coach. Today it'll get you to New Zealand and back, the long way round.)
It'd suck to be a woman or an apostate in such a society, though. (Especially when they put you in the airlock without a spacesuit for getting uppity ...)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 8:38 PM
Boing Boing summarizes your essay as explaining the futility of space exploration, but as even you explained at the start of the article state, its only futile on economic grounds, but ideological grounds know few boundaries of wallet or logic.
The argument of not putting all out eggs in one basket is pretty powerful, and one that could easily motivate a multi-billionaire philanthropist to spends a few billion on a seed ship. Its notable that many of the backers of commercial space expansion are our internet age billionaires with nothing better to do with their money.
Yes, space colonization is futile from a mass emigration point of view, but it seems inevitable that 50-100 years from now humanity's seeds will be spreading far and wide.
We do still throw out messages in a bottle into the ocean, dont we?
Posted by: Surur | June 16, 2007 8:57 PM
Surur, you interest me: would you like to explain why "the argument of not putting all our eggs in one basket" is so powerful? That is, what can it do for you, for me, or for anyone else on this planet today?
(Hint: I think it boils down to a category error we often make, in confusing our own self-interest in not experiencing personal extinction with the existence of a species-wide collective self-interest in not experiencing species extinction. But I'd be interested in hearing other explanations.)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 9:00 PM
I say anybody so intimidated by the stars shouldn't write science fiction anymore.
Posted by: Grant Entwistle | June 16, 2007 9:14 PM
It may be in part a category error, but it also could be a biological drive that says "continuation of the species is important to me", the same one that helps people decide to have children. From an economic standpoint, having kids is not a wise decision. You diminish your earning power, add another ongoing cost sink to your household, and any economic return you might see at the end of the day is limited and possibly nil. And yet people decide to have kids all the time.
Posted by: Stephen Granade | June 16, 2007 9:15 PM
Your argument does make sense, but so did the arguments at the turn of the 20th century that we would never reach the moon. It simply was not economical to build the giant cannon required to blast monkeys into orbit. So, yes, with today's technology, interstellar travel and interplanetary colonization remain more viable plot devices than possible human futures.
One other thought, interplanetary colonization represents a strong selection pressure for those humans who have the psychological fortitude (or psychosis) to want to be ripped from out little blue jewel here and plopped onto a barren wasteland. Maybe the universe favors extremists? History does have precedent here, e.g. Mormons/Utah, Calvinists/North America, Scientists/Antarctica. I'm just saying.
Posted by: Lance | June 16, 2007 9:21 PM
Von Braun was pessimistic about interstellar travel too!
We should try fixing the mess on Earth and renewably survive and detox for a few generations before shipping our problems to space.
The Apollo missions and a possible manned expedition to Mars have and will give us the perspective and hope to be able to sustain this work.
Posted by: Avi Solomon | June 16, 2007 9:26 PM
Grant @18 ... I'm currently writing a space opera. One that plays by the scale-factor rules. (It's not impossible, it's just rather an interesting challenge.)
If I'm going to try and write hard-SF, I'd rather get it right than risk tripping into a puddle of vacuous misconceptions and mistaking it for a universe of possibilities.
Stephen @19: I'm deeply suspicious of appeals to biological drives, because as a species we seem to exhibit rather a remarkable degree of behavioural plasticity. I know Richard Dawkins has taken to stomping on lots of peoples' bunions recently, but I would still strongly recommend reading "The Extended Phenotype" to anyone who still believes in group selection arguments. As for teleologists and believers in some numinous destiny, that's basically a religious argument and not falsifiable (or worthy of airtime, IMO).
As for lots of people deciding to have kids ... I assume you don't live in a country where the total fertility level is sub-replacement, right?
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 9:26 PM
Perhaps I'm reading the article wrong - but you seem to be saying space travel is just plain futile. Not only for now, but for all time.
Although you do a good job "scaling" the journey of space travel, you don't do anything to scale the advances in travel that mankind has made.
A few hundred years ago, travel from NY to LA took months, now it takes hours. It's proposed that in the near future, that trip could take minutes (i.e scramjets). You talk about the journey to reach Jupiter taking years, yet the New Horizon's probe just did it in months.
I'd put my money on the fact that Technology will move us closer to choice C (i.e. the "magic wand" method) then most people can probably imagine. It might not happen in my lifetime, but I'm betting that the technology that got us from "first flight" to "space flight" in less then a hundred years has a few surprises left for the future of mankind.
Posted by: VonSkippy | June 16, 2007 9:28 PM
Lance @20, I thought I was being fairly clear: I've got a beef with magical fantasies about space colonization -- not the same thing as space exploration -- and I'm interested in extrapolations that play by the rules and eschew magic wands and silver bullet solutions for dealing with the physics werewolf. Obviously the prospects for a lunar expedition didn't look good at the turn of the 20th century, unless you were Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and even then, it wasn't until somewhat later that folks like Herman Oberth and Robert Goddard began trying to actually build liquid-fueled, and later multi-stage, rockets.
You'll note that I explicitly mentioned starwisp-type probes, nanotechnology, and uploading as possibilities -- then decided not to explore them. Because, y'know, we don't have any definite knowledge of whether they're even possible, yet. If they are possible, then we may actually be able to contemplate interstellar colonization at a not-too-outrageous price -- and we may even be able to go and visit the neighbours -- but it's going to look very different from your traditional SFnal scenario.
VonSkippy @23, see this earlier blog entry. Note also that the energy input required to attain a given non-relativistic velocity scales as the square of the velocity, not linearly, and if you want to decelerate at the other end and are using a reaction drive it effectively scales as the fourth power of the velocity. For relativistic travel -- anything much above .4 of c -- it gets even worse.
(Do kids actually still study physics in school these days? I despair ...)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 9:32 PM
Charlie, I see your point. But sitting here with my kids running amok while I'm trying to focuse, I can't help myself. I do hope for a universe with a human presence! If I had a quadzillion bucks I'd invest them in human space colonization anytime... (AND it can be argued that everything we do is motivated by selfinterest, so why not this???).
Posted by: LucretiusCaro | June 16, 2007 9:38 PM
Charlie @22: I don't think a biological drive is the whole story, or necessarily the majority of it. People choosing not to have children is a fine example of how we ignore any effect of such drives. However, having children or not having children is, assuming you're in a first-world country, a decision with personal ramifications and costs that you can quickly figure to first order. The costs of space travel aren't nearly that easily figured out by people. As proof, I'd point to the response to this very post.
And country of origin doesn't really enter in: there are still plenty of people across the globe deciding to have children, even if the probability of such declines with increasing education and purchasing power.
Posted by: Stephen Granade | June 16, 2007 9:42 PM
Doing deeds for all time is a real and proven motivator, and has the immediate benefit of glorifying the person who initiated the effort in the first instance. Without this motivation we would never have the Sistine Chapel for example.
The whole conservation movement is about inconveniencing ourselves now for the benefit of distant future generations. When we talk about limiting global warming in 2050, anyone in their 30's will probably dead by then.
Sure, "putting all our eggs in one basket" is less powerful in dictating our spending priorities than having a bigger screen to watch TV on, but Americans have been happily spending $55 per year on just that by funding NASA.
To bring this ramble to a close, the immediate benefit to the donor is the same as sponsoring a puppy/gorilla you will never see, for the civilization that launches such a probe it will bring a similar amount of glory as other massive ego-boo projects, and it satisfies our biological drive to perpetuate our DNA, even if its only distantly related.
There seem reason enough for us to launch at least a few every hundred years, and it only takes one to succeed for us to have a interstellar civilization in 1000 years time.
Posted by: Surur | June 16, 2007 9:45 PM
Mrf, I forgot one other point, so a back-to-back post. Charlie, have you had a look at the newer multilevel selection theories? I know Dawkins isn't persuaded by them, but there are some aspects of e.g. Wilson's work that I find intriguing.
Posted by: Stephen Granade | June 16, 2007 9:48 PM
Surur: okay, I see where you're coming from. (And if there was an international equivalent of NASA you could subscribe to, I'd be in with my $55 a year on general principles.) But I still maintain that the urge to immortality thing -- at least when divorced from reproduction -- is essentially religious in tone; you won't ever see any results, so you're basically doing it on the basis of faith in something you will almost certainly never see.
Interstellar civilizations (as opposed to interstellar colonies) strike me as being an absurd idea, but that's another essay. Put it this way: in the absence of cheap FTL travel or other "magical" solutions to the scale problem, what on earth is there to bind two interstellar polities together -- except possibly the exchange of cultural data, bartered on a tit-for-tat basis ("I'll keep exporting my soap operas as long as you keep me updated on yours")?
Stephen @28: Nope, I'm woefully out of date in evolutionary biology.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 9:52 PM
And how!
It's weird how it's always the libertarians and conservatives who are into this crap. They think it's bad for society to care for the sick, or to protect the environment of the only habitable planet we've got, but wet themselves dreaming of The Human Species colonizing other planets, even though as explained above it's economically pointless and well-nigh impossible. That includes you, Jeff Bezos.
Just for fun:
H.R.4286
Title: A bill to establish a National space and aeronautics policy, and for other purposes.
"Title IV: Government of Space Territories - Sets forth provisions for the government of space territories, including constitutional protections, the right to self- government, and admission to statehood."
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d097:6:./temp/~bdvtDF:@@@L&summ2=m&
Posted by: Chris | June 16, 2007 9:52 PM
"unless interplanetary space is full of energy creatures"
Well, there's our endless energy supply right there! That's whyu we should go into space - to capture and enslave these energy creatures.
Posted by: Patrick | June 16, 2007 9:54 PM
Charlie @12 typo "arms and parks": ITYM "farms and parks".
Posted by: Cole Kitchen | June 16, 2007 9:57 PM
Executive decision (this means you, Cole :) ... I am willing to fix typos in the original essay, but life's too short to fix typos in comments!
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 9:58 PM
Charlie, your reasoning of dismissing not putting our eggs in one basket of "That is, what can it do for you, for me, or for anyone else on this planet today?" is incredibly myopic. By your reasoning, we should abandon any efforts into reducing pollution, global warming, etc. since anything we do today can't harm us in 50 years, no matter what it does to our children's children.
While I agree that colonization may not be practical from the economic standpoint, simply saying that it doesn't benefit you today is a selfish reason.
Posted by: JohnM | June 16, 2007 10:00 PM
As we know (mostly to the detriment of the world) religious ideas are very powerful motivators.
Regarding the trade in ideas, we are half-way there already. With automated fabrication they will only become more so. In the end, it will come down to energy, matter and ideas, and two of those are commodities.
With individual wealth and power increasing, some billionaires will chose to make atom bombs, and some will fund star wisps. Its inevitable. They may even stock it with their own embryos.
Posted by: Surur | June 16, 2007 10:11 PM
"can't even figure out how to live in the Gobi desert or the ocean's floor" ???
We're not even really trying, so I wouldn't say "can't" - can't be bothered, perhaps.
Posted by: bria | June 16, 2007 10:14 PM
Interesting article. I agree that deep space exploration will have very little effect on the lives of people for a few generations to come but human beings are very inventive and are bound to discover methods of travel we can't even conceive of. We're nomads, we always want to see what's over the next hill. I say 'we' when I mean 'them'; you and I will be long dead but our species will be out there colonising the universe; perhaps that's how we got 'here' in the first place....
Posted by: Darren | June 16, 2007 10:18 PM
typo: are robots are all over it already. Ours are, indeed.
Posted by: Toby | June 16, 2007 10:19 PM
Typo: "are robots are all over it already" (are = our).
As a species, we do things which are altruistic, benefitting an unrelated group. We pay taxes, which in some countries are part used to fund educational services which tax payers without children do not benefit from. Police officers intervene to protect strangers and firemen rescue people from burning buildings. Soldiers voluntarily fight for their country, an abstract concept if ever there was one. Other complete strangers have been known to put themselves at risk to save a drowning child who is not their own. We assume that these acts are part of civilization and society, and when they are not the dominant tendencies, we say that civilization has broken down, or society has failed. As a species, we're also very hung up on moral codes, which is no accident, but is the thing that makes civilizations and societies cohere and function. The confusing thing is that there obviously is an evolutionary basis for both group level altruism and imposition of moral structure, but I am suspicious about appeals to group selection. Anyway, maybe it's a combination of altruism and an attempt to attach it to a moral framework that leads to the "all-our-eggs-in-one-basket" justification for space colonisation?
Posted by: daen | June 16, 2007 10:19 PM
Charlie,
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is one of my favorite depictions of solar system colonization. The idea of wiping the slate clean and struggling to build a utopian government from scratch appealed to me, and I also liked the way Robinson portrayed colonization as a mechanism for the various cultures and factions of Earth to find their own space. Just as a reader with no scientific background, I found it plausible.
But, Charlie, would you say that Robinson's scenario, which involves space elevators and terraforming, falls under the category of a magical fantasy about space colonization?
I do have an insatiable hunger for reading space opera, and I was pleased to see in No. 22 that you are writing something in that subgenre, despite your skepticism about the real-world possibilities of colonization. I'll be interested in seeing how you handle the scale-factor rules.
I stumbled here via Andreessen's list of the top 10 sf authors of the 00's, and based on the descriptions there, I'll pick up "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise" as entry points into your work.
Posted by: cjp | June 16, 2007 10:53 PM
cjp, I think the Mars trilogy is about the most totally optimistic take on solar system colonization that I can absorb. Even so, he rushes it -- giving his protagonists longevity treatments so that they can see out a 300 year project, and then pushing through the terraforming of Mars in a fraction of the sort of time period currently considered necessary.
(The current space opera project I'm working on sidesteps the problems of human space colonization by, er, sidestepping humanity 1.0. We are, after all, the weakest link in the whole endeavor. So I suppose you could reasonably accuse me of waving a magic wand. My excuse is that it's a work of fiction, and I'm not using a really big wand :)
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 10:57 PM
As a slight correction, it takes only two and a half years to get to Jupiter using a Hohmann orbit.
I have other comments on Economist's view web log.
Posted by: John H. Morrison | June 16, 2007 11:10 PM
John: I was looking at a table of round trip times, not one-way. Fixed.
The species survival utility you mention is an interesting one, but as I've noted, it's not a clear economic benefit to us, here on Earth, to know that humans on another planet or space colony will survive even if we're clobbered by a wandering comet. If that's a concern, it makes a lot more sense to put the money into detecting and developing techniques for zapping Earth-grazing comets, or remediating environmental problems here on Earth, than it does to try and bootstrap a colony in a hostile environment while writing off 99.99999% of the existing human species as colateral damage.
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 11:18 PM
As for magic wands, modern cosmology probably has at least three up its sleeve: dark matter, dark energy, and whatever it was that drove inflation in the first 10-33 seconds of the big bang. There are a half dozen more gaps in the foundations of physics that don't get as much attention as unifying the standard model of quantum field theory with gravity right now. Dark energy is specifically an anti-gravity phenomenon.
But these are all red herrings if we don't care to exploit them. So we need to understand why we care. "Darwin's universal solvent" undergoes a mind-bending amplification when evolutionary variation finally discovers modes of organization that are capable of imagination and planning. Species whose individuals envision their descendants' survival and work according to plans for that survival have survival rates higher than species of equal complexity whose individuals don't care.
Ever since earlier primates discovered their ability to plan for their childrens' futures, we've been selected for caring about our kids' future and doing everything we can to make sure that they have one.
Even if group selection doesn't work for ants or fishes, it is surely working for H.sapiens now.
Posted by: George Loomis | June 16, 2007 11:18 PM
Charlie,
But. Even with todays technologies, we could have viable orbital habitats. Oh, not the tin-can ISS, but places where we actually look into 0-G chemical and biological synthesis. And we only have to haul most of the raw materials UP, the transfer vessels downwards don't have to be a spaceship, they just have to fall correctly.
Oh, and an asteroid capture mission is viable as well. Even NASA is considering looking at a near-Earth orbit asteroid visit. That could be interesting.
Posted by: Andrew Crystall | June 16, 2007 11:24 PM
George @44: yup, you're not wrong. I'm going to be curmudgeonly and insist on standing on my base until some sort of application of one of those wildcards in physics comes along -- see also starwisps, mind uploading, etcetera -- but I'll admit the possibility. Your point wrt. group selection is also worth noting. (I'd like to add, though, that sometimes human beings do things that are really fscking stupid, maybe with a side order of evil on top -- under the fond illusion that they're doing it for ends that justify the means. We may be trying to do the right thing, but it does not follow that the thing we are trying to do is right.)
Andrew: I'd love to see even a one-person closed-cycle biosphere run for twelve months on end. We're crap at that kind of environmental engineering. Nuclear subs that can cruise underwater for months nevertheless are able to exchange gases with their ambient fluid (and extract oxygen by electrolysis); the Space Shuttle is so leaky it gets through a complete air change in about a week, IIRC. Humans only consume a few kilograms of oxygen per day, so for short to medium duration space missions -- anything up to a 300 day sojourn on a space station -- it makes sense to ship LOX and food along, rather than to grow/recycle your own. Which means we've never really had to take that kind of recycling seriously before. But the first remotely serious attempt at space colonization will have to do so ...
Posted by: Charlie Stross | June 16, 2007 11:33 PM
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars. Zubrin makes a very thorough case for the idea that Mars settlement is not merely feasible, but fairly straightforward, using existing technology. He also does some math I don't pretend to understand saying that it's actually less fuel-intensive to settle Mars than the Moon.
Posted by: Geno Z Heinlein | June 16, 2007 11:35 PM
Solid article. Well researched. The math seems optimistic. Real-world cases probably come out significantly worse than you estimate.
Robert L. Park has a chapter debunking manned interplanetary space flight in his 2001 book Voodoo Science.
As for space colonies...the International Space Station, as everyone just heard, nearly shut down due to a computer glitch. 100 billion to support 3 people in orbit, and it almost became uninhabitable 'cause of a computer crash. (Doesn't make you too optimistic about uploading your consciousness, does it? AN UNEXPECTED APPLICATION ERROR HAS OCCURRED - CORE DUMP OF YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS BEGINNING...) So much for L5 colonies or Solar Power Satellites.
The real problem with manned interplanetary space flight, as Park points out, involves human exposure to cosmic rays. Estimates suggest that an unshielded crew would get enough high-energy nuclei blasting through their bodies to die from cancer during a trip to Mars. Hohmann transfer orbits obviously greatly worsen this problem, since they take the longest time. TANSTAAFL.
www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7753
As an example of just how high energy these cosmic rays are, Apollo astronauts reported seeing intermittant flashes when the particles blasted through the vitreous humor inside their eyes. There's also the issue of osteoporosis caused by microgravity. Exercise doesn't seem to help much.
Enough shielding to cut down the cosmic rays to a survivable level would increase the payload so much that the rocket equation beats you to death. Of course, a magnetic shield offers an alternative possibility, but once again, at a brutal energy cost. TANSTAAFL again.
The thinking now is that space elevators might not be practical since they'd take passengers through the Van Allen Belt -- lethal radiation again. Once again, shielding issues, a huge increase in the cost per pound to orbit: once more, no free lunch.
Alas, you'd need a truly huge rotating wheel to generate artificial gravity and avoid osteoporosis. A smaller rotating capsule risks Coriolis effects which could give you a ceberal embolism if you turned your head too fast. Once again, a great honking Battlestar-Galactica-type spaceship is required to support a huge rotating wheel for artificial gravity. Of course, we might be able to fix the osteoporosis problem with gene therapy. Not so sure about the cosmic ray issue. Maybe. Gene therapy might be a free lunch there. Peter Watt's novel Blindsight uses that technique during the protagonist's trip back to earth.
Ah, for the days of Niven's World of the Ptavvs, when fusion-powered torchships accelerating to Neptune at one G seemed plausible...
Posted by: mclaren | June 16, 2007 11:56 PM
Hmmm.... you also don't take into account that lifespans are increasing quickly. Would a person who takes LiveForever(TM) medications and a ton of medical DNA-resequencing equipment with an extended lifespan of 5 or 6 centuries even care about a 50-year space voyage??
And don't be so negative about propulsion technology.... we have gone from 35mph to Mach20 in the space of only one century. Would not a stone-age villager in Borneo (they still exist) looking up at the contrail of a 747 or SR-71 wave it off as "magic technology"??
I am heartbroken that we stopped the Moon flights 30 years ago and wasted our time with the Shuttle, but the only thing we'll achieve by turning our backs on space is to doom mankind from either boredom or a stupid local accident.
Posted by: Gerry | June 16, 2007 11:59 PM
Dear Charles:
1) Of course interplanetary and interstellar colonization are not going to look like the European colonization efforts. Nor did the European colonization effort look like the Indo-European migration that established those populations. Nor did the migration, 10,000 years ago, that established the Indo-Europeans; or the migration 100,000 years ago that established a human presence outside Africa. Different technology levels and different circumstances dictate different behaviors.
Barring the sort of magic wand you have used in your space operas, colonization of other bodies in this system will take decades or centuries, and interstellar exploration will likely be centuries to millenia even for the nearest stars -- at tech levels quite different from our current status.
This does not intimidate me. We are five centuries into the colonization of the Americas at this point, and approximately one hundred centuries into the out-of-Africa project. Are those doing well so far? Providing good returns on investment? I thought so.
2) Your estimates on launch of humans from Earth assume all life support and other mass is to be launched from Earth. It has been recognized for upwards of fifteen years now that space travel cannot be large-scale economical without utilizing off-Earth resources. This requires extra start-up capital, which is why it has been delayed, but pays off in the long run.
I hate to break it to you, but your objections are not new and have already had some serious thought devoted to them.
3) You wrote: "But the domed city on Mars is going to have to wait for a magic wand or two to do something about the climate." Of course, that's exactly what terraforming is all about. I admit that I think terraforming would take more time than is posited in, say, K. S. Robinson's space opera; but that is mainly because I do not foresee much a massive capital investment in terraforming Mars. Your previous comments indicate similar sentiments.
Nevertheless, in the short run, I agree with you: I think the rest of the first century of spacefaring will be dominated by tourism, research, development, and manufacturing in Earth orbit, one or more bases on the Moon (some research, some tourist), probably one research base on Mars, and perhaps some mining bases in the asteroids to deal with the automated mining fleets. That's what we are capable of with current-plus-immediately-researchable technology.
I also think technology will not sit still, and I know you think the same. It won't stay that way. Take Robinson's story again: asteroid colonization doesn't take place until the 23rd century, after a century plus of deep-space mining operations advance the technology far enough.
4) You wrote: "Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter... then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!"
Be careful for what you ask for; you just might get it. The point about Las Vegas has already been made, of course. The Inuit are another counterexample, as are the Polynesians. In general, humans have proven to be remarkably adaptable to conditions.
However, your point is also specious because of the extreme proximity of the Gobi and the North Atlantic to more hospitable regions. If you want to live off the proceeds of the North Atlantic, you don't build a ship to sit in the North Atlantic; you live on Nantucket and Nova Scotia. You could alter the environment, but because the Earth's climates are interdependent we're not likely to do that. I do not foresee the Moon ever being colonized extensively; there's no point when Earth is so close.
The advantage of extraterrestrial environments is that, since there's no pre-existing life (except perhaps on Mars) to disturb, you can do anything you want to the environment. You can make it as pleasant as Earth is, for a suitable price -- all you really need is cheap energy (solar or fusion) and time. This is a task harder than European colonization of the Americas (where all the groundwork was done by the native Americans) but easier than the out-of-Africa migration (where the environment could not be altered, and had to be learned through trial and error with close to zero technology).
I read with amusement your description of Septagon system in Iron Sunrise. In lieu of Niven's Law of Fictional Assumption ("There is a technical term for anyone who thinks that a fictional character's biases and prejudices are those of the author's; that technical term is: 'idiot'."), I will not assume that you share the Eschaton's opinion of the space colonization crowd... but your essay does little to convince me otherwise. I agree with the implicit criticism that ideology will not conquer space. I disagree with the assertion that it won't happen. I agree with the assertion that it won't happen the way we expect. (Who predicted tourism and the dot-com boom as the keys to renewed rocket research? I don't think anyone thought of that...)
5) @14: I see your Jonestown and raise you Moses in Sinai. Now there was a crazy migration project if I ever heard of one... religiously motivated, too... probably wasn't pleasant to take part in... and yet look at all the civilizations whose heritage traces back to that one. Was it worth it?
6) @16: It is a personal choice as to whether you give a damn what happens after you die, if you have children, and whether you care what their survival chances are. If your answer to all these questions is "no" then few arguments (genetic, memetic, religious, or otherwise) will have much effect on your positions on long-term plans, as you have denied any possible benefit for making them. However, consider these corollaries:
a) Would you like to live in a world where the vast majority held the same position?
b) Would you even exist if, in the past, the vast majority held the same position? If so, what would your life be like?
7) @46: I agree that closed-loop recycling needs more work. Do you really think that work will not be done?
Posted by: Catfish N. Cod | June 16, 2007 11:59 PM
Ack, for shame, Charlie! Even at sub-replacement, you still can't say that "lots" of people don't decide to have children! How many millions do, even in, say, Italy?
Nice essay -- but going by the usual rule, I'd say this almost guarantees that there will indeed be some kind of interstellar colonization. But yeah, it probably won't consist of transporting canned meat. Talk about doing something for religious reasons!
Posted by: Michael | June 17, 2007 12:01 AM
...............here's the bottom line:
as the Moon landings, humans will walk on Mars
Just To Prove it's not worth it. it will be done
several times (not in my lifetime) and then abandoned.
Portugal/Spain got the credit for the New World.
USA got the Moon.
? Mars.
Posted by: john of sparta | June 17, 2007 12:30 AM
Another typo, penultimate paragraph:
'and live their for the rest of'
Posted by: Nigel | June 17, 2007 12:32 AM
As far as seedships building people on the other end, I liked Alastair Reynolds' take on it. The people of Yellowstone in his main series with Revelation Space and such are the second people to have colonized their planet in near lightspeed craft. The first were from America (loosely) and built by automated systems on the other side, no live cargo. Of course, being raised by robots or computerized systems turns out to have not given them the requisite amount of proper human contact. Their personalities had some rather nasty quirks which were propagated culturally (the kind that seem to involve people using axes or otherwise going like "The Shining") and within a couple of generations, they had wiped themselves out...
Posted by: Al | June 17, 2007 12:45 AM
Though the Sun is larger than the Earth, it is
also further away.
You left out the Heinlein ("Universe") solution.
Posted by: Peter H. Salus | June 17, 2007 1:11 AM
I have a dumb question, Charlie, prompted by the fact that I am writing this from Carolina, an incredibly pleasant suburb of San Juan.
Doesn't most of your solar system argument boil down to the fact that Earth is the only real estate worth squat in the vicinity? Unless I'm missing something --- I agree that a desire to spend money on species-survival is essentially religious, but is also pretty widespread --- your argument would change if Mars were a bubbly blue sphere with places like Carolina on it. Right?
Posted by: Noel Maurer | June 17, 2007 1:17 AM
There is a quasi-religious argument, based on the Gaia hypothesis, which states the whole point of intelligence is to spread the biosphere to other (hopefully lifeless) planets. Being a believer in memes and an infinity of parasites (self-inserting sequences on plasmids, plasmids, cells, organisms,flea, bigger flea, human, societies, nations, civilizations, planets and life itself) this has always seemed elegant to me.
Posted by: Surur | June 17, 2007 1:33 AM
The article was worth the read but you really need work on your author's tone. It's really condescending.
Posted by: Alex White | June 17, 2007 1:35 AM
The most glaring error I see is what appears to pass for "moral thinking" in Libertarian circles:
"The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern."
As if moral behavior is strictly limited to individual concerns. The author gets centuries of moral thought bassakwards. Chris @ 30 gets it exactly right.
The author also seems to perpetuate a number of myths about third-world economies and population rates. See Hans Rosling's :
Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen.
You didn't mention another major obstacle to space travel, even travel within our solar system... gravity. Astronauts who spend a lot of time in low gravity environments come back much worse for wear. I don't know the current knowledge, but it seems to me that any prolonged trip, even if it is only as far as the Moon, is a one way trip. Your heart, weakened by having no resistance would not be able to handle the extra load of a return to Earth. Besides, what is the lifetime of a human on the Moon or Mars? We don't know. Our bodies are exquisitely tuned to 1g, how long will they even function in low or micro gravity? Many of our bodily systems depend on gravity to move our fluids around and remove waste products. All we are is bags of offal held together by thin membranes.
Peter Watts in Blindsight proposes an "antimatter-teleportation (telematter) drive". This is just for exploring within the solar system but has great promise.
As for an economic incentive, wouldn't the asteroid belt be a huge resource? Lots and lots of raw materials out there and in the rest of our solar system to boot.
I do agree with others who have said we should get our home on Earth in order first. If we don't get global climate change under control it is doubtful we'll make it past 2100 let alone survive long enough to fund interstellar exploration.
Global warming 'is three times faster than worst predictions'
Posted by: noen | June 17, 2007 1:48 AM
" your argument would change if Mars were a bubbly blue sphere with places like Carolina on it. Right?"
But no Country Club. Or Hill Brothers.Or those public housing projects were they shoot at each other A la Gaza every few weeks. Right?
Posted by: Lemmy Caution | June 17, 2007 1:48 AM
meh... so no monkeys get to jaunt around in space. sfw.
i think that's why i've enjoyed various authors takes on the robotic space travel/singularity premise, from clark to yours to vinge. we're too fragile to adapt to anything but terrestrial life.
but is that really such a great loss? what distinguishes us is that we're thinking monkeys. maybe all we need send is the thought, the meat can stay at home and enjoy a few more sunrises.
and thanks for the interesting comments. will have to steal some ideas for my own amateur writing....
Posted by: che tibby | June 17, 2007 1:48 AM
...You know, between you and that idiot, Gregg Easterbrook, it's no wonder that the gullible are easily bamfoozled into thinking space exploration is a waste of time. If defeatist schmucks like you were in the right, Columbus - or anyone else - would have never set foot in the Americas. The fact that you and your ilk refuse to acknowledge is that it's in Humanity's basic nature to explore, to see what's on the other side of the hill. Your asinine argument demands that we, as a species, renounce what has clearly separated us from the beasts. If you're so adamant that this core aspect of human nature is a bad thing, then do us all a favor and remove yourself from having to deal with it directly.
Preferably before you contaminate the gene pool, natch.
Posted by: OM | June 17, 2007 1:49 AM
Hello again. I just wanted to point out, Charlie's example of the Gobi Desert as a place we have yet to inhabit is only superficially true. It's true because there are no European cities there, but the place has been marginally inhabited for centuries, if not millenia, by nomadic tribes. The Mongols, for example, occupied that hellish place. Recently even, Chinese colonization, er "land reclamation effort" have created a modern city in that frigid sandbox. In fact it's called Shihezi looks pretty comfy to me.
Posted by: Lance | June 17, 2007 2:06 AM
I like the essay, and like that Cory et al point to it from BoingBoing, however they spun it.
The crude rule of thumb is that fission drives are 0.1% efficient at converting mass to energy, and fusion drives are 1% efficient at converting mass to energy.
Typing this from what was once The Old West, the economic bottom line is this. In 2007 dollars, a fully provisioned covered wagon plus horses, mules, or oxen cost in the $100,000 to $250,000 range
Families headed West, not for the land of milk and honey, but to get away from a family, employer, town, church, or government that they could not stand.
If the cost in 2007 dollars drops to the $100,000 to $250,000 range to put a family in Earth orbit, millions of people will go into orbit. If the cost in 2007 dollars drops to the $100,000 to $250,000 range to put a family on the Moon, millions of people will go to the Moon. Same range for Mars, millions go to Mars. Ditto asteroids.
A cubic kilometer of metal asteroid is worth a quadrillion dollars at current prices. After the first trillion dollars worth of nickel is brought to Earth (nickel foam lifting bodies down through the air, floated on ocean to port, melted to make stainless steel at a regular steel costs) the price of nickel will have equilibrated down to the price of iron, and something else must be mined. But much of that first trillion is profit.
The cost of transforming Mars from undeveloped real estate to fully developed real estate is also order of magnitude a quadrillion dollars. After that, it's all profit.
But my wife asks me to say the following
Re (5): Darien scheme.
Professor Christine M. Carmichael is well-along in writing an alternate history novel in which the Darien scheme succeeded. Mexico and Central America were developed by Protestant Scots. The USA has, in effect, two versions of Canada adjacent to it, one to the North, one to the South.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | June 17, 2007 2:08 AM
You make a stong case, but for a writer of science fiction, I would think that you would have a better imagination. Humans always seem to find ways around physical laws, or at least how to cheat them. Anything that we can think off now, we will have and far more. The electron microscope was only invented roughly 60 years ago and now we're building gears out of atoms for Christ-sake!
Posted by: Atom Ant | June 17, 2007 2:31 AM
This is all a negative "can't do" article by a guy who writes about ninjas? He doesn't explore the possibilities of of close to C speeds or time dialation that could make the trip very short for explorers. He also agonizes over the required energy. without any mention of antimatter energy, solars sails or Bussard Ramjets, all of which have been speculated on for years and are becoming a reality.
Throughout history there have always been naysayers, but nobody will remember them.
Posted by: bill king | June 17, 2007 2:55 AM
for those of you raising an eyebrow at my reference to antimatter drive,,,
check this out...
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2006/antimatter_spaceship.html
Posted by: bill king | June 17, 2007 3:03 AM
Re: group selection. Yes, Dawkins has issues with it, but he's the reductionist to end all reductionism. If you pick your group realistically (e.g. semi-isolated human tribes) it can be shown to make sense -- particularly for beings such as us that rely so much on culture for our survival. Survival and the "inheritance" of traits then occur at the group level and off you go.
Which leads me to a related point -- who says any potential colonists would be strictly human? I don't mean human 2.0, but rather the results of cultural and biological divergence amongst human groups settling near(ish) Earth space on asteroids and so forth. If you're going to settle an inhospitable rock, it might as well be one with a really shallow gravity well. Throw in unregulated genetic fiddling and a few technological novelties, and you end up with groups who wouldn't see anything silly about life on a generation ship. Yes, I read Schismatrix when I was young and it warped my mind.
Posted by: A different Chris | June 17, 2007 3:15 AM
Re: 66:
(1) antimatter energy: like hydrogen-fueled cars, the concept is pitched to confuse energy generation with energy storage. By forseeable technology, making antimater in micrograms, let alone tons, is many orders of magnitude more expensive than other forseeable interstellar technologies. I knew Heinlein, who quoted me in his afterword to his Encyclopedia Brittanica article "P.A.M. Dirac, Antimatter, and You" in "Expanded Universe." We corresponded a bit.
(2) solar sails: "Project: Solar Sail" edited by Arthur C. Clarke, David Brin, and Jonathan Post. Penguin Books, 1990. ISBN: 0-451-45002-7 A collection of essays and short stories ...
(3) Bussard Ramjets, as we now understand them, in our part of the cosmos, are more like parachutes than engines; with drag greater than thrust.
I'm pretty sure that Mr. Stross knows the science and engineering of (1),(2),(3). These merely add footnotes to his essay. They do not undercut any of his arguments.
Of course there can be unforseen technologies. I'm sure that there will be. See, for instance:
"Space Travel in the Next Millennium", commissioned poem as summary/frontispiece of:
Proceedings of Vision-21 (Space Travel in the Next Millennium, NASA Lewis Research Center, 2-4 April 1990, NASA Conference Publication 10059, 1991.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | June 17, 2007 3:17 AM
#66: The example drive that Charles uses for his example is WAY more efficient than any theoretical antimatter drive.
Antimatter isn't Propulsion Magic. It's an energy storage technique. The NASA article mentions that the ablative antimatter rocket has an Isp of 5,000 seconds. That's way more than what we can do now, but really pitiful for the task of fast interplanetary or interstellar travel.
Theoretical fusion drives can do a lot better; an Isp of 130,000 seconds was predicted for one type. (Inertial confinement fusion.)
That would make interplanetary travel fairly quick, but that's still not enough to make interstellar travel fast and easy.
Posted by: Stefan Jones | June 17, 2007 3:20 AM
Charlie said:
> And unlike on Earth, you can't walk away. Walking out
> and becoming a refugee is not an option if things turn
> to shit. You're potentially in a backs-to-the-wall
> situation.
My sons would say, "So long as I've got broadband to my friends, who cares?"