How living in space challenges our identity as a species.
Excerpt
Introduction
In a crisp fall evening in 1985, the Princeton University chapter of Students
for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) held an open meeting.
About two dozen undergraduates attended, spreading out in groups of two or
three among the raised, hardwood pews of a small lecture hall.
The club’s President, Jeff Bezos, talked a little about SEDS and a lot about
his dreams for a glorious future in space. At one point he was describing a
scheme to build gigantic space habitats that theoretically could house millions
of people. The construction technique involved using huge solar mirrors to heat
a metal asteroid until it was completely molten. Then workers would plunge
a long tungsten tube into its center and inject large quantities of water. This
would flash into steam, inflating the asteroid like a balloon to make a spherical
hull—A loud slam cut him off. A student in the middle of the room jumped up
and, choking back sobs of rage, yelled, “How dare you rape the universe!”
After she had stormed out, Jeff, more bemused than ruffled, leaned toward me
and another SEDS officer and said: “Did I hear her right? Did she really just
defend the inalienable rights of barren rocks?”
Jeff, like the rest of us, had no trouble brushing aside criticism before it
could sink in. Having grown up in the belt-tightening Carter administration,
under the Cold War threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, Earth seemed
small to us: fragile and crowded. Beyond lay boundless space, with limitless
energy, resources and opportunity. Out There, population and consumption,
and hence science and the arts, could grow forever. Our template was Gerard
K. O’Neill’s The High Frontier (1976), a plan to build miles-long habitats
along the inside walls of huge, spinning cylinders in orbit.1 Green and spacious,
O’Neill colonies would house tens of thousands or even millions of people. The
colonists would earn their way by building giant orbiting solar power stations
that would beam energy down to microwave receivers on Earth. Everything
would be built using lunar and asteroidal ores, eventually moving all polluting
industry off-Earth. According to O’Neill, the colonies could earn and grow fast
enough to off-load Earth’s entire population in a mere 35 years.2 The Moon and
asteroids had enough mineral resources to build thousands of Earths-worth of
new, enclosed land. In the era of energy crises, Limits to Growth and Skylab,
O’Neill’s proposal made the front pages of Physics Today, Science and the New
York Times, attracting a grass-roots following of techno- and eco-humanists that
has not been rivaled since.
Still, a long and notable list of critics were as furious at the concept as
Jeff’s accuser. Historian Lewis Mumford regarded space colonies as “technological
disguises for infantile fantasies.” Nobel prize-winning biologist George
Wald wrote “Let me say at once that I view them with horror.” Educational
reformer John Holt remarked that O’Neill and his followers had “lost the feel
of real things.”3 To the critics, the whole mythology of finding escape in the
heavens from the wreckage we seemed certain to make of Earth seemed both
apocalyptic and futile. Given our struggles to sustain ourselves on Earth, where
evolution and long experience have adapted us to its abundance, how could a
single generation hope to do better in an unexplored, radioactive vacuum?
Privately, I had a few doubts of my own. Not about space colonies; the
problem was the Space Shuttle. Still in the design stages when O’Neill first
proposed his colonies, it was finally flying—at fifty times the ticket price that
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had promised. Of
course that killed O’Neill’s colonies, which depended on low transportation
costs. But NASA was the only game in town. Where else could spacers such as
myself go to realize our dreams?
That fall, I sought out celebrity physicist-author Freeman Dyson for some
career counseling. On the theory that the Henry Fords of rocketry would
emerge from garages rather than NASA centers, he gently suggested that I get
out of the space business entirely and earn my living in the much more lucrative
field of computers. With some luck, perhaps I could earn enough money to experiment
with new launch schemes as a hobbyist. I believed him, but I couldn’t
turn away—not even a few months later, when the Space Shuttle Challenger
crashed. Instead, I went into astronomy, managed an archive of images from
NASA’s planetary missions, designed satellite orbits and parts, published astronomy
software and trained to operate the Microphone experiment aboard
the doomed Mars Polar Lander.
Meanwhile, cleverer souls followed Dyson’s plan. In college, Jeff Bezos
switched from aerospace to computer science. Later he founded Amazon.com,
made billions, and launched a very secretive space company that, according to
its web site (www.blueorigin.com), is “creating an enduring human presence in
space.” Bezos is hardly alone. In recent years, at least six self-made billionaires
have begun to experiment with passenger space transport. Unlike Christopher
Columbus or Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun, they don’t need to convince
skeptical rulers or dip into the national treasury; they already have the money.
They can explore space any way they want. They know technology. They know
business. They know what to do.
Or do they? Giving the old space dreams a new, corporate face would
hardly comfort the critics. Will Bezos, Musk, Branson and the rest have any
better “feel for real things” than NASA? Will they beat NASA’s prices by factors
of tens to hundreds? Will they make space launch safe enough to attract
millions of travelers? And if they succeed, can humanity expand into space
without also expanding its fatal wars on itself and nature, as the critics had
warned?
With these questions in mind, I began building spreadsheet models of a
rocket business. To inject some economic reality into the analysis, I started with
a hefty operating profit margin and worked back through the technical details to
obtain a better estimate of ticket price (which rocketeers all too often and quite
erroneously equate to their operating costs). The results were mixed. I found
that a private company probably could send a passenger safely and profitably
into orbit for $140,000 rather than today’s going rate of $20 million. But the
development costs, lifted straight from published figures in aviation, came to
several times as much as the space entrepreneurs appear to be spending. Worse,
many of them appear to be building the wrong kind of rocket and trying to sell
it to the wrong customer.
Next I turned to O’Neill’s cylindrical colony design—and recoiled as technical
flaws leapt out of nearly every system. With an inherently unstable rotation,
mirrors too large to hold their shape and a chemically volatile atmosphere,
the design was a giant Rube Goldberg contraption just waiting to burn up or fly
apart. O’Neill and colleagues had known about some of these issues, but angrily
waved them away as engineering details. With a cadre of True Believers at
NASA and elsewhere, the design and its economic basis in beamed solar power
have remained largely unchallenged. Until now.
I began by simplifying the habitat design, making its hollow shape short
and squat for stability and turning it on its side to avoid pointing problems.
I got rid of the co-rotating mirrors, external shielding, agriculture pods, dish
antennae and other protrusions. This made it easier and cheaper to build and
maintain. As with an O’Neill colony, it would spin to simulate gravity, allowing
people to live on its inside walls. I chose a thick hull so it could hold an
Earth-like atmosphere at sea-level pressure. This also helped it resist radiation.
To simplify the problem of recycling, I surveyed the biospherics literature for
clues about relying less on untried mechanical systems and more on familiar
plants and soils. This drew me deeper into ecology—and led to a paradox.
In the mid-1970s, Australian ecologists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren
had developed permaculture, a practice of designing homes, towns and
cities that sustained themselves through complex, forest-like ecologies. This
may seem a step backward until you consider the enormous efficiency of forest
systems. For example, acorns from an oak woodland can match a wheat field
in terms of calories produced per acre. Yet unlike our monocrop agriculture, a
natural forest includes many other plant species, all of which are edible—either
by humans or hundreds of other animals.4 Healthy forests can also have hundreds
to thousands of times less soil erosion and dozens of times better nutrient
recycling than monocrop agriculture.
As a designer, I could not ignore these efficiencies. How might permaculture
work in space? I imagined, as Russian space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
had over a century ago, a “greenhouse conservatory” that could run on
sunlight as autonomously as Earth itself.5
How odd, then, that O’Neill and his libertarian followers, who knew of Tsiolkovsky,
would design their tiny world as a colony: an economic possession
of a distant nation or corporation. Like colonial powers throughout history,
these owners would have every incentive to secure and control their formidable
assets by any means available, including debt bondage and coercive monopolies.
About the last thing they would ever want to do is make the colonies
autonomous. Thus the colonists themselves would have even less freedom than
today’s ground-controlled astronauts.
My notion of an autonomous, permacultural mini-world did not fit the colonial
model. Lacking significant exports or need for imports, it would offer
prospective investors little by way of recurring income. For residents, though,
Introduction 11
it would provide plenty of value as permanent real estate—the very thing that
launched O’Neill and his students into space studies in the first place.
But if not a colony, what should I call it? Certainly not a habitat, which
connotes problems long-since solved. The word biosphere fit, but it also fit
everything from sealed glass bubbles with algae and brine shrimp to the entire
Earth itself. Paolo Soleri’s arcology, Dandridge Cole’s Macro-Life, Isaac Asimov’s
spome and the Artemis Society’s xity each described space dwellings,
sometimes employing biological metaphors. But all of these schemes were urban
and human-centered, housing only selected species as necessary to provide
food, water and air. If anything, these designs maximized our separation from
living nature, sealing off its essential life support functions in vats and tubes,
except where it was pleasing to the eye to have a pretty lawn or flower garden.
By contrast, my work was becoming increasingly focused on our physical,
psychological and social need to live fully within nature in all of its wildness,
diversity, robustness and efficiency. To call attention to the difference between
this mode of living and the other schemes, I eventually coined a word for it:
(’g¯ı’¯om) n, an artificial world in space that sustains itself
using natural ecology. From Gaia, the theory of Earth as a living,
self-regulating organism.
s began as a modest attempt to update Tsiolkovsky and O’Neil’s
designs, which had been gathering dust for decades. But as question after
question led back to ecology, I ended up with something unexpected: a direct
challenge to the story of escape and conquest that drove space exploration
for over a century. Where space colonies once promised endless growth for our
current way of life, s, as living ecosystems, would require us first to find
a new way to live. I also began to see how the same pattern of war and waste
that threatens us on Earth has measurably begun to cripple us in space.
Make no mistake: human space flight is in jeopardy today. Despite megaleaps
in computer and materials technology since 1969, it has become more
costly and dangerous than ever to send people into orbit. Neither money nor
new technology nor political will has cracked the problem thus far. Nor, in my
view, are they likely to. Working on what we must do to make space habitation
possible is like asking what a caterpillar must do in order to fly. Wrong
question! It can’t fly. The important thing to ask is what it can become.
Read more about Gaiome and Kevin Polk HERE.
Copyright 2008 Kevin Polk. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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