Why We Will Live in Space
Let’s Not Suffer a Failure of Imagination
Elon Musk has claimed we’ll soon colonize Mars. Many people, including some space scientists, disagree. But "space" is not limited to the Moon and Mars.
In her recent Scientific American article, entitled Why We’ll Never Live in Space, science writer Sarah Scoles displays a surprising lack of imagination.
While imagination does not substitute for technological advancement, it often inspires such. Interview any scientist or engineer who has worked on space-related projects, and it’s likely that he or she was stimulated in this direction by the works of Robert Heinlein, Gerard O’Neill, or other visionaries.
Heinlein was a science fiction writer, who not only predicted that the Moon landing would be followed by a decades-long interregnum in space progress but also, to within four years, the arrival of American fascism.
Dr. O’Neill was a Princeton professor of physics who envisioned a space development program, as contrasted to the largely performative efforts of the 20th century. Everything described in O’Neill’s magnum opus, The High Frontier, published half a century ago, is now rapidly becoming feasible.
Following Caltech’s recent proof of concept demonstration, multiple nations are planning to build solar power satellites (SPS) to replace Earth-based sources of electricity. China has announced plans for a demonstration SPS in the 2030s, with a full two-gigawatt system planned for 2050. Britain, Japan, and the US military have similar plans.
Unlike Earth-based solar power, SPS will provide continuous power 24/7, wherever on Earth required, without need for storage. Power will be beamed via microwave transmission to rectifying antennas, possibly in deserts, and converted to electricity to supply power as needed. According to NASA, these microwaves will be so diffuse that they will pose no harm to passing birds or even cattle grazing underneath them.
SPS systems will soon be able to replace the need for fossil fuel power plants on Earth, if such remain in operation after the 2050s. (New, small modular nuclear reactors, completely safe and manufacturable like cars, are also coming soon, from Rolls Royce, Westinghouse, and some startup companies. This does not even consider nuclear fusion.)
Dr. O’Neill calculated that it would be necessary to strip mine the entire surface of the Earth to a depth of 1/2 mile to match the asteroidal resources known in the 1970s. This catalog has since been significantly increased, and does not even consider the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud, both of which offer even more stupendous resources for future centuries.
Companies and nations are now making plans to mine asteroids, the mining of which will completely replace terrestrial mining in this century. While some of the recovered materials will be returned to Earth, the majority will be used for tomorrow’s megaprojects in space.
What kinds of projects might those be? Beyond SPS, the most audacious of these will be what some of us call O’Neill spaceworlds. (Dr. O’Neill used the term “colonies”, but this now connotes certain attributes which are both unwanted and wrong, as such will become small, self-sufficient, societies.)
One very reasonable objection to envisioning a future of living and working in space is that most of us will not ride rockets into orbit and, even if we did, there would be significant atmospheric pollution from such a large number of trips.
Fortunately, the space elevator has recently become feasible from an engineering standpoint. It is the “Green Road to Space”, with nearly all of the energy used to lift people and cargoes to orbit recovered through regenerative braking. The International Space Elevator Consortium (www.ISEC.org) projects the first elevator going into service in the late 2030s, and many can be built in this century and beyond.
Ms. Scoles raises other reasons why we cannot dwell in space. Her focus is on planetary bodies and moons, not spaceworlds, and she does raise some valid concerns there.
However, other of her concerns are lacking in foundation, notably when applied to spaceworlds. In particular:
(1) While the health risks of low and zero-gravity living are well documented, a rotating spaceworld will provide Earth-normal gravity on its large interior surface. (Low and zero-gravity will also be provided, but only for occasional recreational purposes.)
(2) The idea that, because such mega projects have not been funded they can never be funded, is historically absurd. I can imagine Ms. Scoles, living in the 18th century, writing about the impossibility of funding floating cities on the ocean — thereby denying today’s mega cruise ships.
(3) The lack of usefulness of space as a human destination, in her mind, is a particularly conspicuous failure of imagination. Tourism is already the sixth largest industry, and growing in importance. Each spaceworld can make a business case for tourism by providing its own unique ecosystem and climactic conditions, thereby becoming tomorrow’s premier tourism destinations. Consider, for example, Black Diamond, a spaceworld offering perfect skiing conditions 24/7 on computer-adjustable slopes miles long. Another possibility: a real Jurassic Park, safely separate from Earth, with ecosystems approximating those of eons past. Many others are also possible, and likely once the first proves commercially feasible.
(4) The threat posed by cosmic rays is non-trivial and, perhaps, her best argument. However, we can greatly reduce the damage of cosmic rays by enclosing the spaceworlds within thick barriers of useful water, mined from asteroids, as Dr. O’Neill proposed. Further, should that be insufficient, a barrier of heavy metal such as lead, again mined from asteroids, can be added; preferably with something separating it from the water. (According to the exogeologist Bill Farrand, PhD, using blankets of sintered or even disaggregated regolith from the Moon or asteroids should suffice.)
If some extremely energetic cosmic rays can still get through, developments in nanotechnology will eventually give us the capability for suffusing organisms with networks of nanites, which will use triple-redundant memories to monitor for and repair damage.
(5) Scoles is correct that people require other people to form viable and enduring societies. As to what population level is desirable, it almost certainly exceeds Dunbar’s number of 150, and is almost certainly well met by the population of Iceland, which is presently 375,000. As described in The High Frontier, a counter-rotating dual cylindrical spaceworld of 10 km radius by 30 km length could easily accommodate such a population.
Most of this is yet to be realized, but serious scientists and engineers are hard at work on all of the above advancements.
About a century ago, the historian Jackson Turner made the case that all five attributes of the American exceptionalism then on display were due to its frontier. He predicted, it seems accurately, that when the frontier ended so, too, soon thereafter would American exceptionalism end.
Fortunately, a new frontier beckons, and it will restore all five attributes in abundance. Not just the final frontier, it is a truly endless frontier. And, as I have written elsewhere, if aliens await us, logic dictates that they will be either neutral or positive towards humanity. There is no “dark forest”.
Importantly, not only America, but humanity as a whole, can benefit from the endless frontier in that same way as America of yore. And, this time, it appears that many nations want to join the game…
We will explore all of this in our forthcoming science fiction television series, Shadowking. Production is expected to commence in 2025. Presently advising us are a rocket scientist, a Caltech PhD, and a former Stanford professor. Everything in Shadowking will be deemed plausible by mainstream scientists and engineers.
