I approve of Kim Stanley Robinson’s message: interstellar travel, and interstellar colonization, are almost certainly impossible. He breaks the obstacles down into 5 categories, physical, biological, ecological, sociological, and psychological (wait, since when is ecology not biological?) and explains how unlikely we are to overcome them. We’re part of Planet Earth, and nowhere else.
This may sound like terrible news to people weaned on Star Trek and Star Wars, but I prefer to think that closing off the fantasy alternatives helps us focus on the realistic ones.
Oh no! For some people this is a disturbing and deeply pessimistic conclusion to come to. Then when you combine that new judgment with the recently discovered problems concerning the plan to terraform and inhabit Mars (presence of perchlorates and absence of nitrogen), and we come to an entirely new realization about our species: there is no Planet B.
Earth is our only home.
Oh no again!
This conclusion, startling to some, obvious to others, has ramifications that are worth pondering. If it comes to be a generally agreed on view, it might change how we act as individuals and a civilization. These changes in behavior might turn out to be crucial for our descendants. So although this entire discussion consists of speculations about hypothetical futures, which is to say, science fictions, still they are worth thinking about, as useful orientations in our sense of our own history as a species.
I like that. It’s not a bad thing to take a sober look at what we’ve got (which is a pretty danged sweet planet) and maintain and enrich it, rather than neglecting it for a dream of building a hermetically sealed dome on a hostile planet far, far away.
Something else I like: Robinson has just written a novel about…humans colonizing a planet around Tau Ceti, titled Aurora
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH7ZRF6zNoc
“Like it or not, Earth is where we make our stand […] to me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot […]”
To be fair, KSR built Aurora around a generation ship mission using what are more or less baseline humans. I don’t think regular humans are going to the stars – it’s either going to be robots or very long-lived transhumans modified from human stock.
The irony, to me, is that if you do figure out how to have people survive long-term in habitats where the only inputs are from outer space, then you lose any particular reason to move permanently to other solar systems unless you really, really want to get away from everybody else back home. After all, you’re already living in space, and the outer reaches of one star system aren’t going to be fundamentally different from the outer reaches of another one.
@PZ Myers
Well, yeah. None of this is stuff that’s going to be done any time this century, and possibly not in the next century as well. It’s not really even a possible choice now, regardless of willpower.
Very nice article but I have some strong disagreements.
I don’t like that he claims the physical problems are the “easiest”.
The physical problems are the most intractable. That is because the physical
limitations of the universe are much better understood than say biological
limitations. Quantum physics and general relativity work extremely well
and to detect deviations from the standard model we have to push really
really hard. We can be almost certain that in 1000 years, assuming our
progress continues, the physical limitations will still be the same limitations.
On the other hand, the other limitations are not clearly well-understood
and as far as my humble understanding goes, and we are still making lots of
rapid progress in other areas mentioned in the article.
So it is very possible that say in 500 years we have
made unbelievable progress (again, optimistically assuming no major catastrophe)
and that biological, ecological, or psychological challenges are no longer there.
But this does not change the fact that there is no reliable propulsion system
for a massive spaceship other than expelling matter in the opposite direction.
And there is no reliable system to prevent collisions with space debris.
And there is no easy way to deaccelerate.
Since we won’t have fancy physics to make other more exciting propulsion
systems possible, nor we will have fancy physics to create “energy shields”
to protect us from rocks floating in space,
I would say physical problems are the most difficult one to tackle.
For comparison, he talks about jobs and that:
there will be quite a few jobs that will simply have to be filled in order for their life support systems to be maintained. Again, however they manage this issue, people will not be free to do what they want, or to do nothing.
But this is weak reasoning. Creating awesome AI or intelligent machines that
are self-maintaining and that require little technical work is not in the same
category of “impossible” as say “discovering new physics”.
Finding out could be hard.
True but any civilization capable of sending a large habitable space colony
over distances of many light years, is also capable of sending many different
intelligent probes to the target planets to gather full information beforehand.
Recall that the settlers will only have their single starship
Again weak reasoning. It is easier to send equipments that are not needed
by humans beforehand.
I like that he is constructively pessimistic, but I think he is way underselling
the physical limitations.
Even the ridiculous claims of the “futurists” about “planing our consciousness
in robot bodies!” is more likely than discovering new and useful physics
for traveling to stars.
One things I really like though is that he makes it clear that even if we very optimistically assume that after some
generations all these issues are solve, even after that, traveling to other planets will be a massive project
that is going to take many generations to plan, build, and execute.
I guess KSR means that you could separate the biological concerns into physiological (better word) and ecological — namely the effects on long-duration spaceflight on the human body regardless of what we can do to fake being on a planet, and the difficulty of faking being on a planet with reasonable assumptions of size.
(Also, ‘what do you do when you get there’ — if you’re really good at building artificial habitats that fake being on a planet, why do you need to go find a new planet, rather than hang around within shouting distance to the planet and star and collection of space rocks we have?)
Also, I read plenty of fantasy novels, SF with the faster-than-light handwave, and dated SFnal ones where I have to pretend they are fantasy*, I can accept SF ones that assume we could colonize the stars.
* This one less so than I used to; I can tolerate outdated science, or missing computer tech, far more than a future that feels like 1950s middle class America (or 1960s in the bowels of NASA) but… IN SPAAAAACE!!!
“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
-Danish proverb
I don’t think anyone can make any informed predictions about the future of space exploration, although it is easy to conclude that with our current technology (including next generation tech like fusion, solar sails, ion motors etc) it is completely impossible.
“(wait, since when is ecology not biological?)”
Looks like KSR recognizes this, actually:
“This leads us to the ecological problems, or perhaps we were there all along, because biology is always ecological, as every living thing is a miniature ecological system.”
Barring faster than light travel (which is only slightly less implausible than the existence of gods), the only way humans are going to get out of this solar system is to send a bunch of embryos along with a crapload of robots that can start terraforming and assembling habitats before hatching the embryos in artificial wombs and raising the resulting kids. Hell, by that time we might not need embryos and can instead build one from raw chemicals and a DNA blueprint.
Impossible with current knowledge and technology? No doubt. Impossible per se? There’s way too many corpses of such failed predictions lining humanities path to give that much credence. Besides, it seems far more likely that we would learn to live on another of the planets in the solar system (Mars being the first obvious candidate), long before we thought about travelling to other systems. That gives us orders of magnitude more time than humanity has existed to figure it all out. I remain optimistic.
He must work at my school. They put Ecology in the Humanities last year. As the Ecology professor, I am appealing that designation.
I think many here, PZ included, are making the same mistake of the optimists, in the opposite direction.
@brett went as far as stating what’s (not) going to happen in ONE HUNDRED YEARS if not two hundreds. Good luck with that.
I don’t really need to be told that sci-fi is unrealistic, I find middle-age disappointing enough as it is. Besides, it’s not something I haven’t been hearing since Spock first raised a skeptical eyebrow on broadcast TV. Where does this materialist urge to crush dreams and rub the dreamer’s face in the rubble come from? It’s not like there’s much about our modern world that came about without dreams. Reality can’t exist without dreams, anymore than dreams can exist without reality. They aren’t opposed.
Colonizing space becomes more realistic if you stop trying to colonize humans in space. Spreading life to some lifeless places is worthwhile even if it’s just microbes.
Long after we’re gone, evolution will have a lot more clay to work with.
This is also the answer to the Fermi Paradox. The aliens figured it out and stayed home.
It’s worth recalling that he left with what he considered a realistic proposal for interstellar travel.
Regardless, colonisation of space-the solar system or further out doesn’t solve the problems of what’s happening to the Earth for the majority of people living on it. Believing that some people somewhere might colonize space is small comfort if the pacific island you currently inhabit is going to be underwater because of climate change.
@F.O.
I’ll happily make a bet that we won’t send a probe to another star by 2100 unless you’re counting ultra-slow stuff like the Voyager probes – and be very happy if I’m wrong. Unless you make the probe really small (AKA less than a ton and somehow capable of sending data back reliably), it’s just too expensive in energy terms.
NelC @11
It’s a reaction to the worryingly common attitude seen in various technophiles where human impacts on this planet are dismissed because hey, there’s always Mars. Or Chiron. Or Trantor. Or Gallifrey. Or whatever.
It’s no different to when certain Christians claim we don’t need to worry about peak oil or climate change because Jesus will come back soon. If it’s a private game of pretend then it’s fine, but when it begins to influence actual public policy then a healthy dose of realism is critical.
True the Earth is our only planet so we need to look after it but I disagree that we won’t live on other planets. Mind you “we” will no longer be Homo sapiens.
The impending advent of the Artificial super-Intelligence renders such speculation moot. The AsI will see us as an infestation that must be contained, and not allowed to infect any more of the Galaxy.
That probably explains the Fermi Paradox.
Call it confirmation bias (it probably is), but it makes me happy to hear of someone with whom I agree with categorically.
Science fiction shouldn’t be a guidebook or a map for the direction of civilization, but a mirror showing us who we are now. We are locked to this planet utterly and completely alone in the universe for all practical purposes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I’m sure that the super AI will realize that sentient biology is a precondition for the emergence of said super AI. Feeling alone in the universe, the super AI will then create simple bacterial biological packages that are sent to every world that could possibly support life in the hopes that after a few billion years novel AIs will be born.
*Tongue only slightly in cheek*
I suspect that that advanced artificial intelligence will have just as much success eliminating us as vermin as we have had eliminating the things we consider vermin. that is not much
uncle frogy
I really disagree with the use of the word “impossible” even if it is qualified by “almost certainly.”
I do agree that interstellar travel and colonization will be extremely difficult, even after we have the technology to do it, and there are a large number of very hard problems for humanity to overcome before it is possible, many of which have little to do with science and technology. Not possible within the next few centuries would also be a better characterization.
However, extremely difficult is not the same as impossible. Solving our environmental and political problems here on Earth first is clearly necessary. Interstellar colonization will not be a Plan B for what ails us today and in the near future, that’s for sure. Earth has to continue to thrive, no matter what.
But assuming we do muddle through, the drive to extend our life span, for one, whether it be biological or technological, is already a powerful one, and should we succeed, our entire perspective on time will change, and suddenly, the idea of taking thousands of years to travel between the stars (presumably in some form of suspended animation) will no longer be considered crazy and out of reach.
There are no plausible short cuts, except for one (maybe). Still very unlikely, of course, but should we receive a helping hand from another intelligent species that’s been there, done that, then all bets are off.
All in all, I would argue that we really don’t know yet what might be possible in terms of interstellar travel. The obstacles are monumental, but are they more monumental than those faced by dreamers in Ancient Egypt when they talked about flying to the Moon? That took us another 4,000 years to achieve.
If we have another 4,000 years of near-uninterrupted technological and scientific development ahead of us, I wouldn’t bet against the first interstellar mission being launched within that time.
The main limiter on a take-it-slow approach is the reliability of your starship. Unlike Aurora, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to make your ship entirely reliant on biomes or their equivalent to maintain basic life support – you need the ship to be able to produce oxygen, filter out CO2, recycle water, and produce something edible through non-life systems just in case the unthinkable happens and any biomes aboard the ship fail. Of course, in Aurora‘s case they had the secondary effect of preserving biodiversity for the terraforming effort, but in a pinch you want your crew to live.
If I recall correctly, it wasn’t really a death sentence for humans in either that or 2312 to live in sterile habitat environment – it just make them weaker and more short-lived, to the tune of losing about 2-3 decades of a two century long life expectancy.
One BIG thing that KSR appears to be failing to account for is the fact that we can still send out automated probes to do all sorts of interesting things. I’ll grant there are some huge AI/software/hardware problems to solve w.r.t. building something completely autonomous that’s sufficiently robust to carry out a mission lasting thousands of years, but it seems to me this is a *much* easier proposition than solving all of the biological/ecological problems involved in building ark-ships.
And as long as there are resources/energy available in the systems they reach, said probes will be able to build all sorts of random shit once they get there, including copies of themselves to send out farther. Even if they can only get up to 1/10 the speed of light and even if it takes hundreds of years to build up enough infrastructure in a given system to send out a 2+ child probes, they can still spread in all directions, and, over time, the exponential growth will win out (with zero additional cost to the originating civilization) — it’ll only take about 10 generations to reach all of the 30,000 stars within 500 light years.
And once they get there, they can be doing whatever surveying is necessary, finding suitable candidates for terraforming, starting in on it where possible, and reporting back on their progress. Note that even if we can only find, say, 5 planets that are sufficiently Earth-like to be usable, that’s still a huge win — never mind that biological advances may well expand the range of what can be considered usable/Earthlike.
100,000 years from now, once the ark-ship/ecology/etc tech has caught up, we’ll know exactly where to send them and have a pretty good idea of what they can expect when they get there. Perhaps still not so much fun for the colonists but it shouldn’t need to be as much of a crapshoot as KSR is suggesting.
Contrary to KSR, I think the hard problems are the physical ones – because one thing we can be pretty sure of is that it won’t be natural Homo sapiens that travels across interstellar space, if our (cultural) descendants ever send anything, but something much, much more robust, and probably completely non-biological. Most plausible is a “Minimalist Manipulator” (MM) – something able to move matter around, possibly under instructions from its point of origin, to construct a more capable manipulator. All this has been discussed here before, and while the most serious problem seems to be that interstellar space isn’t actually empty, and if you hit even something very small at very high relative velocity it’s going to do a lot of damage, I wasn’t persuaded that travel at something like 0.1c was out of the question – particularly if you can afford to lose most of the MMs you send out. Nor is it remotely plausible that anything – even MMs – would be sent out without knowing a lot about the destination; space telescopes several orders of magnitude more capable than anything we’ve built so far are certainly possible; probably taking advantage of the sun for gravitational lensing in addition to using lots of mirrors.
just how is 500 year communication time supposed to work exactly? last time I checked the ansible has not been invented yet and I have not heard of even a theory that would make one possible. Without faster than light communication any robotic mission to any where 100’s of light years away would have to be considered just gone. Whom is going to be listening for messages from those distances and that long ago. The only thing I am aware of that we as humans do that has that kind of time frame on it is religion.
Would we even be able to pick out the signal from a probe from the rest of the noise at that kind of distance? it would have to have a dam big transmitter. any messages from us it would have to take with it anything we could send would be very old if it’s dam big receiver could even hear it.
Terra-forming the rest of the solar system is far fetched enough and difficult enough that it will probably occupy us for the next few 100’s of years at the least. That is if we can make the economic case for it of course. We have not even done anything on the moon besides putting a flag on it in 1972.
If life from this planet ever does reach other solar systems it probably wont be homo-sapiens.
uncle frogy
One thing I always struggle with in these discussions is the timeframe proposed for terraforming. Even the most pessimistic estimates seem to put it in the range of a few hundred to a few thousand years… We do have one example of how long it takes to terraform a planet: the Earth. It took more than 2 billion years to develop an atmosphere with any appreciable level of free molecular oxygen. Even if we take the starting point as the emergence of cyanobacteria, you’re still looking at a timeframe in the order of hundreds of millions of years. Transforming a planet is hard.
@uncle frogy:
And yet the vermin keeps cropping up all the time. Mice, cockroaches, mosquitoes… I have a feeling we humans will be a lot easier to eradicate, especially since we are trying our best to do it ourselves.
well we do seem to try to kill each other a lot but in all this time we have not managed to even reduce the population for any appreciable time. the slums of the world world attest to the tenacious habit of our clinging to life. Life may be short and nasty on the bottom but the slums are full of children all over the world.
uncle frogy
The enthusiasts for techno-salvation claim that to resolve our world’s ecological issues we need to look to other worlds. We can head off in search of another habitable planet around another star, and run into all the problems KSR outlined above. I foresee at least one additional problem: ‘Habitable’ dies not mean ‘habitable to humans’. Earth has supported life for 3.5 billion years or so, and multi-cellular life for about 700 million years. The atmosphere however, has only been breathable to humans for extended periods from the Carboniferous through to the end of the Permian epoch, and then from the Jurassic epoch onward- about 350 million years. It is quite possible that an alien planet could support a thriving biosphere but posses an atmosphere quite unsuitable to humans, and that’s assuming the alien ecosystem would depend upon oxygen. Oxygen is toxic to lifeforms not evolved to exploit it, it is quite possible an alien ecosystem could have evolved to exploit the energy of another volatile toxin, chlorine say, or hydrogen sulphide.
Alternatively, say the techno-optimists, we could terraform a world closer to home, Mars is the most likely candidate. Currently conditions on Mars are little inclement, the climate and atmosphere are roughly equivalent to condition in Earths stratosphere, there is no magnetic field leaving the surface blasted by lethal radiation and the gravity is too weak to hold on to much of an atmosphere. But we could terraform Mars. All we would need to do is pump an entire Earth atmosphere of air there, reignite the core wit e billions of nuclear weapons to generate a magnetic field, synthesize another atmosphere worth of oxygen on a human timescale (it took nature 2 billion years) and conjure up an artificial gravity system to prevent this brand new atmosphere from trickling away into space. Then we would have to transport billions of surplus humans to this new home, presently it costs roughly an object’s weight in gold just to send it into orbit, much more to launch it to Mars. This cost may come down with new technology, but the energy requirement will remain the same. And of course these billions of people will need life support on the way, further raising costs. We will have to do all this, furthermore, while our society is currently headed for a collapse which will at best resemble the disintegration of the Roman and Chinese empires in the fifth century AD, and at worst will resemble a full-blow action replay of the Permian mass extinction.
When one turns to the Techno-optimists and ask, ‘do we have to do this? Could we not we not instead find an alternative to endless economic growth as the basis of continued human well-being?’ they reply that this is unrealistic.
Well, we send an ark fleet of three ships, with the folks in suspended animation. Of course, the first ship will contain, middle managers, telephone sanitizers, and hairdressers. Somehow, we won’t get to launching the other two ships.
Sadly, all humans will subsequently perish from a particularly virulent strain of virus passed by dirty telephones.
Christopher @ 7: Long Shot by Vernor Vinge ( 1972 or 1973) was an early story along these lines.
— — — —
Anyway, if the crew of Nostromo brought along Jones the cat for company, I hope the von Neumann machines that build habitats in suitable planetoids orbiting other stars will have a few humans around for sentimental reasons . (if you regard cats as psychological symbionts Jones might actually be the main protagonist of Alien)
In fact, Nobel prizewinner Hannes Alfven* (using the pen name Olof Johannesson) wrote a story about future humans co-existing with Ara ther like horses still co-exist with humans despite not being needed to haul cargo.
— — —
* written during the sixties. Even Freeman Dyson had heard about that story.
— — —
Humans 2.0 may well have lifespans enabling them to cross over, but that is another matter.
” Ara ther” should be “AI rather “. The martian bugs in my brain have ganged up with toxoplasma gondii, making writing difficult.
Refreshed before posting to find that birgerjohansson has ninja’d my bringing Ridley Scott and Douglas Adams into it. Oh well, post anyway…
I never felt that terraforming would be an viable alternative to an inhospitable Earth. I always imagined that, at best, you’d just spend hundreds or thousands of years living on an almost (but not quite) entirely unsuitable planet (gravity, energy, radiation, temperature, poor sources of nutrients) and generally a highly hostile planet where the most you could say was that the atmosphere was just about breathable and everything else there hated you. Pretty much like what the terraforming colonists found who went to LV-426 as pictured in “Aliens” (1986) I suppose.
Edit: longship and birgerjohansson
“Aurora” did a marvelous job of showing what a monumental task it would be to send even just a few thousand people to another world. We’re not going to be able to send extraneous population to another world. Best we try to solve our problems here.
The priority of preserving our blue planet from destruction through our own collective greed and stupidity is clear, and in so far as Robinson makes that argument I agree with him. I also agree that the idea that we can pollute and otherwise mess up Earth and then just run off to another planet is dangerous and irresponsible. As of now, and for the foreseeable future, practical interstellar travel is indeed beyond our reach, and we must act in accordance with that reality.
That said, the caveat is important – impossible now and for the foreseeable future, that is not the same thing as being impossible forever. If history has taught us little else it is that we humans aren’t great at making long term predictions, and precognition really isn’t thing. While it may be a cliche, there is also the point that necessity is the mother of invention. Right now the only imminent threat to our continued survival on Earth is our own shortsightedness and idiocy, but that may not always be the case. If in the future we find ourselves facing a catastrophe we can’t avoid that might render the planet difficult or impossible to inhabit, like a stellar event of some kind of which we have advanced warning, then the calculus becomes very different, and difficult or ultra long term options become much more attractive when the choice is between attempting to reach another world or sitting on our hands and simply waiting for the entire species to die.
We can’t predict exactly what will be possible 500 years from now (an mere instant even in the history of our own species so far, let alone in terms of truly deep time) and it is ridiculous to suggest that we can know what our species (or its descendant intelligences) might look like thousands or tens of thousands of years in the future. While the possible transhumans of machine intelligences that may ultimately achieve interstellar travel will probably look little or nothing like contemporary humans, that is again a different proposition from declaring such travel impossible.
For now, and for at the very least a considerable time in the future on human timescales, interstellar travel and colonisation is not so much entirely impossible as so costly, dangerous, time consuming and impractical that the whole notion is a non-starter. As such, Sci Fi stories are just that – stories and dreams. While a terrible basis for informing policy, such stories and aspirations still have their uses in society. And since we cannot know what the future will hold, we cannot say for certain that the set of circumstances and technology level that renders such travel an unacceptably bad risk will hold forever.
What PZ calls constructive pessimism I would term a clear eyed recognition of the situation today. Such a grounded outlook is no bad thing, so long as it doesn’t trap us into the notion that our limits today will be our limits forever. We need to remember that thinking about how interstellar travel might reasonably be done if it becomes necessary is not a flippant waste of time, but prudent speculation that might give us a leg up should we need to find a new home for our species down the line.
In my day job at the International Worldwide House of Rocket Exploration (IWHORE), I get a lot of engineers who fervently believe that “the stars are our destiny”. There is no amount of physics, data or other science you can bring to bear that will convince them otherwise. Invariably, I am accused of being a Luddite or anti-technology, and the Wright brothers often make an appearance.
Just because we have made astounding progress in doing what pre-enlightenment humans would have dismissed as witchcraft does not mean that what we now consider to be impossible is inevitable. If it violates physics, it’s probably going to remain impossible. And interstellar travel violates a whole lot of known physics.
Another SF writer, Charles Stross, made a similar point on his blog a few years ago and got an influx of Heinlein-worshipping space libertarians lecturing him on how wrong he was for his pains. He quotes Bruce Sterling who pointed out that we haven’t yet colonised places on the planet like the Gobi Desert which at least have the benefits of normal gravity, an oxygen atmosphere and a working ozone layer, not to mention being reachable in a matter of days or hours rather than months or years.
There was a lot of blue-sky thinking about space colonisation since the start of the Space Age (or even going back to the days of Tsiolkovsky) which hand-waved a lot of the problems away– or didn’t even recognise the problems (like how much of the terrestrial biome we would have to take with us to ensure we remain healthy). I was born in 1973 (right after the last Apollo mission to the moon) and grew up with the gorgeous O’Neill drawings of space colonies that adorn Robinson’s articles… but the truth is, they represent a future unlikely to come to pass.
Also, F.O. @1: no fair posting the “Pale Blue Dot” speech! It makes me blubber like a child every time I hear it!
Does anyone actually advocate interplanetary or interstellar travel as a replacement for earth or is that just a straw man?
All the techno-dweebs in love with Mars and beyond seem to justify the endeavor either with the ‘because it is there’ explorer’s excuse or as an off site backup of humanity’s ‘light of consciousness’ in case there is a giant meteor we can’t stop or something well beyond humanity screwing ourselves over.
Sometimes I think it is less about “because it is there” or to preserve the “light of consciousness” and more that the people who advocate space colonisation know that they are the ones who have gorged themselves disproportionately at the buffet of Earth’s resources and are looking for a way to do a runner before the bill arrives…
@26
500 ly is simply the edge of the bubble. For communicating with the nearer stars you only need decades. There will be a fairly continuous stream of reports coming back. And if you know roughly where something is in the sky, listening for it is fairly straightforward; tracking something with (or that will be able to build) a megawatt transmitter at interstellar distances is not essentially a different problem from tracking the 8-watt Pioneer 10 transmitter at interplanetary distances and we were able to do that just fine.
The real issue there is it’s going to take a while for results to come back and it’s reasonable to ask how the listener program will survive any upcoming collapses of civilization we might suffer. On the other hand:
(1) If the Romans had launched spaceships, we’d probably remember; in fact it’s a fair bet that if they did there’d be at least one book of the New Testament devoted to the subject.
(2) even if we didn’t remember, the probes would stay out there and continue their stuff. continue broadcasting indefinitely, we’d pick up the signals again and eventually figure things out (it would be kind of like SETI except that there’d actually be stuff to find)
@Christopher
No one that I’ve heard of, lately. You do get the “back-up” argument, that’s it a good idea to have a back-up colony off-world in case we get hit with a cosmic calamity or do something seriously fucked up to ourselves such that civilization collapses on Earth (AKA nuclear war, futuristic biological pathogen, etc). But I don’t see a lot of claims that this is somehow replacing Earth – they want both Earth and the off-world colonies to thrive. At least one of them (Robert Zubrin) thinks that a Mars colony would be a source of innovation that would end up helping people back on Earth.
Honestly, a self-sustaining colony off-world is far enough off (second half of the 21st century, at least – and it depends on what we develop in terms of compact manufacturing and resource processing) that it’s not really worth discussing for the “back-up” argument. You’d be better off trying to build up capabilities to deal with the cosmic calamities and redundancy to deal with the planet-side ones.
@Cat Mara
It’s more the fear that if humanity doesn’t expand off-world, it will stagnate, crawl up its own ass, and die. Or turn inward, introspective – and then die.
Not sure that’s an entirely valid argument. After all, there are plenty of readily accessible places near the Gobi Desert that are much more desirable places to live, so there is no real incentive to try living there. In any case, while not as hostile as the Gobi Desert, there are plenty of desert locations in Arizona that have been turned into habitable locations, at great cost and environmental expense.
I don’t think there is much chance of that. Even those who firmly believe in an afterlife often cling on to life tenaciously to the bitter end. It certainly costs us taxpayer a penny or two.
We may be the first species on Earth to develop the technological means to wipe ourselves out, but we are also the first species on Earth to have evolved to the point where we are capable of surviving a worldwide catastrophe, and that point is now, more or less.
Even if billions die in the process, unless Earth was rendered completely uninhabitable, I do not doubt that some people would survive, and they would have the drive and determination to rebuild what was lost. I believe that’s just who we are as a species.
I’m not sure I’m going to accept impossible per se. He sounds to me like an early chemist explaining how turning lead into gold is impossible. And so it is, by chemical means. But a better understanding of the subatomic physics involved makes it possible. However, to follow the analogy out (as I believe one can), like turning lead into gold, it’s probably going to turn out that by the time it’s possible, it’s also clear that it’s far more trouble than it’s worth. For now, let’s just send more robots off to explore the solar system and maybe see if we can get out as far as the nearest stars with the robots. It’s all good fun and a better use of resources than many.
Cat Mara, @41:
I think it’s simpler than that. These are the stories they (sorry, we) grew up with as children. We want to believe them. It can be very difficult to accept that your childhood dreams are silly and unrealistic, especially when they’ve formed part of your over-arching understanding of the world. It’s not just that space colonisation is a cool idea – it’s wrapped up with ideas about the destiny of mankind and the purpose of our civilisation. It’s hard to let go of those ideas, and accept that we have no particular destiny or purpose. I think it’s actually very closely related to the religious impulse.
@PZ:
Don’t you find that to be a horrible conclusion, though? If you and Mr. Robinson are correct, we are never leaving the Earth. The resources we have here are all we’ll ever have. The logical implications of this makes most dystopia novels look like a mythical heaven. We’re required to conclude:
* That technology beyond the Stone Age is ultimately unsustainable.
* That since expansion is impossible, and population growth is unsustainable, then we need to engage in culling actions in order to maintain stability.
* That war for the purposes of resource acquisition is the only way for a people, culture, or nation to survive.
As a biologist, don’t you find the idea of mankind not being able to expand from Earth to have the worst consequences possible for our ecosystem?
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@newenlightenment:
I can certainly come up with alternatives. I don’t think you would like any of them, since they more or less start with “Cull the human population to a sustainable minimum”.
Lot of wrong assumptions there.
* Who says technology beyond the Stone Age is impossible? Did they have wind farms producing electricity, too, and biotechnology to improve agriculture to the same degree we do now?
* Population growth IS unsustainable. The Earth doesn’t have infinite capacity. No one’s talking about culling, though: the answer is education and opportunity. People willingly reduce reproduction when given a chance to do otherwise.
* War is the only possibility? Absurd. No — dangerously delusional. There is another viable strategy: cooperation. I notice that I can get food at the grocery store (or if I wanted, go hunting for deer) without killing my neighbors to do so, and actually, that having happy, productive neighbors increases the resources available to me.
I think your preconceptions are misleading you here.
@PZ:
Technology requires metal and power as resources. Eventually, we will run out of easily obtainable ore to mine. The cost to produce the plastics, metals, and chemicals that sustain industrialized technological civilization will rise exponentially. We won’t be able to sustain the biotechnology we have and can create because we won’t have the tools necessary to create it. Copper corrodes. Iron rusts. Concrete crumbles. We can only recycle so far. Unless there is a massive discovery or innovation in recycling technology, current recycling technology projections create a rather grim outlook.
As for power, that’s even worse. Yes, we can move to various types of sustainable energy, but solar is currently the most viable of the bunch….so long as we have the tools to create efficient solar panels. This technology is really still in its infancy, too; it has not yet proven complete viability. This doesn’t even get into the battery/storage problem, even if Tesla has an idea about it. Our primary assured methods of maintaining our current technological level is still limited to radioactive fuels and fossil fuels.
The last report I read that soberly assessed our resources here on Earth for the purposes of maintaining current technology world-wide was somewhere around 2010. I’ll have to dig it up. At any rate, we can extract enough radioactive fuels from the planet to sustain power for about 1000 years. Fossil fuels, including coal, comes to about 2000. And this is to maintain technology at 2010 levels with the population of 2010 remaining static. Future progress in technology and/or increasing population begins to lower those time frames. With current increase assesments as of 2010? 500-1000 years, at the most optimistic. At 2010 technology.
After that, kaput. Inevitable disaster cascade due to increasing scarcity. *shrugs* It’s just math. And if we’re not assuming a capability to be able to colonize the stars, we shouldn’t feel confident in a huge progress/discovery in the renewable power area either. It’s just not in the offing, according to what we know.
We agree. The choices are expansion to other areas or population control to maintain viability. That’s putting the solutions to their most basic, reductive form, of course.
I think that you are being a bit pollyanna about the nature of humanity here. You might be able to get a bare majority of humanity to agree and cooperate with you – but we are far from rational creatures, and there are always those who will put their own interests above humanity’s interests.
Essentially, you have a closed system with finite resources and a population with no real breeding controls, only individually self-imposed ones. And you truly believe that we’ll have some Star Trek-like cooperating society through the wonders of education?
Then there’s the whole bit about opportunity. If we’re in a closed system with finite resources, then opportunity maxes out at some point. Only so much pie to go around. And since this is a zero-sum game, that also limits the opportunities available. Again, this goes back to population control.
I think it’s more of a case of your Rosseau versus my Hobbes.
@Hildred Castaigne
You realize that all of the rich countries and most of the poorer ones have gone through massive birth rate reductions through literally that – a combination of education, public programs, better health, etc – right? It’s most definitely in the realm of possibility, and if we get serious human life expectancy extension I’d expect to see birth rates drop even further.
If we’re talking about the truly long time frames – millions of years – then yes, we’d have to figure something out either by reducing population or drawing resources from off-world. But that’s a long time frame to do it right.