Spamming the cosmos
One of my earliest solid memories -- I would have been four and a half years old at the time, but it's still vivid -- is of being woken up at a ridiculously early hour by my parents and taken downstairs to watch television. The TV (a brand new black and white one) was showing a blurry grayish landscape, and not much was happening. Occasional crackling voices; then a guy in a bulky white suit crawls backwards down a ladder, almost blocking the camera.
(For the next five years, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. Then I unaccountably realised that this was going to be hard and re-focussed on being a science fiction writer instead. Weird, but I digress ...)
Thirty-five years older, and much more cynical, I find myself deeply conflicted over the whole "let's go to Mars" thing. We fragile multicellular organisms evolved under remarkably strict environmental conditions. We are, bluntly, Not Suited for the task of exploring the cosmos -- expose us to vacuum without protection and we invariably die in 100-1000 seconds. The environment is not fail-safe for us. While there are parts of the Earth's biosphere that are equally hostile, for the most part we can survive and even prosper in it. Whereas, as Bruce Sterling noted, Mars makes the Gobi Desert look like paradise.
There are other issues, too. One is philosophical, and as far as I know very few SF writers have ever addressed it (Greg Egan being a notable exception). We tend to confuse personal extinction with species extinction, and to act as if it is to our personal advantage to spam the universe with mutated copies of our own genome -- but is it, really? Individuals may like children, but I find no physical or intellectual solace in the idea that a thousand years hence human civilizations will exist throughout the solar system -- only the tenuous emotional sense of connectedness to the future. It is a sad thing to be forgotten, as Ozymandias reminds us, but is that sufficient justification for sending uncounted descendants into an environment to which they are fundamentally ill-suited?
Then there are practical problems. Space is big, and the energetic costs of shipping bulk matter around the place (for example, in sending canned primates to Mars) are huge. Should space colonisation actually take off, most people will end up living their lives in horrendously isolated communities, the costs of travel between regions being comparable to crossing the Pacific ocean by dug-out canoe. Sure, new propulsion technologies may mitigate the problem, but as we have discovered, transport technologies become weapons of efficiency in direct proportion to their kinetic energy. (Think 9/11, in space, with O'Neil cylinders instead of the Twin Towers and with light sail or ion drive spaceships as the airliners. No thanks ...)
And the political ones. Can you imagine growing up in a city state where there is no outside universe, to all intents and purposes? If the political culture was liberal -- in the sense of being tolerant of diverse opinions and lifestyles -- it might not be too oppressive, but I fear that there would be enormous peer pressure towards certain types of lifestyle conformity and draconian restrictions on privacy; if your neighbour's neglect of their house can actually kill you by letting the air out, you're unlikely to leave them alone.
The "keeping all your eggs in one basket" idea doesn't hold water either. Current developments in propulsion technology and astronomy promise to mitigate the threat of a random dinosaur-killer impact. The existence of a self-sufficient colony on Mars is scant comfort to me if there's an asteroid heading for my head; I want prevention, dammit, and prevention is actually cheaper than visiting Mars. (Oh, and forget the nonsense about the natural life-cycle of the sun rendering Earth uninhabitable in the distant future; that's several hundred million years away yet, and the life expectancy of the average terrestrial species is on the order of one megayear. We'll be long gone before that happens, unless it transpires that tool-using sapience is a stable phenomenon across geological time -- and all the evidence to this point suggests the exact opposite.)
I don't want to suggest that the idea of humans spreading throughout the comos is intellectually bankrupt, impractical, undesirable, or morally wrong. But there are very real problems with this vision that the gung-ho space cadet wing consistently fail to confront, and until we address them we're doomed to spin our robot wheels in the Martian dirt.
In the meantime, the robot probes are at least better adapted to the landscape than we are -- and who knows? If we crack the AI problem, or the mind uploading problem, maybe we can go there, and without any of the difficulties highlighted above (which emerge from our physiology rather than our psychology).
(For the next five years, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. Then I unaccountably realised that this was going to be hard and re-focussed on being a science fiction writer instead. Weird, but I digress ...)
Thirty-five years older, and much more cynical, I find myself deeply conflicted over the whole "let's go to Mars" thing. We fragile multicellular organisms evolved under remarkably strict environmental conditions. We are, bluntly, Not Suited for the task of exploring the cosmos -- expose us to vacuum without protection and we invariably die in 100-1000 seconds. The environment is not fail-safe for us. While there are parts of the Earth's biosphere that are equally hostile, for the most part we can survive and even prosper in it. Whereas, as Bruce Sterling noted, Mars makes the Gobi Desert look like paradise.
There are other issues, too. One is philosophical, and as far as I know very few SF writers have ever addressed it (Greg Egan being a notable exception). We tend to confuse personal extinction with species extinction, and to act as if it is to our personal advantage to spam the universe with mutated copies of our own genome -- but is it, really? Individuals may like children, but I find no physical or intellectual solace in the idea that a thousand years hence human civilizations will exist throughout the solar system -- only the tenuous emotional sense of connectedness to the future. It is a sad thing to be forgotten, as Ozymandias reminds us, but is that sufficient justification for sending uncounted descendants into an environment to which they are fundamentally ill-suited?
Then there are practical problems. Space is big, and the energetic costs of shipping bulk matter around the place (for example, in sending canned primates to Mars) are huge. Should space colonisation actually take off, most people will end up living their lives in horrendously isolated communities, the costs of travel between regions being comparable to crossing the Pacific ocean by dug-out canoe. Sure, new propulsion technologies may mitigate the problem, but as we have discovered, transport technologies become weapons of efficiency in direct proportion to their kinetic energy. (Think 9/11, in space, with O'Neil cylinders instead of the Twin Towers and with light sail or ion drive spaceships as the airliners. No thanks ...)
And the political ones. Can you imagine growing up in a city state where there is no outside universe, to all intents and purposes? If the political culture was liberal -- in the sense of being tolerant of diverse opinions and lifestyles -- it might not be too oppressive, but I fear that there would be enormous peer pressure towards certain types of lifestyle conformity and draconian restrictions on privacy; if your neighbour's neglect of their house can actually kill you by letting the air out, you're unlikely to leave them alone.
The "keeping all your eggs in one basket" idea doesn't hold water either. Current developments in propulsion technology and astronomy promise to mitigate the threat of a random dinosaur-killer impact. The existence of a self-sufficient colony on Mars is scant comfort to me if there's an asteroid heading for my head; I want prevention, dammit, and prevention is actually cheaper than visiting Mars. (Oh, and forget the nonsense about the natural life-cycle of the sun rendering Earth uninhabitable in the distant future; that's several hundred million years away yet, and the life expectancy of the average terrestrial species is on the order of one megayear. We'll be long gone before that happens, unless it transpires that tool-using sapience is a stable phenomenon across geological time -- and all the evidence to this point suggests the exact opposite.)
I don't want to suggest that the idea of humans spreading throughout the comos is intellectually bankrupt, impractical, undesirable, or morally wrong. But there are very real problems with this vision that the gung-ho space cadet wing consistently fail to confront, and until we address them we're doomed to spin our robot wheels in the Martian dirt.
In the meantime, the robot probes are at least better adapted to the landscape than we are -- and who knows? If we crack the AI problem, or the mind uploading problem, maybe we can go there, and without any of the difficulties highlighted above (which emerge from our physiology rather than our psychology).
<< Home