Our expectations determine so much of what we see, which is one of the great lessons of Michael Michaud’s sweeping study of our attitudes toward extraterrestrial intelligence in Contact with Alien Civilizations (Springer, 2006). But extraterrestrials aside, I’ve also been musing over how our attitudes affect our perceptions in relation to something closer to home, the human space program. Recently I was reminded of Richard Gott’s views on the space program and the Copernican Principle, which suggest that just as our location in the universe is not likely to be special, neither is our location in time.
My expectation, for example, is that whether it takes one or many centuries, we will eventually have expanded far enough into the Solar System to make the technological transition to interstellar missions. But Gott (Princeton University) has been arguing since 2007 that there is simply no assurance of continued growth. In fact, his work indicates we are as likely to be experiencing the latter stages of the space program as its beginnings. The view is controversial and I like to return to it now and again because it so shrewdly questions all our assumptions.
Image: Apollo 17 Saturn V rocket on Pad 39-A at dusk. Will manned space exploration ever achieve the levels of funding that made Apollo possible again? Credit: NASA.
So ponder a different, much more Earth-bound future, one in which funding for human spaceflight may end permanently. Examples abound, from the pyramid-building phase of Egypt’s civilization to the return of Cheng Ho’s fleet to China — not every wave of technology is followed up. Thus Gott, in a short but intriguing discussion called A Goal for the Human Spaceflight Program:
Once lost, opportunities may not come again. The human spaceflight program is only 48 years old. The Copernican Principle tells us that our location is not likely to be special. If our location within the history of human space travel is not special, there is a 50% chance that we are in the last half now and that its future duration is less than 48 years (cf. Gott, 2007). If the human spaceflight program has a much longer future duration than this, then we would be lucky to be living in the first tiny bit of it. Bayesian statistics warn us against accepting hypotheses that imply our observations are lucky. It would be prudent to take the above Copernican estimate seriously since it assumes that we are not particularly lucky or unlucky in our location in time, and a wise policy should aim to protect us even against some bad luck. With such a short past track record of funding, it would be a mistake to count on much longer and better funding in the future.
This application of the Copernican Principle goes against my deepest presumptions, which is why I appreciate the intellectual gauntlet it hurls down. Because what Gott is sketching is a by no means impossible future, one in which the real question becomes how we can best use the technologies we have today and will have in the very near future to ensure species survival. Gott’s answer is that within the first half of this century or so, we will have the capability of planting a self-sustaining colony on Mars, making us a two-planet species and thus better protected against global disaster of whatever sort. We will have created an insurance policy for all humanity.
Let’s act, in other words, as if we don’t have the luxury of an unbroken line of gradual development, because an end to the space program some time in the 21st Century might mark the end of any chance we have to get into the Solar System, much less to the stars. Skip the return to the Moon, a hostile environment not conducive to colonization, and go for the one best chance for extending the species, a planet with water, reasonable gravity and the resources needed to get an underground base off to a survivable start. The real space race? The race to get a colony planted in the most likely spot before all funding for human spaceflight ends.
Gott is reminded of the library of Alexandria, a laudable effort to collect human knowledge but one that eventually burned, taking most (but thankfully not all) of Sophocles’ plays with it. Here he’s thinking of the surviving seven Sophoclean plays and weighing them against the 120 that the dramatist wrote, by way of making the case for off-world colonies as soon as possible:
We should be planting colonies off the Earth now as a life insurance policy against whatever unexpected catastrophes may await us on the Earth. Of course, we should still be doing everything possible to protect our environment and safeguard our prospects on the Earth. But chaos theory tells us that we may well be unable to predict the specific cause of our demise as a species. By definition, whatever causes us to go extinct will be something the likes of which we have not experienced so far. We simply may not be smart enough to know how best to spend our money on Earth to insure the greatest chance of survival here. Spending money planting colonies in space simply gives us more chances–like storing some of Sophocles’ plays away from the Alexandrian library.
As I said, this is bracing stuff (and thanks to Larry Klaes for the pointer). Gott is not the only one wondering whether there is a brief window that will allow us to move into the Solar System and then close, but he is becoming one of the more visible proponents of this view. The motto of the Tau Zero Foundation — ad astra incrementis — assumes a step-by-step process over what may be centuries to develop the technologies for travel to other stars. But Gott’s point is emphatic and much more urgent: For incremental development in space to occur, we should multiply the civilizations that can achieve it, spinning off colonies that back up what we have learned against future catastrophe.
That’s a job not for the distant future but for the next 4-5 decades. Gott reckons that if we put up into low Earth orbit as much tonnage in the next 48 years as we have in the last 48 years (in Saturn V and Shuttle launches alone) we could deliver 2,304 tons to the surface of Mars. And while he talks about heavy lift vehicles like the Ares V, we also have commercial companies like SpaceX with its Falcon Heavy concept and the continuing efforts of Robert Zubrin’s Mars Society to make something like this happen even absent massive government intervention.
Will the first interstellar mission be assembled not by an Earth team but by the scientists and engineers of a colony world we have yet to populate? There is no way to tell, but a Mars colony of the kind Gott advocates would give us at least one alternative to a future Earth with no viable space program and no prospects for energizing the species through an expansive wave of exploration. One colony can plant another, multiplying the hope not only of survival but renaissance. But all of it depends upon getting through a narrow temporal window that even now may be closing.
Interesting. Related question…. Do you think the advent of commercial spaceflight might jump start space exploration? The reason I ask is we see how risk-intolerant NASA is when it comes to human spaceflight. A demand for 100% safety is not going to be compatible with exploring the unknown. Consider how many Europeans died during the Age of Exploration. When a Space Shuttle explodes, it is a national disaster and there are no flights for a long period of time. But, I would imagine that all the astronauts (whether they are government employees or in the private sector) KNOW that space exploration is very risky and they accept those risks.
If someone like Space X “loses” a capsule with their own “employees”, I doubt it will be seen as a national disaster anymore than the loss of life on a commercial fishing ship is a national disaster. That will allow the company to focus on the actual problem and fix it, but not be burdened with years of congressional inquiry and additional oversight. Basically, the first time a commercial space operation results in loss of life, it will be a news story for a few days….and that’s it. That means that someone like Space X can take on slightly more ambitious missions.
This isn’t to imply that companies will be irresponsible, but there has to be an acceptance that these missions might not turn out well and it doesn’t seem like a government agency is going to handle that risk/reward decision very well.
The problem with these Copernican applications is you have to know when to apply them. Bayesian ideas are old, so you could’ve made this argument in 1960, and concluded that the space program wouldn’t last into the 1970s.
An unnoticed aspect of such notions is that you need further arguments about choosing when a statistical argument has a chance, ie, when an ensemble of expectations is broad enough to apply statistics at all. It may be that the early stages of so vast an undertaking as the leap into space is not such a case, since it concerns an enormous range of events to occur–scientific, technical and political. Further, this ignores drivers–why go into space at all? If there’s a reward for doing so, the system has a bias to grow, not dwindle.
“But all of it depends upon getting through a narrow temporal window that even now may be closing.”
I can imagine that back when agriculture was only a generation old (back in prehistory) that some wag came along and told a farmer in the field that we might be in the final stage of growing our own food since he might in fact be part of the final generation of farmers.
This abuse of Bayesian statistics (there is an equivalent form of abuse for frequency statistics) seems to be more common lately, or at least I’m noticing it more. There is no statistically-justifiable reason to believe that this is the final half of human space exploration. There may be a valid justification but this isn’t one of them.
Regarding a colony on Mars, wake me up after we first succeed in establishing a self-contained and self-sustaining colony on the Antarctic ice sheet. Until then, speaking of a Mars colony is wildly over-reaching.
Maybe the end of the current instance of the United States government space program. Not the end of humanity’s expansion into space. Egyptian pyramid building stopped. Construction of monuments by humans did not stop.
The Apollo astronauts’ footprints on the moon are estimated to last anywhere from 10 to 100 million years. But the Copernican Principle tells us that our location is not likely to be special. If our location within the history of footprints on the moon is not special, there is a 50% chance that we are in the last half now and that the footprints on the moon will disappear in less than 42 years. I wonder what selenological process will erase them?
If you liked The City and the Stars you might also like The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps. Arthur C. Clarke liked the book enough to endorse it with the wish that he’d been the author. The intense space exploration you’d like to see may not come until well into the last half of this century. Meanwhile, ten billion people is a lot for the earth to support…A revolution in energy must somehow come soon…and in the process it will upend many lives and fortunes and create political tragedies, ending the lives of many governments…..
Take your fish oil pill now and count your blessings…..
After all, all life began in the oceans…..JDS
The ‘copernican’ principle doesn’t really work when applied that way. I’m not quite sure why. One of the arguments is that you are a product of your culture, and thus could only exist now, at any other time you’d be someone at least slightly different. Another is that it always makes the same argument, and as such it cannot be predictive. Probability doesn’t work like that, probability is partial information – you can’t just refer back to it as something that remains true in the presence of other information, it changes in the presence of other information.
James D. Stilwell said on May 9, 2012 at 10:48:
“If you liked The City and the Stars you might also like The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps. Arthur C. Clarke liked the book enough to endorse it with the wish that he’d been the author.”
With all due respect to Arthur C. Clarke, he seemed to have a habit of endorsing and positively reviewing just about anything that came his way, to the point that I questioned how much he actually read of the work. I recall his Sky & Telescope review of Carl Sagan’s 1994 book Pale Blue Dot where he spent more words talking about himself and his ideas than Sagan’s book! Not that Clarke didn’t have some interesting ideas (in his later novels, I found the footnotes often more interesting than the stories!), but hopefully you see my point.
As for Savage’s Millennial Project, it is another pretty picture book with grandiose ideas about colonizing the galaxy that just about any space enthusiast could write. Savage also assumes there are no other living beings in the entire Milky Way galaxy, so all 400 billion star systems are there for humanity to do with as they will. Gee, what could possibly go wrong with that kind of thinking?
Last time I checked, this plan from two decades ago hasn’t graduated much beyond its initial ideas and the group – which now calls itself the Living Universe Foundation – often sounds more like a cult than a space advocacy organization.
This is why I like groups like Space X; they have gotten past the rosy rhetoric and have put metal together. The fact that they are having a hard time shows how much more support all real space efforts need. Humanity could do it if it actually cared and thought ahead to our real future. If not, then we do not deserve to be in space and will eventually reap the consequences of this decision. There’s another data point for the Fermi Paradox.
And Gott is right, statistics or no, if we don’t act soon, we can say goodbye to the stars. And I bet you all those problems that need to be solved on Earth first as so many like to say will just get worse and not better. Ignorance, selfishness, and short-sightedness are what is really holding us back, not technology and know-how.
SpaceX’s Elon Musk seems to be on the same page as Gott with his reasons why he wants to start building a Mars colony asap: “The window to become multi-planetary is open now and we need to take advantage of it now, just in case it closes,” he said in an interview with New Scientist, posted here on the Mars Society website:
http://www.marssociety.org/home/press/news/illputmillionsofpeopleonmarssayselonmusk
@Gregory Benford”The problem with these Copernican applications is you have to know when to apply them. Bayesian ideas are old, so you could’ve made this argument in 1960, and concluded that the space program wouldn’t last into the 1970s.”
But the manned space program indeed died in the 70’s (1981 to be exact). Compare the advances in space exploration in the 30 years between 1951 and 1981 and the advances in space exploration between 1981 and 2011.
1950 – 1981: From nothing to the manned landings on the Moon and the first long term stays in space.
1981 – 2011: Same ol’ same ol’, up and down to LEO.
The Space Shuttle/ISS may not have killed manned space exploration, but they were a symptom of the lack of vision and meekness.
I strongly agree with the imperative of setting up an independently sustainable colony on Mars ASAP, ever since I read Robert Zubrin’s ‘Entering Space’. One problem is, we don’t have a way of voting for it. We need to promote notions of instituting public control of scientific research priorities: people would be more interested in ‘saving the humans’ than the esoteric measurements mostly sought by painstakingly slow-progress missions like most ESA/NASA ones.
The golden age of government sponsored space projects is on the way out. That only worked in the 60’s and 70’s because we had two superpowers attempting to upstage each other in rocketry. As for China’s recent efforts, we will see how that ends up. Something tells me that it won’t be sustainable, since they are due for quite a bit of economic and social turmoil in the coming years.
However, the nice thing about the future is, well, is that it is the future. Open ended. So what if the space ‘program’ (government driven) efforts die. This doesn’t imply the end. Perhaps it is just what needs to happen. Maybe a good thing in the long run. Opens things up for smaller groups and companies to fill the gap. Like we are currently seeing with Space X, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin in recent years.
So long as technical progress continues in a general way without humanity getting thrown back into another dark ages, then the window is open. Since earth orbit is useful and profitable (satellite communications, etc), then there isn’t too much risk in dropping below that baseline of capability for quite some time.
While a colony on Mars might be achievable in the next few decades, a self sustaining colony (barring a huge improvement in efficiency and flexibility in manufacturing) would require far longer. I’d start with trying to devise a way to establish a high technology self sustaining colony in Antarctica, no easy task (if it could even be done) – once you start to look at the details of the economics and infrastructure requirements.
– Ever notice how things appear so much simpler when they’re far away?
A comment just in from reader Greg Parris via email, which he has agreed for me to publish here:
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Your essay today was very thought provoking. Typically, we humans don’t do things that do not have utility in the short run (maybe because our life spans are so short). Apparently, the building of pyramids on a grand scale did not continue to have short run benefits.
Based on our history of spreading across the globe out of Africa (my daughter is majoring in anthropology, lots of interesting discussions at family events), I am optimistic about our innate drive to colonize other places to live. However, the most efficient way to spread our presence into the planetary neighborhood might be to allow our technology to proceed before us and prepare the way for us to follow. If we have automated aluminum and steel processing in lunar orbit fed by automated material collection of near earth objects, then minimum payload to orbit can yield maximum construction material in orbit (per your “Planetary Resources” article). The speed of advancement in AI and robotics (IBM’s Watson, Jeff Hawkins at Numenta, self-driving cars from Google, etc.) leads one to be optimistic about our ability to automate difficult activities.
So, barring a game changing technical advancement in our ability to get payload to orbit cheaply, minimizing the time required for colonization may be optimized by focusing our efforts on automated operations. The concept would be “Let our technology prepare the crops so that we may harvest”.
Over the years, I had been disappointed many times by the progress of the space program, but I think that while we will have periods of incremental progress, our exploration of space will not stop.
The first thing to note is that America’s halcyon days in which a significant proportion of the country’s GDP was spent on human space exploration are over and will not return in the foreseeable future. America’s space program, in the near future is going to mainly run on a gently declining budget driven by inertia and congressional pork.
However, this decline does not necessarily apply to other countries. Europe will continue in the long run to spend a steadily increasing amount on space. The European space program is driven by the French, and when the French decide on something they stick with it. Witness their approach to high-speed rail and nuclear power.
The Chinese (and to a lesser extent the Indians) will ramp up their space programs for reasons of national prestige. By 2050, the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the US economy (in the order of $50 trillion/year) so maintaining a lunar base will not be a great strain.
Next, we come to the commercial aspects of space. Space is already very valuable and I think we have now entered a feedback loop where the cost of space access will fall leading to new commercial possibilities, which will up the volume of business leading to a further fall in the price of access. SpaceX has taken an important first step in that direction and Skylon waits in the wings.
Without a commercial driver, space exploration would, I think, resemble the exploration of Antarctica where there would been a steady, but low budget, expended on space science. It will be the commercial exploration of space that will drive our initial colonization (think Antarctica if it could be mined and have it’s oil resources extracted.)
I think there will be a steady growth on the commercial exploitation of space, and every time a new piece of infrastructure is added, it creates opportunities for further infrastructure. At some point the falling costs and increasing volume of business will bring the introduction of new technology that will open up the solar system to exponential growth, but unfortunately, this critical point probably won’t be in our lifetime.
I remain an optimist about the possibility of space exploration and colonization of our solar system and of far off systems, and I also wonder why other civilizations haven’t presented themselves to us by now.
However, I often think there might be a couple of basic, practical reasons that civilizations don’t end up going beyond their planet’s orbit (and eventual give up on space flight altogether). These reasons are:
1. If civilizations continue to put as much junk into orbit as we have managed to do, there might come a time when it would be impossible to fly through all the debris safely enough to go to other planets (or star systems).
2, If civilizations were to use up their resources as fast as we are on earth, they might run out of the materials (and energy) required to manufacture, fly, and support anything they might place in orbit or beyond.
We could be doing our space exploration in a much smarter way then the way we are doing it.
Whats “controversial ” in Gotts thinking is only his argument , not the conclution . You dont need any Copernian theory or any exotic statistics in order to get the feeling that spaceexploration could soon be history . All you have to do is to to watch the news on TV .
What will happen when 15 billion people will be competing for the remaining rawmaterials ? Probably not too much spaceexploration ..
And for those who think a colony on Mars or the Moon might be the way forward , I would sugest to try and establish a selfsustained “colony” here on Earth first , and to get started NOW ! A wellbuild Hothouse , laboratory equipment for analysing the air and some brave and tough volonteers , is really all it takes to get started …
How wonderfully ironic – March 22 was the sixtieth anniversary of the famous Colliers magazine cover article titled “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!”
The amazing artwork and details are here:
http://dreamsofspace.blogspot.com/2012/03/colliers-march-22-1952-man-will-conquer.html
As one subtitle in the article says as true in 1952 as it is now: “What are we waiting for?”
I bet in 1952 they thought we would be way ahead of where we are now in space. Well, it’s not too late…. yet.
Yes Gregory Benford and Ron S, it is all too easy for even the best and brightest among us to make mistakes when it comes to statistics.
Benford, that was just a plain error of yours to elevate the state of past observers above of potential future ones. Tying in the space programme with other technological trends was a better conceived concept, but I believe that the result of that exercise is not the resounding rejection of Gott’s idea for the following reason. The trend of exponential growth in human technology is only a few hundred years old itself, and, in reality, what confidence can we have in any preconceived point that it may be leading to.
Ron S, what a great coincidence it is that human agriculture was conceived soon after the Holocene interglacial period began. This period has been freakishly warm and stable. When these interglacials end it seems that the ice age can return within a human lifetime – and no-one yet knows what triggers the change. This is but one of many reasons to believe that your confidence in the persistence of agriculture once adopted is ill-placed. But oh what certainty we may pretend when we look back even though we wouldn‘t be here writing if it hadn‘t been so!
It is also worth pointing out to Tim Whitworth that for his objection to extend the window to permanency requires us to come up with an infinite range of possible reframing of similar questions from past to future cultures. That just seems wrong.
Finally, I feel need to apologise for the tone of my above comments. If I had had more time I would have framed them far less aggressively – sorry about that.
I would suggest that Richard Gott’s application of the Copernican Principle is completely invalid, because it makes the elementary error of applying a statistical argument to a unique case. It also ignores the observational fact that we do in reality live in a highly unusual situation. It is therefore meaningless.
You ask whether the first interstellar mission will be assembled by a team from Earth or some extraterrestrial colony. A simple consideration of energy costs indicates that, barring some breakthrough in sourcing massive amounts of cheap energy, that first mission will be assembled by a broad-based Solar System civilisation, no doubt including Earth, Mars, asteroid and other colonies. Earth alone or Mars alone cannot hope to construct such a vehicle. I discuss this in more detail in two papers currently going thru the JBIS review process. (These build on a methodology published earlier by Marc Millis.)
Ad astra incrementis!
Stephen
Oxford
The Copernican principle strikes me as perhaps the defining example of reasoning beyond one’s data…
Paul ,as a student of the Middle Ages you know human technology and science advances in fits and starts and not a straight line.
I am wondering of you think we are headed that direction …..
The only areas where there have been real technological improvements have been in computers and biomed. There has been a quiet productivity revolution in manuafacturing as well. Even biomed looks like it is stalling
I think all this has led to the long term economic problems engulfing the developed world. China in a way has had the befit of growth through catch up . Clarke predicted that increased manufacturing productivity would lead to less jobs, He however thought the benefits would be distributed to society. Reality is looking more like Vonneguts Player Piano instead.
Clearly 1970 -2020 is not 1870-1970. I see hope in James Camerons asteroid effort ,Space X,the research in in vitro meat(a NASA spinoff)
I think certain Billionaires see this problem and want to do something.
There are entrenched billionaires in fossil fuels and finance who are interested in “theirs” and have a strong interest in stopping the future
Imagine you have friends living on Mars: you could e-mail them and expect a reply within 24 hours, just as if they lived on another continent on Earth. Martians could (and doubtless would) comment on blogs like this one. The idea that Mars could be a separate branch of civilization has been made obsolete by the Internet; really it would be more like another nation-state (a new New Zealand, say) to add to the 200-odd we already have. Culture travels at the speed of light: if you want to create a new culture through sheer distance, you need to go to Alpha Centauri at least, and even that might be a bit too close.
Mars isn’t even much of an insurance policy. Most of the plausible threats to Earth civilization as a whole (wars, epidemics, collapse of the agri-ecosystems that produce our food, etc.) could spread to a Mars colony about as easily as they could spread between countries on Earth. The notable exception would be a large asteroid impact – but that’s not a significant threat on the century timescale.
The objections of Astronist make me want to add to my comments on Tim Whitworth’s opinion. To me, the only way to make Whitworth’s objection quantifiable is to find an objective way to measure the size of the sample space of all questions that would be their cultures equivalent of asking “what is the probability that I find myself in this phase of space exploration” and their likelihood of being asked. The best that I can say now is that Whitworth feels that the adjustment to confidence intervals would be very very large, and I feel it would be small.
The Astronist may believe that statistics on a sample of one is impossible. This had been long believed before Gott’s brilliant insight. Alternatively, Astronist realises that they can, but posits that in this case there are “unique” factors that render it inapplicable to Gott’s methods. Note how convenient and unlikely that would seem to an impartial observer – especially if no detailed reasoning was given.
@Rob, I think you are exactly correct with your refutation of the various arguments proffered here against Gott. His statistical argument is much more solid than it would appear at first glance, and I cannot come up with a good refutation myself. And we are not just talking about the end of the space program, but about the end of humanity itself. More precisely, the argument makes it unlikely that there are many more thinking observers in the future than there were in the past.
The one thing I will say is that there are large error bars around this “estimate of doom”. There is a full 5% probability that there will still be at least 20 times as many people in the future than there were in the past, and a 1% chance there will be 100 times as many. Some consolation, but not entirely satisfactory.
Ironically, Gott’s argument does not support his conclusions, as any efforts that we might undertake to escape our “fate” are unlikely to be successful, by the same argument. More ironically, or rather tragically, the argument represents an elegant solution to the Fermi paradox, as it assigns a fairly small value to L in the Drake equation, probably enough to solve any dilemma.
It still seems like there should be a flaw here somewhere, but I do not see it. None of the counterarguments mentioned here so far are convincing to me.
Rob, I don’t mind your tone, but I would appreciate it you actually made a specific point rather than vaguely allude to “errors” I/we have made that pertain to the actual subject at hand.
Fascinating article and discussion.
We can imagine that humanity might go extinct because it failed to achieve colonization elsewhere in the solar system before it met an unexpected existential event. OK, but what if it were to go extinct because we failed to achieve interstellar colonization before we met an existential event? That would mean that the hurdle to overcome in order to survive the unpredictable existential even is interstellar travel itself. The only two scenarios that I could imagine whereby this would happen would be through solar system-wide contamination of self-replicating technology or a physics experiment gone bad which destroys all of the solar system. If this were the case, then perhaps we need to achieve a manned interstellar colonization mission at some point in the near future. If this were the case then Fermi’s Paradox would have its explanation since interstellar colonization is very hard. But if this were the case, then the interstellar community’s inability to prioritize an early “manned” interstellar mission would itself be a major reason for Fermi’s Paradox. Ironic.
None-the-less it seems only prudent to establish an off-Earth, self-supporting colony. Yes, Mars is the logical best place for colonization but can we achieve it on Mars the earliest? What about the Moon?
The Moon was water ice with methane and ammonia. So I believe that it has what is needed to establish a colony. I see the Moon as having the distinct advantage of allowing preparatory development using telerobotics which would greatly lower the costs of preparing a site for humans as compared to starting a Martian base. This could be a determinative factor. If it were to cost $11 billion to prepare a base on the Moon while also resulting in an economically viable cis-lunar propellant infrastructure compared to $100 billion to prepare a base on Mars, then it really doesn’t matter that Mars is the better eventual place for a colony, it might be that we will only have enough money to prepare a lunar base and not a Martian base. We need to be practical and not ideal in these matters.
Skepticism has been expressed about the ability to develop a self-sustaining colony. Is that because it is presumed that such a colony would essentially need a large civilization to produce high-tech devices?
A lunar water ice mining operation could produce oxygen, water, fertilizer, and food. From the lunar regolith we could get metals, glass, and fiberglass. Machining equipment could be used to produce more machining equipment and most every tool. You can get around the need for high-tech equipment (e.g. integrated circuits) by using pre-1950 technology (e.g. vacuum tubes) and creative solutions (e.g. using telescopes to monitor telebot movements rather than needing on-board cameras). Shielding is readily available. Artificial gravity could be produced with centrifuges. Given all of this capability, how sure are we that we couldn’t make the last steps to a fully self-sufficient colony using local resources?
Speaking further of the space program, I was wondering Paul if you might have any further information concerning this symposium down in Houston that’s going to be held in September? I’ve gone to the site and it’s quite bereft of any substantial information or content and September is not that far away. I’ve heard some others mentioned that they would like to have this new symposium to be a little heavier on the use of demos and models to further clarify what was being talked about. While that has some merit I imagine, my hope is that the speakers in this symposium will not stray too far from the factual topics and lectures that they are preparing up. Demos and models can only take one person so far and then ideas have to be discussed. Additionally more pedestrian concerns such as hotels, bookings, etc. need to be announced hopefully in the near future.
Rob Henry
https://centauri-dreams.org/?p=22665#comment-99492
I am not so pessimistic about humankind’s future, including space exploration, and I do not agree that our ‘window of opportunity’ is really closing. The latter because this present (seeming) slowdown is not for any structural or insurmountable reason, such as lacking technology, depleted resources or, even worse, fundamental physical barriers. It is merely the political and economic climate in the western world, foremost the US, which causes this present bog in space research. Technology keeps advancing and so do other countries and, above all, laudable private initiatives such as SpaceEx and Planetary Resources.
It is a myth that the earth is running out of resources, just as the depletion of whales in the 19th century (very sad no less) did not mean the end of oil or available energy, on the contrary, as we all know. Just some particular resources are getting scarce, such as the ‘easy oil’, rightly forcing us to become smart.
We must and will master nuclear fusion in the near future (and please do not say that ‘they have been promising that for 5 decades’, people have been desiring to fly for millennia and we managed after all). More and more vital resources can and will be replaced by organic (i.e. carbon-based, renewable) substitutes.
There may indeed be more serious showstoppers to our window of opportunity, such as a new ice age, a supervolcano eruption, a giant meteorite impact, etc., and there is indeed some relative urgency to this issue (urgent as: within the next few centuries), but a temporary political climate is a minor issue.
History shows that, once a great new technology or an opportunity is discovered, it will sooner or later be utilized by someone.
I agree with Astronist that the Copernican principle does not apply here for statistical reasons and is misused by Gott.
Finally, I cannot help noting with annoyance that this apocalypical thinking is so deeply rooted in our culture and thinking. I grew up with it myself, this impending and inevitable doom and gloom. It was the Soviets coming, global nuclear war, a worldwide epidemic, devastating climate change, population growth, some divinely imposed global punishment for our sins, etc. etc.
In my half-century on this planet I have learned a few things with regard to this: things usually turn out not so bad as many people fear, humans are extremely resourceful when needed, and our options are now greater than ever before. Not a reason to become complacent, self-contentious and stupid of course, but a good reason to remain optimistic and thrifty.
bill writes:
Wish I did have more news, Bill, but I haven’t been getting any updates from the 100 Year Starship organization and so am reliant solely on their website. I’ll post anything further I hear as soon as it comes in.
Dave Moore: Currently about half the children born in France are not born to french mothers. By 2050, France will be majority non-french and the pressing question of the day will be its decaying welfare system and decrepit infrastructure.
India is a third world nation where over half a billion people shits in streets, fields and ditches every day and raw sewage flows down the street every time it rains. By 2050, they will be the worlds most populous nation with up towards on and a half billion people. I dont think building a Mars base to avoid extiniction by some random event will be high on their priority list. The only long term player is China, and the pragmatic chinese will doubtless notice that its more rewarding to spend space launch capacity on near earth ventures that provide a real, tangible return than Mars or Moon colonies that may cease to be cost centers someday in the next two hundred years.
As for private space firms and their rocket projects, they suffer from the same physical limitations that plague the rockets of public institutions. Its these, and the technological difficulties associated with overcoming them, that is limiting the presence of humans in space.
David writes:
I have to admit, David, that at the back of my mind is always the thought that straight-line extrapolations into the future don’t fit well with human history, and the example of European society after the fall of Rome reminds us that progress can stall or reverse. I’m more or less an optimist about our own time, but I don’t think we can assume that a technological society won’t have periods of regression. All of which makes me very dubious about trying to predict where we’ll be in, say, two centuries or even two millennia. My view is that we should define tough goals and be fully aware of the things that threaten them.
The Copernican Principle says there should be no specialness about our point in time. Thus, there should be nothing special about living in a time when human space travel occurs. It would be exceptional if this should be the one human lifetime, out of thousands before and after in genus Homo’s evolutionary history, that featured human space travel. Thus, human space travel should continue for much of our genus’ existence.
For what this is worth: Most people have assumed that the Copernican Universe means that Copernicus came along, removed Earth from the physical and spiritual center of the Cosmos, and “demoted” our planet and our species to just one of the celestial multitude, mere cosmic commoners.
This is not quite the case, for it is an interpretation made by many others and passed on through the centuries.
The ancients actually viewed Earth as being at the bottom of the Cosmic Pit, with only the Underworld at the very center of our world being the lowest level. Here is where all the cosmic “junk”, including impurities, evil, etc., settled. This explained why life on Earth was harsh and humans were often cruel or indifferent.
If one could travel upwards, however, they would find increasing levels of goodness and purity, especially once one got past the Moon’s sphere of influence. Eventually you would reach all the way up past the stars to Heaven where life was perfection.
This is why folks like Galileo were so thrilled with the Copernican view of things, because it literally took us out of the Cosmic Pit and elevated us among the stars, aka Heaven. We were no longer the lowest of the low in existence.
So yes, in one sense humans did (and still do) think they are the center and focus of reality, but almost paradoxically they also considered themselves to be unclean and unworthy when they thought everything went around Earth, like water circling a drain.
For the details, see Dennis Danielson’s The Book of the Cosmos:
http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/ddaniels/cosmos.html
I also recommend Galileo Goes to Jail by Harvard University Press, which also tackles many myths and misconceptions that build up over the ages.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057418
It seems to me we are not yet in a colonization phase of near space but rather are currently in an exploration phase which could last for some time. Spain did exploration of the “new world” and then followed up with colonization. They didn’t sent 10 guys in a rowboat and expect colonization. They sent Galleons full of men and material. We all know about Columbus’ first trip but the second is much more interesting. Spain provided 17 ships, 1,500 soldiers and cavalry. You can’t do that with a rowboat, we need Galleons. More on this theme when I have the time.
Forever Mars
by Dwayne A. Day
The Space Review
Monday, February 13, 2012
Over the past six decades or so, dozens of plans for sending humans to Mars have been produced, usually by teams of engineers and occasionally by individuals.
Far more books about human missions to Mars—fiction and non-fiction—have been published, and thousands of papers on the same subject have been presented at conferences or appeared in technical journals.
Many of these books, papers, and articles have speculated about when such a mission can be accomplished. Some have even been so audacious that they put the date in the title: “Mars in ’88”, “Mars in 1995!”, and Mars 1999.
Full article here:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2025/1
To quote:
But like so many aspects of human spaceflight, Wernher von Braun was there first:
“Will man ever go to Mars? I am sure he will—but it will be a century or more before he’s ready. In that time scientists and engineers will learn more about the physical and mental rigors of interplanetary flight—and about the unknown dangers of life on another planet. Some of that information may become available within the next 25 years or so, through the erection of a space station above the Earth.”
Two comments:
– If we need space for population growth, space is not tha place for the moment. The cost per person of launching them into space, never mind keeping them alive when there, will be a lot more than irrigating enough Sahara or other desert land on Earth to house and feed them.
– Us ‘older’ generation watched Apollo and see the growth potential. Younger ones see space as something that went out with floppy disks, desktop PCs, and steam trains. Every time we wheel out another reference to the Space Shuttle, or extol the virtures of the Mercury-7 astronauts, we turn off another couple of potential space engineers.
One minute we are despairing of ever colonizing space, the next we are planning on having a Space Elevator by 2050:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/brin20120509
Following up on the need move large amounts of material in order to colonize a new place, I provide a random list of what things cost per pound here on earth.
– 40’ Shipping Container: $1.00/lb
– Ford F150 Pickup: $4.97/lb
– Precision 3-Axis CNC Mill: $16.32/lb
– My laptop computer: $100.00/lb
Now let’s take these common items and boost them into orbit for $1000/lb (I’m being generous). This makes these items between 10 and 1000 times more expensive. I’m not sure what the cost to orbit would need to be for an “earth only” supply strategy for colonization, but I would guess closer to $5/lb than to $500/lb. The other alternative is to only boost high value items from sea-level and acquire the rest in orbit at low cost. Lifting low value items out of the lunar gravity well may not be cost effective either. Near earth objects really seem to be a direction with much promise.
In any case, as we move from an exploration to a colonization mentality I feel confident that we will find ourselves thinking of transporting millions of tons of material and not thousands of pounds as we do today.
ljk: “One minute we are despairing of ever colonizing space, the next we are planning on having a Space Elevator by 2050…”
Almost there…
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-05-10/
JohnHunt:
I agree with your other points, but this is a bit hard to swallow. I don’t think pre-1950 technology would get anything at all done on the moon. We are pretty much stuck with high-tech in space. On the other hand, integrated circuits are small and light (especially the 21st century versions), and easily transported from Earth during the long and arduous trek towards actual, complete independence.
Ron S, you illustrated your objection to Gott’s argument with a perceived counterexample. In such instances it is customary to use the best such example that you can think of offhand.
If you had just used a random example of something that had lasted ten thousand years (agriculture) when most else around it had failed the distribution of successes and failures could only be used to strengthen Gott’s point. It would strengthen the point if you looked at it from any time perspective, and were trying to show that even from the perspective of the first generation of farmers, Gott had it right. Though one trait from that time lasted hundreds of times longer than expected, their would have been 100’s of traits from that time that were less persistent than may be expected from Gott‘s analysis of each one individually.
Thus I assumed that you were picking a trait that was obvious from the very first that it was going to last far longer than expected by this sort of analysis. By your comment of May 9 it seems you don’t, and so it is very hard to detect what point you were trying to make from that example.
Lord!
Seems like a monkeys swimming in a barrel of molasses.
Rob Henry, I do not believe that statistics on a sample of one are impossible, a view which you attribute to me. Rather I simply point out that they are meaningless. If there is said to be a 50% chance that we are in the second half of the period of human access to space, then what this means in practice is that if a situation like our present one is run a large number of times, then 50% of the time human access to space will end within another half century, and 50% of the time it will continue beyond that time period, and the 50% will be achieved with greater accuracy as the number of trials is increased, just as with tossing a coin. But we are not able to perform this experiment. The experiment which we are able to perform is to toss the coin only once, and a coin tossed once only either shows 100% heads or 100% tails, and one does not know which it will be until one performs the experiment. Therefore Gott’s analysis is perfectly correct, so long as it is applied to situations which can be run many times. Human society and evolution, however, are run only once, and so if we want to estimate what may happen in the future, we must turn to real physical, economic and technological factors.
To put it another way, Gott’s argument assumes that we are living now at a typical point in history rather than an unusual one. But if we choose one single particular point in time, such as the present one, then it is not known a priori whether it is typical or unusual. All we can say is that if we have before us the complete span of human history and choose a number of random points in it, then most of those points will fall at unexceptional times, however those may be defined. But we are emphatically unable to perform this experiment, because we do not know how long human history will continue (even if that was a well-defined concept, which it will only be if humans become extinct without leaving any successors) and we are not choosing multiple points in it.
Stephen
Oxford, UK
All,
Let me reference everybody to Dr Bruce Cordell at 21st Century Waves who makes an excellent case that we are on the verge of a new Maslow Window Boom for Space exploration between 2015-2025+. Implied in many of the writings on the 21st Century Waves Website is the notion that there may be a relatively brief but highly productive window for Space Exploration before a temporary setback or actual decline occurs which in turn halts progress for multiple decades as has happened to us from 1972-2015?. According to some of the articles on 21st Century waves our current Civilization may have no more then the remainder of the 21st Century to explore and colonize Space before a major setback hits, which partially validates the Gott thesis, albeit with 50 additional available years (to 2100). There is also the entire issue of the Kurzweil Singularity circa 2045, which if true could fundamentally alter how Earth based Intelligence might approach Space exploration and colonization.
My greatest concern with a number of the notes above is that they over reflect today’s realities and constraints. In essence, to much “today think” and not enough future vision. Personally, I believe that there will be a couple of major Space Booms during the 21st Century with the first one by 2020, and well into the pending 6th Innovation Wave. Furthermore, by 2100 and after the second Space Boom (2071-2090) not only will there be at least 1 Million Humans living and working in Space and on other Interplanetary bodies, but the first very high risk Interstellar Missons will have also been launched. The real question is will the U.S. retain its leadership in Space./
Eniac > “I don’t think pre-1950 technology would get anything at all done on the moon”. We are pretty much stuck with high-tech in space.
Equipment can be remotely controlled by wire. Concentrated solar light can separate water from regolith and can melt metals which can be cast and machined. Etc. So please specify an example of what requires large high-tech industry which cannot be produced on the Moon. I’m not questi0ning that there might be something but please give an example.
Eniac > ” On the other hand, integrated circuits are small and light (especially the 21st century versions), and easily transported from Earth during the long and arduous trek towards actual, complete independence”.
Yes, I think that this is an important interim strategy which could buy you at least a hundred years of complete independence while you are implementing the technology needed to become self-sustaining. Just how many .1 gram computer chips could you deliver in a single 3,500 kg payload delivery to the lunar surface???