While I’ve often opined in these pages that a Solar System-wide infrastructure must emerge before we can contemplate interstellar flight, the obvious question is how we get there. Stephen Ashworth (Oxford, UK), who writes the insightful Astronautical Evolution blog, recently tackled the subject with such vigor that I asked him for permission to run his essay verbatim, especially since it grew out of a discussion right here on Centauri Dreams. If you’re trying to do something spectacular — like growing a global civilization into an interplanetary one and boosting wealth into the realms needed to push to the stars — how would you go about it? Ashworth’s vision for the ‘ten-billion-times growth factor’ makes the needed transformation. Is it a logical extrapolation or does it push too far? A lively debate should grow out of this one.
As a lifelong jazz buff, I can’t resist adding that Stephen is to be heard on tenor sax playing jazz standards at the Monday evening jam sessions at either the Ampleforth Arms in Risinghurst, or the Chester Arms off the Iffley Road, for those of you in the neighborhood. I now have a can’t-miss music scene — Ellington, Gershwin, Cole Porter — for my next trip to the UK, with interstellar talk to follow. Life is good.
by Stephen Ashworth
The ten-billion-times difficulty
Paul Gilster reports on his Centauri Dreams blog that, just before setting out to go to this month’s 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston, he received an e-mail from someone whose grasp of the difference between interplanetary and interstellar distances was less than perfect. “We’re already going to Pluto”, said the writer. “How much harder can it be to go to a star?” Gilster mused: “I could write a whole book in answer to that question. Wait – I already have…”
Regular reader Joy often posts comments from a more skeptical or reality-check point of view. This time she responded in the comments section:
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Velocity x 1000 = energy x 1,000,000
x Crewed spaceflight duration 100 x longer than the longest space station missions
x Mass of vehicle 100 x anything we have orbited
I reckon it to be merely 10,000,000,000 times harder
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Regular reader Astronist (a.k.a. Yours Truly) produced the following response to Joy’s calculation:
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Joy said: “I reckon it to be merely 10,000,000,000 times harder.”
Given determination, patience and the resources of the Solar System, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem:
Present-day human population x 1,000,000 – this is John S. Lewis’s estimate (in his classic book Mining the Sky) for the population of a developed Asteroid Belt. Say 3% growth for 470 years.
Present-day wealth per person x 10,000 – this is 2% growth for 465 years.
Multiply these together to get an economy 1010 times more powerful than that of today, thanks to the power of that fashionable bête noire, exponential growth.
Taking the resource of solar power (380 × 1012 TW) as indicative of our actual physical room for growth (and remembering that the biggest growth factor for a starship identified by Joy was propulsion energy), an economy well over a trillion times larger than at present is conceivable (asteroidal matter for space colony construction can be expanded if necessary by dismantling small moons). Thus we would still at that point possess only 1% of the ultimate economic power of a fully developed interplanetary civilisation.
About the year 2500, therefore, Joy’s growth criterion could be met, assuming continued faith in material progress and success in finessing our way through all the stresses and strains of growth.
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However, within the confines of a blog comment I did not have sufficient space to specify the practical details of how our global civilisation might grow to a multiglobal one with a million times the population and ten thousand times the wealth per head than today.
An omission which I shall now try to make good.
Scenarios for growth… or decline
In considering future growth in space, a number of different scenarios suggest themselves.
How will growth be driven forward?
- Will it be driven primarily by government, through a continuation of the present-day space agency monopoly, certainly on manned and on lunar and planetary spaceflight?
- Will the space agencies be disbanded and further progress managed entirely by commercial enterprises?
- Or will some balance between government and commerce acting in concert drive future progress, thus the private-public partnership model?
This gives us three broad options to choose from.
Secondly: what will be the economic and social conditions on Earth over the next few centuries?
- Will we face a “perfect storm” of overlapping and multiplying crises in overpopulation, climate change, rising sea levels, peak oil, militant religious and ethnic fundamentalism, social security burdens for a greying population, cheap and easy access to weapons of mass destruction, and the “existential risks” of genetic engineering and self-replicating machines?
- Will we face such an abundance of entrepreneurial ingenuity, new sources of energy and multiplying wealth creation that war, poverty and deprivation become things of the past?
- Or will the future be a crazy patchwork of both of the above: with immense new sources of wealth as new technologies go to market, but at the same time immense new problems deriving both from old conflicts and from the stresses involved in adapting to new ways of life?
There are therefore another three broad options, making in combination nine distinct scenarios.
However, eight of these scenarios involves extremes of one sort or another: of monopoly by bureaucrats or buccaneers, of wealth or poverty. Others may wish to explore these. For the present I should like to develop further the “middle way” scenario: a creative community of public and private institutions acting in concert, yet with no overarching master plan, and a set of new technologies which both multiply wealth and introduce new problems, yet whose benefits on balance exceed their drawbacks.
This scenario is therefore based on the pattern of past history: progress arises as an evolutionary, system-level phenomenon, not one governed by any one institution or single clique of middle-aged men in smoke-filled rooms, and the new technologies of the past 200 years have on balance indeed benefited humanity despite all the problems they have brought in their wake.
While others may disagree, to me this seems both the most plausible vision of our future, and the one most likely to achieve the result of expanding civilisation to the stars.
A scenario for the ten-billion-times growth factor
Within this middle way scenario, I would envisage the following sequence of events for the future of manned spaceflight merging into Solar System colonisation.
1. Government exploration missions to low Earth orbit, and establishment of an outpost there. (Now complete.)
2. Based on the exploration in step 1, private enterprise now markets low Earth orbit for commercial passenger spaceflight, dominated by space tourism but also featuring commercial space manufacturing and university-funded science, and creates a growing, economically self-sustaining low Earth orbit infrastructure. (Now just beginning, and dependent upon SKYLON-type vehicles for full success. Expect this phase to unfold during the 2020s, with ultimately thousands of passengers flying to orbit and back every week.)
3. As low Earth orbit becomes more populated and costs of access fall, a market will appear for lunar flyby trips (Space Adventures has announced it already has one committed client for a flight around 2015). These are best satisfied by adapting existing space hotel designs for injection into Earth-Moon cycler orbits, thus ensuring that full solar flare protection, repair facilities and buffers of consumables can be built up in cislunar space. (Late 2020s to 2030s.)
4. The growing space hotel system and the demand for translunar propellants create a large-scale market for volatiles, especially water, in orbit which can be satisfied by robotic mining of the near-Earth asteroids; again, government exploration, in this case robotic asteroid exploration, will be needed to develop the technologies towards commercial sustainability. (2030s to 2040s.)
5. Based on the infrastructure in steps 2, 3 and 4, governments, singly or in collaboration, now launch new exploration missions to the Moon very much more economically than could have been achieved with an Apollo-style system, and establish one or more outposts there. (2050s.)
6. Based on the infrastructure in steps 2, 3 and 4, the construction of solar power satellites to serve Earth now becomes economically attractive, and the conversion of Earth from fossil fuels to solar power begins. (2030s to 2050s.)
7. Based on the exploration in step 5, private enterprise now markets the Moon for commercial passenger spaceflight, dominated by space tourism but also featuring lunar surface science, and creates a growing, economically self-sustaining lunar surface infrastructure. (2060s.)
8. Based on the infrastructure in steps 2, 3 and 4, government now launches exploration missions to Mars and Venus, and establishes outposts there. (2080s.)
9. Based on the exploration in step 8, private enterprise now markets Mars and Venus for commercial passenger spaceflight, dominated by science and colonisation. Interplanetary transport will use a network of cycler stations based on several decades of experience with Earth-Moon cycler stations. (Into the 2100s.)
10. Outposts on Mars and Venus grow into colonies, and meanwhile the cycler stations also grow into substantial transit cities, supplied from asteroids rather than from Earth. (First half of the 22nd century.)
11. Based on the existing interplanetary infrastructure, government now launches exploration missions to the Main Asteroid Belt, Jupiter and further afield. (Mid-22nd century.)
12. Based on the exploration in step 11 and several decades of experience operating interplanetary cycler stations, private enterprise sets up mining and construction ventures in the Main Asteroid Belt to create self-sufficient colonies there. New cycler stations link these colonies with the inner planets. (Mid-22nd century.)
13. At the same time, private enterprise sets up cycler stations to serve Jupiter and Saturn, serving growing colonies on the respective giant planets’ moons and among the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. (Late 22nd century.)
14. The interplanetary economy is now growing independently of Earth, but at the same time the commerce (material, energy, information) between the colonies and Earth enriches civilisation at all locations. (The state of play at 1 January 2200.)
This scenario thus completes the transformation of civilisation from monoplanetary to multiplanetary status, and sets up the conditions under which economic and population growth may now proceed without interruption until the limits of the carrying capacity of the Solar System are reached.
Clearly, those limits will one day be reached, and the transition to a low-growth society must be faced. Those who call for such a transition are correct. However, their timing is wrong. I estimate that growth can continue at typical present-day rates for a few thousand years. The society that will face the transition to a low-growth economy will therefore be very different from that of the present day.
At some point a few centuries in the future (I suggested the date 2500 above – as good a guess as any), the first starships will be able to depart, carrying our descendants to the stars. By this time, I assert in all seriousness, almost all of our descendants will be living permanently in space colonies. Why? Because we need to grow, and that is where the greatest opportunities for growth are.
Perhaps the biggest question so far unanswered is how humanity will change in coming centuries under the influence of genetic and information technologies. While genetics may modify us, principally in terms of improving disease resistance and extending our lifespans, information technologies, it is often claimed, have the potential to create a superior order of machine beings which are more intelligent than we are and more capable than natural humans in every way. Humans may be confined to Earth forever, or may even vanish completely, driven extinct by competition from the superior machine intelligence they have created.
This, however, is a topic for another essay.
Or will the future be a crazy patchwork of both of the above: with immense new sources of wealth as new technologies go to market, but at the same time immense new problems deriving both from old conflicts and from the stresses involved in adapting to new ways of life?
It should be obvious that this will be the future. We always have both the good and the bad. Has it ever been any different?
The book “The Millennium Project” depicts the stages by which we can become a K2 civilization by 3000, launching our first interstellar colony ships to become a K3 civilization by 1,000,000 AD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps
Colonies on Venus? The weather sucks and its gravity well is almost as steep as Earth’s. Who would want to live there?
I’ve always felt that cycler cities built from asteroids would be the core of an interplanetary civilisation. It is one of these cities which will eventually head to the stars. As for the comment about colonizing Venus, it is perfectly suited for aerial cities.
Curt Wohleber Writes:
At 50 km above the surface, Venus is the most earth-like of any other planet in our system – the pressure sits at 1 bar and the temperature averages 77 degrees fahrenheit… so why not?
Astronist Wrote:
Any fully self sustaining economy would have to be generated via the private sector. Thanks for getting it right. Many seem to forget that.
I really like this projection, due to its discrete, by milestones approach. There are some technologies and envisageable developments (e.g. practical fusion energy, cheap near-perfect ultralong carbon nanotubes/graphene sheets), that could move the steps in this calendar a decade or two earlier or later (especially towards its conclusion on the XXII and XXIII century), but the paused approach, by discrete hops farther and farther from Earth, is pretty much what I also think could actually happen.
What remains a strong belief for me, is that humanity can and will eventually make the Solar System its home, and it could be relatively soon in historical terms (decades and centuries, not millenia or worse).
This calendar may not align with the hope of many of us -including myself-, wishing that we could live long enough for witnessing these great things coming to happen. But that doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that humanity has ways to imagine and create scenarios, where it can expect to prosper during all the foreseeable future, and where we could abandon once and for all, the cultural fatalism that comes with a world imagined as a zero-sum game.
An open-ended future, where humanity strives to reach even greater things like Kardashev level I and II levels of energy generation and production, is certainly one that most people are not used to think about as achievable.
Some thinkers and dreamers have done so, but such projections have never been really taken very seriously by the mainstream intelligentsia, as something that humanity could ever really experience or achieve.
Well, I am among those that hope the mainstream pessimists are proved wrong, and that we are forced by simple historical facts to come to accept such open-ended future.
I think the Astronist’s projection to a society 10,000 times as wealthy per capita reasonable, but am a little concerned that he seems to equate wealth with power at one stage.
It doesn’t fit in with my expectations of humanity for their individual use of energy to ever be ten thousand times greater, and rather dangerous if it was. If you look at Joy’s factors many of them seem to fit better with our technology and knowledge usage being orders of magnitude higher, rather that just our power.
Interesting stuff, but I think things could move more quickly than in this scenario once we have the first true spaceships. Aldin likes to point out that the Apollo CM could have gone to Mars, so I think going from a cis-lunar spaceship, to one able to go to the outer planets, could happen pretty quickly.
I think settlements on Venus and Mars won’t be at the forefront of settling the solar system.
Planets are useful for primitive life and naked apes, but modern Humans have surrounded themselves with a technological civilisation, and our civilisation will flourish most in places that are better suited to the needs of that technology, with adapting bits of those environments to create the habitats to support our bodies the cheaper option. Our technology will function better in free space, with the energy of continuous sunlight available, as well as the heat sink of continuous darkness, with no stray dust, no annoying atmosphere, and no crippling gravity.
I think population pressures and the desire to explore will carry us out through the Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud, with or without interstellar ships. Let’s meet up on New Years Day, 2500 and see how it has worked out. I’ll buy the first round!
Present-day human population x 1,000,000 – this is John S. Lewis’s estimate (in his classic book Mining the Sky) for the population of a developed Asteroid Belt. Say 3% growth for 470 years.
Present-day wealth per person x 10,000 – this is 2% growth for 465 years.
Multiply these together to get an economy 1010 times more powerful than that of today, thanks to the power of that fashionable bête noire, exponential growth.
Let’s be a bit careful about these figures. The population growth will not start from the Earth’s population, because that would imply huge and cheap access to space. More likely you start with a colony, say 1000 people and start the population growth curve from there. Thus you need not 1millionx, but more like 1E12x.
Economic growth of 3% is typically population growth x productivity growth. Thus 3% economic growth is really 2% population, plus 1% productivity. Thus to get 10,000x richer per person at 1% takes more like 1000 years. Now the question arises can we be 10,000 richer. Bear in mind we are only about 50x richer than citizens of the Roman empire. Most of teh high economic growth we have experienced is the result of industrialization. As we continue to evolve into a post-industrial society, it seems likely that economic growth will slow, especially as much of what is counted as economic growth is just shifting people from unpaid (uncounted) to paid (counted) work. Looking at it another way, can we consume 10,000x as much as we do today? Is that even possible?
I am a great fan of colonizing the solar system via asteroid habitats, but these will have to be made very cheaply to attract colonists. Some sort of low cost self assembly allowing for easy “move-in” is going to be required. Otherwise these would be strictly playthings of the super wealthy. Island enclaves will not be sources of strong economic growth.
OTOH, starships in 500 years might not be human crewed behemoths, but rather very small machines that can develop at the target. The resources for this sort of vessel might be very much less.
SM,
You say the weather is great 50 km above the surface of Venus. Great! How would you get an outpost, let alone a city, to hang at that altitude. Oh, and by the way, where would the residents get the resources to sustain their lives, little things like food and building materials?
I like the plan, overall.
One caution though. Once the Moon has a thriving base on it, we should be extremely careful not to use the far side as a dump for Earth’s vast stockpile of nuclear waste. I can envision a catastrophic explosion. Who knows, it could be so powerful, the Moon’s orbit could be drastically altered…
(apologies) :)
Thanks for the comments, people. Regarding Venus, the issue of gravity is an interesting one. Doubts have been raised as to whether human embryo development is possible in the low gravities typical of Mars and smaller bodies, so one of the points in favour of Venus is its Earthlike gravity. The colonisation of Venus has been promoted by Geoffrey Landis, in a paper and also an interesting SF short story “The Sultan of the Clouds”.
Clearly freely orbiting space colonies sidestep the gravity issue: they can generate as much or as little gravity as we fancy. And any manned interstellar vehicle would need to be based on space colony technologies and architectures. But I suggest that the logical way forward is one step at a time (Ad astra incrementis, indeed), with planetary/lunar colonies on suitable worlds acting as catalysts for space colony development.
Stephen
The so-called “private enterprose” can never lead. (Personally I wouldn’t want to see it in any role in future human expansion to our solar system and beyond, but that’s beside the point.) Currently the “private enterprise” is capable of doing in unmanned spaceflight what government were able to do in about 1964. All the manned “private enterprise” plans call for either sub-orbital or low Earth orbit flights. Which would mean that in manned spaceflight “private enterprise” could, by 2015, have achieved the level that USSR and USA had in 1963.
So, the “private enterprise” follows 50 years behind. Only when technology has become cheap and relatively safe can it even attempt to do what governments have done much earlier. Thus, governments need to be in the vanguard.
Personally, I would like to see any future human colonies on Moon, Mars, asteroids, the orbit of Venus etc leave behind the socio-economical system currently prevalent on Earth and try to build a different kind of basis for their societies. As badly as laissez-faire free markets work on Earth, they would work much worse – if at all – on pioneer settlements that would depend from Earth for centuries before developing to a level that they could produce themselves everything they need to exist and to grow, and to participate in a possible interplanetary “trade”.
If we will attempt to terraform Mars and Venus, the amount of resources and time spent on those attempts – which I hope we will try if Mars and the clouds of Venus are barren of life – will mean that it will need resources from the whole of humanity, it needs to be a common project and that will limit what we can spend on pushing farther out in the solar system and eventually into the interstellar space.
@Curt Wohleber and others, on the issue of where we would want to live in the solar system, have a look at “2312” by Kim Stanley Robinson, who tackles the issues of where as well as anyone has to date. Who else could open a book describing a stroll across Mercury as an everyday event?
@ Abelard Lindsey: Robinson also tackles the ‘crazy patchwork’ deftly.
@Mazanec: Thanks for mentioning Savage’s book, which is now twenty years old as as worthy of thoughtful review as ever. I wish he had expanded on his ideas but I’ve not seen anything else from him.
And a postscript on “2312”: the book has the feel of the first part of many volumes which I hope it is. But for a full and smart discussion of what the solar system might look like in a few hundred years, nobody has done it as well, and in the end, he even tackles the issue of interstellar travel. I’ll leave the description out…
Some consequences of a million fold increase in population and associated 10 thousand fold per capita GDP.
1. Using Earth as the base for the population expansion until teh spacer population is large would require shipping around 200 million people into space, permanently, per annum. That is a million airliner sized flights per year. Or shipping 2/3 of the US population per year. Obviously we run out of rich first world country populations in a hurry. Which means that the plan would call for exporting the poor, but growing populations.
2. Consumption and GDP are energy related. A 1E3x GDP/capita will mean some fraction of that increase in energy consumption. That is not possible for the Earth population, however efficiently energy is produced. Therefore there will be a huge difference between the standards of living of the spacers and earthers.
3. However beautiful the offworld colonies are, Earth will always be the most beautiful, environmentally rich habitat in the solar system. With a million fold larger spacer population, how will they get to visit? Moreover, how will they feel about the grubby, stay-at-home earther population enjoying that planet, while they live on artificial habitats and terraformed planets? Demand that earthers be removed? And who will get to visit earth – only the very tiniest minority of spacers will have a once in a lifetime opportunity. Certainly KSM’s 2312 scenario of required health sabbaticals on Earth would not be possible.
I just do not see this “infinite” growth scenario as either likely or possible.
Curt Wohleber said on October 9, 2012 at 12:06:
“Colonies on Venus? The weather sucks and its gravity well is almost as steep as Earth’s. Who would want to live there?”
It is called terraforming:
http://www.paulbirch.net/TerraformingVenusQuickly.pdf
The layer of Venusian atmosphere that is most like Earth’s environment as SM mentioned in this thread would be an interesting place to investigate for an expedition team in some kind of sophisticated dirigible, but I am not sure how sustainable it would be as some kind of permanent colony, unless the occupants don’t mind making sure the whole setup stays afloat all the time.
In addition, if this layer contains as much sulfuric acid as which saturates the rest of the planet’s dense atmosphere, how can we compensate for that other than using terraforming to eliminate the corrosive substance? And just how free is this layer of high winds and the tendency to cause a floating object to bob up and down like a cork in the ocean? One of the Vega balloons dropped thousands of feet in one case when it floated over a depressed area of the surface.
Despite Venus being visited by numerous probes for over fifty years now, we still have much to learn about that fascinating planet. Sadly I d0n’t see many plans for future exploration by our various space programs, due mainly to the difficulties in studying Venus directly plus the view that it is a lifeless world. Which we do not know for certain because we have yet to do more than dip a few mechanical toes oh so briefly on its surface. There could be life in those “friendly” air layers or just below the surface where the conditions are likely stable. But we won’t know unless we check it out directly.
I think we should also examine Joy’s assumptions. Is a 1E6x energy requirement 1E6x harder? Is a 1E4 mass and duration increase really 1E4x harder to do? Both of these ignore scaling and experience effects. By analogy, the first A-bomb was a huge project for the US during WWII. The vastly larger 10’s of thousands of megatons of our current arsenal was not commensurately harder to build. Mass and energy requirements are more likely to be log scale harder to do. Duration of a human crewed flight difficulty is completely unknown as we have next to no experience.
I suspect that a starship of some sorts will be much easier to launch than we expect. I just don’t believe it will be some human crewed behemoth worldship. But that is another conversation.
We live in a capitalistic society. So the only way widespread expansion in to space will happen is via the free market and the profit motive. And the current private space industry is not 50 years behind. But thats a whole other debate.
Tom Mazanec said on October 9, 2012 at 11:39:
“The book “The Millennium Project” depicts the stages by which we can become a K2 civilization by 3000, launching our first interstellar colony ships to become a K3 civilization by 1,000,000 AD.”
Savage’s book is really no different from any typical science fiction story on the subject of humanity’s future in the Universe. If anything his ideas have gained little more than a cult following, with no teeth or meat behind them.
We have already witnessed in this twelfth year of the 21st Century what happens when someone publicly declares that we should have a colony on the Moon by 2020: General ridicule and a promise of being fired by a certain presidential candidate.
Private industry out to make megabucks and claim whole new resources and territories are probably the only real way we will spread humanity throughout the Sol system. Oh, I know there is that United Nations treaty from 1967 that says no one can own another world, but I would not bet against the likelihood that once corporations fully realize how to make a profit in space, they will easily circumvent that treaty. Other than collectively whining and sending out strongly worded letters, what else could the UN really do about it?
As for national efforts outside the USA via NASA, I don’t know if Russia can sustain by itself what it has now or ever get back to what it once had and planned. India might become a serious presence in the Sol system one day, but they have a ways to go. China is probably the most serious contender for colonizing the Sol system, but who knows what might happen should they have a major regime change down the road? In the 1990s, many were certain that Japan would be the one to conquer space, but their two decade old recession has shelved those plans. As for the ESA, I don’t see them getting serious when it comes to colonization any time soon, certainly not on their own. All the other national space programs are just too young and lacking at this point to do much more than launch LEO satellites.
Science will be largely supported only where it can benefit the corporations, just as it was used as a front to explain Apollo and hide all sorts of Soviet space missions, especially under the ironic label of the Cosmos series.
Savage is also convinced that the Milky Way galaxy is devoid of life beyond Earth and that it is human destiny to spread terrestrial organisms throughout the stars. As with most people who make these claims, they have no real evidence of a lifeless Cosmos. They will also be in for a big surprise should we come across other advanced intelligences with similar ideas on existence.
I really do not like being so cynical and pragmatic, especially when it comes to our future in space. For I really am convinced it is the only way our species is going to survive and keep our civilization intact. However, my youthful days of thinking that space missions were and are all about science and that the early generations of astronauts were all about exploring space for its own sake are largely put away.
As I do not expect human nature and goals to change much without something radical happening along the way, we will only achieve these lofty ideals and visions on the back of industry and those out to make a buck or trillion. It may be left to a very different kind of mind emerging from our world that can truly appreciate and utilize the Universe as we hope to do.
SM, the problem with capitalism driving the expansion to space is that capitalism has never driven the expansion to anything, it has just used expansion driven by other forces, mainly macro-historical events, to it’s benefit.
The reason is that the amount of wealth and resources needed to bring forth the expansion and the timescales of when profit can be gotten are so great, that something else – states – have had to do the groundwork that the capitalists have then used.
When we talk about the colonisation of the solar system, we are talking about immense amount of wealth and resources that need to be dedicated to these goals for a very long time. Those who put forth the money and resources needed can not expect to get any profit for it during their lifetimes nor their descendants in the near future. The benefit will be for the whole of humanity, our civilization, and the profit will take the form of human existence on new worlds. It will not take the form of money.
If libertarian science fiction has taught us something, it’s that we can’t expect grateful colonists on Mars etc to happily act for the benefit of Earthly taxpayers or financiers, paying back the investment made on human colonisation of the planet. No, they will be quoting US Declaration of Independence or whatever when they can stand on their own. Whatever amount of money and resources we will pour on colonisation will not make a profit in the conventional meaning of the word.
More so with expansion to other solar systems over interstellar distances. Those who built and sent the starships can never expect any material gain. It has to be purely altruistic action for the benefit of humanity. Over interstellar distances, on sublight speeds, neither political or economic control can be sustained. Trade over instellar distances would have mainly take the form of ideas, not material goods.
I think that the scenario is refreshingly reasonable, but I anticipate some differences.
A key point to bear in mind is that people now and in the future understand the hurdles. So, plans will be developed to overcome those hurdles as early as reasonable and so won’t necessarily fit the regular timeline. For example, the first true interstellar mission might be a lot less massive and might used beam propulsion thereby needing 1/10,000th the power. Neither of these fit the normal extrapolation. So, the crossover point for when we develop enough power might come hundreds of years earlier than expected.
Also, there are the so-called black swans. As biotechnology and other self-replicating technologies become broadly available, worldwide events might happen as the result of individual decisions. These defy societal trends and history isn’t much of a guide to the future. Consider that the Al Qaeda rate of killing averaged about 22 per year before 9-11. This illustrates how future events can be off the scale and unpredicted based upon past history. So, in the final analysis, I expect that the future will be considerably different than described,
I wrote an honors paper for a English 102 class last winter semester,
the hypothesis was a a $250 Billion per year carbon tax invested in a social security sovereign wealth fund for new born children born that year and every year afterwords,
(A)(1) it curtails carbon emissions
(A)(2) it grows in value at 4.5% a year after accounting for inflation for 67 year when it pays a supplemental benefit to the existing social security
(A)(3) at year 76 the first of the new born carbon children retire, the fund should be worth about $80 Trillion, this will be impossible to invest only in the American stock markets and would represent a sizable portion of the world GNP
(A)(4) We would transfer the TVA and Columbia river federal utility’s to this fund and build a fleet of heavy water reactors( 70 reactors) that would take a century to build them all and can burn spent PWR reactor fuel (DUPIC). cash flow from these federal utility’s would amortize the heavy water reactors and pay future retirees. 70 reactors would cost more then $1 trillion
(A)(5) is space based solar power feasible? would it need to be built with lunar and asteroid raw materials? I am hoping yes to all of these, say it would cost $1.4 trillion to build this fleet, this amount and the heavy water reactors would be under 3 % of the total value of the carbon tax sovereign wealth fund, acceptable risk perhaps for the pension fund prudent person rule
the carbon tax would be exhausted in 3 or 4 decades, but in a century our carbon tax fund would be in excess of several hundred trillion dollars, even after dropping the earnings to 3%( to pay a retirement benefit at year 67)
the retirement benefit at year 67 plus 20 years is $400 billion per year another stimulus to that future economy. many of the elderly then would not qualify for government assistance freeing more up more of society money for science and space exploration
the fund would from the beginning earn 1% more per year then the growth rate of the world GNP so we would have to invest off world
Interesting debate about government space versus private enterprise space. I believe there’s a misconception here. Raimo starts by saying that private enterprise (why “so-called”?) can never lead. But this is not the issue, and nobody to my knowledge is suggesting that it should. The issue is that we’ve had 50 years of government astronaut exploration, and so how do we now consolidate our fragile foothold in low Earth orbit, let alone further afield? Clearly the ISS is not likely to be maintained long-term, let alone expanded, by the ISS partner governments. Yet without major growth in orbital traffic and infrastructure, costs are not going to come down enough to make access to Moon, Mars and beyond affordable. In order to get beyond occasional exploration missions by specialist astronauts, commercial traffic to orbit has to grow. People like Rand Simberg have made this very clear.
In the same way, while government first developed walkie-talkie phones and the internet for the military, it took commercialisation for a mass market to bring mobile phones and the internet into every home. And that’s how it should be: government exploration needs to be picked up by private enterprise if it is to become an intrinsic part of the economy. Apollo was not, and so we’ve not gone back to the Moon for 40 years, just as the 15th-century Ming Chinese voyages of exploration were cancelled and forgotten for half a millennium.
Stephen
Alex Tolley: “The population growth will not start from the Earth’s population, because that would imply huge and cheap access to space.” Thank you for the correction. You’re absolutely right, and this is in fact a point John S. Lewis makes in his book: population growth in space has to start anew from a relatively small founder population.
Regarding offworld colonies: they really do have to develop into places equally attractive to live as Earth itself. Clearly you’re correct that only a tiny minority of space dwellers will be able to visit Earth in person. But at Centauri Dreams we’re contemplating people spreading to the stars, of whom not a single one will ever be able to visit Earth in person! (Disregarding magical propulsion systems.) The vision of the future which is increasingly shaping my ideas is one in which the majority of our descendants regard space colony life as the norm. Just as we now regard living in Britain or America or wherever as the norm, and wandering the African savannah where our species originated as an aberration. (My apologies to any readers from sub-Saharan Africa.)
Stephen
Is a three percent growth rate really realistic? This seems to assume a future rather like the present, only ever more so; Human labor continues to be tied to production, only the ratio of production to human input keeps gradually rising.
I don’t think this is at all realistic. At some point, somebody is going to create a Von Neumann machine, a technological self-replicator. Something that consumes asteroids and sunlight, and produces more of itself, along with any products it’s given the specifications of. We might very well be able to produce such a system in the next fifty years.
At that point, a three percent growth rate is absurd, unless a deliberate decision is made to keep growth down. Such a system could have a doubling time on the order of a year or less, increasing a billion fold in under 30 years.
I think, rather than centuries of gradual growth, we’re going to hit a technological phase change, during which the resources and energy available will expand to K2 status while humanity barely has time to increase our numbers at all. To avoid this we would have to make a deliberate, and rigorously enforced decision NOT to achieve such a status.
It’s not going to take thousands of years. It probably won’t take hundreds. We’ll have the resources to launch star ships by 2100, is my guess.
Economics will definitely be a major driver for space colonization. Resource mining in particular will do the heavy lifting needed to establish our presence in space.
While commercial spaceflight is not huge yet, keep in mind that it’s a very recent development. And considering the amount of success and growth its seen in a short time, I feel nothing but optimism about commercial spaceflight. I see no reason to criticize it based on its current state.
As for what form colonization will take, I’m sure O’neill colonies/stanford torus will be used, due to the practical advantages. There will probably be a mix between this and lunar/planetary outposts.
As to the future, I would go with option 3 for both questions. The world will be a messy place, as always. There will be various motivating factors to expand into space, but once the infrastructure (cheap access to LEO) is established, historical forces will take over.
I agree that solar system colonization will come well in advance of interstellar voyages. However, there’s the possibility of finding an Earth analogue out there somewhere. In that case, there will be a greater motivation to take the enormous leap of crossing the stars.
Alex Tolley says “However beautiful the offworld colonies are, Earth will always be the most beautiful, environmentally rich habitat in the solar system.” And I have a bit of a problem with that.
Imagine the most beautiful habitat possible on Earth. Of cause such an environment is not very likely, but we can make it commonplace in an O’Neil colony.
Alternatively, imagine really untamed wilderness – such as New Zealand before the first human habitation 600 years ago. So recent was our invasion here that we have such vast quantities of DNA from extinct fauna, that we were studying it before the polymerase chain reaction was even invented. Unfortunately our native fauna included the largest eagle ever known to exist, and it seems doubtful that the Haast Eagle could even be made to fear anything, let alone humans. We could never recreate such a world on Earth, but in a space such virgin terrestrial habitats could one day spring to life.
Meanwhile, the Earth could come to resemble a septic waste pond at the bottom of a huge gravitational well, but I think it will do a little bit better than that.
@Rob Henry
No matter how idyllic you make your colony, it will always be a microcosm. Even the largest O’Neill’s contained just a few million people. The enclosed land surface was small and obviously not the surface of a world. Unless travel between different and varied worlds is like taking a train or plane, these worlds will ultimately be stultifying in their sameness. Think the space equivalent of “island fever”. I’ve experienced that on what is arguably a beautiful island – Bermuda – and it is a very real problem for a number of people.
OTOH, I do know people who live out their lives near home and never travel and it may be that space colonies will best suit people who enjoy that mode of living.
But if so, where will we find the people who will eventually want to strike out for the stars? Hopefully in a civilization of 1E16 people there will always be an abundance of those who have the sense of wanderlust and will want to explore the galaxy.
bigdan201 said on October 11, 2012 at 4:25:
“I agree that solar system colonization will come well in advance of interstellar voyages. However, there’s the possibility of finding an Earth analogue out there somewhere. In that case, there will be a greater motivation to take the enormous leap of crossing the stars.”
I do not think this can be stated strongly enough: An Earthlike alien world implies a planet that has LIFE on it as a result, possibly even some form of higher intelligent life.
So do we take this into consideration when building our interstellar colonization vessels, or do we just take over that world and assume the natives will either welcome us or get out of our way?
And at the risk of sounding like every hoary old SF plot since The War of the Worlds, what happens if an expanding ETI thinks Earth would make a dandy new home for its kind? What if they too are more focused on colonization than making new friends?
Astronist, I called the private enterprise in space “so-called” because government funding and government contracts play an important role in many of the current efforts. ISS, funded by a consortium of governments, is ironically the hub of commercial “private” space efforts at the moment. If I’m not wrong, sub-orbital space tourism companies have also gained financial support from the US states where their spaceports are planned to be.
I have also severe doubts about the viability of space tourism. Travel even to LEO is still relatively dangerous and one accident leading to deaths could throw a devastating punch to space tourism companies. Two might be lead to a collapse of the whole barely emerging sector. The private companies with more stricter budgets might also be unable to keep up the kind of safety standards as government agencies, so accidents could well be more likely with them.
Yet sub-orbital manned spaceflights and cargo missions to LEO are relatively simple if compared to a jump from there to permanent manned presence beyond Earth. If “private enterprise” is ever going to do it, it will happen decades after government driven exploration, and probably again through government policies of helping the so-called “private enterprise” through government funding and contracts. So, if “private enterprise” thrives, it thrives because it gets governments to support it.
If we ever will have major colonies outside the surfaces of planets and moons, they pretty much need to be O’Neill stations, mini-worlds. It’s hard to contemplate humans being able to live even part if not their entire lives and stay sane without large open spaces with lots of nature around them, places where they can breath deeply and feel that they are not confined into small spaces. Also any planetary and moon colonies would have to be planned as O’Neill stations on the surface, probably underground, starting from old lava tunnels perhaps. To adapt to life outside Earth humanity needs to carry as much of Earth with it as can. I think there are clear limits to our ability to adapt to drastically different environments.
Alex Tolley said on October 11, 2012 at 9:56:
“OTOH, I do know people who live out their lives near home and never travel and it may be that space colonies will best suit people who enjoy that mode of living.
But if so, where will we find the people who will eventually want to strike out for the stars? Hopefully in a civilization of 1E16 people there will always be an abundance of those who have the sense of wanderlust and will want to explore the galaxy.”
Not too long ago there was a news item suggesting that the first manned missions to Mars be one-way expeditions, where the crew will set up a permanent colony rather than plan on returning to Earth, at least any time soon (though they did not suggest how to send back any surface samples).
Many people responded to this idea in a very positive manner. They would volunteer for such a mission in an instant, apparently. Now how many of these people who are big on leaving Earth and most of humanity forever would actually be suited to set up and live in a Mars colony is another matter. However, the point is, the idea of striking out for a new world with no plans to return home seems to have the same level of appeal as for those who first immigrated to the New World from Europe. For many of them, North and South America might as well have been the Moon or Mars.
If we accept the fact that there will be ups and downs with current humanity no matter where we head off to, we might have a real chance to permanently settle the Sol system and one day beyond, especially with those who have the true pioneer spirit.
Raimo Kangasniemi Writes:
Government space is inefficient and expensive, that’s why NASA is pawning off LEO flight to private companies who can accomplish such tasks at minimal cost. NASA estimated that it would have cost almost $4 billion to develop the Falcon 9 using a traditional approach vs the $300 million SpaceX spent on development. By privitizing space, you ultimately create competition, drastically lower prices, and get space travel off the taxpayer’s dole, no longer subject to the whims of senators and the congressional budget office.
And about the safety issue… private space is still subject to the same safety standards; yet without the stifling nature of government bureaucracy and regulation to slow down and ultimately cancel said projects.
Astronist pretty much summed it all up:
Astronist Writes:
Should we terraform Venus first?
George Dvorsky
As a future terraforming species, we take it for granted that Mars will be our first megaproject. But while transforming the Red Planet into something more hospitable for life seems the most logical — if not easiest — first step towards colonizing the solar system, it may actually make more sense to tackle our sister planet first.
Because some scientists warn of a runaway greenhouse effect here on Earth, it may be prudent for us to terraform Venus first — a planet that has already undergone a carbon dioxide-induced apocalypse. And by doing so, we may learn how to prevent or reverse a similar catastrophe here on Earth.
Full article here:
http://io9.com/5950875/should-we-terraform-venus-first
As a long time reader, I would make some basic observations on this particular blog entry and on some of the comments.
First, to understand what will drive space exploration and colonization we must first look at a historical model, i.e the exploration and colonization of the continents that would become known as North and South America. Although this is a bit of a simplification, in the case of North America, the exploration and colonization occured because of two primary drivers; persecution (government and religious) and wealth. These two drivers are purely selfish, as human beings tend to be, no matter what others may say.
Second, the primary difference between historical colonizations and hypothetical future colonizations is not the conditions of the place to be explored and colonized as our technology will be capable of mitigating those conditions. It is not costs or dangers, as historically human beings have proven themselves capable of overcoming such things if the primary drivers are great enough.
The primary difference is that the primary drivers are not powerful enough and the access to the traveling medium is still far too limited for your ‘average’ person, who in the end would be the ‘colonist’, to have any desire to go explore or colonize.
Make access to orbit achievable for your ‘average’ person via whatever methodology necessary and then provide sufficiently powerful enough drivers and humanity will do the rest.
A bureaucratic state will never capably get beyond earth orbit, due to its incredibly ignorant and banal inefficiencies (unless ITS primary drivers become so great that they overwhelm that inefficiency).
It may very well be that the first true extraterrestrial colonies will be established by a totalitarian regime akin to North Korea. Since there are no economic reasons to establish habitats near asteroids or launch colony ships to nearby stars, it takes a certain level of “crazyness” to do it. I would compare it to the construction of the pyramids. Imagine, for example … in 2100, a habitable planet is discovered around a nearby star. The mad dictator of a powerful totalitarian country hears about this of course and wants to immortalize himself through becoming the individual responsible for making humanity a starfaring species. The required infrastructure, the ships and the eventual colonies would be his pyramids … and most of the economic weight of the nation would be dedicated to their construction.
Oh and with (partially) self-replicating, highly autonomous technology availible, it seems likely to me that we could construct the vast energy gathering arrays required for beamed propulsion to the stars from asteroidal material much sooner than 2500, perhaps in 2100-2200.
I don’t think that we will spread into the solar system for economic reasons, the sole exception being tourism and perhaps space solar power, if it ever becomes cheap enough to outcompete terrestrial nuclear and renewable power sources.
It would probably be better ditch the comparison to the European colonisation of the Americas, because for a long time those were not driven by the lure of new uninhabited lands to settle but by the wealth of settled lands. First, in 1492, with the hope of trade etc with Cathay, then soon afterwards by the hope of taking existing wealth by force.
Instead, especially if people want to insist on “private enterprise”, I would suggest looking at the first human colonisation of the Americas 14 000 years ago or the human exploration and colonisation of the islands of the Pacific, when humanity was expanding into unsettled territories.
When it comes to terraforming Venus, it would be a very long term project, as would terraforming Mars. Instead of choosing between these terraforming projects and interstellar expansion humanity should really, in my opinion, seek to do both, if at all feasible.
This should be done under the guidance of first a global and then a solar system government, “private enterprise” being driven always by “private” insticts, goals and hope of profits, instead of the common good of humanity.
When it comes to Falcon 9 being cheaper, it’s anything but innovative, is based purely on previous, test and tried technologies and incapable of doing the job NASA needs a new launcher to do. Orion capsule alone weights twice as much as the maximum that Falcon 9 can put on a geosynchronous orbit.
The problem with this “mad dictator” scenario is that the amounts of energy required for interstellar travel are so high that a star ship or star ship launching system is the practical equivalent of the Death Star, capable of sterilizing whole hemispheres with a single shot. So you’re positing a mad dictator with the power to kill everybody in the solar system at will.
I don’t think a society capable of interstellar travel dares to tolerate the existence of mad dictators.
It would be very hard to stop mad dictators when you have both private enterprise driving human expansion and sublight speeds.
Let’s say we have the so usual libertarian sci-fi billionaire who build his or her own space habitat and sends it as a generation starship to an another solar system, making her or his descendants – or clones – hereditary rulers of the starship. When they arrive into the destination, this dictatorial family then could establish their own civilisation and eventually send out new generation starships to colonise new solar system under different branches of the billionaire’s dynasty.
Stopping this over interstellar distances would be very hard, especially if the whole human expansion is controlled by similar individuals.
Comparisons to historical colonizations should not be ditched. They provide a window to understanding the human psyche and what drives us. Colonization of space will be done only when the drive to do so is powerful enough to overcome what holds us back.
Governments, especially useless bureaucratic socialist ones, will never have that drive. Totalitarian regimes might if they have a sufficient amount of resources, simply because the whole nation will act in concert with the whims of whoever makes the decisions (whether they want to or not).
Corporations could, but only if there is a sufficient profit margin. A single, very rich, benefactor could but only if he/she was willing to give away all their wealth to do so.
Raimo Kangasniemi, if we leave the colonization of space to a ‘global government’ it will NEVER get done. First, because it would be a huge, unwieldy, bureaucratic mess which would spend all its time and resources fighting itself (or enriching itself at the expense of the governed). Second, because there would be no driver which could sufficiently overcome the boundless inefficiencies and waste of a ‘global government’.
It amazes me that a logical, intelligent person could actually believe that a large, global government could do much of anything except create a class of elite oligarchs (read bureaucrats).
LJK:
I do not think it “implies” this at all.
If such expanding ETI existed, one of them would have taken possession of Earth long ago.
Raimo:
I disagree. This is not hard to contemplate, and has been contemplated in science fiction quite a bit. There are quite a few people living in Manhattan who do not care much for leaving their island at all. I believe Isaac Asimov was one of them. Would Manhattanites all go crazy if you took Central Park away? I doubt it.
There may be limits, but I think you much underestimate our capacity to adapt.
This is definitely a very important consideration for interstellar colonization. But for now, it’s purely speculative. My main point is that finding a suitable destination planet within a reasonable amount of lightyears would provide a major impetus for making the interstellar leap. And considering the wealth of exoplanets we’ve been finding, it’s entirely plausible. How we’ll deal with native life and ETI neighbors is a tangent for another thread.
All this aside, the comparison still holds up. The fur trade played a huge role in the colonization of the American continent, along with several other resources.
Rare earths and platinum group metals abound in asteroids, which are needed for our technology and lifestyle. Then there’s the possibility of helium-3 for fuel. Space mining will be a major driver for space advancement.
Also, crossing the ocean in those days was a distant voyage of uncertain return. There were communication and trade links, but for the most part, the American colonists were in new territory. Space will provide a similar escape and detachment from the earth.
Mad dictators have incurred enormous human costs throughout history. That’s why I favor a solarsystem-wide infrastructure and economy as the springboard to the stars, rather than a techno-pharaoh and an army of slaves. Interstellar technologies will have to be handled with a high degree of cooperation and safeguards.
If all this intellectual energy and imagination were being channeled into solving the environmental problems we have created on Earth, the only planet we are ever likely to know, principally global warming, we might stand some chance of surviving long enough to start thinking about travel away from Earth. But currently, it’s looking like we have at most to the end of the century, and most likely much less time, before Earth becomes unviable to hominids, especially hominids with a globally-integrated food distribution system which will fall apart when most of the farmable land – ie. low-lying and therefore increasingly prone to flooding – no longer produces and keeps us alive. The wars for the remaining food and water will reduce the global population drastically, but not solve that problem since organisation will break down and chaos will rule. Homo sapiens’ talent for selfish greed will do the rest, and the few survivors will lack all the hunter-gatherer skills needed to survive for long without planet-wide commerce to sustain them.
Long before all the blocks to space travel are solved, we will have caused our own extinction along with all the other species we are extinguishing currently with callous disregard.
It’s a fine intellectual exercise certainly, but don’t make the mistake than any of this is anything other than fiction. The imaginative hominid took his/her eye off the ball, and screwed up. Or has no one here heard about the impending ecological collapse? Given we have only a few decades to right all the wrongs of centuries and steer a more ecological path, very few appear even aware of it, and there are still many vested interests acting against doing anything, from the anti-windfarm Nimbys to the nuclear true-believers and those with money invested in oil.
Perhaps NASA lost impetus when most involved realised their youthful dreams just weren’t going to happen. And for all their expertise and money, they were/are still using chemical rockets, a technology invented by the Chinese thousands of years ago. I watched the moon landing in the sixties, and since then everything else has developed immensely over the fifty years, but what has happened to spaceflight?
Peter Simmons, just to briefly answer your two questions: yes, I have heard about the “impending ecological collapse”. For decades. Given that one of the main alarmist indicators, the mean global air temperature, appears to have stabilised over the past decade or so, the collapse seems to have been a false alarm. Life goes on, but we’ll need to continue keep an eye on this just in case. Obviously, the pros and cons of various viewpoints are being vigorously debated on other websites.
What has happened to spaceflight? — if you take the indicator of number of astronaut seats to orbit per year, then it peaked in 1985 and has been ticking over ever since. Some (myself included) believe that space tourism will soon usher in a new phase of growth. If you take the indicator of man-days spent in orbit per year, then it has actually continued to grow, rising to a new peak in 2010 thanks to the ISS now being occupied by a resident crew of six. Meanwhile Mir was occupied for ten years continuously, and the ISS for over ten years now. So there has been progress, albeit slower than many (myself included) would wish.
Stephen
Oxford, UK
Peter Simmons, after reading your last comment, I feel that I must inform you with some urgency to one of the greatest failing of the human brain: we like to see everything in terms of stories. Now let my indulge as to why you have accentuated this trait to a dangerous degree.
Before I start let me congratulate you on not falling for the fallacy that because nothing has ever halted the explosive growth of human technological society since it began 400 years ago then talk of its demise are just alarmist. As per models, the idea of tipping points is real, as is the threat, and the fact that we have survived so long is statistically irrelevant since it is the only way we could be here to think such thoughts (plus the trend for exponential growth means that most lives will be lived near its end).
Here is the problem. We face many possible threats that could tip us over the threshold, such as the sudden collapse of Greenland or West Antarctica, or a supervolcanic eruption or the sudden onset of an ice age, or even Prince Charles’ grey goo. The list is very long, that being only a tiny portion of it. Now imagine you are an evil genius intent on destroying humanity, and the only real aid you have is the human want of reasoning in terms of stories. Here’s how you would do it.
Wait till there is sufficient interest in one demise scenario that it reaches the threshold for peer reviewed published research that it is first to reach consensus on its reality and imminence. Next push the idea that we should spend the majority of our economic surpluses mitigating it – better still see if you can use the crisis to argue for reduction in our economic output. Label anyone who argues against your plan, as in denial. Now wait till a completely different crisis hits, whereupon we will have no surpluses to fight it and you will have won.
Here is something to think about. What if anthropogenic warming has already passed its tipping point and, when it is too late, we realise that the only way to advert it is to place mass produced shading mirrors is space, but because we curtailed our space programme this is no longer possible. Oh, how we would all laugh!
When I was a wee lad in the 1970s, there was equal certainty that the human race was about to be wiped out by an ice age; scientists were even urging the creation of a program to dust the Earth’s polar ice caps with carbon black, to make them absorb more solar heat and prevent their expected growth. Also:
A recent issue of “National Geographic” (from late 2011, if memory serves–I found it in the magazine rack at my local clinic) has two mutually-contradictory articles. One warns of an impending Eocene-scale methane release if we don’t “cool it” (literally) regarding our technological civilization; the other is about Mongolia, including the economically-devastating record-cold winters that have hit them for the past three years. One photograph shows a father and son gathering the freeze-dried carcasses of their goats–yet the world is about to become a global steam lodge…yeah, sure.
When it comes to the few previous posts above, climate change takes different forms in different places. It’s not a straightforward case that everything warms similarly at the same time. In some places it means, currently, colder and/or wetter local climate.
A planet and it’s weather are a complex system, which we have to remember when we try look after the planet on which we live and when we look at planets around other stars, trying to find out if they are habitable.
bigdan201, when it comes to fur trade, for a long time Europeans were mainly buying the furs from the natives instead of hunting them themselves. The French explorers in the 16th century North America were also still searching a waterway to East Asia at the same time as they were engaging in the fur trade. So, it was still a case of tapping into existing wealth – the existing trade networks in North America – and trying to find an alternative way to the wealth of Asia. (Timothy Brook’s “Vermeer’s Hat” has an interesting chapter on this.)
If we would have found even primitive civilizations on Venus or Mars, we would have colonies there already. But we found out that they are more equivalents of Antarctica than the Americas in 1492 and thus there are no humans living on Mars nor Antarctica permanently (although McMurdo is pretty much a proper small port town nowadays). Mars surely offers more than Antarctica in the long term, but less – in comparison – to us immediately than the Americas did to the explorers, conquistadors and settlers after 1492.
Paul, if we would eventually have private companies rich and big enough to drive the colonization of the solar system and our interstellar expansion, they would be in effect governments into themselves and also large “bureaucracies” which they would need to operate, just like democratic governments do.
Can the numbers be simply multiplied to get 10 billion like that? For one thing if we were to use nuclear (ie Orion) instead of chemical or ion propulsion then that 1,000,000 energy needed is much more manageable due t0 the increase in isp.
As for the global cooling myth of the 1970s, it was just that, a myth.
begin quote
During the period 1965 through 1979, their survey found 7 cooling papers, 19 neutral and 42 warming. In no year were there more global cooling papers than global warming.
end quote
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/global_dimming.html
That on a planet as vast and varied as the earth there would be a few areas with colder than normal weather is not expected. What I find unexpected is that people would decide it’s absolute proof against a warming planet. It’s like going into a house, turning on the heat in 4 rooms and the air conditioner in a fifth and using the the cooling fifth room to say the house as a whole is getting cooler.
Climate change wouldn’t be that big of a challenge for an intelligent species. As a start just phase out burning coal and replace it with nuclear. That would cut out over 30 percent of co2 emissions. Sadly environmentalists will protest against nuclear and call it a victory when such a plant is shut down, usually to be replaced with a coal burning plant.
@david lewis I feel labelling the ’70’s media driven fear of a pending ice age “myth” (at least as it pertains to allegedly reflecting scientific weight of evidence) misses a very important point.
Whether the evidence for global cooling ever predominated is only part of the picture as we delve to enquire how pressing that question is to humanity. We also need to incorporate evidence for the rapidity of onset when ice ages do arise, and there seems evidence that sometimes this speed can be stunning.
@astronist, I think you might be being too lackadaisical when you dismiss past false alarms as unworthy. I think the real message should be that strong economic growth and flexible outlook is our best defence against unexpected crisis generated from our great population expansion. And that includes increased vulnerability to the environmental alterations wrought by nature, such as a large meteorite strike, solar flare, etc.