Science fiction has always had its share of Earthside dystopias, but starflight’s allure has persisted, despite the dark scrutiny of space travel in the works of writers like J. G. Ballard. But what happens if we develop the technologies to go to the stars and find the journey isn’t worth it? Gregory Benford recently reviewed a novel that asks these questions and more, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora (Orbit Books, 2015). A society that reaches the Moon and then turns away from it may well prompt questions on how it would react to the first interstellar expedition. Benford, an award-winning novelist, has explored star travel in works like the six novels of the Galactic Center Saga and, most recently, in the tightly connected Bowl of Heaven and Shipstar. His review is a revised and greatly expanded version of an essay that first ran in Nature.
by Gregory Benford
Human starflight yawns as a vast prospect, one many think impossible. To arrive in a single lifetime demands high speeds approaching lightspeed, especially for target stars such as Tau Ceti, about twelve light years away.
Generation ships form the only technically plausible alternative method, implying large biospheres stable over centuries. Or else a species with lifetimes of centuries, which for fundamental biological reasons seems doubtful. (Antagonistic plieotropy occurs in evolution, ie, gene selection resulting in competing effects, some beneficial in the short run for reproduction, but others detrimental in the long.) So for at least for a century or two ahead of us, generation ships (“space arks”) may be essential.
Aurora depicts a starship on a long voyage to Tau Ceti four centuries from now. It is shaped like a car axle, with two large wheels turning for centrifugal gravity. The biomes along their rims support many Earthly lifezones which need constant tending to be stable. They’re voyaging to Tau Ceti, so the ship’s name is a reference to Isaac Asimov’s The Robots of Dawn, which takes place on a world orbiting Tau Ceti named Aurora. Arrival at the Earthlike moon of a super-Earth primary brings celebration, exploration, and we see just how complex an interstellar expedition four centuries from now can be, in both technology and society.
In 2012, Robinson declared in a Scientific American interview that “It’s a joke and a waste of time to think about starships or inhabiting the galaxy. It’s a systemic lie that science fiction tells the world that the galaxy is within our reach.” Aurora spells this out through unlikely plot devices. Robinson loads the dice quite obviously against interstellar exploration. A brooding pessimism dominates the novel.
There are scientific issues that look quite unlikely, but not central to the novel’s theme. A “magnetic scissors” method of launching a starship seems plagued with problems, for example. But the intent is clear through its staging and plot.
I’ll discuss the quality of the argument Aurora attempts, with spoilers.
Plot Fixes
The earlier nonfiction misgivings of physicist Paul Davies (in Starship Century) and biologist E.O. Wilson (in The Meaning of Human Existence) about living on exoplanets echo profoundly here. As a narrator remarks, “Suspended in their voyage as they had been, there had never been anything to choose, except methods of homeostasis.” Though the voyagers in Aurora include sophisticated biologists, adjusting Earth life to even apparently simple worlds proves hard, maybe impossible.
The moon Aurora is seemingly lifeless. Yet it has Earth-levels of atmospheric oxygen, which somehow the advanced science of four centuries hence thinks could have survived from its birth, a very unlikely idea (no rust?—this is, after all, what happened to Mars). Plot fix #1.
This elementary error, made by Earthside biologists, brings about the demise of their colony plans, in a gripping plot turn that leads to gathering desperation.
The lovingly described moon holds some nanometers-sized mystery organism that is “Maybe some interim step toward life, with some of the functions of life, but not all…in a good matrix they appear to reproduce. Which I guess means they’re a life-form. And we appear to be a good matrix.” So a pathogen evolved on a world without biology? Plot fix #2.
Plans go awry. Backup plans do, too. “Vector, disease, pathogen, invasive species, bug; these were all Earthly terms…various kinds of category error.”
What to do? Factions form amid the formerly placid starship community of about 2000. Until then, the crew had felt themselves to be the managers of biomes, farming and fixing their ship, with a bit of assistance from a web of AIs, humming in the background.
Robinson has always favored collective governance, no markets, not even currencies, none of that ugly capitalism—yet somehow resources get distributed, conflicts get worked out. No more. Not here, under pressure. The storyline primarily shows why ships have captains: stress eventually proves highly lethal. Over half the crew gets murdered by one faction or another. There is no discipline and no authority to stop this.
Most of the novel skimps on characters to focus on illuminating and agonizing detail of ecosphere breakdown, and the human struggle against the iron laws of island biogeography. “The bacteria are evolving faster than the big animals and plants, and it’s making the whole ship sick!” These apply to humans, too. “Shorter lifetimes, smaller bodies, longer disease durations. Even lower IQs, for God’s sake!”
Robinson has always confronted the nasty habit of factions among varying somewhat-utopian societies. His Mars trilogy dealt with an expansive colony, while cramped Aurora slides toward tragedy: “Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped… that the future has only bad options.”
Mob Rules
Should the ship return to Earth?
Many riots and murders finally settle on a bargain: some stay to terraform another, Marslike world, the rest set sail for Earth. The ship has no commander or functional officers, so this bloody result seems inevitable in the collective. Thucydides saw this outcome over 2000 years ago. He warned of the wild and often dangerous swings in public opinion innate to democratic culture. The historian described in detail explosions of Athenian popular passions. The Athenian democracy that gave us Sophocles and Pericles also, in a fit of unhinged outrage, executed Socrates by a majority vote of one of its popular courts. (Lest we think ourselves better, American democracy has become increasingly Athenian, as it periodically whips itself up into outbursts of frantic indignation.)
When discord goes deadly in Aurora, the AIs running the biospheres have had enough. At a crisis, a new character announces itself: “We are the ship’s artificial intelligences, bundled now into a sort of pseudo-consciousness, or something resembling a decision-making function.” This forced evolution of the ship’s computers leads in turn to odd insights into its passengers: “The animal mind never forgets a hurt; and humans were animals.” Plot Fix #3: sudden evolution of high AI function that understands humans and acts like a wise Moses.
This echoes the turn to a Napoleonic figure that chaos often brings. As in Iain Banks’ vague economics of a future Culture, mere humans are incapable of running their economy and then, inevitably, their lives. The narrative line then turns to the ship AI, seeing humans somewhat comically, “…they hugged, at least to the extent this is possible in their spacesuits. It looked as if two gingerbread cookies were trying to merge.”
Governance of future societies is a continuing anxiety in science fiction, especially if demand has to be regulated without markets, as a starship must. (Indeed, as sustainable, static economies must.) As far back as in Asimov’s Foundation, Psychohistory guides, because this theory of future society is superior to mere present human will. (I dealt with this, refining the theory, in Foundation’s Fear. Asimov’s Psychohistory resembled the perfect gas law, which makes no sense, since it’s based on dynamics with no memory; I simply updated it to a modern theory of information.) The fantasy writer China Mieville has similar problems, with his distrust of mere people governing themselves, and their appetites, through markets; he seems to favor some form of Politburo. (So did Lenin, famously saying “A clerk can run the State.”)
Aurora begins with a society without class divisions and exploitation in the Marxist sense, and though some people seem destined to be respected and followed, nothing works well in a crisis but the AIs—i.e., Napoleon. The irony of this doesn’t seem apparent to the author. Similar paths in Asimov, Banks and Mieville make one wonder if similar anxieties lurk. Indeed, Marxism and collectivist ideas resemble the similar mechanistic theory of Freudian psychology (both invented by 19th C. Germans steeped in the Hegelian tradition)—insightful definitions, but no mechanisms that actually work. Hence the angst when things go wrong with a supposedly fundamental theory.
The AIs, as revealed through an evolving and even amusing narrative voice, follow human society with gimlet eyes and melancholy insights. The plot armature turns on a slow revelation of devolution in the ship biosphere, counterpointed with the AI’s upward evolution—ironic rise and fall. “It was an interrelated process of disaggregation…named codevolution.” The AIs get more human, the humans more sick.
Even coming home to an Earth still devastated by climate change inflicts “earthshock” and agoraphobia. Robinson’s steady fiction-as-footnote thoroughness brings us to an ending that questions generational, interstellar human exploration, on biological and humanitarian grounds. “Their kids didn’t volunteer!” Of course, immigrants to far lands seldom solicit the views of their descendants. Should interstellar colonies be different?
Do descendants as yet unborn have rights? Ben Finney made this point long ago in Interstellar Migration, without reaching a clear conclusion. Throughout human history we’ve made choices that commit our unborn children to fates unknown. Many European expeditions set sail for lands unseen, unknown, and quite hostile. Many colonies failed. Interstellar travel seems no different in principle. Indeed, Robinson makes life on the starship seem quite agreeable, though maybe tedious, until their colony goal fails.
The unremitting hardship of the aborted colony and a long voyage home give the novel a dark, grinding tone. We suffer along with the passengers, who manage to survive only because Earthside then develops a cryopreservation method midway through the return voyage. So the deck is stacked against them—a bad colony target, accidents, accelerating gear failures, dismay… until the cryopreservation that would lessen the burden arrives, very late, so our point of view characters do get back to Earth and the novel retains some narrative coherence, with character continuity. Plot Fix #4.
This turn is an authorial choice, not an inevitability. Earthsiders welcome the new cryopreservation technologies as the open door to the stars; expeditions launch as objections to generation ships go away. But the returning crew opposes Earth’s fast-growing expeditions to the stars, because they are just too hard on the generations condemned to live in tight environments—though the biospheres of the Aurora spacecraft seem idyllic, in Robinson’s lengthy descriptions. Plainly, in an idyllic day at the beach, Robinson sides with staying on Earth, despite the freshly opened prospects of humanity.
So in the end, we learn little about how our interstellar future will play out.
The entire drift of the story rejects Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s “The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but humanity cannot live in the cradle forever.” – though we do have an interplanetary civilization. It implicitly undermines the “don’t-put-all-your-eggs-in-one-basket” philosophy for spreading humanity beyond our solar system. Robinson says in interviews this idea leads belief that if we destroy Earth’s environment, we can just move. (I don’t know anyone who believes this, much less those interested in interstellar exploration.) I think both ideas are too narrow; expansion into new realms is built into our evolution. We’re the apes who left Africa.
Robinson takes on the detail and science of long-lived, closed habitats as the principal concern of the novel. Many starship novels dealt with propulsion; Robinson’s methods—a “magnetic scissors” launch and a mistaken Oberth method of deceleration—are technically wrong, but beside the point. His agenda is biological and social, so his target moon is conveniently hostile. Then the poor crew must decide whether to seek another world nearby (as some do) or undertake the nearly impossible feat of returning to Earth. This deliberately overstresses the ship and people. Such decisions give the novel the feel of a fixed game. Having survived all this torment, the returning crew can’t escape the bias of their agonized experience.
Paul Davies pointed out in Starship Century that integrating humans into an existing alien biosphere (not a semi-magical disaster like his desolate moon with convenient oxygen) is a very hard task indeed, because of the probable many incompatibilities. That’s a good subject for another novel, one I think no one in science fiction has taken up. This novel avoids that challenge with implausible Plot fix #2.
Realistically considered, the huge problems of extending a species to other worlds can teach us about aliens. If interstellar expansion is just too hard biologically (as Paul Davies describes) then the Fermi paradox vanishes (except for von Neumann machines, as Frank Tipler saw in the 1970s). If aliens like us can’t travel, maybe they will expend more in SETI signaling? Or prefer to send machines alone? An even-handed treatment of human interstellar travel could shore up such ideas.
Still, a compelling subject, well done in Robinson’s deft style. My unease with the novel comes from the stacked deck its author deals.
Hmmm. . . My own novel ‘Aurora’ was published in 2004, revised edition 2013. But it only went as far as Mars!
>The Athenian democracy that gave us Sophocles and Pericles also, in a fit of unhinged outrage, executed Socrates by a majority vote of one of its popular courts.
I would recommend I. F. Stone’s _The Trial of Socrates_ for a rather different view of this incident. It’s worth nothing that neither Socrates nor Plato thought democracy was a good idea.
That novel doesn’t make any sense to me, although I’ll still give it a try.
Why the travelers would try to integrate into an alien biosphere rather than continuing to live on their ships at the destination (or build larger, more spacious space colonies upon arrival)?. It’s not likely that they’ll go from “living on Earth” to “traveling in a generation ship to the stars” without a long period in between where humans are born, live, and die aboard relatively self-sustained colonies in interplanetary space. They’d be used to living aboard space habitats, probably more so than living on a planet or moon.
I doubt they’d be trying to do it with on-board living ecosystems as the means of sustenance, rather than heavily redundant, robust, rebuildable mechanical systems of life support either.
I’m not a sci fi person, but there is a 2009 movie titled “Cargo” which has a failed settlement in the Solar system in its plot (in the background, not illustrated). Not too bad for giving spacy feeling, I recommend it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381940/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
I’ve read some of Robinson’s stuff. Some of it is actually good. However, I can’t stand his politics, which oozes out in everyone of his novels.
Has it ever occurred to Robinson that maybe he is one of the reasons why people want to go to space?
I did notice some kind of shift in attitude on Kim Stanley Robinson’s writing in his previous book “2312”, where a very developed Solar System civilization is depicted, but where everyone also had to come back to Earth every decade or so for a sabbatical period of some years in order to not die sooner.
In the book they did have longevity treatments, but those worked well only on Earth. As if Earth was some kind of mystical place and our bodies needed to be in contact with it for not degrading and withering down.
I thought this was just a plot device, for adding some tension and a weakness to the spacer civilization. But it seems Kim really entertains the notion that there is no place for us outside of Earth, even when he writes about successful or partially successful efforts of settlement of bodies outside of our planet.
At least he still believes we could go to the Solar System and live there, but this kind of philosophical disappointment and nihilism seems to be a growing motif for some authors. A previous example I can recall is Stanislaw Lem, who grow increasingly cynic, weary and pessimistic about science fiction and the future in general, and it showed in his books, up to the point of stopping writing it.
As author, it’s his prerogative to believe in anything he chose to believe or feel in any way he chooses to feel about our future in space, and even push hat belief in his books. But from an objective point of view, it does feel like cheating when the work is laid on in such a way as to trick the reader into believing this is hard sci/fi.
As Greg very pointedly remarks, it is not. It’s an opinion based on loading the dice and arranging the universe in such a way as to be worse and more tragic than it is.
Of course, there is the contrary as well: blindly believing that the universe follows some teleological narrative, that human history follows it and that things are somewhat arrayed in our favor. They are not. The universe simply is and doesn’t care about us.
That can be seen as good or bad. Nevertheless simply existing and being able to take that life elsewhere outside of Earth can be perceived as a good enough thing. Without any further loaded dice in favor or against us, we already won the lottery, by virtue of being alive, sentient and living in a universe that doesn’t forbid the dream of filling the cosmos with life.
Without giving too much away I think the approach to Insterstellar
Ark posited by G. Bear’s Hull Zero Three, seems like a way to insure
success albeit with a very coldblooded approach. Basically you make
a crew with genetic engineering and memory implants to make Ideal crews
for each phase of the mission. Actually the catalyst for the failure of that approach was a foolish oversight that in real life could be avoided. Maybe Bear was afraid of his own concept and sabotaged it, which distracted from
it being a better novel.
But it seems Kim really entertains the notion that there is no place for us outside of Earth, even when he writes about successful or partially successful efforts of settlement of bodies outside of our planet.
I read “2312”. This plot device along with his characters discussing how the off-world habitats should not have been allowed to be politically independent from Earth made this novel quite “creepy” to me. Its clear to me that KSR does not like the pioneering ethos that makes up much of the space movement, let alone the basis of American culture. He really does not want pioneering types to become political independent of the rest of humanity. There is an English-language word that describes this mentality. That word is (drum roll please): totalitarian.
Just a side note here. So long as human beings are willing to accept genetic engineering of their children as moral, I suspect that lifetimes of centuries are indeed within reach. From an evolutionary perspective, long lifespans can actually be counterproductive, since those lifeforms can over harvest resources and not have fast enough generations to adapt and out compete other species. But we are no longer bound to those constraints. Although yes, it is hard to see reaching that point in less than a century.
Rob: Yes, I recommend Bear’s Hull Zero Three as another, less staged, approach.
The last Robinson book I tried to read was 2312. If he had used technobabble and remained vague, I could’ve slogged through with my WSOD intact.
But in attempting to harden his sci fi, he used terms without knowing their meaning. A craft cycling between any two bodies, Robinson calls an Aldrin Cycler. The Aldrin Cycler is a specific kind of Earth to Mars cycler whose orbital period equals the earth-Mars synodic period (about 2.14 years). The Aldrin Cycler needs the line of apsides turned about 50 degrees each orbit. The are many different cyclers, each having their own interesting possibilities. I wish Robinson had done a little research.
And interplanetary Hohmann trips that last weeks?!
I seem to recall more blunders but I don’t want to dig up this book.
Robinson’s clueless use of terms I’m familiar with didn’t merely pop my WSOD, it shredded it. I couldn’t endure reading the whole book.
—
Here I’m reiterating the point Brett made earlier. “Why would the travelers try to integrate into an alien biosphere rather than continuing to live on their ships at the destination (or build larger, more spacious space colonies upon arrival)?”
2312 reeks of planetary Chauvinism.
If memory serves, the so called Aldrin Cyclers were asteroids remade into O’Neill Cylinders with their own ecosystems. If human civilization has the ability to make biomes from small bodies, the asteroids and comets offer far more real estate and resources than rocky planets and large moons.
Making habs from asteroidal materials is plausible, terraforming planets much less so. It is also vastly easier to exit and enter a small body’s gravity well vs the deep gravity well of a planet or large moon.
Regardless, in 2312, only a small fraction the solar system’s population dwell within asteroids.
It would take decades or centuries to fill the Main Belt, millennia to settle and fill the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Of course settling the Kuiper and Oort implies an powerful, long lasting power source. Perhaps it’s not a given we’ll have fusion power (other than from the sun). But generation star ships seem to rely on this assumption as well.
By the time humanity has settled the outer boundaries of the solar Oort, it doesn’t seem like a huge task to send seed colonies to the Oort clouds of neighboring stars.
—
“Robinson says in interviews this idea leads belief that if we destroy Earth’s environment, we can just move. ” This is offensive. Robinson as well as UCSD’s Tom Murphy seem to view space enthusiasts as folks with no regard for planet earth. Do they think the typical “Space Cadet” drives his Hummer to the beach and gleefully wraps baby sea turtles with plastic six pack rings?
Most space enthusiasts are well aware we live on a fragile planet. Robinson and Murphy would do well to take a look at Elon Musk’s efforts to promote solar energy and electric cars. Speaking for myself, I drive small cars, insulate my home and business. I certainly don’t have 10 kids and 100 grandkids.
—
The spoilers didn’t spoil the story for me as I have no intention of reading any more of Robinson’s books.
Nitpick. The Naked Sun is set on the planet Solaria. Aurora is the setting for the later The Robots of Dawn.
I really liked 2312. Aurora seems depressing. KSM seems to be turning away from optimism. IIRC he recently said that he didn’t think Mars could be colonized.
Thank you for the critique. I read and enjoyed the Mars trilogy by KSR, skimming over a lot of the political bs, but 2312 had so much socialist bs as to make it unenjoyable. I doubt I would have read anything else by the author and this pretty much seals the deal. A shame really, as I do enjoy his writing technique and vocabulary. Humans are Not a socialist species.
Extremely, extremely well written, Paul my hat off to you completely. While I only scanned what had been written I do have the feeling that you are on to something. Something like this:
We’re always in the cusp of some kind of excitement that permeates us as a species. We always think that there is going to be a better place and it will be more exciting if only we undergo some type of voyage, and some type of other lifestyle. But oftentimes we find that the places we go to and the things we do are nothing more than just reflections of our imaginations. They’re not at all as exciting as we deem they would possibly be. And that brings me to my other observation is that we tend to believe that the other worlds are going to be teeming with life and they’ll be exciting aliens with their own histories and their own type of new and exciting ideas. However, I believe that reality of the situation is going to be that will find far more rocks, and perhaps very primitive life and that will be the extent of how exciting it will be.
As for the humans perhaps murdering one another. I’ve always felt that the development of the higher cortexes of the human brain was both an blessing and a curse. And I say that because of the fact that the human cortex while it gives us much that we can be proud of overlays basically a reptilian brain stem that does nothing but cause us to have hunger, thirst, and seek out mates. It’s a sort of dichotomy which is unsolvable at this time, and shows the capacity between higher impulses and more base ones.
Like the first steamship to make the transatlantic crossing while carrying the book that said such a voyage was impossible, I hope the first starship carries a copy of “Aurora.” As the newly-arrived settlers sit on their front porches to enjoy the evening of a new world, they can read passages to each other for laughs.
Alex Tolley:
Thanks for correction! My memory needs backup…
A great post…
Optimism will take us far…to the Moon and back six times…
Reading H.G. Wells’ revised two volumn set of The Outline of History and you have to be amazed there is a human civilization at all…from Priest to Emperor to King to Tyrant to President…perhaps we will live long enough to witness our first Internet President…someone with 800 million Likes on Facebook…This might provide a sizable warchest for the politically ambitious…
The earth and its people have been a suscessful generational ship revolving around the galactic core…
Perhaps miniaturization has definite limits…
The owners of CERN will learn this in time…
Trying to miniaturize the sun must be daunting…
Miniaturing the earth will be daunting as well…
Thank you Mr. Benford for opening many eyes.
I totally agree with Brett’s comment above, and argued it in detail in the pages of JBIS in 2012. Without extensive multi-generation experience of living in orbiting space colonies within the Solar System, a starship cannot be certified as fit for a multi-generation flight beyond. But in that case the dependence upon finding an Earth-analogue planet at the destination is removed, and the nearest possible destination is much closer.
Stephen Ashworth
Oxford, UK
I wonder how Robinson manages to return his ship to the Solar System? The hint of a magnetic launcher seems to imply a piece of orbiting infrastructure many AU in length and consuming many TW of power, which could only be built by a highly developed interplanetary civilisation, certainly not by his motley crew, per your summary! Propulsion may be beside the point in this novel, but cannot be ignored if he wants to be convincing.
SA
Charlie writes:
Thank you, Charlie, but understand this is not my work, but Gregory Benford’s! I agree with you entirely about its excellence.
Gregory Benford writes:
As does my own. In any case, I’ve gone back to the text and changed the reference to The Robots of Dawn, as Alex noted.
Surely it is common sense that by the time we are in a position to send crewed starships to other solar systems like Tau Ceti – even slow generation ships – that we would have the technological means to detect, image and analyse planets to see if they are life bearing? We are detecting exoplanets now (Kepler 452b anyone?) but in a few decades, maybe sooner, we should be able to actually image them and study their atmospheres, get a sense of their biospheres, and even detect life signatures. So it seems a bit of a reach by KSR to suggest a generation ship would be sent out over centuries only to find the planet is lifeless. My point is – any interstellar flight – be it slow in a generation ship, or fast in a relativistic craft, or very fast if we can somehow circumvent Einstein, will be a careful, well planned and well thought out mission that is going into the interstellar void forewarned and thus forearmed. Therefore they would know well ahead of sending generation ships which star systems had habitable planets, and that would mean the whole plot of Aurora would be different. I guess I’m an optimist in terms of interstellar flight – clearly KSR is not (as the review by Gregory Benford indicates).
Robinson says in interviews this idea leads belief that if we destroy Earth’s environment, we can just move.
Of the space people, no one and I mean no one has this mentality. KSR is being disingenuous if he thinks this about us. None of us have the desire to ruin Earth’s environment. We merely have the desire to have and to become more than what we are now.
2312 was actually the only novel of KBR’s that was actually readable. Its actually quite good and I recommend reading it (as a libertarian, I do believe in giving credit where credit is due). All of his other stuff was so utterly boring that it literally put me to sleep when reading it (seriously, most of his stuff makes a good sleeping pill). However, what comes through loud and clear in this novel is his hatred for the libertarian pioneering types who want nothing more than mere autonomy from most of the f**k-ups that comprise the vast majority of the human race. KBR does not like us having such autonomy. He does not believe in autonomy for “the men of mind”, and that is why I despise his writings.
“Social justice” is nothing more than a rationalization of the parasitism of the productive by the non-productive.
KBR is the anti-Heinlein. That is why I despise his writings.
Since childhood, I have viewed space as a frontier, no different than the American frontier of the 19th century. The bubble and the parasitical crony capitalism that it has spawned since 1995 has reinforced this conviction a hundred fold for me. The reality is that, unless something like Mach’s principle “wormhole” FTL gets developed, our future in space is the O’neill L-5 scenario. Those of us who want openness have to make this happen. It is easy for the nay-sayers to say this cannot happen, no different than those who said heavier than air flight was impossible, or any other significant accomplishment in the past was impossible. The real work (and real guts and courage) is doing the necessary R&D and technological development to make it happen.
Gregory Benford is right about the plot fixes of course, but I’m still glad I read this oppressive and rather despairing novel, its a curative to the (over?) hopefulness expressed in his previous 2312 (a novel I love and return to again and again). I’m not sure if the final message is that humans are destined to remain on Earth (to me the final scenes were very reminiscent of those at the end of Blue Mars – the famous ‘on Mars, on Mars, on Mars’ passage) but rather a reminder that there’s a very very big leap from being a Solar System-wide species and an interstellar one
P
Setting a book in space does not make it science fiction. KSM writes political fantasy, not science fiction. I struggled through ‘Red Mars’, but never finished ‘Green Mars’, nor started Blue Mars’. Reading interviews with him, you get the impression that he does not even believe space travel to be possible, and his knowledge of science and space is rudimentary. He would be the last place I would look for fiction on star travel.
There’s an element of truth to the idea in 2312 that you might suffer a weaker immune system and worse health if you’re constantly living in a sterile environment. One of the big suspected reasons for the rise in allergies in the US is that children aren’t being exposed to potential allergens as much in childhood anymore.
Alongside vaccinations, people living in space stations permanently would probably want some type of “allergen vaccination” or the like to build up their resistance in childhood. That would then be periodically re-tested throughout life, just like how we have to get revaccinated every so often. You would not need to go back to Earth to do that, though.
Given the “antique” technology that was used in the novel (such as the Oberth method of deceleration), I couldn’t help noticing that the starship looks like two stacked Wernher von Braun “Collier’s” wheel-type space stations (a space station design that I think *would* work well, if NASA ever got over their apparent dislike of centrifugal artificial gravity). Also:
I too echo Brett–if a “traveling O’Neill space colony”-type starship were large enough and pleasant to live in, the attitude of the intermediate generations could well be, “This *is* our world. We’ll [meaning their descendants] reach another when we get around to it–and if there isn’t a suitable one, we’ll use our new sun’s energy and build more worlds like ours there.” In addition:
I don’t know if I agree with Gregory Benford’s statement that “expansion into new realms is built into our evolution.” Most people are perfectly content to live where they are, unless natural or socio-political conditions become very unpleasant and can’t be remedied. A few in every group are smitten with the desire to explore, but they are in the minority. Likewise, H.G. Well’s assertion (through one of his characters in “The Shape of Things to Come”) about “All the universe–or nothing. Which shall it be?” applied/applies only to Wells and to the relatively few people who share that view; most people, if told that, would shrug and say, “For you, maybe, but not for me.” Most people–and I’m not saying it’s either good or bad–just don’t have such aspirations, and those who do err in assuming that their aspirations are universal (no pun intended).
Before commenting on others people’s comments, I will comment on the article and the book.
I was extremely disappointed in it for several reasons.
First of all generation ships are very inefficient idea of interstellar travel and one that causes the most problems-using such a ship is bound to create multitude problems. Author uses the most troublesome example to prove his point.
Colonizing an alien biosphere isn’t really useful, the generation ship described by Reynolds provides enough habitat and living space already-and he mentions asteroid habitats left in Sol System that even larger than it that can be easily created on site-notice that the colonist are capable of building an interplanetary infrastructure with their robots, but don’t even think about replicating these asteroid habitats.
For what reason they push onto hostile second planet when they have a better option already in front of their eyes? We don’t know.
Robinson like many others misses the point in this regard-interstellar colonization requires technologies that make interstellar colonization of other planets pointless.You already have technologies that allow you to obtain as much living space as needed. And planets are too difficult to be an attractive habitats for space explorers.
Now exploring space to discover life and study universe is another thing.
Which brings me to another flaw in the book.
We know already that for hundreds of years humanity in this universe colonized Solar System and discovered other exoplanets. Surely it has the means to detect alien biospheres through telescopes? But I can’t seem to recall any mention of this.If the first planet targeted in Tau Ceti harbors life, then it means statistically that it is quite widespread among the stars. Hence it would mean that humanity by the time ship has arrived in Tau Ceti would discover other much more developed worlds by telescopes.
Robinson avoided fundamental issue here. With life on other planets, there is no justification of avoiding contact and discovery and attempts to study it.
No other exoplanets are mentioned, no other journeys of other space ships to other stars are either. A very poor exercise in world building to prove one’s point resulting in tremendous plot hole so to speak.
Notice the lack of curiosity among the colonists-not only they didn’t envision that there could be lithosphere life(which we already know dwarfs surface life in terms of mass) but besides one character, nobody thinks about studying it, or exploring(even through drones) if the planet and it oceans have anything more advanced.
Heck, a simple method of seeding the oceans of Aurora with Earth based life and checking what would survive would be relatively simple experiment.
There are other points, but not as important to this book-the fact that by several hundred years human civilization basically remained unchanged at all, the fact that the ship has no governance(already mentioned), that the solution for space exploration is already there in form of AI and cryostasis and so on…
All in all a very poor and disappointing book, written not from position of science and desire to explore but from an ideological dictate condemning humanity to stagnation.
I think the generation ships should orbit the Sun for several generations before even leaving the Solar system. They will be more stable that way. There might be thousands or even millions of those ships and a large number might leave for a single destination at once. That would allow people to “move” if they feel they need to. Also, there would be unpopulated “wilderness” ships that are used for vacations, to get away from other people for a while. (I suppose every ship should have some area allocated to “wilderness”, anyway..)
This gravity well is well getting us down, solving the significant delta v of Earth and the rest is a lot easier. I have always struggled with the ‘need’ to find a second Earth when we can make thousands, area wise, in our own solar system with the materials we have. There would also be the problem if we find life on this second earth in that we could and most probably will interfere with it’s development. We should only go there to study it not land there and take over. And we can make our home easily between the stars, we don’t need a Sun all the time, we could make a simulated one.
My articles in the JBIS and ANALOG, “Getting There is Half the Fun: Colony vs. Crew” proposes that multigenerational starships be populated by Belters who have no memory of, or allegiance to, Earth, and should comprise many asteroids specifically modified to provide different environments. The articles are also the first to discuss the economics of such an expedition–why would the Earth System finance it, why would people be willing to go, knowing they will die en route, and what would the colonists do for the rest of their lives? Simply living out one’s life inside/aboard a metal can, regardless of its size, does not appeal to most rational people.
It seems to be a pretty common feature of human societies here on Earth that a common enemy is needed to unify them. To unify the people of a fragile worldship perhaps they could be given such a common enemy, and be told that there’s an enemy to faced. Rather than internal strife, their energies could then be focused towards facing that enemy. Maybe tell them that an ETI signal was detected from the system they’re traveling towards.
As social creatures we seem to be willing to follow any idiot who can arouse our passions, and who claims “they’re evil,” or “they’re coming to get us.”
Though it might be better to just engineer a species better suited for life in enclosed habitats; one that isn’t so prone to sociopaths.
Guys, if you want to read a good Mars story, I recommend Greg Bear’s “Moving Mars”. It is probably the best Mars SF novel around.
Re: Stan Robinson’s Aurora. I believe one motivation for creating this novel may be to end decades of nagging: “Hey Robinson, how come you never leave the solar system?” Aurora answers: “There. I left. For a bit. But there’s nothing interesting out there. And getting there is too hard. Let’s focus on fixing our home.”
In fact, I got no bones to pick with KSR’s odes to Our Planet – (hey, one of my tomes is EARTH) – and its solar siblings. Moreover, I find his politics to be interesting and major contributions to the discussion of how advance human societies may govern themselves. Still, when it comes to Aurora’s stay-home message, he had to expect folks would accuse him of stacking the deck.
1- Alas, we keep running into the same problem, even among fellow members of our Promethean guild. It never occurs to hand-wringers that your current set of problems might seem quaint to people just a generation hence. In this case, when tech-science difficulties are used to stymie your colonists, the question then arises… might not the next set learn from these mistakes? One has only to squint and picture that successor ship finding Tau Ceti’s obstacles quite surmountable.
2- Note another deck-stacking… how KSR presumes Solar System civilization is just barely rich enough to have afforded to send one expedition… but not (generations later) wealthy enough to make expeditions increasingly a matter of proliferating whim. In the end, stay-at-home boils down to an assumption of permanent (if relative) poverty.
3- KSR’s no-Captain premise may allow lots of colorful chaos, murder and plot-propelling societal collapse. But it also is silly. Even if the population aboard ship live according to Robinsonian prescribed post-Marxian according-to-needs principles combined with Rothbardian no-coercion (that predictably shatters under stress) they’d still have backup plans and those would include occasional emergency drills that familiarized them with age-old techniques. A ceremonial captaincy – AI selected – that could assume command in a crisis. Should that then fail in order to drive the plot? Sure! But stacking the deck should be subtle. Even just a bit.
4- What I find stunning is that in this book KSR indicts his own prescriptive utopia as brittle and incapable of resilience! I am sure the intended message was “if my super-mature society can’t handle an interstellar expedition, then no one can, hence forgetaboutit.” But that is not what the reader derives. Rather, the book’s take-away is just “my super-mature society can’t handle an interstellar expedition.”
Indeed, from the behavior of the denizens of Aurora, one is left to conclude something fundamental about this ship and expedition – that it was created by the folks back home, and carefully staffed, with one fundamental goal in mind – to be a “Golgafrincham B Ark.” A dig that should be self-explanatory, if you are sf’nally literate.
The most disappointing thing is that Stan Robinson is generally a master of problem-solving fiction, making him an archetype of what I believe to be the fundamental premise of Sci Fi, making it the opposite of traditional fantasy. The premise that children might – sometimes — learn from the mistakes of their parents. By that metric, Aurora is, for all its tech-heavy recitations — alas – far more polemic than science fiction.
Realistically, short of an advance in propulsion which permits a round trip in less than a lifetime, or a last ditch effort to avoid extinction through some cosmic event, interstellar colonization will follow asteroid and cometary colonization. The colonists will have grown up in space colonies. They won’t think it’s any big deal to spend their lives in an artificial habitat.
The ship will just be a space colony that happens to be going somewhere else fairly fast. Just colonize an outbound comet, throw an engine on it, build more colonies when you get wherever.
I would be very surprised if biological post humans become our predominant interstellar colonizers. It seems far more likely that colonizers will be synthetic with either their own minds or uploaded human ones. The colony ships will carry just the minds in atorage as minimal payload, then create the bodies to inhabit on arrival. Planets can be living or dead, Earthlike or not, no matter. A mind traveling in stasis will not be aware of time, making travel at even slow fractional c doable. Ships can be relatively small and therefore energy efficient and relatively cheap. No complex ecosystems to maintain. The cost is that humans as we currently are will not be star travelers, but confined to the solar system.
@David Brin, regarding your point 3: I find A. E. van Vogt’s ‘The World of Null-A’, where everyone just knows what to do more believable (computers, cybernetics, just good training?) than a “post-Marxian according-to-needs principles combined with Rothbardian no-coercion” where “lots of colorful chaos, murder and plot-propelling societal collapse” just happens some times as if it was unavoidable. It seems very unbelievable to me that such a society could ever spawn an interstellar voyage of any kind.
I did not find KSR’s writing to be science oriented in his Mars books. Instead of solving problems with science, he seemed to be listing the many ways that people or societies could adapt to the conditions by changing themselves, instead of using technology. Maybe some of his other books are better, but I seldom return to an author that disappoints twice in the first two books I read (Red Mars, Green Mars).
Mr. Benford states that generational ships are the only way that humans to reach the stars. However, if chryostasis can be perfected, that is another way. Go to sleep, and wake up in another star system a few thousand years later. Time does not really pass for the frozen traveller.
@Brett Bellmore
That’s why I came around over time to the idea of generation ships. If they’re already living in the outer solar system, running on fission or fusion* power, using resource utilization complete from raw material to finished products, and requiring hours of time just to get a signal to Earth and back, then it’s not going to be a big deal for them to spend a long time in transit. Hell, a transit time of several centuries might be a good thing, since it allows them to get gradually more used to longer and longer time-delays in communication back home.
* If we ever get fusion that’s both cost-effective and net positive to a useful degree. Nature isn’t encouraging on this front – IIRC the power density in the Sun’s core is roughly on par with a compost heap. It generates a ton of light and heat due to its size, not because it gets a high power output per meter cubed.
Of course, if you’re living in space colonies for the long run, then it’s an open question as to why you’d even want to do an interstellar expedition beyond sending robotic probes. You’d only do it for some pretty extreme political problems. For everything else, you can send robotic explorer probes and build colossally huge space telescope arrays, the latter of which might be able to see surface features on exoplanets if you put them in the right place.
Several aspects of the Aurora story are especially disappointing.
The SF trope that we find a nice habitable planet and then build a space arc to go settle it is just wrong. If a planet has oxygen then it has life (as Gregory Benford points out in his piece). If a planet has life then we probably need to stay away from it for safety and ethical reasons, or at least study it carefully for centuries to make sure we understand what we’re doing. If we go to colonize a distant star then we need to think in terms of space settlements and/or terraforming a sterile world using Earth life. Space settlements can be built relatively quickly, terraforming a planet could take many centuries.
One aspect of such an expedition that often gets overlooked is that the challenge and joy of exploring an entirely new solar system. Half a dozen planets and hundreds of Kuiper belt objects. Indeed one reason Earth would finance such an expedition is the scientific and entertainment value of watching the expedition explore.
In JBIS Vol 66 no 10/11, (Colonizing the Plutoids: The Key to Human Expansion into the Galaxy) my colleagues and I propose that such an expedition first establish a base on a Pluto-like body. In part because Pluto-like bodies are probably fairly common around any star with planets. In part because we can practice setting up such bases in our solar system before the mission. And also because such bodies probably have most of the resources such a base would need. We propose how such a base could provide Earth-like gravity, significant shielding from radiation, and plenty of room. From there the expedition could explore their new solar system in comfort and safety. Eventually they could begin to build space settlements and launch a multi-century terraforming efforts.
With reasonable communication technology the colony could maintain contact with Earth. Not just occasional messages but a broadband communication link that would allow members of the colony to keep up with Earth culture, its literature and entertainment and even contribute to it. Using distance learning they could even get advanced degrees from good Earth colleges. They would not be isolated and along. Their lives could be as interesting and fulfilling as any on Earth.
Going to the stars as Kim Stanley Robinson proposes in Aurora is doomed to fail, but there are ways to do it that would succeed. Failure is easy, success, not so much.
“If we ever get fusion that’s both cost-effective and net positive to a useful degree. Nature isn’t encouraging on this front”
Nature is essentially saying to us: “Fusion reactors come in two versions. One is huge, runs for billions of years, and has a very low power density. The other is small, runs for microseconds, and has a very high power density. Take your pick.”
It’s been clear for some time there’s no fundamental obstacle to building a fusion reactor, if you don’t mind that the “fuel pellets” have at least a several kiloton yield. You just have to build big enough that the reactor can survive the fuel pellet going off. It’s just engineering, we could design one today if the word “bomb” didn’t scare people. Heck, we could have built one in the 50’s.
All the problems with fusion come from trying to do it small and steady state. Nature doesn’t ‘want’ it to be both of those at the same time.
“it’s an open question as to why you’d even want to do an interstellar expedition beyond sending robotic probes. ”
We’ll end up doing interstellar expeditions for political/social liberty. Some people will want to explore social/biological options that the rest of society might frown on, and they’ll want privacy and distance, so that they won’t be interfered with.
And we’ll do it for resources. Sure, the resources of the solar system are vast, but the best will be claimed early on, and people living out in the Kuiper belt might like the idea of going somewhere that they can claim resources closer to a convenient star, instead of having to live out where the Sun is just another star.
I find that the premise is based on the fallacy that surviving in a planet in another star is inherently more difficult than surviving in a moon of an outer planet. It assumes that humanity has an interplanetary civilization, so it has managed to stay self-sufficient in remote places for long periods of time. Once you have the technology and know-how to survive in a outer moon with no atmosphere, there is barely a difference between doing it in a remote moon of Saturn, or in a remote planet of another star
Both George Pal and C.S. Lewis produced stories including arguments that mankind should not attempt to colonise the stars. KSR seems to have produced another example. It is certainly a point of view, but not one I subscribe to.
@RobFlores
You mentioned here in your above comment about a Interstellar Art that was written in the book form by the author G. Bear’s Hull Zero Three. I seen this book advertised many times in a discount books magazine, and I’ve always been extremely interested as to what that particular book is about.
In fact I was so interested in it. I checked back and I saw that there had been a movie that came out at the theaters in 2009 called Pandorum, which starred Dennis Quaid as the principal character in the movie and it was about a individual who awakened in a spaceship and wasn’t aware of where he was and it started out he was alone.
Would you happen to know if the movie Pandorum is based upon the book you mentioned above Hull Zero Three? I’d be intensely interested to find out if you happen to know if there’s a connection between the book and the movie.
Charlie, Hull Zero Three came out in late 2010, so I doubt there was any connection between it and the movie you mentioned. The Wikipedia says of Pandorum that it “…was directed by Christian Alvart and produced by Robert Kulzer, Jeremy Bolt and Paul W.S. Anderson. Travis Milloy wrote the screenplay from a story by Milloy and Alvart.” Greg Bear seems to have no involvement.
To enhance w/o giving away too much on Hull Zero Three.
I affirm with P.G. that there is not direct connection with the movie Pandorum.
As to the book itself A brief high lights of good and bad.
Good:
1) I liked the concept of designed crew for each part of the mission.
2) Reasonably suspenseful
3) The overall strategy of using an ice ball as a yolk to maintain an interstellar ark seems about right to me, taking into account the length of the journey.
4) Genetic smorgasbord
5) A fast read.
Detractions:
1) The diagram describing the ship configuration does not help as much as
it could when trying to follow the action space the ‘hero’ is moving through.
2) One of the main protagonists is very young, I don’t understand why
it has to be so. It is not an advantage to that protagonist’s ‘leader’ to
be that young. It’s not like there are cramped spaces to move through.
Plus for the tasked assignment a diminutive size and youth is of no help
as part of the assignment is to persuade adults who are not always so
keen to follow the advice of a pre-teen youth.
3) There are moral questions, and some resolution is given by
a non-corporeal agent. But G Bear does not make it clear if that agent is
caused by the ship’s design or a transcendental being intercession, or result of biological imprinting. Maybe it was reading too fast and missed it.
7/10 rating.
Kenneth Roy,: I thought that the communication gap between even our nearest star systems and our earth could have a gap of years . That is a long time to wait to find out your grades.
Steve Bowers wrote:
“Both George Pal and C.S. Lewis produced stories including arguments that mankind should not attempt to colonise the stars. KSR seems to have produced another example. It is certainly a point of view, but not one I subscribe to.”
Do you know which of C.S. Lewis’ novels have that theme (I’ve read that he considered the interstellar distances to likely be a Divine quarantine, but I didn’t know he incorporated that theme into any novels–I’d like to read them). Many thanks in advance for your help!
Its a shame, but KSR seems to have lost the plot in more ways than one. This seems to be an occupational hazard for authors who have been at the top of their game for a long time. At the risk of starting a flame war, I think that anything by Heinlien after the early ’70s to be rubbish, Job was ok at best, but not great.
I loved the Mars triology, its the best fictional treatment of what it would actually take to terraform a planet IMHO. While I don’t agree with the politics, I don’t mind it, as one of the motivations of colonizing a new world is to try out new forms of society.
As to why you would want to terraform a planet after spending generations getting to it in an world ship? Legroom and permanence, hollowed out asteroids are going to be small isolated islands, ecologically speaking and their ecologies are most likely going to require permanent maintenance. While a successfully terraformed planet could last indefinitely and form a while new branch of Earth life.
As for gravity wells, the delta-v required to get up and down from even a gas giant is going to be an accounting error for the propulsion systems of even the slowest world ships.