This is a tough question. It’s one that I’ve been sort of sliding around as well in terms of my posting so far on this blog. But it’s also a very important one.
There are some halfway decent arguments against spending resources on a space program of any sort, much less one that puts the resources to sustain humans into the works – what with the endless list of requirements to keep them alive, to sustain them in the space environment, to subject them to the extraordinary dangers of space-flight. Several questions are posed regularly by those of this camp.
1. Couldn’t these resources be spent elsewhere on better things?
Space is expensive. It requires a lot to build rockets, and it requires a lot of rocket to get a small bit of matter where you want it to go in space. There are still people starving in Africa. People still die of malaria and bacteriological illnesses.
If we pose the question which should we be spending our resources on, space, or saving starving people? – the expected answer is saving starving people. But there’s a serious assumption there – that spending resources on “starving people” is actually going to alleviate starvation. There are many countries in the world that still have starvation, malnutrition, rampant disease, and that have populations that die like flies. They usually also receive upwards of 30% of their GDP in terms of resources designed to keep them from these very ills. They also usually have one other element in common: They are ruled by tribal or authoritarian despotisms which take that aid money and either burn it, leave piles of food to rot, or buy weapons with our charity and use them to terrorize their populations. The problem has never been one of “resources”. People who are free – who have their able bodies at their own disposal, usually never starve. There are instances where natural disaster or infirmity occasionally prevails. But they, under normal circumstances, never fail to at least feed themselves. Taiwan is a resource-less rock in the middle of the ocean – the Taiwanese don’t starve. South Korea is a harsh piece of terrain, yet South Koreans don’t starve. North Koreans do.
If we posed this question another way – would you rather, given circumstances favorable to doing so, spend your resources on either space colonization, or liberating people from tyrannies - I’d cheerfully divert the funding from my lifelong dream and spend my engineering talents, for part of my life, designing the new and improved despot-seeking-missile. (In fact, that’s what I hope to do). What mankind stands to gain, medium term, from eradicating tyranny is much greater than from a space program.
But there’s another problem with this question – it’s a false dichotomy. We spend $16 billion on NASA per year. We spend $2.5 trillion dollars on everything else. NASA is only 0.1% of our total federal spending. In contrast, we spend $400 billion per year in interest on our national debt! If we were going to trim something, there’s no shortage of places to start. Why cut the space program? Why challenge increases in the space program with starving children in Africa, but not federal highway maintenance pork? ($35 billion, most of which is probably pork, unleashed and running wild. BTW, we’re spending more to maintain the highways than we did to build them – figure that one out).
If we were the United States of NASA, and we spent 80% of our federal budget on space exploration, I’d want to cut the space program back down to a reasonable size too. I’d probably be blogging my discontent from an internet café on Mars, but even so – then starving children in Africa would be a valid point to raise.
2. Wait for Technology to Develop
The second argument that’s often raised against it is that we don’t have the technology to colonize space. We should wait until we have the ability to do it before making any serious efforts at climbing this mountain.
This argument is in error for the following reason: It assumes that Technology Just Happens, that men have a passive role to play in the development of technology, and that they do what they can when it becomes possible to do it. That’s not how it works. Capital T Technology doesn’t solve problems for us. Men develop technology to solve problems. I believe that our greatest technological advancements happened, not while we were waiting for them to happen, but when we were striving to overcome an obstacle. The oceangoing technology of our millennia of sailing was not invented, refined, or developed by abstract theorists in a land-locked university. Conversely, our knowledge of fluid dynamics came first to the Romans and the ancient Persians, who had to plumb their cities and irrigate their deserts. The steam engine wasn’t built for amusement. James Watt’s efforts to regulate the device were not born of abstractions, but practical experience and experimentation. Our greatest bursts of applied invention and innovation, of technological advancement, came first when we had the world to explore and understand, second when we had the continents to tame, and more recently when we needed to fight our wars and overcome the enemy.
To make no effort towards conquering space means that we will develop no technology making it any easier to do so. Our expertise in other fields may advance arbitrarily. But we will remain precisely in the position we are in now in terms of being able to put humans on other planets and moons and enabling them to live there. Having made no efforts to make this work, we will have no technology to help them. We can see the outlines of this in the frustrated question that many space-enthusiasts have asked of late: “Why could send men to the moon in the 70s, and yet can’t send men reliably into orbit today?” The answer is that we haven’t been pushing ourselves to go the distance. The Saturn V was developed by engineers who had practical experience pushing the boundary of our aerospace knowledge. They had designed rockets, rocket planes, and innovative supersonic airplanes before. They had practical experience building the things. The Saturn V wasn’t just a rocket – it was a culture that enabled it to exist. Today, the blueprints to build that rocket are in storage somewhere, the engineers are retired or deceased, and the companies that built the parts are out of business. Even the people who engineered the shuttle are spending their efforts holding the fleet together, and retiring. Most of the engineers in charge today have never had the opportunity to design and build a new rocket.
It ultimately doesn’t matter when we start – the technology won’t happen until we do. If we develop a moral paradigm now to put this off to a future generation, then as long as the paradigm persists, we will make no progress towards accomplishing the goal. 3. What do we have to gain from humans in space?
Short term – not much beyond basic research
I’ll be the first to admit that, in the short term, it’s a daunting task to find a compelling reason to go. Economically, even the best prospects seem incredibly inefficient compared with developing an equivalent industry here on earth to serve earth’s population.
The argument that we’re running out of resources here on Earth is not a very convincing one. In terms of material resources, such as metals and rock, the type of resources we are likely to find in space, Earth has thousands of tons per capita available in readily extractable deposits. We simply are not going to run out of these. Rarer metals can be recycled quite easily from scrap (in fact, more easily recycled in some cases, than mined and refined). We may run out of oil, but we aren’t going to find oil in space anyway. We have sufficient deposits of uranium for the forseeable future. In terms of biological resources – we, the breadbasket of the world, aren’t using the majority of potential farmland available to us, and if we wanted to we could increase yields many times over using genetically modified crops, or farming more efficiently. Using crop rotations, we can harvest any reasonable quantity of wood needed and have it grow back in a decade or so. Pine trees are a type of weed anyway. And how are you going to do any of this better inside a space-limited dome on the moon or Mars?
The planets and moons available to us are stark barren wastelands. In the inner solar system, in terms of material resources available to a colony, you have variations on the theme of rock. Antarctica presents a friendlier face for would be colonists.
There are some methods that a space colony might have of generating income. These aren’t necessarily business-plan quality economic justifications of a space colony, but they can generate some cash and begin to pay back the earth for shelling out the resources to colonize.
A moon colony could build reflective mirrors out of the silicon and titanium in the lunar soil, run giant solar thermal plants, and beam the energy back to earth via a microwave or radio pulse. This would probably require relay satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Even though you could generate energy more efficiently by just building nuke plants on Earth, the Earth will never have a shortage in demand for energy. It will always be something that pays, for as long as civilization does industrial work. At present average prices (8 cents per kW-h), 10 GW of electricity would give you $200/sec. Of course, the inefficiencies involved in transmission might necessitate that a 10GW antenna on earth equate to a 100GW plant on the moon. But hey, $7 billion/year wouldn’t be anything to sneeze at. Already half NASA’s budget.
There are some interesting small-scale things we can do in zero gravity. We can reliably produce metal foams with small bubble geometry and no directional bias. We could conceivably produce some sort of biological products. That was the intent of some of the ISS experiments. If we could find something that we could only accomplish in zero-g, we could then justify a lunar colony on the basis of providing raw material to orbital factories. But I haven’t heard of anything yet. We need to get up there and start tinkering.
Medium Term
What is the purpose of running? It expends your body’s resources. It tires you. It requires your best efforts and exertion. But afterwards, you become fit. You learn to tolerate pain. You learn what you are capable of and what is required of you to perform. You are less prone to deteriorating health due to lack of exercise.
My argument is that in the medium term, exerting ourselves nationally to overcome the obstacle of space colonization will make our air and space capabilities fit, innovative, diverse (if the funding given meritocratically, which is going to be a bit of a challenge, in light of history). It will drive progress. It will also ensure that we maintain the ability to perform as we do. It’s harder to backslide technologically while pushing ahead. Basically, this is a rehash to my response to question 2.
Long Term:
In the long term, assuming that civilization confines itself to Earth, it will eventually (more distantly than in the immediate future, or even this century, but eventually) enter a zero sum situation. Probably not in terms of resources, but in terms of culture, in terms of what individuals can hope to build and achieve without stepping on each other’s toes. It would become a zero sum game in terms of what the best and brightest, most motivated could apply their efforts to. One company’s engineering achievement, say, a new jet-liner, could put thousands of aero engineers out of business for decades – because eventually in such a world, only one would be required to fill the entire niche. Without new industries being generated, or new products agitating the market, it would become a zero sum game in terms of the diversity of products and services. Expanding societies are healthy societies. Those that lose momentum tend to start caving inwards. There’s nowhere left for innovation to go, to grow to, away from the established society and culture, but up.
The solar system has the advantage of being absolutely huge. If we begin to develop a civilization that expands there, it will be long before we run up against similar boundaries.
Eventually, the probabilities are very small, and yet eventually, there may be another major asteroid strike on Earth. There are thousands of asteroids that orbit within the inner solar system. Our rather shell-shocked moon provides a myriad of examples of what a collision can do. 100 mile wide craters, the works. Defending Earth would be the ideal response to such a situation. Without a competently space-faring civilization capable of finding such asteroids on time, and sending enough H-bombs their way to vaporize them, we’ll probably end up being caught by surprise with minimal response time, and with no long distance launcher like the Saturn V to lob anything at it. We’d have to hope in a last minute explosion breaking the object up enough for our atmosphere to absorb the matter. It could still cause widespread damage (1000 1-mile wide craters vs 1 100 mile wide crater + massive secondary effects from shockwaves/tsunamis/ect).
A space faring civilization, one that has developed the capability to survive on bare rock and raw materials, that has refined it’s construction to the point where it can operate independently of nature, is a far more resilient civilization than exists at present, just as our civilization is a far more resilient civilization than the ancient Mycenians – who were forced into mass migration and invasion because of a climate change. Our technological development has enabled us to deal with more and more situations and disasters, and to inhabit and thrive in greater and greater regions of our world (not to mention thrive to greater and greater degrees). The ability to colonize space would mark a turning point in that, given raw material, we could conceivably survive anywhere. We would become, not just conquerors of new environments, but builders of our own environments. (Of course, we still have to do the work of getting to this point).
For that matter, we would also have the capability to expand to just about anywhere as well. Anything that could conceivably happen to Earth would not destroy a space-faring civilization.
(An additional, though somewhat odd point: a space-faring civilization would be immune from cultural nihilism and civilization collapse. Any degradation below a minimum competence in dealing with the environment, as well as any philosophy bent on opposing or destroying man’s constructive nature would result in death, hence would engage people’s survival instincts in preserving civilization. Perhaps this wouldn’t be total immunity, but I’d be surprised if a country run like Soviet Russia or North Korea could survive in space given that their people have or had a hard enough time surviving on Earth!)
Finally, in terms of the larger universe as a whole: While I hope life is abundant – that it resides wherever it possibly could reside, and that planets like Earth aren’t so very rare around other stars, we still have to face the fact that most of our own solar system is inhospitable to life, and that there is likely a large ratio of the wider universe that is also absolutely barren. Life has managed to conquer many niches, from high altitude mountain peaks, to hydrothermal vents in the ocean, to the interiors of volcanoes. So far, only mankind has managed to set foot and survive in space. All the ingenuity of life so far has only managed to allow it to survive beneath the thin envelope of our atmosphere, or the (comparative to the radius) thin oceans coating the surface of our planet. If we can accomplish our expansion into space, perhaps we will be doing it in the name of life on earth as well as human civilization.
(And doesn’t that sound like a sappy sound-byte that would go at the back of a documentary? :-P Oh well. I mean it.) |
|