Eric Armstrong wrote:
> I've continued to ask myself, how could we
> reseed civilization after a meteorite impact?
Interesting thinking. It inspired this essay. It's a little rambling and
over the top philosophically... I really need to catch up on my sleep
after staying up for this cliffhanger election...
Starting with something I've posted before on Slashdot:
======
Some people at NASA from a generation raised on planetary sci-fi just
doesn't get it. Colonizing the surface of the Moon would create a
habitable area equal to Africa. Colonizing Mars would produce a
habitable area with a surface area equal to Earth's land masses (not
including ocean surface). Sure, do it someday for fun, but not first.
NASA should instead invest the bulk of its R&D in creating one
self-replicating space habitat that could duplicate itself using only
sunlight and asteroidal ore. If duplicating once per year in a hundred
years such a habitat and its offspring would produce thousands of times
the habitable surface of the Earth, enough to support trillions of
humans and large populations of other species.
Remember: a planet is a very wasteful way to use mass. It is much more
efficient to use shells to contain atmosphere. If you want gravity, just
spin it. If you don't want gravity, live in bubbles.
Related links (the first has great pictures)
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/settle.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/spacsetl.htm
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.nas.nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
=======
Space station? For a hundred billion (estimated total cost over the life
of the ISS) we should have had a space habitat; look for cost
calculations by my Physics professor at Princeton (the late Gerry
O'Neill) based on using a lunar mass driver (although I am not a big fan
of solar space satellites which was his plan to fund the habitats).
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html
Gerry O'Neill started teaching his students about space habitats by
having them answer the questions: is the surface of a planet the best
place for an expanding industrial civilization? The answer is that it
makes more sense to have industry/civilization in space -- cheap energy,
little worry about pollution, variable gravity, plenty of raw materials,
lots of room for expansion, no endangered species (we know of), less
zoning laws.
I think the habitats will be self-funding as places to live and sources
of vast computational power (produced using the cheap power) and
creative product designs (from the inhabitants) much like many city
cores are today. The greatest value to Europe of the colonization of
America wasn't in raw materials but in resulting new ideas and wartime
aid centuries later and the value of having a place to ship dissidents
and malcontents and the poor.
It is unfortunate the best qualities and values of many of the native
Americans were overlooked and violated during the subsequent genocide
over land possession -- those qualities and ways of living might have
helped prevent those disastrous Eurpoean wars if they had been America's
prime export instead of cotton and other goods. One might hope they
still can -- see for example the values in "The Walking People".
http://www.mindspring.com/~kimall/Reviews/walkingpeople.html
http://www.ipl.org/cgi/ref/native/browse.pl/B840
From the first link:
> "The Walking People" is a transcription of the oral history of
> part of the Iroquois people.
> [snip]
> Above all, this is a book about organizational learning.
> The Walking People make a conscious choice to
> be open to the changing world around them, never making assumptions,
> always willing to learn, ever appreciative of the subtlety and majesty
> of the world. They choose adaptation over arrogance, listening
> over ego. They have a profoundly spiritual view of Nature.
> They encounter many people who have made other choices-- those who try to
> enslave weaker tribes, or those who create jealous gods in the face of
> countervailing physical evidence-- and they charitably characterize these
> people as "not a learning people." In their journey, they encounter
> wildly varying climates, terrain, and food sources. If they weren't
> open and humble, they wouldn't have survived.
Hopefully, expansion into space will not destroy or overlook something
of equal value. Likely though (rightly or wrongly) the trillions of
people living in space habitats will look (literally) down on Earth
residents as a sort of uncultured poor ancestry who should be sent
economic and technical aid because they aren't smart enough to move
off-planet. It is likely the ideas of these trillions of people will
produce a sort of cultural imperialism over the next millennia, just
like American TV shows produce a sort of cultural imperialism back in
Europe. How will a few billion (poor) people on Earth match the
creativity of trillions of (wealthy) people in space?
Of course, self-replicating space habitats might still be destroyed by a
plague of destructive self-replicating robots, similar to how a species
could go extinct from a disease, but the odds are probably lower than a
planetary civilization getting wiped out.
I strongly believe self-replicating space habitats will be the future
homes of the bulk of the human race if we survive to bring it about in
the face of intelligent machines and dropping birth rates in
industrialized nations. That doesn't mean most people on Earth will move
to them -- it would only takes a few million émigrés and a few centuries
exponential population growth to produce billions of space habitat
residents who never have set foot on Earth. It might be ironic if
someday typically conservative organizations like the Catholic Church
became the major proponents of self-replicating space habitats as a way
to accommodate their values related to procreation.
One (admittedly bizarre) question I've been musing on lately is: is it
morally wrong to pursue a course of action that will ultimately lead to
the deaths and related suffering (after perhaps long, rich lives) of
trillions of people (and their engineered derivatives) in the next
thousand years or so? If we just let the human race go extinct in this
century (via war, pestilence, meteorites, apathy, etc.), then these
trillions of deaths (with their preceding lives and related suffering)
will have been avoided. This is a somewhat related argument to saying
people shouldn't eat meat because it causes animals that might not have
otherwise lived to be born and suffer miserable lives and then be
slaughtered. It's a complex argument -- the obvious retort is if the
lives are worthwhile (not typical for food animals) then the dying part
is more than balanced out by the value of the living part. Still, once
one starts making massive shifts to the course of human destiny via
augmenting technology these sorts of questions pop up.
A related brief excerpt from an essay on Buddhism found at:
http://www.upali.lk/island/mon/tue/islfetrs.htm
> Buddhism and the problem of suffering
> by D. Amarasiri Weeraratne
>
> The problem of suffering is universally recognised.
> No other problem of theology or
> the philosophy of religion has drawn and sustained the attention
> of so many thinkers in all climes and ages.
> In the words of the Hebrew prophet, "Man is born to trouble as
> the sparks fly upward". It was the celebrated Greek poet Homer who said,
> "For men on earth it is better not to be born at all,
> or being born to pass through the gates of Hades with all speed".
> Socrates the sage of Greece declared that if the troubles of
> men were to be reshuffled and distributed, each man would be content with
> his quota and would not like to share that of another.
> Anatole France summed up in seven words the history of mankind when he said,
> "Man is born he suffers and dies", Tennyson in his ‘In Memoriam’ depicts
> the universality of suffering when he said in two poignant
> lines "But never morning wore to evening, but some heart did break".
> Instances can be multiplied from the world’s literature to show that
> the keynote that underlies existence is suffering. It is on this central
> theme that the Buddha built up his doctrine". "One
> thing do I teach suffering and the cessation of suffering" said the Buddha.
> He was not concerned with speculative problems like the existence of God,
> creation of the world etc. He started from known facts, the burning
> question that grappled the attention of thinkers who formed the elite
> among the world’s philosophers. Not only human life,
> but life in the ocean depths, forests, and among the birds of the air
> is dominated by suffering. The inexorable law of eating and avoiding
> been eaten is at work among the animals. They too are subject to
> disease, decay, and death, and suffer in consequence.
So, based on that, it is a legitimate question to ask if one does want
to go to extreme lengths to ensure continued existence of the human
race. This is irrespective of one's personal philosophy given the fact
that the reader is already alive through being born by no fault of his
or her own. We need to distinguish between the issue of a personal life
lead according to conventions and the decision to push existence and
those conventions of living on to future generations.
Proceeding on the presumption that it is morally acceptable (if not also
moraaly justified and/or perhaps even morally required) to inflict
suffering/living/dying on trillions of as yet unborn humans (or in other
words, affirming the classical survival value model of evolved
contemplative life, i.e. love&life as a celebration&comedy outweighs the
tragedy), then self-replicating space habitats are the way to go, and
may be be humankind's ultimate technological innovation.
Here is the latest cataclysmic hobgoblin I am musing over which the ISS
or space habitats not protect us from (the Galactic Superwave):
http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/bluecosmic.htm
http://www.etheric.com/Superwave/Superwave.html
The last I couldn't reach directly and is cached at:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.etheric.com/Superwave/Superwave.html+superwave&hl=en
Also see: http://www.etheric.com/LaViolette/Predict.html
Cached at:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.etheric.com/LaViolette/Predict.html+superwave+galaxy+core&hl=en
From the first cached page:
> Dr. Paul LaViolette is a very quiet, modest. soft-spoken, humble and
> unassuming, scientist. . . but like the boy with his finger in the dike,
> he could be forgiven if he were loud, bombastic, insistent, rude and
> intemperate -- because his message most emphatically means life and death,
> survival versus oblivion, opportunity grasped over against an accelerating
> nightmare of the elements of Nature periodically gone wild. The Galactic
> disaster he alone has discovered and documented, recurs once every 13,000
> years. Concatenating astronomy, physics, geology, meteorology and archeology,
> he finds a ubiquitous, grim and irrefutable true story of stark terror told
> by astrology, myth and legend: The Core of the Galaxy routinely explodes,
> leading to circumstances that in the past have resulted
> in mass extinctions - and we're presently somewhat overdue.
The basic notion is that just because the night sky looks constant to
casual observation doesn't mean really terrifying things don't happen in
the night sky every ten thousand years or so.
I've also heard of a prediction that if a star within a hundred light
years went super nova all life on Earth would be killed by the massive
neutrino (not neutron) flux [i.e. really massive so the normally
negligible interaction probability of neutrinos might do serious
biological damage]. Good thing we live in an unfashionable* sparsely
populated section of our Galaxy -- something space habitats also will
not protect from.
Perhaps planning to survive a galactic Superwave disaster or nearby
supernova is the kind of activity which would take a trillion humans
commanding the resources of the solar system and the increased
likelihood one of those (augmented) trillions would have the creative
idea to handle that challenge. Here is a technobabble solution to the
Superwave problem: perhaps a solar system wide quantum bubble generated
by billions of habitats could divert the Superwave energy inside that
bubble into harmless vibration of particles along one of the other 19
dimensions hypothesized for our space-time continuum?
Of course, for a more certain disaster, a Scientific American article
from 10 years ago (vaguely remembered) said all life on the planet is
doomed in 100 million years because the Sun has been getting hotter at a
rate oddly (think Gaia hypothesis) compensated by the loss of
atmospheric greenhouse CO2 which has kept the Earth's heat balance
relatively stable over the past couple billion years. In 100 million
years the CO2 will be all gone (global warming a minor blip in this) and
the Earth's surface will be too hot to support life. You can't add more
CO2 back to solve the problem as this would just make the surface even
hotter.
100 Million years is about last 3% of Gaia's life (of a few billion
years). If Gaia is in the last 3% of her life, it would make sense for
her to change her life strategy and risk mass extinctions through
spawning an intelligent species capable of acting as a geological force,
to gain a chance to perhaps give birth to other Gaias (as
self-replicating space habitats). [However some big mylar mirrors in
space orbiting the planet might reduce the incident solar radiation, so
this particular disaster is perhaps easily handled by planet bound
beings.]
-Paul Fernhout
Kurtz-Fernhout Software
=========================================================
Developers of custom software and educational simulations
Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com
*["unfashionable" concept from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas
Adams]
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