Five Billion Years of Solitude

by Paul Gilster | Oct 8, 2013 | Culture and Society | 32 comments

About a third of the way into his new book Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars (Current, 2013), Lee Billings describes a time capsule that was sealed in July of 1963 near the Cabrillo Freeway in San Diego, though it has since been moved. Within it was a book that looked a century ahead, with contributions from politicians, astronauts, military figures and others about the world of the future. Copies of the book, titled 2063 A.D. are available, and within them one can find the musings of Nobel-laureate Harold Urey, who worried about our use of energy and noted that largely because of the need for electricity, US fossil fuel consumption had increased eightfold between 1900 and 1955.

Was the trend sustainable over the long haul? Urey doubted it, and he was hardly alone, for the need for energy seems to impose sharp limits on what a society can do. Billings notes the work of Tom Murphy (UC San Diego), who works with a long-term 2.3 percent increase in energy usage per year, yielding a factor-of-ten increase every century. Things happen quickly over time — by 2112 the world is consuming 120 terawatts, a number that rises to 1200 by 2212. Cover every bit of land with photovoltaic solar arrays and assume 20 percent efficiency and you can supply the world of 2287, which will need something on the order of 7,000 terawatts.

Building Toward Kardashev Type III

You can see where this is going, and Billings is expert at connecting the march of numbers with real events and the people who can explain them. First, here is what happens once we’ve got all that land covered with solar-power arrays:

From there, increasing the efficiency of the photovoltaics to a miraculous 100 percent and covering the oceans as well as the continents would allow the 2.3 percent annual growth in energy use to persist for another 125 years, taking our steadily growing civilization into A.D. 2412 before it outpaced the total amount of sunlight falling upon the Earth. Another energy source, nuclear fusion, could potentially sustain an annual 2.3 percent growth rate for some centuries beyond this, at least until the waste heat from the vast amount of power being produced evaporated the oceans and turned Earth’s crust to glowing slag. For a planet-bound civilization, the boiling point of water and the melting points of rock and metal place insurmountable limits upon the expansion of energy use.

A grim prospect, but perhaps an informative one. Talking to planet hunter Gregory Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz), Billings brings up the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, a bit out of Laughlin’s wheelhouse considering that he spends most of his days teasing out the faint signatures of distant exoplanets, leaving SETI to those who specialize in it. Intriguingly, though, Laughlin tells him that if a SETI detection ever does come, it will likely be extragalactic.That, of course, is a mind-boggling thought, but it follows directly out of the energy constraints above.

After all, Freeman Dyson came up with ‘Dyson spheres’ in their various configurations as a way of solving the energy problem, at least for a time. A Dyson sphere or ‘shell’ operates through a cloud of energy collectors completely surrounding the parent star, perhaps constructed by dismantling entire planets. A galaxy in which Dyson sphere building on a massive scale was occurring would be an interesting one indeed, gradually dimming in the optical while infrared from the enclosing shells became more and more apparent. There have been, in fact, searches made to look for signatures like these, though so far to little effect. James Annis (FermiLab) has studied 137 galaxies looking for candidates for this kind of engineering, and we are on the cusp of further studies looking for what Andrei Kardashev once described as Type III civilizations.

A Dyson sphere, according to Billings, would capture about 400 billion petawatts of power, equalling the Sun’s output, but even here that 2.3 percent growth in energy use catches up with us. A single Dyson sphere can no longer meet its builders’ energy needs after a millennium at this rate, while within about 2500 years, we would be using the energy of an entire galaxy. Billings asks whether the fact that we don’t see stars or galaxies dimming into the infrared may not be telling us something profound about our own expectations of exponential growth. That ever increasing upturn in our charts of the future may, over time, be the result of a temporary historical anomaly.

Science and Character

Although I’ve focused on a specific question out of Five Billion Years of Solitude, it’s a deliberate attempt to get at the jewel-like complexity of the larger work. Open to a page at random and you will find the kind of issues we kick around here on Centauri Dreams under discussion by some of the top minds in the field. Moreover, Billings has a twin purpose. He’s out to illustrate the vistas being opened to us by our exoplanet explorations (and by astrophysics at large) while putting us in touch with many of the remarkable individuals who ply this trade, some of whom may be the first to identify a planet like our own around another star, and perhaps the first to find unmistakable signs of life in its atmosphere.

Thus we meet Frank Drake, whose Project Ozma launched the SETI effort and whose Drake Equation has helped us understand the factors involved in searching for life. Billings’ account of the small SETI conference convened at the Green Bank observatory in West Virginia in 1961 gives us the origins of the equation and its reception among an audience that included such stellar figures as Philip Morrison, Bernard Oliver, John Lilly, a young Carl Sagan and Harold Urey himself, whose Nobel had come from his discovery of deuterium. The Green Bank conference was all about whether SETI made sense, whether there was a serious possibility of detecting signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, and we’ve been parsing the problem ever since.

Billings is expert at finding the telling detail, which in Drake’s case may be his love of orchids (he maintains over 200 hanging in pots and strewn over tables in the greenhouses outside his Santa Cruz home). Even more striking, though, is the stump of a giant redwood that he used to explain growth over time to his children, counting tree rings that extended back 2000 years. What I love about Five Billion Years of Solitude is the way Billings can work with an object like this and its multi-millennial reach while then extracting the larger cosmological message. In the passage that follows, he moves with panache from Earth years to galactic time-frames:

Over the course of the tree’s 2,000-year existence, the Milky Way had fallen nearly five trillion miles closer to its nearest neighboring spiral galaxy, Andromeda, yet the distance between the two galaxies remained so great that a collision would not occur until perhaps 3 billion years in the future. In 2,000 years, the Sun had scarcely budged in its 250-million-year orbit about the galactic center, and, considering its life span of billions of years, hadn’t aged a day. Since their formation 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun and its planets have made perhaps eighteen galactic orbits— our solar system is eighteen “galactic years” old. When it was seventeen, redwood trees did not yet exist on Earth. When it was sixteen, simple organisms were taking their first tentative excursions from the sea to colonize the land. In fact, fossil evidence testified that for about fifteen of its eighteen galactic years, our planet had played host to little more than unicellular microbes and multicellular bacterial colonies, and was utterly devoid of anything so complicated as grass, trees, or animals, let alone beings capable of solving differential equations, building rockets, painting landscapes, writing symphonies, or feeling love.

This is fine stuff, and you will find passages to equal it throughout the book. Along the way, Billings speaks not only to Drake and Gregory Laughlin, but to Geoff Marcy, to Jim Kasting. He talks paleoclimatology with sedimentary geologist Mike Arthur (Pennsylvania State) and ponders space telescope breakthroughs with Matt Mountain, who directs the Space Telescope Science Institute. With Terrestrial Planet Finder in its confusing multiplicity of forms still on ice and starshade proposals for JWST still in the realm of theory rather than practice, Wesley Traub (JPL) explains the maddening frustrations of trying to design cutting-edge equipment. We may not see a true Terrestrial Planet Finder until the 2030s, but that doesn’t mean the effort stops. We still have missions like TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) in the works.

Working with the Possible

Billings’ conversations with Sara Seager (MIT) offer a wonderful segue from crisis into opportunity. Seager began as a cosmologist but swiftly switched to working on exoplanets with Dimitar Sasselov at Harvard. Moving increasingly toward questions of astrobiology and how to characterize habitable planets, she has been a tireless conference organizer and advocate for exoplanetary studies at a time of budgetary crisis. Her “The Next 40 Years of Exoplanets” conference at MIT’s Media Lab in May of 2011 was in several respects a call to arms, and Billings was there to hear her exhortation: “So I convened all of you here, and that’s why we’re recording this, because we want to make an impact and we want to make that happen. We are on the verge of being those people, not individually but collectively, who will be remembered for starting the entire future of other Earth-like worlds. That’s why we’re here.”

I wasn’t at the MIT conference but did follow most of it via online streaming, and I still recall Geoff Marcy’s anger at the lack of progress that had been exemplified by the failure to follow through with Terrestrial Planet Finder, the interferometric version in particular. It was at this conference that Marcy called for an Alpha Centauri probe “even if it takes a few hundred years or a thousand years to get there.” Such a mission would, he believed, energize and engage young people and jolt a moribund NASA into new life, and it would draw amply on international resources.

But Seager’s announcement that she was going to be devoting a substantial part of her time to the commercial spaceflight industry surprised many in the audience. Seager has a get-the-job-done approach that focuses on solutions no matter how far afield they may take her. As depicted in Billings’ shrewd and graceful prose, she is a complex, driven scholar with a taste for outdoor adventure and a habit of endless invention. If NASA won’t build a TPF, why not build Seager’s ExoplanetSat, on the model of one tiny satellite with telescope and solar panels focusing in on a single star at a time. Fly them in their hundreds on the cheap. Get things done.

You get to know these people through Billings’ words, and he’s adept at capturing their voice for extended quotations, letting them have the lead in describing their own work. In addition to the character portraits that inevitably emerge, the book is studded with the tools and concepts of exoplanetology. It is a poignant and inspiring look at an emerging discipline that mixes the human triumphs and foibles of key scientists (watch them fight over who discovered what) with a scholarly rigor — someone just coming upon the exoplanet field will find everything from planet detection to spectroscopy, habitability, geology and climate laid out with precision. I am hard pressed to think of any book I have read so voraciously, and with such continuing admiration.

Mars: The Interstellar Connection

by Paul Gilster | Oct 7, 2013 | Culture and Society | 15 comments

Aerospace engineer Gerald W. Driggers embraced the dreams of Dr. Werner von Braun and his team at an early age and was privileged to meet and work with many of them. He was a prominent figure in studies of space colonization and industrialization with Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill in the 1970’s and also served as an officer in the US Air Force working on satellite launch vehicles. He has published over 35 technical papers and general interest articles and contributed to three books on technical subjects, but is now turning his attention to science fiction, authoring a series of books called The Earth-Mars Chronicles. Gerald and his wife became the first U.S. sponsors of the Mars One Project, whose objective is to place a team on Mars in 2023. A portion of the proceeds from sales of “The Earth-Mars Chronicles” goes to the Mars One Project. For 17 years, Gerald has lived on a series of boats because, in his words, “It was the closest thing I could get to a space ship.” He currently resides in Florida with his wife and Wilson the cat.

by Gerald W. Driggers

I was in the middle of working on The Earth-Mars Chronicles Vol. 2 Home for Humanity when the opportunity arose to submit an abstract for the second Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop. The review committee selected one of the two abstracts I submitted with the title “Martians Will Make the Best Interstellar Voyagers.” My research into human factors related to extended isolation away from Earth (i.e. settling Mars) led me to an appreciation of how many issues were time and distance independent. Following that chain of logic provided me with the title of my presentation. However, the concept of a connection between going interstellar and settling Mars grew as I delved further into the subject matter.

Although I applaud heartily the current enthusiasm exhibited at starship and interstellar conferences and symposia, I am convinced that the roadmap to the stars must include suitable infrastructure and capability within our own solar system. This sentiment was expressed by Paul Gilster in Centauri Dreams with this statement commenting on the Deep Space Industries announcement on 22 Jan 2013 of a new asteroid mining initiative. “Could it be the beginning of the system-wide infrastructure we’ll have to build before we think of going interstellar?” Equally as insightful was the comment “I think before we ever really undertake sending something to another star, we will probably have to be masters of our own solar system,” made by Les Johnson in an interview with Space.com. The infrastructure mentioned by Paul and the mastery referenced by Les both have many dimensions including the human as well as the technical.

A question I posed to myself was: What are the elements of the human dimension? There has been considerable research in this area over the past fifty years and luckily much of it was summed up in 2012 by Dr. Nicholas Kanas and Dr. Rhawn Joseph in a table of long duration space mission stressors (in Colonizing Mars: The Human Mission to the Red Planet, edited by Levine and Schild, Cosmology Science Publishers, 2012). In the following list items one through nine were summarized by Dr. Kanas and number ten is from the work of Dr. Joseph.

• 1. Extended separation from family and friends (Potentially forever – added by me)
• 2. Unknown psychological effects of long-term low gravity and high radiation
• 3. Extreme feelings of isolation and loneliness
• 4. Lack of support from Earth due to distance and communications delays
• 5. Increased autonomy and dependence on on-board resources
• 6. Limited social contact and interpersonal novelty
• 7. Filling leisure time with meaningful activities
• 8. Increased risk for medical and psychiatric illness due to time away from home
• 9. Earth-out-of-view phenomenon
• 10. Concerns over sexual tension, pregnancy and normal childbirth

My objective was to evaluate how the human population of Mars would compare to other pockets of humanity in a possible era of starship development so I picked 100 years as a target for extrapolation. Making an accurate specific prediction of where we will be in the Solar System 100 years from now is totally impossible so I examined a number of scenarios stretching from interplanetary stagnation (no fun and of no use to us) to highly optimistic where humans are operating throughout the inner Solar System. I subsequently picked the optimistic scenario with Mars settlements, exploitation of NEO and main belt asteroids, and lunar mining and settlement being mature and growing in 2113. This scenario was used to define where there would be permanent concentrations of people suitable to provide crew for an interstellar voyage.

The evaluation and comparison criteria are too detailed to present here but consisted of considerations of levels of automation and remote control for mining operations, maintenance and repair; likelihood of families as part of a large staffing; and likelihood of permanent long-term (lifetime) residency. My conclusion was that the three most viable sources for interstellar voyagers would be the Earth (by definition), the Moon and Mars. The next step was a subjective assigning of a measure of confidence related to an individual’s coping with the stressors based on their background and experience.

As I stated this is highly subjective, but I believe an examination of the environment and attributes one would expect from a citizen of Mars may assist in understanding my red, orange and green assignments. The very existence of expanding multi-generational Mars settlements implies that the individuals and culture will have the following characteristics although the number of generations required to achieve steady state in all areas is unknown.

• a. A stable social structure in an isolated, self-reliant environment.
• b. Have learned how to handle diversity in a society of limited size.
• c. Physically and mentally stable population in a less than 1g environment.
• d. Totally self reliant and capable of making anything they need.
• e. Minimal ties to Earth.
• f. Physically adapted to a lower atmospheric pressure.
• g. Physically and mentally adapted to living in an artificial environment.
• h. Mentally and physically adapted to the foods available.
• i. Accepts living in a machine generated environment with no reservations, but understands the responsibilities.
• j. No Earth (or Moon) out-of-view mentality.
• k. Comfortable with limited infrastructures such as pharma and health care.
• l. No uncertainty & anxiety over whether subsequent generations will be healthy.

Mars residents will by definition score well in all 12 of these categories. Lunar residents are less likely to score as well in categories d, e, j, and k. It is not possible to score the last factor (l) because it is currently unknown whether normal pregnancy, childbirth, and development are possible in the Lunar 1/6 Earth gravity environment. The population on the Moon could conceivably be composed of adults and children above a certain age who were born on Earth, whereas a growing population on Mars will not happen unless normal pregnancy, childbirth and development are possible. Human beings simply do not flock to a place where they cannot have children and raise families. Subsequently, I ranked Mars higher than the Moon in this category.

This then makes my case that a significant multi-generational population on Mars will provide a hearty pool for selection of low-risk interstellar voyager candidates. Unfortunately, my assessment of milestones on the way to having that population did not fit the 2113 target date I was initially using as a goal. There are far too many details to go into here, but the evolution time for in-space infrastructure and transportation does not appear to support a flourishing population on Mars before about 2140. There are, however, a number of wildcards in the space deck that could change this. Mars One, Inspiration Mars, Space X, Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries and a host of other private and commercial entities are striving to significantly accelerate my timeline. I do wish them all well.

Here are my parting thoughts from my presentation. Although not absolutely essential technically, it seems intuitively obvious that humanity will expand beyond Cis-Lunar space before embarking on an interstellar voyage. But do we have to expand well beyond the asteroid belt before entertaining serious interstellar ambitions? I conclude that the answer is no, even if Jupiter has to be exploited to obtain the necessary ^³He. Also, advocating for the right near-term infrastructure is the equivalent of advocating for interstellar flight, so the sooner we settle Mars, the sooner we will have our “…system-wide infrastructure…” and be “…masters of our own solar system.”

If we get it right on Mars we are much more likely to get it right in interstellar space.

Deep Time, Big History, and Existential Risk

by Paul Gilster | Oct 4, 2013 | Culture and Society | 29 comments

Nick Nielsen thinks big, as his previous work in these pages and elsewhere has shown. His presentation on “The Large Scale Structure of Spacefaring Civilization” at the 2012 100YSS conference examined humanity’s growth as defined and enabled by the structure of spacetime itself. His continuing work with Heath Rezabek weighs the factors that threaten a technological civilization, while considering what we can do in response. An author and contributing analyst with strategic consulting firm Wikistrat, Nielsen here looks at our concepts of time and the emergence of ‘Big History,’ which might be called ‘history in a cosmic context.’ We are now developing the tools that, used properly, can address and resolve issues of existential risk.

by J. N. Nielsen

James Hutton is often credited with the origins of the modern conception of geological time, which is sometimes called “deep time.” Looking upon the Bass Rock in the outer part of the Firth of Forth James Hutton is said to have remarked, “…the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.” (The Bass Rock: Its Civil and Ecclesiastic History, “Geology of the Bass,” p. 82) Hutton also became famous for saying of the deep time of geology, “we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

Deep time is also called geological time, because the order of change in geology, essentially invisible in terms of human time, is revealed in deep time. The deep time of the geological record is time enough for continents to move and reshape themselves, for mountain ranges to rise and fall, and for the planet entire to pass through a range of climates from a glaciated snowball earth to a steaming global swamp.

Image: Geologist, physician and naturalist James Hutton (1726-1797). This is Hutton’s portrait as painted by Sir Henry Raeburn in 1776.

For all this diversity, science has given the peculiar name of uniformitarianism, since although conditions and structures of the Earth change continually, the forces acting on the Earth are uniform over time. Charles Lyell especially developed geology along the lines of uniformitarianism, and this had a great influence on Darwin, who carried Lyell’s Principles of Geology along with him during his journey on the Beagle.

By the late twentieth century, however, Stephen J. Gould was able to argue in his paper “Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?” that to say that geology embodies uniformitarianism is nothing more than to say that geology is a science, and this is not controversial, so that it becomes unnecessary to explicitly formulate uniformitarianism as a scientific hypothesis, which freed up Gould and others studying deep time to consider other models of the past that are slightly less uniform but no less “deep” in the temporal sense (e.g., punctuated equilibrium).

Deep Time in Biology: Astrobiology

It took biologists time to come to a full realization of the antiquity of life on Earth, just as it took geologists time to formulate a time scale adequate to describe the processes of geology. The geologists got there first, but they got there with the help of paleontologists. William Smith, who drew the first modern geological map of England, dated rock strata by the fossils they contained and so established a correlation between geological time and biological time. (This is a story told in the excellent book by Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World.)

It is only in our time that we are coming to realize that the geology of the Earth and the life of our planet must be understood in a cosmological context. The formation of the Earth itself was a process that could be characterized as astrophysical before it was geological, and the astrophysics of our solar system continues to this day to shape the surface of our planet.

Life on Earth has shared the fate of the planet that hosts it, and this life has been shaped by cosmological events also. The earth, for example, wobbles in its orbit, and in fact the sun bobs up and down in the plane of the Milky Way as the galaxy spins. The wobbling of the Earth consists of eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession, which together are referred to as Milankovitch cycles, and which significantly affect the insolation of the Earth, i.e., the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. This wobbling and bobbing has consequences for life on earth because it changes the climate – sometimes predictably and sometimes unpredictably. But regularity (or, if you prefer, uniformity) is at least partly a function of the length of time we consider.

Astrobiology has come about from the need to see life in its cosmological context, which is as much as to say that astrobiology is the biology of deep time. And we may need time even deeper than that provided by the geology of Earth to explain life. A recent well-publicized study, “Life Before Earth” (see preprint here) by Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon, argued that projecting the complexity of life backward through time implies that life originated approximately 9.7 billion years ago, which is almost twice as old as the earth, which implies in turn that earth was “seeded” with life as soon as it was cool enough to support life (or sufficiently stable to sustain life), rather than independently arising on Earth.

Deep Time for Humanity: Big History

A scientific conception of deep time in geology and biology was the necessary prerequisite to the introduction of deep time into history, which latter was, from its ancient Greek inception up through the twentieth century, a humanistic rather than a scientific discipline. “History” was synonymous with written language, and the “historical period” was the period of human existence coincident with the use of written language.

The relatively recent emergence of what is now often called “Big History” is a result of many factors, not the least of which were the technologically facilitated dating methods that began to emerge in the middle of the twentieth century – most famously, carbon-14 dating. With the ability to date artifacts scientifically, a new and precise chronology emerged in parallel with written chronology, but this new chronology could be pushed far deeper in the past, and thus provide human beings with our own “deep time.”

The best known names in the field of Big History today – David Christian, Cynthia Stokes-Brown, and Fred Spier – have drawn heavily on the many special sciences to assemble an overall “big picture” view that places human history in the context of scientific historiography, wrapping up the whole in a chronology that extends from the Big Bang to the present day.

This Big History picture of human beings and the world in which they live has made us aware of the fact that our planet, our bodies, and our lives have been shaped by forces much larger than our planet, and even larger than our solar system. Ancient gamma ray bursts coming from deep within the galaxy may have affected the path of evolution of life on earth; closer to home, the Earth’s insolation has driven climate, and climate is a primary driver of evolution. So it seems that we are not only “star stuff” as Carl Sagan said, but our star stuff continues its relation to the stars even after it has become Earth-bound.

Ignorance is Bliss

In the early history of our species, ignorance of existential risk was bliss. Human beings, their hominid predecessors, and the species that preceded them in turn, were fortunate merely to survive, i.e., to overcome the immediate existential risks posed by the local climate and conditions and to go on living from day to day. And when the small initial population of homo sapiens was geographically restricted to a small area of Africa, these local risks were profound and potentially existential.

It is widely postulated that human beings passed through an existential bottleneck about 70 thousand years ago (cf. population bottleneck), when there may have been only a few thousand representative individuals of our species alive. This existential bottleneck in human history was once theorized to be the result of the Mount Toba explosion, though recent research has suggested that this is not the case. There is an ongoing debate as to whether this existential bottleneck was a short, sharp event brought about through sudden climatic change (of the sort that might be triggered by a geophysical event) or a “long bottleneck” lasting up to 100,000 years. Whatever the cause, we got through by the skin of our teeth – though we did not know at the time how lucky we were.

Human beings were once an endangered species on the Earth. No longer. No we have made our way into every habitat on the planet (with the exception of Antarctica, unless one counts the scientific bases there) and have ambitions of controlling the climate of the entire planet. The trouble we have gotten ourselves into by the unrestricted burning of fossil fuels could yet be mitigated by geoengineering through the relatively simple and straight-forward means of placing a slight shade between ourselves and the sun (a “Dyson dot” in the terminology of Robert G. Kennedy, cf. Dyson Dots), but this is only one of many dangers that face us that must be understood on cosmological scales of time and space.

Why Existential Risk Now?

Why should existential risk be a concern for us now, when we have gotten along just fine for several hundred thousand years (and Earth before us for billions of years) without any awareness of existential risk? Are we not sounding a bit like Chicken Little proclaiming that the sky is falling? Do we not risk becoming just another doomsday prophet holding up a sign that says that the end of the world is coming?

Existential risk is a concern for us now because we are capable of understanding existential risk in a way that we would not have been able to understand existential risk in the past. The slow and incremental accumulation of scientific knowledge has made it possible for human beings to formulate the idea of deep time and to apply it in turn to geology, biology, cosmology, and even to human history. Just as a conception of deep time was a requisite for the modern scientific study of geology and biology, scientific historiography and big history was a requisite for the formulation of the idea of existential risk.

We have, essentially by dumb luck, made it thus far. This “dumb luck” may be the Great Filter of SETI and Fermi paradox debates, i.e., whatever it was the prevented a slew of other technological civilizations from emerging and crowding our little corner of the Milky Way, which now seems to us (now, that is to say, that we know how to listen) eerily silent. Some may credit it to divine providence rather than dumb luck.

However it happened that we survived, we have survived so far, but we have no guarantee of continued survival. We do, however, have knowledge on our side. Our scientific progress steadily adds to our knowledge of the world, and that makes us ever more clearly aware of our relationship to the wider world, which in this context means cosmology.

How consciousness of existential risk differs from Chicken Little and doomsday prophets is not only in its rational and scientific character, but, just as importantly, in the rational and scientific character of the response to existential risk. Scientific study of the universe can reveal to us the dangers that we face in great detail, and even the likelihood of our having to face them (a sterilizing gamma ray burst is not very likely, but a massive solar flare could very well burn out electrical power grids around the world). Moreover, the same science implies rational, scientific means of existential risk mitigation.

We are not limited to waving our arms and shouting that the sky is falling, or calling for our fellow man to repent because the end is nigh; we can formulate and execute specific existential risk mitigation strategies and measure their efficacy with the same sober scientific precision. And this is exactly what we need, because we can no longer count on being lucky. If the Great Filter still lies in the future, it will not be luck that gets us beyond it, but our own grit and determination.

Visualizing Vessel

by Paul Gilster | Oct 3, 2013 | Culture and Society | 15 comments

In his first article for Centauri Dreams, Heath Rezabek described an installation design called Vessel that we might develop to mitigate near and long term risk. The essay explained why we should pursue practical strategies to avoid the permanent stagnation of society in case of catastrophe, and described the need for enduring educational facilities to forestall a flawed realization of our potential over time. The Vessel proposal involves the deliberate engineering of resilient and flexible facilities dedicated to the retention of humanity’s legacy as an ongoing hedge against what he calls Xrisk. In this second article, Heath makes a case for the importance of visualization in the early stages of any long term project — whether terrestrial or beyond — as a strategy and tool for focusing enthusiasm on the long work of system design.

by Heath Rezabek

Cory Doctorow, author and open source advocate, has said that if we want to change the future, we need to change the stories people tell themselves about it. As discussed in my first article on the Vessel proposal, culture is well accustomed to visualizing dire possibilities, particularly those of Xrisk subtype Permanent Stagnation. Yet if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the predominant vision of the future is one in which we fail to achieve our full potential, then at the least this fact won’t help our efforts to build the wherewithal to achieve something more enduring.

Figure 1 – Stephan Martiniere (http://www.martiniere.com) – Selected to accompany a not-yet-published space.com interview – Used by permission

Because they can set trajectories and influence the tone of ongoing efforts, visualizations — even early on in a project — can be very potent, and important to conveying an understanding of the project’s potential. This realization was also behind the first FarMaker Speed Sketch contest, successfully carried out for Starship Congress 2013. Children, enthusiasts, and professional concept artists competed for prize money and recognition, painting and drawing and rendering speed sketches of starships, based on the Daedalus theme. (Speed sketches are a genre of concept art common throughout the entertainment and visualization fields, where rapid techniques are used to express the energy and essence of an idea in a visual form.)

At the moment, from our vantage point of stalled or listless efforts, cultivating new visions of an interstellar future may not make much sense to the broader public. But years from now, as our capabilities and motivations for action grow, (and presuming we endure) these efforts may prove key in sparking forward momentum. If this is true of interstellar aspirations, perhaps it could be true of Earthbound aspirations as well. The most pressing aspiration at hand is the drive to build — or even to see for ourselves and our world — a future in which Earth-originating life achieves its full potential. Of course, ideas and techniques applied in one area (such as the Vessel project) can be applied in other areas (such as eventual starship design), and vice versa.

The phenomenon whereby vividly articulated visions of alternate futures helps pave the way for their realization is not a new one. From Leonardo da Vinci to Jules Verne and on to our present day, we’ve long been aware that the inventions of the mind can unfold in the world when expressed for others to perceive. But currently, there is particular and renewed interest in describing and modeling future possibilities as thought experiments to test their viability. One term for this approach is Design Fiction; another is Science-Fiction Prototyping. Doctorow made the observation cited above in discussion with Brian David Johnson, as part of his work with sci-fi prototyping. Bruce Sterling has an extensive archive of writings on Design Fiction in its present form. At Arizona State University’s Project Hieroglyph, science fiction authors such as Neal Stephenson, Geoffrey Landis, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, and others explore the potential for speculative ideas to shape reality.

We’ll return to these related strategies in future installments. For the moment, however, we’ll stay focused on the basic power of concept art and visualizations for both informing and inspiring others, when working with a speculative proposal or technology. In the case of the Vessel project, my experience of the power of visualizations to clarify and galvanize understanding came early. At 100YSS 2012, for the first presented version of the Vessel proposal, I discovered that the single most effective element of my presentation turned out to be the visualization of the Lilypad seasteading habitat, designed by Vincent Callebaut. This visual anchor, once linked with the dedicated task of housing archives and labs, immediately sparked in session attendees a sense of form and function for the Vessel proposal.

Figure 2 – Vessel as an instance of Vincent Callebaut’s Lilypad seasteading habitat, 100YSS 2012 and Starship Congress 2013.

Figure 3 – Vessel as an instance of Vincent Callebaut’s Lilypad seasteading habitat (Cutaway and Details)

Upon seeing these slides, viewers later said, they had an instant sense of the proposal, and immediately understood more clearly what I meant (and didn’t mean) by a Vessel archive. This understanding was not merely important for building comprehension, or even for support. It also helped to set tangible limits to the problem space we were exploring, and the design solution I was proposing. A self-contained habitat may or may not be closed-loop; but in any case it is not in itself a sprawling city. If anything, it might be a facility within that city, or even a campus or complex within that city; but it had limits and an overall, centrally-focused, form. A Vessel habitat could easily be envisioned as a module on a starship, or an orbital station, or an Arcology (as per Paolo Soleri), or other similar forms.

Figure 4 – Arcology, architectural ecology: The city as space station, envisioned by architect Paolo Soleri, 1969.

These design limits help shape the debate: How do you provide energy to such a habitat? Are there technologies not viable on a very large scale which could be used for smaller, mission-critical facilities? What is its likely maximum scale or size? Importantly, what would it look like if different versions were built in a variety of settings?

For Starship Congress, I decided to visualize a Vessel installation in a few more forms. The goal was to express that a Vessel could be “massive as habitats, with others more like sculptures, compact and dense as a room.” One goal for 2014 is to develop the Vessel Open Famework, a Creative Commons (CC BY-SA) document which would sketch out the fundamental aspects and design patterns for a Vessel installation, in such a way that others could evolve and adapt them to fit their unique requirements. So, for the first time, I began to sketch out first guesses at functional schematics: What functions were key and core, and what types of spaces did they imply? The idea that outer layers would be (in the near term) public-facing and fairly welcoming, while inner spaces would be highly specialized and include mission-critical archives, had been there since 2012. Yet the idea of an Open Framework — as a practical, realizable working document available for anyone to adapt — evolved from this task of identifying a minimal set of functional spaces, each forming and informed by its neighbors.

Figure 5 – Vessel Open Framework: Draft functional schematic, Starship Congress 2013

Open Source is an often-misunderstood form of intellectual property. Creative Commons does not prevent the creator from selling or making a profit from their work. The extent of shared content is flexible and depends on the license chosen. The preferred license for the Vessel framework, the CC BY-SA License specifies that you can do whatever you like with the design, including commercialize any results or adaptations, so long as you also pass on the right to do the same to those who next encounter your own derivative work. This flavor of open licensing does not negate the ability to commercialize, but rather removes any artificial scarcity from its core value so that the original design can be applied as widely as possible, and its true value determined.

From the perspective of Xrisk mitigation, aiming for open source distribution of the core framework has been a simple, nearly inevitable, decision. Earth-originating life faces a variety of complex challenges having complex causes; it stands to reason that partial solutions may be found across many different domains. Because we cannot know where risk-mitigating solutions will be pieced together from, and because the stakes are so high, it is essential to remove barriers to sharing and access wherever possible. The stakes at work when dealing with Xrisk define a large playing field. On that field, eventually, open source of some kind or another is an inevitable development if we are to truly test our most viable strategies as widely as possible.

With a document sketching out the Vessel Open Framework firmly in mind as a goal for 2014, I wanted to offer up a simple but compelling baseline design to speed future work. I wanted a simple shape and form which said to others, ‘This is a very simple starting point, which is probably not ideal for a final architecture, but which is intriguing enough to spark new interpretations.” The shape and form which resulted is that of a simple cube, tilted and sunk halfway into the groundplane, so that three overhanging entries are visible, a peak (perhaps housing communications or power arrays) is clear, and the iceberg-like sunken mass of half the structure underground is implied, just waiting to be explored. While it bears a passing resemblance to the pyramid, these other implications (understories for deep archives; three enties into three collections based on nature, science and culture) are also there to be inferred.

Figure 6 – Cubic Vessel

While I had developed this concept before Starship Congress, I did not have the wherewithall to realize images of this shape before the presentation. Upon returning home, I set to work with two artists I had come to know in the months leading up to the event. Together, Mark Rademaker and Joshua Davis have yielded some intriguing first glimpses of this strawman shape for further development. Pictured below, these rough first versions need one key preface: By the time we set to work, I had become excited by the possibilities of beamed solar power as a dedicated source due to several sessions at Starship Congress, but I had no clear idea what working beamed solar would look like. Additionally, I had become curious (during Day 1’s discussions of beam riders) about the question of whether communications and power / propulsion could be carried on a unified beam, and all of this collided in some very romanticized beaming in the first Cubic Vessels below.

Figure 7 – Cubic Vessel with Naive Beamed Solar Power and Communications Signal – Mark Rademaker

Figure 8 – Cubic Vessel with Naive Beamed Solar Power and Communications Signal – Joshua Davis

In discussions with Lt. Col. Peter Garretson, who delivered an inspired talk at the end of SC Day 3 in which beamed solar figured prominently, I was led to some more realistic interpretations of beamed solar power in the near term. (See below.) While not central to the Vessel Open Framework, the idea of dedicated energy is compelling enough as a backup or failsafe to be well worth visualizing realistically. A discussion of dedicated power for a Vessel facility is planned for future installments.

Figure 9 – Solucar – Concentrated solar receiver (Wikimedia Commons)

Figure 10 – Gemasolar – Concentrated solar receiver (Wikimedia Commons)

Figure 11 – Cubic Vessel with Concentrated Solar Receiving Beacon – Joshua Davis

From a growing understanding that these visualizations will be continually refined, we have begun to move towards more flexible frameworks. No visualization is final, and we continue to try new ideas as we gather resources on proposals for long term archives, and the sustainable societies which would be gathered there to miantain them.

Below is pictured Joshua Davis’ recent rendering of a lunar vessel, its receptor at the peak and its habitats built beneath the lunar surface, below a massive reflective array which nourishes the mission-cricitcal collections of the Vessel itself.

Figure 12 – Cubic Lunar Vessel with Concentrated Solar Receiving Beacon – Joshua Davis

Onwards we move, slowly building a unified design pattern language for the Vessel project, visualizing as we go. An inspiring image, even of something impossible here and now, can move the mind to spot new connections and bring them to bear on the problem at hand. In future articles, we’ll continue to explore other aspects of this work, such as discussions with Lt. Col. Garretson on potential locations for Vessel infrastructures, correspondence with USD’s Danieh Sheehan on the viability of hardening a Vessel’s power infrastructure against massive solar events, and the practical question of how we might build one using existing technologies if we had (say) 24 months til critical need.

For now, I welcome comments and reflections on the hypothesis that where vision and visualization leads, the mind and will can often follow.