How long before we can send humans to another star system? Ask people active in the interstellar community and you’ll get answers ranging from ‘at least a century’ to ‘never.’ I’m inclined toward a view nudging into the ‘never’ camp but not quite getting there. In other words, I think the advantages of highly intelligent instrumented payloads will always be apparent for missions of this duration, but I know human nature well enough to believe that somehow, sometime, a few hardy adventurers will find a way to make the journey. I do doubt that it will ever become commonplace.
You may well disagree, and I hope you’re right, as the scenarios open to humans with a galaxy stuffed with planets to experience are stunning. Having come into the field steeped in the papers and books of Robert Forward, I’ve always been partial to sail technologies and love the brazen, crazy extrapolation of Forward’s “Flight of the Dragonfly,” which appeared in Analog in 1982 and which would later be turned into the novel Rocheworld (Baen, 1990). This is the novel where Forward not only finds a bizarre way to keep a human crew sane through a multi-decade journey but also posits a segmented lightsail to get the crew home.
Image: The extraordinary Robert Forward, whose first edition of Flight of the Dragonfly was expanded a bit from the magazine serial and offered in book form in 1984. The book would later be revised and expanded further into the 1990 Baen title Rocheworld. The publishing history of this volume is almost as complex as the methods Forward used to get his crew back from Barnard’s Star!
Forward was a treasure. Like Freeman Dyson, his imagination was boundless. Whether we would ever choose to build the vast Fresnel lens he posited in the outer Solar System as a way of collimating a laser beam from near-Sol orbit, and whether we could ever use that beam to reflect off detached segments of the sail upon arrival to slow it down are matters that challenge all boundaries of engineering. I can hear Forward chuckling. Here’s the basic idea, as drawn from his original paper on the concept.
Image: Forward’s separable sail concept used for deceleration, from his paper “Roundtrip Interstellar Travel Using Laser-Pushed Lightsails,” Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets 21 (1984), pp. 187-195. The ‘paralens’ in the image is a huge Fresnel lens made of concentric rings of lightweight, transparent material, with free space between the rings and spars to hold the vast structure together, all of this located between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. Study the diagram and you’ll see that the sail has three ring segments, each of them separating to provide a separate source of braking or acceleration for the arrival, respectively, and departure of the crew. Imagine the laser targeting this would require. Credit: Robert Forward.
I tend to think that Les Johnson is right about sails as they fit into the interstellar picture. In a recent interview with a publication called The National, Johnson (NASA MSFC) made the case that we might well reach another star with a sail driven by a laser. Breakthrough Starshot, indeed, continues to study exactly that concept, using a robotic payload miniaturized for the journey and sent in swarms of relatively small sails driven by an Earth-based laser. But when it comes to human missions to even nearby stars, Johnson is more circumspect. Let me quote him on this from the article:
“As for humans, that’s a lot more complicated because it takes a lot of mass to keep a group of humans alive for a decade-to centuries-long space journey and that means a massive ship. For a human crewed ship, we will need fusion propulsion at a minimum and antimatter as the ideal. While we know these are physically possible, the technology level needed for interstellar travel seems very far away – perhaps 100 to 200 years in the future.”
Johnson’s background in sail technologies for both near and deep space at Marshall Space Flight Center is extensive. Indeed, there was a time when his business card described him as ‘Manager of Interstellar Propulsion Technology Research’ (he once told me it was “the coolest business card ever”). He has also authored (with Gregory Matloff and Giovanni Vulpetti), books like Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interstellar Travel (Springer, 2014) and A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars (Princeton University Press, 2022), as well as editing the recent Interstellar Travel: Purpose and Motivations (Elsevier, 2023). In addition to that, his science fiction novels have explored numerous deep space scenarios.
Image: NASA’s Les Johnson, a prolific author and specialist in sail technologies. Credit: NASA.
So there’s a much more optimistic take on the human interstellar guideline than the one I gave in my first paragraph, and of course I hope it’s on target. We’re probably not going to be going to what is sometimes called an “Earth 2.0,” in Johnson’s view, because he doubts there are any such reasonably close to us. That’s something we’ll be learning a great deal more about as future space instrumentation comes online, but we can bear in mind that the explorers who tackled the Pacific in the great era of sail didn’t set out thinking they were going to find another Europe, either. The point is to explore and to learn what you can, with all the unexpected benefits that brings.
Johnson’s early interest in sails, by the way, was fired not so much by Forward’s Rocheworld as by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s novel The Mote in God’s Eye (Simon & Schuster, 1974), where an incoming laser sail from another civilization is detected. The realization that unusual astronomical observations point to a technology, and a laser-beaming one at that, is an exciting part of the book. Here the authors’ human starship crew describes the detection of a strange light emanating from a smaller star (the Mote) in front of a much larger supergiant (the Eye):
“…I checked with Commander Sinclair. He says his grandfather told him the Mote was once brighter than Murcheson’s Eye, and bright green. And the way Gavin’s describing that holo – well, sir, stars don’t radiate all one color. So -”
“All the more reason to think the holo was retouched. But it is funny, with that intruder coming straight out of the Mote…”
“Light,” Potter said firmly.
“Light sail!” Rod shouted in sudden realization…”
For more on all this, see my Our View of a Decelerating Magsail in these pages. It’s not surprising that Niven and Pournelle ran their lightsail concept past Robert Forward at a time when the idea was just gaining traction. We all have career-changing literary experiences. I can remember how a childhood reading of Poul Anderson’s The Enemy Stars (J.B. Lippincott, 1959) utterly fired my imagination toward the idea of leaving the Solar System entirely. It was a finalist for the Hugo Award that year following serialization in Astounding, though I didn’t encounter it until later.
Johnson’s work at Marshall Space Flight Center takes in the deployment of a large solar sail quadrant for the Solar Cruiser mission that was first unfurled in 2022 to demonstrate TRL 5 capability, and has just been deployed at contractor Redwire Corp.’s facility in Longmont, Colorado to demonstrate TRL 6. In NASA’s terms, that means going from “Component or breadboard validation in relevant environment” (TRL 5) to “System or subsystem model or prototype demonstration in a relevant environment (ground or space).” In other words, this is progress. At TRL 6, a system is considered “a fully functional prototype or representational model.” Says Johnson in a recent email:
“25 years ago, when I first met Dr. Forward, he inspired me to plan a development program for solar sails that would eventually lead us to the stars. With Bob’s help, I laid out a milestone driven roadmap that began with the space flight of a 10 m² solar sail, which we did in 2010 with NanoSail-D.
“Next on the plan was the development of something an order of magnitude larger. This was achieved with the development and launch of the 86 m² Near Earth Asteroid Scout solar sail in 2022 and the soon to be launched ACS-3 sail. The Solar Cruiser sail is an order of magnitude larger still at 1653 Square meters. The next step is 10,000!”
Image: NASA and industry partners used two 100-foot lightweight composite booms to unfurl the 4,300-square-foot sail quadrant for the first time Oct. 13, 2022, at Marshall Space Flight Center, making it the largest solar sail quadrant ever deployed at the time. On Jan. 30, 2024, NASA cleared a key technology milestone, demonstrating TRL6 capability at Redwire’s new facility in Longmont, Colorado, with the successful deployment of one of four identical solar sail quadrants. Credit: NASA (although I’ve edited the caption slightly to reflect the TRL level reached).
Solar sails are becoming viable choices for space missions, and the Breakthrough Starshot investigations remind us that sails driven not just by sunlight but by lasers are within the bounds of physics. A key question that will be informed by our experience with solar sails is how laser-driven techniques scale. Theoretically, they seem to scale quite well. Are the huge structures Forward once wrote about remotely feasible (perhaps via nanotech construction methods), or is Johnson right that fusion and one day antimatter may be necessary for craft large enough (and fast enough) to carry human crews?
Back in late 80’s Southern California when the transhumanist scene first started, we came up with a variant of embryonic space colonization. Assuming that some kind of molecular nanotechnology is developed (either “dry” or “wet”) that we would upload our identities into nano computer memory (inactive of course). This would be transported along with the rest of the nanotechnology, necessary to create a complete industrial infrastructure from scratch, to the new solar system. Once arrived, the nanotechnology would self-replicated and deploy to create the new industrial infrastructure. Once created, new bodies for the uploadies would be grown (these could be either synthetic biology or pure nanotech) and the uploadies identities downloaded into the brains of the new bodies. You are now on your new home world or continental sized space colony complete with the industrial infrastructure to create whatever life you want for yourself.
The origins of this idea is Robert Frieta’s self replicating seed concept he came up with in 1980.
I still think this is the most likely way we will go to the stars.
@ Abelard. I like the idea of flying a small or medium sized moon. The realities of physics limiting transit speeds, the real scientific problem is how to keep any humans alive for such a journey, an adventure that clearly takes more than 100 years in one direction. I haven’t made an assessment, but it seems like a large mass moving slowly wouldn’t take much more energy than a small mass trying to move quickly? On, or in, a moon-sized planetoid, science, culture, life and art could proceed throughout the transit. A culture could be developed within which each new generation learns about the mission, embraces or critiques, adopts or modifies. Who knows what kind of people may ultimately arrive somewhere, but the point is they would be people…
Not saying your conclusion is wrong, but your LSS budget is likely a huge overestimate as recycling is likely to be pretty good in that spacecraft with perhaps a 1% loss, implying one might only need about 1% of that mss budget. I would envisage recycling would be more like a unit that takes in all the wastes and outputs the food and air required for our crewperson.
Maybe this will give us a boost
https://www.sciencealert.com/antimatter-could-unlock-a-radical-new-future-of-interstellar-travel
That tech makes Forward’s proposal seem almost lo-tech. I am doubtful that the technology to grow human bodies and transplant minds is even possible. It is almost a trope in SciFi, but I think more fantasy than even scifi. I am not even sure why you would do that rather than let the new bodies develop with their own minds. The moral issue alone is rather disturbing, although discussible.
Seed ships are a version of directed panspermia, but where the ships must be very intelligent to determine if their destinations are suitable for human habitation. Should those worlds be sterile and terraformed, or will an existing living world be biologically compatible with human biology? Can humans be safely raised without human mothers, or will the feral population only revert to human “norms” over generations?
Effective Altruists might argue that a galaxy full of humans is worth any near-term price, although I would disagree with that viewpoint. Imagine if we adapted Roko’s Basilisk to a religion of a deity requiring this outcome.
@Alex Tolley
Indeed this idea of growing humans with artificial means elsewhere is very disturbing and morally bankrupted.
Seed ships might very well be the way to go, this for terraforming a world in advance of human colonisation.
As several here have brought examples from scifi, I do the same this time.
In the later part of a certain science fiction novel it is revealed that the population on the planet had been brought up with benign androids, given a culture and taught they have a background and ancestors.
That they have no ancestors and background cause a severe existential problem for most of the inhabitants since the loss of the images, music and films that they built their cultural identity on all turn out to be fake. Suicide, drug abuse and riots becomes increasingly common. And while it’s not religion that turn out to be the winning philosophy that win out.
But that of populist political extremism. The planet become a dictatorship and start to build the ships and technology needed to make war on the human race that had lied and given them such a horrendous heritage.
So in this scenario the do not start feral, but rather become such when they find out they’re nothing more than replicated beings, they therefore feel they can cast aside any idea of humanism, law and history that have been brought from Earth.
This is of course one scenario among several, but one I find quite likely in the meaning that any such population would not consider themselves to be truly human. And the potential for severe problems would then be there from the start. (Which in the novel was the very reason the population was given a false background and history.)
And at any time nanotechnology is mentioned. I return to the question on how they would make a processor fit in such a small machine.
There’s one type of nanotech that is remotely possible, are the kind that is built with biological materials and as such would be upgraded leukocytes.
But such could not build any industry or function outside of a living body.
I stand by my point. “Transhuman” tech will be developed long before we have the capability to go to the stars, assuming FTL is impossible.
@Abelard Lindsey
I have no doubt that is likely. Whether we should develop those technologies if we have the capability, is another issue.
The title of Poul Anderson’s novel in Astounding (1959) was “We Have Fed Our Sea” (a line from a Rudyard Kipling poem). Two part serial; I don’t know how much Campbell may have shortened it. I read it in 1960, a library copy. Not sure if the SF Book Club published it or not.
What intrigued me was Anderson pairing STL with FTL. A robot ship sent out with a matter transceiver aboard. (Anderson used the awkward term ‘mattercasting’.) (Matter transmission was an old super science in SF in 1958 when Anderson wrote the novel.) (Star Trek borrowed the idea for the ‘Transporters’ (much of the time without receivers!).)
I was captivated by the idea. I knew about matter transmitters from SF, but never had thought of coupling with fast slower than light starships with receivers. I can’t think of any SF that had used this before that I know of. Since the Anderson novel has the concept been used again? I mean I know of one instance of a ‘matter transmitter’ network for interstellar travel, Hugo winner Way Station by Clifford Simak. I have a vague recollection of a few other stories like Simak’s.
Anderson used tachyons for the FTL; some other SF authors did that too. Nowadays it would be traversable wormholes, maybe even ‘quantum’ traversable wormholes. Tho the technology is total handwaveium.
Even so, Al, very cool handwavium.
@Al Jackson
P K Dick’s The Unteleported Man has a variant where Earth people are teleported to a colony world, but never return. The protagonist takes a spaceship to the world. although not strictly teleporting, Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels have minds put in “cortical stack” devices that at then activated in local bodies. The SciFi tv series Dark Matter has the protagonists travel in a spaceship, but download their minds into other, distant bodies by transmission. There must be many other variants of the 2 techniques.
Many have pointed out how the movie Avatar borrows Poul Anderson’s plot device of , heck, an ‘Avatar’ on the surface of Jupiter (oddly Anderson was using a quite old model of Jupiter). Anderson’s Avatar was controlled ‘tele-presence-wise from a space station orbiting Jupiter. Anderson wrote that story in 1957 the movie was out in 2009. I don’t think Anderson got any credit.
J.
Still have the paperback “The Enemy Stars”. Bought it for 50 cents when I was a teen and it has survived many transits since then.
Spoiler alert: The Kipling poem appears on the very last page recited by the old Orkney Islands (?) patriarch.
As I remember:
“For a thousand we’ve fed our sea and she calls us still unfed.
T
Though nary a wave of all the waves but marks our English dead…”
Voyage of the Southern Cross.
I love that paperback, bought when it came out. It’s just a few feet from me on the shelf.
BTW, Robert Forward never liked our idea of going to the stars. He made no bones to us about his dislike of transhumanist ideas.
The reality is that transhumanism and space go together as a set. You really cannot separate these if you are serious about space colonization.
Not that we “cannot” but rather, more difficult by 1.5 – 2.5 orders of magnitude. I like this blog, but the premise of it is kinda silly. We have not even set up bases on the moon. Rotating space habitats? Never been done.
I’m going to suggest “never” is the right answer to the question of human interstellar travel. To support, I’m going to present a little mental model, and this is in self-clarification mode vs. trying to teach. First some simplification assumptions. I don’t want to deal with anything other than the mass required to support a single human life inside of whatever vehicle. First, water. A human needs a half gallon to a gallon a day. Let’s specify a small female needing half a gallon (about 4 lbs) a day. Food. I want to assume an artificial nutrition substance, again overlooking anything about psychology, etc. that provides necessary calories and nutrients, but humans need fiber in their food, at least half a pound a day. Air. Humans need about 1lb of air per day at typical sea level pressure and typical atmospheric mix of gasses. Simplified, yes? Total weight in lbs/day = 5.5. No biggie? But we are going to be taking a one way journey of 4 years (huge assumptions here) and spend a year there. Then given our destination will not have a laser system to propel us, maybe 8 years to get back. So 13 year elapsed time (I wish) gives us a sustenance payload of only 27,000 lbs (including our hero and her clothes). Rounding again, that is about 12 million grams. Please forgive my humongous assumptions and rough math – the contemplated journey would consume 21.29 terawatts per day. That is about .0004 of the total energy use of all humanity, and that is just one person. A clear critique of this little exercise is that the speed I used of .2 light speed would be an average, therefor peak speed would be at least twice that, if technically feasible. Contemplate a crew of 10, add all the mass for their ship (heroically assuming the power is generated off-ship), and add some mass for the exploratory vehicles and tools to be used at destination, you can easily arrive at a power budget that is about half of all energy consumed by the human race currently. Given the political challenges we face in funding much more mundane adventures, how can we imagine that a technical solution to interstellar travel, even if feasible, could be funded at that level of power consumption? It’s too much.
If we populate the Solar System IMO it’s just a matter of time before we go to the stars.
21.29 terawatts is enormous by today’s energy amounts but is an absolutely tiny fraction of what the sun puts out.
Populating the solar system, however, is at this point a rather large if.
The issues in travel away from earth are related to timespace and mattergy.
Travelling at the speed of a photon, one arrives at any and all destinations at the instant of departure. Any appreciable fraction of lightspeed will corespondingly reduce the experienced/elapsed travel time. But in spite of this a journey of decades or generations will require manipulations to biology.
Varieties of suspended animation may or may not entail progressive deterioration of bodies. Staying awake for decades or lifetimes will require a closed-circuit biological ecosystem and and understanding enough to tweak it appropriately when such adjustments are needed.
Gravity is not thought of as part of biology, but in its absence the body gets rid of what is not used: muscles waste away and bony calcium is excreted in the urine, often forming uninary stones. The other physical hazard is radiation; shielding for it may do double duty as water storage. Using magnetic fields as shielding is another question.
Internal propulsion systems such as fusion and antimatter are still in the wishing stage. The convenience and accuracy of ground based laser sails comes with a limit to their reach; solar/stellar light extends further, but perhaps different in convenience and accuracy.
I am not saying this is possible for humans, but clearly, teleporting/beaming a person at lightspeed to a receiver bypasses the human biology problem of interstellar travel. Therefore travel time costs are borne purely by automated ships whose purpose is to deliver teleport receivers and related infrastructure to the target system.
I find it interesting that we assume that any star travel must mean moving meat bodies through space to a destination. On Earth, we have had over a century of projecting ourselves electronically to distance places, first by voice with radio and telephone, more recently with video. We can “experience” distance places through electronics. If we don’t need 2-way communication, we can do the same for any distant destination. Whatever can be transmitted – sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, can be incorporated into an immersive experience.
Should we discover some form of FTL (preferably instantaneous( communication, we could “travel” to distant destinations, with mechanical avatars allowing movement to travel at the destination. We eliminate the need to move our bodies. I see this developing on earth, and we could certainly travel and experience the Moon and NEAs by this means. Mars would need to be a directed experience only. However, even if lightspeed cannot be breached, then if the full environment can be transmitted as a 3d recreation (holo deck?), then the individual can travel within this environment and explore it quite safely, even in environments that would require protection but can be explored on Earth (or wherever one lives) in a “shirt sleeves” state.
To do this only requires the data acquisition and transmission technology to be sent to these places, at sublight speeds. Within our system, one could explore any of the planets, on their surfaces, oceans, and atmospheres. Fly in the atmosphere of Jupiter, walk on Pluto, dive in the subsurface ocean of Europa. I would expect this will all be possible for anyone on Earth to do this a century or two from now, all at a very low cost, far less expensive than a physical cruise to those worlds, and something that can be experienced for any length of time, in time blocks of any length.
In the near term, I think real-time data could be injected into video games, allowing games like GTA to incorporate the actual city environment rather than the prebuilt environment, or other games that generate simulations. Apple’s VisionPro becomes the early hardware to create an immersive experience, ultimately being extended to haptic input from gloves to full-body suits. The hardware to send [real-time] data from planets would be robotic, transmitting high-resolution environmental data into the “holo deck” experience that can be experienced with electronics by the individual in the comfort of their homes or in special facilities.
So the bottom line is that we will travel to the stars, but not physically. We will experience those destinations at home using electronics.
@Alex T
The best classic SciFi analogy I can think of is Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt” (1950). The simulation is based on a real environment, but simulated. Extensive mapping of dead planets and Moons would be the easiest to simulate. Living worlds, including the “vanished” ecosystems of Earth, would be harder, but feasible given enough behavioral data of the fauna and cataloging of the life forms.
I’m skeptical humans will ever go to the stars unless FTL travel really is possible and if it is then advanced aliens probably have already been here and engaged with humans which suggests some humans have already gone to the stars just not in their own technology.
If FTL travel is possible, it won’t happen in my lifetime. ;-( Apart from Einstein’s math that states you cannot go FTL by breaking through the light barrier analogously to the sound barrier, the other objection is causality violation.
I am not so concerned about this latter. I would even like to see SciFi stories flesh out what the galaxy might look like if causality violation was possible and the consequences for human affairs and the physics of large objects. Back in in my youth, Frank Hampson’s Eagle comic stories of Dan Dare had a small glimpse of this in the first part of the story, “The Man from Nowhere” where an alien starship suddenly appears in the scanners at Space fleet, implying the ship was an FTL vessel. [It wasn’t, and I don’t think the sudden appearance was explained.] The use of handwavium tech of FTL communication (e.g. Le Guin’s “ansible” or Star Trek subspace transmissions) is a common trope in SciFi, as are FTL ships and wormholes that eliminate the distance and time of interstellar travel.
We live in an age where our science and technology might be rather like the Victorian era of energy generation – combustion, without an inkling of the vastly more potent nuclear energy. Maybe c is impossible to exceed as we currently believe, or maybe there is a way to bypass that limit that we haven’t discovered yet. Funnily enough, I am currently rereading the excellent manga (trilogy) of Yukinobu Hoshino’s 2001 Nights. The stories include sub-light travel, but then the discovery of FTL allows a series of stories about human expansion into the galaxy, including what happens when the sub-light ships reach the inhabited worlds. Beautifully drawn (lots of design homages to the movie version of 2001: ASO) and with some interesting, but lightweight, philosophizing.
The notions of transhumanism derive from extreme reductive materialism applied to human consciousness, claiming that consciousness and all its characteristics and properties like subjective awareness are ultimately one and the same as the brain’s incredibly complex neural apparatus. This is basically impossible, because human consciousness is immaterial and noncomputable and therefore impossible to artificially embody in some sort of computer system. The well-known “hard problem” of consciousness capsulizes this with the observation that the simplest “qualia” of conscious awareness and perception (such as the subjective perception of the color red for instance) are of a fundamentally, existentially different and higher realm of reality from matter and energy and their motions and interactions. The conscious perception of the color red is fundamentally immaterial – it has no physical dimensions, weight, velocity, etc.
Accordingly, no computer will ever be conscious, basically since consciousness is not computable and computation is all that computers can ever do, and therefore human consciousness will never ever be able to be transferred into an advanced AI computer system. Undermining the entire transhumanist agenda.
Sorry, but we will never possibly be able to download our consciousness into computers in order to reach the stars. Other methods will have to be found if possible. My feeling is more toward this being an impossible goal.
Forwards concepts could be greatly improved by laser recycling, trapping the laser light between light sail and a mirror greatly reduces the size and cost of the concept. Perhaps a large mirrored disc with a hole in the middle would be better. The laser light shines through the hole onto the sail and is forced to bounce between the two.
The requirements for laser recycling are even more stringent than for regular laser driven sails, it’s likely only feasible over relatively short distances.
Not really, both the mirror and said lens must point at the spacecraft. Even if it is recycled 10 times that’s a 10 fold decrease in capital costs or there abouts.
The only way I see humans travelling between stars is via very large structures taking centuries to transit. The advantage is that over time other faster modes of travel become available and can be transmitted to the spacecraft or the occupants could be picked up on the way. Nuclear propulsion is probably the best, nuclear bombs get more efficient as they get bigger.
I agree that manufacturing people on site seems the most likely solution. This solution doesn’t come in a vacuum, nor from a very distant future: medical research is already pursuing 3D-printed organs for transplant. Of course, the brain is a special situation, but moral issues seem little barrier: see https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2023.1017235/full about “organoid intelligence”, which proposes slave human nervous tissue for industrial purposes. I think this scheme is not merely horrid but has dangers that cannot be appreciated without understanding the role of causality violation in the “hard problem of consciousness” … but here let’s postulate society somehow survives the ensuing crisis and goes on to send interstellar probes, bearing the insights of what is needed to make a synthetic human truly conscious rather than merely an AI replica.
The first step to transcending the human form is to understand that we’re not humans. Each of us is rooted in an ecological community, and key aspects of your personality – whether you’re outgoing, autistic, depressed, schizophrenic – seem to depend significantly on gastrointestinal symbionts and other microbes such as Toxoplasma gondii and Haemophilus influenzae. Moreover, we don’t think someone is a different person if they lose their legs, or as their brains remodel, learn, forget; even as they suffer terribly from stroke, we see them yet as who they were beneath their handicaps. The definition of an individual is neither genetics nor the fertilized zygote, as there are identical twins. With split-brain experiments and hemispherectomy we even see that one person may in a sense be made up of two, if the communication between cells is merely halted at some dividing line. I would expect some variety of Atman to play a role in the future’s self-conceptualization.
Under these circumstances, humans on Earth would pursue survival by synthetically printing up replacements for any and all parts of the body as needed. They could restore themselves entirely from backups, convinced that an accurate replica of the nervous system can be in certain meaningful ways “themselves”, and perceive duplicates of themselves as collaborators rather than competitors, with a kind but practical economic system to match such conditions. They might be able to consolidate memories between their different bodies now and then, and adapt some of them to survive corrosion, vacuum, extreme radiation, or even the absence of available phosphorus. Other unforeseen technologies would be learned during those centuries. Maybe they could send an electromagnetic signal crafted in such a way that it assembles a basic von Neumann machine out of the oncoming solar wind of a distant star, which could listen for further instructions. Maybe it will be routine for them to use nanobots, or maybe to use tomography to immerse an entire 3D structure in optical or sonic “tweezers”, so that each cell can be directed to grow with the right neurites with the right neighbors, and the right proteins in the right phosphorylation states in each neurite. It will not be perfect. In the end, for better or worse … whatever they do to themselves on Earth, they will do in space.
@Mike Serfas
The idea of replacing oneself with a “cloned body” and inserting your backup mind is the technology behind the recent movie Restore Point which I can recommend. However, I find the technology extremely unlikely, even by 2041 when the movie is set. It will prove as wrong as Blade Runner’s 2019, and probably Blade Runner 2049’s near future.
But let us suppose that one could replicate the brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, etc. Is the mind of that brain fully deterministic, chaotic, or something in between (Langston’s “edge of chaos”)? Would the replacements be similar to the dead person, but subtly, or not so subtly, altered, as if drugged? What would be the status of copies rather than replacements? Would mad dictators print up armies of “super soldiers” based on the very best originals (Star Wars “cloned soldiers” based on the fantasies of the eugenicists and the real-life approach of a certain C20th European dictator).
At this point, I am not fussed by the morality of experiments on organoids. These are fewer than the brains of fetuses that we abort within the early second trimester (I think). They are just a tiny ball of brain cells and synapses, (1-10 million neurons currently) which is the brain size range of a cockroach to a small lizard. A human has about 100 billion, 4-5 orders of magnitude greater. But clearly (I hope!) we would not want disembodied brains of any type where a mind of some consciousness resides, however low-level.
The possible post-human future you describe might be a possible path, although it seems like a dystopia. But what is dystopic to me might not be to that future humanity.
In Rendezvous with Rama Clarke with careful subtly suggests that the Ramans are sending ‘electronic’ copies of themselves to the stars. Sort of like a ‘solid state’ matter transmitter (so to speak). To be ‘re-constituted at the other end, using Super-Science quite incomprehensible to us Terrans. A favorite theme of Clarke.
The rocket equation limits the interstellar potential for craft carrying their own propellant, but there are alternatives including exotic but also electro-magnetic techniques that could address the energy requirement.
Ultimately, the interstellar travel of meat bodies is not just to satisfy human curiosity but as an extension of off-world migration of human population. Limited to the earth alone, the limits to growth and laws of entropy impinge on humanity’s well being as well as the ecosystem. An off-world infrastructure begins to answer some of those needs, but our local environment is harsh and doesn’t readily answer the need for living space. Even if we were able to populate an outpost on Mars the existence of humankind remains extremely precarious. Exo-planets with livable environments are the “gold” attracting wide interest in interstellar. Is the space available for us to move in? Or will we meet our neighbours? It isn’t realistic at the present moment and may take a hundred years, a thousand, or never. But I consider this the essential driver and motivation.
@Project Studio
We can only guess if our biology is compatible with the local biology on a living world. If not, we would have to avoid direct contact with it, protected inside structures and venturing out inside our transports and isolation suits. Sterile worlds we could terraform, although that would take millennia. Or we stay in our worldships. But if so, why even go?
Even if humans can populate planets in the galaxy, or at least the environs of stars, without FTL communication there can be no galactic civilization, just fragmented civilizations on isolated planets or in small bubbles of stars. Even with FTL communication, the size of the galaxy is too large to allow for any coordinated actions due to the limits of mass moving no faster than c.
At this time, there are only 2 feasible ways to populate the galaxy with humans .
1. create worldships and hope they hold together for the journey of centuries, even millennia.
2. create the humans locally and avoid the time spent in transit. The seedship method. How we create humans is another issue, but clearly we are on the cusp of growing embryos in artificial wombs. Maybe robots with advanced AI can nurture the babies to adulthood.
Either way, the long journey times suggest waiting until suitable worlds can be found by exploratory probes and made destination targets, perhaps after [partially] terraforming first.
All these considerations are of course quite true. And while exoplanets are common we don’t yet know the statistical odds of finding an earth twin or close enough.
I like to wonder how we might harness the energy of magnetic reconnection events to sling probes – manned or unmanned – into the void at relativistic speeds. There has been talk of particle beams driving sails, perhaps one could ride a beam of solar energised particles emanating from a solar flare of CME (hard to predict).
https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/RoR_WWW/SWREDI/2014/SEP_YZheng_20140602.pdf
I’ve been considering this topic for most of my life, having been obsessed with star travel ever since I got my first glasses and saw the stars for the first time in my life in elementary school, while Apollo was still going on.
I think manned interstellar colonization is probably inevitable unless we either suffer an irreversible societal collapse, or come out of some singularity type event either transformed into or replaced by software beings. We will colonize solar space, colonization will extend further and further from the Sun, and at some point Kuiper belt colonists will take the trouble to put the body they’ve colonized on a low speed interstellar trajectory. That’s the slow diffusion model, reliant on generation ships that are whole, already stable societies.
For faster colonization, (And it will be colonization; Interstellar travel is hard enough nobody is making round trips!) you’ll probably require a combination of beam propulsion on the acceleration phase, due to sparing consumables on the ship, and fusion or antimatter propulsion on the other end.
Forward’s scheme for using the beamer in the Solar system for all phases of the mission is theoretically feasible, but is it really socially feasible? And as a colonist, would you really want to rely on the beam coming back on, on schedule?
Fast interstellar travel requires either dramatic physics breakthroughs, like finding quark droplets in the asteroid belt, that can be used for mass/energy conversion, or ratios of infrastructure to population that are probably only achievable with self-reproducing machinery.
That’s why I finally concluded that the one key enabling technology for interstellar travel is the creation of working Von Neumann replicators. Once you have those, you can just throw essentially unlimited resources at the problem; Manufacture beam propulsion systems capable of sending out terawatt beams across lightyears, manufacture antimatter by the ton. And build ships which are essentially endlessly self-repairing, and capable of seeding an entire civilization at the destination.
Really, if your obsession is interstellar colonization in the future, the place to put your efforts today is self-replicating machinery.
“And as a colonist, would you really want to rely on the beam coming back on, on schedule?”
That was mentioned in the beginning of “The Mote In God’s Eye”. There’s an easy hypothetical way the Motie probe could decelerate, but it depends on the Motie home system keeping the beam active. For some reason, the Moties assume the beam will be shut off soon after they leave.
I think that someone, somewhere, is going to try to send physical humans on an interstellar voyage, even if it means freezing the crew during the transit or traveling by generation ship. The motivation may be the same motivation that leads people to attempt to cross the Atlantic in really small (10′ or less) boats.
Dr. David Kipping is suggesting the possibility that the natives near a star elsewhere may have “salted” it with elements from the “island of stability” (just beyond our present reach) in the periodic table.
I seen this as well, perhaps the star was caught in a kilonova beam event.
@Michael
I think you underestimate the difficulties. The recycling of light requires the 2 mirrors to be perfectly flat, reflective, and parallel. Not even the slightest yaw of the craft can be allowed, let alone drift.
In practice, solar sails are as low areal density as we can make them, and as a result they both wrinkle and billow under light pressure. The craft’s trajectory under the influence of even weak gravity will result in the misalignment of the sail with the ground laser-mirror combo.
It struck me that a partial solution is to use cube corner mirrors to at least solve the yaw problem. However, this would require the craft’s sail to be much more massive and therefore lose the very benefit one is hoping for.
As Brettggests, this is more a lab demo than a practical propulsion solution. However, if you can suggest how it might work in practice given the issues I would be interested in the solution.
Alex, the same would be for the lens and even one extra bounce ~halves the costs. The size of Forwards idea necessitates a space construction even the laser system. With the recycling concept the gain is quite high starting the craft off as it is much nearer.
https://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Olivia-Sturman-RMP-POSTER-test-2.pdf
I think colonization of other planets by humans is the wrong path to take. These colonization thoughts show that our current way of thinking of ourselves as the most important life in the universe, to the detriment of and at the expense of all other life, hasn’t changed yet. We just have to look at what we’ve already done here to see how sending humans to other planets could end badly for all life that already exists there, or for the human colonists. I think there are other better options, such as building colonies in space and leaving all other life alone to evolve without interference. How would we feel for example, if an advanced civilization landed on earth, or on mars, and started terraforming either to suit their environmental needs and there was nothing we could do to stop them? What if ‘they’ started mining the asteroid fields in our solar system? If we find a planet around one of the nearest stars that has already has life, and could support us, would we send our colonists there if we could? Why? The effort and resources required would be far greater than building something like rotating O’Neil type colonies in our own system, and we wouldn’t be affecting any other evolving life on other planets. If we wanted to move to other solar systems, we could target dead ones with lots of resources in space, rather than attempting to insert ourselves into living already thriving ones.
Ross, the word does not imply forcefully taking over existing civilizations in the context of interstellar expansion. It’s a technical word and not a political one in this context at least in my mind.
Without going full Humpty Dumpty (“When I use a word. . . ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”), “colony” and “colonization” do tend to be loaded words, at least in some contexts.
I tend toward using derivations of “settlement” in place of “colony” and “colonization” when contemplating human migration off planet.
As in, for example, “the Mars Settlement” as an at least initial name for the eventual intended first permanent human settlement on Mars. (Which we hope will fare better than the Roanoke, uh, Colony, in 1585.)
One negative connotation historically with derivations of “colony” is the possible displacement of sentient life that was there first — perhaps not first ever at that location (i.e., perhaps having themselves displaced others that were there before them) but first in relation at least to the new, human “colonizers.” That’s the frequent historical connotation that you and Ross are discussing.
But it also can have a negative historical connotation vis-à-vis the new off-world settlement having a dependent sovereignty that is subordinate to a sovereignty back on the home world, Earth, over the “colony.”
I’ve given those couple of words all that thought because — a while back — I reached about 85% completion on a draft constitution for that eventual Mars Settlement.
In the draft, I chose the word “settlement” over “colony” and further made it explicit that the Mars Settlement had independent sovereignty from the outset. Now, of course, as a practical matter, the settlement would be highly dependent on the home world for a quite considerable time, if not forever. But, at least at a legal and political level, I just wanted to fast forward through the whole colonies versus the home world dynamic where the settlement ultimately had to fight for its political independence. (Admittedly, that’s not as big of an issue when we’re talking about light years away, in connection with Paul’s current article.) I figured that starting off with de jure independence might avoid some hassles down the road.
Anyway, that’s my bit on “settlement” and “colony.”
Hopefully, I’ll finish and publish the draft at some point. I had reached the conclusion that I needed to prepare also an explanatory document similar to the Federalist Papers that were published as a series of articles explaining and advocating for adoption of the United States Constitution back in 1789. (Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” would be a fun title, but something like “The Martian Papers” might work better with the historical tie-in.)
But, frankly, it’s tough to put something like that out in the midst of the current — really global — political climate. Too much shouting through megaphones and too little listening — from whichever side or viewpoint they’re shouting from.
I started on the draft because what I saw that had been done by others — including a draft linked on some Mars settlement online site — was, to my eye, just not workable. One just can’t — at least effectively — take the whole otherwise unedited text of the U.S. Constitution and just insert one’s favorite position statements on sundry hot button issues of the current day.
First, for an off-world settlement, one needs a flexible and staged structure of governance that takes into account the realities facing — initially — a small group of settlers and which works — as a practical matter — from the very first sol when their boots hit off-world regolith. The thirteen colonies already had at least nascent institutions — like the prior colonial court system — and a much, much larger population. The U.S. Constitution is not a “plug-and-play” document that would work immediately with a handful or so of settlers arriving on a first settlement ship. An progressive, phased structure is needed — with, e.g., population-level triggers — for an orderly progression from at first a primarily “mission-command” structure needed for immediate survival (with some fundamental checks on power) ultimately to a fully thriving representative democracy.
The beauty of much of the United States Constitution is that it created a structure that took human nature, and in particular the temptation of desiring power for its own sake, into account. That structure, and its key insights, provides a good model for an off-world settlement, in broad brush. But certain concessions have to be made for being at first a small population fighting for survival over fifty million kilometers away from a thriving global biosphere.
Second, on those hot button issues, neither you nor I ultimately will decide issues for the off-world settlement. Going back to that sovereignty issue — whether or not the home world governance and populace wants something handled one way or another, ultimately the off-world settlers will make up their own minds, while facing realities that folks over fifty million kilometers away just won’t be facing, at the very least in the same way.
So, yeah, I don’t avoid those hot button issues in the draft — I don’t just leave blanks in their place. As the writer of the initial draft, I put what I believed to be best, if for nothing else as a placeholder in the document. But I do believe that folks need to understand that the ultimate decision is not only not mine, but also not ours here on Earth. It’s theirs.
Because it will be a “settlement,” not a “colony.”
And first establishing a viable — structure — for off-world self-governance is the most key fundamental. They’ve literally got to survive and not kill themselves fighting over power — and transition of power — first. As they then also address those hot button issues.
So, yeah, that’s a lot of thought on a couple of words. But Humpty Dumpty aside, words — and the historical connotations that they may have — carry force.
Hopefully your draft could be published or linked here, once ready for review. Much like science fiction can explore off-world/future scenarios too sensitive or difficult to put in an earthly/present context, your Martian constitution could perhaps suggest what is dearly missing in our present local planetary governance.
Wondering why you would suggest representative democracy when the means would surely exist for direct democracy? Hopefully all on Mars are educated and brought up to be responsible and informed citizens (unlike the earth’s vast population of unintelligent ‘marching morons,’ who could perhaps be encouraged to instead emigrate to Venus).
Hey, Project Studio. The prospect of an ultimately representative democracy really is directed to a settlement that has reached a very, very high population level. At some level of population growth, even a highly responsible and informed citizenry is going to have neither the time nor the inclination to engage in the day-to-day minutiae of legislating. I believe that they’ll need and want retained specialists – elected representatives – to do that for them on a day-to-day basis – always subject to the citizenry’s ultimate control via elections (“do a bad job at legislating, and you get fired”) and the occasional directly-democratic plebiscite on specific major issues of concern. A citizen can be constantly engaged and informed only as to so much, especially when a highly educated person is focused on their own particular tasks, family, etc. So the operating premise is that at a certain level of population growth, and associated legislative complexity, a representative democracy is more efficient than a wholly direct democracy. Even where technology otherwise might allow millions each to post their view, at least on the fly, on something, at least in broad brush, without necessarily having or taking the time to read the actual proposed legislation and all proposed amendments or alternative legislation. Again, at that point, we’re talking about large population levels, certainly not a handful of settlers that can all fit in one hab pod, or even that all can sit through committee hearings on Zoom.
So, basically, there’s an orderly progression – based primarily on population levels – in the document from a nearly-military (but nonetheless constrained) command structure, to a predominately direct democracy, and ultimately to a representative democracy for a very, very large population.
On the very first sol, and for some time thereafter, the situation will be one – for survival – where some one person needs to have the ultimate authority to say – without at least immediate question or dissent – “do this, now” because of the immediacy and gravity of the many potentially life-or-death situations that the settlers could face.
(That situation is reminiscent of the scene from the 2000 movie U-571 where Matthew McConaughey’s character shouts directly back to the stern of the rapidly sinking boat, not using the intercom: “Fire! Tank, fire now or we die!!” And that was at the culmination of a movie where one of the principal themes was an impromptu commander and crew both having to learn that there are decisions and times where one person necessarily has to make the call, imperfect as it may be. That’s, in a general sense, the kind of immediacy and gravity that crewmembers, and then settlers, potentially can face isolated on their own over fifty million kilometers from home.)
That said, there are times and decisions, even at the outset, where you don’t want one person to have the final say. So the draft document includes multiple limits on the likely erstwhile mission commander’s authority. And you definitely want to progress out of that near-dictatorial command structure (cf. “We’re here to defend democracy, not to practice it,” from Crimson Tide) as quickly as possible – and to have the specific circumstances and timing of that progression away from the military-type command structure clearly spelled out in advance.
So, after that progression, for much of the early life of the settlement, once it survives initially, yes, a totally democratic “body of the whole” basically serves as the legislature and in some contexts even as the judiciary.
Well, hopefully with that pure democracy not descending into a mob rule that tramples over individual rights. (Staying with my movie references, think of the lynch mob being held off by a solitary Wyatt Earp in the eponymous film. The majority clearly was ready to hang the prisoner without trial; and, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that that particular potential dynamic of human nature necessarily is limited to only the less intelligent. Smart people sometimes just have more articulately-stated biases.)
The drafters of the Constitution were well aware of the potential excesses of total democracy reflected in history, and the later stages of the French Revolution – led at times by some very intelligent people – then provided a ready reminder of that. And, of course, to an extent, the drafters also were trying to preserve the power of the political “elites” of their day, the landed gentry. That’s why, e.g., we didn’t have direct popular election of Senators until after the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. But, over and above that particular largely self-interest, the drafters were cautious when it came to a wholly direct democracy, to the extent then practically feasible in the first instance with that size population with the technology of that day. The drafters overall were trying to take into account – and establish checks and balances on – where the less benevolent aspects of human nature, including collectively, could take a society.
* * * * *
But, yeah, if I ever get finished, subject to what is without question Paul’s editorial decision and then specific review, it would be great to possibly do some articles on the draft here. Or at least a link or links.
It would need to be a series of articles or links spread out over time betwixt and between all the other content here (I’m chomping at the bit to get to the latest piece on a solar gravity lens mission). As there’s a fair amount of ground to cover once you’re doing a draft constitution for an offworld settlement. Bite-sized presentations of draft text and explanatory discussion spread out serially would be the way to go, somewhat similar to how we have had a continuing discussion of offworld agriculture over a series of articles by multiple authors. And, thankfully, the more hot button issues of the current day really are few and far between once you get into the nuts-and-bolts of just creating a viable governance structure for an offworld settlement from the regolith up (contemplating also issues like a planetary economy as they pertain back to governance structure).
It has been an interesting project of both looking back to why certain provisions were included in, inter alia, the 1789 Constitution and then looking forward to whether and how those provisions might have benefit or relevance for a Martian (or other offworld) settlement here in the 21st Century and beyond.
And, hey, I hear that Venus is not all that bad above the cloud tops – approximately 1G and far less of a protective suit required. So we might want to encourage the Bubbas to go somewhere else, or at least closer to ground level, lol.
@George King
I hope we can read some linked articles as you flesh out your draft. Nielsen has posted his ideas over time on space-faring civilizations. I think adding context, like the Federalist Papers would be very useful to understand how you arrive at your result.
BTW, I would loathe any settlement to be a corporate settlement with all the pathologies that have been seen in the past. However, I fear that might be what happens. The conflicts are exactly as played out in season 4 of “For All Mankind” as the series looks to a season 5 with a possible independence of the Mars base from Earth and the Helios corp. The “belters” on Ceres in “The Expanse” are very much trapped in a corporate situation. As I look back on some of the SciFi tv shows I have enjoyed, it seems that corporate ownership often plays the part of a villain, rather like Westerns in space.
Ian McDonald’s “Luna” trilogy has a fleshed-out lunar civilization that is mostly separate from Earth control, with what seems to me to be a “libertarian” model of polity, and with everything being transactional. The poor people cannot even get sufficient air to breathe. I hope that is not how any future colony, whether Monn, Mars, habitat, or Exoplanet ends up. Nice life for the elites, a dystopia for many others.
I should say that perhaps I need to use a different term than self-sufficient. As you say, almost no nation is self-sufficient and we know the economic benefits of trade. What I was trying to get at is the idea that a settlement could exist without becoming a sink for imports to survive, but with nothing to trade to pay for these imports. Countries can certainly run with trade deficits, but ideally trade values should balance, at least after the initial growth period. I have yet to see any viable trading scheme for Mars, at least with Earth. With space settlements it could work, but that is very “chicken and egg” territory.
Interesting to see in your view representative democracy as a successor to direct democracy as a population grows and matures. I suppose that the wisdom of a decision to delegate decision making to a body of representatives depends very much on what one sees to be the ‘business of government.’ Here on stagnant earth the business of almost any government appears to be the maintenance of the status quo for the stability that benefits powerful special interests. On a new planet with untold possibilities for growth and development the ‘business of government’ could be quite different and it is my opinion that individual citizens could passionately feel the need to represent themselves in decision making. After a time I suppose that need might become quiescent as planetary development plateaus and a (hopefully benevolent) status quo ensues for that planet.
I’m in no way advocating for mob rule in my preference for direct democracy, a benefit of a constitution and code of rights being its ability to ward off the ‘tyranny of the majority.’
I think that occasional necessity for quick action based on orders depends more on the leadership traits exhibited by the pioneers rather than a command structure as such. Without due considerations of ‘true’ leadership it is sheer luck to have a competent leader sitting at the top of a command structure. Often the emergent behaviour of command structures works to exclude true leaders from command, for example, Mr Roberts vs Captain Morton (1946 novel by Thomas Heggen, based on his experiences in the South West Pacific during World War II).
Well @ProjectStudio, an extended response didn’t go through. The Centauri site never showed that the reply was awaiting moderation; but it thereafter told me, a couple of times over a couple of days, that I was trying to post previously submitted material.
In any event . . . I’m looking for a standalone vehicle on the web on which to present the actual current partial working draft and commentary, perhaps with a method for on-site comments, depending on what I find as a workable vehicle.
(It is a – ton – of content. I had forgotten how much I had actually written of what I had intended to write.)
Meanwhile, there’s “still some time” in terms of a permanent Mars settlement becoming an imminent prospect, if it ever does.
(See the other comments to this article re: the challenges facing sending humans there in the first place, at least currently. And that’s on just a relatively short hop to Mars, not to the stars.)
So, in the meantime, I’ll suggest that we might proceed like your passionate, energized and well-informed Martian citizen-legislators and, metaphorically, wait to at least get the baby in the bath before we toss it out with the bathwater.
(I’ve never been a big fan of the “you can read it after we vote on it” method of legislating, regardless of who is legislating.)
You may find that at least – some – of your concerns are addressed in the actual draft, particularly re: the prospect of a bad mission commander early on (who somehow nonetheless gets a spacecraft to Mars in the first instance). As what the journalists call a “tease,” history provided me much more than only the 1789 Constitution to draw from in addressing, inter alia, such a situation.
But I’m otherwise going to hold off on speaking in the abstract about content where I spent – considerable – time working on actual concrete provisions seeking to address particular situations, issues and concerns.
And I don’t want to do anything that might tend to further hijack Paul’s really unrelated discussion, after what was intended by me to be only a passing reference directed to a very particular point regarding connotations of words.
Mars “ain’t going anywhere,” relatively speaking; and it doesn’t look like we’re getting there anytime soon. (When I started working on the draft, the prospects of someone at least actually trying to send permanent settlers to Mars seemed more imminent then than they do now.)
So I’d suggest that we just wait a bit re: further discussion here and see whether I can find a workable vehicle to post the actual specific – draft – material on the web. And then go from there.
It’s good that there’s this much interest from a passing reference. But I think further discussion would be improved by continuing against the backdrop of the draft itself, at least as written to this point. So I’ll be looking for a vehicle toward that end.
George, re this:
“The Centauri site never showed that the reply was awaiting moderation; but it thereafter told me, a couple of times over a couple of days, that I was trying to post previously submitted material.”
I never saw this, so I assume it was automated in the software. If you run into this problem again, let me know in an email and I’ll fix it.
Thanks, Paul . . . it probably worked out for the best, as I think my second, “let’s hold off on running further down this rabbit hole right now” response probably was better on balance.
I (think I) made some decent points in the prior attempted submission. But I think if I put the draft out somewhere first, some folks might go something like: “oh . . . well, if . . . that’s . . . what we’re specifically talking about, that’s not too bad . . . but you might consider maybe doing this tweak there . . . .” And then we likely will have a more productive discussion dealing with actual specifics rather than with abstractions in short posts going back and forth.
But, yeah, definitely thanks.
My pleasure, George. Your contributions here are much appreciated.
What a great discussion.
This post reminded me of the scene in Star Trek Next Generation where Data very decisively orders the crew to abandon ship.
https://youtu.be/xzF28qAe9Ug?si=1LQmt0sskFJxRqVO
Ross’s reflection is interesting insofar as it brings us back to the question of why we explore. If there’s an idea of appropriation peculiar to the human species, there’s also the eternal and agonizing question of whether we’re alone. There’s no guarantee that we’d pursue our research as relentlessly if, tomorrow morning, we knew we were no longer alone in the universe because we’d be probably focusing on this novelty. It does seem important to me to have a certain philosophy in our “SETI” in parallel with the purely technological thinking.
@George King
I think your draft is based on the context of a settlement that wishes to become independent of the nation that outfits the trip. Is that so?
What if any Mars settlement is more like a corporate [mining] town, where the corporation sets the rules and dictates what the “law” is and how it is executed?
This seems like a plausible alternative model given the increasing size and power of corporations and the need to ensure that the settlement is not just a cost but is also producing something of value. [Idk what that value could be based on, although I doubt there is any material based on extraction that would be economic. Perhaps some unique subsurface biology?]
A corporate settlement might operate like ocean platforms today, and where the corporation’s home base might be the legal jurisdiction, as well as any rights of the crew. If so, a US corp. could still operate under US laws which would apply to the settlement.
Yes, the settlement could eventually wish to become independent if they thought they could become sufficiently self-sufficient from the parent corp. and at that point want to create a new constitution and basis for a legal system.
Yes, Alex, there definitely are a number of scenarios under which an intended permanent settlement might be established on Mars.
And, ultimately, we may well see a number of settlements attempted by a number of quite different government, corporate and/or other interests. Spacefaring nations are not limited to Western or Western-type democracies; and more nations, such as, for example, nations in the Middle East, are seeking to initiate or expand spacefaring capabilities. And the news stream over the past few years certainly has discussed proposals by corporations, mercurial billionaires, and even corporate media outfits wanting to do the first offworld reality show, to fund the “project.” (One would hope that a “reality show” settlement would not be left literally high and very, very dry if the ratings didn’t hold up.)
My working draft definitely is written primarily for a context where a Western or Western-type (such as Japan or India) democracy, or a coalition of such governments, is the driving force behind the settlement from the outset. The question then is of providing a viable structure for on-site governance of the settlement — either as an entity that politically and legally is subordinate to a home world sovereignty back on Earth (i.e., a “provincial local government” on Mars) or instead, as I suggest, starting, at least theoretically, as an independent sovereign from the outset. Either way, the settlement will need some form of local government that transitions away from what necessarily will start as a mission that, onsite, initially is under the ultimate operational command of a single individual (see also my discussion with Project Studio).
You’re raising the prospect basically of an offworld “company town.” Where the corporation is saying basically: “If you’re an employee for the company in the company town, you follow the company’s rules. All decisions will be made by either ‘corporate’ back on Earth and/or, under ‘corporate’s’ ultimate direction and control, the head company officer on Mars.” That very well may occur.
A corporation definitely will have essentially total control, as they will be able to control the purse strings with an iron grip. Any nascent Martian financial “system” – whether for interplanetary or intraplanetary commerce – most definitely will start merely as an exchange of debits or credits in Terran-based financial accounts. These days, outside of gold in central bank vaults and the residual physical money still in circulation, the money actually used in commerce is just information — packets of data — stored on and exchanged between computers. A wholly information-based monetary system allows for at least the potential for total control, as the corporation can cut off a settler’s financial access to goods and services including on Mars. And it’s not like they will be able to just go off and boondock somewhere and live off the land. Everything, including even access to the air they breathe, may be subject to ultimate corporate control, which of course was part of the thesis in the first Total Recall.
We’ll just have to see how all that goes if the company town becomes a toehold for a Martian civilization that grows beyond its initial corporate focus. But there’s certainly any number of sci fi dystopias – set on Earth and in the heavens – where a dictatorial corporate entity or cabal refuses to relinquish control. (Heck, some have even said that we either are in or are well on our way to such a dystopia of corporate control now, lol.)
There’s otherwise arguably not a necessary connection between legal independence and practical, functional self-sufficiency. I doubt that any independent sovereign nation these days is entirely self-sufficient to the point where they are wholly independent of international trade – at least they likely would endure substantial hardship if they were to be cut off from — all — foreign trade.
Regardless of how a settlement gets started, yes, as you note, its denizens ultimately may decide that they want to craft their own structure for at least local self-governance. A document such as I am working on would be one resource for them to consider in preparing their own governing document. I’ve written it so that it potentially can be operative from that first “one small step” onto Martian (or other) regolith by an intended settler. But the staggered provisions for primarily population-level-based changes in structure (see again my response to Project Studio’s reply) can be implemented at basically any point along the way.
So, to your specific question, yes, my draft – in part – is for settlement that desires independence either initially or somewhere along the way. But even a provincial government subordinate to a Terran sovereignty still needs structure. And the document is directed to that structure, either way. I focused in my initial note above on independent sovereignty in order to sharply distinguish a “settlement” from a “colony” at least semantically, as those words were the focus of that note.
But it’s a constitution, not simply a declaration of independence. It just seeks to eliminate the need for ever feeling the need for such a declaration, by including it as one facet of the one overall draft document.
A corollary to our discussion here is that there very well may be multiple Martian settlements being present ultimately at the same time that are founded by multiple different interests – some of which may have no desire whatsoever to found (or even see flourish) a Western-type liberal democracy in a settlement on Mars. Thus raising the prospect of intraplanetary foreign policy and possibly, unfortunately, even conflict. History of course is full of examples of wars, proxy wars, and civil wars fought over the expansion of a particular type of political, economic and/or social system into new territory.
But that’s another note for another day.
(As is a discussion of what a Martian interplanetary and intraplanetary economy might be based on, including vis-à-vis interests back on Earth. Similar to the discussions here of a projected Martian agriculture, including following upon your article, booting up a civilization on another planet from scratch – with multiple facets that we just take for granted back here – of course is “quite” an undertaking. But a discussion for another day . . . .)
Zubrin has just published a book examining what life on Mars (human) might look like: https://mailchi.mp/marssociety/2022convention-1105034?e=28029e7d0b
Outside of those groups which will settle space both in the Sol system and beyond with baseline humans, I forsee most of our future in space as belonging to the Artilects and inorganic machines. They are more durable, faster, smarter, and everything else required to survive in the harsh environment of open space and other worlds beyond Earth.
Also see my recent Centauri Dreams essay on how humans could join the machines in space if they are modified for the various celestial environments:
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2022/11/04/in-person-or-proxy-to-mars-and-beyond/
No space agency is truly ready for a crewed mission to Mars or anywhere else beyond Luna, despite having humans in space since 1961 and a space station that has been continuously occupied for over two decades. See here:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/i-ve-been-studying-astronaut-psychology-since-apollo-a-long-voyage-to-mars-in-a-confined-space-could-raise-stress-levels-and-make-the-journey-more-challenging/ar-BB1iEhd7?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=5c40aa6b7eb74fd2fdc81b23394bfee3&ei=9
And this book might also come in handy for the issue:
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2012/09/11/the-psychology-of-space-exploration-a-review/
It is easy to focus on the technical aspects of deep space exploration, as one sees in this very article and the comments thread. However, unless we address the human factor, we will probably have to rely on robots and advanced AI to get the jobs done.
Whatever else may happen down the road, Earth will become uninhabitable in just a few billion years thanks to our star changing from a yellow dwarf sun to a red giant. We will have to move elsewhere as a species, or whoever is still around by then.
Maybe we will end up living in the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud for a while as our Sol changes from a red giant to a white dwarf, but eventually we will have to find a younger and stable star system to inhabit – unless we just want to cruise around the galaxy in a WorldShip and avoid the whole settling down in one place thing.
@LJK
When we think (if we can) in terms of billions of years, let us remember that every metazoan on Earth has evolved from the phyla that appeared in the Cambrian, just over 1/2 bya. There will be no “humans”, or post-humans. If our lineage continues, in a billion years it will be very different in form, although most likely the lineage will not continue, but will be supplanted by something else entirely.
I agree that artilects will likely be the dominant forms in space, and will likely prove more long-lasting in some form than biological intelligences. They also have the advantage that when the Earth is uninhabitable for metazoa, they can survive on Earth until it is consumed by the sun in its red giant stage, and, like Stapleton’s 18th men, continue to occupy the remaining outer planets, as well as dwarf planets, and asteroids all the way out into the Oort, and make the jump to the nearer stars. In a billion years, they could potentially occupy every star system in the galaxy.
Whether we should characterize these artilects as “we” (our descendants) or a totally separate lineage of intelligence (the latter, IMO) with little to no connection with their [post]human creators, will be of no interest to extinct “humans”. Complex life in our system will likely disappear, leaving it to the artilects and surviving microbes.
The counterfactual to this future is that the machines may want to preserve some form of humanity (and its required biosphere support), by preserving the state of the biosphere and our genetic form at some future point and maintaining that state in perpetual stasis, preventing evolution, at least of humans. Whether this will be like Clarke’s Diaspar in The City and the Stars or a zoo/nature preserve as a variant on the “Zoo Hypothesis” posted recently. What we can be sure of, is if this scenario is to survive the deep time when the sun dies, this preserved humanity will not be living on planet Earth (unless the artilect version of the Magratheans has decided to design a new Earth in another, younger, star system).
Compelled by increasing complexity and the concomitant decreasing returns, corporations expand and coalesce becoming behemoths that overwhelm and meld with societal and governance armatures: thus fascism, the combination of governance and corporate management into an increasingly unified continuum as in China and the USA amongst others.
Off-earth, with control over the very air one breathes and the increasing complexity demanded by unaccommodating environments, the dependence on corporatocracy will be just that much greater. Even if biological humans have been replaced by Artilects and their associated machines.
The further we “evolve(?)” from the earliest of our ancestral hunter-gatherer bands, the more rigorous the constraints on the individual and the group – no matter which way you slice it. Even the elites are under unspoken constraints of conformity.
Fascism, especially wrt the original Italian concept is the government directing and controlling corporations and business to control the state. In the US, it seems more like corporations and business controlling the government. It is fuzzy, but I don’t think that is fascism. If the US government takes control those business entities then we will have fascism. However, this seems unlikely, as these entities are now transnational and largely outside of a single government’s control.
I recommend reading Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism which is about the imbalance of corporate vs government power and the problems it has caused. The power imbalance has been and continues to be, favorable towards corporations rather than the government.IMO, the US is becoming more authoritarian via its own agencies, especially laws enacted and the use of law enforcement against the population. And yes, those laws favor moneyed interests i.e. big corporations and the super-wealthy.
That corporate power over governments, already being used to change treaties on space resources, may well result in corporate control of space settlements, much as it does on Earth, but with even greater control over any human settlers “working on Maggie’s farm”. The 1960’s counterculture ultimately failed, and government and corporations won.
Alex, read the twitter files, governments were interfering with freedom of speech not the other way round.
This is my only response to the “Twitter files” issue as it is now wildly off-topic.
1. Government censorship is one facet of authoritarian government, including fascism. (c.f. Fascism in interwar Italy and Germany. Contemporary: e.g. Hungary, Russia, and Poland (PiS party control, now ended)).
2. The Twitter Files was an agenda-laden attempt by Elon Musk to “prove” censorship by Twitter. Its evidence was widely debunked, and I believe, tainted the journalism of Matt Taibi. [Money corrupts?] The irony, of course, is that Musk at the helm has proven far more censorious than when Dorsey was in control.
I don”t think it is Alex, any government interference from left and right is to be avoided. Matt Taibbi is quite a left leaning journalist so for him to speak out is unusual. As for Elon I would rather work for him and do my best than work as a grant slave to an ungrateful tax heavy and mores coming government. And it is most certainly not off topic as a government will have to be formed in space eventually to govern their subjects and our activities.
“Off-earth, with control over the very air one breathes and the increasing complexity demanded by unaccommodating environments, the dependence on corporatocracy will be just that much greater. ”
Hence the limitations and harshness of outposts on Mars, Ceres, or O’Neil cylinders, etc. People will emigrate to an exoplanet with a ‘close enough’ self-maintaining ecosystem if at all possible.
Back in the 1970s to 1980s might have been a golden era for designing L5 and L4 habitats. And if I recall correctly, the efforts went toward self sustained vehicles with a window toward the sun and just a bit of propulsion capability. The various organizations engaged in their development often had illustrations of people out in vineyards or other acreage enjoying a picnic or gathering the harvests…
And would you like to buy a bridge connecting two New York City boroughs?
Not entirely fanciful. One would presume that if industrial civilization survives the current crises, many industrial civilization problems could be alleviated by space infrastructure – outsourcing much mining and manufacturing to remote areas beyond the Earth. Even supporting populations somewhat comfortably – further and further from the sun.
You get the picture. I suspect operations around Jupiter would be too hostile due to the E-M, but other large planets, the asteroids, or moons could provide better access to raw materials to support … millions in such artificial additions to the solar system…?
So, on the long term such habitats could be launched toward other stars … Except that what do you do to replace the influx of light from the sun?
Reflecting mirrors are only going to take you so far… So eventually, fusion power will have to include something akin to providing for artificial suns – even if such a device takes the habitat only as far as the Kuiper Belt. If you can do that though, then interstellar is more of the same, but for a much longer haul.
But then the more features the habitat includes for a full human society, the more of a liability these amenities have for eventual interstellar migration.
Then we encounter all the other paradoxes of trying to reach a star. Throw an amenity away and you reduce the odds for a society’s survival in transit. Keep it and the transit will take longer. Accept nothing that will take longer than your best working alternative.
Among those that occur is the possibility that one star or more will eventually wander into the solar neighborhood. Not simultaneously unless they are part of binary ( as in the case of the red dwarf Sholz’s star and brown dwarf 70,000 years ago). That was within 52,000 AUs.
Now another incident might not be for 70,000 years or maybe even more, but our transit rates to nearby stars with current means are not much better. This would be about an eighth of the distance to Alpha Centauri, and I don’t really know which of the two has the better real estate. But in both cases, they would provide genuine sun-like thermal sources out the window.
But if your “mission capture” capabilities take you only to stars with deficient planetary systems, there is no point in initiating the journey.
And we are still talking journeys of a millennium or more either way.
Nuclear fusion might bring relatively small payload fractions to destinations in centuries, say, but for larger habitats, thousands of year journeys might be made more sustainable…
And the decisions about such transits? The basic consideration would still be whether it could be established that habitable planets existed at the targeted star systems. That might be one of the easier parts of these scenarios to assess. But the worry there is whether this criterion forces a seach out from parsecs to tens of parsecs.
Wdk, Jupiter is not that bad. The issue is mostly Io providing the material to be ionised, tame that and you have a huge power source to throw spacecraft to the stars.
Just remember that “trasnhumanism” is a fancy word for when medicine turns into a true bio-engineering discipline. Today, doctors are neither scientists or engineers.
Colonizing Space Might Be More Difficult Than Anyone Expected
Story by Tobias Carroll
Does the future of humanity involve living in outer space? Plenty of movies, television shows, tech magnates and governments have answered that with a resounding “Yes!” As for writers Kelly and Zach Weinersmith — well, they’re not so sure.
The Weinersmiths are the authors of a new book, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? As the subtitle indicates, they take a somewhat more skeptical approach to questions of living in space, from exploring the very real health risks of spending extended periods of time traveling through the solar system to pondering the logistical challenges of establishing a permanent settlement on another world. And that’s before they get to the question of space cannibalism.
Full interview here:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/colonizing-space-might-be-more-difficult-than-anyone-expected/
While I do not pretend that exploring and settling space with human crews will be easy, I wonder if this modern-day over cautiousness, pessimism, and navel-gazing are the real hindrances…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/colonizing-space-might-be-more-difficult-than-anyone-expected/ar-AA1lnN9a?rc=1&ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=208d98876f99436396925f3eb345630b&ei=10
See this new essay about early attempts at human flight. The boldness and the destiny is what motivated these brave pioneers, whose work, including their failures, led to real flight:
https://lithub.com/crash-again-crash-better-a-brief-history-of-failed-attempts-at-human-flight/
There are alternatives, by the way…
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2022/11/04/in-person-or-proxy-to-mars-and-beyond/