I found this article about why we’ll probably never be able to escape earth in a fleet of chrome-y, salvific starships to be beautifully written and surprisingly moving! Won’t you join me in the reading of it? (Also, if you are a Science Person and have reason to be more optimistic about the possibility of post-Earth humanity, please reassure me in the comments.)
Meanwhile, the tremendous increase in our knowledge of biology has taught us that human beings are much more complicated than we thought, being in effect complex assemblages interpenetrated with larger ecologies.
These and other findings make a contemporary evaluation of the starfaring plan rather startling: one begins to see it can’t be done.
Oh no! For some people this is a disturbing and deeply pessimistic conclusion to come to. Then when you combine that new judgment with the recently discovered problems concerning the plan to terraform and inhabit Mars (presence of perchlorates and absence of nitrogen), and we come to an entirely new realization about our species: there is no Planet B.
Earth is our only home.
Oh no again!
I do not spend a lot of my time wondering about humanity will do after I myself have died, much less what we will do in the more-or-less-near future when the Earth becomes uninhabitable, so I was more than a little surprised to find myself so heartbroken to learn that travel to the stars is almost certainly impossible, no matter how fast and massive we eventually build our spaceships.
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t go into space; we should. We should send people to the moon, and Mars, and the asteroids, and every place we can in the solar system, putting up stations and swapping humans in and out of them. This is not only a beautiful thing to do, but useful in helping us to design a long-term relationship with Earth itself. Space science is an Earth science. The solar system is our neighborhood. But the stars are too far away.”
Why did this paragraph make me a little weepy? I don’t know, friends! I don’t know! I want something dim and distantly good to happen to us as a group, whether that be some sort of placid, pleasant afterlife or at least a hospitable bacterial biome for our genetic material. And probably it won’t! (I just like living so very much, I hate the idea of running out of it forever. I’d like to stay.)
If nothing else, this is a good reminder for all of us to re-read Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. “’Soon the sun will set’ – is that prophecy? No, it’s merely an assertion of faith in the consistency of events…It never was any better, it never will be any better. It will only be richer or poorer, sadder but not wiser, until the very last day.” Bless me, Father, for I ate a lizard.
(I just like living so very much, I hate the idea of running out of it forever. I’d like to stay.)
i feel like this more or less sums up…well, everything, really.
this^ times 1000
I actually feel quite comforted by the thought of dying sometimes, when I think about how the world has the potential to go to shit (climate change is the main driver of this). I will have escaped from the rising sea levels and the wars over fossil fuels forever, hooray!
Where is my space elevator?
Additionally, everyone read 2312 because it’s great.
Although it’ll probably make you sad that we might never zoom around to planets in terraformed, themed asteroids.
Breaking my usual lurkerdom to say that part of why this essay cut me so deep is that it was by Kim Stanley Robinson, famous for his utopian scifi, like 2312 and the Mars Trilogy! This is the guy who made me dream about space, and no he’s bringin’ me down.
At least this is motivation for me to read his latest book, to see how he handles the whole generation ship concept that he puts down in his essay.
Noooooo! Et tu, Kim Stanley Robinson? Those books transformed me! I have been holding out hope for a Bogdanovist Mars colony!
Maybe we can get a Bogdanovist Earth colony instead.
I just (mostly) read Aurora, and I’ve gotta be honest, it’s basically this article, but a lot longer and with a lot more detail about specific problems. I mean, the first part where he’s introducing everything about how the ship works was interesting, and there are parts where I was really interested in the ship itself as a character (it narrates most of the story), but at a certain point the plot just became “things are going wrong.” The characters discover more things going wrong, things are still going wrong but more, everyone talks about what’s going wrong without having any solutions, etc etc, and then I stopped and just read the summary of the ending on wikipedia, and that was enough for me.
I liked the ideas of 2312 very much, the little biomes and Venus and Mercury and all that, but good god did I dislike Swan.
ETA – not that protagonists must all be likeable!
I was pretty indifferent to Swan but I really didn’t like Wahram and was sort of irritated at the lack of character development for Genette. Like the smalls in general seemed to very much be plot devices and set dressing rather than actual characters.
Was it just me or did the romance come out of nowhere? The ideas were the best part of the book.
Yeah they were both like, “You fail my personal Turing Test, maybe that’s sexy? Author?”
And Robinson was like, “Odd pairings are my jam. Go go go.”
Can we talk about Red Mars, too? I lovelovelovelovelove that book (favourite hard science fiction book? Possibly!), but can’t seem to get into Green Mars. It’s a damn shame, because I was desperate for more after finishing the first one.
I feel like the first fifty pages were a little dreamy and… trying really hard to give us a feel for what Mars had become since the last book. I think the last two thirds is better than the first book, but it’s because I like… discussion of infrastructure problems? And obviously some botanist cornered him at a dinner party because the botany is an order of magnitude better in the second book, which is obviously the most important thing in any science fiction.
Also there’s a lot more Nadia, and Nadia is the best, who is the person getting the Nadia tattoo, that is a boss tattoo.
Nadia is by far the best character, like, my god.
With you on the first 50 pages. I got partway into the procedural stuff in Green Mars (the big underground conference) and kind of petered out, though. In Red Mars all of the political theorising and manipulation felt so gritty and intense, like you could sense how high the stakes were, but I didn’t feel that thrill of excitement in the 2nd book. Maybe I didn’t give it a fair shot. Dammit, I’m going to pick it up again!
To be fair, part of the whole point of Green Mars is that the revolution needs to deal with the boring bureaucratic stuff too; it can’t all be sexy space explosions or it’ll be a repeat of 2061. It’s even lampshaded, with Mikhail the anarchist Bogdanovist complaining at the Dorsa Brevia conference about the boring sessions about school systems and wastewater wand whatever.
Not sure how far you got so this may be spoilery but for me most of the tension in the second half of the book comes from Maya and the other people trying desperately to sustain but also slow down the unrest on Mars until the opportune moment for successful revolution arrives; one misstep and they will bring the fury of the terrans down on their heads early and lose their chance.
I’m just hear to say yes! Nadia is the best.
I am the person who is still trying to decide where to put the Nadia tattoo.
She rules!
Tell me more about the Nadia tattoo?
I want to get a delta v tattoo because of that passage in the beginning of Red Mars – I love it so much. I don’t know where to put mine either; inside of the wrist seems best but I don’t know if I want to have to explain it to everyone who asks.
‘Beauty is power and elegance, form fitting function, right action, intelligence and reasonability’ – what Arkady says when she asks him why he loves her.
I just don’t know where to put it – my back and torso are covered already and I don’t think I want to go down my arms.
Nadia, but also Ann Clayborne.
Gotta love a misanthropic optimist.
I feel like I should read those books again, just so I can appreciate Ann appropriately.
I loved Red Mars and somehow never started Green Mars, but “a lot more Nadia” is EXACTLY the review I needed to get me to read it.
I think that this is probably because there are so many new characters that he introduces but leaves really vague and he veers hard into political and social stuff (a major topic in every other work of his I’ve read). Blue Mars is much of the same, more new characters, more political and social theory, less technical stuff.
Which like ideally the book would be 30% destruction of space elevators and moons and terraforming, and 65% dealing with the ecological ramifications
I have it on audiobook and I’m really trying to get into it, but it feels kinda dated? Like, he’s obviously trying to do right by 70’s feminists but he can’t really imagine what being a woman is actually like. Maybe it will be better once it’s not from the POV of noted nationalist-misogynist Frank half the time
Oh! Have you read Aurora? It’s Robinson’s anti-2312. I just finished it and I’m *crushed*. It’s not like his Mars Trilogy or 2312. Like he read some actual science on biology and ecology and population genetics and had to share his existential crisis with all his readers.
Noo don’t be crushed! I took it more as a cautionary tale. Just because shit gets messed up flying to and from tau ceti it doesn’t mean we can’t have at 2312 style life here in the solar system. Shooting around in biomes (or whatever) and then restocking as needed. Taking our time to figure out how to avoid all those unforeseen problems. We’re gunna do it! I am aggressively space-optimistic.
I agree! The points about physics seem pretty difficult to get around, but the biology problems are just that we don’t know enough yet. Yes, biological systems are very complex and we barely understand them right now. But there’s nothing but time and effort preventing us from learning enough to understand them. I mean, the ship in Aurora was the first of its kind. Of course there were problems! You do something big and hard and complex, and you screw it up, and you learn from it and do better. That is how we all learn things.
Of course I veer wildly between that sort of optimism and “we’ll have screwed ourselves over too badly to recover from before we learn enough to get to that point,” but none of this is going to go down within my lifetime anyway. I just want my self-driving car.
I just finished reading Aurora, it is specifically mentioned that it is not the first of it’s kind, nor was it the last. It was however, the only one that stayed in contact and the only one that returned out of something like two dozen that were launched. That’s a pretty grim outcome.
Don’t worry! All of this is based on the assumption human beings exist by the time “we” have a realistic shot at traveling the stars. Our horrifying genetically altered neurally linked man-machine hybrid great great great grandchildren won’t have such a hard time with the listed constraints.
THANKS ROB
I can’t wait!
There’s not even a good jet pack for us to buy at Target or anything. I guess we’re destined to take JJ Abrams’ space scraps or just run around in circles making “VROOM!” noises while eating astronaut ice cream.
It sounds like you’re implying that running around saying VROOM while eating astronaut ice cream is a Thing That Will Occur Only in the Future, rather than a Thing I Am Doing Right Now.
(Ok, Dippin Dots isn’t actually astronaut ice cream but I spent the first decade of my life or so thinking it was. Close enough.)
I will cling to Wait But Why’s series on Elon Musk’s grand Mars plan* like Luke clinging to that metal thing under Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back.
*http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html
just a heads up, the asterisk made the link not work. I googled my way there though
Thanks! 🙂
well…so there’ve been massive revolutions in physics before. the fact that Einstein basically curbstomped Newton in terms of fundamental assumptions about the universe isn’t necessarily a one-time event. geniuses do occur, and the definition of a genius is someone who sees something no one else could. that’s not to say faster-than-light travel is physically possible, but just because our current (admittedly sophisticated) understanding suggests not doesn’t mean we won’t get Einstein’d again. we just can’t know either if or when.
interestingly a lot of the problems with a generation ship could be handled to a certain extent with medical transhumanism. some thinkers are optimistic about curing aging, which would knock out a lot of the problems with a ship that takes 200 years to reach its destination in one swoop. if we had a more sophisticated understanding of the brain, we could better treat or eliminate all those bugs in our psychology like boredom and cabin fever and both authoritarianism and resistance to leadership. if our bodies or itty bitty roboids living inside us stopped cancer when it started, we’d be able to withstand more radiation. if we weren’t such flawed animals, unintentionally shaped by the puddle we were poured into, then simpler solutions to this kind of problem could prevail. designer humanity would make interstellar colonization much more plausible, although still not much of a tourist thing. if you want an interesting novel that explores this premise, that Einsteinian physics is basically accurate but posthumans can be used to colonize the galaxy, check out Neptune’s Brood. a race of organic robot hybrid thingies has conquered the stars in the far, far future, and some of them almost religiously shepherd around human goo so that they can bring their originator race to the cosmos. the story itself is about how economics works in a slower-than-light travel/lightspeed communication society, which is interesting in and of itself.
don’t hold your breath, though. especially not in hard vacuum. expel all the air from your lungs immediately and you can survive up to thirty seconds or so.
Do you suppose that an adult human body from, say, the present day could be retrofitted with the medical technology you mentioned if they were to travel to a point in the future where it exists? Asking for a friend.
In that particular book, if I remember correctly, all the species’ cells are essentially sophisticated nanomachines. Still, maybe you could Theseus’ Ship oneself to convert to posthuman.
I’m a science fanboy, not a scientist, but I think the outlook’s not good for us normals. I’m still waiting on the conventional medical revolution so that just being alive isn’t a constant physical torment. also not holding my breath, because the respirocytes have to be installed prenatally.
Upvoted for mentioning a Charles Stross book.
Neptune’s Brood! So good. I’m reading the Nexus trilogy now, which is basically about humanity dealing with the emerging abilities to become trans / post-human. I’m all aboard the post human train.
“the definition of a genius is someone who sees something no one else could”
A common misconception! Newton and Einstein are actually constructive examples. Recall that Leibnitz invented calculus more-or-less concurrently with Newton, and that Einstein’s annus mirabilis was not so much a set of discoveries that only he could have discovered, but rather three to four separate major discoveries that were actively being investigated by other theorists at the time. Even Einstein’s crown jewel, general relativity, was (at most) a century ahead of it’s time – we only now have the experimental apparatus and computational sophistication to perform strong constraining tests of his theories.
Which is not to say that those men weren’t incredible – they likely single-handedly advanced their fields by 10-100 year jumps. But the solutions they uncovered were out there, and would have been found by others had they not existed.
interesting!
The Expanse TV show starts soon and I am so excited! I can’t wait to see those books come to life. Mars vs Earth, crappy asteroid cities, and Shoreh Aghdashloo!
I have not heard of this show, but I would follow Shoreh Aghdashloo into a volcano if she smiled and spoke to me.
I highly recommend image searching “Chrisjen Avasarala” to see all of the amazing outfits she is wearing in the show. Those saris! That hooded coat!
Ooh, thanks!
Unnnfff yes her voice is outRAHgeous.
I would obey her while swooning.
I can’t even deal w/ how excited I am for that show. I’m torn between watching them as come out or waiting till the end of the season and binge watching the whole thing. All at once is my my general preference but I don’t think I’ll have enough self control to wait.
I too am hyped somwthing fierce.I hope hope hope it turns out and runs a couple of seasons so we get to see pastor Anna give methodist communion with bulbs of grape juice in zero-G. Also want to see her wear a brown suit and just hang-out. That book did more to get me through my ingrained disdain for religion than I deserve or could’ve hoped for.
I learned ecology at the same time my roommates had an immense, needlessly complicated fishtank, and it forever colored my understanding of how ecology works.
Anyway, just put like one dude on Mars in a big shelter for a couple years, let it cycle with all the bacteria that he brought with him, and then send a hundred plus people to settle the arcologies. If someone’s taking a class on algae, dump only the single-celled versions into the atmosphere, because the multicellular stuff will grow two meters a week and the colonists won’t have anywhere to pack all that extra biomass.
You can’t control what the Special Interest Fairy bops you over the head with, and sometimes it makes you a person who will stare at your roommates’ fishtank for hours a day, asks a multitude of questions, and does nothing material or active to support said fish tank.
I was not the best roommate.
No! That was ideal! DO NOT TOUCH THE FISH TANK!
(NotThatAmy is my actual roommate with the fish tank. Obviously if you are selecting a roommate you should go for someone who will also read the Toast. This is difficult if the Toast will not be invented for ten years, but somehow we both chose well.)
(multiple immense needlessly complicated tanks, by the time it was all said and done)
I miss my gobis and my puffers and all of my amazonian aquatic flora.
This gives us a good alternate ending for “The Martian” though – eventually, the human settlement on Mars will be very grateful to Watney and his gut bioflora.
I was basically just thinking “isn’t this like The Martian, but in reverse?”
I approve of using Matt Damon as that first zebra fish that we all know probably won’t make it because the nitrates are going to be all over the place for the first couple of weeks and also who the hell knows what sort of pathogens came in with all those exotic aquatic plants you ordered from Florida?
Matt Damon seems nice, but if you need a list of sexist botanists to strand on another planet, lmk.
Wait, did you miss Matt Damon whitesplaining racial diversity to Effie Brown and hetsplaining homophobia in Hollywood to Ellen DeGeneres?
He might be nice, but he’s pretty freaking clueless.
Uuuugh, I did miss that. How many people can we send to Mars?
I’m imagining Martian soil scientists categorizing any organic layers as ‘Wamus’.
Wetland delineation on Mars being based on any signs of hydrology at all, Wamus-rich soil, and mutated Martian potatoes.
Mars is probably not that different from the Incan highlands.
That’s baaaaasically my reaction, except I’m imagining space stations as people-fishtanks. You wanna figure out the ecological hurdles on inhabiting space? Get some aquarists in your think-tank!
help I put a German in my space station and now he’s 12 feet tall and has eaten the other astronauts
The European stock is really genetically limited, so they’re prone to space-madness. You’re going to need to isolate him until it passes so that no one else becomes infected – do you have an empty nursery spaceship? You might also want to change the air a little early, filter out some of the entrails.
*dies laughing*
*iz ded*
This is the best idea on this entire article, and I love you.
BRB, sending this to The Burgomaster who is a Science Person with die-hard optimism about the possibility of post-Earth humanity.
Okay. Kim Stanley Robinson, of all people, knows what he’s talking about, and what he says is true. But if you want to feel a glimmer of optimism for our efforts to get out of here, you can read about the 100 Year Starship (http://100yss.org/). It got a big ol’ grant from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in order to “excite several generations to commit to the research and development of breakthrough technologies to advance the eventual goal of interstellar space travel.” It’s also headed by astronaut/superhero Mae Jemison, whose boots we are not worthy to kiss.
She certainly is *lightyears* ahead of us all in badassedness. Thanks for showing me a new superhero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae_Jemison (hell yeah she grew up in Chicago)
I’m with Frost on the topic of space travel: (he wasn’t really talking about space travel; I am wilfully misunderstanding him)
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
he really was just BEGGING to be willfully misunderstood.
Balderdash.
First, the argument that “Newton was wrong, so Einstein could be wrong too” is hooey. Newton was right in broad strokes; relativity is a refinement of Newtonian physics in certain extreme circumstances like high gravity and high velocity. If you look closely at Newton you arrive at Einstein, but our scientists have looked very closely at Einstein and seen no hint of other physics beyond. So that leaves us with the inescapable conclusions of relativity: the fastest you can arrive at the nearest star is four years and some months, and it will take you over a hundred thousand years of objective time to cross the galaxy.
But, so what? It won’t happen in our lifetimes, but certainly a travel time of 100 years to get to nearby stars is doable. The tech is nowhere near ready, but that doesn’t mean it never will be. Even if we just send advanced A.I., or frozen embryos, or something else we can’t even imagine yet, it likely can be done at some future technological level of development. Bouncing around the galaxy in FTL drives? Unlikely. But that doesn’t mean that all types of interstellar civilization are impossible.
Amen and thank you. Was just about to rant about this (and Kim Stanley Robinson’s general take on science fiction) in general (but you’ve spared the Toasties my noise).
I’d already come to this conclusion, after reading this longread on the “Mars One” project/scam. (I’m pretty sure that it’s already been on The Toast, but it’s worth repeating, especially after The Martian.)
Oh hello, daily crippling angst at birthing children into this dying world.
Just the current biosphere! Life on earth will be around long after we’re gone.
But it’s still a closed system. There won’t be much life around when the sun cools, expands, and obliterates the planet.
Well, Earth life has another 5 billion years, give or take, to figure out how to deal with that! We’re basically in the planet’s midlife crisis right now.
Well, maybe not if we turn Earth into New Venus first.
I have to imagine this is not particularly helpful for Frumiosa’s anxiety about her children.
I start to feel bad about my potential offspring and then I remember that if I have kids it’ll be because of my own selfish reasons and that I’m bringing them in, their suffering will not *directly* be my fault, and I can take them out. ( << I don’t mean any of that.)
I do not want children, and while this is mainly due to the simple fact that I don’t like children that much, the thought that I will not be creating new individuals to suffer through climate change is actually quite comforting.
(If it makes you feel better, my mother frequently talks about how she feels really bad for me and my siblings, as we reached adulthood as the recession hit and are experiencing all of the fun Millennial stuff of low-paid jobs and lack of any chance of homeownership. But we’re fine! So this generation’s children probably will be as well.)
Always wanted starships to happen, and see the wonders of the universe close up, but have really suspected it would be like being stuck on a dysentery plagued submarine, FOREVER.
I remain blindingly, grotesquely, almost fatalistically optimistic regardless. Stop crushing my dreams, science.
I am not worried. We are constantly evolving, as is our body ecology. The bacteria will figure out a way to survive and so will some of the human race. Maybe the obesity “epidemic” is an evolutionary response to the coming dark times?
While he’s right that perchlorates and nitrates and soil disparity and all of our delicate intestinal fauna will pose problems, that’s really short-term thinking. Evolution is for always, and if we introduce life to these places it will, uh, find a way.
As much as I approve of quoting the sexist scientist-impersonating dude of all time, I have to point out that evolution is entirely and exclusively about short-term solutions. That’s all it can solve. There are real, definite, hard limits to our biology that evolution cannot resolve no matter how much we wish it would.
It’s not even that! It’s the death of everything that wasn’t somehow already adapted to the current shitshow. Also probably things like “you happened to build an extra-deep tunnel on accident” and “you were not bitten by the disease-giving tick during the worst part of the epidemic.”
Death is senseless and random, so too, then, is life!
Cheerful thought.
Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints, it takes, and it takes, and it takes, and we keep living anyway…
Exactly. Why worry? Everyone you know, someday, will die.
In a way that is neither a karmic reward nor a cosmic punishment, and no god will laugh cruelly at the irony of the situation.
Just realized I misspelled sexiest. Sorry, everyone.
Life might find a way, but what sort of life survives is chaotic – evolution is the story of a billion extinctions. Would you find the survival of blue-green algae to be comforting? A Mars, settled only by tardigrades and bacteria?
Fun fact, until this moment I had always written “tardigrade” as “tardis gaurd” which is now out of my subconscious and into my headcanon.
i do find the survival of blue-green algae comforting. or the idea of it. which sounds snarky but isn’t!
It also occurred in an environment where anything less than a gradual couple-percent shift in temperature or atmosphere composition over a few million years means everything immediately starts going extinct. The Permian extinction ain’t got shit on Earth life trying to make it in Mars conditions.
On Earth, lots of environments killed everything and then were recolonized later – maybe we can colonize Mars in waves of death and disaster.
ah, the little-considered Soviet human wave charge approach to terraforming
I think the writers vision only holds up under very specific assumptions:
We are able to solve some massive problems (building an absolutely enormous colony ship. Maintaining a self sustaining self contained eco-system (which we can’t even do on Earth!). Being able to generate enough energy to accelerate and decelerate said bloody massive ship to and fro 0.1c)
They’re basically saying “what if all technological progress stalled except in these areas were we magically manage to solve problems without thinking about anything else” (!)
1)If we’re able to get something to 0.1c and back we’ve probably solved all our energy issues. Basically limitless energy.
2)47% of jobs are predicted to be automated in the next two decades. So over a long time scale, there probably won’t be any work to be done by humans on this ship.
3)If we have nearly limitless energy, and we don’t have to do any work, what’s stopping us at a ship a trillionth of the Earth’s size? Also why does the size of the Earth matter? Most of it is molten rock. We can build something much more space-efficient than the Earth, so that one trillionth might actually be a ridiculous amount of space.
4)Population stuff is harder. But maybe nanotech can get us to a place where all bacterial and viral diseases are treatable (send in tiny robots to neutralise the bugs), and also to repair our cells from the inside, keeping us young and healthy indefinitely. Much less need for babies.
5)Really in a contained space ship environment limiting reproductive liberty is sensible policy rather than tyranny. Bit like complaining that ISS astronauts aren’t allowed to take guns on board. (this I realise is much more subjective but my point is that I don’t buy the writers points that it’s a Big Obstacle.)
So really I think the article is only worth it as a thought experiment on “if we could actually physically take people to another planet right now, all of our other technology is completely inadequate”. But by no means do I think the article is a case for assuming this will always be the case.
Now to work on the cultural shift that will convince humans that there really will be “much less need” for babies.
Far be it from me to argue with Kim Stanley Robinson, but screw it, I’m onna argue with Kim Stanley Robinson. Mainly because he’s not here, but still.
Ultimately, Robinson argues that we will never travel to the stars because we will never have the technology to do so. But “never” is a long time, Yes, we will likely never travel to the stars on generation ships carrying whole functioning ecosystems. That is because this is a tremendously stupid way to go about it. Granted, that’s the only remotely plausible way we could accomplish such a project– right now, using the technology we have on hand.
Kim Stanley Robinson was born in 1952. Anyone who has lived through the entire history of modern computing should really know better than to suggest that, 100 or 1000 years from now, humanity will still be confined to the physical limitations of biological evolution. Technological advancement isn’t going to continue indefinitely, but what nature can do, we will probably be able to do faster and better. We’re cheating already, exploring the surface of Mars daily, even though no human has ever been there.
No, we won’t be sending heavy, wet, fragile human bodies to other solar systems along with all our accompanying luggage and trees and lionfish and bacteria. We won’t experience years of unwanted physical confinement while en route.
Granted, the same technological advances that would allow this sort of travel would also obviate the physical necessity of doing so. Humanity won’t be at risk of destruction by asteroid or supernova, because the same advances that will permit interstellar travel will also keep us safe right here on Earth. Will we go to the stars anyway? It’s hard to say; I’d bet that at least some of us would want to. But if we never go, it will be by choice.
I hope you are proposing that we’ll send AIs to the stars to observe and report back and not that we’ll be sending human blueprints to reconstitute on arrival. Because the ethical implications of the latter are pretty horrific.
Sorry, I realize now that my actual stated notion was needlessly vague. I was alluding to transhumanist ideas of personality uploading. So we ourselves would basically be the AI’s, free to reconstitute our original human blueprints on arrival, or not, depending on whether the destination is environmentally friendly to Humanity Classic.
An interesting thought. But I think both problems are harder than we expect.
Oh I agree with you there, these problems will be ridiculously hard, and I’m going to be long dead before anyone is close to a solution. Yet I think they must be solved, eventually. Practically any modern field of human endeavor is aided by making computers smaller and smarter. Sooner or later, this technology will become directly applicable to the processes in our own brains.
Read that as “trashhumanist”. Thought “it me”
IDK I mean Earth bukakkeing distant worlds with its automated spermatazoons won’t be pretty, but it’s not that much ethically different than any other diaspora
there’s a bigger issue with getting from here to that specific route in that if you presume it’s humans doing the space travel and not immortal, all-wise incarnations of the Internet, no living person ever gets to leave and no person ever gets to come back, so not much prospect of a return on your hintillion dollar investment other than satisfying scientific curiosity
My ethical concerns are entirely about the colonists, not the planet they’d occupy. A multi-generational migration or one where we send machines that can raise a generation of colonists are ethically dubious because you’ve knowingly sent people who did not volunteer, were not informed, and cannot consent on a slow, painful suicide mission at worst and at best sent them out to a life of extreme isolation and hardship under a necessarily authoritarian regime.
I’ll concede that it may not differ too much from other diaspora events, but that doesn’t make it right. Know better, do better, and all that.
I have argued with Kim Stanley Robinson in person, and he was generally pleasant and delightful throughout, so go ahead.
(I thought he was someone else. I thought he was a middle-aged man with opinions on what science fiction I should be reading, when in fact he was the author of the book I was holding, asking for anonymous feedback.)
I’m with you there. Saying we’ll never get to the stars with our current technology feels like looking at a baby that’s just about figuring out how to crawl and saying it’s never going to run a marathon.
That being said, it’s a long way off, current humans maybe wouldn’t recognize the future-humans (mostly-humans? sort-of-humans) that actually make the trip, and it is MOST DEFINITELY not a get-out-of-ecological-responsibility-free card. The only way our transhuman descendants can make it to the stars is if we ensure our world survives long enough to get over the substantial technological hurdles.
Agreed, as a species we have problems that are a lot more immediate. But I also think that: “let’s take care of Earth, so we can survive to reach the stars” is both more hopeful and, given technological trends, more probable than: “Let’s take care of Earth, because it’s the only home we’ll ever have.” For us individuals living today, the latter is surely true. But for the human species, the former seems more likely.
depends whether or not we develop a functional interplanetary transit system before we burn up all the high-density fuel sources on shoes with basketball players printed on them and phones that can play flappy bird, really. there is a point where it starts getting radically harder to do anything really ambitious, you can’t run a Mars rocket on solar.
…yet.
I remember reading an early-19th century account of why passenger trains would be impossible– the human body was never meant to travel as fast as 30 or 40 miles an hour and the forces involved in going around a curve would obviously crush the vital organs. The Mars trilogy was awesome, but some of Robinson’s concerns strike me as similarly hypothetical.
It’s been a while since I read the Mars Trilogy, but mostly what I remember was that the concerns were generally not hypothetical, but well understood, while the solutions generally were hypothetical, and poorly understood.
The limits of acceleration that the human body can handle are known. The air force has decades of really solid data on this. Ways to mitigate or prevent trauma from g-force is a hard problem unless we’re capable of really significant re-engineering of every aspect of the human body.
Citing 19th century articles about passenger trains pulping travellers is fine, but it’s important to keep in mind that those articles could easily have been written by someone like Rush Limbaugh or the Food Babe rather than, say the period equivalent of a biologist or physician working for NASA. That is, someone who makes their living inventing things for people to be afraid of rather than someone who makes their living inventing things to make it easier and safer for people to move about in the world.
Even in the 19th century horses were capable of reaching speeds of over 30 miles per hour and horse racing was a huge and popular past time. A significant portion of the population knew how fast a horse could run and that jockeys (and even lay people) survived falls at that speed. Records of ignorance from a past portion of the population does not mean that we are still equally ignorant about similar issues at the present time.
I’m kind of interested by how many responses here are arguing by analogy: some things looked impossible in the past, but they were not, so this impossible-seeming thing will be possible too. But some things looked impossible and still have not happened, and other things looked possible and weren’t, and so on. People have been variously right, wrong, off-base, insightful, misguided, and genius about all sorts of things. All that tells you is that people right now must also be variously right, wrong, off-base, etc. It doesn’t prove anything about which items on the practically infinite list of things we currently think impossible are going to switch over to the Possible list.
Ahhhhh thanks for opening that window, I needed a logical breath of fresh air. Not to lessen the other points being made, I genuinely have a hard time recognizing fallacies and like when others point them out in a nice way.
yeah science doesn’t actually work like this
I do though strongly suspect that in fifty years the concept of equating space travel to a big slow boat full of 150 lb water bags touring other planets like a Carnival cruise is going to seem hilariously quaint, like the turn-of-the-century guys who proposed building a gigantic honking cannon to launch people ballistically at the moon. If your actual concern is ‘getting life/people to other planets’, and not how you do it (complete humans, human lifetime, etc.), that’s probably reducible to getting matter to other planets, and that’s something entirely feasible with present-day known physics.
How that squares with our present-day society is another question, given that every known or probable way of doing it is phenomenally expensive and offers zero prospect of meaningful financial return, ever. We might have working spaceship blueprints waiting around for a long, long time for the return of the pharaohs, cause our current money-havers ain’t into that kind of thing.
Oh man, never a bad time to re-re-reread Canticle! Tho I do have to set aside a few days to be devastated after finishing it :<
Hmmm, I went into this article expecting to be super depressed, but I donno! As a Biology Science Person, I feel like all the problems from the crunchy old man sci fi “let’s talk about inertia for 20 pages” authors are still the main obstacles! Inbreeding effects can be managed with clever population genetics, you’re probably not gonna see much spontaneous mutations messing stuff up even across like 100 generations, and I don’t think the all microbiota stuff is as intractable as he says. Building an ark ship (think of how BIG it would have to be!) that could cart all that crap across light years still seems like it would be impossibly hard.
In other words, if we ever get to the point where we can actually MAKE a ship capable of the journey, I think we as a species will have nailed down how to manage bacterial ecologies, guy…
(fair point with the psychology and sociology stuff tho)
Is this a safe space to admit that I was disappointed to learn that Kim Stanley Robinson was not, in fact, a woman? It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this.
Also, have hope. Even our current sciences know stunningly little about people/the world/the universe, and there is no way to predict what we will learn in the next 50, 100, or 500 years.
I saw him speak, and at one point he quoted a number, and then said “I know it’s right, I had my wife help me with the math.”
Awww, that’s awesome! This is mitigating some of my disappointment at male Kim Stanley Robinson.
There was a sequel to Leibowitz out not so long ago. (The author took his own life; the finishing touches were added by someone else.) I don’t suppose anyone here got around to reading it?
Leibowitz didn’t do all that much for me, possibly because the back cover blurb was woefully misleading and I was expecting something else entirely. I can’t recall the quoted passage, artful though it is.
(I should add that I still found Leibowitz vastly preferable to KSR’s Red Mars. Less than thrilling, that one.)
I hadn’t heard there was a sequel, I must track it down.
A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ! ONE OF MY TOP FAVORITE BOOKS!
🙁
I recently re-read Ursula Le Guin’s story “Paradises Lost” about a multi-generational interstellar ship. By the time the ship arrives at its destination, the idea of living on a planet is so foreign to the the great-great-great-grandchildren of the original crew and most choose to just stay on the ship and continue flying among the stars. It really stuck with me, the idea that physically living on Earth is such a part of the human identity.
I remember reading this! It’s the one with low-g ballet, right? It was awesome!
One, one of the best generation ships stories out there has to be the wonderful short stories in the Birthday of the World- Ursula K. LeGuin strikes again. I have to hope that anyone who is enjoying this thread will get a kick out of that book.
Two, why on earth would we send people out on a generations ship before the terraforming is complete? I’m imagining that if we can’t conquer FTL travel, we’d probably find the right planet, send rovers, then send terraforming supplies out and get the stuff well started and tinkered with before anyone gets in a ship. When you get there they’d already be well stocked up with snacks and tools and a head start, so the planet isn’t going to be some giant surprising area with nothing going on, it’s going to be real freedom compared to the ship. How can you possibly think that the people who get it together enough to design a generations ship are just going to drop it off somewhere we haven’t even checked out at all yet?
Three, why would there necessarily be resentment among the travelers? I don’t resent my great grandparents for coming to America or lament which state I was born in. I mean, I guess there’s the generational resentment of inheriting flawed systems, but people are adaptable and no human on the planet gets to choose where they’re born, so you are basically going to have generation one that opted into the system and generation two and on will be like, “well that’s the deal we’re born with”. Humans have always lived within systems of constraint and for a lot of societies incredible authoritarian constraints have worked out just fine- maybe not for all individuals, and they do all tend to eventually shift, but there have been huge authoritarian dynasties lasting generations with caste systems and all through history. You only have to look at China, Japan and India before colonialism to see immensely dense complex and authoritarian systems that only were dismantled through outside cultural intrusion, and KSR should know this because I’ve read the Years of Rice and Salt and he wrote it. I’m not on team authoritarian regime at all, but I can’t deny that they have power. The idea of freedom from hierarchy and pursuit of liberty and happiness is brand new in comparison.
4. Why would we assume that the ability to control our internal biome and aging process are uncontrollable? We already live longer healthier lives than previous generations, I don’t know that we’ll ever become a species that lives 1,000 years but it’s not completely insane to think that humans might start living up to 140 or 160. All the 115 year olds alive today were born in 1900, so by the time we get to 2085, anyone who is 115 would have been born in 1970, which is probably around the time people were really getting serious about prenatal nutrition. I have read some great articles that basically say we have no idea how long the post WWII generations will live because they’re the first generations to have a lot of healthy well fed kids in them, who didn’t suffer from chronic diseases.
5. Maybe our ships will be biomes themselves. instead of sterile complicated machine ships, maybe they’ll be organic self healing ships, that we live inside like the trillions of bacteria that live inside us, with feedback loops. Why wouldn’t we design a biological instead of mechanical system to keep us going? I get what he’s saying about island effects, but there are examples of closed loop terrariums that do ok. Aren’t there a few examples where the ship is basically a hollowed out asteroid that is huge? I’m sure there are physics issues with this, but I’m willing to believe that a generations ship will be possible.
There is an infinity of solutions to KSR’s short-sighted problem list, but the point of his article is to encourage stewardship here; not surprising for an environmentalist.
Sure the stars are far, so why send people who age and get sick and die? Why not re-engineer our DNA to eliminate aging and disease? And to effectively repair the point damage from very energetic ions? Understanding our genome and its expression as a prerequisite to interstellar travel may seem obstructive, but it is only one additional step in the process–maybe an inevitable one.
Or why not send fertilized ova, preserved at low temperature? Machines with extreme redundancy and some capacity for self-repair could hatch them and educate them to maturity in the target system.
Or why not send the information to make a human and leave the biological component out of the journey entirely?
If we eliminate the need to get there quickly (a hundred thousand years is a very short time on a stellar scale) then the problems KSR poses disappear almost entirely. With careful planning, we could colonize the galaxy in a few million years.
Of course, one would have to leave out the dramatic narcissistic fantasy of traveling to the stars as a functioning present-day human with unmodified DNA.
Humans raised by machines on a ship may be biologically homo sapiens, but socially, culturally, emotionally, and intellectually, they will be something quite different.
My friends and I are doing Drunk Science this week (like Drunk History, but) and now all I want to talk about is generational ships. Oh mannnnnnn
Maybe it’s just the people I get drunk with, but literally every week is drunk science week. It’s a blast. Highly recommend.
We don’t have to travel to another star when we can make cozy space colonies closer to earth. Gerard O’Neill made an excellent plan for orbiting, cylindrical space habitats that could hold millions. Assuming the shell is assembled from asteroids (we could mine the Moon, but that is quite rude. The Moon is an old friend.) the inside of the colony itself would be quite Earthy. Trees, swamps, lakes, farms, a comforting view of starlight through meters-thick glass screens. It would even provide its own oxygen!
Traveling faster than light is hurrying way too much. Do you know how much energy is needed to accelerate something to even a fraction of C? It’s exhausting. Why bother physics when you can build a lovely slice of home within reach of Earth? It’s quite possible with the technology we had in the 1970s, to boot. Though I do suppose we can fit in radical genetic modification and remorseless AI techno-queens after supper.
Leibowitz chickened out at the end and had his monks climb on a spaceship and leave as the nukes started falling (again).
It reminds me of a short, beautiful, thing that someone wrote: http://swanjolras.tumblr.com/post/102498776997/go…
which makes me tear up, every time
An interesting exercise by KSR: basically reversing, for the sake of argument, one of the core impulses of Sci-Fi: identifying constraints, and then using them to slingshot the imagination further (shades of Apollo 13!).
Though this was informative, and it reinforced the gravity of those constraints, it was not terribly convincing for me. The future is a vast landscape of (in the words of Rumsfeld, I guess?) unknown unknowns. In the past 200 years, we’ve shifted our paradigms of physics dramatically; in the past 50, information tech has moved so far that it’s beyond what previous generations could have possibly imagined. Technological revolutions are massively unpredictable, and they’re getting more frequent.
I’d guess (uninformed-ly) that the trips to local planets and satellites — mars, asteroids, etc — will be a first step to extending the reach and lifespan of our species. Longer trips, like the ones being discussed by KSR, are far beyond the current horizons of our knowledge…. but not beyond the eventual reach of science and (post)-human endeavor. So let’s keep writing, optimistically, and get our asses moving on terran stewardship, so that when the next threshold come along, we’re still around to cross it.