INTERPLANETARY SPACE

The burden of human and future human ‘TAB’ life on our planet’s natural resources assure that they will eventually be depleted below our collective needs to consume them. An unbiased observer from outer space might even consider humanity to be a plague species, permanently undermining the health of its host planet. The question for this chapter is to surmise how likely a hypothetical outer space intelligence is to meet a human? The high probability of the existence of other intelligent life within our universe is heavily predicated on the vast size and age of the universe. This same metric makes the likelihood of them meeting humankind vanishingly small. We have existed for less than a blink of an eye in cosmic time. Much more likely is that alien intelligent life will meet our machine offspring (or earth sourced biology) custom engineered for life on other celestial bodies.

Impartial analysis of our human biology is that we are evolved to live under very specific and limited environmental constraints. Change the atmosphere, the gravitational force, the exposure to radiation, the requirement for water and carbohydrate food sources, even the loneliness of isolation, and we fail to thrive. Bacteria survive extended exposure to deep space. We don’t last even a minute. The logistics for maintaining delicate human life in near earth orbit has proven to be prohibitively expensive. Compared to this, NASA’s Explorer Missions have been in operation for decades. The longest of which, (IMP 8) has been operational for over 26 years and still produces valuable information about the solar wind.

Space exploration by even the earliest versions of robotics has proven to be both cost effective and robust. As the order of magnitude improvements in robotics and artificial intelligence progress over the next decades it will become glaringly obvious that space exploration is the realm of the machine. Assuming that we don’t discover a mechanism for faster than light space travel in the next few centuries, the only human biology that will be sent to habitable planets is our DNA code. It won’t be our DNA specifically. It will be genetic instructions derived from human genes custom designed as enhanced versions of intelligent life suited for planetary habitation. This manufactured life will likely be a conceptual ancestor of the selfish machine (Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene) programmed to do whatever is best for its genes as a whole. TAB humanity will have already been superseded by the cyborg life forms envisaged in popular science fiction. Self-maintaining factory spaceships will carry and protect the chemicals necessary for building biological life the hundreds of light years required for traversing cosmic distances. Once parked in orbit the factory ship will send down robotic systems designed to create a habitat for birthing life on the target planet. Computer stored genetic code will be used to manufacture new life from scratch. Trials of the early pre-planned species will be tested in the new planet’s ecosystem. Results of these trials will hone the suitability of the customized life for unexpected environmental constraints.

The eventual destiny of intelligent biologic life being sent to other planets will depend on the continued success of intelligent life on Earth. Predicting the results of the co-existence of TAB humanity, cyborgs, robots, and artificial intelligence is not possible. It is plausible to predict that biologic life will be sent out repeatedly to destinations outside our solar system. In the oncoming millennium, DNA carried by spacecraft from Earth is the most likely source for carbon based life in our solar system.

In his book, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century, George Friedman predicts that technological progress in this century will focus on space for both military strategy and solar power. For reasons identified earlier in this chapter I believe that the dominate space faring community will be intelligent robots. They will be both autonomous and also guided by Earth based control. The competition for the strategic military high ground will be the impetus for rapid evolution of these systems. The likely utility of a space elevator to cost effectively ferry material up to geosynchronous orbit would seem to be the most promising vehicle for near Earth space development. Such elevators will be very time consuming to develop and launch. Unfortunately they would be tremendously susceptible to military or terrorist attack. If damaged the carbon nanotube based elevator cable would whip down circling the earth many times with destructive force. For this reason I think that space elevators will have to wait until the Earth is under some manner of central control.

I also have doubts of satellite based solar collectors beaming to Earth microwave or laser energy. The same critique applies. These power plants would be tremendously fragile; susceptible to micrometeorites, solar storms, and military attack. The potential cost effectiveness of space based solar energy capture versus the rapidly advancing engineering for land based energy capture has yet to be demonstrated. My favorite is nanotechnology or engineered photobacteria directly converting solar radiation to hydrogen gas. I doubt that space based power will be a significant component of Earth based consumption for many centuries.