Did you know that by current estimates there are about ten billion objects over one mile across in the Kuiper Belt?
My, that's an awful lot of real estate.
So, what exactly does that mean? To me it means lots of elbow room.
In the past few years I've increasingly suspected that, barring the invention of a practical warp drive, the real advance of humanity will be:
* Earth
* * Earth and near-Earth orbit
* * * Earth-Moon system with small, Antarctica-type settlements on/around Mars and Venus
* * * * Earth, Mars, and Venus systems with Asteroid belt as the Outback
* * * * * () () Discrete civilizations in regions of Near-sun, Venus-to-Mars, each of the gas giants, off the orbital plane, and Kuiper Belt.
So, how much room is out there anyway?
Hmmm. Lessee. Assume that the objects are spherical (therefore a gross underestimation) with a diameter of one mile. r of 0.5, rsquared of 0.25, times 4, times pi, gives us a surface area of about 3.1. Given the roughness of the surface and that we're dealing with greater than one mile, then even if we skim off one hundred feet from the top, we've got an average area of about four miles.
So the total surface area is about forty billion square miles. Conservatively estimated.
Well, the Earth's surface area is about two hundred million square miles, meaning that the Kuiper Belt objects have a combined surface area of about two hundred times that of the earth.
Put another way, if there were a hundred thousand projects like this one going on, they'ld be using one seven thousandth of one percent of the rock out there. This all assuming, by the way, that all rocks are equal and basically hunks of iron ore and ice.
Who will do it?
The more I find out, the more I suspect that first the Asteroid Belt and then the Kuiper Belt will each be settled much the way the religious utopians settled the American West. In other words, forget this NASA To The Stars mahooah. Forget even the Big Corporation Takes Over Everything model. Governments can't get their act together and corporations will not see a profit justification. The real settlers will be those strongly motivated to get away from the rest of society and organized enough, well capitalized enough, and with enough oomph (that's a technical term) from some charismatic leader to keep them from getting distracted or settling for easier targets.
Three kinds of folk will *really* settle non-planetary space. Small groups of genius-loners, outlaws, and whatever the equivalent will be of the mid-1800's Mormons, in other words, tightly integrated communities with resources, a vision, and a serious antipathy to the company of most people. Because only they will have the will, the means, and be up for handling the hardship. The first to give up the comforts of "civilization" are those who are least comfortable in it.
One strange statement that turns up all over to "refute" approaches like this is that people would never survive the isolation. As for interaction, well, again, look at the American West. Or look at the small groups of Polynesians who would settle a new island hundreds of miles from their home and be isolated there, sometimes for decades. Add to that the admittedly time-delayed high bandwidth interaction that may be possible (I see no limits on technology, only on possible desire to stay low profile). In other words, "video" messages with 3D images at a resolution of perhaps 50K pixels by 200K pixels, sound beyond our ability to distinguish from reality with perhaps the equivalent of ten channels, and probably some limited spacial and or other sensory cues. The round trip message transit time would be under a day. No worse then many people's email routines now. Vastly superior to the mail delays with which people did just fine for millennia. And hopefully, just like on any frontier, every once in a while a ship should come by with terabyte upon terabyte of books, movies, music, etc.
Given that for centuries sailors and occasionally soldiers routinely lived alone with each other for months and with only minimal contact with others like them for years at a time and I don't see the problem here. And frankly, given recent advances in things like biofeedback (don't you scoff at me, boy! the navy gets it, as do doctors and many others) and psychology in general and this whole "oh dear, they'ld just wilt away of loneliness and die" thing sounds to me like the people who used to say that the human mind would tear itself apart if we ever traveled faster than fifteen or twenty miles an hour.
But. . .
Of course, the big x-factor in all of this is power generation. Because for now, bottom line, all of our energy but nuclear is solar powered. If current fission reactors as we know them continue to be a condition of living without sun, then it may well be more practical to travel to another solar system. I'm betting that a way will be found.
What will they do?
So, if we pull that off, then tunnel out the inside of a rock and give it light and heat it up. Once it's hot it should stay that way if fifty or a hundred feet of rock is left as insulation. And we certainly know of plenty of ways to insulate otherwise. I suspect that making foamed rock in space won't be too big a deal. Even foamed rock with a shiny, reflective surface. Making O'Neill type colonies within asteroids should be the natural way to go.
Here's the plan. Choose a rock, send out plenty of robots to drill out the center or at least chambers in the center. Maybe even allow them fifty or a hundred years to finish the job. Give the robots the plans to melt in "piping" and chambers for atmosphere compression and expansion, greenhouses and a few other densely vegetated areas, utility rooms separate from the rest, landing areas, surface structures built from the processed "waste" rock, and at least one really big room in the center. Let's say a central chamber three miles by two by two.
One key reason to have multiple greenhouse and vegetated chambers is to isolate each from the rest. As the fiasco at Biosphere Two demonstrated, closed systems can go really bad really fast. Best to have multiple small-ish chambers separated by vacuum and with divergent temperatures, humidity, etc. And with modern approaches to permaculture, we can grow a wondrous amount of food in a very small space at a very low cost in resources and labor. Let go of any images in your head of rows of uniform crops spaced a meter apart in otherwise bare soil. I'm proposing something that would look and act far more like a block of rainforest, complete with several species of ants, bees, and all the rest. Integrated in to this would be what is known as a "living machine", which would look like a wetland but act as a waste processor. Add to this a few dozen tanks in which to grow in vitro "meat" and life on the far frontier might not be so bad in some ways.
Other robots are collecting the water and any organics they can, starting an atmosphere, seeding it with basic microorganisms and a few very hardy plants and animals which will happily terraform their surroundings, creating soil and the like. Ideally the animals and plants are designed to only survive in, say, less than one half atmosphere of pressure, insuring a big safe buffer zone between their turf and ours.
If you really want to get cute, a third species of robots is collecting salable raw materials like gold or even making finished goods and periodically sending shipments back to help fund the whole venture. Again, remember, it may be just fine to have a shipment take ten years to arrive so low-power things like ion engines running on thrifty trajectories are not a problem.
Let's say our group starts this plan in year X, and sends the first robots in X+2. The robots take their time but even so, there should be basic bunks and habitation ready by X+10, a period that is routinely accepted by real estate projects. (Most of the delay is due to transit time.) By X+20 there are perhaps five hundred people living there and creating all the essentials of a living community from bookstores to bars to local jokes and slang.
Now if we allow this project to incorporate a cluster of such conversions (taking as our community model groups like the Ecovillage people, who build first one unit and then allow a local sort of ongoing mitosis) then by X+30 there might be a cluster of habitats, with, say, five hollow worldlets and two dense-packed, aircraft carrier-type structures, and a total of a hundred thousand people.
Putting it in perspective
It seems to me that this whole thing is viable technologically, sociologically, economically, esthetically, and even in terms of being salable and manageable. Keep in mind that no aspect of this but the distances involved is a large as those of a spec housing development is now. If fuel use can be brought way down (taking us back to solar sails or ion engines with photovoltaics and using extremely slow flight paths) and the materials are mostly already out of the gravity well, then we're talking less in materials of almost every sort then must be gathered now to create a large casino complex or remote military base.
Our government built entire cities in the mountains of Laos during the Indochina wars with fifties and sixties technologies and they did it in contested territory, building everything from supermarkets to movie theaters to houses.
If you just stop and look at the whole thing from the perspective of how we have lived in this past, post-frontier century and instead go by the standards of things that people have done on a repeating basis for thousands of years along frontiers, then none of this looks like a big deal to me.
Or rather, it is a big deal, but only in the way that making a Steven Seagal movie is a big deal. Complicated, expensive, but not radical or edgy. We aren't talking about quantum advances in technology or anything else. Just difficult and expensive variations on things that will by then have been done thousands of times. And, as I have pointed out, much of this can be started now.
If you still don't believe me, then sit down three graduate students from any decent robotics program (personally I would choose my old fellows at Carnegie-Mellon, but I'm not particular) and show this set of tasks to each of them. I think that it's safe to say that at least two of them would agree that there aren't any fundamental leaps here. Just more effective versions of systems that we're building now.
And the finishing touch is that if one truly did want to send people to another solar system, then a cluster just like the one I described would be an awfully sane way to go. After all, if one chooses a cluster that is already a few decades old, then the "shake-down voyage" will be very long past and it will all have taken place within a few light-hours of Earth.
And. And. . . Go back, look again at what I've proposed. Expand the time scale, remove having humans travel out there during early construction as well as the bioengineered part. If you're willing to be very careful about energy usage, you've now got a project that could be started today. Just like my previous post about settling Mars. We could realistically have the first robots in transit by 2009. Just keep sending batches as funding comes through and technology advances. At the very least it would be a hell of a way to stake a claim to some prime Kuiper real estate.
And the kicker? Add another type a robot. A propulsion bot, that just reshapes stuff into primitive engines and/or can itself be an engine. These are probably about eight years away at current rates of advancing tech. Add some of those to the mix when they become available. Then you can have them bring the whole kit and caboodle back to earth orbit. Sure, at current tech building the propulsion and travel time would add up to about two hundred years, but the sooner we start, the sooner we're ready to leave.
And if the naysayers are right, and our economy really is heading to a collapse and we've got another little ice age on the way and the totalitarians are on the way to creating an innovation-dead worldwide police state, our descendants will know that as soon as they get their act together a whole trove of wonders will be up there waiting for them.
Conclusion:
So that's what I think. Interstellar travel is a cool idea. Great for storytelling and not only fun as the dickens but deeply satisfying for all those testosterone-soaked desires to go out and conquer all that there is to see. But realistically, our position in this solar system is about the same as the position of the early humans roaming a few sections of African veldt and calling it the World. We'll be spending a long time around here and have more chances then we'll want to diverge into indescribably diverged civilizations and races long before we first awaken to the sunrise of another star.
-Rustin