Beyond: Our Future in Space (27 page)

Beyond the style makeover, there are more substantial improvements. The Apollo-era life-support system will be replaced by twin pads of absorbing material on the back of the spacesuit. One absorbs water vapor and carbon dioxide while the other vents these waste products into space. Then they switch roles. The electronic controls and power supply are much smaller and easier to replace. The back of the Z-2 suit can be attached and sealed to the spacecraft, allowing astronauts to climb out through what’s called a suitport. This avoids the need for complex air locks and facilitates much longer times outside a spacecraft or a bubble dome.

In the early 1970s, NASA hired Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill to design orbiting colonies that could support thousands of people (
Figure 46
). The artistic visions of these vast spinning wheels, with their interior towns and lakes and beaches and fantastic views, are breathtaking, but they’re so far beyond our current capabilities that they smack of science fiction.
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A few years ago, British designer Phil Pauley released a proposal for Sub-Biosphere 2, an undersea facility with eight habitats. While he waits for funding, he’s building a rainforest biome in Saudi Arabia. Otherwise, there’s no sign of a serious follow-up to the intriguing but flawed experiment in the Arizona desert.

This is a shame, because more research is needed not only to find out how we could live off-Earth, but also how we can live harmoniously on our own bruised planet.

Space Societies

Let’s start by stating the obvious: It’s far easier and cheaper to fix the problems of this planet than to find a way to live off-Earth.

What are the challenges that might make us want to find a new home in space? The ultimate demise of Earth will occur in four billion years when the Sun runs out of its nuclear fuel. At that point, the Sun’s core will collapse and the star’s violent reconfiguration will eject a layer of gas that will engulf the Earth and cook the biosphere. But long before that, the Sun will start to burn hotter as it consumes its hydrogen; about half a billion years from now, the temperature on Earth will have risen enough to make the oceans boil.
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Those timescales are long enough that we might be forgiven for not getting too worried. The best metric for proximate danger is the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
. Starting in 1947, a group of scientists and engineers created the Doomsday Clock to show how far we were from apocalypse. As the threat of nuclear holocaust receded, the proximity of the clock to midnight started to take into account the possibility that through climate change, biotechnology, and/or cyber-technology we could cause irrevocable harm to our way of life and the planet. The clock sat at two minutes to midnight in 1953, at the nadir of the Cold War. In 1991, it receded to seventeen minutes to midnight with the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2012, however, it read five minutes to midnight because of a surge of nuclear weapons in the hands of small, unstable countries, and the sense that climate change may have passed a tipping point.
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Many voices have weighed in on the subject of leaving the Earth. Carl Sagan put it this way: “Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring—not from exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.” Science fiction writer Larry Niven was more succinct: “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program.” We may be able to fend off impacts from space, but physicist Stephen Hawking sounds the alarm about other threats: “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”
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A mass exodus from Earth is implausible. After all, it costs $50 billion just to send a dozen people to the Moon for a few days. Elon Musk may claim he’ll reduce the price of a trip to Mars to $500,000, which is a hundred thousand times less, but that seems unlikely at the moment. If the Earth becomes contaminated or inhospitable, we’ll have to live in bubble domes, fix it, or suffer through it. Nonetheless, in this century a first cohort of adventurous humans will probably cut the umbilical and live off-Earth. What issues will they face?

Beyond survival, their first issue is their legal status. As we’ve seen, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty addresses ownership. According to Article II, “Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” That seems transparent, but it doesn’t mention the rights of individuals. Bas Lansdorp, the CEO of Mars One, said his legal experts looked into the treaty. He thinks that “what goes for governments also goes for individuals in those governments.” If Mars One achieves its goal, thirty people will settle the red planet by 2023; the gradually expanding settlement will use more and more Martian land. Lansdorp insists that their goal isn’t ownership. “It is allowed to use land, just not to say that you own it,” he says. “It is also allowed to use resources that you need for your mission. Don’t forget that a lot of these rules were made long ago, when a human mission to Mars was not within reach.”
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Some space players claim altruistic motives, but none of them can succeed without revenue to fuel their dreams. What happens when profit is the only goal?

Large multinational corporations are bound by international trade law, but they could plausibly argue that they have the right to use, even to exhaust, the resources of an extraterrestrial body. A government that wanted to appropriate land on the Moon or Mars might withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty, and it’s unlikely it would suffer any serious consequences. Even Mars One exists in a legal limbo. Bas Lansdorp needs to fund his $6 billion mission: “Imagine how many people would be interested in a grain of sand from the New World!”

At some point, the debate will stop being hypothetical. The history of colonization of the Earth shows that a claim of ownership is irresistible. Each succeeding generation of settlers who are born and die beyond Earth will feel less connection to the home planet. They are likely to chafe at the rules and regulations imposed from afar. Tanja Masson-Zwaan, deputy director of the International Institute of Air and Space Law and a legal adviser to Mars One, says, “I assume at some point these settlers will become more detached from Earth, and will live by their own rules.”

The historical example of Manifest Destiny is misleading in the context of space colonization. Countries have grown and gained resources on Earth by seizing territory and displacing or subjugating the original inhabitants. Even in the twenty-first century, the stains of this brutal history persist. Space is a new resource. The people who leave Earth won’t be taking land from anyone.
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Eventually, they’ll have to make everything they need to survive and prosper. They will create their own wealth. It will be hard to hold them to any Earth-centric legal framework if they want to be independent.

Colonization implies replacement and growth. A Mars colony can be augmented by new arrivals, but a healthy, normal culture centers on the family unit. There will be sex and there will be babies.

Sex in space hasn’t progressed beyond snickering and titillation. It’s the stuff of urban, orbital legend. Every couple of years, NASA and its Russian counterpart wearily deny that astronauts have had sex. The astronauts themselves stay tight-lipped. Official policy forbids it. Zero-gravity sex is tricky for several reasons. Blood flow doesn’t work as well as on Earth, so men will have trouble getting erections. Sweat piles up in layers, making intimacy less pleasant. Physics is also an obstacle: The slightest push sets an object in motion. NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg once demonstrated this by using a single strand of her hair to propel herself across the cabin. Straps and harnesses would also have to be used. Given human ingenuity and desire, though, it’s possible that intercourse has taken place in some quiet, dark corner of the International Space Station. But it’s not written in any mission log.

Martian sex presents fewer obstacles. The 40 percent gravity would require minor adjustments. To finesse the issue of procreation, if not coupling, all-male or all-female crews have been proposed. More controversially, voluntary sterilization has been suggested for the first colonists. Mars One plans to arm its colonists with contraceptives, but it’s not known how well they would work on Mars. Norbert Kraft, the medical director of the project, isn’t entirely reassuring when he says they will “make colonists aware of the risks associated with having sex.” The first waves of Mars colonists will die there, and they know that the medical facilities will be rudimentary; they’re unlikely to want babies. But as colonies get established, the dictates of biology and human culture will prevail.

Even if we discount Mars One’s plans as fantastical and hopelessly ambitious, colonization is likely eventually because there are enough pioneers with financial backing to make it happen.

When a small group of humans branch out from the root of the tree, who will they become?

Evolutionary Divergence

Imagine when the first baby is born off-Earth. That event will be an extraordinary milestone, resetting the clock of human existence. In Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting,” an engineer at a Moon base is preparing to relocate to Mars when his wife goes into labor. The baby’s first, plangent cry shakes him to his core, resonating more than the roar of any rocket ship.
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How many people does it take to start over? In conservation biology and ecology, there’s a term called
minimum viable population
. This is the lower boundary on the population of a species in the wild such that it can survive natural disasters and demographic and genetic variations. In animal population studies, about 500 adults are required to avoid inbreeding, and 5,000 adults are required to allow a species to pursue a typical evolutionary lifespan from origination to extinction of one to ten million years.
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These are rough estimates, used in biology to estimate the probability of extinction; in the United States, models of minimum viable population trigger protection by the 1973 Endangered Species Act.

For humans, the minimum number can be relevant during a dramatic population bottleneck. If a species population is reduced by environmental catastrophe, the genetic diversity in the remaining individuals is also reduced, and it can only grow slowly by random mutations. The robustness of the remaining population is weakened, making them more vulnerable to another adverse event.
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This is true even though the survivors may have been the fittest individuals. Also, inbreeding is more likely, with offspring having an increased chance of recessive or deleterious traits.
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When geneticists sequenced the DNA of chimps and humans, they made the staggering discovery that a single band of thirty to eighty chimps can have more genetic diversity than all seven billion humans alive today.
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We have very little genetic diversity, even though it could have developed since we diverged from chimps six million years ago. Research on mankind’s restricted gene variation indicates that humans migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, and at some stage before that our numbers may have dwindled to as low as two thousand. Some geneticists hypothesize that this bottleneck was caused by the explosion of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia and resulting major environmental change.
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Regardless of the cause, our genetic makeup hints at the fact that we were once in a perilous state, at the edge of extinction.
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More recent human history gives better examples of how to define the viable size of a space colony. When a new population is established by a small number of individuals from a larger population, it’s subject to the
founder effect
, first described by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. The founder effect leads to both loss of genetic variation and genetic divergence from the original population.

In 1790, Fletcher Christian and eight other mutineers from HMS
Bounty
were joined by twelve Polynesian women to settle on Pitcairn Island, a windswept volcanic outcrop in the South Pacific. The fifty current residents of the island are all descended from these few “founders.” In 1814, fifteen British voyagers settled the remote island of Tristan da Cunha, located in the Atlantic midway between South Africa and South America. The population had grown to 300 by 1961, when a volcano erupted and everyone was evacuated to England. These small populations left the inhabitants subject to genetic abnormalities. On Pitcairn Island, Fletcher Christian spread a gene that contributes to Parkinson’s disease, while the current inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha have ten times the normal incidence of a degenerative eye condition that leads to blindness.