Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Search
Why Should We Colonize Space?
October 6th, 2010
It came up in a post last week (and follow-up comments, thanks James Nicoll!) that E. O. Wilson thinks it would be a bad idea to colonize space, apparently because this is a “ruinously expensive” way to deal with overpopulation. The big space colony days were in the 1970s, after we’d landed men on the moon (yes, really, Margaret Atwood), and Paul Ehrlich and others were pushing the idea that population growth was going to lead to the collapse of civilization in just a few years. Like Malthus centuries before, Ehrlich’s predictions have failed to materialize due to a combination of economics, technology, and the use of contraceptives in the industrialized world (excepting maybe Catholics).
Anyway, overpopulation is one reason to colonize space, according to some in the past. And lets include both space colonies and colonies on other worlds like the Moon and Mars under the heading of colonizing space. Recently Stephen Hawking has urged the colonization of space to help insure the human race from extinction, in the event something bad happens to Earth (e.g., asteroid impact):
The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. [So], let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.
Let me propose that we should go because it is there and we are a curious species that demands new frontiers. I’ll call this reason “the need to explore and learn to live in new environments.”
Let’s include reasons like escape as well. There are places to seek political or religious asylum in the world, but maybe this is still a valid reason.
Science? The far side of the moon is a great place to put future radio telescopes (as well as other kinds). How about looking for life on Mars or the moons of Jupiter, and studying those worlds long term?
Hearkening back to the cold war, maybe we should go in order to compete against each other. There may turn out to be economic boons, or just national pride on the line. Call this “fear someone else will do it and benefit.”
Speaking of economic boons, there has been talk of mining asteroids. Space hotels in low-Earth orbit may be able to make huge amounts of money down the line. How about the possibility of microgravity manufacturing of rare materials?
Maybe you have some reasons I can’t think of.
I think we should do it for a combination of several of the reasons above, whether or not it makes the best economic sense. I suspect people who visit my blog are biased, but maybe we shouldn’t colonize space. Maybe it’s a waste of money, lives, and more. I mean, most people in the world live close to the coasts here on Earth rather than in less hospitable places like the mountains of Wyoming…
What do you think?
Loading ...You can choose more than one answer.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Because Heinlein told me I would be able to visit other planets and by damn, I want to!
While I’m all for exploration (which is generally much better done by robots than humans…) and the establishment of microgravity research facilities, most of the justifications given for off-world colonisation are just plain daft.
It’s not a realistic solution to overpopulation or environmental degradation: if we’ve got the tech to sustain an off-world colony, then we’ve got the tech to deal with those problems right here.
It’s also not a defence against homeworld extinction in the forseeable future. There’s a big difference between “establish an off-world colony” and “establish a completely self-supporting off-world colony”; we might manage the first, but we’re at best a few centuries away from the latter. Ditto for economic exploitation of space; we’re a long way from making money out of anything space-based outside of low-orbit telecoms and the like.
Folks need to stop obsessing so much about the SF tropes that they’re missing, and appreciate the ones that are here (Wireless pocket-sized datanet access! Ubiquitous comms! Genetic engineering! Brain scanners! Robot surgeons! Mind-machine interfaces!). Although some SF authors made a few good guesses about future developments, most of ’em were wrong, and all the wishful thinking in the world isn’t gonna change that.
Remember my comment about hearing comments from Americans make that make them sound like people who when they were kids got to lead King Billy’s horse in the Twelfth of July parades?
This took me 0.44 seconds to find.
No, I don’t James!
I’m pretty pissed at the Pope at the moment (as usual), and if Catholics don’t follow the precepts of their church, I wish they’d stop calling themselves Catholics and stop supporting things they don’t believe in!!!
You know I hate it when smart people hold intellectually inconsistent positions.
I’ll justify my own with the argument that the Catholic Church officially opposes contraception even if people who say they follow the Catholic Church actually don’t do it. Go Brazil!
Really, the only way to shut up the Pope and his clergy is for “Catholics” who don’t listen to them anyway to quit being Catholics and stop going to Catholic Churches so they lose their power. They fucking lie in AIDS-ravaged Africa that condoms cause AIDS, and people die. This disgusts me, among other related things.
They were upset this week about the Nobel prize going to the inventor of In-Vitro Fertilization. The only reason anyone pays attention is the billion plus “Catholics” out there. STOP IT!
It isn’t like there aren’t a hundred other Christian sects. One probably actually shares the beliefs of these “Catholics.”
I don’t agree with anything my President says, but you don’t have to do officially do so to call yourself an American. That’s not how Catholicism works when it comes to matters of Church doctrine.
Welcome to Catholicism as it is practiced in the real world. This is a well known conundrum in Canadian politics; people who are RC tend to vote Liberal (soulless technocrats who generally follow more socially liberal policies than their main rivals, the Conservatives, albeit sometimes only because of the weight of public opinion compels them) and not Conservatives, even though on the face of things the oppressive, perhaps even willfully malevolent policies [1] of the Conservatives seem like a better fit for people following Pope Palpatine and his not much better predecessors. The ability of many Catholics to ignore the latest lunatic rants from the guy with the hat in Rome is a well-established fact. It’s probably for the best that the church reserves the infallible thing for statements made ex Cathedra, which they drag out about as often as the US actually nukes people and only for things that cannot be subjected to real world analysis absent a time machine or common sense.
If you’re going to criticize street level RCs, do it for stuff that they actually do do, not stuff theory suggests they should do, assuming a perfectly spherical Catholic and a frictionless inclined plane.
1: Like setting out to destroy the statistical validity of our census for ideological reasons.
That said, Ogawa’s The Next Continent has a reason for space development I had not seen before: people will pay obscene amounts for their weddings and it may be that this is a market that can be tapped. Cue 13 years of building a small but well appointed wedding chapel at one of the lunar poles.
I guess it is unreasonable of me to expect religious people of all types to be consistent and rational about their religion. I still think there needs to be a Catholic revolution where the silly stuff and things inconsistent with the modern world get thrown out. 😉
You’re right about weddings — even people who aren’t multimillionaires will spend crazy sums of money.
And speaking of religion and the moon, know what the hare krishnas think about the moon landings and why?
I agree that colonizing the solar system is a pretty inefficient way to deal with population issues. Unless we can fill the sky with cruise liners shuttling folks off-world 24 hours a day it’s going to be a big waste of time.
I don’t think we’ll be finding any Clarke like monoliths sprinkled through the solar system if we don’t look though. I say we go look. It might be a stupid reason – but that’s my motivation.
Hey, those of you that don’t want to go should stay here. [shrug]
The colonization of space will be done by private efforts, by those who want to live in space and not by the old, big, national space programs. It’s not really a question of should “WE” colonize space – the question is – should “I” colonize space. For me, the answer is yes, but I won’t be spending your tax dollars doing it. You get to make your own decision.
I agree that colonizing the solar system is a pretty inefficient way to deal with population issues.
Particularly since it looks like Warren Thompson was right.
An excellent reason to colonize space is to shorten any future dark age on the Earth. Rebuilding after a global disaster will go more quickly if people from the Moon, Mars, and all the way out to the Kuiper Belt still have their technological infrastructure intact.
I am all for colonization of off-Earth environments. I would add that off-world colonization would weaken the influence of the Pope as well so you can add it to the list.
I don’t believe that possessing the technology and ability to colonize off-world environments implies we have the ability to correct our current environmental woes on Earth. I do think that off-world colonies will be highly motivated to become self-sufficient or at least reduce their vulnerability due to resource starvation or shortages. I think that colonization is a first step needed to develop the technology to survive without Earth-side assistance elsewhere.
All in all, I want to see human colonization off-world. On the Catholic front, I am not a fan. It is obscenely common for clergy and parishioners to disagree with Catholic dogma. Yet the Catholic church is a hierarchal top-down organization, if you disagree, leave the damn church. With the current Pope you won’t see any progress. But my dissatification with all Christian Churches is quite strong, as a preacher’s kid I am pretty disillusioned.
I vote conservative, James Davis Nicoll. I am also Albertan. I suppose you think that we should all burn in hell because we pull oil out of the ground and eat starving orphans for breakfast. While I am frustrated with the catholic church, did you ever realize that maybe you should blame the corrupt leadership instead of the poor saps who are threatened with eternal damnation should they leave the fold? Just a thought.