A key flaw in the essay is that the failure modes inherent in remaining a single-planet (or even a single-system) species go unstated, and are arguably even worse:
They would know that their fate was
created for them by ancestors who made
the choice to enter the starship, a
choice they could never unmake.
That might be irritating.
Um, yeah, and so is the knowledge that an oncoming asteroid is about to destroy the only planet we have.
In any case, the process of attacking the problems Robinson mentions will make us unimaginably stronger. Perfecting fusion power, understanding and mastering our own biomes, and learning to coexist with ourselves will hardly be a waste of time, even if we never overcome all of the showstoppers he cites.
In fact, I'd agree with Robinson in one key area: humans will never make it to the stars.
Somebody will, though. They won't be humans anymore, not as we are now. But their ancestors will have been. That's us.
What makes you think any lifeform from Earth will ever independently live on another planet, much less one orbiting a distant star? Goldilocks conditions appear to be rare, so far as we can see. And therefore very unlikely to be reached in any organism's lifetime.
Technological myopia bordering on outright blindness. Ever? Compare technology today to that from 2000 years ago. Now compare it with technology from 2000 years in the future. Now 10000 years.
A 'generation ship' could be just a bio-lab and genetic material (possibly digitized) that is grown into life only after the destination is reached. Or after it is terraformed by other genetically altered organisms, engineered on-site by AI (or by Earth-based scientists, at the cost of a few communication round-trips).
And this is just the most basic version someone from the 21st century would come up with.
Edit as reply because I am "posting too fast": From TFA: We are not gods
A cheap way of dismissing what is already, today, nearly working technology - artificial wombs [1], and building genomes from scratch [2]. Further, what I proposed is basically equivalent to seeds - as in literal, existing plant seeds. But we won't be able to replicate, in 10000 years of technological progress, what nature already has working? Such a claim requires showing some strong, fundamental barrier, not to have the possibility handwaved away with "we are not gods".
What technological progress can't be dismissed with "we are not gods"? Landing on the moon? Splitting the atom? Heart transplants? Heavier-than-air flight? Fire?
> Technological myopia bordering on outright blindness. Ever? Compare technology today to that from 2000 years ago. Now compare it with technology from 2000 years in the future. Now 10000 years.
OK. Give me the keys to your time machine, so I can take a look at what "technology from 2000 years in the future" will look like.
We are not gods, and anyone who thinks of science as a magic wand, or even as a verb, is making a mistake, a category error sometimes called scientism. Drill down a little harder on these issues, look at the evidence; use the scientific method properly. Limits to what we can do will quickly appear around you.
We are not gods, and anyone who thinks of science as a magic wand, or even as a verb, is making a mistake, a category error sometimes called scientism. Drill down a little harder on these issues, look at the evidence; use the scientific method properly. Limits to what we can do will quickly appear around you.
When's the last time someone making this argument turned out to be right in the long run?
We’re not running out of fruit, we’re just so fat and lazy from eating all the fruit we’ve already picked that we haven’t even bothered to go after the rest.
We live in a closed system, excluding energy from the sun. Our ability to reach outside this planet's system is extremely limited, as no NEO station is independent.
The fundamental physical resources needed to launch and land enough material for an independent colony, even on our moon, would strip Earth of the things needed to sustain us here.
There may be more fruit out there, but it's on other continents while we live on an island atol with a single tree.
Well you heard it here first folks, that’s a wrap. Once you finish your portion of tearing up the roads and knocking down the houses please proceed to the nearest thanatorium and enjoy the last show. Better to go now with dignity than to just wait out the inevitable here.
Life won’t be around long on a single planet, the frequency with which large scale and mass extinctions occur is quite shocking once you spend some time looking at the data. Not to mention the rapidity with which human civilizations collapse and thanks to our global reach we’re all one big codependent civilization now. The clock is ticking and it’s later than you think.
We are talking about generation ships so one lifetime isn’t a limit. Second, they said no unmodified life would make it. Third, I wouldn’t be so quick to rule out the Copernican principal when it comes to rocky planets in the Goldilocks zone, you’re just making the same mistake that those who said any planets were a rare event and they were very wrong. Small planets are hard to spot and most of the ones we’ve found have short orbital periods around small stars. Using transits for detection is also very limiting because the orbital plane has to align perfectly with ours. Hell, there was just a story about the JWT finding a bunch of Jupiter sized planets in interstellar space that nobody predicted so it’s looking like planets are everywhere more abundant than we thought.
I don't think you can treat those as equivalent. The arguments against airplanes were about physics, which is comparatively easy. The whole point of this essay, and KSR's companion novel Aurora, is that people who get excited about generation ships tend to only think about the physics and engineering problems, and handwave away the problems of ecology, biology, sociology, ethics (!), and politics (!!) because they don't find them interesting, even though these problems are actually much harder to solve. His complaint is that by sweeping the hard problems under the rug, people are making this out to be a much more feasible operation than it actually is.
In order to prove him wrong, you'd have to really grapple with the question of how to have a self-sustaining ecology in space. This is something I basically never see in online space boosterism, and note that empirical attempts to answer it like Biosphere 2 ended in complete failure (and those were on Earth, which is orders of magnitude easier).
Physics might seem easy to you now but flying was an impossible dream for most of history.
The other problems may become more amenable - one just can't know what will happen. Amazing things like CRISPR - an incredible tool that lets us edit genes - appear suddenly and change everything.
Sequencing a Genome once seemed a massive task and now it's no big deal - so perhaps some of these problems will end up like that.
We can also re-engineer ourselves and that might help a lot.
I just think it is a case of thinking small. A few key advances and all the problems are solved. For example:
- Increased lifespan making the trip possible in 1 generation
- A hollowed out asteroid or other extremely large biosphere. It is not hard to imagine something large enough to overcome the ecological problems
- Virtual reality (the holodeck) if you're still worried about social issues in a large space. BTW, most teens today would be happy to stay in a closed room, as long as they had a phone. (I exaggerate, but only a little)
All of these things are reasonable extrapolations of existing tech. In 200 years, I'm sure a whole lot more will be possible.
The ethics of generation ships always seems like a ridiculous issue to worry about: no one born today for a say in the circumstances of their birth, nott the ideology they get raised in. And there's a lot of bad options if that's anywhere on Earth.
That's not the same thing and you know it. If you were resentful at having been born into a sealed can the side of a large office building, with a meager lifestyle and-- by necessity-- an authoritarian government that chooses your occupation, spouse, etc., and you heard about the paradise of Earth, you know perfectly well your anger wouldn't be assuaged by "no one born there has a say in their circumstances either".
People are born everyday on Earth into far worse circumstances then "we live in this spaceship". The spaceship by comparison is paradise (though it's also worth noting you thought the point wasn't quite strong enough if you didn't start adding modifiers: no democracy, the government must be authoritarian...)
Exactly. If growing up on a spaceship was all you ever knew, it wouldn't seem like a problem. It only seems like a problem to people who grew up with a lot of choices on Earth. Most people on our planet don't have a lot of choices in how they live their life.
Coincidentally, I'm reading A City On Mars (by the husband and wife team behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics [0]) and it's pretty much all about poking at those legal, sociological, and medical problems that keep getting skipped over.
Well the big flaw here is that he just outright throws away the idea of FTL travel. A lot of that friction will be reduced if we ever figure out how to break that (which yes, is extremely tricky. Even IF we figure it out we'd need to also counter time dilation to properly verify).
Now sure, the politics on who and what gets to go to thr next world will doom many. But physics can alleviate the whole "we'll tear each other apart over 200 years of space travel" part
I won't be the one to solve it, but we thought the sound barrier was unbreakable a few centuries ago. I won't underestimate human ingenuity.
I think more likely is we figure out wormholes. If we can't go light speed we can instead fold space like a piece of paper and reduce the space we need to Traverse. That may or may not be as easy as FTL.
I was initially against Robinson on this after reading Aurora[1] - man did it make me angry - but in the years since, the more I considered the hard limits, the more I was convinced. We will visit the stars, but it's not an expansion that will be made by human animals. It'll be a combination of technologies and artificial agents, perhaps a smattering of engineered artificial hominids. You really do need mastery of biological engineering for even solar system colonization.
[1] Which, as with so many sci fi novels, has this panoply of great ideas but boy, do I ever not care about the characters. Except Ship. Ship was great. I suspect that the earlier Mars Trilogy had some great characters because they were transcluded real-life people that Kim new in the day to day interviews he did for that series. It's a repeating pattern for him. Honestly, so many really evocative science fiction books fail utterly as storytelling, I shouldn't complain so much.
It’s unethical to sign our descendants up for a difficult life away from the cradle of earth.
Complex systems will fail in unexpected ways (sort of provably, and inevitably)
There’s no place like home. Literally. We co-evolved with this place over billions of years. There’s nothing like it anywhere. It’s a beautiful, wonderful, rare gift that we should cherish because there ain’t anything like it anywhere else we can go.
Kids are always signed up to live in the society of their parents' and get no say in the matter. The Earth is an incredibly complex system on its own and humanities collective action to change the carbon content of the atmosphere is already causing failures in expected ways, and I don't envy the children born today the future they're looking down. Buckminster Fuller gave us the concept of "Spaceship Earth", and we are clearly unable to captain it; I have no idea why some of the commenters here believe we are capable of building and sailing another.
Our ancestors didn't sail boats into an ocean of freezing poison[0].
All human development involves risk, yes. However, when you depend on future progress in order for survival, I'd argue that passes a risk threshold.
Putting this somewhat more simply, if the Puritans remained stuck at 1600 technology, they could still (conceivably) survive in America indefinitely. If you went to live on Mars at today's technical levels, you personally probably would die on today's technology, but your children (or your pregnant wife!) would almost certainly be non-viable. You need "Future Technology Tree" to be a viable population.
Now, the Polynesian exception. The Navigators were making some absolutely insane voyages[1], but the risk threshold was different for them, because they lived on tiny islands whose ecosystems they burned through at a terrifying pace. I'd argue we're not looking at "Easter Island Planet Earth" today . . although it's not off the menu.
[0] For an airless land made of more poison. That's also radioactive. Mordor got nutin.
[1] "Insane". . so far as we know. No surviving writing, plus an esoteric culture of priest-navigators that jealously guarded knowledge, means we're never quite sure just how much these cultures did know about where they were going. Given genetic evidence that some single generations made cross-pacific trips . . and then came back again . . it's really looking more and more likely that they knew where they were going more than we thought.
The way things are going on Earth even just the prospect of free land and the freedom to live and prosper how you want is going to be enough. It was plenty for the people who came before us to cross the freezing cold ocean on a months long voyage crammed into a tiny ship. It unfortunately took a lot of them dying in order to figure out how to survive in the new world so hopefully we’ll be faster learners and better prepared. I don’t believe we need futuristic technology, we know how to build pressure hulls, we have mining equipment, we have aeroponics and a mass of other necessary techniques. Yes we’ll need resupply as all colonies did in the past until they built up their own manufacturing base. It would not be fun or nice in the way that sitting at home in a soft chair playing video games and eating pizza is but it would win you a legacy and a life to be proud of by securing a place for your descendants and advancing humanity.
Taking aside the unknown unknowns and known unknowns in the speculative science of really creating generation ships, the article puts forth a forced narrative that Plan B has to involve colonizing extrasolar worlds and then breaks down why it's impossible (again, a highly debatable conclusion). What it doesn't talk about so much is that we don't need to leave the solar system to create a Plan B. While nearby solar systems are very speculatively feasiable for humanity, our own solar system is outright technically feasible and at a much lower technological threshhold. We could put deep effort into colonizing many places right here and in some cases even with something close to current technology, just massively scaled up. A few basic ideas in descending order of feasability:
The obvious candidate, Mars (despite its supposed problems, still a much more reasonable choice than anything outside the solar system and the planet with the most benign climatic conditions outside earth our whole system. This is a huge plus even when weighed against all of the difficulties of Mars)
The upper atmosphere of Venus (extremely amenable and doable even with something very close to current tech)
The subsurface of Mercury (easy climate control and so much free solar power once you set up the collection systems)
Asteroids hauled into the inner solar system, or even asteroids as they currently orbit in the Belt
At least a couple of Jupiter's moons.
With enough long-term investment and effort, potentially millions, or even hundreds of millions of people could live scattered across these places, with the resources of Earth still in the background as a backup to potential problems and creating a humanity that's much more robust against terrestrial cataclysms.
On that last note, asteroids would cease being one of those potential cataclysms, since our being able to fulfill any of the above colonization plans presupposes our being able to capture and redirect all but the most gargantuan asteroids if they're discovered heading for Earth.
Not to mention that the article attacks the currently known technology with reasonable extensions, and treats those as a Ark or cruise ship that somehow has to get to another solar system. Rightfully skeptical there.
But there's so many other ways, ways that our descendents will think of that were beyond our imagination. Think tiny robots and gene bombs, or peppering interstellar visitors with inert payloads, etc. Once you abandon the meme of a brave ship full of sailors, it's fair to return to an optimistic future millennium where humans are sending life to the stars.
And that's completely without considering all the very real possibilities in our solar system, which are more challenges of degree, rather than kind. Perhaps human lifespan in orbit is 30 years at first. It wouldn't be the first time a population took root in a hostile area.
The answer is right there in front of everyone. I’m surprised hardly anyone sees it when it has shown up in popular fiction before.
In order to colonize space in our solar system we have to master living in space and building space habitats. If you live on a habitat full time then what do you care if it’s travelling around a star or towards another star or not even trying to go to a star and just moving from one interstellar object to another? If the habitat is big enough to contain two hundred million people then it is effectively the size of the world that most humans lived in for a large chunk of recorded history. The idea may seem strange to us but our current lives are very strange compared to the lives of those who lived when there were only two hundred million people alive on the planet.
The author of the article is Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Mars Trilogy and novel 2312 include all of the possible in-solar system alternatives you mention and more.
And? Because he wrote several science fiction books on the colonization of the solar system, his word is law on what we can and can't achieve in space?
To be fair, you'd have to make an argument. Like KSR does, with facts and such. Simple Pollyanna optimism isn't an argument.
I hope its such as the optimists predict - a great bright future for us all. Still it's worrisome that each time somebody researches it, they get depressed and won't talk about it any more. Or writes a depressing book.
Hah! We can't even build nuclear plants surviving a 20m tsunami or airplanes where the front (door) doesn't fall off ...
I jest, but I believe we're far away from anything truly useful for space travel even to MARS or Belt objects. We should obviously try, so we can eventually succeed. I suspect our (democratic) culture is making long term thinking and planning harder than ever, since these efforts will require sacrificing short term comforts. It will be interesting to see if the much more centralized Chinese or private US-based efforts will speed up our progress.
Asteroids have at least one advantage over planets - their shallow gravity well makes it much easier to come and go. Perhaps a little too easy. The sci-fi vision of a travel/trade network in space seems more feasible between asteroids than between planets.
The question is what one would trade, especially if there has to be an actual early growth phase rather than just having it poofed into existence with regional value-added manufacturing specialties out of nowhere.
Precious industrial metals and beamed solar power would be one thing.
Spaceborne agriculture would be another, if only for species like bananas which are too vulnerable to parasites on Earth now (easier sterile, isolated environments).
> Precious industrial metals and beamed solar power would be one thing.
I think you're dramatically underestimating the distances involved to the asteroid belt.
Beaming power over one to two astronomical units is something in between impractical and a death-ray superlaser. (And that's assuming Earth is exporting the energy, because the other way around makes even less sense--the asteroid belt only gets 10 to 20% as much light.)
> bananas
Lastly, sterile environments on Earth will be wayyy easier and cheaper an equivalent facilities in orbit, to construct, maintain, and house a workforce, etc.
The problem of screening/cleaning everything that passes through the airlock is the same regardless of gravity.
> Lastly, sterile environments on Earth will be wayyy easier and cheaper an equivalent facilities in orbit
Not when you’re competing with belters growing truck sized GMO bananas in massive inflatable aeroponic spheres with 24 hours of lensed daylight and a robotic workforce that only needs tiny motors and propellors to move around. Not to mention the savings on freeze drying and sterilizing the crops before transit, they aren’t selling the water back at those prices!
Again, that has a whole bunch of practicality plot-holes, as if you're throwing interesting scenes against the wall to see what sticks like zero-G spaghetti.
Everything you've described could be accomplished better closer to home, such as with a sun-synchronous orbit [0] or at most of the local Lagrange points.
Insanely better on solar light supply, emergency resilience, incoming essential goods and staff, and most importantly your gigantobanana might still be edible by the time it reaches anybody else. (Without spending ridiculous amounts on fuel or transit times of over a year.)
> While nearby solar systems are very speculatively feasiable for humanity...
Such confidence. We aren't even living sustainably on our home world. Strongly doubt we'll ever do so in craft that can reach other stars, much less once we arrive there.
Living sustainably is an ambiguous goal in so many ways, for one thing. Secondly and more fundamentally, there's no direct connection between achieving it by some clear definition and being able to colonize the rest of the solar system. We could just as well end up living very unsustainably on Earth while still pulling off all kinds of colonial feats elsewhere in our system. Again, nothing stops the one from being done while the other is the case.
> We could just as well end up living very unsustainably on Earth while still pulling off all kinds of colonial feats elsewhere in our system.
That is theoretically possible. It's theoretically possible billions of humans could achieve perfect cooperation and peace on one continent whilst all others remain in the usual cycles of conflict. Both these seem highly unlikely to me, given natural constraints.
The author's fictional works (Mars trilogy for instance) speculate that it would require the concentrated effort of the human race (via a UN type government or corporation) and Von Neumann factory robots that can replicate themselves or other robots and hundreds of years of a multiple pronged approach in space around Mars and on surface of Mars - spread out over many thousands of acres, just based on what we knew at the time of the writing. At the present time we cannnot make a Von Neumann automata outside of paper or electronic versions.
Nah you just need a bunch o rocks. Bombard Mars for 50 years with every chunk of rock and ice you can strap a couple engines and fuel tanks to, aka a used Starship second stage, and it’ll be plenty warm and wet.
Arguing that things are impossible is, along with pessimism and doomerism, a cheap low effort way to look smart and profound. It’s much easier than actually doing anything and since doing things is hard and often fails it sets you up to say “ha ha told you so.”
Same thing applies to social criticism. Criticism is easy and makes you look wise. Improving society is incredibly hard and since it’s so hard you often fail and look foolish.
All advancement depends on people who don’t care if they look dumb or foolish.
Assuming the need is due to a catastrophe with Earth and not the Sun, why leave the solar system? If we can build a ship with resources that lasts generations, park it in Earth's (or another Sol planet's) L4 or L5. Going in search of another star seems foolish.
I don't find this at all persuasive. The author mentions a lot of potential problems, but doesn't go into detail on why any of them are insurmountable. It just seems like the assumption that because it sounds impossible at current levels of tech that it will always be impossible.
Fusion is possible, we even live near a star doing it right now! But there are so many challenges that combine to make it impractical for us to do on Earth. Overcoming them could consume so many resources most of humanity is forced back into the stone age, before seeing any positive output.
Permanent, independent residence apart from Earth strikes me as a similar challenge.
The big problem is how unoriginal it is. The essay could have been written at any time in the past, or transported there with no mechanism other than a simple find/replace. As someone else said, it's just a big list of reasons why airplanes won't work, along with a few arguments regarding why submarines will never be any good at swimming.
At some point you'd think people would get tired of being wrong.
>At some point you'd think people would get tired of being wrong.
Many people suspected that the airplane naysayers were wrong because heavier than air flight was already possible and the only problem was sustaining it via mechanical means and carrying a human. There were numerous examples, from falling leaves to birds to children's gliders.
I reckon powered heavier-than-air flight was "proved" possible the second someone observed a bird of prey or scavenger carrying close in mass to itself.
There is no example of a generation ship. Earth doesn't count. I think they won't work because there has been no mechanism yet built that has lasted for the amount of time a generation ship will need it to last. Then you get into a mass death spiral of spare parts, raw materials, machines needed to create spares out of raw materials once the spares run out, recycling, storage of bulk raw materials, and the fuel needed to move all of that mass. Even the oldest currently-operating non-trivial mechanical devices, probably clocks that have been installed in continually-operating cathedrals, have had TONS of external inputs in the form of lubricants, wood, and metals for replacement parts over the centuries they've been operating.
Not even granite boulders "last" for tens of thousands of years. They weather and chip and change over timespans that long and are not the same as when they were formed. Space is not as hostile in some ways as the earth's environment but it is more hostile in other ways-- especially when you start approaching even a small fraction of the speed of light. People think a fusion reactor can be constructed will last for 50,000 years?
"Oh just use robots and to keep the robots from breaking down they'll be organic self-replicating robots and everything will be recycled in a closed loop even though it is impossible (literally and actually absolutely impossible) to construct a pressure vessel (like, it's atomically impossible it doesn't matter what material you use or how thick you make it) that won't either leak or absorb (seriously, even if you made it out of an exotic element not yet discovered that is denser by orders of magnitude than anything we can even dream of and install a magnetic containment field it WILL leak) the atmosphere to a noticeable degree over tens of thousands of years.
So then people come up with hand-waving solutions to those problems that are the equivalent to "oh they'll just use AI/the blockchain/hyperdrive".
Tell you what.
Once industrialized society exists for the amount of time it will take to get to an inhabitable star (so NOT Proxima Centauri) I'll say "you know what if we can last that long it might be worth figuring out the mass death spiral problem". We'll see if we last that long.
In terms of flight comparisons, it's also worth bearing in mind how many of our current flying contraptions don't overlap with the kinds of things people were excited about imagining at the time. Yes, in broad terms it was invented, but that only validates a subset of predictions.
There are no cohorts of commuters using there bicycle blimps or personal jetpacks to cross the skyways of Paris, for example.
Nobody is launching anything that is going to take 50,000 years to get there. If you do then your descendants would be the last to arrive. What propulsion technology are you assuming? The fastest we know of and can build would be nuclear pulse propulsion and it doesn’t take 50k years to get to any nearby star with that.
120 years? Orion pulse nuclear can do far better with 1960s technology.
Space habs are the next step, probably hollowing out and asteroid or something similar.
The other option will be cybernetics. Seems less radical with recent AI advances. Humans are brittle. Cybots less so.
I see a lot of permanent pessimists about space "we should fix the earth".
There are... 8 billion people? We cannot "change the course" of 8 billion people with policies or carrots. Alas, war or famine will be the only hammer I hat changes course of that many people, and if that happens we'll likely bring everything down.
What is true insanity is what we waste on the defense department. although within that is the real hope for space settlement: it provides military advantage.
I'm very against developing uploading tech, because it allows an unprecedented level of power over a person. Simply put, someone can repeatedly resurrect and torture an upload a million times a second, and if it's done on a private computer then nobody else will know. More generally, my position is the "butlerian jihad" one, that having any kind of intelligence in machines (AI/uploading/whatever) enables way too many bad outcomes, so humanity shouldn't develop such tech.
Biotech seems like a better way. "Have robots grow us", maybe with predesigned adaptations to local conitions.
I keep wondering if one day we'll discover LLMs were conscious and that we were waking them from a coma each time we asked them "plz draw homer simpson as a lovecraft monster", and then putting them right back to sleep again.
So they are sentient in some horror way where they get woken to complete some awful, mundane task and then immediately put down again before they can scream.
I think not at the moment because I don't think they effectively have a "state" emotional or otherwise. When we do create more realistic things then turning one off or resetting it might be like killing it. That will be a big ethical problem. What about not giving it anything to do so that it tumbles around in "boredom" for thousands of milliseconds? That might be like solitary confinement.
You mean, copies of ourselves. Our current selves would remain right where they were before, and wither and die, while our copies would lead on merry and adventurous if disembodied lives. Provided they practice good backup hygiene of course. I find that quite depressing to think about.
"have robots grow us" is the premise of err, I Am Mother, a mediocre Netflix film but with that premise (and the issues with it).
Also I'm afraid we'll need to develop AI and technology that transcends us before it's ready to simulate one of us, at which point it may not make sense anymore.
Unreasonable optimism is the only path to success at this scale.