…to first order, any way. Some thoughts from Charlie Stross.
32 thoughts on “The Earth Is Not Habitable”
If I were going to the expense of an interstellar probe, I’d want it to have a better way of detecting habitabity than sending down a decorticated human clone. Most likely I’d want the probe to send me raw environmental data and let me decide what’s habitable.
But mark, then you couldn’t keep using the phrase “meat probe” in your essay, which is funny.
Decorticated human clones are to testing planet habitability, as Ares I is to launching crews to LEO.
Decorticated human clones are to testing planet habitability, as Ares I is to launching crews to LEO.
A pithy comment.
Spock’s Brain
No technologically advanced society would ever consider living on a planetary surface. Visit one for a vacation perhaps, just as people go to Antarctica, but not as a permanent home.
This is related to some arguments against space colonization, the “It’s too hostile for human life” angle. Sure, if viability of colonization were somehow related to the short term survival of meat probes in the wild.
@Karl Hallowell…
I don’t think space colonization is possible…. governments of world have more important things to do rather than space programme…….
No technologically advanced society would ever consider living on a planetary surface.
You’re setting the bar for “technologically advanced” at the point where biology is utterly and irreversibly transcended — you do realize that, right?
It could be argued that O’Neill set the bar at “1975.” As a thought experiment, if we were somehow starting over but with our present level of technology, I wonder if we would choose to settle on Earth rather than in large orbiting habitats with all the aesthetic pleasures of a terrestrial environment but without the storms, eruptions, fires, glaciers, earthquakes, and what not.
I don’t think space colonization is possible…. governments of world have more important things to do rather than space programme…….
Governments of the world aren’t the only entities who will ever do things in space. And given that governments of the world do a lot of less important things than space activities, the importance threshold for space has always been exceeded.
500 megayears or so is a maximum for habitability of Earth by baseline H. sapiens without massive technological help. That figure is uncertain of course; it depends on the capacity of Earth’s control systems to absorb further increases in solar output.
However, that figure could be an astronomically gross overestimate. Climate modelling suggests three attractors for Earth in its current configuration (of continent positions and so on) in this epoch. Two are metastable (Snowball Earth and the current glacial/interglacial cycle) and one is completely stable barring massive terraforming effort – conditions similar to Venus. (There is less solar input than Venus but much more potential greenhouse gas in the form of H2O.)
Nobody knows how much forcing is necessary to push Earth into the third attractor. We are doing the experiment willy-nilly, and by the time we get the result it will be too late to do anything about it. When doing something might kill all life on Earth, common sense might dictate that we should stop doing it.
You’re setting the bar for “technologically advanced” at the point where biology is utterly and irreversibly transcended — you do realize that, right?
People have “lived” on space stations for quite some time – not true of other planets or the moon. On going incremental development will see that living gradually become more sustainable and self sufficient. The evolutionary pathway has already been established.
Living is space is the low hanging fruit, living on another planet or the moon is at this stage pure science fiction, a far more distant prospect with many uncertainties yet to be resolved. It is kind of like making a fusion bomb (technology many decades old), and making a useful fusion reactor – perpetually twenty years away.
When doing something might kill all life on Earth, common sense might dictate that we should stop doing it.
What might kill all life on Earth? I haven’t seen anything yet.
I don’t think space colonization is possible…. governments of world have more important things to do rather than space programme…….
Space settlement is far more important than most everything that a government does (humanity can survive without government, but not without space settlement – in the long term), however, that is not to say that they have a mandate to do it. The days of government driven colonization seem to be over. This leaves private institutions to do the work.
Initially only a very small minority will settle space – not enough for a significant government mandate.
People have “lived” on space stations for quite some time
After careful selection and considerable training.
See “seasonal affective disorder” for an idea of how the more typical members of our species would be affected.
I should point out that while living in Fairbanks, Alaska I sometimes, during the winter of course, arrived at work before dawn and didn’t get out of the office until after dark — and this while working part-time. Someone told me one-seventh of the population up there turns over every year.
[[[You’re setting the bar for “technologically advanced” at the point where biology is utterly and irreversibly transcended — you do realize that, right?]]]
I am not sure what you mean by biology. Do you mean evolution? But space settlement is simply continuing the human evolutionary trend of the last ten thousand years of humans taking increase control over their habitat. Comparing an O’Neill Colony to the ISS is like comparing a pup tent to a city. A space settlement will have the exact gravity, radiation protection, climate, etc. needed for the sustained survival of its population.
And yes it will be a selection process. Those that thrive and adapt to living in orbital settlements will prosper and their descendants will populate the galaxy. Those that don’t will remain on Earth and to whatever fate a planet of limited resources and variable climate has for them.
I think in the end people will choose whether they would prefer to live in a habitat or on a planet. And I think the risks of life on a planet will strike a lot of people as much less than those associated with an entirely tech-dependent existence inside of a pressurized tin can.
It seems likely that there would be a variety of habitats available. I guess if someone wanted to live in a ‘tin can’ then it’s their choice.
For my tastes, I would prefer something like an Orbital (Iain M Banks), or a Ringworld. Maybe whizzing around in a GSV (again, Banks) would be cool too.
People put their faith in technology now. Just look at how dependent modern cities are on computers, telecommunications, power grids. Now imagine all those are gone. It could happen. All it would take is a solar flare similar to the Carrington Event of 1869. Most Earth settlements and infrastructure have developed organically with limited thought to their robustness in natural disasters, until one occurs.
By contrast orbital settlements would be designed as robust systems with the ability to survive the worst case hazards in their environment, including massive solar flares. The orbital settlements would have back-up systems that are not always found in human infrastructure today since orbital settlements would designed as complete systems with fore thought to protection against hazards in the environment they exist in.
Add to that that hazardous in space are fewer. No earthquakes, storms. floods. You will have systems to dodge NEOs and debris too large for the shielding. It would be shielded from solar flares. Orbital settlements would also have back-ups to critical systems. I know I would probably feel safer in an orbital settlement then I do now on Earth in the artificial caves we call buildings 🙂
We’re presently more aware of the risks of planetary life than those of space-habitat life, which may present dangers no one has even imagined yet. So predicting how people will choose to live when both options are available seems premature.
Eh. An unimpressive essay, to say the least.
His ‘thought experiment’ presupposes a really really REALLY stupid exploratory civilization with advanced insterstellar accel/decel capabilities; but incapable of remote atmostpheric detection, of basic orbital scanning (with technology available in the 1960’s) upon arrival in orbit, or of almost anything a sane exploration program would do, even to choosing a star in the right evolutionary stage.
A commenter called him on it on his own blog, and he replied that it really wasn’t what the essay was about.
Apparrently it’s really just a confusing rehash of the Fermi Paradox and Drake equation issues, issues that people have been discussing with a lot more clarity for the last twenty or thirty years.
To be brutal about it:
Yes, there will be lethal failures in space habitats. Some of them will kill everyone aboard. And we can’t know all the possible modes of failure ahead of time. However, there are two points here worth mentioning. There will be more than one habitat, and it is vanishingly unlikely that they will all fail at the same time – if only because they will not all be constructed at the same time. They are also unlikely all to be constructed to the same design.
The same applies to buildings, and to ships, and to airliners. And what have we done in those cases? We learn from the failure, and each failure makes it less likely that failure by the same path will happen again.
Catastrophic failures have not stopped us from building ships, aircraft and buildings. Nor should they stop us from building habitats.
I and others have said this before: Yes, people will die on the High Frontier, and die in large numbers. But many people died on the American frontier too – and if the early Americans had shrunk from that there wouldn’t be an America.
If we get on with the job and colonise space, two hundred years from now the vast majority of humans will never have set foot on Earth. And barring some vast cosmic catastrophe, the Universe will never be rid of us.
“See “seasonal affective disorder” for an idea of how the more typical members of our species would be affected.”
See vitamin D for a cure.
I don’t expect the majority of humans will choose life in space. In fact I expect the emigration rate to probably be on the order of 1 in 100,00 or less. And this is also in keeping with past watersheds of human expansion. The number of humans that migrated out of Africa was probably under a 1,000. Yet they were responsible for the population of the rest of the world. The number that reach Australia has been estimated as low as 50, let they populated the entire continent. Even immigration to the New World from Europe was probably in the single digits in terms of percent. I don’t see space being any different. It will take a special breed to settle space just as is required for any frontier. But their reward is that their children will inherit the Galaxy.
In terms of failure modes, yes new ones will be found as orbital settlements multiple, plus one of the standards, human over confidence and bad decision making will find many new ways to express itself. But ask yourself, where is your life expectancy likely to be higher, in a subsistence level village or a modern city? Where are the risks to your survival likely to be lower? And why should space settlements, with even more control over the human environment, be an exception to this trend that goes back to the first discovery of fire and human tool making?
“There will be more than one habitat, and it is vanishingly unlikely that they will all fail at the same time – if only because they will not all be constructed at the same time. They are also unlikely all to be constructed to the same design.”
I’m getting back on my hobby-horse again, but … suppose there’s another solar mass ejection on the scale of the enormous one observed in 1859? It will fry all the transistors aboard every space habitat that doesn’t have massive shielding, and it seems unlikely the people aboard are going to be able to go on with their lives when all their machines are broken. Possibly a habitat could be built with thick, massy shielding to withstand an EMP blast, but unfortunately human beings don’t usually build to anticipate disasters until such a disaster has occurred and caused lots of death and destruction.
(Incidentally, an 1859-style event will also fry all the transistors on Earth, disabling our communications and our automobiles, along with destroying the big transformers that enable all our electrical power grids to deliver electricity … so the world would be left with a 21st century population and a technological infrastructure from about 1900, except without the human skills that people in 1900 had for coping, and the most important machines that would still work would be guns … so I’m afraid it would end modern technological civilization. At least this thought puts the possibility of a mere city-busting asteroid collision in perspective.)
They also won’t all be in the same place. A CME is very big, but doesn’t cover the entire solar system at once!
In addition, some of them will be behind something solid.
Mark,
The open designs of the drawings of the O’Neill colonies is pure fantasy. Real Orbital Settlements will need to be well shielded from radiation since people will be spending their entire lives on them. The additional protection needed for CME, even on the scale of the Carrington Event, will not add much to the overall cost will be built into the base line design specs. Its easy to build a Faraday Shield about an enclosed structure like an orbital settlement. By contrast it would be very difficult to harden human civilization to withstand a modern CME on the scale of that 1859 flare.
By contrast it would be very difficult to harden human civilization to withstand a modern CME on the scale of that 1859 flare.
Thomas, I have a two step process for fixing that.
Step 1: Experience a modern CME.
Step 2: Suddenly, we become very interested in hardening human civilization to withstand a modern CME. And we fix the problem.
This process would hold for any disaster either on Earth or in space.
Karl,
That brings to mind another advantage of orbital settlements. The populations will be much smaller, from a couple hundred to a few tens of thousands, so modern sound bite politics will prove less effective while its hard to con neighbors who saw you grow up. Another is that the high tech economy they are part of would require both higher levels of education and a need to be more rational. And not much room for parasites. One could have hope that those factors would lead to better governance. But then frontier communities do tend to have a better sense of what is important and what is noise.
I certainly agree with that, Thomas. When mistakes and fraud can kill off the colony, people are going to be less tolerant of the shenanigans that shows up in Earthside political leadership.
Good point about the lethality of most of Earths planetary surface, namely the ocean. Seafaring means trusting oneselfs life to a fragile artificial environment. Even a mere mile from shore the naked human will die with high probability (as he can’t even see the theoretically rechable safe shore). Man’s achievement in settling environments hostile to his life or at least in using them to generate nourishment (fishing) is remarkable.
If I were going to the expense of an interstellar probe, I’d want it to have a better way of detecting habitabity than sending down a decorticated human clone. Most likely I’d want the probe to send me raw environmental data and let me decide what’s habitable.
But mark, then you couldn’t keep using the phrase “meat probe” in your essay, which is funny.
Decorticated human clones are to testing planet habitability, as Ares I is to launching crews to LEO.
Decorticated human clones are to testing planet habitability, as Ares I is to launching crews to LEO.
A pithy comment.
Spock’s Brain
No technologically advanced society would ever consider living on a planetary surface. Visit one for a vacation perhaps, just as people go to Antarctica, but not as a permanent home.
This is related to some arguments against space colonization, the “It’s too hostile for human life” angle. Sure, if viability of colonization were somehow related to the short term survival of meat probes in the wild.
@Karl Hallowell…
I don’t think space colonization is possible…. governments of world have more important things to do rather than space programme…….
You’re setting the bar for “technologically advanced” at the point where biology is utterly and irreversibly transcended — you do realize that, right?
It could be argued that O’Neill set the bar at “1975.” As a thought experiment, if we were somehow starting over but with our present level of technology, I wonder if we would choose to settle on Earth rather than in large orbiting habitats with all the aesthetic pleasures of a terrestrial environment but without the storms, eruptions, fires, glaciers, earthquakes, and what not.
I don’t think space colonization is possible…. governments of world have more important things to do rather than space programme…….
Governments of the world aren’t the only entities who will ever do things in space. And given that governments of the world do a lot of less important things than space activities, the importance threshold for space has always been exceeded.
500 megayears or so is a maximum for habitability of Earth by baseline H. sapiens without massive technological help. That figure is uncertain of course; it depends on the capacity of Earth’s control systems to absorb further increases in solar output.
However, that figure could be an astronomically gross overestimate. Climate modelling suggests three attractors for Earth in its current configuration (of continent positions and so on) in this epoch. Two are metastable (Snowball Earth and the current glacial/interglacial cycle) and one is completely stable barring massive terraforming effort – conditions similar to Venus. (There is less solar input than Venus but much more potential greenhouse gas in the form of H2O.)
Nobody knows how much forcing is necessary to push Earth into the third attractor. We are doing the experiment willy-nilly, and by the time we get the result it will be too late to do anything about it. When doing something might kill all life on Earth, common sense might dictate that we should stop doing it.
You’re setting the bar for “technologically advanced” at the point where biology is utterly and irreversibly transcended — you do realize that, right?
People have “lived” on space stations for quite some time – not true of other planets or the moon. On going incremental development will see that living gradually become more sustainable and self sufficient. The evolutionary pathway has already been established.
Living is space is the low hanging fruit, living on another planet or the moon is at this stage pure science fiction, a far more distant prospect with many uncertainties yet to be resolved. It is kind of like making a fusion bomb (technology many decades old), and making a useful fusion reactor – perpetually twenty years away.
When doing something might kill all life on Earth, common sense might dictate that we should stop doing it.
What might kill all life on Earth? I haven’t seen anything yet.
I don’t think space colonization is possible…. governments of world have more important things to do rather than space programme…….
Space settlement is far more important than most everything that a government does (humanity can survive without government, but not without space settlement – in the long term), however, that is not to say that they have a mandate to do it. The days of government driven colonization seem to be over. This leaves private institutions to do the work.
Initially only a very small minority will settle space – not enough for a significant government mandate.
After careful selection and considerable training.
See “seasonal affective disorder” for an idea of how the more typical members of our species would be affected.
I should point out that while living in Fairbanks, Alaska I sometimes, during the winter of course, arrived at work before dawn and didn’t get out of the office until after dark — and this while working part-time. Someone told me one-seventh of the population up there turns over every year.
[[[You’re setting the bar for “technologically advanced” at the point where biology is utterly and irreversibly transcended — you do realize that, right?]]]
I am not sure what you mean by biology. Do you mean evolution? But space settlement is simply continuing the human evolutionary trend of the last ten thousand years of humans taking increase control over their habitat. Comparing an O’Neill Colony to the ISS is like comparing a pup tent to a city. A space settlement will have the exact gravity, radiation protection, climate, etc. needed for the sustained survival of its population.
And yes it will be a selection process. Those that thrive and adapt to living in orbital settlements will prosper and their descendants will populate the galaxy. Those that don’t will remain on Earth and to whatever fate a planet of limited resources and variable climate has for them.
I think in the end people will choose whether they would prefer to live in a habitat or on a planet. And I think the risks of life on a planet will strike a lot of people as much less than those associated with an entirely tech-dependent existence inside of a pressurized tin can.
It seems likely that there would be a variety of habitats available. I guess if someone wanted to live in a ‘tin can’ then it’s their choice.
For my tastes, I would prefer something like an Orbital (Iain M Banks), or a Ringworld. Maybe whizzing around in a GSV (again, Banks) would be cool too.
People put their faith in technology now. Just look at how dependent modern cities are on computers, telecommunications, power grids. Now imagine all those are gone. It could happen. All it would take is a solar flare similar to the Carrington Event of 1869. Most Earth settlements and infrastructure have developed organically with limited thought to their robustness in natural disasters, until one occurs.
By contrast orbital settlements would be designed as robust systems with the ability to survive the worst case hazards in their environment, including massive solar flares. The orbital settlements would have back-up systems that are not always found in human infrastructure today since orbital settlements would designed as complete systems with fore thought to protection against hazards in the environment they exist in.
Add to that that hazardous in space are fewer. No earthquakes, storms. floods. You will have systems to dodge NEOs and debris too large for the shielding. It would be shielded from solar flares. Orbital settlements would also have back-ups to critical systems. I know I would probably feel safer in an orbital settlement then I do now on Earth in the artificial caves we call buildings 🙂
We’re presently more aware of the risks of planetary life than those of space-habitat life, which may present dangers no one has even imagined yet. So predicting how people will choose to live when both options are available seems premature.
Eh. An unimpressive essay, to say the least.
His ‘thought experiment’ presupposes a really really REALLY stupid exploratory civilization with advanced insterstellar accel/decel capabilities; but incapable of remote atmostpheric detection, of basic orbital scanning (with technology available in the 1960’s) upon arrival in orbit, or of almost anything a sane exploration program would do, even to choosing a star in the right evolutionary stage.
A commenter called him on it on his own blog, and he replied that it really wasn’t what the essay was about.
Apparrently it’s really just a confusing rehash of the Fermi Paradox and Drake equation issues, issues that people have been discussing with a lot more clarity for the last twenty or thirty years.
To be brutal about it:
Yes, there will be lethal failures in space habitats. Some of them will kill everyone aboard. And we can’t know all the possible modes of failure ahead of time. However, there are two points here worth mentioning. There will be more than one habitat, and it is vanishingly unlikely that they will all fail at the same time – if only because they will not all be constructed at the same time. They are also unlikely all to be constructed to the same design.
The same applies to buildings, and to ships, and to airliners. And what have we done in those cases? We learn from the failure, and each failure makes it less likely that failure by the same path will happen again.
Catastrophic failures have not stopped us from building ships, aircraft and buildings. Nor should they stop us from building habitats.
I and others have said this before: Yes, people will die on the High Frontier, and die in large numbers. But many people died on the American frontier too – and if the early Americans had shrunk from that there wouldn’t be an America.
If we get on with the job and colonise space, two hundred years from now the vast majority of humans will never have set foot on Earth. And barring some vast cosmic catastrophe, the Universe will never be rid of us.
“See “seasonal affective disorder” for an idea of how the more typical members of our species would be affected.”
See vitamin D for a cure.
I don’t expect the majority of humans will choose life in space. In fact I expect the emigration rate to probably be on the order of 1 in 100,00 or less. And this is also in keeping with past watersheds of human expansion. The number of humans that migrated out of Africa was probably under a 1,000. Yet they were responsible for the population of the rest of the world. The number that reach Australia has been estimated as low as 50, let they populated the entire continent. Even immigration to the New World from Europe was probably in the single digits in terms of percent. I don’t see space being any different. It will take a special breed to settle space just as is required for any frontier. But their reward is that their children will inherit the Galaxy.
In terms of failure modes, yes new ones will be found as orbital settlements multiple, plus one of the standards, human over confidence and bad decision making will find many new ways to express itself. But ask yourself, where is your life expectancy likely to be higher, in a subsistence level village or a modern city? Where are the risks to your survival likely to be lower? And why should space settlements, with even more control over the human environment, be an exception to this trend that goes back to the first discovery of fire and human tool making?
“There will be more than one habitat, and it is vanishingly unlikely that they will all fail at the same time – if only because they will not all be constructed at the same time. They are also unlikely all to be constructed to the same design.”
I’m getting back on my hobby-horse again, but … suppose there’s another solar mass ejection on the scale of the enormous one observed in 1859? It will fry all the transistors aboard every space habitat that doesn’t have massive shielding, and it seems unlikely the people aboard are going to be able to go on with their lives when all their machines are broken. Possibly a habitat could be built with thick, massy shielding to withstand an EMP blast, but unfortunately human beings don’t usually build to anticipate disasters until such a disaster has occurred and caused lots of death and destruction.
(Incidentally, an 1859-style event will also fry all the transistors on Earth, disabling our communications and our automobiles, along with destroying the big transformers that enable all our electrical power grids to deliver electricity … so the world would be left with a 21st century population and a technological infrastructure from about 1900, except without the human skills that people in 1900 had for coping, and the most important machines that would still work would be guns … so I’m afraid it would end modern technological civilization. At least this thought puts the possibility of a mere city-busting asteroid collision in perspective.)
They also won’t all be in the same place. A CME is very big, but doesn’t cover the entire solar system at once!
In addition, some of them will be behind something solid.
Mark,
The open designs of the drawings of the O’Neill colonies is pure fantasy. Real Orbital Settlements will need to be well shielded from radiation since people will be spending their entire lives on them. The additional protection needed for CME, even on the scale of the Carrington Event, will not add much to the overall cost will be built into the base line design specs. Its easy to build a Faraday Shield about an enclosed structure like an orbital settlement. By contrast it would be very difficult to harden human civilization to withstand a modern CME on the scale of that 1859 flare.
By contrast it would be very difficult to harden human civilization to withstand a modern CME on the scale of that 1859 flare.
Thomas, I have a two step process for fixing that.
Step 1: Experience a modern CME.
Step 2: Suddenly, we become very interested in hardening human civilization to withstand a modern CME. And we fix the problem.
This process would hold for any disaster either on Earth or in space.
Karl,
That brings to mind another advantage of orbital settlements. The populations will be much smaller, from a couple hundred to a few tens of thousands, so modern sound bite politics will prove less effective while its hard to con neighbors who saw you grow up. Another is that the high tech economy they are part of would require both higher levels of education and a need to be more rational. And not much room for parasites. One could have hope that those factors would lead to better governance. But then frontier communities do tend to have a better sense of what is important and what is noise.
I certainly agree with that, Thomas. When mistakes and fraud can kill off the colony, people are going to be less tolerant of the shenanigans that shows up in Earthside political leadership.
Good point about the lethality of most of Earths planetary surface, namely the ocean. Seafaring means trusting oneselfs life to a fragile artificial environment. Even a mere mile from shore the naked human will die with high probability (as he can’t even see the theoretically rechable safe shore). Man’s achievement in settling environments hostile to his life or at least in using them to generate nourishment (fishing) is remarkable.