I spent the last decade or so, as a hobby, working on a revision of Marshal Savage’s The Millennial Project because, as space futurist proposals go, it was unique in its approach of the pursuit of space through the cultivation of a Post-Industrial culture and civilization, not some package of discrete ‘missions.’ Realistically, you can’t create an ejector seat for Spaceship Earth given the technology at-hand. Perhaps because of the mythology crafted around our colonial and pioneer history, we are always underestimating how difficult autarky really is. Contemporary civilization is a cybernetic system. A complex interdependent network. It doesn’t expand by tossing out miniature clones of itself. It grows, plant-like, at the ends of its communications links with the sustainability of those extensions keyed to the ‘bandwidth’ of those links. Eventually, we may have the means to create effective self-contained seeds for civilization. But near-term, expanding the civilization to space is the work of a whole civilization and you really need a majority portion of society living high on Maslow’s Pyramid to accomplish that in earnest. And so addressing the big issues on Earth–Global Warming and its impacts, fossil fuel dependence, world hunger, shelter, healthcare, education, the unsustainability and exploitation of Industrial Age economics–are just as integral to a long-term space development vision as inventing some new kind of rocket.
I’m sort of puzzled as to why KSR is trying to debunk what is already a rather old-fashioned notion of space development and colonization. Perhaps this is targeted toward the still rather retrofuturist ideas common to the space advocacy community. But it’s old fashioned even by TMP’s '80s era perspective. Well before the term was coined, some space futurists realized that our habitation of the rest of the solar system, if not the rest of the galaxy, was probably contingent upon transhumanist solutions. In those days that was seen in the context of biotechnology, which previously had the cultural role we put nanotechnology in today. The gigantic rotating space colonies and the generation ships deriving from that were premised on the basic solution to ‘space wasting’. But this solution is in a horse race with clinical solutions that will always be cheaper and more convenient if they are at all possible. In the time it would take to construct the first O’Neill style colony, the practical need for them might become obsolete by clinical advances. So which do you want to bet on? The TMP vision banked on the ultimate eventuality of that clinical solution–on the simpler solution winning out–and thus saw a solar civilization based primarily in asteroid belts and on low pressure microgravity habitats of far simpler engineering. Terraforming was optional and not necessarily ideal.
Today even this notion is beginning to become anachronistic as contemporary futurism suggests a highly mobile consciousness for future humans, implying that the predominant means of passenger travel in space may be radio and laser and the predominant habitat a virtual habitat–what I like to call VRcos. (virtual reality arcology) We might argue about the plausibility of AI and the transportable consciousness, but at least this is a more contemporary idea.
A contemporary vision of interstellar colonization most-certainly doesn’t involve the generation ship. It more likely involves the ‘packaging’ of the human being into more highly resilient forms, such as full-stop suspended animation through chemical fixation (nanotech-assisted plastination), the resilient storage of the information content of the mind and body, or the reliance on automated pre-settlement to facilitate the transmission of consciousness by interstellar telecommunications. And so in this context necessary payload fractions can be quite small and the starship becomes a much smaller, lighter, simpler vessel capable of larger fractions of C. I like concepts such as the Powell-Pellegrino Valkyrie tether-ship with their external antimatter reaction engines, or my own update of TMP’s starship, composed mostly of ice in a needle-like structure like the London Skylon using its enclosed fore and aft engines alternately as thrusters and X-ray laser deflectors.
At the most minimalist, we can eliminate the spacecraft altogether by imagining the consciousness of passengers and a supporting seed data package reduced to data sets spread redundantly across a vast swarm of nano-machine spores sprayed in the direction of a target star by a large solar-pumped orbital laser. The spores then use whatever materials they land on to construct colonial ‘seedlings’ gathering other spores and communicating with each other to gather their dispersed data packages into more useful sets directing their further construction and collection until they can then go about creating habitats, cultivating adapted biomes, establishing telecommunications, sending more spore-swarms to other stars, and reconstructing their passengers. Civilization as an interstellar infection…
