Space colonies

Brand, S. (1977). Space colonies. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

(Brand, 1977)

green – pro space coloney

red – anti space coloney

blue – question

 

p.6

The sky starts at your feet. Think how brave you are to walk around. – Anne Herbert

One thing that impresses me about the space environment is that, hostile as it is to us pulpy organisms, it is wholly benign for electronic and mechanical machinery, much better for them than this corrosive, weighty Earth’s surface.

In whatever philosophical and technical configuration they are, we shall be obliged to rely upon machines to make space habitable for us.

 

p.9 – O’Neill

The High frontier – It is the frontier of new lands, located only a few days travel time away from the Earth, and built from materials and energy available in space.

Solar energy – virtually inexhaustible, reliable (available 100% in space), over 10x more efficient than on earth.

Materials – We are at the bottom of a gravitational well 4000 miles deep, from which our materials can only be lifted at great cost. Our technique must exploit the fact that the moon has a gravitational well only 1/20 as deep …..  ….. and is a rich source of metals, glass, oxygen, and soil.

p.10-11 – O’Neill

The date of realization of colonies of that size does not depend on materials or engineering – those we have already. rather, it depends on a balance between productivity, a rising living standard and the economies possible with automation.

The first colony will be located IN a Lagrange point

For the entire construction of island one the excavation left on the moon will only be 7 x 200 x 200 yards.

island one = high economic payoff,

The use of lunar materials eliminates the need for incurring the high lift costs from the earth, and so appears capable of giving solar electric power on earth at rates initially competitive, and eventually much lower than coal-fired or nuclear power plants. This is the prime importance of world peace, because the energy source is inexhaustible, and these power stations can be built for every nation that needs them.

If we use our intelligence and our concern for our fellow human beings in this way, we can, without any sacrifice on our part, make the next decades a time not of despair but of fulfilled hope, of excitement, and of new opportunity.

p.12 – O’Neill before comittee

Space colonisation – or the development of space manufacturing industries.

Is it possible, within the limits of current technology, using only the ordinary construction materials with which we are familiar, to build communities in free space rather than on a planetary surface like the earth, the moon, or mars?

Can these communities be large enough, and sufficiently Earth-like, to be attractive to live in; small worlds of their own rather than simply space stations?

Would such colonies have unique advantages from an economic viewpoint, so that they could justify the costs of their construction and contribute in a productive way to the total human community?

….. workers in heavy industry could easily reach external, non-rotating factories where zero gravity and breathable atmospheres would permit easy assembly, without cranes, lift trucks or other handling equipment, of very large, massive products.

In a space colony, the basic human activities of living and recreation, of agriculture, and of industry could all be separated and non-interfering, each with its optimal gravity, temperature, climate and sunlight and atmosphere, but could be located conveniently near to each other. Energy for agriculture would be used directly in the form of sunlight, interrupted at will by large, very low mass aluminium shades located in zero gravity in space near the farming areas. The day length and seasonal cycle would, therefore, be controllable independently for each crop.

in space, temperatures of up to several thousand degrees would be obtainable at low cost, simply by the use of low mass aluminium-foil mirrors to concentrate the ever-present sunlight.

In energy terms, we are at the bottem of a gravitational well which is 4,000 miles deep.

…. we must accelerate a spacecraft to a speed of more than 25,000 miles per hour before it can escape the earth’s gravity and go as far as lunar orbit.

The energy required to bring materials from the moon to free space is only 1/20 as much as from earth.

p.14

At the time of the Apollo project we did not think of the moon as a resource base. The moon landings, originally motivated by national pride and a sense of adventure, became scientific expeditions and as such returned a high payoff in knowledge. Now, though, it is time to cash in on Apollo. It was impossible to plan in a rational way a program of space colonization until the Apollo lunar samples were returned for analysis. From those samples, we now have the analyses of the lunar soil and rock. Table 1 summarizes representative data from soils at the Apollo II landing site:

TABLE1 UNSELECTED APOLLO II SOIL SAMPLE (This unselected sample is more than 30% metals by weight.)

1. Oxygen 40%
2. Titanium 5.9%
3. Silicon 19.2%
4. Aluminium 5.6%
5. Iron 14.3%
6. Magnesium 4.5%
7. Calcium 8.0%

The lunar surface materials are poor in carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen; in the early years of space colonization, these elements would have to be brought from earth. They would be reused, not thrown away. For every ton of hydrogen brought from earth, nine tons of water could be made at the colony site, the remaining eight tons being oxygen from the processing of lunar oxides. The removal of half a million tons of material from the surface of the moon sounds like a large-scale mining operation, but it is not. The excavation left on the moon would be only 5 yards deep, and 200 yards long and wide: not even enough to keep one small bulldozer occupied for a five-year period.

With gravity, good long-term health can be maintained; the colonists should experience none of the bone-calcium loss suffered by the Skylab astronauts in their zero-gravity, non-rotating environment. Physiology experiments in rotating rooms on earth indicate that humans can acclimatize to quite high rotation rates, some to as much as one rotation every six seconds.

It seems almost a certainty that at such a level a person with a serious heart condition could live far longer than on earth, and that low gravity could greatly ease many of the health problems of advancing age.

A range of costs for large-scale engineering projects is listed in Table 2, for scale:

TABLE 2 APPROXIMATE COSTS OF ENGINEERING PROJECTS,

IN 1975 DOLLARS

• a) Panama Canal – 2 Billion Dollars
• b) Space Shuttle Development – 5-8 Billion Dollars
• c) Alaska Pipeline – 6 Billion Dollars
• d) Advanced Lift Vehicle Development – 8-25 Billion Dollars
• e) Apollo – 39 Billion Dollars
• f) Super Shuttle Development – 45 Billion Dollars
• g) Manned Mission to Mars – 100 Billion Dollars
• h) Project Independence – 600-2000 Billion Dollars

 

Interview with O’Neill p28

There are lots of places on the earth where 1% ore is regarded as relatively good these days. And there are large areas of the lunar surface where just the ordinary dirt that you pick up out of the ground is as much as 10% aluminum, and around 30% in total metals.

p.32 – T. A. Heppenheimer

What are libration points? The answer is that libration points are locations where a spacecraft may be placed so as always to remain in the same position with respect to the Earth and the Moon. Suppose the Earth and Moon were fixed in space and did not move. Then a single libration point would exist at the point

where the gravity fields of Earth and Moon cancel out. A body placed there would feel equal and opposite attractions from Earth and Moon, and so would stay fixed in place. But if the body were moved slightly, it would feel a slightly greater attraction from either Earth or Moon, and so would fall down, moving rapidly away from the libration point. That point, therefore, is unstable.

Libration points are then the points where these three effects cancel out: the two gravity fields, and the centrifugal force. The French mathematician, Lagrange, in 1772, showed that there are five such points.

p.34

Perhaps with O’Neill’s “seed pods” now emerging the perspective is enlarged again. Not that we should care less for the earth, for it will remain the principal home for most of us for a long time. But now, mother earth need no longer remain barren and generations of diverse offspring can continue to ask why. RUSSELL SCHWEICKART  – NASA astronaut (Spacewalk, Apollo 9)

The underlying justification of an organized society is to encourage and nurture the ongoing learning of its citizens. Thus an enduring society is not one that sees itself as primarily an aggragation of economic institutions – its economic stability will be a derivative outcome of its capacity to learn and learn and learn, endlessly. RICHARD RAYMOND – President, Portola Institute (which parented the Whole Earth Catalog)

p.36 – WENDELL BERRY (Poet, novelist, farmer, teacher, author) 

For what is remarkable about Mr. O’Neill’s project is not its novelty or its adventurousness, but its conventionality. If it should be implemented, it will be the rebirth of the idea of Progress with all its old lust for unrestrained expansion, its totalitarian concentrations of energy and wealth, its obliviousness to the concerns of character and community, its exclusive reliance on technical and economic criteria, its disinterest in consequence, its contempt for human value, its compulsive salesmanship.

In order to make up for deficiencies of materials on earth we will exploit” (i.e., damage or destroy the moon and the asteroids. This is in absolute obedience to the moral law of the frontier: humans are destructive in proportion to their supposition of abundance; if they are faced with an infinite abundance, then they will become infinitely destructive. 

O’Neill is not, then, merely asking for a public subsidy in the amount of a hundred billion dollars. He is proposing that he and his colleagues should be permitted to experiment with fundamental values. This is the violence of the specialist. This kind of thing is familiar enough. What is new here is the scale.

On the one hand, we have an admirer of Mr. O’Neill’s project saying that if it should be implemented, “maybe humankind could walk gently in the Universe.” And on the other hand we have an article by a twenty-year-old scientist at work on Mr. O’Neill’s project, in which it is proposed that we should send out to the asteroid belt a work crew equipped with about one thousand 100 megaton hydrogen bombs….” The editor’s implicit approval of both statements makes of the first a vacuous sentimentality. The other, in any context, would be monstrous.

p.38

In proposing this idea, O’Neill has done us all a favor, by forcing us to ponder our philosophies and approaches to life on (or off) this planet. What if we were now living in a space colony, debating the possibility of colonizing earth? Would we be asking the same questions? I think not. From the viewpoint of a creature in some metal and plastic isolated environment, the key question would probably be seeking the companionship and cooperation of the diverse population found on earth, rather than avoiding it for the “safety,” or “high technology of a space cocoon. – WILSON CLARK (Author and advisor to California’s Governor Brown.)

People would become used to the whole earth, seeing it they would not see all those funny lines denoting political divisions, arbitrary in many cases, but would rather learn to think in terms of regions rather than nations, biotic provinces rather than NATO or SEATO, geo-oceanographic reality rather than trade embargoes with island republics, watershed reality rather than states rights. When the blood” & guts of Viet-Nam began pouring out of the TV News onto the living room floor the peace movement in America began to extrapolate; similarly I feel that the whole ecological awareness of people & their understanding of inter-relatedness would be vastly accelerated by information (visual & sensory) that could be provided by the stations. 

If it were handled wiselybacteria-like it could gain somewhat of the aura that the ancient Olympic games had & as such might serve as a model or operating symbol for world & planetary evolution. One could, for instance, move the UN into space. That would change the game. – STEVE DURKEE Artist (back cover), co-founder of Lama Foundation, book designer 

p.40

1970’s space colonisation sexism

“It plays a function, which may be negative or positive, of giving us another frontier, when we’ve used up all the ones we have on Earth. I’m not sure if we should want to have another frontier. It seems to me to block constructive response to problems here on Earth.” – Conversation with DENNIS MEADOWS – Social technical-systems analyst and author.

p.42

Surely we will roam the universe with our minds and dream up far less materialist, more elegant means to re-structure and repattern ourselves. Surely we can leapfrog the current instrumental materialism and perhaps, even escape the prison of matter entirely. For heaven’s sake, what difference does it make which arm of our spiral galaxy we are in? Will journeying across it in a spaceship really change anything? As O’Neill himself says, people manage to make themselves unhappy in almost any circumstances.” When will we stop trying to re-tool the planet and get on with the job of trying to re-tool ourselves? For me, not the High Frontier, but the Human Frontier. My question remains. “Why?’ – Hazel Henderson – Co-director, Princeton Center for Alternative Futures; advisor, Office of technology assessment

I think “Space Colonies” conveys an unpleasant sense of colonialism which is not, I think, the spirit behind the idea. I prefer “Space Cities.” – CARL SAGAN – Space scientist, exobiologist, Author

Whatever type of system were introduced there would almost certainly be serious problems with its stability – even if every effort were made to include many co-evolved elements. We simply have no idea how to create a large stable artificial ecosystem.

We can say, then, that although there appear to be no absolute physical barriers to the implementation of the O’Neill program, potentially serious biological barriers remain to be investigated. What about psychological, social, and political barriers? The question of whether Homo sapiens can adapt to the proposed space station environment seems virtually answered. Six thousand men live for long periods on a Navy super-carrier orders of magnitude smaller than a proposed space habitat, without women and without the numerous other amenities envisioned by O’Neill. Many city dwellers pass their lives in a similarly circumscribed area and in much less interesting surroundings (travel among stations and, occasionally, back to Earth is envisioned). There is little reason to doubt that most people would adapt to the strange situation of access to different levels of gravity.

Environmentalists often accuse politicians of taking too short-term a view of the human predicament. By prematurely rejecting the idea of Space Colonies they would be making the same mistake. – PAUL and ANNE EHRLICH – Population biologists, environmentalists, authors, Paul helped conceived the concept of co-evolution

p.44

If we are going to move out into space, we will have to learn how to be inhabitants of the universe, and that will require a transformation of consciousness.

I don’t see anything wrong with setting up a colony in space but I do see something wrong in thinking that one can create wildness by placing it into a container. At the present time, there is a battle going on in American culture between those who are trying to surround management with Culture, and those who are trying to surround and contain culture with Management. – WILLIAM IRWIN THOMPSON – Author, co-founder of Lindisfarne

What bothers me most about Space Colonies — even as concepts – is their betrayal of what I believe to be the deepest and most meaningful human values. I do not think one can live a full human life without living it among animals and plants. From that viewpoint, urban societies have already lost large parts of their humanity, and their perversion of the countryside makes life there hardly better, sometimes worse.

So that my point is that the very idea of Space Colonies carries to a logical – and horrifying – conclusion processes of dehumanization and depersonalization that have already gone much too far on the Earth. In a way, we’ve gotten ready for Space Platforms by a systematic degradation of human ways of life on the Earth.

A nice example of that is in the major developments of architecture throughout this past generation. It’s all gone to designing monstrous machines for human existence in the cheapest ways out of the shoddiest materials. (not a fan of brutalism it seems…)

All that dehumanizing architecture is getting us ready for Space Colonies (examples include – Le Corbusier designed a building for art and design students here, the Carpenter Center, of poured concrete of course. Unfortunately, the building itself is the showpiece. It’s a goldfish bowl — visitors can see from outside everything going on inside. There is no privacy whatever. Just the thing for an artist).

So one last but not least consideration concerning them: Who is to go to them? The power elite of our over-developed society? The highly affluent? Who else? – GEORGE WALD – Biologist, pacifist; Nobel Prize 1967

p.48

Howard Odum calculated it would take about 2.5 acres of ecosystems combining water and land to sustain safely one person in a space colony. – JOHN TODD – Biologist, co-founder of The New Alchemy Institute, co-designer of The Ark on Prince Edward Island, Canada

p.50

How much architectural variety sprang from the resistance a not fully conquered environment offered in the past. Now, that we can adopt any style we want, will every imitation be tried out? It’s bad enough to come upon a Dutch windmill next to the Damascus gate in Jerusalem. I hope this kind of thing and the resulting boredom will be spared us in outer space. How boring, to make a space colony look like an island in the Bahamas or a township in New England! Why not make it look as much as possible like a space colony, and discover what that will be? – BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST. Benedictine monk, founder of “Houses of Prayer” movement

O’Neill estimates that the space colonies project could be funded conservatively at 12.7 billion dollars per year; about 7% of the defence budgets. Funding a joint space colony project represents an interesting form of disarmament. Verification becomes much simpler – no need to count ICBMs, bombers, etc. Expenditure levels on the space colony project would be directly visible in terms of progress toward concrete goals. … – Dave Caulkins Los Altos, California

p.54

Paradoxically, the creators of such a spaceship would be psychologically least suited to be its permanent inhabitants. The Professor O’Neills of the world might make brief visits and inspection tours, but they could not tolerate the sort of life that permanent residents would have to pursue there. People of great originality and independence of spirit would be intolerable in the spaceship community, particularly if they belonged to different tribes (tribe being races, religions, political groups ect.).

For a libration point colony to survive it would have to have only one tribe on it. (This is a necessary but not sufficient condition, for even an initially uniform tribe may differentiate in time.) This means that the political system of the spaceship must include progress-stopping features from the first day people go on board. This means totalitarianism. What group would be most suitable for this most recent Brave New World? Probably a religious group. There must be unity of thought and the acceptance of discipline. But the colonists couldn’t be a bunch of Unitarians or Quakers, for these people regard the individual conscience as the best guide to action. Space colony existence would require something more like the Hutterites or the Mormons for its inhabitants. Scientists and college professors would, as residents, be disastrous. – GARRETT HARDIN – Biologist and Author

People ask me, “Where do you live?” I answer, “I do not mean to be rude or facetious, but I live on a little planet called Earth. I never leave home. My backyard has become greater and greater until it has proven to be a big sphere, and I can travel in any great circle direction and eventually find myself where I started, ergo: I never leave ‘home’.” If anyone asks, “How was the trip?” or “Where do you live?” they are not living in cosmic realism – they are “grooved like an L.P. disc.

To all who are living in cosmic realism, the immediate inauguration of additional Earth-Moon, around-the-Sun flying formations of our team could not be more humanly normal. It is just as normal as a child coming out of its mother’s womb, gradually learning to stand, then running around on its own legs. – BUCKMINSTER FULLER – Design Scientist and Author

p.57

The first living thing on this planet had, as a necessary support system, the whole existing cosmos, since only the existence of a specific if unknown cosmic balance made possible a specific if unknown solar system balance, that made possible on earth the appearance of a specific organism (one of them had to be the first). The cosmos in toto was the “territorial imperative” of a bacteria-like organism. No cosmos as such, no bacteria as such. 

p.59

The Urban Effect. It states that the transformation of the cosmos in the direction of the spirit is the Urban Effect. That is to say, the Urban Effect is an eschatological imperative.

Is space migration now a responsible act, a diversion or pure escapism?

To end there is no escaping the need for a more reverential, urbane, civilised sense of the human experiment and, ultimately, the need for the eschatological vision of a universe in the process of self-divinization, the Urban effect. – PAOLO SOLERI – Urban visionary and author

p.61

Big money always seems to ignore the lesson of the past and skip the present by insisting the future is our present. – David Shetzline – Author

p.62

A huge debate between John Holt (author) and T.A Heppenheimer (engineer and scientist).

Holt: Space is not Heaven. It is not even Disneyland. It is an environment as hostile and deadly as the core of a nuclear reactor or the inside of a tank of nerve gas. In time, we will probably learn how to move around in it a bit more and do a few more things in it. But Earth’s major problems will have to be solved on Earth.

Heppenheimer (counter): These are the statements that space is insuperably hostile, that it can be of no significant value to man, that we must solve our problems on Earth, and the like. There is an alternate position, which is equally theological. This is compounded of assertions such as “the earth is the cradle of man, but man cannot live in the cradle forever,” or the “man’s colonization of space is as significant as the colonization of the land by aquatic animals in the Cambrian Epoch,’ or that “man’s imagination and daring can overcome any limits.” I feel the pessimistic theology is naive, and is irresponsible. In a time of challenge to the foundations of our industrial civilization, it ill-behooves us to dismiss major technologies out of hand.

This type of optimism is useful in that it may lead us not to be daunted by initial difficulties, but instead to seek to apply ingenuity and resourcefulness so as to overcome difficult problems.

p.68

Heppenheimer: Certainly, one should not seek to deny others the possibility of what to them may be an important and exciting new type of life, merely because one would not himself choose that life.

It can scarcely be denied that large numbers of people will freely volunteer to live in space, even under austere conditions, when this becomes possible. If it is in the national interest that they do so, then esthetic judgments lose much of their force.

Holt: This is a death rate of something over 6%. But our ventures into space have been very modest, and surrounded by the most elaborate and expensive precautions. It seems altogether reasonable to assume that if we begin complicated mining and industrial operations on the moon and in space, our casualty rate will be even higher, perhaps much higher.

ME: 1.4% fatality rate for the number of piloted flights to space. -https://www.livescience.com/33175-the-fallen-heroes-of-human-spaceflight.html

1.74% death rate constructing world trade center – a global frontier. Sixty deaths, and a death rate of 17.4 per thousand workers.- https://checkers-safety.com/fatalities-construction-industry-timeline/

Holt: The model of an aircraft carrier is not a bad one, to give us an idea of what space colonies will be like. A few people in them will live like Admirals; most will live like enlisted men.

If “national needs” (i.e. the interests of powerful pressure groups) dictate, we will find plenty of poor people to draft for the menial and dangerous work of colonizing space.

Someday, in a world where mankind has learned how to put a stop to war and to feed all the world’s people, to try to colonize space might be a practicable, fitting, and even worthy enterprise, But not now.

p.72

Stewart Brand – Editor

Earth and Moon, for once, drawn to scale. In this scale, the nearest next item, Venus, would be seventy-two yards away. Between, nothing. Except for sunlight.

If we can learn to successfully manage large complex ecosystems in the Space Colonies, that sophistication could help reverse our destructive practices on Earth. And if we fail, if our efforts to impersonate evolution in Space repeatedly run amok, then we will have learned something as basic as Darwin about our biosphere — that we cannot manage it, that it manages us, that we are in the care of wisdom beyond our knowing (true anyway).

People want to go not because it may be nicer than what they have on Earth but because it will be harder. The harshness of Space will oblige a life-and-death reliance on each other which is the sort of thing that people romanticize and think about endlessly but seldom get to do.

Returning to the question of Artificial vs. Natural, my friend Dick Baker has his doubts. Some years before he became a Zen abbot he worked in the merchant marine and observed that too long on board in a totally man-made environment tended to make the seamen a bit crazy. The same, he’s noticed, goes for cities.

It’s true, we make ourselves dishonest in worlds we have had too much of the making of. Still, “Natural” has a way of getting in through whatever barriers. As Baker said in another context, “From the Buddhist point of view everything is artificial.’

p.76 – Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9 astronaut) Speaking to Stewart Brand

When you rotate you immediately complicate the process of looking outward from the spacecraft. If you want to look internally and work internally, it’s no problem. However, if you want to communicate with the earth, or you want to point a radiotelescope, or an optical telescope, or you want to make observations externally, then the only direction you can look is along the axis. And even then unless you want to have things rotate as you look at them, you immediately have to de-rotate something. You’ve got to somehow get out of the rotating system, or counteract the rotation by having a counter-rotating hub, or perhaps some sort of separate equipment standing off to the side that doesn’t rotate and a data link between you and it or something of that kind, so it complicates and therefore increases the cost of space operations to have an artificial gravity.

Convection works, as well as a lot of other things that you are used to here on earth. And if you’re going to start growing food and vegetables and things, there’s a lot less uncertainty about what you’re trying to do if you have an artificial gravity. On the other hand, the work with Skylab was all in zero gravity. We had three guys up there on the last mission for about three months. After 84 days we saw no indication of anything that would stop us from going for significantly longer periods.

I’m so excited about O’Neill’s project because it presents a challenge that’s worthy of interest and time and energy on the part of young people, where so much of what we’re doing is sort of the drudgery of space flight. We’re trying to extract a practical value out of a communications satellite and those kinds of things, which are useful, which are good, which I have nothing at all against, but which are not the kind of a challenge which is going to cause somebody to climb Mount Everest.

Types of Earth Observing – meteorology, oceanography, earth resources, forestry, agriculture (both in space and observing earth it will permit you to do. features for agricultural benefits). They’re going to be doing all different types of astronomy – radio astronomy, optical astronomy, a whole new infra-red and ultra-violet astronomy. – how space can help earth

There is one suggestion I’d like to make to Gerry O’Neill. I sure would like to have the inhabitants of those colonies have a relationship with the cosmos and not just be totally internal, inward-looking. – meditating, eating with stars.

p.82 – Wendell Berry Angry –  letter on April 27, 1976

“Either knowledge,” you say, meaning either the success or the failure of space colonization, “is a kind of growing up.” This assumes that all knowledge is good — which, of course, is not true. It is especially not true of knowledge that depends on practical proof or demonstration. Most people, one hopes, would not consider themselves improved by having killed someone, though, having done so, they would know more about it than before. There is no culture know of that has not held that good people must refuse to know some things.

“If we can learn to successfully manage large complex ecosystems in the Space Colonies, that sophistication could help reverse our destructive practices on Earth.” Sophistication, like knowledge, is a subject power, is good or bad according to the use that is made of it. Generally speaking, the more technological sophistication we have attained, the more destructive we have become. 

It is not sophistication that makes people behave responsibly, but generous purpose and moral restraint. 

It was not inherent in their technical expertise, but in their willingness to live within strict moral-ecological limits. They did not waste anything.  Some people in our own culture have something of it now. If such undestructiveness is so clearly possible on earth, by what logic shall we look for it in outer space? How can we expect to discover it by extravagance when its first principle is thrift?

“People want to go not because it may be nicer than what they have on Earth but because it will be harder.” This is essentially a warmed-over Marine Corps recruitment advertisement – the same irresponsible promise, appealing to the same sad fantasy: “If I could just get out of this nowhere place, I could be a real man. I could show ‘ern. Let me point out to you, Stewart, that we have not yet, in this country, faced the hardship of the earth.

Space colonization, you say “employs the same nations, the same engineers, manufacturers, contractors, etc.” as the arms race. Exactly. And this makes it certain that the worst characteristics of this society will survive in space colonization. The assumption I am arguing from is that you cannot escape character: you can only change it by changing its understanding of its limits.

The fundamental totalitarian impulse is to officialize excellence. We already have far too little free science because most scientists are busy “applying” science for the corporations or the government, which are therefore not afraid of excellent scientists.

“The popular wisdom currently holds that purely techno-1 logical fixes are ‘bad’ because each technological solution’ creates five new and different problems. But the reverse side of the coin is surely just as valid: purely societal fixes + are also ‘bad’ because each societal ‘solution’ creates five new and different problems!

It is impossible to differentiate between a society and its technology; there is a mutuality of causation and influence that I do not believe can be convincingly picked apart. All that can be served by this distinction is the self-esteem of a specialist who, for moral convenience, wishes to ignore the social consequences of mechanical “solutions.”

Mr. Vajk’s false distinction between technology and society rests upon another, implicit distinction that is equally false: he supposes that the human considerations of technology and society can somehow be separated from all of creation that is not human: plants, animals, soils, waters, climates, regions, continents, the world, the universe. The universe of systems within systems survives because it is healthy, it is in balance. Humans survive within it because – only because they are, so far, more healthy than not.

The flush toilet is a social-technological solution to a problem: How to get rid, of excrement inoffensively. This solution immediately creates two problems (soil depletion and water pollution) which call for solutions (agricultural chemicals and sewage treatment plants) which create many other problems which call for more solutions which create even more problems, and so on and on. I doubt seriously that Mr. Vajk, if he had the national budget at his disposal, could accurately trace out and forestall or minimize the adverse effects of the flush toilet, much less those of space colonization.

p.84

Your thinking on this matter is demonstrably superficial, and its superficiality slides over a political alignment that I find both morally repugnant and personally threatening. The fact is that you cannot advocate space colonization without implicitly advocating an enlargement of governmental power and the enlargement and enrichment of the corporations. – the people will have to pay for it.

In practical terms, your advocacy of space colonization amounts to a betrayal of No these modest settlements of the earth.

Spring 1976 CO statement – “Humans are destructive in proportion to their supposition of abundance; if they are faced with an infinite abundance, then they will become infinitely destructive.”

Stewart Brand:

As near as I can tell, a large centralized government has been sufficient for a Space program, but it is not necessary. The next big project, Spacelab, is being designed and constructed wholly outside the U.S. by a consortium of European nations. Would you favour a world of proliferating smaller governments and occasional major collaborative enterprises such as ocean farming and Space exploration? I would.

According to Sauer no acre of Earth is unaffected by “the agency of man” – especially the places we have tried to protect. Cultural now and increasingly dominates biological. Recently something has been added to cultural which is the product of intellect –technology in its full range of exquisite to brutal.

Maybe our function is to help maintain the best of biological wisdom and the best of cultural wisdom, and continually sort the exquisite from the brutal technology.

p.86 – Jesco Von Puttkamer

they (NASA) agreed that Space Stations – orbiting construction camps – are the real primary need to get to any of the interesting projects, since they all have to be assembled in orbit.

“We have even looked at building large structures to illuminate parts of the Earth with light from space. You can get ten times the intensity of the full moon by having may be 50 mirrors floating out there. You can save electricity on the ground. You can reduce crime in certain areas by making it bright enough. You could facilitate around-the-clock construction. There are even now investigations going on whether crop-growth can be increased by having illumination from Space.

p.88

Marshall McLuhan observed, “Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information,” (Culture is Our Business, 1970).

Wild freedom, trees falling in the wilderness unheard, the unimpeded health of ecosystems – that’s our banner. But I wonder if it’s already long gone, like the Earth-centered solar system or the seven days of creation. – Stewart Brand

Jesco Von Puttkamer –

Let us keep our options open at this time where we are but at the threshold of new frontiers, and let us plan our next steps to be responsive to mankind’s near-term needs and wants while building a solid foundation of ethical responsibility and technological capability from which an open, choiceful long-term future (or futures) becomes accessible. That alone, in my opinion, provides validity to the Space Program.

It is a fact that the pursuit of space goals generates innovations in virtually all fields of science and technology, and therefore helps stimulate progress in areas not even remotely connected to the original program.

….”Space Industrialization.” a progressive program to provide permanent, practical and commercial utilization/tools of space through products and services that create – in the long run new values, jobs, and better quality of life for all mankind…

I used to see this power of nature to spread life as something of a religion – a matter of faith rather than provable evidence. Since it is a driving force upwards toward higher goals and higher meaning, some people call this power God but that is an expression which came into existence because of the deficiencies of other explanations. I used to be unable to comprehend that anyone would question the validity of our thrust into the unknown. Today, I’m still no closer to a better understanding. All I see is the experts warning us of population explosion, resources depletion and “limits to growth,” and at virtually the same instant in eternity, we have begun to venture into space … confound it! that can’t be just coincidence!

Man will always carry the disciplines of finitude with him/her, even into the far reaches of space, for it is precisely in the confrontation with the infinity of space that the realization of his own finitude will be thrust upon him.

p.90

… For me, Life’s purpose is to become increasingly aware of itself and to evolve into increasingly hostile environments (sea to land to air to space)… – Roger C. Girouard Tallahassee, Florida

Eric Drexler:

space is such a deadly environment that man cannot live there successfully, and was not meant to be there (if god had intended people to live in space, he would have given them the capacity to build habitats there…)

The worst we can do is disturb it with life. In its way it is hostile, but I wouldn’t care to try a temperate zone winter without shelter either. Someone said that man is the only animal that fouls his own nest. The obvious response is that man is the only animal that is trying to grow up without leaving the nest.

p.93

Ecological Considerations for Space Colonies

As the earth becomes more crowded and its resources depleted the options for growth become progressively circumscribed. Yet problems of expansion into space also seem nearly unsurmountable.

The potential for malfunction of small ecosystems seems large: the probability of disease microbes, fungal infections of plants and other disasters must be estimatable.

p.94

T.A. Heppenheimer

The space colony will be heavily dependent upon advanced technology, rich in energy, rich in the materials which can be obtained from the Moon. Any system of agriculture, to be valid, must reflect these features.

In our modern society, few need labor merely to win the ordinary creature comforts of life; our industrial technique makes it possible for most people to be free from constant concern for life’s necessities. In that sense, they have the opportunity (whether they use it or not) to pursue life-styles which will enrich their sense of life. In the space colony, agricultural technology can easily produce such an abundance of food and other necessities as to leave the colonists entirely, free from fear that they will come to mishaps. They thus can live in freedom and concern themselves with the possibilities of the High Frontier, rather than ceaselessly worrying that someone, by breaking the rules, will bring disaster to all.

SB – No one has successfully maintained a terrarium or other isolated organic system for very long. Hydroponic greenhouses, etc. are richly linked with the rest of the Earth’s biosphere. Ecosystem management is still a speculational science, like exobiology. What we do know about monocrops is that when they go down, they crash.

It may be true that a closed cycle agriculture could be set up using non-biological techniques to recycle liquid, solid and gaseous wastes. But I have not been able to find any reports of such a system having been put into operation for an extended period.

p.96

MIGRATION is MUTATION, the EARTH is merely the COCOON, we are CATERPILLERS who now are ready to METAMORPHOSE into BUTTERFLIES and fly off into SPACE – Jim Anderson, Nameless Hearsay News

p.98

Jacques Consteau: How is it that so much money is going to be spent to explore distant things that have very little to do with our life, while the ocean seems so little known, and needs so much funding?”

p.103

Jacques Consteau: …but I do not think that it is a way of life to live off the planet, same as I do not think that it is a way of life to live in underwater cities.

One anecdote that happened to me just four days ago. I was with two eminent archaeologists on a small island across from the ancient harbour at Knossos, Crete. We spotted from the ship some not ruins really, but a very old construction site. There was a slope which obviously had been polished by prehistoric man to pull a boat out on the rock. We landed, and while the archaeologists were looking in the neighbourhood for artefacts – and they found not much – I was picking up wildflowers. The very simple little flowers, I associated with them on this hot day. While I was doing so I discovered the hidden entrance to a cave which they had been passing by without noticing. We entered this cave and it was a primitive neolithic temple. So it’s just by looking at the flowers that you may have the discovery. The specialists look at progress and science ) and see nothing. You have to remain deeply attached to the Earth if you want to understand what’s going on.

p.104 – Eric Drexler

If the colonization of space happens, it will be both as a by-product of early, small scale space activity and as a result of a deeply felt yearning of most of the human race: a yearning for an open future for themselves and their descendants.

“Let us find out if some proposal like this can supply us with economical, environmentally safe energy and other benefits, and, if the benefits outweigh the costs, and if the risks seem small enough, let’s consider doing it.”

p.106 – Eric Drexler

They go as corporate expeditions seeking steel in the asteroids and constructing power stations in Earth orbit. They go as political groups seeking a place to practice. They go as outlaw bands; the United Nations space treaty breaks down and is forgotten.

Given practically anything from tundra to equatorial jungle, people have always managed to farm in the past. Given light, water, minerals, and some attention, it is an observed, tested fact that corn, soybeans and, indeed, many plants will actually grow.

As for crop failures, which are rare enough here, give me a designed agricultural environment any day. Ecologists: please remember this is an energy-intensive farm, not a coastal wetland!

Earliest space colonies are like submarines or Antarctic bases, where people have done useful work (and even come back for more), except with the minor benefits of sunlight, open space, more people, more regular activity, and open communications to Earth.

Others again, out of their fears, objected against it and sought to divert from it; alleging many things, and those neither unreasonable nor improbable; as that it was a great design and subject to many inconceivable perils and dangers; as, besides the casualties of the sea (which none can be freed from), the length of the voyage was such as the weak bodies of women and other persons worn out with age and travail (as many of them were) could never be able to endure. And yet if they should, the miseries of the land which they should be exposed unto, would be too hard to be borne and likely, some or all of them together, to consumer and utterly ruinate them. For there they should be liable to famine and nakedness and the want, in a manner, of all things. The change of air, diet, and drinking of water would infect their bodies with sore sicknesses and grievous diseases … – The date is 1620, the writer William Bradford, one of the Pilgrim Fathers, and later a governor of the Plymouth colony.

hardcore members will explain that material limits were never the issue (read Forrester’s more recent papers), but social limits are. This is backed up with no sociology, and with a disregard of the deep human desires of the Third World for a decent life.

p.108

the proper future for the human race is careful stewardship of our planet. The image that comes through this sect’s writings is of the Earth as an evolved organism, and of the human race as a temporarily cancerous part of that organism.

Is it playing god to permit yet another of a long chain of expanding, evolutionary steps of this planet’s life? Or is it perhaps playing god to stop that flow, to close a cage on the Earth, to cry, “Stop! Our true goal is in sight and lies here!”?

many in this sect are convinced that reaching their paradise of the mind demands denying people all hope of a materially satisfying life in the future, apparently because people are too stupid to make the correct choice, or to synthesize the best of both worlds.

many people accept the thesis “one world or none.”

On this planet there are a multitude of dangers to the survival of attractive societies and to the survival of civilization itself. Space may not save us, but it seems to offer a greater hope.

I am not sure that having the whole human race pursuing one of these courses would properly fulfill human destiny. “Many Worlds” permits many decisions. “Many Worlds” permits mistakes.

If there is a purpose to evolution, that purpose says go! Gather sunlight and barren rock and make life! Take the abilities of a thousand species, the minds of those who wish, and go! And stay! And scatter to the winds!

p.124 – Interview with Carl Sagen And Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis: As soon as you get a consensus there’s no life on Mars, that’s where the ball game begins as far as I’m concerned. Because that’s when we’ll be able to define the ways in which we know life has modulated the Earth.

p.127

Sagan: An unprotected human being would be in trouble in both places of course, but Mars has so much more in the way of available resources than the Moon does, it’s just no comparison. Mars is loaded with water. Not in a liquid state but it is available, and all those puffs of oxygen in the gas exchange experiment show it’s loaded with oxygen. Not exactly so that you could stick your head into the ground and take a deep breath, but with a little technology you could collect that oxygen. So I would say if people had a serious reason to do it – and I don’t know of any yet – I think it would be possible to make some colonies on Mars.

p.128

Outlook for Space urges that NASA, in its planning, be responsive to national needs. Future programs could elaborate on unique satellite services to the major concerns of food, energy, the understanding and protection of the environment, health care and such, Certainly the value of such programs can be generally appreciated, could bring NASA into more conversation with potential users of space, win support for more Earth-oriented programs … and so open more jobs.

p.134 Eric Drexler

One of the lowest requirements of any interest is 2.4 km/sec: the velocity needed to get off the moon.

It would take as many Earths to fill the solar system (500,000,000,000,000,000) as elephants to fill the sea (an unpleasant prospect).

p.139 – talking to Russel Schweickart

If risk were not an issue everybody would go into space. and the risks aren’t all that great in reality. If you compare the time you spend on an aeroplane, space travel is actually safer.

p.142

Put yourself near the ragged edge, because that is where things are moving the fastest. If you’re learning how to ski, the optimum learning rate is where you’re not standing up all the way down the hill but neither are you wiping out every time – where you’re right on the edge of being out of control.

Schweickart: No no no, they’re not small. That’s one of the most interesting things, that we will be evolving, living, interrelating, (1 hesitate to say natural, but approaching natural) systems in space, where that feedback time is much shorter inherently and therefore the consequences of actions within living ecosystems becomes a much more immediate thing, and the nature of the responsibility of the human as part of an ecosystem comes home very clearly. That then translates back into the total planetary ¿ environment in terms of recognition of responsibility.

Brand: I think there’s a flip going on here. On the planet’s surface the ecosystems manage the people to a large degree, and here you’re talking about a flip where the people are gonna have to manage ecosystems to a larger degree, and that may be paid back in better handling of the Earth, and better respect for the Earth, or whatever. But it’s a really fundamentally different situation. It would seem to me that we’re now talking about a much higher role of consciousness in biology. You can turn off the human consciousness of northern California, and things will naturally come to a better balance rather quickly. With these situations you’re talking about, if you turn off the human consciousness you may wind up with just brown paste within a couple of months — the kind of brown paste that you find in terrariums after a while.

McClure: Scum. Organic scum.

Schweickart: I think we’re both really saying the same thing on different ends of the perceptual spectrum. I mean, there in the space environment it’s so obvious that you’re in control that you forget that you’re really not in control. On the Earth you are so clearly out of control that you forget that you are in control. And in reality you’re both. In all situations.

p.146

JERRY BROWN, 1977:

“Ecology and technology find a unity in Space.”

“When the day of manufacturing in Space occurs and extraterrestrial material is added into the economic equation, then the old economic rules no longer apply. Going into Space is an investment. It’s not a waste of money, it’s not a depleting asset, it’s an expanding asset, and through the creation of new wealth we make possible the redistribution of more wealth to those who don’t have it.”

“Awareness of limits leads to awareness of possibilities.”

“As long as there is a safety valve of unexplored frontiers, then the creative, the aggressive, the exploitive urges of human beings can be channeled into long term possibilities and benefits. But if those frontiers close down and people begin to turn in upon themselves, that jeopardizes the democratic fabric.”

“As for Space Colonies, it’s not a question of whether – only when and how.”