Worlds without ends - US space program

Reason, June, 1996 by Frederick Turner

What's the point of going into space? The answer lies in a future economy based on "charm."

The disappointing progress of the U.S. space program was not primarily the result of the technical difficulties it faced, nor the dangers to which we were alerted by the Challenger disaster, nor its great expense, nor the sense that there were pressing social and ecological problems to be solved at home, nor the fact that the leaders of the program were World War II-era people with World War II attitudes and style who had not replaced themselves with fresh blood. All these were factors, certainly, but they are symptoms of a larger problem: We will only begin to develop a truly spacefaring civilization when we feel it is in our interest to do so.

What does one do with space once one has got there? What interests of ours are met and served by going there? Space turned out to be just what the word originally meant, that is, distance and interval. There is no point in going to distance or interval. There's no there there. One goes through it to get someplace where one has business or pleasure. Space is a whole bunch of nothing. Of course there are things and places on the other side of space, but they turned out to be just exactly the kind of things and places one would try hard to avoid if they were down here on Earth - baking hot or freezing cold or poisonous or totally barren - just plain miserable.

Movies, of course, imagined these places inhabited by sweaty miners or oppressed factory workers or heroic warriors or ascetic scientists, who are about the only people who for practical reasons go willingly to such places on Earth. But it is hard to imagine anything worth the transportation costs into and out of the Earth's gravity well; one mines and manufactures to be able to afford the luxury of going into space, one does not go into space to afford the luxury of mining and manufacturing. There is valuable information to be gained out there, but it can be obtained efficiently by robots, which is not the same as actually being there.

But certainly if we wanted we could, by the '90s, have gone to all the places in the solar system and done all the things that we expected to in the '50s. If we had as a planet committed to a consistent space effort the kind of resources we committed to World War II, we could have colonies on the Jovian moons by now and be working on interstellar flight. If we had just had enemies out there, we would have a splendid space program. Now we don't even have the Russians.

Maybe, however, we don't need Russians, or their equivalent (an Eldorado, an opulent Indies, a mine of information). Postwar generations of space thinkers have proposed a different goal for space exploration from the old ones of mining, industrial profit, war, or science. What is suggested is that livable worlds can be built, created, out of those extraterrestrial wildernesses. Ecopoiesis (the introduction of freestanding and proliferating life into a lifeless environment) and terraforming (the further project of creating an environment hospitable to human beings and other earthly animals) offer a much wider field of possible interests than do traditional visions of space exploration.

Yet the prospects here, too, are not promising on the surface. We had better face it. No Antarctic waste, no arid desert or barren mountaintop or volcanic inferno or abyssal ocean trench on Earth is more hostile to life than the most benign microclimate anywhere else in the solar system. So far so bad, as far as the case for space exploration is concerned. But this is not the end of the story. With terraforming and ecopoiesis we are beginning to enter mental territory where the glimmer of possible human interests might begin to show.

One key issue is what constitutes a human "interest" and, even more important, how human interests will change during the coming era in which planetary engineering will become feasible. The first European explorers of the Americas in fact misunderstood their own interests: They were looking for precious metals (which, though abundant, were never as plentiful as their seekers wished) when the real riches of the New World were the great pre-Columbian food and stimulant crops, and the fertile land and rich base metal resources of the western continents.

The gold and silver brought back by the Spanish monarchy had the complex economic effect of impoverishing and depopulating Spain and enriching its enemies, England and Holland. In Iberia profitable farming, with the dense population it supports, was priced out of the social market, to be replaced by flocks of voracious goats that ate the vegetation, damaged the soil, and dried out the climate. Bankers along the Rhine, the Danube, the Po, and the coasts of the North Sea and Baltic grew rich on high-interest loans taken out by Hapsburg monarchs to finance the defenses of their far-flung empires; the accumulation of capital fueled the Northern European industrial revolution, whose raw materials were the mundane bulk commodities the Hidalgos had scorned. The true beneficiaries of the Columbian discovery were not the aristocrats, sailors, and warriors but the farmers and planters who followed them, and the businessmen and industrial entrepreneurs who followed them.