I have an advantage over most of you--about 5 years of thinking about the consequences of nanotechnology [1]. It is only with Eric Drexler's presentation at the last annual meeting that the consequences of molecular scale construction have been coming to the attention of the National Space Society. I don't know how you have reacted to these revelations, but it was not a uniformly pleasant experience for me. I no longer believe any significant number of us will get into space by "conventional" means. As I am one of the founders of the L5 Society, you can see that exposure to these ideas has caused a wrenching readjustment of my world view.
In spite of that, I still put effort into the space cause. In the last year I have been trying to get the National Space Society to 1) take a stand against the Moon Treaty, 2) attempt to get the Moon Treaty formally rejected by the US, and 3) get the '67 Outer Space Treaty revised or rejected. It seems clear that a government agency is the wrong kind of organization to reduce the cost of going into space and liability provisions of the '67 Treaty are being used by government lawyers to stifle private companies offering launch services. I wanted to live out there, and keep working on these political problems because I still want to.
But conventional development leading to a breakout into space has kept receding into an ever more remote future, probably well beyond my unaugmented lifetime, while the nanotechnology breakthrough seems to be looming over the horizon. After finally adjusting to the nanotechnology view, (it took years) the future I now see for space development--and my role in it--is much more attractive than the old L5/space colony paradigm.
What is the "nanotechnology breakthrough," what relation does it have
to living in space, and what do either have to do with "MegaScale
Engineering"?
When we figure out how to make, feed, and control replicating assemblers the base of our "industrial capital" (roughly equal to wealth) will depend on something that replicates in 20 minutes. Planning, design, transportation, etc. will slow down the pace, but even a factor of 10,000 slower would leave us with more than a doubling per year.
All of us survivors of "limits to growth" know about exponential increase. Human populations do it with minimum doubling times of about 15 years, the industrial base in the developed world does it in about 20 years. The ratio between population and industrial growth rates equals the increasing (or decreasing) wealth per capita. Because of differential birth rates, rich societies really are getting richer and, in some cases, the poor are getting poorer.
With replicating assemblers, wealth per capita will rapidly increase if we can harness even a small portion of the nanotechnology potential (provided, of course, human populations are still limited to slower doubling times). A capital base doubling on a time scale of a year or less would make us almost arbitrarily wealthy, at least until we run into resource limits. Nanotechnology offers an opportunity for widespread personal wealth on a scale (in terms of materials and energy) that can only be compared to today's world gross product. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate the number of doublings their personal worth would need to reach one GWP.
The changes we should expect from wealth on this scale make the sum of all the technological and social changes since we started chipping flint look tame.
How would even vast wealth get us into space? Being rich won't automatically get us into space, but the few of us who want to go there will no longer have to get a government or a large corporation to pay our way. We won't have to sell our dreams to anyone, but we will have to keep them, and that may not be an easy task!
The process of reaching energy or material limits on Earth could provide a few MacroScale Engineering SF story backgrounds. For example, the real carbon dioxide crisis will be when there is too little from people taking carbon (the strongest engineering material) out of the air to build houses, roads, tunnels through the mantle, industrial works, and spacecraft in large numbers. Some civic minded types (the Autaban Society? Serria Club?) might burn coal fields to bring the level back up so plant productivity wouldn't be seriously hurt. A small engineering project would be to leave a few percent of the coal underground, reworked into diamond arches to hold up the roof and keep from disturbing the surface. Illuminate this space with light pipes from the surface, and you have several hundred square miles of 200 foot ceilings a thousand feet underground with activity at the edges still churning out CO2 as their main product, energy as a minor byproduct, and heat as the unavoidable waste product. Toxic trace elements? Wall them up in the arches to keep them from "unimproved" life, they certainly wouldn't bother people who were using cell repair machines to stay healthy.
Remember the Hunter in Hal Clemet's Needle? Cell repair machines, an obvious product of replicating assemblers, could stitch together cuts like the Hunter. Even better, they could heal damage right down to the molecular level. They could clean out clogged blood vessels, inspecting DNA for errors, reverse the effects of aging, and rebuild damage from stray cosmic rays. The avant-garde will not be satisfied with maintaining a youthful physique, and will make modifications, like growing new teeth out of diamond, or answer the little ad that says: "Reverse Your Retinas--Get Rid of Unsightly Blind Spots!" As soon as they become available, I want the integrated memory package so I can recognize the 10,000 people who expect me to know them and the enhanced math/science/engineering "thinking aid" that would let me design a starship in an afternoon (and build it in a few months.) The availability of such things will split the race into those who don't want to change, and those who know how pitifully limited their abilities are and want improvements.
Cell repair machines have another use. They won't (by definition) revive the dead, but even arch conservatives Peterson and Drexler admit that cell repair machines could cure "severe, long-term, whole-body frostbite." This is an obtuse way to say that the concepts of nanotechnology and cell repair machines changes cryonic suspension from a longshot to something that only requires "the faith of Goddard." Goddardknew from calculation that the Moon was in reach. There were only two things about Apollo that might have surprised him. It occurred much sooner than he thought it would, and he would have been dismayed that we didn't stay. Anybody who looks at the nanotechnology/cell repair machine concepts will come to same conclusion Goddard did, it can be done, and likely will--within a generation or two. So what if it cost more, and takes longer to develop the technology. It doesn't take much income to keep you in liquid nitrogen. Adjusting your world view to include suspension (if needed) and revival may take longer than your allotted span, but that's your problem. Cryonic suspension offers anyone a chance to go into the future who can afford the small amount of life insurance needed to pay for it. Cell repair machines will get us back and let us live long enough to reshape the galaxy.
Well, what do we do when faced with vast wealth and lives as long as
we want? Just about anything we want to. Neither material or energy limits
will pinch for a long time for the small number of people willing to go
off planet. Getting around the solar system seems easy enough, and with
arbitrarily long lives, the stars are within reach.
The information gluttons among us can contemplate a monstrous but short-lived feast. A few years after the nanotechnology breakthrough we will have the ability to drill the entire Earth to the mantle on a 1 mm grid at trivial cost and without disturbing anything. We are going to suck all the available information out of the Earth. When we do, we will be able to revive at least some of the dinosaurs by sorting through amber for their DNA. A few years ago it was reported in Discover that readable DNA from 70-100 million-year-old insects has been found embedded in this natural plastic. Surely a few of these bugs were blood sucking or biting like deer flies and we will find DNA from at least a few of the dinosaurs. We may find enough in an exhaustive search to revive the Neanderthals and possibly some of our other ancestors. Neandrerthals seem to have made their living by wrestling cave bears, were immensely strong, and may have been smarter than we are. The first guy to raise enough for a football team will clean up.
We can clone or computer simulate the famous people from history in cases where we can locate enough fragments of undecayed tissue to decipher their genome. Leonardo de Vinci, for example, is known to have painted with the tips of his fingers, leaving bits and pieces in hardened oil paint. There is enough left of Einstein's brain, and it was preserved soon enough after death that really advanced nanotechnology might allow us to recover his memories and personality. With even the faintest hope of doing so, it seems a shame for researchers to keep whittling on it. Preserving the pieces left in liquid nitrogen with the cryonics patients now in storage might be a good idea. In any case, the cold would stop further degradation.
The feast won't last very long. Extracting information from the rest of the solar system will take only a few years and promises to be much less interesting. (I don't expect artifacts to be found on Mars.)
After we have discovered all the local information, knowing where all
the fossils and artifacts are buried, and knowing exactly what they look
like right down to the placement of atoms, what can we do to fill the post-nanotechnology
equivalent of Scientific American?
But there are real limits to what we can find out with remote sensing, so someone will have to take a closer look. What is the optimum way to sweep out the Galaxy and obtain most of the available information? Going out and sending back information works, but takes too long for my taste. Besides I want to see the wonders of our galaxy, all of them. There are 100-200 billion stars in our galaxy alone and even with nanotechnology to help it will take a year or two per star system, not counting travel time between stars. Visiting every interesting object in serial is literally impossible, since the interesting places won't last long enough. I don't want to take such a long time looking over this one small flock of stars that most of them burn out.
The only way clearly available is to explore the Galaxy in parallel. This is a topic that hard to discuss, even with readers of science fiction. Most of my friends in the cryonics organizations are very uneasy about xeroxing people.
To explore the Galaxy in parallel, we need to make only a few starships, say 100 and recruit crews for perhaps 10, but we make copies of the crews to fill all 100. At 1,000 people per ship, and 100 ships (100,000 adventurers) this would probably be necessary anyway. I doubt there are as many as 10,000 people in the entire world who would board a starship. Misfits who want to do something as opposed to watching or reading about space exploration are a very rare compared to the number of Star Treck fans. They may not be common even amoung NSS memebers. An assembler doesn't care what it is making, and unless there really is some special "vitalizing" force, we won't have to make hard choices about which way to go--we take all roads (or at least a fair sample of them).
People have talked about making a copy of themselves and having the copy do the unpleasant chores. That's silly. A good copy would be indistinguishable from the original right down to desires. You could neither make a copy to go visit the stars nor one to stay on Earth that would be happy unless you didn't care which you did (unlikely) or someone messed with their personalities (unethical). In fact, I think it would be unethical to distinguish between copies (a case where the Golden Rule applies in its strongest form). The only case I can see where copies are justified is a situation where a person really has no preference between two mutually exclusive choices. The copying process might best be fixed so as to split the original material in half, so neither of the individuals coming out of the process would have a better claim to being "original". The ethical questions about copying people, reprogramming them, mapping yourself into faster hardware, and the rights of constructed personalities is a topic I would like to see getting more serious discussion.
Another problem is how to improve ourselves without getting completely lost. Today the mental modules at the root of our personalities change slowly if at all. When our deepest desires can be quickly modified with trivial effort, how much of us will survive? The results of modifying ourselves could be as tragic as being modified by others.* This and nanotechnology based "super dope" that make everyone happy but without ambition (or even the desire to eat) are among the subtle dangers we face. It is time for those of us who are concerned about our futures to start thinking about these problems.
Heavy guage philosophical problems of identity aside, and assuming we avoid the dangers, I expect starships to exit the solar system within a decade of the nanotechnology breakthrough. They might be pushed by laser, or powered in one of several other ways. At the target stars, they build new launch facilities and an appropriate number of copies of the ship and crew for the targets ahead. How many stars do they get to visit? If 100 ships go out, each ship and its descendants will need to visit a billion stars (neglecting losses and overlaps). Fortunately exponential growth comes to the rescue. A ship needs to copy itself only about 30 times since 230 is about 109. If thirty is too few stars for your taste, double less often, if too many, make more copies per generation.
Do we go out and come back to exchange information? Not with 50 billion starships. Even if there is room to park them, where in our solar system could we hold a meeting for 50 trillion intrepid explorers? We will need an economy sized ringworld, and getting a permit to build one around Sol might take longer than the round trip. Besides it takes twice as long as needed. There is no point in wasting time even if we have it. So we will sweep across the Galaxy and converge for a giant party, scientific meeting, and for those who want it, a memory merge so they can have seen all the wonders of the Galaxy. Oh yes, the con committee will have to get a little ahead of the pack to construct party hotel(s) for 50 trillion.
The first two of these columns discussed nanotechnology and a few of
the consequences, ending with a discussion of a monumental party on the
far side of the Galaxy.
More seriously, what will be our effect on aliens? What rules of conduct should we abide by? Perhaps equally to the point, will we find any?
Debate rages (that may be too strong a term) between the Saganites and the Tiplerites. Carl Sagan and Co. hold the opinion that technological life is fairly common, with radio capable civilizations every few hundred light years. This school proposes vast listening posts to eavesdrop. Frank Tipler points to the lack of any evidence that our galaxy, or the universe at large, is inhabited by technophiles. [4] I have come to lean very strongly toward Tipler because I think that before very many years go by our existence in this particular part of the universe will become very obvious. Laser cannons pushing light sails would be seen as obviously unnatural beacons far across the universe. It may be that life is fairly common, but the time it takes for technology to arise is much longer than the time available on most planets. This may be the real answer to the Fermi question.
But I am willing to withhold judgment 'til we sweep out our Galaxy. That should give us a representative sample.
How long will it take to cross the Galaxy looking for life and getting
a look at everything? Light takes about 100,000 years. At an average of
0.5c, it should take 200,000 years.
There are a number of interesting problems which people so inclined might
consider. How do we get back together at a place we can't even see from
here? If we send out several con committees (so a "run in" with something
solid doesn't leave us without a party hotel) how do we get them all together
at the same place? How many centuries should we party? How much bean dip
will we need? How big could the party get and avoid a Schwartzchild collapse?
The dead dog party will no doubt drag on for several millennia. If the
party is a success, it will be imitated. Should we give one party per galaxy?
Or one on the far side of the Virgo cluster?
There is another way to move the Earth. We could use much of the mass of the asteroid belt to transfer momentum from Jupiter to the Earth. It takes about the same time to change the Earth's orbit. It might take almost that long to convince me that we could play interplanetary billiard balls that long and not accidentally put a cue ball in the pocket!
The best scheme to cope with stellar aging is not to move the Earth,
but to cool off the sun. David
Criswell has called this process "star
lifting" [3] and worked out (at least
in theory) how an advanced (and wealthy) culture would go about cooling
their sun by removing mass and storing the mass to heat it up later. (You
want to take good care of your star, otherwise it gets all dark and icky.)
If enough of the mass of a galaxy is in stars, we may be able to prevent or at least greatly modify galactic collisions by moving stars. (The gas, dust, black holes, and dark matter should tag along if we move the stars slowly enough.) This could be used as background for SF of a scale that hasn't been seen since the days of Doc Smith, or Clifford Simak's Cosmic Engineers.
A nice fresh G-type star can actually cross the average distance between galaxies before it burns out. This is for people who want to travel and stay home. Reminds me a little of Larry Niven's Puppeteers.
Naturally small stars, or ones reduced by "star
lifting" have inconvenient spectral characteristics, at least for those
of us evolved in the light of a G-type star. Two solar sail hemispheres
could be used to reflect light back on the star and change its spectral
type. The surface layers would heat up to look like a G type, and the light
would escape in a narrow band to light planets or space habitats ranging
up to a ringworld. The interior temperature and burn rate of the star should
not be affected, but it might inhibit the star's normal convection patterns.
If someone in stellar physics wants to work the numbers, I would like to
see a copy.
The ideas about nanotechnology have been evolving for less then 10 years, and have only recently spread out beyond Eric Drexler and his close associates. We have only started to think about what we will be able to do with nanotechnology tools, great wealth, and long lives. Will we reshape planetary systems and stars, or change the courses of galaxies? The outline of this future is only starting to take shape. Will these memes spark a social movement like the space colony meme? Hard to say, but they offer many of the attractive features of O'Neill'sspace colonies, especially new lands, personal involvement, and grand adventure. They have the added advantage that advanced age will be no barrier. A few of us are starting to take the "Far Edge Committee" seriously. In any case, these ideas should provide more interesting speculation than L5 ever did.
Such are this year's thoughts on the future of living in space. The
stay-at-homes will rework stars and planetary systems. The more adventurous
will board the starships, stopping every now and then for a memory merge
and party.
Roger Gregory (of Xanadu Hypertext) has predicted that molecular design software will be in the hands of an army of unfunded hackers within the next few years. Simulation programs are available now for molecules of several thousand atoms. They are expensive, and burn a lot of computer time, but given the ever rising capacity of personal computers, who cares? These tools can be used to design (= build in computer space) and run a whole family of molecular manipulators. Eventually "molecular hackers" seeking prestiege and perhaps prize money will design one that can make a copy of itself in computer space. We then have a target to link with what we can do in the known world of chemistry/ biotechnology. Once we have all the steps down (this object with this input and this outside help can generate the next one in the chain to this more capable device, etc.), it should become a relatively short-term project of months, or at the most a few years, to physically implement nanotechnology.
Thanks to all who review this article in draft.
H. Keith Henson was one of the founders and first president of the L5 Society. Memes, computers, nanotechnology, cryonics, and planning for the Far Edge Party are amoung his current interests. The Far Edge Committee may be a precursor to the infamous "Last Proton Club," unless "barions are forever."The Far Edge Committee (so far) is only a mailing address (1685 Branham Lane, #252, San Jose, CA 95118) and a column in the Spacefaring Gazette, a National Space Society newsletter for western chapters.