Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) (25 page)

Yet Clarke was a scientist, not a politician, so he saw the Moon as both a scientific asset and one that contained abundant natural resources that could help nourish Earth. “Within a few years of the first landing, it should be possible to establish a small camp on a permanent basis, keeping it supplied by a regular service of ships from Earth. A great effort would be made to set up an observatory with a telescope of moderate size: in fact it would be worthwhile building a spaceship for no other purpose than to carry a reflecting telescope of, say, twenty-inch aperture to the Moon…. The Moon has so many advantages as an observatory that future generations may well wonder how we discovered anything about the heavens while we were still ‘earthbound.'”
¹⁰

An observatory on the Moon could be used to find and track asteroids, a fact that Clarke did not address. In common with many other scientists and others in the space community, he thought that asteroids are loaded with natural resources that can be exploited to help Earth, and he minimized the potential danger they pose. Former astronaut Tom Jones, a veteran of four space-shuttle missions and whose memoir,
Sky Walking
, predicts that near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) offer advantages for commercialization as well as exploration of NEAs, agrees. “The water and other mineral resources that we know are present on
some NEAs could help reduce the long-term costs of exploring the Moon, Mars, and the rest of the solar system. And in the course of exploring them, we can test the technology needed to divert any asteroid on a collision course with Earth…. From my spacefarer's perspective,” he continued, “the most attractive idea about ‘astronauts to asteroids' is that such voyages represent a natural progression in difficulty, more challenging than the dash-for-the-Moon Apollo missions but less daunting than the multiyear duration of a Mars landing expedition.”
¹¹

John W. Young is concerned about the asteroid threat and about humanity's survival in general, which is why he has become a strong advocate for colonizing the Moon, a place he knows firsthand. In 1981, he commanded the space shuttle
Columbia
on the first flight that orbited Earth; in total, he spent forty-two years with NASA, during which he became very familiar with the asteroid situation. He also became intimately familiar with the Moon, since he has been there twice. He orbited it during the Apollo 10 mission in late May 1969 in a dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 landing in July, and he was the ninth person to walk on the lunar surface when he commanded the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972 and spent seventy-one hours there, including a romp with Charles Duke in a lunar roving vehicle.

“I started advocating [colonizing the Moon], so as to enable humankind to survive even if Earth gets hit hard by an asteroid, we must continue exploring the Solar System,” he wrote in
Forever Young
, his autobiography. “Specifically, we need to build a permanent human base on the Moon where people from different nations can live and work. If we can learn how to terra-form on the Moon, the same technology could save Earth inhabitants from the long nuclear winter that would be caused by an asteroid impact.” The reference to a nuclear winter, in which debris would cloud the sky for months, blocking sunlight, implies that the impactor he had in mind was quite a bit larger than the one that grazed Chelyabinsk.

Young is respectful of NASA for much of what it has accomplished, certainly including the Apollo program and Solar System exploration, but he nonetheless faults it for not making a strong case for a return to the Moon, not for glory, but for the safety of the world in the broadest sense: planetary defense:

In trying to persuade the public why we need to go back to do more human exploration of the Moon, has NASA chosen to explain that such exploration will provide us with much of the advanced technologies that are badly needed to ensure the long-term survival of our threatened and endangered species on Earth? No. Has NASA made a powerful enough case that the Moon is the very best place to establish the first human bases for living, working and supporting Earth's people in this, the twenty-first century? No. It's no doubt because NASA's bureaucracy sees no political advantage in scaring people. But I see it differently. The human race is at war. Our biggest enemy, pure and simple, is ignorance. The bottom line of all human exploration is to preserve our species over the long haul. We have no idea how much time we have left. The Solar System and Planet Earth are talking to us. But no one is listening. There are major events that can “do in” our civilization. And in time they most certainly will.
¹²

Clarke not only envisioned the Moon as an observatory that would not be impeded by an atmosphere—and therefore a superior vantage point to search for threatening asteroids, though he did not mention that—but, far more important, he saw it as the logical first place for people and other creatures to settle and homestead as they migrated inevitably toward Mars and the other outer planets. Although he probably would not have put it this way, for Clarke, the need to explore and migrate to worlds beyond this one—wanting to see what is beyond the horizon and venture there—is as embedded in the human genome as romantic love, protection of family, and seeking safety from the extremes of nature. The last is what impelled Osepok to get out of town, and it, together with the migration impulse, is probably what got Clarke to decide that colonizing
the Moon would be the logical first step in the great expansion to other worlds.

The greatest technical achievements of the next few centuries may well be in the field of what could be called “planetary engineering”—the reshaping of other worlds to suit human needs. Given power and knowledge (wisdom is rather useful, too) nothing that does not infringe on the laws of Nature need be regarded as impossible. We will return to this theme when we discuss the other planets, but it will already be apparent that the conquest of the Moon will be the necessary and inevitable prelude to remoter and still more ambitious projects. Upon our own satellite with Earth close at hand to help, we will learn the skills and techniques which may one day bring life to worlds as far apart as Mercury and Pluto.
¹³

Scientists will be among the first to say that social generalizations are dangerous. But they will also say, without stigmatizing biology or chemistry in the slightest, that physicists are known to be the most imaginative of the breed. Clarke was primarily a physicist, though his degree was in both physics and chemistry. Hans Bethe was a physicist, and so were Theodore Taylor, Edward Teller, and the exuberant and irrepressible Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist from one of New York City's earthier neighborhoods, who taught at Caltech (including freshmen) and proudly boasted that he was first and foremost an intellectual “explorer,” knowing that exploration in its many forms contributes so much to the glory and nobility of the human spirit.

To that extraordinarily imaginative group of notables, add Gerard K. O'Neill, who was a professor of physics at Princeton University, and a prophet who decided that spreading out by creating a self-sustaining colony in space was unarguably imperative, given Earth's finite capacity to nourish the creatures that live off it and the multiple dangers out there. He got that out in a landmark work, “The Colonization of Space,” which appeared in
Physics Today
in 1974 and was expanded into the
book
The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space
, which was published two years later and immediately became the bible of the migration to space movement. (Osepok undoubtedly would have loved it, even though her reasons for abandoning Earth were cynical, not curious and adventurous in the tradition of exploration.)

“How can colonization take place?” O'Neill asked, rhetorically in “The Colonization of Space.” He continued:

It is possible even with existing technology, if done in the most efficient ways. New methods are needed, but none goes beyond the range of present-day knowledge. The challenge is to bring the goal of space colonization into economic feasibility now, and the key is to treat the region beyond Earth not as a void but as a culture medium, rich in matter and energy. To live normally, people need energy, air, water, land and gravity. In space, solar energy is dependable and convenient to use; the Moon and asteroid belt can supply the needed materials, and rotational acceleration can substitute for earth's gravity.

Space exploration so far, like Antarctic exploration before it, has consisted of short-term scientific expeditions, wholly dependent for survival on supplies brought from home. If, in contrast, we use the matter and energy available in space to colonize and build, we can achieve great productivity of food and material goods. Then, in a time short enough to be useful, the exponential growth of colonies can reach the point at which the colonies can be of great benefit to the entire human race.
¹⁴

What O'Neill had in mind for the human habitat was a pair of cylinders that would be between sixteen and twenty miles long and four miles in diameter. They would be self-contained worlds that are copies of the most attractive and hospitable parts of the home planet, including dwellings, parklands and forests, lakes, rivers, grass, trees, animals, and even birds (but not farmland; agriculture would take place somewhere else).
¹⁵
“Birds and animal species that are endangered on Earth by agricultural and industrial chemical residues may find havens for growth in the
space colonies, where insecticides are unnecessary, agricultural areas are physically separate from living areas, and industry has unlimited energy for recycling.” He emphasized that each space colony would be a complete, self-contained ecosystem that could thrive independently of Earth.

“With an abundance of food and clean electrical energy, controlled climates and temperate weather, living conditions in the colonies should be much more pleasant than in most places on Earth,” he continued. “For the 20-mile distances of the cylinder interiors, bicycles and low speed electric vehicles are adequate. Fuel-burning cars, powered aircraft and combustion heating are not needed; therefore, no smog. For external travel, the simplicity of engineless, pilotless vehicles probably means that individuals and families will be easily able to afford private space vehicles for low-cost travel to far distant communities with diverse cultures and languages.”

And while living away from the home planet for a lifetime has usually been considered anathema to most people, O'Neill saw a benefit to it. “The self-sufficiency of space communities probably has a strong effect on government. A community of 200,000 people, eager to preserve its own culture and language, can even choose to remain largely isolated. Free, diverse social experimentation could thrive in such a protected, self-sufficient environment.” He also noted that the communities would be protected from cosmic rays by the depth of the atmosphere and by land and steel supporting structures, but he erred in claiming that meteoroid damage should not be a serious danger because of their composition. “Most meteoroids are of cometary rather than asteroidal origin and are dust conglomerates, possibly bound by frozen gases; a typical meteoroid is more like a snowball than like a rock.” Comets, as has been noted, are indeed more like snowballs than rocks, but meteoroids are small rocks that are derived from meteors and, hence, asteroids, and they are therefore also rocks, not chunks of ice.
¹⁶

Gerard O'Neill was not the first to envision a large, self-sustaining colony in space. But he was a modern visionary whose detailed description of one and what would be necessary to keep it functioning so captivated Carolyn and Keith Henson that they created the L5 Society in Tucson in 1975, the year after “The Colonization of Space” was published, to carry his dream to fulfillment. The group took its name from the Lagrangian points, where the gravitational pull from Earth and from the Moon cancel each other out, so the colony would stay put without drifting off.

But there was an obstacle. It was called the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, or the Moon Treaty for short, which turned over the jurisdiction of all celestial bodies to the international community in a “common heritage of all mankind” morass. The Moon Treaty was born out of a palpable fear after Americans landed on the Moon that either side, but most probably the Americans, would build a missile base there with the weapons trained on targets on Earth. Missile defense was hard enough when they came from the other side of the North Pole, but it would be next to impossible to stop a barrage of them raining down from lunar launchers. And, beyond that, there was a feeling that a nation that controlled the Moon would have some unarticulated but real advantage over the other nations on this planet, most likely having to do with its vast natural resources. The treaty therefore held the United States to the spirit of Neil Armstrong's famous declaration about he, Aldrin, and Collins being there for all humankind.

So the agreement stipulated that the Moon had to be used solely for the benefit of all nations and peoples, and activities on it were therefore subject to international law. That put it off-limits as the site of a farm for the space colony. More important, the treaty prohibited any form of sovereignty or private property in space, which would have been the death knell for the colony
itself. Nations with space programs—Russia, China, Japan, and India—did not ratify the treaty, and the L5 Society saw to it that the United States did not ratify it either. In the end, however, the colony literally died of its own weight. Calculations showed that the cost of rocketing the many thousands of tons of material to the Lagrangian points where Island One, as it was also called, would be constructed would be $96 billion.

Freeman Dyson, another theoretical physicist (though from Princeton, not Caltech), thinks that that sum is “preposterously large” to spend on a single enterprise, even on Island One.
¹⁷
In his autobiography,
Disturbing the Universe
, which celebrates science's contribution to civilization, he notes that O'Neill claimed that the $96 billion would be repaid within twenty-four years and asserts that, in reality, the space colonists would have to work for 1,500 years to pay each family's share of that staggering debt. The answer for Dyson is governmental. “It must inevitably be a government project, with bureaucratic management, with national prestige at stake, and with occupational health and safety regulations rigidly enforced. As soon as our government takes responsibility for such a project, any serious risk of failure or of loss of life becomes politically unacceptable. The costs of Island One become high for the same reason that the costs of the Apollo expedition were high. The government can afford to waste money but it cannot afford to be responsible for a disaster.”
¹⁸