Read Beyond: Our Future in Space Online
Authors: Chris Impey
Beyond: Our Future in Space (28 page)
But you don’t have to be stuck on an island or Mars to suffer genetic isolation. The 18,000 Old Order Amish of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, are descended from a few dozen individuals who emigrated from Germany in the early 1700s. It’s tragic that babies born into this community have a high incidence of an extremely rare and fatal genetic disorder called microcephaly.
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The sweet spot for a space colony may be the size of a small village. John Moore, an anthropologist from the University of Florida, developed simulation software for analyzing the viability of small groups.
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He suggests that the optimum number for a viable long-term colony is 160. This number could be reduced with judicious genetic selection to minimize the probability of inbreeding.
If space colonists don’t get “new blood” from the home planet, their gene pool will experience
genetic drift
—the change in frequency of gene variants or alleles due to random sampling. The effect is larger in smaller populations, and it acts to reduce genetic variation, which in turn reduces a population’s ability to respond to new selective pressures. This may sound bad, but genetic drift and the founder effect on Earth are major drivers of evolution. They lead to the formation of new species.
Over generations, the colonists will evolve. We can imagine some of the changes that will take place. The lower gravity on Mars will alter the cardiovascular system and reduce the cross-sectional area of load-bearing bones and tendons. There will be accelerated trends in human evolution on Earth—toward being taller and having less body hair, weaker muscles, and smaller teeth. The lack of a varied natural environment will probably lead to weaker immune systems. An additional challenge will be to maintain sensory stimulation as well as intellectual stimulation, to keep the brain sharp.
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A new species will have evolved if off-Earth humans can no longer mate and produce viable offspring with those who never left Earth. We know this will take a long time, because a small group of people went on a one-way trip to the Americas about 14,000 years ago, and when Europeans encountered them 500 years ago, they were still the same species. Some groups in Australia and Papua New Guinea have been mostly isolated for 30,000 years and speciation didn’t occur. But for colonists on the Moon or Mars, the process will be accelerated by the different physical environment and the higher incidence of mutations due to cosmic rays.
Finally, after hundreds of thousands of years and thousands of generations, when the first off-Earth baby’s cry is no more than an ancestral memory, the colonists will have come of age. They will no longer be us. Imagine that the colonists live in total isolation and one day we encounter the ancestors of the people who left our planet. They’ll speak their own language, have their own culture, and resemble us only partly. For each side, it will be like looking in an eerily distorted mirror.
Our Cyborg Future
It’s one of the classic scenes in movie science fiction. In the cult film
Blade
Runner
, the replicant Roy Batty saves “blade runner” Rick Deckard from slipping off the edge of a tall building. With superhuman strength, Batty tosses Deckard onto the roof. He then sits cross-legged and waits for his preprogrammed four-year lifespan to expire. He says to Deckard: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. . . . Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. All those moments will be lost in time . . . like tears in rain. Time . . . to die.”
Roy Batty is a cyborg, as originally imagined by Philip K. Dick in his novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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The term
cyborg
—short for cybernetic organism—was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960. Clynes was a gifted pianist and inventor who worked as a chief research scientist at Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York; his boss was Kline, a medical researcher with more than 500 publications. They envisaged that an intimate relationship between humans and machines might help explore the new frontier of space: “Altering man’s bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments would be more logical than providing an Earthly environment for him in space. . . . Artifact-organism systems which would extend man’s unconscious, self-regulatory controls are one possibility.”
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Although cyborgs are the stuff of dystopian science fiction, we creep ever closer to the merger of flesh and machine.
Replacing body parts such as hearts and arms and legs has been routine for years, but cyborgs imply enhanced capabilities not present in the original human. Conventional medicine is already exploring this terrain—robotic limbs can be more powerful and flexible than the original limb, and cochlear implants can perceive sounds inaudible to a normal person. (We’ve already met a modern-day cyborg in the form of Tony Stark, aka Elon Musk.) Brain-computer interfaces give direct communication from the brain to an external device. They are being used to restore sight to blind people and mobility to people who are paralyzed. NASA has developed the X1 Robotic Exoskeleton to enhance the capabilities of astronauts—Iron Man is becoming a reality (Figure 47).
Neil Harbisson is a British artist born without the ability to sense color. In 2004, he started wearing a head-mounted “eyeborg,” a device that converts colors into vibrations that Harbisson hears through the bones in his head. The eyeborg is referred to in his passport, making him the first government-sanctioned cyborg. The camera extends his senses by letting him hear infrasound and ultrasound, and see infrared and ultraviolet colors beyond the range of normal human vision. He wants to have the device surgically and permanently attached to his skull, and he’s described how the software and his brain united to give him an extra sense.
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Figure 47. NASA project engineer Roger Rovekamp models the X1 Robotic Exoskeleton. It was created in the Advanced Robotic Development Lab at Johnson Space Center, to augment the capabilities of astronauts.
Cyborgs resonate in modern culture, embodying the tension between free will and mechanical determinism. They’re reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s dark vision of Frankenstein, animated by electricity and overpowering its creator.
The acceptable face of cyborg research is represented by Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England. He was one of the first to experiment with implants, having an RFID chip put into his arm in 1998. Four years later, he had an array of a hundred electrodes grafted onto the nerves of his arm. This allows him to extend his nervous system over the Internet and control a robotic hand at a remote location. Warwick’s wife also had a cybernetic implant, and when someone grasped her hand, he was able to feel the same sensation in his hand on the other side of the Atlantic—a bizarre form of cybernetic telepathy. “Jamming stuff into your body, merging machines with nerves and your brain, it’s brand new,” according to Warwick. “It’s like this last, unexplored continent staring us in the face.”
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Cyborg technology can be found in research labs but it’s also gone underground. When Warwick gets an implant, he employs a team of trained surgeons; Lepht Anonym settles for a potato peeler and a bottle of vodka. She’s one of a growing number of biohackers, also called grinders, who do their own implants. As she puts it, “I’m sort of inured to pain at this point. Anesthetic is illegal for people like me, so we learn to live without it.” Her YouTube videos establish her as the young face of the biohacking movement. To the underground cyberhackers, computers are hardware, apps are software, and humans are wetware. One popular starting point is to have a powerful rare-earth magnet inserted into the fingertip. This lets someone sense a variety of electromagnetic fields, in addition to subways passing underground and power lines hanging overhead. Once they learn how to miniaturize them, biohackers will implant themselves with medical sensors that can talk to a smartphone and a device that will let fingers “see” by echolocation.
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This goes beyond sensory extension to the creation of entirely new senses.
The philosophical movement that forms an umbrella for cybernetics and cyborgs is called
transhumanism
. Transhumanism is a worldwide cultural and intellectual movement that seeks to use technology to improve the human condition. Radical life extension is one aspect, as is the enhancement of physical and mental capabilities. Two prominent transhumanists are Nick Bostrom, a University of Oxford philosopher who has assessed various risks to the long-term survival of humanity, and Ray Kurzweil, the engineer and inventor who popularized the idea of the singularity, a time in the not-too-distant future when technology will enable us to transcend our physical limitations. This isn’t a prospect that leaves people apathetic. Author Francis Fukuyama called transhumanism “among the world’s most dangerous ideas,” while author Ronald Bailey said it’s a “movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations of humanity.” Kevin Warwick is committed to the cause of transhumanism: “There is no way I want to stay a mere human.”
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Transhumanism could revolutionize space exploration. If we follow the route of nanotechnology, space probes will be miniaturized and the lower costs of manufacture and propulsion will allow us to explore a broad new range of venues in the Solar System. Alternatively, we can use robots as proxies while we’re comfy in a control room on Earth. More radically, we might embrace the future seen in
Blade Runner
, where cyborgs are sent out to explore and toil. They’re imbued with artificial intelligence and superhuman powers, and they have a “kill switch” in case something goes wrong. Cyborgs could be our metaphorical children—the descendants of our species—spreading out into the cosmos long after we cease to exist.
M
ilky white light and enormous weariness. Every part of me aches but I’m immobilized. My finger twitches uncontrollably, as if it belongs to someone else. Slowly, inexorably, I become aware of my arms, my legs, my skin, as if the feeling is being retrieved from the bottom of a deep well.
My eyes flutter open. The panel just above my head registers my vital signs. In sealed beryllium coffins alongside me, one hundred fellow travelers are also stirring from a sleep close to death. Another panel shows the location of the ark. It’s in a stable orbit around Proxima Centauri B1. Although I push the thought away, it muscles into my head: I am twenty-five trillion miles from home.
There’s much to do. We’re purposeful and don’t talk much. Everyone is trying not to think about the eighteen stations where, when the lid slid open, it revealed a body that hadn’t revived, one cold to the touch. A second blow came soon after. Telemetry on Ark 3 showed that it passed clear through the Proxima Centauri system. It’s heading for the void of interstellar space. A meteor impact compromised the solar sail and there was no way to apply the brakes. I shudder at the thought.
Can eighty people start a new world?
Gradually, camaraderie returns and our spirits lift. We tell jokes at mealtimes and tease each other. We’ve traveled like flotsam for an implausible distance, a thousand times farther than anyone ever has before. I pause in front of the only window on the ark and stare out. The Sun is somewhere in that field of stars, like a buttercup set on velvet, but I can’t find it. No matter what happens next, we can have pride in the achievement and the adventure. But any of us who says they’re not afraid is lying.
Milky white light again. We’re in the shuttle pod buffeting through the atmosphere to scout out a landing site. From Earth, our new home is a pale dot. Previous remote sensing had showed it’s a living world, its air charged by photosynthesis, but we arrive knowing little about a place where we will live and die. Our mission is a huge, expensive gamble, a step across the void, hoping to find safety on the other side.
The six of us cast nervous, sidelong glances at each other. The pilot stares intently at the screen. Below us is tortured, vertiginous, and unfamiliar terrain—there’s no reassuring plain or prairie, nothing like a savanna, no endless vista.
Finally, a glimpse of land through swirling clouds. Deceleration. A jolt. We don our suits and enter the air lock, as excited as children about to explore a secret garden.
It’s difficult to describe the indescribable. We’ve landed in a verdant valley flanked by steep cliffs. Vines cling to every surface. Water drips from the cliff tops, which are partially obscured by thick clouds. There’s a dense mat of vegetation underfoot. We see many plants but no animals. Everything is strange and off-kilter: gravity is weaker than Earth so I have a spring in my step, but the air is thicker so I fight back a smothering sensation. We all wear scrubber masks to keep the air breathable and filter out microbes that may be hazardous. Instinctively, everyone stays close to the lander.
Is this a swamp or Shangri-la? Either way, there’s no turning back.
Working efficiently, we unpack the habitat. At the touch of a button, the memory film made of carbon nanotubes unfolds and inflates into a dome that soars twenty feet above our heads. After installing two air locks, we spend the rest of the day setting up a living space. Over the next week, the rest of the crew will join us on the surface, leaving our ark an empty, orbiting hulk, incapable of any more voyages.
Overwhelmed, exhilarated, anxious. Emotions war inside me. It seems strange to want to be alone since, as a group, we are so utterly alone. But at a break in our construction, I wander away from the dome. The only way to walk through the convoluted landscape is to follow a small stream. Looking around, I notice something strange. There are no trees. I bend down to scoop up some pebbles and rocks. Their mineral forms are familiar and reassuring; at least geology is universal.
Out of the corner of my eye, movement. I look more closely. What I thought was a mat of moss is actually a delicate web of tendrils that are moving and growing. They undulate and turn, like a carpet that’s weaving itself. It seems chaotic, but suddenly the tendrils form spirals and complex geometric shapes. Then, just as suddenly, the patterns disappear. I stare, transfixed.
