Tomorrowland (18 page)

While iron is the most abundant metal found in asteroids, they also contain nickel, gold, cobalt, and perhaps the biggest find: all of the platinum-group metals. “In human history,” says Eric Anderson, “all the platinum that’s been mined on Earth would fit in a tractor trailer. But platinum has excellent technological properties. It’s a great conductor. But at two thousand dollars an ounce, we really can’t build new industries around it.”

Getting the necessary platinum for the creation of new industries is a tantalizing possibility, but more practical concerns will likely drive early mining missions. Fuel cells are a necessity if we’re going to fight global warming, but we need platinum to run them. If all five hundred million vehicles on the road today suddenly had fuel cells, then our entire supply of platinum would be exhausted in fifteen years. Meanwhile, iridium, used for LCDs and flat-screen TVs, and tantalum, used in cell phones, are both abundant in space but in short supply on Earth. The same holds for phosphorus — needed for fertilizer — and gallium, hafnium, and zinc — all needed for electronics. “The Earth,” says Diamandis, “is a tiny crumb in a supermarket of resources. I’ve said for a long time, the very first trillionaire on Earth will be the person who figures out how to mine an asteroid and open up that supermarket.”

But gold in ’dem hills isn’t the only thing fueling our space rock fire. In the past few years, for reasons ranging from “because it’s what’s next” to “because it’s the only way to guarantee the survival of the species,” NASA has firmly committed itself to establishing off-world colonies. While colonizing either the Moon or Mars seems the next logical step, most feel that we should learn to crawl before we walk. “Visiting an asteroid is a fantastic stepping stone to Mars,” says Derek Sears, professor of space and planetary science at the University of Arkansas. “You can test out the hardware and the human behavior.”

Human behavior is key. A trip to Mars will take three years. Space flight is extremely punishing, both physically and mentally,
so no one has any idea how humans would fare over that duration. But an asteroid, one that’s passing close to the Earth, is a few month’s voyage, which makes them a very good place to learn to crawl.

Even more important to our off-world plans is water. “Most aerospace engineers feel,” continues Sears, “that water is the real key to off-world colonies. Carrying water out of a gravity well is extremely expensive. But there is a whole class of asteroids that are 25 percent water. We call them mudballs. So a rocket ship could stop off at an asteroid on the way to a space colony and tank up on water. There’s no cost. Just warm up a chunk and off you go.”

Nor is this where possibilities end. As far out as asteroid mining or Mars’s colonies might still seem, there’s much more in the works. University of Arizona emeritus professor John Lewis, in his now classic
Mining the Sky
, points out that as we get better at the technology, we could also learn to mine gas giants like Jupiter for their massive quantities of helium-3. “What would you do with our 10 tons of helium-3 when we get back to Earth?” writes Lewis. “The market value for helium-3 is set by the amount of energy that it can produce in a helium-3/deuterium fusion reactor. That has a cash value of $160,000,000,000 . . . That means helium-3 is worth 1,000 times its weight in gold or platinum. Here is surely the most valuable raw material in the solar system, well worth the cost of transportation back to Earth!”

So how far are we from launch? Eric Anderson thinks we’re five to ten years away from our first asteroid mining mission, and a great many people in the private space sector agree. NASA believes things will go the other way round: First we’ll have manned missions to asteroids, next we’ll have robotic ones, but, as Anderson also says, “NASA doesn’t like to fail in public, so their scientists tend to be fairly conservative. A year before Burt Rutan won the XPRIZE, if you asked them if a private company could send a ship to space, they would have said it was impossible.”

And once we’re actually mining asteroids, well, look out. “This is a truly disruptive technology,” says Brother Guy. “Certainly, in the long run — whether you’re talking about wealth creation or the taking of mining, one of the most environmentally damaging industries, off-world — everyone is better off. Frankly, in the long run, the upside is so big it’s almost utopian. But in the short run, there will most definitely be some consequences.”

PART THREE

THE FUTURE UNCERTAIN

The Psychedelic Renaissance

THE RADICAL WORLD OF PSYCHEDELIC MEDICINE

In my other job as the cofounder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project (
flowgenomeproject.com
), I have spent the past fifteen years studying the intersection of altered states of consciousness and ultimate human performance. As a result, I have also kept a close eye on research in nearby areas, and that includes the science of psychedelics.

Few topics hold as much promise as this science, though it is safe to say that most people don’t share this opinion. Not many “technologies” have drawn as much ire as these drugs. Yet, as this story makes clear, society’s longstanding hostility is finally starting to abate. For the first time, we are starting to see these substances for what they really are: Both an amazing window into the outer ranges of human experience and a treatment for some of our most intractable conditions.

What’s more, these chemicals give us deep insight into philosophical questions of enormous importance — how the brain constructs reality; the relationship between mind, brain, and body; and the neurobiological correlates for belief, meaning, and transformative experience. To put this differently, psychedelics are among our oldest disruptive technologies — literally pre-dating our species — yet their
potency and potential, then as now, remains as mind-bending as ever.

Yet the real point of this story is compassion. Discussions of future technology often omit this element. Sure, they may talk about the “human factor” — how a certain tech will cure disease or end poverty or some other glistening proclamation — but that is empathy at a distance, not compassion on the ground. This story is an exception. It peeks into a controversial future that already exists, that already impacts the lives of real people with real problems. It expands the meaning of compassion. It is an honest look at the real human factor: fragile, brave, and — as is often the case — in need of a miracle.

1.

The room where they wait is a long rectangle. The floor is covered in thick green carpeting, so everyone calls it the “green room.” One wall of the green room is covered in books, the other three in paintings. There are marble fireplaces and a high ceiling. In the center of that ceiling sits an old floral medallion — once the anchor point for a massive Victorian chandelier. The chandelier is long gone, but the medallion remains. When Mara Howell lies in bed, she looks straight up at it. The flowers are braided into a wreath, and maybe it’s all that Victorian ornamentation distorting the image, or maybe the design was intentional, but either way, the result looks less botanical than celestial. The flowers look like angels. A hovering swirl of angels. And Mara hopes, like everybody in the green room hopes, that they are angels of mercy.

Marilyn Howell, Mara’s mother, and Lindsay Corliss, Mara’s close friend, are also waiting in the green room. Lindsay is nervously tidying up. Marilyn is just nervous. She stands beside her daughter and beneath the angels, but can’t stay still. Instead, she walks to the window and glances into the street again. It is late morning and early summer, and the trees are full of leaves and the sky is free of clouds and none of these things are making Marilyn feel any better. Even the angels no longer make her feel better. For her, these days, the passing of spring is far too metaphoric. The season of hope and renewal is ending. Maybe the angels have lost their power. Maybe they never had any to begin with. She glances out at the street again and wonders — where the hell is Allan?

Marilyn doesn’t know much about Allan — though she knows he’s late and she knows that’s not his real name. Allan is an underground therapist of sorts and the work he does, what he calls his
“crimes of compassion,” remains very much illegal. It took Marilyn some serious effort to even drum up his phone number. Then there were the meetings. On the first meeting, Marilyn had several hundred questions, but Allan had several hundred answers. His knowledge was impressive, as was his willingness to take great risks for perfect strangers. Marilyn liked him immediately — which was a good thing, because there were no other options.

Mara was thirty-two when diagnosed with colon cancer. That was a little over a year ago and an unusual diagnosis. The disease typically strikes the elderly — in 2001–2002, the median age was seventy-one. On top of that, Mara is, to all who know her, “vibrant.” She rarely drinks, does no drugs, eats right, sleeps well, is ridiculously optimistic, always battles her weight but gets plenty of exercise. A month before her first major surgery, she’d been in Honduras gathering data on fish populations and earning a master’s certification in scuba diving.

Another word often used to describe Mara is “tough.” She taught school in Oakland, California, for starters, but the story everyone likes best is the one from back when she was nineteen and trekking through the Kenyan bush on a National Outdoor Leadership School training program. Their team leader got gored by a buffalo, suffering broken ribs and a gaping chest wound. Mara was the only one in the group with first aid training, so she stayed with him — stayed alone in the bush — while everyone else went for help. She banged pots together to keep away lions, used clean socks to stanch the chest wound. Her story now appears in the NOLS first aid manual as an example of “Best-Case Performance in an Emergency Situation.” And when it comes to cancer survival, these days, young, vibrant, tough, healthy, and optimistic is also the stuff of best-case performances in an emergency situation. Unfortunately, Mara remains the exception to that rule.

In the past year, Mara has tried all the traditional drugs and all the alternative therapies. Wow, has she tried all the alternative therapies. Massage, macrobiotics, Chinese herbs, Tibetan herbs, acupuncture, acupressure, the Feldenkrais method, chiropractic
realignment, the power of prayer. At a Catholic Mass in Boston the priest read from the pulpit: “Blessed Virgin Mary, please intercede to heal Mara Howell.” Jews at the Aquarian Minyon in Berkeley chanted “
Mi Sheberakh Avoteinu
,” while Buddhists in Hollywood tried “
Nam-Myyoho-Rebge-Kyo
.” Twice, Mara went to Brazil to meet the famed faith healer John of God. Purportedly, John of God has healed over 15 million people. Maybe as many as 45 million. But he couldn’t heal Mara. Nor could he ease her pain.

Mara falls into another anomalous category — alongside 2 percent of the populace — whose pain cannot be controlled by current medications. Pain is usually measured on a scale from zero to ten, with zero being “no pain” and ten being “worst pain imaginable.” Despite a dozen different meds, morphine, methadone, the works, Mara’s pain rarely dips below a five. It is often up around an eight — which is when most of us would be screaming.

About five weeks ago, it got so bad that Mara was forced to leave her apartment in Oakland for the home where she grew up. So the green room, which was really the front room in Marilyn’s Boston home, was converted into a sick ward. It was after a hospital bed had been installed beneath that floral medallion that Marilyn decided it was time for a chat.

A few months back, she’d heard rumor of Allan and the particular work he does, but broaching the subject with her daughter was not easy. The treatment is not only radical, not only illegal, but also geared toward helping patients confront what’s politely called “end-of-life anxiety,” and known to most as mortal terror. Mara’s reaction was immediately hostile. “I’m not interested in discussing end-of-life issues,” she snapped. “Who told you about this? How could they be so insensitive?” Then she thought it through. She knew she needed a miracle, and this treatment, unlike all the others, had a peculiar history of spiritual transformation — that is, she also knew, if it didn’t kill her first.

The second meeting Marilyn had with Allan was more difficult than the first. Allan is an underground psychedelic therapist. Psychedelic therapy is built on the 1960s idea that psychedelics —
drugs like LSD and psilocybin (the “magic” in magic mushrooms) that are known to radically alter cognition and perception — also have the ability to produce profound insight at lower doses, and cathartic life-changing experiences at higher doses. Psychedelic therapists not only administer these drugs, but act as guides throughout the journey. While psychedelics are generally considered neither habit-forming nor physically harmful, there are exceptions to that rule. And this is why that second meeting between Allan and Marilyn was more difficult than the first — because that was the meeting they discussed risk.

The drug Allan’s considering for the first session is MDMA, known on the street as Ecstasy, and a latecomer to the psychedelic tool kit. First discovered by Merck in 1912, MDMA didn’t hit the therapeutic world until the middle 1970s when pharmacologist Alexander Shulgin, then teaching at the University of California, San Francisco, heard from his students that it helped one of them get over a stutter. Shulgin dosed himself, reporting “altered states of consciousness with emotional and sexual overtones.” He also noticed the drug “opened people up, both to other people and to inner thoughts,” and decided its primary benefit was mental. Others agreed. Ecstasy was criminalized in 1984, but not before it had been introduced to thousands of therapists.

Because Allan and Marilyn don’t want to compromise Mara’s palliative care, the MDMA will have to be administered on top of all her other medications, and this is where the danger lies. Researchers describe Ecstasy not as a psychedelic, but rather as an
empathodelic
— “psychedelic” means
mind-manifesting
, while “empathodelic” means
empathy-manifesting
— but chemically it’s an amphetamine. Because amphetamines increase heart rate and blood pressure, and Mara is already suffering palpitations, there’s a chance of inducing a heart attack. Peril of neurotoxicity is another concern. A third problem is diminishing her emotional and physical reserves — it would not be hard to trigger a slide from which there would be no return. But the greatest threat is ignorance. Mara would be on nine of the world’s strongest drugs
simultaneously, and nobody really knows the effects of that potent cocktail. Allan decided to consult outside doctors. It’s dicey, they said, but doable. Marilyn and Allan decided on a low starter dose. Mara agreed to roll those dice. That was two days ago.