Gregory Benford - Skylife

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GREGORY BENFORD

SKYLIFE

FIRST THERE was a flying island.

Then there was a brick moon.

The inventors, Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels, 1726) and Edward Everett

Hale

(grandson of Nathan), were not entirely serious. Still, the significance of

their visions reached well beyond the engineering inventions of the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries. In Hale's alternative to living on Earth, "The Brick

Moon" (1869) and its sequel, "Life on the Brick Moon" (1870), people set up

housekeeping inside Earth's first artificial satellite and did quite well.

Hale's artificial satellite, the first known presentation of the idea, called

attention to a technological innovation implicit in our observations of the

Earth-Moon system and that of the other planets that possess moons.

What nature could do, we might also do.

We, the third type of chimpanzee, fresh out of Africa and swinging in trees,

thought of lofty havens.

For Hale, the artificial satellite meant not only a technological feat but

also

the expansion of human possibilities, a vision of social experimentation

beyond

the confines of Earth. Space exploration has ever since carried the hope of a

social and cultural renaissance springing beyond the planetary cradle.

Such visions increased toward the end of the nineteenth century and throughout

the twentieth, as if humanity were trying on one after another. Now the United

States is launching the parts for the greatest skylife hostel yet -- to mixed

reviews. Understanding the transparently foolhardy enterprise demands some

historical perspective. Living in space is in the end about more than a hotel

room in the sky.

It does not seem strange in hindsight that the idea of space colonies should

have become so prominent in the United States, a nation that has itself been

described as a science fictional experiment. The American attempt at a

dynamic,

self-adjusting utopian vision based on a constitutional separation of powers

and

the intended, orderly struggle of those powers with one another as a way to

deal

with a quarrelsome human nature -- is still in progress. But it is also held

back by the limits of planetary life.

The first major twentieth-century vision of humanity in space was set down in

all seriousness, and with extraordinary thoroughness, by the deaf Russian

schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (18571935). He did not try to match Jules

Verne and H. G. Wells as a writer of stories, but his fiction and nonfiction

set

out with great imagination and technical lucidity the scientific and

engineering

principles for leaving Earth, and presented nearly all the reasons, cultural

and

economic, for expanding human capabilities beyond Earth. He saw that the

entire

sunspace was rich in resources and energy and could be occupied. Every step

from

space capsule to moonship was itself a small habitat, a way of taking a bit of

our home world, its air and food, with us into the cosmos.

For many years the concept of space habitats lived mostly in science fiction

stories. Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937) described the use of whole worlds,

natural and artificial, for interstellar travel and warfare. Edward E. "Doc"

Smith, today called the father of the Star Wars movie saga, used planets

similarly in his Skylark and Lensman series of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s.

Isaac

Asimov, in his Foundation stories of the 1940s, showed us Trantor, an

artificial

city-planet that rules the Galaxy. Don Wilcox's "The Voyage that Lasted Six

Hundred Years" (1940) introduced the idea of using generation starships to

reach

the stars, in the form that was to be often imitated, one year before Robert

Heinlein's more famous story "Universe" and its forgotten sequel "Common

Sense"

-- gritty realistic dramas of travelers aboard a space ark who learn, in the

manner of a Copernican-Galilean revolution, that their world is a ship.

The uneasy familiarity of generation starship stories springs from our seeing

the Earth as a ship, the stars as other suns. We glimpse how our view of the

universe changed in the last thousand years. Earth is a giant biological ark

circling its sun. As in Heinlein's "Universe," the dispelling of illusion and

misconception lays the groundwork for surprising hopes and the expansion of

human horizons.

Behind the science fiction stories stood visionary nonfiction such as J. D.

Bernal's 1929 The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, which pictures an urban

ring

of worlds around the Earth. In the 1950s, Arthur C. Clarke and Wernher von

Braun

envisioned space stations as giant wheels spinning to maintain centrifugal

"gravity." They thought that such stations would orbit the Earth to observe

weather, refuel interplanetary spaceships, and train astronauts who would

later

set up bases on the Moon and Mars conservative proposals that even today we

have

not fully exploited.

Engineer Dandridge Cole, in his bold and comprehensive visions of the early

1960s, called space settlements "Macro-Life." These might be new habitats

constructed from advanced materials, or nestled inside captured asteroids,

hollowed out by mining their metals. Isaac Asimov described the same concept

"multiorganismic life" and coined his own term, "spome," as the space home for

such a way of life. Cole envisioned Macro-Life as the ultimate human society,

because of its open-ended adaptability, and delved into its sociology. Asimov

proposed the scattering of spomes as insurance for the survival of humankind.

Both thinkers saw space settlements as a natural step, as important as life's

emergence from the sea. As amphibians would venture into the thin air of the

shore, we would carry our biology with us.

Cole wrote:

"Taking man as representative of multicelled life, we can say that man is the

mean proportional between Macro-Life and the cell. Macro-Life is a new life

form

of gigantic size which has for its cells individual human beings, plants,

animals, and machines .... Society can be said to be pregnant with a mutant

creature which will be at the same time an extraterrestrial colony of human

beings and a new large-scale life form." Cole defined his habitats as a life

form because they would think with their component minds, human and

artificial,

move, respond to stimuli, and reproduce. Residing in space's immensities

offered

a unique extension of the human community, an innovation as fundamental as the

development of urban civilization in the enlightened Green city-state. Yet

living in the rest of the space around our sun re-created some desirable

aspects

of rural life, since habitats would have to be self-contained and ecologically

sophisticated, with the attentiveness to environment that comes from knowing

that problems cannot be passed on to future generations. Perhaps this

nostalgia

was crucial in the American imagination, with its rural past so quickly

vanishing.

The arguments presented for such a long-term undertaking are economic, social,

and cultural. Few would deny that the solar system offers an immense

industrial

base of energy and mass, enough to deal with all the material problems facing

humanity.

We live under a sky ripe with fundamental wealth, but our technological nets

are

too small to catch what we need from the cornucopia above our heads.

Yet hard science had to come before high dreams.

While science fiction writers used the idea of space habitats for dramatic

stories, engineers and scientists brought to it an increasingly revealing

verisimilitude. Fundamentals of physics and economics came into play.

Space colonies have some advantages over our natural satellite, the Moon. A

rocket needs to achieve a velocity change of 6 km/sec to go from low Earth

orbit

to the lunar surface. That same rocket can go to Mars with only about 4.5

km/sec

investment, if it uses an aero-shell to brake in the upper Martian atmosphere.

Also, any deep space operations could be much better managed from an orbit out

beyond the particle fluxes of our magnetic Van Allen Belt, a fraction of the

way

to the Moon.

I've had a steady conversation with Buzz Aldrin for the last decade about his

personal dream of returning to the moon. It's about hard realities.

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Gregory Benford - Skylife

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