Space colonies

This may seem a wacko idea, but it is the only way I can see that we can resolve a conundrum.

There are too many people on Earth, and even with declining birth rates the global population will continue to rise to around 9-10bn by mid century. Even without getting into debate about man made global warming, the combination of industrial society and large population is putting unbearable strain on the ecosystem. We are in the midst of another great extinction, caused by man.

Some worry that the primitives (including Muslims) take over by default as industrial populations collapse; economists worry that dependency ratios become unsustainable. I worry more that ageing societies become dull, conformist and uncreative. There is already IMO a decline in creativity, partly due to cultural exhaustion but also because of ageing population. A healthy society needs young people, and unless the death rate rises sharply (possible, as antibiotic resistance rises), that means a growing population. Transhumanism may give us young bodies, but not the flexibility and rebelliousness of young minds, and would in any case make the overpopulation worse.

When I was young we believed in progress, because the standards of living were changing before our eyes. If you are Chinese, that’s how you feel nowadays. We cannot go back to traditional society anyway, and it was pretty horrible. But above a certain level of income there is no correlation between contentment and income, and materialism becomes empty and corroding hedonism. We need a new non-hedonistic goal for progress. It may not solve the existential issue, but it gives something to do in the meantime.

Fast track back to the seventies, to the ideas of Gerard O’Neill – live in space colonies. There are no environmental constraints and space, and room for an infinite expansion of population leaving the Earth for tourism and as a nature reserve.

All well and good, but there is a huge gap between launching small payload satellites and getting billions of people into space, and if you can see any serious thinking or research on the following issues, well it has passed me by and please pass me to the sources:

- We need new technology, especially for the energy-intensive bits of getting out of the Earth’s gravity well, chemical rockets are far too primitive and wasteful. My own favourite would be space tether which is electrically conductive, where descending to earth vehicles are braked magnetically by generating electric current ( a bit like the regenerative brakes on an electric train) which powers a vehicle going up into space.
- All the resources needed to develop such colonies are available in huge quantities in the solar system. We cannot bring them from Earth, not only for obvious ecological reasons but also because of the energy penalty of the Earth’s gravity; it would take far less effort to send unmanned supply ships to collect water from Jupiter’s moons than to bring it from Earth.
- Cosmic rays and micrometeorites? Two metres of solid shielding will do the trick, and rotation provides artificial gravity

This requires huge technological leaps – but none of it unfeasible – but the smallest viable scale space colony is quite large, and needs a whole support system. We can envisage a space colony system (yes, run with private industry) but how to get there from here in incremental steps – it is not obvious. We need a process not one-off events.

Sending a man to the moon was a bit like Admiral Zheng He and his fleet sailing the globe in 1421: a bit of government show which led nowhere. We need the equivalent of European colonisation of the Americas (but no slaves growing sugar, please). There are no products from space that make the huge expense worthwhile. The only other motivator is an arms race, as in the 50s and 60s. China may indeed provide that, and a race to build a moon base first. Meanwhile one can see the goal, but no process to get there.