Starship Fleming Terraform
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“Original Non-Fiction” finalist for the Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Writing, http://canopus.100yss.org/?p=402... Terraforming Planets, Geoengineering Earth James Rodger Fleming Science, Technology and Society Program Colby College, Maine 04901 USA Can humanity survive on Earth into the indefinite future without taking control of the climate system and biosphere, or perhaps one day engaging in solar engineering? If we seek to colonize other planets, will we need to live sequestered from harsh environments in little residential capsules and venture out only in spacesuits, or should we practice terraformation to make the environment of other planets more Earthlike? In either case, we will need to master bio-geo-chemical engineering to generate fresh air, water, and food. Would it be better then to engineer planets for humans or to engineer humans and perhaps cyborgs to withstand harsh environments? Since prediction of new technological developments or inventions has proven to be notoriously inaccurate, what insights can we derive from the history of planetary manipulation proposals and fantasies? In 2248, according to science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Icehenge,1 heroine Emma Weil’s “five-hundred-year project is the terraforming of Mars,” while starship captain Eric Swann’s “is the colonization of a planet in another system.” “What’s the big difference?” asked Swann; “About ten or twenty light years,” replied Emma (22). One of the biggest challenges facing the starship was generating fresh air, fresh water, and food for the crew while recycling wastes with near 100 percent efficiency. The starship is a traveling biosphere, and engineers have to balance the photosynthetic coefficient for algae and the respiratory coefficient for the humans and animals to prevent too much build-up in either CO2 or oxygen: “Light feeds algae. Algae feed plants and fish. Plants feed animals and humans and create oxygen and water. Animals feed humans, and humans and animals create wastes, which sustain microorganisms that mineralize the wastes (to an extent), making it possible to plow them back into the soil” (adapted from p. 29). Eighty percent efficiency in this system was good enough for a three-year voyage; 99 percent perhaps for 100-years, but perfect 2 closure in any system, even a planet, is not technically possible. Major problems include mineral deficiencies, the incomplete recycling of wastes, and minute losses of water that would coat the interior of the ship and pool in cracks and crevices. The starship would have to recharge its systems somehow. Even by 2610, or some 600 fictional years from today, Mars remains a hostile environment for humans, and author Robinson envisions humans safely venturing only as far as Pluto, while the fate of the starship, which had left the solar system remains unknown. The pace is much quicker, unrealistically so, in Robinson’s later more popular writings, Red, Green, and Blue Mars, where it takes less than two generations, beginning in 2026, for the granddaughter of the first Martian colonist to depart from a fully terraformed solar system in an interstellar vessel headed to another star system twenty light-years away. Such is science fiction, but what about its more proximate cousin science fantasy? Fantasy often informs reality (and vice versa). NASA managers know this well, as do Trekkies. The best science fiction authors typically build from the current state of a field to construct futuristic scenarios that reveal and explore the human condition. Scientists as well often venture into flights of fancy. Although not widely documented, the fantasy–reality axis is a prominent aspect of the history of science and technology. The chief distinction is that the fiction writers provide a moral core and compass. Science fiction and science fantasy meet in such classic works as Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), a two-billion year “history” of the future in which the human species and its many successors escape the dying Earth and colonize other worlds, until the remnants of humanity are extinguished when the Sun becomes a supernova. Near the end the last men, living on Neptune, design an artificial human dust, “capable of being carried forward on the sun's radiation, hardy enough to endure the conditions of a trans- galactic voyage of many millions of years, and yet intricate enough to bear the potentiality of life and of spiritual development.” This, for Stapledon, is humanity’s final legacy. Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky (1950), concerns the terraformation of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede by frontier homesteaders who depart an Earth that is 3 overcrowded and near ecological exhaustion. The colonizing farmers face a super harsh environment of thin air and biting cold. Not only do the hardscrabble space pioneers have to nurture their crops in such conditions, they have to create their own soil from crushed rock. The Greening of Mars (1984) by James Lovelock and Michael Allaby brings contemporary environmental and social issues into story telling about planetary transformation.2 Writing before the Montreal Protocol was enacted or the Cold War ended, the authors anticipated using banned chlorofluorocarbon gases to warm the Martian climate, transporting them there with surplus US and Soviet missiles, and paying for the whole operation with funds from the “peace dividend.” The colony was populated by “homeless” people who had sold all their Earthly assets in exchange for Martian real estate futures, valuable only in proportion to the progress of terraformation. Two ersatz starship missions have already been launched on Planet Earth, but not by NASA or any other space-faring nation. Some twenty years ago a crew of eight attempted a shakedown cruise of some 16 months, but the life support systems failed miserably and the mission had to be aborted prematurely. Oxygen levels in the craft, which began at a robust 21 percent, systematically decreased to about 14 percent causing members of the crew to suffer from high-altitude sickness, sleep apnea, and extreme fatigue. Other life support systems also went erratic. CO2 levels fluctuated on a daily basis by as much as 600 parts per million (ppm), with much greater seasonal variation. 3 Wintertime CO2 levels soared as high as 4,500 ppm, or close to a lethal concentration. Although the ship was huge, enclosing 3.5 acres, it was not huge enough, and fluctuating plant photosynthesis alternating with system respiration threatened to overwhelm the carbon dioxide scrubbers. With the human crew suffering mightily, most of the mammals and birds brought on board dead, and insect pests such as ants and cockroaches flourishing, the mission came to a screeching halt. After scrubbing and tuning the life-support systems, a second mission was launched a year later with a crew of seven, but it too crashed, this time within six months, due to a severe management dispute, a munity which involved monkey-wrenching the craft, and the early departure of two crew members. By now it should be clear that we are discussing the foibles of Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert, not an actual starship. 4 There was no propulsion system and the craft was surrounded by the friendly biosphere of Earth, not the vacuum of outer space. The closed-system research days of Biosphere 2 ended under the management of Columbia University (1995-2003). For several years the facility was the site of a planned residential development with tours being offered to the public. Now it is managed by the University of Arizona, which uses its the soaring glass vivarium for experiments on dryland grass species. The interesting technical, human, and managerial lessons of Biosphere 2 are legion, and are fully worthy of study.4 For our purposes the lessons of the two missions launched in the 1990s indicate that we need to learn how to run a small artificial biosphere successfully before we can ever hope to terraform a planet or geoengineer our own. We have a lot to learn in the next 100 years. In his book Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments (1995) Martyn J. Fogg reviewed the history and some of the technical aspects of “orchestrated planetary change.” He defined “planetary engineering” as the application of technology for the purpose of influencing the global properties of a planet and “terraforming” as the process of enhancing the capacity of a planetary environment to support life. The ultimate in terraforming would be to create an uncontained planetary biosphere emulating all the functions of the biosphere of the Earth—one that would be fully habitable for human beings. “Astroengineering,” or modifying the properties of the Sun or a star, by intervening in its opacity, nuclear reactions, mass loss, chemical mixing, or other properties, is admittedly hyper speculative now, but who can say in the future? Fogg described how ecological-engineering techniques might be used someday to implant life on other planets and how geoengineering might be used to ameliorate (or perhaps exacerbate) the currently “corrosive process” of global change on the Earth. He presented order-of-magnitude calculations and the results of some simple computer modeling to assess the plausibility of various planetary-engineering scenarios. He deemed it “rash to proclaim” impossible any scheme that does not “obviously violate the laws of physics.” Yet Fogg focused only on possibilities, not on unintended consequences, and left unaddressed questions of whether the schemes are desirable, or even ethical.