Futures for the Space Age

MARCH 24, 2022
BY KLAUS Æ. MOGENSEN

In this article, I outline four scenarios for how the Space Age might develop in this century and beyond.

We are undoubtedly living in a Space Age. Thousands of satellites are orbiting the Earth, providing global communication, weather data, GPS, maps, astronomical knowledge and much more. The International Space Station, the ISS, has been continually manned since 2000, probes have penetrated the outer reaches of our solar system, and rovers and even a helicopter are exploring Mars. Yet the number of people in space in any given year peaked in 1985 at 62, and has slowly declined since then, and no human beings have set foot on another astronomical body since 1972, when Gene Cernan left the as yet last human footsteps on the Moon. This raises the question of whether there is a future for human beings in space, or if space will belong to machines. Another question is whether the Earth’s presence in space, human or machine, will continue to expand, or whether we will be content to remain near Earth once probes have explored what there is to explore in the solar system. These two uncertainties frame four scenarios for the future of the space age over the next century and beyond.

EARTH IS ROOM ENOUGH

Let’s face it: The original space race was born more out of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union than out of any real desire to explore and colonise space. Even though Apollo 11 brought a few rocks back from the Moon, the main purpose was to plant the US flag and a plaque bearing Richard Nixon’s name. Although we still send people to the ISS, the value of doing so seems dubious. When have you last heard of any important discovery made on the ISS? In this scenario, ISS is decommissioned in 2028, with no plans for a successor. This basically ends human presence in space, barring a few tourist billionaires going on brief orbital or suborbital flights. The novelty of this quickly fades, and a fatal accident in 2039, when a handful of the world’s richest and most famous people die, highlights the fact that space flight just isn’t safe.

2042 sees the last human being returning from space for the last time. With climate change, loss of biodiversity, overpopulation and recurring economic crises, there are more important things to focus on than outer space, which probes have revealed to be very unfriendly to humankind. Colonise Mars? Antarctica would be a nicer place to live. The consensus is that we should strive to keep our own planet liveable before we spend quadrillions on establishing uncertain footholds elsewhere.

Satellites are still being launched into space, and they provide important services, including a global internet, but Earth’s orbital space is becoming increasingly saturated – until 2048, when a large piece of space debris hits and destroys a major satellite, creating more space debris and starting a cascading series of collisions in what is known as the Kessler Syndrome, destroying all satellites in the most-used orbits, including the all-important geostationary orbit where communication satellites are situated, and filling these and surrounding orbits with debris. What’s left are mainly near-Earth orbits where the orbits of space debris naturally decay, and the debris falls into the atmosphere and burns up. Unfortunately, this is also true of the satellites there, so they must be continually replaced or provided with ways to stay in orbit, such as solar-powered interaction with the planet’s magnetic field. A few space observatories and other special satellites in distant orbits are all that’s left in permanent orbit. Since the debris also makes manned space flight hazardous, all such plans are abandoned until the situation improves, which could take generations.

As the century progresses, people learn to live without space. World-spanning underground and deep-sea cables provide for all our communication needs, with less lag than satellite communication, and stratospheric blimps provide weather data as well as wireless communication where no cables are laid. In the end, humanity chooses to look inward and make the Earth a better place to live, with a well-managed population and climate. Those with the desire to do so can explore complex virtual worlds from the safety of their own homes. This is infinitely more fun than travelling the desolate emptiness of real outer space.

ORBITAL LEISURE

In early 2021, the Gateway Foundation announced its plan to build an orbiting space hotel, Voyager Station, by 2027. The hotel is designed as a rotating wheel that generates pseudo-gravity equal to one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, with a ‘floor’ space of 50,000 square metres, capable of housing 440 people together with restaurants, bars and gyms. The hotel becomes an instant success among the economic elite and is soon followed by more hotels, timeshares and even private space retreats where those who can afford it can get away from Earth’s stifling restrictions. There are no taxes in space, and the only laws that apply are those the owners of the space habitats decide on. Tired elderly people get a new lease of life in low gravity, which puts less stress on muscles, hearts and sagging body parts and allows new types of leisure, including weightless sports. As time goes on, the number of people in space at any given time grows to tens of thousands, and eventually millions. Materials for the expanding orbital habitats are harvested from small asteroids ferried from the Asteroid Belt by robot spaceships, at far less expense than rocketing them up from the ground.

The first human born in space, Leia Leeloo Barbarella Wilson, sees the light of day in 2048, and she becomes the first of a new generation of real spacemen and spacewomen who have never stood on the surface of a planet or moon. They see no need to do so. What has old Earth to offer that can’t be had up here, except diseases, bad weather, violent conflicts, and poverty? On the other hand, they don’t see any need to expand further into space. In Earth’s orbit, the habitats are close to one other, and it is easy to communicate with friends and even visit them physically – and the Earth is admittedly a very pretty marble to look at. The view can’t be beat. Maybe, deep down, people just aren’t psychologically comfortable with really letting go of the cradle of mankind.

Eventually, the ‘Orbitans’ diverge further from the ‘Earthers’. Newcomers and tourists rocketing up from Earth are viewed as sorry and clumsy outsiders who don’t belong to the true space society. To further distinguish themselves, the Orbitans start genetically modifying their bodies and those of their children to better handle low or zero gravity, and some replace their feet with an extra set of hands, which are of more use. They adopt hairdos that would be impossible in Earth-normal gravity and wear clothes suitable for environments with no ‘up’ and ‘down’ and perfectly regulated climates. Skirts, coats and capes won’t stay in place in microgravity, and you don’t need clothes to keep warm – unless, of course, you take a spacewalk ‘outside’. Clothing becomes purely decorative and sometimes optional; a fact that outrages and fascinates visiting Earthers (those hicks). The Orbitans are happy as and where they are. Space is their dwelling place, but the stars are not their destination.

THE ROBOT HEAVENS

Humans aren’t very well suited to living in space or on other planets. Our muscles, bones and hearts atrophy under low or zero gravity, and our eyesight suffers. Robots, on the other hand, thrive in space as though designed for it – which, of course, they are. They need no gravity, air or water and no food except electricity, and they are resilient to radiation and the extremes of cold and heat that can be found out there. It is no wonder that Mars is solely inhabited by robots, and despite various plans to colonise Mars, living there would require 24/7 protection from the cold, radiation and near-vacuum conditions. It would be like living in a post-apocalyptic bunker where the Earth’s surface has become uninhabitable, only worse because of the ever-present, extremely fine Mars dust that gets in everywhere. Terraforming Mars to make it more like Earth would at best take centuries, and would be more costly than any previous human undertaking, and thus not really worth the effort. And Mars is the best suited planet or moon for human colonisation that we know of.

This does not mean that humanity gives up space. We will just choose to explore and colonise it vicariously, through robots. Robots can harvest asteroids and the lunar surface for everything we need, from rare minerals to helium-3 for fusion power. They can explore the deep atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn and Titan and the subsurface water oceans of the major Jovian moons, and they can patiently travel for decades to the outskirts of the solar system, or even undertake centuries-long journeys to other stars – and beam back images and data of all the places they go. Maybe, eventually, they will find a planet so similar to Earth that humans could comfortably live there, but would we want to undertake the risky, generations-long trip to get there?

In the end, we realise that humans are for Earth and space is for robots. Towards the end of the 21st century, scientists, aided by artificial intelligence, begin to design a species of sentient, self-replicating humanoid space robots for that can evolve to adapt to any environment they encounter. They will be our space children and will spread the heritage of humanity among the stars, while we flesh-and-blood humans will remain here on Earth for as many centuries, millennia or eons as we can survive.

METASTATIS

After a long decline, human space flight experiences a revival in the 2030s, when NASA establishes a space station called Gateway orbiting the Moon as a steppingstone for a permanent Moon base, and a private space company sends people to Mars to examine the feasibility of a colony there. By the middle of the century, asteroid mining by robots provides materials to massproduce spaceships in Earth orbit, and colonists are soon rocketing off to Mars and the Asteroid Belt, where asteroids are transformed into large, rotating habitats. The Belt contains plenty of water, from which oxygen can be extracted, as well as minerals to make soil for farming and helium-3 for fusion power, and by the end of the century, the Belt houses several self-sufficient space colonies. Over the next century, the Belter colonies expand to house hundreds of millions of people, all living comfortably among forests and lakes, and as suitable asteroids are used up, people eventually begin colonising the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune, which houses many thousands of objects larger than 100 km and millions larger than 20 km, consisting of roughly equal proportions of ice and a mixture of carbon, nitrogen, metals, and various minerals – perfect for human habitation.

There is room enough in the Kuiper Belt – or the ‘Outer Ring’, as it comes to be known – for trillions of people, and it takes more than a thousand years before space runs out. The next step is the Oort Cloud, a widely scattered sphere of objects, billions of which are larger than 20 km, capable of housing quadrillions of people in cool comfort. The scattered colonies are nudged together to form loosely bound swarms a few tens of millions of kilometres in diameter for faster travel and communication, with each swarm becoming a federation of hundreds or thousands of habitats, each housing millions of people.

As the Oort Cloud becomes populated over the next millennia, and humanity begins to settle similar clouds around neighbouring stars, nudging up to our own Oort Cloud, metastasis has been achieved. The ‘cancer’ of humankind has spread from the original ‘tumour’ of Earth to fill the body of our solar system – and it is now ready to spread to the rest of the galaxy

This article was published in SCENARIO Magazine, Issue 61 - available for purchase in the SCENARIO Shop