A Step Farther Out Page 5

  Now how can something as complex as space colonies be built for that low a price? And wouldn't it be cheaper to build space manufacturing facilities in near-Earth orbit rather than going out to L5?

  That's the beauty of the O'Neill concept. All the building materials for the colonies must, of course, be put into orbit—but they need not come from Earth. Most of the raw materials for the L5 colony will come from the Moon.

  The Moon has one twentieth the gravity well that Earth does. The colonies will be in stable Trojan Points. Put those two data together and you reach an interesting conclusion: much of the mass of the colonies need never have been launched by rockets at all.

  There are several devices for getting lunar materials to the L5 point. One involves a simple centrifugal arm: a big solar-powered gizmo similar to the thing used to pitch baseballs for batting practice. It flings gup, such as unrefined Lunar ore (25-35% metal, from our random samples) out to the L5 point, and the laws of gravity keep it there. Refining takes place at the colony, and the slag is useful as dirt, cosmic ray shielding, and just plain mass. There's also oxygen in them there rocks.

  Another workable device is the linear accelerator or mass driver—a long electric sled as used in countless science fiction stories. Both these can be built with present technology.

  Obviously, then, O'Neill colonies have a prerequisite, namely, a permanent Lunar Colony. Now that's certainly within present-day technology; I once did studies that demonstrated that with technology available in the 60's we could keep astronauts and scientists alive for years on the Lunar surface, and things have come a long way since then.

  The Lunar Colony will need at least one near-Earth manned space station, since Earth-orbit to Lunar-orbit is the most efficient way to transport large masses of materials from here to there. The Lunar Shuttle will be assembled in space, and won't have all that waste structure that would enable it to withstand planetary gravity; thus it can carry far more payload per trip.

  It's here that I think the profits come in. Skylab demonstrated that space manufacturing operations have fantastic potential profits. There are things we can make in space that simply cannot be made on Earth. Materials research benefits alone might pay for the space station. Certainly the potential for Earth-watch operations, pollution monitoring, better weather prediction, increased communications, and all the other benefits we've already got from space, will contribute to profits as well.

  And once space shows a visible return on investment, we may well be on our way.

  So. The prerequisite for the space station is the Shuttle; and there's the weak point. The Shuttle is in trouble. There are a number of Congresscritters who'd like nothing better than to convert the Shuttle into benefits for their own districts. There are plenty of intellectuals who continually do cry "Why must we waste money in space when there are so many needs on Earth?" The obvious reply, that most of our expenditures on Earth seem to have vanished with no visible benefit, while our space program has already just about paid for itself in better weather prediction alone, does not impress them.

  There are also the Zero-Growth theorists who see investment in space not as a mere waste of money, but as a positive evil.

  We are close to breakthrough. For a whack of a lot less than we spend on liquor, or on cigarettes and cosmetics, on new highways we don't need, on countless tiny drains that flitter away the hopes of mankind, the United States alone could break out of Earth's prison and send men to space. The effect on future generations is literally incalculable. We can do it; but will we?

  * * *

  I wish I were sure that we would; or that if we of the US don't do it, somebody else will; but I am not. There are just too many disaster scenarios. A Great Depression, War. The triumph of anti-technological ideology. The continued ruin of our educational system—in California, with 30 State Universities, there is not one in which bonehead English is not the largest single class, and the retreat from excellence (called democratization and equality of opportunity) races onward. Any of these, or all of them at once, could throw away an opportunity that may never again come to mankind.

  So what can we do?

  For one thing, we can organize at least as well as the opposition. Science fiction readers may have mixed emotions about "ecology" movements, consumerism, Zero-Growth, and the like, but I think we have not lost our sense of wonder, nor abandoned our hopes. We have not given up the vision of man's vast future among the stars. We have not traded the future of man for a few luxuries in our time.

  Unfortunately, we have no voice, or rather, we have a myriad of voices, none very effective.

  In the 50's a number of us in the aircraft industry used to bootleg space research. There wasn't any budget for that crazy Buck Rogers stuff. Most of us believed we would see the day when the first man set foot on the Moon. We didn't believe we'd see the last one. I hope we haven't.

  Like many of us who recall pre-Sputnik days, I alternate between hope and depression. Recently I have seen one hopeful sign, although it is a bit frightening.

  As I write this it appears that the Soviets have built lasers sufficiently powerful to blind our infra-red observation satellites. These satellites are in very high orbits, meaning that the Soviet lasers must be extremely powerful. One old friend who has remained in the industry told me at a New Year's party that the Soviets must be at least 5 years ahead of us, and this in a field in which we thought we were supreme.

  Why is this hopeful? Isn't it rather frightening?

  It's frightening if you think the Soviet Union may fall or be under the control of convinced ideologists willing to trade part of their country for all of the world. There is nothing in Marxist ideology to forbid that—indeed, any communist who has the opportunity to eliminate the West and thus bring about the world revolution, and who fails to do it because of the price in human lives, is guilty of bourgeois sentimentality. So yes, it's frightening that the Soviets may have taken several long strides toward laser defense against ICBM's.

  It's hopeful, though, in that it may stimulate us to get moving in large laser R&D. In my judgment, defense technology is the ideal way to conduct an arms race, if you must have an arms race. (And it takes only one party to start a race, unfortunately.) Defense systems don't threaten the opponent's civilian population. They merely complicate offensive operations, hopefully to the point where no sane person would launch an attack; and they give some hope that part of your own civilian population may survive if worst comes to worst.

  If we can't justify space operations in terms of benefits to mankind, then perhaps we can sell them as defense systems? Big lasers can be used as space launching systems. If built they can put a good bit of material into orbit, thus making the manned space factory economically feasible and nearly inevitable; and once in Earth orbit, as I said in the first of these columns exactly two years ago, you're halfway to anywhere.

  Specifically, we'd be halfway to an era of plenty without pollution; halfway to assuring that our descendants won't curse our memory for throwing away mankind's hope for the stars.

  ___________

  *Readers with more interest in O'Neill colonies should send $20 to the L5 Society, 1620 N. Park, Tucson AZ 85719, which publishes a newsletter and lobbies for NASA support for space colonies. I thoroughly recommend their organization.

  How Long to Doomsday?

  "WHILE YOU ARE READING THESE WORDS FOUR PEOPLE WILL HAVE DIED FROM STARVATION. MOST OF THEM CHILDREN."

  Thus opens Paul Ehrlich's THE POPULATION BOMB.

  "It seems to me, then, that by 2000 AD or possibly earlier, man's social structure will have utterly collapsed, and that in the chaos that will result as many as three billion people will die. Nor is there likely to be a chance of recovery thereafter. . . ."

  Thus closes a popular article by Dr. Isaac Asimov, perhaps the best-known science writer in America.

  It would not be hard to multiply examples of doom-crying among science fiction writers, or, for that matter, the American
intelligentsia. There are dozens of stories and articles describing life in these United States after the year 2000 as poor, nasty, brutish, and short—although hardly solitary as Hobbes would have it.

  Much of this doomsaying springs from three original sources which are endlessly requoted: Ehrlich's work previously mentioned, and two outputs from MIT: WORLD DYNAMICS and THE LIMITS TO GROWTH. All are essentially mathematical trend projections, with the MIT studies employing complex and highly detailed computer models.

  Strangely, intellectuals including science fiction writers have a lot of confidence in these economic models, although they have very little in the ability of social or physical scientists to save us. It's almost impossible to overestimate the influence of these three books. Writers make predictions based upon them; teachers quote them endlessly, or worse, quote secondary and tertiary sources which draw their ideas from them.

  The result is that these works and the view they represent have become "conventional wisdom" for the young. DOOM is "in the air" so to speak; a great part of our younger generation is convinced that no matter what we do, no matter how much we discover or learn, we are finally and inevitably doomed. If Isaac Asimov says we are finished, then what hope have we?

  Even when the result is not total defeatism—after all, if we're doomed no matter what we do, why not "tune in, turn on, and drop out"?—the influence of this view is crucial. For millennia the concept of progress has been the driving force of Western civilization. Our philosophy was simple: hard work and study would save us. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Now all that is lost. Western civilization has lost faith in progress. Our only salvation, a new era of intellectuals say, is through Zero-Growth; "Small is Beautiful"; "soft energies"; and the like. Political figures including the Governor of California and the President of the United States base their future planning on this philosophy; they have specifically abandoned the older idea that "knowledge is power" and that good research and technology development will bring about an era of plenty.

  Yet—are we doomed? Surely the works which generated that view deserve analysis.

  * * *

  First: the blurb that opens Ehrlich's book is clearly wrong. My copy was published in 1969, a year in which about 53 million people died from all causes. It takes four seconds to read the blurb, so for one person to die each second, 31.5 million—about 60 percent of all deaths—would have had to be from starvation.

  Taking the UN cause-of-death statistics and being as fair as possible by including as "starvation" any cause related to nutrition—diphtheria, typhus, parasitic diseases, etc.—we get about a million, or some 5 1/2 percent. Dr. Ehrlich is off by a factor of ten.

  Actually, world agriculture is keeping up with population. At the Mexico City meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975, Dr. H. A. B. Parpia, the senior professional of the UN's Food And Agricultural Organization, told me that just about every country raises more than enough food to be self-sufficient. The food is grown, but sometimes not harvested; or if harvested, spoils before it can be eaten. In many countries vermin get more of the crop than the people: insects out eat people almost everywhere. The pity is that the technology to harvest and preserve enough for everyone exists right now.

  Now this essay is not intended to be a Pollyanna exercise. There's no excuse for relaxing and saying that hunger is a myth. It isn't. But simple food storage technologies, and research into non-damaging pesticides and pest control methodologies, could stop famine in most of those parts of the world where that horseman still stalks the land. Other simple technologies—even Mylar linings for traditional dung-smeared grain storage pits—would save lives.

  We know how to do it; but we won't unless we're willing to try. We won't get anywhere sitting around crying "Doom!"

  Yet according to Dr. Ehrlich's book, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

  Fortunately that didn't happen; but the doomsayer viewpoint, which did not stop agro-engineers from making efforts despite the flat prediction that their efforts were useless, did invade our schools so successfully that a new generation of students believes in Doom as thoroughly as ever did a Crusader in the holiness of his cause.

  * * *

  The other side of the coin was expressed in the Hudson Institute's THE YEAR 2000, which points out that the level of rice yield per acre in India has not yet equaled what the Japanese could do in the Twelfth Century. Another analyst, Colin Clark, has shown that if the Indian farmer could reach the production levels of the South Italian peasant, there would be no danger of starvation in India for a good time to come.

  In other words, it doesn't even take Miracle Rice, fertilizers, and a high-energy civilization to hold off utter disaster in the developing countries. It only takes adding technology to traditional peasant skills—indeed, the kind of thing advocated by E.F. Schumacher in his SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL-ECONOMICS AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED. Showing people how to use Mylar and simple non-persistent fungicides for food storage along with peasant agricultural methodology will hold the line against famine—for a while.

  Moreover, we have new technologies. There are means for increasing protein production. More protein in childhood would cut back infant diseases like kwashiorkor and "red baby"; those diseases have the effect of permanently lowering adult IQ by about 20 points. What if the next generation of a developing country were "20 IQ points" more intelligent? For many of the ignorant of the world are not stupid; but they may be stunted.

  But the doomsters have an answer. If we help those people feed themselves, they'll only breed to famine again. Worse, they'll demand industry. They'll strip-mine phosphates and poison the seas (as shown by Cousteau on a recent film). What's the point of helping them? Doom is still around the corner.

  The best answer is that historically people haven't done it. When nations reach a high level of technology—and of infant survival—the fertility rate falls. The US appeared to be an exception to that with the WWII "baby boom," but now that squiggle in the fertility rate has passed. The girls born in 1944 are 35 now, leaving their child-bearing period, and the number of girls born per fertile girl in the US has fallen to an all-time low: so low that now one occasionally hears economists advocate bonuses for larger families! The same is true of the other industrialized nations. Populations of wealthy nations do not rise without limit.

  Yet—in our schools and colleges and universities straight unadulterated Malthusianism is taught and learned and has become "conventional wisdom."

  * * *

  There's another form of doom not so fashionably discussed: the Marching Morons (that is, the least successful tend to have the most children). It's a problem we must face; but it's doubtful that before the year 2000, or even 2500, it will have destroyed our social institutions.

  As a matter of fact, given present population trends, the US won't have very many more people in 2000 than now. Population is growing, albeit slowly: there's a "bow wave" generated by the World War II "baby boom," and of course there is always immigration—both legal and illegal. Still, best projections show us peaking in about 2025 with population then declining to its present level—where it will stay.

  Suppose that never happens, and we reach 350 million people before something stops US population growth. The area of the United States is about 9.5 million square kilometers; of that, some is water, and some simply uninhabitable. Call it 8 million even, and we have a present population of about 26 people per square kilometer.

  If we reach 350 million people—and few projections show us getting there in 50 or even 100 years—we would have 43.5 people/km2, a big increase. Some writers say that we will be driven stark, staring mad by overcrowding, and this well before 2020 AD; Asimov, recall, expects Doom before the year 2000, primarily from this cause.

  We'll be inundated with personal c
ontacts, at each other's throats, sleeping in hallways and abandoned automobiles; mothers will kill and eat their children; few will have any incentive to work; all except the very rich will be in utter misery as civilization collapses.

  Well, what civilized countries have population densities higher than our doom-level of 43.5 that we might reach in 50 years?

  Practically all of them. West Germany, a not uncivilized place, has 244 people/km2, equivalent to 1.9 billion people in the US! Denmark has 114 people/km2; France 93; England and Wales, 322. Even Scotland, with its highlands and islands and hills and moors has 66.

  What densities can people stand and remain sane? No one really has an answer to that. But the Netherlands, a charming place, has 319 people/km2; the Channel Islands has 641; and Monaco, the densest place on Earth, has 16,000!

  Of course the U.S. could not be packed like Monaco or England. We would not like it if our country were as thickly populated as Denmark (although our eastern seaboard is more densely populated in some places right now); but surely we would not all go insane if we lived as close together as the Scots!