Space has been portrayed as a silver bullet to a lot of the world’s problems. From energy shortages to world hunger and over population, many think the plenty of the stars will save us. However, space habitation is not a silver bullet; there are no silver bullets.
This post was inspired by the paper No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering by Dr. Fred Brooks, professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Most of the ideas in that paper are limited to the paper’s field, software engineering. But, there is an argument made that can be applied anywhere:
“...as we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity... Although we see no startling breakthroughs, and indeed, believe such to be inconsistent with the nature of software, many encouraging innovations are under way. A disciplined, consistent effort to develop, propagate, and exploit them should indeed yield an order-of-magnitude improvement. There is no royal road, but there is a road”.
Basically, Dr. Brooke is claiming that, if there where a scale from productivity, reliability and simplicity. It would be impossible to go from 1 to 10, 10 to 100 and so on with one piece of technology or one change in habits. However, those increases are possible with a system of technologies and habits implemented, with discipline, overtime. For example, at the beginning of this school I brought running shoes. I ran about 10 times and they felt great, but, as the year progressed, I ran less and less. I never really developed the mindset of a runner, running wasn’t a high enough priority for me. Next thing I knew, I was very good friends with the freshmen 15. This experience is not limited to me.
The lessons from software engineering and running shoes are important to promoting and planning space settlement; they both prove that there is no silver bullet.
There is a paper by Dr. David Livingston, The Ethical Commercialization of Outer Space, which demonstrates how much trouble space settlement alone can cause. Dr. Livingston is host of The Space Show and an expert who has influenced me greatly. He argued that
“without an ethical orientation to the conduct of one's business, people can be made to suffer extreme harm as business decisions often have the power to touch most people's lives... [T]he founder and CEO of SpaceDev, Inc. of San Diego, Jim Benson, an individual who is deservedly at the forefront of launching new commercial space businesses, can serve as an example. Mr. Benson is an important and capable leader in commercializing outer space, but some of his statements describing what the early period of the new commercial space industrialization will look like foster concern for the ethical issues. Perhaps the best example of this comes from an interview with Benson in the Oct. 26-Nov. 2, 1998 issue of The New Yorker magazine regarding space commercialization as discussed at Space98, an international space conference held in Albuquerque, New Mexico in April 1998. Benson, who was both an important speaker and participant at Space98, said in reference to a question about the establishment of space colonies that "these colonies are going to grow like boom towns. There is going to be no planning. It will be an economic workhouse. You're going to wind up with prostitutes in space and blue-collar workers and office workers, and people are going to die, they are going to be killed, and we are going to find places to squeeze people into some tuna cans up there”.
I believe there is something to the overview effect - a feeling of being insignificant yet connected to all humans generated by looking at the Earth from space, but I really wonder if one would have time to look over the Earth while counting money earned by unethical means. The mindset of some of the leaders in the space field is...scary. With this in mind, we realize that forcing a change in business culture by paying for space settlement (just like paying for running shoes) will not fulfill the responsibility “we in developed nations bear...for the plunder of the past centuries”. It could only cause more plunder, because current business practice is a habit.
However the alternatives to space habitation, social change or environmental action, alone will not generate a non-spacefaring way to reach O’Neill’s goal of plenty for all humans. We need more resources to support our growing populations. Environmental action can protect remaining resources by insuring that farmland and fresh water are not polluted. It can make our use of resources more efficient through recycling and energy conservation. However, we are quickly running low on farmland and water. Extracting energy from the biosphere could backfire; I remember a lecture where we discussed alternative energy and what would happen to the Earth if we used enough wind power to significantly slow the winds or enough geothermal were used to cool the core of the Earth. Those scenarios would take a lot of energy use to become real, but it is something to consider when looking at the energy needs 100 years from now.
Social change could create a more educated, wealthy humanity and it has been shown that education and wealth reduces the number of children per family, but social change is hard when resources are dwindling. The following is O’Neill’s argument, covered in-depth at the end of chapter 2 of The High Frontier, but societies tend toward totalitarian rule in desperate situations like running out of resources, destroying the chances for a cultural change.
This is why I really think that the space community must always broadcast that there will be hard work involved with accessing the resources of space and achieving the image of a space based utopian future. We have a long road filled with the overcoming the obstacles involved with attempting to implement widespread environmental awareness, encouraging a sweeping social change and building support for an epic space settlement program. All three massive endeavours, if brought together, can pull off our ideals. It will take a lot of hard work and passion from the people who want to see a spacefaring society that lives up to its promises. There are no silver bullets, but there is a path.
However the alternatives to space habitation, social change or environmental action, alone will not generate a non-spacefaring way to reach O’Neill’s goal of plenty for all humans. We need more resources to support our growing populations. Environmental action can protect remaining resources by insuring that farmland and fresh water are not polluted. It can make our use of resources more efficient through recycling and energy conservation. However, we are quickly running low on farmland and water. Extracting energy from the biosphere could backfire; I remember a lecture where we discussed alternative energy and what would happen to the Earth if we used enough wind power to significantly slow the winds or enough geothermal were used to cool the core of the Earth. Those scenarios would take a lot of energy use to become real, but it is something to consider when looking at the energy needs 100 years from now.
Social change could create a more educated, wealthy humanity and it has been shown that education and wealth reduces the number of children per family, but social change is hard when resources are dwindling. The following is O’Neill’s argument, covered in-depth at the end of chapter 2 of The High Frontier, but societies tend toward totalitarian rule in desperate situations like running out of resources, destroying the chances for a cultural change.
This is why I really think that the space community must always broadcast that there will be hard work involved with accessing the resources of space and achieving the image of a space based utopian future. We have a long road filled with the overcoming the obstacles involved with attempting to implement widespread environmental awareness, encouraging a sweeping social change and building support for an epic space settlement program. All three massive endeavours, if brought together, can pull off our ideals. It will take a lot of hard work and passion from the people who want to see a spacefaring society that lives up to its promises. There are no silver bullets, but there is a path.
