Earth: a unique home for biology

There is a revolution brewing.  It’s an economic revolution, like the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions, but this one is the Space Resources Revolution, and I think it will be the greatest one of all.  It will bring the billion-fold greater resources of our solar system into the economic reach of humanity.  It could end poverty.  It could pay off all the world’s national debts.  It could open up amazing possibilities for our future.  It could bring in what many have called the “post-scarcity economy.”  These are some of the benefits of a Type 2 civilization.

Lunar Regolith

Earth is special because it has everything life needs in one place.  Other parts of the solar system aren’t so good in that way, but all told their material wealth is a billion times greater than the Earth’s.  That’s a billion with a “B”.  Not just a number I’m throwing around because it sounds big, that’s the actual order of magnitude of many of the resources in space.  Two billion times more solar energy leaves the sun every day than what falls on the Earth.  One billion times more metal resides in the main asteroid belt than all the high grade ore buried in the crust of the Earth.  The four largest moons of Jupiter — the Galilean moons — have a billion times more water than all the oceans, rivers, and ice caps of Earth.  And the largest asteroid, the dwarf planet Ceres, has by itself a million times more water than the Earth; but then, a mere million is negligible compared to the water and other volatiles of the outer solar system.  There, we find entire worlds composed of frozen water instead of rock, and other worlds composed of frozen methane, nitrogen, and such.  The volatiles of the Trans-Neptunian Objects and Oort Cloud may be better described by trillions with a “TR” than mere millions or billions with an M or a B.  Truly, we live in a wealthy home, this, our solar system.  It has far more energy, material resources, and space than we can meaningfully comprehend.

Martian regolith

But the Earth has some things that the rest of space doesn’t.  It has forests that give us wood, farmland that gives us crops.  Humans can hunt and gather and farm here.  We are a species adapted to this biosphere, living at the top of a food chain.  Before we appeared, microbes and worms spent billions of years breaking down the minerals of the regolith, combining them with carbon from the atmosphere to make topsoil.  Then the plants lived in the topsoil, and then the animals lived upon the plants.  This biosphere is something we need, and outside of the Earth the solar system doesn’t supply it.  When we go to the Moon, we find barren regolith instead of topsoil and life.  On Mars, it’s more barren regolith.  On Titan, barren regolith.  On asteroids, barren regolith.  Everywhere in space, the regolith is barren, unconverted by life into higher grade resources that we could have easily used.  This is part of the barrier that makes it hard to leap from a Type 1 to a Type 2 civilization.

Regolith on Titan

But the good news is that, still, we have the technology to leap this barrier, to go beyond a single planet and access the billion-fold greater resources of space.  We can build machines that will convert raw regolith into higher-grade resources, just like life did here on Earth.  And whereas life did it across the span of billions of years, these machines will do it within just a few human generations.  The machines will run on solar energy, just like most life does on Earth.  They can pull elements from the atmospheres of planets and moons and combine them with other elements from the ices and rocks to make whatever molecules we need.  They can manufacture goods via 3D printing or casting or any other method.  They can do all this in an environment where biological organisms cannot live, because we can design them to thrive in that environment.  In short, what we can do with modern technology is put the functional equivalent of life into space, making it no longer barren.  Robotic industry, as a form of life, would serve us, first, by gathering its own energy and materials to sustain itself, and second, by acquiring and processing resources to make whatever goods and services we need.  (This may sound really, really crazy if you have not been exposed to these ideas before, but in my lab at the Kennedy Space Center we have already developed some of these technologies, and as I will explain in future posts the rest of the technologies are just a few years away.)

Barren asteroid regolith

So then, with a billion-fold greater resources than what biological life has here on Earth, the artificial life can do amazing things like terraform Mars to make its air warm and breathable, dense enough to stop cosmic radiation and sweetened with the aroma of martian forests and wildflowers.  It can build institutes for the humanities in space, fully endowed by the robots so that anybody who wants can spend their lives writing literature or making music or studying.  It can build giant particle accelerators for scientists to solve the mysteries that are presently beyond our reach.  It can construct cities on distant moons, working with human designers to fill them with architectural wonders and art.  It can build generation ships for pioneers and their children to travel to the stars.  In short, it will enable us to live at the top of the food chain throughout the solar system as we do here on Earth — and much, much more.  It will be the great prerogative of future generations to decide what things they will do with such wealth.

In the next post I will talk about the distribution of resources in our solar system, how they exist in a pattern because of the way they formed.  This pattern indicates a strategy we need to adopt to really reach the pinnacles of a Type 2 civilization.

Technology to extract oxygen from barren regolith, tested on Mauna Kea, Hawaii in 2010.

Soon, in the coming posts I will shares practical strategies and things we can all do today to make space colonization a reality.  If you’re a space enthusiast, or if you think these ideas are in any way interesting, then please share this blog with others!

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Phil Metzger

Phil Metzger is a physicist/planetary scientist who works on technologies for mining the Moon, Mars, and asteroids; for developing extraterrestrial spaceports; and starting for robotic industry in space. He recently took early retirement from NASA, where he co-founded the KSC Swamp Works. He is now with the planetary science faculty at the University of Central Florida. Subscribe to the email list to get notified of updates to this blog!

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Pop culture almost never talks about the value of space industry.  Most people have never had someone explain to them the reasonableness of it.  They are skeptical when you talk about mining the Moon or asteroids, or about building Martian colonies and things.  It all seems too far away to be relevant.  Exploration in space is something they do understand and value.  Factories in space…not so much.  They ask why we would want to dig for metal in an asteroid when there is still so much metal to be mined here on Earth.  They ask how making things in space could be more cost-effective than making them on Earth where there are workers, resources, infrastructure, and consumers.  These are good questions and deserve to be answered.  And while there are actually a great many excellent reasons to start up space mining and industry, I am going straight to the most exciting reason of them all.  (I will discuss those other reasons later, like abundant clean energy, and jobs, and national debt, and making our place more secure in this galaxy.)  For now, I want to explain how our overall civilization can be revolutionized into something so awesome we are hardly able to imagine it.  To have even a chance of imagining it, we first need to stretch our brains.  Somehow, pop culture hasn’t stretched them for us.

Nikolai Kardashev. source: http://ufn.ru/en/ufn90/kardashev.html

So let’s start with the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev (b. 1932).  He was studying the possibility of radio signals from alien civilizations in space when he wisely noted that not every extraterrestrial civilization will be at the same level of progress that we are. Some civilizations could be vastly older than ours, and vastly far ahead — perhaps by hundreds of millions of years, or even by billions.  When you consider that technology is growing exponentially (and possibly always has been), then a billion years’ head start really amounts to something.  So Kardashev came up with a classification scheme for civilizations to help us stretch our brains.  He defined a Type 1 civilization as one that is basically like ours.  It’s what we assume a civilization is like when our brains aren’t stretched.  Such a civilization has spread across its own planet so that it has brought essentially all the resources of the planet into its economic sphere.  A Type 2 civilization, however, is one that has gone beyond its home planet and is using vastly more energy up to that of an entire star.  A Type 3 civilization is one that has spread across interstellar space and has begin using the energy of all the stars in an entire galaxy.  What Kardashev pointed out was that if there are any Type 2 or Type 3 civilizations out there, then their communications signals certainly would not look the same as our own.

Type 1, 2, and 3 civilizations are defined as planet-scale, solar system-scale, and galaxy-scale, respectively.

This begins to stretch our brains, which is important.  Consider now our (already) more expansive way of thinking about alien civilizations compared to what we see in the popular movies of Hollywood. In the movies, the aliens are always smarter than us…well, they are about 2 or 3 times smarter than us.  (And actually, they usually prove to be stupider than us in the end when they self-destruct.)  Why is it that they are never portrayed as a hundred times smarter than us, or a thousand times, or a million times, or a billion, or a trillion?  Is 2 or 3 times our intelligence some kind of natural limit?  The problem is that the movie aliens suffer from a severe case of anthropocentrism, the assumption that the current state of humanity is the measure of all things, and so the aliens show up looking and acting basically like us.  They are just a little smarter, more bald, and packing ray guns.  What Kardashev did was expose the error that leads to anthropocentric movie aliens.  He told us that there are so many orders of magnitude in the realm of what is possible — and we can apply this not just to the energy usage of a civilization, but to its intelligence, to its technological prowess, and to its depth of ethical commitment — that we shouldn’t assume our own civilization is the measure of normal.  How could it be?  We are still growing, at least technologically, and that so very quickly, so of course we haven’t discovered the limit of what is possible for a civilization.  We haven’t even comprehended its order of magnitude.

And so this begins to hint at the Big Idea behind space industry.  It’s not just about bringing back some metal we dug out of an asteroid.  It’s not just about creating jobs or paying down the national debt.  Those things will happen when we get space industry going, but the really mind-stretching outcome, the Big Idea, is the one that excites me the most.  It’s the fact that space industry will put us well on our way toward achieving a Type 2 civilization with all the amazing things that that such a revolution will bring. As I will argue in future posts, we can achieve this outcome in as little as 50 years, and when we do — well, it’s almost impossible to describe what great things can follow.

In the next post, we’ll take a look at the revolutions of civilization that humanity has already gone through. I hope this will further stretch our brains and also encourage us, knowing that as we have done great things before, so we can do great things again.  The current state of humanity is not the measure of normal.  Talk of industry in space is not something to be skeptical about.

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Author information

Phil Metzger

Phil Metzger is a physicist/planetary scientist who works on technologies for mining the Moon, Mars, and asteroids; for developing extraterrestrial spaceports; and starting for robotic industry in space. He recently took early retirement from NASA, where he co-founded the KSC Swamp Works. He is now with the planetary science faculty at the University of Central Florida. Subscribe to the email list to get notified of updates to this blog!

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