In the next few posts I will lay out the case for starting up mining and industry in the solar system. Such an industry offers us brilliant possibilities; it offers to make us more secure here on planet Earth, to ramp up our economy, to create jobs, to pay off the national debt, to end poverty, to save the environment, and so on. And now you’re thinking I’m just another wild-eyed space enthusiast. But I haven’t even begun to show you what makes me really enthusiastic about space industry. None of the things I have mentioned so far is the Big Idea behind it.
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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@DrPhiltill
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It is about time any space exploration was continued; we had the capability in the 50’s to undertake long passage. Privatizing means business ventures like mining. Here is a website of material by the designer of the Enzmann starship, Dr. Robert Duncan-Enzmann: http://enzmannstarship.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the link, Michelle. I’ll check it out. I spoke at the 100 Year Starship conference on how we should include use of our own solar system in the plans for building starships. (“On the way to other stars, don’t skip over the solar system.”) We can make starships much more affordable, and therefore build lots more of them and send missions to many more stars if we start mining in our own solar system first and build the starship hardware in space rather than launching everything. We need space mining and industry after we get to another star if we want to survive there, so we have to develop the technologies and skills to do it, anyway. So let’s focus on that and make use of it in the process of building the starships. After discussions at the 100 Year Starship conference I realized that this needed to be quantitatively modeled to really convince people, so I got to work on that with some colleagues and our paper finally came out in print this past month, here: http://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/%28ASCE%29AS.1943-5525.0000236 . In that paper I mentioned (in the final two sentences and in the conclusion) that this kind of self-sustaining industry would make it possible for us to build starships and travel to other stars. I used to be pessimistic about the chances of actually traveling beyond our solar system because of the travel time and the energy and cost required to do such a mission, but when you consider how dynamic our civilization would be after we leverage a billion times greater energy and resources, then sending out lots of starships, including even multi-generation world ships or beamed propulsion ships (with giant energy beaming stations located on the Moon) or ships launched at extremely high velocity with a giant chain of magnetic loops — well, none of that is science fiction any more. It really is do-able. So I’m no longer pessimistic about traveling to other stars. We definitely can do it, and it won’t be that far off in the future.
I see the simple reason of extraterrestrial life-forms in movies just being two or three times smarter than us in keeping the dramaturgy round and acceptable.
Otherwise the script would be implausible for the viewers on the one hand, on the other how would you make it comprehensible that an Alien is so much more intelligent? We are not bright enough to understand way higher intelligence, are we?
My assumption is that the strong will to survive and evolve, programmed into life as we know it, will make us going the next steps sooner or later. The risk about it is that we might be too late with going them.
But man is also a life-form that thinks on an economical level, which has been the reason for so many steps forward already. Luckily this kind of motivation seems to direct our views strongly towards space right now.
…interstellar travel constant acceleration (Sun-Deneb: 1000g)… Earth…the 2 ships that will go formation flying for mutual assistance if there are problems…indestructible structures made of Hexapentas materials, awaiting in airport the arrival of passengers… Day 1: zero-speed… THE SHIPS TAKEOFF►… navigation computer places on screen the ship in the center of sphere…spherical\tridimensional\spatial Heading: Deneb… Antimatter rocket engines…ON… Here we go…goooooo!…1g…10g…100g…constant acceleration cruise: 1000g (9.8 kms/sec²)… Inside of living areas (the same as going submerged in water: constant acceleration downwards…less…constant thrust, constant acceleration, from water upwards)…the gravitational transformers, perfectly synchronized with acceleration, running: 1000g constant acceleration toward the floor ↓↓(motors)↓↓…less…999g constant acceleration toward the ceiling ↑↑(gravitational transformers)↑ = 1g constant acceleration toward the floor↓… 8.5 hours: light-speed = 1c…the fusion reactor as an artificial sun illuminating the immense Vital Support Gardens to lowering, from their comfortable appartments, cheerful passage to the pool…the electromagnetic shield anti-radiation…antigravity fieds generator run forwards, working: light objects away from the path of the ship, and trajectory ship away from the heavy objects…superluminal-speed > 1c… 42.5 hours: reaches hyperluminal-speed = 5c… Day 508: Half Journey…1000 light years…high hyperluminal-speed = 1435.39c… OFF engines…a few minutes of weightlessness during maneuver…the ship rotates 180º around its axis…motors ON again and… ◄starts to brake… Day 1017 (2.79 years): End Path party…2000 light years…zero-speed… The forever young passage of the 1st Immortal Generation (3D Bioprinting…Telomerase…modified Biological Timers…) disembarks at destination: an extra-stellar planet came errant to orbit of Deneb giant.
…space-elevator (orbital station centrifugal 1g)▓▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬←▬▬▬▒▬▬▬Faraway high beyond Earth surface at 183,754 kms…fast orbital speed 49,913 kms/hour…there it is the counterwheight great Terminal Orbital Station-1g centrifugal force… Awaits passengers in subterranean Earth Station a hyper-speed vertical electric train of Magnetic Levitation… “Spatial train that coming from Orbital Station-1g and Orbital Station-0g entering at the moment, will depart again after 1 hour”…medium-speed = 5,000 kms/hour: Earth/Orbital Station 0g…distance = 35,795 kms…total travel time = 7 hours… Orbital Station-0g/Orbital Station-1g…distance = 147,959 kms…total travel time = 29.6 hours… Well seized from retractable cogwheels, with slow-speed at the beginning travel of strong gravitation from Earth (or strong centrifugal force from Orbital Station-1g), with conventional zipper track… THE TRAIN DEPARTS►… already enough far, with little gravitational Earth attraction: Cogwheels off…MAGLEV on… Here we go…goooooo!…hyper-speed→…passengers stayed in comfortable private compartments…←already braking enough near from each Station…slow-speed, changes propulsion system again: Maglev off…COGWHEELS on… 7 hours: Train is vertical at zero-speed, the passengers disembark at destination: Geo 0g-Station… Tour continuing again… THE TRAIN DEPARTS►… already entering at dominant G centrifugal field…within of train, living compartments rotates 180º…already enough near from Terminal…slowly by zipper track train´s cogwheels are braking strongly “downhill”… 29.6 hours: Train is vertical on Terminal at zero-speed, near from Vital Support Gardens, in spectacular and covered by transparent graphene´s domes with Earth views always in the ceiling, the passengers disembark at destination: counterwheight centrifuge 1g-Station… “Be careful and not fall down outside from Station, because then…goodbye”… “Remenber that still from here, only can return to Earth on Train, due to high orbital Station´s speed which is higher than escape Earth´s speed”…
the “pop” cluture as the “scientist” culture such as you never must insult free way and without motivation. That class of insult only can comes from a crazy as you that put offensives phrases cutting names in your blog “scientist”
Take the time to visit the me http://whistory.org , and say that the change in design and meniu?
3D Bioprinting…will arrive in time for us the Fantastic Voyage towards the Immortal Future?…