The Future of Humanity, Page 3

  THE NEW GOLDEN AGE OF SPACE EXPLORATION

  All these exciting discoveries of exoplanets, along with the novel ideas brought about by a fresh new generation of visionaries, are rekindling the public’s interest in space travel. Originally, what drove the space program was the Cold War and superpower rivalry. The public did not mind spending a staggering 5.5 percent of the nation’s federal budget on the Apollo space program because our national prestige was at stake. However, this feverish competition could not be sustained forever, and the funding eventually collapsed.

  U.S. astronauts last walked on the surface of the moon about forty-five years ago. Now, the Saturn V rocket and the space shuttle are dismantled and rusting in pieces in museums and junkyards, their stories languishing in dusty history books. In the years that followed, NASA was criticized as the “agency to nowhere.” It has been spinning its wheels for decades, boldly going where everyone has gone before.

  But the economic situation has begun to change. The price of space travel, once so high it could cripple a nation’s budget, has been dropping steadily, in large part because of the influx of energy, money, and enthusiasm from a rising cohort of entrepreneurs. Impatient with NASA’s sometimes glacial pace, billionaires like Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos have been opening up their checkbooks to build new rockets. Not only do they want to turn a profit, they also want to fulfill their childhood dreams of going to the stars.

  Now there is a rejuvenated national will. The question is no longer whether the U.S. will send astronauts to the Red Planet, but when. Former president Barack Obama stated that astronauts would walk on the surface of Mars sometime after 2030, and President Donald Trump has asked NASA to accelerate that timetable.

  A fleet of rockets and space modules capable of an interplanetary journey—like NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) booster rocket with the Orion capsule and Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy booster rocket with the Dragon capsule—are in the early testing phase. They will do the heavy lifting, taking our astronauts to the moon, asteroids, Mars, and even beyond. In fact, so much publicity and enthusiasm have been generated by this mission that there is rivalry building up around it. Perhaps there will be a traffic jam over Mars as different groups compete to plant the first flag on Martian soil.

  Some have written that we are entering a new golden age of space travel, when exploring the universe will once again become an exciting part of the national agenda after decades of neglect.

  As we look to the future, we can see the outlines of how science will transform space exploration. Because of revolutionary advances in a wide range of modern technologies, we can now speculate how our civilization may one day move into outer space, terraforming planets and traveling among the stars. Although this is a long-term goal, it is now possible to give a reasonable time frame and estimate when certain cosmic milestones will be met.

  In this book, I will investigate the steps necessary to accomplish this ambitious goal. But the key to discovering how our future may unfold is to understand the science behind all of these miraculous developments.

  REVOLUTIONARY WAVES OF TECHNOLOGY

  Given the vast frontiers of science that lie before us, it may help to put the broad panorama of human history into perspective. If our ancestors could see us today, what would they think? For most of human history, we lived wretched lives, struggling in a hostile, uncaring world where life expectancy was between twenty and thirty years of age. We were mostly nomads, carrying all our possessions on our backs. Every day was a struggle to secure food and shelter. We lived in constant fear of vicious predators, disease, and hunger. But if our ancestors could see us today, with our ability to send images instantly across the planet, with rockets that can take us to the moon and beyond, and with cars that can drive themselves, they would consider us to be sorcerers and magicians.

  History reveals that scientific revolutions come in waves, often stimulated by advances in physics. In the nineteenth century, the first wave of science and technology was made possible by physicists who created the theory of mechanics and thermodynamics. This enabled engineers to produce the steam engine, leading to the locomotive and the industrial revolution. This profound shift in technology lifted civilization from the curse of ignorance, backbreaking labor, and poverty and took us into the machine age.

  In the twentieth century, the second wave was spearheaded by physicists who mastered the laws of electricity and magnetism, which in turn ushered in the electric age. This made possible the electrification of our cities with the advent of dynamos, generators, TV, radio, and radar. The second wave gave birth to the modern space program, which took us to the moon.

  In the twenty-first century, the third wave of science has been expressed in high tech, spearheaded by the quantum physicists who invented the transistor and the laser. This made possible the supercomputer, the internet, modern telecommunications, GPS, and the explosion of the tiny chips that have permeated every aspect of our lives.

  In this book, I will describe the technologies that will take us even farther as we explore the planets and the stars. In part 1, we will discuss the effort to create a permanent moon base and to colonize and terraform Mars. To do this, we will have to exploit the fourth wave of science, which consists of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology. The goal of terraforming Mars exceeds our capability today, but the technologies of the twenty-second century will allow us to turn this bleak, frozen desert into a habitable world. We will consider the use of self-replicating robots, superstrong, lightweight nanomaterials, and bioengineered crops to drastically cut costs and make Mars into a veritable paradise. Eventually, we will progress beyond Mars and develop settlements on the asteroids and the moons of the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn.

  In part 2, we will look ahead to a time when we will be able to move beyond the solar system and explore the nearby stars. Again, this mission surpasses our current technology, but fifth wave technologies will make it possible: nanoships, laser sails, ramjet fusion machines, antimatter engines. Already, NASA has funded studies on the physics necessary to make interstellar travel a reality.

  In part 3, we analyze what it would require to modify our bodies to enable us to find a new home among the stars. An interstellar journey may take decades or even centuries, so we may have to genetically engineer ourselves to survive for prolonged periods in deep space, perhaps by extending the human life span. Although a fountain of youth is not possible today, scientists are exploring promising avenues that may allow us to slow and perhaps stop the aging process. Our descendants may enjoy some form of immortality. Furthermore, we may have to genetically engineer our bodies to flourish on distant planets with different gravity, atmospheric composition, and ecology.

  Thanks to the Human Connectome Project, which will map every neuron in the human brain, one day we may be able to send our connectomes into outer space on giant laser beams, eliminating a number of problems in interstellar travel. I call this laser porting, and it may free our consciousness to explore the galaxy or even the universe at the speed of light, so we don’t have to worry about the obvious dangers of interstellar travel.

  If our ancestors in the last century would think of us today as magicians and sorcerers, then how might we view our descendants a century from now?

  More than likely, we would consider our descendants to be like Greek gods. Like Mercury, they would be able to soar into space to visit nearby planets. Like Venus, they would have perfect immortal bodies. Like Apollo, they would have unlimited access to the sun’s energy. Like Zeus, they would be able to issue mental commands and have their wishes come true. And they would be able to conjure up mythical animals like Pegasus using genetic engineering.

  In other words, our destiny is to become the gods that we once feared and worshipped. Science will give us the means by which we can shape the universe in our image. The question is whether we will have the wisdom of Solomon to accompany this vast celestial power.

  There is also
the possibility that we will make contact with extraterrestrial life. We will discuss what might happen were we to encounter a civilization that’s a million years more advanced than ours, that has the capability to roam across the galaxy and alter the fabric of space and time. They might be able to play with black holes and use wormholes for faster-than-light travel.

  In 2016, speculation about advanced civilizations in space reached a fever pitch among astronomers and the media, with the announcement that astronomers had found evidence of some sort of colossal “megastructure,” perhaps as big as a Dyson sphere, orbiting around a distant star many light-years away. While the evidence is far from conclusive, for the first time, scientists were confronted with evidence that an advanced civilization may actually exist in outer space.

  Lastly, we explore the possibility that we will face not just the death of the Earth but the death of the universe itself. Although our universe is still young, we can foresee the day in the distant future when we might approach the Big Freeze as temperatures plunge to near absolute zero and all life as we know it will likely cease to exist. At that point, our technology might be advanced enough to leave the universe and venture through hyperspace to a new, younger universe.

  Theoretical physics (my own specialization) opens up the notion that our universe could be just a single bubble floating in a multiverse of other bubble universes. Perhaps among the other universes in the multiverse, there is a new home for us. Gazing upon the multitude of universes, perhaps we will be able to reveal the grand designs of a Star Maker.

  So the fantastic feats of science fiction, once considered the byproduct of the overheated imagination of dreamers, may one day become reality.

  Humanity is about to embark on perhaps its greatest adventure. And the gap that separates the speculations of Asimov and Stapledon from reality may be bridged by the astonishing and rapid advancements being made in science. And the first step we take in our long journey to the stars begins when we leave the Earth. As the old Chinese proverb says, the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. The journey to the stars begins with the very first rocket.

  PART I LEAVING THE EARTH

  Anyone who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen fueled system in the world, knowing they’re going to light the bottom, and doesn’t get a little worried, does not fully understand the situation.

  —ASTRONAUT JOHN YOUNG

  1 PREPARING FOR LIFTOFF

  On October 19, 1899, a seventeen-year-old boy climbed a cherry tree and had an epiphany. He had just read H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and was excited by the idea that rockets could allow us to explore the universe. He imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device that had even the possibility of traveling to Mars and had a vision that it was our destiny to explore the Red Planet. By the time he came down from that tree, his life had been forever changed. That boy would dedicate his life to the dream of perfecting a rocket that would make this vision a reality. He would celebrate October 19 for the rest of his life.

  His name was Robert Goddard, and he went on to perfect the first liquid fueled multistage rocket, setting into motion events that changed the course of human history.

  TSIOLKOVSKY—A LONELY VISIONARY

  Goddard was one of a handful of pioneers who, despite isolation, poverty, and ridicule from their peers, forged ahead against all odds and laid the foundation for space travel. One of the first of these visionaries was the great Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who mapped out the theoretical basis for space travel and paved the way for Goddard. Tsiolkovsky lived in total poverty, was a recluse, and scraped by as a schoolteacher. As a youth, he spent most of his time in the library, devouring science journals, learning Newton’s laws of motion, and applying them to space travel. His dream was to travel to the moon and Mars. On his own, without the help of the scientific community, he figured out the mathematics, physics, and mechanics of rockets, and he calculated the escape velocity of the Earth—that is, the speed necessary to escape the gravity of the Earth—to be twenty-five thousand miles per hour, which is far greater than the fifteen miles per hour one could attain with horses in his time.

  In 1903, he published his famous rocket equation, which allows one to determine the maximum velocity of a rocket, given its weight and fuel supply. The equation revealed that the relationship between speed and fuel is exponential. Normally, one might assume that if you want to double the velocity of a rocket, you simply need to double the amount of fuel. Instead, the amount of fuel you need rises exponentially with the change in velocity, so that enormous amounts of fuel are needed to give an extra boost in speed.

  This exponential relationship made it clear that you would need huge amounts of fuel to leave the Earth. With his formula, Tsiolkovsky was for the first time able to estimate how much fuel was necessary to go to the moon, long before his vision became reality.

  Tsiolkovsky’s guiding philosophy was, “The Earth is our cradle, but we cannot be in the cradle forever,” and he believed in a philosophy called cosmism, which holds that the future of humanity is to explore outer space. In 1911, he wrote, “To place one’s feet on the soil of asteroids, to lift a stone from the moon with your hand, to construct moving stations in ether space, to organize inhabited rings around the Earth, Moon and Sun, to observe Mars at the distance of several tens of miles, to descend to its satellites or even to its own surface—what could be more insane!”

  Although Tsiolkovsky was too poor to convert his mathematical equations into actual models, the next step was taken by Robert Goddard, who actually built the prototypes that would one day form the basis of space travel.

  ROBERT GODDARD—FATHER OF ROCKETRY

  Robert Goddard first became interested in science as a child witnessing the electrification of his hometown. He came to believe that science would revolutionize every aspect of our lives. His father encouraged this interest, buying him a telescope, microscope, and a subscription to Scientific American. First he began experimenting with kites and balloons. While reading in the library one day, he stumbled across Isaac Newton’s celebrated Principia Mathematica and learned the laws of motion. His focus soon became the application of Newton’s laws to rocketry.

  Goddard systematically turned this curiosity into a usable scientific tool by introducing three innovations. First, Goddard experimented with different types of fuels and realized that powdered fuel is inefficient. The Chinese had invented gunpowder centuries earlier and used it for rockets, but gunpowder burns unevenly and hence rockets remained mainly toys. His first stroke of brilliance was to replace powdered fuel with liquid fuel, which could be precisely controlled so that it burned cleanly and steadily. He built a rocket with two tanks, one containing a fuel, such as alcohol, and the other tank containing an oxidizer, such as liquid oxygen. These liquids were fed by a series of pipes and valves into the firing chamber, creating a carefully controlled explosion that could propel a rocket.

  Goddard realized that as the rocket rose into the sky, its fuel tanks were gradually depleted. His next innovation was to introduce multistage rockets that discarded spent fuel tanks and therefore could shed some dead weight along the way, vastly increasing their range and efficiency.

  And third, he introduced gyroscopes. Once a gyroscope is sent spinning, its axis always points in the same direction, even if you rotate it. For example, if the axis points toward the North Star, it will continue to point in that direction if you turn it upside down. This means that a spaceship, if it were to wander in its trajectory, can alter its rockets to compensate for this motion and return to its original course. Goddard realized he could use gyroscopes to help keep his rockets on target.

  In 1926, he made history with the first successful launch of a liquid fueled rocket. It rose 41 feet into the air, flew for 2.5 seconds, and landed 184 feet away in a cabbage patch. (The exact site is now hallowed ground to every rocket scientist, and it has been declared a National Historic Landmark.)

  In his lab
oratory at Clark College he established the basic architecture for all chemical rockets. The thundering behemoths we see blasting off from launchpads today are direct descendants of the prototypes he built.

  FACING RIDICULE

  Despite his successes, Goddard proved to be an ideal whipping boy for the media. When word leaked out in 1920 that he was giving serious thought to space travel, the New York Times published scathing criticism that would have crushed any lesser scientist. “That Professor Goddard,” the Times snickered, “with his ‘chair’ in Clark College…does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high school.” And in 1929, after he launched one of his rockets, the local Worcester newspaper ran a degrading headline: “Moon Rocket Misses Target by 238,799 1/2 Miles.” Clearly the Times and others did not understand Newton’s laws of motion and incorrectly believed that rockets could not move in the vacuum of outer space.

  Newton’s third law, which states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, governs space travel. This law is known to any child who has ever blown up a balloon, released it, and watched the balloon fly in all directions. The action is the air that suddenly rushes out of the balloon, and the reaction is the forward motion of the balloon itself. Similarly, in a rocket, the action is the hot gas ejected out of one end, while the reaction is the forward motion of the rocket that propels it, even in the vacuum of space.

  Goddard died in 1945 and did not live long enough to see the apology written by the editors of the New York Times after the Apollo moon landing in 1969. They wrote, “It is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”