Green expansion of the human race?

It is commonly stated that if all the 7 billion people on our planet lived at the same standard of living as the average citizen in the USA or Europe, the environment would have to be plundered and polluted so much that the whole ecosystem would collapse to the point where humanity could not survive.

As a long time environmentalist I agree. This is a pity because the desire to create and expand is built into the human psyche.

But there is a way that humankind could expand in number, widen its horizons, satisfy its thirst for adventure and raise its standard of living while preserving the environment, even returning it to a pristine state free of global warming and with biodiversity increased.

How? Improved agriculture, recycling, repairing and updating products rather than scrapping them, eliminating planned obsolence, seeking a higher quality of life rather than raising consumption levels as well as improving efficiency of production, transport and energy generation, and voluntarily slowing down the rate of population growth (thanks to Ken for reminding me), would be part of the answer. Yet consumption per capita is still likely to grow enormously even with these measures fully in place, although physically there is quite enough land area to accommodate us all, with some 20,000 square metres of land per person. 

The real solution, I maintain, lies in the rest of the universe.

Once we have found a cheap way of getting into orbit and have constructed space elevators (now close to becoming practicable) we can mine lifeless asteroids, comets, moons and planets for minerals instead of digging large quarries and mines into the Earth’s crust. Solar power can be harnessed in orbit and beamed down to supply pollution free and abundant energy to supplement wave, tidal and wind power. Alternatively, our energy could be obtained by clean nuclear fusion (as opposed to fission, which is the current form of nuclear power), using helium-3 mined on the moon.

Obnoxious waste could be packaged and sent crashing into the sun. The sun is a thousand times the volume of the earth and is fiercely hot: all the waste ever produced by mankind would be vaporised in a fraction of a second.

Protein-rich food could be grown in orbital farms and so reduce the pressure to use land and sea at the expense of biodiversity.

Those of us with a desire to explore have a whole universe waiting for them – there is no need to claustrophobically confine them to the Earth. Who knows what may be discovered as men venture onto the surfaces of Mars, the moon and the satellites of the outer planets? Some may even wish to  live there in colonies  but in all likelhood explorers would wish to come back to this planet, a heavenly haven compared to anywhere else known to us.

In the very far future it may be possible to terraform entire planets, convertng them into earth-like worlds. Meanwhile, it seems to me that humankind has the ingenuity and will to open up the universe while making the Earth a Garden of Eden for as many as choose to live here.

John

Author, 2077 AD

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

More things in heaven and earth...

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in thy philosophy

This is a quotation from  Hamlet.  Shakespeare had no idea how right he was.

All the things around us are made of atoms; yet each atom is 99.99999999999999% empty space (12 nines after the decimal point)  permeated by force fields. Even if everything we experienced was solid to the touch and there were no liquids or gases, only 0.000000000001 % of it would be genuinely solid matter. In fact if one took into account that much of our visible environment is water or air or the vacuum between planets, stars and galaxies, the per centage of solid matter would be even less.

The same applies to us.  We humans, too, are ghostly configurations of force fields in empty space punctuated by barely detectable points of matter  such as electrons and quarks. Yet our consciousness conveys to us the experience of living in a seemingly material world, filled with solid objects which jolt us if we knock into them.

Today, 95% of the material universe we observe takes the form of dark energy and dark matter and is outside the realm of current science. Even the 5% we have some theoretical hold on is incompletely understood or even wholly misunderstood – - life, evolution, subatomic particles and consciousness, for example. It is often ‘explained’ in terms of randomness. Radioactive particles are emitted from atoms at random. Evolution proceeds by selection pressure plus random mutations according to neo-Darwinism. 

But as mentioned in a previous posting, it is quite possible that meaningful realities are behind random events (e.g. random quantum events may be clues to some hidden deeper reality, just as the random digits forming pi correspond to the geometry of a circle).

We build increasingly powerful technology for probing the natural world. Yet every question we answer generates more questions, and the revealed knowledge allows even more powerful technology to be invented, resulting in yet more discoveries and so on ad infinitum.

Our centre of consciousness and creativity  exists in a ghostly mileu of particles and force fields. We are ghosts in ghosts searching for truth, love, wisdom, justice and some kind of fulfilment. Are these more real than the world we see, hear, touch, taste and smell?  We are confronted with choices between good and evil and, deep down, we know we have been given free will in some mysterious way.

The ancients were perplexed, inspired, awestruck and terrified by the world around them, by the creation of life from somewhere and its disappearance into somewhere.

So what has changed? Today we have science  to dissect the material world and see how it works as well as medicine to heal diseases of mind and body. Yet science has not tamed the universe. The more it discovers the more mind stretching, unpredictable and miraculous the natural world becomes, while free will, good and evil, justice, love, truth, beauty and immortality continue to be supremely important to every person on the planet, especially philosophers, artists, priests and mystics.

  

That’s how I see it . Feedback welcome!

John

Author, 2077AD

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

Skylon spaceplane: what is NASA waiting for?

When NASA landed men on the moon it was an exciting moment in man’s history, one that many thought would never happen and since then the deniers have convinced themselves that it did not in fact happen – it was all a conspiracy to deceive us, all six Apollo landings, each one fully reported by the western and Soviet media, all the samples of moon rock distributed to labs throughout the world, all the interviews with the astronauts and the books written by them.

The Apollo programme was superseded by the International Space Station and Space Shuttle missions.  NASA is now retiring its Space Shuttle in search of a cheaper way of launching crews into orbit.

Once they can launch payloads at a much lower cost it will be possible to build larger structures in orbit, such as interplanetary ships able ot carry manned expeditions to Mars. This type of craft can’t be built on the Earth’s surface because it would have to undergo the rigours of take off and reentry, and be too heavy to transport into orbit against the Earth’s gravity.

The main barrier to reducing payload costs (dollars per pound lifted into orbit) is the large amount of fuel needed during take off. This fuel has to be carried and this is self-defeating because the more fuel carried the greater the load and the larger the energy needed to lift it against the Earth’s gravity.

 Several companies have been bidding for contracts with NASA to provide a cheaper freight service to orbit. SpaceX, for instance, has won a contract to replace the Space Shuttle with a Falccon 9 launcher and Dragon spacecraft.  Yet one system , it seems to me, stands out above all other competitors: the Skylon Spaceplane. It is being developed by Reaction Engines, a small company near Oxford in the UK, and unfortunately, for reasons beyond me, does not seem to be involved in the bidding and I rarely hear it mentioned in the media.

Initially it would be a cheap way of launching satellites but could be scaled up to take people into orbit and back, as well as transport people between runways anywhere on the planet in less than 4 hours. The Skylon would take-off and land on a runway. It is based on an exclusive propulsion technology called SABRE (Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine). This allows the Skylon to get into orbit with far less liquid oxygen on board. It extracts the oxygen it needs from the atmosphere and mixes it with an on-board supply of liquid hydrogen to generate the explosive energy needed for thrust. A small amount of liquid oxygen would have to be carried for use above 15 miles high, since the air is too thin beyond that height.

It recently passed a thorough technical review by the UK Space Agency. All that  is needed now is investment money. If NASA or large private corporations in the USA were to adopt this in a big way, contracting much of the work to the UK’s space industry (already big and expanding fast) the prospect for manned journeys to Mars, asteroid mining and many other enterpises would be transformed. It would also provide jobs for the western world and an impetus for technological evolution.

If humanity is to continue growing and developing without destroying our planet or destroying itself by internecine conflict over resources, it needs to expand  into the rest of the universe. 

Update on 10 June 2012.
I have just learned that the SABRE air-breathing hydrogen-burning engine (see pre-cooler below) is being tested around now and if the tests go well it will be demonstrated and publicised at the Farnborough air show in the UK.

 Even if they don't go well the technology is already on its way to being fully proven. How long before big money and a sense of urgency are forthcoming?

  See Skylon: a gift to a venture capitalist?

added in August 2012

John

Author, 2077 AD

cosmik.jo@gmail.com