Lifeboat Foundation

All organisms are at least a little “alternamorphic”: their form depends on the environment they grew in. A plant may be bigger under optimal conditions, smaller or even stunted under poor ones. A single cell may be bigger after a meal. A human may be darker or lighter depending on degree of sun exposure. Perhaps more interestingly, some kinds of grasshoppers, when crowded, change strikingly in appearance, becoming…locusts which gather in huge, hungry, migrating clowds, leaving devastated farmland in their paths. These are the locusts swarms of biblical fame.

If properly endowed by natural evolution or genetic engineering, plants could turn the concept of alternamorphism to their advantage in many interesting ways. For example, consider the humble corn (zea mays) plant. It is a staple of the world food supply but is not particularly easy to grow successfully in one’s garden, as many an inexperienced gardener can attest. Now imagine a new kind of corn plant that, after bearing its ear of corn, alternamorphically either dies or sinks a taproot that lasts the winter and then, in its second spring, sends up a new shoot that grows more slowly than before, but more sturdily. That grows, in fact, without producing any ear of corn that year but rather is built to last the following winter, so that it can build on that growth with further development in its third spring – eventually turning into a large corn tree that produces dozens of ears every year, and with far less work than farming an equivalently productive corn patch.

But what would determine which alternative the corn plant chooses, dying off as happens now, or beginning the process of turning into a corn tree? A reasonable genetic code for this would be to opt for the tree strategy if the ear is destroyed early in its development or fails to develop properly for whatever reason. In that case it makes sense for the corn plant to devote its energy to something else, such as trying to grow into a tree. Indeed, any excess of vitality would be a good reason to pursue the tree strategy, even if the initial ear is growing well. Perhaps the corn plant is simply experiencing highly favorable growth conditions and has the werewithal to both produce an ear, and grow the required large taproot. Similarly, any annual crop or other plant could potentially alternamorphically become a tree. Farmers and gardeners would be delighted. On the other hand, hundred foot ragweed trees would be bad news for many an allergy sufferer. Alternamorphic trees are just a start. The reader may enjoy dreaming up other kinds of alternamorphisms. In a number of years it may be possible to actually create these in a do-it-yourself basement bio lab.

It is a refreshing fact that the prospects for human survival are substantially higher if we live on two worlds, instead of just Earth. The moon, say, or Mars… every extraterrestrial body poses unique technical challenges to colonization. Yet nearly all are at least potentially habitable – in theory. Our survival prospects climb higher for three worlds, higher still for four. The more worlds we colonize, the more likely a colony on at least one of them will still exist at any given future moment. It’s like flipping quarters: the more you flip, the greater the chance at least one will come up heads.

Last time: More Exotic Colonization Options. This time: Pluto and Eris – the Outer Limits

The outer limits: Pluto and Eris. Pluto just does not get enough respect. Last hired and first fired of the planets, it was discovered on Tuesday, February 18, 1930, in Flagstaff, Arizona by self-made astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. It was forced into retirement by an act of the International Astronomical Union, which revoked its full planetary status on August 24, 2006, after only 76 years on the job. Pluto has been technically renamed “134340 Pluto” and relegated to dwarf planet status, to the continued consternation of Plutophiles everywhere.  To make things worse, it is not even the biggest dwarf planet, or for that matter the most distant. Those honors go to Eris, discovered in 2005 and not that well-respected either (many people have never even heard of it). As targets for colonization these bodies have problems, though nothing like those associated with the gas giant planets or even Venus. The main problems are getting there in reasonable time, and obtaining enough light energy to warm the colony (which is sealed to keep the air in), to grow food, and to generate electricity such as with solar cells.

A one-way trip to Pluto is feasible in about 9 years. The New Horizons spacecraft launch of January 19, 2006, destination Pluto, was designed with a planned travel time of 9 years and 176 days. Eris is less than four times as far away as Pluto. Sometimes it can actually be closer to the sun than Pluto, though this won’t happen next for about 800 years.

Prospective colonists will have severe energy challenges once they manage to actually get there. Pluto’s distance from the sun ranges from 29.7 times Earth’s average distance, up to 49.3 times Earth, depending on where it is in it’s rather uncircular orbit. For Eris, the range is from 37.8 to 97.6 times Earth. Unfortunately the brightness of the sun is related to the square of the distance, not the distance itself, so the sun on Pluto is actually between 880 and 2,431 times weaker than on Earth (i.e., 29.7×29.7 to 49.3×49.3).

With the sun so weak, sunburn would be the least of your worries. In essence, you’d need 2,431 computer-controlled mirrors all reflecting the sun to the same spot, to be sure to get up to at least Earth’s sunlight intensity at that spot. Then, if that spot was inside an transparent, airtight bubble, you could grow crops there, right at that spot. If you wanted to grow 1 acre of crops, on the order of what’s needed to support a person, you’d need up to 2,431 acres of computer-controlled mirrors. During favorable periods you’d need less, as “few” as 880 acres, but you do have to eat during the unfavorable times too. For Eris, the sunlight is as low as 9,518 times weaker than Earth (implying 9,518 mirrors for Earth-style light intensity). Though this sounds dim, it is actually about 35 times brighter than the full moon, so you could see well enough to get around without artificial light or mirrors. Still, mirror manufacturing definitely needs to get more cost-effective before colonization becomes feasible, unless some other energy source can be found besides the distant sun. Once the energy problem is solved – well, bon voyage!

What we can do now

Tracking the advance of space technology. It would be good to understand how quickly space-faring technology is advancing. Research on elaborating, testing, standardizing and using such technology tracking methodologies should be supported by academic research, incentivized by government research funding. That way we would know better what to get ready for in terms of a time frame for future space colonization. The leading approach could be expanded upon. It is termed “Technology Readiness Levels,” or TRLs, and is used in the US by the National Astronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) as well as other organizations worldwide. TRLs classify relevant technologies on a spectrum, such as from speculative on to mature. “Speculative” describes, for example, proposals for faster-than-light travel via cosmic wormholes. “Mature,” on the other hand, could be applied to space systems that reach operational status, like the US space shuttles of the early 21st century.

From sunbathing to moonbathing to starbathing. Closer to home, it is useful to keep in mind that moonlight is hundreds of thousands of times dimmer than sunlight. This means that, though sunbathing is hazardous even with sunscreen (as we will see later), moonbathing is perfectly harmless, and perhaps even fun. Feel free to go right ahead. But don’t expect to get a moontan as the light is simply too muted and pale, even compared to sunshine on Pluto or Eris. So that’s the situation with moonlight…but what about starlight?

The brightest star in the heavens is Sirius, with an apparent magnitude of -1.47. This is quite a bit dimmer even than the full moon, whose apparent magnitude is about -12.9. The lower the apparent magnitude, the brighter the object. The sun, for example, has an apparent magnitude of -26.7. We can explore this issue further, in case you run into someone inclined to concentrate starlight from Sirius to sunlight-equivalent intensity for the exotic purpose of tanning by starbathing. A difference in apparent magnitude of 5 is defined as a 100-fold change in brightness. The difference in apparent magnitude between the sun and Sirius is a little over 25. At a factor of 100 change in brightness for every 5 levels of magnitude, 25 levels means a hundred-fold brightness change compounded 5 times, for a total change in brightness of 100×100x100×100x100, or 10 billion. In other words, starlight from Sirius would need to be concentrated more than 10 billion times to reach the intensity of sunlight. At roughly 4 billion square inches in a square mile, that means about 3 square miles of starlight from Sirius focused onto a single square inch. Since starbathing requires more than a square inch of light, that pretty much means an entire metropolitan area or its equivalent devoted to focusing Sirian starlight onto your beach towel. Other stars are dimmer and would require even more area.

From starbathing back to sunbathing. However impractical, starbathing at sunlight-equivalent intensity is possible in principle! However, it would be unhealthy, and for the same reason that sunbathing is unhealthy. Sirius is much hotter than the sun so its light is more skewed toward the ultraviolet. Thus protecting the skin from UV (ultraviolet) exposure from super-concentrated starlight would be very important. Sunscreens are typically rated in terms of ability to filter out B (medium wave) type UV (abbreviated UVB), which causes sunburn. They tend to let through A (long wave) type UV. This UVA does not cause sunburn, but does damage the skin, causing the most dangerous kind of skin cancer, malignant melanoma. This is consistent with the lack of evidence that ordinary sunscreen use protects against this often-deadly cancer. Even ordinary window glass does not screen out UVA reliably. In short, star-tanning, like suntanning, should be avoided. On the other hand, appropriate sun exposure is needed to create vitamin D in the skin. And ordinary starlight is so attenuated that starbathing at night under unconcentrated starlight is perfectly fine if you feel like doing it, just like moonbathing. Enjoy!

Communing with your inner colonist. Take up vegetable gardening, just like space colonists likely will! Food production in extraterrestrial colonies might involve hydroponic tanks or chemical factories producing soylents of various colors for food. But production may also involve growing plants, just like on Earth. Off-Earth farming will resemble vegetable gardening more than commercial agriculture. Instead of acre after acre of a single crop, colonists will grow many different kinds of plants in modest quantities inside the colony’s bubble. That will give the colonies more diverse and thus robust ecosystems. It will also make for a more varied diet for the colonists, which is healthier as well as better-tasting. So, while growing your own vegetable garden, you can work knowing that you are doing what the space colonists of the future will likely do. Your gardening experiences here on Earth, both good and bad, will mirror to a significant degree those of future space colonists and deepen your understanding of space colony life.

Ever have a day when everything went wrong? You predicted you would have a normal day, but your alarm clock didn’t ring. Already running late, you couldn’t find your briefcase or backpack. Staggering out the door, your car won’t start. Later, you find out you missed a surprise meeting or maybe a quiz. It’s not you, it’s the whole prediction game…

#1 – Observer effect; #2 – Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle; #3 – Quantum tunneling; #4 – Butterfly effect (last time); #5 – External perturbations;#6 – Why care I…Existential unmeaning, or why predict if it doesn’t matter? (last time); #7 -Why care II…The “so what?” horizon (this time).

This post is the last in the series “Chasing the Future.” Next time will begin a new series, “Space Empire.”

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Chasing the Future: spoil sports of the prediction game #7 — Why care II…the “so what?” horizon

How much is the future of the human race worth? We’ll increase it later, but let’s start with an admittedly bargain basement $100. If you had $98.04 now, and put it in the bank at an interest rate of 2% per year, then in a year you’d have $100. That means getting $100 one year from now is only worth having $98.04 now, at least from a “Time Value of Money” perspective. Similarly, getting $100 in 2 years is only worth $96.12 now, because adding 2% to $96.12 gives $98.04 in one year, and compounding by adding another 2% gives $100 a year later. Extending this reasoning further, the human race in a modest 233 years would be worth just under a dollar now. In 466 years? Less than a penny.

It’s safe to say that a hundred dollars is an underestimate for the value of the entire human race, at least to us. So let’s increase it to a fair (or at least fairer) price. We might multiply the number of people by the value of the life of each and every person on the planet. What is the value of a person’s life? Economics (known as the dismal science, even to economists) tells us that the de facto value society places on a human life can actually be calculated, and courts of law in fact sometimes do such calculations. Answers vary, of course, but a few million dollars is often not that far off the mark. Multiply that by the number of people in the world and you get a biggish number, $100 quadrillion at the most for the value of the human race.

But wait – maybe you don’t trust the financial and legal wizards with something so important. After all, we already trust them with some pretty important things, and they periodically betray that, seriously screwing things up. Maybe we should use a higher number, just to be more sure we aren’t under-valuing ourselves.

How about a dollar for every single atom in the known universe? That’s around $10^80 (1 followed by 80 zeroes dollars)? It is a lot of cash. Way (way way) more than the United States has ever printed. There are literally not enough atoms in the known universe to even print that much money. Yet, if that is the value of humanity’s existence 9070 years from now, the value at present would be…$100! A scant 466 years after that? Less than a penny. How about the present value of humanity existing in a million years? The answer is a fraction of a penny so tiny that popular spreadsheets, calculators and computer programming languages can’t even state it. They typically just think it is 0, but if you must know, it’s actually about  $0.000[insert 8,513 more zeroes here]0001.

Wait – someone in the back has a question – yes? “But it’s not just the value in year on million we’re after. We also need to add in the value in year 1,000,001, year 1,000,002, etc., forever and ever. That’s got to add up, eventually.” Well, only a little, it turns out. The value now is “bigger,” but still less than $0.000[insert 8,511 more zeroes here]0001 even at a dollar an atom. The upshot of all this is that there is no good reason to care whether humanity exists in ten thousand or a million years, at least according to the time value of money approach favored by economists. Therefore there is no need to plan that far into the future, or go to trouble and expense to preserve the Earth indefinitely, or even to bother predicting that far ahead. The time value of money seems indeed to be a spoil sport of the prediction game.

Making it personal. Maybe you are still unconvinced. Such sophistry fails to capture the real facts at a gut, common sense level, you might say. Then consider the following argument.

You care about yourself, so you don’t want humanity to end while you are still alive (it might not be pleasant). You care about your children (or you will if you have any some day, or maybe you care about some or even all other children), so you don’t want humanity to end during their lifetimes, even if you are already gone. You probably even care (or will care) about your grandchildren because you will hopefully get to know them personally. Furthermore, you care about their grandchildren (if maybe a little less) simply because you care about your grandchildren, who care about theirs. But you have no gut level reason to care about the generations after that, because neither you, nor anyone you care about will ever know them. To put it another way, how much do you care about your grandparents’ grandparents, and how much did they care about you? Still care in some more abstract, dispassionate sense? Then see the previous paragraph.

Maybe you are a fast enough breeder, and long enough liver, that you’ll care about your great grandchildren and theirs, instead of just grandchildren. Yet that is still only 6 generations into the future, not even the biblical 7, a couple of centuries or so at the most. So relax, quit worrying, eat dessert first…. In particular, don’t bother with predicting past the 2-century “care horizon,” because there’s little point to it. The care (or “so what?”) horizon is, thus, our last spoil sport of the prediction game.

Postscript. Are you still fascinated by the future, despite all the arguments to the contrary? If so, you are like me. Read my next blog post series, “Space Empire: from Mercury to Pluto.”

References

“Time Value of Money”: TVM is standard terminology in the finance and accounting world.

“Well, only a little, it turns out.” There is a formula for calculating the sum of a geometrically decreasing, infinite series. Look it up (or play with a spreadsheet instead).

Paul J. Crutzen

Although this is the scenario we all hope (and work hard) to avoid – the consequences should be of interest to all who are interested in mitigation of the risk of mass extinction:

“WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.

The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest – and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let’s suppose that happens. Humanity’s ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. “A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people,” says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about “saving the planet” we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?

The only way to know is to look back into our planet’s past. Neither abrupt global warming nor mass extinction are unique to the present day. The Earth has been here before. So what can we expect this time?”

Read the entire article in New Scientist.

Also read “Climate change: melting ice will trigger wave of natural disasters” in the Guardian about the potential devastating effects of methane hydrates released from melting permafrost in Siberia and from the ocean floor.

For any assembly or structure, whether an isolated bunker or a self sustaining space colony, to be able to function perpetually, the ability to manufacture any of the parts necessary to maintain, or expand, the structure is an obvious necessity. Conventional metal working techniques, consisting of forming, cutting, casting or welding present extreme difficulties in size and complexity that would be difficult to integrate into a self sustaining structure.

Forming requires heavy high powered machinery to press metals into their final desired shapes. Cutting procedures, such as milling and lathing, also require large, heavy, complex machinery, but also waste tremendous amounts of material as large bulk shapes are cut away emerging the final part. Casting metal parts requires a complex mold construction and preparation procedures, not only does a negative mold of the final part need to be constructed, but the mold needs to be prepared, usually by coating in ceramic slurries, before the molten metal is applied. Unless thousands of parts are required, the molds are a waste of energy, resources, and effort. Joining is a flexible process, and usually achieved by welding or brazing and works by melting metal between two fixed parts in order to join them – but the fixed parts present the same manufacturing problems.

Ideally then, in any self sustaining structure, metal parts should be constructed only in the final desired shape but without the need of a mold and very limited need for cutting or joining. In a salient progressive step toward this necessary goal, NASA demonstrates the innovative Electron Beam Free Forming Fabrication (http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/electron_beam.htm) Process. A rapid metal fabrication process essentially it “prints” a complex three dimensional object by feeding a molten wire through a computer controlled gun, building the part, layer by layer, and adding metal only where you desire it. It requires no molds and little or no tooling, and material properties are similar to other forming techniques. The complexity of the part is limited only by the imagination of the programmer and the dexterity of the wire feed and heating device.

Electron beam freeform fabrication process in action

According to NASA materials research engineer Karen Taminger, who is involved in developing the EBF3 process, extensive simulations and modeling by NASA of long duration space flights found no discernable pattern to the types of parts which failed, but the mass of the failed parts remained remarkably consistent throughout the studies done. This is a favorable finding to in-situe parts manufacturing and because of this the EBF³ team at NASA has been developing a desktop version. Taminger writes:

“Electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF³) is a cross-cutting technology for producing structural metal parts…The promise of this technology extends far beyond its applicability to low-cost manufacturing and aircraft structural designs. EBF³ could provide a way for astronauts to fabricate structural spare parts and new tools aboard the International Space Station or on the surface of the moon or Mars”

NASA’s Langley group working on the EBF3 process took their prototype desktop model for a ride on the microgravity simulating NASA flight and found the process works just fine even in micro gravity, or even against gravity.

A structural metal part fabricated from EBF³

The advantages this system offers are significant. Near net shape parts can be manufactured, significantly reducing scrap parts. Unitized parts can be made – instead of multiple parts that need riveting or bolting, final complex integral structures can be made. An entire spacecraft frame could be ‘printed’ in one sitting. The process also creates minimal waste products and is highly energy and feed stock efficient, critical to self sustaining structures. Metals can be placed only where they are desired and the material and chemistry properties can be tailored through the structure. The technical seminar features a structure with a smooth transitional gradient from one alloy to another. Also, structures can be designed specifically for their intended purposes, without needing to be tailored to manufacturing process, for example, stiffening ridges can be curvilinear, in response to the applied forces, instead of typical grid patterns which facilitate easy conventional manufacturing techniques. Manufactures, such as Sciaky Inc, (http://www.sciaky.com/64.html) are all ready jumping on the process

In combination with similar 3D part ‘printing’ innovations in plastics and other materials, the required complexity for sustaining all the mechanical and structural components of a self sustaining structure is plummeting drastically. Isolated structures could survive on a feed stock of scrap that is perpetually recycled as worn parts are replaced by free form manufacturing and the old ones melted to make new feed stock. Space colonies could combine such manufacturing technologies and scrap feedstock with resource collection creating a viable minimal volume and energy consuming system that could perpetually repair the structure – or even build more. Technologies like these show that the atomic level control that nanotechnology manufacturing proposals offer are not necessary to create self sustaining structure, and that with minor developments of modern technology, self sustaining structures could be built and operated successfully.

May 2: Many U.S. emergency rooms and hospitals crammed with people… ”Walking well” flood hospitals… Clinics double their traffic in major cities … ER rooms turn away EMT cases. — CNN

Update May 4: Confirmed cases of H1N1 virus now at 985 in 20 countries (Mexico: 590, 25 deaths) – WHO. In U.S.: 245 confirmed U.S. cases in 35 states. – CDC.

“We might be entering an Age of Pandemics… a broad array of dangerous emerging 21st-century diseases, man-made or natural, brand-new or old, newly resistant to our current vaccines and antiviral drugs…. Martin Rees bet $1,000 that bioterror or bioerror would unleash a catastrophic event claiming one million lives in the next two decades…. Why? Less forest, more contact with animals… more meat eating (Africans last year consumed nearly 700 million wild animals… numbers of chickens raised for food in China have increased 1,000-fold over the past few decades)… farmers cut down jungle, creating deforested areas that once served as barriers to the zoonotic viruses…” — Larry Brilliant, Wall Street Journal

Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth D. Baum (2009). The Sustainability Solution to the Fermi Paradox. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 62: 47-51.

Background: The Fermi Paradox
According to a simple but powerful inference introduced by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, we should expect to observe numerous extraterrestrial civilizations throughout our galaxy. Given the old age of our galaxy, Fermi postulated that if the evolution of life and subsequent development of intelligence is common, then extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) could have colonized the Milky Way several times over by now. Thus, the paradox is: if ETI should be so widespread, where are they? Many solutions have been proposed to account for our absence of ETI observation. Perhaps the occurrence of life or intelligence is rare in the galaxy. Perhaps ETI inevitably destroy themselves soon after developing advanced technology. Perhaps ETI are keeping Earth as a zoo!

The ‘Sustainability Solution’
The Haqq-Misra & Baum paper presents a definitive statement on a plausible but often overlooked solution to the Fermi paradox, which the authors name the “Sustainability Solution”. The Sustainability Solution states: the absence of ETI observation can be explained by the possibility that exponential or other faster-growth is not a sustainable development pattern for intelligent civilizations. Exponential growth is implicit in Fermi’s claim that ETI could quickly expand through the galaxy, an assumption based on observations of human expansion on Earth. However, as we are now learning all too well, our exponential expansion frequently proves unsustainable as we reach the limits of available resources. Likewise, because all civilizations throughout the universe may have limited resources, it is possible that all civilizations face similar issues of sustainability. In other words, unsustainably growing civilizations may inevitably collapse. This possibility is the essence of the Sustainability Solution.

Implications for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
If the Sustainability Solution is true, then we may never observe a galactic-scale ETI civilization, for such an empire would have grown and collapsed too quickly for us to notice. SETI efforts should therefore focus on ETI that grow within the limits of their carrying capacity and thereby avoid collapse. These slower-growth ETI may possess the technological capacity for both radio broadcasts and remote interstellar exploration. Thus, SETI may be more successful if it is expanded to include a search of our Solar System for small, unmanned ETI satellites.

Implications for Human Civilization Management
Does the Sustainability Solution mean that humanity must live sustainably in order to avoid collapse? Not necessarily. Humanity could collapse even if it lives sustainably—for example, if it collides with a large asteroid. Alternatively, humanity may be able to grow rapidly for much longer—for example, until we have colonized the entire Solar System. Finally, the Sustainability Solution is only one of several possible solutions to the Fermi paradox, so it is not necessarily the case that all civilizations must grow sustainably or else face collapse. However, the possibility of the Sustainability Solution makes it more likely that humanity must live more sustainably if it is to avoid collapse.

“Two steps forward and one step back.” “It is hard to get ahead when all you do is fight fires.” “Urgent stimuli require urgent responses – no time to wonder where the journey ends.” Life can be hard. Or not… “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy”. No dolphin thinking here, Aesop is clear: ants have no fun, but the grasshopper is a party animal.

The common theme of these iconic images is an enduring cultural understanding that short-term thinking has risks. Risks run the gamut from personal to global, with time spans from seconds to the distant future. What else can we say about these risks?

Let’s begin with personal risks of short-term thinking with possible consequences on the seconds time scale. Did you run a yellow light today? Go through a green without checking cross traffic? Turn in front of an oncoming vehicle? (How close, how fast, and with how much general congestion would you do it again? Such turns assume they can be completed without something unanticipated happening ahead to prevent it. That’s predicting the future, and has risk.)

Moving up the time scale, how about hanging out instead of studying an important topic in a college class? Sure, many assignments really are unimportant! And grades alone say little about future success. However for the right topic, an hour of learning is probably statistically worth cash in terms of starting salary and lifetime earnings. Writing, technical skill development (depending on major), and so on are among possibly valuable topics. Similarly, if you smoke, every cigarette shortens life by an average 11 minutes, at least for men. If you don’t smoke, starting risks continuing. Short-term thinking, long-term risks.

As a final example, saving for your retirement years makes sense. But all too often, short-term thinking wins out and money is spent unnecessarily that would have been smarter to put into a retirement account. It is to compensate for this that the US and many other industrialized countries have systems in place to encourage retirement saving, imperfect though they often are.

Moving from individuals to groups, companies are groups within which many people spend much of their waking hours. Companies are notorious for short-term thinking. Most are much more interested in maximizing performance over the next year than they are in maximizing it over the next 10 years – but which actually makes more sense?

The same tendencies are found at the national government level as well. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proclaimed “peace in our time” on Sept. 30, 1938. Yet on Sept. 3, 1939, he declared war on Germany. Similarly, politicians in democratic societies regularly manage their country’s affairs with their eyes glued to the next election. Longer-term national interests are thus de-emphasized, hardly a desirable tendency. Politicians in non-democratic countries are subject to similar forces.

The ultimate result is suboptimal leadership, which can only hurt countries in their competitions with other nations as history ebbs and flows. Short-term thinking must, therefore, explain in part an important historical phenomenon that humanity has been condemned to repeat with annoying regularity: the parade of nations that achieve world superpower status only to lose it. From Genghis Khan to the Roman Empire, Portugal to Spain to the twelve years of Germany’s 1000-year reich, Great Britain to Mother Russia…. If the cycle continues, who will be next?

Humans now live in a global village; events in one location can affect other locations thousands of miles away. For example, climatologists have determined that CO2 emissions here contributes to global warming here, there, and everywhere. Risks from potential pandemics like bird flu, as well as existential risks like asteroid impact, nuclear war, and nuclear or supervolcanic winter are of concern to everyone everywhere – or should be. Short-term thinking about such issues increases long-term risks and costs. Thus the real cost to future generations of CO2 emission now may be high, but the current cost is very low: just squirt it out the smokestack.

True cost is, logically, some composite of current and future costs. Thus the rational approach is to understand the true cost, then determine how to save on true costs by prophylactic spending now. As long as (true costs) – (prophylactic spending now) > 0, the world is better off with the prophylactic spending now, as expensive as it might be. If spending is painful, then less pain now is better than much more later. Yet short-term thinkers naturally focus like a screaming laser beam on the “pain now” part of the very different concept, “less pain now.” Long-term thinking means understanding that difference.

Why do people risk short-term thinking? Given the negatives of short-term thinking, one might well ask why it is ever done. Even if thinking short-term leads to the wisest course of action, thinking long-term would lead to the same result. That’s why we call it wise. Yet people still do insist on thinking short term. The following table gives some reasons why.

Table. Some cases of short term thinking.

What can we do?

Go ahead and think short term, when appropriate. For example, a salesperson in the midst of working on the next sale should focus on the sale (and its commission) without being distracted by concerns that the company might go under along with the position. Such concerns are for later. But even the short term goal of making a commission on a sale is a useful step in the long term goal of earning a living. Ergo, both short and long term thinking sometimes produce the same result. Put more strongly, short term thinking, justified by long term thinking is long term thinking.

Know when to think long term. Let’s suppose you wish to drive to someone’s house located 5 miles to the northwest. Thinking short term, you soon find a road going due northwest and take it, only to discover that the road curves around in a circle and leaves you going back southeast on the same stretch on which you were going northwest a couple of minutes ago. Luckily you soon find another road going approximately northwest. Taking it, you soon reach a T intersection and are forced to turn right or left, both directions that do not get you any closer to your destination. Going right because, direction-wise, it is a little better than going left, you travel miles out of your way before finally getting to a bridge over the river, after which you make your way to your destination without too much further trouble. Having learned your lesson, next time you consult a map or go on-line for directions, avoid the two previous wild goose chases, and end up taking another bridge that you missed the first time but is a much better choice.

Whether you are traveling, picking next semester’s college classes, taking the next step in your career, engaged in shuttle diplomacy in the middle east, or doing selective breeding for crop improvement, the principle is the same: compared to short range planning, longer range planning tends to zig-zag less, leading to better results. That’s why it makes sense to save for retirement, vote for politicians with vision instead of a talent for manipulating the emotions, and have your own personal strategic plan. As Covey puts it, “Begin with the end in mind.”

Choosing time horizons. Would you prefer a free dinner coupon at your favorite restaurant good for the next seven days, or good for a week starting next year? How about this one: would you prefer to spend your retirement savings now, or save it to spend after retirement? (Assume for the sake of argument that the money in it now keeps exact pace with inflation.) Thus a long term view requires considering different horizons various distances into the future, and not looking only a single long term horizon (and besides, how long would it be?). When people increasingly account for longer term horizons not only in their own thinking but that of people with more influence in society, then long term social goals will have a greater role in public discourse. Then, the future of nations as well as humanity will be safer and wealthier.

As the free dinner coupon example suggests, distant time horizons can affect valuation. People care about their and their childrens’ futures. Do they care less about their grandchildrens’ futures? Great-grandchildrens’ futures? What about 10, 100, or 100,000 generations hence? How much do we (and should we) care about our descendants 10 million years from now when, if they exist, they will likely resemble us less than we resemble the chimpanzees from whom we split with 95% probability a mere 5-7 million years ago?

How to think and act long term. This may be trickier than it seems. The farther into the future one wishes to consider, the more uncertainty applies. Peoples’ careers take unexpected turns. The best-laid plans can go awry. Next-day weather forecasts are usually not bad, jokes aside, but 10-day forecasts are pretty iffy; 20-day forecasts can be little more than statements of historical averages. Uncertainty expands the farther ahead the horizon; “Eat dessert first.” The classical approach (and you can do it yourself with pencil and paper) is to list the possible futures, the probability and net value of each, and calculate a future’s true value as its net value x probability. A 10% chance of ending up with $1 million thus has a true value of $100,000. Decision theory experts call the $100,000 the “expected value” even though with the only possible values being $1 million or nothing, $100,000 can hardly be expected! Experts also sometimes realize that not everything is directly financially measurable and so use ‘utility’ instead of money in the calculations.

Mathematics aside, not surprisingly, the ability to delay short term gratification for longer term rewards has been shown to result in higher achievement, even among young children. Teaching this skill would thus be a worthwhile goal. Another approach is to advance the reward (i.e. the gratification) ahead of the thing that it is supposed to reward. Paying for a service before it is performed does that for the provider, but risks poor performance, while paying after does it for the payer, but risks extra demands and nonpayment. When feasible, avoid buying goods on credit (“buy now, pay later”), which provides gratification now for delayed payments at the cost of extra payments (interest); a cost to the lender it is the risk of inability to pay back the loans, which caused the recession of 2008-10.

Upgrading ‘the system.’ Even times far in the future will eventually become now. It will be good if things are as good as possible when they do arrive. Short of optimizing the integral of the expected utility of the density function of the predicted goodness of each time point from now to eternity assuming hyperbolic discounting of future valuations to be not only an ethnocentric psychological law but a cultural universal and law of nature as well (I know you might not want to do that!), why not ask your country and the world to at least be in as good a shape as possible in a generation or two instead of just next year? Even hyperbolic discounting doesn’t explain why being in good shape when today’s children come of age is not only intrinsically desirable, it is also likely to be a good foundation for their children to do well too.

Let us shift our attention briefly from the overall good to competitive goodness: if your country does better than other countries over the 20 years or so, then other coutries will be less able to mess with the well-being of your children. In the current (and historical) environment of amoral, cutthroat international competition, that’s worth thinking about. (Also worth thinking about: the human race and the people in it would be better off if said cutthroat environment were improved.)

A world run by long term thinking is made of countries governed that way; such countries are based on organizations that work that way, organizations made of ordinary people with the habit of long term thinking. To construct such organizations, countries (and if you think big, maybe a new world order), hire people who think long term. Electing is a kind of hiring, and education can be tuned to help people learn to both perform and recognize successful long term thinking. But mainly, someone who thinks that way likes to do so, has references and successors from previous jobs who say they did it, and whose previous actions show long term benefits.

To help people think long term, organizations can use scenario simulation, which involves investigating the implications of possible alternative futures. This approach is already much used in military planning. Taking the natural next step, why not legally require publically owned corporations to createa and maintain long term strategic plans, and to use decision making processes that explicitly refer to them? Types of goals that run counter to the national interest could be disallowed, which is helpful because then desirable goals will tend to have a bit of extra influence, at least, by virtue of being written down.

A brand new system. One might easily argue that a new and better system beats patching up the same old system with scotch tape and baling wire. The current system encourages risk. Only a small percentage of athletes who give years of mental and physical energy to their sports will make it professionally, but the percentage of those who don’t take that risk who make it is close to zero. The situation is similar for pop musicians. Moving from the individual to the national and global levels, the goal of economic growth in and of itself is often given precedence over other useful goals that can be conceived (e.g. employment, safety, happiness, fairness, health, etc.). This leads to society giving second class consideration at best to risks to individuals as well as to more widespread risks like global warming, famines, and global pandemics. (At least this is better than governmental authoritarianism, which is another serious problem.)

Radically new systems based on goals other than those present-day countries currently use provide new alternatives. Most countries heavily weight criteria like economic activity, persistence of (an authoritarian) government or, as in the case of China, both. Yet history shows that new systems can be designed and tested. Some are failures; the challenge is to find one that actually works better than the current inefficient, inequitable, and risk-naive systems.

Further Reading

“Summertime”: name of an aria composed by George Gershwin for the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. The lyrics are by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin.

“…dolphin thinking…”: Strategy of the Dolphin, D. Lynch and P. L. Kordis, Ballantine Books, 1990.

Aesop, Aesop’s Fables, many editions and arrangements exist.

“…every cigarette shortens life by an average 11 minutes”: a Web search such as:
“11 minutes” cigarette life returns many links to relevant information.

“Adolescents can act on impulse as though they think they are immortal.” V. F. Reyna and F. Farley, Risk and Rationality in Adolescent Decision Making: Implications for Theory, Practice, and Public Policy, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, vol. 7, no. 1, Sept. 2006, http://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/pspi/pspi7_1.pdf.

“Even adults often think they really are immortal…”: Billions of adherents of various major religions believe that their sentient essences are, indeed, immortal. See also J. Bering, Never say die: why we can’t imagine death…why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die, Scientific American, October, 2008, http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=never-say-die.

“The former Easter Island civilization cut down all palms…”: J. Diamond, p. 419 and chapter 2 of Collapse: How Civilizations Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin Group, 2005.

“As Covey puts it…”: S. R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, various editions and publishers.

“…time horizons can affect valuation…”: L. Borghans, A.L. Duckworth, J. J. Heckman, and B. ter Weel, The economics and psychology of personality traits, Journal of Human Resources, 2008, vol. 43, no. 4, pages 972-1059. http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/Borghans_Duckworth_etal_JHR_2008_v43_n4.pdf.

“…the chimpanzees from whom we split …”: S. Kumar, A. Filipski, V. Swarna, A. Walker and S. B. Hedges, Placing confidence limits on the molecular age of the human–chimpanzee divergence, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Dec. 27, 2005 vol. 102 no. 52, pages 18842–18847, http://www.pnas.org/content/102/52/18842.full.

“Eat dessert first.” Part of the quote “Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.” Attributed to US writer E. Ulmer, http://thinkexist.com/quotation/life-is-uncertain-eat-dessert-first/347441.html.

“…time horizons can affect valuation…”: L. Borghans, A.L. Duckworth, J. J. Heckman, and B. ter Weel, The economics and psychology of personality traits, Journal of Human Resources, 2008, vol. 43, no. 4, pages 972-1059. http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/Borghans_Duckworth_etal_JHR_2008_v43_n4.pdf.

“Teaching this skill would thus be a worthwhile goal.” W. Mischel, Y. Shoda, and M.L. Rodriguez, Delay of gratification in children, chapter 15 of Social Psychology: A General Reader, edited by A. W. Kruglanski and E. T. Higgins, Psychology Press, 2003, pages 202-211.

The projected size of Barack Obama’s “stimulus package” is heading north, from hundreds of billions of dollars into the trillions. And the Obama program comes, of course, on top of the various Bush administration bailouts and commitments, estimated to run as high as $8.5 trillion.

Will this money be put to good use? That’s an important question for the new President, and an even more important question for America. The metric for all government spending ultimately comes down to a single query: What did you get for it?

If such spending was worth it, that’s great. If the country gets victory in war, or victory over economic catastrophe, well, obviously, it was worthwhile. The national interest should never be sacrificed on the altar of a balanced budget.

So let’s hope we get the most value possible for all that money–and all that red ink. Let’s hope we get a more prosperous nation and a cleaner earth. Let’s also hope we get a more secure population and a clear, strategic margin of safety for the United States. Yet how do we do all that?

There’s only one best way: Put space exploration at the center of the new stimulus package. That is, make space the spearhead rationale for the myriad technologies that will provide us with jobs, wealth, and vital knowhow in the future. By boldly going where no (hu)man has gone before, we will change life here on earth for the better.

To put it mildly, space was not high on the national agenda during 2008. But space and rocketry, broadly defined, are as important as ever. As Cold War arms-control theology fades, the practical value of missile defense–against superpowers, also against rogue states, such as Iran, and high-tech terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas–becomes increasingly obvious. Clearly Obama agrees; it’s the new President, after all, who will be keeping pro-missile defense Robert Gates on the job at the Pentagon.

The bipartisan reality is that if missile offense is on the rise, then missile defense is surely a good idea. That’s why increasing funding for missile defense engages the attention of leading military powers around the world. And more signs appear, too, that the new administration is in that same strategic defense groove. A January 2 story from Bloomberg News, headlined “Obama Moves to Counter China With Pentagon-NASA Link,” points the way. As reported by Demian McLean, the incoming Obama administration is looking to better coordinate DOD and NASA; that only makes sense: After all, the Pentagon’s space expenditures, $22 billion in fiscal year 2008, are almost a third more than NASA’s. So it’s logical, as well as economical, to streamline the national space effort.

That’s good news, but Obama has the opportunity to do more. Much more.

Throughout history, exploration has been a powerful strategic tool. Both Spain and Portugal turned themselves into superpowers in the 15th and 16th century through overseas expansion. By contrast, China, which at the time had a technological edge over the Iberian states, chose not to explore and was put on the defensive. Ultimately, as we all know, China’s retrograde policies pushed the Middle Kingdom into a half-millennium-long tailspin.

Further, we might consider the enormous advantages that England reaped by colonizing a large portion of the world. Not only did Britain’s empire generate wealth for the homeland, albeit often cruelly, but it also inspired technological development at home. And in the world wars of the 20th century, Britain’s colonies, past and present, gave the mother country the “strategic depth” it needed for victory.

For their part, the Chinese seem to have absorbed these geostrategic lessons. They are determined now to be big players in space, as a matter of national grand strategy, independent of economic cycles. In 2003, the People’s Republic of China powered its first man into space, becoming only the third country to do so. And then, more ominously, in 2007, China shot down one of their own weather satellites, just to prove that they had robust satellite-killing capacity.

Thus the US and all the other space powers are on notice: In any possible war, the Chinese have the capacity to “blind” our satellites. And now they plan to put a man on the moon in the next decade. “The moon landing is an extremely challenging and sophisticated task,” declared Wang Zhaoyao, a spokesman for China’s space program, in September, “and it is also a strategically important technological field.”

India, the other emerging Asian superpower, is paying close attention to its rival across the Himalayas. Back in June, The Washington Times ran this thought-provoking headline: “China, India hasten arms race in space/U.S. dominance challenged.” According to the Times report, India, possessor of an extensive civilian satellite program, means to keep up with emerging space threats from China, by any means necessary. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Deepak Kapoor said that his country must “optimize space applications for military purposes,” adding, “the Chinese space program is expanding at an exponentially rapid pace in both offensive and defensive content.” In other words, India, like every other country, must compete–because the dangerous competition is there, like it or not.

India and China have fought wars in the past; they obviously see “milspace” as another potential theater of operations. And of course, Japan, Russia, Brazil, and the European Union all have their own space programs.

Space exploration, despite all the bonhomie about scientific and economic benefit for the common good, has always been driven by strategic competition. Beyond mere macho “bragging rights” about being first, countries have understood that controlling the high ground, or the high frontier, is a vital military imperative. So we, as a nation, might further consider the value of space surveillance and missile defense. It’s hard to imagine any permanent peace deal in the Middle East, for example, that does not include, as an additional safeguard, a significant commitment to missile and rocket defense, overseen by impervious space satellites. So if the U.S. and Israel, for example, aren’t there yet, well, they need to get there.

Americans, who have often hoped that space would be a demilitarized preserve for peaceful cooperation, need to understand that space, populated by humans and their machines, will be no different from earth, populated by humans and their machines. That is, every virtue, and every evil, that is evident down here will also be evident up there. If there have been, and will continue to be, arms races on earth, then there will be arms races in space. As we have seen, other countries are moving into space in a big way–and they will continue to do so, whether or not the U.S. participates.

Meanwhile, in the nearer term, if the Bush administration’s “forward strategy of freedom”–the neoconservative idea that we would make America safe by transforming the rest of the world–is no longer an operative policy, then we will, inevitably, fall back on “defense” as the key idea for making America safe.

But in the short run, of course, the dominant issue is the economy. Aside from the sometimes inconvenient reality that national defense must always come first, the historical record shows that high-tech space work is good for the economy; the list of spinoffs from NASA, spanning the last half-century, is long and lucrative.

Moreover, a great way to guarantee that the bailout/stimulus money is well spent is to link it to a specific goal–a goal which will in turn impose discipline on the spenders. During the New Deal, for example, there were many accusations of malfeasance against FDR’s “alphabet soup” of agencies, and yet the tangible reality, in the 30s, was that things were actually getting done. Jobs were created, and, just as more important, enduring projects were being built; from post offices to Hoover Dam to the Tennessee Valley Authority, America was transformed.

Even into the 50s and 60s, the federal government was spending money on ambitious and successful projects. The space program was one, but so was the interstate highway program, as well as that new government startup, ARPANET.

Indeed, it could be argued that one reason the federal government has grown less competent and more flabby over the last 30 years is the relative lack of “hard” Hamiltonian programs–that is, nuts and bolts, cement and circuitry–to provide a sense of bottom-line rigor to the spending process.

And so, for example, if America were to succeed in building a space elevator–in its essence a 22,000-mile cable, operating like a pulley, dangling down from a stationary satellite, a concept first put forth in the late 19th century–that would be a major driver for economic growth. Japan has plans for just such a space elevator; aren’t we getting a little tired of losing high-tech economic competitions to the Japanese?

So a robust space program would not only help protect America; it would also strengthen our technological economy.

But there’s more. In the long run, space spending would be good for the environment. Here’s why:

History, as well as common sense, tells us that the overall environmental footprint of the human race rises alongside wealth. That’s why, for example, the average American produces five times as much carbon dioxide per year as the average person dwelling anywhere else on earth. Even homeless Americans, according to an MIT study–and even the most scrupulously green Americans–produce twice as much CO₂, per person, as the rest of the world. Around the planet, per capita carbon dioxide emissions closely track per capita income.

A holistic understanding of homo sapiens in his environment will acknowledge the stubbornly acquisitive and accretive reality of human nature. And so a truly enlightened environmental policy will acknowledge another blunt reality: that if the carrying capacity of the earth is finite, then it makes sense, ultimately, to move some of the population of the earth elsewhere–into the infinity of space.

The ZPG and NPG advocates have their own ideas, of course, but they don’t seem to be popular in America, let alone the world. But in the no-limits infinity of space, there is plenty of room for diversity and political experimentation in the final frontier, just as there were multiple opportunities in centuries past in the New World. The main variable is developing space-traveling capacity to get up there–to the moon, Mars, and beyond–to see what’s possible.

Instead, the ultimately workable environmental plan–the ultimate vision for preserving the flora, the fauna, and the ice caps–is to move people, and their pollution, off this earth.

Indeed, space travel is surely the ultimate plan for the survival of our species, too. Eventually, through runaway WMD, or runaway pollution, or a stray asteroid, or some Murphy-esque piece of bad luck, we will learn that our dominion over this planet is fleeting. That’s when we will discover the grim true meaning of Fermi’s Paradox.

In various ways, humankind has always anticipated apocalypse. And so from Noah’s Ark to “Silent Running” to “Wall*E,” we have envisioned ways for us and all other creatures, great and small, to survive. The space program, stutteringly nascent as it might be, can be seen as a slow-groping understanding that lifeboat-style compartmentalization, on earth and in the heavens, is the key to species survival. It’s a Darwinian fitness test that we ought not to flunk.

Barack Obama, who has blazed so many trails in his life, can blaze still more, including a track to space, over the far horizon of the future. In so doing, he would be keeping faith with a figure that he in many ways resembles, John F. Kennedy. It was the 35th President who declared that not only would America go to the moon, but that we would lead the world into space.

As JFK put it so ringingly back in 1962:

The vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

Today the 44th President must spend a lot of money to restore our prosperity, but he must spend it wisely. He must also keep America secure against encroaching threats, even as he must improve the environment in the face of a burgeoning global economy.

Accomplishing all these tasks is possible, but not easy. Yes, of course he will need new ideas, but he will also need familiar and proven ideas. One of the best is fostering and deploying profound new technology in pursuit of expansion and exploration.

The stars, one might hope, are aligning for just such a rendezvous with destiny.