Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sustainability – Page 674

By Avi Roy, University of Buckingham

In his essay “Fifty Years Hence”, Winston Churchill speculated, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

At an event in London today, the first hamburger made entirely from meat grown through cell culture will be cooked and consumed before a live audience. In June at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh, Andras Forgacs took a step even beyond Churchill’s hopes. He unveiled the world’s first leather made from cells grown in the lab.

These are historic events. Ones that will change the discussion about lab-grown meat from blue-skies science to a potential consumer product which may soon be found on supermarket shelves and retail stores. And while some may perceive this development as a drastic shake-up in the world of agriculture, it really is part of the trajectory that agricultural technology is already following.

Creating abundance

While modern humans have been around for 160,000 years or so, agriculture only developed about 10,000 years ago, probably helping the human population to grow. A stable food source had tremendous impact on the development of our species and culture, as the time and effort once put towards foraging could now be put towards intellectual achievement and the development of our civilisation.

In recent history though, agricultural technology has developed with the goal of securing food supply. We have been using greenhouses to control the environment where crops grow. We use pesticides, fertilisers and genetic techniques to control and optimise output. We have created efficiencies in plant cultivation to produce more plants that yield more food than ever before.

These patterns in horticulture can be seen in animal husbandry too. From hunting to raising animals for slaughter and from factory farming to the use of antibiotics, hormones and genetic techniques, meat production today is so efficient that we grow more bigger animals faster than ever before. In 2012, the global herd has reached 60 billion land animals to feed 7 billion people.

The trouble with meat

Now, civilisation has come to a point where we are recognising that there are serious problems with the way we produce food. This mass produced food contributes towards our disease burden, challenges food safety, ravages the environment, and plays a major role in deforestation and loss of biodiversity. For meat production, in particular, manipulating animals has led to an epidemic of viruses, resistant bacteria and food-borne illness, apart from animal welfare issues.

But we may be seeing change brought by consumer demand. The public has started caring about the ethical, environmental and health impacts of food production. And beyond consumer demand for thoughtful products, ecological limits are forcing us to evaluate the way food is produced.

A damning report by the United Nations shows that today livestock raised for meat uses more than 80% of Earth’s agricultural land and 27% of Earth’s potable water supply. It produces 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions and the massive quantities of manure produced heavily pollute water. Deforestation and degradation of wildlife habitats happens largely in part to create feed crops, and factory farming conditions are breeding grounds for dangerous disease.

Making everyone on the planet take up vegetarianism is not an option. While there is much merit to reducing (and rejecting) meat consumption, sustainable dietary changes in the Western world will be more than compensated for by the meat intake of the growing middle class in developing countries like China and India.

The future is cultured

The logical step in the evolution of humanity’s food production capacity is to make meat from cells, rather than animals. After all, the meat we consume is simply a collection of tissues. So why should we grow the whole animals when we can only grow the part that we eat?

By doing this we avoid slaughter, animal welfare issues, disease development. This method, if commercialised, is also more sustainable. Animals do not have to be raised from birth, and no resources are shunted towards non-meat tissues. Compared to conventionally grown meat, cultured meat would require up to 99% less land, 96% less water, 45% less energy, and produce up to 96% less greenhouse gas emissions.

Also even without modern scientific tools, for hundreds of years we have been using bacterial cells, yeast and fungus for food purposes. With recent advances in tissue engineering, culturing mammalian cells for meat production seems like a sensible advancement.

Efficiency has been the primary driver of agricultural developments in the past. Now, it should be health, environment and ethics. We need for cultured meat to go beyond the proof of concept. We need it to be on supermarket shelves soon.

Avi Roy does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

The Conversation

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Just five years ago, anybody who spoke of technological unemployment was labeled a luddite, a techno-utopian, or just simply someone who doesn’t understand economics. Today things are very different – anybody from New York Times columnist Tom Friedman to CBS are jumping on the bandwagon.

Robots-Will-Steal-Your-Job-front

Those of us who have been speaking about the tremendous impact of automation in the workforce know very well that this isn’t a fad about to pass, but that it’s a problem that will only exacerbate in the future. Most of us agree on what the problem is (exponential growth of high-tech replacing humans faster and faster), and we agree that education will play a crucial role (and not coincidentally I started a company – Esplori – precisely to address this problem); but very few seem to suggest that we should use this opportunity to re-think our entire economic system and what the purpose of society should be. I am convinced this is exactly what we need to do. Published in 2012, my book, Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy – which you can also read online for free — shows we might go about building a better tomorrow.

We have come to believe that we are dependent on governments and corporations for everything, and now that technology is ever more pervasive, our dependence on them is even stronger. And of course we don’t question the cycle of labor-for-income, income-for-survival and the conspicuous consumption model that has become dominant in virtually every country – and that not only is ecologically unsustainable, but it also generates immense income inequality.

Well, I do. I challenge the assumption that we should live to work, and even that we should work to live, for that matter. In an age where we already produce more than enough food, energy, and drinkable water for 7 billion people with little to no human labour, while 780 million lack access to clean water and 860 million are suffering from chronic hunger, it follows that the system we have in place isn’t allocating resources efficiently. And rather than going back to outdated ideologies (i.e. socialism), we can try new forms of societal structure; starting with open source philosophy, shared knowledge, self-reliance, and sustainable communities.

There are many transitional steps that we can take – reduced workweek, reform patent and copyright laws, switch to distributed and renewable energies – and there will be bumps along the road, no doubt. But if we move in the right direction, if we are ready to abandon ideologies and stick to whatever works best, I think we will prevail – simply because we will realise that there is no war other than the one we are fighting with ourselves.

boy_bubble2

There is a real power in the act of physically moving. In so doing, each and every morning I can escape the cacophonous curse of the ubiquitous ESPN in the gym locker room. I toss my bag in my locker and immediately escape to the pure, perfect, custom designed peace of my iPod’s audio world. I also well remember the glorious day I moved away from the hopelessness of my roommate’s awful sub-human, sub-slum stench and into my own private apartment. The universe changed miraculously overnight. I think you can get my drift. The simple act of moving itself can be powerfully transformational. Sometimes, there is not enough bleach and not enough distance between the walls to have the desired effect. Physically moving is quite often the only answer.

As we consider transhumanist societies, such transitional power is certainly the result by many magnitudes. My team has been engaged in developing the first permanent human undersea settlement over the past few decades. In this process we have had the distinct advantage of planning profoundly transhumanist advances specifically because of the advantageous context of relative community isolation. Further we have the benefit of deriving change as a community necessity — as a psychological and cultural imperative for this degree of advanced cultural evolution. It is a real kind of powerfully driven societal punctuated equilibrium that can be realized in few other ways.

In moving into the oceans, the submarine environment itself immediately establishes the boundary between the new, evolving culture and the old. While the effect and actual meaning of this boundary is almost always overrated, it is nonetheless a real boundary layer that allows the new culture to flourish sans the interferences or contamination from the old. Trying to accomplish transhumanist goals while culturally embedded is far more difficult and far less persuasive to those who must undergo dramatic change and for the transformation to actually take hold and survive generationally. But in a new, rather isolated environment, the pressure to evolve and integrate permanent change is not only easier, it is rather expected as a part of the reasonable process of establishment.

In one of our most powerful spin-offs back to the land-dwellers (LDs), our culture will begin on day one as a ‘waste-free culture’. It is an imperative and therefore a technological design feature. It is a value system. It is codified. It is a defining element of our new culture. It is also radically transhumanist. In our society, we teach this to one another and to our children, as well as every subsequent generation. In our undersea culture we have a process called ‘resource recovery’, since every product of every process is a resource to be utilized in the next round of community life cycle processing. Hence even the vilest sewage is just a part of the carbon cycle for the next round of our life support system engineering. Nothing is to be ‘wasted’. Nothing is to be ‘cast off’. We cannot afford ‘waste’ of any kind, hence waste will cease to exist as a concept. Everything is a resource. The life of the next cycle depends on the successful re-integration of each preceding cycle. The future life and wellbeing of the colony directly depends on the successful implementation of the conservation of resources and in turn the preservation of the natural health of its immediate environment in just this fashion.

Such advancement would be most difficult to engineer in a land-dweller community. The first problem would be simple re-education and the most elementary expectations. The next hurdle would be the re-engineering of every process that the LDs now identify as ‘waste processing’, ‘waste storage’, ‘waste distribution’ etc. Sadly, much of the LD’s unprocessed and unstabilized product is dumped into our ocean environment! But in the simple act of moving the same people to a new social structure, the impossible becomes surprisingly straightforward and even easy to implement. The difference and the power were always implicit in the move itself. The transhumanist ideal seems much better framed in this context when one considers that this is only one of countless examples of building new societies that are cleanly separated from the old.

It is certain to engender arguments to the contrary, I am sure. For how often is the rare opportunity available to move into a new cultural paradigm cleanly distinct from its predecessor? Certainly then the transhumanist concept must be able to rely on in situ prototypes that must be ultimately successful for the successful evolution of the culture. I have no argument with this, except to emphasize the intrinsic power in clean cultural separation as described in this example.

Obviously the ocean settlement is only one prototype. Space settlements and surface based seasteading are other examples to consider. The fact is clear, transhumanist cultures will always and quite easily develop in the new isolated human communities that are about to flourish in the most unexpected of places.

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Dennis Chamberland is the Expeditions Leader for the Atlantica Expeditions, where others may participate. Dennis is also a writer, the author of the book, Undersea Colonies and others, where many of these concepts are discussed in greater detail.

Medical science has changed humanity. It changed what it means to be human, what it means to live a human life. So many of us reading this (and at least one person writing it) owe their lives to medical advances, without which we would have died.

Live expectancy is now well over double what it was for the Medieval Briton, and knocking hard on triple’s door.

What for the future? Extreme life extension is no more inherently ridiculous than human flight or the ability to speak to a person on the other side of the world. Science isn’t magic – and ageing has proven to be a very knotty problem – but science has overcome knotty problems before.

A genuine way to eliminate or severely curtail the influence of ageing on the human body is not in any sense inherently ridiculous. It is, in practice, extremely difficult, but difficult has a tendency to fall before the march of progress. So let us consider what implications a true and seismic advance in this area would have on the nature of human life.

keep-calm-and-be-forever-young-138

One absolutely critical issue that would surround a breakthrough in this area is the cost. Not so much the cost of research, but the cost of application. Once discovered, is it expensive to do this, or is it cheap? Do you just have to do it once? Is it a cure, or a treatment?

If it can be produced cheaply, and if you only need to do it once, then you could foresee a future where humanity itself moves beyond the ageing process.

The first and most obvious problem that would arise from this is overpopulation. A woman has about 30–35 years of life where she is fertile, and can have children. What if that were extended to 70–100 years? 200 years?

Birth control would take on a vastly more important role than it does today. But then, we’re not just dropping this new discovery into a utopian, liberal future. We’re dropping it into the real world, and in the real world there are numerous places where birth control is culturally condemned. I was born in Ireland, a Catholic nation, where families of 10 siblings or more are not in any sense uncommon.

What of Catholic nations – including some staunchly conservative, and extremely large Catholic societies in Latin America – where birth control is seen as a sin?

Of course, the conservatism of these nations might (might) solve this problem before it arises – the idea of a semi-permanent extension of life might be credibly seen as a deeper and more blasphemous defiance of God than wearing a condom.

But here in the West, the idea that we are allowed to choose how many children we have is a liberty so fundamental that many would baulk to question it.

We may have to.

quizzical baby

There is another issue. What about the environmental impact? We’re already having a massive impact on the environment, and it’s not looking pretty. What if there were 10 times more of us? 100 times more? What about the energy consumption needs, in a world running out of petrol? The food needs? The living space? The household waste?

There are already vast flotillas of plastic waste the size of small nations that float across the surface of the Pacific. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have just topped 400 parts per million. We are pushing hard at the envelope of what the world of capable of sustaining, and a massive boost in population would only add to that ever-increasing pressure.

Of course, science might well sort out the answer to those things – but will it sort it out in time? The urgency of environmental science, and cultural change, suddenly takes on a whole new level of importance in the light of a seismic advance in addressing the problem of human ageing.

These are problems that would arise if the advance produced a cheap treatment that could (and would) be consumed by very large numbers of people.

But what if it wasn’t a cure? What if it wasn’t cheap? What if it was a treatment, and a very expensive one?

All of a sudden, we’re looking at a very different set of problems, and the biggest of all centres around something Charlie Chaplin said in the speech he gave at the end of his film, The Great Dictator. It is a speech from the heart, and a speech for the ages, given on the eve of mankind’s greatest cataclysm to date, World War 2.

In fact, you’d be doing yourself a favour if you watched the whole thing, it is an astounding speech.

chaplin great dictator

The quote is this:

“To those who can hear me, I say — do not despair.

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.”

And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

What if Stalin were immortal? And not just immortal, but immortally young?

Immortally vigourous, able to amplify the power of his cult of personality with his literal immortality.

This to me seems a threat of a very different kind, but of no less importance, than the dangers of overpopulation. That so long as men die, liberty will never perish. But what if men no longer die?

And of course, you could very easily say that those of us lucky enough to live in reasonably well-functioning democracies wouldn’t have to worry too much about this. It doesn’t matter if you live to be 1000, you’re still not getting more than 8 years of them in the White House.

But there is something in the West that would be radically changed in nature. Commercial empires.

What if Rupert Murdoch were immortal?

It doesn’t matter how expensive that treatment for ageing is. If it exists, he’d be able to afford it, and if he were able to buy it, he’d almost certainly do so.

If Fox News was run by an immortal business magnate, with several lifetimes worth of business experience and skill to know how to hold it all together, keep it going, keep it growing? What then?

Charles-Montgomery-Burns--007

Not perhaps the sunny utopia of a playground of immortals that we might hope for.

This is a different kind of issue. It’s not an external issue – the external impact of population on the environment, or the external need of a growing population to be fed. These problems might well sink us, but science has shown itself extremely adept at finding solutions to external problems.

What this is, is an internal problem. A problem of humanity. More specifically, the fact that extreme longevity would allow tyranny to achieve a level of entrenchment that it has so far never been capable of.

But then a law might be passed. Something similar to the USA’s 8 year term limit on Presidents. You can’t be a CEO for longer than 30 years, or 40 years, or 50. Something like that might help, might even become urgently necessary over time. Forced retirement for the eternally young.

Not an unproblematic idea, I’m sure you’ll agree. Quite the culture shock for Western societies loathe to accept government intervention in private affairs.

But it is a new category of problem. A classic problem of humanity, amplified by immortality. The centralisation of control, power and influence in a world where the people it centres upon cannot naturally die.

This, I would say, is the most obvious knotty problem that would arise, for humanity, in the event of an expensive, but effective, treatment for ageing.

But then, let’s just take a quick look back at the other side of the coin. Is there a problem inherent in humanity that would be amplified were ageing to be overcome, cheaply, worldwide?

Let me ask you a question.

Do people, generally speaking, become more open to new things, or less open to new things, as they age?

Do older people – just in general terms – embrace change or embrace stasis?

Well, it’s very obvious that some older people do remain young at heart. They remain passionate, humble in their beliefs, they are open to new things, and even embrace them. Some throw the influence and resources they have accrued throughout their lifetimes into this, and are instrumental to the march of progress.

More than this, they add a lifetime of skill, experience and finesse to their passion, a melding of realism and hope that is one of the most precious and potent cocktails that humanity is capable of mixing.

But we’re not talking about the few. We’re talking about the many.

Is it fair to say that most older people take this attitude to change? Or is it fairer to say that older people who retain that passion and spark, who not only have retained it, but have spent a lifetime fuelling it into a great blaze of ability and success – is it fair to say that these people are a minority?

I would say yes. They are incredibly precious, but part of that preciousness is the fact that they are not common.

Perhaps one day we will make our bodies forever young. But what of our spirit? What of our creativity?

I’m not talking about age-related illnesses like Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s disease. I’m talking about the creativity, passion and fire of youth.

The temptation of the ‘comfort zone’ for all human beings is a palpable one, and one that every person who lives well, who breaks the mold, who changes the future, must personally overcome.

Do the majority of people overcome it? I would argue no. And more than this, I would argue that living inside a static understanding of the world – even working to protect that understanding in the face of naked and extreme challenges from reality itself – is now, and has historically been, through all human history, the norm.

Those who break the mold, brave the approbation of the crowd, and look to the future with wonder and hope, have always been a minority.

mind closed till further notice

Now add in the factor of time. The retreat into the comforting, the static and the known has a very powerful pull on human beings. It is also not a binary process, but an analogue process – it’s not just a case of you do or you don’t. There are degrees of retreat, extremes of intellectual conservatism, just as there are extremes of intellectual curiosity, and progress.

But which extremes are the more common? This matters, because if all people could live to 200 years old or more, what would that mean for a demographic shift in cultural desire away from change and toward stasis?

A worrying thought. And it might seem that in the light of all this, we should not seek to open the Pandora’s box of eternal life, but should instead stand against such progress, because of the dangers it holds.

But, frankly, this is not an option.

The question is not whether or not human beings should seek to conquer death.

The question is whether or not conquering death is possible.

If it is possible, it will be done. If it is not, it will not be.

But the obvious problem of longevity – massive population expansion – is something that is, at least in principle, amenable to other solutions arising from science as it now practiced. Cultural change is often agonising, but it does happen, and scientific progress may indeed solve the issues of food supply and environmental impact. Perhaps not, but perhaps.

At the very least, these sciences take on a massively greater importance to the cohesion of the human future than they already have, and they are already very important indeed.

But there is another, deeper problem of a very different kind. The issue of the human spirit. If, over time, people (on average) become more calcified in their thinking, more conservative, less likely to take risks, or admit to new possibilities that endanger their understanding, then longevity, distributed across the world, can only lead to a culture where stasis is far more valued than change.

Pandora’s box is already open, and its name is science. Whether it is now, or a hundred years from now, if it is possible for human beings to be rendered immortal through science, someone is going to crack it.

We cannot flinch the future. It would be churlish and naive to assume that such a seemingly impossible vision will forever remain impossible. Not after the last century we just had, where technological change ushered in a new era, a new kind of era, where the impossibilities of the past fell like wheat beneath a scythe.

Scientific progress amplifies the horizon of possible scientific progress. And we stand now at a time when what it means to be a human – something which already undergone enormous change – may change further still, and in ways more profound than any of us can imagine.

If it can be done, it will be done. And so the only sane approach is to look with clarity at what we can see of what that might mean.

The external problems are known problems, and we may yet overcome them. Maybe. If there’s a lot of work, and a lot of people take a lot of issues a lot more seriously than they are already doing.

climate-change-silence-630

But there is a different kind of issue. An issue extending from human nature itself. Can we overcome, as a people, as a species, our fear, and the things that send us scurrying back from curiosity and hope into the comforting arms of wilful ignorance, and static belief?

This, in my opinion, is the deepest problem of longevity. Who wants to live forever in a world where young bodies are filled with withered souls, beaten and embittered with the frustrations of age, but empowered to set the world in stone to justify them?

But perhaps it was always going to come to this. That at some point technological advancement would bring us to a kind of reckoning. A reckoning between the forces of human fear, and the value of human courage.

To solve the external problems of an eternal humanity, science must do what science has done so well for so long – to delve into the external, to open up new possibilities to feed the world, and balance human presence with the needs of the Earth.

But to solve the internal problems of an eternal humanity, science needs to go somewhere else. The stunning advances in the understanding of the external world must begin to be matched with new ways of charting the deeps of human nature. The path of courage, of open-mindedness, of humility, and a willingness to embrace change and leave behind the comforting arms of old static belief systems – this is not a path that many choose.

But many more must choose it in a world of immortal people, to counterbalance the conservatism of those who fail the test, and retreat, and live forever.

Einstein lived to a ripe old age, and never lost his wonder. Never lost his humility, or his courage to brave the approbation and ridicule of his peers in that task he set himself. To chart the deep simplicities of the real, and know the mind of God. The failure of the human spirit is not written in the stars, and never will be.

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We are none of us doomed to fail in matters of courage, curiosity, wonder or hope. But we are none of us guaranteed to succeed.

And as long as courage, hope and the ability to break new ground remain vague, hidden properties that we squeamishly refuse to interrogate, each new generation will have to start from scratch, and make their own choices.

And in a world of eternal humans, if any individual generation fails, the world will be counting that price for a very long time.

It is a common fear that if we begin to make serious headway into issues normally the domain of the spiritual, we will destroy the mystique of them, and therefore their preciousness.

Similar criticisms were, and sometimes still are, laid at the feet of Darwin’s work, and Galileo’s. But the fact is that an astronomer does not look to the sky with less wonder because of their deeper understanding, but more wonder.

Reality is both stunningly elegant, and infinitely beautiful, and in these things it is massively more amazing than the little tales of mystery humans have used to make sense of it since we came down from the trees.

In the face of a new future, where the consequences of human courage and human failure are amplified, the scientific conquest of death must be fused with another line of inquiry. The scientific pioneering of the fundamental dynamics of courage in living, and humility to the truth, over what we want to believe.

It will never be a common path, and no matter how clear it is made, or how wide it is opened, there will always be many who will never walk it.

But the wider it can be made, the clearer it can be made, the more credible it can be made as an option.

And we will need that option. We need it now.

And our need will only grow greater with time.

In an enormously influential article published in 1974 in Psychology Today, and in a longer version published later that year in BioScience, Garrett Hardin introduced the metaphor of the lifeboat for economic and ethical consideration. This conceptual construction was intended as an improvement over the then-popular ecological metaphor of “spaceship earth” coined by Kenneth Boulding in 1966. Interestingly, in the opening paragraph of “Living on a lifeboat”, Hardin indicates that metaphors in general may be understood as only an early stage in mentally approaching difficult problems, and that this stage may be surpassed as theory advances and becomes more rigorous.

In Hardin’s analogy, large entities such as nations or the biosphere are likened to a boat, while smaller entities – for example, migrating individuals or groups – are likened to swimmers trying to board the already cramped vessel and exploit whatever resources are on board. In the imagined scenario, it is believed that the boat is near carrying capacity, but exactly how near is not known with certainty given the many future possibilities. A central question focuses on at what point, if any, the risk of sinking the entire boat outweighs the good provided for each additional rescued swimmer.

The metaphor of the lifeboat has structured thought about conservation, economics, ethics, and any number of other disciplinary areas for decades. The question I would like to pose is the following: Is the lifeboat scenario still (or was it ever) an apt metaphor for structuring thought about ethical conservation of resources, or have we reached a stage where the boat should be scuttled in favor of either a new metaphor or more literal language? Please feel free to post any thoughts you may have on this issue.

1. Thou shalt first guard the Earth and preserve humanity.

Impact deflection and survival colonies hold the moral high ground above all other calls on public funds.

2. Thou shalt go into space with heavy lift rockets with hydrogen upper stages and not go extinct.

The human race can only go in one of two directions; space or extinction- right now we are an endangered species.

3. Thou shalt use the power of the atom to live on other worlds.

Nuclear energy is to the space age as steam was to the industrial revolution; chemical propulsion is useless for interplanetary travel and there is no solar energy in the outer solar system.

4. Thou shalt use nuclear weapons to travel through space.

Physical matter can barely contain chemical reactions; the only way to effectively harness nuclear energy to propel spaceships is to avoid containment problems completely- with bombs.

5. Thou shalt gather ice on the Moon as a shield and travel outbound.

The Moon has water for the minimum 14 foot thick radiation shield and is a safe place to light off a bomb propulsion system; it is the starting gate.

6. Thou shalt spin thy spaceships and rings and hollow spheres to create gravity and thrive.

Humankind requires Earth gravity and radiation to travel for years through space; anything less is a guarantee of failure.

7. Thou shalt harvest the Sun on the Moon and use the energy to power the Earth and propel spaceships with mighty beams.

8. Thou shalt freeze without damage the old and sick and revive them when a cure is found; only an indefinite lifespan will allow humankind to combine and survive. Only with this reprieve can we sleep and reach the stars.

9. Thou shalt build solar power stations in space hundreds of miles in diameter and with this power manufacture small black holes for starship engines.

10. Thou shalt build artificial intellects and with these beings escape the death of the universe and resurrect all who have died, joining all minds on a new plane.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121231180632.htm

Excerpt: “Galactic cosmic radiation poses a significant threat to future astronauts,” said M. Kerry O’Banion, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy and the senior author of the study. “The possibility that radiation exposure in space may give rise to health problems such as cancer has long been recognized. However, this study shows for the first time that exposure to radiation levels equivalent to a mission to Mars could produce cognitive problems and speed up changes in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”

It appears when Eugene Parker wrote “Shielding Space Travelers” in 2006 he was right- and all the private space sycophants claiming radiation mitigation is trivial are wrong.

Only a massive water shield a minimum of 14 feet thick and massing 400 tons for a small capsule can shield human beings in deep space on long duration missions. And since a small capsule will not have sufficient space to keep a crew psychologically healthy on a multi-year journey it is likely such a shield will massive over a thousand tons.

This mass may seem to make Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO) impractical but in fact it is not an obstacle but an enabler. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion using bombs to push a spaceship to the outer solar sytem becomes more efficient the larger the ship and this amount of water is useful in a closed loop life support system.

Lighting off bombs in the Earth’s magnetosphere is not acceptable and this points to the Moon as the obvious place to launch nuclear missions and also to acquire the water for radiation shielding. The Space Launch System (SLS) is the human-rated Heavy Lift Vehicle (HLV) with a powerful escape system that can safely transport the required fissionables to the Moon.

2013 may be the year of the comet and the year of the spaceship if the two goals of protecting the planet from impacts and establishing off world colonies are finally recognized as vital to the survival of humankind.

A happy new year to the human race from it’s most important member; me. Since self-worship seems to be the theme of the new American ideal I had better get right with me.

With my government going over the fiscal cliff it would appear that the damned soul of Ayn Rand is exerting demonic influence on the political system through worship of the individual. The tea party has the Republicans terrified of losing their jobs. Being just like me, those individuals consider themselves the most important person on the planet- so I cannot fault them.

As Ayn Rand believed, “I will not die, it’s the world that will end”, so who cares about the collective future of the human race? Towards the end of 2013 the heavens may remind us the universe does not really care about creatures who believe themselves all important. The choice may soon be seen clearly in the light of the comet’s tail; the glorification of the individual and the certain extinction of our race, or the acceptance of a collective goal and our continued existence.

Ayn Rand made her choice but most of us have time to choose more wisely. I pray for billions, tens and hundreds of billions of dollars- for a Moonbase.

I am not one of the Earth is overpopulated crowd. We could have a high quality of life for every man, woman and child on this planet if we did not, as a species, spend most of our resources pandering to moral weakness and cravings for profit. The myth of scarcity is a smokescreen to obscure the reality of greed and ignorance. Which is why people like Gerard K. O’Neill sought to improve the human condition with space colonies.

We need to go into space to first safeguard the Earth from impacts and the human race from extinction, and along with these missions to spread life into the universe through colonization. None of those three things has anything to do with getting filthy rich or intimidating other nations with our firepower so we can steal their resources. Which is why it has not happened.

Happy New Year with hopes for a more enlightened public.

Happy new year to my Wife, my Daughter, my Father, and to those who give a damn about next year even if they will not be there.

I was recently told by a person commenting on another blog that beamed energy is a myth. The commenter claimed that Fusion energy would be a more likely future development. I cited Criswell and Zehner and gave back.I am a very progressive eco friendly person and I have wondered many years if there is some energy industry conspiracy that keeps clean power from becoming a reality. The only conspiracy is human greed influencing exactly how we live on this planet.

Zehner’s book spells out the situation in a unique way; he calls it as he see’s it and the numbers cannot be spun too much because he presents the basic foundations of what it takes to make the electricity flow. Criswell is more biased toward his proposal even though it is peer reviewed and has all the math equations.

What Criswell is proposing is a river of energy traveling from vast collectors on the surface of the Moon to Earth Geostationary orbit and from there down to surface recievers of several square kilometers.

What fusion proposes is to keep a sustained nuclear reaction going without the use of a sun. The other way to generate useful energy from a fusion reaction is to actually explode H-bombs underground and harvest the resulting heat and nuclear products. The only useful work that can be had from a H-bomb besides this kind of excavation is to use it as a propulsion device for spaceships.

The two questions here seem to be:
1. Can microwave energy be beamed across long distances in space (a quarter million miles or so) from a transmission site on the surface of the moon to a geostationary relay station? Yes or No? Probably yes but what really matters is the size of the geostationary relay station.
If it has to be over a couple square miles in area
then getting it to Earth geo from the metal shop on the Moon may not be practical.

2. Can energy be made available for the projected world population of 10 billion people in the coming decades of this century?

No. To supply the same amount of energy to all 10 billion inhabitants of Earth that is presently consumed by Westerners with a high standard of living would require……..a river of energy being beamed down from space. All the fossil, nuclear, solar, and renewable energy on the planet is NOT going to be able to meet that need without an astronomical amount of coal and gas power plants, along with a huge expansion of nuclear.

It will be cheaper and less suicidal to build the power stations on the Moon.
If it will work.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/build-death-star-petition…itics.html

When the possible mixes with fantasy it should turn peoples heads- it does not happen very often. But this toungue-in-cheek petition is actually a case of truth being so close to fiction and no one seems to be noticing. I have been posting in the comments section of Centauri Dreams lately due to my disappointment with the contributor situation on the lifeboat blog and I am now happy to share edited versions of them here.

December 11, 2012 at 7:50

It is now the second decade of the twenty first century and we actually have a
tremendous amount of technology available and devices that may have been tested in some form in the past and found to work quite well but by various circumstance did not enter production. The example that every real space nut is aware of is the Aerojet AJ-260 monolithic solid rocket booster. Each of these put out over 7 million pounds of thrust and would probably have been used in a pair with yet another aerojet product called the M-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-1_(rocket_engine) as a core liquid engine as in the Titan configuration. This was the logical progression of a more powerful partially reusable vehicle to replace the Saturn V; a vehicle with over twice the first stage thrust. Instead we tried to go cheap with the Space Shuttle and recieved zero ROI. In fact we have the ability to build much larger solid boosters of up to 325 inches. Built with submarine hull technology it is recovered at sea and resused. This system is the only practical reusable technology as the liquid shuttle motors turned out to be a total waste of time returning to earth for reuse.

We can look back a half century (!) and see that it was Aerojet who had the equipment to set up a base on the Moon. By comparison the equipment that SpaceX is pushing as the next generation is.….a hobby rocket. With a pair of the largest possible solid rocket boosters and a core cluster of liquid hydrogen/oxygen along with upper stages, the HLV is the most efficient method available for getting into space. Getting into space by landing a payload on the moon. Chemical propulsion is completely appropriate for getting to the Moon where atomic spaceships can be assembled, tested, and launched on missions to set up the next base of operations. Eventually the ability to build large spheres with solar energy and lunar ore will make Bernal Spheres several miles in diameter available. This size should not be surprising considering there is no gravity and solar energy can be manipulated to refine and form large sections for such a sphere.

What may be the perfect place to build Bernal Spheres may be the same locale proposed for the next NASA space station http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2165/1. With vast amounts of microwave energy beamed from the Moon and focused this may be the place to melt masses of ore with microwaves and blow them up like glass balls. Balls several miles in diameter to start with.

Accelerated by beam propulsion and decelerated by H-bombs these Bernal Spheres, first proposed in 1929, may reach speeds of 10 percent of light and be our first starships before the end of this century. If revivable cryopreservation is available then several thousand colonists could be carried and if not then a small generaqtion crew would propagate for the journey. Not only starflight may be accomplished but our Earth powered by Lunar Solar Power allowing a western quality of life with a very high standard of living for a population of 10 billion. No more have-nots. Beam propulsion energy beamed down from relays in orbit from the Moon would allow cheap lift to space a reality and millions leaving the planet everyday for Bernal Sphere Lives in the outer planets or the many or the few leaving on star treks. Except for cryopreservation and more refined beam technology this is all just technology from over a half a century ago. The refinements in microwave beaming have come about through clean fusion energy research devices used by Kevin Parkin in his propulsion research. http://thesis.library.caltech.edu/2405/1/Parkin-Thesis.pdf

December 11, 2012 at 17:21

One of my favorite talking points concerns military spending; we can spend the public treasure on training our young people to clear buildings with automatic weapons or we can train them to build spaceships. We can keep building nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines or we can build spaceships. The money is going to be spent and supposedly a democracy has the right to choose how. Considering the tens of thousands of heavy bombers built in world war two and the fleets of jet bombers built in the cold war, supporting a launch schedule of 50 to 100 super heavy lift vehicles a year is not only possible but actually a easy goal. I will now tread on tricky ground by characterizing in the same category as jumbo jets; only construction costs are being looked at.

Considering the construction practices and materials, you would think the cost for a super-heavy lift vehicle should be close to the fly away price of a jumbo jet. This is a vehicle that can land a space shuttle payload at the lunar poles. It is simply a matter of retooling factories and retraining people.

The same amount of money for a different defensive strategy based on creating energy in space instead of stealing it on Earth. I was never a fan of Space Solar Power because just like O’Neill figured out in the 70′s we cannot send these truly gargantuan power station constructs up from Earth. But I have recently become quite interested in Criswell’s Lunar Solar Power. Within a realistic survey of the technology available it does not seem like there is any flexible path to the stars- only LSP has the potential to get a large number of human beings off the Earth by eventually providing enough energy to make the holy grail of cheap access to space possible- by way of Beam Propulsion. There really is no other contender technology.

It works like this; chemical propulsion to get to the moon where nuclear missions can be launched and eventually enough power can be beamed to Earth to allow beam propulsion to replace chemical propulsion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II
Considering the 150,000 bombers built by the allies in World War II I think we certainly have the ability to send a hundred big rockets a year to the moon if a couple decades down the road we have enough power beamed back to give everyone on earth a house with cheap electricity and clean water. A very high standard of living for everyone on Earth with zero carbon emissions and pollution. With enough electricity giant plasma reformers can break down contaminated materials and even nuclear waste could be safely lifted off planet with beam launched vehicles. Eventually the population will drop as space habitats become extremely attractive places to live and Earth becomes a vacation destination.

The public really has no clue that such a future is entirely possible- there are no technical challenges that have not been answered or laws of physics that have to be broken.

Though I am not really a Zubrin fan and do not consider Mars a good destination for various reasons, a chapter in one of his books describing the superships built by the Chinese Empire and their abandonment is really the classic lesson that should be taught to the public anyone advocating space travel. There is nothing stopping the human race from going into space except our lack of vision.

The ploy to make money off militarizing space fell on it’s face decades ago. The main reason for this is that if you want clear the table you can send a couple vehicles up in satellite opposite orbits and explode ball bearing filled warheads; no more satellites. This is the equivalent of nuclear weapons making war obsolete on the surface below, Mutually Assured Destruction of everything in orbit makes any weapons on the moon or elsewhere redundant. The only airspace that counts is zero to a couple hundred miles straight up. It only takes a couple minutes to get up there and they cannot be stopped.

Launching from the Moon has no purpose because to even contemplate destroying all these ground launched space weapons and making Moon weapons relevant means profoundly contaminating the planet with fallout from nuclear weapons and that brings MAD back into play.

This is the main reason there is no army base on the moon right now. The secondary reasons why there are no military bases Beyond Earth Orbit is of course the expense- it is hard money when building weapons that sit on a runway or in a silo are easy money. It is easy to roll hundreds of defense contracts cumulatively worth hundreds of billions through the door but anything that goes into space with a human in it has a microscope on it. No profit there.

December 13, 2012 at 15:20

http://earthsky.org/space/asteroid-toutatis-passed-within-18…-11-12

The valid military mission for space is a CAPS Comet Asteroid Protection System; atomic spaceships armed with nuclear weapons. This also can answer another threat- engineered pathogens- by establishing survival colonies on other bodies in the solar system to guarantee species survival.

You would think with drones taking over pilot roles and Navy surface forces contracting that the military would be all over going into space. But the military mind is not famous for successfully preparing for the next war.

The war we are fighting right now is basically one of exploitation; the masses of poor are being manipulated with religion to violently oppose the status quo of haves and have nots on this planet. It took a while for the lightbulb to come on but it finally dawned on me recently that the solution to conflict on this planet is to provide every human being on earth those basic qualities of life that remove the percieved need for militant activity. The only system that has a strong possibility of winning the war against exploitation does so by exploiting Lunar Solar Power as advocated by David Criswell.

It is a truly epic project and is not a sure thing by any means; microwaving the atmosphere is going to have unintended consequences. But to bring the carbon footprint down to zero and have basically cheap endless electricity for the predicted 10 billion people on Earth may very well compensate for the downside.

December 5, 2012 at 16:05 Concerning Skylon:

The “point” is this- orbital speed is not the goal, escape velocity is. Getting to the moon with a worthwhile payload is the key to getting into space on Atomic Spaceships. LEO is just going in endless circles at very high altitude- going nowhere not fast enough. Chemical propulsion is appropriate for getting out of the magnetosphere without contamination the biosphere but that is all. The moon is the place to test, assemble, and launch the nuclear systems necessary to go anywhere in the solar system.
The holy grail is not Skylon or Falcon or anything resembling them; there is no cheap.
What is required is a couple thousand Isp and the only way to do that is beam propulsion. This line of reasoning ultimately ends with David Criswell’s concept of Lunar Solar Power.
The same magnitude of power necessary to even begin to think about any interstellar mission. Which, by the way, is what this blog (Centauri Dreams) is about.

December 6, 2012 at 16:24 –you cannot escape from the box you are trapped in- the money box. Whenever someone starts quoting economic formulae or strings of zeros it means only one thing; they are not going anywhere.

The reason to go into space is not filthy lucre. This is a question on which may hang the extinction or continuation of the human race. If money cannot be made then it will not happen is the common perception. It will not happen for money. The best way I have found to understand the problem is to look at the U.S. defense budget. It is so immense yet almost invisible to the public who do not question the vast mountains of treasure being expended on shiny cold war toys. It seems that endless billions of dollars are consigned to endless lists of defense contracts.
Anyone who says we do not have the money to accomplish massive projects in space is a liar or ignoring the trillion dollars a year that disappears into the military.
The truth is that weapons and black projects are easy money; they often have no mission or cannot do the supposed mission they are intended for. They do not have to- mostly they just sit somewhere or are “classified.” I know from personal experience that much of the money spent on defense goes into programs that do not work as advertised or do not even work at all.
Spaceships are hard money- they have to work. No profit there.

December 6, 2012 at 16:52

Private space propaganda has had the effect of making it seem all so easy. Electric propulsion will not get you through the Van Allen belts fast enough. So far only Hydrogen and Oxygen have the kick necessary to get people out there. The Rocket Equation is not going to change. As for “refueling in orbit”, that is the most magnificent job of pushing baloney ever accomplished. Repeat a lie enough and people believe it. Liquid hydrogen technology was perfected at tremendous expense but that technology does not include storing and transferring it in space. In fact- it has never even been attempted due to the nightmare plethora of problems that arise. It is ultra-cold exotic stuff that does not store well, requires pre-cooling with liquid helium to transfer, and since a transfer pre-cool cannot be done completely it generates boil-off. Re-liquifying the boil off results in the exothermic form of hydrogen which promulgates more boil-off in the storage tank. That is just the beginning; zero G effects and radiation make everything even more difficult.
This is why they store oxygen in high pressure tanks in the ISS. Hydrogen is not even a possibility.

Storable propellents make earth departure stages very large compared to hydrogen oxygen stages. What turns out to be the best solution is a Heavy Lift Vehicle just like the much maligned SLS. The Ayn Rand-in-space-club wail and gnash their teeth and dogpile anything that appears in the blogosphere criticizing their demi-god Musk and his hobby rocket tourist scam. But that does not change the fact that there is no cheap.

December 7, 2012 at 16:33

Reusability is a myth. It is why the RS-68 was built. The key to resuability is robust construction and maintainability. Both are impossible with rockets. Fill a egg thin container with super cold liquified gas, subject it to extremes of heat and vibration; it and the controlled bombs called rocket motors then get thrown away because it costs far more to inspect, rebuild, and fly them again. And anyway performing complex maintenance in space is not practical.
There is no unobtanium or wishalloy that is going to change that.

December 8, 2012 at 18:52

Concerning the statement that “everyone agrees” that lowering launch costs is key.

Really? It would seem that spending MORE money on space access would be key. Like that one trillion that will be spent on the F-35 stealth fighter over the next half century. It does not work as advertised and never will but shareholder checks are going out. This piece of junk may eventually drop some million dollar bombs on some illiterate mountain tribesmen to justify it’s existence. Considering we have reusable solid rocket boosters that put out 3.6 million pounds of thrust ready for production but instead complain they cost too much and want to go cheap, I think your point is actually ridiculous.

Concerning why I appear to angrily dismissive of private space;

I do not appear to be, I AM angrily dismissive. The are scamming the taxpayer. Hobby rockets and billionaut toursts are not a space program.

Considering how I seem to be mistaking cheap access to LEO as unimportant;

You seem to be mistaking Low Earth Orbit for deep space. You are talking about going in endless circles at very high altitude. I think it is a stupid waste of time to think that way. 30 years of tin cans going around and around is enough.

Concerning questioning the powers that be fairly and with respect about launch costs;

Fairness and respect have nothing to do with it. It is all about greed. The “recieved wisdom” is that oversight and transparency is above all things the most important factor in space exploration. We know this by the Apollo 1 fire- probably the single most important event in the race to the moon. It took some people burning to death to make us hold the profit motive in contempt and demand the job be done rigtht. We know this from the Space Shuttle Program that used a single cooked-up think tank study to promise ridiculously low prices per pound to orbit. And the pressures to launch and budget cuts that prevented any escape systems being fitted or retro-fitted causing the loss of two shuttle crews. There is no cheap.

Concerning my narrow view of practical propulsion schemes;

Like steam engines, we know the thermodynamic realities of rockets pretty well by now. Everything revolves around exhaust velocity which I hope can be grasped by comparing the numbers for rocket fuels and electric propulsion. Back in the 50′s ex-nazi/future nasa member Von Braun did calculations for reusing expensive rocket stages and came up with feeble payloads of a few tons delivered from massive lauch vehicles. Those calculations are just as valid today as they were then and lead to the same conclusion; our gravity well and rocket fuel exhaust velocities mean reusability is not practical. But there is obviously money to be made by lying about this and advertising the impossible.

December 10, 2012 at 19:37

Concerning the possibility of operating reusable launch vehicles and spacecraft like an airline;

Fantasy. You might as well be discussing star gates and hyperdrives. You get to your “hotel” and what happens next? Since liquid hydrogen depots are not going to happen for a very long time (I do not think ever) if you want to go anywhere except in circles you will have to board a Earth Departure Stage using storable propellents. The Isp numbers for UDMH and N204 mean your ticket to the moon is going be about the size of Saturn V first stage. Understanding these numbers is why we made it to the moon; it is obvious that the most efficient way is a direct launch from Earth by way of a Heavy Lift Vehicle with hydrogen upper stages.
This is the first thing that anyone interested in space travel should comprehend; THERE IS NO SUBSTITUE FOR A HLV WITH HYDROGEN UPPER STAGES!

This is the second thing that anyone interested in space travel should comprehend; CHEMICAL PROPULSION WILL ONLY GET YOU TO THE MOON- NUKES ARE NEEDED FOR HSF-BLO (human space flight beyond lunar orbit).

And this is the third thng that anyone interested in space travel should comprehend; MASSIVE GOVERNMENTAL RESOURCES ARE REQUIRED TO BUILD ATOMIC SPACESHIPS CAPABLE OF ESTABLISHING OFF WORLD COLONIES!
It is not the airlines and tourists are not going to Mars. It is a scam. There is no cheap.

December 10, 2012 at 20:17

Concerning space “entrepreneurs” hopes for the future;

They clearly hope that the public remains as stupid as they are for believing the fairy tales they are telling.

Any space program that can be called such begins where Apollo left off- with at least a Heavy Lift Vehicle launching every month landing payloads on the moon near ice deposits. There is no flexible path- it is very direct and determined by physics to be possible with the appropriate technology and massive funding. So far “new space” is just a way to funnel tax dollars into those “enterpreneurs” pockets for nothing in return.

December 12, 2012 at 14:45

“Getting to Mars with chemical rockets is totally possible if you start in LEO”

The last mission profile I read had a 100 ton Earth Departure Stage. There was no mention of how much radiation shielding the crew would have or if they had an artificial gravity system. The will suffer some permanent bone loss and serious debilitation without artificial gravity; without massive shielding on the order of a couple hundred tons the first bad solar event that heads their way will kill them if mutated pathogens do not do them in first.

Chemical Propulsion will only get you to the Moon. Nukes are required for Human Space Fight- Beyond Lunar Orbit (HSF-BLO). The mass of radiation shielding removes any possibility of chemical propulsion being practical. The possible half exception is launching a beam propelled stage from the Moon and use aerobraking to slow down on arrival to Mars. But that would require large solar power installations and antennae fields on the moon. And you might boost your way to Mars this way with a couple thousand Isp beam propelled Lunar Departure Stage but you have to get back.

In any case all the really interesting places to go- low gravity icy moons- are in the outer solar system. Mars may seem “just close enough” and being a planet may seem to make it more hospitable in some way but this, like reusability, is a myth.
Bombs are the only way to carry a massive shield and get out past the asteroid belt and back within the psychological limits of the crew- which are probably around 5 or 6 years. This Moonwater filled shielding shell massing a minimum of 400 tons is one of the key elements in a closed loop ecosystem capable of supplying clean air and water to a crew for those 5 or 6 years.

I do not think this situation is going to change when they inflate some playboy clubs for going in endless circles at very high altitude. Of course Private space advertises it that way.

December 12, 2012 at 20:31

Concerning the difficulty transporting nuclear fuel and an atomic spaceship to the Moon;

“pits” can be sent to the moon in a human-rated capsule with a very powerful escape system on the SLS. That is as safe as it gets and after a hundred and thirty shuttle missions with no escape system and with packaging designed to survive vehicle failure that is the risk that must be accepted. A typical deep space mission lasting 5 or more years would require a couple thousand of these pits. This nuclear material represents the base fuel that when formed for a pulse unit system has an Isp so far beyond any chemical fuel that you must admit any comparison is completely ridiculous.

While electric systems have high Isp’s, comparing their typically ounces of thrust to a bomb is even more ridiculous. The Moon has high quality ore to build alloy pusher plates in the thousands of tons range required- and thorium to fuel reactors for use in deep space. But in the short term thin discs can be sent to the moon on HLV’s and stacked to form thicker plates to construct the initial spaceships for the first bomb propelled deep space missions. The best destination for this mission is Ceres in my opinion. You can read more of my desperate plan to save the planet at–

voices.yahoo.com/water-bombs-8121778.html