Whoa There, Space Pilgrim

A few thoughts about space colonization for Monday morning:

- Let’s take it as granted that the goal of space colonization is to allow humans to live in space, not just visit any particular place in space and return. This means colonies, which are self-sufficient human-inhabited entities, in that the humans who live there will be staying there for the length of their lives, and reproducing there, and the humans they produce will live there as well. They are self-sufficient from the perspective of human genealogy, if not the organic necessities of human life, even though we tend to tack the latter onto the former.

- And as any reader of R. Crumb’s Genesis will tell you, the minimum required number of humans to beget a lineage of humans is two.

- But, we must assume that we’d care for a bit of genetic variation, and furthermore, in case there is an interstellar breakup, we might like to allow our galactic breeders to “keep their options open” as it were, and send more than two. Even if artificial insemination equipment is provided for, it is not guaranteed that two humans will be able to conceive and carry to term and raise healthy offspring, nor that those offspring will be able to do the same.

- So we begin to wonder, (as Charlie Stross did in an essay that inspired these thoughts) what is the minimum number of humans that must be included in a gene pool for successful reproduction and a flourishing population. We could ask some population experts, study the genotypes of some isolated populations, and come up with a minimum number, X.

- But why are we looking for a minimum number? Well, as the conventional wisdom dictates, the most expensive part of human life in space is life support. Water, air, exercise, sustenance, etc. To create a colony in which humans can breed and reproduce, they must be able to live, of course. And from what we know about where these colonies might exist, the first colonists will have to be sent with a significant supply of these supports, at least until they can begin to create their own perpetuating support system. And, why water, air, exercise, and sustenance are all cheap on Earth, getting them into outer space is costly. So, if we send the minimum to successfully reproduce until they can create a perpetuating support system, we have created the human colonial spore pod, which we can fire into space at targets with nice real estate, if no organic grocery stores.

- This belies a certain understanding of the human colonial urge. To basically design spore pods, space-capable Nina, Pinta, and Santa Marias, full of buckle-shod pilgrims, (or convicts. Or pious children) which we can send off to the edge of the world, hoping that it might stick onto what it is flung at. Which is really weird, when you think about it. Our species is really nothing more than a bunch of penguins standing at the edge of the ice, seeing who will get the closest so we can shove them into space and see if the space orca gets them. But this is what we do. We don’t inhabit places inhospitable to us for no reason. If one is going to accept the basic ideas of evolution, we have to assume that our species-desire to send humans up mountains and to the bottom of the ocean and to Newark airport and to the Moon is not just something we do because we’re bored or think it might somehow be less trouble than a cab to JFK, but something we do as part of a pattern that has seen us become the “dominant” (in whatever way that we are) species in the ecosystem of earth. The pattern of the human species is to perfect our technology in order to let us do the odd things we do. The more technology we develop, the more crazy things we start doing (though we do stop some efforts on occasion, like trying to seriously build ornithopters or transmute lead) and the wider our range in the ecosystem becomes, and the larger our population gets. At least so far.

- But these Ninas and Pintas and Santa Marias aren’t really successful in and of themselves. They go, and they land, and maybe they eat each other during the harsh Virginia winter (just a little taste won’t hurt) but not one of these single seeds has ever engendered an entire stable population. Barring any unforeseen ammonia-loving cephalopodic Squantos of Titan who break bread with our rocket-propelled breeder orgy, I can only imagine that the harsh realities of chemical systems not exactly like the one we thrive in will kill off these human-spore pods in large numbers. The way colonization seems to work here on Earth, is that either populations who have a certain set of ecosystematic-skills slowly migrate, adapting their sustenance practices as they go over thousands of years, or it requires such a critical mass of spore-pods to the point where they are not expanding their population to cover the new environment, but actually reproducing their old environment in the new place. And yet, they still die off rapidly, until the transformation is complete, and you get full cities and states with names like New Amsterdam and New England and cute little village greens and barns that look almost exactly like the greens and barns some thousands (or billions) or miles away.

- So why do we send the spore-pods rather than saving it all up until we can send an entire Europe out into space? Well, that isn’t the pattern. The penguins have their pattern, and we have ours. Certainly we’ll lose some space colonies, but we’ll keep sending them until we reach some sort of critical mass, that to me, seems like it will look a lot like what we call terra-forming. I like to think that the slow migratory way might be possible too (and it would be cooler) but we haven’t exactly been able to migrate to the oceans in the last several hundred thousand years, so the ecosystem of another planet might be a bit of a stretch.

- Terraforming, of course, comes from 20th century futurist roots, meaning “to make it like Earth.” Either by making another planet’s ecosystem conform to the features of Earth’s ecosystem that we require to survive, or, as I would include, making a fake ecosystem from scratch, both of which would no doubt pretty closely resemble Earth. Now that I think about it, that’s a pretty funny way to colonize other worlds. Kind of like colonizing America by dragging it back across the Atlantic and welding it onto Portugal. Not that it isn’t possible, but it kind of takes the fun out of living on Tatooine if some jerk real estate developer made it look like the suburbs of Chicago. The pattern will find its own way though, and whatever the terraformed planets must look like in order to sustain human life and reproduction is what they will look like, because I’m taking the inevitability of space colonization as a foregone conclusion.

- But if terraforming is the way to space colonization, and it must be done by a substantial segment of the population and not just a handful of huguenot-astronauts, and if this will be probably pretty expensive and no doubt require a lot of people perishing in cold cold space (and maybe, fingers-crossed, cannibalism), then it is starting to appear that this is not simply colonizing space, but the reproduction of Earth. Yes. Earth, itself, will begin to beget it’s own lineage.

- At this point, the Earth might be so crowded with humans, whom have already built condos on Mt. Everest and Foxcomm dormitories in deep ocean trenches, such that sending spore-pods of human beings to dine on the sweet, sweet flesh of their friends and co-workers while struggling desperately to transmute oxygen and carbon dioxide from methane might seem like a good career move. Hell, people might be lining up to go. As is the pattern of the human species, at least so far as we remember. As these desperate waves of Earth immigrants board the converted space galleons to head to a new life of spreading scarlet fever to the local life forms, Earth itself will be moving. If you consider the way that Europe, “the extent of the civilized world” got up and renamed a whole continent (more than that) after itself and its political ecosystem, terraforming doesn’t really sound like too big of an endeavor. It is human’s pattern not to slowly migrate and evolve, but to sweep and convert, riding on the fastest technology available. The clash of civilizations that was the colonial period on Earth was not just racism and brutality (though it certainly was) it was expediency. Would it be quicker to slowly make peace with every band of humans living in stable harmony on the land, to trade equally and fairly, and to wait for them to invite a good proportion of another continent’s population to come and live with them and breed the place into a copy of the old continent, or just to kill any who seemed troublesome, lie to the rest, and enslave large numbers of the inhabitants of a less attractive continent to provide the building power to do it? I give you: History! The evolution and unfolding of the human pattern. It’s the human way–the only way we know how.

- The human species reproduces itself through the ecosystem that sustains human life. So, it is pretty straight forward, I think, that the human species will eventually begin reproducing this ecosystem anywhere it can manage through technology to sustain that ecosystem. And then, of course, reproducing itself within that ecosystem. Because like it or not, the human species is part of the Earth’s ecosystem, and it IS the Earth’s ecosystem, if not the crowning jewel of it as we might like to imagine, then the cinderblock of the Earth’s ecosystem–the ugly, reproducible, only-strong-enough-for-the-task, easily graffitoed, totally necessary fundamental component of urban blight that we are.

- If/when space colonization happens, the Earth will have learned to breed. We are its spore.