Review: More Everything Foreverby Jeff Foust
|
| “Mars would make Antarctica look like Tahiti,” he writes, which may be an understatement. |
There was less about another similar topic: space settlements, once better known as space colonies. Most of the presentations on that topic were from student groups (curiously overrepresented by schools in India and Romania) as part of a student space settlement competition. While space solar power has seen a new surge of interest in recent years, space settlements have not, even at a conference by a group whose roots go back to the rallying cry of “L5 in ’95”—as in 1995.
That came to mind while reading the new book More Everything Forever by science writer Adam Becker. In one chapter, he brings up the space settlements envisioned a half-century ago by Gerard K. O’Neill in large part because of the impressions those plans had on a high school student in early 1980s Florida by the name of Jeff Bezos. Those settlements have become part of the (very) long-term vision that Bezos has espoused at Blue Origin of having millions of people living and working in space.
Of course, we seem little closer to O’Neillian space settlements in 2025 than we were in 1975, and Becker blames it on… mass drivers? “The technological advances that O’Neill was hoping would enable the mass driver simply didn’t work out,” he writes of the “failure of O’Neill’s mass driver.” But the mass driver didn’t fail; it has simply never been built at any scale because it was intended for use on the Moon and asteroids, not the Earth, something Becker only parenthetically acknowledges later. There are lots of reasons why we’re made little progress on space settlements in L5, such as overly optimistic assessments of their cost and difficulty, not to mention the failure of the Space Shuttle to be the low-cost space transportation system envisioned at the time. Mass drivers have little to do with it.
This is one example of a trend in the book of critiquing visions of humans living in space, be it in free space or on the Moon or Mars. (To give you a hint of what the author thinks of them, the chapter in the book that covers them is titled “Dumpster Fire Space Utopia.”) He notes, quite accurately, how difficult it would be for people to live on the Moon or Mars given challenges from radiation to toxic regolith. “Mars would make Antarctica look like Tahiti,” he writes, which may be an understatement.
Becker, though, leaps from the current challenges, if not impossibilities, of space settlement to conclude that it can never be done. “So building a large city on Mars probably isn’t possible in the first place,” he writes. The problem, though, is confusing that which can’t be done now with that which can’t be done ever. Are these problems truly and permanently insurmountable, or simply beyond our current capabilities, like trying to build an F-35 in 1925? (A key factor in trying to overcome those problems will be why people will want to live on the Moon and Mars, and how badly they want to do so, something the space community has been grappling with for decades.)
The discussion of “space utopias” is one chapter in a larger book that examines, quite critically, topics like artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and philosophies such as “effective altruism” that are popular among many in Silicon Valley. The inclusion of the criticism of human space settlement is based on some of those figures in earlier chapters who projected a future where humanity would expand beyond Earth into the solar system, galaxy, and even the universe.
| “Going to space would fix everything. Technology—specifically, technology to get off the Earth—was the answer to all the world’s ills. But then I grew up,” he writes. |
It also was personal for Becker. In the book’s final chapter, he describes his love of Star Trek as a child, one that shaped a worldview that space “would solve many—maybe even all—of the problems here on Earth.” He no longer believes that to be the case, convinced now that it is an “outdated vision of the future.” That includes being oddly dismissive of the Overview Effect, the worldview-shifting experience of spaceflight that many space travelers have reported. John Glenn went to space and later became a politician, he noted, then “was implicated in the Keating Five scandal.” Glenn, of course, had corruption charges dropped against him, which Becker does not mention.
“Going to space would fix everything. Technology—specifically, technology to get off the Earth—was the answer to all the world’s ills. But then I grew up,” he writes, dismissing those earlier visions of spaceflight. “We aren’t leaving the Earth.” (Reading statements like that helped explain why the publisher declined requests from this publication for a review copy.)
He notes he is not sure what will replace that vision of space as the future. The only concrete proposal he provides is to get rid of billionaires—or, rather, their billions, suggesting that an individual’s net worth be capped at $500 million: “there’s no reason we as a society have to put up with the continued existence of billionaires,” who he argues help “fringe philosophies” thrive. (In the book’s acknowledgement section, he thanks, ironically, the financial support he received from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a nonprofit established by a businessman who was a billionaire in today’s dollars at the time of his death.)
Space, of course, was never going to be the only solution to all our problems, but the idea that it is useless is equally flawed. Most of the space industry has avoided those false extremes, focusing on how to instead make it easier to access space and work there, and make use of space to improve society and perhaps make some money. Maybe one day—or decade or century—that will lead to space settlement on the Moon, Mars, or at L5. You may need to wait longer for a space elevator, though.
Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted.