SPACE ON EARTH Saving Our World by Seeking Others
CHARLES S. COCKELL
macmillanscience
e-book
Space on Earth
This page intentionally left blank
Space on Earth Saving our world by seeking others Charles S. Cockell
Macmillan London New York Melbourne
Hong Kong
© Charles S. Cockell 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2007 by Macmillan Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00752–9 ISBN-10: 0–230–00752–X This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 16
9 15
8 14
7 13
6 12
5 11
4 10
3 09
Printed and bound in China
2 08
1 07
contents
preface vii acknowledgments xiii earthrise 1 chapter 1 new worlds 14 chapter 2 the human adventure 32 chapter 3 rich bounty and new crises 45 chapter 4 new views on an old world 67 chapter 5 green living 89 chapter 6 greening the universe 111 chapter 7 earth and space 131 chapter 8 new alliances 153 chapter 9 a habitable world – summary 171 bibliography and further reading 176 index 180
This page intentionally left blank
preface
Space exploration is the investigation, by means of manned and unmanned spacecraft, of the reaches of the universe beyond Earth’s atmosphere and the use of the information so gained to increase knowledge of the cosmos and benefit humanity. Environmentalism is a political and ethical movement that seeks to improve and protect the quality of the natural environment through changes to environmentally harmful human activities; through the adoption of forms of political, economic, and social organization that are thought to be necessary for, or at least conducive to, the benign treatment of the environment by humans; and through a reassessment of humanity's relationship with nature. Definitions from the online Encyclopaedia Britannica (July 2006) Of all the challenges that society now faces, the wise use of the Earth’s biosphere and the successful opening of the space frontier are the most ambitious and the most pressing. Although
vii
viii
preface
these two challenges stand side by side as projects of immense importance and urgency, they are usually treated as being completely different, and sometimes even as antagonistic to each other. Many people feel that space settlement is a waste of money and time while problems on Earth remain acute. The view that environmentalists are introspective and have little vision for the exploration and settlement of the space frontier is also a sweeping generalization, but one that is common among protagonists of mankind’s push for the stars. About a year ago I gave a lecture on the human exploration of Mars. A member of the audience asked why we were spending money exploring space when there were so many problems to solve on Earth. I explained my position with a simple analogy – imagine that we had just drunk a cup of tea and put the cup in the kitchen sink. Would this mean that we should decline all offers to go and drink tea in another person’s house until we have cleaned our own cup? The answer is clear – the two situations are not mutually exclusive. We can go and drink tea with friends, and clean up our own cup before or after we visit them – we can do both. So I suggested that we can solve environmental problems and explore space. Exploring space does not mean that we do not care about the Earth; nor does it mean that we are obliged to solve all our problems on Earth before launching adventures beyond. After the lecture I thought about what I had said and I realized that I had missed the point. Environmentalism and space exploration are not only perfectly compatible, but positively beneficial to each other. We explore space because it helps us care for the Earth and we explore the Earth’s environments and try to protect them because it helps us get into space. The links are so tight that one can argue that environmentalism and space settlement have actually one and the same objective – creating sustainable human communities in the cosmos – whether they are on the Earth or on any other planet or moon.
preface
ix
Why should we care about these links and trying to strengthen them? To strengthen these connections will vastly improve our ability to solve environmental problems, and it will increase our chances of successfully settling space, with all the resources it has to offer. In continuing a philosophy of division between home and away we miss an opportunity to improve the human condition. As I write this book, New Orleans is reeling from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This vibrant city, known around the world for its culture, was reduced to a primitive state of existence in two days. But Katrina’s arrival was not unexpected. Satellites in space had observed its approach: the fruits of the exploration of space were available to save the people of New Orleans, if not the city itself. Environmental scientists had modelled the effects of hurricanes on the city and knew what the consequences of the breach of its protective levees would be. We can argue about the details of this disaster – there were complex policy errors. But fundamentally, there was a disconnect between the images of the hurricane pouring in from space and the knowledge on the ground of what a hurricane could do to the local environment – a disconnect that was decades old. The preparations for the disaster, and the impact on the people, were such that the satellites might just as well have never existed. There are an enormous variety of definitions of ‘environmentalism’ and ‘space exploration’. I take ‘space exploration’ to mean any endeavours involving our robotic and human probing and settlement of the cosmos, whether by governments, private industries or individuals. When I talk about ‘environmentalism’, I mean more than advocacy and activism. My definition takes in the science of understanding our environment, including ecology, biology and earth sciences: those disciplines that seek to understand the past, present and future habitability of the Earth.
x
preface
To begin with, we explore some of the scientific and technological links between understanding and caring for the Earth and settling space. Then we will venture into looking at ‘green’ ways of living and how space settlers and those who live sustainably on Earth share common goals. Next we’ll explore some of the ethical links that bind space settlement and the Earth’s environment. Finally, we will look at some suggestions about how these links might be deepened to forge a richer cooperation between space settlers and environmentalists. This book is, to some degree, a polemic. It expresses a point of view as much as it is a description of science and technology. I hope to illustrate that an environmentally aware society and a space-faring society are not an ‘either/or’ choice for humanity. I do not claim that these connections are new or even controversial; space agencies have been observing the Earth and its environment from space for decades. What I attempt is a synthesis. I suggest that a more systemic link between environmentalism and space exploration should be attempted at many social and technical levels – to such a degree that they dissolve into one and the same objective. However, I also argue that despite these links, neither activity is a panacea for our problems. For example, the exploitation of endless space resources, such as metals from the asteroids, would precipitate one of the most profound environmental crises on Earth by fuelling mass consumption. This potential crisis is another reason for the environmental and space settlement communities to come together and pool their intellectual and practical resources to take on these problems. We live in a challenging, significant, period of history. We have come face to face with the need to address serious environmental problems, and we have realized that the scale of human industrial activity is influencing the health of the Earth’s biosphere. At the same time, the technology is emerging to open
preface
xi
the space frontier, and to open it by government and private enterprise. These two challenges can be addressed as a single goal. Charles S. Cockell July 2006
This page intentionally left blank
acknowledgments
This book is a synthesis of a number of trains of thought, and I am indebted to many friends and colleagues for lively and interesting discussions. The opportunity to work professionally with those involved in the exploration of space and those involved in environmental work has yielded fascinating insights into the synergies between these areas. Thanks are due to colleagues and other individuals at the Open University, NASA, ESA, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Russian Federal Space Agency, the British Antarctic Survey and other institutions who have provided insights into their work. I am particularly grateful to Oliver Angerer of the European Space Agency, Darlene Lim of the NASA Ames Research Center, Harriet Jones of the University of East Anglia, Rocky Persaud of the University of Toronto, Andrew Schuerger of NASA Kennedy Space Center and Dale Stokes of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for critical reviews of some of the chapters. I am grateful to Sara Abdulla for her editorial guidance. I thank those who have taken part in the Earth and Space Foundation, and particularly those expeditions that have been funded through the Foundation. These expeditions have often provided practical examples of the links between environmentalism and space exploration, and thus inspiration for some of the examples discussed in this book. xiii
xiv
acknowledgments
Most of all, I am alive at a time when humans have recognized the importance of space settlement and the care of the Earth’s environment. I hope that this book will provide some further contribution to the debate on where these two activities should take us, and how they should be unified.
earthrise
The settlement of space and the environmental stewardship of the Earth are one and the same challenge
‘Earthrise’ is the simplest English word that summarizes what this book is about. Earthrise is the sight of our planet appearing over the horizon on a distant world – a spectacle enjoyed many times by the Apollo astronauts on the Moon. The word is powerful because only a spacefaring civilization can experience it. To see Earthrise you have to be a species that, as well as understanding its own home, has the intellectual capability to dream of moving beyond that world, and the practical skills to do so. The word also encapsulates that we are looking at the Earth rather than anywhere else – whatever planet or moon we happen to be on. To look back to watch an Earthrise you must be a species that has the vision to go into space, and the vision to contemplate how its achievements might help it understand and appreciate the home world. The experience of Earthrise belongs to a species that has an understanding of the manifest connections between settling space and responsibly using the best planet it has. Every generation has a set of social and technical challenges that dominate its vision for the future and absorb its intellectual 1
2
space on earth
energies. For the ancient Egyptians it was building magnificent pyramids. For Westerners of the early 20th century it was reaching for the skies: the science of heavier-than-air flying machines. At the beginning of the third millennium, civilization is confronted with challenges that are not so much about improving our quality of living or our architectural legacy, but rather are vital to our very survival: the sustainable and responsible use of Earth’s environment and the permanent settlement of outer space. The first great social challenge, to care for and protect the Earth, already occupies the minds of many scientists, engineers and policymakers. In 2000 the population of the Earth had just reached six billion people and it is estimated to increase to an astonishing nine billion by 2050. This population is large enough to change our environment on a global scale and in some profound ways. Spread all these people over a ball of rock with a radius of a mere 6,400 kilometres and it is easy to see that we can influence the environment in potentially quite drastic ways with proliferating industries and waste. In the 1970s the environmental movement made us recognize that humans can alter conditions on a planetary scale. Only after 30 years of campaigning has environmentalism moved from the radical to the mainstream. Efforts to consolidate a global response to our environmental problems have not always been easy. The Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in Kyoto, Japan in 1997, and devised to help stabilize the production of greenhouse gases, has been a contentious agreement. Its proposed goal – to cut greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized countries by 5.2% compared to 1990 – has been endorsed by many nations, but remains intensely controversial to those who wonder about the veracity of global warming. Gallant and successful efforts have been made to solve some of our environmental problems. International law has come into force to prevent the trade in endangered animals. Dumping waste into the oceans is now controlled globally by the Conven-
earthrise
3
tion on the Prevention of Marine Pollution. Visionary programmes have been started, such as the World Conservation Strategy, drawn up in 1980 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, which put the spotlight on the crucial need to try to use species and ecosystems sustainably, preventing their permanent destruction. From curtailing pollution to reducing the deterioration of our natural environment, these sorts of international agreement help us to act globally to control our effects on the health of the Earth. The second challenge of similar proportions that we must tackle is the settlement of space. The vast expanse of the Universe beyond Earth offers answers to some of our most fundamental questions, such as the existence of life on other planets and the origins of stars, planets and the Universe itself. More than this, the exploration of space, like environmentalism, is vital to our existence. We are vulnerable to asteroid impacts and the depletion of many resources on Earth. By moving into space and exploring it, we will work out how to protect the Earth from cosmic threats and how our limited resources can be augmented, or replaced, with the endless minerals and wealth of space. The road to space has not been easy. The dreams of large space colonies that many had in the 1960s have not been realized. Gerard O’Neill, a Princeton University physics professor, who founded the Space Studies Institute in the USA in 1977, proffered a vision of gigantic spaceships holding tens of thousands of people. These communities would live permanently in space and their experiences and practical knowledge would pave the way for exploration and settlement beyond our Solar System. Many of his generation believed that by the turn of the millennium these homes in space would already be built. This does not mean that space exploration has failed; it means that society has not grasped the nettle in quite the way some had hoped. Important strides have been made.
4
space on earth
The unmanned exploration of space during the last 50 years has been astonishing. Spacecraft have flown inwards towards the Sun to visit the baking planet Mercury and the cloudenshrouded hell that is Venus. Spacecraft have flown outwards to visit the frozen wastes of Mars and the intriguing moons of Jupiter. Space probes have photographed the rings of Saturn (and one has landed on its largest moon, Titan), and they have sent back remarkable photographs of the blue haze of Neptune. The tiny little space probe Pioneer 10 has left the Solar System altogether and is now on a two-million-year solitary journey to the constellation Taurus. It even carries a plaque offering greetings to any potential aliens that might stumble across it in the abyss of space, and wonder who built it. Triumphs in the human exploration of space have been impressive. Many people might question the state of progress since the Apollo Moon landings, but much has been learned on space stations about human adaptation to long duration space flight. This work doesn’t get quite the same publicity as landing on the Moon, but it is essential, quiet research and study that has been going on behind the scenes. Such research is critical if humans are going to learn to live and work in space. The knowledge gained by engineers and scientists on the Russian space station, Mir, during the 1990s is impressive when one considers how difficult and risky it is to get off the Earth. Scientists now have some fairly good ideas about how the human body adjusts to life in low gravity. The private settlement of space, which is an emerging new endeavour, will encourage even more rapid advances in the ability of everyday people to travel to other planets. Neither of these challenges – environmental stewardship and the settlement of space – can be sidelined. If we ignore the Earth and get on with our lives, we will very soon cause ourselves, and the rest of the biosphere, serious disruption. Had scientists not detected the ozone hole by the careful study of the Earth’s
earthrise
5
upper atmosphere in the 1970s, people in Australia and New Zealand might now have an even more serious problem with sunburn and skin cancer than they already have. To deal with the ozone hole problem, the international community developed the Montreal Protocol of 1987, which controls the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the substances partly responsible for ozone depletion. The Protocol is one of the great success stories of taking environmental research through to international agreements, and thus to an improvement in the planet’s health. It is thought that if all nations continue to comply with the Protocol, the ozone layer will reach pre-hole levels by about 2050. Studying the environment has in this case yielded astonishingly useful results. Society has to continue to meet this challenge of understanding the Earth and its biosphere throughout the third millennium so that we can manage our affairs and our impacts on the planetary lifesupport system upon which we all rely. Similarly, if we disregard the opportunity to explore space, we will ignore resources and insights essential to our long-term future. Beyond the orbit of the planet Mars are pieces of rock – asteroids – left over from the formation of our Solar System. A few of these rocks pass closer to the Earth and might be easier to reach. Some of these asteroids contain enough nickel and iron that they are, by themselves, worth over $1 billion. We don’t want to go into space only to make money, but this simple number focuses the mind on the incredible scale of resources in space that will drive the human future. The scientific insights that we get from exploring space deepen our understanding of the origins of life, and thus our place within the evolution of the Universe. The planets and moons of the Solar System, such as Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter that may hide beneath its surface a liquid water ocean, offer glimpses into the possibility of life in our Universe.
6
space on earth
The great expanses of the cosmos offer hope for a limitless future of industrial, technical and scientific opportunity. This is a vision, but it is one with very practical implications. To stay only on the Earth and not to venture into space would be like locking yourself into a supermarket and developing your whole life solely within the confines of that single store, when a simple push of the door would yield an entire high street, with its diversity of shops. For humanity to decide to stay on Earth indefinitely and to reject a future in space would be a total failure of our sense of vision. The practical limitations we impose on ourselves by such a short-sighted view of our future are vast, if difficult to quantify now. For the past century people have generally seen understanding the Earth’s environment and moving into space as two very separate problems, and different organizations have been set up to deal with them. Sometimes the two groups are even antagonistic to each other. It is not uncommon to find environmentalists who regard space exploration as a waste of money, an activity that draws off resources that should be used for solving problems here at home. On the other hand, I have met space settlers who regard environmentalists as Luddites, peering inwards to the wounds of Mother Earth and lacking the vision to look outwards to the endless resources and opportunities in space. These perceived differences are superficial. Environmentalists and space explorers actually share the same overarching goal – the sustainable use of the environment around us; they just differ in the location they focus on. If we look at each community through the eyes of the other, we can think of environmentalists as people who believe in the successful colonization of planet Earth, a laudable and grandiose vision of space exploration. Space explorers, on the other hand, are an ambitious set of environmentalists who would like to extend human living to the
earthrise
7
surface of other worlds. In the process of pursuing these common ambitions, both groups of people reflect very practical and deep connections between them. Just one example of how they can communicate with each other illustrates my point. Today, engineers are concerned with the development of abrasion-resistant, efficient solar panels. The panels are being perfected for the roofs of energy-efficient houses that use less fossil fuel, thus reducing our dependence on these finite sources of energy and reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases. Although the initial cost of solar panels can be high, once installed they can, over time, become cost-effective for individual households. By improving their efficiency, the area of the panels needed to create enough power for a home can be reduced, making them less costly. Efficient solar panels will be needed on the dust-ridden surface of Mars for future human bases. Giant dust storms that can rage across the surface of the planet for a third of the year will scour the surfaces of solar panels. As solar power might be used to gather energy for these future settlements, making sure they can stand up to the harsh Martian environment is important. Abrasion resistance will allow them to maintain their power output for longer and minimize the amount of upkeep they need. As Mars is further from the Sun than the Earth, and light levels are about half of what you would get in your garden on Earth, efficiency is important. The fewer solar panels that are needed, the easier living on the Martian surface will be. Engineers concerned with renewable energy on Earth might focus their minds on reliable solar energy for the future human settlement of Mars. And those who design solar panels for Martian exploration might think about how their ideas might accelerate the development of this technology for use on Earth, particularly in cloudy and dusty regions of the world. Many of the problems are similar.
8
space on earth
Interdisciplinary connections are almost always fertile, and the environmental and space exploration communities, by encouraging a greater crossover in ideas, discussions and practical technologies, could enhance their collective contributions to advancing the human condition. In short, their amalgamation would accelerate the improving conditions of humanity faster than each discipline acting separately. More importantly, if we fail to enhance and develop these links, we will lose important opportunities. As we’ll see later in the book, space debris – pieces of defunct spacecraft and satellites orbiting the Earth – endanger the operation of many spacecraft launched into orbit around the Earth. If the space engineering community had fostered a stronger link with environmentalists earlier – applying the concepts of preservation of land on Earth to the preservation and care of Earth’s orbits – perhaps this problem would have been considered earlier and methods to mitigate it implemented. Examples of the common ground between the two great challenges – like the Martian and Earth-bound solar panels – are innumerable. A modicum of this cross-fertilization does exist already. Scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center in California are designing miniature greenhouses for astronauts to grow food on board the International Space Station. These same researchers are also involved in designing automated greenhouses for Earth’s extreme environments, where food can be difficult to grow, such as in remote towns in Alaska. The technologies and sensors needed to make a miniature greenhouse look after itself on a space station are similar to those that can be used to grow crops in poorly populated regions on Earth, where continuous maintenance might not be possible. But these connections are not wide and institutionalized. They tend to occur through serendipitous collaborations born of expediency or short- to medium-term common interests.
earthrise
9
Many people are obviously quite concerned about their potential employability if there are cutbacks in the funding of space exploration and they make good efforts to ensure that their expertise has more earthly applications. Very pragmatic reasons have created some of the connections.
As the Earth is just a planet, it should not be too surprising that there might be regions of it in which the environment overlaps that of parts of other rocky planetary bodies in the Solar System. Temperatures at the Earth’s poles, such as in Antarctica, are similar to some regions near the equator of Mars at certain times of the year. In extreme environments that harbour life, scientists are gathering the essential knowledge to explore other planets for signs of life. Where the continents spread apart in the depths of the oceans, hot water spews out at a searing 300 °C. Surrounding these vents is microbial life that can grow at over 100 °C, and the pressures are a thousand times those that you and I experience. These remarkable vents have stirred curiosity about Europa, an intriguing moon of the giant gas planet Jupiter. Roughly the same size as our own Moon, Europa has a surface of ice that appears to have an ocean underneath it. Although Europa is too far from the Sun for solar warmth to melt its ice, the buckling of the moon, caused by the massive tidal forces that Jupiter exerts, has created a liquid water ocean under the crust. Where the water meets the solid rocky core, there may well be vents. Are they home to life forms? We don’t know. But the study of extreme environments on Earth and the
10
space on earth
life they contain is helping direct searches in potentially lifesupporting environments on other planets, and giving us a good reason to look after them. Without the guidance of Earth’s environments, space agencies would be prodding in the dark, literally – wildly sending space missions to random planets and moons to seek life. The study of the extremes of life on Earth, driven by the desire to find the outer limits for life in general, and the interest in understanding how life adapts to the conditions on Earth, can help inform space missions. As the Earth is just part of the cosmos, it is influenced by the vagaries of changes in our astronomical environment. During the last few decades astronomers have become increasingly aware of the threat of asteroid and comet impacts. A single rock ten kilometres across, like the one thought to have brought an end to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, can drastically alter the conditions for life, causing widespread extinctions. Anyone with a concern for the state of our biosphere should know something about these objects – they have been very influential in the past. They can bring to bear upon the environment changes that far exceed the current shifts being caused by humans. To understand our own impact on the environment, and how it fits into the history of life on Earth, we should know about asteroids and comets, and how often they can disturb the biosphere. They are a rude reminder that planet Earth and space are not conveniently separated where the atmosphere ends. One of the most obvious reasons that environmentalists and space explorers keep apart is that settling space and managing the Earth seem such daunting problems. Space explorers sometimes feel that Earth’s problems are insurmountable and that we should abandon it and spread into the cosmos, away from our dependence on the biosphere. This vision has some elements of truth in it. In the long term it is true that we will have to escape
earthrise
11
the Earth and go somewhere else. Our biosphere is ultimately doomed. The Earth will eventually be engulfed by the fireball of the Sun as it turns into a Red Giant in five billion years. Even in about two billion years time the biosphere will overheat from a natural runaway greenhouse effect, as the Sun’s luminosity increases. However, this problem is so far in the future as to be practically moot. Many of the people that pursue this line of logic sometimes forget that most of the six and a half billion of us (and rising) on Earth are not going anywhere for a long time, and that we should indeed solve the environmental problems at home. It is also true that there are environmentalists who regard the Earth as very special and that we should exert our energies on looking after it, rather than finding alternatives. Their view has truth in it, in the sense that there is no other planet in our Solar System that has a biosphere so suited to carbon-based life as Earth. Although some planets are more Earth-like than others, there is no planet that will sustain humans in the luxurious green paradise to which many of us have become accustomed. Environmentalists are right: the Earth is very special. It is sometimes even said that the environmental movement itself was caused by our ability to see the Earth from space, that to see a single round globe finally helped us understand its finiteness. Whether it did, or whether in fact the environmental movement was caused by multiple developments, is open to some debate. During the 1970s the cumulative concentration of the insecticide DDT in the food chain came to light, publicized through Rachel Carson’s influential book Silent Spring. Nuclear power was gaining favour during the oil crisis and the spread of nuclear weapons was contributing to a new type of environmental activism. There were other public and important environmental debates around the world that were probably very important for changing public perceptions at this time,
12
space on earth
awakening a more widespread environmental consciousness. Images of the Earth from space have undoubtedly given us an unprecedented understanding of the scale of ‘Earth’. These images have, at the very least, made it easier for us to comprehend the idea of humans having a globally significant impact on the environment. Perhaps my favourite way of summarizing the common vision of environmentalists and space explorers is to think of the Earth as a spaceship. To call our planet ‘Spaceship Earth’ has become something of a cliché. The phrase is often used glibly as a means of conveying the fact that we live on a small planet that we need to take care of. Actually it is a very important phrase, because it also underlines the point that learning to live on Earth is identical to living on any other spaceship, whether that is a space station in orbit around the Earth or a base on another planet, such as Mars. It is ironic that many people who criticize the cost of space programmes prefer to think of planet Earth as a spaceship. By referring to the Earth in this way, they have, perhaps completely unintentionally, agreed that they have the same objective as space settlers, except that they like to focus on Spaceship Earth rather than the International Space Station or human missions to Mars. The spaceship analogy is useful because it focuses the mind on the types of things that concern both environmentalists and space explorers. The ‘life-support’ system of spaceship Earth is the biosphere. Environmentalists’ concerns are the health of the atmosphere, recycling our waste, looking after the water supply, producing sufficient food, ensuring that we don’t pollute our surroundings, and attempting to minimize the damage to other living things sharing the Earth with us. On space stations in orbit around the Earth, engineers are concerned with exactly the same things, albeit on a much smaller scale. They worry about the composition of the atmo-
earthrise
13
sphere and the recycling of waste in the ship, and ensuring that it does not build up to toxic levels. They expend great efforts to ensure that the water supply remains fresh and is not polluted. If there are plants and animals, they are keen to ensure that human waste and contamination do not destroy this other life, particularly if the inhabitants of the ship are to use it as food, and depend upon it for their lives. One could justifiably claim that environmentalists are much more ambitious space settlers than those who populate the world’s space programmes. They have chosen to understand and care for the life-support system of a planetary-scale spaceship; this is a much more difficult task than looking after the equivalent systems of any ship so far designed by space engineers. The lifesupport system of the Earth is an extraordinarily complex machine that has evolved over more than four billion years. Its many interactions and feedback loops dwarf any machine made so far by people, and it is a very successful machine. Space stations and their life-support systems are inherently flawed, and do eventually break down; yet we built them and we know how they work. Trying to operate and understand the system that surrounds us on Earth is an immense undertaking. Despite these obvious challenges, there are parallels between the mighty task of looking after the biosphere and the comparatively trivial task of tending our feeble machines in space. To help us prepare for a life in space we need to go in search of places where the machinery of the Earth’s biosphere operates at its limits. In places such as freezing polar ice sheets and baked deserts, we begin to learn how life can keep a hold on Earth when it is challenged by some of the most extreme conditions possible, conditions that we will eventually encounter on other planets. The colourful variety of life forms that live in some of these hostile habitats and the way in which they have adapted to cope will help us to successfully live in the cosmos.
1 new worlds
Environmentalists are leading the way in the exploration and settlement of new worlds
It is difficult to believe that there are places on Earth that could resemble the hellish radiation-seared surface of the Moon, or the dust-ridden surface of Mars. But across our planet are locations that in one way or another do resemble the surfaces of other worlds. From hot springs to icy wastes, there are many environments on Earth that can tell us about conditions on other planets and moons. It is in these strange environments that we are preparing ourselves for the exploration and settlement of space. No environment on Earth is completely similar to that on other planets. We have an atmosphere that protects us from some of the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation and provides us with the oxygen that we need to breathe. Mars has no significant amount of oxygen and the Moon has an atmosphere that is so thin it is virtually unmeasurable. In fact, no planet in our Solar System, other than the Earth, has an atmosphere that can sustain humans. But there is much more to living in space than the need for an atmosphere, and if you are willing to put some obvious differences aside, you can find places even on our rela14
new worlds
15
tively benign planet that tell you something about Mars, for example. The average temperature on Mars is a chilly –60 °C – temperatures often dip this low during the Antarctic winter. Temperatures come close in the Arctic too, particularly during the permanent darkness of the winter months; in the Canadian high Arctic, temperatures drop to below –40 °C during February. Hot deserts share other similarities with the Martian surface. The Sahara in Africa and the Atacama in Chile are extremely arid (the Atacama gets less than one centimetre of rain a year), making their surfaces desiccated and inhospitable to life. Mars too is a desiccated desert planet. By studying the Earth’s deserts, their geology and how life survives in their dry and cold conditions, we can learn something about the geology of Mars and, if we are lucky, maybe about life as well. Work carried out in these diverse places on Earth leads the way in the exploration and settlement of new worlds. Drawing attention to the value of these pristine environments has given us good reason to care for them, and space is becoming a new reason to protect some of the most extreme places on Earth from environmental impoverishment. From the earliest days of space exploration, the freezing polar regions have attracted particular interest. The Viking landers, sent to Mars to seek life in the 1970s, had their hardware and life detection equipment tested in Antarctica. The results they sent back from Mars were controversial, and many debate even to this day whether they found life or not, but the polar regions were quickly understood by NASA to host some of the closest environments we could get to places on Mars that would help calibrate attempts to find life elsewhere. In the frozen valleys that lie on the edges of Antarctica, near the American McMurdo Station on Ross Island, scientists discovered lakes that were covered in ice all year round. Beneath their
16
space on earth
permanently frozen surfaces there is plenty of liquid water. Situated in the ‘Dry Valleys’, so called because they receive no precipitation, these lakes get their water from melted snow that percolates into the valleys when the snow cover and ice melt during spring and summer. Within the lake water, microscopic life thrives. Antarctica contains 70% of the world’s freshwater, almost all of it locked up in ice and snow. Liquid water is essential to life – it is used as a solvent for biochemical reactions. As far as we know, there are no life forms that can directly use snow or ice as a source of this most vital substance. It simply is not energetically favourable to transform ice into a liquid state. Even the colourful snow algae that sometimes cause red and green blotches in the snow where they grow depend on melting for their metabolism to function. So, surprisingly, desiccation is a major problem for life in Antarctica because of the rarity of liquid water. Any life that can get a foothold on that continent is not helped along by the extremely cold temperatures. These slow metabolic processes to a snail’s pace, and if ice crystals form within cells they can cause irreversible damage. Temperatures can be remarkably low – Russia’s Vostok Station in the Antarctic interior holds the lowest temperature record for the Earth. At –89 °C, the record is about 30 degrees colder than even the Martian North Pole in summer. During the 1980s, NASA scientists began to explore the Dry Valley lakes of Antarctica. They found an astonishing menagerie of microscopic life. On the bottom of the lakes are carpets of cyanobacteria – single-celled photosynthetic organisms that harvest energy from sunlight. Beneath the ice, just enough light penetrates for photosynthesis, and the ice cover gives them protection from harmful ultraviolet radiation. With water, nutrients and light, the bacteria can grow and cover the bottom of the
new worlds
17
lake, surrounded by an environment that is otherwise completely hostile to life. These carpets of microbes produce so much oxygen gas that the mats become buoyant and begin to lift off the bottom of the lake and ascend to the ice above, like microbial balloons, earning them the nickname ‘lift-off’ mats from microbe aficionados. Some of these mats form conical shapes, some look like brown doormats and some form a scummy type of green mass. Within them are many species, like a microscopic zoo bound together by the thin filaments of cyanobacteria. The mats are often layered from the many generations of microbes laid down, one on top of the other, forming what looks like a tiny layered cake. Within this layered environment many different chemical reactions occur over distances of just millimetres. The products of one microbe may be the food for those living underneath, and so a complex cycle of elements and compounds is established within the micro-environment. Some of these microbes, like the cyanobacteria, use photosynthesis, while others do not rely on the sunlight at all. Instead, they use chemical compounds as a source of energy and can dwell under the surface of the mat, where sunlight may be completely extinguished by the communities living above them. The cyanobacteria are believed to be an old group of microbes, possibly dating back to the earliest periods of Earth’s history, some three and a half billion years ago, after life first arose on our planet. They are not unique to this environment. Cyanobacteria also turn up in volcanic hot springs, on the walls of buildings, and in the oceans. They are, in other words, generalists. Not being too fussy about their environment, they are skilled at getting by in hostile conditions. This versatility makes them suited to surviving in conditions that other bacteria might find too harsh. For example, the cyanobacteria that grow in the Arctic are actually better adapted to warmer temperatures. But
18
space on earth
because there are not many other microbes to compete with them, growing fast isn’t really necessary to get by; hence there is no selection pressure to grow optimally at the ambient temperatures around them. In other regions of the Antarctic, particularly around the edges of the continent, where rocks are exposed, cyanobacteria colonize rivers, where they form layers of red, orange, brown and black mats. Their orange and brown pigments protect them from the bright light and the radiation damage from sitting under the Sun’s ultraviolet rays. Some of these pigments, called carotenoids, are the same as you find in carrots, and cause their characteristic orange colour. During the winter, the microbes freeze completely and are ready to grow again when they thaw the following spring. In the Dry Valley lakes the water under the ice never completely freezes, retaining just enough warmth to get through the winter in a liquid state; thus the mats could in theory grow all year round. However, the Antarctic winter brings 24 hours of complete darkness, during which microbes cannot photosynthesize. So the mats go into a type of dormancy at the bottom of the lake, from which they emerge when the Sun returns at the beginning of spring. However, even during this darkness, many of the microbes that can gather their energy from chemical compounds rather than sunlight remain active. On the surface of Mars there are valley networks and channels carved by ancient waterways that attest to a time in the distant past when water washed in abundance across the surface of this now desert world. The ancient waterways of Mars have been seen by many satellites. The Viking orbiters first gave us pictures of these features in the 1970s. Dried deltas, flood plains and rivers all bear the unmistakable signs of flowing water, and as the resolution of the cameras on our orbiting spacecraft has improved, so the images have become more and more persua-
new worlds
19
sive. Indeed, few people would now doubt that Mars passed through a phase when liquid water was in much greater abundance than it is now. Today, dust devils streak across the surface, leaving characteristic trails in the fine material that covers the ground. Each year, seasonal temperature changes on the planet initiate dust storms that rage across the surface. In some years, the storms become so intense that they enshroud the entire surface of the planet, sometimes for as long as 200 days, denying Earth-bound astronomers, and even spacecraft, a glimpse of the surface. The nature of these ancient water features is still somewhat in debate. Did they form on a warm, wet planet three and a half billion years ago, or did they form under ice sheets on a planet that was, for the most part, frozen, like Earth’s polar regions today? The environmental conditions that prevailed on Mars billions of years ago are a matter of great controversy, but the presence of liquid water during that past is not. Even today, gullies around the edges of craters suggest that under the surface there may be liquid water. The presence of liquid water on Mars in the distant past has fuelled the debate about life on the planet. We know that the Earth and Mars exchange pieces of rock in the form of meteorites. Thrown up in asteroid and comet impacts, these lumps of rock rain down on our planet from Mars each year, and conversely there are pieces of Earth landing on Mars. It is estimated that about 400 kilograms of Mars lands on the Earth each year. Most people are staggered by this high number, but of course most of this material lands in the sea because our planet is just over 70% ocean. Most of the rest lands in unpopulated areas. Only a very few of the Martian rocks land in deserts or on ice sheets where they can be found by scientists. Researchers know that the rocks are from Mars, because trapped within them are pockets of gas that match exactly the composition of the Mar-
20
space on earth
tian atmosphere determined by the Viking landers that sampled the Martian air directly in the mid-1970s. The meteoritic composition matches that of the Martian rocks, which has also been measured by the various landers and rovers that have visited the planet. Scientists also know that three and a half billion years ago, when Mars had more liquid water on its surface than today, microbial life had already evolved on Earth. This is apparent from the fossil record, although there is dispute about whether some of the earliest fossil evidence might be artefacts caused by non-biological processes. In the ancient rocks of Earth are the tell-tale signatures of chemical compounds altered by early life, and there are even fossils you can see with the naked eye. These ‘stromatolites’ are much like the mats in the Antarctic Dry Valley lakes; layer upon layer of minerals and microbes formed characteristic cake patterns that can be found in the ancient rocks. So even if life did not evolve on Mars independently of Earth, could it have been transferred on rocks from Earth to the surface of this once water-rich planet? It’s speculation, but it is a tantalizing possibility. It drives the quest to find environments on Earth that might resemble the early environments of Mars. And this is where we return to the lakes of the Antarctic. Scientists such as Christopher McKay of NASA Ames Research Center in California have suggested that as Mars began to dry up, losing its water to the frozen ground and to space, freezing ice-covered lakes would have been the last refuge for life. The lakes of the Dry Valleys are similar to what might have persisted on early Mars – lakes surrounded by freezing dry desert, slowly losing their water, squeezing life into ever smaller pockets of existence, until the only refuge was deep below the ground. That the lakes of the Dry Valleys can sustain such an abundance of life has awed microbiologists, because it shows that on a dying planet, where pockets of liquid water are freezing and dis-
new worlds
21
appearing, an extraordinary abundance and diversity of life could still be maintained. Might explorers one day drill into the ancient sediments of lakes on Mars and find the microscopic fossils and remains of life similar to the microbes that live in the Antarctic today? By studying the microbes of the Antarctic lakes, scientists have at least learned where and how to look for fossil life on Mars. Mars is about half the size of the Earth, but it is still a vast planet on which to search for life. One might get lucky randomly turning over rocks and looking for signs of life, but it would most likely take an extraordinarily long time to find anything with such a haphazard approach. The uniqueness of the life in the Dry Valley lakes has led to greater efforts to preserve it. It is now forbidden to swim in the lakes, apart from scientific diving. Strict protocols for field parties keep the place clean, and the use of vehicles is tightly controlled. Human impact is reduced by removing all the waste from expeditions. Although there are other reasons for wanting to look after the Dry Valleys, here is an example of an unusual and special place on Earth that has helped us prepare for the exploration of other worlds – environmentalism at the forefront of space settlement. We protect this region of our world precisely because it can help us to understand others that we might one day visit. It would be easy for us to spoil the Dry Valleys. The lakes are beautiful, the valleys austere. The ferocious winds that scour this landscape fashion boulders with strange shapes. Some boulders look like dogs, some like cats and some like people. The fertile imagination sees all sorts of strangely familiar shapes. It would be potentially a wonderful tourist location. Novelty dives could be organized into the lakes to view the microbes that survive in this extreme environment – many would appreciate this unusual experience. Imagine a two-day stay at the Hotel
22
space on earth
Antarctica, where your room view looks over the Dry Valleys, across the lakes and the white wasteland beyond. The poles are vital to space explorers for the very obvious reason that they are cold. Apart from the boiling planets, Mercury and Venus, almost all the places in the Solar System that are of interest as sites for future robotic and human exploration, from Mars to the outer planets, are perishingly cold. Many warmer spots are also showing us the way into space. Although the average temperatures experienced in the polar regions are similar to those on Mars, the average temperature on a planet is no indication of what local temperatures might be like – just as a cold day in winter can be very unpleasant outside, but quite warm within your house. Similarly, that the temperature across most of the surface of Mars is well below freezing, and may have been for many millions or even billions of years, does not exclude the possibility of local patches of warmth. Volcanoes, for instance, are much warmer than the average temperature of a planet because they provide a source of local heat from the molten lava beneath. So now our quest takes us to the splendour of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA. Yellowstone National Park is pocked with mud pots, geysers and springs spewing boiling water. These hotspots, heated by the magma that lies just beneath the park, are a riot of colour thanks to the microbes that live within. In some springs, splashes of bright orange and green mats grow across the ground. In others, pink tendril-like filaments twist and turn in the boiling waters, hanging on for dear life in case they should accidentally detach and be washed into the colder world further downstream. Most of these microbes not only like to grow in searing temperatures – up to 98 °C – they actually need to. Such ‘thermophiles’ are thought to be the descendants of ancient heat-loving microbes that populated the early Earth when volcanoes were more common and asteroids and comets
new worlds
23
bombarded the planet, heating the surface and creating a scorched world where only primitive microbes that could handle the heat would survive and grow. Using DNA’s singlestranded cousin, RNA, extracted from the microbes, a family ‘tree of life’ can be pieced together. The branches of this tree are thought to correspond to evolutionary distance, and indeed, the heat-loving microbes clump near the root of the tree, suggesting that they are the descendants of the most primitive forms of life. Yellowstone is typical of volcanic regions. Similar hot springs and geysers can be found elsewhere in New Zealand and Taiwan, where magma lies close to the surface. In the ‘ring of fire’, the region around the Pacific Ocean where continental plates collide and slide under each other, there are many rich hydrothermal systems that feed heat-loving microbes. The microbes in hot springs are diverse. Many species might coexist in a single boiling pit, consuming the nutrients that well up from underground. Some of them like acid conditions, some alkaline. Depending on the chemistry of the water and the way it interacts with the rocks and elements beneath, each pond harbours a very different collection of microbes, which continue to grow in each little habitat until the underground plumbing changes and the water source shifts somewhere else. Perhaps some will be made extinct if a pipe stops supplying water and their boiling habitat cools down. Other new geysers might start up elsewhere, and they will be colonized by microbes washed in or blown in from other streams and hot water sources. Thus, over many years, these microbe populations shift and change in response to the ever-changing environment of Yellowstone. Many of the microbes that live in these hot springs leave abundant fossil evidence of their activities. In Yellowstone there are great mounds of silica and carbonate compounds formed around the bodies of long-dead microbes. As the springs spew a
24
space on earth
variety of elements, some of these solidify around the filaments of the microbes. Long after the microbes have rotted away, these hardened sheaths bear the imprint of the myriad of life forms that they once entombed. A core of this material, over 100 metres long, was removed from one of these giant hot-spring mounds to reveal the microbial history of Yellowstone over the past several thousand years. It showed how the environment has changed from lakes to the familiar terraced landscape of today. These changes are recorded in the different carbonate materials and the signatures of oxygen and carbon trapped within them. Thus these mounds tell us about the environment as well as the microbes that once lived within it. Among the microbes that live in the mounds are cyanobacteria. They colonize the surface and interior. A menagerie of other bacteria, which prefer the oxygen-poor conditions of the interior of the travertine rock, take advantage of the environment. Dissecting the extraordinary complexity of all the potential biological processes that went on within these minerals is of huge interest to exobiologists – scientists searching for life beyond Earth – because it might show them how life can survive in similar rocks on other planets and what sort of fossils they might look for. Volcanoes and their heated water are not unique to the Earth. Any planet that has a liquid core will have within it the heat to drive volcanic activity. The surface of Mars features some very special volcanoes indeed. Across the cratered surface of the Red Planet are volcanoes whose heights exceed even Mount Everest. Olympus Mons, for example, stands two and a half times higher than Everest. Others, such as Pavonis Mons, are also vast. These volcanoes were formed by repeated eruption of molten lava in a single location. Some might be dormant, ready to erupt again in the future.
new worlds
25
The reason for the sheer scale of these structures on Mars is that the land on which they formed is stationary. As the molten rock erupts from below the ground, it gathers on the surface in exactly the same spot. By contrast, on Earth, plate tectonics moves the land masses over the molten rock supply. Like a welding torch, volcanoes burn through the surface in long chains, their shapes and lengths determined by how fast the land is moving above the molten rock. The island chains of Hawaii are a classic example of this effect. Thus, on Earth, volcanoes may never reach the impressive sizes of those on Mars. When Martian volcanoes were active, around their periphery there may have been regions of hot water – much like those of Yellowstone. Where there is hot water there is a chance that heat-loving microbes can grow, and, as in Yellowstone, many of these microbes leave tell-tale traces of their existence in fossil minerals. Exobiologists scrutinize fossil minerals from Yellowstone under the microscope, map the mounds from the air, and try to find a uniqueness in these signatures – a fingerprint – that they might look for on Mars as the indisputable sign of past, or maybe even present, life. The search for life on Mars is currently the domain of robots. Soon it could become an enthusiastic pursuit of human explorers. Although the first human missions to Mars have not yet been scheduled, the technology exists to send people to the Red Planet. Within decades we can hope for adventurous explorers to start digging around in the soils of Mars. Perhaps they will, in their spacesuits, dig into ancient volcanic regions, clearing the dust to try to reveal the minerals of dried hot springs. These explorers will take their lessons from Yellowstone to Mars. There are many reasons to look after and study Yellowstone. The wolves need to be cared for, the wild flowers and forests
26
space on earth
must be protected, and as a place of natural beauty it is right that we care for it for future generations to enjoy. But within the fabric of reasons for protecting this park is the thread that Yellowstone is a repository of information: an insight into the Earth in its earliest, fiery and tormented days when life first arose, that tells us how life might have taken hold on other planets.
Even in the depths of the oceans there are environments that we might want to protect and care for because of their value to the opening of the space frontier. Where the continental plates spread apart in the middle of the oceans, hot fluids come rushing to the surface into the cold ocean waters. Discovered in the 1970s, these hydrothermal vents were first thought to be so deep and lacking in light they could not possibly support any life, and if they could, it must be very simple and unimpressive. Quite the contrary. These vents support a remarkable variety of life, and not just bacteria. Worms, complex multicellular creatures that rely on bacteria in their guts to synthesize sugars, huddle round the warmth of the vents, tangling amongst each other and swaying in the currents like octopus tentacles. Towers of microbes rise high above the vents, carrying out various chemical transformations to get energy. Thus a deep world of life is sustained in utter darkness. The interactions between the microbes are complex. Some take up sulphate from the sea water and turn it into sulphide, itself a food for other microbes. One microbe’s waste is another’s dinner, and through these cycles webs of microbes grow and reproduce around the vents, forming microbial chim-
new worlds
27
neys or ‘black smokers’. Some researchers suggest that the abundant minerals and unique chemistries of black smokers could even have given rise to life on ancient Earth. The vents that line the spreading continents may also have universal importance. They represent the amazing lifesupporting chemistry that can occur when water meets a source of underground heat. It is by studying these features that our concern and interest in the Earth’s environment has forced our gaze toward new worlds. Orbiting the great planet Jupiter is a moon roughly the same size as our own. Europa was first photographed close-up by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it flew its tour of the Solar System in the 1970s. What it sent back to its Earth-bound controllers stunned them and the world audience. Europa was no anonymous rocky moon, like so many of the leftovers that orbit the planets of our Solar System; it was covered in ice, thick ice. As the calculations and observations improved it became apparent that Europa is not just a block of rock covered in a layer of ice. Between the rocky core and the icy surface there seems to be an ocean of liquid water. The planet Jupiter is so massive that its tidal forces cause the little moon to buckle and twist inside, generating heat. This heat sustains the ocean and keeps it liquid. Some scientists have speculated that the ocean may sustain life. Of particular interest is where the ocean meets the rocky core; here the heat from the moon might drive the circulation of water. Perhaps dotted across Europa’s core are vents, much like the ones in our own oceans, providing nutrients and energy for life. Over the four and a half billion year history of our Solar System, could completely novel forms of life have evolved in the heated environment of the dark Europan vents? The vents on Earth have provided a tantalizing glimpse into the possibilities for life on a distant moon. The future of environmentalism on Earth – under-
28
space on earth
standing and protecting these vents – has become intimately intertwined with the ocean of Europa. Europa might seem to be a very unusual and extreme extraterrestrial environment, quite unlike anywhere you have ever been, but there are many Europa-like environments on Earth, and in some quite unexpected places. Tírez Lake, in the hilly La Mancha region of central Spain, is salty, being fed with water by the surrounding semi-arid regions. It contains compounds that could exist in Europa’s ocean. NASA’s Galileo spacecraft examined the surface of Europa in the 1990s using its Near Infrared Mapping Spectrometer and sent back clues to the composition of the buried ocean. The ocean appears to have salts dissolved in it; these salts can be detected on the surface of the moon where the ocean has welled up in cracks to the surface and spread out onto the icy rafts. Tírez Lake is rich in sulphate and chloride salts and might be similar to the waters of Europa. By studying the water in the lake, scientists can get ideas of what they would expect to detect using instrumentation on a spacecraft, if the water in Europa really is similar to that in Tírez. In the quest to understand Europa we leave Spain and return to Antarctica. In 1996, Russian scientists discovered a different, but no less remarkable, environment deep beneath the ice sheet. Buried under the ice are bodies of liquid water, trapped for hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) of years, in isolation from the surface. These isolated pools of water are formed when heating within the Earth melts the ice at the bottom of the sheet. These lakes are analogous to Europa’s ocean. The largest of these, Lake Vostok, so named because it is underneath the Russian Vostok Station, is covered by an incredible 4 km of ice and is over 250 km long and 50 km wide. Samples were recovered from just above the lake after an international team drilled deep into the ice in 1998, and microbes
new worlds
29
were found trapped within the ice. The lake may well contain microorganisms that have been isolated for about a million years. Investigating the chemistry of the lake and the physical processes going on within it might show us how an ocean trapped under ice evolves, and what type of environment it offers for life. Drilling into Vostok and other subglacial lakes presents some formidable challenges. The drill must be kept completely sterile, or it will contaminate the lake and its pristine conditions will be ruined. Russian, American and French scientists have been developing new technologies for getting into these types of lake and taking samples for about ten years. Getting down to the lake is not simple. The four kilometres of ice that must be drilled is difficult going. Then there is the risk that the drill or probe will freeze within the ice on the way down. Vostok is just one of over 70 lakes within the Antarctic ice sheet, but given its size, ice depth and interest to exobiologists, it has become a test bed for technologies that might one day be applied elsewhere. Like Lake Vostok, the oceans of Europa are believed to be buried under several kilometres of ice. Melting through this to get to the ocean beneath will present one of the most challenging endeavours in extraterrestrial exploration, and it is in Antarctica that scientists could learn how to do it. None of these Europa-like lakes, from Spain to Antarctica, will exactly match Europa’s ocean, but each might have characteristics that in some way shed light on some particular aspects of that distant moon. In the case of the Spanish lake, it is the water and its geochemistry that have yielded new ideas about the salty waters of Europa. The similarities between a salty lake in Spain and water trapped within an ice sheet in Antarctica may not be very apparent, but they are scientifically linked by an extraterrestrial body half a billion miles from the Earth. What we have here are wonderful examples of how the study of Earth’s
30
space on earth
environments and the desire to understand their workings has led us to other planets and moons.
This new link between environmentalism and space is principally an ‘instrumental’ one. It emphasizes the practical use of environments on Earth to help explore space, either with robots or directly, ourselves. There is nothing inherently wrong with an instrumental view of the link. Wilderness areas have been protected many times before for their uses to humans, whether as repositories of scientific information, sites of economic value or places with aesthetic appeal. Some environmentalists have qualms about wilderness areas being protected for instrumental uses, because if those uses change, then the environments might lose their value and subsequently be ruined. An appeal to instrumental uses, however, can be a highly effective way to save environments. The protection of a rainforest because it provides economically useful nuts can provide a powerful incentive for looking after it. Similarly, the instrumental or practical uses of a growing number of environments for the exploration of space provide a powerful reason for looking after them. The scientific benefits of preservation are deepened. There may be existing reasons for looking after the environment in question. Yellowstone National Park is already protected for its forests and countless other natural wonders, but scientific value for assisting the exploration of space, or for understanding the nature of extraterrestrial environments, adds further preservation value to it. One can appreciate the wonders of Yellowstone as an aesthetic experience for
new worlds
31
many good reasons. But there is now a new dimension when we stare across those bubbling cauldrons and the strange expanses of microbial life that inhabit them. They are beautiful because they may resemble environments on early Mars or early Earth. Our aesthetic appreciation of the landscape and what it means is intensified because by viewing these landscapes our imaginations are transported to distant worlds in space and time. The experience is made markedly richer in a quite novel way, an astronomical and planetary way. But I would argue that the link between many of these environments and space environments is not entirely instrumental. The recognition that many of them, some of them quite extreme, tell us about extraterrestrial environments lends them some additional intrinsic value. We learn to respect them because they have an affiliation to environments millions (and in some cases billions) of kilometres away. As we explore a greater number of moons and planets in our Solar System, and possibly around other stars as well, so the number of these earthly environments that will fall within the fold of this new cosmic ethic of environmental protection will grow.
2 the human adventure
If we destroy the Earth’s environments we will destroy the very information that will accelerate our expansion into space
It will be a very long time indeed, if ever, before humans get out to Europa and visit the vents in the oceans. Perhaps, because of the thickness of the ice, which is estimated to be many tens of kilometres, we will never dive into this ocean ourselves. Instead, we may rely on robotic emissaries, sending back images from deep within. However, there are worlds where humans will go sooner and establish themselves. Our own Moon and the planet Mars are the two most likely candidates for the establishment of a human presence. Asteroids could also become homes. Just as the Earth’s extreme environments have become testing grounds for the scientific study of distant moons and planets, so they have also become places to prepare for the human settlement of space. The notion of using environments on Earth to help in the human exploration of the cosmos developed in the 1960s, when NASA needed to find places to train the astronauts for the Moon. Not being scientists, but rather test pilots, many of these men – for they were all men – had spent most of their careers more concerned with fast flying. To do their rock32
the human adventure
33
collecting job on the Moon – they eventually returned with almost half a tonne of rocks – they had to be given a crash course in geology. Not any geology would do. The Moon is covered in craters and during the cratering process rocks are heated and pressurized. This process does many unusual things. To get the right samples and to have a rough idea of what they were looking at, the astronauts had to know something rudimentary about asteroid and comet impact craters. They went to Meteor Crater in Arizona to learn their trade. This bowl-shaped crater, one kilometre across, in the deserts of the American Southwest provided them with the training they needed for the Moon. It is just one of 170 asteroid and comet craters now known on the Earth. Meteor Crater was formed 40,000 years ago when a lump of iron about one hundred metres in diameter slammed into the surface of the Earth. The energy released during the impact was vast, equivalent to about 100 megatonnes of TNT or 10,000 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs being detonated all at once. The impact carved a bowl into the ground, ejecting the contents into the surrounding terrain. Many of the rocks bear a unique stamp of the heat and pressure they experienced during the impact. Some minerals, such as quartz, become finely shattered. Heated to several hundred degrees centigrade, the excavated material probably ignited trees around the crater. Winds of several thousand kilometres an hour stripped the ground bare of all vegetation and animal life for hundreds of square kilometres around the impact site. During the early history of the Solar System, such impacts were much more common than today. Remnants of planet formation would have collided with the surface of the new planets maybe a thousand times more often. Some of these objects, several hundred kilometres in diameter, were large enough to have boiled the oceans of the early Earth, filling the atmosphere
34
space on earth
with steam and molten rock. Fortunately, because of its much greater gravitational pull, many of them hit the giant gas planet Jupiter, and as the impact frequency declined, Earth became a safer place. Plate tectonics have erased most of the impact craters formed on the early Earth. Long ago forced under the continents and melted away, they were wiped from the geologic record. Other craters have been eroded by wind or by water. Even vegetation does its bit to wear them down. Fortunately, some have survived for a significant period of our planet’s history. Vredefort crater in South Africa is two billion years old, and even today parts of its ring structure remain. As scientists explore more of the formerly inaccessible parts of the world, such as China and Africa, so this inventory of craters expands. Unlike Earth, other planets and moons still bear the scars of their early bombardment. Our Moon has no atmosphere to speak of and, of course, it has no water, so its craters have been preserved for over three billion years, yielding insights into cratering in the formative years of the Solar System. Indeed, it is from the record of craters on the Moon that geologists can check their theories about how often craters were made on Earth. Mars is also pocked with impressive craters. Although it has an atmosphere and once had abundant liquid water, the surface water was lost long ago and the atmosphere is one hundredth the thickness of the Earth’s. Furthermore, there is no surface vegetation to help erode craters away. The 3,000-km-wide Hellas Basin in the Southern Hemisphere is thought to be an ancient impact crater. As craters are so prevalent on the two bodies in the Solar System that explorers are most likely to visit in the near future, the Moon and Mars, we should learn all we can about them on Earth, as the early moonwalkers tried to do.
the human adventure
35
When astronauts landed on the Moon it was their preparations in Meteor Crater on Earth that helped them select samples. The now famous crater is owned by the Barringer family. It has an excellent Visitor Center in which the history of cratering is told. It is one of the few places that really introduces the public to something fascinating on Earth that also has relevance to space exploration and our understanding of other planets. Visitors that stand near the handrails and stare into this thrilling and very chilling hole in the ground come face to face with a process that wiped out much of life on Earth, and that happens on every other solid planet in the Universe. It was here that people prepared to leave Earth and travel to a distant world. We should look after this crater and others too – maybe some day we will need them again. By the mid-1970s, following the Apollo program, the search for ‘analogue’ environments – places that in some way resemble extraterrestrial environments – quietened down. It didn’t look like humans were going into space again soon. But by the end of the 20th century the interest in analogue environments was revived as interest in human missions to Mars again gained pace. Both NASA and the Mars Society implemented some new studies. At 75° N, in the permafrost plains of Devon Island in the Canadian high Arctic, sits the Haughton impact crater. Twentyfour kilometres across, it was formed by an asteroid or comet impact 40 million years ago. The NASA Haughton-Mars project, established by Pascal Lee at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in California, set up base camp on the edge of the crater in 1997 and began investigations on how humans could operate on Mars. In 2000 they were joined by the Mars Society, which, under the leadership of Robert Zubrin, an Colorado-based enthusiast of humans living on Mars, assembled a simulated Mars habitat to test out protocols for operating on that planet.
36
space on earth
The interest in the site lies in the fact that it is an impact crater with lots of ice in the ground, similar in some respects to Mars. Like Meteor Crater in Arizona, it is geologically similar to Mars. Ancient hydrothermal pipes pepper the edges of the crater, where the intense heat of impact, and the replumbing of the water systems caused by the excavation of the giant crater bowl, led to the formation of hot springs. Rocks that were shocked by the impact litter the ground. The unique geological attributes of the site are matched by its interesting microbiology, which also offers insights into what kinds of life we might look for on Mars. I became involved in the project to look at the microbes in the rocks. During the intense heat and pressure of impact, many minerals were vaporized and the rocks became shattered. Within these porous, cracked rocks, we found that microbes can flourish, showing us how impact craters can provide a habitat for life. Impacts are not the only process to make cracks and fractures in rocks, but our work showed how a process that is normally associated with destruction – impact cratering – can turn rocks unsuitable for microbes into ones that are filled with them. Microbes also live in the breccia, the cement-like matrix of rocks formed during the intense heat of impact. Vast hills of this imposing grey material stud the crater; the way in which it was formed could be similar to processes that created impact breccias on Mars. Some of the technologies that would be needed for survival on Mars have been tested at Haughton. Geologists have donned spacesuits that they might one day wear on Mars. Testing them allows the designers to make them as flexible and comfortable as possible. The atmosphere of Mars is almost pure carbon dioxide, and it is only one hundredth the density of our own atmosphere. Explorers will live in pressurized habitats and venture out onto the surface in suits designed to
the human adventure
37
give them the mobility and dexterity to explore, while keeping them alive. ESA and NASA engineers interested in planning scientific excursions across the surface of Mars have watched how scientists do their work in the field to improve the way science and exploration could be done on Mars. Wearing suits can slow down your productivity. As the explorers gather rock samples, perhaps in their quest for life, they will need to know how much they can reasonably expect to accomplish in their allotted time. In analogue environments, these protocols can be tested. No environment on Earth completely matches another planet. It rains rather a lot in the Arctic and no scientific excursion on Mars is going to be called off because of rain. On Mars there are no polar bears. In the Arctic, as a spacesuited explorer heads into the crater, a person on an all-terrain vehicle must follow along with a shotgun to watch for these magnificent, dangerous and often hungry beasts. Nevertheless, the crater, the frozen ground and the isolation create a scientific environment that bears many important similarities to Mars. Mars is so far from Earth that the speed of light is too slow to have immediate two-way radio conversations with people back on Earth. The time lag, which can be anything up to 40 minutes, means that it is essential that teams learn how to deal independently with any problems they encounter. In many Mars analogue environments, communications protocols are tested to allow future explorers to deal with this long delay. These are early steps, but extreme environments will one day help us get to Mars. In short, analogue environments on Earth give scientists and technicians the opportunity to put their ideas and technology through its paces. Not until a real mission is launched does everything fall into place at once, but at least they can test out components to see what works and what needs rethinking.
38
space on earth
Even when space scientists and engineers have plenty of experience, and maybe humans have been to Mars many times, environments on Earth will still be used to trial new technologies and frame new scientific questions that explorers might take to other planets. The list of these analogue environments is long. In Iceland, volcanoes are the features that bear some resemblance to those on Mars. In the Australian desert, designers test prototype rovers. Even underwater environments are useful to space explorers. The difficulties and often the clumsiness of operating underwater have some parallels with moving around in space. The technologies used underwater – recycling, food growing units and communication systems – operate on similar principles to the machines required in space. Preserving underwater environments could assist in space exploration.
Back in Antarctica’s frozen wasteland, a great deal is being learned about how humans might behave on other planets. The physical conditions may not be the same as on Mars or the Moon, but one factor that is very similar is the protracted isolation of people, particularly during the long polar winter. Extreme weather and continuous darkness prevent planes from landing and truly cut off over-wintering crews in the Antarctic from the rest of the world – just as they would be on the Moon and Mars. Space agencies already know that isolation and confinement, mixed with hard work, lead to tensions among space station crews. Skylab, America’s first long-term step into the space fron-
the human adventure
39
tier, was launched into orbit in 1973. The third crew of Skylab was given 10 days off to rest during the 84 day mission. But they worked through the first three rest days to keep up with their busy schedule. When, on the fourth off-day, Mission Control set them more tasks, a mutiny nearly broke out, precipitating a meeting to prevent the crew from breaking communications with Earth in protest. Eventually, the crew came to a new agreement that many of their burdensome tasks would be taken off their compulsory list and instead pinned to a wall on the station. Crew members could choose different tasks from the list and carry them out when they felt they had time to spare. The effect was dramatic. All of the tasks were completed, and more. Giving people some spare time can make them more productive. Learning lessons in space about how people behave when they are cut off from the outside world is fine, as the experiences on Skylab attest. It is much cheaper and safer if these things can be learned on Earth before we send people hundreds of thousands or millions of kilometres away to the Moon, Mars and eventually even beyond. Several major campaigns to understand how people behave in isolation have been carried out in Antarctica. In the European Concordia Station, at a place called ‘Dome C’ in the Antarctic interior, fewer than twenty people remain there each winter, investigating atmospheric physics and doing astronomical observations. The station is plunged into almost five months of continuous darkness with temperatures as low as –80 °C. The height of the continent, added to the thick ice sheet, puts the station at an altitude of just over 3,000 m, which is sufficient to affect breathing in some people when they first arrive. Archways connect three buildings: a quiet building for labs and sleeping quarters; a noisy building for the restaurant and the workshop; and the power plant. The small austere outpost is invaluable for understanding what an isolated
40
space on earth
station on another planet might be like as a place to live and work. There are further psychological similarities between the Antarctic and other worlds. The interior is essentially a large flat, wild and white wilderness. There are no trees or animals, and none of the variety that many of us take for granted. Similarly, on the Moon and Mars there are no trees, the landscapes are quite monotonous (grey on the Moon and red on Mars), and there will be few other people or towns and cities to visit, at least in the early stages of settlement. Using questionnaires, and by studying the blood levels of key hormones, researchers track morale and stress levels in Antarctic stations to understand what occurs during long-term isolation. Classic patterns of behaviour have begun to be understood. When people first arrive, during the summer, their morale begins to drop. They are away from home, isolated and missing their families. Then the winter arrives and the station is closed off from the rest of the world. They might be forgiven for becoming even more depressed because of their now fixed isolation, but instead morale levels rise – the team is excited that the base is theirs. Their real mission has begun. A sense of cohesion immediately forms amongst them: a sense of a small group of people facing a challenge together. Morale rises for a short time after this new-found purpose, then it begins to decline. As winter progresses it drops to low levels. Stuck together, with no escape, the reality of their situation begins to hog their thoughts and morale drops continuously throughout the winter. Then summer approaches. The thought of new faces, mail delivery, and the possibility of getting out of the base sends morale soaring again, and it continues to rise until they are sent home. One of the most striking psychological changes that was recorded in the first study of group psychology in an over-
the human adventure
41
wintering team in Antarctica during 1958 was the development of absentmindedness and loss of concentration, perhaps due to a lack of mental stimulation. Dreams and daydreams become more pronounced in isolated groups of people. The combination of stress and perhaps the concern about issues at home fuels vivid dreams that may be connected with their deeper worries. Similar changing patterns in morale and behaviour and the different ways to deal with them are what we could expect in people sent on tours of extraterrestrial bases who leave friends and family at home. On the surface of Mars or the Moon these changes in morale could become fatal in a team responsible for tending to life-support systems. Providing enough mental stimulation can keep isolated teams of people from losing focus. Entertainment of various kinds, such as movies, games and music, can help. Research shows that micro-environments with plants can help reduce tensions. Astronauts on board the Mir space station reported that looking after crops on board gave them a sense of connection with home. Indeed, simply looking after anything living can enormously improve morale, just as looking after a pet on Earth can make people feel happier. Communication with family members through the Internet and radio help to keep morale up and encourage mental stimulation during isolation. Some of the psychological changes that appear in people sent to extreme environments can be damaging if they are left to fester. Groups can split into factions based on different interests. Different levels of experience can unravel group morale, and hostilities can jeopardize safety by making people unfocused and tired. By looking not just at individuals, but at crew interactions, in extreme environments, better psychological testing and selection methods have been devised for people travelling into space.
42
space on earth
Many National Parks are isolated – often the very reason why they become National Parks in the first place. San Miguel Island in the Channel Islands National Park in California is one such. Here a ten foot by twenty foot cargo box with no running water and only solar panels for electricity is home for the volunteer who chooses to be a park ranger for the summer months. The Parks Service finds no shortage of volunteers for this challenge. Psychologists who want to know how people adapt to such harsh isolation have studied the people that volunteer for, and survive, these experiences. By studying the personality attributes of successful park rangers, better selection protocols can be developed for people destined for new settlements in space. Some important lessons have already been learned. The psychologists found that people who share a common experience – not necessarily a common location – share common attributes. The sort of person who can sit in a cargo box on an island in California for several months is likely to be the same sort of person who can sit in a base at the South Pole. It is the requirement for getting on with other people, or indeed purely your own company, and dealing with extreme conditions that influences the types of people that go into and emerge from these places. These are very important discoveries because they suggest that the information can be applied to other planets. Mars may be very different from an island in California, but the research suggests that people who can survive and prosper on such an island are likely to be the same as people who will get by on the surface of Mars.
the human adventure
43
Seeing the links between environments on Earth and the exploration of space can open up important opportunities, but failing to see them can be wasteful. It was in the deserts of Arizona in 1991 that the most famous experiment in preparing for the human exploration of space was implemented – the Biosphere 2 project, near a small town called Oracle, close to Tucson. This project was one of immense vision and ambition, but much of its fame resulted from the problems it encountered after its construction. Biosphere 2 was established to test the ability of humans to be locked into a tiny simulated ‘Earth’, as its name suggests, ultimately in preparation for artificial biospheres on other worlds. The facility, spread across three acres, hosted a rainforest, savannah, ocean, marsh and desert in over 200,000 cubic metres of space. Despite the bad press, it was a remarkable and pioneering undertaking. Rains and fogs in the facility were controlled by computer. Giant lungs moved gases around, and refrigeration units carefully controlled the temperature of this artificial world. Soon after it came into operation in 1993, the oxygen levels in the Biosphere began to drop at about 0.5% a month. Within a few months, the inhabitants experienced oxygen levels so low that it was equivalent to living at 1,000 m altitude. Levels dropped further, until they became dangerously low. Investigations revealed that the oxygen was being used up by respiring bacteria in the soils. Essentially, the soils were too rich in organic matter and this had encouraged the bacteria to grow and consume the atmospheric oxygen needed by the biospherians. There was another mystery. In consuming oxygen, bacteria should produce carbon dioxide. But the carbon dioxide levels were not increasing as fast as would be expected. Where was it going? The scientists eventually found that the carbon dioxide was being mopped up by the concrete in the foundations of the biosphere as it cured.
44
space on earth
Both of these problems – the disappearing oxygen and carbon dioxide – would have been difficult to predict and are easy to criticize in hindsight. They were problems that might have surfaced with a deeper interaction between those who had the vision to explore space, and environmentalists with a knowledge of gas cycling through ecosystems. In that sense, Biosphere 2 was a success, as it has provided invaluable lessons about collaboration for the exploration and settlement of the Earth and space – lessons that ultimately brought it criticism. But that is often the fate of those who have the boldness and vision to start the revolution. The link between environmentalism (understanding and protecting Earth’s environments) and space exploration (preparing to go to other environments) is therefore driven by the simple fact that the Earth shares geological and physical similarities with other planets. Within these similarities environmentalists and space settlers blend together and become one and the same people. It is obvious that we must care for the Earth’s biosphere and learn to protect and use it wisely. If we destroy the Earth’s environments we will destroy the very information that will accelerate our expansion into space. Wise environmental stewardship is wise space exploration. Environmentalism and the settlement of space can be seen to be one and the same goal. But there are other reasons for bringing environmentalists and space explorers together – to address the extraordinary potential crises on Earth that will be precipitated by our ability to spread into the cosmos. We may yet face environmental challenges far greater than anything we face today – a crisis caused by the endless resources of outer space.
3 rich bounty and new crises
Space settlers are leading the way in finding new environmental solutions for Earth
An argument for the settlement of space is that by spending large sums of money building space programmes, private or government, we create technologies of use to people on Earth. These spin-off technologies find their way into our homes and are of tremendous benefit to people. One of the most famous examples is scratch-resistant glass. Originally developed to protect the visors of space helmets from the harsh conditions of space and lunar dust, scratch-resistant coatings are now standard on fashionable sunglasses. I am not particularly enthusiastic about this line of reasoning. Instead of spending $25 billion going to the Moon, it would be better to just spend one or two million dollars paying someone to make some scratch-resistant glass, if that is what you need. One could argue that many of these technologies are unexpected, and could never have been predicted prior to the space program. Thus it was useful that we did go to the Moon so that these technologies emerged. This argument is specious. It is akin to saying that we should spend $25 billion building a giant model mackerel. In the pro45
46
space on earth
cess we will undoubtedly learn new construction methods; perhaps in the process of building scale models of mackerel we will learn new modelling techniques and we may even learn something unexpected about fish hydrodynamics. But this does not support spending vast sums of money building giant mackerel. In almost any project, whatever that may be, if you spend billions you will learn something new. Similarly, spin-off technologies are not a good reason for the exploration and settlement of space. Instead, there are very good direct reasons for going into space that will benefit the quality of life on Earth and yield new opportunities and ideas for solving environmental problems. We have seen how environmentalists are leading the way in understanding new worlds; let’s look at some of the practical ways in which space settlers are helping the environment of the Earth, and how projects developed by them have helped give new impetus to solving some of our oldest environmental concerns. We have learned a lot about the Earth’s environment simply by going into orbit around the Earth and then to the planets. Each successive phase of expansion in space exploration and settlement has brought incredible practical benefits to us and our ability to look after life on Earth. Placing satellites in orbits transmitting a signal to the ground made it possible to pinpoint positions. With four of these satellites, position determination in three dimensions can be done with great accuracy, giving your place and altitude. With enough of these satellites, a so-called constellation, one can be sure that on any place on Earth there will be a sufficient number of satellites overhead to get your exact position. Begun in 1978 by the US Department of Defense, the Global Positioning System is made up of 24 satellites. The Soviets had a similar system, GLONASS, that was designed to do a similar job,
rich bounty and new crises
47
although after the collapse of the Soviet Union the system became less well repaired and less reliable than its US counterpart. The Europeans are building another constellation, the Galileo system, which by 2008 promises to make satellite navigation even more widely available. The signal transmitted by the satellites is picked up by a ground receiver. It works out the time it took to receive the signal from the satellites, thus getting a range. Originally designed to provide accuracy down to several metres, the system now gives accuracies of just a few tens of centimetres, particularly if ground base stations are also used. The benefits to life on Earth of these positioning satellites have been very profound. Adventurers, sportsmen, hikers, surveyors and builders now use GPS systems to determine their location accurately, and many people use them in their cars. On a less mundane level, these systems have become essential for navigation across the world’s oceans, increasing safety and reducing the chances of environmental damage caused by shipping. Accurate coastal GPS mapping in oil tankers has reduced the chances of accidentally running aground, with the appalling environmental consequences. Some of these benefits are undoubtedly serendipitous spin-off advantages. Once technology such as GPS is in place, all sorts of people find uses for it. In that sense, entering space will create spin-off contributions to our way of life. But we don’t need to rely on these fortuitous spin-offs to justify the exploration of space. Much of the technology has obvious and powerful enough uses for us to see from the beginning how vital it is to our future. Two hundred and fifty GPS units were stationed around the city of Los Angeles to study whether this earthquake-prone city moved regularly and whether these movements could improve the warning of impending earthquakes. Researchers
48
space on earth
were astonished to discover that the city moves up and down about 11 centimetres each year. This ‘breathing’ of the land is caused by the water that the bedrock sucks up like a sponge, causing it to expand. When the land dries out in summer it settles back down. To make predictions of earthquakes and to see whether there may be any near-term threat, it is important to know about these other movements, because they might dilute any tectonic movements diagnostic of impending earthquakes. GPS units can help geologists to catalogue their understanding of how the land moves, and from this information new insights into earthquakes are garnered. Communications have been dramatically improved by the exploration of space. We all know about teleconferencing using satellites. Scientists were quick to take advantage of the possibilities that communications satellites opened up in environmental monitoring in the Earth’s extreme environments. Temperatures have been monitored year round in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, near Ross Island, using a datalogger that gathers information and transmits it via satellite to the eager scientists in their warm offices back at home. If the system is well organized, the data can be automatically uploaded to a web site from where researchers can download it. In this way fascinating extreme and isolated environments that scientists cannot visit very often are constantly monitored. The more conventional way to do this is to set up a logger that gathers the data and stores it on a memory chip. Then, once a year, you can go and get your data. This system relies on regular maintenance, which is problematic in extreme environments that may not be accessible to scientists for long periods each year or may be costly to get to. With a solar panel to gather energy, dataloggers in inhospitable places can operate for many years on their own, transmitting information back via satellites until ultimately they break down.
rich bounty and new crises
49
Networks of these loggers can be deployed to send back data from many different locations, giving scientists extraordinary new insights into conditions for life over wide areas. By using the same loggers all carefully set to measure the same parameters, very valuable data sets of the behaviour of whole ecosystems can be retrieved. Governments and corporations are always on the lookout for economically useful minerals, gases and other commodities, and they have been very adept at finding innovative uses for space exploration to this end. Gases that come from sources of valuable natural gas and oils underground can seep to the surface and discolour the rocks and vegetation. Images taken by the Landsat satellites, which began their silent monitoring of the Earth in the 1970s, can be scanned for these subtle colour changes, often leading to the identification of new economically valuable resources. Unfortunately, the more effective location of these resources from space allows us to spoil the environment more rapidly. On the other hand, by locating valuable resources more accurately, corporations and governments can mitigate environmental damage by taking a less random and destructive approach to finding these riches and exploiting them. Often petroleum companies start their surveys with seismic studies – using small explosive charges to create underground waves which can then be traced and studied to seek out new pockets of oil. This approach is very expensive and time-consuming, and (depending on where the survey is done) it can be environmentally destructive. Carrying out a space survey beforehand, using images gathered from orbit, winnows the number of sites of interest to just a few to be subjected to more intensive exploration on the ground. Already, remote sensing in this way has effectively found new oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia.
50
space on earth
Changes in local geology – telltale signs that something interesting is going on underground, can show up valuable metals. Metals in soils can cause vegetation to change colour slightly and by observing these changes in the patterns of images taken from space, minerals such as copper, zinc and many others are spied in the rocks. Once corporations do find something they like and get to work extracting the resources, eyes in space can continue to be useful by watching the development of the new mines and alerting those on the ground to environmental problems that might be developing during the course of exploitation. In the Amazon rainforest, the Ecuadorian government became concerned about the way in which petroleum exploration was encouraging widespread human settlement. Presented with Landsat images of settlements in the forests before and after development, the government decided to prevent its uncontrolled continuation. Using space imagery, the impact on the forests is now monitored and more effectively controlled. The experience in the Amazon is an excellent showcase for how finding resources and looking after the environment can occur side by side with the benefit of information arising from the settlement of space. The experience in the Amazon has been repeated around the world. From over-grazing to deforestation, environmentalism and the remarkable practical benefits of space settlement meet head to head in our efforts to monitor the impact of humans. From India to Africa, rates of deforestation are now watched by satellites and the information is used to help control the problem. Herds of animals can be moved to let land recover. Villages can be carefully planned to cut back on the encroachment of forests. These efforts help us understand the way in which the Earth’s environment works and help improve the quality of all life on Earth by allowing us to mitigate or reverse some of our
rich bounty and new crises
51
most damaging behaviours. Some of these surveys could be carried out by air or on the ground, but only at great expense. Satellites can watch the atmosphere to see how we are altering the air around us and so help us coordinate efforts to keep it healthy. Caused by the destruction of the important ultraviolet radiation-screening gas ozone by chlorofluorocarbons produced by industry, the ozone hole opens up in the southern hemisphere every spring. The hole often has less than half the normal concentration of ozone; short-wavelength ultraviolet radiation penetrates to the surface of the ground through the gap in the shield. As they are more biologically damaging than the longer wavelengths, the effects can potentially be very damaging. The incidence of skin cancers and cataracts is increasing, so there really are direct effects on human health. Ultraviolet radiation stunts plant growth, reduces the productivity of algae and can adversely change the health of both the humblest bacteria and more complex animals. Ozone can be monitored from the ground. The gas absorbs light in a very specific way. By comparing the absorption of light at different wavelengths it is possible to infer the concentrations of ozone in the stratosphere. But with this approach it is impossible to map the entire ozone hole each spring and to follow it as it changes – it alters every few days. Even with aircraft, such a feat would be formidable, if not impossible. Again satellites have offered a solution. The TOMS (Total Ozone Monitoring Spectrometer), an instrument on board NASA’s Earth Probe satellite, has been watching the ozone hole since the 1980s. It has enabled scientists to map the Earth’s ozone concentrations, thereby helping policymakers to see what effect international agreements, such as the Montreal Protocol on reducing CFC production, are having. Forecasters can watch the progress of the edge of the ozone hole and warn people in South America and New Zealand of impending high
52
space on earth
ultraviolet radiation. The public can be told to cover themselves and wear sunglasses when outside during the period that the hole is above them. And, of course, everyone can watch the hole on the World Wide Web, perhaps raising our collective awareness of our responsibility to care for Earth.
Watching the Earth from space seems a rather passive environmental benefit of exploring space. We are improving our ability to find resources, use them wisely and watch our impact on the Earth, but all this is just a product of the cameras and other instruments attached to satellites. There are much more active ways in which robots and humans can bring environmental benefits to Earth from the settlement of space. The Earth is just a small ball of rock. It is one of many millions of rocks in our Solar System and beyond. In some ways it seems rather absurd to complain about limited resources when the vast, endless, resource-rich expanses of space beckon. Might we simply harvest what we lack from space? Energy supply is probably humanity’s biggest challenge today. The burning of fossil fuels is polluting and warming our home planet at an unprecedented rate. The problem is becoming acute, with increasing population and standards of living across the planet. Fossil fuels are limited. Laid down over a hundred million years by the remains of sacrificial microbes and plants, the oil, coal and a great deal of natural gas hidden underground cannot keep supplying us with energy indefinitely. Is there a cleaner way of getting energy that would allow us to maintain the Earth as an oasis in space?
rich bounty and new crises
53
Solar power is abundant. Our Sun, a vast nuclear fusion reactor, pumps out energy which bathes the top of our planet’s atmosphere with about 1,300 watts per square metre. This is about ten times more energy than the sunniest places on the Earth’s surface. Out in space, free of clouds and the darkness of night, solar power is in continuous supply. The idea of building satellites to collect solar power in orbit around the Earth is tantalizing. In 1976, a series of hearings was held by the US Subcommittee on Aerospace Technology and National Needs, during which several engineers involved in designing solar power satellites presented their ideas. When you read these documents today, they are pervaded with an incredible sense of vision and foresight. The researchers considered solar panels 11 by 4 kilometres in size – vast constructions that would need a new class of spacecraft to get them into orbit. Even today, with improved solar panels, the devices would be very large and would need new space construction techniques. Costing several tens of billions of dollars in the 1970s, the system was never constructed because the ability to launch such huge machines was not pursued. The Space Shuttle was originally envisaged to start hauling up the various parts of the solar power satellites, but it cost a great deal more and was launched a lot less frequently than originally intended. It now costs about $10,000 to haul half a kilogram of material into orbit around the Earth. Building a solar panel the size of New York and made of silicon and metal would cost billions; each one would be like building a space station. What’s more, in the 1970s the researchers thought that at least 60 of them would be needed to start producing power that would make up a good fraction of US energy demand. One favoured solution is to construct solar power satellites using resources on the Moon. The lunar soil has plenty of silicon
54
space on earth
for making solar cells, and other metals and oxides that could be used to build the truss and the other parts of a working solar power satellite. The surface gravity of the Moon is just one sixth of the Earth’s, so it would be much easier to lug the finished units out to orbit than it would be to launch it all from the surface of Earth. This plan depends on having a manufacturing base on the Moon sufficiently complex to be able to build a solar power satellite, so this isn’t yet a practical solution to solving the problem of getting satellites into space. Beaming the power back to Earth is not such a big problem. Once the power has been harvested by the solar arrays it is turned into microwaves and sent down to a receiving station. In 1976, an experiment in the Californian desert showed that microwaves containing 30 kilowatts of energy could be beamed over one and a half kilometres with 82% efficiency. Collection stations across the Earth would gather the energy from the satellites, which would orbit the Earth in step with the collecting stations below. Surprisingly few major environmental problems were foreseen. The engineers worried about microwave beams going awry and cooking the local wildlife. The waste heat made by the collectors concerned them, and the land that would be needed for the receiving stations might be quite unsightly. These challenges would be really very trivial compared to the environmental problems that come with fossil fuel power stations. Microwave beams transporting the energy to Earth can be controlled and automatically switched off if they are not on the collector. The large receiver dishes, although a definite mark on the land, are not completely solid. Light and rain can get through them. In theory, the land under the collectors (which would be on stilts) could still be used for farming. These receiving stations were only envisaged to cover a few square kilometres anyway, and they would take up no more land than
rich bounty and new crises
55
conventional power stations. Even the waste heat from the collectors could be disposed of or even used as energy itself. Apart from pieces of equipment and old collectors that need replacing, the solar power satellites wouldn’t produce much waste. Solar power satellites should, in principle, give us huge quantities of energy with minimal environmental effects. Freed from the curses of nuclear waste and carbon dioxide emissions, a future of solar power satellites looks very bright indeed in theory. In the 1970s, construction problems, the lack of a base on the Moon and the costs made solar power satellites look unlikely. Now, as improvements are made in solar cell design and space construction, and as we move towards a future where commercial space flight looks increasingly likely, the era of the solar power satellite looks more promising and their construction more feasible. Eventually, solar power satellites may even have to compete with other power-generating sources in space. The most promising is perhaps helium-3, a light form of the party-balloon gas helium. Helium-3 can be used as a fuel in nuclear fusion reactors, burnt with the heavy form of hydrogen, deuterium, potentially releasing vast quantities of energy. Unfortunately, helium-3 is a rare gas. There are no places on Earth to mine or collect it, but it is much more common in the solar wind, the particles that stream out from the Sun. As these particles bombard the surface of the Moon, they collect in the soils over billions of years. Since the Moon has no significant atmosphere, water or even wind to remove the materials on the surface, the elements from the solar wind have collected over its lifetime in the uppermost soils. That said, it is estimated that it will still take 100 million tonnes of lunar soil to get just one tonne of helium-3. One tonne of helium-3 would be worth several billion dollars to the energy industry, so it is a resource well worth digging for. One
56
space on earth
would need to burn just over 400 tonnes of helium-3 each year to feed the world’s power needs, but this is a theoretical estimate. The main practical problem with helium-3 is the lack of a nuclear fusion reactor to put it in. Expenditure on nuclear fusion research has been in decline worldwide; an intense focus on constructing prototype reactors that could use this resource has been lacking. Nevertheless if the human exploration of the Moon becomes a reality once more, and governments of the world start to look for new energy resources, helium-3 on the Moon could drive the research needed to build the reactors to burn it. Helium-3 lurks in the atmospheres of the gas planets, from Jupiter to Neptune. Some have speculated that we could mine the atmosphere of Uranus and ship it back to Earth for nuclear fusion reactors. The gas planets are so cold that familiar gases in the Earth’s atmosphere – carbon dioxide, nitrogen, argon and oxygen – are frozen out. What is left is an atmosphere composed almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium: several million times the amount on the Moon.
Over the past few centuries we have mined, crushed and extracted so much metal and minerals from rocks around the world that further supplies are becoming very difficult to get at. Mines are becoming deeper and less pure, meaning that greater quantities of material must be processed. It does not look like we are about to run out soon, but the cost of these materials is likely to increase as they become harder to collect. For decades, space agencies and enthusiasts have contemplated plans to exploit the iron and nickel resources of the Solar
rich bounty and new crises
57
System as an alternative to poorer grade metal ores on Earth. These proposals seem like science fiction, but they are a simple manifestation of the fact that the periodic table is universal – and so, therefore, are the metals that we need for our industry. Iron on the Earth is the same as iron on asteroids – it has the same number of protons and the same number of neutrons. All of the elements were originally formed in stars and released in supernova explosions. Expanding the human economic and industrial sphere of influence beyond Earth is therefore not a radical departure from our previous activities, but rather a seamless expansion of the use of the resources of the Solar System, whether they are on Earth or elsewhere. The environmental challenges posed by our industrial and economic presence on Earth are interwoven with the challenges of our presence in the rest of the Solar System. Iron is one of the most common materials we use. About 10% of the raw materials of industry are accounted for by this, the fourth most common element in the Earth’s crust. At present levels of use it is estimated that we may have about 300 years of consumption left. This estimate depends very much on technology, and it assumes that we are getting access to ores that are relatively exposed. We might get better and better at extracting this element from poorer and poorer ores, and then the number of years left could well be increased to thousands of years. Beyond the Earth is the debris of Solar System formation, tens of thousands of rocks and their fragments that orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter as the asteroid belt. A proportion of these remnants have more erratic orbits. Having been ejected from the asteroid belt, some of them orbit inwards and pass close to the Earth, close enough to be of interest to a spacefaring civilization seeking new resources in the earliest stages of its expansion into space. Asteroids offer almost boundless quantities of minerals to supply our industries. They have about three
58
space on earth
hundred times as much metal in them as lunar soil, and it would be well worth developing ways to process them as a first priority in our settlement of space. Some of the most common types of space rock are named chondrites, so called because these stony bodies have small glassy spheres, or ‘chondrules’, in them. Some chondrites, called carbonaceous chondrites, are quite rich in salts such as magnesium and calcium sulfates. These compounds, although not metals, might find many uses in industry as acids, bases and other additives. Within their salts is plentiful water, which can be heated and released, perhaps to be used as a coolant in metal industries in space, but also as a source of hydrogen and oxygen. Carbonaceous chondrites could be used as a source of volatile chemicals to make a wide diversity of fuels from methanol to methane and other chemicals used in manufacturing industries. But the real riches in asteroids come from the metals. Some of the chondrites are up to 92% pure iron or nearly 10% nickel. The iron, of course, is needed for making steel; nickel has an extraordinary variety of important uses in batteries and hightech alloys. Asteroids contain titanium, cobalt, magnesium, sodium and other economically important metals; a true treasure trove is waiting to be exploited. The plus side of asteroids, when seen from the environmentalists’ perspective, is that they are not covered in rainforests and endangered species. When mining them we are not likely to do any environmental damage as we normally see it. We will, of course, damage the asteroid. If it were an asteroid that might be considered very beautiful to a future space-faring civilization (perhaps it is named after a famous space explorer or scientist and is especially prized for its intrinsic value), then we could imagine an environmental outcry. But generally speaking, if asteroids to which people do
rich bounty and new crises
59
not feel a strong attachment were selected, they could be exploited with little environmental damage. Amongst the asteroids that orbit close to the Earth are other intriguing varieties that should be of interest to future industries. E-type asteroids contain a mineral called enstatite, a type of magnesium and silicon oxide. Enstatite could provide the raw materials for silicon used in solar panels and oxygen for life support systems. In many of these asteroids there is pure silicon which could be used to make solar cells and computer chips. Mtype asteroids are nearly 99% metal – literally natural blocks of iron. To get at this metal merely requires breaking a chunk off and melting it. These asteroids are more pure than the purest ores available on Earth. A single asteroid can be worth billions of dollars. The value of all the asteroid material is estimated to be several billion dollars for each man, woman and child alive. Humanity’s iron needs could be met for the next four hundred million years with all the asteroid material available to us in the Solar System – far in excess of anything imaginable on Earth with the best of technologies. Nickel reserves on land are estimated to last for another fifty years. The nickel mined from metal-rich rocks from the ocean floor may last for a thousand years, but the nickel in the asteroid belt should keep us going for a few million years. The effort needed to scrape nickel-rich nodules off the sea floor may well make nickel one of the most important elements to be mined in the early stages of asteroid exploitation. The use of these resources will not be a new industry to humanity. Many ancient cultures in the Bronze and Iron Ages built tools with iron from meteorites. Often used to make spearheads or swords, these Earth-falls were exploited by societies that could not find naturally rich iron ores in the ground. The dagger of King Tutankhamun of Egypt is believed to be made
60
space on earth
from meteoritic iron. Lying around in deserts and barren lands, meteorites are an easy source of metals, albeit on a vastly smaller scale than that to be found in space. Space settlers would be merely expanding an existing market, not creating a new one. We can think of early cultures as the first people to use space resources – a glimpse into a future when, instead of waiting for these resources to fall from the sky, we will actively go into space and collect them for ourselves. Matching the sheer quantity of resources in space is the relative ease with which they could be gathered. One of the advantages of asteroids is that most of them are so small – just a few kilometres long – that their gravity is very weak. Even some of the largest, which are hundreds of kilometres across, are still very small compared to a planet or even the Moon. An asteroid with a diameter of about one kilometre will have gravity about thirty thousand times less than Earth. With such a feeble tug, it takes little energy to get off the ground and carry away the resources. From the point of view of extracting resources, the ones that pass close to Earth – Near-Earth Objects – are attractive targets. These ideas seem more fantastical than using satellites to monitor the Earth, but already robots have been sent to explore the surfaces of asteroids. In November 2005, Japan’s little Hayabusa probe briefly landed on the 535-metre-long Itokawa asteroid. Launched in 2003, its designers still don’t know whether the spacecraft managed to fulfil its mission – to collect a small sample from the surface of the asteroid – but it sent back stunning images of this mainly nickel and iron S-type asteroid. Itokawa is exactly the type of asteroid that interests mineral prospectors. The space exploit was a startling demonstration that missions to go to the asteroids and collect their materials are no longer science fiction. We can imagine the drilling and extraction of metals from rocks like Itokawa and then processing them into useable prod-
rich bounty and new crises
61
ucts. They could feed industries in space, on the Moon and on Earth. Raw materials might be shipped to the surface of the Earth for processing by factories. If industries wanted to minimize atmospheric pollution, the products could be made in space and then shipped to Earth, thus avoiding harmful industrial activity on Earth. This future will only unfold, of course, if it makes economic sense. It might be cheaper to build an emission-free factory on Earth to process the raw materials than to build the final products in space. All of these ideas depend on the economics of space manufacturing, which are speculative at present. We can see that the vast resources of space do offer a remarkable future of resource-rich manufacturing, and they tempt humanity with the possibility of reducing the damage to Earth by removing some of the most polluting manufacturing processes into space.
Of all the connections between space settlement and environmentalism, the possibility of gathering resources from space is perhaps the one that could have the worst effect on Earth. This utopian view of space resources that I have just sketched – maintaining the Earth as an oasis and developing almost limitless sources of energy and minerals – is an attractive one. There are an increasing number of books welcoming the emergence of an environmental future when space resources will save the Earth. But there are many potential problems with this future. Resources brought back to Earth might simply fuel mass consumption. One could argue that the depletion and limitation of resources we currently have on Earth is good – it keeps the pop-
62
space on earth
ulation in check, it keeps our waste under control, and it reduces the burden on the environment. But imagine billions of people on Earth using unlimited resources from space. The only way to stop this unfolding age of plenitude from destroying Earth’s environment would be to remove the waste produced from all these resources back into space, but it is not clear that this will be profitable or attractive enough for anyone to bother doing it. The promise of limitless resources from space will threaten the Earth’s environment in potentially very serious ways. These problems become particularly serious when one considers that the Earth is almost certainly likely to always be a very attractive place to live. It has forests, a breathable atmosphere, lakes, oceans and abundant life. Compare this to the grey lethal wasteland of the Moon, the red desiccated deserts of Mars, or the radiation-bombarded blackness of outer space. Given the choice between living in space or on the Earth, most people would probably prefer the latter, where they can move and breathe freely and admire the natural wonders around them. If the resources from space become widely available on Earth at a good price, this is likely to be even more the case. Abundantly available space resources are likely to fuel migration back to the Earth, further contributing to environmental difficulties and the population explosion. Regardless of how rapidly space markets and communities do develop, the people of Earth will overwhelmingly, for a long time, remain the largest market in the Solar System, even if it turns out that people are enthusiastic to leave Earth and live in space. There are six and a half billion of us here on Earth. We cannot predict when there will be an equal number in space, making markets there equal in size to those on Earth, but we can be fairly certain that the Earth will remain the largest market for resources for some time to come. So it is reasonable to assume that for a considerable period space resources will be trans-
rich bounty and new crises
63
ported back to the surface of the Earth to feed this large market – with its ensuing impact on the environment. The same concerns apply to solar power satellites. Yes, solar power satellites could free us of energy shortages, climate change and starvation on Earth, but what would society be like with access to huge amounts of cheap energy? What would happen to consumption? The energy must go somewhere, and it will feed new electrical appliances, more street lighting, more development and more waste. Society’s greed for energy tends to grow to match availability. Power and resources from space will not necessarily create a new, clean environment. Indeed, it is more likely to be the fuel of mass global consumption and environmental destruction on Earth. Space does not offer a panacea. It is common for space explorers to argue that by exploiting the resources of space we can remove all factories and manufacturing processes from Earth. Pollution would be banished from our green world forever and Earth could return to a state of harmony with Nature while we go about settling the space frontier. This vision is a powerful one – it has a talismanic power over those that want to believe that technology will save us. It is a very humanist vision; it has embedded within it the idea that we should not worry about environmental problems because in space there is a solution to them, and humans will master that solution. Everything is going to be fine. This is a blind faith in technology, dangerously rife in many publications and visions of space exploration. I predict that the emerging threats and challenges of keeping the Earth’s environment healthy alongside the vastly expanding availability of energy and resources from space will become one of the most serious and extraordinary challenges to the welfare of Earth and Earth-based human civilization, rather than a salvation to our many problems. Global warming may pale into
64
space on earth
insignificance compared with the crisis on Earth precipitated by the human settlement of space. Despite this emerging threat, could our settlement of space offer other benefits to, quite literally, save us and the rest of the biosphere from destruction? We, and all species on Earth, are threatened by asteroid and comet impacts. In the past, these events have almost certainly caused destruction to life on Earth. Most famous is the Cretaceous–Tertiary event 65 million years ago, when an asteroid hit the Yucatán Peninsula in present-day Mexico, apparently wiping out the dinosaurs and 75% of life on Earth. The dinosaurs had until then held mastery of the land, air and sea for about 130 million years, forty times longer than we have. That even this long dominion over Earth was not enough to save them from environmental disaster is one reason why we find the idea of an asteroid impact killing them off so fascinating. We suspect we might be next. In 1908 something exploded above the region of Tunguska in Siberia, flattening two thousand square kilometres of forest. The stony asteroid or comet involved was too small to make it through the atmosphere – instead, it disintegrated in the sky – but it was a reminder that the Earth is vulnerable. Tunguskasized explosions happen about once every thousand years. Larger ones that cause global scale extinction are estimated to occur about once every hundred million years. A space rock of about ten kilometres diameter can cause global devastation. A small size like this might seem inconsequential, but it is travelling at a staggering seven to eleven kilometres per second – that’s about 20,000 miles an hour. This kinetic energy, released in impact, is devastating. It is thought that these impacts hurl dust and rock high into the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight and shutting down photosynthesis, the base of the Earth’s food chains. Fortunately, there
rich bounty and new crises
65
has been no such event in the history of recorded human civilization. Because of the vast disaster that could be inflicted by an asteroid or comet, there is intense interest in devising methods to deflect them away from Earth. But first, we need to know what objects are out there and what they are made from. Armed with this information it might then be feasible to find ways to divert any that are found to be on a collision course with Earth. Astronomers have been methodically watching Near-Earth Objects and mapping their orbits. To map them doesn’t need space exploration as such. It can be done from the ground using telescopes. But diverting asteroids will need missions into space. To shift the trajectory of a large rock you need to know what it is made from, and how strongly it is held together. If it is one large lump of rock it will be difficult to break up using an explosive. If it is a jumble of rocks, then a well placed detonation might cause it to fragment, but these fragments might themselves pose a threat as their orbits intersect with Earth’s. Alternatively, an asteroid could be nudged by firing a laser beam at it; the gas released would cause it to change its path sufficiently to miss the Earth. Giant air bags have been suggested as a way to bump away rocks. What some of these asteroids are made of can be found out using telescopes that measure the reflectance of their surfaces. But to really discover the strength and composition of an object we need to visit it, take photographs and even probe its surface. With this information, engineers can devise ways to divert them. Already scientists are on their way to doing just this. In February 2001, NASA’s NEAR (Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) spacecraft touched down on the 33-kilometre-long asteroid Eros. It sent back 69 close-up images before landing on the surface. NEAR photographed boulders, and the spacecraft’s gamma-ray spectrometer sent back information on the compo-
66
space on earth
sition of the asteroid, the first such instrument landed on the surface of an asteroid. The team had not expected the spacecraft to land safely, but the continued stream of data, meriting an extension of the science mission by ten days, allowed them to gather information about what Eros was made of. Although Eros was surprisingly low in sulphur, it had many similarities to meteorites that have landed on Earth in the past. Whether we will be threatened by such an object at any time soon and whether we will see it in time and be able to stop it are important questions. The fact that space agencies are already despatching robotic craft to gather information about asteroids shows how space exploration is being used to address one of the potentially most devastating environmental changes we can imagine – the collision of an asteroid or comet with the Earth. Vast resources of minerals and energy, environmental protection and protection from death by impact are just three reasons for going into space. One would be hard pressed to create a more compelling list of benefits that have come from the settlement of space, and all of this without recourse to spin-off technologies. There are many direct reasons for going into space. We will prospect for new space resources and we will build more reliable spaceships that can travel across the Solar System. The exploration of space is not just an outward looking vision, turning away from the Earth and heading out, like an explorer who strides out across Antarctica, looking forwards, only towards the destination. That would be a mistake. By striking out into space we are gathering technologies and insights that can help us understand and better protect the old home world, Earth. Many of us already rely on the exploration of space for things as down to earth as our weather forecasts, and for many of the environmental policies that are helping to protect our planet for our children and for subsequent generations. It is to these more earthly benefits that we will now turn.
4 new views on an old world
The settlement of space is an environmentally responsible thing to do
Impressive insights into our biosphere have come, and continue to come, from the exploration of space. To say that the settlement of space is an environmentally responsible thing to do would not be a device to counter criticism that space exploration is a waste of money, but it is truly a statement of fact. The deep connections between environmentalism and space research are a manifestation of the simple fact that as one moves away from home, so one’s perspective alters, just as flying high over a city in an aircraft gives you a big-picture perspective on life below. When the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into space in October 1957, it was obvious to even the most unenthusiastic observer that it had opened up new scientific horizons. The threat felt by the non-communist world as this sphere passed unchallenged over their cities and towns, high beyond even the most capable aircraft, was apparently palpable on that day and triggered the great energy of the US space program. It was obvious even then that artificial moons could do much more than spy on enemies. These machines might allow us to observe the Earth and improve our quality of life. And so from 67
68
space on earth
the earliest days of space travel, satellites were set to work investigating the Earth. The first human into space, Yuri Gagarin, immediately made the connection between the home planet and his adventure in space. When he ventured into orbit for 108 minutes in 1961, rather than sending back comments about the new space frontier, some of his first comments were, ‘I can see coastlines of the continents, islands, rivers, large bodies of water, and various features of terrain’. What astonished him and other early space pioneers was that they could look back to Earth and get insights into the state of our world. They could see, in a single field of view, entire continents and oceans. That vision captivated them as much as the black void to which they could alternatively have directed their comments and thoughts on the future direction of civilization. Explorer 1, the first US satellite, made one of the most significant discoveries in the history of space exploration. Soon after launch in 1958, it found the Van Allen Belts. This established that the Earth is surrounded by radiation belts that trap particles raining in from outer space. Early Russian satellites mapped the extent of the Earth’s magnetic field, created by its liquid nickel and iron core. By the early 1960s, the Kosmos and Elektron satellites were busy understanding how the atmosphere of the Earth is influenced by what lies beyond. All this in less than five years after satellites first ventured into space. The magnetic fields and the radiation belts surrounding the Earth shield life from high-energy particles that stream out from the Sun and in from the rest of the Galaxy. Without this protection, life would suffer much greater damage to its genetic material. We cannot say that without these screens life would be impossible, because we do not know how evolution would develop on such a planet. We can say that without these screens life would certainly have a much more difficult time.
new views on an old world
69
The radiation belts and the magnetic field also impinge on the climate of the Earth by causing reactions in the upper atmosphere and changing the behaviour of the atmosphere. The impact of this knowledge is more than just scientific. It reveals how the Earth interacts with the rest of the cosmos. The discovery of the radiation belts was truly the time when the inextricable links between the Earth and space could be clearly seen. The Soviets were quick to see how the new era of satellites could help improve life on Earth. I’m sure that scientists in the Soviet Union were laudably focused on the scientific benefits of space exploration, but environmental monitoring was also seen by the Soviet government as one of the instruments of creating cooperation throughout the communist world. By using space assets to collect environmental information for other socialist countries, they cemented political ties. They accomplished this through Intercosmos, the agency that linked socialist countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary and East Germany into a common space-faring civilization. Although all space agencies use their satellites to build new opportunities for cooperation, the Soviets were particularly good at it. Within ten years of entering space, they had already drawn up the Biosphere programme, with the purpose of watching the environment and mapping the resources of their collaborating countries. From 1978 to 1982 experts from many different countries got together to pool their knowledge. Biosphere-M focused on Hungary; and Biosphere-V looked at Vietnam; and there were other Biosphere programmes for Romania, Mongolia, Bulgaria and Cuba. By the time the Biosphere programme was over more than half a million photos of the Earth had been gathered. Each mission used astronauts on board the Salyut 6 space station combined with unmanned satellites to chart a vast range of phenomena. Volcanoes, rivers, cyclones, areas of industrial pol-
70
space on earth
lution, agricultural resources, lakes and many other features and changes on Earth were carefully monitored. The photographs were used to help organize industrial development. In East Germany, they mapped the air pollution around the industries of the Ore Mountains for the first time and in Cuba, under the Biosphere-C mission with Cuban astronaut Arnaldo Mendez, they catalogued oil slicks on the ocean and mapped them to help efforts on the ground to reduce pollution along the coastlines of Cuba. For the first time they brought back detailed images of areas around the country that were affected by hurricanes, and they studied the sizes of Atlantic waves. The Biosphere series of missions had at their heart one of the greatest advantages of satellites as a way of looking at the Earth’s environment – they can scan vast areas that aircraft would take much longer to do. And, of course, once in space they do not need much fuel. To map the ground with aircraft and to do it repeatedly over many decades to catalogue any changes would cost a great deal of money. Perhaps the most obvious advantage of studying the Earth from space is that satellites can study phenomena that cut across political boundaries. Many geological features, such as mountain ranges and plains, can cover thousands of kilometres. Indeed, it was only with images sent back from the Landsat satellites that Chinese researchers were able to start understanding the geology of the Tibetan plateau in its entirety, a region that is otherwise practically inaccessible because of physical and political barriers. There are other problems with trying to do all this from aircraft. Each aircraft might fly at a different height on each pass of the area being mapped. Sometimes the surveys do not exactly overlap and they have many years between them, leaving gaps in the coverage. Piecing all this information together into a coherent picture requires a great deal of time, money and skill, and the end result is usually imperfect. It is estimated that the
new views on an old world
71
cost of photographing the ground with a satellite is about a fifteenth of that if you had to do it all using aircraft. A great example of the advantages of this perspective from space is unravelling the complexities of plate tectonics. The land masses of the Earth are made from plates that collide and move around, raising mountains, spawning islands, causing earthquakes and forming volcanic regions. Understanding how the different plates are interconnected needs a planetary-scale perspective. As the plates move at a slow rate – no faster than the growth of your finger nails – it is virtually impossible to get longterm accurate measurements on the ground. Some ingenious ways to measure the position of land masses have been devised; one of the most simple, at least in its principle, is to fire a laser at a satellite in orbit and measure the time it takes for the signal to come back. Reflector mirrors that were placed on the Moon by the Apollo 14 and 15 astronauts in 1971 have been used for this purpose. The distances that the land moves are tiny, but because the distance between the ground and the satellite or mirror on the Moon is vast in comparison, tiny movements are magnified and can be accurately worked out. This laser ranging can measure land movements to the nearest millimetre. Using dedicated reflecting cubes attached to numerous satellites, grids can be built up that enable highly accurate measurements of the shape of the Earth and the movements on its surface. Fractures, faults and rifts that form around moving land have been catalogued as never before from space, giving new insights into the regions of the world affected by earthquakes. It was from the reaches of space that Russian geologists mapped the Svan fracture, an important fracture in the Caucasus that slices through the local landscape and is part of the key to understanding the geologic history of Eurasia. Previously, photographs failed to appreciate the size of the fracture, but from
72
space on earth
space the astronauts could see it breaking away from Svan lake. It is five times as long as the lake, much larger and much more important than had ever been appreciated before. Another wonderful example of the way in which space has enabled previously impossible investigations is the mapping of the ocean bottom. One way to get a chart is to cross the ocean many times using ships, from which scientists can measure the depth by manually dropping lines down or using sonar, but this is timely and expensive. Not least, unpredictable weather on the high seas makes this work difficult and sporadic, adding further to the costs. Fortunately, the shape of the ocean surface mirrors the ocean bottom. Where there is a high peak on the ocean bottom, perhaps an underwater mountain range, the gravity of the peak literally pulls the water around it, creating a peak in the water surface. Where there is a deep trench in the ocean bottom, the water on the surface of the ocean sinks slightly as the rock on either side of the trench pulls the water down and out. The scale of the surface features on the ocean is not as big at the ocean bottom, or else we would have a very unusual looking ocean, with giant water-mountains and troughs. But on the other hand, some of these shapes can be surprisingly large. The eight-kilometre-deep Puerto Rico trench, which lies north-east of the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean, causes a 22 metre drop in the surface of the ocean compared to the coast. This drop occurs over many hundreds of kilometres, so it cannot be seen with the human eye, but it is nevertheless big enough to be seen by a satellite that can measure distances to the nearest centimetre using radar transmissions. The charting of the physical world has been matched by new possibilities for mapping the biological world. Vegetation is changed by the soil conditions and local drainage patterns. Space has proved an invaluable vantage point from which to
new views on an old world
73
map vegetation cover and understand how local geology and human activity affects the growth of plants. Plants, for example, are vital as food and habitat for bighorn, deer and antelope that roam Arizona in the US. Identifying an urgent need to map this vegetation cover, the Arizona Game and Fish Department made a detailed comparison of changes that had occurred between 1984 and 1997 using Landsat images. Their study provided the first detailed maps of what had changed over 13 years, and now people on the ground have a better idea of which areas they need to watch more carefully to protect the habitat of the large mammals that live there. From space the boundaries of tropical rainforests and savannahs can be photographed in detail and the encroachment of people on the forests and vegetation can be watched over many years. Using this imagery, plans can be drawn up for protecting places and setting up parks in the most vulnerable places. Once National Parks are established, new satellite photographs can be used to monitor them continuously over many years to check their health. Today, the Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Alaska is regularly watched from space. The Yosemite National Park authorities in California use space photographs to monitor the human impact and improve the management of the high levels of tourist traffic through the Park. In Japan, the Akkeshi Lake resort, located near the marshlands in eastern Hokkaido, in the northernmost of Japan’s main islands, is monitored using images from space taken by the IKONOS satellite. The famous tourist location, visited for its hot springs, is an extraordinary mix of unique bogs, fens and swamp forest. It has been designated a Special Protection Area for wildlife, known especially for its abundant and diverse waterfowl. Some environmental changes can occur quickly, and catching the course of hurricanes or, say, snow melt is all but impossible. Satellites and space stations, on the other hand, can observe
74
space on earth
changes repeatedly. In the Russian Arctic, space photographs are routinely used to watch the annual growth and retreat of snow-pack. Monitoring these changes is useful for industries and people planning journeys and operations across the Arctic, who want to know whether the roads and fields are clearin.g More recently, some of the most inhospitable regions of the world have been watched from orbit. Concern about global warming has focused attention on the ice shelves of Antarctica. From space, scientists have been able to map the ice shelves and study their seasonal changes. Although the ice shelves themselves are unlikely to affect global sea levels, they act as buttresses for glaciers on Antarctica, essentially braking their movement. If they disappear, glaciers can flow more quickly and this might itself influence sea level. On the ground, observations and surveying of ice shelves would be impossible. In 2002, over 3,000 square kilometres of the Larsen B ice shelf, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, broke off from Antarctica and fragmented into icebergs. Each one of these icebergs was tracked from space as they dispersed across the Southern Ocean. Some Antarctic icebergs can migrate many hundreds of kilometres further north from where they first broke off, giving researchers new ideas about the water cycle around Antarctica, one of the most biologically productive regions of our planet. Elsewhere, glaciers and ice can be a real danger to people. In the Alps and other high mountainous regions glaciers form in valleys, trapping lakes behind them. When they melt, and particularly when they break up without warning, the water released threatens villages and people. In 1965, near the French town of Chamonix, a glacier melted, releasing its water completely unexpectedly. It claimed over 80 lives, highlighting the need for early warning systems. From orbit, glaciers can be carefully monitored for signs of danger that can be relayed to people on the ground. In the process, sci-
new views on an old world
75
entists also improve their knowledge of glaciology. The retreat and advance of glaciers is used as an indicator of climate change, so by watching glaciers all over the world climatologists can refine their ideas about global warming. Many types of volcanic eruption have now been observed directly from space, and have given clues about the possible effects of giant eruptions on the Earth’s climate. When a volcano erupts it ejects ash and dust high into the atmosphere. Some of these eruptions have been so severe that the dust and ash reach the stratosphere, circle the globe and reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface. The Earth cools and drops into a ‘volcanic winter’. When Mount St Helens in the USA erupted in 1980, the Earth’s temperature dropped by only one tenth of a degree. More fierce volcanoes can cause much more profound changes. Mount Tambora erupted near Indonesia in 1816, releasing so much ash that darkness was recorded for two full days over 600 kilometres from the volcano. In the past these eruptions may have caused major evolutionary changes. ‘Traps’ – large regions of lava-covered ground, whose name comes from the Norwegian word for ‘staircase’, are the legacy of these events. The eruptions were so massive that volcanic winters may have dramatically cooled the Earth for years, possibly causing widespread extinctions. For example, the Deccan Traps, which cover almost half a million square kilometres of India, are contemporaneous with the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinctions 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all life on Earth went extinct. Some scientists think that these eruptions may have been an alternative extinction mechanism to the widely supported asteroid-extinction theory, or at least that they might have contributed to adverse global conditions – the asteroid being the final nail in the coffin. From the ground, scientists can try to track the erupting plumes of volcanoes as they circle and dissipate around the
76
space on earth
Earth, but the most effective way to watch a volcanic eruption is from space. Since 2001, the Aqua satellite, a joint project between American, Japanese and Brazilian scientists, has had its Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) trained on volcanoes to get a better idea of whether they are likely to erupt again. The eruption of the Sheveluch volcano on Russia’s highly active Kamchatka Peninsula in 2004 was first spotted by satellite. From the vantage point of orbit the erupting ash plume was followed as it spread. Instruments on board the satellite could measure the thickness of the plume and its light-blocking effects. After the eruption a growing lava dome inside the caldera was detected. The dome would be difficult for anyone to see from the ground because of the extreme danger of venturing near the active volcano, and the growth of this new dome is a signal that the volcano might be liable to erupt again. Satellites are routinely used to watch the progress of hurricanes. As early as 1969, they warned the people of Florida of the imminent approach of Hurricane Camilla and over 50,000 people were evacuated. Since then, satellite observations of hurricanes, their formation and possible landfall have become a staple on the evening weather forecasts in hurricane zones. Most of us now take this forecasting and warning for granted. Hurricanes are relatively localized and, like volcanoes, some regions of the world are more prone to them than others. Despite this, it is still very difficult to know exactly where they will start and where they will be most destructive. It may never be possible to build a computer program that will plot the course of a hurricane and the towns and cities most likely to be affected with complete accuracy. This unpredictability is a characteristic of natural disasters. Only by watching them unfold from space can their courses be understood. The terrible consequences of a lack of communication between environmentalists and space explorers are often
new views on an old world
77
brought home. On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans. The storm surge from this immense hurricane soon breached, and broke, the levee system around Lake Pontchartrain, and the city was flooded. The death toll was in excess of 1,300 and there was well over $270 billion of damage. Over one million people were displaced. At its peak, winds of 175 mph smashed the city’s levee defences. It was one of the worst and most expensive natural disasters in US history. Hurricane Katrina was not a surprise. Satellite pictures of its approach were beamed into living rooms on the usual weather forecasts and news programmes. Its ferocity and the threat it posed to inland communities could easily be seen. The environmental scientists were not unprepared either. They had for decades made predictions about the effects of a major storm on the US mainland. Using computers they had even simulated the potential effects of a large storm on the New Orleans levee systems. So what went wrong? There were many policy errors in how to deal with the storm, before and after it had arrived. Regardless of what decisions were or were not taken inside the government, the ultimate effect was that the communication between the space scientists, who had the footage of the hurricane, and the environmental scientists, who knew what the effects of the storm might be, was not good enough. For decades before, these two groups of people should have been encouraged to work more closely together, with support from the government, to get New Orleans ready for the inevitable. Other natural disasters are equally fickle. Fire is an unpredictable menace, as it may start in any place that has dry vegetation and it is very quickly changed by the shifting patterns of winds. Each year, between about three-quarters of a million and eight million square kilometres of forest and grassland burns in fires. Satellites can report on the location of fires, helping evacuations to be organized in good time, and the pictures they send back
78
space on earth
can be used to direct the fire services to the most threatening areas. Even the flow of something usually as benign and vital as water can turn into a natural hazard. In the USA, floods cause billions of dollars of damage each year. With topographic maps of an area, it is possible to find the low points and to get a rough idea of where water might tend to collect, but the course of a sudden and ferocious flood is sometimes known only as it occurs. From space the world’s flood regions can be watched, potentially saving lives and helping housing developers to pick places that are less likely to be swamped. Often coming in the wake of heavy rains, floods displace people. In the rainy season of 2004, a flood in north Thailand, caused by an unusually early start to the rains, forced over 6,000 people to move. Six people died during the ensuring flood and over 70 houses were destroyed. The satellites gave help to emergency services trying to coordinate the response to this disaster. By collecting information over many years, databases are slowly being assembled about areas of the world where floods hit hardest. Eventually, this hard-won information could be used to make better predictions. Early rainy seasons will trigger flood warnings in places that have suffered from the most damaging inundations in the past. The European Space Agency has learned these lessons, and in 2004 it established a visionary service to humanitarian agencies working in the strife-torn Darfur region of Sudan. The roads to the region, where over 1.4 million people, displaced from their homes, were located, often become inundated in the rainy season. ESA activated the Charter of Space and Major Disasters. Under this agreement, satellite images are given to the organizations on the ground in under 12 hours from when they were taken from space, allowing people in the area to immediately find the best roads for moving aid into the most needy areas.
new views on an old world
79
With a population of 1.3 billion and a land area of just under ten million square kilometres, China too has immense challenges in responding to natural disasters. Among the collection of misfortunes that this vast country experiences are floods, dust storms, typhoons, landslides, forest fires, drought, and snow and ice hazards. In the past, loss of human life could be huge, but the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), based in Wuhan, has been using satellites from many different space agencies to watch over disaster hotspots. Its Fire Monitoring System sends back continuous satellite imagery of the forests of the north-east and south-west, enabling government agencies to see new fires and track them, warning people along its path. Its dedicated Disaster Monitoring Satellite Constellation, made up of three satellites – with more to come – can image a swathe of land a remarkable 720 kilometres wide, sweeping across China and sending back vital pictures and data to eager disaster relief personnel who can get the information straight off the Web. Deren Li, a senior scientist at NRSC, estimates that whereas it used to take 25 hours to get disaster relief information using aircraft – and that was with the most rapid response possible – it now routinely takes less than five hours to get data directly from space into the hands of relief workers. The sheer size of China and the many climatic zones it cuts across has made it a test bed for many of the technology and data processing challenges needed to integrate all the diverse information coming back from different satellites into a coherent and easily understood picture for people on the ground who need to act. Now China’s experience is helping the rest of the world to use satellites to understand and prepare for the unpredictability of Mother Earth. Satellites have proven themselves to be silent friends, watching our world while we get on with our lives. They warn us when danger from volcanoes, fires, flood and hurricanes is imminent. They tell us when our logging, burning and mining have
80
space on earth
become destructive, sending us warning shots that prompt us to get our act together. They gather information about the biosphere, sending it back to eager scientists who seek to piece together the past and future of our world, information that itself may help us understand our own impact on the environment. Had we not ventured into space in 1957, today we would not have anywhere near the data and warning systems we now have. Stuck with aircraft and ground vehicles, the task of gathering integrated global information about the Earth and our effect on it would be all but impossible. It would require armies of people, thousands of planes and vast expense. Satellites are being used to map the height of waves around the world’s seas and oceans to improve the safety of shipping and reduce the chances of oil spills that threaten the health of our environment. They chart the blooms of phytoplankton that inhabit our oceans. These tiny single-celled creatures provide food for the marine food chain, from fish to whales. When they bloom in the wake of nutrients that have welled up from the sea bottom, their pigments, such as the chlorophyll that they use to trap sunlight for growth, can be spotted and measured by satellites. These images allow scientists to find out where the most productive regions of the oceans are, giving them impetus to protect these regions or learn how to farm them more sustainably. In the short time of our exploration of this endless frontier that stretches for billions of light years, trillions and trillions of kilometres, we have found huge benefits, even at the start of the journey. At a distance of only 36,000 kilometres above ground, where many satellites orbit the Earth at the same speed as the planet rotates, the returns to the protection and study of the Earth have simply been vast. Much of what I have recounted relates to satellites, but observations on natural phenomena from volcanoes to hurricanes
new views on an old world
81
have also been made by people on space stations. There is no doubt that humans have a role in gathering the information from space. They have an amazing ability to see features and patterns that at the time may not be relevant to their mission, but which may be of paramount importance later. Whilst watching a volcano on Earth, for instance, maybe they see from their space station a forest fire and decide to look at that as well. Since its first launch in 1981, the Space Shuttle has produced thousands of high-quality photographs of different regions of the world, an outstanding vindication of how, when people are holding the camera, they can pick out the features that might be interesting. In some cases people can make up for the one major deficiency of satellites – their inability to catch transient phenomena. Although satellites can photograph volcanoes and hurricanes, they tend to just circle around the Earth, mindlessly taking snapshots of everything below. Humans, on the other hand, can scan the disc of the Earth, seeking out the beginnings of volcanic eruptions or storms, and they can direct their camera to those features, providing vital insights on the early stages of these events. Human pattern recognition skills currently exceed the abilities of the most advanced computers; they spot unexpected relationships between things that are impossible to program because, by definition, they are unknown until a human first sees them. Robots can do valuable things and almost all the major environmental advances that we have gained from space have been made by satellites. Nonetheless, there is a place for humans in this endeavour.
82
space on earth
To really understand your own country it is good to visit others; it helps to develop a perspective on your own culture and origins. So travelling to new planets can help us understand home. As the space race took satellites to places remote from Earth, so our appreciation of the Earth improved. Satellites that merely go to orbit around the Earth give us a deeper understanding of our influence, good or bad, on the environment. Satellites sent to other planets have put all this information into a much broader context. Even the early explorations of other planets opened our eyes to the remarkable beauty of our own biosphere, its tenuous hold on Earth, and what happens to a potentially life-bearing planet when conditions aren’t quite right. Venus is today a searing hell of a world. Globally cooked to just over 460 °C, the second planet from the Sun is shrouded in a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere that was first seen close up by the US Mariner 5 and Soviet Venera 4 spacecraft in 1967. What these spacecraft discovered, and further emissaries confirmed, is that Venus is afflicted by a very bad case of a runaway greenhouse effect. Its surface temperature is much higher than it would be if the planet had no atmosphere. The carbon dioxide lets heat in and reduces its escape to space. This state of affairs was brought about by Venus being too close to the Sun. Long ago water boiled from the surface, stopping the carbon dioxide from being locked up in carbonate rocks. Venus is now a lifeless planet. The upper temperature limit for life is about 120 °C, and there is no water on the surface for biological reactions to occur in, even if it could withstand the temperature and pressure. Around two billion years from now, when the Sun’s luminosity reaches a higher value than today, the Earth itself will be afflicted with a runaway greenhouse effect and all life on it will eventually be extinguished. The spacecraft that visited Venus
new views on an old world
83
have given us a startling insight into the far future of our own planet. Who could have believed 50 years ago that by sending a tiny spacecraft to Venus we could get to know the fate of the Earth’s fragile biosphere in two billion years? Like time machines, spacecraft have taken environmentalists into the future. These journeys to Venus have had profound scientific influences. We have realized that the biosphere is not a permanent part of the Earth’s existence, something which we can treat in any way we like without repercussions. Today we are worried about the injection of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere from industry, deforestation and other human activities. The global temperature rises caused by greenhouse gases are predicted to increase sea level and cause flooding and many other changes besides. Carbon dioxide concentrations have risen from about 280 parts per million two hundred years ago to over 340 parts per million today. These concentrations are not as extreme as the 95% carbon dioxide atmosphere that shrouds Venus, but we have that planet to thank for helping us to appreciate the need to watch the carbon dioxide on our own world. We might have so far escaped Venus-like cooking by keeping far enough away from the Sun, but can we be too far away? Satellites sent to Mars have taught us just as much of an environmental lesson as those sent to Venus – if for very different reasons. Like Venus, Mars was a place that people once thought was an abode for intelligent life. H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds was predicated on the idea that Mars was a benign, habitable world. Percival Lowell, even at the beginning of the 20th century, thought it to be a world inhabited by a dying Martian civilization constructing canals to channel the last pockets of water to their desiccated cities. These views of Mars were the
84
space on earth
early stages of an optimism about the potential habitability of planets. A lot of the knowledge we now have about Mars has come from satellites and landers. Recently gathered evidence of ancient standing bodies of liquid water gained from observations on the planet by NASA’s Opportunity rover and ESA’s Mars Express orbiter, together with our knowledge that rocks can be transferred from one planet to another, as manifested in the discovery of Martian meteorites on Earth, has given us reason to suspect that even if life never independently evolved on Mars, it might have been transferred there from Earth. Gullies around the edges of craters, seen by the Mars Global Surveyor satellite and interpreted as water seeps, seem to testify to the presence of liquid water, even on present-day Mars. Are there pockets of conditions that might be conducive to life? Are there microbes underground on Mars? Conditions on Mars are very different from Earth, despite its ‘Earth-like’ reputation. Mars lacks an ozone shield to protect the surface from damaging ultraviolet radiation, which was first confirmed by the Mariner satellites sent to Mars by NASA in the late 1960s. On Earth, the shield is made from the reaction of ultraviolet light with oxygen. When the oxygen molecules are split in two by ultraviolet light, they recombine to form ozone, which happens to absorb most strongly in the region of the spectrum that would otherwise cause severe biological damage. As there is negligible oxygen in the Martian atmosphere, the levels of ozone are also vanishingly small, and the damage to exposed DNA would be up to a thousand times greater than on Earth. Mars also has high background levels of high-energy particles that stream in from the Sun and the rest of the cosmos. Mars is a small planet. Mariner 4 discovered that the dynamo that drives the formation of the magnetic field on Earth lost its power long
new views on an old world
85
ago on Mars. Without the field there is little protection from high-energy particles, and on the surface Martian life would be constantly bombarded by them. The atmospheric pressure is so low that in most places liquid water cannot exist at all. Any water on the surface would either become ice or would instantly turn to vapour, bypassing the liquid water phase altogether. And so on Mars, using satellites and landed spacecraft, we see what happens to the surface of a planet without an ozone shield, without a magnetic field and with a thin atmosphere – all manifestations of the fact that it is too small. Maybe there is life just below ground, but the lack of a lush and productive biosphere on the surface attests to the harsh conditions on the planet. Telescopes can tell us a lot about other planets, but they cannot give us the detailed images of the surface that tell us about the ancient waterways that carved their courses across the Martian surface. They do not tell us definitively whether there is life there and they cannot measure the ozone and the lack of a magnetic field in quite the same detail that orbiting satellites can. We need rovers to seek out signs of ancient water and to drill into rocks to see if Mars was once conducive to life. Our growing view of other planets as inhospitable for life has mirrored our growing recognition that the Earth is subject to large natural changes in its potential habitability, and that humans too can change favourable conditions. The exploration of other planets using satellites and landers and the confirmation of the absence of other intelligent life in our Solar System has helped us realize the uniqueness of Earth’s biosphere, at least in our own Solar System. Of course, Venus and Mars are not the only two planets to give us a perspective on Earthly life. They just happen to be interesting because they have atmospheres that might tell us about the past, present and future of our own planet. Our own
86
space on earth
Moon and the giant gas planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn, show us the diversity of ways in which planets and moons can form. Some have no atmosphere at all and some have no solid surface; in the case of the gas giants, they have surfaces made of solid metals under such high pressures that life is almost certainly impossible. A survey of our Solar System tells us much about the unusual place that a small rocky planet with a benign atmosphere has in the varying planetary environments on offer. One of the most remarkable recent developments has been the ability to study planets orbiting distant stars. The discovery of ‘extrasolar’ planets offers a potential environmental revolution. The first extrasolar planet was found by astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva in 1995, orbiting a star named 51 Pegasi. The planet, about half the size of Jupiter, is so close to its host star that it orbits every 4.2 days, hence the designation of these types of planet as ‘Hot Jupiters’, a reference to their close proximity to their parent star. Data collected by Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler at the Lick Observatory showed that this planet was in the data that they had been collecting since the 1980s. They went on to find planets orbiting the stars Tau Bootes, 55 Cancri and Upsilon Andromedae. Extrasolar planets are found by looking for the dimming of distant starlight as the planet passes in front of the star. The slight wobble that the planet induces in the star’s position as the star and the planet rotate around their common centre of mass is also another signature of a planet. With these methods astronomers have been able to directly detect distant worlds. The amount of wobble or the amount of dimming, and its timing, can be used to calculate the size of the planet and how quickly it orbits its star. So far, almost all the planets discovered have been Jupitersized planets, because these are easiest to detect. They are large
new views on an old world
87
and have the greatest effect on their parent star. But there are plans to build large orbiting space telescopes such as NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder or ESA’s Darwin mission that will let scientists eventually build catalogues of Earth-sized planets around distant stars. Imagine the benefits for Earth of studying myriads of Earth-sized rocky planets. Astronomers will be able to determine the atmospheric composition of these planets by analysing the light they reflect. Perhaps some of these planets will have atmospheres similar to what we believe the early Earth’s may have been like. Perhaps some will be on the verge of turning into runaway greenhouses, and we will find the last vestiges of moisture in their atmospheres. A good analogy for all this is a zoo. Considering only Mars and Venus is akin to learning about animals from a zoo with only two animals. These two animals might tell you something about your evolution and origin. But there will be many gaps in your understanding; many missing links. These two animals may be on distant branches of life’s rich and varied tree. They certainly help you to understand life better, but there is much more to learn. Conversely, in a zoo containing many thousands of animals, some are your direct descendants and some are far removed. Taken together, these thousand animals allow you to piece together the evolution of your species and to understand where you fit into the big picture of life. They are still not representative of all life on Earth, but they allow a great advance on the state of knowledge that you had with just two animals. Similarly, we can think of Earth-sized extrasolar planets as an environmental zoo. With many thousands we could begin to understand how common or rare the environment of the Earth is. We might begin to understand what the Earth was like in its past and what will happen to it in the future. With this insight, perhaps we can better appreciate the impact of humans on the Earth’s environ-
88
space on earth
ment, and the extremes to which it can be pushed before it becomes inhospitable for life. We have come a long way in just a few short decades since we gained entry into space. Already environmentalism has profited from the adventure in many colourful and diverse ways; all of them are connected by the simple fact that the Earth is a planet linked to the rest of the cosmos. By examining other planets and looking back at our own from a distance, it is not surprising that we have gained huge insights into how our world works. The study of the Earth is, after all, just a specialized application of planetary sciences, of one particular world of interest. There is more that you and I can get from the exploration of space – not just scientific knowledge and better prediction of natural disasters. The whole way of life in space and on Earth can become intertwined – we can learn to live more responsibly and develop better technologies and solutions to our everyday needs by forging more effective links between environmentalism and space exploration. Even something as simple and vital as recycling our waste can be improved.
5 green living
Space settlement is an exercise in green living
When you think about what is involved in living in a healthy, sustainable way, you realize that space settlers are concerned with exactly the same problems as people who like to think of themselves as ‘green’. To build a space station in orbit, for instance, space agencies are faced with all the same problems that concern people living in confined spaces in cities and towns. As the cost of sending things into space is so high at the moment, one cannot use things up in a haphazard, profligate manner. And it is costly and wasteful to use spacecraft to bring large quantities of waste back to Earth. These huge costs have forced space agencies to think about ways to reduce consumption and to bring down the mass of materials to be sent to space stations. Even if launch costs come down very dramatically (and they surely will with the emergence of a private space industry), recycling goods and reducing waste in space will still be a commercially sensible and viable thing to do. Water on space stations is recycled (although this hasn’t always been the case. An astonishing three tonnes of water was shipped to the Skylab space station in the 1970s and stored in ten enormous cylindrical tanks). As a thirsty hard-working astro89
90
space on earth
naut mending the space station might drink six litres (that’s six kilograms) a day, space agencies have been working hard to find ways to cut down water use and keep it clean, so it can be used for drinking. Food too takes up space and mass, so space agencies try to reduce the amount that astronauts need to eat to get their daily mineral and energy requirements during their missions; the expense of space transport makes it wasteful to ship large amounts of low-energy food containing ingredients that cannot be metabolized, or that provide little physiological benefit. By carefully selecting lightweight foods that are beneficial, but can be packaged into small spaces, the amount of waste is minimized. As on Earth, pollution released into the atmosphere must be prevented. Space stations are, of course, enclosed spaces. If gases and noxious chemicals are unintentionally released into such a confined volume they quickly become a threat to astronaut health, and, if the situation is bad enough, their lives can even be in danger. In 1997, the release of antifreeze, ethylene glycol, into the Russian Mir space station caused a sudden panic on board; the crew were forced to don breathing masks to protect themselves. The ageing space station was showing its weaknesses, in a year which also saw the failure of the carbon dioxide scrubbing equipment, used to keep the air fresh, and an unfortunate collision with a Progress cargo ship. Fortunately for the crew, the glycol leak was contained. Experiences like these have shown first-hand how careful engineers have to be to select materials that are free of hazardous chemicals that might find their way into living areas. A great deal of research and effort goes into testing materials and making them ‘space-worthy’. As more people like you and me enter space to live and work there, or even just to enjoy tourist trips, undoubtedly these stringent safety requirements in the pressurized confines of
green living
91
space modules and hotels will become more widely imposed, just as safety has become so important on passenger aircraft. On Earth, building household appliances that have a low risk of releasing noxious gases into our homes is obviously beneficial, and manufacturers work hard to stop the use of poisonous materials in our homes, from furniture to kitchen appliances. The incentive is there from a simple human health point of view, but also, in our litigious age, anything that can release healththreatening substances is a potential liability. Space agencies have a strong incentive to build machines that work for a useful length of time without costly breakdowns. It cuts down the chances that they have to be brought back to Earth for replacement, with the ensuing space transport costs, and makes sure that the crew have a productive and safe time during their missions. Similarly, on Earth, reducing the waste from old machines could help prevent the build-up of waste in landfill sites and the depletion of resources. So the exploration of space, as you can see, can be an intensely ‘green’ activity – space settlement is an exercise in green living. Even if launch costs are drastically reduced, it will still be necessary to curtail wastage in spacecraft that may be a long way from home. Eventually, humans will settle new planets such as Mars, where water is more abundant than in space and the local soils can be used to grow food. But even on Mars, as on Earth, preventing the negative impact on the environment from waste will be important; the pressures to reduce consumption and live sustainably will still exist. With such a synergy in purpose between space settlers and environmentalists it is extraordinary that the crossover has not been more fruitful. What appears to be the very simple act of eating a meal is a mundane, but powerful, example of how space explorers and environmentalists can work together. The many iterations that space agencies have been through to get
92
space on earth
wholesome diets for astronauts and cosmonauts that take up small amounts of space could help us reduce waste on Earth. Admittedly, some of the foods on space stations and shuttles, such as freeze-dried ice cream, are not likely to be popular here on Earth, but recently Space Shuttle and space station diets have radically improved. New compromises are being made between making a diet that is technically correct and making one that is enjoyable to eat, whilst at the same time takes up minimum space. Beef slices with barbeque sauce, rice pilaf, butterscotch pudding, and shortbread cookies are now just some of the items carried on board the Space Shuttle. There is probably a lot more we could do with these specially designed meals sent into space. Space Shuttle diets might be made widely available to people interested in green living. This new type of ‘low-waste’ food could be sold in supermarkets and would be designed to provide a balanced but tasty diet, whilst at the same time cutting down on some of the waste poured into the environment. In space stations, not only is the mass of food reduced to a minimum, but so is the amount of wasteful packaging, which takes up yet more space and uses up valuable mass. An important contribution of this approach to food production could be to cut down the huge amount of packaging that gets thrown away. Each year, in the USA alone, an incredible 200 million tonnes of household waste and food goes into landfill sites. So although the idea of Space Shuttle food and diets being offered as supermarket foods might seem somewhat bizarre and even trite, in fact any small move to cut down on wasteful eating and packaging could have a dramatic impact on this extraordinary quantity of waste. Just a 10% reduction in the amount would be a significant leap forward, cutting down the required landfill area and the cost of refuse collection. Food composting is a common activity on Earth, used to degrade old food and other biodegradable waste from kitchens
green living
93
and gardens. The microbes naturally present in the leaves, food and other waste material put into the composter metabolize the material and turn it into familiar brown mulch. As the temperature of the pile of waste heats up, so new microbes come into play, and at each stage more of the molecules from which the waste is made are broken down, making organic material and nutrients available for the microbes. Composting is applied on larger industrial scales to deal with waste from towns and cities, and turn it into something useful that can be put back on the land. Organic food has become a viable industry, although it still remains a minority food market. A lot of agricultural organic fertilizer used today comes from what amounts to industrial-scale composting. On the Moon and Mars, composting would work well as a method to deal with leftovers. Food waste and dead plants from life-support systems might be lacking some of the natural microbes to be found in garden waste on Earth, but microbes could be added artificially to get the process going more effectively. Freeze-dried microbes in packets could be sprinkled into food and ‘space waste’ to help produce useful compost that could then be used in life-support systems to grow vegetables and fruit. If some planetary bodies, such as Mars, turn out to have indigenous life, these potentially invasive microbes might have to be prohibited. In the early stages of human exploration on the Moon and Mars, it is unlikely that there will be fertilizers freely available at a time when manufacturing processes will be simple. Fertilizers will be costly and massive to transport from Earth, and it will be some time before nitrates and phosphates are made into fertilizers using lunar or Martian rocks and soil. Under such constraints, organic farming would not be an environmentally driven pursuit, but one made necessary by a need to recycle as many of the useful nutrients in biomass as one possibly can.
94
space on earth
Already some real advances are being made in this direction. The European Space Agency’s MELISSA (Micro-Ecological Life Support Alternative) project has been investigating ways to reuse human waste for future human missions into space, even including our toilet waste. The life-support system is cleverly split into several compartments, each section taking the recycling process one step further. In the first stage, bacteria are used that prefer to grow without oxygen and at high temperatures. They get to work degrading the human waste into a form useful for other types of bacteria, such as denitrifiers and photosynthetic bacteria that use the organics to grow. In the later stages of the recycling system the nitrates produced by the bacteria feed plants and photosynthetic bacteria which produce the oxygen for the human crew to breathe, and they take up the carbon dioxide waste. The system is ingenious, because the plants and bacteria themselves are used as food for the crew, so the system is completely self-contained. This is essentially an advanced composting system – the culmination of over ten years of research – and eventually it will allow humans to live on the Moon and Mars, independently of the Earth. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has similarly been leading the world in developing new technologies for advanced lifesupport systems. Focusing on algae and cyanobacteria, their Institute of Hydrobiology, a research organization with over 250 staff, based in the city of Wuhan in the centre of China, is developing new ways to use these highly productive and edible oxygen-producing organisms in life-support systems. This ‘aquaculture’ might one day provide nourishment for Chinese space stations and bases on the Moon and beyond. Recycling food in this way has much more importance than just providing some compost for growing new plants. It cuts down the amount of trash that must be taken off other planets, particularly places with planetary protection guidelines that
green living
95
forbid the release of waste into the environment, such as Mars. As scientists might be interested in looking for life on Mars, for instance, it would be completely unacceptable to dig a landfill site and fill it with the detritus of our extraterrestrial bases. Even under today’s COSPAR (Committee on Space Research) policies, the number of spores on a spacecraft sent to Mars is strictly controlled. We can probably expect these policies to be even more enthusiastically implemented when humans eventually start producing waste. I suspect that even the most basic environmental regulations on other planets will probably force people to live green lifestyles to prevent contaminated and spoiling material from drifting across the planetary surface and ruining otherwise pristine sites that may be the focus of scientific study. Recycling might have wider application than to household waste. Resources such as iron and nickel, although seemingly limitless in space in comparison to the Earth, must still be extracted, processed and fabricated into products using energy and human and robotic effort. Even in space, with such vast access to metals and cheap energy, it will still be necessary to recycle items for new appliances and machines, particularly if they are made from rare materials. This point of view is sometimes difficult for those who believe in the limitless resources of space to comprehend. But ultimately, of course, any organization, from government to private industry, has to be cost-effective, and in the latter case, profitmaking. Waste is counter to profit-making. Why build a machine that lasts for a short time, only to have to replace it and use up time and energy extracting more metals from asteroids to provide the raw material? Obviously, limitless resources will not release us from a motive to reduce waste and curtail consumption. On Earth, in order to reduce the consumption of resources and increasingly difficult-to-extract metals, new efforts are
96
space on earth
being developed by industry to build machines and household appliances that can be easily disassembled into their component parts and reused. From washing machines to cars, these new devices are designed from the outset for ease of recycling. This type of manufacturing may be more expensive to begin with, as it requires wholly new designs, but in principle there is no reason why a machine that can be easily disassembled should be a great deal more expensive than one which cannot. It is merely a question of a difference in the initial design and the profit-making strategy. The methods used to build these green products could well be applied in space. A small energy-efficient washing machine that is designed to be pulled apart when it breaks down and reassembled into a new machine using some new components should work just as well on the Moon or on Mars as it does on the Earth. A production line for space habitat components and machines could gain a lot from the green industry. Mars and the Moon certainly have less gravity than the Earth, making it easier to launch spacecraft, but they still have gravity and it will cost fuel and human resources to have old appliances taken away. By using up old machines, space stations and habitats will produce less trash that must be transported away, thus reducing space transport costs, mitigating the waste problem and, on some planets, reducing the violation of planetary protection requirements. Space stations are, from an industrial perspective, quite mediæval, in the sense that components are often manufactured as one-off items. Before the Industrial Revolution introduced the basic concepts of the production line, items were more often than not built as one-off entities. Cotton-weaving machines and carts were all lovingly assembled from custom pieces. Stained glass windows were constructed, one pane after another, until complete. Furniture was built one piece at a time,
green living
97
each piece carefully honed to fit into another: every step of the process was altered and directed according to how the last piece came out, until the item, perhaps a table or chair, was finished. The process was inefficient, costly, and unable to keep up with the needs of a more affluent, voraciously consuming society. The assembly line, using machines that fabricated standardized items, made mass production possible. There is no doubt that one of the greatest benefits of the production line was that products became interchangeable. A broken component on one machine could, for the first time, easily be replaced with a component from another. Products became transnational and even transcontinental. The origins of the machine and the person who built it were no longer relevant. Products could be moved around the world from one place to another; in essence, they became global. It doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to see how this simple philosophy can be expanded into interplanetary products. At the moment, however, spacecraft are built much along the pre-production line philosophy. Each gadget and experimental apparatus is lovingly crafted for its specific purpose. Maybe every now and then, in the case of the Space Shuttle’s heat shield tiles, for example, several copies of one component may be manufactured in production line style. But generally, spacecraft are not mass-produced. The reason for the mediæval process of assembly of spacecraft is, of course, that they are not built very often. There isn’t the demand for several hundred in one go, at least not yet. All of this will change as space becomes commercialized. Private access to space will generate a vast demand for standardized modules and pieces for spacecraft. Then, maybe, we could imagine a small energy-efficient refrigerator for use on the Moon and on Earth being assembled by the same production line. The potential for the convergence
98
space on earth
of technology and processes between the Earth and space sectors can be seen in many of the most mundane activities of everyday living. As common production line philosophies develop, so the machines and materials produced by them will need to be tested out to make sure that they work in the different planetary environments that they are destined for. The environmental community could step in and do an interesting job of allying itself with the space exploration community by establishing concept housing on Earth that is used to test out new technologies for green living on Earth and space, and to find new common ground in the technical and ergonomic design of equipment for both frontiers. Desert housing could become a test-bed for efficient use of water and food and new machines that are small, compact, energy-efficient and easily dismantled. Space agencies might use these facilities for testing the longevity of recycling systems destined for orbit, and particularly for the deserts of the Moon and Mars. By physically putting scientists and engineers from both communities together in houses they will find new ideas, and their creative talents will naturally begin to converge. Of all our environmental challenges, trying to recycle our waste has created some of the most difficult problems. Whilst we go about building extraterrestrial production lines, we might also think about how we can develop common production lines in waste recycling. Already I’ve touched on the landfill problem with old food and degradable garden waste and the possible common interests in composting on Earth and throughout the Solar System, but what about all that other non-biodegradable waste that we produce? The sheer scale of waste production, even just in the UK, is mind boggling. Every day about 14 million glass bottles are buried in landfills. This is not just wasteful, but it presents a chal-
green living
99
lenge in securing land to bury it all and preventing unsightly destruction of the countryside. But glass is a very useful material; it can be crushed up and used to make more bottles, road surfacing, tiles and even bricks. Glass is a truly remarkable product with amazing potential for space exploration. It can be made on the Moon and Mars because both of these planetary bodies contain plenty of silica, the basic constituent of glass. The Martian surface is a rust of iron oxides, a quite serious contaminant of glass, and it will be much more serious than it is on the Earth. Nevertheless, the iron can be removed from crushed up Martian soils and rocks chemically or magnetically. Once that glass ends up in products that eventually break it will be useful to recycle it and use it in other products. Glass bricks can be used to pave roads; perhaps the first Martian roads. It can be used to build glass-brick shelters for Martian rovers, and it can be used as material for sheltering from radiation. Of course, it will also be used to make bottles, jugs, glasses and plenty of other items for the Martian and lunar household. Aluminium and steel can similarly be recycled, in addition to many other metals that find their way into our refuse. Metals are so valuable there has been an intense market pressure to build recycling machines that can separate them and then prepare the material for reuse. Magnets can be used to remove iron, for example, from other products. Recycling machines like those used to separate metals on Earth could be used on the Moon and Mars for the efficient reuse of metals that have been extracted from indigenous soils and rocks. Other products that could be recycled in space habitats are batteries, clothes, computers and electrical appliances. Today, when these items have finished their useful life on the space station, they are removed and brought back to Earth and replaced by new products, with the ensuing cost to space programmes
100
space on earth
and the wasteful demand on limited space that might instead carry science experiments or the parts of new habitats. On the Moon and Mars, we could consider reusing them. Space engineers and scientists are an excitable and excited group of people. Because of their backgrounds they often like to seek out imaginative things to do. Designing space stations, habitats for Mars and lunar rovers are what they all dreamed about when they were young. After all, this is what space settlement is all about – the opening of a new frontier. Nonetheless, space will be a frontier for some extraordinarily mundane environmental problems, even more mundane than glass bottles and tin cans. Nappies (or diapers) are essential for young children. The world before nappies was a very messy one, and one that was a great deal more fraught for parents. As yet, there has been no pre-potty child in space, so the problem of how to deal with nappies in space has not been addressed. But it isn’t true to say that the problem is completely novel. Undergarments have been developed for astronauts who do not have the option of going to the toilet on long treks and explorations in their enclosed space suits. During the Apollo moonwalks these undergarments allowed them to relieve themselves. They were, of course, not called diapers or nappies; that would not have appealed to grown test-pilots. They were called ‘Disposable Absorption Containment Trunks’. Once a space-faring civilization expands its presence in space, the problem of baby nappies will become acute. The average baby uses around 5,000 disposable nappies from birth through to early potty training. In a standard landfill site on Earth the average nappy can take up to 200 years to decompose; on the Moon and Mars this will cause a potentially very serious problem. On Earth, this problem is being dealt with by using nondisposable varieties.
green living
101
Sent away regularly to be washed by a nappy-washing service, reusable nappies radically cut down on waste and curtail the huge volume taken up by these items. Nappy waste on the Moon is not very romantic. It is not the stuff of space dreams. Baby poo is not the foundation of a bright new future in space. But it is a major environmental problem in the exploration of space. Finding methods to contain baby faeces is one of the fundamental challenges in opening the way for the colonization of the space frontier. Environmentalists and space explorers would do well to work together to use experiences on Earth to address this forthcoming concern in space. A not-too-dissimilar and very down-to-Earth challenge will follow us into space. In a lifetime, the average woman in the developing world uses 10,000 sanitary towels or tampons. Two and half million tampons are flushed down the toilet every day. Tampons are not a problem new to space. There have been female astronauts and cosmonauts who have dealt with this problem. But once the large-scale settlement of space gets under way and women begin to spend a substantial amount of time there, there will be a waste problem and the issue will have to be addressed. New methods of degrading these items will be developed. Perhaps in synergy with environmental organizations on Earth, new biodegradable forms of these products could be developed that can be broken down by specific microbes added to them after use, necessitating common practices in waste disposal on Earth and in space. Despite dire warnings about the extraterrestrial tampon mountain, in space there will be some alleviation from problems that are found on Earth. Not every environmental challenge will follow us. Of all the products that get poured into landfills and deplete available space, paper is one of the worst. Every tonne of paper on Earth uses about 17 trees and 7,000 gallons of water in production, and once dumped into landfills it may take a long
102
space on earth
time to degrade. A sheet of paper can take up to a year to start to be digested by the variety of microbes to be found there because of the tough indigestible cellulose from which it is made. There will be no problem with paper in space because there are no trees. This is not to say that plant biomass from lifesupport systems could not be fabricated into paper, but the product will be extremely rare, regardless. The lack of raw material for paper will force the formation of a paperless electronic culture in space. Libraries will be held on memory media of various kinds and communications will occur exclusively electronically. Despite all these developments, from solving the problem with the tampon mountain to developing paperless economies and constructing production lines for using refuse more effectively, there will no doubt still be a great deal of pollution. No amount of care and thought can allow us to build 100% efficient economies. No degree of optimism can save us from the basic fact that we must deal with pollution in space as we do on Earth. Pollution is a very practical problem, but in some ways this aspect of the green way of living also touches on environmental ethics – it is an attitude about our surroundings and our interest in keeping them clean, rather than necessarily exclusively a practical concern. However, the practical manifestations of caring about pollution are the most tangible offshoot of green living. On Earth we are starting to work hard to reduce pollution in our environment. Recycling and efficient use of energy and resources are two approaches to this, but one of the most important is simply to stop dumping waste mindlessly into the environment. In space, the ethos of recycling has practical importance, despite the apparently endless stretches of pollution-absorbing emptiness into which our waste could go. Dumping waste can ruin places where we are not so free to move around. Many satellites are launched into geostationary orbit 36,000 km above the
green living
103
Earth. From this special altitude they can watch the Earth’s surface and remain constantly above the same location. Because geostationary orbit is so useful for many applications, such as satellite communications, navigation and environmental monitoring, it is becoming crowded and polluted with pieces of old satellites that are now defunct, and by the increasing number of satellites launched into the orbit by the increasing number of nations that want a presence there. Looking after this orbit – keeping it clean and managing it – bears many similarities to safeguarding any place on Earth. It can be done by legislation or international agreement. As geostationary orbit becomes fuller, no doubt such agreements will be developed to find ways to use it most effectively, whilst at the same time reducing the quantity of polluting old satellites that remain there. There are now estimated to be over 11,000 pieces of orbital debris more than ten centimetres in size travelling around the Earth from exploded satellites and pieces that have fallen off those long-since neglected. Smaller pieces of debris, less than one centimetre in diameter, are even more numerous. Some estimates put their number at over 100,000. When a Space Shuttle is launched, each of these must be accounted for and the shuttle’s orbit must be modified if any of them is in danger of interception. Pieces can be travelling at well over 10,000 miles an hour, so even small chunks of rubbish can be a hazard by damaging the windshield or the heat-resistant tiles. The orbiting waste might eventually be cleaned up. Like a high-tech broom, a laser beam could be used to nudge pieces of space debris into a trajectory that will take it into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it will be burned up. Project Orion, a system intended to do just this, has been ongoing since the 1970s, and although it should not discourage efforts to reduce waste, it might offer a solution to the large amounts already there.
104
space on earth
The onerous job of watching all this debris and keeping the shuttle away from it lies with the US Space Surveillance Network. Already we are polluting space and endangering the operations of spacecraft on the frontier. In other words, the lack of communication between environmentalists and space explorers has been damaging. If space settlers had had deeper links with the ideas and practicalities of the environmental community at an early stage, perhaps the space debris problem could have been averted. By considering the orbits of the Earth to be places worthy of being looked after and cared for, like a national park, the quantity of scrap could have been reduced or mitigated. Now, like a vandalized local town park, we have to deal with the problem after the fact. Removing this rubbish will be much more difficult than preventing a great deal of it being deposited in the first place. In a very real way we can see what happens when Earth-focused and space-focused engineers do not communicate on matters in which they have a great deal to teach each other. Legal frameworks for keeping space clean and green might learn from environmental law. We can go about designing whole new approaches to solving our pollution problems in space, but why do that when we have spent so long working out how to deal with pollution on Earth? Article IX of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty states that the signatories to the act must ‘conduct exploration of [outer space] so as to avoid their harmful contamination...’. Legal frameworks that are used to protect national parks on Earth should inform the framework of space law and keep space a green frontier.
green living
105
New technologies will bring new forms of pollution. Some of this pollution will come in the form of self-replicating machines. Designed for manufacturing and extracting resources without a human presence, the self-replicating machine will tend to itself and create copies. These machines were first conceived by physicist John von Neumann, and science fiction has long favoured them for spreading through the Galaxy and laying the framework for an intergalactic civilization. In the near term, self-replicating machines may be a way of establishing early manufacturing bases on planets within our own Solar System. Released onto the surface of the Moon, they could begin to eat rocks, extracting metals and other resources, particularly water, and storing them or using them as raw materials for new products. The materials they extract and process would be partly used to replicate themselves. Similarly, on the surface of Mars they might lay the groundwork for new habitats and bases across the planetary surface. Once a human presence has been established on Mars, these types of machine could expand our presence with minimum human effort. They might even be sent out into the field to conduct scientific exploration and to build research outposts in challenging and risky places, such as in canyons and on Mars’s giant volcanoes. Self-replicating machines could easily become a form of pollution, covering the surfaces of moons and planets with unintended waste and expanding far beyond the number required to carry out efficient industrial activities. Built into their programs will be algorithms to curtail them after specific periods of time or quantities of manufacturing. These programs will be as much driven by environmental concerns as practical ones about keeping manufacturing under control. Perhaps many of the programs that limit these future factories will have been developed on Earth, where we will be concerned with stopping them from self-replicating beyond their intended use.
106
space on earth
Tiny nanomachines will add yet another dimension to the pollution problem. Leaving aside the overdone sensationalism of ‘grey goo’ (as the idea of out-of-control nanobots reducing everything to a uniform slurry has become known), there is a legitimate concern about nanotechnology on the space frontier. Mixed amongst the sands of Mars, nanobots that might have been unintentionally or intentionally released from a habitat on the surface could be difficult to remove from the ground. Similarly, on the Moon, a dusty location, small machines will easily become lost within the fine surface. Once lost, they may be difficult to recover. The year 1959 is not often seen as pivotal in the exploration of space, but on 14 September of that year the Soviet Luna 2 spacecraft crashed into the Moon, the first spacecraft to crash on another planet. In the process, it scattered its cargo of hammer-and-sickle medallions across and into the lunar surface. And so began the new problem of pollution on other worlds. On 26 April 1962, the US Ranger 4 spacecraft crashed into the Moon. Ranger 6 followed two years later. Luna 5, 7 and 8 from the Soviet Union and Ranger 7, 8 and 9 from the US all crash landed on the Moon. By 1965, nine spacecraft lay strewn across the lunar surface. In 1971 two Soviet spacecraft crashed on Mars and spacecraft pollution extended even further. Not to be outdone, in 2006 the European Space Agency crashed its SMART-1 spacecraft on the Moon. Even spacecraft successfully landed on other planets eventually break down. Like abandoned cars, they too become pollution; they litter the landscape with pieces of old hardware. Indeed, any extension of human technology and machinery to beyond the bounds of Earth, in the context of its inevitable eventual demise, represents a form of pollution. When space becomes commercialized, a vast expansion of this problem is inevitable. As space becomes filled with private
green living
107
corporations making profit, we can expect that, like industrial pollution on Earth, space debris will become increasingly difficult to police. On Earth, industrial pollution can be carefully monitored by national agencies and factories, and corporations can be fined for excesses. In the endless reaches of space, who will expend the time and money to watch perhaps many thousands of corporations to ensure that they do not release noxious chemicals on countless possible planetary bodies? Certainly new legal structures will have to be created to guide industries in their use of space, particularly across the pristine surfaces of planets like Mars. Ideas will be garnered from the legal protection of rivers, forests and other wilderness areas on Earth. Pollution in the form of abandoned and crashed spacecraft is a particularly thorny issue. Unless we are prepared to accept this pollution, we can never explore the surface of other planets, so ironically in our quest to understand the environments of other planets and what they tell us about the Earth, we pollute them. One could implement regulations only allowing orbiters to explore other planets, and one could also require that after a mission has been completed these orbiters be ejected into space to prevent them crashing to the surface. However, even in free space, these spent spacecraft are a form of pollution, and planetary science would be extremely hamstrung without orbiters and landers. Alternatively, we could accept that landers are necessary to investigate the surfaces of other planets and agree that when humans finally get there they will go and clear up the mess. A robot landed in an extreme environment is unlikely to cause offence if people cannot even see it. Provided it does not pollute the environment by releasing toxic wastes as it decays and becomes weathered, then its impact will be minimal. Another way to look at this problem is that these spacecraft and other types of space pollution will become a part of human
108
space on earth
history. After a time, things strewn around the landscape become historically significant. Many people spend good money to dive to the wreck of the Titanic. Ancient arrowheads or coins from centuries ago that are found in deserts are not regarded as pollution, but rather archaeological wonders, even though they may have originally been carelessly dropped on the ground with an attitude no better than the vandal that leaves a burnt out car lying around today. What is a crashed spacecraft now will become an archaeological artefact later. These arguments are further complicated by the diversity of different environments in space. The vacuum of space is not just one place, monotonous and homogeneous in its characteristics. It is a place with gravitational influences of many moons and planets, where one empty black region may be enslaved by gravity and another may not exert much pull at all. Some regions of space, like geostationary orbit, can become polluted and must be cared for like any place on Earth, because spacecraft and their pieces tend to remain there. The same is true for the Earth–Moon Lagrange points, the regions between these two bodies where their combined gravity tends to trap objects – wanted or unwanted. In contrast, it is possible that the infinite expanses of free space outside of these regions might actually be an acceptable landfill site. Trashing the Earth with our waste is unacceptable because of the limited space that we occupy. This same sense of clean living will certainly apply to other planetary surfaces such as Mars and the Moon, and to the other regions where spacecraft become gravitationally trapped, but it may not apply to the vacuum beyond – the almost infinite realms of interstellar and intergalactic space. Over such vast spatio-temporal scales, the likelihood that any waste will eventually collide with another civilization or pollute someone else’s back yard is tiny. Perhaps these huge expanses of vacuum will allow us to adopt a new
green living
109
interstellar environmental ethic where it is in fact acceptable to dump waste into the emptiness of space. Indeed, given the vastness of interstellar space, perhaps this is more environmentally responsible than dumping it in regions of space that are likely to affect other living things. The ‘interstellar landfill’ might be a sensible place to dispense with pollution that would otherwise spoil the Solar System and its finite bounds. All sorts of other pollution will eventually come from industry and space colonies – old manufacturing plants on the Moon, pieces of broken off asteroids with old drilling rigs, pieces of habitats that blew away in the last Martian dust storm, bits of rovers strewn across the Moon and Mars, landers on Titan and Europa, and defunct spacecraft visiting distant comets and even solar systems. Where humanity goes, its pollution will follow, and we will need to decide what to treat as pollution and what to treat as wonderful artefacts of our history. Many people, particularly those that have to live next to these ‘artefacts’, may have very conflicting views. Environmentalism must follow us to the stars, like it or not. The problem of reducing debris in space and keeping it a clean environment has been called ‘astroenvironmentalism’ in the space community – a parallel to ‘astrobiology’ and other ‘astro’ permutations of earthly activities. I feel that this term is too geocentric. It conveniently confines the problem to another box. ‘Astroenvironmentalism’ implies a separation between space environments and Earth environments. Cleaning up pollution in space is simply environmentalism – a continuity of our environmental conduct on Earth into space. That said, there are, of course, some key differences between environmentalism on Earth and in space. It is worth looking at a few of these, because differences can be just as enlightening about how to develop new approaches. Water is such a rare commodity on space stations and in planetary bases that even
110
space on earth
urine might eventually be recycled. Except in the most extreme desert regions of the world, where this level of recycling might be useful, few people at the moment will recycle their urine, either for drinking or as general purpose water. Here environmentalists and space explorers may be at odds. Startlingly, this is one example of the way in which space settlers have actually exceeded the environmental community in their pursuit of sustainable living. Profound differences between green living on Earth and in space are obvious in the area of energy production. Hydroelectric power plants and tidal power will be irrelevant on the Moon and Mars, where there are obviously no free-standing bodies of water. It is quite inevitable that the first links between space exploration and environmentalism will be practical, rather than philosophical. Nonetheless, there is an important ethical basis to the links between what are currently two disparate disciplines, as we’ve seen. Let’s now look at a few foundational tenets that might bring these two endeavours together, and provide the philosophical underpinnings of a new environmentalism for a space-faring society.
6 greening the universe
The arguments for the care of the Earth’s environment and its creatures get stronger the further from Earth we go and the more we realize the startling uniqueness of life on Earth
Before the birth of any true biological understanding of the origins of plants and animals, people had to rely on their own experience to provide a rational framework for the world. The Greeks had an essentially anthropocentric view of life – that it existed for the sake of humans – but thinkers such as Pythagoras did begin to wonder whether life might have its own value. Later, the Romans believed that people were guided by unwritten rules. Like a biological equivalent to the laws of the Universe, these laws determined the way in which people behaved and their interactions with the world around them. The Romans came to believe that there must be a separate set of laws for animals – ius animalium – the right of animals. The notion that there might be laws for animals was a revolutionary concept, because it recognized that humans, although the perceived masters of the world, were not the only ones to be governed by some underlying laws, and that animals might be important enough to be subject to such laws themselves. It was 111
112
space on earth
the beginning of extending an ethical framework to the nonhuman biosphere, and the earliest flicker of an extension of ethical understanding to the stars themselves. Judæo-Christianity, and with it the Western concepts of justice, brought a very different ethical perspective. It emphasized animals’ use to humans rather than their having any intrinsic worth, and this cost to our relationship with the biosphere prevails today. Some hold that the environmental problems that we now experience have their roots in this tradition: that nature is there to be used by us (others counter that the true intention of Christianity is that humans should be stewards of the Earth, rather than just users of it). Whether this is really the root of today’s problems is hard to dissect. Mechanization, the beginnings of consumerism, and ever more advanced ways to gather and prospect for natural resources, which are driven by very pressing practical needs, might equally be said to be the cause of environmental destruction. This early pre-17th-century debate occurred in a social context where superstition and quackery were rife. But in the 17th century superstition gave way to new scientific methods. Science saw an emergence into the mainstream of public activity and intellectual environment improved for those who wished to consider the relationship of nature to humans. Within this social and historical context lawyer Nathaniel Ward (1578–1652), botanist John Ray (1627–1705) and philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) began to establish the Western basis of the proposition that animals had some intrinsic right to life of their own, independent of their use to humans. The next two centuries were not a period of environmental ethical debate, but then there was no environmental crisis to encourage such discussions as there is today. The notion of animal rights was considered by those who considered it at all to be an interesting, but essentially irrelevant, diversion. Even in
greening the universe
113
the 21st century, animal rights proponents can sometimes be viewed by the media with scepticism and derision. Without a perception that large numbers of animals were threatened there was little reason to consider the ethics of the non-human biosphere to be anything other than an intellectual indulgence. In the 20th century we first began to accept the notion that industry and the growing human population might have an adverse effect on the environment. In 1949, American forester and conservationist Aldo Leopold published a book that was at the time quite obscure, but contained within it notions that would later become some of the most influential contributions of the 20th century, even if not completely new. Sand County Almanac contained his idea of a ‘Land Ethic’ which posited that land, and all the organisms on it, should be treated as a whole and should be looked after as such. This community view of life recognized that maintaining the health of ecosystems should be a high priority. Leopold famously summarized his approach with the axiom, ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’. The notion that the community should be afforded status in an ethical framework, and particularly that other organisms should be treated with equal respect, is often referred to as ‘biocentric’ ethics, as opposed to anthropocentric ethics, which emphasizes the utilitarian value of nature to human beings. The general precepts of an ethical framework for the coexistence of all life on Earth were beginning to emerge, and they developed much further over the next few decades. In 1979 a new journal, Environmental Ethics, was founded by American environmental ethicist Eugene Hargrove to provide a forum for some of these discussions, which it continues to do today. Leopold’s ideas crystallized the notion that protecting the community, and not necessarily individual creatures, is an
114
space on earth
important priority. For the space-faring civilization his contributions are also important because they embody a planetary scale view of life. There had previously been some dilemma amongst ethicists about how to deal with the idea that individual creatures had some sort of ‘rights’, because it is obviously absurd to spend one’s life protecting and caring for each individual animal and plant one encounters. German environmental ethicist Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) became famous for helping worms off footpaths and looking after individual insects. Schweitzer’s laudably benevolent attitudes towards the rest of the biosphere, however, were fuel for those who wished to ridicule the notion of animal rights. He developed a concept of ‘Reverence for Life’. The reverence that he referred to is a reference to the sense of awe that we hold for nature and natural processes in general. He applied it to the tiniest of creatures. To be fair to Schweitzer, he was not of the opinion that we should respect every little creature all of the time. He recognized that when a farmer ploughs a field to make food for cows, some plants will be destroyed. In situations where creatures had to be killed to provide some benefit to other life, he was willing to accept limited destruction, but he was quick to point out that this did not release the farmer from showing respect in all other situations where he or she might come across identical plants that were growing in the field. Leopold’s recognition that the community was important, but not necessarily individual worms and flies, freed people from the dilemma in Schweitzer’s view of expanding ethics to cover lower life forms. Leopold’s Land Ethic dramatically widened the circle of objects worthy of inclusion in some type of ethical framework. Christopher Stone went a step further and suggested in his 1972 book Should Trees Have Standing? that inanimate objects such as rivers and oceans should also be considered to be worthy of being afforded legal rights.
greening the universe
115
There is a common thread running through these views: an expansion in the sphere of entities with moral relevance. Within Leopold’s Land Ethic there is a sense of reverence of life that Schweitzer would recognize. The notion of extending the ethical debate to inanimate objects could be argued to be the ultimate manifestation of Schweitzer’s ideas – a reverence so great that we even care about rocks and rivers. In the 1960s the practical implications of these ideas began to emerge, and they would inform a new generation of activists who would take environmentalism from the fringe to the mainstream in the coming decades. Concerned about the effects of pesticides on wildlife, Rachel Carson penned her book Silent Spring, published in 1962. It warned of the impending disaster of the concentration of pesticides through the food chain and the eventual damage that would be done to the biosphere. Carson was soon ridiculed, particularly by the chemical industry. Held up as some type of fanatic, one satirical response to her book, The Desolate Year, published by the pesticide manufacturer Monsanto, offered a vision of the biosphere run amok with weeds and pests following the banning of pesticides. But her arguments were powerful, and following a presidential order to investigate the suggestions in her book, the pesticide DDT, one of the most egregious cumulative poisons, was banned in 1972. Rachel Carson died in 1964 of breast cancer – she never saw her warning take effect – but her book was one of the more notable contributions to the growing awareness of our impact on the biosphere. With this historical perspective on the birth of environmental concern and its practical implementation on Earth it is easier to try to apply and develop these ideas for the concerns of a spacefaring civilization.
116
space on earth
When we talk about environmental ‘worth’, it is generally true to say that we are weighing up two essential facets of any organism or object – its ‘instrumental’ worth and its ‘intrinsic’ worth. These two terms crop up in ethical debate and they are useful because they broadly define two different views of the world around us. Things have instrumental worth when they are in some way useful. An ox that ploughs a field has instrumental value to the person who uses it to plough. An asteroid with resources has instrumental value to a civilization that needs these resources to build a spaceship. A rainforest has instrumental worth to a small group of people who use it to collect nuts that they sell to the food industry and also to humanity as a carbon sink or a barrier to runaway desertification. The lunar soil has instrumental worth to a helium-3 mining community that want to sell the material to the energy industry. The instrumental value of animals, plants and even objects is the easiest idea to understand, and given the relationship of much of the developed world to nature, some might say that our problem is that it is the only aspect we seem to understand. Intrinsic value is a more nebulous concept. It refers to the idea that things have some value independent of humans, although it is difficult to define in any quantitative way what that value is. You might say that it simply means that things have a right to exist, independent of their practical use to people. For example, a lion might have instrumental value to tourists who take photographs of it roaming around a safari park, but most people would agree that it has some type of value in its own right – a reason to exist independent of its value to tourists.
greening the universe
117
Intrinsic value lies at the heart of some of our strongest feelings about protecting the biosphere. Many environmental campaigns are fought on the basis that animals or plants have a right to their own existence and not merely to persist because they are useful to humans. Thus it is that we view our world and the life forms that live here through these two lenses – their instrumental and intrinsic worth – and we construct ethics that allow us to apportion moral concern to them. As an example of what might be involved in constructing an environmental ethic for a space-faring civilization, let’s turn to microorganisms (sometimes called microbes, and including all single-celled organisms and viruses). It’s a good place to start, since they are ubiquitous on Earth, the most likely life forms to be found on other planets, and generally overlooked. There are microbes living six kilometres deep in the crust of the Earth, floating around in the atmosphere, and at all points in between. For the first three billion years of life’s history on Earth there were only microbes. Since the Cambrian explosion 600 million years ago, a multiplicity of complex multi-cellular organisms has evolved and proliferated on Earth, but they are still just a veneer on the microbial world. Today, microbes remove 140 million tonnes per year of nitrogen from the atmosphere and make it accessible for plants and ultimately animals. Without nitrogen-fixing bacteria life would run out of nitrogen and no higher forms of life could exist. The notion that microorganisms might fit within an ethical debate is not new. In 1965 bacteriologist René Dubos suggested that germs should be allowed to coexist with humans. He never went as far as claiming that they would be recognized as having an intrinsic value, but he recognized that they were an integral part of a biotic community and should be treated as such. The
118
space on earth
microbiologist Bernard Dixon took this view one step further in 1976. He pointed out that the ultimate extension of the biocentric viewpoint requires that we protect the smallpox virus from annihilation. Dixon argued that the destruction of smallpox is no more acceptable than the destruction of lions. It has an intrinsic right to exist independent of humans and it plays a part in ecosystems. Therefore, it deserves the right to live. His choice of smallpox is somewhat questionable, because some microbiologists would argue that, like all viruses, smallpox is not ‘alive’ as it depends upon its host to propagate and therefore does not have the ability to self-replicate, usually viewed as a key defining quality of ‘life’. However, Dixon could have chosen the bacterium that causes anthrax and the argument would be the same. Because of the enormous destruction in human life that can be caused by lethal microbes, most of us would probably assume that killing them is acceptable. If we did not, we would very quickly return to 19th-century life expectancies. Indeed, in 1977, American writer Joe Patrouch published an interesting article in the science fiction magazine Analog entitled ‘Legal Rights for Germs?’. The article is a view of a future when germs have legal rights and household disinfectants are banned. One problem with all of these views is that they focus only on the destructive roles that microbes play, not on their beneficial and indeed vital roles in the biosphere. Perhaps this is understandable. Diarrhoea, Black Death, smallpox, cholera and so on have brought destruction over many millennia to humans. We should not be surprised that many ethicists become focused on this history. But their arguments do not really address the problem of whether microbes have moral relevance. Smallpox and other human-disease-causing microbes are a tiny subset of the microbial world, and they are a distraction from an overarching
greening the universe
119
argument about the ethics we afford microbes in general, and in particular the vast majority that have no influence on human health. But why should we care about microbes? First we should consider their instrumental worth. Humans and animals all depend upon microbes, so when we talk of protecting microbes because of their instrumental worth, this may even be an understatement. If the microbial world was in large part destroyed, it is unlikely that many multicellular organisms, including us, could survive for very long. Even on the scale of individual organisms, microbes can be vital. The death of photosynthetic organisms in a pond can reduce the food supply and indirectly kill individual fish. Even the humble termite has bacteria in its gut, with which it digests wood. Without them it could not survive. So microbes have extraordinary instrumental value. We might say that microbes have ‘survival’ value. Without them we and other animals cannot survive. What about microbes’ intrinsic worth – the value they have independently of their value to humans? They dominated the Earth for three billion years before complex life came to be, and yet despite many mass extinctions they still dominate the world. Some microbial species have gone extinct during that time, but the branches of the tree of life that contain microbes have been extraordinarily resilient. With such tenacity for so long and with such a remarkable evolutionary legacy, does not the microbial world have a right to its own worth? After three and a half billion years of evolution what right do we have to start destroying this phenomenon? The protection of microbes is the protection of life’s family tree, and for this fact alone they might merit worth independent of their use to humans. A microbial ethic would recognize that without microbes there can be no other life. How does the protection of lethal disease-causing microbes fit this ethical view? In terms of the his-
120
space on earth
torical debate about smallpox, we can find reasons to agree with those that might seek to bring this microbe under human control. Like all microbes, smallpox has intrinsic worth in a microbial-centric world simply by virtue of its existence and its right to continue to exist. However, it can kill millions of people. Smallpox is in the league of highly destructive agents; the devastation it can bring to bear on human civilization might merit its control. We can argue, then, borrowing from the lexicon of the animal rights movement, that humans can act as moral agents for their moral patients, the microbes. As we have the ability to alter and destroy microbial communities and ecosystems that have persisted on Earth for over three billion years, ten thousand times longer than us in our modern form, we must accept responsibility for acting on behalf of microbes. In exceptional circumstances, because some specific microbes are unusual in their ability to bring global-scale destruction to significant percentages of human populations, it may be the case that our own instrumental considerations outweigh the intrinsic worth of a particular species. A considered view of microbial ethics provides us with a way to assess this dilemma, in contrast to the simplified view of all microbes as being wholly negative.
Environmental ethics on Earth has many practical applications. The ethical frameworks we build guide us in the treatment of the biosphere and geosphere. There are over six billion people on Earth, and it is hard for us to operate and even survive without altering our environment. Environmental ethics provides us
greening the universe
121
with the intellectual tools to address the problem of the mutual coexistence of the Earth, its non-human inhabitants and its vast human population. But it is apparent that the current environmental ethical debate is insufficient for a space-faring civilization that must embrace the challenges of exploring the vast realm of space far beyond Earth and its possible other inhabitants, however basic they may be. We need a much expanded vision of ethics. My thesis is that environmentalism and space settlement can be viewed as one and the same objective – the sustainable existence of humans in the cosmos. Can we find environmental ethics to fit this idea? Today, environmental ethical discussions are focused on objects only on this planet. We consider whether objects have instrumental worth and intrinsic worth. This is a view of environmental ethics that fits a society bound only to Earth, and it considers only the component parts of this world. A space-faring civilization must consider the instrumental and intrinsic worth of the Earth and its component parts to the space-faring society; equally, it must consider the instrumental and intrinsic worth of objects in space to the Earth and its inhabitants. We should first consider the value of the Earth to a civilization that plans to spread across the Solar System and eventually, perhaps, beyond. What value does Earth have to the space branches of a space-faring civilization? As we’ve seen, the biosphere is a source of analogue environments that help us explore space. We protect ice-covered lakes in Antarctica, volcanoes in Iceland and asteroid craters in America because they help us to understand and explore space. They might help us search for life or assist us in understanding the geology of other planets. Within this ethos, environmentalism and space settlers find common ground. A space-faring environmental ethic can create a strong and lasting connection between Earth and space that can be of ben-
122
space on earth
efit to Earth and space dwellers many millennia into the future. Even if you don’t use any of Earth’s resources, its analogue environments are useful to you. Perhaps, as you explore the volcanoes of some distant world, you can use the databases of Earth volcanoes to understand them better. As you examine what you think is life on another planet, the information about life in extreme environments on Earth can help you out. The use of Earth’s environments in this way gives the Earth an instrumental value to people who may not even live there. These instrumental considerations affect our view of microbes and our ethical framework for them. All of the biology that we would seek to care for within terrestrial environments analogous to extraterrestrial environments is microbial, because that is what we expect to find elsewhere, if anything at all. We are not expecting to send spacecraft to search for polar bears on Mars or whales in the oceans of Europa. The idea that we should protect the Earth because it helps us settle space is the easiest idea to understand. We might also protect the Earth for its own intrinsic worth, not just because we think animals, plants and microbes should have a right to continue to exist, but because the Earth has a universal intrinsic worth. The possibility that Earth might have an intrinsic value within a space-faring environmental ethic has a great deal of long-term importance. As humanity moves away and explores new regions of space, its connection with Earth weakens. For example, imagine a space-faring civilization that gathers all of its resources from asteroids and lives amongst these objects. As few of these new space-dwelling pioneers will visit the Earth, then their sense of the intrinsic worth of the planet will also fade away. It will be to them a distant world, a curiosity. At the moment, we don’t know how many Earth-like planets there are in the Universe. We also don’t know how many, if any, harbour life, let alone multicellular life. But we can be sure of
greening the universe
123
one thing. None will be exactly like the Earth. Evolution will have created completely new beasts unrecognizable to us. Even on Earth, palaeontologists dig up fossil creatures that once lived that are remarkable by today’s standards – dragonflies with one metre wingspans, for example, or carnivorous kangaroos. From this perspective the Earth is completely unique, like a human individual. There may be similar ‘Earth-like’ worlds, but there is no planet exactly like ours. Thus, in the universal picture, the Earth has intrinsic worth as a unique biosphere, and therefore so do its component parts. In this regard, a space-faring environmental ethic is not hierarchical in the subjects it cares about. Because all creatures on Earth, from the civet to the cyanobacteria, are likely unique in the Universe, then all natural communities on Earth are worthy of protection. I’m not arguing that this is the only reason to look after ecosystems. Quite the contrary: we must continue the conservation and preservation of ecosystems for all the existing reasons – the instrumental value they have to us, the future scientific value they might have to us, and their vitalness to the health of other ecosystems on Earth. But the space-faring environmental ethic provides a completely new reason for ecosystem preservation and conservation – an understanding that ecosystems have universal value as unique interstellar examples of life and evolution. Indeed, it is perhaps the most egalitarian environmental ethic of all, given that it advocates sweeping protection for all organisms from microbes to people themselves. In short, the Earth will have intrinsic worth to a civilization that has long since left its surface and established a permanent presence elsewhere. For a space-faring civilization then, there are both instrumental and intrinsic worth arguments for looking after the Earth. Indeed, the arguments for the care of the Earth’s environment and its creatures get stronger the further from Earth we go and
124
space on earth
the more we realize the Galaxy- and (eventually) Universe-wide uniqueness of life on Earth. Eventually, a space-faring environmental ethic of this kind might feed back to the people of Earth and help them value nature on a new level. If we walk through a forest or park and see everything around us as a unique life form in the Universe, perhaps we will develop a much deeper appreciation for its existence. We might view life on Earth through the eyes of an alien that has set eyes on these wonders for the first time. They have no knowledge of terrestrial ecosystems and the relative importance of one organism over another in maintaining biotic integrity. They are, however, in awe of all creatures as new examples of life on a planet, and they respect them all equally as remarkable manifestations of this planet’s unique experiment in evolution. A space-faring environmental ethic calls for us to see life on Earth through similar eyes. The respect that we hold for the uniqueness of life on Earth might also help us to have respect for other planets and moons that have life. If we can learn to respect all life forms on Earth because they are profoundly unique experiments in evolution, perhaps we will have a respect for life on other planets and moons for exactly the same reasons.
Do the far reaches of space have instrumental and intrinsic worth to people on Earth? We dealt with the instrumental value of space and its assets in Chapter 3, from asteroids’ metals to the Moon’s helium-3. It is quite easy to see how inhabitants on Earth can regard space as a place we should care about because it is useful to us.
greening the universe
125
Eventually, the inhabitants of the Earth and future space dwellers will protect other planets because they help us to understand the Earth. Imagine finding a planet with an atmosphere much like Earth’s. Perhaps we would protect this planet because it helps us understand the fate of the Earth’s atmosphere, or how environmental conditions might have influenced the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere in the past. Even in our own Solar System we can already see some examples of these potential sites of special scientific interest. The intrinsic worth of extraterrestrial objects to people on Earth is a less tractable part of the ethical debate, particularly when we consider lifeless objects, i.e. most of the Universe. Here Christopher Stone’s call to extend intrinsic worth to inanimate objects such as rivers and oceans is helpful. Holmes Rolston, an American environmental ethicist, also averred that any object with a proper name should be considered to have value. If we have ethical standards for the river Amazon or the Pacific Ocean, then surely these same ethical standards could apply to a starforming region of the Galaxy or a black hole? Throughout the vast expanse of interstellar space there are many objects and things of potentially little value to humans, but should we respect them anyway? Just as we stand in awe of the Grand Canyon and protect it, perhaps our sense that objects in the rest of the Universe have intrinsic worth will be based on a similar sense of wonder. The sulphur volcanoes of Io, the jets of radiation ejected by a supernova explosion and the hot gas giants orbiting other stars are just as impressive as the Grand Canyon, but currently not as easy to appreciate because few people see them with their own eyes. A space-faring civilization will witness these spectacles directly and perhaps grasp the intrinsic worth of extraterrestrial objects from a sense of insignificance at the grand scope and beauty of nature in action.
126
space on earth
What I have presented above is the basis of a space-faring environmental ethic. It concerns the intrinsic and instrumental worth of the Earth and objects in space and the common ethical values that we apply to them. These connections provide a powerful reason for forging common ethical debate between environmentalists and space explorers. Such is the importance of environmentalism and space research as two challenges that must be addressed together, it would be useful to form this ethical debate into a more developed discussion in environmental ethics. This need for extraterrestrially relevant ethics is not speculation. Already we have a test case. The Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), an international body made up of scientists and policymakers, has an intricate set of regulations governing the decontamination of spacecraft before they are despatched to other planets. These regulations have been internationally implemented and are similar to the regulations that govern the transfer of organisms across the Earth. To prevent contamination of new continents by agricultural pests there is an involved process of applying for permits to transfer material back and forwards. Institutions must apply for these permits and rigorously enforce them. In the same way, interplanetary policies are designed to prevent us from transporting microbes to other planets and contaminating them. They were first established by the Committee on Contamination by Extraterrestrial Exploration (CETEX) in 1958, and they represented one of the first attempts to take environmental ethics to the stars. The policies are also designed to stop us from bringing microbes back from other planets, if they exist, and contaminating the Earth. The policies have been successful in getting space agencies to catalogue and take measures to reduce contamination on their spacecraft. How do these COSPAR policies sit within the ethics discussion? Firstly, what about the instrumental and intrinsic worth of
greening the universe
127
planetary protection guidelines for the Earth? We want to protect the Earth from extraterrestrial organisms for very instrumental reasons – to stop the Earth’s biosphere from being destroyed by an alien pandemic, however unlikely that may be. We also do it for intrinsic reasons – organisms on Earth have a right to exist and not to be destroyed by our foolish actions of introducing non-indigenous alien microbes. On this point, the ethical framework works quite well. What about the instrumental and intrinsic worth of planetary protection for Mars and other planets? The planetary protection guidelines are designed to stop Mars from being contaminated, because we consider any possible life there to be valuable for scientific study. Eventually, we might want to study it and even learn something about the origins of life on Earth. These concerns embody instrumental (scientific) reasons for protecting life on Mars, if it is there at all. If Mars has microscopic life then it will have an intrinsic worth on a similar level to microbes on Earth. If Mars is lifeless we may want to preserve that lifelessness because of our respect for the landscapes and features of the planet – an application of Stone’s view that even lifeless objects deserve some type of respect.
A particularly difficult part of accepting the intrinsic worth of objects is the possibility that technology might allow us to make some planets capable of bearing Earth-like life. The process of transforming a planet into one capable of sustaining humans is called terraforming. Various schemes have been proposed since
128
space on earth
the 1970s. Environmentalist Jim Lovelock, for instance, suggested injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere of Mars to warm the planet, melt the water and make it capable of supporting a primitive biosphere. But even if we never alter an entire planet through large-scale atmospheric engineering, we may well decide to cover some areas in domes and locally change the conditions. Do we have the right to transform a planet into one covered in life in the Earth’s image? The debate rages on. Some argue that Mars has an intrinsic worth as it is – a frozen, barren red planet. Others counter that human beings alter many inanimate objects on Earth, so why not Mars? Indeed, although Christopher Stone discussed legal rights for inanimate objects, he did not explicitly state that their legal rights should include the right to remain lifeless. Humans have the ability to make Mars more useful to life, which some consider to make it more valuable. If Mars already has life, then another set of considerations must prevail – we must try to find out whether terraforming will make the indigenous life extinct. If so, then we might seriously question the ethical basis of terraforming. If pockets of this life will survive the process, maybe terraforming could proceed. As on Earth, few arguments in space-faring environmental ethics will be black and white. There will be many examples of situations where instrumental and intrinsic worth are difficult to dissect. One particularly fascinating example of a major conflict in our ethical conduct concerns the protection of the Earth’s environment from destruction caused by asteroid and comet impacts. The realization that Earth has been, and will be, struck by asteroids and comets, potentially destroying large percentages of life, has led to suggestions that we should divert these incoming objects. We would do this by detecting them early and then exploding or deflecting them to stop them colliding. These
greening the universe
129
propositions all have at their core a highly anthropocentric environmental ethic. Unlike anthropogenic ozone depletion or deforestation, asteroid and comet impacts are natural and their prevention is actually an environmental interference, regardless of whether it happens to be of benefit to humans. It might be argued that such schemes represent an unacceptable environmental manipulation. If dinosaurs had implemented an asteroid and comet diversion plan, mammals might never have risen to preeminence, and we would not exist. Thus, the diversion of asteroids and comets might be said to have a negative environmental impact when the opportunities for life that arise after such events are considered to have been thwarted. This same argument could be applied to any attempt to prevent any other natural catastrophes like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. Usually the instrumental benefits to humanity and the existing biosphere are considered so overwhelmingly important that arguments that asteroids and comets should be allowed to impact Earth without any attempt to stop them are not seriously entertained. The point is that as we explore space, what appear to be black and white ethical situations may not be quite as simple as they first appear. Yet another fascinating ethical problem that may be faced by a space-faring civilization is contact with life constructed with a completely different biochemical architecture from what we are familiar with. If we do not know whether we are dealing with an inanimate object or something living, this would affect the ethical framework within which we view it, and thus our treatment of it. Perhaps in this case we would err on the side of caution and treat it as a living thing until we can prove otherwise. In other words we assume ‘highest moral relevance’ as a default. A similar dilemma concerns the definition of ‘intelligence’. Although we talk about treating life on Earth with reverence, we
130
space on earth
still kill plants and other animals. What would happen if we viewed an alien life form to have some instrumental worth similar to a plant and we killed it, only to discover that we have in fact murdered a sentient, intelligent being? Perhaps then, with such complications inherent in contact with alien life, we should assume the highest moral relevance, and treat all alien life as intelligent until proven otherwise. Aside from reducing the chances of a terrible injustice against alien life, this general approach might also mitigate our own destructive tendencies. There is ample historical evidence of our propensity to destroy life forms, cultures and even people with which we are not familiar. If, during past human exploration, we had proceeded with a principle of ‘highest moral relevance’, much suffering and destruction could have been avoided. Thus it seems sensible to apply such a principle in future to all our dealings with nature. Developing a unified environmental ethic for a space-faring civilization is difficult. Even on Earth we disagree about the reasons for preserving some things and the reasons for exploiting others. This is not surprising. We face a continuous battle between human wants and the needs of the rest of the biosphere. As we mine and extract resources from other bodies, particularly ones that have life, we will face identical conflicts in how we assign our priorities. Once we see that the ethical questions on Earth and in space are intertwined, then we can understand better how the common practical challenges are linked. So, back to these practical challenges. A tour of some of the links between environmentalism and space exploration is all very well, but we actually need to forge these links between the communities more effectively, rather than just recognizing that they exist. How do we do that? What policy and institutional steps could we take to bring these benefits to bear?
7 earth and space
Climbing Mount Olympus on Mars and looking after an endangered tiger on Earth are to us one and the same thing – exploring, settling and understanding the Universe successfully
Organizations that do not recognize any division between environmentalism and space exploration are extremely rare. Historically, most deal either with the exploration of space or with the environmental protection and study of the Earth, and this has been one of the main reasons for the wedge that exists between these two areas. Most scientific exploration organizations established before 1950 tend to be focused exclusively on the Earth, because prior to the birth of the space age, their founders were Earth explorers. Space settlement organizations, set up by those driven and enthused by the new space race in the 1950s and 60s between the USA and the Soviet Union, are usually focused on the space frontier. The engineers and scientists born of this race that went on to establish these new organizations were generally not Earth explorers beforehand. This strict separation is not entirely accurate. The Explorers Club of New York invites astronauts to join its ranks, even though the organization is primarily an Earth exploration organization. 131
132
space on earth
The British Interplanetary Society has held talks on environmental problems. But there are only a few organizations that set as their goal understanding and caring for the Earth and the exploration of space in equal measure and as a united objective. Conversely, environmental organizations saw their origins during the birth of the environmental movement in the 1970s, so in some respects their histories are contemporaneous with the exploration of space. However, environmentalists again took their stock of founders from the pool of those who explored the Earth. Of course, this was completely reasonable. If you have a potential problem with the Earth’s environment you go to policymakers who know about the environment, and you go to Earth scientists to provide you with the academic, and maybe some of the technological, knowledge to attempt to solve your problem. It would have seemed bizarre for an environmental organization in the 1970s to have set up a Board of Directors made up of space engineers and scientists. In many ways, it becomes self-fulfilling. The more organizational structures are separated into space exploration and environmentalism, the more the perception of this separation exists and thus the more it is perpetuated from generation to generation. Similarly to other people with my interests, from an early age I became quite aware of the separation between the study of space and the study of Earth. I went to a boarding school when I was seven and read avidly about the heroic era of polar exploration and about NASA’s plans to explore the Moon and Mars. Both activities were about exploration and the acts undertaken by individuals to open up new and exotic frontiers, but the books I found in the library were invariably separated, not just in their content, but physically as well. Books about the heroic era of exploration were under history or some such similar heading. The exploration of space was under science.
earth and space
133
As you grow older you seek affiliation with others with similar interests. I had to join the British Interplanetary Society to fulfil my interests in space exploration when I was 17, but later I also had to join the Royal Geographical Society to sate my interests in exploration on Earth. When I was 19 I began planning an expedition to Mongolia, but at the same time I was avidly reading books on the exploration of Mars. And at the age of 25 I had just finished an insect-collecting expedition to the rainforests of Indonesia. At the same time I was writing papers on Martian polar exploration and how expeditions might be planned across the ice caps of the Red Planet. I know from talking to fellow scientists that this type of experience has been the same for anyone who has grown up with a generic interest in ‘exploration’ and its many manifestations. We modern-day explorers end up with two parallel lives: field exploration on other planets and field exploration on Earth. This apparent choice seems illogical, when in both cases the objective is the same – exploring new frontiers. And it is often frustrating, as neither group of people necessarily grasps the excitement of belonging to the other. Thus, I developed the idea to establish a Foundation that would break the separation between environmentalism and space settlement. The most obvious common link seemed to me to be in field science and exploration. After all, field work is where scientific investigation finds one of its most prominent expressions, particularly on new frontiers. In the field, practical scientific discoveries are made. It seemed that an organization that wanted to forge connections between space settlement and environmentalism should start there. That is where we started. In 1994 I established a new British charity called the British Foundation for Non-Terrestrial Exploration. The purpose of this new organization was very simple – to help fund expeditions
134
space on earth
that use space technology and information to protect the Earth’s environment and to help fund expeditions that would use information from extreme environments and other locations on Earth to explore other planets and to build a spacefaring society. At the beginning of 1995, the organization was registered as a charity in the UK and we were ready to give out the first grants. One of the problems with establishing a new organization, particularly before the advent of the Internet, was getting out to people and getting it known. I had £500 of my own money to give away to expeditions and needed to find willing candidates. The best way to do this was to watch the newspapers and use connections. In six months I identified three expeditions ready to be recipients of the first grants of the organization. The first was an international caving expedition to Mexico. The study of people and their interactions in extreme environments can help us understand how astronauts interact on long space missions, particularly those to Mars that may take many years. Patricia Santy at the University of Texas Medical Center, who had long had connections with the US Astronaut Corp and was interested in finding ways to improve astronaut selection, knew of this caving expedition. The expedition would use a set of questionnaires to investigate in great detail the interactions amongst the team members while they explored numerous caves across Mexico. The information that was gathered would be applied to improving astronaut selection for future space station and Space Shuttle crews. It was a wonderful example of how expeditions on Earth can help us get into space and improve the ability of humans to work in this new and hostile frontier. They accepted our first grant. Then a newspaper report in the UK announced that British polar explorer Robert Swan was planning an epic trek to the South Pole. This unique expedition would use satellite technol-
earth and space
135
ogy to send despatches home that would be picked up in classrooms around the UK to teach pupils about extreme environments. Back then, pre-Web, when satellite phones were still very expensive, this was a very unusual venture. It seemed to be an excellent example of how space technologies can help us on Earth, particularly in educating the next generation about a new frontier. So I contacted Robert Swan and offered him the money. He gladly accepted and the expedition became our second recipient. From the beginning I was keen that the new Foundation should be international. It would have been a contradiction if a Foundation whose purpose was to create links between environmentalism and the settlement of the vast expanse of space had narrowed its grant giving to only one country. The awards had gone to a US and a British expedition. I needed another country to come on board. It was another newspaper story that alerted me to a Russian Academy of Sciences expedition to Siberia. They were hoping to collect rocks formed during the Proterozoic Eon – 2.5 billion years to 545 million years ago – to shed new light on this period of Earth history. During the Proterozoic, oxygen levels first began to rise. Before then, the oxygen being produced, if it was being produced at all, reacted with other gases such as hydrogen from volcanoes. The pre-Proterozoic world was a very different place. Without oxygen, every multicellular complex creature we now know could not exist. Oxygen is used to burn the carbohydrates we use for energy. Before the Proterozoic, when the atmosphere was without oxygen, only microbes could survive. The Earth was literally a ‘microbe world’. Without oxygen there was no ozone layer to protect the surface of the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. Then, for reasons still controversial, the oxygen levels rose and the ozone shield formed. The shield protected life on the surface
136
space on earth
of the Earth from ultraviolet radiation and made it more benign to live on. As the oxygen atmosphere formed, so life started to use the gas, and with such reserves of energy now at its disposal, it started to become larger and more complex. About 600 million years ago the first multicellular life begins to appear in the fossil record – jellyfish-like creatures. These fossils mark the beginning of an explosion of life that eventually led to us. And so the Proterozoic covers some of the major evolutionary developments of life on Earth. Within it is the answer to how a planet bearing only single-celled microscopic life can give birth to animals, plants and ultimately intelligence. This Russian expedition was an outstanding example of the way in which field exploration can help us understand the past nature of the Earth, which could in itself help us to understand the history of the Solar System, the evolution of life on Earth and potentially how life might evolve on other planets. I spent a month of convoluted telephone calls that spread across Russia until they finally bore fruit. It was the third expedition to receive a grant. Two small £50 grants were also awarded to an International Space University expedition to some of the significant game reserves of Africa and a small NASA expedition to Yellowstone National Park to study the microbes that live in the extreme hot springs. After they had been supported, the money I originally donated to start the Foundation was spent. The little Foundation had now funded a range of exciting projects, from the use of space technologies to educate people, to early planetary history, to human factors research in extreme environments to help space settlement. These projects were an embodiment of what this new organization was about. It had successfully found projects that reached into many of the unusual and extraordinary links between space settlement and environmentalism. As it was the first year of grant-giving it was
earth and space
137
important that this was a showcase year, a demonstration that the Foundation had a viable idea. Early 1995 brought something of a sense of achievement. It is easy to establish a new organization, but whether it will take hold and actually work is another matter. One person’s good idea may be another’s idea of folly, but all the grants had been accepted and the expeditions expressed enthusiasm for the new organization and its charter. In February 1995 I moved to the NASA Ames Research Center in California to do postdoctoral research. It was there that I made contact again with Douglas Messier, an American journalist with a long-time interest in the environment and outstanding journalistic ability, and John Criswick, a Canadian astrophysicist and future computer entrepreneur, two of my old colleagues from the International Space University. We met there in Toulouse, France, in 1991 when ISU was still an eight-week summer course. At ISU we had frequently discussed the idea of an expedition to Antarctica to simulate a mission in space. Now I was in the USA it seemed to me that we should consider establishing a US organization. We joined up to found a US version of the Foundation. With the international connections growing, the British Foundation for Non-Terrestrial Exploration seemed a little nationalist and it was necessary to make it more widely appealing. We settled on a new name: The Twenty-one Eleven Foundation for Exploration. The year 2111 was the 200th anniversary of the expeditions of Amundsen and Scott to the Earth’s South Pole and the date by which we hoped there would be expeditions to the Martian polar ice caps. The date symbolized the connections between Earth and space exploration; the idea that the same motives that drive us to understand the Earth and its environment would one day drive us on to Mars and other planets.
138
space on earth
Eventually we would decide that the Twenty-one Eleven Foundation was itself a difficult name to remember. It took some explaining to get people to understand the link between Scott, Amundsen and the South Pole of Mars and the links between environmentalism and space exploration. In one case we were asked whether it was some sort of youth party and dating agency, such as Club 18-30 – Foundation 21-11. In 2000, just after the millennium, we made our final name change to simply the Earth and Space Foundation. Furthermore, it seemed to us that the name would not go out of fashion. It was simple and robust and likely to be meaningful and understandable for a great deal of time to come. The real proof of a Foundation’s legitimacy is when people start to write to apply for grants. Of course, expeditions are usually desperate for money, particularly if they are run by scientists, as they are not typically a rich bunch of people. Calling up expeditions and offering them grants as I had done in 1995 was a sure sign that there were expeditions relevant to the Foundation’s objectives and ready to take our money, but would they actually seek us out, understand what we were up to and sit down to fill in an application form? By early 1996 we had our first web site up and running and it announced our grants on offer. By March of that year we had 15 applications to the organization. It was very obvious that the Foundation could work and be self-sustaining. I began to pay some more money into an endowment account to help us build up some capital and we received some kind donations from people who believed in us. Since that year we have had on average twice as many applications to the organization as there are grants. Now called Earth and Space Awards, they have become an accolade that is useful for expedition planners to add to their portfolios to demonstrate support for their plans. No doubt the vision statement of the Foundation will change in the future, but in attempting to define what we are all about
earth and space
139
we used a vision statement: ‘the Earth as an oasis, cared for by a space-faring civilization’ – a Foundation dedicated to the diversity of connections between environmentalism and space settlement. The organization has had ups and downs. The original newsletter, Tranquility, was abandoned because it took too much work. All of us in the Foundation have full-time jobs and this organization is run at the weekends and during the odd evening. We also had a plan for a grand education programme that did not happen. Such is the learning curve of a new organization. But the Earth and Space Foundation has nevertheless survived and the idea behind it has flourished. The decision to focus on field work was a good one. Small amounts of money can go a long way. If we had decided to focus on industrial connections between environmentalism and space exploration, our money would have disappeared amongst vast contracts from space agencies to industry. But fieldwork is run by universities who often have to collect funding from a number of sources to get the amount they need. Many projects are run by scientists, who do not necessarily have industry connections and support from the private sector. A Foundation demonstrating its support and giving an award, even a modest amount of money, can help a very great deal to make these ventures happen. In this we could actually make a difference. The Foundation has always championed the need to bring environmentalists and space explorers together on its Boards. In 1999, Don White joined our Board of Directors. Don is President and Founder of the prestigious conservation organization Earthtrust. Earthtrust has fielded teams of researchers and mediators around the world. It has campaigned to save dolphins, with its international certification programme to have tins of tuna labelled as dolphin-friendly, alerting consumers to the ter-
140
space on earth
rible impact on dolphin populations of careless trawling. Don is a true visionary and, some might say, a radical. That is what it takes to bring real environmental change. On top of his lifelong dedication to environmentalism, he is interested in space exploration, making him a perfect candidate for our Board. Over time we have seen members of California’s Space Development Council join us, and space scientists and biologists have helped us out. Indeed, our Boards have always been open to space explorers and environmentalists alike, from industry or universities. We recognize all these people as ‘explorers’. They are people interested in exploring the Earth and exploring space and using the experience gathered in both places to provide mutual benefits. We don’t see them as belonging to any particular group. In 1998, Dale Stokes, joined our Board of Directors. Working at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Dale has been into and across the oceans in some of the world’s most remarkable submersibles and ships. He has studied extreme life in Antarctica for the National Science Foundation. As a biologist, oceanographer, scientific instrument designer and a person with a great deal of interest and enthusiasm for the exploration of space, Dale is just the type of polymath we want to promote now and in the future. Perhaps one of the most useful things that the Foundation does is to highlight the incredible diversity of connections between space exploration and environmentalism with its annual Earth and Space Awards. Each year adds a new set of connections and expeditions. By 2004, the Foundation had helped fund 50 fieldwork projects around the world. Each one of these had a unique perspective. By displaying all these funded projects on our web site we hope that, if nothing else, they act as exemplars, showing why environmentalists and space settlers should get together to solve the world’s problems.
earth and space
141
Almost every angle on the connections between Earth and space has, at one time or another, been funded by the Foundation. The physical environment of our planet has had some critical effects on life and how it develops, and therefore ultimately what it even looks like. Gravity is an unseen but powerful force. It plays a part in telling plants which way is up and which way is down. It helps embryo development in many animals, providing a direction against which the different parts of the body can be defined. Gravity helps shape how tall trees are, how big a bird’s wing needs to be to fly and how powerful a heart needs to be to pump blood through the body. We actually know surprisingly little about how this most basic of forces in our Universe influences life on Earth. In 1996, tiny biospheres that included shrimp and water plants enclosed in a glass bubble were sent into orbit on board the Russian Mir space station to try to understand how gravity influences the evolution of life on Earth. These tiny aquatic ecosystems represent the most simplified food chains. They were left in orbit for two years and then returned to Earth to be studied at the University of Arizona. The Foundation helped to fund the study of these tiny ‘Earths’ when they returned and the results are still being investigated. They are the beginnings of new experiments to understand the role of gravity in shaping life. Satellite technology has been used prolifically by field expeditions to help investigate the workings of Earth. Global Positioning Systems have become so widespread now that the Foundation tries to avoid the gratuitous use of this technology as a reason for giving an award. But some of the more unusual awards have included the use of GPS to map ancient ‘tells’ or burial mounds in Syria. What is enclosed by the modern state of Syria – ‘the Fertile Crescent’ – was the birthplace of astronomy,
142
space on earth
accountancy, animal domestication and many other fundamental developments in the history of human civilization. The Foundation helped fund a large archaeology project by the Syrian government in collaboration with the Society for Syrian Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Space technology can improve the way we responsibly use the environment for food production. The river plains of Guinea and Sudan support vast savannah zones that are important rice production regions for this area of the world. In 1997, the Foundation helped the West African Rice Development Association (WARDA) in its efforts to use satellite remote sensing to chart the flood plains. The remote sensing data was coupled with ground-truth and pictures taken from aircraft to build up maps of this vital food production region. The charts are now being used to improve rice production and harvesting. In Guatemala the people are faced with destruction of the forest on which their livelihood depends. Rather than rejecting economic progress and trying to save the forests for their intrinsic merit, one novel approach is to make the forests themselves valuable, although these schemes must be carefully assessed to be successful. A group of expeditions, to which the Foundation provided an award, used remote sensing to plan ecotourism routes in the forests, thus providing capital to the local communities through the tourist trade. This approach is now making the protection of the forests a sensible economic decision for them. If they destroy the forest, they destroy their income. Coral reefs are an enormous source of biological diversity and contribute to the health of the world’s coastal regions. Yet globally they are under stress. Temperature changes and pollutants are threatening the diversity and very existence of some of the most important coral reef regions of the world. Edinburgh University in Scotland are at the vanguard of a project to map completely new and uncharacterized coral reefs in Madagascar, and
earth and space
143
the Foundation helped support them. The study is part of an ongoing effort by the University’s ‘Coral Awareness’ programme to examine new coral reefs to reveal the extent of their biological importance to local ecosystems and the health of the oceans. At the end of the expedition in 2001 the University had successfully established a multi-year mapping project in the region. We have also looked to countries that are less well known by the industrialized world. Mongolia is a country of vast natural resources and wealth, but its people need to know how to manage and use this wealth successfully. With growing links to the rest of the world, Mongolian scientists are keen to learn new lessons and use technology in beneficial ways. The Earth and Space Foundation helped to fund two separate projects focused on this nation. One used GPS to chart archaeological remains throughout the country that date back to the days of Ghengis Khan. The locations of these historical sites are used to plan a strategy for looking after them. This is important for Mongolia because these remains represent their cultural history. They can also be used to draw in tourists to visit the country and help generate revenue. When winter ends in Mongolia, herdsmen often have difficulty finding snow-free patches for grazing their livestock. In the past, searches were carried out on the ground, but this takes a long time and it is very tedious. If unsuccessful, herds can go without food for a considerable time, affecting their health and the livelihood of Mongolians. We helped to support a project using satellite mapping in 1997 to seek out areas where the snow had melted and herds could graze. Now, as a result of this project using satellite remote sensing, information on where the snow has cleared can be fed directly by satellite to herdsmen across the country who can take their herds to these regions. To protect their environment, and prevent the overgrazing of the
144
space on earth
land, they can use the satellite pictures to choose new grazing pastures. We have become involved in some very unusual projects, and not just ones with immediate practical benefits that come from satellites. The Foundation has helped to fund a study of dolphin intelligence. Dolphins are remarkable creatures that demonstrate certain aspects of self-awareness and other attributes of intelligence. Earthtrust runs Project Delphis, a programme that brings together computer scientists and biologists to try to unravel communication in this non-human mind. They communicate with their dolphins using underwater computer touch pads that allow the dolphins to type in responses to questions. Using this technology they can start to determine the boundaries of dolphin cognition. In 1996, the Foundation provided an Earth and Space Award to help this project. The space-related applications of this very novel project are twofold. First, the link between biologists and computer scientists that was needed to study dolphin intelligence is vital to many other areas of biology, such as the development of lifesupport systems in space. The collaborations that have been forged by this project have yielded valuable lessons in how to establish interdisciplinary scientific links. Second, unravelling communication in a non-human mind fosters new ideas for how to detect signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. Project Delphis is an excellent exemplar of how some very fundamental and worthwhile biological research – understanding cognition in dolphins – can be relevant to the future and very long-term human exploration of space. It is a good science project with a healthy and speculative dose of vision thrown in. Life in some of Earth’s most extreme environments has been studied with help from the Foundation. The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection was given an award in 2001 to help launch an expedition to the Antarctic led by Brian
earth and space
145
Duval. He is a specialist in snow algae. These micro-organisms live within the snow, gathering their nutrients from the tiny amounts of contaminants to be found in melt water and collecting their energy from sunlight. They often give snow a red or green cast. These colours are made by the pigments they produce to gather sunlight and to protect themselves from ultraviolet radiation. Brian Duval is interested in snow algae as an analogue of possible forms of life in extraterrestrial snow- and ice-covered environments. So as well as yielding direct information on how these organisms contribute towards productivity in the polar regions of the world, the work has interesting implications for exobiology, the search for life beyond Earth. The expedition returned with new collections of these unusual extreme environment organisms. From life under the sea-ice in Antarctica to life in Canada’s extreme north, the polar regions of the Earth give us ideas about where to search for life on other cold, rocky planets like Mars. Getting people to see our point of view has been a mixed experience. Despite the separate organizations that pursue Earth and space exploration, most scientists organizing environmental expeditions readily appreciate how satellites can help them. We have often found that the Foundation has encouraged environmental researchers to think about how their work relates to space. During the search for money, an expedition team might come across our web site and ponder how, for instance, their planned study of microbes in an extreme environment could fit within the remit of our funding guidelines. It is then that they make the link with another planet and come to us seeking support for an expedition with implications for the search for life on other planets. So, too, we have also found it surprisingly easy to get people onto our Boards. Many environmental researchers harbour a
146
space on earth
fascination with space exploration, but never find a way to express it. The offer to sit on a Foundation Board where they get to see environmental projects that have a link with space gives them the chance to express these interests. Similarly, space engineers and scientists often have an interest in environmental concerns, but in their day-to-day lives don’t often get the chance to indulge them. We have found them enthusiastic to find out what we are up to. These experiences should give us a lot of hope, because it suggests that the lack of communication between both groups is born more of pragmatic reasons, such as their different workplaces, rather than a lack of interest about each other’s work. Conversely, it is also true that some people have been suspicious of our work. As grant money is limited, environmental organizations can perceive that adding space to their agenda merely dilutes already scarce resources that they have for their existing projects. Blurring the division between space and Earth can seem to threaten the status quo of funding allocation. Part of the connection between space exploration and environmentalism is education. Without this, these links cannot be understood by the next generation and put to good use. One of the Foundation’s award categories is education projects. The International Space University (ISU) is a multidisciplinary graduate school that provides education in subjects as diverse as space law and space life sciences to more than 100 students from over 20 countries around the world each year. The Foundation gave an award to send all of ISU’s summer session students in 2001 to an environmental exhibition in Bremen, Germany. The exhibition was a display of the types of new technology that might be used in environmental monitoring, from advances in satellite technology to new imaging methods. We wanted to help fascinate the future space leaders in environ-
earth and space
147
mental research, and give them some idea of just what an incredible planet Earth actually is. And so the list continues, an enormous collection of expeditions that fit into one of the Foundation’s two award categories: ‘using the Earth to help understand other worlds and to create a space-faring civilization’ and ‘using space to help maintain the Earth as an oasis’. Each year the awards are sifted and viewed by members of the Board of Directors and Advisors, and then selections are made. Each year those involved continue to be intrigued and fascinated by the colourful and endless permutations in the way in which the settlement of space becomes interwoven with environmental work. A Foundation with a vision for the future also needed to have a goal that reflected its ambitions but lay beyond its current abilities, something that made people realize that our vision was here to stay. We needed a set of future awards that would connect the exploration of space to the history of the exploration of Earth. We did this by offering a set of awards for expeditions on Mars and the Moon that paralleled those that had been achieved on Earth. Consider some of the best-known expeditions that have happened on Earth and I think that you will agree with me that the crossing of the polar regions and the climbing of the world’s highest mountain rank as some of the most memorable. Most people know of the historic race to the Earth’s South Pole by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and the British explorer Robert Scott. Amundsen won the race and Scott and his men tragically died on their way home. American explorer Peary’s heroic attempt on the North Pole is also legend. Almost everyone knows that Nepalese climber Tenzing Norgay and New Zealander Edmund Hilary were the first to climb Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth. These expedi-
148
space on earth
tions, fairly or unfairly, have dominated the history of exploration on Earth, and they create powerful cultural resonances around the world. The motives and desires that underpinned these historic expeditions seemed to our Foundation to have universal appeal. They were about achieving a first, whether that be crossing the polar ice caps for the first time or reaching the summit of the highest mountain. It is true that science was not always, and usually never was, the first priority of these expeditions. As an organization that was interested in forging links in fieldwork between environmentalism and space exploration, we were keen to emphasize the scientific links, but it seemed undeniable to us that these expeditions represented the underlying spirit of exploration that drives us to new frontiers. We recognized the parallels on other planets. On Mars stands Mount Olympus, more formally known as Olympus Mons. This mountain is two and a half times the height of Mount Everest. It is the highest peak in the Solar System. Who will be the first to climb this immense structure and be able to claim that they reached a peak higher than even Everest? In 1994, the Foundation established the Olympus Mountaineering Award for the first team to reach the summit of this immense structure and to recognize this amazing feat. There will be some differences with Mount Everest. Olympus will be intensely boring. The slopes across this ancient structure are only about five degrees, so instead of climbing craggy rocks with gapping glaciers that can swallow an entire expedition, the team will instead spend much of their climb scaling a shallow, almost imperceptible, slope to the summit. Olympus, unlike Everest, is not a mountain formed from the crashing together of two continental plates. Instead, it is a giant extinct shield volcano. At its summit the volcano projects into space, and when the explorers arrive there, instead of being greeted by the
earth and space
149
salmon coloured skies of Mars, they will be surrounded by skies that are black. They will literally be in space. The explorers could have a challenging climb if they want. Around the edges of the volcano are sheer foothills three kilometres high, and cliffs of similar dimensions are to be found in the caldera near the summit. It is possible to avoid these, but imagine abseiling down a three kilometre cliff deep into the crater of this volcano. Olympus Mons is not just a higher version of Everest; it is a unique climb, and will offer unique challenges for mountaineers. The Olympus Mountaineering Award will be a worthy award when it is finally claimed. The polar ice caps of Mars are fascinating regions to explore. The north polar cap, about a quarter of the size of Antarctica, is made of water ice, much like the Antarctic ice sheet itself. Cut across by swirling valleys, the polar caps, like the polar regions of the Earth, are plunged into complete darkness for many months. Because the tilt of the Martian axis is similar to the Earth’s, but the Martian year is 687 Earth days long, some regions of the polar caps experience periods of darkness almost an entire Earth year long. During the winter, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere freezes out and flutters down to the surface of the cap as snow; at the Martian North Pole this ice can be two metres thick. The polar ice caps contain within them answers to fascinating science questions. From Martian orbit they appear to have a layered texture. Like a giant cake, there are alternating layers of red and white. The red layers are formed by great dust storms that deposited dust at the caps many hundreds of thousands and even millions of years ago. Like an archive, they record when dust storms happened in the past, and they might reveal things about past Martian climate. Because the polar ice caps have water ice, is it possible that deep within them or at their bases this ice has melted and pro-
150
space on earth
vided a source of liquid water for life? Perhaps future expeditions will drill these ices to learn about the past climate of Mars and to search for Martian polar life. But as on Earth, the crossing of the Martian polar ice caps either on snow shoes or vehicles will surely entice future explorers. The north polar cap is undoubtedly going to be the biggest prize. The south polar cap is smaller than the northern one and is covered in dust at the geographic South Pole. A crossing here would be more like a desert expedition than a polar one. We set up awards in 1994 to recognize the first crossings of the Martian poles. The Northern Polar Award recognizes the first expedition to cross the Martian north polar ice cap to the geographic North Pole and the Southern Polar Award is its counterpart at the south pole of Mars. They must cross the poles without airborne support or resupply. There is yet another feature on Mars that has no comparison on Earth and yet will create nothing short of awe in the future explorers of Mars. The Valles Marineris canyon system is a canyon so long and so wide that the length of the Grand Canyon would fit sideways into this structure. Over 4,000 kilometres long, the canyon is up to seven kilometres deep in places. Spectacular scarped walls and cliffs will be explored by those who descend into its depths. Established slightly later, in 2000, the Valles Marineris Award is offered by the Foundation to the first team to descend into the canyon from the edge using no technological support other than that required for life support and basic mountaineering. They must do it on foot. And of course, it would be remiss of the Foundation if we ignored the Moon. It is true that Mars has environments that have the greatest historic synergies with exploration on Earth – ice caps, mountains and giant canyons – but the Moon will also be explored by future expeditioners. The Lunar Circumnavigation Award, established in 1994, was set up by the Foundation
earth and space
151
to honour the first expedition team to circumnavigate the Moon overland. They can do it along any route they choose, provided it is a complete circumnavigation. We don’t seriously expect that by offering these awards we will accelerate missions to Mars. What they do is to put a spotlight on the similar spirit that underpins our desire to understand the Earth and explore new frontiers in space. They show that as well as purely scientific endeavours these two groups of people have much to learn from each other in developing the ethos of exploration. The awards will eventually reward those who apply this common ethos and the lessons of exploration on Earth to conquering these new challenges on Mars. The Earth and Space Foundation is just one example of the way in which practical links can be forged between the two challenges of wise environmental stewardship and space exploration. It is perhaps self-congratulatory for us to make the claim, but I don’t think it would be wrong to say that our Foundation was really the first non-profit organization to attempt to create practical connections between these two endeavours in their widest manifestation and to reward those efforts. Space agencies have for a long time been using space to monitor the environment and even to use extreme environments to study other planets, so it would be an exaggeration to say that the Foundation was the first to see where the mutually beneficial ties are and to try to support them. But it has successfully created these connections across a wide front, as the expeditions it has funded through its Earth and Space Awards will testify. And it is true to say that it was really the first organization to bring environmentalists and space explorers together on its Boards, recognizing them as one and the same category of people. The experience of the Earth and Space Foundation has been powerful. It demonstrates in a very practical way that exploring
152
space on earth
space and expending efforts on the Earth’s environments can be entirely complementary and that each can strengthen the efforts of the other. Most importantly, it shows that within the non-profit sector, these two efforts can be successfully connected into a single organizational structure. As the need to create connections between environmentalism and space settlement deepens, so similar organizations will find more of a role. We can imagine a time when organizations dedicated solely to space exploration or environmentalism will seem quite anachronistic in a civilization that has transformed itself into the space-faring guardians of a planetary oasis in space. In the next chapter I want to expand this discussion to consider some suggestions about how the links might be widened and what sort of institutions we might build to make this happen.
8 new alliances
Green and velvet organizations do not recognize the separation between environmentalism and space settlement
There are many levels on which practical connections could be forged between environmental and space groups, but for the sake of simplicity they can probably be split into three categories. There are opportunities in government organizations, ways in which federal institutions around the world can improve communication and action between environmental departments and space organizations. Then there are the links that could be made in industry, opportunities for new markets and wealth that could find their common ground on Earth and in space. Finally, there are all the possible connections in academia, universities and schools – what we could sum up as educational projects that will forge the intellectual and scientific ground. Governments are not newcomers to the idea of linking Earth and space exploration. After all, it was governments that built Earth-observation satellites, global positioning satellites and held hearings to find out all about solar power satellites. As a reflection of the appreciation of the link between Earth and space, NASA even created a program called ‘Mission to Planet 153
154
space on earth
Earth’, treating Earth as just another planet to which it might send space probes. In this case, of course, the satellites were turned back on the Earth and their purpose was to monitor the Earth’s environment, just as we might study the environment of Mars or Venus. Indeed, governments and space agencies from ESA to NASA, and more recently the Indians, Japanese and Chinese, have so far been the overwhelming force in the settlement of space and developing its Earth-based applications. It was also NASA and the National Science Foundation that first sent scientists to study the Antarctic to try to understand the barren polar deserts of Mars. Almost all of the links that do exist between Earth and space exploration have actually come from government activities. So in terms of a vision for the future and the prospects of building a green space-faring civilization, much of the credit must already go to governments and their various activities. Nonetheless, there is much more that governments could do. At the moment the budgets that get spent on space exploration and domestic matters are separated in all countries with space agencies. They are considered part of two separate objectives with very different interest groups. Departments for Energy and the Environment are very different from ministries or government departments that deal with space settlement, for example. New Departments for Earth and Space Affairs should be created. Forming interdisciplinary government departments of this type can be a double-edged sword. They could just create an enormous amount of red tape by generating new commitments and links between different departments that cause the apparatus of government to slow down, or they could catalyze new ideas and developments. It is a question of how they are managed and how they see their role. A Department for Earth and Space Affairs charged with crosslinking government departments that deal with space agencies
new alliances
155
and Earth-based domestic issues, its main role dedicated to helping find new funding and industry contacts to create these links, would be a powerful force for development. For example, such a department might take responsibility for solar power satellites, ensuring swift and effective communication between space agencies and departments of government that deal with energy and the environment. Within the myriad of organizations relevant for constructing a solar power satellite, many government departments could become involved, and make useful contributions. Other tasks for a Department of Earth and Space Affairs would be assessing energy prospects on the Moon with the Department of Energy and assessing legal rights to asteroid wealth with legal departments. Perhaps one of the most useful immediate contributions of such a department would be to share information from very diverse projects that involve the Earth and space, which might not have reason to be connected. The field of energy production is an excellent illustration of where it would be useful. Although space energy resources are not quite a reality, we could easily see where, in the near future, such an interdisciplinary government department will find an important role in coordinating energy needs. A Department of Earth and Space Affairs will know about many energy projects at once and be able to give advice to each of them about their prospects for success. It would, for example, know about current projects for using solar energy on Earth and be able to give advice on energy production from solar power satellites. It would know about helium-3 mining on the Moon and the energy availability from this enterprise. It would then assess the relative costs of different forms of extraterrestrial energy and compare these numbers to terrestrial energy output. Armed with this information it would then liaise with Departments of Energy and Environment, lunar enterprises
156
space on earth
and solar power corporations to come up with the best suggested energy strategy using these diverse forms of energy. This strategy would then be adopted and refined by the Department of Energy. We can think of such a department as a conduit for information pouring in from different energy-producing enterprises on the high frontier and on Earth. Part of the way forward to transform the government into an institution that can work in space and on Earth with minimal conflict in its activities is to create crossover in the ethos of government departments. This is the first stage to changing the culture. Once the perception is changed, practical projects will flow from that. Space agencies could become more ‘green’. By recycling waste and constructing energy-efficient buildings, they could make a significant contribution to environmental responsibility. They could showcase the synergy between exploring space and being environmentally aware without a great deal of effort. Industry already has high standards of managing energy use, if as nothing more than a way to cut down its own bills, and many of these practices are transferable to government. These are changes that could be implemented immediately. Environmental departments should become more space aware. If becoming environmentally aware is becoming ‘green’, then perhaps becoming space aware is becoming ‘velvet’ – as I like to dub the colour of space. A velvet organization would embrace technologies, materials and techniques that derive their origins from space missions and programmes. Just as a green organization tailors its activities to maximize benefit to the environment, so the velvet organization considers its activities in the context of advancing our progress on the space frontier. Eventually, many organizations will be ‘green and velvet’, and at this point society will truly make the transition to an environmentally aware space-faring civilization.
new alliances
157
Government agencies can lead the way. The National Park Service operates one of the largest environmental concerns in the USA. It draws in millions of visitors each year and presides over some of the most important protected regions in the USA, from the stunning Yosemite National Park, California to the Bryce National Park, Utah. Organizations like the National Park Service should create new categories to preserve assets that are useful for the settlement of space. These ‘Planetary Parks’ would bring space exploration into the National Park system. Anyone visiting Yellowstone National Park could see the microbes and learn about the search for life on Mars through improved display materials. Some of the people who think that space research is a waste of time and resources that detracts from solving problems here at home and some of those who believe that Earth-bound concerns distract from forging into space settlement are those not directly involved with these activities. There is no reason why many people should find the connections between these two activities obvious if even some experts struggle to see them. As most scientists fight over the same pots of grant money to save the environment or go to space, it is reasonable that a large proportion of the public perceives there to be an ‘either/or’ decision between these two activities. Planetary Parks could do much to break down these barriers and help literally millions of people to understand that protecting places on Earth can help us get into space and vice versa. Ultimately, Planetary Parks could be created on other planets too. Regions of the Martian polar ice caps could be declared Planetary Parks. Representative regions of Martian deserts and volcanoes might be preserved. They would be areas protected for their own intrinsic beauty, but also for future scientific study, free of human waste and destruction, and for the future enjoyment of all.
158
space on earth
Perhaps whilst visiting Yellowstone National Park, visitors will learn about Planetary Parks near the volcanoes of Mars and the connections between hydrothermal features in Yellowstone and those on Mars. Unlike Yellowstone, of course, Planetary Parks on other planets would need international agreement. Many of the principles that guide environmental law for parks on Earth are likely to be the same in space. These include the desire to keep designated areas in a state of environmental balance and free of human-caused destruction. Parks are usually kept free of military activity. Resources are not squandered or used in an environmentally damaging way, and all people should have a right to visit. In the USA, the Wilderness Act of 1965 defines a wilderness as ‘... where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain’. This wonderfully generic definition lends itself well to space. Just a few small alterations can make it useful. Perhaps a wilderness in space or on any other planet should be a place ‘... where the land or space is untrammeled by people, where humans are visitors who do not remain’. If extant life is eventually found on Mars or elsewhere, then the phrase ‘and its community of life’ in the original wilderness law can be added back into the definition for this planet. National Parks, reserves and their kin are the most important and publicly known manifestation of environmentalism. They are the greatest symbolic and practical gesture that we make towards the environment – to declare regions of the Earth off limits to human destruction. Thus it seems reasonable that if we want to get the public to understand the benefits of space research and environmentalism as two interconnected goals, it is through this system that we could act first. Governments can act to focus public minds by bringing attention to environmentalism and the settlement of space in other
new alliances
159
ways. One excellent approach that could be co-opted for focusing the public mind is Earth Day, conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970. The first Earth Day was held on 22 April 1970. Today events across the world increase public awareness on 22 April each year. Many news channels focus on the state of the world’s environment and look back over the year or even longer. The public, for one day in the year, focus on environmental matters. This isn’t the whole answer to increasing environmental awareness; it is just one way of seeding people’s minds so that other approaches, campaigns and issues sink in more easily. With Earth Day, environmentalism passed from the radical to something that is a planetary concern that many people can now understand. Similarly, the Space Day Foundation presides over the annual Space Day, supported by the governors of 47 US states. Space Day is celebrated on the first Thursday of each May and the Foundation works to get young people enthusiastic about space settlement. Why not, then, an ‘Earth in Space Day’ to increase public awareness of things that link the exploration of space with its benefits to Earth? Perhaps Earth Day itself might simply be expanded to include a space theme – the role of space science in helping the environment of Earth and the role of the Earth’s environment in helping us understand space. Educational establishments and academic institutions must also play their part. These organizations hold the key to attitudes and visions that will permeate the leaders of tomorrow. If the next generation of politicians, CEOs and professors can be taught that a responsible Earth dweller also probes space then a virtuous circle will ensue. From high school to university a range of courses should educate the next generation about the enormous number of connections between Earth and space. Universities provide many
160
space on earth
existing courses in environmental sciences, planetary sciences and even astronautics. Why not a degree in Environmental and Space Studies? Students would learn how extreme environments on Earth, from Antarctica to the deserts of Australia, can tell us about other planets. They would learn about remote sensing and the use of satellites for studying the Earth. Students would be taught about space resources and how they could be of benefit to people and life on Earth. They would learn how to build energyefficient houses on Earth using technologies developed from the settlement of space, such as solar cells. They would also have ethical discussions about the links between the exploration of Earth and space and the quandaries that these raise. This degree course would, over a period of three to four years, teach them everything they need to know to become environmentally aware citizens that belong to a space-faring civilization, capable of advancing both goals as mutually essential parts of the human future. To teach such courses new academic facilities should be formed that emphasize the cross-disciplinary connections between the Earth’s environment and space. New libraries of Earth and Space Studies must be created that provide the literary support to this pursuit, covering documents from science and engineering to ethics and culture. Many students will start to develop their own ideas for how Earth and space are linked and they will go on to implement practical projects, perhaps on solar power satellites or methods of bringing metals extracted from asteroids to industries on Earth. From these activities we can imagine new scientific journals. Some journals will encourage discussion on scientific matters that link the Earth’s environment and space. Other journals will focus on the engineering links. We could imagine an international journal for earth and space technology that would
new alliances
161
encourage technical papers describing technology that can be used both on Earth and in space. Already there are a few journals that will take scientific and technical papers that link Earth and space exploration. There are plenty of technology journals and remote sensing journals, for example, which are quite interdisciplinary. However, a common forum where the diversity of links between the exploration of space and the use of Earth’s environment can be compared and discussed in greater depth could be useful. Existing university departments should expand their remit. Departments of philosophy, ethics and environmental policy could encourage students to grapple with the cultural and political implications of the widened horizon. Legal departments should establish independent courses in space environmental law that consider legal structures for the protection of extraterrestrial sites of high scientific, historical or cultural value. Where asteroids and other resources are to be used by industry, lawyers will need to balance exploitation versus conservation or preservation. Such lawyers will need much more environmental training than existing space lawyers. Perhaps most importantly, at least in terms of practical advances, engineering departments at universities should offer courses to learn about the whole range of common engineering problems. Extraction of minerals from asteroids and the building of energy-efficient appliances for use on Earth and in space habitats could both be areas that students could work on. For their university projects they would build appliances that would be useful in homes on Earth and in space habitats on other planets. These might include appliances that use the minimal amount of water and take up minimal space – useful in regions on Earth where water is scarce, such as areas of Africa and in space stations. These courses should be developed in the coming few decades.
162
space on earth
Students of Earth and Space Engineering might construct solar panels for use on any planet in the Solar System. They would consider some of the engineering requirements for solar panels in extreme environments on Earth and the surface of the Moon, Mars and the asteroids, and then go out and build the ‘universal’ solar panel. These projects would help them consider how engineering practices could be standardized for many different products for use throughout the Solar System. They would form a core of people who will eventually do for the Solar System what Henry Ford did for cars. They will be able to design production lines that make products for use on all planets – a very competitive approach to Solar System industry compared with those companies that might produce a different solar panel, for example, for every different planet. Industry will eventually snap up students of Earth and Space Engineering. Interdisciplinary links do already exist in universities. There are, after all, many departments of Earth and Space Sciences. However, they almost exclusively focus on academic links in geology, atmospheric sciences and geophysics. In recent years, they have expanded to astrobiology and therefore brought in a more biological focus into their studies. Comparative planetology, where one compares the environment or geology of one planet to another, is a particularly common area of study. These existing collaborations are valuable as they show that the scientific connections are already in place in many disciplines. Indeed, Earth and Space Sciences Departments could be the scientific basis for expanding the links between Earth and space exploration. The expansion that I propose is one that is more predicated on the challenges facing society as it seeks to solve environmental problems and practically explore space. Put simply, Earth and Space Sciences Departments show that there are legitimate and robust connections in the sciences, but the potential collaborations that could be developed are vastly
new alliances
163
greater than those that have been developed and exploited so far. More ambitiously, we should also consider entirely new institutes and universities dedicated to the diverse science, engineering, political and ethical connections between living on Earth and living in space. There are models that suggest that these new organizations are workable. The International Space University, which has been running since 1989, holds a summer course every year in which about one hundred students gather to learn about different aspects of space settlement. They join the summer session to specialize in a particular field, such as space business or space life sciences, but throughout the summer they learn many aspects of space education, from law to engineering. During the summer they do a design project, which can be anything from an international Mars mission to a lunar base. The purpose of the ten-week course is to educate students in subjects related to space and its many and interconnected threads, and it has been very successful. In many ways, the short duration of the course makes it particularly valuable. It is a chance for the space leaders of tomorrow to meet and share ideas in an intensively focused course. There are some environmentally related lectures on remote sensing and the study of life in extreme environments. However, these lectures tend to disappear into the milieu of discussion about space settlement. Parts of this course that deal with the links between environmental research and the settlement of space could be more forcefully collected together and presented as an integrated approach. Alternatively, given the potential scope of the ideas and their many practical implications, perhaps it is time for an International Earth and Space University or an Institute for Environmental and Space Studies. Another effective way to get people to change their ideas is by setting up new charities and non-profit organizations. Because
164
space on earth
they are small and able to redirect their focus quickly, nonprofits are often effective at pushing new ideas and developing them. Furthermore, they are not encumbered by the bureaucracy that can weigh down decisions in larger institutions. Like the Earth and Space Foundation there are many organizations that have touched on aspects of environmentalism and space exploration. Often their focus is quite specialized, but there is plenty of room for new organizations to emerge that work on many of the vast number of mutually beneficial connections. Together they could represent a broad new front that inextricably links the exploration and settlement of space with the wise use of the Earth’s environment. Attempts to expand space education to people who do not have the benefit of a space programme have been made by Cosmos Education. This US-based Foundation, which is dedicated to improving science education in developing countries, has been working in regions in Africa, where space is not high on the list of national priorities. Founded by Kevin Hand of Stanford University in 2000, the Foundation has set up education projects across the length of the continent. Its ‘Under African Skies’ project has travelled throughout Africa taking the excitement of astronomy to many people who live under the most basic conditions. Under African Skies has opened eyes to the wonders of the Universe. Using volunteer teachers and students from the USA and across Africa who are happy to find a good reason to travel, the Foundation has taken ideas to people who would not otherwise have a chance to learn about space and astronomy. Admittedly, many of these people are not even aware of environmental issues, so they are some way from becoming environmentally aware and interested in becoming a space-faring civilization, but astronomy and space sciences can broaden their horizons and make them ambitious to improve their own conditions and those of the rest of the world.
new alliances
165
Another interesting way to take space exploration to schools has been developed by the Spaceship Earth Foundation in the USA. The Foundation, through its EarthSeeds project, plans to a put a picture of the Earth from space in every classroom by 2020. They hope to stir a new enlightened view of Earth, in much the same way as the view of the Earth from the Moon was supposed to have awakened the lunar explorers to the fragility of Earth and the need to protect it. This philosophy was expounded by Frank White in his 1987 book The Overview Effect. White argued that once large percentages of humanity can leave Earth and see it from a distance, their view of it and the rest of humanity will change. We will, in essence, become more accepting of the finite bounds of Earth and more cautious in our ways. He sees this as akin to an evolutionary change in humanity and the way it operates. He draws upon the words of many astronauts who have testified that their perspective on the Earth was altered after they ventured into space. Some have even claimed that the first images of Earth from space triggered the environmental movement itself. All these views are quite controversial. Some would argue that people are people. They have enemies and friends regardless of whether they have seen Earth from space or not. Copernicus’s revelation that we are not the centre of the Universe did not stop warfare. Is there any reason to suspect that seeing the Earth from space will really make us better people? Perhaps we can only find out by carrying out the obvious experiment, which is to give everyone the chance to experience this perspective for themselves. Benefactors and funding bodies should look favourably on Foundations and enterprising non-profits seeking to advance the education of a generation of environmentally responsible space explorers. In the short term, new funds to kick start new
166
space on earth
organizations in this area might be a productive contribution for well-off philanthropists to consider. Like the Spaceship Earth Foundation, other organizations have touched on the cultural and philosophical dimensions that link our presence on Earth and in space. The Swiss-based OURS Foundation focuses its attentions on art and culture in space. It was the first organization to put together an art exhibition in orbit to balance the fact that beauty and culture often take second place to the raw engineering challenges of getting humans into orbit and beyond. These activities are not directly linked to environmentalism, but they can assist in deepening cultural connections and therefore they facilitate a society receptive to the idea that life in space may not be so different from life on Earth. The theme of the OURS exhibition was ‘Space and Humanity’. Organized in conjunction with the European Space Agency, the artworks were taken to the Russian Mir space station in 1995. Twenty original pieces made it into orbit, selected by a panel of artists and astrophysicists. Some came back, some stayed up: the Mir crew picked their favourite, ‘When Dreams are Born’, by American artist Elizabeth Carol Smith. Said Thomas Reiter, a German cosmonaut, speaking to Mission Control, ‘This kind of thing [he holds up a picture] are a part of what is necessary to keep us alive, to keep the memory of the Earth, of our families, of our friends, of nature’. Now the OURS Foundation has plans for more orbiting art installations and keeps a database of the many types of art associated with space exploration. The diversion of asteroids and comets on a collision course with Earth is a most ambitious project, but we should start developing different methods to do this now. The B612 Foundation was set up with a plan to shift the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015. Founded in 2004, it investigates the different ways to shift these harbingers of mass destruction.
new alliances
167
It boasts an interesting diversity of people on its Boards, including Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart and Clark Chapman, a US astronomer who has been involved in assessing the risks of asteroid collisions. The Foundation has picked a tractable problem. It hasn’t set out to intercept an Earth-colliding asteroid or map all the asteroids in the Solar System. Instead, it has chosen to push hard for a demonstration that we can, if need be, nudge such an object into a new trajectory – the first stage of building a practical and viable planetary defence system for Earth. Non-profits can do a lot to change ideas, but the greatest concentration of wealth is in industry and wealth is what is needed to implement large-scale practical projects. Industry should move to encourage new enterprises that exploit the value of products made for both frontiers. In the very near term, new companies that specialize in products that can be used anywhere should be established to prepare the way. Small energyefficient appliances that might be used on the Moon could also be used in energy-efficient environmentally responsible housing on Earth. At the moment the market for extraterrestrial products is very small, limited in fact to requirements for space stations and orbiting government facilities. Under the current government-dominated space programmes there is little scope for industries to build products for use on Earth and space, but companies should begin to think in this direction. Inevitably, as space exploration develops in the next few decades, so many companies on Earth will be called upon to provide the necessary equipment and products for space. New commercial ventures in space tourism, such as the XPrize Cup and Virgin Galactic’s plans for space trips suggest that the market for space products is not far off. The X-Prize Cup is an event held in New Mexico where anyone can come to see spacecraft and talk to astronauts and people who have flown
168
space on earth
privately into space. Following the flight of the first private spaceship, SpaceShipOne, in October 2004, Richard Branson’s Virgin group of companies has signed up to build larger versions of the spaceship that will take fee-paying passengers into space. Ventures like his and the many more private space-faring companies that will undoubtedly be spawned in the years and decades to come show that it is not far-fetched to be planning for green and velvet corporations. As companies move into the space frontier, rather than considering their space contracts to be separate from their usual Earth-based contracts, they should consider how markets and economies of scale can be realized by producing pan-Solar System products. Industries obviously depend upon markets. They will not produce products that cannot make a profit. One way to bind Earth industries and space exploration together is to create common markets. Eventually, when the space-faring civilization becomes large enough, the Earth itself will be a subset of the space market (although with six and a half billion people, Earth is always going to be a very important market). Resources from asteroids will be traded in space and some of these will be bought and sold for use on Earth as they will be for the Moon and Mars. To help this to unfold we should encourage companies that operate on Earth and in space to buy and sell products of importance to life on Earth and in space. Green and velvet corporations are better than purely green corporations, because they are also trying to find ways to build products that not only benefit Earth, but that could be used to expand human existence in space. Green corporations are not detrimental to space settlement; they just don’t make a contribution to this other aspect of the development of human civilization. They miss opportunities to produce products that could be valuable to people on the space frontier.
new alliances
169
Green and velvet corporations will also be better than purely velvet corporations which are only interested in making products useful in space. Velvet corporations might be liable to sell products that are environmentally damaging on Earth – for example, refrigeration units with CFCs that deplete the ozone layer. These refrigerators are fine in space, but on Earth they are environmentally damaging. Incinerators that burn waste can eject their smoke into the emptiness of space without any detriment to anyone if they are far enough from a planet, but on Earth these products will be polluting. Green and velvet corporations care about the Earth and homes in space. They are better at creating mutually beneficial industrial synergies. We should begin to encourage the emergence of the green and velvet market now to avoid the overwhelming and potential detrimental effects of the purely velvet market on the Earth’s environment at some point in the future. Venture capitalists can help. Corporations that devise good ideas for products such as energy-efficient electrical appliances that might be used on Earth and in space should be encouraged to set up small subsidiaries to develop their vision further. These green and velvet companies would be the seeds of tomorrow’s Earth and space industries, actively working to build an environmentally pleasant Earth, whilst at the same time building a space-faring civilization. Industry could be helped along the way by government. We could imagine tax breaks for industries that focus on the development of technologies that benefit both the settlement of space and the Earth. What I have presented here are vignettes of ideas about how the settlement of space might be more effectively linked to life on Earth. It is by no means complete. My purpose is simply to illustrate the sheer scale of opportunities for improving our prospects for settling space and looking after the Earth as two
170
space on earth
interlinked objectives. There is no limit to the things we can do and the new avenues we can explore. We just have to use our imagination. Just think what society could do if industry, academia and government set about stimulating these opportunities to improve life – on Earth and in space.
9 a habitable world – summary
Eventually, the terms ‘space exploration’ and ‘environmentalism’ will become obsolete
Four and a half billion years ago, from the swirls of gas and material of the early Solar System, the Earth took shape. The origins of our world and the life on it are so remarkable that they take priority in religious texts as well as scientific ones. But the facts are as extraordinary as the fables. Soon after the Earth was formed – about seven hundred million years after – there is evidence of life in the fossil record. The tell-tale chemical signatures of life soon give way to hard evidence in the form of micro-fossils, the preserved remains of Earth’s earliest biosphere. The emergence of these microorganisms ushered in profound environmental changes. Cycles of carbon, iron, sulphur and many other elements were influenced and, in some cases, dominated by life. It was only six hundred million years ago that complex multicellular life evolved and took hold in the sea. Only during the last two million of those do we appear on the stage, and only during the last forty thousand of those four and a half billion years of evolution do we start farming, painting caves and building spaceships. 171
172
space on earth
Environmental change has happened many times as these various stages of evolution emerged and changed the conditions of Earth. The production of oxygen by microbial life, so extensive that it now takes up a fifth of the atmosphere, has been described as the greatest pollution event in the history of life on Earth. By contrast, we have increased the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere by about 50% over the last two hundred years. In other words, massive environmental changes have occurred in the past and they have happened at the hands of unintelligent life. Despite these changes, the Earth has remained habitable to life since its emergence, largely because of where we happen to be. Our place in the Solar System is the ‘habitable zone’, the region where liquid water is stable. Water is one of the most fundamental requirements for life. Without it there is no life as we know it. The environmental changes that have occurred in the past and which will occur in the future take place within the general context of an astronomical location that is conducive to life, at least for the next one or two billion years, whatever the details of that life may be. The habitable zone is the most basic concept of ‘habitability’. As well as being habitable, the Earth must also be conducive to our existence and our society. This means that temperatures must fall within defined limits that are much narrower than those for the stability of liquid water. We must have a breathable atmosphere, clean water and enough food. Seen from this perspective, environmental concern is just about a specialized subset of the habitable zone, about maintaining the Earth as an oasis for life, and in the process hopefully maintaining it as an oasis for humans. It is not surprising that as we go about maintaining the habitability of Earth and our spaceships, many connections will start to emerge between them.
a habitable world – summary 173
At the moment, these links are not developed to their full potential. The reasons for this are mainly historical, but also because very few of us go into space. As yet, not a single human individual lives permanently on the space frontier. At the time of writing, less than 300 individuals have been into space out of the many billions of humans that have ever lived. Small wonder that the idea that environmentalism and space settlement are one and the same goal is difficult to comprehend. Small wonder that environmentalists find space exploration distracting and irrelevant and those that explore space cannot see the role of environmentalism in their exclusive endeavour. As space becomes accessible to many more people, creating places where people will be born, live and die, perhaps even without visiting the Earth, the links will become more obvious and widespread. Our opportunity to build this bridge is not open-ended. Once humanity finds a way, perhaps driven by private enterprise, to access space, a new independent branch of society will become established there – it will rapidly become remote and separated from earthly concerns. Similarly, solving many environmental problems is now possible because we live in an affluent, resource-rich world with access to the means to address the diverse challenges. Leave it too long and space explorers will have built a community no longer concerned for Earth; environmentalists will be struggling in a world that is becoming poorer. The fusion of environmentalism and space settlement is a unique opportunity in the emerging history of humankind: one that is now, for a relatively brief period, available for us to grasp. One day the idea of environmentalism being only about looking after life on Earth and the idea of space exploration being only about moving off Earth will seem bizarre to a generation of humans that is taught in school about life on Earth and in the many other colonized locations in space. To them, environmen-
174
space on earth
talism will be about looking after life all over the Solar System, and space settlement will include the exploration and study of Earth amongst many other planets. In this context they will be inseparable. Eventually, the terms ‘space exploration’ and ‘environmentalism’ will become obsolete. They will seamlessly melt together into an accepted way of thinking about human and other life in the Universe – where the exploration of space is just part of a universal environmental agenda. There will be conflicts. Eventually, resources from space might fuel uncontrolled consumption on Earth, threatening its habitability. Diseases from microbes, plants and animals on Earth might infect extraterrestrial colonies and cause disasters in the far reaches of space. When the first astronauts orbited the Earth (and many more after them), their comments about the Earth were revealing. As I have adumbrated before, they did not return grandiose statements about the onward push into the space frontier and the need to ignore Earth. Many of their most eloquent statements touch on the cultural and ethical links between the environment of Earth and the adventure in space. Michael Collins said to a joint session of Congress in 1969 after his mission on Apollo 11: As we turned, the Earth and the Moon alternately appeared in our windows. We had our choice. We could look toward the Moon, toward Mars, toward our future in space – toward the new Indies – or we could look back toward the Earth, our home, with its problems spawned over more than a millennium of human occupancy. We looked both ways. We saw both, and I think that is what our Nation must do.
a habitable world – summary 175
When the first private astronaut, Mike Melville, roared into space on 21 June 2004 on SpaceShipOne, he did not return with effusive visions of the conquest of the space frontier for private individuals. Instead he said: The colors were pretty staggering from up there. Looking from the Earth up there, you know, it’s almost a religious experience. It’s an awesome thing to see. You can see the curvature of the Earth. I could see all the way out, way out past the islands off the coast of Los Angeles. Earth cannot go on forever; it will be habitable for about another two billion years. Beyond that time, any ideas about the links between Earth exploration and space exploration will expire, as humans – or whatever we evolve into – will be forced to move on. Even then, concern for the habitability of distant worlds may still be important. For now, the care of Earth and the settlement of space are the two greatest challenges that human society must embrace. The ability to forge these two challenges into a common vision of our human future will be one of the most important philosophical, social and practical developments of the emerging spacefaring civilization.
bibliography and further reading
Adler, I. (1959) Seeing the Earth from Space. John Day Company, New York. Baker, J. (1990) Planet Earth – The View from Space. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Bekey, I. and Herman, D. (1985) Space Station and Space Platforms – Concepts, Design, Infrastructure and Uses. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, New York. Benson, J. (2000) Environmental Ethics. Routledge, London. Booth, N. (1990) Space: The Next 100 Years. Mitchell Beazley Publishers, London. Byrne, K. (2001) Environmental Science. Nelson Thornes, Cheltenham. Callard, S. and Millis, D. (2001) Green Living. André Deutsch, London. Callicott, J. B. (1989) In Defense of the Land Ethic. Essays in Environmental Philosophy. State University of New York Press, New York. Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring. Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, MA. Chapman, C. R. and Morrison, D. (1989) Cosmic Catastrophes. Plenum Press, New York. Cockell, C. S. (2003) Impossible Extinction – Natural Catastrophes and the Supremacy of the Microbial World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Collins, M. (1974) Carrying the Fire. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Connors, M. M., Harrison, A. A. and Akins, F. R. (1985) Living Aloft. Human Requirements for Extended Spaceflight. NASA, Washington, DC. Cronin, V. (1977) Why Man Explores. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.
176
bibliography and further reading
177
Dallmeyer, D. and Tsipis, K. (1997) Heaven and Earth: Civilian Uses of Near-Earth Space. Utrecht Studies in Air and Space Law. Kluwer, London. Dubos, R. (1965) Man Adapting. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Dwiggins, D. (1970) Spaceship Earth. Gold Gate Junior Books, San Carlos, CA. Ehrenfeld, D. (1978) The Arrogance of Humanism. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Gehrels, T. (1994) Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ. Goldsmith, D. and Owen, T. (2002) The Search for Life in the Universe. University Science Books, Sausalito, CA. Hardersen, P. (1997) The Case for Space. ATL Press, Shrewsbury, MA. Harding, R. (1989) Survival in Space. Routledge, London and New York. Hargrove, E. (1986) Beyond Spaceship Earth. Environmental Ethics and the Solar System. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA. Harrison, A. A., Clearwater, Y. A. and McKay, C. P. (1991) From Antarctica to Outer Space. Springer-Verlag, New York. Hartmann, W. K. (2003) A Traveler’s Guide to Mars. Workman Publishers, New York. Heppenheimer, T. A. (1977) Colonies in Space. Stackpole Books, Harrisburg, PA. Hodge, P. (2001) Higher than Everest. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Jakosky, B. (1998) The Search for Life on Other Planets. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Koval, A. and Desinov, L. (1987) Space Flights Serve Life on Earth. Progress Publishers, Moscow. Lauber, P. (1996) You’re Aboard Spaceship Earth. HarperCollins, New York. Launius, R. D. (1998) Frontiers of Space Exploration. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT. Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press, New York. Lewis, J. (1996) Mining the Sky. Helix Books, New York. Lewis, J., Matthews, M. S. and Guerrieri, M. L. (1993) Resources of NearEarth Space. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ. Lewis, R. S. (1975) From Vinland to Mars. A Thousand Years of Exploration. Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., New York.
178
space on earth
Lomborg, B. (1998) The Skeptical Environmentalist. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lovelock, J. and Allaby, M. (1984) The Greening of Mars. André Deutsch, London. Lowman, P. (2002) Exploring Space, Exploring Earth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mazlish, B. (1965) The Railroad and the Space Program: An Exploration in Historical Analogy. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Mendell, W. W. (1985) Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century. Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, TX. Nash, R. F. (1989) The Rights of Nature. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. National Research Council (1966) Biology and the Exploration of Mars. NRC, Washington, DC. National Research Council (1992) Biological Contamination of Mars. Issues and Recommendations. NRC, Washington, DC. O’Neill, G. K. (1977) The High Frontier. William Morrow and Company, New York. Perlin, J. (2002) From Space to Earth. The Story of Solar Electricity. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Postgate, J. (1994) The Outer Reaches of Life. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Regis, E. (1985) Extraterrestrials – Science and Alien Intelligence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ride, S. and O’Shaughnessy, T. (1994) The Third Planet. Exploring the Earth from Space. Alfred Knopf, New York. Ristinen, R. A. and Kraushaar, J. J. (1999) Energy and the Environment. John Wiley & Sons, New York. Sagan, C. (1994) Pale Blue Dot. Random House, New York. Sheehan, W. (1997) The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ. Schmidt, S. and Zubrin, R. (1996) Islands in the Sky. John Wiley & Sons, New York. Schrunk, D., Sharpe, B., Cooper, B. and Thangavelu, M. (1999) The Moon. Resources, Future Development and Colonization. Praxis Publishing, Chichester, UK. Siegle, L. (2001) Green Living in the Urban Jungle. Green Books, Dartington, UK.
bibliography and further reading
179
Simpson, J. A. (1994) Preservation of Near-Earth Space for Future Generations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Smith, A. E. (1989) Mars. The Next Step. Adam Hilger, Bristol. Steiner, G. (2005) Anthropocentrism and its Discontents. Pittsburgh University Press, Pittsburgh, PA. Stern, S. A. (2002) Worlds Beyond. The Thrill of Planetary Exploration. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Stine, G. H. (1997) Living in Space. M. Evans and Company, New York. Stone, C. (1974) Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects. Kaufmann Press, Los Altos, CA. Stuster, J. (1996) Bold Endeavors. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD. Taylor, P. W. (1986) Respect for Nature. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Turner, R. (2003). The Energy-Saving Home. Penguin, London. Ward, B. (1966) Spaceship Earth. Columbia University Press, New York. Weber, R. (1985) Seeing Earth. Literary Responses to Space Exploration. Ohio University Press, Athens, OH. White, F. (1987) The Overview Effect. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA. Wilks, W. E. (1963) The New Wilderness. David McKay Company, New York. Wilmarth, V. R. et al. (1977) Skylab Explores the Earth. NASA Special Publication No. 380, NASA, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. Wingo, D. (2004) Moonrush. Apogee Books, Ontario. Zubrin, R. (1999) Entering Space. Putnam Books, New York.
Index
Akkeshi Lake resort 73 analogue environments 35, 37–8 instrumental value 122 animal rights 111–13 Antarctica expeditions 134–5, 144–5 Amundsen and Scott 147 ice shelves 74 isolation 38 lakes 15–16, 18, 20–1 psychology of isolation 40 similarity to Europa 28–9 similarity to Mars 15 aquaculture 94 art 166 asteroids danger of impact 10, 64, 128–9 deflecting 65, 166–7 environmental damage 58–9 erratic orbits 57 E-type 59 instrumental value 129 Itokawa 60 low gravity 60 mining 56–7
Near-Earth Objects 60, 65 S-type 60 value of 5, 59 astroenvironmentalism 109 atmosphere 14 author’s career 132–3, 137 B612 Foundation 166–7 biosphere, protecting 12–13 Biosphere 2 43–4 Biosphere programme 69–70 British Foundation for NonTerrestrial Exploration 133–4, 136–7 grants 134, 136 name change 137 see also Earth and Space Foundation; Twenty-one Eleven Foundation for Exploration carbon dioxide 83 Carson, Rachel 11, 115 caving expedition 134 CETEX 126 CFCs see chlorofluorocarbons China 79
180
index
chlorofluorocarbons 5 chondrites 58 Collins, Michael 174 comets 128 danger of impact 10 composting 92–3 Concordia Station 39 coral reefs 142–4 cosmic rays 84–5 Cosmos Education 164 COSPAR 126 craters Earth 33–4 erosion 34 Mars 34 Moon 34 Cretaceous–Tertiary event 64, 75 Criswick, John 137 cyanobacteria 16–18 versatility 17–18 Yellowstone National Park 24 Deccan Traps 75 Department for Earth and Space Affairs (proposed) 154–5 Desolate Year, The 115 diapers 100–1 disaster relief 78–9 Disposable Absorption Containment Trunks see nappies Dixon, Bernard 118 dolphins 144 Dry Valley lakes 16, 18, 20–2 cyanobacteria 16 protection 21 Dubos, René 117 Duval, Brian 144–5
181
Earth atmosphere 14, 69, 135–6 attractive place to live 62 early history 171 environmental change 172 instrumental value 127 intrinsic value 122 pollution 91, 102 removing manufacturing from 63 as spaceship 12 special nature of 11 ultimate fate 11 uniqueness 85 viewed from space 1, 68, 165 Earth Day 159 Earthrise 1 EarthSeeds 165 Earth and Space Awards 138, 140, 144, 148–51 Earth and Space Engineering 161–2 Earth and Space Foundation 138–41, 144–52 Board of Directors 139–40, 145–6 grants 138 education 159–63 enstatite 59 environmental crisis caused by resources from space 61–4 environmental ethics 126 Environmental Ethics 113 environmentalism compatibility with space exploration viii, 6 defined vii
182
index
differences between Earth and space 109 instrumental link with space 30 mainstream 2 making connections with space exploration groups 153 obsolete term 174 separation from space exploration 131–2 environmental monitoring 49–51, 69–70, 73–4 human skills 81 political uses 69 environmental organizations 132 environmental worth 116 Environmental and Space Studies 160 environments extreme 9–10, 14, 32 instrumental value 30, 123 intrinsic value 31 Eros asteroid 65–6 ethics 112 biocentric 113 environmental 120–1 microbes 117–20 Europa 5 ocean 9, 27 Everest, Mount 147 exploration organizations 131 extrasolar planets 86–8 Earth-like 123 extreme environments instrumental worth 122 isolation 41 satellite monitoring 48
fire 77–8 floods 78 food environmentally friendly 91–2 low-waste 92 fossil fuels 52 Gagarin, Yuri 68 glaciers 74–5 glass 99 Global Positioning System 46–8 benefits 47 earthquake research 47 Mongolian archaeology 143 Syrian burial mounds 141–2 global warming 83 governments 153–6 gravity 141 green and velvet corporations 168–9 green living 89–110 greenhouse effect 82 greenhouses 8 Guatemala 142 habitable zone 172 Hargrove, Eugene 113 Haughton crater 35–6 microbial habitats 36 Haughton-Mars project 35–6 Hayabusa probe 60 helium-3 55–6 hot springs 23 housing, green 98 hurricanes 76–77
index
183
hydrothermal vents 26–7 Europa 27–8
Lunar Circumnavigation Award 150–1
ice drilling 29 icebergs 74 instrumental value 116–17 microbes 119 intelligence 129–30 dolphins 144 interdisciplinary connections 8, 162–3 International Space University 146–7, 163 interstellar landfill 108–9 intrinsic value 116–17 extraterrestrial objects 125 microbes 119 iron 57 asteroids 58 isolation 38–40 mental stimulation 41 psychological changes 40–1 San Miguel Island 42 ISU see International Space University Itokawa asteroid 60
manufacturing green 95–6 mediæval 96–7 Mars atmosphere 84 awards 150 communication with Earth 37 contamination 127 dust storms 19 life 19–20, 25, 84–5 meteorites from 19 old ideas about 83 polar ice caps 149–50 similar environments on Earth 15 solar panels 7 temperature 15, 22 terraforming 128 water 18–20, 84 McKay, Christopher 20 MELISSA project 94 Melville, Mike 175 Messier, Douglas 137 Meteor Crater, Arizona 33, 35 meteorites iron 59–60 Martian 19–20 Mission to Planet Earth 153–4 Mongolia 143 Montreal Protocol 5, 51 Moon geology 33 helium-3 55 Lunar Circumnavigation Award 150
journals
160–1
Kyoto Protocol
2
Lake Vostok 28–9 lakes 28–9 Land Ethic 113–15 landfill, other planets 95 laser ranging 71 law 161 Leopold, Aldo 113–15
184
index
manufacturing on 54, 61 spacecraft crashes 106 morale 40–1 nanomachines see self-replicating machines nappies 100–1 National Park Service 157 NEAR probe 65 Near-Earth Objects see asteroids nickel 59 Northern Polar Award 150 nuclear fusion 55–6 ocean bottom, mapping 72 Olympus Mons 24, 148–9 Olympus Mountaineering Award 148–9 O’Neill, Gerard 3 organic farming 93 OURS Foundation 166 Overview Effect, The 165 ozone 84 Earth 135 hole 4–5, 51–2 packaging 92 paper 101–2 Pavonis Mons 24 Pioneer 10 4 Planetary Parks 157–8 planetary protection 126–7 plate tectonics 71 pollution 102 legal issues 107 self-replicating machines 105 population 2 Project Delphis 144
Project Orion 103 Proterozoic Eon 135 recycling glass 99 metals 99 in space 95 resource depletion 56 Rolston, Holmes 125 San Miguel Island 42 Sand County Almanac 113 Santy, Patricia 134 satellites 46, 48–50, 79–80 compared with aircraft 70–1 construction using Moon’s resources 53–4 environmental monitoring 48, 73–4, 154 fires 77, 79 flood monitoring 78 geological surveys 70–1 geostationary 80, 102–3 hurricane tracking 76 mapping ocean bottom 72 ozone monitoring 51 resource identification 49–50 solar energy collectors 53 Sputnik 1 67 wave monitoring 80 Schweitzer, Albert 114–15 self-replicating machines 105–6 Should Trees Have Standing? 114 Siberian expedition 135 Silent Spring 11, 115 Skylab mutiny 38–9 smallpox 118, 120 snow algae 16, 145
index
social and technical challenges 1–2 solar panels 7 solar power 53–4 consequences of cheap energy 63 environmental impact 54–5 receiving station 54–5 satellites 53 Southern Polar Award 150 space accessibility 173 debris 8, 103–4, 107 human exploration 32 pollution 102 Space Day 159 space exploration compatibility with environmentalism viii, 6–7 defined vii ethics 121–2, 124 green activity 91 need for 3 negative views of 6 obsolete term 174 practical benefits 46 private 167–8 separation from environmentalism 131–2 unmanned 4 space resources 52–63 environmental problems 61 helium-3 55–6 minerals 56–61 solar energy 52–4 space stations 4 environmental monitoring 81 food 90
185
pollution in 90 protecting environment of 12–13 safety 90–1 water 89–90 spacecraft abandoned 106–7 crashing on Moon 106–7 decontamination 126 mass production 97 spaceship analogy 12 Spaceship Earth Foundation 165 spacesuits Mars 36–7 spin-off technology 45–6 Sputnik 1 67 Stokes, Dale 140 Stone, Christopher 114, 125 stromatolites 20 Svan fracture 71–2 Swan, Robert 134 tampons 101 terraforming 127–8 thermophiles 22 Tírez Lake 28 toilet waste 94 Total Ozone Monitoring Spectrometer 51 Tunguska explosion 64 Twenty-one Eleven Foundation for Exploration 137–8 Under African Skies project Valles Marineris Award 150 Van Allen Belts 68 vegetation, mapping 72–3
164
186
index
velvet organizations 156 see also green and velvet corporations Venus 82–3 Viking landers 15 Virgin Galactic 167–8 volcanoes Earth 25 eruptions 76 Mars 24–5 monitoring 75–6 Vostok, Lake see Lake Vostok
recycling 98 reduction 95–6 water essential to life 16 Mars 18–19 recycling 89, 109–10 waves 80 West African Rice Development Association 142 White, Don 139 White, Frank 165 Wilderness Act 158
waste 92, 98–9 empty space 108–9 geostationary orbit 102 profits and 95
X-Prize Cup
167–8
Yellowstone National Park 22–6, 158
Bringing science & technology alive for 160 years Whether reporting on a radical ship design in1854, an arctic exploration gone wrong in 1904, Loop Quantum Gravity, Time Before the Big Bang, or how a Mars robot works, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN has always set the standard for intelligent discussion of science and technology. Today, there is simply no other publication that commands the same respect of leading scientists, while inspiring students and readers.
where the best minds come for the best science journalism www.sciam.com A photocopy of this order form is acceptable. P4MS320
Yes!
Send me 12 issues – a full year – of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN for: ❑ $34.97 [U.S. addresses only] ❑ $44.00 Elsewhere
Name: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Address: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ City: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ State/Country: __________________________________________________________________________________________________ Zip/Postal Code: _________________________________________________ ❑ Payment enclosed. ❑ Bill me later. Charge my: ❑ MasterCard ❑ Visa ❑ American Express Card #: _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Exp. Date:_______________________________ Signature: __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ MAIL ORDER TO: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, PO BOX 3186, HARLAN, IA 51593-0377 USA Remit in: U.S. dollars drawn on a U.S. bank, Pound Sterling checks drawn on a U.K. bank, Euro Checks drawn on a EU bank. Current exchange rates are acceptable. Price includes postage. GST is included; please add appropriate PST. BN# 127387652RT. QST# Q1015332537 in Canada. 2005
The leading international weekly journal of science
An illustrious tradition of editorial excellence. Since 1869, Nature has consistently published the best of scientific journalism and primary research, including:
1896: 1939: 1952: 1974: 1977: 1995: 1997: 2001:
X-rays discovered Nuclear fission explained Structure of DNA discovered CFCs found destroying stratospheric ozone The obese gene cloned Discovery of extra-solar planets Dolly the sheep born Human genome sequenced
Subscribe to Nature today and get 51 issues of high quality science with full online access, including FREE access to
[email protected], the authoritative online science news service. Visit: www.nature.com/nature/macscioffer and secure a 20% discount.
