IMAGINE YOUR NEXT HOME HERE...

In my last blog post I suggested that overcrowding on Earth isn’t sufficient reason to colonize other planets because there are still lots of alternative places we could inhabit right here on Mother Earth, like the deserts, the oceans, or even Antarctica. But getting a little more creative, there are still more interesting options to look at.

Underground: There aren’t a lot of practical reasons we can’t live underground, more or less in giant skyscrapers that go down instead of up, at least in places amenable to digging deep holes (not in flood plains or coastal areas). A lot of SF books, including the hugely popular Wool series by Hugh Howey, have suggested that we might have to live that way in the event that some catastrophe makes the surface unliveable. We can get water, air, and energy down there, and the temperature is consistently warm. We just don’t like living where we can’t see the sun. But it’s conceivable that we might be able to manufacture sun lamps whose rays are very close to the real thing. Or even develop ways to channel real sunlight deep into the ground without much loss. Colonies on our Moon or the moons of the gas giant planets would likely be underground too. Even surface habitats beyond Mars would get very little sun.

Up in the Air: One of the most exciting visuals in SFF movies is the floating city, which would probably require the discovery of antigravity. But there are other ways to live the high life. Airship technology using Kevlar fabric and recent energy and motor developments enables the creation of some truly gigantic platforms that can ply the stratosphere up above all that inconvenient weather, where solar power is abundant. The first commercial applications will probably be the stratellites being built by Sanswire and Tao Technologies for wireless communications, but who’s to say we won’t see stratospheric luxury condos sometime soon? It might not be feasible to house large populations that way, and access to staples other than energy (like food and water) might be problematic, but the available space is there.

Mountains: There’s a lot of territory that’s unpopulated because flat floor space is at a premium. That said, we have lots of experience with construction on slopes (as opposed to, say, in a vacuum), and the main difficulty, as with airships, would be delivering food, water, and other goods to the homestead. But perhaps some improvement of the old pneumatic tube mail delivery system used in early office buildings could serve. Or maybe a variation based on magnetism. I’m not an engineer, but transportation and delivery of commodities is something we also have a lot of experience with, and the invention of new technologies might not be necessary.

And finally…

Digital space? Maybe Ray Kurzweil and others who herald the coming Singularity are right, and humanity will at some point dispense with physical bodies and merge with artificially intelligent machines or otherwise upload our consciousness into digital (i.e. virtual) real estate. Our physical space requirements would certainly drop (though no one really knows how much hard drive space a human would take up!) Especially if quantum computing becomes reliable, including storage media. You may say that’s much farther off in the future than Martian colonies but I’m not so sure. Information technologies have been developing at a faster rate than space tech lately, and its impossible to predict what sudden breakthroughs could arrive in either field and change the picture overnight.

Even if you’re someone who’s intent on seeing humans colonize other worlds, futurists like Marshall T. Savage, author of the book The Millennial Project—Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps suggest that creating self-sustaining colonies in Earth environments like our oceans is important practice before we take the big step beyond our friendly ocean of air. Let’s make sure we can get it right here before we put lives at risk “out there”.

From the perspective of a science fiction writer, I’ll still write about space colonies. It’s fun! But I just might direct a little more imaginative focus toward the creative ways we could use to keep calling Mother Earth home.

STILL LOTS OF ROOM ON EARTH?

IMAGE COURTESY OF NASA

Colonizing other planets in our solar system, or even orbiting other stars, is a perennial element of science fiction. It’s fertile ground for stories of every kind. But, practically speaking, will it be worth the tremendous effort required anytime soon? We could do it out of curiosity, or even the sheer joy of adventuring. In my personal opinion, the most pressing reason to spread Earth life to other planets is the “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” philosophy. Earth, or any single planet, is vulnerable to any number of doomsday scenarios, and we owe it not only to each other but to all of this planet’s life forms to preserve them here and ultimately protect them by transplanting them “out there” too.

What doesn’t pass the logic test is the assertion that we should colonize other planets because we need the room—that we’ve overcrowded our home and need to find new hospitable real estate. Yes, the most people-friendly land areas of Earth are overcrowded, but that’s actually a rather small percentage of the planet. Of Earth’s land mass, about a third of it is desert (defined as receiving less rainfall than it loses by evaporation) and a quarter is mountainous. So a little over 40% is more easily habitable, but that doesn’t mean it’s all inhabited. Huge tracts of boreal forest making up much of Canada and Russia are only lightly inhabited, partly because it requires a little more effort to eke out a living there, but mainly because people tend to crowd together along coastlines and large river basins. If we occupied all of the so-called habitable land space with the population density of the average city, we could house many times the current human population of seven billion. Of course, that’s not practical because, for now at least, we still need a lot of that land to produce food.

Contrast that with the habitation needs elsewhere in the solar system, where all food, water, and even air will have to be produced or imported. Even if we used up all of Earth’s easily-habitable land surface, there are lots of other places we could live on this planet with much less difficulty than creating extraterrestrial habitats.

The oceans: The most obvious (though not necessarily easiest) alternative living space on Earth because they’re a lot larger than the land—71% of the planet compared to the dry 29%—and they offer a lot of vertical territory as well as horizontal. In a brilliantly forward-thinking book I’ve mentioned before called The Millennial Project—Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps author Marshall T. Savage proposed colonizing the oceans first for practice and practicality. He envisioned floating colonies grown much like a coral reef, producing energy and fertilizing vast algae beds by drawing deep ocean water to the surface. The algae and other mariculture products would be a plentiful food source not only for each colony’s own inhabitants but exported around the world. There are other ideas for living on the ocean, but Savage’s is a good example. The ‘vertical real estate’ I mentioned—quantities of water to great depths—would be primarily for food production. Underwater habitation might be possible, but it would present many of the same challenges as a space colony.

Deserts: Possibly the easiest target for our expansion plans because the only real barrier to their habitation is the lack of water, and irrigating them would nearly double our habitable land space. If we can come up with a technology to produce ready supplies of water from the air, deep underground, or from the nearest ocean via desalinization plants and pipelines, we can render desert areas habitable even if they’re not necessarily fertile because of poor soil.

Antarctica: The south polar continent is included among Earth’s desert spaces, but offers even greater challenges because of its cold weather. Still, it’s not as cold or dry as the Moon or Mars (Mars can see temperatures in the area of 20C but also down to the -150C’s!) and other places we’re considering colonizing in the Solar System are even harsher. Heating is a factor of energy, and as we become more proficient at tapping the inner heat of the Earth, or maybe develop practical fusion energy, the Antarctic cold will be less of an issue. Not to mention that global warming may yet take hold there!

So far, I’ve looked at other geographical places where we might live, but in my next post we’ll get more creative and investigate some really interesting new digs, and the real meaning of “living the high life”.

HOW MUCH OF THE FUTURE WOULD WE RECOGNIZE?

I’ve been on a bit of a classics binge lately. I don’t mean Homer or Euripedes, or even Shakespeare, but some of the classic science fiction writers of early last century, including a couple of novels by Harry Harrison and Marion Zimmer Bradley set in far future eras when the human race has spread to hundreds of other worlds. A pan-galactic human civilization was a pretty common SF trope in those days (still is). The stories were creative and entertaining, but in spite of taking place hundreds, if not thousands of years from now, an awful lot of the everyday trappings of life would be perfectly recognizable today.

I’m talking about things like guns, cars, and ordinary furniture like chairs and tables, not to mention clothes we might wear today (even if only to a Halloween party). To be fair, they didn’t say the cars had wheels and internal combustion engines. Maybe we’ll still call them cars even if they look more like Luke Skywalker’s land speeder. Some of the guns were ray guns instead of projectile weapons. And, really, how many different contraptions can be invented to accommodate the human butt in a seated position? Plus, for as long as we continue to wear clothes, I suppose shirts, pants, and jackets will remain pretty similar. But still, we’re talking about highly advanced civilizations. To build an interstellar empire is going to require faster-than-light travel—very high tech stuff, if it isn’t impossible.

In such a far-flung future will we need—or want—individual cars to get us around? Weapons that have to be drawn from a holster and gripped with the hand? Seems likely to me that if we still need to cover our bodies, those coverings will be in the form of something we’ll spray on, spread on, or extrude from our skin. Who knows if we’ll even have organic bodies that need covering? Or any physical bodies at all?

I’m not criticizing the classic writers. For one thing, they hadn’t experienced the explosion of technological progress of the past fifty years, especially information technology and nanotechnology. My point is not that they were wrong, but that—just maybe—they were right.

There are many ways our future could unfold. From where I sit right now, it’s easy to think that computer tech and connectivity will continue to increase until we experience something like the “Singularity” that Ray Kurzweil and many others predict, when we might actually upload our consciousness into artificial brains of some kind. By that route, or some other, we could end up having no physical bodies at all within a few centuries from now. Even if we choose not to do that, we’ll almost certainly develop technologies that will eliminate the need to sit on anything (how about electromagnetic suspension fields, or antigravity?), or grasp a weapon (isn’t it more likely we’ll have wearable weapons, or even weaponry built right into our bodies?), or drive a vehicle somewhere we want to go (Beam me up Scotty!)

But that’s just the most intuitive trajectory from our current perspective. Maybe it’s totally wrong.

Maybe we’ll just keep on using stuff we’re familiar with for nostalgia’s sake. Or we’ll decide to keep a lot of it because it’s tried and tested and we don’t feel it can be significantly improved. Because we like the solid feel of a chair. Because wearing mix-and-match clothes lets us express our individuality (and our tribe memberships too). Because we get really bored being chauffeured around everywhere when we could be driving ourselves. It’s not knowing these things that makes being a science fiction writer fun.

I guess it’s also worth mentioning that a 100% accurate portrait of the everyday paraphernalia of life a thousand years from now wasn’t the point of these stories. They were created to evoke emotions, express opinions, illustrate themes. They featured relatable characters following intriguing plots that made you want to find out what happens next. Weighing down such stories with too much technical detail or imaginative decoration can actually get in the way of the deep connection between reader and story.

So how much detail about futuristic SF settings do you expect your favourite authors to deliver? It’s fiction writing, not rocket science…or should it be?

Personally, I enjoy it when a writer has gone to the work to understand technology and creatively applied it to invent technical gizmos, transportation systems, digital currency infrastructures, or other detailed worldbuilding that feels true. But I don’t care how smart you are, there’s no way you can predict what human society and its everyday trappings will look like in a thousand years with any accuracy whatsoever. And that’s OK.

Good stories are good stories. I didn’t enjoy these classic tales any less because a character worked in an office with a desk that had papers piled on it.

I guess I’m saying that, even though we’re writing science fiction set in the future, unless the minutiae of your imagined world are the point of your story, it’s OK not to sweat the small stuff.