PISCES will be posting our presentations on their website shortly, but in the meantime here's a link to the presentation I gave last week at the PISCES 2012 conference on the Big Island.
Btw, Buzz Aldrin was in the house and gave a great presentation on his Mars Cycler concept. I think Buzz can talk orbital mechanics all day long. It was an honor to have him there, and a pleasure to have several good conversations with him (mostly about scuba diving in New Guinea and Fiji!).
The world faces looming food production problems, and - strange as it may sound off the bat - space settlement research may be one of the keys to addressing it.
Check out this short essay from David Frum, my favorite conservative thinker, on what he sees as likely agricultural crises next year. Food being rather important to people, Frum expects such crises to have serious political implications especially in the developing world. As you may remember, the Tahrir Square revolution in Egypt began with popular discontent over the high price of bread.
I don't know if Frum's prediction for 2013 will turn out to be accurate or not, but with climate change impacts, loss of agricultural land to urbanization, soil loss, resource constraints, and a global population increase of 40% or more in the next couple of decades (which will require global agricultural output to double), you can bet that it will be in coming years and decades. I would definitely bet on low-cost, high-output sustainable agriculture being one of the major growth industries of the future.
The impacts on agriculture from climate change driven droughts, floods, and heat stress are obvious. You're probably also aware of looming local and regional water shortages, soil loss, and soil salinization. But the biggest resource issue you've probably never heard of is the likely shortfall in phosphorus, one of the major elements of fertilizer.
And here's where space comes in. Space-derived technologies are one of the ways we're going to be able to address agriculture production issues. I'm not suggesting this will be sufficient - there are lots of tedious drought/flood-resistant crop R&D, new irrigation technologies, and a myriad of other disciplinary approaches that are as or more important. Funding in those areas should be top priority - yes, even above space funding. But my bet is that space agriculture will turn out to make important contributions to the bigger puzzle of how to feed 10 billion people.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying we'd grow food off-world and ship it to Earth. I am saying that the technologies needed to figure out how to grow stuff up there have critical applications to solve sustainability problems on Earth. If we can figure out how to feed a crew of 6 or 8 in a self-sufficient manner on the surface of the moon or Mars, using only (very limited!) local ISRU inputs, we'll have also made significant contribution to solving food production constraints on Earth. Mine is a spinoff argument, not a colonization one.
This will become a big issue of the future. If not in 2013...then soon enough.
Do not miss this lovely and lyrical ode by Carl Sagan on the duality of both our need to explore and our duty to address suffering and injustice. But not only can we do both - we must. We have to keep the light of civilization burning by moving forward to innovate and explore. Such is our obligation - not merely to inspire the living, but to help ensure a secure future for those who will replace us.
The IAA study group examined the technical feasibility of the concept, prospective markets and expected policy issues. The report describes and evaluates three alternative solar power satellite concepts, and concludes with a high-level set of findings and specific set of recommendations for the global space and energy community.
The study concluded SSP is technically feasible, but that economics of solar power satellites "can only be determined by means of international end-to-end systems studies, focused technology maturation and systems-level demonstrations. An international roadmap for realizing this goal is presented, which could achieve a major pilot-plant scale demonstration within 10-15 years."
Reuters, covering the release of the report, said that:
You are very unlikely to spend your retirement years on a space station parked at L5. Or L4 or L1 for that matter.
And even if, theoretically, we did create such space colonies, it wouldn't solve Earth's overpopulation problem.
Watch the fascinating 5-minute NASA video from 1975 on space colonization below. Nate Berg at The Atlantic notes that this film was "the product of a 10-week NASA program in the summer of 1975 that pulled together engineers, scientists, architects and students to imagine convincing ideas about how humans might be able to live in space for long periods of time on a large scale." "Taurus" was conceived as a one mile diameter, doughnut shaped (i.e torus-shaped - hence "Taurus", get it?) space station that could permanently house 10,000 and was situated in L5 orbit, a gravitationally stable sweet spot in between the Earth and the moon. It would be constructed from lunar-mined ore, powered by solar energy, and its colonists nourished by a 100-acre farm.
Such grand deep space colonies didn't happen for reasons I outline below. Space colonization as a solution to global overpopulation - which is part of what sparked such ideas back in the day - isn't viable. One day, probably a very long time from now, we may create O'Neill Cylinders with thousands of people living in them - but if we do it won't be to solve an overpopulation problem on Earth.
As the world hit 4 billion people in 1975, a great number of people worried about Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich's warnings in the late 1960s that the looming world "population bomb" would inevitably result in the starvation and deaths of "hundreds of millions of people" by the end of the decade.
Obviously that Malthusian catastrophe didn't happen (fortunately!); Ehrlich and others failed to appreciate the major increases in agricultural output brought about by Green Revolution technologies. Agricultural research began in the 1940s and 1950s to develop new high-yield varieties of wheat, rice, corn and other crops, combined with increased availability and adoption of irrigation technology, fertilizers and pesticides. Beginning in the late 1960s, that research started to pay off. By the mid-1980s, global crop yields had more than doubled, thus staving off the predicted famines. (Side note: all of those advances - from research to irrigation infrastructure to fertilizer - were greatly facilitated by Western aid subsidies to developing countries.)
But the eventual success of the green revolution wasn't immediately apparent back in the mid-1970s. Fears of a Malthusian catastrophe, combined with the amazing success of the Apollo program, sparked the notion that perhaps the only solution to global overpopulation was to build self-sufficient (or what we now call "closed loop life support") space colonies. These ideas were popularized by Princeton physicist and space activist Dr. Gerard O'Neill. Oh, the optimism of the day. But these were were not just ahead of their time; they were also quite unnecessary, as global economic and agricultural growth since that time has shown.
But here's the but. Roger Martin from Population Matters notes a quote from Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1970 for his critical contributions to the Green Revolution. In his Nobel acceptance speech Borlaug said, "I have only bought you a 40-year breathing space to stabilise your populations."
In an essay noting our reaching the 7 billion person mark last month, New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert wrote that:
[Bill Gates and others] have pointed out [that] just to keep per-capita food production constant in the coming decades will require a second “green revolution.” (The first one increased global grain yields by roughly two per cent a year from 1950 to 1990.) This will have to be accomplished under increasingly trying circumstances. An analysis in Science concluded that rising temperatures have already begun to depress global corn and wheat production. Another analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, warned that, owing to global warming, corn and soybean crops in the U.S. could decline by as much as eighty per cent by the end of the century.
Part of what made the first green revolution possible was a sharp increase in the use of phosphorus-rich fertilizers. Thanks to this increased use, experts say, reserves of phosphorus are now being exhausted. Foreign Policy has called this “the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.” Other essential commodities that could similarly run short include oil, water, and arable land. Jamais Cascio, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future, an offshoot of the RAND Corporation, put it this way recently on the Times Web site: getting to ten billion “would be a sign of successful navigation of this century’s problems.”
Many writers make the inarguable point that Malthus (and Ehrlich) were wrong. They were, in the sense that they underestimated technological advances that allowed the population curve to continue its upward trajectory for far longer than they imagined. But their basic point is correct: given limited resources and relatively fixed technological constraints, there is an upper limit to how many people the Earth can support. And even the original green revolution can't continue, since increasing water scarcity, salinization, soil loss, input shortages (such as phosphorus) and other problems put limits on even the best of current technology.
The planet has a carrying capacity. Whether the number is 8 billion, 10 billion, 15 billion or more is probably not something that would be wise to test.
We're gonna need a bigger boat. But that's not possible. And not only that - there are no life rafts, either. Space colonies aren't going to solve our problems. Earth is the only spaceship the vast, vast majority of us will know.
I think space technology might be critical to solving many problems here on Earth. But as a solution to overpopulation - no. Space technology can, maybe, help us address certain resource shortages. (If somebody finds economically viable amounts of phosphorus on the moon, that might really be something to write home about.) [Added 12/12/11: I'm being facetious; phosphorus is not found in great quantities on the moon.]Mining the moon for Helium-3 has applications for medical imaging devices as well as a source of possible aneutronicnuclear fusion. Dennis Wingo has written about the abundance of platinum group metals. And finally, there are rare earth elements.
But even beyond possible space resource utilization, it may be that the sustainable living technologies that the world will need to allow several billion Chinese and Indians who expect, demand, and can afford American standards of affluence, will have to be developed through space programs. Technology doesn't necessarily develop just because there is a theoretical need for it; often there must be an external catalyst to make it possible. But more on that idea later.
Gerard O'Neill was an impressive visionary, but he lived a hundred years ahead of his time. And while I like and respect many modern-day O'Neillians, such visions are at best premature. But perhaps more importantly for current space policy, their message is not one that will advance space exploration. People want tangible benefits from space - back on Earth.
But orbiting massive space colonies are a nice fantasy.
Hackers interfered with two U.S. government satellites four separate times in recent years, according to a congressional commission report to be released next month.
In October 2007 and July 2008, a NASA-managed Landsat-7 satellite experienced 12 or more minutes of interference, and a Terra AM-1 satellite was disrupted for two minutes in June 2008 and again that October for nine minutes, according to Bloomberg Businessweek's analysis of the annual report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
The report says the hackers gained access to the satellites — both are used for Earth climate and terrain monitoring — through the Svalbard Satellite Station in Spitsbergen, Norway. It's believed the attackers may have hijacked the Internet connection at the Norway ground station to interfere with the operation of the satellites.
Space Weather Forecasters Get Serious by Richard A. Kerr on 20 October 2011
It took a while, but space physicists who predict immense balls of solar debris smashing into Earth have finally caught up with their brethren who forecast terrestrial weather. Rather than simply relying on rules of thumb, space weather forecasters have begun running a computer model that actually simulates the development of conditions between the sun and Earth. They're following the lead of atmospheric weather forecasters, who have been using computer models since the 1960s. Warnings of when solar storms will strike Earth are already much improved.
The better the warning of major solar storms, the better earthlings can prepare for the consequences, which can include electrically fried satellites, degraded GPS navigation, and widespread blackouts. The culprit is a magnetic bubble of tens of millions of tons of protons and the like blown off the sun at several million kilometers per hour. It might seem easy enough to keep track of something that big, but observation platforms between the sun and Earth are few and far between. And the choppy sea of magnetic fields and charged particles that the ejected bubbles plow through can slow and deflect the bubbles.
Billion-Ton Comet May Have Missed Earth by a Few Hundred Kilometers in 1883
A reanalysis of historical observations suggest Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago.
KFC 10/17/2011
On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.
Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L'Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla's telescope. (Since then, others have adopted Bonilla's observations as the first evidence of UFOs.)
Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the 'misty' appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together.
But there's much more that Manterola and co have deduced. They point out that nobody else on the planet seems to have seen this comet passing in front of the Sun, even though the nearest observatories in those days were just a few hundred kilometers away.
That can be explained using parallax. If the fragments were close to Earth, parallax would have ensured that they would not have been in line with the Sun even for observers nearby. And since Mexico is at the same latitude as the Sahara, northern India and south-east Asia, it's not hard to imagine that nobody else was looking.
Manterola and pals have used this to place limits on how close the fragments must have been: between 600 km and 8000 km of Earth. That's just a hair's breadth.
This panoramic view, photographed from the International Space Station, looking past the docked space shuttle Atlantis' cargo bay and part of the station including a solar array panel toward Earth, was taken on July 14 as the joint complex passed over the southern hemisphere. Aurora Australis or the Soutern Lights can be seen on Earth's horizon and a number of stars are visible also.
Among Atlantis’s final contributions to the ISS is the Robotic Refueling Mission, developed at Goddard Space Flight Center. Atlantis brought this module to the International Space Station, where it will provide key support in maintaining future spacecrafts for years to come. STS-135 astronauts traveled to Goddard to complete special training for these robotics, a major component of the final shuttle mission. RRM is one of dozens of Goddard payloads to travel aboard orbiters into space throughout the 30-year flight history of the Shuttle Program.