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.
A new NASA prototype lunar prospector is set to begin testing in Hawaii next month.
Hawaii's unique volcanic terrains are some of the closest terrestrial analogues to the moon and Mars, a fact that hasn't gone unnoticed by NASA and other international teams, including those from the Google Lunar X PRIZE.
NASA has developed a prototype rover named Artemis Jr. for NASA’s Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction, or RESOLVE, project. The rover is designed to prospect for water, ice and other lunar resources, and will also demonstrate how future explorers can take advantage of resources at potential landing sites by manufacturing oxygen, water, and hydrogen from soil.
NASA will conduct equpiment and concept vehicle field tests in July outside of Hilo, Hawaii, in order to demonstrate how explorers might prospect for resources and make their own oxygen for survival while on other planetary bodies.
The State of Hawaii recently passed legislation to provide initial funding for the International Lunar Research Park (ILRP), which will set up an multinational program to facilitate robotic and other space-related research at several lunar analogue sites near Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. This is underpinned by a cooperative Space Act Agreement between NASA and Hawaii signed in 2010.
Robert Pearlman from collectSpace reports that the drill on Artemis Jr. was developed by the Canadian Space Agency.
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.
The 14th International Mars Society Convention met a week ago in Dallas. It's not that I'm opposed to going to Mars - it's just that I think Zubrin and the other Mars Firsters are completely unrealistic about political and economic realities. And they're downright reckless when it comes to the technology, which, their protestations notwithstanding, is just not anywhere close to ready yet to think about sending people there in nine years or whatever their goalis.
I admire their committment and passion for the endeavor. They are to be praised for their outside-the-box thinking, and indeed have some great ideas. Going to Mars would be an inspiration for all the world. The technological developments that would come out of it are not to be underestimated.
But:
1. Going to Mars is NOT JUST ABOUT THE ROCKET. Taber MacCallum from Paragon Corp. had some really interesting things to say in his interview on the Space Show back in June. The Mars Now people have completely unrealistic ideas about what it will take to have an adequate life-support system enroute and on surface. A completely closed-loop system, which is what it will take on the enroute portion at the very least, has not even been tried on the ISS. If we started now on a mega-funded 10 year crash program, yes, it might be possible but it would really be pushing the envelope. To suggest that we could do this in the medium term is reckless and naive.
Check out this amazing video. Inventor Markus Kayser has constructed a machine that uses sunlight and sand as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3D printing process.
While this experiment is obviously early-stage, it's a great proof of concept. The implications for constructing habitats and other materials on the moon is obvious. This is ingenious stuff that NASA should have already done. (If they have and I'm not aware, please leave a comment.) But assuming NASA wasn't on to this sort of thing: fund this guy now. Lunar base or no, this sort of manufacturing could have great applications here on Earth as well.
Here's one reason to stay Earthbound. There's no such thing as pizza in space. Funny, the thought never occurred to me until now, but yeah - making pizza in zero-g might be a little difficult, and that fact would make a trip to Mars pretty much impossible as far as I'm concerned.
From ABC News:
there is no way to get pizza on a space station or space shuttle mission. It just doesn't hold up. You can't freeze-dry pizza or dehydrate it very successfully...
They don't really say why - I assume that microgravity makes the cheese go all over everywhere, but it could be the fact that getting a NASA safety rating for a wood-burning oven in a capsule is easier said than done.
I propose two solutions, one interim and one longer term. First, institute an immediate Cup O' Pizza policy for the last shuttle flight. Those, you can microwave. And second, pizza-less spaceflight is the showstopper that demonstrates the imperative of developing artificial gravity technology. Hey Bigelow, get right on that. You're going to have to figure this one out before I go up on one of your hotels for a 10 day vacation. Cause I'll definitely be wanting pizza.
NASA study concludes - as we kind of knew - that current food systems are inadequate for long-duration spaceflights without compromising crew members' health and performance. There was a good episode of Nova Science Now on this subject a month or two ago. Seems that blueberries are a magic food in helping to prevent DNA/cell damage from cosmic radiation.
But still:
"If we go to Mars, we need a five year shelf life of food and that means we need to start looking at new technologies to start preserving the food," said Michele Perchonok, Advanced Food Technology Manager at NASA and one of the study authors.
For long-duration missions like Mars, I don't see how there's any way around the need to grow some of the food in the spacecraft. And for that, we're going to need a much bigger capsule than Orion. Calling Bigelow...
What's also interesting is the potential spinoff health applications of this research for human health back on Earth.