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.
You're probably already hip to the fact that rare earth elements (REEs) are essential to many high-tech and clean energy technologies. Praseodymium, dysprosium, and ytterbium may not exactly roll off the tongue but you've probably got some of these "exotic" elements in your pocket and in the screen in front of you. They're not as rare as their name implies, but they are expensive - and environmentally "dirty" - to obtain.
REEs are found in local concentrations on the moon and asteroids. NASA notes that their Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) carried on India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar-orbiting spacecraft in 2008-09 found several previously unknown new range of processes for mineral concentrations on the moon. Carle Pieters from the NASA Lunar Science Institute says that geologists have a good idea how lunar rare earth elements became concentrated (areas and outcrops where REEs are found are local and small), we need more surveys to map and characterize their distribution.
Given their apparent indispensability and the fact that they're politically and environmentally fraught, I think that sooner or later extraterrestrial mining for REEs is going to become not only economically viable, but politically critical and environmentally desirable. Europium, tantalum, and neodymium will become a lot more common words in our vocabulary in the future.
NerdGraph has created a nice little infographic giving some basic background on REEs. A small clip is above, but the full infographic is well worth a look - after the jump.
Science journalist Chris Mooney has Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson on his Point of Inquiry podcast today to discuss Tyson's new book "Space Chronicles". Mooney called for questions for Dr. Tyson on his Facebook page, and a woman named Christine asked the (good) question: "Beyond helping spur a culture of innovation (although important), are there specific ways that space exploration can help us deal with the very big problems we are facing on this planet, like climate change and water scarcity?" Here is my reply:
Christine, yes - space exploration can incentivize and support the development of new technologies that will facilitate sustainable economies on Earth.
One way to think about it is this: the technology innovation aspects of the space program of the 60s were in large degree about solving the problem of making electronics and other equipment smaller - much smaller - in order to get humans to the Moon. The Apollo program was thus enormously successful in (among other things) spurring the miniaturization of electronics and providing a critical boost for computing technologies that we are still benefiting from today. Miniaturization and computing technology got the boosts they needed and are now self-sustaining trends.
The technological problems we'd face in getting humans into deep space, or to the moon for extended periods is different than in the 60s. Think of it this way: if you can keep 4 or 5 humans alive on the Moon for months at a time, with a bare minimum of air/water/food resources, the technologies we would need to develop to do that successfully will help drive solutions to feeding, housing, and providing energy to 7 (or 9 or 12) billion people back on Earth. The Bloom Box fuel cell now used by Google, eBay, etc. to provide much of their electricity was first funded by NASA in order to solve the problem of generating electricity to astronauts on Mars.
As someone who works on conservation/climate issues, I think the conservation/Earth sustainability line of argument to support human spaceflight has not been sold as well as it could be. Yet.
Sometimes you gotta think non-linear to get to the solution you're looking for: if you want to solve sustainability problems on Earth, maybe we have to send people off the planet to do so.
I'll be fleshing out this argument soon, which I think supports and extends Tyson's excellent argument. (Maybe he's already made the same point - I just bought his book but haven't yet read it.)
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.