Taking Root Amongst the Stars
From SolSeed
This is Chapter 6 of the SolSeed book.
Contents |
Giving birth to a family of living worlds
The birth of a human baby is a wondrous occasion. This view is pervasive across the entire human species, spanning vastly different cultures and material circumstances. And yet, as it grows up, every baby will have moments during which it is cruel to others. Some babies when they grow up will even go so far as to start a war that costs the lives of thousands or millions of other innocent human beings. Even with these negative possibilities fully in view, there is no hesitation: the birth of a child is a wondrous occasion.
Contrast this with the antipathy that a great many people feel toward the notion of earth giving birth to a family of living worlds. The objections generally point out the awful things that humans do to each other and our tremendous habits of consumption. People see wars, starvation, and cruelty as things that we must outgrow before we spread beyond on this planet. It's as if the likelihood of spreading these undesirable aspects of Life and humanity overwhelmingly tip the balance toward Life being unworthy as it currently is.
If your descendants survive for 40 generations, every child alive after those 40 generations will be your direct descendant. You will be the direct progenitor of every horrendous villain alive. You will also be the ancestor of every great author, every great artist, every great scientist who finds the cure for a disease. Your descendants will start wars. Your descendants will negotiate for peace. A child can be a seed that eventually leads to all the miraculous beauty of the human race. Our civilization can be a seed that can lead to all the miraculous beauty of all the great artists of a trillion-year-long Galaxy-spanning civilization. Likewise, our biosphere is a seed that can lead to all the miraculous beauty of a green and thriving universe. Yes, there will be horrors and atrocities committed along the way. But what is the alternative? To say that greening the universe is a mistake is to say that no Permian amphibian should ever have chirped for a mate because one of his descendants started a war. It is to say that we should teach the frogs living today to be silent and chaste in their spring pools lest their descendants invent a chemical weapon.
But none of this is to say that we can't, or shouldn't, think about what advice we would give to our descendants to maximize the benefit and minimize the destructive effects of their actions. This has always been part of the work of both futurism and science fiction: giving people hope for a bright future and providing cautionary tales about paths to avoid. Here we present some stories about the future that the SolSeed Movement hopes for and works toward.
Orbiting mini-worlds
Habitats in space, as defined by images that NASA shows us, are traditionally sterile white boxes and tubes with little life other than their human occupants. The only green, or color of any kind, is to be found in some ultra-processed space food we may see the astronauts carefully imbibing, doing their level best to avoid polluting the limited air supply with floating crumbs. If there is any plant life in the public imagination of space, it is also strictly for food (as in the typical depiction of a greenhouse adjoining a future Mars base) and its growth is carefully regimented and constrained.
Such was not always the case. In the 1970s, in the afterglow of our first successful mission to another world, Gerard O'Neill and others developed an ambitious vision of huge orbiting colonies with complete self-sustaining ecosystems inside. Humans would live in ordinary houses built on the inside surfaces of giant spinning spheres and cylinders (the spin creating the effect of a roughly Earth-equivalent gravity or perhaps somewhat less). They would lead lives much like those of their Earthbound brethren, though they would only have to glance at the upside-down forests and rivers arching overhead to remind themselves of where they were.
Many people were disappointed that these ideas did not gain more traction and work their way into NASA's planning, but that doesn't mean the dream is dead. The International Space Station is the largest structure ever built in orbit, and it will doubtless serve as a stepping-stone to far larger ones, whether built by governments or new private space-station manufacturers like Bigelow Aerospace. There is a revived interest in visiting the asteroids, at first only for mining and perhaps to test methods of diverting a potential biosphere-killer like the one whose impact killed the dinosaurs, but these could be the first steps toward hollowing out such a giant rock, filling it with air, and seeding life inside.
It's hard to be optimistic, though, when you think about the size of such a bubble world in comparison to the sum total of all previous objects we've sent into space. Millions of tons of shielding alone would have to go into the design, for defense against damaging solar and cosmic radiation. O'Neill proposed huge mass drivers to launch material from the Moon that would go into shielding, oxygen, and the beginnings of soil for the new colonies' plant life. To date, we've never done any construction work in space, unless you count snapping together pre-built space station modules; it seems too great a leap from where we are today to go straight to establishing a mining rig and other major installations on the Moon. So what stepping-stones can we envision that would take us in that direction?
Biospheres 3, 4, 5, etc
You've probably heard of the Biosphere 2 experiment: a large glass-walled building containing several miniature ecosystems, completely airtight, with the only input from outside being sunlight. Eight "Biospherians" spent two years inside this sealed structure, researching how well this microcosm of Earth's biosphere could maintain itself, with one main goal being to see if such a system could provide life support for spacecraft and space colonies.
The experiment is best known for its failures, both sociological and technical (particularly oxygen getting absorbed by the concrete supports to the point where it became somewhat difficult to breathe). But that doesn't make it less surprising that few significant efforts have been made since then to study how to get it right. After all, technological life-support systems (air and water purification, oxygen generation, etc) often have single points of failure and can be difficult to repair. By contrast, each element, or niche, of an ecosystem is composed of many self-repairing organisms, making it much more robust, reducing the likelihood that problems will escalate into disaster.
Research in this area may be a key area where SolSeed can make a contribution. Two of the Biospherians started a company, Paragon Space Development Corporation, that has created very small closed-ecosystem experiments for the International Space Station and is planning to send a living flower to the Moon. NASA also has a "bioregenerative life support" research division, relatively poorly funded but with at least one project underway at the University of Arizona to develop a space-rated crop-growing module. Perhaps we can study and expand on their work, starting small as they have, helping this nascent research community work its way up to a closed system that we can more confidently send humans into (which may be a better way than what Biosphere 2 attempted, trying to get it all right on the first try).
Of course, there are many other challenges associated with moving such a self-sustaining habitat into space. Many proposals exist for moving matter from Earth's surface to orbit more cheaply, from single-stage scramjets to space elevators, in addition to mass drivers and even ultra-high-altitude balloons and airships. There is no reason why SolSeed couldn't contribute to these endeavors as well, once we have the resources. But keep in mind that what separates the SolSeed Movement from other groups interested in space travel is our ethic of "going to space for the sake of all life." Given that, it may make the most sense to focus our energies primarily on the more biological and ecological aspects of the project, rather than on hardware engineering.
Terraforming/ecopoeisis: a multi-species joint venture
- Three scientific meetings on the topic of making a second home on Mars were held, and at one of them, Robert Haynes, a distinguished geneticist from Toronto, coined the word ecopoeisis--literally, "the making of a home"--for the practice of transforming an otherwise uninhabitable environment into a place fit for life to evolve naturally. I prefer it to the word terraforming, often used when considering this act for planets. Ecopoeisis is more general. Terraforming has the homocentric flavor of a planetary-scale technological fix.
- ~ James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia, p. 186
- "One generation plants the trees; the next gets the shade."
- ~ Chinese proverb
Let's imagine that in fifty or a hundred years, our efforts to bring life into space have borne fruit, and there are several miniature biospheres floating around Earth or elsewhere in the Solar System. But the first generation of people living inside these hollow spheres and cylinders is growing nostalgic for the wide-open skies and distant horizons of Earth, and their descendants may find the same longing through watching videos or VR simulations of their ancestral home. It's time to consider a life-bringing project of more ambitious scope.
Transforming an entire planetary surface to support multicellular life is a massive undertaking by any measure. On Earth, it took many millions of years for photosynthesizing bacteria to produce the oxygenated atmosphere that provides the essential energy source for animal life. Practically speaking, humans are unlikely to develop the patience to embark on such a glacially slow transformative process. Clearly, we will need to find some means of artificially accelerating the creation of a habitable environment, both to help gather support for the project, and to reduce the risk that humanity itself won't be around long enough to finish the job. Proposals for how to do this range from simple, low-tech ideas (scattering black dust on polar caps to absorb heat and melt the ice) to grandiose construction projects (huge mirrors to reflect sunlight onto or away from a planet, or a world-enclosing "tent" held up by miles-high poles to keep air from escaping to space), to what might be described as life-supporting violence (crashing comets into the surface to get more water, or setting off hydrogen bombs underground to release volatile elements).
But the time from the beginning of a terraforming/ecopoeisis project to the time when humans can walk the new landscape unprotected by spacesuits is likely to be many decades no matter what we do. In his Mars novels, Kim Stanley Robinson posits a longevity treatment that allows some of his characters to live through the whole process, but we can't count on such a breakthrough to occur in real life, so we must contend with the probability that a project begun by one generation of humans must be completed by another. Indeed, there is a great risk that people who won't accept this will take drastic measures to speed up the process, and create a dangerously unstable planetary environment as a result, one that is all too likely to collapse back into uninhabitability with even greater speed. So to set up a terraforming project on a sustainable basis, we must study the great multigenerational projects of the past, like the construction of cathedrals or the Great Wall of China, to see what lessons we can draw from them about keeping people motivated when working toward a result they will not live to see.
Of course, construction projects may not be the best metaphor for the whole process of ecopoeisis, though of course they fit just fine if you're building a world-tent. Robinson and others have suggested that ecopoeisis is actually a form of large-scale gardening. There are many possible quibbles with this metaphor--particularly the notion that humans are in charge of the whole thing, when the goal is to grow a planetary wilderness that sustains itself with as little ongoing human intervention as possible--but the emotional resonance of the concept is a good one.
Adapting to new worlds
- And they were different, profoundly different, sharing interests and enthusiasms perfectly incommunicable to any other generation, as if . . . members of the old Homo sapiens were now coinhabiting the planet with a new Homo ares, creatures tall and slender and graceful and utterly at home, chattering to each other in a profound self-absorption as they did the work that would make Hellas Basin into a sea.
- ~ Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, p. 474
As with gardening, any ecopoeisis effort will involve directed evolution: reshaping life to fit its environment at the same time we work to make that environment more hospitable to life. This will probably involve genetic engineering rather than more traditional breeding techniques, but the idea is similar--though most of the modifications will be functional rather than aesthetic, more like the way settlers of new lands in past centuries bred new varieties of crops better adapted to a new climate (a skill that also has direct application to our current climate crisis).
And humans themselves will likely be modified as well, perhaps taking on some characteristics of some of our planet's extremophile species. This may allow us to live unaided on the surface of Mars even while the air is still extremely thin, cold, and oxygen-poor. And such modifications may be the only way to make ecopoeisis projects on more extreme worlds in our solar system feasible. For example, rather than making a massive effort to give Venus a truly Earthlike atmosphere, we might choose to evolve modified organisms capable of breathing a different kind of air.
The result is that as we grow new biospheres, each adapted to its own home world, we will likely diverge into multiple species of humanity at the same time. In other words, we may find ourselves living in a solar system much like the one imagined by early science-fiction writers, with "Moon Men," "Martians," "Venusians" and so on, each species bearing a striking resemblance to the human form, but each with notable physical and sociocultural differences that make it all too easy to form prejudices against these "aliens." This is one more reason why a widespread reverence for all forms of life is crucial to ensuring a bright future.
Generations between the stars
Long before life has finished spreading across the solar system, some bold explorers will want to venture farther afield. Basic physics tells us that unless fantastically powerful new means of propulsion are discovered, the first starships will either be very small, carrying only a few humans and a tiny microcosmic biosphere, or very slow, taking many decades to cross the immense gaps between stars. This brings us to the idea of the generation starship, whose initial crew will not live to see its arrival at the destination star, while their descendants will arrive having known nothing but life aboard their ship.
The people who would set out on such a voyage, assuming they did so willingly, would have to be like the cathedral builders and terraformers/ecopoets, but even more extreme. Not only will they die while the voyage is still unfinished, they will spend their lives locked in an unprecedented isolation, leaving everyone else literally light-years behind, and will condemn all their children to the same fate. Unless we discover some means of faster-than-light communication, there will be no way to keep in touch with the solar system without waiting years for any response to a message. Thus it will be essential to build such a starship as a true world in miniature, with the humans on board forming not so much a crew as a complete society, capable of sustaining both itself and its containing vessel across the centuries. Again we see the value of ecosystem-based life support: while human-built machinery tends to wear out, any shipboard functions that could be performed by living things could be much more reliably sustained over such a long haul. (It's a "generation ship" for those creatures too!)
This leads to a question frequently posed in science fiction: after living in such a closed, self-sufficient environment all their lives, would the people who arrive at a distant star system refuse to leave their ship? If the voyage's goal is colonization, their new home will certainly be far less hospitable than the one they're leaving. Again, this problem may be less severe if the starship contains some amount of wilderness, rather than being built as a sterile, tightly controlled environment, like a flying office building.
But the problem could be worse still: even if the plan is to keep the ship as a living space while exploring new worlds, the very idea of such exploration may not be interesting or desirable to those with a mindset born of lifelong confinement. Many might find the idea of leaving the ship too terrifying to even contemplate. Then again, many people who have lived their whole lives "confined" to the surface of Earth are passionately interested in exploring other worlds! It's likely that with a large enough population on the generation ship, there will be plenty of people willing to take the risk of leaving their technological womb.
On our own, far from home
The bigger issue is not confinement but isolation. Even if we travel to a new star system at nearly the speed of light, taking only a few years in transit, we'll still need a fully functional and self-sufficient society to build a new home at the far end. Until the light-speed barrier is broken, such a colony can expect only very occasional resupply from the home system, and any messages sent back home will arrive centuries into the future of the worlds the colonists departed from. (If and when we do develop some kind of hyperspace travel or warp drive, however, travel and communication between stars may become no more difficult than between planets in our solar system.)
Working on their own, the colonists will probably have to start by building airtight structures to house themselves and their fellow creatures from Earth, effectively duplicating the sort of environment the generation ship would already provide (and likely solving most of the psychological issues mentioned above). This would allow for a gradual expansion of their population, a first step toward the ultimate goal of building a whole new planetary civilization, with the full range of industries, a new diversity of cultures, and in general, enough room for all the possibilities that simply couldn't be supported within the fixed volume of a starship's hull. To complete this transition, the new civilization will need the ability to embark on a planetary ecopoeisis project, so that life will not always be constrained by the need to put on a spacesuit before venturing outside.
There is one possible alternative. Say we haven't departed from the Solar system yet, but robotic probes or fantastically powerful telescopes have provided detailed information about the planets orbiting our destination star. Then we might be able to simulate the environment of one such world and develop a new ecosystem adapted to survive in that environment, including a new variant on Homo sapiens. But this would probably only be possible if the world in question were already somewhat Earthlike, with at least a fair amount of free oxygen in its atmosphere--which essentially requires the existence of an alien biosphere to keep pumping out more oxygen as those highly reactive molecules break down and combine with other materials. Which brings us to the most difficult question of all: How can we justify trying to settle on another world that already has its own web of life?
Coexisting with alien biospheres
- The fifty thousand Firsters from Earth had only meant to be the spearhead of Barrayar's colonization. Then, through a gravitational anomaly, the wormhole jump through which the colonists had come shifted closed, irrevocably and without warning. The terraforming which had begun, so careful and controlled in the beginning, collapsed along with everything else. Imported Earth plant and animal species had escaped everywhere to run wild, as the humans turned their attention to the most urgent problems of survival. Biologists still mourned the mass extinctions of native species that had followed, the erosions and droughts and floods, but really, Miles thought, over the centuries of the Time of Isolation the fittest of both worlds had fought it out to a perfectly good new balance.
- ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, "The Mountains of Mourning"
In the previous sections we used the words "colony" and "colonists" uncritically, despite the dark history of colonialism on our own planet, because the moral issues with "invading" a lifeless world aren't particularly worrisome. But if we truly respect and value all forms of life, we must take every possible precaution to prevent a war between biospheres like the one described in the quote above. Even if a "balance" is eventually reached, the cost in lives (probably including plenty of human lives) is too horrific to contemplate.
There is little question that we will eventually be tempted to colonize another already-living world. Most astrobiologists strongly suspect that single-celled life, at least, is very common in the universe, and it was single-celled algae that provided Earth's crucial oxygen supply for the past two billion years. (In more recent times multicellular plants have taken on about half of that job, but they couldn't do it without their chloroplasts, which are essentially algae living symbiotically inside the plants' own cells.) Even in this solar system, there's still a chance we could find a network of life thriving underground on Mars, or swimming among the hydrothermal vents on Europa's ocean floor, away from the constant rain of radiation that makes the surfaces of those worlds uninhabitable.
One solution that won't work is the idea of "separate but equal," colonizing a part of the planet where natives don't live. For example, living only on the surface of Mars is no guarantee against the chemical effects of our activities percolating down into the hypothetical underground realm of the native Martians. In the long run, particularly if we're engaged in transforming the surface environment, such effects are essentially inevitable. And on worlds where we're drawn by the lure of a nearly Earth-equivalent atmosphere, what are the odds that we would have the willpower to quarantine ourselves from that atmosphere, with massive air filters to prevent contamination in either direction? The whole point of making a home on such a world, rather than one of the billions of barren, airless rocks that are doubtless available in almost any star system, is to avoid having to live in such a sealed, fragile habitat.
So what does peaceful coexistence look like? Well, the first rule is clearly "no terraforming." Undoubtedly every living world we find will be unique, and to transform such a world's environment in a vain attempt to clone that of Earth will surely destroy the existing biosphere. Instead, we must adapt ourselves to become members of the native web of life, possibly even modifying the basic biochemistry common to every being from Earth to match an alien world where life is built from a different set of amino acids.
This will be especially tricky on a world similar to ours, where life has had billions of years to fill almost every conceivable ecological niche. We'll have to gently nudge our way into their food web, mindful that while any given niche has room for more than just one species, that doesn't mean the current occupants will be happy with their new competition. Initial trial runs in enclosed habitats will allow us to study how modified Earth species interact with the natives, so we can genetically remove any tendencies toward the unrestrained expansion typical of invasive species entering a new bioregion on Earth. Put more bluntly, we'll probably have to make sure our "invasives" are actually vulnerable enough that alien predators can keep them in check. We're not proposing the same treatment for humans, who should be smart enough to know better, or at least smart enough to enforce laws against overpopulation and damaging native ecosystems.
But are laws a good enough precaution? Our history on Earth suggests otherwise, and while we're assuming that dealing with the consequences of that history will force us to develop better value systems, that doesn't mean we can entirely trust our future selves not to get out of control. One possible external force to keep us in check would be an intelligent alien species, particularly if we could establish communication and negotiate a treaty allowing limited human settlement on their world. But if no sapient locals exist, we'll simply have to imagine what such a treaty would say and try to act as if it existed.
Then again, maybe we could solve the problem by bringing intelligent natives into existence.
Uplift and psychopoeisis
Let's back up for a minute before following that train of thought. What if we arrive at an extrasolar planet where life hasn't evolved past the microbe stage? Well, that leaves all the multicellular niches free for the taking, but just taking them doesn't really fulfill the SolSeed Movement's ideal of creating as much possibility as possible. Instead, what if we encouraged the native life to complexify further, using subtle tweaks to genetics and the environment? The goal would be to trigger the equivalent of Earth's Cambrian explosion, when multicellular life suddenly appeared in a profusion of forms in the fossil record. Earth was already 4 billion years old at the time; on any given alien world, such a flowering of possibility might not occur until billions of years in the future, or might never occur at all, which would be very sad. Maybe we can do something about that--not playing God to the extent of directing another world's evolution, just giving it a general push in a positive direction.
That brings us back to the question of intelligent life, which, as mentioned in the previous chapter, can create entire new categories of possibility. In David Brin's Uplift series, a fictional galactic civilization is based around a tradition of genetically engineering non-sapient species to give them intelligence. The "Uplifted" species are then forced into a thousand years of indentured service to their "creators," much as religious humans seek to serve the will of their god or gods. That arrangement strikes us as barbaric, but that doesn't mean the whole concept of Uplift is wrong.
Returning to the previous section's argument, perhaps one of our motives in accelerating the evolution of some promising alien species would be to create a means of limiting our own unhealthy ambitions, by ensuring there is someone to speak for the rights of an alien biosphere. Such a newly sapient race might well be in awe of our powers, so we would need a robust human faction dedicated to preventing us from taking advantage of that. Children eventually learn that their parents are not gods, but imperfect beings just like themselves; we should explicitly teach this lesson to any adopted "child" species as soon as they're bright enough to understand. Then, to some extent at least, the Uplifted aliens could be left to form their own independent varieties of thought, culture, and technology.
Maybe we need a better term than Uplift for this project. After all, like the real-world "white man's burden," a euphemism for the project to "save" humans with dark skin by converting them to Christianity, Uplift is associated with a story of imposing our values on other beings because "we know what's best for them." The difference between Brin's Uplift story and ours is equivalent to the difference between a fundamentalist religious school and a secular school whose only goal is for its students to live up to their full potential. Okay, that's not entirely fair, but the only quasi-religious value we would try to instill in our alien students is respect for all life.
So if ecopoeisis is the mission to unlock a planet's potential by bringing it to life, perhaps psychopoeisis is a good name for the project of enhancing a species' intelligence so that their new minds can add more life, possibility, diversity, and wonder to the cosmos.
