Let's start with Important News. Water on the moon? Yes, but with a cavil.
The chairman of my PhD committee, the late Dr. Jim Arnold, had many fine accomplishments to his credit. One was his confident prediction that we would someday find deposits of water ice in permanently shaded regions at the lunar poles, and possibly even at the poles of broiling-hot Mercury. Both forecasts were bold... and later largely verified! Now, NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft (launched in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organization), has confirmed the presence of solid ice near the surface polar craters on the Moon.
Without question, this is exciting news. At NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program (NIAC), we've funded initial studies of some cool concepts for exploring those dark craters and characterizing the deposits, which could prove valuable in the future, especially if humanity ever comes up with a good reason to establish settlements on the "harsh mistress" surface of Luna.
But alas, many are interpreting this all wrong... as a reason to make such settlements. Supposedly to turn lunar polar ice into rocket fuel, a dismal misappropriation, when similar resources can be accessed elsewhere at lower cost, and the water could have vastly better uses, down the road.
But let's put all this in context.
== Return to the moon - or asteroids? ==
Many of you know that I have a low opinion of the cult that has declared all-out war on science and every other fact-using profession. With regard to space, this cult has declared absolute devotion to returning American astronauts to the surface of the Moon…. the most useless and counter-productive activity that could possibly be chosen out there. Even were there anything of value to do on that dusty plain (with one exception, there are no “resources” and it definitely is not a 'way-station' to Mars), humanity will check off that box anyway, as China, Russia, India and every other Apollo wannabe does their rite-of-passage tourism thing at the bottom of that absurdly impractical gravity well.
There is no reason for us to "lap" the rest of the world by 50+ years, doing what they are going to do, anyway. Not when the U.S. should lift its gaze to goals that only it can achieve.
As for that polar water, we should leave it for use by future lunar colonists... and yes, there will be such colonies! Just not right away. And we shouldn't steal their water, when there are certain types of asteroids that offer vastly more, at far greater efficiencies.
Alas, the Trump Administration has canceled not only most Earth observing missions - (for blatant political reasons that betray our children) - but also most asteroid sample return activity, even though asteroids are where vast wealth might actually be found, taking a huge extraction burden off our home planet, while making us all staggeringly rich.
A moon-return fetish is just the thing to distract us from those riches, which could zero out value of moguls who own sunk-cost mines down here on Earth. The deep reason for this veer in national policy.
Am I focused only on right wing lunacy? Oh, there are others. In attempting to sabotage asteroid mining, the far-right has allies on the far-left, such as this person, conveying (if not supporting) drivel that: “Capitalism Will Ruin Other Planets After It Ruins Earth.” At a Left Forum Conference in Manhattan, a NASA researcher suggested that the drive to explore exoplanets and mine asteroids has been bred primarily out of a need to feed the beast of capitalism.
"Late era capitalism is feeling the pressure from resource scarcity, and therefore, it has to find its own way out. It cannot think outside its own box of solutions, and it will have to find another place, and another place, and another place to exploit."
There are so many levels this is dumb. For example, the environmentalism that these folks extoll only appeared in a scientific and outward-looking society that also generated and distributed enough wealth to create a truly vast, educated class. These smug finger-waggers always assume that they are the only ones who notice and care, when in fact a majority of their fellow citizens favor regulations and research aimed at ameliorating the side-effects of all that wealth generation. It is only people with zero-sum minds who buy into the tradeoff that we must shiver in the dark, in order to save the world.
Positive summers (like those who read my novel EARTH) know that it is a wealthy and educated and confident people who start to incorporate externalities, like the best interests of future generations and a living planet. And there's no better way to make a world of wealthy Earth-lovers than getting access to those riches out there.
Of course there’s guilt by association – that the two groups most rabidly alienated from this scientific renaissance happen to be today’s farthest left and today’s entire, insane right.
== How this fallacy applies in scifi ==
But the worst silliness of articles and ravers like this is their simplistic inability to grasp scale.
Sure, one can imagine or envision a far future in which “capitalist” exploiters run wild, burning the galaxy. Heck, I portrayed that back in the early 1980s. But – as much as I enjoy tales like THE EXPANSE – they are impossible across the time scales envisioned.
Across a mere two centuries, you cannot have both a rapidly expanding and resource-rich techno-industrial/scientific society and a tech-empowered populace driven into poverty by overpopulation. Malthus based his calculations on there being a limited supply of arable farmland. But, in any Expanse-like future, that supply is rising geometrically faster than human women can pour babies out of their wombs. Perhaps exponentially faster. (And that leaves out the ability to make food and other goods more directly, out of energy and raw materials, something we seem to be verging on, already.)
Scratch figures on an envelope. The Expanse is way fun! But there is zero chance that there'd be the warrens of teeming, underpaid prols in a civilization that is simultaneously building starships and mining the moons of Jupiter. Human wombs just cannot keep up fast enough to save Malthus.
Oh, I am not insisting the future will be free of poverty. For one thing, those who are currently trying to re-establish feudalism need poverty to be widespread for their own, selfish reasons. As Orwell described, in 1984, A cruel state may grind the majority into dust as a means of control, and because feudalism is inherently sadistic. But that’s another matter. It’s not the future of The Expanse, where there’s capitalism aplenty, but a sufficiency of democracy and consumer society and actual competition for wealth production not to be artificially limited. And where women are having ten or fewer kids.
No, if we truly do get the wealth of asteroids and a plethora of new techs to use it and the freedom to ensure minimal justice, there will be a myriad problems! Negotiating with AIs of course, and preventing rogues from dumping asteroids at Earth. Preventing us from speciating into gods and servants. Maintaining a liberal and worthy culture, and so on. But assuming we navigate those shoals well, there ought to be enough wealth to end both poverty and depredations against our garden homeworld. If we have, by then, learned the science of incorporating externalities into market prices, then this attack on “capitalism” will seem quaint.
As, I hope, will be the wrath-spasms of feudalist oligarch dinosaurs.
== The one use for asteroids... blow em up! ==
Hey, as an old fan of the eponymous video game, I don't mind preparing, just in case of the worst. Thus, NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have issued an outline plan - across the next 10 years -- to both prevent dangerous asteroids from striking Earth and prepare the country for the potential consequences of such an event. A catastrophic asteroid strike is "a low-probability but high-consequence event" for which "some degree of preparedness is necessary."
In the third objective out of five in the plan (I'd have recommended five more), NASA is asked to come up with new ways to deflect an asteroid heading toward Earth. This involves developing new technologies for "rapid-response NEO reconnaissance missions," in which a spacecraft could launch toward an Earth-bound asteroid and somehow change the space rock's course so that it no longer posed a threat. NASA had plans to attempt this with the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) in 2021, but the Trump administration scrapped that mission in 2017. For reasons described above.
And yes, some of us have been preparing for decades. You can be involved in private efforts via the B6-12Foundation. And no, this is not the same thing as seeking the riches out there.
== Lots of fermis ==
A new study conducted by Anders Sanberg, Eric Drexler and philosopher Tod Ord, from the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University, has reevaluated the Fermi paradox is in such a way that it makes it seem likely that humanity is alone in the observable Universe.While the effort is worthy - seeking a spread of the various input parameters of the famed Drake Equation - it still winds up rather tendentious, alas.
Sanberg is quoted: “One can answer [the Fermi Paradox] by saying intelligence is very rare, but then it needs to be tremendously rare. Another possibility is that intelligence doesn’t last very long, but it is enough that one civilization survives for it to become visible. Attempts at explaining it by having all intelligences acting in the same way (staying quiet, avoiding contact with us, transcending) fail since they require every individual belonging to every society in every civilization to behave in the same way, the strongest sociological claim ever. Claiming long-range settlement or communication are impossible requires assuming a surprisingly low technology ceiling. Whatever the answer is, it more or less has to be strange.”
As many of you know, I’ve long been involved in SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence – but am opposed to METI, or purposely beaming (yoohoo!) “messages” into the cosmos. Not so much because I lie sleepless, worrying about alien invaders. (See a scary-plausible scenario, though, in Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem.) But rather, because it is arrogant and unscientific and immoral to commit all of our children to a fateful course without thoroughly discussing the potential risks with both the public and humanity’s top sages.
U.S. Federal Appeals Court judge David Tatel lately raised another aspect about the arrogance of METI endeavors that seek to peremptorily bypass all of our institutions of wisdom and deliberation. One of the very first laws passed by the U.S. Congress, the Logan Act of 1799, prohibits any US citizen from negotiating with other nations on behalf of the United States without authorization.
No one in 250 years has been prosecuted under the Logan Act, but it served a cautionary function, reminding would-be amateur diplomats to let professionals do their jobs. No act of private “diplomacy” could ever be more presumptuous and dangerous than drawing attention from potentially dangerous foreign powers in the sky.
And finally, from the sublime... to the...
== Aliens - or not? ==
Read up on the administration’s plans to get out of the business of managing and supporting the International Space Station by 2025, seven years from now. And...
In a paper entitled “Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?” published in the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology journal, 33 scientists researching the cause of the Cambrian Explosion – the mysterious point in Earth’s history when complex animals erupted in our oceans – add to the panspermia or cosmic cause hypothesis another layer: “the equally mysterious and sudden (later) appearance of octopuses.” Hey, I do not deem this to be plausible! Still, it’s another example of the boldness of our scientific (sometimes more sf’nal) exploratory spirit.
“Octopuses are a special and highly unusual species that can edit their own RNA and slow down their evolution – a process that science can’t explain yet. It’s interesting that many scientists think the idea of intentional panspermia as their origin on Earth “should not be discounted.” Oy!
