If you could ask just one question of an extraterrestrial visitor to Earth, what would it be? For Ellie Arroway, the astronomer protagonist of Carl Sagan's 1997 novel Contact, that question would be, "How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourselves?"
Ask yourself this question: How might they do it? If you are like too many Terrans, your answer will involve platitudes about wisdom, world peace, and feeding the hungry. But the question is backwards. You don't survive to travel space. You travel space to survive. Or, as science fiction author Larry Niven put it, "The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program."
Perhaps you are familiar with the Biblical notion of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They are Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. They have always stalked the Earth, just not all of it all at once. Allow me to explain:
The Earth's life support system is failing. You may wish to argue about whether it is too hot or too cold, and the cause of either, but my data is telling me that drought is occurring in all of the world's food baskets simultaneously. The Earth's food reserves have fallen from 47.9 million tons in 2005 to 27.4 million tons in 2009. Energy prices, which drive everything else, are headed up, not down. Even if we deny that the Earth's mean temperature is rising or that the severity, duration, and frequency of storms is on the rise, it is still true that more people live near sea coasts and that their numbers and lack of preparation and mobility leads to phenomenal death rates when a storm surge arrives.
Wealth is concentrating. It was always true locally. Now it's true globally, which means there is no escape. It's most dramatically apparent in items like luxury yachts. At Sunseeker, a U.K. boat builder, production of smaller boats fell off by a third after the 2008 crash. Sales of the company's premium products, vessels over 130 feet in length, surged.
Opportunities are vanishing. That is true whether a job or small business formation is the objective. Manufacturing jobs exist primarily where labor is cheap. Transportation of manufactured goods is inexpensive enough to make use of cheap labor feasible on a global scale. If you can't find a job with a large manufacturer, maybe you can start your own small business, but you will need to find a market niche so small that it will escape the attention of the larger factories. Small business cannot succeed in the shadow of the megacorporation. Think of Wal-Mart and downtown retail in America. Even innovation fades in the absence of a frontier to create fresh needs. Think of barbed wire and the Great Plains, of the beginnings of transoceanic navigation and the chronometer, or of space flight and the small digital computer. Such drivers of invention have all but disappeared.
Labor is cheap. It's what Ebenezer Scrooge (Charles DIckens, 1843, A Christmas Carol) called "the surplus population". It describes unneeded hands, hands that are easy to replace.
Life is cheaper. It is a relatively common practice to make choices about legalistic issues like safety and compensation for loss based on projected lifetime earnings (which can only be based on what you currently earn, or on your station in life).
There are more, and worse, epidemics. The mathematics of population biology instructs us that there is a minimum population below which a disease cannot reach epidemic proportions. That number depends on the removal rate (how fast people die or recover) and on the contact rate (how often we shake hands, figuratively speaking.) The very fact that there is a critical population below which a disease will die out tells us that the larger the global population becomes, the more kinds of diseases can reach epidemic stage. With increasing population, a greater number of lethal diseases can spread beyond their point of origin. In a global community with fast transport, even a small population is susceptible.
Biodiversity is in decline. This is true in the agrisphere, the man-made part of the biosphere, as well as in the natural world. Humans derive about 75% of their nutrition from just four species of engineered plants. Meanwhile, the wild plants which gave rise to those created varieties are disappearing under the plow and the grader.
The zero-sum perception of economics is commonplace. In the current circumstances, it is easy to think, and probably largely true, that every gain by an individual, a business, or a nation comes at the expense of another. It is the logical basis of crime, conquest, and war.
Large industries are naturally risk-averse, leading to slow technological progress. I'm not talking about the cheap-to-make variants of existing technology like iPhones and flash drives. I'm talking about the kind of massive and massively expensive tooling required to manufacture automobiles, for example. The tooling used to build internal combustion engines, or to form metal body shapes, is specialized. New technologies would require scrapping that investment and starting over. In the absence of a frontier, where every industry is a startup, it is far cheaper to buy the rights to new technology and shelve the idea than it is to produce it.
This network of interacting crises has attracted the attention of political opportunists and their academic apologists. The agenda of the self-appointed illuminati among us is based on the insights of Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, who published The Population Bombin 1976, and The Population Explosionin 1990. Here are the premises:
Earth contains an insufficiency of everything -- fossil fuels, raw materials, arable land, fresh water, buildable land -- to provide everyone born into the world with a 20th century U.S. standard of living, which is what we all want. Logic dictates that the equilibrium wage, meaning the global standard, will be a Third World wage.
The impact of human lives on the planet in terms of energy use, pollution, waste disposal, etc., can be reckoned as a qualitative equation,
Impact = Population x Affluence.
The equation means that the the exorbitant birth rates of the "developing" world produce large numbers of individuals, who, however, do not pollute much because they are poor. People of the developed nations, though fewer in number, use more energy, pollute more, and generate more garbage.
In the progressive view, better living conditions reduce birth rates. This view is not universally accepted.
Population control skews the age distribution to the right. Fewer births and fewer deaths mean more old people.
And the final premise: If you are a member of the elite, none of the above applies to you.
Those are the five axioms of enclosure-centric thinking. In terms of policy, this is what they mean; perhaps you will recognize some of it:
In order to preserve the Earth for future generations ("of aristocrats" is the implicit thought here), the developed world, and Americans in particular, must abandon their expectations of continued affluence.
In order to decrease population growth in the developing world, we must improve the developing world's standard of living.
In order to lessen the burden of useless old age on reduced numbers of younger workers, we must ration technological life extension for most older citizens.
Here we assume that attrition alone will be sufficient to control the surplus population. If not, more aggressive means may be considered.
The experimental efforts of Dr. John Calhoun at Johns Hopkins University and at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) during the middle part of the 20th century supply clues to what is happening in the world and what will happen next, regardless of any policies of a global illuminati. Calhoun worked with rats and mice in enclosed spaces varying in size from a single room to a quarter acre. The colonies would start with perhaps a few dozen rodents, who, for all their lives, would live under ideal circumstances, wanting for nothing, dwelling in rat paradise. Calhoun identified several noteworthy behaviors in his subjects.
As their number grew, the animals would periodically crowd a specific feeding station, one of several, the rest being virtually abandoned. Calhoun called this the "behavioral sink".
At first rarely, and then with increasing frequency, apparently normal males in the crowd would attack juveniles, females, or lower-status males. The less aggressive animals, both males and females, withdrew, the females to the highest nesting boxes on the enclosure walls, the males to the enclosure floor.
Some of the male exiles invited attack from dominant males by hovering too near the nesting boxes. They were identifiable by their matted fur and their scars. Calhoun named them "probers" for their unique behavioral aberration. At night, squads of probers would surprise the watch, invade the nesting boxes, and devour the young
Other males, whom Calhoun dubbed "the beautiful ones," lost interest in all social activities and spent their time obsessively grooming themselves. Those animals never found mates.
As things progressed, the attacks of the probers saturated the normal males' defense of the ramps to the nesting boxes. Females augmented the defense, but their aggressive behavior transferred to the young, whom they killed, perhaps accidentally, and then ate.
The population successfully weaned fewer and fewer young. Its age distribution skewed into senescence (most of the survivors having lived beyond reproductive age). Their numbers never reached more than 80% of the enclosure's capacity, as measured by the number of nesting boxes. Only a few aging animals were left at the end of the experiments. In each case, the population would have died out completely if the study had not been terminated.
So what is the mechanism of destruction? It is that outcasts cannot leave, as they leave rodent populations in the wild. In nature, they decamp, and they either die or find a more suitable situation elsewhere. If enclosed, they go to war, competing by destroying their competitors.
Do rats provide a representative analog of human behavior? I believe that they do, but that is not a popular viewpoint. When Calhoun died in 1995, his obituary in The New York Times reported that he had suffered frustration about his work "...because its implications for the future of the human rat race were often met with studied disregard."
Calhoun himself misinterpreted his results as the effects of crowding, believing that population density is a major factor in the behavior of inner-city gangs, for example. Social psychologists pointed out, however, that certain Asian cities where gang crime is less of a problem have higher population densities than places like New York or Philadelphia, where gangs dominate. The reason for the difference turns out to be that Hong Kong and Shanghai are populated by numbers of transient merchants who come into the city to sell their products, and then return to their farms in the countryside. These populations are not enclosed. However, where residents cannot leave, or cannot imagine leaving, enclosure exists and acts on people as on rats.
At this point in human history, the entirety of planet Earth has become enclosed, and the effects of enclosure are making headlines. The news behind the headlines is that the population of Earth lacks a frontier, and that lack is killing us.
To explain why Alaska, or the oceans, are not frontiers, consider the definition of the term "frontier", a vastness with the following three properties:
A frontier has wealth without proprietors. Nobody owns it. Nobody owns the mineral wealth or other kinds of wealth in it. Everything is free for the taking, or at least, no one is able to stop the taker. And, of course, it does have wealth, far more than just enough to live off the land.
A frontier has Isolation. It is not materially connected to home. It is separated by a barrier that forbids access, except to the bravest, the most determined. The example of America proves instructive. The first half of the 1940s was the last time the American continent was isolated enough from European powers to inhibit their attack upon the United States. Travel time then was about three days by fast ship. Isolation is a matter of time, not distance.
A frontier offers anonymity to all comers. Social class, position, degrees, certificates, records, and family status matter less, if at all. Every pair of capable hands is needed and wanted to tame the wilderness. Even past criminality can be forgiven, to a point.
Virtually every spot on Earth is owned or claimed by a nation willing and able to defend it for economic or military reasons. Every point on Earth is within 20 minutes flight time of a ballistic missile. Every point on Earth is connected to the same stressed ecosystem. Nowhere on Earth welcomes refugees anymore. There are no frontiers left on Earth.
Metaphysical realms are a poor bet. "God helps those who help themselves," said Benjamin Franklin. In a similar statement of faith, Heinricherson Faust, the scientist hero of Goethe's play Faust, frees himself from a pact with the Devil through practical, dirty-handed struggle. (At the end of Act V: "He who strives on and lives to strive/ Can earn redemption still".). Intelligent design is efficient design. We can expect no future miracle of salvation because that miracle has already occurred. God has given us the tools to save ourselves: a mind and a spirit capable of conceiving the technologies to enter space.
Princeton physics professor Gerard K. O'Neill called space "The High Frontier" in his 1976 book by the same name. In it, he gave what he called an "existence proof" that humans could build and live comfortably on colonies in space, independently of the Earth, but benefiting the home planet in many ways: clean solar power delivered to the Earth in virtually unlimited quantities, new hope for an exciting and affluent future, new markets, inventions stemming from the needs of the new environment, and openings for technologies and political systems that would could not be permitted to challenge the status quo on Earth.
The nation that does this gets far more, but, perhaps most significantly, it gets the military high ground, justifying the expense of it all (about 0 billion a year over 15 years) by the simple expedient of diverting funds from conventional and failing military efforts to space colonization and industrialization, with all that it implies.
For our trouble, we also get truly isolated facilities to handle any strains of microbial life we may find in space, high vacuum, low temperature, and zero gravity (all valuable industrial resources expensive or impossible to obtain on Earth, but free in space), exciting and profitable work, a reduction in social pressure for crime and terrorism on Earth, and, like Atlantis, Camelot, and America in their time, the next "Land of Wonders".
The obstacles:
Cost, but not so much. We could more than do this work for a fraction of the money squandered on the military and social futilities of the United States Government alone.
Technological barriers, but not so much. No breakthroughs in physics, materials science, propulsion, or structures are required. At least one (carbon nanotube wire for the cables of space elevators) would be useful. Closed-cycle life support might be a particularly instructive challenge. We will need solid engineering.
Cowardice. We will need to take some risks, including the risk of using nuclear propulsion. A sufficient number will be willing to take these risks. The rest will be unwilling to name their deficiency, and will be silenced by it.
Communication/Education. This is the most difficult work of all, and the work left to what are typically the weakest minds. About 4% of the U.S. population already get it, according to an admittedly old copy of the Space Activist's Handbook. We can start with that.
Legal/Political Barriers. The Outer Space Treaty, the Moon Agreement, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty are examples. Like the treaties themselves, this speed bump is worth mentioning only in a historical context.
For the first time in their history, Americans are afraid. They are the worst kind of afraid, with a cold, hopeless, debilitating fear rather than the hot sense of urgency which has driven them to vigorous action in the past. Too many believe they must not see what cannot exist according to the gospel of sustainable development: that there is a third path that avoids both environmental disaster and dreadful losses of sovereignty and prosperity. What we do not yet see in America is that the world needs an exit, and that the only way out is up. When we do, we will begin to end the dark age that began when frontiers disappeared from the Earth a hundred years ago and we embarked upon a desperate and futile attempt to address that loss with a specious philosophy of political altruism and all manner of the wrong stuff.
Further Reading
Survivors from Earth, Laurence B. Winn, SpaceFarers Corporation, 2009 (Available as an Amazon Kindle book. Also available on the author's web site.)
Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, George Dyson, Henry Holt and Company, 2002
The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, Gerard K. O'Neill, William Morrow & Co., 1977 (An expanded edition, published in 2000, is also available.)
Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization, Robert Zubrin, Jeremy P.Tarcher/Putnam, 2000
Population Biology: Concepts and Models, Alan Hastings, Springer-Verlag, 1997
The Population Explosion, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, 1990
The Age of Triage, Richard L. Rubenstein, Beacon Press, 1982
"Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population", John B. Calhoun, Proc. Roy. Soc. Med., Volume 66, January 1973, pp. 80-88
"Population Density and Social Pathology", John B. Calhoun, Scientific American, February 1962, Vol. 206, No. 2, pp. 139-148
The Great Frontier, Walter Prescott Webb, University of Texas Press, 1951
The Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner, Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1920
