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THE ULTIMATE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

Four years ago the Smithsonian Channel featured Steven Hawking on four space documentaries.  One was Leaving Earth:  Or, How to Colonize a Planet.  He passed away in 2018 at the age of 76 before the program was completed.  I just watched this episode and it helped me synthesize variant thoughts in my mind about the ultimate fate of Humanity.

In 1976 I spent a summer at NASA's Ames Research Center, joining a group of university faculty on Project Orion to design the first device capable of detecting an extrasolar planet.  At that time, the planets of our solar system were the only ones ever seen.  After meeting Carl Sagan at Ames during that interval to view the first photo sent back by Viking 1, five years later when I was working for the U.S. Senate, I helped him convince the U.S. Congress to gain the initial funding for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Established was annual funding for 12 years, leading to the formation of the SETI Institute in Palo Alto.

Since then my attitude regarding funding NASA and space in general was to sit back and detect signals from advanced civilizations, with appropriate funding.  Clearly the Apollo Project to the moon and back was a crucial national program for political reasons, as this effort helped to bankrupt the Soviet Union, ending the Cold War.  Since that time 30 years ago, though, I thought it was a waste of money to spend multi-billion hardware exploits into outer space, for there were other more important priorities for society. 

Such was my attitude until I saw that Smithsonian documentary.  Some of my thoughts now:

  • While there are supposedly 200 billion trillion stars in our universe, the odds of intelligent life occurring could well be lower than one in a 200 billion trillion, and probably much lower.  That is the Drake equation to the right, which you can sway in any direction you want.
  • Homo sapiens could well be that one miracle in all of cosmic history.  Might have been the first time not  to happen again.
  • If that is so, we need to assure that we continue into the future.  It's scary, but we could expire instantly:
    • If the Ukrainian War leads to nuclear warfare, something I thought disappeared after the end of the Cold War, we could end all of life as we know it, maybe forever.
    • There is the danger of biological warfare, which could cascade out of control, or maybe a more effective microorganism as in The Andromeda Strain, to wipe out mankind.
    • We have been around for less than a million years.   There have been five to more twenty extinction events in the last 540 million years.
  • Gamma rays, asteroids and other dangers from space.
  • Aliens?  Woopy, as this would mean we are not alone.

Overall probability                                                    19%
Molecular nanotechnology weapons                        5%
Superintelligent AI                                                     5%
All wars (including civil wars)                                    4%
Engineered pandemic                                                2%
Nuclear war                                                                  1%
Nanotechnology accident                                         0.5%
Natural pandemic                                                     0.05%
Nuclear terrorism                                                     0.03%

That effort was made by the Future of Humanity Institute in 2008.  That 19% potential is worrisome.  Other estimates about the global collapse of civilization:

  • 95% of being extinct in 7.8 million years in the Doomsday Argument.
  • 30% over the next 500 years.
  • 0.05%/year by the Global Challenges Foundation.
  • There were many more speculations.

In any case we ultimately need to someday do something, for while our sun will be good for another 5 billion years or so, it will expand into a red giant in about a billion years to boil off our oceans.  If something happens today, or in a few decades, it is already too late, of course.  So if keeping our species alive into the future is a high priority, what can we do beginning today?

  • The current one to fear is global warming.  There are contrarian views about what to do, and the result is that nothing is being done.  I have a fatalistic one in The Venus Syndrome.  I suspect we will someday solve this problem.
  • Some billionaires, led by Elon Musk, want to colonize Mars as soon as possible.  They could be right, for they will be using mostly their money to do something.
A more thoughtful pathway was suggested by that Smithsonian documentary.  I have enhanced it:
  • We need to find another planet, and it won't be in our solar system.
    • Perhaps begin to learn on the moon, or in near space.
    • In 1976 Gerard O'Neill wrote a book about colonizing space, essentially starting with huge habitats to support life, powered by the sun.  I was linked with NASA then, and interacted with him at Princeton.
    • Then on to Mars, although Musk wants to skip the earlier steps.
    • That doc suggested the closest extrasolar planet, Proxima Centaury b, which is located nicely in a habitable zone of this red dwarf star.
      • "Only" 4.2 light years from us.
      • Orbits in 11.2 days relatively close to the star, but that orbit might be cool enough to support life.
      • If we zoom there at the speed of current technology, it would take 54,400 years.
  • However, NASA's Juno reached 165,000 MPH when it swooshed by Jupiter.  At that rate, 17,160 years.
  • If we can tame a plasma engine, possibly a trip of 2000 years.  As this is Wednesday, I'm going to educate you.
    • There are four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas and plasma.
    • 99% of all visible matter in the cosmos is in the plasma state, like all stars.
  • The problem is that space is vast.  Light would take 100,000 years just to go from one end of our Milky Galaxy to the other, and 2.5 million years to travel to our neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy.
  • The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative of Yuri Milner hopes to reach Proxima Centauri in 20 years.  Something to do with tiny sails being pushed forward by laser light to reach 20% the speed of light.

But none of the above talks about sending humans to this extrasolar planet.  MIT Technology Review indicated it would take at least 6300 years, with initially 49 breeding pairs.  No mention about how much energy it will take.

What about cost?  That Breakthrough Starshot budget is $100 million.  But that is only to plan for the effort.  The expectation is $10 billion to actually send those miniscule wafers powered by laser light.  They would use a 100-gigawatt laser array to continuously beam on to those sails.  However, we would need to build a laser a million times more powerful than what exists today.

About sending humans, consider a mass a million times the size.  And they haven't found a way to do any deceleration yet.  When you're in this field, nothing is impossible.

In any case, the first stage of exploration will no doubt first involve robots.  Then explorers, maybe cyborgs, followed by real human pioneers.  What year are we up to now?  Maybe as soon as the 22nd century.  Eventually, colonizers.  The astro-thinkers at MIT however, hope to bypass all that with those 49 breeding pairs.

And what about energy?  The field is just starting.  A lot of questions with wishful hopes.

It occurred to me that we can send ants and bacteria to some appropriate earth-like planet, and hope that the most difficult first step was the appearance of archaea.  Once they get established, perhaps evolution will eventually create some semblance of intelligent life.  Or does it matter, as artificial intelligence will most likely deem biological life to be deficient, leading to a future society lacking us.  Cheaper and safer for us to send AI ambassadors to colonize future Earths anyway.  At least our universe will have intelligence for a longer period, and hopefully forever.


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