by Ed Finn
This collection takes on the challenge of imagining new stories at the intersection of public and private—narratives that use the economic and social history of exploration to inform scenarios for the future of the “new space” era. The stories in this collection weave together the flag and the garden, the nation-state and the corporation. They also balance the abstract hopes and fears of collectives with the more immediate concerns of individual people. Space exploration is only viable in the long term if enough people feel a personal connection to it, finding a story about the world beyond our atmosphere that they can inhabit and believe.
And so we are delighted to share this, a collection of space-futures narratives informed by the lessons of the past, the insights of current technical and scientific research, and the eternal hopes and fears of humans facing the unknown.
The most important lesson we have learned in this project is that people have been thinking of ways to get to the stars for a long time. While an array of new missions, companies, and launch platforms have entered the extraplanetary game, the fundamentals are almost unchanged. The human drive to explore is coupled with an equally powerful impulse to bring things back, to weave our discoveries into the broader web of human civilization. The growth of our species has not been a linear march towards technical knowledge but an omnidirectional expansion, a thickening layer of activities, projects, logistics, conversations, and culture. In that way the commercialization of space will also be, we hope, a kind of domestication—not in the sense of taming nature but in the sense of creating a space for dwelling, a venue for human life to unfurl in all its weirdness and complexity.
This collection advances the central mission of the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University to encourage more creative and ambitious thinking about the future. Its roots lie in Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, which brought together science fiction writers and scientific researchers to come up with technically grounded, optimistic visions of what might happen next. Each story presented a glimpse of a possible future that a young scientist or engineer might be able to achieve in a single professional lifetime—Thinking Big, but also imagining worlds that are within arm’s reach of contemporary technological development.
Hieroglyph was not just a book project but an experiment in forging a community that included students, teachers, policy-makers, and working professionals in many different walks of life. It lives on as a collective organized around the idea that we can work towards better futures by working up some better dreams. The stories in that anthology explored futures shaped by synthetic biology, neuroscience, structural engineering, and many other fields.
This book is also an experiment, one that builds on what we have learned from Hieroglyph and many other related projects at CSI. One major change is that we have integrated narratives and nonfiction even more closely than we did with Hieroglyph, asking our various collaborators to engage and share their work with one another at several stages in the project. These collaborators joined four thematically organized teams of writers, social scientists, and space experts: Low Earth Orbit, Mars, Asteroids, and Exoplanets. Together they were able to explore a wide range of questions about the social, technical, and commercial possibilities of expanded human activity in each of these domains. We are also pleased to include all of their final products here, fiction and nonfiction, something we were not able to do with the first Hieroglyph collection because of printing constraints. Here readers can follow ideas and arguments across multiple essays, echoing the circulation of those ideas among our contributors via phone conversations, email exchanges, and a few in-person meetings.
Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities is an experiment in a second sense, as a research project funded by NASA. In that regard, this is an exploration of the value of using narrative projections about the commercialization of space exploration and public-private partnerships. The act of putting writers, natural scientists, engineers, and social scientists into dialogue around the near future of space has effects on those collaborators themselves, who have grappled with—and we hope, learned something useful from—the exercise of working across disciplinary and creative boundaries. Their work may also be useful to NASA researchers in the future, and will certainly be of interest to scholars of space exploration in relation to science policy, cultural studies, literature, and related fields. Most importantly, we have worked hard to craft this collection for a broad public audience, expanding our collective conversation about the future of space exploration through a series of thought-provoking visions about how it might unfold.
With all of these audiences, we hope the volume will advance several different objectives. First, finding novel perspectives and descriptive structures for some of the classic dilemmas that complicate space exploration: risk, cost, and long-term benefits. The second objective turns that novelty on its head by arguing that many of these dilemmas are not new at all, but instead questions that explorers have faced many times before, from the fourth-century voyage of Pytheas of Massalia and the incredible journeys of Polynesian peoples across the Pacific Ocean to the nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions sponsored by British food manufacturers like Huntley & Palmer and Beach’s. And finally, we hope we have created a collection that draws together our audiences around shared stories—the community of space researchers, policy-makers, and entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and a broader public that continues to be inspired by the discovery and exploration led by NASA and other entities, on the other.
What distinguishes our experiment is the harnessing of economic history and science fiction to the frame of our current technological horizon: a set of stories that inflect and reinvent the lessons of the past to illuminate possible futures. Imagining commerce in space has its own rich history in the genre of science fiction, from Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s classic satire The Space Merchants to contemporary works like the television series The Expanse, based on the novels of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (writing as James S. A. Corey). These are stories that consider space as a mirror for human culture and identity, a set of environments that, no matter how unfamiliar to us, can become familiar to characters who dwell in them. They perform the crucial imaginative work of placing everyday humans into thriving extraplanetary environments, and thereby allow us to see a very different solar system through their eyes.
This is one of the important functions of science fiction: to take the novum, the “new thing,” and make it familiar through the alchemy of a story. The strange remains strange, but it also becomes known to us, as recognizable as a tricorder or a lightsaber. In this way, science fiction is a genre of exploration. The stories and essays in this volume dramatize and contextualize that reciprocal aim of exploration, to link back, to weave together, and consider how we might voyage into the unknown and forge new kinds of cooperation, commerce, and community.
Human Exploration of Mars: Fact from Fiction?
by Jim Bell
Sending people to Mars or other deep space destinations is no longer solely the realm of science fiction. While NASA or other interested players in the space business don’t yet have a specific detailed timeline for human missions to Mars, for example, they and others are investing heavily in the needed technological, political, and societal resources required to make such missions happen. Ironically, science fiction itself may be at least partly responsible for this recent sea change in science reality.
Numerous potential ports of call await future human space explorers. The next travelers in space may be returning to the Moon after a more than half-century hiatus, making the first visits to low-gravity asteroids that pass relatively close to the Earth, or setting out on a grand adventure of exploration or perhaps even colonization to Mars and its moons. But Mars, in particular, has caught humanity’s imagination as the “next destination” for astronauts, fueled by exciting scientific results from recent robotic space missions, as well as by a renewed fascination with Mars in books, films, and
social media.
Indeed, since the earliest telescopic observations, Mars has consistently been a subject of public fascination and wide-ranging scientific interest. The canali of Italian astronomer and civil engineer Giovanni Schiaparelli were sold to an eagerly awaiting early twentieth century public as extraterrestrially engineered “canals” rather than mere geological “channels” by the amateur astronomer and businessman Percival Lowell. Those same Martians invaded Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, as well as many of the panicked households of America, via Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre company’s 1938 radio rendition of “The War of the Worlds.” In the 1950s and even well into the 1960s, some astronomers were publishing papers in Science magazine and elsewhere hypothesizing the presence of lichen or other simple life-forms on Mars based on the latest telescope observations.
It would take a small initial flotilla of early robotic flyby, orbiter, and lander missions to convince the scientific community, as well as the public, that the surface of Mars is a barren and inhospitable place. Even then, however, the idea of life on Mars was quickly brought back to the fore of public and scientific debate by the 1996 controversy over the possible existence of fossilized life-forms, and other evidence of living organisms, preserved in an Antarctic meteorite that made its way to Earth after being blasted out of the Martian subsurface by an asteroid impact. Despite the initial and continuing scientific skepticism about the veracity of those claims, massive media and public interest in that possibility, fueled partly by the direct involvement of the President of the United States and a supportive U.S. Congress, has inspired the past two decades of highly visible, and highly successful, orbiters, landers, and rovers sent to the Red Planet. The main goal of most of these missions has been to search for evidence that Mars once was, or perhaps still is, habitable.
But the roots of this public support go far deeper than just the scientific motivation. Over many decades now, science fiction creators—including authors, television and film producers, and video game makers—have built stories and drama around space-related themes, and especially around imagined interactions between humans and aliens, helping to prime a far-reaching (and, for those industries, economically rewarding) public interest in all things space. Regardless of whether those interactions have been friendly or adversarial, or whether those aliens have been benevolent or hostile, the basic premise has achieved wide public support and acceptance: people are going to go out into deep space—to explore, to work, to vacation, or just to live a different life.
How much any of those imagined space-related futures that are depicted in literature, film, or television is actually achievable is highly debatable, of course. While the prospects for almost-magical (to today’s physics) technologies like transporters or warp drives or lightsabers seem extremely dim in the near future, if at all, the idea of people traveling by rocket to places like Mars seems not too far-fetched an extrapolation from the Apollo missions to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And the idea that people would run into trouble during those voyages, or that they would have fantastic adventures, or that they would make astounding discoveries (like discovering other life-forms beyond Earth), seems easy for a now-space-savvy public audience to accept. After all, this same public is bombarded almost daily with amazing and far-reaching actual discoveries in astronomy, physics, biology, and many other fields of science and technology.
Science fiction has created a positive feedback loop that is influencing the future of space exploration. From the routine airline-like space travel and psychedelic alien encounters of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 to the pragmatic heroism and realistic technologies depicted in Andy Weir and Ridley Scott’s more recent The Martian, stories about people in space have spurred conversations, cult followings, and strong emotions in our society. That interest has translated into citizen advocacy for government-funded space activities, as evidenced directly by the creation and influence of nonprofit advocacy groups like The Planetary Society, and indirectly by the massive outpouring of attendance and viewership for major space-related events like the Moon landings, Space Shuttle launches, Mars rover landings, and the recent Pluto flyby.
Science fiction may even be influencing the development of the nascent private commercial space industry, which has space exploration plans often motivated by different goals than government space agencies. In many of these companies, employees from CEOs to factory floor workers cite books, films, and television shows as motivators of their own passion for space exploration, and in some cases even as models for their future corporate goals. For example, would SpaceX be pursuing its long-term goal of colonizing Mars, or would Planetary Resources be pursuing its long-term goal of mining asteroids, without science fiction creators having established that there is an eager and enthusiastic pool of public supporters (and investors) who will back such ventures?
Coming back to the idea of achievability, how important is it to the future of actual space exploration that science fiction represents and depicts an accurate imagined future? What harm could a few lightsabers or warp drives or transporters do, sprinkled here and there throughout the genre? The answer, I believe, depends on the timescale over which the metric is applied. That is, when considering the potential for the exploration of space in the far future (hundreds to thousands of years from now or more), it is easy to suspend the need for accuracy and assume that we can’t possibly predict technological advances or innovations that far into the future. So why not photon torpedoes and antigravity shielding? But if a story is to have a significant influence on the near-term future of space exploration (within the next few decades, for example), I believe that it needs to be grounded in a defensible pragmatism about what is actually achievable—technologically, scientifically, and politically. This, to me, is the source of the phenomenal public support for The Martian. Author Andy Weir has created an entirely plausible (technically, scientifically, and politically) near-term future for the human exploration of Mars, and in that future there is drama, danger, and discovery—all critical elements in the story’s public success. It is easy—not only for the general public but also for rank and file space scientists and engineers—to believe that such adventures are indeed possible in the 2030s … and so, let’s work to try to make them actually happen! Even when gently pressed to admit that some of the science in the story is not fully accurate (like the intense sand storm early in the story—far, far more powerful than a storm could possibly be on Mars today), Weir told me that he didn’t think that a little scientific exaggeration would matter, given the overall plausibility of the story and the need to establish the premise of an easy-to-understand example of a man-versus-nature conflict. Indeed, amplifying the actual power of the well-known dust storms of Mars is ultimately forgivable, in my opinion, because the details of the storm are irrelevant to the success of the story, or to its ability to inspire people to work towards getting humans to Mars for real. The Martian is a great example of positive science fiction feedback that could very well lead to a self-fulfilling literary prophecy.
The stories in this anthology also provide excellent examples of such potential positive feedback. Carter Scholz’s “Vanguard 2.0” uses the Low Earth Orbit setting to examine questions of wealth and equity in space. The plot takes place in and around two inflatable human habitats in Low Earth Orbit, and follows the machinations of a cryptic trillionaire, Gideon Pace, who uses his riches to launch a thus-far-unprofitable business using drones to deorbit space debris that might pose a threat to satellites or spacecraft. The story raises the specter of space-based weapons platforms and the idea of using orbital weapons to defend Earth against asteroid impacts. Simultaneously, it considers how the role of private interests in space could change the way that off-world areas are governed and, indeed, how power in space might change power relations and dynamics back on Earth. Pace is a clever, if devious, policy thinker: his interest in expanding his presence in Low Earth Orbit is an attempt to maneuver a
round the terms of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, now that activity in space is a private-sector endeavor, no longer the sole province of government agencies. Scholz’s story offers a useful warning about the risks of dual-use technologies and competing interests that might emerge in the regulatory near-vacuum of Low Earth Orbit as it becomes an active zone of commerce. It suggests that policy conversations about regulating private-enterprise activity in space need to happen before powerful actors establish themselves as providers of essential services.
In “Mozart on the Kalahari,” Steven Barnes imagines space tourism in Low Earth Orbit expanding rapidly, funded by corporate sponsors like Disney. In this future, exploration and experimentation in space are bootstrapped by a tourism industry that caters to the wealthy. Space is only marginally more accessible than it is today; vacations cost a hundred thousand dollars a day, and the only other routes off-world are through elite universities and fiercely competitive science fairs like the one around which the story revolves. The other scientific phenomenon at the heart of the story is the expanded availability and sophistication of do-it-yourself genetic engineering kits for kids and college students. Recent genetic engineering breakthroughs like CRISPR make the democratization of this technology, and massive increases in its power, seem distinctly possible in the near future. The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition already challenges hundreds of teams of young people to “imaginatively manipulate” genetic material each year. Barnes’ radical point of departure from our current reality turns on genetic interpenetration between humans and other species, and suggests that we might consider genetically engineering human bodies as one step towards creating a thoroughly spacefaring future.