Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures
Page 11
[1] “List of International Space Station Visitors,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Space_Station_visitors. [back]
[2] Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Melinda Marshall, and Laura Sherbin. “How Diversity Can Drive Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, December 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation. [back]
[3] Valentina Zarya, “3 Ways Facebook Is Trying to Diversify Its Workforce,” Fortune, January 19, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/01/20/facebook-workforce-diversity-data-driven. [back]
[4] Cory Doctorow, “Technology Is Making the World More Unequal. Only Technology Can Fix This,” The Guardian, May 31, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/may/31/technology-is-making-the-world-more-unequal-only-technology-can-fix-this-cory-doctorow. [back]
[5] Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy, “Luxembourg’s New Space Law Guarantees Private Companies the Right to Resources Harvested in Outer Space in Accordance with International Law,” Portal of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, November 11, 2016, http://www.gouvernement.lu/6481433/11-presentation-spaceresources. [back]
[6] “List of Female Astronauts,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_astronauts. [back]
[7] Charles Bolden, “NASA Policy Statement on Diversity and Inclusion,” NASA, June 8, 2010, https://odeo.hq.nasa.gov/documents/Diversity_Inclusion_Policy_Statement.pdf. [back]
[8] Ritika Katyal, “India Census Exposes Extent of Poverty,” CNN World, August 2, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/02/asia/india-poor-census-secc. [back]
[9] “Nigerians Living in Poverty Rise to Nearly 61%,” BBC News, February 13, 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-17015873. [back]
[10] For a full, free online version of the text of “Whitey’s on the Moon,” see https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/gil-scott-herons-poem-whitey-on-the-moon/239622. [back]
[11] David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek, Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014). [back]
[12] Turner T. Isoun and Miriam J. Isoun, Why Run before Learning to Walk? (Ibadan, Nigeria: BookBuilders Editions Africa, 2013). [back]
[13] See https://www.nasa.gov/topics/benefits/index.html. [back]
[14] Isoun and Isoun, Why Run before Learning to Walk? [back]
[15] Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1994). [back]
[16] Calestous Juma, “Technology Will Drive Scientific Progress in Africa Not the Other Way Round,” Quartz, August 15, 2016, https://qz.com/757766/technology-will-drive-scientific-progress-in-africa-not-the-other-way-round. [back]
[17] Isoun and Isoun, Why Run before Learning to Walk? [back]
[18] Dante S. Lauretta, “The Seven-Year Mission to Fetch 60 Grams of Asteroid,” Scientific American 315 (2016). [back]
[19] Kevin Pollpeter, Eric Anderson, Jordan Wilson, and Fan Yang, “China Dream, Space Dream: China’s Progress in Space Technologies and Implications for the United States,” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, March 2, 2015, https://www.uscc.gov/Research/china-dream-space-dream-chinas-progress-space-technologies-and-implications-united-states. [back]
[20] Tim Fernholz, “China’s New Quantum Satellite Will Try to Teleport Data outside the Bounds of Space and Time,” Quartz, August 20, 2016, https://qz.com/760804/chinas-new-quantum-satellite-will-try-to-teleport-data-outside-the-bounds-of-space-and-time-and-create-an-unbreakable-code. [back]
[21] Andrew Jones, “A Comprehensive Guide to China’s Space Activities in 2016,” GB Times, July 1, 2016, http://gbtimes.com/comprehensive-guide-chinas-space-activities-2016. [back]
[22] Zach Rosenberg, “This Congressman Kept the U.S. and China from Exploring Space Together,” Foreign Policy, December 17, 2013, http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/12/17/this-congressman-kept-the-u-s-and-china-from-exploring-space-together. [back]
[23] “Nigeria: Workers of Chinese Company Protest Mass Dismissals, Deaths, Injuries Attributed to Poor Work Conditions and Alleged Discrimination; Company Responds,” Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, 2015, https://business-humanrights.org/en/nigeria-workers-of-chinese-company-protest-mass-dismissals-deaths-injuries-attributed-to-poor-work-conditions-and-alleged-discrimination-company-responds. [back]
[24] Michael Martin, “Star Trek’s Uhura Reflects On MLK Encounter,” Tell Me More, National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942461/Star-Treks-Uhura-Reflects-On-MLK-Encounter. [back]
[25] Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2016); Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (New York: William Morrow, 2016). [back]
[26] Russell Brandom, “Today’s SpaceX Explosion Is a Major Setback for Facebook’s Free Internet Ambitions,” The Verge, September 1, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/1/12750872/spacex-explosion-facebook-satellite-internet-org-zuckerberg. [back]
Section II: Mars
She tumbled, landed on a knee and both hands. Her gloves broke through the duricrust. It felt like a layer of caked sand at the beach, only harder and more brittle. Like hardened mud. And cold! Their gloves weren’t heated the way their boot soles were, and there wasn’t enough insulation when actually touching the ground. It was like touching ice with the bare fingers, wow! Around 215 degrees Kelvin, she recalled, or minus 90 degrees Centigrade; colder than Antarctica, colder than Siberia at its worst. Her fingertips were numb. They would need better gloves to be able to work, gloves fitted with heating elements like their boot soles. That would make the gloves thicker and less flexible. She’d have to get her finger muscles back into shape.
She had been laughing. She stood and walked to another freight drop, humming “Royal Garden Blues.” She climbed the leg of the next drop and rubbed the crust of red dirt off an engraved manifest on the side of the big metal crate. One John Deere/Volvo Martian bulldozer, hydrazine-powered, thermally protected, semiautonomous, fully programmable. Prostheses and spare parts included.
She felt her face stretched into a big grin. Backhoes, front loaders, bulldozers, tractors, graders, dump trucks, construction supplies and materials of every kind; air miners to filter and collect chemicals from the atmosphere; little factories to render these chemicals into other chemicals; other factories to combine those chemicals; a whole commissary, everything they were going to need, all at hand in scores of crates scattered over the plain.
—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
The Baker of Mars
by Karl Schroeder
The flapjacks fry up quick; Myrna can tell they need to be flipped when the batter’s rim dulls and the bubbles across its top burst like little fumaroles. Craters on a Georges Méliès moon.
“Hey, Myrna! Is your coffee good?” She looks up from the grill to see Hartney holding up his cup. The new guy standing next to him seems embarrassed, but Myrna’s not about to let Hartney scare away a potential customer. She grabs the box of grounds and sidles down the galley kitchen to the front counter. “Check it for yourself.” The doubtful customer holds up his phone, which sees the box, scans it, and checks its provenance in the global fair exchange blockchain. “Chavez Farm, Costa Rica.” He leans into a trapezoid of sunlight and reads whatever the Chavezes have to say about their family-run operation, or maybe checks where their coffee is roasted, how it’s distributed, how the chain is audited—whatever might influence his decision to drink this particular brew in this particular diner. Finally he shrugs. “S’okay. I’ll have a latte.”
Hartney laughs. “Awful lot of fuss for a cup of joe.”
Myrna starts to multitask between the latte and the ‘jacks. “What do you know? You live on Mars.”
New guy does a double-take; Myrna can see him realize that most of the people in the little corner diner are eating breakf
ast. It’s 3:30 in the afternoon, not even a sane time for a shift change. “You guys are homesteaders?”
Hartney sits up straighter, trying to shine past his thinning hair, polyester shirt, and pasty complexion. Myrna loves him for it. “I’m already a billionaire!” he proclaims, to guffaws and jeers from up and down the joint. “It’s true. I’m one of the Thousand.”
The First Thousand on Mars. Sounds more impressive than this corner diner in Tampa, crowded with a dozen other Thousands. “‘Jacks are up,” says Myrna, then, “here’s yer latte.”
“So what’s it like living on Martian time?”
“Adapt or die,” somebody says before Hartney can. Hartney’s seamed face falls a little, but he adds, “How are we gonna survive there if we can’t do it here?” Most of the breakfast crowd look like they’ve been moving one time zone a day for the last five years. Which they more or less have. The Martian day is 40 minutes longer than Earth’s.
“Hey, Myrna does it,” says Grace from the front window, where she’s soaking up the sun. “And she’s not even a Martian.”
“Oh, I dunno,” Myrna objects. “I have a stake.”
“Yeah? What stake?”
She laughs. “You guys.”
And it’s true: who else is going to feed these dreamers—these soft rebels and temporal exiles—their breakfast at their real breakfast time, their lunches at their lunchtime? They can barely take care of themselves, telecommuting to a whole other planet. Someone needs to watch over them.
“Well, good luck,” says the new guy, in a tone that causes Hartney to look up sharply.
“It’s a sound venture,” the brave settler objects. “Pioneers always hit some bumps on the road.”
“Some?” The new guy snorts, and everything goes quiet. “Sorry,” he adds quickly, “but having the Feds and Russia threaten to pull out isn’t just a ‘bump.’ If your assets get stranded, you could lose your whole stake.”
“We’ll weather it,” insists Hartney; then he turns away. Conversation over.
A few minutes later Myrna rings a bell on the counter. “Closing in ten,” she announces. The diner is just a sideline. She’s got a secondhand Baxter boxing her deliveries, but even with drone service she hasn’t been able to fully automate. There are pork and coconut buns for a restaurant down the road, cupcakes for a kid’s party, and lots of full meals for Martian shut-ins. She’s not about to tell the new guy that Hartney is one of her more high-functioning customers, but it’s true.
She hurries them all out the door. Myrna’s mind isn’t on the new deliveries, as it should be if she wants repeat business. One particular bag, stuffed with white boxes still radiating heat, stays atop her mind’s inventory as she shuts down the ovens, locks the cabinets, and powers down the register. He hasn’t eaten properly since last year. This is his first order in three days.
As half her orders float off under drones, each a little wandering cloud, Myrna calls a car and gathers the straps of the remaining bags into two knotted handfuls. She shouldn’t worry. But she’s going to make Wekesa her first stop.
She leaves the car by the curb, advising it to lock itself. The air conditioning’s running to keep the cakes cool. It’s not her car—in fact, she has no idea who owns it—but it’s quite visible on the autosharing blockchain. This is a trustworthy vehicle. It’s not going to steal her cakes.
Myrna trots up three flights of steps since the elevator is out. There’s no air conditioning in the halls here, and it smells of vinyl, carpet glue, and unsuccessful cooking. She hears voices and TVs even though it’s the middle of the workday. That’s normal; a lot of people are unemployed.
After all the hurrying to get here, the long intermission after she knocks on Wekesa Ballo’s door makes her self-conscious. She feels like a video game character on pause. Just as she’s raising her hand to knock again, the door opens a crack.
“I texted you,” she says to the bleary eye that punctuates the strip of black. “And what are you doing with the lights off? It’s 9:00 a.m. in Kasei Valles.”
“Ten, actually.” He opens the door and the smells that waft out are of electronics, bleach, laundry soap. “But I’m not at Kasei right now.”
Myrna frowns around at the dark in Ballo’s apartment. “Where are you, the other side of the planet?”
“Practically.” He’s a hunched black shape eclipsing computer monitors as he takes the bag of food to his bare little kitchen.
“Wekesa, that’s crazy.” First there’s the 40-minute permanent jet lag, and now he’s shifted time zones? There are only a few places he could be, and none make sense. “Why aren’t you working your claim?”
He’s not even bothering with plates, just wolfing down the food while standing at the counter. Hasn’t asked her to sit. As if her question was time-delayed like his systems on Mars, he suddenly glances up. “I had a visitor. After that … I dunno. I was angry, I guess.”
“Angry? What kind of visitor?”
“A ghost.”
She can’t tell if he’s joking; in the dim light his face is a black cutout save for faint crescents the monitors cast on his eyes. “Want to see?”
“You’re starting to creep me out.” Reluctantly, she goes to the playpen—her private name for the round, padded region of Wekesa’s living room that’s been given over to his VR rig, which is centered on an omnidirectional treadmill. There are bungee straps hanging from the ceiling that you can hook yourself to, but Wekesa never uses them. When Myrna first started playing VR games, the rigs had been big goggle affairs. Using them was like strapping a bowling shoe to your face. As she steps into the rig today, lasers paint a Martian landscape on her retinas; she’s there instantly and seamlessly. She hears Wekesa approaching and moments later his avatar appears next to hers.
Myrna cranes her neck at the sky. “Shouldn’t it be morning at Kasei Valles?”
“This isn’t live, it’s a recording. Watch.”
In the grand old cathedrals of Europe, the pipe organs have up to a second’s delay between your pressing a key and the note venting through the brass flutes. As you play, the sound washing around and through you is already in your past, unmoored from your actions. She’s often thought that the homesteaders, miners, and builders of Mars must experience their world that way.
Her shadow is short under the butterscotch sky. When she starts walking, the shadow remains behind, pinned to the ground. Turning, she sees that it’s not actually hers, but is being cast by the tall, spindly telepresence bot that Wekesa is struggling to pay for through his prospecting work. There are thousands just like it all over the planet. Like most, this one is accompanied by a little rover that can carry rocks, and a half dozen or so drones with huge fans. It’s part of the private-public venture that is building settlements, industries, and life support in advance of a hoped-for human landing. Wekesa has sunk all his money into buying this bot and getting it transported to another planet, in the hope that what they build there will someday attract clients and customers beyond the launch companies and speculators.
On a normal day the drones fan out around Wekesa’s bot, recording the whole landscape in LIDAR and high-definition video. This 3D environment gets beamed back to Earth, and Wekesa can wander around in it as if it were a game level. When he finds something interesting, he’ll go through the motions of investigating it, though of course he’s just a virtual pip in the game and isn’t—yet—affecting anything real. When he’s recorded a set of actions he’s satisfied with, he uploads the sequence to Mars and the bot plays it out on the real planet: walking, kneeling, turning over a rock, splitting it with a hammer. This happens anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour after Wekesa’s done the commit, and meanwhile he’ll have moved on to something else of interest. Then, in a flash, the results of his last command play for him. He can rethink his next course of action, or simply commit immediately. His Martian counterpart is smart enough to pick up fumbled objects, to improvise in simple ways. Usually he doesn’t have to redo
anything.
Thus, by halting turns, is Mars explored. Somewhere over the crisp horizon, work gangs are building cities, though no human has yet set foot on the planet. Like organists, the workers play 10 minutes or a half hour ahead of reality, picking up girders from ground onto which they haven’t yet been unloaded, committing as a team. They achieve that focus which, in the flow of the fugue, demands they experience not what exists now, but rather what they are summoning into being.
Hartney claims that it’s actually easy to do. Mars isn’t like a place, it’s like a sepia-toned photograph. A half hour from now, everything will be exactly where you expect it to be unless you moved it yourself. Nothing but you changes or transits the uneven landscape, except the imperceptibly tilting sun.
So Myrna swears and almost falls down when she turns and sees a tall, imperious woman striding toward her over the rocky red dunes.
“Wekesa Ballo, we must talk!” the woman shouts. “You are taking too much!” She raises one arm dramatically to point at the tumbled rocks.
“Who are you to wear that face?” snarls Wekesa—not here and now, but in the recording.
The figure tilts its head. “I am Kasei Valles. I am the place where you stand. I am the thing you steal.”
There’s a confused sound from Wekesa. The tall woman raises her chin and says, “Are you listening to me? You have sold too many well concessions on this land. You are draining the brine faster than the aquifer can be renewed.”
There’s a long silence, then a fumbling sound. The beige landscape comes apart like a cough of smoke, and there’s Wekesa, glowering in his apartment with his arms folded.
“Wekesa, what was that?”
Myrna’s worst fear is confirmed as he says, “She was my wife. Eloise.”