Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  Something else about robots: a nonviolent campaign would have no effect on them. They’d view the Montgomery Bus Boycott as an illogical exercise. An AI could beat a Gary Kasparov, but it would blink uncomprehendingly at a Colin Kaepernick. The appeal to human solidarity, to fellow feeling, reaches its limits at the borders of consciousness. So, we’d best get started soon if we’re going to get started at all.

  Epilogue

  Grounded

  I was eight years old in July 1969, and so, almost from the start, my dawning sense of the outside world included the larger universe. I watched Apollo 11 from hours before liftoff to the end of the mission a week later, switching off the television only for occasional bouts of parentally mandated sleep and for trips to the backyard, where I would stare at the moon in wonder. I memorized all the NASA acronyms (LEM, for “lunar excursion module”; EVA for “extravehicular activity,” which is to say, walking on another heavenly body). I recited the countdown out loud, over and over: “T-minus twelve, eleven, ten, nine, ignition sequence started, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. We have liftoff. Apollo Eleven has cleared the tower.”

  So, in the spring of 2018, forty-nine years later, it was a journey back into my deep innocence to stand on the roof of the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building, of course, the tallest building outside an urban area and the structure with the largest doors on planet Earth and the biggest painting of an American flag) and stare out across the Cape Canaveral scrub in the hour before dawn as a rocket owned by Elon Musk prepared to hurl itself toward the International Space Station. When the moment came, it was as I’d always imagined: the clouds of steam as gas vented, then the immensely bright column of flame erupting. For a second, nothing seemed to happen—until, with remarkable slowness, the rocket began to rise, the grip of gravity yielding to the force of its engines. As the Falcon 9 began to accelerate, a great ripping sound caught up to the sight; ever faster, the ship rose into the paling sky, Roman-candling through the clouds for six minutes before it finally disappeared from straining eyes.

  It is the most awesome technological spectacle humans have produced, universally seductive. Even to Ayn Rand. She covered the launch of the moonshot for her magazine, The Objectivist, and though she of course insisted the government had no business funding such things, she allowed herself to be overcome anyway: “What we had seen, in naked essentials—but in reality, not in a work of art—was the concretized abstraction of man’s greatness … that a long, sustained, disciplined effort had gone to achieve this series of moments, and that man was succeeding, succeeding, succeeding.” Better yet, she wrote, Neil Armstrong didn’t ruin his great moment on the moon by talking about God, “did not undercut the rationality of his achievement by paying tribute to the forces of its opposite; he spoke of man. ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’ So it was.”

  Rand would like the current space program even more. President Trump has proposed zeroing out the budget for the International Space Station, meaning that much of America’s reach into space will need to be funded by the band of tech billionaires who have seized the opportunity. On this day, it was Musk’s company SpaceX, but the flare of rocket engines also illuminated the vast hangar of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin project. There are others: the late Paul Allen, with his six-engine space plane; Richard Branson, already taking reservations for a Virgin Galactic spacecraft that will carry passengers and satellites into space. It beats trying to build the biggest yacht (though Allen, whose 414-foot Octopus has two helipads and a Jet Ski dock, may have held that title, too). Indeed, there’s something earnest and boyish about the whole spacefaring effort, something more likeable than busting unions back home on earth. As Bezos put it recently, “If I’m 80 years old and looking back on my life, and I can say that I put in place the heavy-lifting infrastructure that made access to space cheap and inexpensive,” then “I’ll be a very happy 80-year-old.”1

  Why go to space?

  “So that the next generation could have the entrepreneurial explosion like I saw on the internet,” said Bezos, conjuring up a vision of brown-and-yellow UPS shuttles delivering printer cartridges to the rings of Saturn.2 (Sometime this year, Vodafone and Nokia plan to set up a mobile phone network on the moon.)3

  Or to escape the wreckage of planet Earth. In November 2016, Stephen Hawking told an audience that “spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves,” and gave us a thousand-year timetable to be off the Earth. The following May, he cut the deadline down to a century. “Earth is under threat from so many areas that it is difficult for me to be positive,” he said.4

  Or, most compelling of all, because once you get to space, you’re on your own. It’s the ultimate libertarian paradise, something lost on none of these visionaries. Consider the physicist Freeman Dyson, who in the late 1950s took a year away from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to help develop a rocket to Saturn that could be powered by a series of nuclear explosions. These plans were abandoned when the Nuclear Test Ban was adopted in 1963, but Dyson remains a space enthusiast because, as he pointed out in 2017, he wants to escape the small patches of the universe “with their laws and treaties and enforcers and tax-gatherers” and wander instead “through the huge stretches of ungovernable wilderness where … no bureaucratic authority can be effective.”5 In space, no one can make you pay your taxes.

  * * *

  But little of this is actually going to happen, because that’s not how space works. Just as with climate change on earth, physics and biology ultimately rule. Yes, it’s possible that we’ll be able to mine some rare minerals from passing asteroids, or do some manufacturing in weightlessness, or even establish Musk’s colony on Mars. In the scheme of things, however, these are minor accomplishments, unlikely to deflect any of the trends now governing the planet. Everything we learn about life in space makes it clear that we’re not going to get a second chance there.

  For one, space flight is hard on human beings. Now that a few people have spent a year in orbit, it’s become clear the toll it takes on everything from the shape of our eyeballs to the stability of our DNA. As Charles Wohlforth and Amanda Hendrix pointed out shortly after Musk announced his Mars ambitions, just the outward flight would put astronauts at unacceptable risk, as they’d be bombarded with so many cosmic rays from the stars that the risk of cancer would be greater than the risk of a spaceflight accident. Mice exposed to these rays develop “brain damage and cognitive losses” even when they don’t get cancer. Here on Earth, water vapor in the atmosphere shields us from these rays, but “it takes two meters of water to filter out about half the radiation, and a cubic meter of water weighs 2,205 pounds. Carrying enough water to insulate a spacecraft is far beyond current capabilities.” And it’s not just cosmic rays: a 2014 National Academy of Sciences report listed nine health risks for a Mars mission (including heart damage from radiation, food and medicine instability, and poor psychological health) that are at an “unacceptable level.”6

  For another thing, space is endlessly vast. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our sun, is 4.37 light years away, which is impossibly far given that the fastest thing we’ve ever shot into space, a probe called Helios 2, which travels one hundred times faster than a bullet, would still take 19,000 years to get there. Not long before it ran out of fuel and began to hibernate, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler satellite tracked down an alien solar system that scientists dubbed Trappist. Its seven Earth-size planets orbit a cooling dwarf star, three of them at distances that might lend themselves to supporting life. It may be the closest possible candidate for a World Like Ours, but it’s thirty-nine light years away, which is to say, it would take Helios about 180,000 years to get there, which is to say eighteen times longer than, as we reckon it, human civilization has existed. That’s why every science fiction story is filled with worm holes and inexplicable warp drives: they overcome the basic physics of the universe—in books.

  At best, we could send transhumans out ac
ross the atmosphere. Indeed, some of the AI enthusiasts imagine that’s precisely what will happen, arguing that we should be exploring “genetic and/or surgical modifications”7 to allow for space travel or, more likely, simply sending robots. The Russian tech pioneer Yuri Milner (whose parents named him for Yuri Gagarin, first man in space) is a Silicon Valley mainstay—among other things, he’s an investor in the gene-testing company 23andMe (not to mention a partner in Jared Kushner’s real estate ventures). In 2017 he announced plans to spend $100 million to send a robot weighing less than a sheet of paper to Alpha Centauri with a giant space sail and a hundred-billion-watt laser. If it works, it will take only twenty years to get the featherweight probe there.

  In fact, the very mission I was watching lift off at Cape Canaveral carried the first artificial intelligence into space, an orb called CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile CompaniON) that had been equipped with the same Watson AI gear that IBM used to win on Jeopardy! and beat the world’s best Go players. CIMON looks a lot like the original iMac, and in weightlessness, it would float around the space station until summoned, and then use little fans to fly across the capsule and face the astronaut, who could then ask it various technical questions. Before liftoff, a team of chipper Teutonic gents from Airbus, who had developed the orb, talked at some length about how it would offer “partnership and even companionship,” and how it would display “infinite patience,” and how it would be “like a buddy, like a good friend working together.” The engineers who built CIMON had been taking him out to restaurants—when you ask him a question, his dorsal fans help him nod up and down in reply. They invested him with an ISTJ personality on the Myers-Briggs Type scale—that is, he is highly logical. “I don’t think anything could be more exciting than launching AI into space for the first time,” one of the engineers said. “There’s nothing cooler than that,” especially given that CIMON has also been trained to eventually spy on its crewmates, examining “group effects that can develop over a long period of time in small teams and that may arise during long-term missions.”8

  * * *

  Getting people to the moon was incredibly hard, and the moon is 250,000 miles away. But let’s say we cross the 50 million miles to Mars—then what? To survive, you’d need to go underground. But to what end? You can go underground on Earth if you want. And the multibillion-dollar attempts at building a “biosphere” here on our home planet (where building supplies arrived on a truck) ended in abject failure. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote the greatest novels about the colonization of Mars, a trilogy that dates back a quarter century. Now, says their author, he thinks the whole thing would be a mistake. “It creates a moral hazard,” he says. People imagine that if we mess up the Earth, we can “always go to Mars or the stars. It’s pernicious.”9

  In fact, it’s worse than that. It distracts us from the almost unbearable beauty of the planet we already inhabit. In a more recent novel, Aurora, Robinson describes a failed mission from Earth to colonize a planet (failed for all the reasons of distance and human frailty I’ve already described). Some of the colonists actually manage to make it back to Earth, and one, a woman named Freya, born on the spaceship, eventually finds her life’s work rebuilding beaches destroyed by the sea-level rise that came with climate change. As the book ends, she’s taking her very first swim in the earthly ocean: “Sun beats on her back, the wet strand gleams. Everything is sparking and glary, too bright to look at. A broken wave rushes up the strand, stops, leaves a line of foam.” She kneels in the surf, as the outrushing water swirls the sand beneath her legs, “black flecks forming V patterns in tumbling blond grains, sluicing new deltas right before her eyes. What a world. She lets her head down and kisses the sand.”10

  I thought of that sweet ending when I was at Cape Canaveral. The day before the launch, I went on a tour with public affairs officer Greg Harland and SME (subject matter expert) Don Dankert, who had overseen the rebuilding of dunes along the Atlantic shoreline of the Kennedy Space Center. I’d been warned not even to raise the topic of global warming, which was fine with me—I didn’t want to get them fired. In any event, there was no need, because the problem was blindingly obvious. We climbed up a small hill overlooking Launch Complex 39, where the Apollo missions left for the moon and where any future Mars mission would likely begin. The ocean was a few hundred yards away—which is perfect in the sense that launching rockets here on the East Coast means that if something goes wrong, they fall into the sea; but not so perfect given that that sea is now rising. NASA started worrying about this sometime after the turn of the century, forming a Dune Vulnerability Team (a DVT, obviously). The worry accelerated dramatically after Hurricane Sandy in 2011. Sandy didn’t hit Cape Canaveral—it hit New York City—but even at a distance of a couple of hundred miles, the great storm churned up waves strong enough to break through the barrier of dunes and very nearly swamp the launch complexes. “Dunes that had previously been relatively stable for decades—suddenly they were gone,” said University of Florida geologist John Jaeger.

  And so those dunes were rebuilt. Dankert had not only found the millions of cubic yards of sand (excavated from a nearby air force base), but he himself planted the last of the 180,000 native shrubs to hold the sand in place. And so far, the new dune has performed, yielding little ground in the face of recent hurricanes. So, perhaps, until a few more chunks of the Antarctic crash into the drink or a bigger storm hits head-on, our escape route to outer space is safe.

  But what impressed me more than the new dune was the sheer affection these two men had for the landscape where they worked. “Kennedy Space Center is the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge,” said Harland. “We use less than ten percent for our industrial purposes.”

  “When you look at the beach, it’s like 1870s Florida—the longest undisturbed stretch on the Atlantic Coast,” Dankert added. “We launch people into space from the middle of a wildlife refuge. That’s amazing.”

  They talked for a long time about their favorite local species: the brown pelicans skimming the ocean just off the beach; the Florida scrub jays; the gopher tortoise. When they were rebuilding the dune, they carefully bucket-trapped and relocated every last one of the tortoises. Before I left, they drove me half an hour across the swamp to a pond near the Space Center headquarters building, just because they wanted to show me some alligators; we could see snouts surfacing near the bank. At each corner of the pond, a sign had been carefully placed: THE ALLIGATORS IN THIS AREA OCCUR HERE NATURALLY. THEY WERE NOT PLACED HERE AND THEY ARE NOT PETS. PUTTING ANY FOOD IN THE WATER FOR ANY REASON WILL CAUSE THEM TO BECOME ACCUSTOMED TO PEOPLE AND POSSIBLY DANGEROUS. The sign continued: if that should happen, it read, THEY MUST BE REMOVED AND DESTROYED.

  Something about that sign moved me tremendously. It would have been easy enough to poison the pond, just as it would have been easy enough to bulldoze the gopher tortoise. But NASA didn’t, because of a long series of affectionate laws that drew on an emerging understanding of who we are. John Muir, in some ways the first self-conscious Western environmentalist, crossed Florida on his thousand-mile walk from Louisville to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867, a trip he used to form his first heretical thoughts about the meaning of being human. From his diary: “The world, we are told, was made especially for man—a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.” His proof that this self-centeredness was wrong was the alligator, numbers of which he could hear roaring in the swamp as he camped nearby, and which clearly caused man mostly trouble. But the alligator was wonderful nonetheless, Muir thought, a remarkable creature perfectly adapted to its landscape. “I have better thoughts of those alligators now that I’ve seen them at home,” he wrote. Indeed, he addressed the creatures directly: “Honorable representatives of the great saurian of an older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now a
nd then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of dainty.”11 Most of us don’t go as far as Muir—we still wince when we read of some gator emerging from the water hazard on the sixth hole to chomp down on an unwary golfer—but his basic idea that all of creation matters has made some real headway.

  That evening, Harland and Dankert drew me a crude map to a beach where I could wait the hours until the predawn rocket launch—a beach where they said I’d be likely to spot a loggerhead sea turtle coming ashore to lay her eggs. And so, I lay on the sand, north of Patrick Air Force Base and south of the sign erected by the Brevard County Historical Commission to commemorate that, here, in 1965, Barbara Eden emerged from her bottle to greet her astronaut at the start of I Dream of Jeannie (the last sitcom filmed in black and white, and certainly a key feature of my early intellectual life). The beach was deserted, and under a near-full moon, it was easy to see a turtle trundle from the sea. She lumbered deliberately to a spot near the dune, where she used her powerful legs to excavate a pit. She spent an hour laying eggs, and even from thirty yards away, I could hear her heavy breathing in between the whisper of the waves. And then, having covered her clutch, she tracked back to the ocean, in the fashion of others like her for the last 120 million years.

  That humans have made her life harder is undeniable. In some places, sea turtles are eaten; in many more, their habitat has been eaten away, often by beachside cities that in turn foster the raccoons and foxes that delight in digging up turtle eggs. Huge numbers of turtles have been caught up and killed by accident in the hunt for shrimp; in Mexico, three hundred sea turtles were found dead in 2018, trapped in a single abandoned fishing net.12