Tomorrowland

by Kotler, Steven

  But this was only the beginning of the battle.

  Fruit flies are the workhorse of modern genetics. As such, we have a long list of fruit fly traits that have been identified and cultivated in the lab. Eye color, for example. In their work with fruit flies, Spradling and Rubin had only to look for a change in eye color — what’s called a genetic marker — to see if their experiments were successful. But no such marker existed in mosquitos. Thus, the only way to figure out if a jumping gene had done its job was to breed potential transgenics by the boatload, dissect the results, and use a microscope to see if the inserted DNA had taken hold. For the long-haul work of fighting malaria, this process was too arduous to be economically viable. Plus, dissection killed the mosquito being studied, which — even if she did contain the inserted DNA — put a serious damper on her future breeding abilities.

  In the late 1980s, to get over these hurdles, scientists began looking for an easily identifiable genetic marker that could be attached to jumping genes. In the early 1990s, researchers at Columbia University began experimenting with a Puget Sound jellyfish that glowed fluorescent green when exposed to UV light. Turns out, the protein that created the glow could be inserted into other species without killing them. Then, in 2000, Peter Atkinson attached this Day-Glo protein to Hermes, and suddenly the use of genetically altered mosquitoes to fight mosquito-borne ailments became a much more viable proposition.

  A few years later, with Atkinson’s Day-Glo marker guiding the work, Johns Hopkins geneticist Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena found a small peptide that binds to receptors in the mosquito’s gut — the same spot where the malaria parasite normally attaches itself. He next engineered a gene that expressed this peptide and inserted it into mosquitos. In these new transgenics, with vulnerable receptor sites blocked by the peptide, the parasite dies before it can reproduce and infect anything else. It was a major breakthrough. Jacobs-Lorena had turned a mosquito into an insecticide.

  Unfortunately, that insecticide can still adapt — and that leads to an entirely different set of problems.

  4.

  One of the main lessons learned in the pesticide wars of the last century was that mosquitoes and malaria are both nimble mutants. Therefore, while everyone acknowledges Jacobs-Lorena’s achievement, everyone knows it’s not enough to win the war. “In order to ensure success,” notes Anthony James, “we need to build a transgenic mosquito that kills malarial parasites in a number of different ways — it’s the only way to stay a few steps ahead of evolution.”

  This work is also under way. For example, Jacobs-Lorena blocks the receptor that the parasite binds to inside the insect’s mid-gut, but James has found a way to block the parasite’s ability to bind to a mosquito’s salivary glands. Meanwhile, at the University of California, Riverside, Alexander Raikhel has taken a very different approach — he’s figured out how to boost a mosquito’s immune system so it turns on every time there’s a chance the insect can get malaria — thus killing the disease before it has the ability to spread.

  Yet, even if we can outfox evolution and find a way to completely kill malaria in the lab, researchers still need to make this work in the real world. The transgenics that Jacobs-Lorena has created have the same life span and produce the same number of offspring as normal mosquitoes. “This means,” he says, “that in laboratory conditions there’s no fitness cost to building mosquitoes with an immunity to malaria. But there could be a fitness cost in the wild, and to really control the disease, we have to find a way to make our transgenic insects have more offspring than wild mosquitoes.”

  This isn’t the only issue. Another problem is that we still need to make the switch from mosquitoes that carry animal malaria to mosquitoes that carry human malaria — a feat not as easy as it sounds. Not only are the mosquitoes that carry human malaria much harder to breed in captivity, there are also key differences between animal models and human models. The same gene that blocks malaria in mice, for example, does not work in humans, although Jacobs-Lorena believes he’s found a different gene to accomplish this task.

  But once that task is accomplished, containment becomes an even greater concern. As there’s no way to build transgenics with a human form of malaria immunity without first breeding insects with the human form of malaria, much of this work has been moved to Level-3 biocontainment facilities — the kind that come with electronic passkeys, multiple airlocks, and drainage systems that dump waste water into a heating chamber that boils off any remnant of disease.

  And this Fort Knox approach better work. Escaped mosquitos could easily lead to disease outbreaks, but more alarming is the fact that jumping genes not only hop around genomes — they also hop from species to species. An escaped transgenic could interbreed with wild populations and produce something that we’ve never seen before — something even more deadly than what we have today.

  And even if unintentional escape can be prevented, eventually we’re going to have to release these transgenics into the wild (a Key West pilot project is already heading down this road). The downside here is that we know very little about how mosquitoes live in the wild. We don’t completely understand how they breed — meaning everything from how they select certain mates to why they choose to lay their eggs in one puddle rather than another. Nor do we know how seasons affect population size or how wide a territory certain populations inhabit or, critically, how and why genes travel through given populations. Thus, what we really don’t know is the full list of dangers involved in tinkering with this balance.

  Mosquito-borne ailments are among the most devastating and successful diseases on earth. The chemical paradigm of the last century produced a disease immune to our drugs and an insect immune to our pesticides. Could we produce a Frankenstein mosquito carrying super-malaria? “There’s just no way to know exactly what will happen in ten thousand generations of mosquitoes,” says Atkinson. But it looks like we are about to find out.

  So here we are, some two thousand years post-Pliny. A line has been crossed and another is about to fall, and the next time someone sets out to catalog the entire contents of the world, they will need to create a whole new mythic category: The very first man-made creature to venture into the wild.

  The Great Galactic Gold Rush

  THE BIRTH OF THE ASTEROID MINING INDUSTRY

  The first time I met XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis — the story that opens this book — he told me about the possibilities of asteroid mining, arguing that the very first trillionaire on Earth was going to be the person who figured out how to mine the sky. It was, without question, one of the zaniest things anyone had said to me. For a science writer, asteroid mining sat somewhere between “cold fusion” and “cloak of invisibility” on the list of things not likely to happen anytime soon.

  But Peter also argued that without asteroid mining — that is, without an economic driver powering space exploration — our species would never really get off our planet. In this, it was hard to disagree. Thus, in the aftermath of that conversation, asteroid mining became one of those technologies I decided to track.

  The story you’re about to read is the result of that effort. It marks the first time asteroid mining appeared not in the pages of science fiction (or in a magazine dedicated to future forward ideas), but in a mainstream publication with a general readership. This is a big deal. Next time you open up a magazine, know that for every article you see, there are five more that ended up on the cutting-room floor. And one of the easiest ways for an article to get cut is for the subject matter to seem too outlandish. The fact that asteroid mining made it through this editorial process tells you much about the state of the industry, which is to say that the economic engine that will unlock the solar system seems to have finally arrived. Very soon, we will no longer be a one-planet species.

  1.

  Brother Guy Consolmagno is fifty-eight years old, with a thick beard, round glasses, and a scholarly manner. In public, he favors the black robes of his Jesuit order, though his garb may be somewha
t misleading. While Consolmagno is certainly a man of the cloth, most of his life has been focused on the details of God’s creation rather than the deity itself. With a PhD in planetary science, Consolmagno’s held teaching positions at both Harvard and MIT and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on the evolution of the solar system.

  This expertise has served him well within the Society of Jesus. These days, Brother Guy, as he prefers, is a Vatican astronomer. To many, especially those who remember that Galileo was severely punished for his heliocentric heresy, the fact that the Vatican now employs professional star watchers seems peculiar — an issue well-summarized by former Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert: “I don’t understand why the Church is suddenly all ‘ground control to Cardinal Tom.’ ” Brother Guy told Colbert that the Vatican supported astronomy because “It’s a good way to know there’s more important things in the universe than what’s for lunch.”

  And this very well may be the case, but lately the list of things the Vatican considers more important than lunch has taken a turn for the unusual. Not too long ago, for example, the Church brought together top scientists and major religious leaders to explore the possibility of alien life in the universe and what that possibility means for Jesus. CNN dubbed the event “E.T. phone Rome,” but, truthfully, this topic was nowhere near as future forward as the one Brother Guy turned his attention to in 2008.

  That year, in “The Ethics of Exploration,” a speech given at the Manreza Symposium in Hungary, Brother Guy got serious about asteroid mining, which, as it sounds, is the act of using rocket ships to chase down giant, floating space rocks, land on their surface, then mine them for minerals and ores. The fact that a Vatican astronomer was speaking about this topic was odd enough, but Brother Guy’s concerns that day were less about the possibility of asteroid mining ever occurring and more about the ethical consequences that would result. “On the one hand,” he said, “it’s great. You’ve taken all of this dirty industry off the surface of the Earth. On the other hand, you’ve put a whole lot of people out of work. If you’ve got a robot doing the mining, why not another robot doing the manufacturing? And now you’ve just put all of China out of work. What are the ethical implications of this kind of major shift?”

  And Brother Guy is correct — it would be a major shift. Asteroids are rocky, celestial bodies that orbit the sun. Their sizes range from large pebbles to small planets, with plenty in between. The main belt has over 40,000 asteroids larger than a kilometer in diameter, and this is the critical part: Most are thick with ore. Jeffrey Kargel, a planetary geologist from the University of Arizona, recently calculated that FE90, a typical Apollo-class asteroid, contains some $50 billion worth of metal, including some 41,000 kilograms of gold, or double what Fort Knox held at its operational height. So forget about merely putting China out of work — dumping this much lucre on the market could, well, end the market.

  And here’s the strangest part — all of this could happen much sooner than you might expect.

  In the fifty years since Vostok 1, the first ever manned spaceflight, asteroid mining has gone from a perennial pipedream of the Star Trek Forever crowd to a serious enough proposition that a Vatican astronomer felt the need to address ethical concerns in public. In fact, in April 2012 — and with backing from the likes of Google cofounder Larry Page, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson — Peter Diamandis, creator of the XPRIZE, alongside Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures Ltd. (the private space tourism company that flew Stephen Hawking into zero-G and sent billionaire Dennis Tito to the International Space Station), announced Planetary Resources Inc. (PRI), a newly formed asteroid mining company. This time, it was Comedy Central host Jon Stewart who summed things up nicely: “Space pioneers going to mine motherfucking asteroids for precious materials! BOOM! BOOM! YES! Stu-Beef is all in. Do you know how rarely the news in 2012 looks and sounds like you thought news would look and sound in 2012?”

  2.

  No one’s entirely sure where the concept of mining asteroids originated, though the great Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky — who pioneered steering thrusters, multistage chemical rockets, space suits, space stations, artificial gravity, airlocks, and, really, most of the technologies in use off-world today — wrote about the idea in the early twentieth century. From there, it orbited the space community for a decade, making a mainstream debut in a 1932 publication of Paul Simak’s short story “Asteroids of Gold” — wherein the brothers Vernon and Vince Drake earn their keep as space miners. By the early 1940s, asteroid mining had become a sci-fi mainstay. Concurrently, a Libertarian ethos began to infuse these tales. Miners, usually known as “rock rats,” were seen as frontiersmen, asteroids as the new Wild West. This theme progressed until the 1970s and 1980s, wherein asteroid mining came to be seen as an anti-environmental, hard-right fairy tale: Don’t worry about using up all the resources here on Earth because we can always go into space and get more. Outside of the space community, mostly, this is where things still stand, but inside the community, in the past few decades, a tectonic shift has occurred: Asteroid mining has gone from science fiction to science fact.

  What really bridged that gap was a trilogy of recent space missions. The first of those was the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Shoemaker, launched by NASA in February of 1996. NEAR Shoemaker became the first unmanned spacecraft to prove that we could actually catch up to an asteroid — which is no simple trick.

  In our solar system, the vast majority of asteroids are found around fifty-six million miles away, hurtling through the gap between Jupiter and Mars. Despite the degree of difficulty involved in catching something that moves at 15.5 miles per second, in 2000 NEAR Shoemaker combined a well-crafted hibernation period (to conserve energy) with an Earth swing-by gravity assist and two carefully controlled thruster burns to catch the second-largest near-Earth asteroid, Eros 433, in midstride.

  Shoemaker spent a year orbiting and studying Eros, which is less interesting to would-be space miners than the fact that NASA ended the mission in 2001, by landing the probe on the asteroid’s surface. In 1999, the agency went a step further, launching Stardust — a ship that traveled three billion miles to rendezvous with the comet Wild 2 — a meeting that took place at the dizzy speed of 33 miles per second. Even better, once Stardust caught up to Wild 2, it used a specially designed air filter to take samples of comet dust, then turned around, traveled another billion miles, and brought those samples back to Earth in 2006.

  Since any successful asteroid mining mission is going to require not only getting to an asteroid but landing on it, digging in, and then coming back home, by far the most impressive mission to date was Japan’s Hayabusa probe. In September 2005, Hayabusa chased down asteroid Itokawa and spent a month analyzing its shape, spin, topography, color, composition, density, and history before landing on the surface in November 2005. There it used a robotic arm to scrape the surface and gather a few samples.

  On June 13, 2010, Hayabusa returned to Earth, making a parachute landing in the South Australian outback. The spaceship burned up in the atmosphere, but a heat-shielded return capsule brought the samples back intact. The first half of those have now been analyzed (confirming, in fact, that they did come from Itokawa) and show roughly the same chemical makeup contained in meteors already found here on Earth — which makes Itokawa rich in exactly the kinds of minerals we want to mine.

  “That scrape of the surface confirmed we’re capable of asteroid mining,” says Brother Guy. “That’s one of the main differences between drilling for minerals here on Earth and on asteroids. The Earth has been chemically processed, so our mineral wealth is only found in certain regions, and many of those regions are very deep underground. Asteroids, though, are homogenous. What’s on the surface is what’s below the surface. You don’t have to dig, you can scrape — and that’s exactly what Hayabusa did.”

  University of Arizona professor of planetary science Erik Asphaug bel
ieves the final piece in the puzzle came with the mapping all of the near-Earth asteroids — an ongoing international effort to avert planetary disaster. This effort began in the 1970s, when scientists figured out that an asteroid with a diameter of ten kilometers killed off the dinosaurs. By the early 1990s, they’d realized a one-kilometer-diameter rock could jeopardize the survival of the human race, and, even more alarmingly, rocks of that size impact the Earth once every 500,000 years. Which is when most everyone in the space field decided it might be good to figure out where all those rocks were lurking and what exactly were their intentions.

  Thus began the great asteroid hunt of the aughts. In the past decade, using a wide variety of telescopes, researchers have located 90 percent of the large near-Earth asteroids — those over one kilometer in diameter — and 10 percent of the smaller ones. In terms of planetary safety, we’ve discovered no species-ending impacts in our near future, but there have been other gains as well. “All of this mapping can be used for asteroid mining,” says Asphaug. “Sure, we’re trying to save the world from a catastrophic event, but along the way we’ve drawn up a pretty good prospector’s map of our solar system.”

  During this same time, there’s also been a philosophical shift surrounding the idea. Brother Guy believes its roots are generational: “So many of us now in the science field got started by reading science fiction. Our view of how the universe could work really was shaped by writers like Robert Heinlein. Once we got old enough and educated enough to be in a position to check the reality of the numbers behind science fictional ideas, we were able to see which ones were really possible and to ask ourselves how to make those dreams into reality.”