All of Earth was once molten. That’s why it has an iron-rich core, containing abundant quantities of other metals that are rare on the surface.4 Rare earth metals are not actually rare. They’re simply not found in any significant concentration in Earth’s crust, and we have no access to Earth’s core, where they lie in abundance. The deepest we’ve ever drilled is less than one five-hundredth the distance to the center of our planet, and the core extends to half the planet’s radius.
Eventually every molten object cools and solidifies. But if a big, fast-moving object then slams into it, you get a shattered, scattered field of pre-sifted space debris. That’s how you get entire asteroids made of pure rock and others of pure metal. What matters to the future space miner is that some asteroids came from a protoplanet’s shattered differentiated core, and they’re packed with rare earth metals, as well as other metals we deem precious, including gold, silver, platinum, iridium, and palladium.
Once you have access to multiple sources of rare earth metals, you no longer have to worry about anybody’s unilateral control of the strategic supply. Yes, Space Prospectors No. 1—a country or a private company—will be the first to start mining the nearest rare-earth-laden asteroid and will therefore control that part of the supply. But so what? Space Prospectors No. 2 will just plan to get to a different asteroid and start mining that one. At which time normal economic and political forces begin to kick in. SP1, the pioneer, will not want to see anyone starting up a mine on a different asteroid. They’ll want the rest of us to buy the rare earths they’ve mined. So they’ll price their product at the point where it’s cheaper for everyone to buy SP1 metals than to send their own missions to other asteroids. If SP1 goes above that price point, the rest of us will just go out and mine our own asteroids.
Unquestionably, asteroid mining will one day be a trillion-dollar industry, even if the vast increase in supply depresses the high prices at which rare earths are currently traded. As the price of highly useful goods drops, the number of affordable applications tends to grow. In the shorter run, however, since asteroid mining won’t start tomorrow—although startups are multiplying, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, for instance, is proposing a fleet of solar-wind-powered nanosatellites to collect data on the composition of several hundred asteroids—we’ll have to come up with other solutions.5 Maybe someone will invent a smartphone that doesn’t need dysprosium. Maybe someone else will finally invent a storage mechanism in lieu of batteries for stockpiling solar energy.
Asteroids aren’t the only small celestial bodies that can bring us a little more peace and security. Some comets contain as much water as the entire Indian Ocean, and it’s not saltwater; do a bit of filtering, and you get freshwater. The way to snare a comet is to match orbits with it and break off a piece, which should be very easy. Comets are loosely held together, like snowballs made of dry snow. They look for excuses to break apart. Even the gentlest nudge from the tidal forces of a passing planet will do. Once you’ve grabbed a piece of the comet, you could put it in orbit around the site where the need exists—Earth, the Moon, Mars, wherever—and intermittently go up and grab iceberg-size chunks of it. Of course, you’ll have to figure out how to accomplish all that, but you’d be working on engineering problems, not scientific ones. Any clever engineer would delight in being tasked to solve them.
There you have it: one vision of a future avenue to peace and healing. In the centuries-long alliance between warfighters and skywatchers, the two sides have more often been in sync than at odds. Now astrophysicists and space scientists—heirs of the skywatchers of yore—may hold the power to erase a perennial rationale for war.
But we’re not there yet. For millennia, war between nations, regions, religious factions, clans, or generally disagreeing or competing humans seems to have been always on the horizon or under way. Yet despite its ubiquity and persistence, “we (or at least we Americans) have forgotten the meaning of war,” wrote the noted historian Tony Judt not long before his death. “In part this is, perhaps, because the impact of war in the twentieth century, though global in reach, was not everywhere the same.” In Africa, in Europe, in Latin America, in Asia, in the Middle East, war in the last century “signified occupation, displacement, deprivation, destruction, and mass murder,” the loss of family and neighbors, homes and shops, personal safety and national autonomy. For both victors and losers, and both sides in the long strings of civil wars, the memories of horror were similar. The United States, on the other hand,
avoided all that. Americans experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The U.S. was never occupied. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swaths of national territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), it has never suffered the other consequences of defeat. Despite the ambivalence of its most recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were “good wars.” The USA was enriched rather than impoverished by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome[, and thus] for many American commentators and policymakers the message of the last century is that war works. . . . For Washington, war remains an option—in this case the first option. For the rest of the developed world it has become a last resort.6
If an all-out space-enabled war should ever occur, it would bear no resemblance to the world wars portrayed in All Quiet on the Western Front or The Naked and the Dead or the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Nor would it be like Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan. There would be no muddy, stinking trenches or sweltering, unforgiving deserts; nineteen-year-old boys would not blindly stagger through jungles half a world away; no Marine would see his buddy’s head blown half off a yard from where he crouched. True space-age war would be sanitized, emotionless, thorough, and likely brief. Nations would fail in a day.
However often American public figures proclaim their country’s prominence or dominance, the work that must be done in this century is inescapably cooperative—a point made by President Barack Obama in a speech to the UN General Assembly eight months after taking office:
[M]y responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologize for defending those interests. But it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009—more than at any point in human history—the interests of nations and peoples are shared. . . . The technology we harness can light the path to peace, or forever darken it. . . .
In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.7
Were this understanding—that dominance cannot be the cornerstone of security in an interconnected world—ever to take root, the resulting cooperation would not only help forestall an arms race in outer space but could also help rescue our home planet from some of the upheavals of climate change.
The Paris Agreement—the 2016 United Nations climate accord, accepted by 197 parties as of early 20188—represents the first time that rigorous scientific consensus has shaped the political agenda of the world. People in power have learned that air and water molecules do not carry passports, as the American astrophysicist Carl Sagan was fond of saying. A melting glacier raises the sea level of all the world’s coastlines. Greenhouse gases generated in one area of Earth mix swiftly with air currents that carry them to all areas of Earth. Warming air and warming ocean currents do not observe national boundaries or property rights. Neither would the thousands of deadly fragments of wayward orbital debris that an attack on a satellite would produce. No longer can the inhabitants of Earth survive as a collection of tribes, each looking out for only its own members. The world itself has become a tribe.
The same day Obama spoke at the United Nations, the journal Nature published grave news about the drastically accelerated melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and
Greenland in 2003–2007 compared with that of the preceding decade. This was a finding by British climatologists, who based their determination on fifty million laser readings from a NASA satellite: an instance of international cooperation, in this case between allies. But adversaries, too, sometimes toss a little cooperation in with their confrontations. It’s diplomacy’s forte.
In July 2015, US–Russian relations pointed toward the dawn of Cold War 2.0. Inflammatory rhetoric had been ratcheted up in the wake of Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and Russian military incursions across the Ukrainian border. In response, the United States had led the call for Western sanctions against Russia. Yet all that bad blood did not keep Russia from sending an unmanned cargo ship packed with food, water, oxygen, and equipment to the International Space Station to do what the community of spacefaring nations needed done following the failure of three supply missions within seven months (two US failures and one Russian). Russia deployed its reliable Soyuz-U rocket—not merely because the space station’s crew consisted of two Russians and an American, not merely because Russia and America are founding partners of the ISS, but also because of the hefty sums Russia had been getting as sole provider of transport to the ISS.
Yes, it’s complicated. And yes, there’s no shortage of contradictions. But in the end, off-planet survival among spacefaring comrades can override them all.
One notable twentieth-century result of the countless alliances between astrophysics and the military is the thermonuclear fusion bomb, whose design principles arise in part from the astrophysicist’s investigations of the cosmic crucible that occupies the center of every star. A less explosive example, from our own century, is the ChemCam instrument (short for Chemistry and Camera) atop the Curiosity rover, which began trundling across Mars in August 2012. From its skybox position on the rover’s mast, ChemCam fires laser pulses at rocks and soil and then uses its spectrometer to analyze the chemical makeup of what got vaporized.
Who or what built ChemCam? The Los Alamos National Laboratory: birthplace of the atom bomb, originator of hundreds of spacecraft instruments designed for use by the military, and home to the Center for Earth and Space Science, a division of the National Security Education Center as well as a hub of support for astrophysics. Los Alamos Lab operates under the auspices of the National Nuclear Security Administration, whose mission is to maintain and protect America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons while simultaneously working to undercut the proliferation of such stockpiles elsewhere in the world. And the lab’s astrophysicists use the same supercomputer and similar software to calculate the yield from hydrogen fusion within the heart of a star that physicists use to calculate the yield of a hydrogen bomb. You’d have to look far and wide to find a clearer example of dual use.
Say you want to know what takes place during the explosion of a nuclear bomb. If you were to tabulate the many varieties of subatomic particles, and track the ways they interact and transmute into one another under controlled conditions of temperature and pressure—not to mention the particles that get created or destroyed in the process—you’d quickly realize you need more than pencil and paper. You need computers. Powerful computers.
A properly programmed computer can calculate crucial parameters for nuclear bomb design, ignition, and explosive yields, so it can predict what to expect from an experiment. Of course, “experiment” means the actual detonation of a nuclear bomb, either in a test or in warfare. During the Manhattan Project, in the 1940s, Los Alamos used mechanical calculators and early IBM punch-card tabulators to calculate atomic bomb yields. Decade by decade, as computing power increased exponentially, so too did the power to calculate and understand in detail the nuclear happenings in a nuclear explosion. And the needs of Los Alamos fostered the sustained quest to build the fastest computer in the world.
Second-generation computers of the 1960s, furnished with transistors that greatly accelerated their performance, in part made the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty possible. While later generations of computers didn’t stop the arms race, they did offer a viable way to test weapon systems without actually detonating anything. By 1998, the Los Alamos supercomputer Blue Mountain could run 1.6 trillion calculations per second. By 2009, the lab’s Roadrunner had increased that speed more than six hundredfold, to the milestone of one quadrillion calculations per second. And by late 2017, its Trinity supercomputer had racked up another factor of fourteen in computing power.9
We know that stars generate energy in exactly the same way that hydrogen bombs do. The difference is that the controlled nuclear fusion that happens in the star’s core is contained by the weight of the star itself, whereas in warfare the nuclear fusion is positively uncontrolled—the precise objective of a bomb. And that is why astrophysicists have long been associated with Los Alamos National Lab and its supercomputers. Picture scientists working away on opposite sides of a classified wall. On one side, you have researchers engaged in secret projects that are “responsible for enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science.”10 On the other side, you have researchers trying to figure out how stars in the universe live and die. Each side is accessory to the other’s needs, interests, and resources.
If you seek more evidence, search the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System11 for research published in 2017 whose co-authors are affiliated with Los Alamos National Laboratory. You’ll recover 102 papers. On average, that’s an astrophysics paper published every 3.6 days. And that’s the unclassified research. Next, peruse the titles of Los Alamos–affiliated papers over the years. Supernovas turn out to be a perennial favorite. Published in the year 2013, for instance, there’s “The Los Alamos Supernova Light-curve Project: Computational Methods.” In 2013–14 there’s a three-paper sequence: “Finding the First Cosmic Explosions. I. Pair-instability Supernovae,” “II. Core-collapse Supernovae,” and “III. Pulsational Pair-instability Supernovae.” For 2006 you’ll find “Modeling Supernova Shocks with Intense Lasers.” For earlier years, you’ll see titles such as “Testing Astrophysics in the Lab: Simulations with the FLASH Code” (2003) and “Gamma-Ray Bursts: The Most Powerful Cosmic Explosions” (2002).
Born in Cold War fear, the alliance between space and national security remains alive and well in the unstable geopolitical climes of the twenty-first century. And it swings on a double-hinged door.
Some alliances, however, are forced on everybody in all domains on all sides because there’s no other choice, as with the swarms of dreck passing overhead in Earth orbit and posing a volitionless threat not only to everything else circling up there but also to our wholly space-dependent way of life down here. Orbital debris is widely recognized as so grave a danger that Bill Maher, in the great American tradition of political satire—the necessary-for-survival alliance of truth, parody, pain, and healing—did a routine about it:
STAR DREK
Human beings are such slobs that, from now on, pigs must declare us the other white meat. Do you know that right now there is so much discarded trash in outer space that three times last month the International Space Station was almost hit by some useless hunk of floating metal—not unlike the International Space Station itself? So really, you’ve got to give the human race credit: only humans could visit an infinite void and leave it cluttered. Not only have we screwed up our own planet; somehow we have also managed to use up all the space in space.
Now, history shows over and over again that if the citizens of Earth put their minds to it, they can destroy anything. It doesn’t matter how remote or pristine, together, yes, we can fuck it up. The age of space exploration is only fifty years old, and we have already managed to turn the final frontier into the New Jersey Meadowlands.12
One place you won’t find comic relief is a US presidential commission report or a military doctrine document about national security space/milspace/counterspace. Some of the language in these things might lead a reader to assume that America’s military already has at its disposal not merely scores of ded
icated satellites, which it does, but also a panoply of fully functional space weapons suitable for various kinds of confrontations, which it does not. The reader might further assume that other countries will shortly have such weapons too and that all sides are ready, willing, and able to deploy them. Not true.
Back in 2009, Major Scott A. Weston, USAF, published a piece in the Air Force’s own Air & Space Power Journal in which he seeks to separate the factual from the fictional regarding prospects for space war. The major, who envisions a sky filled with hazardous debris under any scenario of overt space conflict, dismantles “the very concept of a space Pearl Harbor.” That specter was raised repeatedly in the January 2001 final report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld. Two pages into the executive summary, the report asserts that an attack on American space assets during a crisis or conflict is not improbable. “If the U.S. is to avoid a ‘Space Pearl Harbor,’ it needs to take seriously the possibility of an attack on U.S. space systems.”13 Weston emphatically disagrees:
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