Present at the Future

by Ira Flatow

  Bob Halterman, former executive director of the space travel and tourism division of the Space Transportation Association, has been studying the legal and technical barriers to space tourism and says the study outlined a plan to go about taking down those barriers. “We’ve seen a lot of progress made, both in the regulatory and the legislative,” he says, “and also in the finance and in the insurance worlds.”

  “I think Rutan has taken what we might call the first baby step,” says Grey, “but it’s opened a Pandora’s box of opportunity, and that’s really the big thing he’s done. He hasn’t built a spaceship that’s going to go to the moon or even go into orbit; he’s built something that says, ‘Hey, it’s possible; we can go further.’ And that’s a very important consideration.

  “There’s a fellow named Bob Bigelow building a space hotel in Las Vegas, which will be an orbiting commercial facility,” says Grey. “And it’s a hotel and a lab. At some point in the future, hopefully not that far away, maybe before 2020, we’re going to see vehicles like Elon’s carrying people and payloads to that private facility. At which point, if the NASA human exploration goes away, that would be sad; we would lose the Lewis-and-Clark function. But the breakout, the human breakout of the planet, would have moved to a sustainable level and we would be on our way.”

  Once people whet their appetite for space travel by a stay in an orbiting hotel, Whitesides believes they, like all tourists, will want to go even farther: “People will be out of the Earth’s atmosphere and be able to look at the moon real clearly, and once they see that, I think they would have a desire to go. So beyond the orbiting resort hotel would be a cruise ship taking people on excursions to the moon and perhaps down to the surface and back, giving them a chance to do some prospecting and perhaps look at Tranquility Base or visit the international research station that might be there by then.”

  Grey agrees: “This has been progressive. First people went to the space camp at Huntsville, Alabama. And then they flew in Russian jet airplanes to the edge of space. These are commercial. Then we’ve got SpaceShipOne and Branson’s suborbital flights. The next thing we’re going to find, as we build that capability for orbital flights on a regular basis, not for twenty million bucks but for maybe a fair amount of money,” is the desire to travel farther and farther out into space and “then eventually perhaps to the planets.”

  THE TANG EFFECT

  The space race of the 1960s spun off new products and materials, from Velcro fasteners to Tang, the orange-flavored breakfast drink. “Space age” plastics, electronics, or fabrics were frequently cited as the unexpected but welcome by-products of space technology. Could the fertile and freethinking minds of space entrepreneurs enhance the future of science and technology too?

  Tumlinson thinks so: “There are hundreds, if not thousands, of university students who have been wanting to have access to the microgravity that you can get out of a SpaceShipOne-type vehicle and haven’t been able to do so either [because of] cost or because they’re in the queue waiting for government vehicles. So that’s going to open up a whole new realm. And also in the zero-G planes that are being flown out there. You’re going to be able to have a lot more access to science.

  “Also, in the bigger picture: The people that came to America, this new world, originally were coming for, shall we say, selfish, greedy reasons and enterprise reasons to make money. And you know, maybe that’s not clean in the world of science. But in the end, because of the access they had, they created a new nation called America, and this country has revolutionized science across the board completely. So by creating access to the new world of space, where people who couldn’t have afforded to go there before can get out there, we’re going to see an incredible amount of revolutionary stuff happen in science, across the board.”

  THE SPACE ELEVATOR

  That kind of out-of-the-box, creative thinking is already evident in an idea that has gained quite a few followers. It’s called the space elevator, and if you search for it on the Internet, you’ll find millions of references.

  “It’s a really hot topic,” says a very excited Whitesides, whose organization is carefully studying the idea. “We know that as a society or civilization, we’re serious about space exploration when we build the space elevator. It’s really the Brooklyn Bridge to space.”

  The space elevator is a very simple idea first suggested by one of the world’s great futurists, science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. In his 1953 novel The Fountains of Paradise, Clarke’s hero wants to build a space elevator. Such an elevator would have a 24,000-mile long cable, one end anchored on Earth, the other on a satellite orbiting the Earth. Overcoming gravity—that is, getting into Earth orbit—is the most difficult and energy-consuming part of any trip into space. The space elevator makes that job much easier. You settle into geosynchronous orbit—up where those communications satellites are parked—and drop a long but very strong wire or ribbon back down to Earth.

  “Then you have an elevator, a sort of a climber that hooks on the side of it and it climbs up into space. And the wonderful thing about that is that you don’t have to use rockets to get out of the so-called gravity well of Earth.” You can slowly ascend and then get up to the top, and then off you go into the solar system.

  So much for the theory. Actually building one is another story. The wire ribbon would have to stretch for 30,000 to 60,000 miles. What material could be strong enough to stretch that far without breaking? Hi-tech carbon nanotubes have been proposed. (See the “Nanotechnology” section for a fuller description.) Some space enthusiasts think that carbon nanotubes could make a cable for a real space elevator. NASA has invested in some studies of exactly how useful carbon nanotubes might be in making a space elevator cable and has even held a scientific conference on the subject after the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2002. But so far, progress on stringing carbon nanotubes together has been slow. Carbon nanotubes are very strong, but they are also very slippery and difficult to align to make a thread, much less a miles-long cable. So right now, it’s extremely expensive to make carbon-nanotube fiber.

  “We’ve never really built anything that long ever before and not even made something as big as a pencil with carbon nanotubes,” warns Musk. “I think there would be some hesitation for people to have this gigantic cable sort of spinning out from Earth and potentially becoming a hazard if it ever does break or come loose or something like that.”

  Whitesides agrees. The space elevator is a concept for the future. But as a metaphor, it’s a dream that fits. “The reason there was a bridge built across the river in New York was the large, thriving economies on either side. By the time we have large cities and economies on the moon, Mars, on the asteroids in space between worlds, then the demand might be there for that sort of technology. And commensurately, that technology will have developed to a level to be able to fulfill that demand.

  “Just as, when they first landed in Manhattan, the idea of a bridge that could span that river, of course, was something that was difficult. I think that when we begin to see these large populations moving off [into] space, that demand will grow.”

  THE NEXT SMALL STEPS

  Grey, Tumlinson, and Halterman believe that the space entrepreneurs have taken the very first but important steps into privatizing and commercializing space. Once people take those first trips into orbit, says Halterman, they’ll want more. “People have expressed their desire in surveys for a place to stay in space, so that gives credence to putting up a habitat of some sort—a resort hotel, perhaps. And then people will be out of the Earth’s atmosphere and be able to look at the moon real clearly, and once they see that I think they would have a desire to go.”

  Grey points out that if you want to look at a model of how the government can create, stimulate, and then pass off a technology to private industry, look no further than the commercial satellite business, an industry generating about $100 billion in revenue per year.

  “How did that get started? It g
ot started because NASA invested about a billion dollars’ worth of taxpayers’ money over a ten-year period to create the technology. It was then turned over completely to private industry. NASA does no advanced communication research anymore. It’s all done by private industry. Now see if we can use that model in transportation. NASA still has some fairly good technology programs. If NASA is willing to open this technology up for private enterprise to use, then private enterprise can pick that up and take these next steps, move a little further into orbital flight and so on. But we’re not going to do it with SpaceShipOne technology.”

  PART VII

  THE OCEANS ARE IN TROUBLE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SYLVIA EARLE: SOUNDING THE ALARM

  I want to get out into the water. I want to see fish, real fish, not fish in a laboratory.

  —SYLVIA EARLE

  The oceans are in trouble. Ninety percent of large fish species worldwide—including tuna, swordfish, and marlin—have been decimated by overfishing and destructive fishing practices such as deep-sea bottom trolling. Seventy-five percent of all commercial fisheries have been fished to capacity and are approaching collapse, if they haven’t collapsed already. Coral reefs and deep-sea habitats are being destroyed, threatened by human activities. Global warming is heating the oceans, causing them to be less hospitable to coral reefs. And in some places, coral reefs have been dying in such huge quantities that some have been almost wiped out.

  Less than 1 percent of the Earth’s oceans are under some kind of protection. We have protection for trees, owls, and fish in our rivers. But only 1 percent of the Earth’s oceans are protected.

  Just how bad is the situation? According to research published in the journal Science, by 2048, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse because of the loss of biodiversity in the oceans.

  Sylvia Earle is working to change that. Earle is an icon of ocean exploration. More than anyone since Jacques Cousteau, Earle, who has the biologist credentials Cousteau never earned, is perhaps the world’s most visible—and vocal—marine biologist. As executive director for marine programs at Conservation International in Washington, Earle says that new fishing methods developed since the 1950s to locate and catch fish have decimated fish populations all over the world.

  “The oceans of the world are in trouble as a consequence of our seemingly insatiable appetite for what we take out of the sea. And it has changed over time. Certainly the fishing issues are global. They’re not limited to any one country or any one continent. And the solutions have to be global too.”

  AMBER WAVES OF FISH?

  One of the solutions is very simple, says Earle. “Think of fish as wildlife,” she espouses. “We don’t try to feed six billion people with wildlife anymore. We never did try to feed that many people. But going back ten thousand years, as hunter-gatherers, we largely made a living from wildlife. It’s only when we started to cultivate that we began to get to an era where we could support larger numbers, and today, about half the calories that feed the people of the world come from a handful of grasses, corn, rice, wheat. Wildlife from the sea is still contributing to the protein that we extract. But we have really not only taken the fish themselves but we’ve [also] destroyed much of the resilience of the ocean through the by-catch that goes along with taking the fish that are consumed, and the habitat destruction. It’s really a growing problem.”

  Our restaurants and supermarkets have been typically filled with food fish—such as tuna and swordfish—which are very large and grow rapidly. So when we hunt and capture them from the sea, they feed a lot of people and reproduce and grow quickly. But overfishing—and our taste for sushi—has depleted stocks of those fish, leaving us with others that do not grow back so quickly. Take the newly popular orange roughy. That fish on your plate may take 30 years to mature and may actually be 100 years old! Imagine how long it will take to replace that entrée!

  “So in time,” says Earle, “we will necessarily have to look to ways to cultivate what we take from aquatic systems for large amounts of protein, if we are to take aquatic creatures at all.”

  We arrived at this crossroads because our culture teaches us that the oceans are boundless, that they are so vast and plentiful that they could never be depleted, says Earle. We believed many years ago that our forests and topsoils and watersheds were plentiful too, until the day came when they began to disappear. And we did something about protecting them.

  “The [National] Park Service came into being to protect areas of natural beauty, our cultural, our historic, our natural heritage, and today, not just in North America but around the world. About twelve percent of the land enjoys some form of protection. In the ocean, it’s a tiny fraction of one percent, and that’s probably because we still have this attitude that the ocean is infinite and able to rebound no matter what we do. But in the ocean, we’re learning not only that it can be influenced by what we do but [also that] we can take positive actions to protect what’s there.”

  Earle says we need to find these critical areas, these hot spots in the oceans, that are most vulnerable and try to protect them. Some of these places are the sea mounts, the tops of underwater mountains, extensive mountain ranges that run down the Atlantic, the Pacific, and Indian Oceans like giant backbones. They rise from the ocean floor a thousand meters or more, yet remain below the surface.

  Though hidden from view, “they’re crowned with life. One of the special things about them is the apparent high degree of specific endemism, creatures that live there and nowhere else, not only in the ocean or the world but in the universe. We look at the Galapagos as a special place because it has creatures that occur there and nowhere else that we know about. The same appears to be true of these undersea islands. They don’t break the surface, but they’re islands nonetheless, separated from other places where such creatures can grow by many miles, and so they’ve developed their own character.”

  They are teeming with a rich diversity of life. And it’s this biodiversity that makes the sea mounts very important, able to resist and recover from change. “Diversity has a really important place in the world. In terms of providing stability, when changes occur, if there’s great diversity, somebody’s going to be able to respond favorably to those changes. If you’ve got everybody basically responding in the same way, then the consequences can be really drastic.”

  Yet even these sea mounts, located beyond any territorial waters, or economic zones, are under attack by forces that are destroying them. Earle likens them to “the Wild West—there’s little to inhibit people from doing just about anything they want to do out there.” A handful of nations, she says, are “disproportionately destroying something that we don’t know how to put back together again.” By that she means trawling, using heavy nets that scrape the sea floor, “like using a bulldozer to catch songbirds and squirrels, they’re knocking down ancient corals, sponges—the whole cross-section of life that is there, and it is simply thrown away, in order to capture a relatively small number of fish that feed not a lot of people but a high-end luxury market, people who are not really dependent on the sea for food but rather are willing to pay a high price. And all of us pay a high price because of the destruction that is brought about because of this action.”

  Earle is hoping that the United Nations may take action, as it did in 1992, putting high seas drift nets off-limits in some areas “because they were found to be so destructive and disproportionately favoring just a few industries and a few countries at a loss to all of us. Now that people are moving deeper and further offshore to get the last remaining pockets of protein in the sea, there is a similar concern that the cost of doing this, the cost to all of us for all time for the benefit of a few in the short term is just not worth it.”

  The ocean is under attack in other ways, and a cause for great concern, she says. The increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is setting off a process that is making the ocean more acidic, a thought that is setting off alarms in the minds of marine b
iologists. Because a more acidic ocean means that corals may not get the calcium from seawater they need to build their homes. Nor may the other tiny, planktonlike creatures in the ocean be able to build the stony calcium-carbonate shells that are their homes.

  “Now, the ocean has not gone acid yet, for heaven’s sake. It’s still pretty solidly on the basic side of things, but there is a trend, and just as we worry about looking at the decline of fish over the last hundred years, especially the last fifty, we’re seeing a trend now in the ocean that we ought to know about at least and have on the balance sheet when we think about what do we do next. We have acid rain. We don’t need acid ocean.”

  Despite the sad state of the oceans, Earle is not pessimistic about the future. “There’s plenty of reason to be positive. After all, ten percent of the big fish are still there. They’re not all gone yet. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape. Despite the fact that we’ve lost maybe thirty percent and another twenty percent are in bad shape, there’s still a chance. I am inspired by individuals.” Earle sees promising signs of cooperation around the world.

  “Just a few years ago, we had a conference that pulled together representatives from twenty countries. We had seventy different organizations, only a hundred fifty people, that gave rise to something like an action plan for trying to come up with not just ‘Woe is me, here are the problems’ but [instead] here are some things we can do. And I see conservation organizations working together: World Wildlife Fund, Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense, NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council]—a whole suite of organizations that are really pulling together, or they always have had common objectives but now there is increased motivation to try to get the job done, and that means working with industry because the solutions are there. Or working with governments, working with whatever it takes to find a common ground, to show the connection between a sound environment and a sound economy, a sound environment and health, a sound environment and all the things we hold near and dear, including life itself.”