Essays

by Gregory Benford

  Others tried to follow. Shackleton made some progress, and then national rivalry became far more serious: World War I swallowed up the exploratory energies. Admiral Byrd and others made headway between the wars, but true, methodical Antarctic exploration did not resume in earnest until the International Geophysical Year, 1957.

  The wars gave the International Geophysical Year teams cheap, reliable air and sea transport technology. (Scientists don't like to talk about it much, but modem war bequeaths science a feast of intriguing gadgets.) Military services were happy to assist, exercising their capabilities. International though the spirit was, national and territorial claims did not vanish; Argentina and Chile still mutter over their rights to turf. Indeed, perhaps the major reason nobody disturbs the present high-minded international air is that no serious resources seem to be at stake. Discover a rich field for mining or pumping and all bets are off.

  Scott-Amundsen: Apollo. Shackleton and Byrd: Voyager and Galileo. The World Wars, in this analogy, are like our rising concern with domestic problems -- not soaring nationalism, luckily, but at least a deflection of those energies to local concerns.

  Bruce Murray pointed out, in a speech published in Space Policy, Feb. 1991, that a science fictional alternate world scenario can perhaps illuminate our predicament. Think what our world would be like, he said, if the two-term limit on the presidency had not been enacted in the late 1940s. Franklin Roosevelt's four terms had provoked that change in the Constitution. The first president it applied to was Dwight Eisenhower. I remember how popular he was even in 1960. I'm pretty sure he could have beaten Kennedy; good grief, Nixon almost did.

  Eisenhower would have presided over the whole early Space Age, 195764. He called space programs "pie in the sky," refused to fund research at a fast clip, and warned us against the "military-industrial complex".

  In a parallel world with Eisenhower in office until 1964, we would have had no brave setting of the Apollo goal, no race to the moon. "It was that close," Bruce said.

  He thinks that by 1990 we would probably have seen some US-USSR muscle-flexing in near Earth orbit and probably a few unmanned probes would have studied the moon. No Grand Tour trajectory for Voyager, probably no Mariner to Mars or any of the rest of it. George Bush's 1989 speech might have been a stalwart call for a manned moon landing before the turn of the millennium.

  Not impossible. I can scarcely argue that such a plausible, sensible space program was unlikely. After all, I had once written a story in which Robert Taft got the nomination in 1952, not Eisenhower. (And Taft's private choice for the vice presidency was one Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin...)

  The plausibility of this imaginary history tells us that we have been very lucky. We lived through dramatic times, Sputnik-Apollo-Voyager, which quite probably will be seen as like Columbus-Magellan-Drake. Maybe we are now getting back to normal. And normal means, alas, dull.

  The trick in using analogies and scenarios is knowing when to stop. How does our predicament differ from the past? We must play to those differences if we are to steer a better course than Destiny would give us.

  Large space projects have fed off nationalism. Kennedy sold fears of Soviet technology, with an attractive patina of worry over our science education. This worked well -- and I directly benefited, being a senior in high school in 1959, from the special science courses rushed into the schools; in fact, I might well not be a scientist today, were it not for the sudden spotlight cast on lowly high school physics courses.

  Gerard K. O'Neill tried to hook up his giant solar power collecting satellites to the energy "crisis" of the 1970s, but of course the price of oil fell well before any such gargantuan project could get under way.)I never really believed in the O'Neill designs or strategy, and spent an entire dinner in a pricey restaurant trying to argue him out of the approach. He was sure that eventually energy prices would prove him right. When he died in 1992 he was still rather wistfully pushing the project.}

  The paranoia road is necessarily short. Fears abate. Enemies topple. So it's time to face "Space as a Place" -- a terrain to be studied and used in its own right, not as a sideshow battleground for earthly concerns.

  We must also face the fact that we've done the easy things. Putting a pressurized Huygens probe on Titan, amid chilly winds and with many more light-minutes of delay in getting radio orders through, will be a much tougher job than was landing Viking on Mars.

  There are some signs of intelligent management. In January 1994 NASA launched Clementine, a bargain basement mission. It rose on a Titan IIG rocket, recycled after spending 25 years in an Arkansas ICBM silo. It is a light, low-cost probe, using land testing) sensors developed by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the heir to the Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. "Star Wars." Clementine is state of the art with powerful laser-ranging device which can map our moon completely for the first time, then leave the moon and fly by an asteroid to within 100 kilometers, 1620 Geographos, about the time you read this.

  Contrasting with the billion dollar Mars Observer, Clementine cost a mere 75 million. Plans for a second mission which will rendezvous with an asteroid and study it come in at about 30 million dollars. A small team put Clementinc together in two years. Such savings point to the hard-nosed, realistic program we need.

  Space must be made cheaper. Even Space Station Freedom, an orbiting pork barrel, is proving to be more than the congress can swallow. The present NASA Administrator, Daniel Goldin, has negotiated with Russia to combine Freedom and Mir, their already orbiting station.

  The reality of the mid-1990s seems to be that a go-it-alone station is not going to get funded by congress. A three-step plan appeals: first, send shuttle flights to the existing Mir for early experiments. Second, fly up US add-ons, so we get our own gear running. Third, collaborate on Mir II, a much fancier station, somewhere a decade or so hence. The trouble here is that shuttles can carry only light payloads into the high-latitude Mir orbit. We can't get by with this "workhorse" any longer. This opens the door to a new, better workhorse vehicle to come.

  I suspect this is how matters will work out. US-Russian joint ventures contain the ominously large station costs, letting the rest of the space program go on with long-range plans that have some fiscal plausibility. Symbolizing the end of the Cold War, collaboration will also provide jobs for Russian engineers who might otherwise be working on North Korean or Libyan missile projects.

  It would also lessen the load on the Shuttle. This is a time bomb in the belly of NASA, for its own internal studies show that the odds are about one in seventy-eight of a major accident, every time it flies. I served on a study group assessing the Shuttle in the 1970s, and we calculated the odds rather higher -- about four percent, or one flight in twenty-five. Regrettably, Challenger was right on the money. Then NASA became obsessed with hand-tuning every bolt on the craft, and now the odds are better.

  But they will never be good. Rockets are not safe, period. The Titan failure rate is about three percent, and the Russian Protons do about the same. No rocket has ever done better over the long haul.

  The schoolteachers-in-shuttles agenda, sold to the public for so long, came out of wanting to project the Eisenhower perspective-- a go-slow Space Age, elbows tucked in, chin down, making no mistakes. How can we counter that?

  First, appeal to the frontier. Young people, not just Americans, want to believe in an expansive sense of the future. More than consumerism and the Beavis & Butthead worldview. Our time needs heroes rather desperately. Notice how the media seize on the merest sign of character, such as Attorney General Janet Reno's accepting some blame for the errors of her underlings.

  Political leaders are tuned to sense this better than scientists. That's why the emphasis on manned space, which scientists like James Van Allen deplore because, after all, it is pricey and returns little for research folk to study. Man-in-space is a political event.

  Actually, the general risk of rocketry plays to this. Danger equals drama. It would be a
breath of fresh air if the President would simply tell the public that every launch is much more like a test pilot run, with casualties expected. No schoolteachers riding a bus into orbit. Instead, gutsy men and women on a wing and a prayer. As in The Right Stuff, "No Buck Rogers, no bucks."

  We'll probably have a shuttle blowup before this decade is out, a fiery finish with grieving widows, and we might as well be prepared. Indeed, the deeper lesson we should drive home is that space will never be safe. Adventures aren't.

  Second, we should have a clear set of cost-conscious reasons for every single project. Here the Antarctica analogy helps.

  There are still solid national reasons for space. Nobody thought that there were good scientific uses to Antarctica when Scott and Amundsen raced across it. We didn't see that chilly clime as a laboratory peculiarly sensitive to the whole planetary system.

  Now the "ozone hole" is a major diagnostic of our planetary health, an early indicator of the depletion which is hard to measure globally, but gives itself away among the frozen crystals floating high above the poles.

  The space analogy to this is "comparative planetology." We can learn basic information about how our system works by seeing the variants played out on Mars, Venus and elsewhere. These places can teach us much about the sensitivity of planets to the sun, to chemical components in their atmospheres, and much else. Clearly there is some connection between solar activity and climate, but we know little of how it works, much less how to make predictions. Mankind arose during the last great inter-glacial time, and another may be coming. What should we do about it.?

  The Martian polar caps contain layers going back to the Ice Ages of Earth. Was the main cause external to both planet s-- the sun? Or is there something more complicated going on, involving the atmospheres as primary players?

  These questions are best answered by robots. They send back reams of data, grist for the scientists' mill -- for people like me, who explore the solar system in their mind's eye. What about manned flight?

  An old siren song might work here: leadership in aerospace. Control of how to get into orbit. Further, dominance of the technologies which might be useful in future conflicts. This certainly means communication and surveillance satellites, but it probably implies some space station capability as well. Certainly, even big robotic expeditions to other worlds will take some assembly in orbit.

  I doubt that robots can do that, though the answer is not obvious. Politically, the manned solution to orbital assembly might be preferred simply because the public will find it far more interesting than watching a cousin of R2D2 fitting pipes together in zero g.

  Most space advocates have regrouped around a clear, seemingly inevitable goal: Mars. Mostly, I suspect, for its romance, mystery and the classic: because it's there. Of all manned projects-- the space station, a moon base, even power satellites--it promises the least, Alan Steele argues, in economic or technological spinoff benefits. Probably true. But it's also the one goal which can quicken the pulse of the multitude.

  I don't think anything on the space menu can satisfy a public longing for action with meaning nearly as well as Mars. It will be expensive and dangerous and we can all go, via TV.

  But to even propose such a thing, as George Bush did, pushes quite a few problems to the top of any space agenda. Current blue-sky planning for Mars exploration assumes that we will use liquid rockets and take about a year each way. This means problems of human deterioration in zero g become major. calcium leaches from bones, muscles atrophy. Should we do studies of people inside spinning cans, to see if centrifugal effects will duplicate gravity in the physiological sense?

  Maybe. Or perhaps we should look beyond chemical rockets. To fast ships which can get a small payload, of people plus a few weeks' rations, to Mars within a month. Their supplies could be pre-positioned, waiting in orbit at Mars. Nobody needs to leave until all their support gear is in place and working.

  Of course, space station research in rotating living quarters has more human involvement, so it might be politically preferred. But the other major problem of a Mars expedition, really high reliability of all that gear, is best served by sending backup systems along long, slow, cheap orbits.

  This underscores another need: really big rockets for getting considerable masses into Earth orbit. Or else, much better ways to do it --laser-driven systems, say.

  All these are policy decisions, but they must be made in light of what humanity as a whole wants to see in space. Drama. People. Mystery. Wonder.

  Perhaps manned presence should be seen now as intrinsically international, because we desperately need goals as big as the human prospect. The world needs lofty aims. Space buffs love their iconography -- the drama of liftoff, of horizons brimming with the unknown, of Voyagers serenely gliding above alien landscapes. As well, they have an answer to those who say that these are simply the distractions of a high culture, perched atop a seething, oppressed mass.

  The industrial nations have about twenty percent of the world's population. The bulk of humanity labors long and hard for little. Not because the advanced nations steal their wealth -- that same twenty percent produces two thirds of the world's output, including agriculture -- but because most of the world has never learned the many social and intellectual abilities which produce wealth.

  We will probably have no real peace in the world until most of humanity is somewhat prosperous, or at least has solid hope of becoming so. But if they pursue the agenda of the industrial nations, the strain on raw resources will be vast. So, too, will be the pollution from more mining, metal smelting, fossil fuel burning, irrigation and the like. The planet simply can't support it, not with present technology.

  The energy and mass needed for uplifting humanity must come from elsewhere -- space. And it is quite foolish, in the long run, for us to do messy, polluting things in this thin shell of vulnerable air and water which gave birth to us all.

  We're fouling our nest. But a smart bird learns to fly.

  GREGORY BENFORD

  BIOTECH AND NANODREAMS

  If this century has been dominated by bigness--big bombs, big rockets, big wars, giant leaps for mankind -- then perhaps the next century will be the territory of the tiny.

  Biotech is already well afoot in our world, the stuff of both science fiction and stock options. Biology operates on scales of ten to a hundred times a nanometer (a billionth of a meter). Below that, from a few to ten nanometers, lie atoms.

  Nanotechnology -- a capability now only envisioned, applauded and longed for -- attacks the basic structure of matter at the nanometer scale, tinkering with atoms on a one-by-one basis. It vastly elaborates the themes chemistry and biology have wrought on brute mass. More intricate, it can promise much. How much it can deliver depends upon the details.

  It is easy to see that if one is able to replace individual atoms at will, one can make perfectly pure rods and gears like diamond, five times as stiff as steel, fifty times stronger. Gears, bearings, drive shafts -- all the roles of the factory can play out on the stage that for now only enzymes enjoy, inside our cells.

  For now, microgears and micromotors exist about a thousand times larger than true nanotech. In principle, though, single atoms can serve as gear teeth, with single bonds between atoms providing the bearing for rotating rods. It's only a matter of time and will.

  Much excitement surrounds the possibility of descending to such scales, following ideas pioneered by Richard Feynman, in his 1961 essay, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." Later this view was elaborated and advocated by Eric Drexler in the 1980s. Now some tentative steps toward the nanometer level are beginning.

  Such control is tempting. Like most bright promises, it is easy to see possibilities, less simple to see what is probable.

  Nanotech borders on biology, a vast field rich in emotional issues and popular misconceptions. Many people, well versed in 1950s B-movies, believe that radiation can mutate you into another life form directly, not merely your descendants --
most probably, indeed, into some giant, ugly, hungry insect.

  Not all fiction about nanotech or biotech is like this -- there are good examples of firm thinking in Greg Bear's Queen of Angels and the anthology Nanodreams edited by Elton Eliott, and elsewhere.

  All too often, though, in the hands of some science fiction writers, nanotech's promised abilities -- building atom by atom for strength and purity, dramatic new shapes and kinds of substances -- lead to excess. We see stories about quantum, biomolecular brains for space robots, all set to conquer the stars. About miraculous, overnight reshaping of our entire physical world -- the final victory of Information over Mass. Or about accelerated education of our young by nanorobots which coast through their brains, bringing encyclopedias of knowledge disguised in a single mouthful of Koolaid.

  Partly this is natural speculative outgassing. One can make at least one safe prediction: such wild dreams will dog nanotech. The real difficulty in thinking about possibilities is that so little seems ruled out. Agog at the horizons, we neglect the limitations -- both physical and social.

  Nanotech holds forth so much murky promise that writers can appear to be doing hard sf, while in fact just daydreaming. Not only is the metaphorical net not up on this game of dream tennis, it isn't even visible.

  People can tell disciplined speculation from flights of fancy when they deal with something familiar and at hand. Nanotech is neither. Worse, it touches on the edge of quantum mechanical effects, and nothing in modem physics has been belabored more than the inherent uncertainties of the wave-particle duality, and the like. People often take uncertainty as a free ticket to any implausibility, flights of fancy leaving on the hour.

  Developing a discipline demands discipline. Dreaming is not enough.

  One point we do know must operate in nanotech's development: nothing happens in a vacuum. The explosion of biotech, just one or two orders of magnitude above the nanotech scale, will deeply shape what comes of nanotech.