Worlds Without Ends

What's the point of going into space? The answer lies in a future economy based on "charm"

Frederick Turner from the June 1996 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

When we are all able to dispose of resources equivalent to those of a present-day aristocrat, we will all want to do the equivalent of hunting, sailing, fishing, gardening. We will all want to relive the wild adventure of the Amerindians working their way down a brand-new continent, the Polynesians feeling their way across the Pacific, the Bantu conquering southern Africa, the Europeans carving out colonial empires. We will never again need theme parks; new planets will satisfy every need that the theme park unsuccessfully tries to meet, and Old Earth will take on instantly a pathos and preciousness it never had for us before by contrast with the terrors of our grand adventure.

Thus we will rediscover the wild again in the almost insuperably hostile plains and mountains of Mars. No longer alienated from reality, we will feel its gritty pressure as we struggle against the hostile terrain. We will be making history there, for there is all the history in a world to make. The mother planet, already beginning to be a boxed-in little place for the more spiritually enterprising, and a prison for our useless young men, will gain a new kind of magic as our home and alma mater.

Who will make all this happen? Not, perhaps, the nation state; it is doubtful that the state as an institution will ever again command the kind of loyalties and commitments and moral prestige that gave us World War I, the Grand Coulee Dam, the defense of Stalingrad, the Holocaust, and the Apollo program. It will be corporations that will go into space, but not, surely, corporations like industrial General Motors or information-based Microsoft. Charm industry corporations will be more like exclusive safari adventure outfits, theater companies, churches, movie studios, art workshops, literary publishers, sports clubs, resort hotels, restaurants.

Eventually it may even be families and individuals who go up there. The technology they will use will be a combination of the almost unimaginable with the familiar: biotech and nanotech to supply the manufacturing base, traditional aeronautics to get us out of Earth's gravity well, human bioengineering to alter our bodies to suit other planets, architecture and theater design to create bearable living conditions, materials science (especially intelligent materials), artificial intelligence, horticulture, self-replicating robots, genetically tailored and trained domestic animals. The keys will be financial cheapness (mainly keeping down labor costs through the recruitment of wealthy volunteers and hobbyists), the use of local materials, improvisation in a technologically fail-safe context, the adaptation of humans to the environment, and the identification of existing far-from-equilibrium energy systems in the solar system that can be tweaked with little effort to create big changes.

More important than the technology, though, will be the artistic insight and economy that will tie it all together and sell it to the public. I have spelled out how all this might work in my epic poem Genesis, and more scholarly treatments may be found in the work of such scientists as Robert Haynes, Christopher McKay, Robert Zubrin, Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan, and Martyn Fogg.

Apologists for space exploration have often added to their list of practical reasons to go to space a half-apologetic reference to the adventure and aspiration of it. It is as if they were ashamed of their true motivations and had to relegate them to the position of an afterthought. But a cold analysis of the direction of the world's economic future leaves such motivations as the only reliable source of good old-fashioned profit, once every automatable and replicable industry has, by improvements in efficiency and competitive reduction of costs, priced itself into economic insignificance. The nations and corporations that get in on the ground floor of the emerging charm economy will control the pipelines of economic value. Terraforming is art, adventure, history, travel: Invest in these and watch your money grow.