Recap
The ‘Politics of Survival’ was devised in 1969 to bring about the Guaranteed Survival of Mankind, a programme which might take 200-300 years to reach that objective. To discuss it the possible threats to survival were discussed under eight headings: (1) weapons of mass destruction, (2) overpopulation, (3) destruction of irreplaceable natural resources, (4) pollution of the environment, (5) long-term genetic breakdown, (6) large-scale impacts, (7) Sun change or nearby supernova, (8) Contact with other Intelligence (not necessarily with malevolent intent) – the first five being dangers of our own making, and the other three outside forces which could intervene drastically in human affairs (Fig. 1).
In Part 1, those last three were discussed to show that space technology would be needed to counter them, and therefore should be factored into discussion of the first five, (1) and (2) of which were covered in Part 2.
Continuation
3 & 4. Exhaustion of resources and pollution. Although they pose distinct threats to mankind these two headings can be taken together here because the same space technologies are relevant to solving both. These technologies are Earth Resources monitoring from orbit, and manufacturing in space (including energy generation). In both cases considerable work has already been done, but has tended towards small-scale, even exotic applications rather than global answers to problems.
The potential of orbital surveys for Earth resources management is enormous, and much more developed now than it was in 2002, let alone in 1969 when it had only recently been recognised through the results of Project Gemini, Project Apollo and the early Landsat satellites. There are applications in forestry, agriculture, mining and land use of all kinds, as well as in all branches of marine activity. Particular examples are in monitoring volcanic activity, earthquake threats, rainfall, snow, flooding, crop diseases, land spoilage and reclamation; in estimating fish stocks, plotting the availability of nutrients, reporting on ice build-up and on sea states in general; and in determining pollution of land, sea and air. The possibilites were the subject of Dr. David Webb’s contribution to the 1984 Presidential Commission on Space, published in 1986 as Pioneering the Space Frontier, and regrettably were excluded by direction of the senior editor. ASTRA offered to publish his contribution, only for it and his notes to be stolen in an apparently targeted burglary. Someone apparently did not want his views to get out there, but who, there’s no suggestion.
Apart from that lost opportunity, relatively little thought has been given even now to the use of orbital survey data on such a scale. The potential exists for worldwide synoptic assessment of all kinds, and detailed assessments of the damage (and repairs) happening in the environment. The concept ‘Spaceship Earth’ could become literally true, with all the world’s cycles as closely monitored as those aboard a manned spacecraft. But such comprehensive coverage will be of little value if it merely calibrates a steady trend towards breakdown, or if it gives rise to one last gold-rush of resource grabbing which accelerates catastrophe.
Politics of Survival precepts will have to be compatible with the ideologies of the groups who are expected to put them into practise. With all the strains and conflicts of the modern world the earliest Politics of Survival objectives will therefore have to be simple ones, though the effects can be far-reaching nevertheless. One of the first such programmes, to tie together the data-gathering capability of orbital surveys with all related efforts at ground level into one overall effort, might be an international programme with the target of removing hunger from the world within the next twenty years. Ironically, we now know that President Kennedy would have preferred such a programme to the Apollo one which political circumstances forced him to adopt. It should in fact be easier than it first seemed because the figures for world hunger which were available in the late 60s, turned out to be overestimates.
For simplicity of objective in relation to sheer scope it beats Kennedy’s famous target (to put a man on the Moon within the decade) by several orders of magnitude, yet it is hard to see on what ideological grounds any group on Earth could object to it. In fact the programme should generate a ‘band-waggon’ effect in which groups not conspicuously concerned about human suffering at present, would cast around for ways to contribute to the programme and lay claim to some of the credit. One minor example would be that merely from identifying and naming major sources of atmospheric and oceanic pollution, there would be an implication that the sources concerned were contributing to the possible failure of the programme. By observation, the result of such publicity is often a voluntary cleanup accompanied by a loud affirmation of social responsibility. At any mention of such a programme, the usual objection is that it takes no account of human nature: but a well-thought out programme, whose steps can scarcely be opposed without apparently favouring starvation and poverty for others, can turn the most selfish of self-interests to its advantage. Self-interest is generally easier to work with than apathy.
Weather and crop monitoring on continental scales had already begun in the 1980s, in hopes to evaluate and get ahead of the drought problem in Africa.1 Such monitoring ties in directly with proposals for world banks of supplies of food, equipment and medical supplies for early mobilisation before famines take hold. A common complaint is that the resources needed will not be diverted from military spending. The answer is that ‘International Resources Liaison’ – the imaginary international organisation represented by the letters ‘IRL’ in Fig. 8 – could only operate by drawing on the military resources of governments around the world. No-one else has the ships, aircraft, ground transport, communications and personnel for the ‘ground truth’ studies which would be needed and the practical action to follow. Absurd as such an idea might have seemed in the 1960s, the trend is now well established with the use of military ships and aircraft for conservation purposes – as in fisheries protection – and humanitarian ones such as famine and disaster relief, and air-sea rescue. All these had been incorporated by 2002 into the brief of the proposed European Rapid Reaction Force, and while many aspects of that were politically controversial, there’s no argument that some military force shouldn’t do them.
The ‘elimination of hunger’ programme deals only with the organic resources of the Earth, however – the food-producing capability of the land and oceans. Mineral and energy resources will likewise be delineated fully by the data-gathering net, but full exploitation of their potential would be disastrous – in immediate environmental effects and in the shortages to follow. The Politics of Survival should not merely prevent that, but relieve the present industrial burden on Earth’s resources and the environment. That objective, to be quantified in a second major programme, should be to remove all major raw materials gathering, energy generation and industrial processing from the Earth’s surface during the next hundred years.
Fantastic though such a statement may look, the groundwork for the transition has already been done and detailed technical solutions have been proposed for many of the intermediate steps. The former USSR had an ongoing programme of research into manufacturing in space and the USA has worked on it intermittently; Europe and Japan have similar interest in it, and a great deal of research has been done in their respective modules on the International Space Station. The first products will be high-cost, low-mass supplies such as vaccines and electronic components, but once processing facilities exist in orbit, raw materials from the Moon become an attractive proposition because delivery can be made cheaper than from Earth, bringing costs down to the point where most industrial processes can be run profitably from orbit.2 Once again, the need at present is for a programme which bridges the gap between the exotic, limited applications and the large-scale operations which are needed; and once again, the Starseed proposal is one possible answer. The Starseeds would act as test-beds for the transfer of terrestrial industries into space, they and the lunar base would develop the delivery systems needed for raw materials, and the solar power satellites (powersats) which they create (see below) can beam energy to Earth-orbiting factories even more easily than to Earth.
Shifting to extraterrestrial resource gathering could help to ameliorate another political issue of the 1980s, Developed World versus Developing, or (though the terminology did some violence to geography) the North-South conflict of interests.3 Environmentalists believe that the rest of the world cannot aspire to the present per capita energy use of the United States, without serious environmental effects.4 Even a complete switch away from burning fossil fuels and forests (which powersats would allow, even in the Developing World, by tie-ins with appropriate ground-based technology5), while reducing the feared build-up of carbon dioxide and its ‘greenhouse effect’, would still leave serious disturbances due to waste heat. It would be intolerable to suggest that the Developing World should cease its development and remain disadvantaged, in order to permit the present energy-extravagant lifestyle of the Developed World, and as a result some have jumped to the conclusion that the collapse of industrial civilisation is unavoidable. Once again, however, the choice is not simply between pollution and poverty, because development in space is an alternative. 60-70% of the USA’s energy use is industrial; it should be moved systematically into space.
But why should the Developing World opt for space development, and how can it be brought about in present circumstances? A partial answer lies in the vexed question of lunar and planetary resources, controversially described in United Nations treaties as ‘the common heritage of mankind’. (See ‘The Ownership of the Moon’, ON, June 18th, 2023.) As the Starseed programme (for example) aims to provide powersats for every nation on Earth, the Developing World should receive its full share of those benefits – but how is their stake in the programme to be acquired? One interesting suggestion by John Braithwaite (unpublished until the first version of this paper came out in 1987) was that the World Bank should advance credit to developing nations, based on the resources revealed by orbital surveys which they allow to remain unused. It is then easy to imagine the same system being used to secure the Developing World’s stake in space manufacturing and raw material supply from the Moon and the asteroids.
The detailed requirements for space industrialisation – lunar oxygen plants, solar-powered electromagnetic launchers, geosynchronous orbit power stations, processing facilities for lunar and asteroidal materials – have been studied not in government programmes but in private projects such as the Space Studies Institute in Princeton. In his closing speech there at the 1985 Space Manufacturing Conference, the late Prof. O’Neill called for a much expanded programme, whose many facets should include a probe in solar orbit to search for Earth-grazing asteroids, and to a considerable extent that requirement has now been met.
He also called for a small, high-performance re-entry vehicle for personnel transport to and from space stations. That initial need could be met by the Waverider space ambulance, which I described in ‘Waverider, Part 1 & 2’, ON, November 27th and December 4th, 2022. Soon afterwards it became highly topical, due to the disruption to the International Space Station’s crew rotational schedule because of a coolant leak in a Soyuz return capsule (Fig. 2).
The Space Ambulance could have solved that problem, and the more recent one with the return of the Boeing Starliner astronauts. I was then invited to submit an entry to the annual Griffith Observer Science Writing Contest, and won 4th Prize with an essay published in the May 2024 issue of the Griffith Observer6 (Fig. 3), with new, up-to-date illustrations of the space ambulance by their official artist, Chris Butler (Figs. 4-7).
From the Politics of Survival viewpoint, larger Waveriders (probably unmanned) could be crucial to space industrialisation, in political terms, because using them, raw materials or finished products could be landed, from Moon-Earth transfer orbit, from the asteroids or from earth-orbiting factories, in any latitude and on conventional runways. (See ‘Waverider’. ON, above.)
Industrialisation of the Moon will lead on to the moons of Mars and to the Earth-grazing asteroids, in search of their known content of volatile elements which are needed for life-support, and on the Moon, until recently, were found only in Solar Wind deposits trapped by the soil. Extensive deposits of water have now been found in shadowed craters at the lunar poles, and much of the currrent space probe effort is being devoted to sampling them and determining their extent. For more plentiful supplies of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and helium a space-faring habitat civilisation would inevitably be drawn to the giant planets. The next phase of Project Starseed (ON, November 20th 2022) involved moving the Starseeds to the L2 point, behind the Moon, where they would build solar power satellites for transfer to geosynchronous orbit, but as a byproduct they would produce O’Neill habitats – not the giant Island 3s mentioned in Part 2 but smaller Island 1s (Fig. 8), capable of supporting 10,000 people and being made mobile with the addition of the pulsed fusion engines of the British Interplanetary Society’s ‘Project Daedalus’ interstellar probe study.7
The first of those would be moved into close orbit around Jupiter (Fig. 9) to extract deuterium and helium-3 in the quantities needed for Prof. Ehricke’s ‘strategic’ development of the Solar System (see Part 1).
In that extraction, Waverider ‘Flying Factories’ will again have a major rôle (see ‘Waverider’, ON, above). But in spreading human settlements through the Solar System and the cometary halo, as in Fig. 1, we would have countered all foreseeable threats to human survival – only one of which has still to be discussed.
Long-term Genetic Breakdown (heading no. 5) is a controversial subject and we cannot be drawn here into fine distinctions about desirable characteristics. The principal fear was that inherited conditions such as haemophilia might become so prevalent, in a high-technology civilisation, that the effect of any disaster might be magnified and too few unaffected individuals might survive to continue the race. For example the dentists’ expertise has virtually removed the pressures of natural selection against soft teeth. Space colonisation would help to counter the trend, partly by reducing the survival threat from any one disaster, but mostly because such disabilities would be more keenly felt in space and new attitudes of social responsibility would arise; these in turn would have an effect on Earth. While every effort must be made to avoid Earth becoming ‘a slum for unwanted genes’, it’s only dimly apparent at present what resources for improvement may become available through genetic engineering, and what the moral issues will be. It is however clear that expansion into space makes genetic breakdown no longer a threat to overall human survival.
Conclusion.
The object of the Politics of Survival is to implement ‘the strategic approach to the Solar System’ and provide a broad enough base of space settlements, raw material and energy supplies to guarantee human survival against all foreseeable hazards. It is not intended that population and industrial growth should continue unchecked. For example, Prof. Freeman Dyson has foreseen a future in which, for purely Malthusian reasons, humanity tears up the planets and builds a shell around the Sun to maximise living space and available energy, while emigrant ships spread our intelligence as ‘a cancer of purposeless technological exploitation, sweeping across [the] galaxy as irresistably as it has spread across our own planet’.8 In the ASTRA discussions which led to Man and the Planets, the view emerged strongly that conservationist approaches would dominate long before such extremes were reached. It is certainly to be hoped that by the time its survival was assured, by the Politics of Survival route, the human race would have acquired new perspectives and more sophisticated objectives than those Dyson fears.
The first change in our perspectives to come from space research was the awareness of our own vulnerability, from the Apollo images of the fragile Earth seen from the distance of the Moon. The correct response to that realisation is a Politics of Survival programme, which does not remove that vulnerability but takes away its potential finality. Another major shift in perspective may come (removing all fear from heading 8) through peaceful Contact with Other Intelligence. At the very least, it would prove that high-technology cultures are not doomed to collapse and that space development is a route to survival. Arthur C. Clarke has suggested that expansion into space may be as significant as life’s evolution from the sea to dry land; when we can set our affairs in an interstellar perspective, we may begin to see the further choices between lines of development which lie ahead of us.
References
1. John Tierney, ‘Drought in Africa: the Bigger Picture’, Science 85, 6, 3, 14 (April 1985).
2. J. von Puttkamer, ‘The Next 25 Years; Industrialisation of Space: Rationale for Planning’, L5 News, 15, 1-7 (November 1976).
3. Anthony Sampson, ed., North-South: a Programme for Survival, Pan Books, 1980.
4. Dave Dooling, ‘Outlook for Space’, Spaceflight, 18, 422-425 (1976).
5. J. Peter Vajk, Doomsday Has Been Cancelled, Peace Press, 1978.
6. Duncan Lunan, ‘Waverider, a Spacecraft in Waiting, Suddenly Topical’, Griffith Observer, 88, 5, 1-19, May 2024.
7. Gregory L. Matloff, ‘Utilisation of O’Neill’s Model 1 Lagrange Point Colony as an Interstellar Ark’, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 29, 12, 775-785 (December 1976).
8. F.J. Dyson, Scientific American, April 1964, quoted in Duncan Lunan, Man and the Planets, the Resources of the Solar System, Ashgrove Press, 1983.