Earth's Confinement: Space Travel and the Future of Life

By Andre Duval

For many years I have been convinced that  space travel can ensure the future of our species and all life from our planet. Indeed, if we neglect it, as we have been doing in recent years, we very likely will become extinct within the next few centuries. After getting into a number of screaming matches over these views, I resolved to put them in book form where they can be be evalutated more carefully. As well as space travel, I've taken the opportunity to discuss artificial intelligence, the singularity, and other key aspects of the future. Enjoy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andre Duval
• Release date: Sep 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386648390

Book preview

Contractions

I’m not sure when I first learned she was dying, but it must have been sometime in grade school.

The teachers never told us in so many words; it’s probably not the sort of thing you want to tell a little kid. Neither did the people on TV. But they let enough slip for there to be little doubt what was happening. No one had yet uttered the dread words passed away. No one had told us she’d gone to Heaven. But we all knew it was just around the corner.

Mother Earth was doomed.

Mother Earth. At one point in my intellectual development I probably believed she was a real woman. My subconscious still does.

Subconsciouses can have strange and diverse reactions when they find they are trapped on dying planets.

They may become quite self destructive.

This is especially the case if they come to believe it is all their fault. Or the fault of whatever greater being they are part of.

They may try to take that being down with them. Your subconscious may tell you that, if you want to see the true assassin of Mother Earth, you need only look in the mirror.

Many of us got this message while we were growing up. Many of us believed it.

You may think a child would necessarily be innocent of all such crimes. But unfortunately we were part of an even greater being, or a closely knit collection of beings, called the human race.

The human race, we quickly learned, was guilty as sin.

Destruction was our deepest essence. Death flowed unbidden from our fingertips.

We had no need of industrial filth and apocalyptic weaponry to destroy Mother Earth. We were overwhelming her through sheer numbers. We were multiplying in her blood, her lungs, and her brain. We were a runaway life form.

We were disease.

That, at any rate, was what many of the teachers thought. They obviously believed we were giant cancer cells. Not that they ever said it out loud either. Some parent would have written them up if they called her kids that.

Some subconsciouses were less receptive to the message than others. My own balked at the whole disease concept. An assassin maybe, but a cancer cell? My subconscious was vain about such things.

But if we weren’t a disease what what were we? My subconsciousness pondered the question and kicked it around silently the way subconsciousnesses do.

Whatever we were, we weren’t going to have much more fun than the planet we were killing. We’d all get hungrier and hungrier as the food ran out, along with everything else that made life worth living: the pie was being sliced thinner and thinner. Soon, you’d have to fight for every piece. If you lost you’d die; if you won, it would just take longer.

One teacher told us the only real question was whether we were living in the last of the Good Times or the first of the Bad Times. But it really didn’t matter if the cup was half empty or half full: there was no way to ever fill it again.

Even a subconscious that has rejected self-destruction may have other problematic reactions when it learns it is a target in an apocalyptic shooting gallery. It may freeze like a deer caught in Death’s headlights. It might scream silently and provoke mysterious panic attacks.

Or it may calmly watch the apocalypses go whizzing by. It may even attempt to classify them.

There were basically three kinds:

A type-one apocalypse would destroy civilization. A war or epidemic that killed just enough people to knock the survivors back to the stone age would be a classic type-one.

Type-one apocalypses get all the best movie rolls, but they are really apocalyptic wimps, barely worthy of the name. Other apocalypses laugh at them behind their backs.

A type-two apocalypse would exterminate the human race and a type-three would kill everything on the planet.

In any case, it was only a matter of time till one of them hit; the air was thick with them: nuclear war, biological war, ozone depletion, petroleum depletion, air pollution, water pollution, mind pollution, killer nanobots and killer computers.

Much was riding on which type hit first. My subconscious was not the only one to reach this conclusion.

I don’t think even the meanest teachers wanted a type-three apocalypse, but the other two kinds had large followings. Many teachers thought a type-two was the only way to save the planet. You could tell by the way they looked at us: a doomsday plague was just what we needed.

But most of them probably just wanted a type-one so the survivors could go back and live off nature. All considered, they were a pretty mellow bunch, those teachers.

My subconscious may not have been absorbing its lessons properly: it soon decided it wanted no truck with apocalypses of any sort. And if it really was on a dying planet, it most definitely wanted to go somewhere else.

But how was it going to do that, where was it going to go, and how on Earth was it going to convince the rest of my mind to help it?

There was one obvious tactic.

I’d been reading science fiction since I’d learned how to read and watching it on television for even longer. I’d always been a fan of space travel. I knew it was capable of taking us much further than the first faltering steps I was seeing on the news. Eventually, it could take us anywhere.

It took only the gentlest nudging from my subconscious to convince   me that space travel could help us leave apocalypses of all sorts far behind. Disperse into space and eventually even a type-three wouldn’t be able to kill us all. If we send enough starships to distant regions of the galaxy, nothing would. Or almost nothing.

Admittedly, there were problems with using star flight as a cure for apocalypses.

For starters, there was the extreme difficulty of reaching even the nearest stars.

I’d learned early on that our Solar System was surrounded by a great gulf of vacuum that dwarfed any distances between its own planets. A journey to any other solar system¹ would be to a trip to Mars what that is to a hop across the Atlantic.

My mother used to have a one volume encyclopedia with a picture showing how long it would take to fly to various astronomical objects by airplane. It was a fairly old encyclopedia; the airplane was propeller driven. I believe it said it would take several million years to reach the nearest star.

But we had lots of faster stuff now. We had rockets!

So what? My Dad was never impressed with rockets. So it would take thousands of years instead of millions of years. Many thousands of years. You’d die of old age before you got very far.

My first thought was that was a shame. It certainly would be a lot harder than it looked on Lost in Space. My second thought was we should do it anyway.

There had to be some way. There were space warps. There was suspended animation. There was teleportation.

At least there might be, eventually. I realized none of that stuff had been invented yet.

But even if NASA did get that warp drive running, there was a much greater problem.

If we ran for the stars, wouldn’t we be abandoning Mother Earth in her hour of greatest need? After all, she was the one who was sick, the primary victim of the whole affair. Saving the human race would be a petty thing if we left her to perish in the apocalyptic storm.

None of this dissuaded my subconscious. The technical problems, it decided, were best left to the higher regions of the brain: surely they could work something out with their vaunted analytic skills. It also managed to convince itself that the best way to save Mother Earth was by running for the stars.

Subconsciouses are not noted for their rigid adherence to logic.

The problems loomed much larger for the rest of my mind. Almost everything I read made starflight sound like something we’d never have for many centuries. As for travel to other parts of own solar system, surely that could be done it our time, but it had its problems too, mostly economic ones: even a trip to somewhere relatively near like Mars would eat up resources and funding desperately needed elsewhere.

Besides, maybe we really were disease.

For me, this was a vague possibility, a mischaracterization I could shake off in all but my darker moments. Others seemed to take it more seriously.

The human group mind seemed to embrace it wholeheartedly. How else to explain its actions?

Once, long ago, it had reached out and touched the Moon. Then, overcome with remorse, it shrank back into its shell and waited for its execution, waited to be cauterized from reality by an apocalypse it was sure it deserved. 

The thesis of this book is that my subconscious was right and our group mind was wrong. The disease model of humanity is a terrible, self-inflicted delusion: we have a far grander role to play than as high-tech, planet-killing pathogens. Furthermore, space travel, almost certainly, is a key to that role. By spreading to the stars, we would in no sense be abandoning Mother Earth. Starflight, in fact, may be the only way to save her, just like my subconscious thought.

This thesis may not be immediately obvious to all readers

Most people are aware that we and our planet are facing hideous dangers, and space travel is sometimes even proposed as a solution. But it is usually only mentioned in connection with the least pressing dangers, ones so rare or distant in time that they aren’t terribly dangerous at all, at least not to those of us living in the current geological era. Hence, as soon as space travel is brought up, urgency flees the room.

We are told, for instance, that it can help us survive asteroid strikes.

Asteroids have been an issue with Mother Earth for some time; they may destroy her in the end. But she’s had reasonably good luck with them so far: she’s been horribly injured by some of the larger collisions but she’s always recovered.

Someday her luck could run out. If a large enough asteroid hit, it could mean the end of her. A slightly smaller one could kill everything but the microbes and knock evolution back to square one.

Much more easily, one could kill all the people. It could happen in your lifetime...

But it probably won’t. The impact that killed the dinosaurs happened sixty-five million years ago and nothing nearly that big has hit since. Which means the odds against it happening any time in this century have to be nearly a million to one.

Sometimes we are told that life should move elsewhere before the Sun grows so hot that Earth becomes uninhabitable. This is not an imaginary danger. The Sun will swell into a kind of star known as a red giant and turn Earth into a flaming barbecue. We know that this will happen and when, for it is an inevitable consequence of astrophysics.

It will happen in about five billion years.

For the sake of honesty, I should say the Sun is due to significantly heat up long before it becomes a red giant. In fact, it could get hot enough to boil the oceans in less than one billion years!

What’s going on here? Everyone knows there are far more immediate threats to us all than stray space rocks and the Sun’s distant dotage. In fact, worrying about them in our current situation is a bit like worrying about getting bit by a rabid dog at the Battle of the Bulge. I suppose it could happen, but it’s not sort of thing that should occupy your mind².

So why are these distant astronomical phenomena trotted out instead of the things we should really be afraid of?

A first guess might be that it’s guilt.

After all, most of the things we ought to be afraid of are our fault in the first place. Nuclear weapons, genetically engineered bioweapons, killer nanobots and rogue artificial intelligences are all products of the human mind.

There is undoubtedly some sentiment that, if one of these things kills us, we’ll have it coming. Using space travel to escape from them would be fleeing our just deserts.

Well, if guilt were the only problem, it would be easily disposed of. After all, while some people are responsible for those dangers, most people aren’t. Most people are completely innocent.

Let me put it this way: If some psychopath with a bomb was going to blow up a city, would you figure its inhabitants had it coming? Would you make them stay and die because they all bore some kind of collective guilt for his actions? Would you think only a wicked city would grow psychopaths with bombs in the first place? Would you set up roadblocks so no one could escape?

Presumably you wouldn’t do anything like that. Not unless you were a psychopath yourself.

More likely, you’d make at least some effort to save them. If you were in a position of authority, you’d probably try to find the bomb and defuse it. But in the mean time, you’d evacuate the city. If you couldn’t evacuate everyone before the bomb blew, you’d get as many of them out as you possibly could.

Now if you’d do that for a city, why not for a whole planet?

Differences? Of course there are differences. With a city, you’d have a very good chance of saving everyone. With a planet and the limitations of space travel, you’d be more likely to save only a lucky few.

Another difference is that, even if you didn’t save the city, there would still be plenty of people left elsewhere to carry on. Eventually, the city might even be repopulated. With Earth, if you failed, there would be no one left to carry on anywhere. We’d be gone forever, and Death would reign supreme over our ashes.

If Earth died because of some technological cataclysm, some human somewhere would probably would be responsible, but the whole human race would not. The children wouldn’t be responsible. Their descendants for generations to come wouldn’t be responsible.

If guilt were the only problem, there would be no reason to drag in distant natural threats to give us some reason to save ourselves.

But unfortunately, there’s more to it than guilt.

It’s not just that we’re responsible for the threat. To a very real extent, we are the threat.

People who left Earth would still be a threat wherever they went. They would be a danger to their new homes and anyone else who might be living there. They might have had nothing to do with the apocalypses they’d escaped on Earth but they could always dream up new ones of their own.

Humans are not intrinsically evil but they are intrinsically dangerous. Even the most innocent ones are dangerous.

Doesn’t that mean we really are some sort of disease, just like teacher thought?

Wouldn’t we be space viruses fleeing a dying body?

Of course real viruses do that sort of thing all the time, which is the only reason there are so many of them. In fact, if humans really were viruses and we didn’t mind being viruses, we could still use space travel to ensure our immortality. All we’d have to do would be to make sure we infected new planets faster than we killed off the old ones. We could go from being a disease of the planet to a disease of the galaxy. And beyond that the universe! We’d be the super flu of the cosmos, and just how could they ever stop us, vaccinate it?

But that sort of thinking just doesn’t sell very well, especially not with people who are genuinely concerned with Mother Earth and the well being of others—which, for disease agents, a surprisingly large number of people are. If you want to convince folks like that, it’s better not to bring up our disease-like qualities at all, and certainly not all those apocalypses that have their roots in the human brain. So those of us who are space-travel fans use asteroids and dying suns to fill in for them and hope nobody notices.

Not surprisingly, few are convinced.

The disease model of humanity must be distasteful to just about anyone if you narrow it down to specifics. Do you think your kids are a disease? Your lover? Your parents? Your pool party friends? Do you think they’re all germs?

Hopefully not, but does it sit any easier in the mind if you draw back and consider all those great and shadowy people you’ve never met? Are strangers a disease? Are humans in the abstract a disease?

As it happens, that’s exactly how the worst mass murderers think. They view all those other people as disease; if not as germs, then as vermin. Something to be stamped out. Maybe it’s some particular group of other people; maybe it’s everyone beyond their own magic circle. They think they’re somehow making the world cleaner by killing them. That’s how Hitler thought. That’s what genocide is all about.

That’s the sort of psychic path you can walk down if you subscribe to the disease model.

Worse yet, if you start to think of yourself as a disease, you’ll probably start to act like one; we usually live up to our mental self-image. And a disease is an ugly thing to see in your inner looking glass: it will not inspire you to great acts of selflessness. A germ has no honor.

The disease model is nothing new; it’s probably been around since prehistoric times in one form or another. If it seems new, it’s because it only recently acquired scientific trappings. We now know what disease is so we have more convincing sounding labels to hang on ourselves. The model, in one manifestation or another, is the only reason we’re still inflicting wars and other atrocities on each other. They will end when we learn to think of all people everywhere as precious and sacred.

All of which only shows that the disease model is destructive. But is it accurate? Doesn’t it fit the human race in many ways, at least in an ecological sense?

Not if you look closely enough.

Viruses and other agents of disease are usually pathetic, minimalist sorts of things. They lack the sophistication and complexity found in the free-living hosts they prey upon. As usual, there are exceptions—wasps, for instance, that are only parasitic during part of their life cycle. (I guess you’d call what they do to caterpillars a disease.) But, for the most part, disease agents are degenerate slime clots, interacting with the rest of the universe only through their victims.

We can be perfectly honest in saying this doesn’t sound remotely like a human being. Humans are among the most complex of Earth’s creatures. If we are not the very apex of complexity, we are very near it. This sounds a little like nineteenth century bio-imperialist bragging, but it’s also quite true.

And yet the disease model remains widely popular the world over. Many people will accept it as axiomatic.

You can start a speech with it; if they are the right kind of crowd, you’ll have them groaning with righteous self-hatred in the first few minutes. Then you can whip them up into whatever frenzy you have in mind.

An axiom like that can lead to all sorts of spooky places.

It may turn you into a fan of type-two apocalypses yourself. You may start to wonder how you might bring one about. And as you sank into that bottomless sea of psychosis, you might find more than one kindred spirit on the internet waiting to help you on your way.

When I first started surfing the web back in the nineties, one of the first groups I came across was devoted, by its own description, to wiping out the human race down to the last frozen embryo. They’d spawned a splinter group dedicated to preserving our species as the most effective means of destroying the rest of the universe.

I don’t remember what they called themselves and I don’t know whether they’re

still around; I have no desire to check. Presumably it was all a joke, though with the web you never know.

But, regardless whether their neurons really were demonically rewired or whether it was all in a strange sort of fun, both groups were making a fundamental error. Both were assuming that humans are the only threat, that evil begins and ends with us.

In reality, that would be giving us too much credit. We are part of a process far greater than ourselves. If we disappear, Mother Earth might get a breathing spell, but very soon she’ll find herself in exactly the same situation she’s in now. The process itself will continue.

Consider what would happen if the world woke up tomorrow and all the people were gone.

I know it’s been done before. It was done on the very first episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s been done so often, you’ve probably seen it in previews of coming attractions, even if you’d never watch that kind of show. Traditionally, not quite all the people disappear: there’s usually at least one left, and you get to see how the hero reacts to being all alone. But what if there were no hero, at least not a human one?

In the last decade or so, this has become the theme of an emerging sub-genre of documentary. Most famously there is the History Channel’s Life After People. The main attraction of the show is, of course, watching how fast everything our species has ever built crumbles to dust. In between collapses, we get to see how Mother Earth herself reacts to a nameless type-two apocalypse.

Her short-term prospects are great in this kind of scenario. So are those of most plants and animals.

Most, but not all. Domestic animals and other life forms dependent on humans would be in grave trouble. And it’s not just the life forms we like: rats and cockroaches would find themselves entering a new Dark Age, their centuries-long gravy train ended at last. But they’d probably survive; they’re good at that. (Life After People has the cockroaches being much less traumatized by the whole affair than the rats: they can eat a wider variety of stuff. I’m not sure if I’d go along with that: rats are far smarter than any insect, and would find opportunities even the script writers missed.)

Many more species would find themselves reprieved. No one would be maintaining an endangered species list anymore, but they wouldn’t have to: almost everything would be off it. There would be a period of adjustment of course, like there always is when a power gap opens up. New habitats would become available, and there would be struggles over them. Several positions as top predator would need to be filled, and this would lead to conflict. But soon an equilibrium of some sort would be attained, and everything would be peaceful again. As peaceful as the jungle ever gets.

The fondest dreams of the most radical environmentalist would be realized in all their splendor. Eden would be restored, and Nature would reign triumphant.

But would it last?

Well that depends on what time scale you were using. On a human scale it would last a very long time. But the human time scale would now be meaningless. By the scale Mother Earth uses, it wouldn’t be very long at all.

For awhile she would no longer have to worry about nuclear weapons or other apocalyptic technology. Not for many thousands of years. There would be no one left to invent them.

But imagine that a million years go by. Imagine ten million.

Suppose that her life expectancy were stretched out that long instead of a century or so. Do you think she’d feel reprieved?

Ten million years sounds like a long time to us, but Earth has been here over four billion years. I know a lady doesn’t like being reminded of her age, but there it is. Telling her she has ten million years to live instead of a century is like telling a human she’s going to die next month instead of just this second, a relief perhaps, but not much of one. Basically, you’re just giving her more time to worry.

Ten million years, maybe twenty. That’s about the only comfort a type-two apocalypse might give her. By the end of that span, and possibly long before, she’d once again find herself in deadly peril from a development that was given only a brief and skeptical treatment in Life After People: a technological species would once again be infesting her land, poisoning her waters and filling her skies with filth. Of course, they might be much kinder and wiser overlords than we ever were. Then again, they could be far worse.

The problem—if you can call it one—is that many animals are fairly close to developing human-level intelligence. Once we’re gone, they will be free to evolve in that direction and you can be sure that some of them will.

Who’s to say that, if we were to disappear, the chimpanzees wouldn't develop their own advanced technology in a few million years and blow up the world—or at least brutalize and threaten it like we've been doing? Personally, I’d be very surprised if they didn’t. I'd expect it of them.

Humans are on center stage now but there are lots of other species waiting in the wings. If something happens to us, evolution will bring them out one by one. If the chimps don’t make it after all, the gorillas will be right behind, and behind them the orangutans. Then the baboons and other monkeys³.

Suppose some group of hopelessly confused cretins really did try to save Mother Earth by killing all the people. If they wanted to do the job right, they'd have to kill off all the primates too. They’d have to kill the lemurs.

But even that wouldn't work. The primates aren't the only animals who are on the verge of advanced intelligence. Killing them off would only buy Earth more time. Maybe a hundred million years instead of ten.

A hundred million years: to Earth, it's next February. In truth, it probably wouldn’t take nearly that long. A hundred million years ago, our ancestors were pitiful shrew-like things hiding from the nearest dinosaur. They probably weren’t nearly as smart as cats and dogs are today. And if you think there is something special about the primate body form, any mammal that is in the habit of climbing trees also has a good chance of evolving into some kind of primate-like creature in the near future.

Something, somewhere would evolve intelligence in what to Mother Earth is an eye blink. Maybe it would be an intelligent wombat.

Talk about juggling with Death.

She must have thousands of nascent techno species at various phases of development. Any one of them could kill her if it ever cooks to completion.

Is she bent on self-destruction? If she’s not trying to make her own diseases, what in Heaven’s Name is she trying to do?

My subconscious thinks it knows the answer: Mother Earth is trying to reproduce⁴.

This may, at first, seem like an odd goal. After all, hasn’t she reproduced already? Aren’t we all her children? Isn’t that why they call her Mother Earth?

Well no, actually. We are not her children, for we are nothing like her. We are only some of her component parts. Earth is a living world. She will not have reproduced until she gives rise to another living world.

In fact, we really are are more akin to cells in her body.

Cancer cells, grins the teacher, I told you so!

But if you take out your magnifying glass again, you’ll soon discover we don’t look much more like cancer than like viruses.

Humans are a threat because they know so much. Cancer cells are a threat because they know so little: They are completely unaware that they will die as soon as they have destroyed their host body. They are unaware that the body is in danger or even that it exists. Unlike every other cell type, they have lost all touch with their function and their destiny. All they’re really concerned with is their next replication cycle. They are incapable of taking anything else into account. Cancer is mass stupidity on the cellular level.

Humans are, of course, quite capable of stupidity but we are equally capable of flights of genius. We are, in fact, capable of just about anything.

Humans are on the other end of the design spectrum from cancer cells. We almost seem to be finely honed for something. Cancer cells have very limited potential: their lives lead only to death. Our own potential has no known limits: it too can lead to death, but it can also lead to other places.

There is really only one kind of cell with anything close to unlimited potential, that can completely transcend the body and go on to greater things: a reproductive cell.

Do a mind flip for a moment and think about your own cells.

Making new cells is something your body has been doing all your life. But you can only reproduce if one of your own cells, after various adventures and transformations, grows into a new person.

Earth has recently reached the stage where she is ready to do the same thing.

In fact, the name Mother Earth has been something of a courtesy title up to this point: it reflects her future hopes rather than her actual accomplishments.

I realize the analogy between human and planetary reproduction is at best inexact. When humans reproduce, they are repeating something that has happened many times in the past. Their bodies are essentially following a script. With planetary reproduction there is no script. For all intents and purposes it is a unique event. As far as we know, Earth has no ancestors. To reproduce, she will have to break into completely new territory. She will be writing her own script as she goes along.

When you try to do something that has never been done before, your first efforts are likely to be clumsy, imperfect, and perhaps quite bizarre. Hence the human race.

Earth needed something very strange indeed. She is not living in a garden. There is no fertile topsoil anywhere near her. In fact there’s only one really good location for an Earth-type planet anywhere in the general vicinity and she’s already got it occupied.

She needed to make something capable of crossing the great gulf of space, something that can survive once it reaches its unknown destination and thrive. If she just shot out seeds randomly, they’d probably all die in the vacuum. She may have already tried that trick. There’s really only one thing that stands much chance of success. She needs smart seeds.

Growing something like that inside you is akin to conjuring up a genie. You never know what’s coming out of the bottle. Whatever it is, it’s going to have a mind of its own. It could grant your wish or kill you. You just have to hope it will figure out what it’s there for before it does too much damage.

Even if it does figure it out, it might decide to do something else entirely

If I were a thoughtful planet, I’d be worried if my first batch of smart seeds seemed to be as clueless as we are. I’d be especially worried if all they seemed interested in was replicating themselves, increasing their powers without end, and fighting over who was going to be the top seed in the pod, all without showing the slightest inclination of leaving. Dumb seeds, more like.

Worried? By entering her reproductive phase she has put herself in mortal danger. She has reached a place where the future is balanced on the point of a pin.

But I don’t know if she’s really worried or not.

I cannot read the mind of Earth.

I do not know, for sure, that she has a mind, even a subconscious one.

Perhaps she is only trying to reproduce in the same sense an apple tree is trying when it bears fruit. Most people would say an apple tree has no mind, that it doesn’t know what it’s doing. Quite likely, they are right. And yet apple trees certainly seem to be trying to reproduce. They succeed at it often enough, even if their offspring just have crab apples.

Of course an apple tree has a script to follow. Everything is spelled out in its DNA molecules.

Mother Earth has millions of such molecular blueprints. Not one of them by itself can tell her how to reproduce. Instead of trying to follow one blueprint, she’s juggling all of them like a mad chemist.