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So how much harder is it to design a nation? A nation isn't just a large city; it has unique needs of its own. A city has a police force but it doesn't need an army, for instance. A city doesn't have a central bank or a mint. It doesn't need a foreign ministry. And move up one more level: how hard is it to design a world? People like Professor Hawking, or the National Space Society (descended from the L5 Society), are proposing the idea of creating a self-sustaining habitat in space. The technical challenges involved are immense; it would be an engineering project to dwarf any which the human race has ever contemplated. What you're talking about is creating a working human society in a place where there is nothing, and I mean vacuum. Complete absence of mass; you have to bring everything you need. The engineering challenges boil down to three parts: physical engineering, ecological engineering, and social engineering. As formidable as it is, the physical engineering problem is the easiest of the lot, because it's the one we understand the best. It's also the one that the National Space Society has spent the most time on. It's necessary to round up enough mass of the proper types, place it into the proper orbit, build powerplants, erect the entire structure in whatever shape it needs to be in, and fill it with gas and soil and water and so on. The quantity of mass involved would be gargantuan, and the physical problem of moving it and getting it into the right orbit is non-trivial. The L5 society originally suggested mining it on the moon and shooting it towards Lagrange Point 5 with mass accelerators on the surface of the moon. To mine and refine millions of tons of mass on the moon would itself require a substantial moon colony. But that whole concept ignores one basic problem: how do you stop those capsules when they reach the L5 point? Momentum is always conserved; you've got to get rid of it some way. For each ton moved to stable orbit, you're going to require a lot of fuel for rocket engines to slow the stuff down and get it into the right orbit. Building immense structures in space is simultaneously easier and harder than on a planet: you don't need scaffolding, which is a blessing, but you do have to work in pressure suits. We don't know how to do it; an entirely new branch of civil engineering would have to be developed to do space construction. How do you fabricate large parts without factories? Can you weld in space? Will welding be sufficiently strong? How do you leak test a structure containing a billion liters of gas? But once you build it, your problems have only begun. What is involved in creating a self-sustaining ecology which can support 100,000 people? That was the L5 Society's original goal for their space habitat. On earth, most of it is taken care of for us because we were given a working ecology premade before we evolved. We don't by any stretch fully understand how it works, and it is extraordinarily intricate. In particular, the issue of how wastes are processed is still partially unsolved. Even little things can trip you up: what do you do about hair? In nature, it's broken down slowly by fungi; if it were not, over a period of time humans and their animal comrades would eventually be knee deep in the stuff. That's just one of a thousand problems which would have to be solved. We don't know how to create a non-trivial self-sustaining ecology. But even that is not the biggest problem. We have well-developed physical engineering skills, the beginning of ecological engineering skills, but we don't even have the beginning of any kind of social engineering. You're going to build a habitat with 100,000 people in it. Which 100,000? How do you select them? How many engineers, and what specialties? Which doctors? Which scientists? What other specialties will be required, and how many? How many educators? What kind of government will it have? That is a non-trivial question, because for this to work, freedom must be heavily sacrificed. Begin with reproductive freedom: it can't be allowed. In a habitat with a limited supply of oxygen to breathe, unregulated breeding can't be permitted. With too many people, everyone will smother. But too few people becomes just as much of a problem; if you can't maintain the worker and knowledge base, the society could break down -- literally; eventually enough machines will fail at one time so that they can't all be repaired at once, and then everyone will die. In fact, breeding would have to be heavily controlled, and it would have to be mandatory. One essential aspect of maintenance of the society would be that a certain number of babies be born each month -- no more and no less. And as the original population ages and dies, the children would have to be trained to replace them. If you required a certain number of thoracic surgeons in the first place, you have to have a plan in place to maintain that number. A certain number of children in each generation would have to specialize in thoracic surgery to maintain the knowledge base. A certain number would have to become atmospheric engineers. A certain number would have to become soil engineers. A certain number would have to specialize in repair and rebuilding of essential power equipment. In fact, it would be necessary to force children into appropriate specialties; the days of "Study what you feel like" would be long gone. The economic problem is immense. Just identifying all the specialties needed is non-trivial; but making the society work would be worse. It's difficult to see how it could be capitalist; it would have to be a planned economy. Unfortunately, the record for planned economies has been extremely poor; so that would be a problem to be solved. The economy of the US involves 280 million people, of which maybe 200 million are essential people and their children. But the US economy is not self-sustaining; it relies on material from all over the world. Just how small can a self-sustaining high-tech society be? While a goal of a 100,000 citizens makes the physical engineering problem staggering, it may not actually be big enough to solve the social engineering problems. A self-sustaining high-tech society might require 10 million people, or even more. And there are ethical problems, too. How many non-productive citizens can such a society support before it endangers the ecology? How many handicapped people, or people dying of wasting diseases, or old people no longer capable of working can a society support, who consume resources but produce nothing, when every hand is busy all the time and there's always too much to do? What if you have too many non-productive citizens; what do you do with them? Shoot them? Putting it on the Moon instead of in orbit only solves some of the problems; it slightly eases the physical and ecological engineering problems but does nothing about the social engineering issues. We don't know even remotely enough yet to solve most of these problems, and it may be centuries before we do. We don't even have the beginnings of a social engineering field, and that would have to be mature for this to even be considered. Professor Hawking suggests that we better get to work on this before biological engineering leads to a catastrophe that kills us all. But that danger will face us long before we have the ability to create a habitat in space capable of surviving beyond the collapse of technological civilization on earth; better to apply ourselves to making sure such a catastrophe doesn't happen in the first place. (discussion in progress) |
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