INTRODUCTION
This presentation is maybe overly pessimistic. Or then again it might be overly pragmatic. Or it could be overly critical, or possibly overly unimaginative. It might just be a sign of the times. The general theme I want to explore though, is that SPACE IS HOSTILE AND IT DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT
Some of the things I'll talk about will more than likely resonate due to the experiences that many of us been living to some degree or other over the last few weeks - isolation, forced cohabitation and limited freedom of movement – aligned with some vague and invisible threat lurking outside. We know where our brains have taken us during these times and some have coped better than others. This formed one of the seed ideas of a range of thoughts I want to elaborate on about Space not being for us. Not from any idealogical standpoints, but due to the reactions and incompatibilities of the human body and human timescales. The limitations we have regarding the space environment are only heightened by the combination that sets us apart from other animal species and that has got us as far off Earth as we have managed so far – the combination of biology and technology.
DRAGON
Tomorrow, Wednesday 27th May 2020, amongst a global pandemic where the vast majority are unable to travel more than a few hundred meters from their houses, two American astronauts - Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley - will be launched into space aboard a Space X Dragon module from Cape Canaveral. This is noteworthy for various reasons. One being that it is the first time that humans have been launched from American soil since 2011. Another being the huge political statement it makes to Russia, suggesting they won't have to keep paying the $80 million dollars per seat it costs to send astronauts from Baikonur, and another fraying of fragile political pacts. And yet another being the big stride forward for Elon Musk's life goal to get humans to Mars. The timelines, economical structures and political positioning necessary to the space industries can not take a break while the pandemic grinds ordinary life to a halt. As co-founder of the Just Space Alliance Erika Nesvold has said “Space is on a much larger time scale than our lifetimes... It’s a time scale where things like the pandemic are small perturbations on the surface of the Earth.”
HULKSNEB
The universe doesn't really care about our existence or function according to our timescales. We are truly lost amongst and within its vastness. It is difficult to physically and psychologically be in Space and our dreams of exploration and colonisation will probably be shattered.
Eugene Thacker wrote about the notion of the world with us and the world without us, the undescribed region in between them being where horror lies. There is also an extension of this notion that describes a world 'not for us'. A world where we were never meant to be, a forbidden land. This idea can be carried over into considering a Space not for us, a place where everything that is us - as contemporary flesh and blood humans - really struggles to survive. The 400km distance of the ISS is our current human limit and has been for some time. There may be humans on the Moon again in 2024 but that timescale always looked ambitious even before a pandemic. That will surely happen though, political and economical capital will ensure that we see humans on the Moon again within a decade. And maybe even Mars one day. Maybe, just maybe, there will even by permanently crewed stations on the Moon and Mars – though it can be argued that that is moving into science fiction, despite there being so many private and commercial projects in advanced stages of planning for them.
Beyond our own Solar System, the increasing discoveries of exoplanets, and especially Earth-like or rocky exoplanets, increases a yearning for space. Why is this? Is it the desire to see the Universe anew? To make contact with non-terrestrial lifeforms? To reinvent the notion of Brave New Worlds? To reinvent who and what we are? Just basic curiosity?
Joan Vernikos, Former Director of Life Sciences at NASA, writes in her 2008 paper Human Exploration of Space: why, where, what for? - That “The basic driving rationales for human space flight are rooted in age-old and persisting dreams. Fascination with the idea of people going into the sky for adventures in other worlds goes back to ancient myths.” This poetic thought avoids the fact that our reaching for these adventures has always been promoted by strategic political and militaristic thinking on the one hand, and as a place of refuge on the other. Either way, capital underpins the position.
There is a curious psychological effect of being within something that cannot be reached. Planet earth only makes sense when seen from the cosmological viewpoint. That same cosmos being utterly unobtainable, a tangible experience of it impossible. Do we strive to get there to satisfy our innate curiosity, or through our need to conquer the fear of the unknown and the discomfort of it not being for us.
DYING IN SPACE
Space is hostile and it doesn't give a shit. Apart from the vacuum, there is a constant flux of radiation in the form of high energy charged particles originating within the Milky Way and from beyond. There are solar particles which are expelled by the sun. There are trapped particles, which form invisible belts around planets with a strong enough magnetic field. It is either deadly cold or deadly hot, with no temperature gradients in which to find the comfortable spot. The temperature differential between the side of an object facing the Sun and that away from it can be 130 degrees celsius.
Contrary to popular opinion, if you suddenly find yourself in space without a spacesuit you will not instantaneously freeze or explode. Conduction and convection and therefore heat transfer cannot occur without matter. More worrying is that upon sudden decompression in a vacuum, the expansion of air your lungs is likely to cause lung rupture and death unless that air is immediately exhaled. Decompression can also lead to ebullism, where the nitrogen dissolved in your bloodstream near the surface of your skin will collect into little bubbles which will expand, puffing you out to around twice your size, starting at your hands and feet and moving in. You will become an uncomfortable balloon limited by the elasticity of your skin. In the vacuum the oxygen will diffuse out of the bloodstream, leading to hypoxia and unconsciousness within 15 seconds. If you're left in space past the 2-minute mark, all your other organs will have to shut down from the lack of oxygen too.
MARS
So we'd need to make a comfortable colony on the Moon or on Mars. While there is 0.17g on the Moon and 0.38g on Mars it is not enough, and this absence of gravitational load takes on a new dimension, transforming from a novelty into a creeping threat. Deprived of gravitational load, our bones suffer a kind of space-flight-induced osteoporosis. And because 99 percent of our body’s calcium is stored in the skeleton, as it wastes away, that calcium finds its way into the bloodstream, causing yet more problems from constipation to kidney stones to psychotic depression. The effects of low gravity on our mechanisms for balance in the inner ear leave us living in a perpetual, gently oscillating, nausea-inducing reality. In this brain-fogged state we'd need to solve the tricky issues of nutrition and protection from radiation.
The radiation on the Moon is connected to the 5 times increase in cardiovascular disease experienced by the people who have been there. On Mars the radiation is 700 times what we receive on Earth. A colony would either need to be in massively shielded surface domes, or in caves or completely underground. Not the utopian space future that many like to imagine.
Religions tell us that the Earth has been finely tuned to satisfy our needs but this is, of course, upside down. It is us who are finely tuned to the terrestrial environment we have evolved in. We could see these as a wide range of temperatures and humidities and climates, but compared to the extremes of space this is a homogenous whole.
If humanity is going to achieve the improbable feat of surviving for billions of years we'd need to go further. Not even Mars colonies would protect us from the Sun's red giant phase in 5 billion years – assuming we'd already survived being bathed in gamma rays from a neighbourhood supernova and the evaporation of the oceans 4 billion years earlier.
LONGSHOT
The fastest current spacecraft is the Parker Solar Probe which is due to reach a maximum speed of 190 kilometres per second as it gets accelerated by the gravity of the Sun. Assuming we could take advantage of a slingshot around the Sun to achieve 190 kilometres per second as a cruising speed it would take us over 6,800 years to reach the nearest star Alpha Centauri – 4.3 light years away. To reach Alpha Centauri within one average human lifespan of 79 years we would have to travel at 16,300 kilometres per second or 8.7% of the speed of light. Proxima Centauri b, the one confirmed planet for the Alpha Centauri system, is slightly larger than the Earth, and orbits in its habitable zone. So maybe it would be worth it.
In the late 1980s an uncrewed mission, optimistically called Project Longshot, was devised to reach Alpha Centauri in around 100 years using 264 tonnes of helium-3/deuterium propellant. The more recent Breakthrough Starshot project founded by the unlikely trio of Russian entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist Yuri Milner, English theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking and the vaguely convincing android Mark Zuckerberg is developing a light sail craft called StarChip that would theoretically travel at between 15% and 20% of the speed of light and arrive at the system in something between twenty to thirty years. A fleet of 1000 tiny StarChips would stream towards Proxima Centauri b, many being lost to cosmic dust impacts. Like a shoal of herring being decimated by hungry tuna. We would then wait another 4.3 years to await any arrival confirmation signals.
Various futurologists, anthropologists, and so-called visionaries have said that “a Space Ark, a giant craft carrying thousands of space colonists on a one-way, multigenerational voyage far from Earth,” is “technologically inevitable.”
Ed Regis writing about Pathological Technologies describes the scenario inside a Space Ark generation ship thus - Life inside the starship would also be physically onerous, given the fact that these interstellar travellers would be confined to an artificial environment for their entire lives and would be subjected to an array of hazards, including cosmic ray damage, epidemic diseases, possible mechanical failures (including breakdown of atmospheric, water, agriculture, waste recycling, or filtration systems), computer malfunctions, crowding, lack of privacy, protracted isolation, boredom and unbearable tedium, trance states and depression, unforeseen emergencies, and every other source of misery and conflict that is found on earth (not excluding crimes of violence, murder, and suicide), although now with the further added attraction that the travellers would be locked up inside a vehicle ten miles wide, from which there was no escape, a craft that would be hurtling through a black void for years or decades, while out of real-time communication with the home planet and beyond any realistic possibility of rescue or outside assistance”
MARS 500
If we stretch our imaginations and our optimism we can get into a science fiction future where it is possible to make the journey to another star system in some 25 years. The architecture of such a vessel – the space ark – is still unknown, and therefore the habitability and effects of its environment. Understanding how humans can or can't cohabit in such conditions is an active field of study for most national space agencies, and so the idea of the analog has proliferated. Astronauts and their proxies can now spend weeks on end in closed simulations in extreme environments on Earth. They invariably allow EVA – extra vehicular activity – which inevitably serves as a pressure relief valve. However, a 25 year journey would not allow this luxury.
Just 4 months after the last space shuttle launch, in November 2011, 6 volunteer astronauts – all men, one Italian, one French, three Russians and one Chinese – stepped out of the Mars500 simulator after 520 days confined together (apart from a few brief sojourns on simulated Mars at the midway point). Space agencies have been examining heterogeneous crews with limited nationalities in order to avoid complications in group cohesion. However, more recent studies demonstrate that a balanced gender representation (and of course they are referring to binary gender) helped to create – and I quote “a rapid bonding among the crew members, and a proper work and life balance”
One of the things the Mars500 astronauts reported was a phenomenon that is now known well in the psychological study of extreme confinement and isolation - a syndrome known as the "Third-Quarter Phenomenon".
"This phenomenon was first described in early 1980s studies that set out to determine how long humans could survive in space. They found that radiation or zero-gravity were arguably less of a problem than interpersonal conflict caused by isolation. Typically, mood and morale reach their lowest point somewhere between the one-half and two-thirds mark of the mission."
This condition has been reported in the actual space environment as well. The veteran cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev wrote during the third quarter of a 211-day mission aboard Salyut 7… "We don't understand what's going on with us... We silently walk by each other, feeling offended. We have to find some way to make things better."
SOLARIS
Maybe we should ask if humans are capable of the shift in consciousness and behaviour that would be necessary to undertake these kinds of missions. Not 500 days confined together but 25 years. The third quarter phenomenon would kick in around 18 years, but that's not to suggest that all will be well until then.
One experienced space analog tester told me what he thinks works best in these situations. He called them engineering monocultures, and emphasised the important of a single kind of mindset. The best astronauts, he suggests, are nerds with an aptitude for extreme sports. What a strange extension of the idea of the Right Stuff. Where once an astronaut needed to be a brave, fit, ideologically sound and with nerves of steel now they just seem to need to be efficient and dull.
Popular fiction and contemporary space entrepreneurism sees planetary colonisation as a new beginning, a brave new world, a reset. But how would we treat a pristine new Earth 2.0, assuming we'd overcome all the physical, mechanical, logistical, sociological, psychological, political and existential challenges of making it there? Would looking at the Moon give us an idea? On the surface of the Moon is over 200,000 kilos of man-made debris. Amongst a sea of shovels, flags, geological tools, lunar experiment packages, landers, rovers, golf balls, twelve pairs of boots, cameras, lenses, film magazines, boxes, canisters, cables, filters, antennas, packing material, ninety-six bags of human urine, faeces, and vomit, blankets, towels, wet wipes, personal hygiene kits, empty packages of space food, and various sculptures, pins, patches, medals - there is a plaque saying
HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON JULY 1969, A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.
RED GIANT
This might have given some impression of how difficult it will be to survive in space, either onboard a star ark, a mission to our own outer planets, or on the surface of one of them. However,if the human race is to have any hope of surviving (which to be brutally honest it probably doesn't) then it will have to undertake one of these journeys. The frilled shark has survived for 150 million years, the sturgeon for 200 million years, the horseshoe crab for 440 million years – all surviving mass extinctions without the aid of technology. If we find a way to avoid extinction through our own means and approach any of these timespans then we will have to face up to some serious challenges.
We have the fortune to be existing in a safe period in cosmic history. In fact, pretty much the only reason we are here is because we are in a safe period in cosmic history. Its tens of million years since the last planet changing impact event, the climate has been relatively stable in a range comfortable for human development, there have been no close supernovae and the Sun is in its prime. All of these things are going to change.
Without going into the effects of global warming here is what could, and statistically speaking probably will happen to Earth and therefore us – if there are any of us still here. Within 100,000 years the Earth will be hit by another climate altering asteroid and within 500,000 years by an asteroid of over 1km diameter. In 1.5 million years the star Gliese 710 will pass the Solar System at just over one light year distance. This is enough to cause major disruptions in the Oort Cloud and initiate a new Heavy Bombardment period. In some 10,000,000 years the star T Pyxidi will go supernova and bathe the Earth with Gamma ray bursts. In a billion years with the Sun's luminosity increased by 10% the oceans will evaporate. In two billion years the Earths core will freeze and we will lose the magnetic shield that protects us from the worst radiation from space. In 3 billion years the surface temperature reaches 150C and in 7 billion years the Earth is engulfed by the Sun.
NEBULA
Sooner or later the surface of the Earth is not going to be habitable, but it also seems that space is not the answer for the salvation of flesh and blood humanity. I think this is connected to the proliferation of cults around post-humanism and post-terrestrialism. Space is a majestic, haunting, spellbinding, fascinating, infuriating and beautiful phenomena, while at the same time monstrous, terrifying, threatening and horrific. It occupies precisely the gap in perception and reality that produces the horror that Thacker refers to in his 'In The Dust of this Planet' series. The human condition seems to be one of an eternal haunting by that which it sees yet cannot access and cannot understand. When the Sun consumes the Earth it will vaporise it, shredding each atom from the one next to it. When it ejects its outer shells and forms a planetary nebula, that is when our atoms will be finally free to travel through light year distances at incredible speeds over unthinkable timescales.