Space...GET ME THERE NOW Part 2

 

Bye bye

In my last post I went on for a bit about how, if we stay on this planet too long, something will inevitable make us a permanent part of the fossil record. A shift in global climate, asteroid, a Palin-Trump presidency, something will put an end to us as a species. Unless we leave. It doesn't need to be all of us, or even most of us. Just enough of us, so that if things do go south here on Mother Earth, it won't be the end of us as a species. But now that that is settled, the situation becomes a bit tricky.

The difficulties with manned space travel are numerous. First and foremost comes the issue that humans don't take too well to extended periods of weightlessness. The Russian cosmonauts who stayed on the space station for a year turned into little more than porcelain dolls. Depending on thrust technology and timing of the launch a space craft can reach Mars in as little as 130 days. But then comes the problem that once outside of Earths magnetosphere, any ship becomes the proverbial bug in the petri dish for the Suns radiation storms. We haven't even touched the problems of food, oxygen and water. One solution would be to put all the passengers into some type of hibernation (cryogenic or otherwise) but that would be highly energy intensive and the ship would still require a crew to maintain it and intervene should something unforeseen happen. So that would just leave us at square one. Plus the problem of all the machinery and equipment that is needed once the colonists arrive at their destination. It all looks to be an incredible money sink for something that has an ROI just short of infinity. How on earth would we be able to make this cheaper and therefore more achieveable.

You probably not like the answer. We will have to become much better at genetic manipulation.

 Genetic manipulation on the human level is something that is very controversial right now. GMO's (Genetically Modified Organisms) are still fighting a losing battle for acceptance in Europe,w here they are often portrayed as some sort of evil corporate scheme that only Ming the Merciless would cook up. Truth is, genetic modification is liable to be the next great achievement of humanity. Something that will make the it possible to grow crops that don't require pesticides because they are immune to all pests and blights. Naturally, there is always a possibility of it going horribly wrong. You just need to read Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl  for a look at a world caught in the grip of ruthless food companies that engineer crop blights to kill off competition. 

However, for the purposes of our argument, genetic modification is something close to the silver bullet. You don't need to worry too much about radiation and muscular/skeletal atrophy due to weightlessness, if you can breed a generation of colonists who are naturally more resistant to radiation and are meant for a weightless environment. Instead of a horribly expensive and energy hungry hibernation system, why not modify colonists to hibernate naturally? We could land a colony ship on Mars, filled with humans who are already adapted to many of the conditions there. What about radiation resistant food stuffs? Or plants with hyper-accelerated CO2-O2 exchange rates? There goes your need to design, test and build a complex air scrubber system or concern yourself about the oxygen supply once you arrive. 

The idea of meddling around with our genes is a very scary notion to most people, particularly the religious and those who have read Auldus Huxley's Brave New World and were scared shitless by it. But much like the social attitude towards homosexuality, television, the internet and cellphones, it will quickly cease to be controversial and will become banal and ordinary. And that day will come when genetic modification becomes cheap. The benefits are just too numerous for it not to become accepted. The ability to eliminate heredity diseases, boost children's immune systems, make us smarter and stronger.. Eventually, we will probably have something like a genetic Moore's Law: that every generation will have twice the genetic advantages and abilities than their immediate ancestors. It is, to quote one of my favorite movie villains, inevitable. As with all things, there may be a significant downside to all this. Science fiction and pop culture is teeming with warnings about the dangerous of "playing God". I take a much more pragmatic approach to this argument. Of all the species that have walked this tiny blue planet, 99% are extinct. If we wish to be part of that 1% that endures, we must seieze every advantage with the ferociousness of a starved man fighting for survival. Because we are. If that means that we must alter ourselves are a genetic level, and then leave our home planet, than we would be fools not to avail ourselves of our ability to do so. 

Charles Darwin's most famous and most misunderstood description of evolution was "survival of the fittest". We as humans will soon have the ability to make ourselves the fittest, no matter the situation. No matter the planet.