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 ed by the sight of intrepid space explorers shinning up rickety ladders into their bed-sit sized capsules precariously lodged on top of massive fire-spitting rockets prior to being hurtled into outer darkness. We take it for granted that they will get to their destination, do whatever they have to do and eventually get back safely. Only when there is a life threatening glitch do we switch over from the football to watch vicariously their calm struggle for survival. Human imagination, engineering and bravery, together with a rather unwitting taxpayer have taken us literally a very long way at least in terrestrial distance terms. But on this scale we have only gone a fraction of an inch on our ultimate journey. Our future extra terrestrial colonizer will have to go almost incomprehensibly further, arrive in an extremely hostile environment, stay there and build a new life. What sort of person will this colonizer be?
Rather than speculating at its physical form, let us start by looking at some essential characteristics of our extra terrestrial person, or ETP for short. Firstly ETP must be able to maintain and expand its knowledge base over multiple generations. Even if it were feasible it would not be satisfactory to cryogenically freeze our explorer and wake him up a thousand years later (for these might be the travel times involved) with only his original knowledge. He will have been travelling close to the speed of light and hence there will be no way we can keep him updated on what is happening on Earth, or whatever intermediate space station he might have started from. ETP must be equipped with the Earthly knowledge base at the time of launch and the means of independently acquiring new knowledge in line with successive generations of its Earthly counterparts. Further than that it must be capable of acquiring knowledge not yet available on Earth, in particular about its approaching destination, which will become increasingly up-to-date the nearer it gets. Thus ETP will be increasingly more knowledgeable in some areas than its Earthly contemporaries while increasingly isolated in others, if only because of the fundamental constraint of the speed of light and hence the elapsed times of extra terrestrial communication. It is reasonable to assume that ETP will follow the established pattern of Earthly life and that it will have a finite life expectancy, with the ability to reproduce and hand on characteristics to future generations. For the longer journeys that must inevitably be made sometime in the future the journey time will entail multiple generations of ETP which must therefore have the ability to pass on its ever-increasing knowledge from generation to generation. Once ETP has landed, even if it has managed this within one life span, the ability to expand knowledge continuously and pass it on to future generations becomes fundamental to the colonization programme. Here we have a close parallel with terrestrial colonization where many generations of locally born descendants of the first colonizers have been required to transform the new found land into something akin to 'home'. This is why we have been referring to ETP as 'it' rather than 'he' or 'she'. We are not talking of a single period in a single explorer's life span, but of multiple generations of a collection of explorers/colonizers/inhabitants with complementary and inter-dependant roles in seeking the common goal of getting off Earth and into a new life. It is the characteristics of this complex organisation that counts, rather than the foibles of any single member. The world may remember the name Rhodes, but it was an organisation not dissimilar to ETP that built Southern Africa. The second characteristic of ETP is that it must be able to exist in multiple environments. In its simplest form this involves its starting environment, its travel environment and its destination environment. Thus the Moon traveller is born and bought up on Earth, has to be augmented by equipment and training to travel and sustain itself at high speed and zero gravity and then to survive on an airless, bitterly cold, infertile and low gravity land before returning to Earth. The ability of homo sapiens to accomplish this was spectacularly demonstrated and made routine within a tiny timespan compared with our real colonial objectives. This success falls short of exploitation and/or colonisation of the Moon; however it can be confidently assumed that if and when this becomes commercially justified it will be done, using relatively straightforward developments of existing man/machine technologies. In the meanwhile equally spectacular developments are being made in the unmanned exploration of space (or rather the things that exist within space) and in the building of manned space stations capable of supporting Earthly life, in particular people, for months and years. All this has been achieved using an ETP that is based on the existing design of people augmented by a range of man-made accessories. Extending current methods to much greater, multi-generation distances create new problems. The size and complexity of space craft which can sustain multiple generations of existing Earth people, with the infrastructure to support the necessary education and research programmes and to develop the knowledge and equipment for survival and colonization is formidable but not necessarily impossible. Indeed popular science fiction, which after all has a pretty good forecasting track record, has for many years postulated the feasibility of such designs and presented an attractive view of life in space. Outside of science fiction, however who would wish to dedicate their own lives together with many generations of their children to a journey, which, for them has no end? Particularly as, unlike science fiction, there seems no possibility of quick trips home via black holes or of sexually desirable aliens of easy virtue popping in from time-to-time. Even if such selfless, desperate or coerced people were to embark upon and survive such a journey, how does their collective ETP get on when a future generation finally arrives? There are a number of scenarios. The destination environment could be essentially the same as Earth, in which case ETP steps off the space ship, if necessary re-constitutes itself as a collection of Earth people and their associated equipment and gets on with it. Their knowledge and equipment will allow them to stave off any predators, subject or destroy the more docile inhabitants depending on their usefulness, and generally over a few generations produce another Earth. At the other extreme the environment may be completely incompatible with the ETP giving no hope of survival of either the people or equipment components. Fortunately this is a fairly easy case to deal with: we should not have gone there in the first place and certainly should not go there again. The intermediate and most likely scenario is that we will have failed to identify a fully compatible environment that we can hope to reach with the prevailing technology, but will have extensively researched the next best thing. This is that we find somewhere, which can support our equipment but not our current people. Then we have two alternatives. We can send equipment that will modify the environment until it can support our existing people and then send the people, or we can modify the people so the resultant ETP can survive in the unchanged environment. The first approach has been extensively investigated for short-distance colonization, and reasonably detailed plans put forward in the case of Mars, something which it is claimed could be achieved within a few centuries. However given the much greater distances and hence travel times involved in the longer term, it seems likely that the second approach will need to be adopted. Thus the people component of ETP must be modified in order to achieve the multiple environment criterion. We have already touched upon the third characteristic of ETP. It must be able to survive in both its travel and destination environments. These will be very different and hence on arrival ETP will first need to convert itself from travel to colonization mode and then to evolve within the latter. Some feat! But fortunately nature does this all the time so here at least, we have something to go on. Having successfully converted and started to evolve, ETP must then demonstrate its fourth characteristic and embark on its ultimate task. It must apply its knowledge and learning capacity to colonizing the new environment. Again there are extreme cases. No doubt sentimental old homo sapiens would like it to transform the environment to one just like good old Mother Earth, but without some of the problems. Then Earth people could be converted to ETP, transported over multiple generations to New Earth and converted back as New Earthers. Once again they could ransack the resources of their new home until the time comes to move on to another virgin part of the Universe. Alternatively our converted ETP could do its own thing, changing the environment to some lesser degree while evolving itself to optimise its survival potential and in the process saying good bye to those it left behind. In summary we have identified four characteristics of ETP. It must have abilities to maintain and expand knowledge over multiple generations, to exist in multiple environments, to convert to and evolve in new environments, and to apply its knowledge in new environments. Within near-terrestrial distances homo sapiens has made considerable strides in this direction, in particular by augmenting itself with a wide range of mechanical assistance - a process very much speeded up of late by the rapid advancement of key enabling sciences and technologies. This evolution started well before the first space exploration and will continue as an essential part of survival on Earth. The first steps of the integration of man and machine are visible, with microelectronics and genetic engineering paving the way. Despite the fears of people, the powers of legislation, and the possible violent panic of those likely to be left behind, the process is ultimately unstoppable. Homo sapiens will not prevail forever and it is a moot point as to whether the current steps towards the integration of man and machine is in fact part of the replacement programme. It is reasonable to assume that ETP will be very different from the present version of homo sapiens. But it will designed and built, at least in the early stages by us. A fascinating, but perhaps not all that important question is whether homo sapiens can remain in control of the process or whether his Monster will take over. However without the monster homo sapiens race will sometime be over, so why not hand over the reins sooner rather than later?
© 1999 Vic Forrington. All rights reserved
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