"War is not healthy
for children and other living things" goes the 60's poster.
It's true -- and yet we
still fight wars. Why? Because war serves several important functions. One of
the most important is to gain or preserve control of resources, particularly
territory. For example, the European desire to expand in the 15th through 20th
centuries could only take place on Earth, and inevitably sparked a long series
of wars both in and out of Europe, culminating with the vast trench-warfare
slaughter of World War I. Today there is an entirely peaceful and far more
powerful alternative, space settlement. Space settlement
is to territorial and resource wars as computer word processing is to the quill
pen. Sure, you can write a book with a quill and ink pot, but why bother when
you've got a PC and MS Word?
Space settlement means
people living
and working beyond Earth, not only on the Moon and Mars, but also in giant
rotating spacecraft -- orbital space settlements.
In the 1970's Princeton
physicist Gerard O'Neill, with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and
Stanford University, showed that we can build giant
orbiting spaceships and live in them [reference].
These settlements can be wonderful places to live; about the size of a
California beach town and endowed with weightless recreation, fantastic views,
freedom, elbow-room in spades, great wealth and true independence. Territorial
and resource wars can be made obsolete by space settlement because of one
simple fact: the vast majority of the resources available to mankind are not on
Earth, they are in space. While exploiting space resources will be monumentally
expensive, this cost is minor compared to the cost of war. A really first-class
space settlement program might cost $100 billion a year, whereas the U.S.
military budget is about $600 billion. Moreover, space settlement can deliver
far, far more resources than even the most successful imaginable Earth-bound
military.
Consider:
- If the
materials in the single largest asteroid, Ceres, were used for orbital
space settlement construction, we could build territory equal to over 200
times surface area of the Earth (1). This is enough to provide every
single nation as much territory as if they conquered the entire Earth.
Furthermore, conquering Earth is probably impossible, whereas building
space settlements is merely incredibly difficult.
- The total
energy resources of this solar system are about 2.3 billion times the
energy available on Earth. This is simply the Sun's energy output -- and
the Sun is an enormous nuclear fusion reactor that works perfectly right
now, today, and is perfectly safe -- or at least isn't going away.
Furthermore, we know, more or less, how to exploit space solar power ([reference]).
- There are
thousands of asteroids in orbits that cross Earth's, and just one of them,
3554 Amun, contains roughly $20 trillion dollars worth of precious metals.
Space
settlement can make resource wars a thing of the past, something we only read
about in history books, because space settlement can deliver far, far more
resources at far, far less cost. Less money, less death, less destruction, and
infinitely less stupidity.
Resources and territory are
not the only reasons for war, but they cause a lot of them. The U.S. has spent
far more defending oil access in the Mid-East than it would cost to build space
settlements. Perhaps it's time to change direction. Perhaps it's time to make
Earth a bit healthier for children and other living things. Perhaps it's time
to choose life over war. Perhaps it's time to start building space settlements.
Footnotes
(1) This works because most
of the mass of space settlements is in the hull, not filling three-dimensional
space. The hull is very thin compared to a planet or large asteroid so uses far
less mass for the same living area. Rotation is used to provide a feeling
similar to gravity with far less mass.
Al
Globus serves on the National Space Society Board of Directors and is a senior
research associate for Human Factors Research and Technology at San Jose State
University at NASA Ames Research Center.
NOTE: The
views of this article are the author's and do not reflect the policies of the
National Space Society.
Visit SPACE.com/Ad Astra Online for more
news, views and scientific inquiry from the National Space Society.
advertisement
