Post-humans may boldly go to colonise other worlds

12 May 2013 - 02:00 By The Daily Telegraph
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DREAMING BIG: The Starship Enterprise will be back on the big screen in 'Into Darkness', the latest in the popular franchise - and the ideas it contains may just help to turn fiction into fact
DREAMING BIG: The Starship Enterprise will be back on the big screen in 'Into Darkness', the latest in the popular franchise - and the ideas it contains may just help to turn fiction into fact

THE best science fiction, from HG Wells onwards, can nourish everyone's imagination.

It can broaden the perspective of astronomers too - that strange breed of which I am a member. Many of us are avid consumers of the genre - although I think we would expect aliens, if they exist, to be far stranger and far less humanoid than those portrayed in Star Trek. But possibilities once in the realms of science fiction have shifted into serious scientific debate: "cyborgs", "post-humans", alien life and even parallel universes.

Most people are at ease with the idea that our present biosphere is the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution. But the even longer time horizons that stretch ahead - familiar to every astronomer - have not permeated our culture to the same extent.

Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5billion years ago, but it has got six billion more to go before the fuel runs out. It will then flare up, engulfing the inner planets and vaporising any life that might then remain on Earth. But even after the Sun's demise, the expanding universe will continue - perhaps for ever - destined to become ever colder, ever emptier. To quote Woody Allen: "Eternity is very long, especially towards the end."

Scientific forecasters have a dismal record. One of my predecessors said, as late as the 1950s, that space travel was "utter bilge". Few in the mid-20th century envisaged the transformative impact of the silicon chip or the double helix. The iPhone would have seemed magical even 20 years ago. So, looking even a century ahead, we must keep our minds open to what may now seem science fiction.

Some proponents of the "singularity" - the takeover of humanity by intelligent machines - claim that this transition could happen within 50 years.

The Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957. Four years later, Yuri Gagarin was the first human to go into orbit. Eight years after that, and only 66 years after the Wright brothers' first flight, Neil Armstrong made his "one small step". The Apollo programme was a heroic episode. Yet, since 1972, humans have done no more than circle the Earth in low orbit. This has proved neither useful nor inspiring.

On the other hand, space technology has burgeoned - for communication, environmental monitoring, satellite navigation systems, and so forth. We depend on it every day. And unmanned probes to other planets have beamed back pictures of varied and distinctive worlds.

Had the momentum of the 1960s been maintained over the next 40 years, there would be footprints on Mars by now. But, after Apollo, the political impetus for manned space flight was lost. This was one of many instances of the widening gap between what could be achieved technologically and what is actually done. As with many technical forecasts, we can be more confident of what could happen than of how soon it will happen.

The development of supersonic airliners, for example, has languished and Concorde has gone the way of the dinosaurs.

In contrast, the sophistication and worldwide penetration of the internet and smartphones advanced much faster than most forecasters predicted.

Nasa's manned programme, ever since Apollo, has been impeded by public and political pressure, which is too risk-averse. The space shuttle failed twice in 135 launches. Astronauts or test pilots would willingly accept this risk level, but the shuttle had unwisely been promoted as a safe vehicle for civilians. So, each failure caused national trauma and was followed by a hiatus while costly efforts were made - with limited success - to reduce the risk still further.

Unless motivated by pure prestige and bankrolled by superpowers, manned missions beyond the moon will need perforce to be cut-price ventures, accepting high risks - perhaps even "one-way tickets".

I would venture a confident forecast that during this century the entire solar system - planets, moons and asteroids - will be explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft. The next step would be space mining and fabrication. The Hubble telescope's successors, with huge gossamer-thin mirrors assembled under zero gravity, will further expand our vision of the wider cosmos.

But do not ever expect mass emigration. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest. Space does not offer an escape from Earth's problems. And, even with nuclear fuel, the travel time to nearby stars exceeds a human lifetime. Interstellar travel is therefore, in my view, an enterprise for post-humans evolved from our species not through natural selection, but by design. They could be silicon-based, or they could be organic creatures who had won the battle with death, or perfected the techniques of hibernation or suspended animation.

A sustained, if not enhanced, rate of innovation in biotech, nanotech and information science could lead to entities with superhuman intellect within a few centuries. A century or two from now, there may be small groups of pioneers living independently from Earth - on Mars or on asteroids.

What about travel beyond our solar system? Even the nearest stars are so far away that no present technology could reach them. The first voyagers to the stars will be creatures whose life cycle is matched to the voyage; the aeons involved in traversing the galaxy are not daunting to immortal beings. By the end of the third millennium, travel to other stars could be technically feasible. But would there be sufficient motive?

Would even the most intrepid leave the solar system? We cannot predict what goals might drive post-humans. But the motive would surely be stronger if it turned out that many stars were orbited by planets that might harbour life.

How bright are the prospects that there is life out there already? There may be simple organisms on Mars, or remnants of creatures that lived early in the planet's history. There could be life, too, in the ice-covered oceans of Jupiter's moons, Europa and Ganymede. But few would bet on it and certainly nobody expects a complex biosphere in such locations. For that we must look to the distant stars - far beyond the range of any probe we can now construct.

In the past 20 years, and especially in the last five, the night sky has become far more interesting, and far more enticing to explorers, than it was to our forebears. Astronomers have discovered that many stars - perhaps even most - are orbited by retinues of planets, just like the Sun is. But do we expect alien life on these extrasolar planets? We know too little about how life began on Earth to lay confident odds.

Science-fiction writers have other ideas - balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of Jupiter-like planets, swarms of intelligent insects, nanoscale robots, and so forth. We should be mindful that seemingly artificial signals could come from super-intelligent (though not necessarily conscious) computers created by a race of aliens who have already died out. Maybe we will one day find ET.

If we do find ET, we will at least have something in common with them. They may live on planet Zog and have seven tentacles, but they will be made of the same kinds of atoms as we are. If they have eyes, they will gaze out on the same cosmos as we do. They will, like us, trace their origins back to a "big bang" 13.8billion years ago. But is that all there is to physical reality?

We are well aware that our knowledge of space and time is incomplete. What we have traditionally called "the universe" - the aftermath of "our" big bang - may be just one island, just one patch of space, in a perhaps infinite archipelago.

Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations. Our present concept of physical reality could be as constricted, in relation to the whole, as the perspective of Earth available to a plankton whose "universe" is a spoonful of water.

In this hugely expanded cosmic perspective, the laws of Einstein and the quantum could be mere parochial bylaws governing our cosmic patch.

It is remarkable that our brains, which have changed little since our ancestors roamed the African savannah, have allowed us to understand the counterintuitive worlds of the quantum and the cosmos. But some insights may have to await post-human intelligence. There may be phenomena, crucial to our long-term destiny, that we are not aware of, any more than a monkey comprehends the nature of stars and galaxies.

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