by Kate Greene
In theory, I’m not so against the idea of aiming for immortality. Like a moonshot or a Mars-shot, I believe good could come from the effort, as long as the discoveries—perhaps some cures or treatments for diseases—aren’t out of reach of so many. But also, in a more basic way, who’s actually able to afford to live longer? The same people who do now? And what’s the cost of this kind of longevity? And what might be the cost, more generally, of seeking immortality for a species with such an apparent acquisitive bent anyway?
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A few years ago, I heard the science fiction author Neal Stephenson speak at an event in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was answering a question about his own writing when he offhandedly, it seemed to me, said that the only reason humans have explored space at all is because Adolf Hitler wanted a missile with the range to bomb London. Before the invention in 1944 of the self-guided V-2 missile, nothing else had the capability. The space era exists because missiles, which are just rockets aimed at earthly targets, finally gained enough oomph to travel the distance. The rocket is one of humanity’s greatest technological compressions of space and time.
I looked into it and learned that more than 1,300 V-2s were fired at England and Belgium and France during the last months of World War II, in Germany’s last efforts to stave off defeat. More than 2,700 people were killed by them in London, but countless others died in their production. Though it was Wernher von Braun who oversaw the invention of the technologies that made the V-2 possible—from its powerful motor that launched it fifty miles high to its liquid ethanol and oxygen combustion, to its self-adjusting guidance system—it was prisoners in concentration camps, working in an underground factory called Mittelwerk, who made the actual physical missiles. Conditions at Mittelwerk were brutal. Prisoners endured little sleep or food, no visible daylight, and poor sanitation. Workers were executed when suspected of sabotage. This is space exploration’s provenance.
After the war, Russia confiscated the V-2 factory and test range and reverse engineered the technology. But America got von Braun, who went on to build a derivative of the V-2 called the Redstone, for the U.S. Army. This was the rocket that eventually took Alan Shepard into orbit.
The technological concepts behind the V-2 are the foundation of all rockets today. For travel into space sixty years ago, as now, we still effectively light a match and ride a fireball into the sky. Brute force. It turns out that finding a more elegant way to shrink the extensive distance of space is very difficult.
Proposals do exist, though. For instance, there’s an idea for something called a space elevator, wherein one end of a tether is anchored to the earth and the other extends beyond the atmosphere with a car that would slowly ascend and descend. Such a tether would need to be made of extremely strong, lightweight material. Some people have proposed carbon nanotubes. As of yet there are no prototypes.
When you ask questions about space travel, it’s only a matter of time before you end up at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, which I attended in 2015. The event, based on a broader project spearheaded by former astronaut Mae Jemison, aims to gather researchers, writers, artists, futurists, engineers, medievalists, economists, and adventurers to change their reference frame around space exploration and space technologies. Although it might not be possible to build a starship that travels beyond our solar system in 100 years, Jemison says, might it be a worthy endeavor to work toward? Imagine the benefits that might fall to Earth in the meantime.
At this conference, I attended a talk by a man who proposed a 100-year-long starship simulation, something like HI-SEAS, but longer by roughly a century. The speaker suggested that the rights to a video feed of participants could be sold, something like the MarsOne scheme, and the money invested. The project could be maintained financially on the interest accrued by investments over the decades.
Another speaker proposed that a material based on the microstructures found on sharkskin could help wounds heal faster—an important technology if you’re far from the resources of a well-stocked hospital. The medievalist spoke on the clothes people would wear on intergenerational spaceships. Someone else talked about the ethics of frozen embryos aboard a starship because if those embryos developed and babies were born, those babies would grow into people who wouldn’t have been able to consent to being born in space. To this, someone in the audience said the same could be said about parents-to-be who move to Nebraska. And Jill Tarter, the cofounder of the SETI institute, which aims to explore the origin of life and the evolution of intelligence and who has the same job as the Ellie Arroway character in the book and movie Contact, was also in the audience, seemingly always asking the most trenchant questions. In one case, to George T. Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic, the commercial spaceflight company, she said: “George, is Virgin Galactic taking on any responsibility before you launch a constellation of six hundred satellites for cleaning up the junk that’s already there that’s a threat to this common layer of infrastructure?” The crowd, or maybe just me, went wild—she was the only one to challenge him on his company’s responsibility toward the enormous amount of existing space debris orbiting Earth. Whitesides didn’t give a satisfying answer.
By far the most compelling talk of the conference was the proposal for a new kind of propulsion system, providing range and speed that’s impossible with chemical rockets. The propulsion would come from an ultrapowerful array of lasers, said the speaker, Philip Lubin, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Normally, Lubin studies the origins of the universe, but he had become enamored by the idea of yoking lasers together to get a beam powerful enough to push small spacecraft to some fraction of the speed of light.
This ultra-high-powered laser beam would push against something like a sail affixed to tiny spaceships about the size of a button but packed with electronics like sensors and cameras and communication chips. The beam would blast the tiny spacecraft to about 20 percent of the speed of light—so fast that it could arrive at the Alpha Centauri star system, our nearest neighbor at 4.37 light-years away, within twenty years. Compared to our current rocket technology, which could only get us there in 30,000 years, Lubin’s laser-based space travel would be an almost unbelievable advance.
And the laser system wouldn’t just be for interstellar probes, Lubin went on. We could locate one laser array on Earth and another on Mars to create a ferry system. A one-kilogram package could travel to the Red Planet in three days. Just a month or so for a larger, crewed vessel, taking into account the human body’s tolerance for acceleration and deceleration. What’s more, Lubin added, the lasers could be used as a way to clear some of the space junk that circles the Earth and threatens the safety of astronauts on the space station and can also damage expensive satellites.
I talked with Lubin after his presentation, after a cluster of other eager attendees had descended and dispersed. He was by far the darling of the event. I asked him if the physics really was sound and, thinking of the fabled space elevator, if there needed to be any new technologies built in the meantime. Lubin told me that based on current technology trends, everything he proposed was either feasible now or would be in the coming years. Nothing fundamentally new needed to be invented. He had even sent the idea to his enemies in the physics community, people who’d love to see him fail. He said they agreed, begrudgingly, that his proposal checked out. Of course it wouldn’t be easy and wouldn’t be cheap, Lubin said, but it could be possible.
About six months after the 100 Year Starship Symposium, Lubin sent me some excited emails. He had some news, and if I wanted to cover it, I should get ready. He and his team had been given $100 million by billionaire Silicon Valley investor Yuri Milner, to build a small interstellar spacecraft aimed at Alpha Centauri. It’s likely not nearly enough money to fully complete the project, but with that blast of cash, the idea suddenly became slightly less crazy. It can start to clear an orbit of its own.
But I also think about the dark truth of all propulsion systems. Any technology
that can close the unfathomable gap between celestial bodies is also, by its nature, able to be weaponized. It just depends on where you point it. And too, the conditions that accelerated the development of rockets in the last century were highly politically and militarily motivated. Is it possible to find the resources and the will to build a new kind of space-propulsion system without a geopolitical impetus? To do so in a globally cooperative way would take treaties and political agreements as well as international will, to be sure.
I should note that these kinds of high-powered laser arrays could actually have a third use beyond space travel and weaponry. They could also be used to beam energy, collected by orbiting solar panels, back to Earth, something called space-based solar power. Japan, Russia, China are actively pursuing the use of powerful lasers for just such a purpose, though some of these projects are decades old and still in the early stages.
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In every movie in which a wormhole facilitates fast travel over vast distances, inevitably, some character in the film will enact the explanation by picking up a piece of paper and pencil, folding the paper, and jabbing the pencil through to prove the point: this is how we bend space and circumvent the strictures of time.
I hate this demonstration more than is reasonable, though I must admit it proves a point succinctly and visually, which is great for film. It’s just the trope of it that makes me cranky. And probably too, the fact that there’s no clear path to anything close to a wormhole in its elegance for space travel. The math allows for it, but the practical requirements, as they stand today, are truly physically impossible.
As a kid, when I learned about black holes, I thought they were the ticket to time travel, that getting sucked into the black hole would make us the pencil in the time-space piece of paper. I remember working very hard in fourth grade on my first long short story about a wayward astronaut not getting turned into spaghetti as a black hole’s gravity pulled him in, but simply transporting to a future version of his own universe. This was the year Mrs. Shannon was my science teacher. When I asked Mrs. Shannon if she understood Einstein’s theory of relativity, she said, to my surprise, that she understood only some of it. I respected her for her humility and honesty and also for her love of cats, which I too, loved. That was the year I would stay after school and pore over back issues of Science News magazine, reading about astrophysics. I wanted to understand everything. I was in love with how a collection of clues could be stitched together to make an invisible thing visible.
Perhaps this needn’t be expressly stated, but I wasn’t very popular in school. My family was a strange family, and I was a quiet and strange child who sensed that something about my true self was perhaps unknowable or if knowable, then possibly undesirable. A friend once told me that she senses something of a fugitive in me—one who’s always aware of the exits, whether or not she uses them. Maybe it was my impending adolescence and the slow dawning to me that I would need to deal with the fact that I was not like other girls and not like the boys either, which left me wondering exactly what kind of adult person I’d grow up to be. I don’t think I could imagine it. I sought refuge in those science stories of faraway places operating under strange but knowable physics. Places that you could almost imagine if you just think about them hard enough and in the right way. I identify fourth grade, when I was nine and soaking up as many scientific concepts as my young mind could grasp, as the year when my desire to place myself within a vast elsewhere truly engaged.
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Most of us exist in a synchronized, agreed-upon time and within some kind of bounded, shared space. In New York, I’ve felt the shared space more than anywhere else I’ve lived, though of course you can also get it in London, Moscow, Lagos, Shanghai, Mexico City, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Nairobi, São Paolo, any place where humans exist in density. In New York, I had to adjust to the subway, the way you sit next to people, stand over people, pack in between people. The agreement is we keep to ourselves. To make eye contact is an act that ranges from ignorant to rude to aggressive. In New York, adjacency is unavoidable, and it’s treated as normal as long as you follow the rules.
Space mattered tremendously to us inside that Mars dome. There was such little privacy. Sian noted this fact at the beginning as she quickly designated her workspace with her equipment and her shelf space in the bathroom with toiletries. Simon did similarly, with his computer monitor and robotics equipment. Yajaira, chief science officer, took the lab. Oleg was a bit more mobile, often working with his laptop on one of the inflatable couches in the common area. I claimed my space, a seat at the shared table near Angelo. There was a lot of computer staring, which wasn’t so different from Earth. Most of us spent much of our time inside in the shared common space, which felt, in some ways, like a social free-for-all. So much so, that in order for me to concentrate on reading or writing, I had to steal away to my room, which as a group we had agreed would be bad if it happened too often—a kind of self-isolation that could be dangerous for crew cohesion. But in the shared spaces, I had a hard time focusing.
About three-quarters into the mission, I learned that Oleg didn’t treat our public spaces as public spaces. It turned out he was treating all shared spaces as inherently public and private, a little like the New York subway. Unless the situation was expressly social, like cooking, working on a project together, or eating a meal, he wouldn’t interact with others. I wish I had known! I had spent some parts of the mission considering his aloofness, and wondering why he wouldn’t return a smile or greeting when we passed each other on the stairs or in the kitchen. It makes sense, in a way. He’d grown up in Brighton Beach from age eleven, riding those trains. He knew how to give people their space. I just hadn’t known he was doing it.
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When you think of grand things, the vastness of the sea, an endless desert, a hulking mass of granite that rises up before you, and the impossibility of deep space, how it keeps extending virtually forever, what do you feel? Do you ache for purchase, for something to hold on to? Can you grab it? Do you become anxious? Do you quickly turn your mind to other thoughts?
The author Robert Macfarlane suggests that people who summit mountains are “half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.” I recently watched a couple documentaries about rock climbers who scaled the face of El Capitan in Yosemite. I imagine the same can be said of them. To sublimate into something as unfathomable as that rock, to hug, to press into it as if your life depends on it with your fingers and toes, the insides of your knees, a shoulder, a palm, to press your pain into such an ancient structure soaring high above the valley—my hands are sweating just thinking about it—is certainly an experience of deep time. Is it the same love of self and oblivion that calls people to outer space? A demand of some kind, to be annihilated? Or finally, a yearning for humility?
XI
HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS
“Okay. So I’m going to get right to the point. We’ve run into a serious obstacle in the HI-SEAS project.”
It was six months before HI-SEAS was scheduled to launch and Jean Hunter, on this conference call, sounded worried. The problem was that the head of NASA grants believed the core component to the mission—the habitat we would live in—was a “construction project,” and construction projects were not allowed to receive NASA grant funds. The prohibition was to keep a scientist from building a palatial lab under their sole purview with NASA money instead of using the agency’s funds for, say, collecting data, which could then be widely shared within the scientific community. While the habitat was conceived as a portable structure, usable elsewhere by NASA for future analog missions, NASA still wasn’t buying it.
Hunter continued: “This is a pretty serious stumbling block for us. It’s late stage. We should be starting the construction for the mid-January shakedown mission. But it gets worse. We did talk to people in the human research program at NASA to see if anyone up there would be interested in building the hab for us. Nobody is. They don’t
want to take on the responsibility of maintaining a habitat. And money is tight. Very tight.”
One solution, Hunter explained, could be to use part of the approximately $300,000 HI-SEAS grant money to rent a pre-existing facility. But if a facility that suited the needs of the project existed, she and Binsted would have already rented it. Another solution could be to convince the University of Hawai‘i or a wealthy private donor to fund the construction, and then rent the habitat from them. Hunter and Binsted were looking into these possibilities. But the most concerning aspect was that NASA had given them two weeks to solve the problem. If they didn’t come up with a workable solution, the agency would retract project funding. Our crew, Hunter said, would have to disband.
As it turned out, HI-SEAS, which has since been awarded $2.2 million more by NASA, was saved by Henk Rogers, Hawai‘i resident, renewable-energy proponent, friend of space exploration, and millionaire founder of the Blue Planet Foundation. Rogers, who had made much of his money early on as a video game designer and owner of the rights to distribute Tetris, offered to fund and build the habitat at a cost of about $200,000. The NASA-grant money would then pay to rent it, spread out over multiple missions. And like that, HI-SEAS became a public-private partnership.
From 2013 to 2018, the project supported five missions of varying lengths—four months, eight months, and a year. But then in February 2018, just four days into the sixth mission, a crewmember trying to fix a power outage was knocked down by an electric shock. He was treated and released from the hospital the same day, but other crewmembers concluded that the habitat conditions weren’t safe enough to continue. The mission was canceled.
NASA subsequently reviewed the HI-SEAS grant, an annual process anyway, but Kim Binsted said in an Atlantic article that the one following the incident was particularly intense. Ultimately, the agency didn’t assign blame for the injured crewmember and even provided more funding to the project. But since the decision came in October, and it was too late to start another mission, NASA requested that that money be used to analyze the five years of data instead.
