Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

by Ed Finn

  The extraterrestrial entrepreneurs of the late 2020s populated near-Earth space with their exploratory and test equipment and filled it with aspiring asteroid miners, mostly self-directed robots. There’s a fortune in raw materials up there, waiting for human exploitation. There is water, which means there is hydrogen for fuel and oxygen for breathing. There is carbon, a lot of carbon, and that means there is raw material that, with the proper processing, can be turned into nanotubes and buckyballs and graphene and carbyne, the basis for space stations and light sails and ships to carry robots to the stars. And humanity too, maybe, if they’re not too fragile for the trip.

  In Greater Seattle, the software industry’s Old Money has moved into the Boeing Everett Factory, the empty ecological niche left when Boeing was broken up. The leaders are the guys who, after cashing out their stock and putting their names on a few marble nonprofits, watched their wealth achieve critical mass. It doubled, tripled, quadrupled, on and on, almost on its own, with plenty of smart financial folk lining up to keep their money from wandering off—and to help it reproduce. Money has its own ecology: it grows where it grows, it doesn’t grow everywhere.

  Over the last 50 years, human intelligence has expanded into silicon, and in the next 50 the silicon, with or without the humans, will expand into space.

  When I saw Seth’s nanobots go into action on the live feed, I drummed a tattoo on my desk: bop-bop-a-diddly-bop-BOP! I called over to Tanisha, who’s my boss. “Look at these guys! They’re breeding like crazy.” I was so proud of them. My little slimebots.

  When the bots launched, it was 3:00 a.m. in the lab, and I was eating a graveyard-shift lunch of leftover sapasui—Samoan chop suey, comfort food for me—and watching the feed from Bennu, which showed a carpet of nanobots on the hapless asteroid, scarfing up water and methane and carbon faster than I was demolishing the sapasui. They were reproducing.

  “They’re breeding fast, and they’ll chomp the hell out of that rock, just eat it up.” I drummed the table again. The speed of this deployment was a first for me: everything seemed to be happening all at once.

  Tanisha looked up from her station. “Well, that’s what they’re supposed to be doing, if the code is solid. Get a grip, Sina.”

  “Slimebots rule!” I pushed a forkful of noodles into my mouth. “I want to be part of the Slimebot Revolution!”

  Tanisha laughed. “That’s what you’re calling it?” she said. “Let’s see how well these guys do on Bennu. We’ll see if they can compete with the dumber gobblers.”

  The bots operate on simple rules based on models of slime mold behavior. They function as a group (or swarm) and can transition back and forth from individual to group mode, quickly identify and capture specific molecules, and plan very efficient modes of movement and cooperation. So far, most nano-miners are single-purpose bots for mining gold and platinum. Our bots are light-years ahead of those guys.

  “Plus,” she said, in a hectoring tone, “you may know a ton about slime molds, but your coding skills could be a bit tighter.”

  I defended myself, though she was telling the unvarnished truth. “My HR file says I have ‘an artless but effective approach to both code and design.’ That’s what it says. You want tight code, you get an AI to write it.”

  Tanisha grinned. “You shouldn’t be hacking into your HR file. You’ll get caught.” She threw her arms up to heaven. “Why is my team made up of ungovernable children? You are so much more trouble than AIs.”

  Tanisha is the night-shift lead, with a decade of experience working with artificial intelligence. I’ve learned a lot from her—about coding, about asteroids, about tweaking my attitude to make it fit the workplace.

  “Hey, I’m not a child.” But I thought about it. She did get all the mavericks. “Maybe you’re supposed to teach us to govern ourselves.”

  Tanisha smiled. “Sina, if you can govern yourself, you can govern anything that walks. That’s what my grandma used to say, anyway.”

  I stood up. “Well,” I said, “these little guys are my children, and I need to check on them. Gotta govern.”

  She grinned. “You had better hope they’re governable, Sina. We don’t want a gray-goo scenario up there. But they are Seth’s responsibility. Check in with her, too, see what she’s thinking.” I rolled my eyes. Tanisha thinks Seth is a girl.

  I’ve got a special affection for Seth and the nanobots—Seth because he’s so friendly, and the nanobots because they’re based on slime molds, and I luuuv slime molds. I’ve kept them as pets ever since I was a kid. That’s why I wanted the job at NanoGobblers, and I think that’s why they wanted me on this mission. Plus my tech skills, of course—my artless coding.

  I scarfed up the last of my lunch and went back to my station. I put on my shades, and immediately I was out there hanging above Bennu, which was pitch-black against a background of stars. Sunlight glinted darkly off the asteroid, which is shaped kind of like a clumpy snowball.

  I love being out there. No lie, this is the best part of my job. Suddenly I was 400,000 kilometers away from Everett, from the heat and the rain and the money worries, perched on Seth’s shoulder, looking out into the universe.

  “Malo, Seth. Ola! Yo, what’s happening?”

  “Malo le soifua, Sina,” he answered like a homeboy. One of the things AIs like Seth do automatically is adjust to the language being spoken, learn new words and so forth. Samoan wasn’t one of his standard languages, but I’d taught him what little I know. (Hey, I grew up in Seattle. Gimme a break.) Maybe he thought it was a kind of English, I dunno, but it made me feel like he was family. Also, I’d dialed his voice down to a deep, sexy bass, just for fun.

  Seth was orbiting Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid—it was about three-quarters of a kilometer away. The communication lag time to Earth is short, a few seconds, not much more than it would be to the Moon, because Bennu was in the part of its orbit that is closest to Earth.

  Out there, my eyes were electronic, so I could zoom in to distinguish small rocks. It was all rocks, actually. Bennu was basically a clump of rocks. Looking out onto the asteroid, I could see that things were changing. Its crispness—its boundary, its roughness—was slowly being covered by an even gray sheen, as the bots replicated, using the asteroid’s own carbon to make the machines that will take it apart.

  I couldn’t see the bots themselves, of course, but the mass of them looked like that gray goo Tanisha was talking about, the unlikely but legendary scenario in which nanobots take over the universe by turning it all into nanobots. At this point, they were still replicating and had not yet started the actual process of harvesting the asteroid. This doubling and doubling and doubling, as each bot made a new one, and then the two bots made two new ones, would take about eight hours total—50 iterations to make 12.5 billion bots.

  When I took this job, it was with the thought that someday I’d get off-planet. I had no idea how wrong I was. It’s way too early for ordinary humans to thrive in the rest of the solar system. AIs and robots will have all the fun in the near term, and the entrepreneurs will do the thriving. But I’m happy that I get to watch.

  Even as a kid, I was infatuated with space travel. Maybe it was because of my mother, who named me Masina, which means “Moon” in Samoan. In city housing in Seattle, I loved watching flyby videos, zooming over Pluto and Charon, seeing the pale, bleak landscapes passing swiftly beneath my imagined ship—nitrogen glaciers and canyons of frozen methane, deep crevasses and strange round holes. When the Osiris REx probe came back from Bennu in 2023, Ta and I jumped up and down like crazy people.

  Or maybe it was because of my dad, maybe that’s where it all came from originally. The Christmas I was five, my dad downloaded some free outer-space gaming software and bought cheap flight-simulator controls—a couple of joysticks, some plastic throttles and foot pedals that hooked up to our PC. To me and Ta, it was like piloting the New Horizons probe, swooping down over Pluto. We loved it—all three of us loved it—and it was multiplayer, a
real family game.

  Mo, when he had the job at Boeing, liked to joke that he worked in the aerospace industry. “Yeah,” he’d say, with a serious nod, “I’m in aerospace.” Then he’d add, with a smile, “I fly a forklift for Boeing.” He’d worked at the Renton plant since we’d come over from Honolulu, where my brother and I were born. Growing up in Samoa, forty or fifty years ago, he said, he dreamed of space and dreamed of flight, and he was going to make sure we kids had what we needed to do what we wanted, whatever we wanted to do. And that part was no joke.

  Now I work nights at NanoGobblers, a nanotech start-up in that big old building at Paine Field, north of Seattle. Twenty years ago, when I was born, it belonged to Boeing and was the biggest building in the world. But that was then, and now it’s a walled city of nanotech developers—stacked boxcars full of cubicles and testing labs and people in windowless but air-conditioned rooms. Not exactly the glamorous part of the space industry, but this is the job that is putting me though college. I get an engineering degree, I’ll be able to get a real job building the habitats. Maybe even get to go out to them. Somebody’s going to, I figure, and it might as well be me.

  Night shifts are quiet. Basically, I just do installation monitoring for nanobot missions: partner with the AI, make sure the bots are working, make sure the incoming data is streaming, check the functionality of the local devices, fix or replace anything that isn’t working, answer any questions the AI has. The techs come in at 8:00 a.m., and I go off to class. Sleep? Who needs it?

  The other night-shifters and I are the space-tech equivalent of gofers. Low-paid, software-savvy since we were kids, we work nights and weekends in the start-ups that are competing for piecework in asteroid mining: nanoware design, testing, and operations management. All nano, all the time. We know we’re lucky to have the jobs and the training in this economy. As soon as the development cost is low enough, these jobs will be held by AIs. I’m hoping I’ll be promoted by then into another job the AIs can’t do yet. It’s musical chairs, staying ahead of the AIs, especially now that they’re programming themselves.

  The air transportation business fled Everett with the Boeing Company and my dad’s job went with them. There are no forklifts any more—no forklifts and no jobs for old guys who graduated from some island high school. Mo got a job in a Samoan sandwich shop. Not great money, but he said that leftover barbecue was an employee benefit that Boeing had never offered. My dad looks on the bright side.

  Seth fascinated me. He had a brain at least as good as mine, a much better memory, an army of bots to do his bidding, and instant access to all the information in the world, which he kept with him on a cube the size of your thumb. He talked and he thought and he made up his own mind about what he did and how to do it. I mean, okay, he was a glorified expert system, but he aced the Turing test and spoke tech-talk better than I did. So I was almost extraneous, and if the Consortium allowed Seth to talk directly to NASA scientists, I’d have been out of a job.

  Seth had powered up fully two months before, when the probe got to Bennu, and I’d gotten to know him pretty well. I get pretty familiar with all the AIs I work with, but he was special: he had mega-meg processing power and a good dose of what they call machine curiosity. I knew there were other systems like him in astro-mining and construction, but he was my first curious AI, and seemed more like a pal than a computer.

  He teased me by pretending he was all kinds of weird people named Seth, and telling me their stories. My least favorite was the ten-thousand-year-old spirit from Seth Speaks, a book that started some kind of weird cult 50 years ago or so. That Seth was a bit creepy, frankly. “I will incarnate whether or not you believe that I will.” He stopped when I told him it scared me. I would love to know who programmed him to tell those stories. I’d take them apart.

  Seth learned from experience, so he changed. He was changing a lot in the time I was first getting to know him, and developing a database-y sense of humor, which certainly wasn’t in his spec. I thought maybe he was malfunctioning in some way, but I couldn’t put my finger on how. Just a language-sim glitch? I posted a note to NASA about it, but they said it wasn’t mission-critical at this point and spindled it.

  Seth was always in conversation with other AIs, even while he was in conversation with me. I didn’t think this was a bad thing: it meant he could get a lot of work done at once. Really, only the Saps First people worry about this kind of stuff, and everyone knows they’re nuts.

  The area between the Earth and the Moon is dotted with AIs and probes and bots and a few people, all trying to find and extract riches from what is mostly empty space. Here and there are human habitats and redirected chunks of asteroids. Every space-striver in the world has AI-directed machinery up there, trying to lay claim to a rock and pry it apart. Of course not all the AIs talk to one another—some are too old to have the capability, or have no surplus power for nonessential communication, or were designed to function only within narrow parameters. But it’s normal now to have the AIs work out shipping routes and direct traffic on the supply lanes without consulting humans. That kind of transportation planning is what AIs are best at. No one worries about collisions any more, and it’s funny to think there was ever any debate about this.

  When he arrived at Bennu, Seth launched a set of explorer bots. He oversaw them while they searched for organic molecules, captured samples, and stored them for return to Earth orbit. Then he started deploying self-replicating nanobots to take Bennu apart, atom by atom.

  For billions of years, Bennu has moved in a solar orbit that crosses Earth’s. It sometimes comes in close to Earth and then swings wide around the sun in a huge ellipse. If we left it alone, the closest it would get to us in the next century is 300,000 kilometers: a whole light-second, but closer than the Moon. For NASA that is too close for comfort, and they decided to take it apart, as long as they were going there anyway. Memo to self: do not intrude on NASA’s comfort zone.

  Bennu was probably around before the solar system was created—it’s a bit of residue that never got made into a planet and, since it was never subjected to the heat and pressure that form planets, it could hold clues about whether life came to Earth from somewhere else, and if it did, how it could travel through the universe. NASA went prospecting on Bennu back in the teens, looking for amino acids and other organic materials, what they called the ingredients of life—chemicals that, when they come together under the right conditions, form even more complex chemicals that can assemble themselves, kind of like nanobots do. Like nanobots, they’re not alive. But, unlike nanobots, they’re on their way.

  The earlier mission to Bennu that NASA sent out in 2016 didn’t have special explorer bots—it didn’t even have an AI—but when it returned seven years later, it brought back some very interesting amino acids. So they launched this second probe two years ago, in 2030, with a smart AI to pilot (that’s Seth) and better tools (the explorer bots) to look for molecules of formaldehyde or ammonia, maybe even proteins. These things still aren’t alive, but they’re made from amino acids, so they’re, like, the next step in the recipe. If they find them on Bennu, it could mean that life is older than the solar system.

  And if life is older than the solar system, it’s almost certainly somewhere else. It would mean that we’re not alone. Big news.

  So whenever Seth’s explorer bots found something that might be what they were looking for, they inhaled it and returned to the probe. When they’d all returned, Seth began the second phase of the mission. He turned loose the slimebots, and they started replicating, using the materials of Bennu itself, mostly carbon and some trace metals. Water frozen in Bennu’s rocks provides oxygen and hydrogen to use as fuel. The bots make billions of copies of themselves, and the copies will gobble up the whole asteroid, sorting it molecule by molecule. They’ll bag the carbon and ice and fuels, then Seth will put up a light sail, and sunlight will push the remains of Bennu to the L5 Lagrangian libration point, way out past the Moon.

 
; The useful thing about a Lagrangian point is that what you put there stays there, waiting for you to come back. The Consortium is building a commercial storage station there. Mining companies are filling it up with raw materials, for resale to space developers and manufacturers. Nothing, no matter how valuable it seems, is sent back to Earth. “What goes up does not come down,” as they say.

  Once Phase II started, Seth and I were free to just knock back, so he got to kidding again about people named Seth. I had 11 other nanobot visual feeds to keep track of, but those feeds are no big deal to keep an eye on—they are mostly small-scale cleanup operations, collecting gold and platinum residue left behind after nickel and iron mining.

  Seth told me he had a video of The Fly, a Hollywood chestnut they redo every few decades or so, hoping to get it right. He liked it because the main character is a guy named Seth, who gets turned into a fly in a teleportation accident. (Ha-ha.) We were going to watch just a little bit, but we ended up watching the whole thing. It was okay, but I’m not a big horror fan.

  “Tell me what you think the movie is about,” Seth asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The dangers of using uninspected transportation?”

  “That is a joke,” Seth said. “Its humor resides in the recontextualization of an exotic, even spurious concept by identifying it with the familiar.”