The "Cold, Hostile Wastes of Space" Myth...

It's one of the most cherished notions about space that it's "the most hostile environment known to Man" or that it's "incredibly inhospitable".  It's understandable that the agencies responsible for exploring space have made these kinds of claims -- after all, it makes what they do seem all the more heroic -- and it justifies big budgets in the mind of a public that wants to see it all as a big Sci-fi epic instead of a practical effort at colonization.

But just how real are the dangers in space? Is space really "colder" than a cold winter night in the Yukon? Is the low pressure of space any worse than the high pressure on the sea floor? Is the lack of breathable oxygen in a vacuum more of a hazard than what scuba divers face in their daily work?

Not really. The fact is, there are places right here on Earth that, at least individually, present nearly all of the hazards that we find in space, and sometimes to greater degrees. I don't mean to imply that space isn't challenging or that we already know everything we need to know about long term life support in space. Quite the contrary, these are active areas of research, and a large part of what this site is all about. What I'm trying to debunk is the rather widely held belief that these obstacles are somehow insurmountable -- that we are destined to stay on this one planet because it's the only one that can sustain life forms like us.

Furthermore, space presents us with a lot of natural gifts: resources that are, by comparison with those on Earth, incredibly easy to get to (once you've gotten into space, of course), and incredibly abundant. Perhaps more importantly in today's era of Green politics, they do not involve displacing the one resource on which planet Earth does have a monopoly: our kind of life form (life of the Terran Genesis, derived all from one single biochemistry which is probably unique in the Cosmos).

Consider the lunacy of digging up rain forest in Indonesia -- destroying biodiversity that is probably literally unique in all of the Universe, and therefore of incalculable value -- to get to aluminum, a relatively common chemical which is available, often directly on the surface in the form of low-grade ores, of at least a half-dozen airless bodies in the solar system which do not sustain any form of life. Does this make sense? Ethically? Politically? Economically? Only if you are deluded into thinking the Earth is the limit to humanity! From a cosmic perspective, these decisions make no sense.

And the wisdom of that perspective will not be commonplace until humans have expanded beyond the Earth. So it is critical to understand that Space (by which we mean the technologically accessible, extraterrestrial reaches of our Solar System) represents not scarcity and adversity, but rather abundance and opportunity.

The Real Dangers

The real dangers of space are mainly in what it does not provide: air, water, and food. These have to be acknowledge, but it also has to be realized that providing a missing commodity is always going to be easier than defending against actively hostile forces. In space, there are very few of the latter, and of those that exist, they are remarkably predictable.

On Earth, we can't say the same: heat, humidity, chemical corrosion, and living parasites (from disease organisms to mosquitoes to barnacles) are ever-present hazards. We don't have those things to worry about in space.

While space does little to warm you up or cool you off, it also does little to overheat or freeze you: vacuum is an excellent thermal insulator, as anyone who uses a thermos bottle should know. Thinking of the "deep cold of space"? Think again -- space is more like a nice warm insulating blanket.

It's more often a problem to figure out how to get rid of heat than it is to worry about freezing from the cold. On Earth (or in any other high-pressure environment), things can be much worse: a blowing cold wind in the arctic can be a lot more chilling, as it can actively conduct and/or convect heat away from you. Space doesn't do that to you.

There is just one serious exception, and that is radiation. Whereas the Earth's surface (and even Low Earth Orbit or LEO) is defended from solar particle radiation by its enormous magnetic field, space in general is exposed to a lot of radiation of all sorts.  The first question to ask about a given environment in space should be, what's the radiation environment like? It varies a lot: Jupiter's outermost large moon, Callisto, for example, has one of the calmest radiation environments in the solar system, while Io, it's innermost, has an environment that would roast a human being in a matter of seconds.

Unfortunately, the reference data available on radiation safety environments is sparse!  This is one of the areas that needs the most work. The radiation data is there, of course (many probes measure it), but it's not a "hot topic" to draw in the press, and as a result, it is left in a pretty academic state. There are models which can be used to compute radiation hazards based on the existing data, but they require expert interpretation, and there are still a lot of unknowns about just how sensitive humans are to various kinds of radiation (which can include anything from pure-energy radiation like gamma rays to so-called "heavy primaries" which are just fast-moving atomic nuclei).

On the other hand, the constancy of solar radiation in the form of sunlight is also one of the great resources in space. With no clouds to worry about, solar power in space tends to be a sure thing. That's why so many spacecraft are powered by it!

Another Agricultural Revolution

It is true that space is not for the faint of heart. We cannot live beyond the Earth without technology. Of course, this is very quickly becoming true of the Earth as well -- at least if we want to sustain our present numbers. Primitive agriculture methods won't feed six billion humans on Earth, and it will take quite sophisticated technologies to feed even a few thousand or few million people in space, but this is not a new problem.

Humans faced the same situation here on Earth when they outgrew the primitive hunter-gatherer sustainability of their ecosystem. They learned that if they wanted to keep on living and growing, they would have to plant crops and raise livestock and adopt an artificial lifestyle: specifically the agrarian lifestyle we now view as quaint and primitive.

Likewise, we will find in space that our old agrarian methods are no longer adequate, and new techniques are needed. There will be a new field of Space Agriculture which will go beyond mere "Life Support", "Closed Systems Ecology", and even "BIospherics"  to establish real, large-scale  growth of food crops and livestock in space to feed the people who will live there.

The recycling of air and water, which on Earth we continue to this day to leave up to the cycles  of nature, will have to be managed in space, much as the food cycle came to be managed under agrarian agriculture. It will be a new way of living, and to be sure, there will be some lifestyle  trade offs (although, despite rampant speculation, it's not clear what they all will be at present).

Most of the technology to live for long periods in space has not been developed yet. The technology for even relatively short duration stays in space is still quite primitive and expensive. So, it's not surprising that those who don't understand the technology or the science are inclined to think it's unfeasible. But this is a myth. The technology has not been developed or perfected simply because we haven't seriously tried to yet -- because until now we haven't needed it.

But we are Human beings, and we are smart. We've survived ice ages, jungles, deserts, frozen tundra, and our own technological follies and aggression. We will survive the global warming on Earth, whether it is due to our own meddling or to natural climate change. And we will survive in space.

Large or Small?

Life on Earth is dominated by multicellular life forms. There are a lot of advantages to this approach, in terms of robustness and ability to recover from injury. Likewise, human civilizations on Earth have always been based on an agrarian base: a level of subsistence existence which requires only small-scale organization (family or tribal groups) of highly self-sufficient groups.

These, like cells in biology give the civilizations that they form much greater robustness and vitality than do the rigidly-structured tightly-state-controlled top-down organizations that we associate with cities and larger governments. When people are self-sufficient, they can afford to be more free, because they do not need to control their neighbors' behavior in order to survive.

Biology and civilization both pay costs in order to maintain this robustness. It's probably true that a perfectly regimented society (or life form) could be more "efficient" under ideal conditions (faster, stronger, more powerful, etc). But it would be brittle: a term which in engineering refers to the tendency of a system to break down catastrophically and fail, rather than slowly degrading under stress. The precedents of biology and civilization both show pretty clearly that brittle is a bad thing to be.

Another reason for adopting a cellular approach is that it makes it easier to grow (a body or a civilization) from tiny units. It's possible to build a giant machine, but it costs a lot. Building lots of little machines tends to be easier to accomplish. In the same way, a civilization can grow more easily from lots of little communities than it can if we try to construct it in city-sized chunks.

This is why I reject the O'Neillian vision of colonizing space under the control of large corporate or government entities by engaging in the construction of giant space colonies. I do not believe that the future in space lies with the "ultimate urban" environment, but rather with the "ultimate rural" environment. In space, they are completely adjacent. Once there are small communities in space, the economic power needed to create large ones will come naturally, as will a natural cultural resistance to adversity.

Without such violent weapons of poverty as central governing powers in such colonies might wield (e.g. a monopoly control of air, let alone water), tyranny in space will be much harder as well, so it stands to reason that a distributed, self-sufficient colonization strategy in space is also a more secure way to achieve a free civilization there.