Authors: Ben Bova
Men had pursued a quest for knowledge for ages before that date. Ancients had mapped the heavens, tribal shamans had started the study of medicine, mystics had developed some rudimentary understandings of the human mind, philosophers had argued about causes and origins. But it was not until the first few decades of the seventeenth century that the deliberate, organized method of thinking that we now call science was created.
It was in those decades, some 350 years ago, that Galileo began settling arguments about physical phenomena by setting up experiments and measuring the results. Kepler was deducing the laws that govern planetary motion. Bacon was writing about a new method of thinking and investigating the secrets of nature: the technique of inductive reasoning, a technique that requires a careful interplay of observation, measurement, and logic.
Bacon’s landmark book,
Novum Organum,
was written and titled in reaction to Aristotle’s
De Organum,
written some fifteen hundred years earlier as a summarization of all that was known about the physical universe. For fifteen hundred years, Aristotle’s word was the last one on any subject dealing with “natural philosophy,” or what we today call the physical sciences. For fifteen hundred years it was blindly accepted that a heavy body falls faster than a light one, that the Earth is the center of the universe, that the heart is the seat of human emotion. (And when have you seen a Valentine card bearing a picture of the brain or an adrenal gland?)
For fifteen hundred years, human knowledge and understanding advanced so little that the peasant of Aristotle’s day and that of Bacon’s would scarcely seem different to each other. This was not due to a Dark Age that blotted out ancient knowledge and prevented progress. For this fifteen-hundred-year stasis affected not only Europe, but the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas as well.
The lack of advancement during this long millennium and a half was due, more than anything else, to the limits of the ancient method of thought. Only incremental gains in technology could be made by people who accepted ancient authority as the answer to every question, who believed that the Earth was flat and placed at the exact center of the universe, who “knew” that empirical evidence was not to be trusted because it could be a trick played upon the senses by the forces of evil.
In the three hundred fifty years since the scientific method of thought has become established, human life has changed so enormously that a peasant of Bacon’s time (or a nobleman, for that matter!) would be lost and bewildered in today’s society. Today the poorest American controls more energy, at the touch of a button or the turn of an ignition key, than most of the high-born nobles of all time ever commanded. We can see and hear the world’s history, current news, the finest artists, whenever we choose. We live longer, grow taller and stronger, and can blithely disregard diseases that scourged civilizations, generation after generation.
This is what science-based technology has done for us. Yet this is almost trivial, compared to what the scientific method of thinking has accomplished.
For the basic theme of scientific thought is that the universe is knowable. Man is not a helpless pawn of forces beyond his own ken. Order can be brought out of chaos.
Faced, then, with a first-generation technology that threatens to strangle us in its effluvia, we have already turned to science for the basis of a second-generation technology. We have turned to Apollo.
We recognize that it is Apollo’s symbol—the dazzling sun—that will be the key to our second-generation technology. The touchstone of all our history has been our ability to command constantly richer sources of energy.
Homo erectus’
burning bush gave way to fires fueled by coal, oil, natural gas—the fossils of antediluvian creatures. Today we take energy from the fission of uranium atoms.
Tomorrow our energy will come from the sun. Either we will tap the sunlight steaming down on us and convert it into the forms of energy that we need, such as electricity or heat, or we will create miniature suns here on Earth and draw energy directly from them. This is thermonuclear fusion, the energy of the H-bomb. In thermonuclear fusion, the nuclei of light atoms such as hydrogen isotopes are forced together to create heavier nuclei and give off energy. This is the energy source of the sun itself, and the stars. It promises clean, inexpensive, inexhaustible energy for all the rest of human history.
The fuel for fusion is deuterium, the isotope of hydrogen that is in “heavy water.” For every six thousand atoms of ordinary hydrogen in the world’s oceans, there is one atom of deuterium. The fusion process is energetic enough so that the deuterium in one cubic meter of water (about two hundred twenty-five gallons) can yield 450,000 kilowatt-hours of energy. That means that a single cubic kilometer of sea water has the energy equivalent of all the known oil reserves on Earth. And that is using only one-six-thousandth of the hydrogen in the water.
Fusion power will be cheap and abundant enough to be the driving force of our second-generation technology. The gift of Apollo can provide all our energy needs for millions of years into the future.
There will eventually be no further need for fossil fuels or even fissionables. Which in turn means there will be no need to gut our world for coal, oil, gas, uranium. No oil wells. No black lung disease. No problems of disposing of highly radioactive wastes.
The waste products of the fusion process are clean, inert helium and highly energetic neutrons. The neutrons could be a radiation danger if they escape the fusion reactor, but they are far too valuable to let loose, for energetic neutrons are the philosopher’s stone of the modern alchemists. They can transform the atoms of one element into atoms of another.
Instead of changing lead into gold, however, the neutrons will be used to transmute light metals such as lithium into the hydrogen isotopes that fuel the fusion reactors. They can also transmute the radioactive wastes of fission power plants into safely inert substances.
The energy from fusion can also be used to make the ultimate recycling system. Fusion “torches” will be able to vaporize anything. An automobile, for example, could be flashed into a cloud of its component atoms—iron, carbon, chromium, oxygen, etc. Using apparatus that already exists today, it is possible to separate these elements and collect them, in ultra-pure form, for reuse. With effective and efficient recycling, the need for fresh raw materials will go down drastically. The mining and lumbering industries will dwindle; the scars on the face of the Earth will begin to heal.
Fusion energy will produce abundant electricity without significant pollution and with thousands of times less radiation hazard than modern power plants. With cheap and abundant energy there need be no such thing as a “have-not” nation. Sea water can be desalted and piped a thousand kilometers inland, if necessary. The energy to do it will be cheap enough. All forms of transportation—from automobiles to spacecraft—will either use fusion power directly or the electricity derived from fusion.
The gift of Apollo, then, can mark as great a turning point in human history as the gift of Prometheus. Like the taming of fire, the taming of fusion will so change our way of life that our descendants a scarce century from now will be hard put to imagine how we could have lived without this ultimate energy source.
Apollo is a significant name for humankind’s second wish for another reason, too. Apollo was the title given to humanity’s most ambitious exploration program. In the name of the sun god we reached the moon. Not very consistent nomenclature or mythology, perhaps, but extremely significant for the future of science and the human race.
For to truly fulfill our second wish, we must and will expand the habitat of the human race into space.
We live on a finite planet. We are already beginning to see the consequences of overpopulation and over-consumption of this planet’s natural resources. Sooner or later, we must begin to draw our resources from other worlds.
We have already “imported” some minerals from the moon. The cost for a few hundred pounds of rocks was astronomically high: more than $20 billion. Clearly, more efficient modes of transportation must be found, and scientists and engineers are at work on them now.
It is interesting to realize that the actual cost of the energy it takes to send an average-size man to the moon and back—if you bought the energy from your local electric utility—is less than $200. There is much room for improvement in our space transportation systems.
Improvements are coming. Reusable space shuttles are replacing expendable rockets, delivering cargo and people into orbit with increasing efficiency and economy. Fusion energy itself will someday propel spacecraft. Scientists are working on very high-powered lasers that could boost spacecraft into orbit. And the eventual payoff of the esoteric investigations into subatomic physics might well be an insight into the basic forces of nature, an insight that may someday give us some control over gravity.
There is an entire solar system of natural resources waiting for us, once we have achieved economical means of operating in deep space. Many science fiction stories have speculated on the possibilities of “mining” the asteroids, that belt of stone and metal fragments in orbit between Mars and Jupiter.
There are thousands upon thousands of asteroids out there. A single ten-kilometer chunk of the nickel-iron variety (which is common) would contain approximately 20 million million tons of high-grade iron. That’s 2 x 10
13
tons. Considering that world steel production in 1973 was a bit less than a thousand million tons (10
9
), this one asteroid could satisfy our need for steel for about ten thousand years!
The resources are there. And eventually much of our industrial operations will themselves move into space: into orbit around Earth initially, and then farther out, to the areas where the resources are.
There are excellent reasons for doing so. Industrial operations have traditionally been sited as close as possible to the source of raw material. This is why Pittsburgh is near the Pennsylvania coal fields and not far from the iron-ore deposits farther west. It is cheaper to transport finished manufactured products than haul bulky raw materials.
The very nature of space offers advantages for many industrial processes. The high vacuum, low gravity, and virtually free solar energy of the space environment will be irresistible attractions to designers of future industrial operations. Also, the problems of handling waste products and pollution emissions will be easier in space than on Earth.
The pressures of social history will push industry off-planet. We cannot afford to cover the Earth with factories. Yet the alternative is a cessation of economic growth—as long as industrial operations are limited to our finite planet.
Although studies such as the MIT/Club of Rome’s “Limits of Growth” have urged a stabilized society, human nature usually wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It should be possible to maintain economic growth by expanding off-planet, and thereby avoid the catastrophic effects of polluting our world to death.
What about the ultimate pollution: overpopulation? Will our expansion into space simply allow the human race to continue its population explosion until civilization collapses under the sheer groaning weight of human flesh?
Many science fiction stories have depicted a rigidly stabilized future society, where vocation, recreation, and even procreation are strictly controlled by the state. Given modern techniques of behavior modification and genetic manipulation, this might someday be possible. Indeed, this is the world that the “Limits to Growth” inevitably leads to.
There is an alternative. In all of human history, the only sure technique for leveling off an expanding population has been to increase the people’s standard of living. War, famine, pestilence inevitably lead to a higher birth rate. Modern science has reduced the death rate to the point where even a moderately rising birthrate is a threat to society.
If economic growth can be maintained or even accelerated by expanding the economy into space—and this growth is shared by all people everywhere on Earth—we may have the means for leveling off the population explosion without the repressions that most science fiction writers are haunted by.
Eventually, people will go into space to live. There will be no large-scale migrations—not for a century, at least. But within a few decades, we may see self-sufficient communities in orbit around the Earth, on the moon, and eventually farther out in space.
For the first time since the settling of the Americas, humankind will have an opportunity to develop new social codes. In the strange and harsh environments we will encounter in space, we will perforce evolve new ways of life. Old manners and customs will wither; new ones will arise.
Scientists such as astronomer Carl Sagan look forward to these “experimental communities.” They point out that social evolution on Earth is stultified by the success of Western technological civilization. Nearly every human society on this planet lives in a Westernized culture. Variety among human cultures is being homogenized away. The new environment of space offers an opportunity to produce new types of societies, new ways of life that might teach those who remain on Earth how to live better, more fully, more humanly.
Which brings us to the last of humankind’s three wishes, the most important one of all, the wish for the gift of Athena.
The gray-eyed goddess of civilization and wisdom. The warrior-goddess who was born with shield and spear in her hands, but who evolved from Homer’s time to Pericles’ into a goddess of counsel, of arts and industries, the protectress of cities, the patron deity of Athens.
It is to Athena that we must turn if we are to succeed in our long struggle against the darkness. For human history can be viewed as an attempt to countervene the inevitable chaos of entropy. We succeed as individuals, as a society, as a species, when we are able to bring order out of confusion, understanding out of mystery. Athena, whose symbol is the owl, represents the wisdom and self-knowledge that we so desperately need.