From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Wed 29 Oct 2003 - 01:28:45 GMT
More on Memes
L5 NEWS. June 1986
(continued)
In one way memes are very different from other infectious agents. We can
consciously mold or modify them in ways we think might improve their power
over our minds. Dr. Gerard O'Neill purposely looked around to see if one of
the major issues of the day could be spliced into the space colony
meme/concept/idea. The energy crisis was the big concern of 1974/75, and
the Solar Power Satellite was a good choice to turn an appealing, but
impossible-to-fund concept into an economically justifiable project.
An alternative to moving away from the space colony meme is to modify it
the way Dr. O'Neill did. In the last year or two such an opportunity has
arisen, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Powered by the conflict
between the intolerant communist meme and the pluralistic western metameme
of diversity, SDI does not need economic justification of the same kind as
SPS. It must be cheaper to kill weapons than to make more of them, but this
is a weak constraint.
The highest levels of the Defense Department have endorsed the meme of
using extraterrestrial materials to solve the vulnerability problem of
space-based assets by shielding them. The saga of this meme must be an
interesting one from its first appearance in print, "Space Forts...," L5
News, June 1979 to Dr. James Wade's talk at the Large Scale Technology
Venturing Conference in 1984 (see the excerpt from Dr. Wade's article in
the August 1984 L5 News). It is entirely possible that it has arisen in
several people independently.
Two years ago, just before finding Dr. Wade's article, I was ready to lead
an effort to try to stop destablizing SDI programs (see "Weapons for
Peace," L5 News, June 1984). It is hard to describe how gratifying it is to
discover that the opposition is on your side.
Until we get nanotechnology, the extraterrestrial materials meme (ETM) is
the critical element for space colonies. SDI shielding needs, according to
an article by Dr. Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, are in the
million-ton region. Given the high level (75%) of public support for SDI,
the US government might contract to buy a million tons of asteroid or moon
rock for shielding if a company would undertake to return it to various
Earth orbits.
There are many technical ways this might be accomplished. The now classic
concept of a mass driver on the Moon (catcher at L2, etc.) is a candidate
though there are still engineering uncertainties in the critical
technologies and Moon rock is a material of limited use. An easier project
(engineering not much advanced over Apollo and Voyager) would put perhaps
6,000-10,000 small chemical or electrical propulsion rock carriers to work
shuttling around the inner solar system, remotely mining some of the 500 to
1,000 accessible asteroids. Given a two-four year trip time, 30-ton loads
per trip, and aerobreaking for Earth-orbit capture, such a fleet could
return 100,000 tons per year over ten years.
A critical element in this project would be to use some of the returned
material to fuel the next trip out. As little as five percent would do
using electrical propulsion. Chemical propulsion could take up to
twenty-five percent of the returned mass.
As large as it is, this project is close enough to current space practice
to analyze its cost, which has not yet been done. If private capital could
do it for perhaps $6 billion, a $20 billion ($10 per pound) guarantee might
be enough to start the equivalent of the '49ers gold rush. And (surprise!)
accessible resources in space and a large and growing level of activity
leads directly to settlements. Just unloading and refurbishing thirty dirt
carriers a day would take several hundred people, and the SDI folks are
interested in structural parts too!
It will take considerable effort to make a rough concept like this into a
meme acceptable to the scientific and engineering communities. We need much
more detailed plans and cost estimates. A summer study like the ones held
in the seventies on space colonies would help. There may be a showstopper,
but if the study results look good, then the project would need to be sold
to the rest of the SDI community, which is far from a monolithic block.
Then the military and the military support block in Congress will need to
be convinced that this is a good use of $2 billion a year of military money
for ten years. And, of course, the public will have to be sold on the
concept both to support the political process leading up to the guarantee
and then to put money into the venture organization.
The major reason L5 has not taken any stand regarding SDI is a perception
by the leadership that the L5 membership is antimilitary. A few very vocal
antimilitary members, many of them active in chapters, have created this
incorrect perception. The bulk of the membership does not care one way or
other (see inset). At worst L5 would lose eight percent of its members
while some seventeen percent would become more active. Also, if discounting
the future is as important a factor in meme attractiveness as it seems to
be, the new space colony meme using the short military shielding path would
become much more effective in recruiting believers, and some of these
should turn into additional members for L5.
Frankly, I think we have only a short window in which to build space
colonies, certainly no more than thirty years. In Engines of Creation, Eric
Drexler doesn't think we have that much time. After that, nanotechnology
will make it easy to do, but could change our deepest mental agents to
where we don't want space colonies, if not entirely destroy the biosphere.
Building space colonies before nanotechnology comes along would give us
both places to try the most dangerous experiments and perhaps a refuge if
disaster strikes.
Recently I asked one L5 officer if he knew of any other course that could
lead to substantial human habitation of space within the next twenty years.
His response was no, and in addition, he thought that our chances were no
better than five percent of getting there on the military bandwagon. I
think a five percent chance is far better then no chance at all.
A long standing problem for L5 is that the space colony meme has always
been long on motivation and short on possible real actions directed to
developing space colonies. This lack of outlets for highly motivated people
may be the reason there have been so many internal fights in L5 independent
of who was in charge. Here we have a specific program (in outline at least)
that leads directly to space colonies in a short time. It will involve a
tremendous amount of work. The reader should consider this article a call
to action on a specific course leading to colonies in space. 15
L5 NEWS. June 1986
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed 29 Oct 2003 - 01:35:34 GMT