From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Sat 03 Jul 2004 - 22:25:39 GMT
(Part 2)
In July of 1979 the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer
Space reported out the long awaited Moon Treaty for ratification by the
member states. Defeating the Moon Treaty is generally considered to be the
peak of L5's influence. In a nutshell, a meme (the treaty) which evolved in
the minds of a number of international lawyers to socialize the resources
of space clashed with the frontier-libertarian-free enterprise space colony
memes in the minds of a lot of L5 members. So far, the treaty-meme has lost.
Jerry Driggers, an aerospace engineer much taken by Dr. O'Neill's ideas (he
gave a major paper at the 1975 conference and was at all the summer
studies) took over as L5 president right in the middle of the Moon Treaty
fight.
The ebbing of the energy crisis made it unlikely that SPS funding would be
resumed any time soon. With no other hook to hang space colonies on, Jerry
made a conscious choice, to direct the Society into the NASA political
support role--particularly for the space station-- that NSI (Wernher von
Braun's National Space Institute) should have filled, but never did very well.
In retrospect (and certainly with no blame on Jerry Driggers) I think this
was a mistake. The meme of expansion into space by government projects
involving a few astronauts may have wider appeal, but the appeal is quite
weak. It motivates only a very few civic minded people to work hard for it
compared to the number who will bust ass even for a remote prospect that
they could personally go into space. Dr. O'Neill attributed the
attractiveness of his ideas to this factor long ago. (see _The High
Frontier_, pg 251.) This change in focus, or if you will, meme
substitution, pulled the heart out of L5 and put NSI and L5 into almost the
same memetic "ecological niche." It made a merger, or the demise of one of
the two almost inevitable.
The two organizations were also put into direct competition for financial
resources. Jerry's attempts to raise money for the Society from the
aerospace industry to support this redirection was a failure, and a
personal disaster. L5 had come to national attention over the Moon Treaty,
* and Jerry had the help of Dr. Thomas Paine who was head of NASA during
the Apollo program and Lee Ratiner, a negotiator for the government on the
law of the Sea treaties and hero of the Moon Treaty fight. But it is hard
to invading someone else's niche. The aerospace companies were comfortable
with NSI. Even if NSI didn't accomplish much, it was unlikely to embarrass
them.
* (Footnote.) (NSI never took a stand on the Moon Treaty, I have been told
that NSS did take a formal position against the treaty about a year after
the merger, but I am uncertain where this was reported.)
During the early years, the space shuttle (one of the keys to O'Neill's
space colony dream) kept falling further and further behind its projected
flight date. This hurt the believability factor as well. While it finally
started flying in 1981(?) it never reached the hoped for flight rate, and
the cost per flight has continued to soar, especially since the Challenger
blew up. While "extraterrestrial materials multiplier" might compensate for
the rising cost, it doesn't look like cargo space to Low Earth Orbit to
start a manufacturing facility could be obtained from NASA for any price.
Does this glum picture leave us with any hope? What would induce people in
the US or elsewhere to tap the resources of space, and coincidentally give
the few space nuts a chance for at least a weekend in orbit? A few years
ago, I considered the SDI project the only current possibility, but SDI
seems less and less likely, not because it isn't a better idea than the
alternatives, but because the idea has become stale, and the perceived
threat of nuclear war has declined. Also, the current proposals do not
require extraterrestrial resources, and that is the only way that more than
a few people will get into space.
My current best guess it that concerns about the greenhouse effect will
bring the SPS meme back into popularity. This country isn't going to
tolerate hotter and hotter summers if there is anything we can do about it.
SPS is the only option for baseload electric power currently known that
makes no acid rain, carbon dioxide, or nuclear waste. The greenhouse effect
is also a long-term concern, longer than the time scale on which space
industry could be established. This should insulate the memes on which the
project will depend from losing influence over four year political cycles
and short term fluctuations in the price of energy. My guess is based on
observing a resurgence of the SPS meme. The August 30 ['88? 89?] San Jose
Mercury News carried an article by the well-known science writer William J.
Broad discussing SPS as a greenhouse solution.
The environment in which the space colony/SPS meme grew during the early
days of L5 just wasn't fertile enough to get itself and those who believed
in it into space. In memetic terms we could say the idea did not infect
enough people long enough, and strong enough, for the economic and
political factors, like those that built the windmills (taxmills?) to come
into play. But the space colony/SPS idea did spread far enough for it to be
considered as a solution to another perceived problem a decade latter.
I recently visited Grand Coulee dam, a project in its day as ambitious as
SPS (and coincidentally it produces about the same amount of power as one
SPS.) The people who promoted Grand Coulee dam worked on it for decades,
promoting it primarily to lift water for irrigation on the fertile, but
dry, plateau. It was finally built for another reason entirely, to provide
jobs in response to the great depression, and secondarily to pump water
(nobody thought that much electric power would ever be needed). The first
use of the power it produced was to supply electricity to Boeing during WW
II, and now it is mostly used to supply peaking power to the Northwest.
There are no Columbias left to dam, but geosync can hold enough SPSs to
entirely phase out the use of coal.
Do we need to do anything, or will the environmental groups take over
promoting SIPS?
I cannot answer.
Memetics is far from an exact science, and behavior of a meme in the "meme
pool" of human culture may be like other unpredictable (that is chaotic)
systems. After an epidemic gets started, its course can be predicted with
considerable accuracy. It is also possible to say that the environment (low
immunity or bad health practices) is conducive to an epidemic.) But a
community can go on for years before one actually happens.
In a similar way, the SPS/space colony idea is out there, and the memetic
environment might be changing in ways that improve its chances for
infecting large numbers of people strongly enough for it to become reality.
This leads to an interesting possibility. It might be that we should not be
talking about the SPS solution just yet. It might be better for us to
terrify everyone by talking about 140 degree summer heat and hurricanes of
250 miles per hour, and introduce the SPS solution to this nightmare alter
the public is in a panic.
If SPS is promoted within the existing NSS, the existing narrow focus of
NSS on a government space station would have to be changed. It is not
obvious to me that the existing governmental agencies concerned with space
are appropriate to build or even oversee building "solar power dams" in
space. NASA for example is a trembling shadow of its former glory, and the
shuttle is not the vehicle for the job of building a solar power industry
in space. The traditional approach is to abandon the old and start anew,
perhaps in a few years we will be hearing about SPS planning by the carbon
dioxide control agency.
[Postscript]
Did I ever think an organization with the audacious goal of disbanding at a
mass meeting in space would actually accomplish that?
Immaterial.
Without ambitious goals people never accomplish _anything_.
===============================================================
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 : Sat 03 Jul 2004 - 22:33:26 GMT