Filed under: livable future, science fiction, Speculation, sustainability, Uncategorized, Worldbuilding | Tags: grim meathook future, science fiction
Okay, not quite in the original sense; However, I thought I’d play with a simple idea. In the future, we can build a starship, specifically a slower-than-light starship that obeys the laws of physics as we currently know them.
What will Earth look like in this case?
Let’s unpack this scenario a bit. For a starship to work, we will need to have developed a bunch of technologies and practices that we currently don’t have.
These include:
–small biospheres that can support people for long periods of time without breaking down. Remember what happened with Biosphere 2? That’s what I mean by break down.
–light-weight shielding that can deal with debris hitting it at absurdly high velocities.
–Either cheap, compact, very, very safe fusion that can burn continuously for decades (for a torch ship), antimatter that can be cheaply made and safely stored for centuries, rather enormous lasers that can fire for decades, and can be aimed with nanometer precision (for a laser sail), or some form of highly accurate, high-powered linear accelerator and “smart particles” that can be cheaply made, fly at relativistic velocities, and steer themselves with nanometer precision (for a beamrider).
–The social engineering to keep small groups working together for multiple generations, or the ability to store humans in some form of stasis for centuries. Remember what happened with Biosphere 2? We’ll have to do much better than that.
The thing about this is that the world will have these technologies, as do the starships. While the technology will be unevenly distributed, bits and pieces of it will be in use all over the planet. For example, if we have fusion, we likely won’t be using fossil fuels for much of anything, because most large metropolitan areas will have fusion plants. They likely will use these energy to power desalination/water purification plants, so that we can all live by the coast and not worry about continents drying up. As I noted in a previous post, we’re stuck with climate for millennia, regardless. I’m not sure where the waste heat goes or how one maintains one of these magic power plants, but based on current experimental plants, it looks like it requires precision engineering at a scale we can’t yet match. This, in turn, implies a stable infrastructure of some scary-good engineers.
In fact, all of these require a lot of really, really good engineers, which means there will be the infrastructure to educate those engineers, whether they are humans, computers, or both. What does that mean for, oh, consumer electronics, aside from having stuff that’s much more complex than what we have today? Who knows?
But let’s look at the other new technology. Small biospheres implies that arcologies are possible. People can build floating “sea castles,” live in domes in the Arctic, on the sea bottom, or in Saudi Arabia’s empty quarter, or anywhere, and live off whatever they can grow in the domes. If they have enough money, that is. Cities will likely use this technology to produce more food within bounds, while wealthy separatist groups flourish wherever they can set up their biosphere.
Things get really interesting when you look at the shielding issue. I don’t know if the shields on a starship could withstand a nuclear explosion, but I do think they’d be impervious to almost all conventional arms. In other words, for the first time since the Middle Ages, defense becomes an option, and castles make sense. They make even more sense if you can live inside one indefinitely, treating it in effect like a starship without an engine. Of course, this radically changes the face of war. I don’t know whether the great powers will go in for castle-busting munitions (terawatt lasers, perhaps?), or more covert action, but basically, every evil genius with plans for world domination now gets his impregnable secret fortress, fully staffed with loyal minions.
Scary thought, isn’t it? We can also ponder the lives of the people who choose to live inside such fortresses. Presumably, it will be possible for them to live in there indefinitely, or to hold themselves in stasis “until the stars are right,” but I doubt it will be what we lazy, middle-class Americans consider to be a Good Time.
Does this sound like an appealing world? I’m not so sure. It’s likely more Neuromancer than Star Trek. That’s the thing I wanted to bring out: a star-faring culture would look very different than what we normally see in science fiction. It will have a technical infrastructure far beyond what we have today, but there’s no particular reason to think that it’s going to be a utopia where domestic robots attend to our every whim. It could just as easily be a weed-infested world dominated by the domed and armored cities of the wealthy and powerful. The only good news will be that people are willing to live that way.
So here’s the question: what did I miss? Any other easy extrapolations?
2 Comments so far
Leave a comment
Putting the life back in science fiction 
“The only good news will be that people are willing to live that way.”
*some people*
Comment by Barry October 14, 2014 @ 2:41 pmYou lost me at “magic shields”. It is even less likely than magic engines, and also not necessary. You might as well assume the arcologies of the future have starship propulsion, it makes as much sense.
I also think you are missing the point that any high energy civilization, whether on or off the planet, will be increasingly less likely to tolerate opaque sovereignity. If the panopticon is a likely scenario for any fragile artificial habitat, it is also a scenario for a world of arcologies. My guess is that once you have the energy on hand for the kind of kinetic war you describe – orbital velocities near the surface of Earth – you either will have an inspection regime or a graveyard. With 15K nukes on hand, we’ve been living the dream for decades.
The basic argument – a civilization that has the ability to build a starship will be very different from today, and will have to have the ability to work other marvels beforehand – is sound (and has been made before). If we can’t close-cycle in Gobi or the Arctic, on the seabed or NEO, then it is unlikely we will be able to do so in deep space – and the energy surplus needed to build and power a starship exceeds that of our current civilization (or Earth’s net power intake).
Comment by b. July 19, 2017 @ 9:11 pm