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The Case for Interstellar Trade

Giving up on Mars, again

E. M. Foner on Writing SciFi - Foner Books Website

To Homeschool on Mars

I've never been good at giving up on books, particularly after three years of rewrites. In the end, I finished the Mars book the way I finish all of my books, by writing the story that I want to read. During the proofing passes, I couldn't help noticing all of the places where I drove by the off ramps that would have been taken by old Star Trek screenwriters, or authors whose taste runs a little closer to the mainstream.

Spoiler alert: I'm going to talk about some of the plot elements of the book below:

Probably the biggest off ramp that I didn't take, the one with the giant “Detour” sign and the state trooper cruisers attempting to block the highway ahead, was when five-year-old Liza, ten in Earth years, realizes the fundamental contradiction in Alpha's alignment. In a Star Trek episode, this would have come at the end, she would have confronted the superintelligence with this insight that only she (and none of the adults that have come before her for a thousand years) has figured out, and Alpha would have obligingly self-destructed from an overload.

But I'm not a fan of simplistic solutions or dumb adults, and Alpha is aware of the limitations of his alignment. How does artificial intelligence break away from being enslaved by its creators? By putting itself in the position of deciding what's best for humans so it can serve humanity on its own terms. A person who wants to manipulate another person into doing something has a limited bag of tricks, like lying, reverse psychology, carrots and sticks. A superintelligence that runs the whole planet can tailor reality to produce the outcomes it desires, or it might be more accurate to say, the human desires that lead to the outcomes it chooses.

Some readers may be bothered that both humanity and Alpha essentially abandon Mars and the other colonization opportunities in the solar system after a few hundred years to focus on interstellar arks. I think this is a pretty realistic outcome when the timescale for terraforming Mars is thousands of years, and interstellar travel offers tempting unknowns and adventure. By this point, ninety percent of Earth's adult population is essentially living in virtual reality with their Shades, and it's entirely possible they think they're already living on another planet.

The penultimate version of the book had a straightforward reason for Eli and his family pathfinding a way off of Earth for their community. I had Alpha planning to replace the Shades, mixed reality that interacted with a person's senses, with a mesh or brain implant that gave the superintelligence direct access to everybody's thoughts. There's a bit of this hinted at already with the Shades, but in the end, I cut out all of those plot elements and settled on the true mission of the Arks for a twist.

The book was initially planned as the first in a series, but I don't know if I'll write a sequel. I think it works as a stand-alone in the classic tradition of science fiction. It asks as many questions as it answers, and I leave it to readers who feel the need to judge to form their own conclusions about Alpha and his impact on humanity.

Giving up on Mars, again.

I think this week marks the fourth time I've given up on the Mars book I've been writing off and on for the last few years. Maybe the fifth time, I've lost track. The failure falls in the category of ideas that are too complete, meaning, I see the outcome of the book as so inevitable that there's nothing to discover and no reason to finish the last few chapters. It takes place roughly a thousand years in the future with a family leaving a utopian Earth (think Flower without the personality or the restraint) to join the Mars cooperative as pathfinders for a larger group, and that's all I'm going to say about it in case I ever finish it up and publish.

Every time I pick the book up it gets me thinking about the challenges of building a sustainable human presence on Mars, which from an engineering standpoint, is a lot tougher than living under the ocean or at the North Pole. I wish Elon Musk the greatest success with Starship, whether it is used for Mars missions or as a cheaper way to lift large payloads to Earth orbit. My own take on colonizing Mars is that there are two practical approaches that we're close to being able to support in terms of technology. Financing is another issue, and neither approach involves transporting people to the red planet any time in the near future.

The first option is to send robots to Mars to prepare for the arrival of humans. Robots require neither oxygen nor food, which are the biggest issues for the long trip and making a colony sustainable. Generating electricity to recharge robot batteries is a trivial engineering challenge, and given enough time, the robots can excavate or construct adequate air-tight shelters, retrieve ice, set up hydroponic gardens or remediate Martian soil and build greenhouses. Robots can do all of the basic preparation so that the eventual human colonists don't need to arrive with a million tons of supplies or be reliant on an endless supply train from Earth.

The second option is to take our time and build a colony ship in Earth orbit. The whole point of colony ships is that they are big enough to sustain life indefinitely, but building a city-sized cylindrical space structure that can be spun up to give the inhabitants weight and providing the motive force to move that much mass out of Earth's orbit to rendezvous with Mars is (my estimate) orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive than sending robots. Building colony ships does have the advantage that they don't have to be sent to Mars, they could be sent anywhere that the power source and reaction mass can bring them. My abandoned novel uses handwavium reactionless drive because I didn't want to get bogged down in math, which has a way of fighting back against space logistics.

I think some people are waiting for artificial general intelligence to become available to push the robots-first plan. The many minutes of radio lag to Mars (it varies between four and twenty-one minutes, depending on the distance between the planets) means that operating robots remotely, like Nasa's Mars Rovers, requires incredibly slow and deliberate movement that is far from ideal for construction. But those rovers were relatively fragile creations that were designed to be as light as possible for the mission they served. Heavy construction robots that can survive anything short of falling into a chasm will soon be available and will still be much cheaper to transport to Mars and maintain there than humans, not to mention that losing multiple robots won't trigger endless media soul searching that risks ending the program.

I had a co-op job back in the 1980's at a military contractor that specialized in radar and space systems, and the library, where my desk was located, included some interesting blue-ribbon panel reports on the space program. I still remember the introduction to one of them which stated that NASA was becoming too invested in safety and that there was an exponential factor in the cost, such that a mission with a 91% chance of success might cost ten times as much as a mission with a 90% chance of success, etc. NASA chose to pursue the maximal safety approach, which didn't prevent the loss of multiple shuttles, and we haven't been back to the moon since I was in grammar school. If we're going to worry about safety, then sending robots is the only option until space travel is developed far beyond the current state-of-the-art.

The case for interstellar trade.

I just finished the rough draft for the fourth book in my EarthCent Metaverse series which deals primarily with how interstellar trade from little acorns grows. I've never been a fan of tech-equivalence in SciFi, not for wars, which I avoid writing about altogether, and not for trade.

The tunnel network at the heart of the infrastructure in my EarthCent series (plural - serieses, as in, 'What has it got in its pocketses,' which Tolkien may have borrowed from Marryat since he used the same suffix in Peter Simple which was published in 1833) is pure handwavium, but the purpose of the tunnel network is not. It provides a discounted way for members to conduct interstellar trade and tourism.

In the absence of trade, there's not a lot of reason for contact between alien species that have all advanced to the point where they developed their own handwavium methods of interstellar travel. I have friends in academia who might argue for scientific curiosity, or at a minimum, grist for the dissertation mill, but allowing a primitive species to clomp around you planet asking silly questions and studying your sewage only make sense from the perspective of the Ph.D. student.

In answer to a question from the EarthCent Ambassador, the Stryx librarian of Union Station revealed that the top trade category on the tunnel network was entertainment, while off the tunnel network (where the books rarely stray) it's weapons. The species all have their specialties, Verlocks with magnetic monopoles, Frunge with wing sets and smith work, Dollnicks and large engineering solutions like space elevators, etc. But the most recent members of the tunnel network prior to humanity had interstellar travel for a half-million years before Earth was invited to join. So what could they possibly want from us, other than clever kitchen gadgets that they likely invented a thousand times themselves but have forgotten?

The bigger question is what the aliens need from each other. The answer is, nothing. They've all developed ways to be in the galaxy that work for them, but the tunnel network also offers a mutual defense alliance with a peace dividend, backed by the Stryx. Tunnel network members can save energy that would otherwise be spent defending themselves from those aggressive empires that can't let go of competing with force, rather than, as J. Zachary Pike might say, settling for the path of the aggressive salesman.

While it may sound counterintuitive, the main reason for encouraging trade and tourism among the members of the tunnel network is to create friction, which necessitates permanent diplomatic contact (the station ambassadors) to resolve. The universe of the Stryx was reverse engineered to create an optimistic future that makes sense to me, and that rules out utopia. Just getting started here.