Right now, the chances are that everyone reading this is a basic human like me, living on Earth, or at an outside chance, in low Earth orbit (who am I kidding‽). Consider that condition. What are the chances that that’s what you are if human life goes on and our descendants fan out into the Galaxy? I’ve gone into this many times of course, and the Doomsday Argument, as this is called, is flawed, but it’s worth going into it again for the purposes of applying it to the situation in which the human race finds itself today.
I’ll just recap briefly. There was a guy who visited the Berlin Wall in the 1960s and predicted that it would come down at approximately the time it did through estimating the probability of where he was in the total number of visitors to the Wall, using only probability, statistics and the time since it had been put up. His name was Brandon Carter, and he later applied a similar argument to estimating how long the human race has left based on the assumption that one is about half way through the total number of human births. When I did this calculation based on my own date of birth, the 1977 CE estimate that 75 thousand million people had been born before me, which covered the past six hundred millennia and a doubling period somewhere around three decades, as it was at the time, it gave me the result that the last human birth would take place around 2130. There are various silly aspects to this argument. For instance, if Adam existed and had made this calculation just before Eve appeared, he would conclude that the human race would be most likely to end with Eve’s death. By the way, I am not fundamentalist and therefore do not believe Eve and Adam ever existed. I just want to make that clear.
Although this is not a particularly marvellous argument, I do think a similar one works fairly well in one particular area, as I’ve mentioned before. It does in fact seem fair to assume the principle of mediocrity about one’s own existence. In that respect, it’s fair to assume I’m a typical example of a human and have been born at a time when prevailing conditions are “normal”, i.e. that the fact that I find myself living at a time when we have only ever lived on one planet and are not cyborgs to a greater extent than Donna Haraway claims. Transhumanism is not the usual human condition and there are neither orbiting space colonies nor settlements on other worlds. If we even settled ten other worlds they would only need a population over the whole period humans dwelt on them about equivalent to the current population of this planet for us to be outnumbered, and that’s a very modest estimate of how human history would unfold if we began to live elsewhere than on this planet. It would be more likely for there to be numerous settlements, either in the form of space stations or people living on other habitable planets. Say there were a million planets settled, which is still a conservative estimate for the number of suitable planets in the Milky Way, and they were settled for only a thousand years each. That’s an æon of human life on other planets. For it to be more probable for us to be here now than there then, it would need the population on each of those planets to average out at less than seven dozen. That is clearly absurd, so we have to conclude that as a species we will never settle on any other planets or build any permanent space habitats, or that our existence here and now just happens to be fantastically impossible.
For this to be the case, we have to conclude that our efforts to go into space are also only ever going to be very minor to non-existent, something which is confirmed right now by the fact that only twelve people have ever visited another celestial body. Even that was difficult because one crew didn’t make it. Now we’re supposed to try again with the Artemis Project, the current plan to go back to where Apollo went. Incidentally, I’ve long thought that one of the issues with the conspiracy theory is that getting there is only equivalent to going round the world ten times. Patrick Moore had a car which had gone further than twice that distance, and the average flight crew probably notch that up in a couple of weeks. Not that it wasn’t an amazing achievement. But humanity didn’t go on to do anything else afterwards, is the issue.
We’re confronted with a problem in the current moment then. It’s looking like there will be more people walking about up there in a couple of years, but if that happens it looks suspiciously like this version of the Doomsday Argument will have been refuted. But before I go there, I want to talk about Brooke Bond.
In 1971, Brooke Bond brought out a series of collector’s cards on the Space Race which started with Sputnik 1 (let’s Russ that up a little: Спутник-1) and proceeded through the various early satellites, planetary missions and the like up to Apollo and then past into the future. I collected the cards and got the book to stick them in. It must’ve been 1971 because it had the pound marked in both shillings and “p”, and they only did that in that year if I recall correctly. Anyway, it was from this publication that I learnt of the plan to send a human mission to Mars via Venus launching in the late ’70s. I remember looking at the years and thinking “1979” and “1980” looked really strange and futuristic, like the numbers on the public library date stamp which had yet to be used. But yes, there was a tentative plan at that point to send astronauts to Venus and Mars which everyone seems to have forgotten. There have in fact been a very large number of such proposals, but I didn’t know that at the time:
Actually, looking at this I realise I got it the wrong way round. They were going to visit Mars first and then do a Venus flyby. My confusion arises from the fact that there were so many different plans to do this. The Russians even considered a Venus mission to be launched in the early 1960s. I remember eagerly awaiting this, in full expectation that it would happen, and the dates passing with nothing to show for them, and how disillusioning it all was. This was a feature of my life at the time. When they found CFCs were destroying the ozone layer and that carbon dioxide emissions were causing climate change, I was convinced that they’d just go, “right, lets take the fluorocarbons out of aerosols and stop using fossil fuels”, and it’s the same kind of disappointment, from which you can see that I wasn’t your typical space nerd or environmental activist, because I suspect rather few people were equally enthusiastic about Green politics and astronautics, but that’s who I am. There is a seamless disappointment there. It’s all part of my same imaginary world, and it was very hard to cope with at the time. I can’t believe how slowly everything except IT progresses, and it’s also weird that IT did advance that quickly compared to everything else. I have certain theories about that, not conspiracy theories but something else, which I’ll leave for another time.
The space-based Doomsday Argument, which I’m going to call “Space Doomsday”, can easily explain why this didn’t happen, although maybe “why” is the wrong word here. The immediate reason the Mars mission didn’t happen was budgetary cuts to NASA in 1970. However, considering our lives as a relatively random sample of human history, we are aware that it’s improbable that human space exploration will ever make much progress, or we probably wouldn’t be here sitting on this single planet where we originated. It’s possible but improbable. The idea that we will in fact end up doing this isn’t ruled out by the fact. It’s similar to the idea that if you have lung cancer, you have probably been a long-term tobacco smoker. That’s something you can reasonably conclude about someone’s previous life given their current condition, although it may also be that they got it from passive smoking or asbestos exposure, for example. It isn’t a dead cert, but it’s probable. Hence it’s probable that something would happen to prevent people from landing on Mars, assuming of course that the expansion into space follows such activities, and in that sense Space Doomsday has predictive power, or perhaps forecasting power. We know we’re here on Earth, so we can reasonably believe the human race does not have a spacefaring future. A slightly less reasonable conclusion is that there will be no human missions to other celestial bodies in our future.
This could potentially lead to a weird version of “Moonlanding” denial conspiracy theory. Obviously I accept humans landed on Cynthia six times owing to not being delusional in that respect, but suppose Artemis happens. I am wedded to the idea that humans will never go there again because of Space Doomsday, so if they do go there I’m tempted to deny that due to it not fitting in with my world view, and the same applies to any planned Mars mission. Am I perhaps a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist in the making? If someone believed in Space Doomsday in the 1960s, would they have ended up denying the Apollo missions were real? If the news that Artemis does succeed appears in the media and we see pictures from the lunar surface and the rest, it’s fair to conclude that we probably have gone there in a second batch of missions, but one’s belief in Space Doomsday could be so strong that it would lead to K-skepticism. For me, that would be motivated by depressive thinking, but others might have more positive reasons for doubt, such as the idea that it isn’t appropriate for so much money and resources to be spent on space missions when there are enough problems on this planet to be addressed.
Speaking of this planet, there could be a link between these two major sources of disappointment emanating from my childhood. Alternative futures are possible from these. In one, we simply don’t go into space much. Perhaps robotic probes become ever more sophisticated, take over from us, and colonise the Galaxy themselves, or maybe there’s just no impetus to do so and we all become more focussed on whatever’s going on down here. This is a relatively positive future compared to the other one, which is that this apparent lack of concern for environmental disaster simply wipes out the human race in a few years, before anyone gets the chance to go to Mars. This chimes with the apparent, though egocentric, forecast that the last human birth will occur around 2130.
The interesting thing about Space Doomsday is that it seems to have predictive power. For instance, it predicts that there will be a reason why nobody will go to Mars or the Artemis project won’t come to fruition. In fact, Artemis has indeed met with problems. The plan is for at least eight missions, the first two of which won’t involve a lunar landing. Artemis I is an unoccupied test of the spacecraft which will orbit Cynthia and return, splashing down on Earth, next year (2022). Artemis II happens the year after and involves a crew orbiting Cynthia, which would be the first time anyone has left cis lunar space since 1972. 2024 is expected to see humans back on the surface for the first time since Apollo, and a series of missions after that will involve building a lunar base for permanent habitation. This looks like the point of no return for human settlement in space, although it might just not happen or not go any further. But in order to be “scientific” about this, I need to define exactly what I mean by the statement that humans will never settle on other worlds or establish a permanent presence in space. That initial statement looks wrong for a start because of the International Space Station, which is a permanent presence. Otherwise, I’m moving the goalposts, and I might say after Artemis I, “well I never said the hardware wouldn’t work” or after Artemis II, “well I never said nobody would ever leave cis lunar space again” and so on. I need to be more precise, and base it on evidence.
My claim is based on the idea that the total number of human births is likely to be at most 150 thousand million. More than this and the chances of living now rather than later in history fall below fifty percent. In fact, therefore, it’s possible to forecast from this position that the total population of space will always be less than seventy five thousand million minus the population still on this planet. In fact if it were ever close to being that high, that would seem to herald the extinction of the human species for probability-related reasons, which suggests further that there will never be self-sufficient space colonies or that some perhaps solar-related disaster will befall life in this Solar System.
Artemis is supposed to lay the foundations for the eventual exploration of Mars. This in itself means it’s unlikely to succeed, not because that’s over-ambitious but because it means it does in fact appear to be a stepping stone to people living permanently off Earth, which either can’t happen or is likely to end in disaster, or at best peter out. Hence it can be expected that there will be major snags in the program. Now it’s difficult to tell whether I’m seeing patterns where there are none, as any major long-term complicated undertaking is likely to meet with the occasional problem. Thinking again of our hypothetical Space Doomsday person living in the ’60s, they might focus on the Apollo I fire and the Apollo XIII disaster as signs that it wasn’t going to work, that there would turn out, for example, to be insurmountable safety obstacles to strapping three guys into a seat on top of a hundred metre column of high explosive. I mean, who’d’ve thought it? But there were six successful missions as well as more successful translunar incursions (excursions?). It is probably true, speaking from my deeply uninformed position, that the risks taken on those missions were much higher than they would be today, and presumably are on the Artemis program, but maybe not. I confess to not paying much attention to Artemis because I don’t want to be disappointed again, so I don’t know much about it.
There are sound economic reasons for returning, including the presence of metals such as titanium more easily accessible than here and, if fusion ever happens, and that’s another thing which seems infinitely deferred, helium-3 in the soil, and water is now known to be available, in the form of ice in the parts of polar craters in permanent shadow, freeing a base from the necessity of a water supply from Earth. It was detected by the Clementine mission in March 1996, in Shackleton Crater.
The spacesuits for Artemis have been delayed, it was announced this August. This will prevent a 2024 landing, since they won’t be ready until April 2025 at the earliest. That puts it later than the next presidential election, and if for example Trump is re-elected, which unfortunately is still possible it seems, he could cancel the program before then. The current space suits are not intended to be used for extensive periods on the lunar surface, hence the need for new ones. One reason for the delay is budget cuts and another is the pandemic. But you could look at it, rather unscientifically, as a curse or fate. There is reason to deduce that something will always stop it happening because it’s possible that we can be confident nobody will ever go there again or to Mars at all. The details of the cause are apparently not available, but right now they seem to include Trump, the pandemic and budget cuts.
The Artemis program involves the building and transport of infrastructure and equipment separately from the crewed missions. This is a factor in its demise. If it was just about astronauts visiting without setting up a permanent base, it could well go ahead as that’s a less significant step in establishing a foothold elsewhere in the Solar System. Hence the crewed lunar orbital mission is more likely to happen, although this is also a step on the way. It would also be more likely to happen if it wasn’t supposed to be a preliminary to going to Mars. There was a plan, decades ago, for the first astronaut to arrive to start putting together a permanent lunar base, which it’s possible to predict wouldn’t happen for the same reason.
I’m not going to deny that a lot of this post is motivated by depressive thinking, although I’m not actually depressed just now. To counter that, I want to point out that depressive realism helps one perceive unpleasant truths, one of which appears to be that our descendants are trapped on this planet forever. And I’m not even saying that Earth is not a wonderful and beautiful place. It’s for this exact reason that humans should move many of their activities, and for that matter bodies, into space, off this planet, to preserve it and allow it to recover. Moreover, there was always going to be positive fallout from space travel, such as the Overview Effect, the Spaceship Earth concept, the discovery of the possibility of nuclear winter, the reminder Venus gives us of how easily climate change can get out of hand, not to mention the various technological benefits. Nonetheless, some people would see being stuck here as a positive thing, and it has positie aspects. It means, for example, that there is no escape from the effects of pollution, reduced biodiversity and anthropogenic climate change, except that maybe there is for the rich and powerful but not the poor and oppressed.
So wouldn’t it be nice if we had a lunar base, went to Mars and built space colonies for the people left here on Earth?
A Box Of Chocolates 