Terraforming Venus; Venus-forming Earth

Terraforming Venus would require taking almost all of the CO2 out of its atmosphere, so it becomes breathable, doesn't crush us (currently 90 atm pressure) and cools the planet down. Using our current mechanical carbon scrubber technology may seem simplistic and unimaginative, but the other options that have been discussed feature similar science-fiction-level ideas (crashing outer solar system ice moons into it, locking carbon into the crust down to a kilometer deep, or getting theoretically present hydrogen out of the mantle.)

This is less likely to happen than being able to move moons around the Solar System. Image from reddit.com/r/mapporn.

Let's make many optimistic assumptions:

That we can build self-replicating independent carbon sequestration plants; this minimizes transport costs and covers the planet.

That they can build and fuel themselves from materials available on the surface of Venus.

That they can withstand conditions on Venus (when the longest any machine we've put down has lasted is on the order of an hour.)

Current carbon sequestration plants are the size of a cargo container, and sequester 900 tons of carbon per year. Assume that this is the rate at which they operate on Venus, and that self-replicating carbon sequesterers are 100x bigger than the real, non-self-replicating ones we have.

Assuming near 100% working replicas, and a one-year self-replication cycle, it would take 40 years to cover the entire surface of Venus with these - after which they would take 2000 years to clean the atmosphere of CO2. (This would still leave a nitrogen atmosphere several times higher pressure than Earth's.)


Venus is not the best candidate for terraforming or habitation, and humans will not settle its surface for thousands of years at least. We should concentrate on terraforming planets in our solar system, building self-replicating technologies, and having humans in isolation from Earth in case of some sort of collapse (most easily, on the Moon.)


On the other hand, here on Earth, just to keep even with carbon emissions at the 2017 level, we would need 40 million of the scrubbers we currently have. That means no matter where you went on Earth, there would be one within less than two and a half miles of you.

We do have machines that are Venus-forming Earth, by making more CO2. They aren't self-replicating, but they seem to have a relationship with one species (unclear if parasitic or symbiotic) and in places they cover the surface just the same.

Timeline of Manned Interstellar Travel, Based on Simple Economics: No Humans on Alpha Centauri Planets Until 2613

It has been estimated that a manned Mars mission would cost $100 billion. Compare this to the most recent unmanned lander, Insight, at $830 million; putting people on Mars then comes with a cost multiplier of 120.

The Initiative for Interstellar Studies estimates that an unmanned interstellar mission would cost at least "in the trillions"; Centauri Dreams cites Odenwald at $174 trillion. Assuming the same scaling, the lower and upper bounds on that then suggest that a manned mission would cost from $240 trillion to $21 quadrillion.

If on the other hand we take the projected cost of a manned mission to Mars, and assume it scales linearly with distance, a manned Mission to Alpha Centauri would cost $55 quadrillion.

It's worth pointing out here that world GDP is $80 trillion. Let's assume an annual economic growth rate over time of 2%. Let's also assume that starting tomorrow we put ALL of GDP toward such a mission - that is, every last human is working this mission and just barely otherwise just barely surviving as peasants eating crumbs.

Assuming an annual economic growth rate over time of 2%, then at earliest, we can launch a manned interstellar mission at the earliest by 2227; at latest, by 2501.

But forget about that. Because neither you, nor any other human on this planet will sign up tomorrow for their descendants being reduced to slavery for centuries for a space mission, which is what those numbers assume. So let's assume we continue to spend money on space exploration at the same rate that we in the US currently are - about 0.11% of GDP. This is already quite a generous assumption, given that most countries can't afford to dedicate such a fraction of wealth to endeavors that don't quickly return on investment. If you're more optimistic and want to set the relative rate of expenditure (over centuries) to the highest it has ever been (in a democracy - you said you were optimistic right?) that's 1966 USA, which is about twice what it is today, and only makes it happen 35 years earlier. (This is more dependent on economic growth than space program expenditure.) So let's stick with current NASA budget fraction, and assume that the future space program is ONLY working on this one mission.

By these assumptions, we can launch the mission at earliest by 2570; for the upper bound estimate, by 2845.

Our fastest spacecraft so far would take another 30,000 years after launch to get there. Let's be more optimistic and assume that the light sail technology we're talking about for unmanned probes also applies to manned craft, and can get the ship up to 10% of the speed of light. Therefore, taking into account travel time and speed-of-light delays, we wiill get the interstellar "Eagle has landed message" at an absolute cheapest earliest date of 2618.

Of course this is still unrealistic, because we're still assuming mission development starts in earnest tomorrow, assuming every government on Earth will let us use a NASA-sized fraction of their GDP for this, and that they will continue to cooperate for at least 550 years building the mission. Think of this in reverse: it's as if in 1470, the middle of the War of the Roses, and the Russians and Poles and Lithuanians still throwing off the Mongol yolk, everyone started spending money and cooperating on a project and continued to cooperate on it until this year.

I think it is unlikely, barring unforeseeable scientific revolutions, that human beings will leave the Solar System this millennium. I think it is likely that there will be civilization or species-threatening or destroying events in this millennium. This discussion of colonizing other planets to mitigate existential risks has a scatter plot listing a probability of event happening within 200 years/risk of civilizational collapse for nuclear war, coronal mass event, rogue AI, and nuclear war as 90%/20%, 70%/90%, and 95%/70%.

Using those same numbers, in the time period until launch there's a greater than a 96.6% chance of a rogue AI, and a greater than 99% chance of coronal mass event or nuclear war.

But fully automated probes could get out more quickly, particularly if we design self-reproducing von Neumann probes. We should start terraforming Mars now, as practice for remotely terraforming planets with von Neumann probes for when we eventually get there. We have time to terraform them, because if physical human bodies ever do get there, it will be in the distant future. But we do not have that much time to get the launch the hardware, which suggests we should at least colonize the Moon as insurance. Cryonics and hibernation technology at this point is still basically science fiction. These numbers are depressing given our previous dreams, but we calibrated on going from powered flight to standing on the moon in 2/3 of a century.

SpaceX Falcon9 Launch from Vandenberg Visible from Northern California

Even though it's 300 air miles from my house to the launch pad at Vandenberg, I knew it would be quite visible - first, because in the pre-dawn twilight, the exhaust plume would be illuminated by the sun; and second, to be visible above the horizon at that distance you only need to be 18.5 km in the air, which an orbital rocket covers in a short period on the order of a minute. Sure enough at 6:18 Pacific Time I saw it. In the pictures below you can quite clearly see that the first stage has burned out and the second stage has ignited.





I was amazed at how quickly it appeared to be moving especially at this distance, but I didn't take video. Fortunately, Reddit user tKMagus did, from a plane as they were landing at LAX (about a hundred air miles, 3x closer):

space

The Boys from Brazil? Or the Boys from Toronto?

In keeping with making bizarre connections between pop culture and academic topics, I illuminate a creeping dark conspiracy that so far as I know, only I have detected! Dear reader, lean close to your screen, for I am about to impart arcane and forbidden knowledge! If you are a fan of economists, as well as the the greatest comedy show ever Kids in the Hall (KITH) (yes, in fact it has stood up better than Python), then shame on you if this has escaped your notice!

Here's Scott Thompson about 1990:




Here's the background picture on economist Justin Wolfers's Twitter feed:



I mean come on.*


*An underappreciated fact is that this is the English translation of both QED and ipso facto.

How Close Are We to Becoming a Kardashev II Civilization?

Kardashev II civilizations have the power capabilities of an entire star. One way to do this would be to capture the star's energy with a Dyson sphere (below).


Futurists and science fiction types (myself included) often over-simplistically extrapolate current, very strange trends (in terms of the rest of history and nature), especially exponential ones. Despite that, people are looking for Dyson spheres for real as part of SETI. I think this program carries so many assumptions that it's doomed; but let's have some fun and say Dyson spheres are for galactic wusses that don't have the stones to just generate the power themselves. If we humans are eventually going to produce enough power to match our own star, how close are we? Is this something that should be discussed during the next election cycle?

Take a guess. Here are the numbers: the current energy output of humans is about 5x10^20 J per year (since this is energy over time, we're really talking about power). The Sun's output is 1.2x10^34 J per year. So how close are we? A factor of 24 trillion, that's how close.


Let's assume, even more stupidly, that our energy curve will continue to rise the way it has in the twentieth century (see above), despite the fact that the vast amount of that area under the energy-time curve (again, power) came from spending stored chemical potential energy in fossil fuels. The curve has gone up 1x10^14 J about every 15 years - arithmetically, not geometrically. At this rate of increase, the sun will have burned out long before we ever match it. (If you want to be a smartass, you could say that this means that we will eventually match the sun's power because the sun's output will drop drastically. But even then the constraint which determines this is the sun, not how fast our energy output grows.)

Another way of looking at it: if you wanted to match the sun's power by burning fossil fuels, then using the energy density of oil, you would have to burn an amount of oil equal to the mass of the Earth, 50 times per second.

What is this, XKCD?

You're saying, "Fossil fuels? Of course you idiot, you can't get to the Kardashev big leagues powering your civilization on combustion engines!" Fine, let's make an Earth out of antimatter, and gradually crash pieces of it into this Earth. You could put out as much as the sun for about a hundred million years, by shooting pieces of the anti-Earth at us at a rate of a million tons per second. (I guess you hold the Earth together with duct tape to keep it from flying apart during all these shenanigans.) Assuming you don't start with the part of the Earth where you're sitting it would probably look cool, but even so I bet you'll quickly be getting some neat-o cancers from all the high-energy photons this produces, and maybe even just diffuse axonal injury knocking you unconscious in minutes. Incidentally my suggestion is to start with Belgium.

Above: Belgium, at left.

There will still be people objecting, i.e. the Ray Kurzweils of the world, that problem-solving abilities (AI) will grow exponentially, and therefore the energy-producing capacity will follow. Fine. The question for them is what is going to power these other exponential trends, at much more mundane time horizons? (Like the singularity that's apparently scheduled for seven decades from now.) If the answer is "AIs will have god-like intelligence and they'll be able to do it and we can't understand", then why shouldn't we also believe doomsday prophets like Harold Camping who say their gods are coming, and make their claim with exactly the same amount of verifiability and comprehendibility? If you think Kurzweil makes sense, you should also read about the economist Julian Simon's commodities bets, because you should agree with him - although I find that singulatarians somehow find reasons to dislike over-optimistic economists, probably mostly just out of mood afiliation and status considerations.

Final answer: we are not going to become a Kardashev II civilization any time soon, and no one really knows how to get there or what this means, because the definition necessarily involves processes we don't understand. But I'm still fine with dropping large amounts of antimatter on Belgium.

ADDENDUM: This is from Wikipedia about the sun's power generation and for some reason I find this shocking.

The power production by fusion in the core varies with distance from the solar center. At the center of the Sun, theoretical models estimate it to be approximately 276.5 watts/m3,[54] a power production density that more nearly approximates reptile metabolism than a thermonuclear bomb.[b] Peak power production in the Sun has been compared to the volumetric heats generated in an active compost heap. The tremendous power output of the Sun is not due to its high power per volume, but instead due to its large size.

Putting it in socioeconomic terms, the sun is like China - the per capita income is actually not impressive but it's huge, so the multiplier is big.

Are People Less Likely to Become Colonists Now?

As compared to a few centuries ago? Certainly. Humans in general today are less likely to strike out to a new land and become colonists. Why is this?

(This is cross-posted to my science fiction and fact blog, The Late Enlightenment.)

1. The environments that are available to us are harsher. Seasteading? The Antarctic? The Moon or Mars? Come on, do you really want to live in any of those places? Sure, Virginia may have had a bit more malaria than England but it has a) solid ground, b) it never drops below -50 C and c) it has a 21% O2 atmosphere. Consequently, it takes a more complex and developed economy to allow survival in the harsher land. And even Jamestown wasn't self-sustaining until the third ship full of people and supplies arrived. (More on Jamestown and Mars here.) And think: how big would a colony in Antarctica have to be in order to be self-sufficient, and make all the equipment they need to survive, not to mention to trade with the rest of the world? (See below for places that are much more amenable to humans than Antarctica and frontiers ripe for settlement right now, but somehow are still not filling up with colonists, in some cases despite the local government's attempt to draw them.)

2. There is a bigger skills gap between the median person and what a colonist needs to know. Even if a new island appeared above the ocean and had a nice temperate climate, few of us (especially in the developed world) would be able to take advantage of it. In Jamestown, people plowed and planted fields, hunted, chopped wood, and built small structures. That's pretty much what they were doing at home except for the building part. Even in the developing world, the gap between the skillsets required of someone living day-to-day versus what they would need to do in a terra nova is much wider than what the settlers of the New World faced, or the Polynesians that expanded across the Pacific. And the hunter-gatherers who crossed the land bridge from Siberia to North America almost certainly didn't even know they were on a new continent (and why would they have cared?)

3. We're just more comfortable. Yes, there are still people in desperate poverty, but not as many of us three centuries ago. The median human is much happier, and if they move, they have more information about which countries offer better opportunities, rather than helping to build a country from scratch.


The exceptions I alluded to above are Siberia and the Canadian interior and the Australian Outback. That's a significant chunk of the Earth's land surface. Seriously, if you think that there is no more wilderness and no more frontiers, just buy a few coats and a hunting rifle and move to the Yukon. West Australia is the size of America's Western and Pacific time zones combined and has a population of 2 million, 1.5 million of which are in one city, and at least near the coast a Mediterranean climate quite like California's, and massive mineral wealth to boot - and even with all that, the Australian government has been desperately and unsuccessfully trying to get people to settle it. In any of these places you can quite easily meet Daniel Boone's requirement of refusing to live anywhere that you can see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney. But you won't do this, despite any belly-aching you might have done along these lines. Why not? Because you have a good life already and you have no idea how to hunt, that's why.

Asteroid Mining and Detecting Others' von Neumann Probes

With the announcement of "firefly", 3D-printing spacecraft to mine asteroids, we're getting closer to exploring space with multiple smaller craft, as well as more immediately economically rewarding activities, which is what will drive space exploration faster.



Of course it's also exciting because I think exploration of low-gravity bodies will give us more information about life elsewhere in the universe than we expect it to. While reasoning about extraterrestrial life invariably means making assumptions we don't even know we're making, based on what we know about the evolution of life on Earth and the number of planets in the rest of the universe, the development of some kind of replicators outside the solar system seems overwhelmingly likely. If we think at least partly self-reproducing probes are possible - and notice above that investors right here on 2013 Earth are trying to convince people they are - then we might be better off trying to get information about extraterrestrial life from artifacts already here in the solar system than from signals.

It is also likely that lower gravity bodies are better for any entity that wants to continue spreading, since gravity wells are energetically expensive to get in and out of. If you can get matter without descending onto a high gravity surface, you should. (Yes, "but what if aliens have antigravity" - but if we're going to bother thinking about it, we have to make guesses with what we know now. Otherwise maybe they'll ride unicorns. More seriously, if they don't care about gravity, why would they waste time with small gravity bodies like Earth? Mine the cores of gas giants. Hide just outside event horizons to evade detection.)

I've given previously in detail my arguments for why these artifacts might already be here, and where we might look. Comets and asteroids was the answer, so of course I'm excited that these mining probes may explore a number of asteroids during my lifetime. If there's something obvious, excellent (and frightening).

If they don't find anything it could mean:

1. There's really nothing there to find. Intelligent life is much rarer than we think. Replicator chemistry is either not as inevitable as it seems, or there's a Great Filter between algae and interstellar expansion, or life is just rare enough that we're isolated.

OR

2. Something is there to find, but we don't notice it at first.

Because we're looking for something alien - something completely outside our experience - it's hard to say what a gas chromatograph of chewed-up alien von Neumann probe chemistry would look like. (This is why I hope full rocks are towed back, so we can have people in Earth orbit doing real chemistry on them.)

So how to distinguish 1 from 2? Keep looking, and follow up any interesting chemistry we find, "interesting" meaning any low-entropy repeating patterns, either temporally or spatially, on low-gravity bodies. I very much doubt we're going to find a metal ship crouching amidst a flying rubble pile. I do think we'll find strange chemistry that's worth looking into, at least insofar as it's relevant to the origin of life on Earth, and at least with comets that's no longer controversial. I haven't yet seen a model which examines what fraction of asteroids we would expect to be colonized by theoretical replicators, so I'm not sure at what rate I should de-weight my expectation of finding alien artifacts on asteroids, as more asteroids are mined without the merest

Make Space Travel Profit-Generating

An article from the Economist has been making the rounds, in which it is noted that for the near-term, the Space Age is over. There should be no surprise: space travel got off the ground as a race between nations and there has not been serious public discourse so far to conceive of it as anything other than a patriotic contest: that is to say, a money sink.


Europeans didn't go to the Americas just for their crowns. Why don't we think in space travel in more economic terms? Image from Anthonares.

Of course, people do things for reasons besides creating material wealth - we do things to create happiness, and wealth is just one (major) route thereto. Net-consumers of wealth (like entertainment) are okay when it's merely entertainment that feeds happiness without doing TOO much damage to the material bottom line - but when we're eating up many billions of dollars in some pursuit, the question of return on investment becomes much more important. Even the comparatively cheaper (in terms of national investment) European adventures across the Atlantic centuries ago were at least partly business ventures. If we want to see space exploration continue, it must become a profit-making enterprise.


Gravity wells are expensive. Enterprising aliens may warn us that the really scary thing about black holes is that they're terrible for profits.

As our economy now operates, the obvious revenue source from operations in space would be metals. The main expenses are getting out of gravity wells, and keeping humans alive. A path forward would then be:

- Improve automation (as is happening independently) and machines' ability to operate in vacuum and zero gravity

- Focus on obtaining commodities from small asteroids (this article breathlessly mentions "trillions" but fails to appreciate the impact on a commodity price when a whole planetoid of it is dumped on the surface.) Anthonares has a good quantitative exploration of the concrete economics of commodities and space-mining.

- Focus on a way to get the ore down from orbit (we don't need a space elevator. When you're dropping something, simpler technology works; you just need clear ground underneath it. Antarctica?)

- An application for self-reproducing automata - if the next-generation automation could make more of themselves out of nickel-iron-iridium, and obtain fuel from the carbon compounds in chondrites, you've just solved the expensive gravity-well problem.


A RepRap device, which is a 3D printer that can print large portions of itself. If it could make itself out of iridium and/or nickel and/or iron, we're halfway to von Neumann probes. Aliens are more likely to meet RepRap's descendants than to meet us.


Note that a single expedition could pay for itself in commodities, but there's a considerable funding hump to get over. (If you think the development time for pharmaceuticals is hard, you haven't seen anything yet.) So there is still a role for those deepest-pocketed, longest-term-thinking of institutions, governments. Depending on your political tastes, this could be anything from tax incentives for private industries, to dedicated government research labs.

As an aside, I've argued before that we're most likely to recognize other intelligences by the self-reproducing tools that are spreading out from their point of origin (their von Neumann probes) rather than their signals, which may be in a medium that we don't know about and in a pattern that we cannot recognize. (Apparently the as-yet-uncontacted hunter-gatherers in the Amazon have somehow missed all our radio broadcasts. I bet they think they would know about all their neighbors.) It's intriguing to think that the first replicators we encounter may therefore be alien mining equipment.

The Economics of Space Exploration: The Private Sector

Following up a previous thread on how the economics of space exploration is really the most important part of the story, we see the importance of the private sector in funding at least the instruments: it's not just in Heinlein. If we think space travel is important to the future of our values and our species, we should be asking more and tougher questions about the real-world economics of it and how we're going to make it happen faster or at all.

Manned Exploration of Asteroids

The U.S. President has announced his plan to have American astronauts "land" on an asteroid by 2025. This is cool for several reasons:

1) It means that rule-makers are finally taking seriously the idea of asteroid defense.

2) If space exploration is going to continue it must become sustainable; that is, materially profitable. The most expensive thing about space travel is getting out of gravity wells. Raw material from small bodies, i.e. that's already in microgravity is therefore orders of magnitude cheaper than material that has to be brought up. (First organization who can make a self-printing 3D printer mostly out of materials to be found in asteroids wins. Template information up by sat phone, finished products down by parachute.) Asteroids are better candidates than comets because objects in stable, closer orbits are slower than objects that fall in from far away and whip around the sun in a matter of days.

3) We'll get a more in-depth look at an asteroid, and we'll find evidence of alien life. Leaping to conclusions there? I've written before that I think that we can't rule out von Neumann probes or replicating non-terrestrial entities of some kind in our own solar system, and that we haven't seen them yet because we're looking in the wrong places. (This probably also qualifies as one of my most absurd beliefs.) Interestingly, one of the greatest science fiction series of all time begins with an astronaut planting a nuclear bomb on an asteroid, and in the process discovering our first evidence of alien life. I don't think we'll be finding any doorways carved into canyons as in this novel, but I do think we'll find the kind of highly monodisperse heteropolymers - with nitrogen isotope ratio suggesting an extrasolar origin - that are an unmistakable sign of high-fidelity replication systems.

In other impactor-related news, I'm planning a trip to Siberia and Central Asia and I was trying to get to the Tunguska site. But it's way off the Siberian railroad and really hard to get to (a week out of my itinerary?) and Black Oil Aliens notwithstanding, there's nothing obviously special about the site; i.e. you want a crater, go see Winslow, and it's fifteen minutes off I-40 east of Flagstaff. I would still love to go - so, if you happen to have seen this on your Google News feed for Tunguska, and you're looking for someone to collect samples from the site but can't find any hearty risk-takers, why not let a hard-working medical student help you out by funding my extra week to get out there and get your work done for you!

Sell 10^9 Shares in Skynet

Given my obsession with linking the Singularity and Skynet, I found this Economist post about the stock market plunge last week funny.

We Should Aim at Making Space Travel Economically Self-Sustaining Now

The Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an alliance of businesses and organizations, just endorsed the President's current vision for space exploration. That's not the interesting part, at least to me. The interesting part is the Federation's stated goals: "to promote the development of commercial human spaceflight, pursue ever higher levels of safety, and share best practices and expertise throughout the industry." Shouldn't economic self-sustainability trump everything else? If space flight pays for itself, it will continue. If it's an expensive amusement park ride, it won't.

Has anyone done even 30,000'-view type proposals for commercially viable space operations? Zero-G manufacturing, towing in an asteroid for iridium? Yes, it's neater to send people instead of computers into space, but people break more easily and cost more money. And yes, the ultimate far-future goal should, as the Spaceflight Federation states, to get humans into space, and to settle bodies besides the Earth as insurance against existential threats, but it has to begin with economically sustainable activity.

[Added later: Tyler Cowen and Charles Stross both try to answer what the smallest population is that could keep us as wealthy as we are. Cowen thinks that even a world with a billion residents would be 15% poorer (presumably on a per capita basis) than our current world. In other words, a billion isn't enough to sustain our current standard of living even on a planet that has an atmosphere and water. Can we really expect that substantially fewer people can sustain just the bare essentials for survival on Mars, which would include technologically complex equipment? Until you get that basic sustenance, other colonies are necessarily dependent on Earth for their survival. Not surprising, since we haven't even sustainably colonized Antarctica yet, even with air and water.]