The Next 500 Years
Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds
2021 Christopher E. Mason @ Weill Cornell Medicine
612.0345 MAS / Beaverton Library
A 500 year Grand Plan for going to the stars ... at very high acceleration and speed, as space-tolerant acceleration-proof sorta-kinda awake-and-aware human beings.
I recently discarded a stack of 20 year old electronic engineering magazines, with articles describing how the new Zigbee standard would soon overtake the old Bluetooth standard. Today, Zigbee is wide spread, but Bluetooth is VASTLY wider spread. Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
Indeed, humans will modify themselves to thrive in the space environment. Not so our descendants can travel to a planet around another Sun, but so that life and mind can thrive in the other 99.99999999% (yes, ten 9s) of the solar system that lacks matter but is awash in sunlight energy. We've outgrown the Earth as a cradle of life; we can create vastly more opportunities in the inner and outer solar system, while restoring our cradle to health, so it can birth future species, and perhaps new varieties of intelligence.
Yes, the Sun will become much hotter over the next billion years. The solar system contains many bodies with a lot of angular momentum and orbital energy; we can arrange asteroid flybys to extract some of that, and flybys of Earth to move it outwards into the cool. With proper engineering and continuous maintenance, our Mother Earth might survive another 5 billion years. The crown jewel of an aware solar system that uses all the rest of its energy to power an enormous constellation of lifeforms and intelligence, thriving in zero gee, vaccuum. and ionizing radiation from the Sun. With the huge time available, and with vastly more energy and resources, "we" (the intelligent beings we artificially evolve to become) we will learn many more ways to live.
p37 Metagenome Mapping: estimating trillions of species on Earth (mostly microbes). The Earth Microbiome Project and the Extreme Microbiome Project sequence and create taxonomies for microbes around the world. Dr. Mason's MetaSUB and the MoBE search for and sequence microbes adapted to our urban environment. The Darwin Tree of Life Project will sequence 70,000 eukariotic species in the UK. If this is "stamp collecting", we will use those stamps to mail intelligent life into the rest of the solar system, and after that the stars. This will take longer than 500 years. Intelligence will grow prodigeously, but there are vastly many niches to fill in our own solar system before it is necessary to find other niches, around other stars vastly further away.
p100 "There is a planned apace station for orbiting Mars ... Lockheed Martin in 2040". Er, no. Unmodified humans need gravity, and radiation shielding. Too heavy to launch from Earth to Mars. On the other hand, Phobos may be an excellent place to dig in and shield a one-gee rotating habitat.