John Brockman - What Should We Be Worried About?

In 2012, NASA and DARPA jointly funded a 100-Year Starship program, the goal of which was to achieve human interstellar flight within the next 100 years. On September 13, 2012, the 100-Year Starship (100YSS) project held the first of its planned annual public symposiums, in Houston, Texas. Here, about 100 scientists, social scientists, educators, journalists, and miscellaneous others gathered to witness a series of scientific presentations outlining schemes by which human beings could, just possibly, leave planet Earth behind, travel to the stars, and establish a new “Earth 2.0” in another solar system, all within a century.

Traveling to the stars, say many of its advocates, is our preordained destiny as a species. As proponent Cameron Smith puts it in “Starship Humanity” ( Scientific American , January 2013): “the concept of a Space Ark, a giant craft carrying thousands of space colonists on a one-way, multigenerational voyage far from Earth” is “technologically inevitable.”

Far from being technologically “inevitable,” the fact is that such a voyage is not even known to be technologically possible . For one thing, the distances to even the closest extrasolar stars are unimaginably vast. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.22 light-years (24,800,000,000,000 miles) from Earth. Even if we were to travel as fast as the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is now receding from us at 38,120 mph, it would take an interstellar craft more than 73,000 years to reach that destination.

But traveling at significantly faster speeds requires prohibitive amounts of energy. If the starship were propelled by conventional chemical fuels at even 10 percent of the speed of light, it would need for the voyage a quantity of propellant equivalent in mass to the planet Jupiter. To overcome this limitation, champions of interstellar travel have proposed “exotic” propulsion systems, such as antimatter, pi-meson, and space-warp propulsion devices. Each of these schemes faces substantial difficulties of its own: For example, since matter and antimatter annihilate each other, an antimatter propulsion system must solve the problem of confining the antimatter and directing the antimatter nozzle in the required direction. Both pi-meson and space-warp propulsion systems are so very exotic that neither is known to be scientifically feasible.

Indeed, these and other such schemes are really just mathematical abstractions, not working systems: They are major extrapolations from states of matter that exist today only at nano levels. (Making even tiny amounts of antimatter, for instance, requires huge accelerators, at stupendous cost.) Still other systems depend on wild possibilities such as making use of extra dimensions that are not known to exist and physical forces or influences that are not known to be real or are sheer flights of the imagination (such as altering the value of Hubble’s constant to make the universe smaller).

Even if, by some miracle, suitable propulsion systems became available, a starship traveling at relativistic speeds would have to be equipped with sophisticated collision-detection-and-avoidance systems, given that a high-speed collision with something as small as a grain of salt would be like encountering an H-bomb. Star voyagers face further existential threats in the form of prolonged exposure to ionizing radiation, boredom, alienation from the natural environment, the possible occurrence of a mass epidemic, the rise of a charismatic leader who might derail the whole project, crew mutiny, religious factionalism, and so on. It is far more likely, therefore, that an interstellar voyage will mean not the survival but the death of its crew.

Apart from all of these difficulties, the more important point is that there is no good reason to make the trip in the first place. If we need an Earth 2.0, then the moon, Mars, Europa, or other intra-solar-system bodies are far more likely candidates for human colonization than are planets light-years away.

So, however romantic and dreamy it might sound, and however much it might appeal to one’s youthful hankerings of “going into space,” interstellar flight remains a science-fictional concept—and with any luck it always will be.

MARGARET LEVI

Political scientist, Bacharach Professor of International Studies, University of Washington; author, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism

We all live in communities of fate; our fates are entwined with others in ways we perceive and ways we cannot. Our individual and group actions often have consequences, sometimes unforeseen, that affect others in significant ways. Moreover, there are those, beyond our families with whom we feel entangled, whose interests and welfare we perceive as tied to our own. In the lingo of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Who is included in the “one” and who in the “all” differs among us, and therein lies the rub.

How we understand our community of fate matters for the perils the world faces today and into the future. That so many people choose to live in ways that narrow the community of fate to a limited set of others and define the rest as threatening to their way of life and values is deeply worrying, because this contemporary form of tribalism, and the ideologies that support it, enables them to deny complex and cross-cutting interdependencies—local, national, and international—and ignore their own role in creating threats to their own and others’ well-being. Climate change and religious zealotry are among the well-documented examples of individual and group actions that have significant spillover effects. Perhaps most alarming is our collective failure to incorporate future generations into our communities of fate. The implications for almost all public policies are enormous.

But there is hope. It is possible to expand the community of fate well beyond the network of those we personally know. We continually make decisions that have consequences for others; there is now evidence that if we understood those consequences and expanded our community of fate, we might make different choices. For example, we buy cheap goods without acknowledging that they may entail labor that is badly paid or treated. As research by Michael Hiscox and Jens Hainmueller details, more information and a different framing can transform the consumption patterns of at least some buyers.

Jaron Lanier, in Edge , has argued that the “new moral question” is whether our decisions are self-interested or take others into account. Whom an individual includes in her community of fate (what Lanier labels “circle of empathy”) is a moral question, yes, but it is also an empirical question. Organizational and institutional factors can explain variation and transformation in the community of fate. They can enable individuals to revise their understanding of the consequences of their actions and change the boundaries of their communities of fate. Of critical importance are the group’s governance arrangements and the procedures for enforcing them. All groups have rules and norms defining membership and appropriate behavior; membership organizations, including government, codify those rules and norms into formal institutions. How the community of fate—and not just membership—is defined requires leaders committed to principles they are willing to uphold in unforeseen circumstances, punishment of violations (to make these commitments credible), and provision of services, security, and other benefits members expect.

But the community can be narrow or broad. To expand the community of fate beyond the actual members of an organization depends on the desire and ability of leaders to convince members that their welfare is tied up with a larger set of others, often unknown others. Success further requires providing new information, in a context of strong or potential challenge to its veracity. Organizations most effective in expanding the community of fate are those allowing members to question what they’re being told and seek additional information if need be. In practice, this implies some form of participatory governance or bottom-up democracy.