Chapter 25: Extinction Insurance
As the new millennium approached, I turned my attention, for a time, to space development.
I. A Game of Chance
You look like a sporting individual. How about a little game of chance? Simply roll a dice, and let’s see if you win or lose.
Here’s the stakes. If you win, life goes on as usual for another day. If you lose, it’s the end of the human race.
Here’s a chip. (Imagine that you are holding it in your hand.)
Now, you have to play. Every day is a gamble. Every day, that chip sits on the table. However, you have a say in where that chip gets played. You can place it on safe bets, or you can place it on a long shot. The payoff is the same either way. If you lose, the chip is taken. That’s the end of the human race.
One more thing. You can — for a substantial fee — purchase extinction insurance. Extinction insurance means that even if… I mean, when… you lose, you will not be wiped out. You will be given a second chip, worth much less than the first, that you can play elsewhere on the table. For another substantial fee, you get a second, and then a third chip. You can place your chips so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to lose all of the chips at the same time.
This means, you will still have something to play with – something with which to rebuild human civilization. You’ll still take a very devastating hit when that losing dice roll comes up, but the human race will still be in the game.
Morally speaking, how much is this extinction insurance worth?
II. On Eggs and Baskets
As an investor, the one word I constantly hear is ‘diversify’. It is the investor’s term for the bit of folk wisdom, “Never put all of your eggs in one basket.” The reason — you may easily end up with no eggs at all. The stock market crash of 2000-2002 taught the value of diversification. Some people lost everything. These were the people who tied their entire personal fortunes to the well being of one company — a company that ultimately failed.
This did not just happen in the ‘dot.com’ companies either. There were Enron employees with their entire pension invested in the company stock — who went from having hundreds of thousands of dollars in their retirement fund to just thousands of dollars when they found themselves out of a job.
They did not diversify.
Diversification is a sound strategy for the human race as well. Right now, we have all of our genetic eggs in one planetary basket. It is a basket that can — and, eventually, will — get dropped. When that day comes, if we still have all of our genetic eggs in one basket, Earth becomes a gold mine for some interplanetary archaeologist of some other species, trying to piece together the story of a planetary-wide race that existed long, long ago, and vanished.
III. Dropping Baskets
By the best of my understanding, the three most significant threats to the human race are:
A. Impact
From time to time rocks flying through space, miles in diameter, have struck the earth. When they do, they have destroyed most of the species alive at the time, inflicting its greatest damage on the larger species, preserving the smaller. Humans are among the larger creatures on Earth. There has one impact, in Earth’s history, that would have destroyed all life. We do not know if there was life on Earth at that time; all traces have been destroyed.
Scientists will soon know the location of all bodies in the inner solar system capable of threatening the human race, and we will be able to avoid the next major collision. We may lose a city or two along the way — or more, if a large enough body strikes the ocean and sets off planet-wide tsunami — but the survival of the species will not be at risk from this quadrant.
The real danger comes from beyond the orbit of Pluto, from long-period comets that come at the earth from far distant space. No survey of the inner solar system can tell us which of these bodies have Earth in its path. The first time anybody saw Comet Hyakutake was two months before it sped by Earth — not nearly enough time to plan any type of interception.
It would require an incredible stroke of bad luck for the Earth to be hit by a long-period comet large enough to end all human life. However, that is what gambling is all about. The people who place the chip for the human race on the gambling table are not likely to lose. However, when we do lose, and we will some day, we will lose it all, unless we have purchased some insurance.
I think that gambling with the future of the human race falls squarely in the ‘bad’ category — something a person with good desires would not want to do.
B. Disease
We have no way of knowing how many species have gone extinct from a new disease. We do know that plagues have devastated human societies — wiping out 35% of the population of Europe during the Black Death, or 90% of the population of North America after the European colonials arrived.
Those times, the human race survived.
However, present-day humans face a threat from disease that no other species, even less modern humans, has ever faced. In the past, the only diseases that we needed to worry about were the random creations of nature — a mutation with deadly effects. They affected a species that was largely immobile. The size of the planet itself and the immobility of the people quarantined those societies that became a victim of a plague.
The next plague would hit a society where people move very rapidly across the whole surface of the globe. Furthermore, it could have an intelligent origin. Its creator may be some religious nut who thinks that God will miraculously protect a group of true believers, or that he and his followers will receive their reward in the after-life. It could be some eco-terrorist who wants to end human existence and leave Earth for the plants and animals. Either way, the threat exists.
C. Environmental Degradation
About 2 billion years ago, the Earth’s atmosphere was a chemical soup that would have been a deadly poison to humans. However, there was life on the surface of that planet. That life took sunlight, mixed it with some carbon dioxide and water, and created oxygen. Oxygen was a deadly poison to many of these life forms. Those life forms are now extinct poisoned by their own natural pollution.
It has happened before, and it can happen again.
So far, we have been able to discover our environmental problems in time to do something about them. However, we cannot promise that the same is true of the next environmental. We could have tilted some ecological balance that will be very devastating to us at some time in the future, and simply not be aware of it until it is too late to reverse.
IV. Extinction insurance
What is this extinction insurance?
Quite simply, it means having enough people living somewhere other than Earth so that, if Earth should suffer some tremendous shock, there are enough survivors to continue.
Extinction insurance, in this case, is extremely expensive. However, refusing to buy extinction insurance means claiming the right to gamble with the future of humanity. Each day, the dice get rolled again for the human race. Each day, there is a chance, however small, that the humans will continue to exist one day longer. Each day, there is a possibility that this day will be the last day that happens.
I am certain of very few things in this world, but this one thing strikes me as certain. There will come a day when the only descendants that any of us will have still living will be those that have moved off of Earth. The Earth itself will be lifeless. Genetic lines that include a decision somewhere to move into space will continue on. Those that do not will end.
It is not only our own future on the line, by the way. Every tiger, eagle, tropical fish, songbird, orchid, and tree surviving that day will be those that we have taken with us, or sent ahead of us. Without our help, they are as doomed as we are.
This is not written to say that people should be lying awake at night fearing that the end of the human race is imminent unless we take emergency action to build space colonies. It’s to say that anybody who is interested in the future of the human race has a reason to support some investment in extinction insurance. Anybody who cares about the future of the human race would be opposed to keeping all of our human eggs in one planetary basket.
V. The Spin-offs Argument for Space Development
Whenever people start talking about space the defenders of space development, it is not uncommon to bring up another benefit as a way of justifying the expense – the spin-offs defense.
Those who advance this argument state, “Sure, the Apollo program was expensive, but look at all of the great inventions we got out of it. Velcro. Microwave ovens. Our lives are so much better because we invested in the space.”
This argument is actually a bunch of horse hockey.
As I have said in the earlier chapters, I am as opposed to those who will use bad reasoning to agree with my position, as those who use bad reasoning to oppose it. This is one of those examples.
Never mind that some of the things attributed to space development were developed quite independently of NASA and the Apollo program. Microwave ovens were actually invented as a result of radar technology shortly after World War II. A Swiss mountain climber noticing the burrs that stuck to his clothing invented Velcro.
A more telling blow to this type of argument asks a simple question. “Do you really believe we would have not had a whole set of spin offs — perhaps different spin offs, but spin offs nonetheless — by investing all of that time and effort in some other project?”
What if, instead of investing $25 billion in the Apollo program, we had invested that same amount of money to accomplish some other goal – to map the Human genome 30 years earlier than it was done, or build a series of bridges from Malaya to Australia, or any of a thousand different tasks we could have cancelled? Is the space program truly the only option that could have produced useful spinoff technologies? That seems unlikely.
So, the spinoff argument provides a poor justification for investing in space development, as opposed to any of these other options. For space development to truly be worthwhile, it needs to provide a benefit that no other option can provide.
It happens to provide such a benefit. No other option allows for the survival of humanity itself past the day that humans on Earth become extinct.
VI. Additional Benefits
We do not need to focus exclusively on the inevitable extinction of human life on Earth to see benefits from the development of space. Space provides other benefits as well.
For most of the options I will be listing, there will be other ways (and, in some cases, less expensive ways) of realizing these same benefits. However, none of these alternatives will allow us to solve the same problems while, simultaneously, buying us extinction insurance against the eventual extinction of human life on Earth.
A. Environmental Protection
Space is dead — most of it. Maybe all of it.
Consider a mining operation on an asteroid, grinding up a floating hunk of rock to get at the elements it contains. All they are chomping on is a rock…iant, dead, floating boulder bathed in lethal radiation in the vacuum of space.
In contrast, the only way to get at ores on Earth is to cut deeper and deeper scars into its living ecosystems. As time goes on, we will see more and more mining in increasingly remote portions of the planet. Antarctica and the North American Wildlife Preserve cannot be saved forever. The ocean floors have huge bodies of resources waiting to be tapped.
Unless we are talking about a human race that survives only a couple of centuries more, we will need new resources to replace those that we use up. We will either be cutting up living ecosystems to get at these resources, or we will be cutting up dead ecosystems. Every place on Earth interacts with a living ecosystem. Space is filled with places that are, simply, dead – there is no ecosystem for us to harm.
It is, admittedly, more expensive to harvest resources in space — at least where direct cost is concerned. However, if we use a broader and more accurate definition of costs which includes the value of what is destroyed to those people who do not have it any more — perhaps the cost is not quite so high.
I have encountered some people who are appalled by the very idea of having human footprints on another heavenly body. They claim, in disgust, “Having human footprints on earth is bad enough, should we be contaminating and infesting the entire universe?”
Contrary to their protestations, these people are either advocating the voluntary elimination of the ‘human disease’ from the universe – because this is how they see us; or they are advocating the destruction of the living ecosystems of Earth in favor of the dead ecosystems of space. Ultimately, they are advocating the extinction of not only of the human race, but of every species that humans can carry with them into space, but will not if their prohibitions are enforced. This advocacy of death over life, and extinction over survival, strikes me as so odd that I would expect the view to be very rare.
It is not nearly as rare as it should be.
B. Taxpayer Funding
As much as I like the free market, it has one significant weakness.
Honestly, the weakness I will be mentioning is not a weakness in the free market itself. It is the cost of setting up a free market. The problem is, free markets are not free. Capitalists are fond of pointing out that there is no such thing as a free lunch. They often ignore the fact that this applies to capitalism itself. It takes an investment of effort and resources to establish and maintain a system of property rights. In some cases, it is so expensive, that the benefits that capitalism would provide in terms of greater economic efficiency do not cover the costs.
How do you internalize the benefit of a beautiful sunset? Or the benefit of saving an ecosystem from being ripped apart? How to you capture the benefits of standing army so that it will benefit only those who pay for it? How does a person in Texas capture the benefit of simply knowing that the Alaskan polar bear are protected in a Canadian wilderness? How can we arrange it so that a Maine lobster fisherman or an Alaska crab fishermen harvest only those creatures that belong to him and not his neighbor’s crabs or lobsters?
Free market economic theory says that, to the degree that those benefits are not internalized; to that degree a particular service will not be as well funded as a free market system would recommend. Where there is no way to extract a fee from those who will benefit, there is less incentive to produce a particular good or service than a free market would recommend if it were possible to collect fees.
This is the free rider problem again.
(a) A Digression on Privatization and Cost
If I may digress for a minute; many of the privatization schemes that political conservatives advance today suffer from this free-rider problem. They turn public goods and services over to private control in such a way that the costs and benefits of that good or service are still externalized, rather than internalized. The private owner has no way to capture payment for the value of preserving a spot of nature, so a valuable good or service finds that it cannot compete. I repeat, these goods and services do not fail to compete because they have less value then their competitors, but because they have no way to capture payment for the value they provide. In a free-market system, private property does not, in fact, go to the purpose that has the greatest social value. It goes to the purpose that has the greatest social value for which rents can be collected and free riders can be excluded.
Pure capitalism calls for eliminating the free rider problem by internalizing all costs — make it impossible for anybody to obtain a benefit that they do not pay for, or impose an uncompensated cost. Practical reason says that this is not always practical. In these instances we need to institute some sort of alternative system that balances the desire to obtain the efficiencies of the free market against the costs associated with making sure that nobody obtain a benefit they do not pay for, or suffer a cost for which they are not compensated.
To prevent this problem, it is appropriate that the government step in and provide a level of funding necessary to secure these goods. The appropriate level of funding is determined by the funding the industry would have gotten in a free market system if all of the benefits could have been internalized.
(b) Application to Space
There is a “free rider problem’ associated with preserving the human race. This is one of those products, like sunsets and national defense, where it is difficult to establish private property rights in a way that ensures that the benefits are internalized. People who wish to see the human race preserved can benefit from the efforts of others without paying the cost, because we cannot withhold “survival of the human race” from those who refuse to pay for it.
As a result, if we wait for the free market to provide “survival of the human race” for its customers, it is very likely that the market will never provide it. Because of the free-rider problem, there is no profit in it. Therefore, if we are going to secure “survival of the human race” for those who value this particular product, we must find some other way to come up with the money and to ensure that this particular good be produced.
VII. The Where and the How of Space Development
What should we be doing? Building lunar bases? Harvest asteroids? Constructing solar power satellites? Colonizing Mars? Terraforming Venus?
I find it surprising how easy it is to assume that I know all of the perfectly correct answers about how to run such a project. This is, after all, one of those areas where I have focused a fair amount of thought and effort. I hope that the effort has helped me to form at least one well informed opinion on the matter.
However, Yet, deep in the back of my brain some lone brain cell is getting ready to slap me on the side of the head and shout, “You idiot, you are not as all knowing as you would like to believe.”
I am going to listen to that obnoxious dissenting brain cell and say that market forces should determine the best way to develop space, not the dictates of some bureaucrat or some arm-chair philosopher. The best way to set things up for space development is to give the market as much free reign as possible consistent with the free market principle that costs and benefits are to be internalized or some other method must be found to cover costs and benefits not internalized.
If somebody tries to launch a giant billboard into space so that it shines an advertiser’s logo down on all people on Earth who look up, that person will impose costs on others. There are more than a few people who do not want to look up at the moon on a clear, romantic evening and see a giant billboard there instead. If these costs are internalized, then such a stunt would be prohibitively expensive. Rather than go through the expense of internalizing these costs, it would likely be more efficient to just ban such a stunt and leave it at that.
A. Prize Missions
One way to help to finance space development, and make sure that the money goes to those who are most efficient at providing us with its benefits, is to have the government give up its program of building interplanetary probes, and offer prizes instead.
The government could announce something lie, “We’ll pay $200 million dollars per gram for the first 10 grams of material brought back from Mars under the following conditions (to ensure safety and prevent the possibility of contamination).” The government can then sit back and wait for somebody to collect the money.
There will be no more costly government failures — no more instances where NASA builds a billion-dollar robot to have it blow up over some distant planet. The government, under this system, would only be paying for success.
More importantly, the private companies that compete for these rewards can go ahead and add whatever they may want to add to the mission in order to generate additional revenue. Options such as corporate sponsorship, pay-per-view broadcast rights, delivering names on a plaque, charging people to remotely drive a lunar or Mars rover, bringing back samples to auction off on the open market, anything these capitalists can think of to make their mission even more profitable (that does not harm others) shall be open to them.
This option would not cost the government an additional dime. If the government is willing to spend $500 million to drill through the ice cores of Europa to look for life, then the government can simply say, “We will pay $500 million dollars to anybody who can deliver to us the following pieces of data under the following conditions.” It’s the same $500 million one way or the other — except one maintains an expensive and error-prone government bureaucracy, while the other promotes private enterprise and pays only for success.
Furthermore, there is a zero percent chance of any cost overruns. The government pays when the goods are delivered, and it does not pay a dime more than it originally offered to pay. Cost overruns are eaten by the company that made the attempt to retrieve the desired data, and that will be a strong incentive to ensure that they will be kept to a minimum.
(a) X-Prize
We saw the benefits of this type of system in 2004 when SpaceShipOne, built by the American company Scaled Composites, claimed the X-Prize. This was a $10 million dollar prize promised to the first team that could reach the doorway to space, 100 kilometers above the Earth, with a pilot and the equivalent weight of two additional passengers, land, and then return to the doorway to space within 2 weeks.
The purpose behind the prize was to give people an incentive to create the technology that we needed to start to develop space on a large scale. The government was not doing this. It was giving billions of dollars to huge companies that had no incentive to open space up to the average citizen. So, a small group of private citizens got together and set up a system that, within 10 years, saw the successful launch of such a rocket.
With this success, Richard Bransen ordered five larger versions of the X-Prize winners and started selling tickets for suborbital flights. His flights were soon booked, and the private development of space seems to have begun.
(b) NASA Prize Money: Centennial Challenges
With the success of the X-Prize, it appears that NASA is starting to get into the space prize business. NASA created a new program called Centennial Challenges to use the efficiency of prizes to help in the development of space. Through this program, NASA will offer prize money to those who successfully accomplish certain technology challenges that the agency has set up.
It is a small start. However, there is no reason not to use the efficiency of competitions to turn large portions of NASA’s space science projects over to private enterprise. Instead of spending $300 million for the next lander to land on the surface of Mars, NASA can cut this in half, offering $150 million each for the first two organizations to put landers on Mars that is able to meet certain minimum standards in the amount and type of data provided. We then get two landers for the price of one. The organizations that compete for these prizes can obtain additional money from other sources, that deliver the promised.
If the government were to offer $2 million for 1 kilogram of lunar material brought back from each of 20 separate locations on the moon, we will likely get a tremendous amount of lunar science done with the taxpayers paying no more than what they presently pay for one lunar probe. If the government were to offer $100 million to the organization that sends a human to the moon to live for 1 week and then return that person safely to earth, we would see the development of technology that could significantly lessen the cost of space development. Other projects could include rovers delivered to Mars, the Jovian satellites, asteroids, comets, and solar wind. A next level of prizes would be offered to those who could bring samples from these bodies back to Earth.
The government participation in these projects would deal with the “free rider” problem inherent in the fact that organizations cannot keep “survival of the human race” from those who are unwilling to pay for it. However, the freedom of competitors to seek other sources of income will help to ensure that the course of space development would advance along lines that served other human interests. It would help to create a space market with all of its inherent efficiencies.
B. The Cost of Space
The biggest obstacle to space development is the cost of going from earth to space. The least expensive way to enter space starts by going as fast as possible, in the same direction as the Earth’s rotation, right along the Earth’s equator. It ends at a space station in a low equatorial orbit, also traveling in the same direction as the Earth’s rotation.
This space in low earth orbit along the equator in the same direction as rotation is the “Panama Canal” or the “Northwest Passage” of space development. If money is to be had from space development, it is to be had by people who build trading posts along these passage.
Think of New York at the mouth of the Hudson river, and New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. Think of San Francisco where the waterways into central California reach the ocean, and Portland, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River. A low orbiting space station is to space what these locations were to the development of America.
This fact allows us to identify a clear example of how government programs skew economic efficiency that private enterprise loves. When building the International Space Station, plans to include the (former) Soviet Union meant putting the station at a high inclination orbit — one that crosses the equator at a high angle. This significantly lowers the amount of mass that can be delivered into space, which significantly increases the cost/mass ratio.
The government selected this orbit for political reasons. However, these political reasons made space development far more expensive than it would have otherwise been. This, in turn, hinders, rather than promotes, the development of space.
If the government had, instead, simply announced that it is willing to spend $8 billion to collect a given set of data — the data that the International Space Station was being built to provide — I strongly suspect that we would have had a station that is far larger, far less expensive to operate, and far less likely to run into overruns that cost the government more than it ever intended on spending. That station would be in low earth orbit over the equator.
It would have supplemented its income by selling additional services to private enterprise, services that its location would have made as inexpensive as possible to deliver. It would have served as a true gateway to space. For example, it might have acquired a hotel module and similar amenities to go along with it, to handle those who are presently spending $20 million per ticket to visit the International Space Station. We would have a significantly larger, flourishing space development industry using transportation craft built from inexpensive composite materials instead of a fleet of aging and dangerous space shuttles.
If the government were to set up a set of prizes to offer for space research in earth orbit, I think that space would open up as follows:
The International Space Station would be abandoned as simply being too expensive to run. Private enterprise would develop an equatorial station. It would start off as an outpost — often unmanned, but capable of holding one or two people when a human presence is required. The rest of the time, the lights will be turned off.
Private enterprise would also continue the development of equatorial rockets capable of entering low-earth orbit. The French have a launching platform near the equator, which will continue to be useful. American and Soviet companies (and governments) will ultimately see the economic need to cut back on their in-country launch platforms and seek equatorial alternatives. Boeing already has a head start in this direction with a sailing platform that it hauls down to the equator. Space planes like SpaceShipOne from Scaled Composites could take off from any large airport, head down to the equator, turn east, and enter space along this route easily enough.
C. Location, Location, Location
Space development enthusiasts ask whether we should develop near-Earth space first, or Mars.
I do not see Mars as offering a competitive alternative, at least for a while. Mars enthusiasts like to point out that the planet has all of the ingredients that are needed for space development right there, and that none of it needs to be hauled in from other locations. Thus, shipping and construction costs would be lower on Mars than elsewhere. This may well be true. However, it is also irrelevant.
Economic viability depends on the capacity to trade, and near-earth-orbit has the advantage in terms of location. How many times do businesses select the more expensive plot of land, simply because it is closer to their intended markets? Tourists can’t go to Mars nearly as easily as they can make it into earth orbit. Stockbrokers can still track the nuances of the market and get real-time data, get and respond to emails and phone calls in a timely manner, and participate in real-time conferences with the people on Earth from near-Earth space. Visits to near-Earth space take less time. Researchers can combine activities done in space with activities carried out on Earth. Near-earth space has a tremendous economic advantage over other alternatives.
It is true that everything needed in order to build in near-Earth space will have to be imported. Some of those resources can best come from extra-terrestrial sources. Whether by mining the moon, or grabbing a few tones of regolith off of the surface of a passing asteroid, there will be some need for resources harvested from space. This will result in the creation of a second, outer ring of space development.
Those outer settlements, of course, will attract more people, who will want more comforts, goods, and services, which will attract others willing to provide those goods and services, and, from this, off-earth settlement will commence.
Mars may be on the list at some time, but a lot depends on what we find there. If we find life, we can expect that the planet will be quarantined and preserved as a scientific research center. If there is no life, then there may come a time when anti-social types who really do not place much value on interaction with the rest of humanity may seek refuge there. Pioneers such as this have existed in the Earth’s past; there is no reason to believe that the pioneer spirit has been entirely beaten out of the human psyche.
VII. Conjecture
Much of what appears in this chapter is conjecture — a vision for the future. It may or may not come to pass, and there is no pressing moral argument to be made one way or the other regarding any of the specific details.
The one pressing moral argument that does have a say in this chapter is the moral crime of gambling with the future of humanity when we could purchase some insurance against a catastrophic loss. Given the fact that nature and man both gamble with the future of the human race, it is wrong not to be investing money in some sort of ‘extinction insurance’. Space development provides the best insurance against the possibility that nature or man could role the cosmic dice and lose the human species.
The first step in purchasing this ‘extinction insurance’ is quite simple. All it takes is for governments to say that, instead of running this or that space mission, it will simply offer cash to the first private agency to carry it off. “We are not going to build the rockets or the probe. We are simply going to pay for the data. Instead of sending a $200 million probe to measure solar emissions, we are instead going to pay $10 million per year to whatever company willing to provide us with data on solar emissions.”
Simple.
I like things that are simple.