Gerard K. OÕNeill
Read September 5, 2000 – January 2, 2001
Reviewed January 6, 2001.
In 1997 I first attended the Space Frontier Foundation conference, a three or four day weekend in which people who want to be moving people en-mass into space get together to have pep talks, report to each other what they are doing, and cut deals. Mainly they talk about fantasy and show cartoons power point presentations. Jim Benson was there, having freshly founded a new company, SpaceDev and at that point in time he still had little to say except for hawking his own personal story (beltway bandit in computers, retired at age 50, didnÕt know what to do, thenÉ). In his autobiography, he rattled off a list of inspirational books about space development that he had read in an effort to get oriented to his next great challenge. I bought two or three of the books and by the time I was going to the 2000 edition of the conference thought I should read at least one of them in preparation. (Mining the Sky by Lewis was another, and I read it right away, having met Lewis and attended his session at that 1997 conference.)
Gerry OÕNeill had a great idea on how current technology could be used to colonize near-earth space. (Not low earth orbit, but the earth-moon vicinity, to start.) Writing in 1975, he couldnÕt see how this could take more than a couple of decades. By 2000 or 2010, an Island One and Island Two should already be in place selling something like electrical power into the earth economy. Using mass drivers for transportation and materials from the moon and asteroids for construction, and scores of cheap space shuttle flights per year to get the first workers out there, it was going to happen right away.
I read an edition of the book revised slightly in 1988 when not much of this was happening yet. The Space Studies Institute, OÕNeillÕs creation, was doing things, working NASA grants, thinking about the problems, but nobody was going off and doing anything. My analysis of this is that problems are a lot harder to solve in reality than they are on a physics scratch pad. All those nasty details about safety and quality and all the things you forgot about polluting the solar system with driven mass to the point where nothing man-made could survive outside of an atmosphere havenÕt come up yet. Not to mention that space shuttle flights are neither cheap nor common. In an Appendix 2, he addresses some of this, blaming NASA and the government like everybody does for the huge slowdown in outward development after the end of Apollo.
You know, most of the energetic people left the program and went to make a fortune (or were laid off) about then. Those of us around now donÕt know what itÕs like to have clear vision, a Òmostly invented hereÓ task, and adequate funding. We havenÕt for thirty years.
Anyway, OÕNeill touches on the real problems, political will and/or some economic driver for moving into space. I figured out the latter some time ago and have been waiting in vain for petroleum deposits to be discovered on the moon or Mars. OÕNeill dealt with the former by taking some of his not-so-technically-hot, but really-politically-energetic acolytes like Rick Tumlinson and using them to form a political activism organization, the Space Frontier Foundation.
So, the basic layout of the book is that he presents the problem, details many facets of his solution, speculates about society in space, and has other commentary. OÕNeill also includes an Appendix 1 which is his own biography with respect to the movement. In it he details how he had had a breakthrough idea in his field of physics, storage rings, which made particle accelerators more capable. He thinks that his idea of the mass driver will enable heavy solar system transportation in the same sort of way. Mass drivers have been demonstrated, but I agree with Benson, we donÕt want to be using them and polluting our corner of the universe with flying rock. Maybe OÕNeill had only one good ideaÉ.
The root problem is easily stated: overpopulation. The expanding number of people on the earth are filling up all the space and using all the resources. Further, we donÕt know how to run society without unbounded growth. This will lead to catastrophe.
People deal with this problem in one of three ways. They deny it: ÒThe worldÕs population would all fit into Texas with ÔplentyÕ of elbow room (this is not a Texan speaking) so thereÕs not a problem.Ó Or, they assume that there is no room for expansion off the earth and they donÕt understand how populations actually work, so they insist that the only solution is for everybody to minimize or eliminate all baby-having immediately. These are the Òsave the whales and kill the unborn humansÓ people. Third are those who paint the picture as direly as possible because they think they have an easy solution that will permit continued, unlimited growth for the foreseeable future. OÕNeill is one of those.
This is all great if the solution were actually something that was happening. When OÕNeill paints the picture, we have only a few decades left before the world runs over (about now actually) and the consequences are indeed dire though he doesnÕt develop them much because he doesnÕt think he needs to.
The solution is to put lots of people in space where there is virtually unlimited, free solar energy.
He then goes into a great deal of detail about how to build islands in space, not other planetary surfaces (after all, the moon and Mars together only about double the dry land space we now have on the earth alone). These are big, rotating cylinders of spheres that are built from asteroid or lunar material, pressurized, and run up to about 1 G at the Òbottom.Ó Mirrors are used on the outside to bring in sunlight and the orientation is such that it doesnÕt seem to be rotating, which might be disturbing to the people. They can then be turned on and off for day and night, but in the agricultural torusses, it will be on all the time, and other features of the environment will be ÒimprovedÓ from GodÕs original design (or the design for which the plants evolved) in order to make them more productive.
All major steps are covered with good physics. Where does the material come from? Where are the first islands built? How are people housed and fed? How are they transported from one island to another or to and from earth? What do they do for recreation? Government? What are the probabilities of catastrophe and responses to it? How do they communicate? What sorts of industries do they build and who are the customers. What strength of materials is required for the one G cylinder? How much human expansion does this allow?
I didnÕt think he missed important questions, but I did think that the answers were sometimes first order only and didnÕt address any of the myriad of details that make engineering jobs so complicated and sometimes stop the show. For instance, he thinks that the amount of meteor flux at his island locations would only cause a puncture of an island every few years, and robots could fix the hole, but he doesnÕt consider the variable statistics involving meteor showers nor does he consider the myriad new meteor clusters that would be created by his enabling mass drivers. He has people zipping around between islands on nearly no energy, but doesnÕt begin to address the issues of safety. When one of those free fall buses misses its target, the recover effort will not be energy-cheap at all! Indeed, many of his analyses and arguments, good as far as they go, are reminiscent of the old atomic energy Òtoo cheap to meterÓ claims of the 50s. ItÕs because they had no idea how expensive it would really be or what the real issues would be once you started killing, injuring or scaring people with the technology.
OÕNeill is well aware that there are all types of people and that some will always cause trouble for others, but he has this fantasy that islands will isolate hostile groups so they donÕt have to fight so much with each other. This is wrong in several ways. First, there will still be a Jerusalem on the earth that is sacred to lots of religions, and you canÕt move those people or the sacred sites off to an island against their will. Second, some of those crazy people will try to crash an island into another just because they can, killing tens of millions of people in the process. Or into the earth! Third, he probably wasnÕt aware of some recent NASA research that shows that you canÕt just grow crops in souped-up conditions 24/7. The plants go nuts like people would under that kind of pressure. No doubt you can develop pest-free agriculture (another easy terrorist target, on the other hand), but not at extraordinary super-earth rates of yield.
He does understand the gravity well quite thoroughly. He refers to it as a 4000 mile mountain.
So, the story holds together at one level, but is quite na•ve and simplistic at the next. IÕm more with Kim Stanley Robinson is his fictional Red Mars. Those people acted like real people and the fantastical technology (but not that far from where we are now) supported them or worked in spite of them. Yes, it enabled much of what happened in the narrative, but there were still guerillas who would burn down the oxygen rich cities and most the people in them, popping the bubble, or crash the moon Phobos into the surface. Or the elevator itself. That is the real human condition.
He vastly overestimates the outward movement, which, after all, has no painful symptoms driving it. ItÕs like heart disease, the world will just all die at once as in a heart attack rather than having a lot of time to work on escapes. Overpopulation is like heart disease; it is asymptomatic until the crises. And without symptoms, the voters of both parties will only bicker among themselves; they will not do anything proactive. He vastly underestimates the progress of the computer. He thinks that by the time people are going off on personal expeditions to asteroids, a computer capable of handling all the navigation will be an easy part of the baggage. Indeed!
By the time I was about two thirds of the way through, I had stopped taking this book seriously and had been wondering if the space cadets up at the Space Frontier Foundation had anymore than just this to base their hopes on.
Then, one Saturday in December, my dad died suddenly. The High Frontier was one of five books that I took with me on the trip back home (six counting the Bible). I didnÕt take five books because I thought I would read five books, I took five books so that I would have a broad choice if the opportunity to do any reading in any book came about. I had no idea what I would be able to bear reading, if anything. The flight back ten days later had a first leg from Dallas-Ft. Worth to Denver, which flew right over the place where dad was buried near Amarillo. After I was certain we were past that point in the flight I thought it might be worthwhile to start thinking about moving on and looked in my pack and picked this book precisely because I considered it light, low impact reading. I just couldnÕt take its grandiose projections seriously anymore as something that I might be able to guide my own life by. I could look out the plane window and see Orion as men had for millennia, but I didnÕt see any orbiting power stations or colonies at L-5. And here it was 2000! The world was nearly full!
OÕNeill died sometime last decade of some terrible disease. They brought his teenage son out to the conference last year (cutting short Jill TartarÕs talk!) to receive an award on his behalf. I doubt that I will live to see the first colony in space, not even of a hundred people, much less tens of millions. So, I fear the worst. Population on the earth will reach critical levels, serious adjustments will be made, some of them quite painfully and quite stupidly and any move out into space will be too little too late to have much effect on it. Whether there will be enough left of civilization in the aftermath to continue the movement in some small way, I donÕt know. There are many people devoting their lives to different outcomes and I am hopeful for them, but not optimistic. And, I have my own problems.