Not surprisingly, the vast majority of discussions at
Space Carnival #15 are related to the private sector answering "
How will we go to space?" I'm more interested in why we'll stay.
It's not obvious to me that space will a civilizational outpost, a "home away from Earth" for a very long time. What's the impetus for making it so? Earth has a lot of things going for it, like air, gravity and the Van Allen belts. If you're living on one of those countries that has its act together, this is a good place to live. No one is starving for lack of food, and there's no shortage of key materials. One day oil will run out, but I'm not even worried about that. We'll switch to nuclear, or solar (and just pay more for it), or whatever, and life will go on.
What's the case for long-term, self-sustaining interest in space? Some popular suggestions follow:
Energy. Yes, there's lots of energy in space, but there's lots of energy down here too. Solar is getting cheaper all the time, and advances in every other kind of technology suggest that energy will not be a constraint on growth. Silicon Valley is investment heavily in alternative energy, and I fully expect a next-generation "Google of energy." It does not follow that we'll need massive investments in space-based energy to meet our future needs.
Tourism. This is real business case, but tourism economies are not self-sustaining. They are the playground of the rich, coming to visit from an actual economic power-house. If space is going to be a real, self-sustaining human outpost of civilization, it needs to be Seattle and California, not Cancun.
Materials. Some of the asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter are believed to be almost pure metals - gold, platinum, uranium, you name it. Valuable stuff. Once you've got a rocket out of Earth's gravity well they're even easy to get to and retrieve (no gravity well to escape a second time). I fully suspect someone will send out a tow truck and bring some back here. Once. Recall, these are commodities that can be recycled, not consumed (like oil). Do you have any idea what bringing the equivalent of 200 years worth of mining output to market, all at once, would do to the market price? One good asteroid could meet Earth's metals needs for decades, or a century. There would be no impetus to go back.
Scientific Outposts. Right. Like Antarctica perhaps? I haven't seen a lot of condos going up there, and its got more going for it than space would. It's possible that scientific outposts will be build. Maybe a really big telescope on the far side of the Moon. And then what? Teams would be rotated out and supplied from Earth. Not self-sustaining.
Some possible things that just might work:
Zero-G Manufacturing. I have no idea if you can build things in space that you just can't build (or build an acceptable substitute for) on Earth. But if that's the case, this could be the seed for a self-sustaining economy. The same would apply to Zero-G Medicine, assuming you could get people into space without killing them.
Aliens. I actually don't think there are any E.T.'s nearby. I'm betting we've got this corner of the galaxy to ourselves. But if we did learn of an alien civilization I expect that we would feel compelled to "take the high ground" and get out of our gravity well (as least militarily). The necessary investment to have military bases on the Moon, the asteroid belts and the outer planets would eventually reach a critical mass whereby the "support" structures would grow on their own and eventually exceed the military in size and economic activity. I wouldn't put money on this happening though.
Also, the mere fact that the Chinese might build a base on the Moon would not be enough to drive this scenario. National competition is self-consuming, not self-sustaining.
Fantastic New Materials. It's possible there's some terribly unique and valuable substance floating around in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus or Neptune. If Earth's economy comes to value this substance, and building Bespin is the only way we can get it, then we'll build Bespin (and elect Billy D. Willians mayor). This isn't entirely unlikely, since I bet that the atmospheric conditions of the gas giants cannot be reproduced on Earth, meaning there will be unique materials there. Whether they're so valuable as to drive investment on this magnitude will be another story.
Lastly: What I think might actually happen:
Mormons. Well, not actual Mormons. They're pretty well settled in Utah. But I can see some religious or political splinter group deciding
en masse to leave Earth and "settle the stars, as God has commanded us." Similar examples in "recent" history are the Protestant settlers of the American north-east, the Mormon exodus from the USA, the settlement of Taiwan by Chiang Kai-Shek's followers, and the settling of Israel post-WWII. All have similar themes too: an insular religious/political group, with practices at odds with the culture that surrounds them, chooses exile and economic hardship in exchange for religious/political freedom.
Given the realities of the world today, I do not expect this scenario to play out in the West. The West has (to its credit) become very accommodating of minority groups. So much so that they have no incentive to leave. If you're looking for immigrants, look to the troubled spots of the world. If space access became cheap enough (via a space elevator or otherwise), there are several groups I can imagine fleeing their current homes: Falun Gong in China, the Israelis (again), or any number of African peoples stuck in one of the European engineered "nations" of that continent. There could also be others, including entirely new groups that arise around a charismatic leader.
The scenario has a second requirement: the group seeking freedom must find living in the West unacceptable (or the West finds their coming to live here unacceptable). Europe and America have been safety valves on political revolution in Asia, Central and South America and the Middle East for many decades now as we have accepted their dissidents. Either this group will prefer space to the West for probably "irrational" reasons, or the West doesn't want them (maybe they're polygamists, or there's just too many of them to safely absorb).
A word on cults: its possible that small-ish cults of crazy-people (such as Scientologists or Raelians) will want to settle space, but I don't think there's enough of them to really establish an "outpost of civilization." The Sea Org is a not a substitute for real culture.
Your thoughts?
UPDATE:
One of the few scientific success stories of the International Space Station has been its use to grow large, pure crystals in microgravity (see Space station unlocks new world of crystals).
Now scientists from the Netherlands and Japan have shown that a strong magnetic field can mimic the effects of microgravity when growing protein crystals.
And another impetus for going dies ...
