A Dark Future (Fun Thoughts about Space)

It is February 5th, 2016. A Friday. It is 11:37 A.M., United States of America Central Time.

You might think that sounds strange to say, but, in the anthropological record, people writing diary entries very rarely give the sort of context that you’d be looking for. A lot of things are assumed.

For example: I say the name, “Donald Trump.” Now, you get a picture in your head of whom I’m talking about, but, in the future, people will most likely not have any idea who that is. (Consider, for instance, that most people can’t seem to name more than 3 U.S. Presidents.)

So, right off the bat, a lot of the things we write are written against the backdrop of a contemporary context, one that is essentially unwritten and, even worse, unspoken. You know what kind of political and cultural atmosphere you’re living in, but you would more than likely have a great deal of trouble expressing just what the time you’re living in is really like.

There’s a virus now. It’s called Zika. It came from a monkey in Africa, like all humanity-destroying viruses do, and its main effect is that it produces microcephaly in fetuses. (That is to say, children’s heads do not turn out as large as they should be: they are rather small, a physical state that leads to significant cognitive disability / impairment.)

As always, I’m a little worried that it’s going to kill off humanity. Things like Ebola or AIDS, they have some sort of ability to kill off at least a continent or two of human beings, but with AIDS, it’s a slow death. Children can and have been born with AIDS, and while that is essentially a death sentence, they are at least born otherwise fully-functional.

With Ebola, the way it kills people is oftentimes far too quick for the virus to spread effectively enough to kill significant amounts of people. It has the capacity to wipe out humanity in the same way the Black Death could have, but that’s the thing: with Ebola, some people survive. At worst, Ebola kills 90% of the people who contract it. While this would produce a significant bottleneck effect, humanity would still survive in some capacity.

Is Zika going to kill off all of humanity? No. Its main feature is that it affects reproduction, and that is particularly worrisome. Could it be so bad that it produces some sort of now-unseen effect, producing some sort of other horrible congenital effects, like some sort of Revenge of the Flipper Babies?

I don’t know. But what worries me more is, if humanity actually survives.

That might sound strange. That’s because I’m thinking a few steps ahead.

Spacewalk with me. The future is, as always, ever-coming. Time never stops. Progress, even during particularly dark periods of human history, does not just cease. Humanity is going places, even if it sometimes has to crawl there.

As it stands right now, humanity is at the cusp of something truly great. We are becoming overpopulated in ways the common man could’ve never dreamed of in World War II. The development of the Internet has produced a worldwide culture that is only going to become more interconnected. We’re all talking to each other. We have a lot of friends.

One of my best friends lives in Malaysia, speaks Malaysian. Another one is Russian, speaks Russian. Three other friends are Canadian. One is Brazilian, speaks Portuguese. One is Chinese, speaks Chinese; lots of people speaking Japanese.

For the longest, scientists from different countries have been getting along like this, but especially scientists working on space-faring projects. American and Russian scientists, even during the space race, were not adversaries. They respected one another.

As humanity grows closer together, people are becoming more and more willing to cooperate with one another. When humanity cooperates with one another, they produce great things. Right now, I’m seeing normal people making friends with people from such far-flung corners of the globe, it boggles my mind. They’re acting like scientists from the good ol’ days.

I have never seen such broad and outstanding cooperation between complete and total strangers in my entire life. This isn’t just a fluke: humanity is evolving, in a very social manner. It’s becoming better. It’s caring about itself more than I think it ever has. As humanity unites, as it becomes better with communicating with itself, it feels a bit like Star Trek to me. I think I can see the writing on the wall now.

You’re probably wondering what I’m getting at. Here’s the rub: humanity, as a whole, is going to be colonizing things in outer space sooner than we think. Perhaps not in my lifetime, but more than likely, you will see the formation of the first colony on another planet or other celestial body.

And that’s where it’s going to get real dangerous.

This post sounds grim, doesn’t it? I suppose it is, but it’s written out of love. I am severely worried about the people who are going to be alive after I’m dead. And while I’m not, say, as knowledgeable about things as someone living 200 years into the future could be about this sort of thing, I’m one of the people who’s living before all that cool outer-space scifi shit happens.

So let me give you some advice. The year is 2016 and there are 7,303,490,987 people alive on Planet Earth as I type this. 30–100 more as I type this. That number grows about something like 3 people per second. And while that’s all well and good, there is a problem with that.

I’ve always seen life as being somewhat like a bacteria curve.

Currently, humanity is undergoing an exponential growth unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our (admittedly poorly-documented) history. In nations that are becoming industrialized, you see this sort of growth partially because food quality inevitably gets better; that’s also why you see obesity rates in places like China growing.

But here’s the thing: eventually, the population growth… stops. You have a problem like Japan, where the birth rate is so low that it’s becoming a national concern. And it’s not just Japan: it comes to every human nation that’s industrialized to a significant extent.

There are two possibilities here: the good one, and the not-so-great one. The good possibility is, industrialization eventually produces a society where people are naturally being born at a lesser, or near-same rate as people are passing away… and the bad possibility is, while that may or may not be the case, the population explosion that industrialization brings will produce more human beings than can be fed or otherwise taken care of.

Currently, the human race depends on staple crops for its sustenance. Corn, wheat, rice.

As a thought experiment, assume for a moment that some sort of blight, similar to the one that nearly killed off Ireland, took out one of these crops. (Yes, I’m aware this is essentially the plot of a popular movie.)

Now imagine that sort of thing happened during a population boom. The loss of a staple crop while food supplies were already severely strained would kill off a significant portion of humanity. That’s one possibility that has to be looked out for. (By the way, I’m sorry if this all seems disjointed: I’m just listing off things to watch out for as they seem relevant.)

Imagine that humanity’s population boom does eventually even out, but there are so many countries that can undergo industrialization that their maximum populations put together exceed the carrying capacity of Earth. (That is to say, there are more people being born than can be fed or taken care of.)

That’s the first problem. Eventually, that problem will “take care of itself,” but that’s so grim as to not even be a proper solution. People dying of starvation or disease is not an acceptable solution to the problem of overpopulation.

The only acceptable solution to the problem of overpopulation, assuming that reproduction goes unchecked — which it probably will, considering how many people detest the thought of the One Child Policy — is…

… humanity is going to go and try to colonize other planets. Which, come to think of it, is really just extending the problem out into the cosmos: without human populations being reduced by war, disease or famine, or, at the very least, some sort of reproductive control that allows for everyone born to be able to receive the resources they need to thrive… sending humanity out into the cosmos, fucking like rabbits, is just going to magnify the problem.

Essentially, humanity has the idea that, if its family grows too large, it can simply get a bigger house. (That is, it can move to additional planets.) In the end, this doesn’t really work, because you’re only continuing to live beyond your means: the further you extend out into space, the more resources you’re going to be using, and the more resources you’re using, the further you’re going to have to extend out into space to get them.

Perhaps not so strangely, science fiction loves to look at this problem. Two video games I love deal with this: the Marathon series, and the Dead Space series. Here’s the problem, though: neither series has the answer to how to stop the inevitable death of humanity.

No matter how far humanity extends, no matter how good it gets at getting resources from other planets, unchecked growth eventually leads to a plateau. And… if there are no more resources at the time of that plateau, it inevitably leads to death.

Okay: let’s assume humanity is going to colonize another planet. We have the technology — well, I don’t have the technology, some other bloke does — and, we’re going to, let’s say, Mars.

Nothing grows on Mars. You can, in theory, get some sort of hydroponics going on Mars, but then, that’s the problem: you are still depending on resources from another planet, to survive on another planet.

Really, Earth is marvelous: it provides for the species that evolved on it. But most other planets don’t do this sort of thing. In fact, if you look out into space, there are very few planets like this one. This fact alone has been the catalyst for science fiction plots like the Genesis Device from the Star Trek: The Original Series movies.

By the way, we are assuming, for the sake of this argument, that we can get to Mars without anything going wrong. Okay: the fastest spacecraft ever made by humanity, to the best of my knowledge, is currently traveling past Pluto, going approximately 35,187 miles per hour. (56,628 km/h).

Mars is 122.98 million miles away from Earth. (Approximately.)

Going 35,187 miles per hour, it takes 3,495 hours to get to Mars from Earth. (People aren’t going to be going that fast, but, just for the sake of argument.)

That’s 145.6 days, by the way. So, a little under 5 months.

If something goes wrong, we can’t help anyone on Mars for at least 145.6 days.

It takes anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes just to send a message one-way between the planets.

What this means is, not only would we be unable to help anyone in trouble on Mars, but we would actually have the grave misfortune of getting to listen to them die, live on the radio.

Getting there is only half the problem: keeping people alive is the other half, and keeping them sane is yet another half. This isn’t simple math. Things you don’t think of can and will kill people trying to colonize any and all uninhabited parts of the universe.

As you probably learned as a kid, space is big. Real big. It is, without a doubt, the biggest thing there is. But joking aside, space travel has the major problem of: if you get stranded, you can’t get out and walk. If your spaceplane breaks, you die.

With a car, you can walk to a gas station or ask to use someone’s home phone. (Or cell phone — who has a landline anymore??)

With a plane, you can parachute out, and break your legs when you slam into a tree.

With a boat, maybe you can hang on to some driftwood and end up on a desert island.

But not with space. In space, if shit goes wrong, you die.

Alright, I’m about done depressing myself and others by writing this. So, let’s assume the following things, for the sake of this last argument:

You can travel safely through outer space, and when you reach a planet, you can feed all the people there adequately. Hell, you can even keep them sane! Let’s also assume that we have instantaneous travel, so that there aren’t any chances that you get stranded on some weird-ass forbidden planet.

Okay. Even with all that, humanity is going to get real weird. You know how sports teams from neighboring states have fans that hate each other? Yeah, that — that’s what’s going to happen, only on a planetary societal scale.

You think that people from different countries don’t like each other?

Shit, man. Just wait until humans have to deal with people from different galaxies!