Three Points of No Return
-- Glimpses of the Future?

The supporters of the space program, cornered in this way, usually fall back on the legendary Teflon pan and other high-tech spin-offs. They point to world-wide communication by satellite and the earth watch which can find new resources, predict hurricanes and document the death of the forests, the ozone gap and other destructive effects of technology on the environment. In fact space travel costs only a tiny fraction of the money spent throughout the world every year on armaments and defence. Carl Sagan for example, informs us:

Using a report of the government's General Accounting Office (the New York Times , 19 July 1970), we learn that the total anticipated cost of the Viking mission to land on Mars in 1976 is about half that of the cost overruns in the so-called Safeguard antiballistic missile system for fiscal year 1970. The cost of a Grand Tour exploration of all the planets in the outer Solar System (cancelled for lack of funds) is comparable to the 1970 cost overruns on the Minuteman III system; the cost of a very large optical telescope in space, capable of definitive studies of the origins of the universe, is comparable to the 1970 cost overruns on the Minuteman II missile; and a major program of Earth resources satellites, involving several years of close inspection of the surface and weather of our planet, would cost approximately the fiscal year 1970 cost overruns on the P-3C aircraft.

A decade-long program of systematic investigation of the entire Solar System would cost as much as the accounting mistakes on a single "defence" weapons system in a single year. The scientific space program is small change compared to the errors in the Department of Defence budget.

These arguments may all be correct but there are two further arguments in favour of the space program which are often overlooked and seldom brought into the discussion. In these arguments space travel is regarded as indispensable for the future of mankind; as one might expect we are dealing here with space travel in two of its long term aspects. The usual thinking of our day in fiscal years and legislative periods makes it easy to lose sight of developments which take place over hundreds or even thousands of years, spanning generations. (Jesco von Putkamer, a German member of NASA, calls this phenomenon "Generation Chauvinism".) We are talking about the Supply of Energy and the Cosmological Aspect of an Advancing Evolution.

Take the energy problem. Its solution is no longer Science Fiction but a bitter necessity. Generation chauvinism is holding up this solution although it deals with the survival of many billions of human beings in heavily endangered areas.

We are wasting every day more fossil fuel than the earth could store up in a thousand years. In a mere 200 years of the industrial age we have managed to use up almost all the reserves of energy which collected over hundreds of millions of years in the form of mineral oil, natural gas and coal. We burn 9 to 10 billion tons of oil per year. (For an expert estimate I am relying here on a study of Reinhard Dahlberg, a former director of the giant AEG electrical concern, with the title The Advanced Technical Use of the Sun and on an interview with him broadcast by Bavarian Radio on the 11th of January, 1990.) According to Dahlberg oil resources will be exhausted by about 2040. At a seminar at the University of Bahrein a Saudi Arabian member remarked cynically on this subject: "The oil will last us for 600 years. You... meaning the industrial states... can do what you want!" This gives us an idea of what could develop in this sensitive region: embittered fighting over the last of the oil.

So what about Atomic Power? In order to close the energy gap until the year 2040 we would need 60,000 atomic power plants worldwide. Every year 1,200 new reactors would have to be taken into the network!! A really crazy idea! Nuclear reactors can't be set up in the desert; they need water for cooling purposes and this usually means location in thickly populated, fertile regions. This means reactors within a stone's throw of each other; rivers seething with hot waste, even more concrete, even heavier security, even more atomic waste and storage problems, and every year, somewhere or other, a Tschernobyl or something worse.

Dahlberg's study suggested the large-scale build up of hydrogen energy. Sunlight should be turned into electric power on great energy plantations; this power could then be used to divide water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen would then be piped into industrial areas. This would mean that the European Community must lease large areas in the Sahara. The energy required by the west German states alone and obtained today from oil, would require 100 of these energy plantations, each one 50 square kilometres. It would cost 400 billion marks to install these facilities. The project has, in fact, a number of grave disadvantages. Even in the northern Sahara which has one of the highest radiation quotas for sunlight the conditions are not ideal. Even at its zenith the sun does not stand directly overhead; considerable sunlight is lost passing through Earth's atmosphere, and at night absolutely no energy is collected. The plant would be exposed to wind and weather and would have to be regularly freed of sand and dust. Pipelines filled with hydrogen are highly explosive: terrorists and the military would continually rise to the occasion. The climatic results are not quite clear: hundreds of square kilometres of the desert floor would no longer be warmed by the sun.

How much simpler it would be to move this energy project or part of it into space. The sun radiation would be optimal at all times; the antennae could be directed by the sun and would be bathed in its unshadowed energy-rich light. The gain in photovoltaic electric power would be many times that obtainable on Earth.

Already in the middle of the sixties the American physicist Peter E. Glaser made a study of projects for collecting solar energy in space for NASA. They were all labelled unprofitable and set aside. Six years ago space travel specialists from MBB (Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm) were very sceptical about the realisation of such projects. But just lately a scenario from MBB published in the magazine Luft undo RaumFahrt , 2/89, was entitled "Unlimited Clean Energy from Space. A Global Energy Concept for the 21st century". There has in fact been a decisive breakthrough recently in photovoltaics; this is amorphic silicon technology. The tiny blocks of silicon carbide no longer have to be cut like diamond in the making of collector cells... the non-crystalline silicon carbide is now steamed on to gossamer thin sheets of foil. This process brings a decided reduction in weight and volume for transport into space. These sun sails unfold themselves as the collector satellite revolves in space. The power plants would be mounted in LEO (Lower Earth Orbit), start production and use their first sun energy to move into GEO (Geo-stationary Orbit) with help from their ion drives. They would drop anchor between the communications satellites and regularly send their energy gains to receiving stations on Earth's surface in the form of laser-steered bundles of microwave impulses.

This is the only reasonable energy concept anywhere in sight which can protect the Earth from a climatic disaster and also retain a technological civilisation. Of course the necessary investments are as gigantic as they are indispensable. Evolution, life on earth in the form of human beings and in the form of their high technology has reached a critical phase. This is truly a point of no return. We are coming to the end of the runway ... we must lift off now, at any price. We must become astronauts.

So now we come to the Cosmological Aspects of Advanced Evolution. Are we alone in the Cosmos? Is it possible that under different suns life has developed on suitable planets and that this development has reached the level of thinking intelligent beings? The notion that this could only be the case on Earth is against all probability and it sounds too much like the old anthropocentric vanity: Man and his world as the centre of the Universe. Hypotheses about extraterrestrial civilisations are a bit of a guessing game. Carl Sagan, the American Astronomer I have already quoted, estimates that in our own Milky Way alone there are a million technical civilisations. In his essay collection Broca's Brain (published in German as Aufbruch in den Kosmos ) he writes: "A million civilisations is a breath-takingly large number, and it is exhilarating to imagine the diversity, lifestyles and commerce of those million worlds. But the Milky Way Galaxy contains some 250 billion stars, and even with a million civilisations, less than one star in 200,000 would have a planet inhabited by an advanced civilisation. Since we have little idea which stars are likely candidates, we will have to examine a very 'large number of them. Such considerations suggest that the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence may require a significant effort".

In the sixties and seventies the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) projects were set up to listen for the signs of extraterrestrial civilisations. In the nineties a wider search is planned with better instruments and highly ingenious computer support. These are the Multi-Channel Spectral Analysers which are able to listen to 14 million frequencies at the same time. Between 1992 and 1999 a hundred million dollars will be available for this great bugging action with the name SETI Microwave Observing Project.

Following a general look around as Phase One, the second phase will be a search action aimed at 773 stars resembling the sun up to a distance of 82 light years. Perhaps this time we will succeed in finding somewhere in the depths of space, that electronic debris with which every technological civilisation surrounds itself, like a cloud spreading out at the speed of light.

It seems to be simply a question of time until we find a radio source of this kind or until we are found by one. By now the ceaseless electronic chatter of the human race, spread out to a distance of a hundred light-years, has already filled a tiny corner of the galaxy, in fact one five-hundredth part. At these vast distances contact is a question of centuries and dialogue a matter of thousands of years. Only then will we receive further information on fundamental questions concerning the development of life, the Universe and Everything, and, especially, information on the pattern of development of other high-tech civilisations.

It is certain that evolution still has a few untried security mechanisms. Before an intelligent race becomes a space-travelling species it must meet several requirements before being admitted to the Astronaut's Club.

One trap that an intelligent can fall into if it is not clever enough is the deadly trap of self-destruction whether by nuclear holocaust or the plagues resulting from careless gene manipulation.

A second trap which is not deadly at once but which can rob a civilisation of its future is the failure to cope with energy problems. This is a further danger for a civilisation that is clever... but not clever enough. An advanced civilisation can develop on the basis of fossil fuel resources but it must have taken the step into space before these resources are used up. They are simply the provisions for the great journey. When these resources are used up too soon a civilised race has disqualified itself: it is shut out from the community of developing intelligent life forms in the Universe. There is no second chance. If some descendant of mankind or some other intelligent terrestrial life-form, builds up a new high culture in the distant future it will not be a technical civilisation because the necessary resources of fossil fuels are no longer available. These beings of the far future will not reach space. The possibility of being astronauts is given only once, per planet. The requirements for the evolution of a space-travelling intelligence are very strict. Mankind may fail to take this crucial step.

Although a worthwhile energy program is one of our highest priorities the realisation of any such program becomes more and more difficult from year to year. The Earth's immense problems, the alterations of the climate and the famine this brings with it, are becoming acute. There is nothing wrong with saving energy, with using insulation, with wind power or with sun cells on the roof; but anyone who thinks these measures will save the situation is a dreamer who has no grasp of the immensity of the problem in order to keep a world population of 6 billion from starvation, in order to provide sufficient transport and to supply and clean the vast overcrowded living quarters... for these purposes we need energy supplies of the order of the 10 million tons of oil per year that we have already mentioned -- or its equivalent. And in 50 years that oil will no longer be available.

The importation of this clean energy from space, where it is in practically unlimited supply, is a necessary step for mankind. The same goes for minerals from the Moon and the asteroid belt.

The alternatives are depressing. After all fossil fuels are burnt, the Earth will be shrouded in a murky haze of carbon dioxide and methane. The Greenhouse Effect will take over, growing stronger through feedback: the melting of the permafrost regions will free vast masses of methane products onto the atmosphere while dying masses of organic matter will pump in more and more carbon dioxide.

In these circumstances an increase in the main temperature of 0.55 degrees Celsius per decade will push the climatic zone 50 to 80 kilometres north every ten years. But the mean temperature, as we pointed out, keeps on rising. Natural vegetation cannot escape the heat... a forest can move forward no faster than 800 meters a year when the climate changes. The forests would be caught by the heat, they would die and set free even more carbon dioxide. Already in the early years of the 21st century the burnt-out desert regions could reach from the Congo to the Alps and the highest temperatures in central Europe could rise to 50 or 60 degrees Celsius, that is 120-140 degrees Fahrenheit. The air masses heated over these vast desert regions and the heavier evaporation of sea water, would lead to a stronger rotation of the atmospheric layers, with wind velocities higher than ever before upon Earth. A tiny foretaste of this were the hurricanes in Europe at the beginning of this year.

As the vegetation failed more and more land would be lost for agriculture; dreadful weather conditions... storms and floods... would damage or destroy harvests on land that was already encroached upon by the rising seas, following the melting of the polar ice caps.

These scenarios are not Science Fiction, I am sorry to say. They come from a computer simulation done by James Hansen and his colleagues from the NASA "GODDARD INSTITUTE FOR SPACE STUDIES" in Manhattan. Under these conditions great famines would reduce the population to a billion or fewer. Mankind would have to sink to a lower pre-technological level of civilisation, perhaps into a state of barbarism, in which every man's hand is raised against every other. Everything points to a long unpleasant afternoon for the human race unless it wakes up at five to twelve... that is right now, if it is not already too late... seizes its chance and takes the great step into space and into the future.