Extraterrestrial Civilizations - Isaac Asimov [123]
The answer to these questions might be an obvious “No!”. In fact, the average person might be so horrified at the thought as to feel that merely to ask the question is not quite sane.
Yet that might be only because all through this chapter I have been (without quite saying so) assuming that the space vessels undertaking the long trip to the stars are what we ordinarily think of as “ships”—like a huge ocean liner, or like the Starship Enterprise on the television show “Star Trek.”
As long as we deal with such ships, the objections to a generations-long voyage are difficult, perhaps impossible, to counter—but must we deal with them?
At the end of the previous chapter, I had envisaged a Solar system dotted with space settlements—settlements large enough to constitute worldlike communities in themselves.
Such space settlements would not carry supplies of food and oxygen in the ordinary sense. They would be in functioning ecological balance that could maintain itself indefinitely, given a secure energy source and the replacement of minimal material. Nor would they carry a crew in the ordinary sense of the word. They would be inhabited by tens of thousands, perhaps even by tens of millions, to whom the settlement would be their planet.
The gradual exploration of the Solar system by the settlers and the gradual extension of the range of the settlements to the asteroid belt and beyond would surely weaken the emotional bonds that would hold the settlers to the ancestral Earth and even to the Sun.
The mere fact that to settlers in the asteroid belt and beyond the Sun will be so much farther off and so much smaller will decrease its importance. The fact that it will become harder to use as an energy source as distance increases will encourage the shift to hydrogen fusion, all the more so since there are ample hydrogen supplies in the Solar system beyond Mars. That, in turn, will make the settlements still less dependent on the Sun.
Furthermore, the farther a settlement moves from the Sun, the easier it can develop a speed capable of taking it out of the Solar system altogether.
Eventually, some space colony, seeing no value in circling round and round the Sun forever, will make use of some advanced propulsion system based on hydrogen fusion to break out of orbit and to carry its structure, its content of soil, water, air, plants, animals, and people out into the unknown.
Why?
Why not?
For the interest of it, perhaps. For seeing what lies beyond the horizon. For the curiosity and drive that has been extending the range of humanity since it came into being, sending bands of people trekking across continents even before civilization began, and now driving them to the Moon and beyond.
There might also be the pressure of mounting population. With ever more space settlements being constructed, there will be increasing pressure on hydrogen supplies, increasing impatience with the growing complexity of intersettlement relationships.
Besides, the trauma of change would be minimal. The settlers would not be leaving home—they would be taking home with them. Except for the fact that the Sun would be shrinking in apparent size and that radio contact with other settlements would become steadily more difficult to maintain (until both Sun and radio contact disappear altogether), there would be no important difference to the people inside the settlement as a result of the changeover from endless circling about the Sun to endless forward movement in the Universe at large.
Nor need the settlers necessarily fear the slow loss of resources through imperfect cycling, or the consumption of their hydrogen fuel. Once