Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [117]
One consequence of this train of argument is that, even if civilizations commonly arise on planets throughout the Galaxy, few of them will be both long-lived and nontechnological. Since hazards from asteroids and comets must apply to inhabited planets all over the Galaxy, if there are such, intelligent beings everywhere will have to unify their home worlds politically, leave their planets, and move small nearby worlds around. Their eventual choice, as ours, is spaceflight or extinction.
*The Outer Space Treaty, adhered to both by the United States and Russia, prohibits weapons of mass destruction in “outer space.” Asteroid deflection technology constitutes just such a weapon—indeed, the most powerful weapon of mass destruction ever devised. Those interested in developing asteroid deflection technology will want to have the treaty revised. But even with no revision, were a large asteroid to be discovered on impact trajectory with the Earth, presumably no one’s hand would be stayed by the niceties of international diplomacy. There is a danger, though, that relaxing prohibitions on such weapons in space might make us less attentive about the positioning of warheads for offensive purposes in space.
*What should we call this world? Naming it after the Greek Fates or Furies or Nemesis seems inappropriate, because whether it misses or hits the Earth is entirely in our hands. If we leave it alone, it misses. If we push it cleverly and precisely, it hits. Maybe we should call it “Eight Ball.”
*There is of course a wide range of other problems brought on by the devastatingly powerful technology we’ve recently invented. But in most cases they’re not Camarinan disasters—damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Instead they’re dilemmas of wisdom or timing—for example, the wrong refrigerant or refrigeration physics out of many possible alternatives.
CHAPTER 19
REMAKING THE PLANETS
Who could deny that man could somehow also make the heavens, could he only obtain the instruments and the heavenly material?
—MARSILIO FICINO, “THE SOUL OF MAN” (CA. 1474)
In the midst of the Second World War, a young American writer named Jack Williamson envisioned a populated Solar System. In the twenty-second century, he imagined, Venus would be settled by China,* Japan, and Indonesia; Mars by Germany; and the moons of Jupiter by Russia. Those who spoke English, the language in which Williamson was writing, were confined to the asteroids—and of course the Earth.
The story, published in Astounding Science Fiction in July 1942, was called “Collision Orbit” and written under the pseudonym Will Stewart. Its plot hinged on the imminent collision of an uninhabited asteroid with a colonized one, and the search for a means of altering the trajectories of small worlds. Although no one on Earth was endangered, this may have been the first appearance, apart from newspaper comic strips, of asteroid collisions as a threat to humans. (Comets impacting the Earth had been a staple peril.)
The environments of Mars and Venus were poorly understood in the early 1940s; it was conceivable that humans could live there without elaborate life-support systems. But the asteroids were another matter. It was well known, even then, that asteroids were small, dry, airless worlds. If they were to be inhabited, especially by large numbers of people, these little worlds would somehow have to be fixed.
In “Collision Orbit,” Williamson portrays a group of “spatial engineers,” able to render such barren outposts clement. Coining a word, Williamson called the process of metamorphosis into an Earth-like world “terraforming.” He knew that the low gravity on an asteroid means that any atmosphere generated or transported there would quickly escape to space. So his key terraforming technology was “paragravity,” an artificial