BEYOND
Our Future in Space
Chris Impey
W W Norton & Company;
321 pages; $27.95
"Worlds may freeze and suns may perish, but there stirs something within us now that can never die again. ... A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars."
The year was 1902 and the speaker was H G Wells, triumphantly concluding a presentation to the Royal Institution of Great Britain. On the heels of his popular work of futurism, Anticipations, the institution's fellows had invited Wells to talk about what awaited the world in the new century. He chose to look much further and prophesied that our descendants would someday abandon our planet for the depths of space.
It's easy to see why Wells was so optimistic and why the fellows were so enthralled. Science and engineering were rapidly transforming the world before their eyes. It was being mechanised, electrified and globalised via automobiles, petroleum, power grids and transoceanic radio. J P Morgan had just created the first billion-dollar corporation, the Wright brothers would soon conduct their first powered flight and Albert Einstein was on the threshold of unlocking the secrets of the atom. Amid all that progress, anything seemed possible - even interplanetary and, someday, interstellar travel.
The opening phase of Wells's grand vision came to fruition faster than even he had predicted, propelled by military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II. A half-century after his speech, the first humans would ride rockets into space, followed less than a decade later by journeys to the moon. As remarkable as this progression was, what's perhaps even more remarkable is how quickly space exploration subsequently lost momentum. We are now approaching a half-century since the last manned lunar voyage and humans have yet to venture out again from low-Earth orbit. As a result, space travel - one of the most futuristic things conceivable - now seems rather retro.
In Beyond, an expansive and enlightening overview of space travel's past, present and possible future, the distinguished astronomer Chris Impey says that despite the last few lacklustre decades, the stars are still humanity's destination. Like Wells's before him, Mr Impey's argument hinges on his encyclopaedic scientific knowledge, his immense faith in technological innovation and on a restlessness he believes is fundamental to the human psyche. Any eventual migration off-world will require not only better rockets, robots and regulations, but also some spark from within. He highlights the example of DRD4 7R, a gene variant carried by one in five people that is associated with novelty-seeking, extroversion and hyperactivity. This variant seems to have emerged some 40,000 years ago, Mr Impey notes, shortly after our ancestors' migrations out of sub-Saharan Africa, and is far more prevalent in the farthest-flung descendants of that ancient diaspora. The implication is clear and resonates throughout the book: the urge to explore new physical frontiers is "built into our DNA", and we can no more abandon it than we can our own humanity. The cosmos beckons and we cannot resist its call.
Back down on Earth, however, Mr Impey acknowledges that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) is "in the doldrums", burdened with an ever-growing list of responsibilities that persistently outstrip its year-to-year budget. However, that could soon change. As China rapidly builds a capability to send crews to the moon in the 2020s, Mr Impey writes, robust funding for Nasa may once again become a matter of national security and pride. But even if no new space race emerges, that's OK, because space travel is no longer the purview of lumbering governments. Mr Impey's greatest optimism is for a new generation of deep-pocketed private-sector entrepreneurs poised to disrupt the business of rocketry, people like Elon Musk of SpaceX, Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic and Peter Diamandis of the XPrize Foundation. The specifics are hazy, but Mr Impey is confident some mix of sub-orbital tourism and innovation-stimulating technology prizes will soon lead to space travel's becoming "massively commercialized", in a process he likens to the growth of the internet in the 1990s. Once that's accomplished, spacefarers will be free to tackle the tasks of living and working beyond Earth, instead of simply getting there.
Mr Impey is not only a skilled scientist who studies active galactic nuclei, he's also an adept and prolific communicator, who packs his prose with wonderful anecdotes and weird factoids. In particular, Mr Impey knows the value of strong characters in storytelling and weaves much of his narrative around illuminating profiles of space pioneers old and new. He also clearly knows that sunny congeniality is a more appealing rhetorical device than sour skepticism. This leads to a minor trouble: his indulgence of questionable individuals and schemes.
Take Dennis M Hope, a 60-something "overlord of the solar system" who has sold more than a billion acres of interplanetary real estate to more than half a million customers. Mr Impey uses Mr Hope as a cute illustration of the vagaries of the nascent field of space law, but is Mr Hope a charlatan? "Not exactly," Mr Impey writes, though he never really explains why not. More problematic is Mr Impey's treatment of Bas Lansdorp, the Dutch entrepreneur and founder of Mars One, an organisation with a less-than-half-baked plan to establish a colony on the Red Planet in the 2020s, in part through funding from a proposed reality television show. To date, much of Mars One's income seems to consist of fees and donations drawn from its starry-eyed applicants seeking a one-way ticket to Mars, something Mr Impey doesn't mention. Mr Impey does drop subtle hints that he knows that some of the people and projects he discusses are ridiculous and abusive of public good will, but readers might miss these delicate and indirect criticisms. One would hope for more forthright honesty from someone who clearly realises space travel requires more than wishful thinking.
Beyond's concluding section presents a scattered but sweeping vision for our future in space and offers more plausible ideas than can be found in whole shelves of futuristic science fiction. Want to construct a lunar base, or mine asteroids for precious resources? Are you looking for alien life in our solar system, or habitable planets around other stars? Mr Impey covers all this and much, much more in a brilliantly brisk series of chapters intended to show how we might someday become not only an interplanetary species but also an interstellar one.
Such a leap would be far more epochal than that of the Apollo moon landings, Mr Impey notes. If Earth were the size of a Ping-Pong ball, the marble-size moon would be only a yard away - and the nearest neighbouring star system would be 30,000 miles distant. Though that distance may now seem insurmountable, Mr Impey implores us to consider the possibility of crossing it, even if only to grasp how far we have come since our ancestors spread out of Africa, and how far we still must go in securing a legacy for our distant descendants.
© The New York Times News Service 2015
