Mark Laporta: The Probability of Extra-Terrestrial Life?

Even in the context of our top-heavy economy, I’m still astonished that two extraordinarily wealthy men — Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — have plans for a Martian colony. Of the two, I suppose Elon Musk has made a more serious commitment to the project. For the moment, Jeff Bezos appears more focused on commercial space tourism than mass migration to another world.

For an upcoming launch of Bezos’ “Blue Origin,” the highest bidder in an auction will be allowed to sit in one of six multimillion-dollar Barcaloungers for a brief, ten-minute flight. Though the animated mock-up of the passenger capsule on the Blue-Origin website looks rather functional, I’ll bet there are opportunities to accessorize it, as:

People who bought these oxygen tanks also bought this

limited-edition designer helmet, exclusively from Perry Ellis^®.

Which is not to suggest that Musk’s “Dragon” module will resemble the cockpit of a Mandalorian cruiser, either. Though we may not be in Kansas anymore, we’re still a long way from Bajor Prime, Tatooine, or Caprica. The stark disparity between reality and science fiction makes me wonder how-the-exploding-neutron-star we’ll ever get beyond our solar system.

For one thing, let’s talk about cost. It’s a topic the average space adventure, mine included, gleefully skirts. To put this in perspective, consider that the estimated cost of Elon Musk’s first Mars mission is six billion USD. That’s just to send six astronauts on a one-way, 54.6-million-kilometer trip. Factor-in inflation and cost overruns and that figure could easily double. Compare that to the estimates available from Quora.com, and other quasi-reliable sources, about the dimensions of Star Trek’s Enterprise, even if we limit ourselves to its original 1960s configuration:

• Length: 289 meters
• Weight: 4,500,000 metric tons
• Decks: 21
• Crew: 430

That’s the equivalent of … well, a lot of Teslas, which range form 35,000–250,000 USD.

Meanwhile, here in the present, we’re having a hard time coughing up two trillion USD just to ensure our entire society doesn’t drown, burn, collapse and descend into a new Dark Age for lack of affordable housing, education, healthcare, childcare, clean water and contamination-free food.

Of course, in the Star Trek universe, which was set only a little more than two centuries in the future, we hear of a fleet of such ships, running non-stop. The standard explanation has something to do with the establishment of a “post-scarcity” economy, but I find that hard to believe. Producing even one of those galaxy-traipsing vessels would create an irreparable scarcity of every available natural and man-made material. You can talk of “replicators” all you want, but a replicator would still need a vast storehouse of base elements from which to whip up the necessary materials.

Even if I imagined that the Star Trek fleet was predicated on several generations of asteroid mining operations, I’m still in a quandary. Think of the cost in credits, personnel and materials to build a fleet of mining ships, an array of asteroid-based refineries, plus living quarters, medical facilities, kitchens, sanitation, drainage, recycling and on and on. At that rate, we have no hope of seeing an equivalent to “the Federation” for upwards of a thousand years, because, you know what? Reality operates within strict physical limits. And if you imagine we could supply our first interstellar fleet with material mined from Earth’s moon, at the rate of consumption needed to build all of those huge ships, the moon would be whittled down to the size of a shirt button in no more than two centuries. Talk about ecological disaster!

But let’s back up even further and have a look at the assumption that human beings can actually live in space. It is, at best, an untested hypothesis. Except, that is, for the data we’ve collected about the effects of radiation and low gravity on residents of the International Space Station. Though hardly Deep Space Nine, the ISS has been in operation long enough to have generated a lot of priceless scientific data about our viability as space creatures.

As a graduate of Wikipedia University, I’ve learned that long-term exposure to our top-of-the-line space craft can result in:

• Motion sickness
• Bone and muscle deterioration
• Fluid redistribution
• Impaired vision
• Intracranial pressure
• Fatigue
• Listlessness
• Psychosomatic worries
• Sleep disorders

Yikes. So much for Captain Kirk’s sexy romps with alien beauties. Absent dozens of radical innovations, they’d both be too busy throwing up.

Again, there’s a lot of ground to cover before we can say goodbye to our solar system. And that’s without considering any astronaut’s exposure to cancer-causing ionizing radiation. We can’t keep it all out. We just can’t. So when Elon Musk blithely says “Honestly, a bunch of people will probably die in the beginning,” as he opines about the future of space colonization, he obviously hasn’t thought the whole thing through. As it stands now, long before anyone dies in space, the majority of early astronauts will wish they were dead, just to break free of those pressure headaches.

Of course, in this regard, science fiction is full of easy outs, from ships that spin to simulate gravity, to entire new branches of medicine that counteract every known disease state. In Probability Shadow, Book One of my scifi/space opera trilogy, Against the Glare of Darkness (Chickadee Prince Books), I posit the creation of a human subspecies through radical advances in genetics. The “Krezovics,” named after a pioneering researcher of Eastern European stock, are humans whose genome has been merged with that of several different species of radiation-resistant beetles. The result is a community of highly intelligent beings able to withstand the grueling working conditions of early space exploration and colonization.

True to form, the Krezovics do the dirty work that unaltered humans later profit from. Once technology catches up with the challenges of migration into deep space, you can shout “Bingo” if you predicted that the Krezovics were then shunned as “mutants” and systematically cut out of human society. By the time my story opens, this is old news and the humans command a military/commercial empire spanning several galaxies. Yet having conquered space, they’re still limited by the same human flaws that make it impossible for the US to get through the month without another mass shooting.

How, you might ask, do the humans and other sentient species in my fictional universe zip around so nonchalantly? That brings to mind another obstacle to deep space colonization that we are farther away from solving than the average novelist wants to admit. The base-line assumption of many scifi dramas is the existence of “space-folding” technology. You know, you just kinda create some sorta negative energy upfront and….

Nobody knows how to do that and certainly not in a cost-effective way. Considering the decades it took to make electric cars practical — and only, I might add, for the well-to-do — I’m not holding my breath for a star ship in my life time. And that’s why the recently revived topic of UFO-sightings leaves me cold. Sure, I get the romance of it. Why else would I have written six science fiction novels and multiple short stories on the existence of alien species?

And yet, as I point out in Probability Shadow and its sequel Entropy Refraction, intelligent life capable of zooming around the Cosmos isn’t likely to waste its resources — even in a post-scarcity economy — on a sight-seeing tour. They’ll only go where there’s business to be done, trade to establish, or culture to exchange. Naturally, this contradicts the premise of many science fiction films from the 1950s, in which malevolent aliens travel thousands of light years — just to knock over our monuments, steal our bodies or resurrect our dead.

As a consequence, though it’s deeply intriguing to imagine our first “close encounter,” I just don’t believe it has happened yet. What would drive an alien species to visit our increasingly toxic dirt-ball? It can’t be our radio transmissions. Unless, that is, the Three Stooges episode where they make water come out of the light fixtures is more universal than I realize. Otherwise, I don’t believe that any sentient being would think we’re ready for concourse with the wider universe. Given our history, I’m more inclined to believe that our species is under quarantine, against the devastating mental illness that has driven most of our history.

In that case, if there are UFOs, their occupants are likely to be prison wardens or at best, epidemiologists, on the look out for an immanent jail break into deep space. Recent talk of Mars colonization must fill them with dread. But just maybe they’ve caught up with a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, with Elon Musk as the host. I can just imagine a bottle-blue insectoid social scientist turning to her commanding officer to say.

“We’re safe for now. The human with the best hope of achieving interplanetary travel just did a comedy sketch about crypto currency mining, set during the so-called ‘Gold Rush’ era.”

“Gold? You can’t mean that the humans attach monetary value to metals.”

“One of them, Commander, has even made a toilet of gold.”

“And to think the Counsel of Light believes these creatures are redeemable.”

I could be wrong, of course, but ask yourself this. If any of the UFO sightings over all these years have been real, why would an alien species come all this way just to buzz our battleships? Unless, that is, they’re much too afraid of contagion to land.

^^^

Mark Laporta is the author of Probability Shadow and Entropy Refraction, the first two novels in the science fiction series, Against the Glare of Darkness, which are available at a bookstore near you, on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. He is also the author of Orbitals: Journeys to Future Worlds, a collection of short science fiction, which is available as an ebook.

Image by Albert Antony / Unsplash