Possible Futures – Orbital aviary

In “The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars,” I wrote about how the moon has the space for farms and processing plants to grow and process food for orbital hotels and condominiums as well as for crewed missions throughout the solar system.  One issue, however, would be meat.  Meat is muscle, and in a lower gravity, you don’t use your muscles that much.  Lunar chickens would be scrawny.  The solution, I figured, would be the rotating space stations you see in science fiction.  These would be in lunar orbit – to be close to their feed sources on the moon and the processing plants there – and would have Earth normal gravity.  They would be giant chicken farms, but for PR purposes, they would be free-range chickens.

One thing that would stop the need for these giant chicken farms in lunar orbit would be synthetic meat, or meat grown in a lab.  When I wrote The Moon Before Mars, I assumed that synthetic meat would be a part of space diets, but there would be people who preferred the real thing.  However, I now think that synthetic meat will become acceptable sooner than our ability to build giant, rotating space stations for chickens. 

So what’s the point of this post?  Well, one of the ways I’m trying to build up support for returning to the moon is writing stories set there, for example, my collection “A Cabin Under a Cloudy Sea and other stories.” When I came up with the idea of chicken farms in lunar orbit, I figured that was a great setting for a story.  But what story could I do there?  At some point, I had let my imagination wonder, and I came up with an idea for a future dating app.  So I eventually put the two together and came up with a story about a kid growing up on this chicken farm orbiting the moon – run by about twenty people, half of whom are his family – as he works on finding a girlfriend. 

So I had this idea for a story – number 1,206 on my list of stories I need to write – set on this space station full of chickens.  And then I realized that this space station full of chickens, while not impossible, is a very unlikely future.  Is there anything similar I could do to keep the story alive?  How about an orbital aviary?

An orbital aviary could be in lunar orbit, but would be more likely to just be in Earth orbit.  It would probably start as a single rotating station, but then more would be stacked together to provide different environments, from tropical, to desert, to artic.  And they would be full of birds.  Well, birds as well as trees, grasses, insects, mice, fish, whatever.  Unlike the chicken farms that would import food, the orbital aviary would try to be self-sufficient. 

So what would be the point?  A lot of people talk about terraforming Mars as if it’s something we actually know how to do and have practical experience with.  Trying to create and maintain a self-sufficient ecosystem containing several hundred species of plants and animals would be a colossal challenge.  And you could fit a few hundred birds – of one species or several – in one rocket launch, as compared to one or two baby elephants. 

Critically endangered species could get a safe place to hopefully bounce back.  It would be like breeding them in captivity, just a bigger captivity with fewer, or even no predators, and the only humans around would be staff, scientists, and bird watchers.

There is also the possibility of bringing back some extinct species.  With the right preserved specimen and the right technical wizardry, we could bring back the passenger pigeon.  But would we just release it in the wild here on Earth? 

So that’s my idea for an orbital aviary.  It would be a test to see if we could build a stable ecology, a place for endangered or de-extinct species to thrive, and a place for people to get a bit of Earth nature in space.  And it would be a setting for a story I may never write.

Possible Futures – Work as jury duty

The way things currently operate, people mine some materials, other people process them into components, and other people use those components to build power plants.  Still other people work in those plants, others maintain the powerlines, and in some cases other people mine the fuel for those plants.  All of these people need to be paid, which is why you get a bill from your electric company every month.  But what happens when robots start doing those jobs?

In a future – most certainly closer than many people are comfortable with – there will be robots that can mine the materials, make the components, and build the power plants.  And there will be robots to maintain the plants and powerlines, as well as to build all these robots.  (These power plants will most likely be solar, wind, tidal, etc. so there won’t need to be other robots to get the fuel.)

There will probably still be people in the loop somewhere, so the cost of electricity may not become zero, but at what point will it just be easier to give everyone free electricity than to maintain the billing department?  “Dear Mr. Smith, last year you used 564,982 kilowatt-hours.  You owe us $1.37.”

I bring this up because there are some people out there who will scoff at the idea of free electricity as a socialist dream or whatever, without acknowledging that automation will drastically effect the economy.  I believe it is very likely that automation, 3D printing, genetic engineering, etc., will bring about a world where the basic needs of everyone will be easily met.  Bread, water, electricity, stuff like that will just be free because it will be more efficient.  Money will only be needed for luxury goods like caviar, yachts, or a ticket up to an orbital brothel.

But does that mean that the majority of people will just sit on their couch eating chips and playing video games?  Some will, but others will paint, make hand crafted furniture, play sports; things you would do if you didn’t have to worry about money.  If you needed money, you’d get one of the few human jobs, which may only be a few hours a week.  In such a world, I’d still be writing and selling my books.

To help foster an element of community spirit – and maybe throw a bone to the “If you don’t work, you shouldn’t eat” people – every few months people may get a notice, like for jury duty.  But you’d have options, like cleaning up litter, or going to a classroom and teaching the kids what you know on whatever subject, or whatever future forms of community service there are.  Your work at these things – maybe a hundred hours a year or so – would go towards your free food, electricity, whatever.  Instead of sitting in a cubicle for forty hours a week to get a wage which you’d then spend on food, shelter, internet access, etc., you’d get all that stuff because you spent time at a retirement home listening to the old libertarians chaffing under the “tyranny” of getting top-notch medical care without having to pay an arm and a leg.

Many people figure that even if automation takes away jobs from humans, there will always be new jobs for the humans.  I think that’s being overly optimistic, but why does there have to be new jobs?  Is there some unwritten law that humans need to work forty hours a week?  I mean, it’s possible to give everyone jobs, but is full employment worth people just sitting in a cubicle hitting a button whenever a light flashes?

Possible Futures – The neighborhood terrorist

In the majority of these Possible Futures posts, I’ll talk about wondrous things that will make our lives better and easier.  But not all possible futures are so rosy.  For example, I’ve talked about genetically modified plants to produce items to be used around the home.  (See Firewood trees and Plastic plants.)  While I do believe that genetically modified organisms could – and hopefully will – drastically change life for the better, I don’t want it to seem like I’m complete blasé about the matter and that genetically modified organisms could only be used for good.  And that’s a key thing I think many people forget when it comes to genetically modified organisms.  Technology is neither good nor bad, it’s how it’s used.  For example, a rocket that launches a weather satellite to help better predict the path of hurricanes, could also launch a nuke to anywhere in the world.

Genetically modified organisms can be used to increase food production, create medicines, provide useful items around the house, and they could be used by some nutjob to unleash a plague.  Biological warfare is not new.  In days of old they’d catapult the corpses of plague victims into a besieged town, but nowadays it’s a bit more sophisticated.  As the technology to modify organisms gets better, and cheaper, the day may come when the guy down the block stops making meth and downloads the DNA of Ebola and gets to work.  You may say that there are rules and regulations about biological agents, but what happens when the “arms” we’re allowed to keep and bear are extended to mutated anthrax, you know, for duck hunting?

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An earlier version of this post appeared on Persona Paper in January 2015.