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.And even if staying down here worked, we d still be stuck in one tinycorner of a huge, wonderful universe.Humanity degenerates withoutnew frontiers.One thing we know about the future: it never happens as planned.AsNiels Bohr is reputed to have said:  prediction is very hard, especiallyabout the future. In the 1870s, when people began to calculate thefuture speeds of transatlantic steamships, they could not imagine whatthe future would bring.It brought aeroplanes, not super-fast ships.Theidea that thousands of times more people would fly across the Atlanticthan had ever gone by steamship could not be comprehended then,never mind foreseen.Similarly, we cannot know what changes willhappen to people, or to our technology, even in a couple of hundredyears.The important lesson from steamships and aeroplanes is that thepredicted seven-hour journey time was spot on  and customs andairport delays take only another seven hours.So having the concepts ofthe space bolas and space elevator means that people will indeed do thethings that those technologies would have made possible, but they willdo them in other ways.So in this book we will continue to write as ifbolases and space elevators will be the way human technology willdevelop.Just as none of the origins-of-life scenarios that we veportrayed are actually the way that life on this planet appeared, but areplaceholders for the real one, so our hypothetical future of humans inspace will be a placeholder, employing space elevator technology as ametaphor for whatever actually gets used.The great thing about that technology, or whatever will supplant it,replace it, or make it redundant, is that it will make getting down on toplanetary surfaces easy.And back up.Until now everyone has been337WHAT DOES A MARTIAN LOOK LIKE?concerned about getting enough people and hardware up.Up and out.But once we have them up, with the kind of robotic technology that isnow being developed, they will be able to park in Clarke (synchronous)orbits, and dangle an elevator down to the surface.We like the idea ofrolling the elevator cable up and using it again for the next planetarydescent, instead of throwing lots of rocket-fuel away to go down.Perhaps planetary exploration really is easier with rockets, though, or ofcourse gptrp, which we haven t invented yet.Perhaps, though, itwill be water and moon rock that s thrown away, and solar poweredrockets.Sustainable rockets, as they aren t at the moment.Whatever weuse, we ll certainly visit all the local sights, if enough of us want to.And it is xenoscience that will inform the thinking that takes us there,not astrobiology.Astrobiology is a science of restrictions.It starts with thewhole universe, and successively narrows it down until all that is left is thesurface of one unrepresentative planet.Its starts with the rich potential ofself-organisation systems and cuts it down to orthodox DNA chemistry.It starts with what might be if things are different, and cuts it down todull repetition of what has already happened (and only a rather orthodoxpart of that).It starts with universals, and cuts them down to parochials.Xenoscience  if it existed as a fully fledged subject  would be verydifferent.It would be inclusive, not exclusive.What kind of process islife? Can we think of new ways to realise that kind of process? Newmaterials, new interactions, new environments? Where could thoseenvironments occur? How could those interactions arise? What have weforgotten?Planet Earth is wonderful, rich, apparently inexhaustible.It is ourhome.It is, near enough, all we know.It is irrelevant.Planet Earth is one tiny, unrepresentative lump of rock in anexceedingly ordinary part of a vast, incomprehensible universe.We caneither follow Ward and Brownlee, and rule out entire galaxies on thebasis of our limited understanding of life, or we can ask what kind oflife might arise in a galaxy unlike our own.If we assume Earth is typical,we are lost.We are like the Easter Islander who sees nothing broaderthan coconuts and clams.We look at the diversity and resilience of lifeon our own planet, and see nothing but narrow escapes and fragility.Does Rare Earth envisage anything that has not already happened on338GALACTIC EMPIRESthis planet? No.For most sciences, that might be acceptable, mighteven make sense.But for a science of the alien?Beyond The Blue Event Horizon (FrederickPohl 1980)Pohl s Gateway introduced the Heechee, a mysterious race thatdisappeared from the universe while leaving behind incomprehensiblehi-tech gadgetry.Most of which works, if only you can find out what itdoes.One of them is Gateway, a structure whose elliptical orbitoverlaps those of Mercury and Venus, which contains nearly a thousandsmall spacecraft shaped like fat mushrooms.Risk-taking humans canvolunteer to get inside, and head off in excess of lightspeed to anunknown destination, taking an unknown time, about forty-five days onaverage.Usually the ships return.If the passengers are still alive by then,they are rewarded for anything they find.Sometimes the reward isenormous, billions of dollars.There is a jokey book they sell on Earth, called Everything That WeKnow About the Heechee.It has 128 pages, and every one of them is blank.By the time described in Beyond The Blue Event Horizon, however, thosepages could be filled many times over.The Heechee are curious, theyhave their own form of science  and in some areas it closely resemblesour own [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]