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Technology

Science slightly over the edge

A Great Mambo Chicken And Other Stories of Science Slightly Over the Edge

by Greg Rehmke

The cutting edge of science may be a bit over the edge for everyday life&emdash;but not for high school debate. In fact, the just-published Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition is just what the doctor ordered for the space exploration topic. The book opens with rocket designer Bob Truax building a personal rocket for Evel Knievel, and launching him across the Snake River gorge. Truax offered to launch Knievel into space for a million dollars.

Truax had earlier designed the Seadragon, a 40-million-pound rocket booster for delivering large payloads into space. Truax, who headed the Air Force Space Program, also designed the Excalibur, the Navy's Thor rocket, and the Volksrocket. Great Mambo Chicken author Ed Regis reports, "Truax' main passion has always been rocketry, and in fact he was the designer, inventor, and world's number one builder of the latest entry in high tech for the masses, the personal spacecraft. Truax wanted to do for rockets what Jobs and Wozniak did for computer: he wanted to make them into everyday items, machines that people could own, operate, and run by themselves, personally."

Truax later dropped his asking price for sending a private astronaut into space to $100,000 (cash&emdash;in advance). The actual launch would cost more but Truax learned from the Evel Knievel episode that much more money could be raised selling tickets and television rights. With the right public relations, launching someone into space in a rocket designed by an elderly eccentric should draw a considerable audience. Truax' Volksrocket, the X-3, was designed and ready to go: cheap VW-style space transport, but the Navy bought it from him in 1988 for $75,000.

Truax, like many other rocket engineers, believes people and cargo should be launched separately: "In Truax's view, the space shuttle philosophy had everything bass-ackwards. Number one, since most of the time the shuttle was only going to be launching satellites (which could be done far more cheaply and efficiently with unmanned vehicles), there was no need to put people aboard. People were unnecessary, and they only made for tougher design margins, and therefore greater expense…"

In addition Truax thought it was preposterous to design the shuttle to land at an airport: "It makes about as much sense as requiring an airplane to be able to land at railroad stations. It flies like a brick and has a dead-stick landing, the most difficult of all landings. It's an unparalleled money-sponge…"

After telling Bob Truax' offbeat story, Great Mambo Chicken follows with a dozen more, each more outrageous than the last. "Home on Lagrange" recounts the adventures of the amazing characters who made up the L5 Society. The L5ers gathered regularly to design and plan space colonies for the Lagrange zones. And the L5 Society was mostly hostile to NASA: "L5 members were fed up with NASA's policy of obsessive perfectionism, which meant that every launch had to be perfect, which meant triple backup systems and all manner of superfluous redundancy, which meant an inordinate amount of testing and expense."

L5 member Timothy Leary was offended with NASA's consistent choice of clean-cut types for astronauts, but mostly L5 members were just plain exasperated by the gradual space exploration slowdown as NASA's bureaucracy steadily ossified. The shuttle eventually killed the L5 Society by driving launch costs so high that any possibility of inexpensively transporting payloads into space was erased. No space transport, no space colony.

Great Mambo Chicken also provides a good overview of nanotechnology, and potential nanotechnology disadvantages. One Nanotech DA is the "gray-goo problem," an unappealing scenario of gray gooish nanotech replicators out of control, and gobbling up the solar system in a few days. Eric Drexler's answer to gray-goo problems, in Engines of Creation: "We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers." Drexler has outlined a number of ways to prevent such accidents, and knowing the specifics might be helpful for debaters caught in gray-goo-slinging evidence wars about nanotechnology.

Technology over time

Today's high technology looks familiar to us only because we use it. The idea of talking heads in boxes (television) transmitted over miles of thin air would sound crackpot just a few generations ago. A single generation ago, microwave ovens would have seemed like weird magic. So how weird will tomorrow's technology be? And where do we draw the line between today's crackpots and visionaries?

Great Mambo Chicken covers some ideas that seem some distance over the line, deep, and deep into crackpot territory. People of the future, a top scientist believes will be "downloaded into billion-fingered bush robots, and travel electronically by beaming software copies of themselves from place to place." It sounds like a great leap forward for space exploration (if not mankind), but it's not likely to happen anytime soon. Hans Moravec, the over-the-line scientist behind the transhuman downloading/bush robot project, says it will take at least fifty years to develop the technology. That may be an optimistic projection.

For more on Moravec, see the front-page story of the Wall Street Journal, December 7, 1990. Moravec also has a space transportation plan using rotating skyhooks to lift payloads from Earth.

In the future, humans (or bush-robots) will eventually bump up against natural resource limits here on Earth. Ed Regis reviews a number of scientists' plans for gathering raw materials in the future. We can search for resources on asteroids and on other planets, but according to Dave Criswell, we'll eventually have to look to the sun.

The sun contains 99 percent of the solar system's mass, which Criswell figures we will want before too long. Criswell has a plan for a very-large scale mining operation that would spin matter out of the sun. As an added benefit, shrinking the sun a bit will stabilize it, enabling it to shine millions of years longer. Also discussed are plans to move the earth with solar sails, move the sun with bigger solar sails, and if necessary move the whole galaxy with more and bigger solar sails. "While we might not ever need to move a galaxy," says Keith Henson, "it's kind of nice to know we can."

Save the solar system!

Some environmentalists who have turned their world-view skyward like the idea of a pristine, undeveloped solar system&emdash;sort of a cosmic nature park. Most of the scientists and engineers in Great Mambo Chicken, however, lack a highly developed sense of environmental consciousness. Most in fact look forward to disassembling the various planets to build broader living spaces. Freeman Dyson would smash and reshape Jupiter into a thin sphere that would circle the entire sun, capture all its currently wasted energy, and thus allow trillions more people to live comfortably in (what's left of) the solar system. Dave Criswell would smash up Mercury to form the powerful machinery needed to spin matter out of the sun.

Not everyone in Great Mambo Chicken is so enthusiastic to smash up the planets for future real estate and sun-draining machinery. David Thompson, a zoology professor at the University of Wisconsin, worries that space colonies would be less livable than advertised, and would encourage a "disposable planet mentality." Thompson's "Astropopulation" article in Co-Evolutionary Quarterly (Summer 1978) criticized the growing garbage build-up in space, from orbiting space junk to leftover lunar trash heaps.

Overpopulation scares that followed the original population of the Club of Rome study, and the later Global 2000 report, provided part of the original push to settle in space colonies. But analysis by Harvard University's Harvey Brooks concluded that "the world could support a population of a trillion people at a material standard of living better than that of the most affluent countries." Brooks envisions two-thirds of these future folks living on artificial islands spread across the oceans. Brooks' scenario is a little too spread out for Bob Truax, who figures that the Earth would support a total population of about a septillion." That may seem a little crowded, but according to Great Mambo Chicken author Ed Regis, "even mainstream Harvard University social-scientist types were saying that the carrying capacity of planet Earth had not been even remotely approached."

Physicist Cesare Marchetti of the Internatinal Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, wrote that "from a technological point of view, a trillion people can live beautifully on Earth, for an unlimited time and without exhausting any primary resource and without overloading the environment." ("A Check on the Earth Carrying Capacity for Man," Energy, Vol. 4, 1979, p. 1107.)

Other scientists weighed in with studies documenting the lack of limits to economic growth. H.E. Goeller and Alvin Weinberg review and project man's past and future natural resource usage in "The Age of Substitutability," explaining that, "most of the [Earth's] essential raw materials are in infinite supply: that as society exhausts one raw material, it will turn to lower-grade inexhaustible substitutes."

Economists say, "substitutes are everywhere." As any natural resource gets more expensive to dig up or process, its price rises. As the price climbs, resource users begin to look for similar but cheaper resources to serve as substitutes. Higher prices encourage more recycling, too.

David Thompson's doubts about growth faded a bit when the Club of Rome forecasts proved wrong. Thompson explains, "The Club of Rome seemed to prove that there were limits, and that we were already close to them, or beyond. But now that the Club's predictions have not been met, I have to admit that if there are any limits, we cannot predict where they lie. What that Club of Rome people forgot was that as you produce more and more people you also get more and more brains. You get more scientists who can figure out different ways to attack problems. If you double the population you get twice as many scientists." Thompson now favors the development of space colonies as part of the healthy biological drive to expand, though he still argues it shouldn't be necessary to trash the Earth to settle the colonies.

Great Mambo Chicken is a book about technological optimism. It chronicles engineers and scientists who (like children) don't like to be told what they can't do. They plan time travel machines; others devise strategies for avoiding the supposedly unavoidable heat death of the universe. Others, like Dave Criswell, have come up with strange, but practical shorter range plans. Criswell proposes holding the 2208 Olympic games in space. Ed Regis reports that Criswell has even "invented a type of aircraft&emdash;swing-wing spaceplane&emdash;that could get sports fans up there and back for the price of a typical ocean crossing."

And as for the great mambo chickens, well, you'll just have to check out your local bookstore to discover their story.