Star Settlers

The Billionaires, Geniuses, and Crazed Visionaries Out to Conquer the Universe

Fred Nadis

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781643134482
• eBook ISBN: 9781643134499
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Astronomy & Astrophysics

The story behind the elite scientists, technologists, SF enthusiasts, and billionaires who believe that humanity's destiny is to populate the stars... Does humanity have a destiny "in the stars?" Should a species triggering massive extinctions on its own planet instead stay put? This new book traces the waxing and waning of interest in space settlement through the decades, and offers a journalistic tour through the influential subculture attempting to shape a multiplanetary future.What motivates figures such as billionaires Elon Musk and Yuri Milner? How important have science fiction authors and filmmakers been in stirring enthusiasm for actual space exploration and settlement? Is there a coherent motivating philosophy and ethic behind the spacefaring dream? Star Settlers offers both a historical perspective and a journalistic window into a peculiar subculture packed with members of the scientific, intellectual, and economic elite. This timely work captures the extra-scientific zeal for space travel and settlement, places it in its historical context, and tackles the somewhat surreal conceptions underlying the enterprise and prognoses for its future.

CHAPTER ONE MARS MANIA 1.0

“I am of another world,” I answered, “the great planet Earth, which revolves around our common sun and next within the orbit of your Barsoom, which we know as Mars.”

—EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, A Princess of Mars, 1911

“Mars is fine but it’s a fixer-upper planet.”

—GWYNNE SHOTWELL, president of SpaceX, 2018

At a 2018 debate at the SETI Institute in Menlo Park, California, Robert Zubrin, a brash man of rumpled appearance, paced the stage; his hands became agitated as he explained the costliness and downright craziness of NASA’s Interplanetary Protection Program. This policy began in 1967, when the United States signed the Outer Space Treaty which stipulated that space exploration not lead to contamination of another planet (“forward contamination”) or of the Earth (“back contamination”). Committed space settlement advocates do not favor this cautious approach. Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and the founder of the Mars Society, insisted that the treaty needlessly added costs to space missions and stifled exploration. For billions of years, he noted, our planet has been bombarded with meteors from Mars—bacteria, if it exists or existed on Mars has been “coming in flocks” all along so there’s no need to fret over microbes smuggled out as hitchhikers on our equipment or as part of soil sample return missions.

In addition to this concern about “back contamination,” “forward contamination,” Zubrin argued, was also not that serious. In fact, we didn’t really have to worry about the transfer of life between planets. Should we bring bacteria to Mars, Zubrin would rather call it “fertilizing Mars” or “enlivening Mars,” not contaminating it. Zubrin’s opponent, John Rummel, a former Planetary Protection Officer at NASA, unsurprisingly, differed.

During this debate in April 2018, the Curiosity rover, or Mars Science Laboratory, NASA’s third on the Red Planet, was continuing its $2.5 billion mission: to search for evidence of microbial life on Mars—present or past—and to survey surface conditions to prepare for human landings. It was also beaming back majestic panoramas of the planet, reminiscent of America’s dry west, making this oddly familiar neighboring planet seem ideally cast as a new frontier. Mars soil sample return missions also were being planned. (The proposed 2020 NASA budget included missions to bring Mars soil samples to Earth by 2031.)

No one at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in charge of the Mars rovers expected to find intelligent life or monstrous beings in Martian craters. But such fantastic dreams only slowly fade. In 1976, when Viking 1 snapped photographs of Mars from orbit, NASA technicians noted that one rock formation, coincidentally, resembled a human face. The notion that the “Face on Mars” was evidence of a Martian civilization became a long-running theory. Tabloid journalists and conspiracy theorists insisted that other geometric patterns on the planet’s surface also indicated the work of intelligent beings. The National Enquirer and allied websites have noted dozens of them. (While such sightings have slackened over the decades, 2018 was a bumper year. To take one example, on April 30, 2018, my Yahoo news feed offered another face on Mars—this one of a “Warrior Woman Statue.”)

Fittingly, it was a similar set of optical illusions, gathered by scientists in the late Victorian era—and more specifically, one map, the 1877 map by Italian scientist Giovanni Schiaparelli that first encouraged the appetite for all things Martian—and indirectly inspired the Mars Science Laboratory rover now leaving wheel tracks in the red dust of Mars—not to mention the blooming of the citizen-led Mars Society with its 10,000 members planet-wide, or those itching to reserve one of the hundred seats on SpaceX’s planned Mars “Starship” transporters when colonization begins.

The best nineteenth century viewing of Mars came during the 1877 opposition. (“Oppositions,” when the Earth on its orbit nears Mars on its wider orbit, occur approximately every two years and two months.) That year, an astronomer in Washington, DC, discovered that Mars had two moons, and in Milan, astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli was startled to see the planet crisscrossed with canali, or channels. Their geometric rigor implied, to Schiaparelli, a civil engineer turned astronomer, that there might be an intelligent species on the planet that had planned and excavated the channels. He carefully mapped them, and left it for others to explain what they were. Schiaparelli was cautious, but in defense of his discovery wrote to a skeptical colleague, “It is as impossible to doubt their existence, as that of the Rhine on the surface of the Earth.”¹ Although Schiaparelli’s observations were controversial, they were not rejected outright; indeed, other astronomers also began to report seeing canals. Schiaparelli’s map of the surface of Mars with its channels gained popularity.

Not everyone believed in the canali. During the same opposition of 1877, astronomer Nathaniel Green trained a telescope on Mars and drew a map completely different from Schiaparelli’s—it included swirling nuanced colors, few identifiable features—and no canals. Green politely wrote letters to Schiaparelli suggesting he might be in error, but the Italian astronomer held firm. In the decades that followed, astronomers continued to debate the merits of the maps of Schiaparelli and Green.

The dispute about the canals proceeded calmly for several decades—and then became quite heated. While the existence of channels was not outrageous, some found infuriating the further argument that they indicated Mars had nurtured intelligent life—indeed a society capable of launching major hydraulic projects to combat a drying climate. Schiaparelli, regarded as a keen-eyed observer, had a formidable group of allies and popularizers. One of his most influential backers in the scientific community was Camille Flammarion, an astronomer, balloonist, science popularizer, and firm believer in extraterrestrial life.

Flammarion was born in a small village in France in 1842 and as a child developed his fascination with astronomy—he recalled borrowing a pair of opera glasses at age eleven, and seeing “Mountains in the moon as on the earth! And seas! And countries! Perchance also inhabitants!” As a young man he became an apprentice to an engraver in Paris, while continuing his studies in night school. A physician treating him for exhaustion discovered the teenager’s lengthy manuscript, “Cosmogonie Universelle,” about the “origin of the world,” and with his recommendation, Flammarion, at age sixteen became a pupil astronomer (doing computations) at the Paris Observatory. His career as an astronomer, meteorologist, popular author, and cosmic visionary quickly followed. He came to prominence at age twenty with the tract, The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds (1862), which hit a nerve with his argument for the likelihood of life on other planets. In 1864, he added Worlds Imaginary and Real in which he reviewed the history of ideas about extraterrestrial life. Clearly, he was certain they were out there—and in this, he was then (and likely now) in the scientific mainstream.

For centuries, leading thinkers reasoned that with innumerable planets orbiting innumerable stars, the “purpose” of these other planets, like our own, was to harbor life. In 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for asserting this and other heresies. Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Edmond Halley (the comet discoverer), and astronomer William Herschel and his offspring were among the supporters of “pluralism,” the belief that there were many inhabited worlds. Seventeenth-century French philosopher Bernard le Bovier de la Fontenelle had advanced this case in his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686).

Relying on advancing scientific knowledge and an ample imagination, Flammarion added flesh to such speculations. In one of his catalogs of non-earthly beings, Flammarion populated Delta Andromedae—a planet with an atmosphere heavier than our air but lighter than water—with rose-colored, floating citizens who survived breathing its nutritious air with overworked lungs; he also offered, on the planet Orion, with its seven suns, plant-like men that moved on starfish feet, and another organism, resembling a chandelier, that could break into pieces and vanish only to later reassemble. Flammarion insisted that otherworldly organisms might have ultraviolet or infrared eyes, an “electric” sense, and spectroscopic abilities.² He offered such wonders in a tone that mixed matter-of-fact detail with poetry. Flammarion’s Plurality of Inhabited Worlds went through thirty-three editions by 1880 and remained in print until 1921.

When Flammarion came of age, in nineteenth-century France, engineers and scientists were culture heroes. French philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon had earlier noted, “A scientist, my dear friends, is a man who foresees; it is because science provides the means to predict that it is useful, and the scientists are superior to all other men.” Saint-Simone’s disciple Auguste Comte, who sought to free Enlightenment thought and its benefits from the grasp of elites, was even more emphatic about science and engineering as the ultimate forces for good in society.

Newspapers and magazines were flooded with science articles and reports from the Académie, lecturers abounded, and publishing companies such as Larousse, Hachette, and Flammarion (Camille Flammarion’s brother Ernest was the founder) offered scientific fare, while Jules Verne, who at times referred to Flammarion in his novels, helped forge a new genre that intermixed science with semifantastic adventure. Another French science popularizer of the time, Louis Figuier wrote in 1867, “Science is a sun: everybody must move closer to it for warmth and enlightenment.”³ Like Comte and Figuier, Flammarion treated science as a redemptive force to be widely dispersed. He was certain that the more that astronomy progressed the greater its appeal. “It leaves the realm of figures and comes alive. Filled with wonder, we see the spectacle in the skies transfigured… The science of the stars ceases being the secret confidant of a small number of experts; it penetrates everyone’s mind, it illuminates nature.”⁴

By age twenty-three, while continuing to work in observatories, Flammarion became an avid balloonist, then president of the French Aerostatic Society, and he made numerous ascensions while conducting meteorological experiments. His balloon outings included his honeymoon, a flight in 1874 with his new wife Sylvie Petiaux-Hugo Flammarion (a grand-niece of Victor Hugo), and culminated in a book about the Earth’s atmosphere. In 1877 Flammarion published his Catalog of Double Stars that became a valuable tool for astronomers, and followed this with the lavishly illustrated Popular Astronomy (1880)—which sold over one hundred thousand copies. In it, he argued there was likely life not only on Mars but also the Moon. In 1877, Flammarion founded the French Society of Astronomy and in 1882 the magazine L’Astronomie. He also organized France’s first observatory open to the public in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Central to the science of astronomy in the late nineteenth century, Flammarion was forgiven his outsized speculations. In fact they were required: reporters flocked daily to his apartment in Paris (its ceiling decorated with the signs of the zodiac) to gather quotes on matters small and large.

Unlike Robert Zubrin and twenty-first century members of the Mars Society, Flammarion was less interested in depicting a future where humans could settle other planets than in stressing that the universe was full of wonders—including the news that humans and many other beings already populated the planets. He was intensely interested in the new field of psychic research, held séances in his parlor, and alternated books on popular astronomy with books on psychic phenomena as well as fiction that fused both realms of speculation. Flammarion’s cosmology—which sought to blend the physical and spiritual universes—in addition to unveiling the “nuts and bolts” of the cosmos, offered a view in which the planets of this solar system and other star systems might be “heavens” or new Earths that humans went to after death where they were reincarnated in slightly more spiritual form.

He offered this vision in Lumen (1872), and later in Uranie (1891), in which the muse of astronomy takes Flammarion on a tour of the universe, and Flammarion recounts meeting on Mars a friend who had died young in a ballooning accident only to be reborn on the Red Planet. No spaceship was involved in these dream journeys, but rather a form of soul travel to other planets. With his ballooning adventures, séances, impassioned writing, public lectures, ample energy, large furrowed brow, and handsome looks, Flammarion gained wealthy admirers—many, but not all, female. In 1882, one such admirer, Monsieur Meret of Bordeaux gave Flammarion a mansion (including a stable with horses) that Flammarion converted into an observatory in Juvisy-sur-Orge to the southeast of Paris. It was inaugurated in 1887 with the emperor of Brazil in attendance.

It wasn’t until the opening of his Juvisy observatory that Flammarion fixed his interest on Mars and added his influence to the debate over Mars’s canals. In 1892, he published La Planète Mars et Ses Conditions D’habitabilité, a survey of all the previous scientific studies of the planet of the past two centuries. The book marshaled all the available knowledge about Mars, including the planet’s two moons, thin atmosphere, the waxing and waning of the planet’s polar ice caps, its varying tilt on its axis, the seasonal color changes that suggested vegetation covered some of the planet’s surface (an idea that originated with Flammarion and maintained credence well into the twentieth century), its length of day (24 hours, 37 minutes) that closely paralleled that of the Earth, and a review of the nearly 400 drawings of Mars that had been completed over the previous two centuries.

Flammarion noted that these drawings, which widely varied, relied on art as much as science. “It is extremely difficult to make a faithful drawing of what can be seen, because the forms are nearly always indefinite, diffuse, vague, without sharp outlines, and sometimes quite uncertain.”⁵ Flammarion admitted that efforts to clearly see the details of the planet through two atmospheres with even the best telescopes resulted in ambiguity. He affirmed that Mars included “streams” and “seas,” but suggested, reasonably, that its age, greater than that of the Earth, explained its relative lack of water and great deserts. While Flammarion could only confirm one of the numerous canals that Schiaparelli and disciples had mapped, he hedged his bets. Schiaparelli was a much-respected figure, known for his keen eye, and Flammarion tried to imagine how such canali might exist. He also confronted Schiaparelli’s report that the canali might appear, disappear, and, as mysteriously, sometimes “double.” Could water, somehow, exist in a different chemical state to explain this behavior? Ultimately, Flammarion was swayed by a preference for observations that supported plurality. Suspecting the canali were not purely natural formations, he wrote, “the actual habitation of Mars by a race superior to our own is in our opinion very probable.”

Flammarion’s description of Mars gained Schiaparelli his most ardent champion: Percival Lowell. On Christmas day, 1892, a relative gave Lowell a copy of Flammarion’s La Planéte Mars. The book inspired the wealthy Lowell, a Harvard graduate, and helped him fix on a vocation. Lowell had turned down a job teaching math at Harvard to travel through Asia. During his travels, he had served as a secretary to a diplomatic envoy, and penned dispatches and books on Korean and Japanese culture—including a work that examined occult beliefs and religious practices in Japan. When Lowell read Flammarion’s La Planéte Mars, he found a new, fixed goal: to set up his own observatory and prove that life existed on Mars. In fact, Lowell wrote “Hurry!” on his copy of Flammarion’s work, aware that the next opposition of Mars was 1894.⁶

Within two years, the Lowell Observatory, established with the help of astronomers and technicians on loan from Harvard, began operating outside Flagstaff, Arizona, and Lowell quickly published his own book, Mars (1895), which confirmed Schiaparelli and went further. Schiaparelli, he insisted, was not deluded—there was an elaborate network of irrigation canals on Mars, and these were clearly the work of a doomed intelligent species, led by brilliant engineers, trying to prolong life on a dying planet.

Like Flammarion, Lowell was a charismatic figure. At Harvard he had been the protégé of mathematician Benjamin Peirce—and he was a polished writer and speaker. Many journalists commented that they felt in the presence of greatness when they interviewed Lowell or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter One: Mars Mania 1.0
• Chapter Two: Rocketeers
• Chapter Three: Von Braun
• Chapter Four: Modern Conquerors of Mars
• Chapter Five: Space Colonies
• Chapter Six: Biosphere
• Chapter Seven: Making Space Fun Again
• Chapter Eight: The Moon
• Chapter Nine: Going Interstellar
• Chapter Ten: The Metaphysical Lure of Deep Space
• Chapter Eleven: The Space Rave
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Endnotes
• Index
• Copyright