Extremophile Humans

"I’ve very much enjoyed the Amazon series, The Expanse. After all, as my readers are well aware, I am a big fan of outer space. In The Expanse, mankind has colonized many parts of the solar system. The moon, of course, has its cities. But also Mars has its colonies, and the people there are engaged in a generational effort to terraform the entire planet into an earth-like world. There are farming colonies on Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede. And there is an entire nation of blue-collar workers who’ve colonized the Asteroid Belt, including the planetoid, Ceres. The solar system is just bursting with humanity, and it makes for fascinating escapist content. I love that show (though, it has its problems, to be sure).

However, in reality, even getting to Mars is extremely dangerous. We may have the rocket technology to get to Mars within a six-month period (or even less), but once any of our spacecraft leave the protective magnetosphere of planet Earth, that ship will be a metal coffin for our explorers. The astronauts would be blasted by the solar radiation shooting out from our own sun. Microwaves, x-rays, and gamma rays would shoot through the hull of the thin spacecraft, and the space explorers would see these particles shooting through their own eyeballs—even if they had their eyes closed. But that’s not the half of it. Once these poor souls get beyond the precious, protective bubble of our magnetosphere and into the space between our planets, their vessel would then be blasted by galactic cosmic radiation. That is, radiation charging in from every direction in the universe, pouring through them like the torrential rains of a hurricane. Such radiation, flooding in from our own Milky Way Galaxy and charging through the unfortunate astronauts, would be highly lethal. Were these people to live through the experience, they would surely have cancer in the long-term. But, in the near-term, they would simply die from acute radiation poisoning and death.

But were these astronauts to somehow still make it to Mars, once there, they would still die from all of this radiation. Because, sad to say, the Red Planet has no magnetosphere whatsoever. Other worlds that are far more dangerous—such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and even Mercury—have protective magnetospheres. But little Mars has none. The place is a death trap.

No, we should have high-tech colonies closer to home.

It makes no sense to try to colonize outer space—much as I hate to say this, I love space so—without first colonizing our most extreme environments, here on Earth. We should first have dome cities on Antarctica, and similar biosphere colonies throughout the Arctic. We ought to have underwater metropolises in all of our oceans—the warm places as well as the icy cold depths. In fact, we should have millions of people living inside of the Mariana Trench. There should be a bustling metropolis settled on the peaks of the Himalayas, each peak connected with roads, rails, and the like. I’m sure the people living atop the world at such heights would eventually develop the necessary mutations required for such high-altitude living. After all, consider how the native Tibetans harbor genes that enable their bodies to process smaller amounts of oxygen, permitting them to live in their current lands. And, for that matter, consider how some of the Bajau of Southeast Asia are able to go underwater for more than ten minutes at a time—and up to five hours total in a day—courtesy of their large spleens.

We should have cities in the caves. And we should have cities in the deserts. In fact, why aren’t the Earth’s deserts being used in a constructive manner at all? Shouldn’t more effort be used to transform the Sahara into a new green zone? And as for those deserts that can’t be “greened up,” shouldn’t productive biospheres filled with people be located in those places? If water’s the issue, desalinate the ocean and pipe it in. Or, for that matter, drill down far enough to get to those enormous underground oceans of water we’ve recently learned about. It would make sense to do all of these things first, before ever considering populating the starways.

We should have cars of all kinds. Petro-powered, sure. But also air-powered. Solar-powered. Electric-powered. Water-powered. (Of course, those of us in the know realize powerful industrial oligarchs usually suppress and/or assassinate those who come up with such new technologies.) We should have trolleys, trains, subways, and high-speed rail. We should have clean waterways with high-speed boats. We should have drone taxis, private helicopters, and drone deliveries. We should have underground tunnel highways (as Elon Musk has attempted). Our cities should delve up into the skies and down into the depths of the earth. We should have a Megacity One somewhere on this globe.

There are many amazing technological answers for how we could spread out as a species. Earth has such a great potential to become a dynamic, fantastic, and incredible place to live. And only then, after we’ve mastered the many challenging biomes of our own world will we be fit enough to charge into space and even consider settling elsewhere." [link to forge-and-anvil.com (secure)]