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rfmcdonald(Part 7 and links to the preceding posts can be found here.)
While browsing through Wikipedia late one recent night, I happened upon its pages describing the British overseas territories, a collection of insular and quasi-insular holdings with populations numbering at most in the tens of thousands, often taken to secure trade routes and naval deployments. These, like the various French overseas territories, are the last vestiges of what was once a world-spanning empire. Unlike the French territories, which have been mostly integrated into the political framework of metropolitan France since the mid-20th century, the British territories have only recently and haphazardly been assimilated into the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom. As Simon Winchester described in his recently reissued Outposts, many of the residents of these overseas erritories were denied full British citizenship and residency rights in the United Kingdom. Only after Hong Kong's 1997 reversion to China did this begin to change, with (for instance) Montserratians gaining the right to residence in the United Kingdom in 1998.
Wikipedia's description of Saint Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, was especially evocative. These three islands are all environments which are basically habitable, with air and water and soil and a tolerable climate. I also remember reading Margaret Mackay's Angry island: The story of Tristan da Cunha, 1506-1963 (London: Barker, 1963), which described life on Tristan da Cunha for the small dense homogeneous settler community, beset by a barely hospitable climate, a treacherous sea that regularly killed one or two percent of the male population every generation in a minor catastrophe, offers made to resettle the islanders all rejected, ending with their temporary evacuation to the United Kingdom after volcanic eruptions made their home uninhabitable.
Tristan da Cunha, it seems to me, stands in tolerably well for the likely first generation(s?) of deep-space settlements, small in population, with limited domestic resources, and highly dependent on external support. (If, by some misfortune, Britain did not exist in 1961, the islanders would have died to the last.) That existential vulnerability is the problem with small societies located in marginal environments. The latest version of these outposts, the various research stations in Antarctica that I explored in Monday's Antarctica posting, don't seem to be significantly more viable than Tristan da Cunha. If anything, they're less viable as actual communities; they are more properly defined as aggregates, groups of people united only by their residence and their occupation and united by little else.
Technologies will advance over the 21st century, of course. I wonder if these advances will be enough. I can readily imagine that it may be possible to build self-contained arcologies like Toronto's Yorkdale Mall only much more ambitious; I further expect that arcology technology would be eminently portable, on the surface of the Earth and offworld. There's still the non-trivial question of supply. Life in isolated outposts has become steadily easier over time, as communications and transportation technologies advance, but these outposts remain just as dependent on external imports--material goods, fuel, food, cultural items--as they ever were. The development of some sort of effective, efficient, and portable nanotechnology is the only thing that can overcome difficulties of supply and allow these outpost societies to become self-sufficient. Is it worthwhile to bet on the development of such a supple nanotechnology, though, at least in the next century? And if we'd need the powers of a quasi-god to settle Mars, how likely is it that any human society short of a nanotechnological singularity would be able to support space colonization, never mind create self-contained societies out there?
I would rather like space to be peopled, true, but I would also like to avoid the sort of mental trap that I noticed in Brian O'Leary's Mars 1999, which took a successful manned mission to Mars and used it as the launching pad for all manner of miracles, everything from telepathy to fusion-drive starships in the 2020s, taking the goal and making it stand in for the means. We have to start somewhere, from firm first principles. I worry that we're not.
While browsing through Wikipedia late one recent night, I happened upon its pages describing the British overseas territories, a collection of insular and quasi-insular holdings with populations numbering at most in the tens of thousands, often taken to secure trade routes and naval deployments. These, like the various French overseas territories, are the last vestiges of what was once a world-spanning empire. Unlike the French territories, which have been mostly integrated into the political framework of metropolitan France since the mid-20th century, the British territories have only recently and haphazardly been assimilated into the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom. As Simon Winchester described in his recently reissued Outposts, many of the residents of these overseas erritories were denied full British citizenship and residency rights in the United Kingdom. Only after Hong Kong's 1997 reversion to China did this begin to change, with (for instance) Montserratians gaining the right to residence in the United Kingdom in 1998.
Wikipedia's description of Saint Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, was especially evocative. These three islands are all environments which are basically habitable, with air and water and soil and a tolerable climate. I also remember reading Margaret Mackay's Angry island: The story of Tristan da Cunha, 1506-1963 (London: Barker, 1963), which described life on Tristan da Cunha for the small dense homogeneous settler community, beset by a barely hospitable climate, a treacherous sea that regularly killed one or two percent of the male population every generation in a minor catastrophe, offers made to resettle the islanders all rejected, ending with their temporary evacuation to the United Kingdom after volcanic eruptions made their home uninhabitable.
Tristan da Cunha, it seems to me, stands in tolerably well for the likely first generation(s?) of deep-space settlements, small in population, with limited domestic resources, and highly dependent on external support. (If, by some misfortune, Britain did not exist in 1961, the islanders would have died to the last.) That existential vulnerability is the problem with small societies located in marginal environments. The latest version of these outposts, the various research stations in Antarctica that I explored in Monday's Antarctica posting, don't seem to be significantly more viable than Tristan da Cunha. If anything, they're less viable as actual communities; they are more properly defined as aggregates, groups of people united only by their residence and their occupation and united by little else.
Technologies will advance over the 21st century, of course. I wonder if these advances will be enough. I can readily imagine that it may be possible to build self-contained arcologies like Toronto's Yorkdale Mall only much more ambitious; I further expect that arcology technology would be eminently portable, on the surface of the Earth and offworld. There's still the non-trivial question of supply. Life in isolated outposts has become steadily easier over time, as communications and transportation technologies advance, but these outposts remain just as dependent on external imports--material goods, fuel, food, cultural items--as they ever were. The development of some sort of effective, efficient, and portable nanotechnology is the only thing that can overcome difficulties of supply and allow these outpost societies to become self-sufficient. Is it worthwhile to bet on the development of such a supple nanotechnology, though, at least in the next century? And if we'd need the powers of a quasi-god to settle Mars, how likely is it that any human society short of a nanotechnological singularity would be able to support space colonization, never mind create self-contained societies out there?
I would rather like space to be peopled, true, but I would also like to avoid the sort of mental trap that I noticed in Brian O'Leary's Mars 1999, which took a successful manned mission to Mars and used it as the launching pad for all manner of miracles, everything from telepathy to fusion-drive starships in the 2020s, taking the goal and making it stand in for the means. We have to start somewhere, from firm first principles. I worry that we're not.
