The South Atlantic Anomaly and Space Suits

Thinking about human survival, and thinking about the environment, I was given pause by a program I watched about the South Atlantic Anomaly, where the Van Allen Belt comes closest to Earth.  This is the magnetic field which protects us from sun spots, solar flares that have destroyed the atmosphere on Mars, for example.



It is a bit of a problem because satellites that pass through it can burn up their electronics, so they must be shut down when they pass through it.  It seems that it is growing and getting worse.  The big problem is that the magnetic field that protects us is getting weaker.  Eventually, the field may temporarily disappear before it switches poles and is restored to full strength (note to geneticists, would such a weak field cause a plethora of mutations, and would this account for Stephen J Gould's notion of punctuated equilibrium?).

This will require that we build whole cities under roof of some kind.  And it will probably require that we wear space suits, or environmental suits.  In fact, as I came back from Argentina recently, I wondered when they would require that passengers wear environmental suits, and why such suits don't already exist for the crews who routinely travel 5 miles up and are that much closer to all the radiation.

And that reminded me that we already wear environmental suits, our clothes.  None of us wants to be exposed to the "elements" in winter, but none of us wants too much sun in the summer.  But if the South Atlantic Anomaly gets stronger, we may all need to think about this more seriously.

Should we be building villages and cities with total contiguous protection from the sun?  Will roofs need special protection?  And when will we need to think about this?  Shouldn't there be serious research be on-going to find out how long we have and what we can do to protect ourselves? 

One idea that was proposed to protect travelers to Mars was to put a great deal of water between the humans and the sun.  Water would serve as a sufficient layer to absorb the sun's lethal radiation.  Perhaps we will use a pool of water as a layer on top of every building as a protective layer.

Perhaps weather reports will include a solar flare report because light travels at 6 trillion miles per hour, while solar flares only travel at a one million miles per hour.  So, you would see a flare 8 minutes after it occurs, while the solar flare itself would only get here 90 minutes later.  You have time to run for cover.

As I recall, there is a type of plastic that helps to protect one from radiation, perhaps all our clothes will come with such a layer.

Certainly, with the South Atlantic Anamoly a reality, we need to start thinking about this...

IF

IF, intelligent life.  The thing about thinking ahead is where do you stop?  If we think about the long term survival of human intelligent life are we necessarily confining our question?  Will human (the carbon-based) life form be the end product of intelligent life, or will some silicon form of our own design supersede us?  The question becomes more intriguing with IBM's Jeopardy trouncing machine than with Deep Blue, which took chess honors from Gasparov in 1997.

There will certainly be augmented humans.  I mean, we have already been augmented with eye-glasses and hearing aids.  And we can do all manner of stuff with tiny computers that we carry around, cell phones and laptop computers.  How long will it be before we have all wear glasses that have screens like fighter pilots that give us all manner of information on those screens and whisper answers in our ears?  And eventually, there will be implants.  I saw an implant that allowed a stroke victim to move a cursor on a screen.  These things are coming.

But okay, maybe it turns out that intelligent silicon life turns out to be like fusion.  Seems possible but we never quite get there.  And maybe this is irrelevant for now, or even the next few hundred years.  So, let's concern ourselves with human intelligent life.  Perhaps we can view any successor form (which we develop) as our continuation.  After all, evolution has shown that two legs are better for navigating than wheels in any difficult terrain, and it may be that evolution will win out time and again.  A pair of forward-looking visual readers - eyes/cameras will give one all the depth perception that one needs, and that three eyes are not economic or useful.  Perhaps we will end up developing brains for these silicon creatures that mimic our own.  And perhaps a successor form will need the same environmental protections that we will be dealing with for the carbon-based humans.

For some things there is probably no protection.  For example, if a gamma ray burst from an exploding nearby supernova comes our way, it's going to burn off the atmosphere, and kill everyone on the planet in a day or two.  So, there is no planning for that.  However, an asteroid that could hit the planet is another matter.  That is entirely an engineering problem that can be solved.  And happily, we (humans) have a plan for discovering and tracking errant asteroids.  Probably our efforts are insufficient and should be augmented.  And we should probably have our engineering solutions in place for deflecting them from hitting earth.

But our best protection would be to have colonies elsewhere off planet.  Perhaps a colony on the moon, or in a huge space station.  Or both.  And we should be inhabiting Mars.  The problem with a mere colony on the moon or a space station is that it would not be self-sustaining and would eventually peter out.  How many times have I, as an insurance agent, told a homeowner to have pictures of his contents, so he can verify and figure out what his loss is in the event of a fire?  But more importantly, how often have I said, put those photos somewhere else, in a lock box, because photos of your house that remain in your house, go up in the flames that consume your house.  We need off-planet backup.

We Need a Book to Restore Our Technology

But if an asteroid struck the planet, and you had, let's say, several relatively self-sustaining colonies in orbit around the planet, perhaps they could return to earth and begin the slow work to restore human life to the planet.  I don't know if there is a do-it-yourself book for restoring civilization, but it seems like a thing to do, a book to write.  Even stone tools require a bit of intelligence.  Early hominids would go miles out of their way to a quarry where they could find flints and glassy obsidian stones that would break to create sharp edges.  How do we take the next steps after thay?  We have language, thank God.  But Neanderthals with brains slightly larger than ours, never did get past stone tools and spears.  So, how do we make copper tools, iron tools?  And, by the way, this should be in book for with pages that will not wear out easily.

You say, oh, they will come down from space with all kinds of advanced tools, and I say, yes, they will.  But those tools will break and wear out and possibly rust, and in the end, you will need to know how to make it all from scratch.  And actually, such instructions should include everything up to and including semi-conductors and nuclear reactors.  I can see a History Channel series in the making.  To see how far Bear Grills, or perhaps a team, could get towards re-creating the tools of civilization.  Bear cheats by bringing a knife.  Not okay.

Whether it makes sense to advance schemes to inhabit Mars at this particular moment is not clear.  Perhaps we should first concern ourselves with finding ways to escape the planet's gravity in reproducible and cheap ways.  If we can drop a carbon nanotube line from outer space like Jack and the Beanstalk, that should be our first goal.  We can probably launch things (to build orbiting spacecraft and space stations) by cannon, but the g-forces would be too great for humans.  Perhaps some combination of chemical propulsion and say electric track might reduce the chemical pollution.

But certainly, we should be doing more along these lines than we are.  Why does the international space station not have the artificial gravity of centripetal force?  Why have we not mastered this?  It would make life for those in space less stressful and longer stays possible.  This is a thing to do now.  It will be necessary for travel to Mars, let's figure it out now.

Perhaps it is early and too expensive to go to Mars just this moment, but the planet should be making all the preliminary steps.  We shouldn't dally too much because without this planetary backup, we are very much exposed.  That's just risk management.

Perhaps we should have a colony or colonies always in deep hiding, say, in a deep mine.  Maybe it would not protect against an asteroid or gamma ray burn off, but maybe it would.  It might depend on where the asteroid lands.  If it lands directly on top, that colony would not survive, but if there are multiple colonies, one of them will surely make it through.  You will need to stock it with all manner and kinds of seeds.  Supplies for several years at a minimum.  And it's not such a big deal, it could be manned by teams that are swapped out on any schedule that you want, daily, weekly, monthly.  It's not like these teams will be out in deep space.

How This Blog Came Into Being

This blog came into being yesterday after I had breakfast with Jason Smith, proprietor of The Book Table (Oak Park, IL), a bookstore which won the 2010 Best Bookstore accolade from The Chicago Reader.  We were banding about ideas concerning energy and the environment, and Jason says, "You should hear this thing I heard about the Netherlands.  They are planning for the next 200 years.  Which cities will have to be abandoned..."

Okay, I was intrigued.  Right up my alley.  I am an insurance agent, a stock market observer and investor, and a writer.  My claim to fame would be my friendship with Saul Bellow, who oversaw my development as a writer for 20 years or so.  Jason, I would describe as the thinking man's dropout.  Though technically, he is not a dropout, he never went to college.  But if you stop there, you miss the fact that his father is a Ph.D. from Yale, that Jason went to the University of Chicago Lab School, and that he spends most of his free time reading books from his store.  Well-read?  I'd say so.  Plainly, he could get a Ph.D. if that were his design.  It was his design to have a great bookstore, which he and his wife Rachel clearly succeeded in putting together.

Jason is one of those areligious Jews, who could be viewed a traitor his to sect, reminding me of a title I recently bought at his store, FDR, a Traitor to his Class.  Though pleased to be counted among intelligent Jews, he's not a particular fan of Israel, and would be happiest if it became a pluralistic, non-religious state.  He was raised in the liberal traditions of intelligent Jews at the University of Chicago, and votes mostly with the Democrats.  But his main concern, expressed at breakfast, was that of a small Republican businessman.  He was concerned about the funding of his large inventory of books, which turns over once a year, and cash flow.

My grandfathers were an FDR Democrat and a staunch Republican (perhaps not so much for Coolidge and Hoover as against Roosevelt), and I myself have voted for both parties.  I voted for Reagan in 1980 and Clinton in 1992, and am a fan of FDR and Eisenhower.  But I am a little bit prickly about being identified with either party.  My novel did include a character who was writing a science fiction, which of course, describes my own, forward-thinking bent.  But I think it is also just part of the times.  Science fiction is one of the important developments of the twentieth century (an off-shoot of the progress of science itself), and to avoid it you are turning a blind eye to the moment we live in.  Jane Austen refers to barouche-landau carriages, what would be so surprising about writing about a Lexus hybrid?

And it was Jason's comment about the Netherlands that set me to thinking.