But its more than just the Internet. Air travel, large-scale shipping, worldwide transit, telecommunications, and an unlimited array of technology has drawn the planet together into a single massive culture. Not five hundred years ago, a person born in England would have only the vaguest concept of most of the world. Today world maps show off every single odd bend and turn in every tiny island on this planet of ours. Ideas like "Western culture" are only fledging remnants of a time when people had no knowledge or understanding of an ocean as vast and domineering as the Pacific. You can fly around the world with a limited expense. I imported a stuffed "Legend of Zelda" Link doll made in Japan which crossed thousands of miles of ocean and land to reach me, all for just thirty dollars - and yet I still thought I was overcharged for it. This is the first time in history that the human race was unified and most likely it will be the last time as well.
Over the course of the next couple thousand years**, barring a major extinction event, the human race will find itself spread out across the cosmos, settling distant worlds lightyears apart. That very massive separation in distance (and thanks to relativity time as well) will inevitably divide our species once again in multitudes of highly diverse cultures. The very same technological advancements that have brought us together so much today will drive our children apart.
Imagine we settle the Earth-like worlds around Gliese 581. There are three planets there with highly Earth-like features. Two of them are just about the right distance from the star to sustain water, and the other one has a mass very close to the Earth's. As of 2010, they're thought to be the best known candidates for extraterrestrial life. However, there is one major issue: its located 20.3 lightyears away from Earth. If we were to send colonists on massive starships to fly out there, going at the speed of the fastest object ever built by man (the Helios spaceprobe reached 150 thousand mph while orbiting the Sun), the spaceship would still take over four thousand years to reach Gliese 581. If you created a magic fantastical super engine that could fly at one tenth lightspeed, you would not reach your destination for two hundred and three years. When dealing with distances of a two hundred and three year journey, its hard to imagine that the trip will be anything other than one-way.
With such a vast division between even just two human-controlled star systems, its impossible to imagine that there would be any kind of direct trade. The simple logistics of transporting even vital supplies such as fossil fuels and food would immediately make them impractical. Even if there was some kind of magical super resource that Gliese system has that Earth desperately needs, it would be economically ridiculous to ever transport such a material (as pointed out by The Intuitor's review of "Avatar"), so Earth would just have to find a way to make it themselves. Also, any off-world colony would, in consequence, have to be almost completely self-sufficient from the Home World: growing their own food, building their own machines, and birthing their own population. Its hard to imagine that there would even be much of a movement of population between Earth and Gliese 581 since the journey would be so long.
Just imagine the kind of commitment it would take for a colonist to leave Earth and head off to an alien world with what are certainly going to be very hostile conditions (at least at first). Assuming that some kind of cryosleep is developed, they might find themselves in suspended animation for hundreds of years. Without a cryosleep, they would have to regenerate their human population on board. Essentially what would happen is that the original generation that chose to fly out to Gliese 581 would die on the journey, and their children would die on the journey as well. With a 203 flight time, not even their great-grandchildren would ever get to set foot upon any world, be it terrestrial or alien. What you'd have is a strange kind of "middle children" of history, poor souls stuck on board a craft they never chose to inhabit completing a mission their grandparents organized decades ago, knowing that they will die before they ever have the chance to know anything outside of their massive space ship. Unwillingly they would become slaves to the mission, continuing to work without any choice in their destinies. The children of these generations would have only a distant ancestral memory of the Mother Planet.
Thanks to a twenty year gap for communications between Earth and Gliese 581, our unified culture would be irrevocably severed. If you wanted a pen-pal on Gliese, you would have to wait forty years for a reply, ignoring the weirdness that comes from relativity time dilation. Just a simple government legal report would take forty years to return, and possibly reach a government that no longer exists***. Taxing this off-world colony would be impossible. Plus, all news each world would know from each other would at least be twenty years out-of-date. These are two human world separated by unimaginable space and two decades in time. There's no trade, no direct communications, and no means of keeping the two united. If that's not the recipe for a cultural divide, I don't know what is.
With separation comes different languages, different ways of life, and different understandings of the universe. Just imagine the vast difference in our history if merely the continent of Africa did not exist. Now combine that with an alien geography, an alien sky, and alien gravity. Then comes the natural course of survival of the fittest. If even the slightest bit of technology fails, the entire colony would be forced back into Darwinian settings. If not complete total annihilation of the colonists, the remnants of the population would be left alone in an alien world where natural selection would inevitably take its course. There may not be life on other worlds now, but after millions of years the lost human colonists would be so different from our forms as to be considered extraterrestrials. Without any knowledge of the past Earth, they would have their own separate history filled with own wars, alliances, governments, advancements, and religions. Perhaps in the very distant future, Earth itself may be met by these alien humanoids, with both species completely unaware of their origins.
Even if something so drastic does not occur, clearly both human cultures will have a very difficult time staying together. A major shift in the mode of thought on Earth would take twenty years to reach Gliese 581, and would probably required more than a bit of a translation either linguistically or culturally. The two planets may keep up a minuscule population exchange with ethnic and religious groups leaving home to find asylum on another world, but its hard to imagine it would amount to very much. Rather groups would probably be constantly leaving for completely uninhabited worlds, until slowly human kind finds its way settling our entire galaxy or beyond. Settlers from one world may find themselves reaching the front door of Earth, which to them might be just another planet, not knowing its importance as the genesis of some much life in the galaxy.
Luckily even if two cultures were to collide, its a big universe. We probably won't have very much to compete over. If a species cannot make due with just the unimaginably vast resources of a star system and its local neighbors, then it probably will have a very hard time conquering an a distant intergalactic civilization. The universe is so huge, and the distances are so great that a interstellar war is something that could only happen in the realm of fantasy. Before a war could occur, somehow various space cultures would need to find a way to get close enough together so as to make transportation feasible. In the Dark Ages, Norman knights might have been able to wander the seas to reach Japan, but it would be extremely unlikely, and their chances of victory would be next to impossible.
However, its probably all more or less a feat of fancy. We as of now do not have any technology that could ever hope to reach another star system, let alone transport any astronauts there. Luckily we have the entire solar system as a playground, a nearly limitless source of power in the Sun (remember, the power source of all life on Earth is just a tiny fraction of sunlight energy), and more space than what we know to do with. We have yet to land a man on Mars, and may never pull it off in our lifetimes. Most likely you, me, and everybody you know will live their entire lives walking on just a single celestial body while the endless infinity gapes at us from all sides. Luckily we live in an age where we know enough that the future will be vastly different than life is today, and have enough knowledge and imagination to try to envision what it might look like.
And if aliens do invade, Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum are both still alive, so we can rest easy.
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* Completely off-topic: I refuse to use the academic year designations "BCE" (Before Common Era) and "CE" (Common Era) due to their inherent phoniness. The name change is based only as an attempt to separate the Gregorian Calendar from a Christian focus: to secularize something that was designed explicitly as a religious construct. What is the Gregorian Year One? The Birth of Christ, either AD or CE. Either way, the focus is still clearly a Christian one, spoken or unspoken. If they want an honest to God completely unsecularized universal calendar, they should just declare 2010 (also known as "The Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ, MMX") to be Year One. Anything else is half-hearted deception - self-deception. What's so bad about a Christian route for a calendar anyway?
** Some past futurists imagined us to be flying to Jupiter by 2001. Today's SciFi imagines such things happening by 2070, and they'll probably be proven hilariously wrong. Since I'm talking about settling our entire galaxy here, giving an estimate for several thousand years is not being conservative at all, as you'll soon see.
*** In 1900 there were fifty-seven nations world-wide. Today there are somewhere between 193 and 203 thanks to the number of disputed national entities that do not have vast diplomatic recognition. Even so, only nine governments that still exist today that were not at some point internally overthrown or constitutionally rewritten. They are San Marino, the Kingdom of Norway, the Principality of Andorra, the Swiss Confederation, the Principality of Monaco, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the United States of America, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. A lot happens in 110 years of history. By the time our space colonists land on Gliese 581 how much could the world map have changed?
There's also the possibility that different cultures would form on the space ship, and wars could break out, leading to the ship's destruction before it's arrival at the new planet. Surely scientists would need to be on board to make sure the ship was in working condition, and they would have to teach the new generation on the ship, and so on and so forth. Humans and their need of weapons would lead to the teaching of how to make and use different guns and explosives, so they could "defend themselves" when they finally reached Gliese 581. This could lead to someone creating a bomb and blowing up the entire ship, making generations of lives pointless and tragic.
ReplyDeleteThe saddest thing is, we here (or rather, our descendents) would possibly never know about our lost colonist, if Earth was even still around to notice at all.
Hell, distances between planets in our own solar system are vast enough to be a challenge. At the speed of light, the sun takes 250 years to send an image to Pluto (WHICH IS A PLANET). Considering it only takes 8 minutes to reach Earth, the distance between us and Pluto is so far, colonisation of it is impossible.
ReplyDeleteObviously, without an engine that folds spacetime, colonizing other planets is very difficult. Oh yeah, and Xepscern, you're wrong. That would mean that pluto is 250 lightyears away, more than ten times the distance from the sun as Gliese 581 is. I think pluto takes 250 years to orbit the sun.
ReplyDeleteI think, though, that a "Cowboy Bebop" sort of situation where the solar system is colonized is more realistic. Although you must realize that until world peace is close or achieved, no one will do a large scale space colonization. There is no way a country can fund an enterprise on that scale without both international cooperation and stability in both domestic and international issues, or there won't be enough money for it.
XYZ
The "Cowboy Bepop" thought seems a little more accurate, but what would there be to colonize in our own solar system? Unless we find a way to convert anything at all into food and water, humans are staying on Earth. Whether we even last on the Earth in the next couple thousand years is a completely different matter.
ReplyDeleteWell, there's that one moon of Saturn that scientists believe might be able to support human life in a few million years. That's in our own solar system, and there's a possibility for liquid water to show up there sometime in the future.
ReplyDeleteI forget the exact specifics, but it is possible to sustain life under a dome on Mars, and the idea is to terraform these planets. Over a period of time longer than humans have ever previously planned for, the environments of these desolate planets would be made habitable. Also, food can be grown using imported soil from earth and kept under UV lights. Certain substances can also be chemically decomposed to form water, but these colonies would serve little purpose other than mining for materials the earth has been depleted of, at least in the beginning.
ReplyDeleteXYZ