X-Risk by Thomas Moynihan

Author:Thomas Moynihan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913029821
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-08-12T17:16:04+00:00

The Moon or Bust

As mentioned, Odoevsky’s The Year 4338 presents a post-scarcity society. But how is this achieved? What about limits to growth? What about the oft-predicted possibility—even in Odoevsky’s day—for the expanding human population to outstrip its means of subsistence, thus posing an X-risk to itself? Well, Odoevsky had already thought of an ingenious answer. Look to all the unclaimed space for farming on the moon, he mused. By bringing ‘various gases’ in order ‘to create air’—and turning the lunar landscapes into agricultural expanses to offset material limits down on Earth, Odoevsky suggested, we could terraform the moon. This is likely the first time this was suggested, and it initiated a long line of futurists who have envisioned lunar hydroponics. (In 2019, a Chinese lunar lander brought a sealed ‘miniature biosphere’ to the moon, allowing the first plants to bud upon its surface.)123 In Odoevsky’s prediction way back in the 1830s, the moon serves as a ‘source of raw materials for the Earth’, ‘sav[ing] our planet from perishing due to the weight of population and its demands’.124

The obvious reference here is the ideas of Thomas Malthus. Indeed, Malthus—the British cleric, often railed against, rarely actually read—casts a long shadow over thinking about our future. Writing around the turn of the 1800s, Malthus suggested starkly that ‘the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence to man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race’.125 He was talking not about extinction, but the natural paring back of populations. Indeed, Malthus remained unconcerned about outright extermination because he was so convinced of the natural tendency of populations to expand explosively. He noted that a population tends to overshoot its means of subsistence precisely because it grows in a nonlinear or exponential fashion (while growth in the availability of sustenance, he thought, tends to grow in a linear or arithmetic fashion). Malthus’s pessimistic provocation provided fertile and innovative ground for later engineers, futurists, and optimists alike. (Indeed, he himself was reacting against the optimistic vision of Condorcet concerning humanity’s long-range future and his proto-transhumanist proposals for our ‘organic perfectibility’.)126 Certainly, Malthus had, ironically, only foreshadowed later strands of anti-Malthusian thinking when he hinted, in his original 1798 essay, that the ‘germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years’.127 He intended this as an impossible supposition, but many futurists since have proposed interplanetary diaspora as a genuine solution to limits to growth. Indeed, ‘Malthusian principles’ provided the background proviso for Freeman Dyson’s 1960 suggestion for building energy-sapping spheres around the sun (any maturing technological civilisation, Dyson supposed, would eventually bump up against the carrying capacity—or material limits—of its home planet, thus spurring it to increase its resource reservoir by damming up the otherwise wasted irradiance of its host star).128

Population growth is a lot like a comet’s path, in that both are curves with dynamic rates of change.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.