BlO—Lancaster Farming, Saturday, September 15,1984
WASHINGTON Tomorrow’s
space pioneers will display the
same gumption common to
yesterday’s settlers of the
Polynesian islands and the
American West.
But instead of traveling in
outrigger canoes or covered
wagons, they may someday ride
into the unknown on microwave
powered rockets and hitch their
fortunes to passing comets. t
“It won’t just be the restless,
explorer-adventurer types such as
the Magellans and Amundsens who
will break the human bond with
earth, but self-reliant, imaginative
people who are willing to take their
chances raising families among
the stars,” predicts Eric M. Jones,
an astrophysicist at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory.
Extraterrestrial Babies
One of the few scientists in the
country studying the implications
of future space migration, Jones
thinks that the first human
children could be bom in space
“within the first few decades of the
next century.”
Jones refuses to predict where
this happy event might take place'
but he concedes that a permanent
base either on the moon or on a
w
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space explorers
may resemble early pioneers
Tomorrow's
nearby asteroid could be a likely
site for the first extraterrestrial
nursery.
After that, the galaxy’s the limit.
History has proven that frontier
folk multiply much faster than
stay-at-homes. And there’s no
reason to believe that the space
frontier will be any different, the
experts say.
“Population-doubling once a
generation every 25 years is
not uncommon in frontier cir
cumstances, so we can imagine a
total solar system population
approaching a trillion in 500
years,” says Jones.
But where would they all live?
Many might end up in the vast
region of widely separated comets
in the farthest reaches of the
system. In a scenario advanced by
Gerard O’Neill, a Princeton
University physicist, they would
not live on the comets, but in
habitats built from materials from
the comets such as silicon,
aluminum, and carbon.
A budding coment colony’s
energy needs would be provided by
solar power and by deuterium
extracted from the comet’s frozen
nucleus. The comet would also be a
source of water.
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LT. BROWN]
LT.3LUE
LT. GREENJ
There is evidence that some
comets aren’t confined to a par
ticular region, but wander through
interstellar space.
Small groups of colonists might
decide to tie their fortunes to these
interstellar wanderers by ac
companying them in large,
. microwave-powered spaceships. A
group tagging along with such a
,r comet could then tap the comet’s
many resources to help sustain
itself almost indefinitely.
“They, like the Polynesians who
learned the seafarers’ trade
among the islands north of New
Guinea, would have learned the
nomad life in the comet cloud and
then could move outward,” Jones
says.
“Drifting through interstellar
space, the nomad groups would
‘fission’ from time to time and
gradually spread toward the
distant stars. Even if there were no
fast ships, by drifting with the
comet, our descendants could
reach the nearest stars in 100,000
years and fill the galaxy in a
billion, a time still short compared
with the galactic age. ”
1
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Drifting With Comets
(Turn to Page B 14)
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Butterfly Magnet
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