Later this month, Tor Books will publish my new novel, The Children of the Sky. This is an adventure on the Tines World, a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep.
Over the years, I’ve written about the likelihood of a Technological Singularity, that is, that we humans may soon use technology to create or become beings of superhuman intelligence. If the Singularity happens, interstellar travel will probably become very easy, even without faster-than-light travel: AIs could probably fit in starships the size of a can of soda, boosted by almost-ordinary lasers. Such minds could tune their own consciousness so that the missions would seem as fast as they please. See Charles Stross’s novel Accelerando for a brilliant vision of interstellar travel in a Singularity era.
On the other hand, the decisions and even the motives of superhuman minds are beyond our ken. Back in the 1960s, editor John W. Campbell, Jr., rejected my attempt at a godling story with the comment (close to an exact quote): “I’m sorry, Mr. Vinge. You can’t write this story—and neither can anyone else.” Brief forays are possible (as with Accelerando), but writing sustained adventure in a post-Singular universe is a hell of a challenge. All space opera writers face this problem, even if they themselves don’t believe in the Singularity; after all, many of their readers do think the Singularity is coming. So we writers have come up with a number of explanations for why the Singularity is irrelevant to our space stories or why the Singularity never happens. For instance, there are the Zones of Thought in the universe of A Fire Upon the Deep.
I think the Technological Singularity is the most plausible noncatastrophic scenario for our near future. On the other hand, anyone who is serious about the future (science-fiction writer or not) should also be thinking about what the consequences will be if the Singularity does not happen. See my own talk about this at the Long Now Foundation.
If there is no Singularity, humanity could be destined for something like the space operas we enjoy so much—and the Twenty-First Century could be the time when we step onto the interstellar stage. Science fiction readers and writers are not the only people who think this: by the time you read this posting, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) should already have held their 100 Year Starship meeting in Orlando, Florida.
I’m attending that meeting and I plan to contribute my own $0.02 worth to the conversation. Spreading civilization beyond this Solar System is the best long-term assurance of human survival. Even without the Singularity, it could be begun in this century—if we can achieve industrial production on an interplanetary scale.
But decades can pass with virtually no progress. Now in 2011, we know several methods for interplanetary space flight that could reduce travel in the inner solar system to the scale of sea travel in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The problem is that we can’t use such methods until we are already at least in orbit. And that is the key technical bottleneck: even after adjusting for inflation, the price of delivering a kilogram of payload up to low-earth orbit is about the same in 2011 as it was in 1969.
Another forty years of such disappointing progress will leave us with nothing but faded dreams. Without drastically cheaper launch systems, money spent on probes and manned space flight is limited to small and super-expensive payloads—and research about other aspects of spaceflight operations is condemned to be theory without benefit of practice.
Developing a cheap orbital launch system may be a hard problem; certainly no one has demonstrated a solution and the last forty years have shown us how inapproprate a government-controlled megaprogram can be for problems without sure solutions. In my Long Now talk cited above, I make suggestions for how this impasse may be broken. A military arms race between Earth’s superpowers would probably do the trick; having short-term, deadly deadlines can work miracles, but such a military path would also be a ghastly, dangerous thing. There are other ways, safer ones. I suggest:
- Privately sponsored competitions such as the X-Prizes. These give companies and small groups a motive to demonstrate key technological solutions, with the risks borne by those groups and companies.
- Real economic prizes in the form of promises from governments and/or the largest corporations: “Give me a price to orbit of $X/Kg, and I’ll give you Y tonnes of business per year for Z years.” Again, the financial risks are taken by the developers who accept the challenge.
- We should abandon the idea of a government program to develop the “one true method”. In particular, there should be no government money up front. In an era where cheap launch solutions are still waiting to be discovered, such funding simply suppresses all other methods—most likely suppressing the one(s) that would really work.
If we can break the launch-price bottleneck, this century can be the time when humankind spreads across the inner solar system out to the asteroid belt. Twentieth Century science-fiction dreamed of the power of such a civilization, and those dreams may still be the truest prophecy of our time: At the end of the Twenty-First Century, with asteroid-based industries supporting GDPs a million times what we have now, interstellar flight will be a doable adventure!
The stars are not too far.
Vernor Vinge is the Hugo-Award winning author of A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. The Children of the Sky—A Fire Upon the Deep‘s sequel —will be released on October 11th.
Mr. Vinge, I’m a huge fan of your writing and this was a very interesting post, combining spaceflight and inteligence. I believe the bottleneck in orbital flights will be solved by limited AI in two areas: rapid prototyping / manufacturing and simulation. The biggest costs in spaceflight now are the hardware. The hardware is costly because it is hideously complex, has to undergo excruciatingly precise and lengthy quality control, is built by hand using hundreds of workers becuase there is not enough repetition in the components to justify erecting an automated production line. But if we could create an automated “maker” plant that will be adaptable enough to create anything at a low price, high speed and at perfect quality, the price of hardware will drop.
Then there is the develoment cost. Currently we have to build version after version of a waverider hypersonic craft just to have them plunge after a few seconds or minutes of flight, or build tokamaks and containment chambers that undergo years of unsuccessful testing. If instead of that we could simulate everything on a computer and come up with a working version the first time we build a hardware component… that would make things so much easier.
I don’t know AI will bring us new ideas, new theories. perhaps not. perhaps there is a hard limit on intelligence – perhaps an IQ of 5000 is impossible. But I know that there are may ideas that we know are possible theoretically but are just to difficult to move from theory to a practical working model, and this is where I see AI and robotics making a huge change for the better.
Michael, as someone who has been involved in the aerospace industry, I can tell you that many, many components are not ‘built by hand’. In fact they are built using the processes you cite; components are grown from CAD files, molded and injected, etc. Rapid prototyping is not the whole story though.
The reason practical working models are required is that software models frequently omit elements that were only obvious in retrospect, once the part fails to destruction in hardware.
It’s a tough road, but I think we’re on the way. Homemade fabbers for growing your own components are only plastic now, but sintering is a future possiblity.
Plastic itself is changing.
Materials science has never been one of the more ‘sexy’ disciplines, but we can now stand on the shoulders of giants and start creating some truly amazing construction materials which really will be gamechangers. New materials + software + fabbers will really give the aerospace industry the kick up the pants needed, once the political aspect as been sorted out. The commercial aspect will run hand in hand.
It will be an exciting time!
FFWLIW, Mr Vinge, might I suggest an area where, acting under my own birth-certificate-supplied alias (at Wired.com in 2006 or 2007 IIRC in the comments on “asteroid defense”: my alias consists of an English composer and his brother, a preacher, and the minimum unit of ecclesiastical governanment.) I suggested a motivator for private companies to invest in space: the reason why you don’t want to throw nukes at rocks in space is you might want to mine them for raw materials uner a legal regime developed from the salvage and finds laws. (Salvage law concerns getting a return on the time invested in keeping sealanes clear of derelicts that place at risk lives and trade; it is an easy job to extend it to mining a NEO with a potentially threatening orbit. Finds law deals with discovering a lost human artifact with no known claimant; since the act of mining an asteroid is the act of claiming it, at least for as long as one is mining it and neither before nor after, teh basic principle could be extended to cover such a case.)
And off that there develops the idea of extending the salvage law to cover reducing space debris. the only fly in that ointment is that governments are notorious for being bad payers, particularly when it’s their junk you’re dealing with. But salvage law is universal and universally respected.
That supplies two major (non-state) motives for private companies to get involved in space. I just doubt that many companies will get their snouts out of the tax-payer-funded subsidy Military-Industrial-Congressional trough to notice.
Amid the doom and gloom that prevails today – the possible implosion of the European Union and devolution of its currency, the Euro; turmoil and war seemingly everywhere; increasing global droughts of potable water; and now, suddenly — … your essay inspires my fatigued mind.
When I was a boy, I dreamed of my travels to distant planets; alas, I will die before inter-planetary travel occurs. (Forget about inter-stellar travel.) You make me wish I were younger, had different skills, could contribute somehow to the future you envision… I raise my glass in toast to a future in which your vision is no longer a dream but reality.
Thank you.
Actually, Vernor, there is a quite different scenario which is not included in those presented in the article to which your “my own talk” links.
It is one for which there is much supporting evidence and differs significantly from the others in that it does not arise from our naturally anthropocentric standpoint.
It posits that the “singularity” predicted by the well-established exponentiality of the development of technology is more properly viewed as a “phase transition” to the next implementation of the process of which biology is a part. This next phase arising from what, at present, we recognize as the internet, arising by a process of self-assembly.
In this scenario our the collective imagination of our species is seen as merely the medium within which technology evolves.
Even though our extinction does not seem to be a necessary concomitant of this wider evolutionary model it is nevertheless rather unpalatable to us.
We like to cling to the subconscious notion that in some way we are “masters of the universe” or at least are of great individual importance – a mindset that in earlier times has helped to generate religions.
In your own case, Verner, it leads to the proposition that the internet would have evolved perfectly well without your excellent contributions.
As relativity would still be with us had there been no Einstein.
The more gifted, curious or motivated among us just pick the low hanging fruit!
This very broad evolutionary model that is not limited to biology extends (at least) from stellar nucleosynthesis right through the current evolution of technology
All this is expanded upon in a very informal way in “The Goldilocks Effect: What Has Serendipity Ever Done For Us?” (free download in e-book formats from the “Unusual Perspectives” website)
I still think a space elevator is the way to go for cheap lift to orbit. Riding an explosive column into orbit is too expensive (chemical) or too destructive (nuclear). It’s time to try pulling instead of pushing.
@Old Soldier –
I’m a big fan of the Space Elevator idea as well, but as far as I know materials science just isn’t there yet. Carbon Nanotubes aren’t strong enough, and can’t be grown to the size needed. It’s definitely something we should be pursuing, but we’re not at a point where we can start building one.
To Petar Belic: Laser Sintering and 3D printing is the way of future manufacturing. Not plastic though.
One Word: Graphene.
It can be used for many components of, well, anything. LOL