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The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 3. Space Brains

Space Migration

Mother Earth has come to term. It's time to leave home.

Taking advantage of the opportunity to develop Earth-orbital space, and the rest of the solar system, as commercial and residential real estate poses not only technical challenges, but also obviously political ones. Ultimately humankind will have to face the challenge. Each coming generation necessarily will see the idea as less flaky and more commonsensical and will feel a stronger urgency as Earth becomes increasingly crowded.

A new order of urban life is possible in space. Solar collectors the size of football fields, manufactured from lunar materials and driving an economy of overflowing abundance—this is the vision of the future shamefully absent from political debates about space policy. But it might be the most promising alternative to a globally centralized technocracy rationing resources to an energy-poor, planetbound population. Even the ambitious space objectives declared by President George W. Bush in January 2004 lack purposeful vision. A mining operation on the moon could have broad practical value, but burning resources to plant a human footprint on Mars is cold-war thinking. Nonetheless, the Bush plan at least refocuses NASA’s energies on a human presence in space, though the plan does not go nearly far enough. A visionary plan would reject the assumption that living beyond the Earth necessarily means moving to another planetary, or lunar, body.

A more fulfilling prospect was envisioned early in the twentieth century: free-floating cities built in orbit around the Earth. But not until the 1970s was this idea translated into a plan. In 1969 Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill convened a freshman seminar to address the inspired question, as he later phrased it, "Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" The class researched the relevant facts and projections and calculated the answer, a resounding, "No." The research revealed crippling expenses associated with any form of big geology. Planets per se turn out to be uneconomical real estate for long-term development. O’Neill estimated, for example, that one-fourth of the energy consumed in the United States for transportation goes to fighting gravity and atmospheric drag.

In 1977 O’Neill published "The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space" an exposition that laid out the technical and humanistic dimensions of space colonization. O’Neill went on to become chief spokesman for the merits of expanding humankind’s ecological range to include the orbital space around Earth. He imagined and developed detailed plans for autonomous encapsulated ecosystems, each a mile or so in diameter and housing communities of from one thousand to up to fifty thousand inhabitants. The space colonization movement that coalesced under O’Neill’s tutelage attracted unlikely cohorts, including conservative senator Barry Goldwater and counterculture impresario Timothy Leary. Despite the cheering of a handful of high-profile advocates, however, within a decade O'Neill’s vision came and went as a popular cause. Nonetheless, the central premise of "The High Frontier" remains cogent. It is the premise that the surface of a planet is not the most suitable facility to host a sprawling industrial civilization, let alone several of them. So far, few people of influence in the political arena or in the scientific community have been willing to pick up the torch and advance O'Neill's vision. But few endeavors could be more critical or timely. The bridge to space will have to be crossed, and better sooner, for the sake of everyone, than later.

Vintage 1970s toroidal space colony design, cutaway view, from studies conducted at NASA Ames.

Beyond the technical and political challenges lie others, including the need to come to terms with the biological effects of weightlessness. This seeming bugaboo turns out to be the evolutionary threshold that separates humankind from angels.

A potential problem with any space colonization or long-term spaceflight proposal is the deterioration of bodily tissues. "During space flight, bone minerals (calcium and phosphorus) and their support matrix are slowly lost. . . . Muscle atrophy [also] represents a significant biomedical problem with special implications for long-term space flight," researchers caution in a NASA life-sciences bulletin. The writers concede that even regimens of vigorous exercise, "do not arrest the progressive atrophy that continues throughout expeditions into zero gravity."

O'Neill was fully aware of these effects, and to protect against them he proposed that the orbiting cities should spin. Centrifugal effects then would simulate gravity and hold things "down." The ground under one’s feet in an O'Neill-type colony would be the inside wall of the spinning structure. As one approached the axis of rotation, the "pole" of the city, the sensation of gravity would lessen, and at the pole it would essentially disappear. O’Neill imagined zero-gravity resorts and sports arenas at the poles. Others promoting the cause advocated spas and honeymoon hotels.

O'Neill assumed that prospective space colonists would insist on some kind of simulated gravity. For one thing, the colonists might want to return to Earth—in which case they would need their bones and muscles intact. What O'Neill did not seem to anticipate was that native extraterrestrials—inhabitants born in the colonies—might have little interest in the ancestral haunts. The prospect of going permanently gravityless is rarely addressed in space-habitation scenarios. Even science-fiction writers tend to assume that our extraterrestrial descendants will want somehow to simulate the effects of gravity and to preserve the terrestrial human form. The minds behind neither Star Trek nor Star Wars included in their stories any suggestion that liberation from gravity and the clunky human form might itself motivate space settlers.

Native extraterrestrials are likely to reject the McEarth model of the space colony, discard artificial gravity as an environmental kludge, and settle into their natural state of weightlessnes. The biological effects of long-term weightlessness are likely to include, besides the impoverishment of some bodily tissues, the enrichment of others. Brain tissue in particular is likely to reap enrichment effects. The scientific understanding of brain development suggests that brain tissue will tend to hypertrophy, or bulk up, if it spends its formative years weightless, because brains are sensitive to their environments and programmed to adapt to environmental conditions. This adaptability, a literal plasticity of the physical connections among the cells, ought to predispose brains to develop with unusual vigor in weightlessness. Such enrichment should occur rapidly and show itself conspicuously already in the first generation of native extraterrestrials, our descendants born into weightlessness.

Released from the tether of gravity, brains are free to move their bearers in ways more varied and complex than possible on Earth, as NASA publicity footage shows. Extraterrestrial brains will have to become proficient at orienting and conducting their bearers dynamically in three dimensions. The familiar developmental milestones of childhood—rolling over, crawling, standing up, walking—will be eclipsed by the need to develop a repertoire of acrobatic competencies to navigate in weightlessness, which in a sense preserves intrauterine conditions. This need will force extraterrestrial brains to tap resources that are left to spoil when brains develop on Earth. Space brains will have to avail themselves of as much and as complex and dynamic a network of internal circuitry as they can muster. A well-established body of research supports this contention of the star larvae hypothesis—the contention that as brains adapt to weightlessness they will evolve increasingly dense and baroque wiring and that this neurological enrichment will shape extraterrestrial experience in ways fundamentally alien from—and probably alienating to—terrestrial experience.

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