We choose to go to the Moon

…space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again.

— John F. Kennedy, “We choose to go to the Moon” speech, 12th September 1962

On June 21st, Mattereum is hosting the fourth Internet of Agreements conference: “Blockchains and Space”. Why?

Space is the largest of all natural resources. On one hand it’s cold and dark and nearly empty, and on the other home to wonders like nebulae filled with quadrillions of gallons of alcohol, and planets made of diamond. There are rocks in space which are basically solid metal, and quite a bit of it is gold or platinum. But all this matter is scattered very, very finely through a void a quadrillion cubic light years in size, spread so thin across the void it is almost impossible to believe it is abundant.

What is rare in space, as far as we can tell, is complexity. Compared to people, asteroids are simple. Even mysterious things like black holes can be summarized as “stuff falls in, and occasionally weird rays come out, kinda”. And simple things mostly change in simple ways: they just hang there, or fall into each other, and that’s about it. Dead matter runs on rails. You can predict it. It is information poor.

Life, though, is different. Connect it to any reserve of energy, some gradient it can lift off from, and life turns simple things — like sunlight and water and CO2 — into complex forms. Most life exists embedded in a web of organisms, an efficient, specialized mesh for absorbing sunlight and turning it into more life, concentrating energy into denser and denser forms. The web of life is like our industrial infrastructure, but refined by a billion years of evolution. Nature is the ultimate market.

So here we sit on a rock which is, as far as we know, by far the most complex place in the universe. We have no proof life exists anywhere else. There’s some suspicion those alcohol clouds I mentioned are produced by life, and a bit of muttering about organic molecules on Mars, but until those boats come in — if they do — it’s better to assume it’s just us, and plan accordingly. It’d be a heck of a shame if all life in the universe were wiped out in some unhappy accident, and worse still if it were annihilated by its own lack of self-discipline and foresight. Life and its complexity are, for want of a better word, good.

Why space matters now

In the 1960s the first humans in space shocked the world with a new perspective: we lived on a tiny “blue marble” in an infinite void. The divisive fear of the Cold War, which had produced the space race in the first place, gave way briefly to the uniting fear of our species’s fragility: we were the squabbling crew of “Spaceship Earth”, alone against a dark background. But the clouds of the Cold War lifted; much of the world prospered, while the rest was absorbed in localised conflict or oppression, and we all went back to our ground-level two-dimensional maps of feuding tribes grappling for resources and influence.

Kennedy’s speech quoted at the start of this article would be unimaginable from a major politician today. Our culture no longer tolerates such grand aspirations, much to our detriment. We need to restore this wider, three-dimensional perspective on our lives, to escape the flat, constrained world that our maps and media trap us in.

If before doing anything important people sat down for five minutes and looked at the earth as it is from outside, a little blue dot containing everything, they would make better decisions. They would be operating in the world as it is, not using some ancient, outmoded model.

We have to face climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and the ever-present pressures of global poverty in our generation. If you’re reading this, the weight is on your shoulders: we are a pivotal generation in human history, much like the generation that invented the nuclear bomb and had to deal with the ensuing fallout.

It is our job to get this right. To do that, we need accurate maps of what is going on. “Little dot floating in space, containing all the life in the universe” is the right map. It’s the best form we have of the truth, and we should not be shy about using it and understanding it.

We are so tiny, yet we contain so much: the seed of a universe-transforming expansion of life, of complexity, into the furthest reaches of space.

If we can just get off this one damn rock.

Making space work, making space pay

The tragedy and salvation of human life is the free market. It’s an incredibly creative system, and an incredibly destructive one. Elsewhere I’ve discussed how we can reshape the market to be less bestial, but for now let’s focus on the other side of the balance: given the near-total absence of political will, if we are going to get properly into space, that is, push enough of our complexity up the gravity well that it becomes self-sustaining, no longer reliant on Earth, that push is going to have to be made by the free market. Our flight to the stars will be powered by profit.

It’s not the most efficient way to do it. A unified global effort could pool resources and knowledge, and provide the political clout to use nuclear rockets, without which it’ll be so much harder. But we aren’t in that world: we’ve got to use profit to fuel our rockets!

So there is us, and the engineering. And in between, there is the business models, and the money.

And that, predictably, is where the blockchain comes in.

Space is risky. But it’s much less risky than most ICOs, and some of those raise billions. To give a sense of scale, the entire Space Shuttle program cost around $220 billion (2018 prices). The total market cap of the cryptocurrency field was around $280 billion this morning. A single space shuttle cost around $2 billion to build; we’ve seen several ICOs of that size. As space buffs among you will know, the shuttle program was expensive and inefficient, beset by political difficulties of all kinds which affected everything from the engineering to the mission design. The Apollo Program, which went to the Moon over and over again, cost half as much.

Even these worst-case scenario costs are clearly within the reach of the crypto community. We can choose to go to the Moon! And we can do much better: we could invest in the vastly more cost-efficient New Space approaches — reusable rockets, asteroid mining, maybe a Mars mission.

To leap from the warm comfort of our gravity well into the cold darkness between the stars and live there is going to take the best our species ever had to offer. Like the fish that crawled onto land and figured out how to breathe, or the lizards that leapt from tree branches and figured out how to fly, we will, if we succeed, leave our mark in the fossil record: the first creatures to colonize the void!

So that’s why we’re doing the world’s first conference about blockchain and space. It won’t be the biggest, it won’t be the grandest, but it is the first, and it won’t be the last. We aim to start the dialogue, and let the titans come along later and put their mighty shoulders to the task.

We start where we are, and we do what we can.

http://internetofagreements.com/space