Space Homesteading
In the future we will not simply travel to visit new worlds but seek to build homes and forge lives on them. So what would being a pioneer in space truly be like? Chloe and George Astrid move to Venus in the 23rd century because the holovids showed them a life of rural splendor in their own private sky castle. George had proposed to Chloe on the observation balcony of the 3783rd floor of the arcology in New York they both grew up in. The view way up there was above the clouds, where the sun still shines even when it was raining down below, and he said spending time with Chloe made every day a sunny day for him, and he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Venus is a nightmare on the ground, a burning land where it rains acid on a molten terrain, but far up above, you can fly a blimp filled with normal breathable air because the thicker Venutian atmosphere is heavier than air, and the temperature has cooled quite a bit. You can take a virtual tour there where your blimp can slowly move along at a pace no faster than a person might jog and keep up with the Sun, so that the Sun never sets. Life in the 23rd century is
in many ways far better than at any time in the past, but it still has its harsh moments, and after some personal tragedy hit them George talked his wife into moving to Venus, to set up their own floating homestead far from anyone else, floating above the clouds in perpetual sunshine. There’s some subsidies and low-interest loans available for those wanting to pack up to Venus, and the default trade for those seeking to be sky farmers is a floating home that has solar panels for sucking in and separating nitrogen from the atmosphere, which is 96.5% carbon dioxide, 3.5% nitrogen, and a handful of other traces gasses. Every so often a remote tanker will come by to remove much of their nitrogen, and they’ll grow plants hydroponically to support themselves and sell and trade the excess to neighbors or even on the Hesperides, the twilight sky city that floats on the day night terminator of Venus. Their home is under a diamond glass dome woven from the extra carbon in atmosphere, surrounded by thin solar collectors, and both rest upon a vast thin storage balloon of many chambers, and as they gather nitrogen into those they rise higher in the sky and when a tanker docks and drains some away they dip down into the clouds. Theirs is not a homestead of soil and grass, but of carbon fiber and aerogel, floating like a great sky-ship amidst the golden clouds of sulfuric acid, refining nitrogen to export to distant places out among the solar system and growing food to feed Venus’s growing numbers. Robots help with a lot of work and they buy and trade for many things, but they like to
keep to themselves and make most of what they need and they try to make the most of what they have. In their free hours they often put on their thin protective suits and breathing masks that they use for outside maintenance, and instead get their hang gliders and fly around the clouds of Venus. It’s a simpler life than most, and a harder one that keeps them busy, but their home is their sky castle, under the eternal sun and above the clouds, and they wouldn’t have it any other way.
Homesteading is a bit of a nebulous term these days but is generally a lifestyle emphasizing self-sufficiency, and typical in a rural environment. The motivations for this lifestyle are as variable as the styles and degrees of approach, but it is obviously one that would seem to translate well to settlers on a new planet. After all, self-sufficiency is a fairly critical approach to any individual or community seeking to set up shop far from Earth. We’ll talk a bit about motivations for homesteading in a moment and how they might translate on to space. However, a key notion for today is that often our notions of people going settling and pioneering are a bit romantic, especially compared to the reality of that life. We’ll ask today if that truly is an option for interplanetary or even interstellar settlement, or if we are tricking ourselves into thinking of space as the next or final frontier, the Wild West of the Galaxy. The 900-pound gorilla in the room is that
currently advanced technology makes true self-sufficiency basically impossible. In the past you could get your family, load it on a wagon with a lot of tools and supplies, and make your way on the Oregon Trail to a farm where you might not see neighbors for days or weeks at a time and where you could be a mountain man and spend a whole season out hunting or trapping or prospecting and never see another soul except your partner or your trusty mule. If you’ve played the Oregon Trail video game you have a pretty good idea how often the journey to these lifestyles was beset with misfortune or how often those who chose to go without neighbors and communities were ruined by the effort, but the possibility existed and was attainable. As we’ll see today, that possibility does remain, but much like nowadays, you will usually be within reach of phones, the internet, and Amazon. Again there’s a lot of motivation
for homesteading and if your goal is to be so far from others they don’t know you’re there and can’t reach you in days of travel or even communication time, there are options for that, like the Oort Cloud or eventually even the galactic rim. Many might want that option one day too, and we’ll explore the Hermit Shoplifter Hypothesis of the Fermi Paradox a bit today too, though I gave it an episode of its own up on Nebula not long after writing this, in order to examine why some people might flee civilization even if they weren’t particularly introverted and recluse. And options like 3D printing, robotics, nanobots, and digital archives do open the door for true isolation, whereas in our modern society our supply chains are so enormous that, as we learned during Covid, basically every industry is essential and we’re more interconnected and interdependent than ever before. Homesteading was not a new idea when Covid started but it gave it a bit of a boost. I am a Homesteader myself,
by most definitions I’ve heard, though in a moment I’ll explain why I don’t think of myself that way. My wife and I have tons of friends who identify as homesteaders, and since she and I seem to check more boxes than most of them I figure it probably applies to us but there’s a missing element. Examining my own motives, I doubt they’re the norm, but my ideal lifestyle is essentially what I already do. I love my job, my work here on this show and the various other hats I wear
in life. And I do them better in my nice quiet farmstead where I can concentrate on my work. Or could until we adopted 3 little kids last year. My wife and I were both homeschooled as kids, and we homeschool our 3 hooligans now, so it took a bit of effort to adapt my workflow around that.
I’ve mostly managed to train them to be quiet when I’m writing or recording but my youngest son Geo often does his schoolwork in my office and last time I asked him to go out so I could record and let his brother and sister know, he ran through the house yelling for everyone to shut up so dad could record before coming back to shout through the door that everyone was quiet now. For my wife and I, the lifestyle was no sacrifice at all, she was raised on a farm and we’re both the quiet introvert types, which is amusing since we’re both professional public speakers. We both have jobs that let us control our days better but often have to work long or late hours. A lot of the stuff that comes with homesteading is stuff one or both of us grew up doing or do as a hobby so it’s part of why I tend not to describe myself as a homesteader.
I’m an eccentric scientist and writer who lives in the country, and my wife describes herself as a farmer, same as she has done her whole life, and same as most second and third generation farmers do, rather than as a homesteader. Most of the folks I know who identify specifically as a homesteader do so after it being a big life change for them and often a big sacrifice. There is an implied element of migration to the term I think, even if you only moved out of town to the nearest rural area, not half-way around the country like in pioneering days. Obviously, definitions can vary but there’s the element I’m trying to bring to focus for today, in terms of what separates a space homesteader from any other space colonist or someone who just lives on a developing planet that is still sparsely populated but on which their ancestors have lived for several generations or even thousands of years. The introductory story at the beginning of the episode was inspired by a number of stories others have told me about their motives for essentially resettling themselves. That’s not new either,
the Green Acres TV show of the 1960s sympathetically parodies the trouble a big city lawyer has packing up and moving himself and his wife to their new farm in the middle of nowhere. It’s not unique to the US or even the last couple centuries, but often in the past it was in the other direction, get off the farm and get a better life in a town or city. Picking up and moving to a better life, and changing lifestyles, is not a new idea and often is an effective strategy – it can be a very bad one too, as many a person discovered on their challenging journey to that golden destination, their own Oregon Trail, either finding it harder to get to than expected or that the grass wasn’t very green. We seen an amusing example of that with David Weber’s fictional Planet Grayson, where the colonists were originally techno-primitivists on Earth looking for the simple life and bought rights to colonize a beautiful blue-green gem of a planet, Grayson, 500 light years from Earth and made the journey at sub-light speed on ice. It was such a gem that they intentionally didn’t
bring teachers and textbooks with them intending to bring only a little higher technology to get started and abandon that for their desired tech-level. They discovered their seemingly paradise like world was so green because it was ultra-rich in arsenic and cadmium. Their descendants led very rough lives and quickly embraced technology as soon as they could get access to it again and took up orbital farming. Which as a minor tangent isn’t a good approach,
you would be putting a vacuum sealed environment full of purified soil and water into orbit to bring food down to your planet. As opposed to simply building a dome with a floor sealed against significant leakage to fill with purified water and soil, which you do not need to haul supplies and food back and forth from space for . To be fair, they have anti-gravity in that setting, so going up and down to space might not be any harder than trucking it across a continent which we often do nowadays. Also, there’s definitely room for space farming,
we’ve discussed it in multiple episodes, but as we saw in our recent episode on Agriworlds, there’s a fairly narrow window of future technologies and development for bulk interplanetary food trade to be economically viable. That matters for our discussion for today because for a lot of folks historically, homesteading was intended to be a path to personal prosperity. Folks were often leaving for the goal of independence or a promised land but also often with prosperity as a primary or secondary motive and that’s a bit harder if space requires a huge personal investment only the ultra-rich or those backed by government monies could achieve. The latter is likely to come with strings attached which might make it less appealing to those wanting personal independence. The workarounds we typically see in science fiction,
besides hand waving it aside, are to assume a gold rush type of scenario, something in space is making for a very fast and high return on investment, typically with a lot of risk too, or the cost is a bit secondary because Earth is so packed to the rafters with people that there’s a lot of mechanisms in place to export them. There’s a tendency to assume populations grow unavoidably, toward Malthusian Catastrophe, but I’d say the evidence tilts toward civilizations tending to react when pushing that limit with something other than a casual shrug that mass starvation will tend to correct the issue for them. I think what we tend to see instead, is that where it’s starting to feel cramped the culture will start encouraging smaller families or immigration to new places, while throwing on subsidies, laws, or tax incentives to immigrate to new planets, build space habitats, or have fewer kids.
My own guess though is that overpopulation doesn’t get managed directly by just shipping folks off to new and distant planets, but rather that’s where you encourage elements of your culture to go to who specifically desire large families or big frontiers. Locally you just build more space habitats in orbit and arcologies on the ground while shifting focus off big families. Those incentives for leaving can also apply to groups you don’t like, who volunteer in order to flee persecution, or perceived persecution, or get sent into exile, or some combination thereof. The Grayson scenario is a perfectly plausible one, folks leaving for their promised land, and in their case getting stuck in a proverbial desert akin to the Exodus from Egypt under Moses. For those who’ve seen the Expanse and remember the big Nauvoo colony ship,
it’s a very similar scenario and also parallels a lot of religious or political pioneer settlements in the colonial era. And other eras too, it’s been fairly common throughout history, and probably pre-history, for chunks of humanity not fitting in well to seek abroad, indeed many young person’s leave their family or village or tribe for a life in a traveling trade or as a merchant or musician or soldier for this reason. And science fiction has explored many of these scenarios, but I would tend to guess the most likely one is that some group with a lot of resources – a nation, corporation, religious or ideological group – gets enough resources together to found an initial outpost and reasonably legitimate claim on a given planet or piece of planet, and does so basically as soon as they can make a respectable effort at it. As such, it’s always a bit resource-strapped, even in a relatively post-scarcity scenario. They also are going to get a lot of pushback if they’re constantly planting
half-baked settlements to claim new real estate – be it militant or more polite. That means they are looking for more investment – literally and emotionally – which means a lot of them are going to be trying to find a method to encourage people to come and in a way that minimizes their own expenditure, but also without risking such a failure rate that it makes them look bad. After all, very few powerful leaders are indifferent to their reputation, especially in terms of an appearance of competence and success. It’s also a lot easier to avoid the claim you’re
over-reaching while planting new settlements out in space if those all have a relatively open-door policy to people going there, not just your personal supporters and cronies, and if it is seen as successful. If country X tries to claim some 100 kilometer wide asteroid or 100x100 kilometer chunk of the Martian landscape, it makes their claim easier to maintain if their allies and rivals and own citizens view it as a successful colony that they can move to or compete inside for business. In a post-scarcity society, we may or may not have the same overall commercial perspective or it might be that the term ‘money’ gets replaced with prestige or reputation for certain applications. And that’s where your basic homesteader situation comes in handy. You might pledge everyone a free ticket to your new location and a chunk of land.
Depending on how badly you want them, this might include a standing subsidy for being there or a lot of equipment, or it might be that you give out low-interest loans for gear and tax waivers. Your objective is to devote the minimum resources for the maximum success so you definitely want to be focused on getting people in there who are predisposed to not expect a lot of help and so that attitude toward self-sufficiency that tends to be associated to homesteading is likely to be something you want and will aim your marketing toward. Of course they might also be future pains in the neck for trying to establish more control over the area as it grows, and in a high-tech civilization there’s no guarantee that when that happens in a hundred or so years that the original settler who left to become independent isn’t still there, rather than a descendant of theirs who might be just as glad to see the Wild West era transition into one with a lot more infrastructure and government.
Which raises the question of what the draw is for them to support themselves, and an important caveat. That a settler might not need much support from home, now or later. It is entirely possible that by the end of this century we will have managed to achieve some or all of the following technologies: Life extension, 3D printers, nuclear fusion, reliable medium-intelligent AI. Let’s consider the impact of that with a quick scenario. In the not-too-distant future an organization sets out to create a big encyclopedia of everything you need to know as a settler, including textbooks and augmented reality training videos of every profession and major hobby. Their foundation releases the Encyclopedia Galactica and keeps it updated. They also put in a big library
of every book, song, movie, recipe, software, or medicine that’s free from copyright or willingly donated. Along with this they include a database of blueprints for any useful tool or building or piece of equipment or even a child’s toy they think a settler might need, along with suggestions of what to use and where. They call this database their Standard Templates and Constructs, or STCs. Neither the Encyclopedia Galactica nor the STCs have all of human knowledge and design in them, not by any means, but it’s got everything they think a settler might need. A lot of it is baseline models from companies donated to include their brand name on the 3D print and with a note that a better design is available for a small premium. This all comes in a nice sturdy briefcase along with a 3D printer, and the case includes some solar panels and batteries.
That printer can actually print its own parts or those for a handful of more specialized or larger printers or industrial machines. But one of its most useful abilities is that it has diagrams for cheap and sturdy solar panels and transparent dome material and batteries and it can make them out of many different combinations of available materials. It’s no match for the state of the art mega-machines some have available and it's often clunky tech twenty years out of date but you can open that box anywhere the sun shines, or where you can plug it into a power supply, and the limited AI on board can consult with you about what you want to build and how best to get to building it. It is not a big old ball of gray goo that’s going to spit out sophisticated electronics in seconds or turn an asteroid into spaceship overnight, but when you arrive on Mars and they hand you your case and your personal rover full of supplies and a deed to your 100 hectare plot of land, it is sufficient that you could drive off to that spot and start building your dome equivalent of a log cabin. If you have more resources you might build a power receiver so you can get energy beamed down by microwave from satellites in orbit, to work faster. I chose Mars as an example because I know it’s a popular spot for folks to contemplate us settling but I’ve never heard a convincing case for how it would ever profit Earth except as a dumping ground for more people and as a prestige project. Unlike asteroid mines or orbital power arrays or space farms, Mars doesn’t really have
anything to export you can’t find easier elsewhere and without the large gravity well. It is a place that could handle large self-sufficient settlements though, and which we already know has a personal draw for many people. It only takes one cheap mass space launcher to make settlement viable at this point, as one orbital ring around Earth with a few ground tethers can get you into orbit for costs on par with a plane flight, and then you can ride a large, slow Aldrin Cycler out to Mars with several thousand other settlers each trip.
The key thing here is that you are a de facto post-scarcity civilization at this point. It’s not that robots simply do everything automatically and with no oversight, but rather that production is pretty massive and automated and that you can mass produce cheap sustainable power generation. An advanced 3D printer with a lot of templates and a simple AI in it is not a Star Trek style replicator, but it fulfills a similar purpose in clever and industrious hands. Also,
the usual Genie-in-a-lamp rule about not being able to wish for more wishes does not apply, there is no reason a 3D printer or replicator can’t make all the bits and pieces needed to make a copy of itself. The very existence of every single biological cell on this planet proves that is the case, and also proves you can make machines at least that small. That said I think it is a big jump to assuming the more extreme scifi cases where you could dump a vial of nanobots on the surface of a planet and watch it magically terraform the place in a few hours, or that any 3D printer is going to pull off either the speed or intricacy a Star Trek replicator. That doesn’t mean one couldn’t give you the necessary instructions and blueprints, based on what you have available, to make your own domed home, pressurized rover, or personal spaceship. It is just likely to require a lot of time and effort of mind and body on your own part, even if it might be a lot less arduous than anything the pioneers had to do and produced a far more luxurious lifestyle. Which isn’t to say you can’t have automated tech so good that
people just step off a spaceship right into their own personal mansion on a new planet, and will consider that scenario more in just a moment. For the homesteader in a civilization that still has scarcity and economic limits, even fairly high-tech ones, that Mars scenario is still possible, I just think that’s more of a case where someone is looking for a place to call their own and is less focused on operating a profitable home farm or business. Venus and the nitrogen farm we discussed at the beginning seem more plausible to me as while Earth hardly needs nitrogen, all our other space colonies would, and it’s rare in the inner solar system. Venus is a bit easier to get off of than Earth, has considerably more nitrogen in its atmosphere than we do, and I suspect people will complain about us removing much nitrogen from Earth. The other obvious location for that is Titan, but it strikes me as a less appealing place to live on. Or over anyway, living on Venus’s surface is a nightmare, though living there is possible with sufficient brute force application of heat shielding so it might be home for the motivated hermit or some doomsday bunker. Asteroids are another good pick for a homestead
life, especially as many are small enough an individual might plausibly own one. There’s around a million asteroids in the belt a kilometer or wider, more than large enough to stuff an entire major metropolis into or build an entire O’Neill Cylinder out of. There are tens of millions a 100 meters across, as big in every dimension as a football field is long, and with more than enough resources in them to build a Kalpana scale habitat all on your own while providing you resources for trade and lots of silicon to be building a solar farm from. But solar farms, or space farms, are also a plausible pathway for a small group, family, or individual, we talked about the economics of space farming more in our episodes space farms and Agriworlds, but it's not too hard to imagine a family that wanted to stay in real-time communication range with Earth opting to setup a hydroponic or dirt farm in one of the Lagrange Points along with the large cloud of other facilities that might grow there, as we looked at recently in our Lagrange Point Settlements episode. How many tons of food per year do you need to export to other space settlements or spaceships for that to be profitable? In the earlier space settlement days, that might not need to be much more than your own family eats, as a new variation on subsistence farming that was the norm for a lot of people in the last few Millennia. How much oxygen and metal do you need to refine
from your hab-dome built over a small crater in the Moon to buy that food and replacement gear for your refinery, smelter, and in-home water recycler? How many square meters or feet of thin solar panels do you need to build and clean and maintain to beam out enough watts of power from your cislunar orbital power grid to buy oxygen, food, water, and air scrubbers? And, of course, to service your loan on buying the place or pay your taxes or rents. It is worth remembering that homesteading might have a traditional history of literal subsistence farming, trading for a few things you can’t make yourself with your surplus, but this might as easily be a family server farm in orbit overseeing data moving around or the big node for the local internet cache in that section of the asteroid belt so that those nearby don’t have to send queries all the way back to Earth to load a webpage. Let’s make up a hypothetical case. The average human settler near Jupiter needs 10 new liters of water a day, between building up a cistern and some loss and leakage, and can pay 1% of their total income for water and half of that goes to shipping. Thus a homestead on Europa melting
and purifying ice or pumping it up from the subsurface ocean kilometers below need to produce 200 liters per person per day, probably more for equipment and setup costs, but to indicate how low a threshold that is, a family of 5 would need only a cubic meter of ice a day to get there, to meet their needs as ice miners on Europa. Even that far from the Sun, they don’t need that many reflective panels or parabolic dishes to melt that much ice, or to run the cutting beams for getting chunks out and dropping them into an ice catapult to launch to orbital collectors. Which might be another small farm equivalent. Up in orbit of Mars a small rotating habitat
uses a slow spinning but large orbital mirror as its counterweight, the paper-thin mirror kept rigid by that spin, and the light and power it shines down feeds the homestead down on Mars. In the realm of high automation and efficiency, and when the goal is material subsistence plus some to spare, you don’t necessarily need much to work off of. Post-scarcity doesn’t imply that you casually burn resources, and in practice what it really means is that you don’t have to scrabble for basic survival or worry that the supply is rapidly diminishing and won’t last. And that takes us to a final train of thought, because in a post-scarcity civilization of that variety you’re not leaving home because you’re worried you will starve to death or that the stars contain great riches for you personally. Some suggest that since it does imply a harder life, only the very independent sorts of people might do it, and that reasoning seems sound enough but we need to remember that one of the big keystones of post-scarcity tends to be virtual reality. People aren’t really motivated by an abundance or scarcity of oil or water;
they are motivated by their ability to fulfill survival needs and wants of a complex variety that we see in things like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Basic physiological ones like food, water, sleep, and shelter, but also other things like amusement, status, fantasy, and do so in a way that Virtual Reality can offer and which many a book, movie, or game already does. You can be king of the world in VR, even if you’re in a cramped apartment somewhere eating Ramen noodles, and so your metal and oxygen dome on the Moon might simply be your way of paying for computing time, life extension treatments, and nutrapaste. Your personal fiefdom or space homestead doesn’t need to be very much to support your lifestyle. In practice I suspect these would be much more purposeful lives with more luxuries into which people often spent time in VR, but that’s probably not Universal. But to take a contrary note, the reality of options like this is that in some scenarios, if you’ve got your own ship and 3D printer and STC and Encyclopedia Galactica, you don’t actually need anyone else, the ship AI can feed you plenty of believable persons and places to enjoy. And that takes us to the Hermit Shoplifter Hypothesis of the Fermi Paradox.
For my part I don’t believe that people would universally bury themselves in Virtual Worlds. There’s also the concern that civilizations would collapse from the ability of devices like advanced 3D printers to let some lone madman build doomsday devices. Even if only 1 in a million people want to build and unleash a nuclear bomb, then society either collapses or spreads way out. I tend to think this is unlikely too but that’s more of a hunch. Also, regardless of if it’s true it just needs to be believable. If tons of people with access to a
personal spaceship, de facto biological immortality, STCs, and an Encyclopedia Galactica think they need to be far away to keep surviving, and can survive in indefinite luxury even far away from others, then lots of them are going to do this, even if just temporarily for a few decades or centuries. And in my opinion, if technology does permit this strategy, for an individual or a small group even, then tons of people are going to do just that, and I consider this scenario more likely than not to occur. Indeed, I rather expect that the main wave of colonization out into the galaxy will constantly be bumping into various worlds or systems where someone fled at full speed and stopped when they felt they were so far away no one would ever get there. But where this becomes a Fermi Paradox solution is if we assume both conditions are true, that folks can live indefinitely in isolation and that any place civilization gets big enough and lasts long enough it inevitably gets wrecked by some lone madman or idiot playing with dangerous AI or some other doomsday tech. Folks inevitably survive from that, or are nearby and can flee, and eventually get the point that survival is about having a large stash of resources to run your machines and computers.
So there’s very little communication or astronomically visible signs of life and folks tend to grab up a personal stash that will last them a few billion years – which might fit into a ship not much bigger than a very large house if they’re efficient with resources – and then fly off into the intergalactic void since they have all they need and they want to be somewhere nobody will find them and they don’t have much reason to have way more resources than they need as some might come after them to steal it. They don’t qualify as Loud Aliens and aren’t visible. And again we deep dived this a couple months back on Nebula in our Hermit Shoplifter Hypothesis episode. I’m quite sure folks will do this if they can too, I just tend to think it will be the minority and most will prefer to stay in or near civilization and that civilization will find ways to work around the tendency to implode. That we will
see plenty of new planets with tons of people and suburban space habitats, but also various folks living more on their own or far from others. This will doubtless go through a lot of different iterations in various times and places. The good news is that if you want your personal homestead, you can probably have it. Whether that’s a space farm or a dome on Mars or the Moon, or your own floating sky garden above the clouds on Venus. I think part of the appeal of settling space is that pioneer spirit, to travel to new lands and see new sites, and to help forge new worlds, to take a barren wasteland and turn it into a paradise. If that sounds like fun, you should try out Cell to Singularity,
a free-to-play science-based game that lets you take life from a barren Early Earth era of the most basic lifeforms through dinosaurs and other epochs all the way to modern times, then go beyond our world to forge a future out among the stars. Cell to Singularity’s designers are also fans of our show so they take Science & Futurism seriously, while also giving the game a compelling science fiction flavor. Tap into the Extraordinary tale of Evolution in this cosmic clicker game, where you start as a single celled organism, then upgrade your biology, intellect, and technology until you engulf an entire planet with a civilization on the brink of technological singularity. Explore from Early Earth out to among the stars, in a game that fits easily into
your busy day and again is free to play, whether you're on your PC or phone, just search Cell to Singularity on Steam, Google Play, or iOS, and start evolving your new civilization today! We’ll get to the schedule in a moment, but speaking of pioneering space and boldly going where no man has gone before, I wanted to congratulate William Shatner, the original Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise, for winning the 2024 Heinlein Award which he’ll be coming by to receive at the International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles at the end of May. He will be only the 19th recipient since the award’s inception 35 years ago, which includes fellow Star Trek Alum Gene Roddenberry, and such other notables as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Robert Goddard, Arthur C. Clarke, Freeman Dyson, Gerard K. O’Neill, Wernher von Braun, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, James Lovel, Chuck Yeager, Robert Zubrin, Jerry Pournelle, Peter Diamandis, and Lori Garver. So very good company indeed. For those wondering, I received the Pioneer Award back in 2020’s ISDC,
not the Heinlein, it’s one of the 4 awards we give out from the National Space Society, of which I’m just finishing my first year as President of, and I’m very much looking forward to this year’s ISDC, more details to follow as we get closer to the event and flush out the schedule post-holidays. Speaking of schedules, this weekend, on February 11th, for Sci-Fi Sunday, we’ll ask what might make a civilization quarantine an entire planet and how that might be enforced. On the 15th we’ll explore various technologies made possible through black holes, including galaxy-wrecking weapons we call quasar cannons. Then on the 22nd we’ll ask if it is possible to terraform the moon to have green lands, blues seas, and white clouds, just like Earth, and then visit the topic of Vacuum Trains and other hyperfast transit systems on Sunday February 25th, before finishing the month on February 29th, as we leap into the topic of life on colony ark ship carrying people to new worlds that will carry us ahead into this leap year. If you’d like to get alerts when those and
other episodes come out, make sure to hit the like, subscribe, and notification buttons. You can also help support the show on Patreon, and if you’d like to donate or help in other ways, you can see those options by visiting our website, IsaacArthur.net. You can also catch all of SFIA’s episodes early and ad free on our streaming service, Nebula, along with hours of bonus content like Topopolis: The Eternal River, at go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. As always, thanks for watching, and have a Great Week!
2024-02-18 17:38
