Butcher, Baker, History Maker

© Laurence B. Winn

Feb 1, 1999

Frontier theory predicts that some of us, very likely you, will have to work harder for less this year. It predicts that your chances of being murdered in your home or on the street are greater this year than last, and will be still greater the year after that. It predicts that you will soon lose another increment of freedom to the necessity of regulation, that a new or newly virulent disease will threaten your health. It predicts that the air you breathe and the water you drink will be more toxic than they have ever been. Frontier theory predicts that, however bad you think you have it, your children will have it worse.

But frontier theory also teaches that the worst outcomes are not only avoidable, but that a sort of paradise can rise from sweat and moon dust. Last month's article, First, Buy Time offers suggestions for extending the narrow window of opportunity which we are about to miss.

That opportunity is the chance to build a frontier in space. It's not a simple thing. You can't just throw your junk in a wagon and head west. You can't just convince some ditsy queen to lend you a couple of boats for a trip across the Ocean Sea. (Not that exploration is ever easy, or that financing it is ever less than an act of courage and vision.) To make a start on the colonization of space will require a broad consensus, a couple of decades and an expenditure on the scale of a major war. Even if we have the will, it is not at all clear that we have enough time.

Academics and science fiction writers (who tend to be academics) speculate that civilizations, of which there may have been many in this galaxy alone, live or die depending on whether they destroy themselves before they can deploy their populations into space. According to this theory, there is a moment in the history of a culture when it has the technology to do either. Miss the moment, and enclosure (see First Principles) automatically and irrevocably brings down the hammer on the side of death. We are traversing that moment.

I have a favorite video, a made-for-TV, late-night movie called Plymouth in which a teenage citizen of a lunar colony tells his friend, who wants to leave, "I love it up here. What I got back on earth? A lousy job, four walls, a TV. Forget that! Here you make history every time an airlock opens. That's what I call living."

Exactly. For the individual, the ordinary mortal who is just so much clay, a frontier is an opportunity to make a difference.

Even before the high frontier exists, it presents individuals with the opportunity to contribute in ways only they can imagine. You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a national leader. If, by a rare stroke of great good luck, you are an artist or a composer, here is a mission for your art. Nothing will fix poverty, war and disease like defeating enclosure, the root of it all.

That is the direction of the Artemis Project, which seeks to begin the space enterprise with entertainment.

The First Millenial Foundation looks to the ocean as a launching pad for space colonization.

Believe it or not, space needs lawyers. So, if you are one, or have a talent for it, here's a chance to distinguish yourself from the ambulance chasers.

If you love nature, you're in luck. Real space colonies will be delicately balanced ecosystems (like Biosphere 2), not orbiting inner cities like Deep Space Nine. By thinking like a space colony designer, an earthbound interior designer can create spaces that damp out noise, absorb toxins from the air, make oxygen and calm the nerves.

Maybe politics is your thing. I don't mean to encorage this, but if it is, check out Spacecause.

Teachers advocating space theme-based education usually find themselves alone in their school districts. Lonely though it may be, this is an opportunity to excel.

Examples of projects:

* Biology: growing plants in a "space colony"
* Scientific synthesis: creating designer aliens
* Creative writing: science fiction

A little imagination goes a long way in space. Oregon Moonbase, the Portland chapter of the National Space Society, conducts lunar colony simulations in local lava tubes. It's a fun campout with useful results. Could this be a new entry in the adventure travel industry?

Buy your kid a model rocket.

Cast your dollar vote. There's nothing like it to get the attention of the movers and shakers. If it's a space flick, see it. If it's a book about space, buy it. Skip football and watch Star Trek instead. Send your kids to Space Camp.

Why are we doing this, again?

We are doing this because our children are bombarded daily with news of famine, plagues, wars, riots, ecological ruin and insane acts of individual malice. They are assured of a declining standard of living and restricted choices in return for more effort and greater sacrifice. They are fully aware that our social tinkering is a flop and our system of justice is a joke. And when the authors of this breathtaking blueprint ask that their laws be obeyed, that their values be cherished, that their institutions be perpetuated and their persons respected, is it any wonder that the boys in the 'hood say WHAT?

We, the grownups, had better give our kids something to look forward to. It had better offer more, not less. It had better promise adventure. It had better guarantee excitement. And it had better do it within the framework of the values we claim to cherish, because if it doesn't, our children will surely seek those things outside that framework, and at our expense. A frontier is what they need. The only credible frontier is straight up. If high frontiersmanship sounds difficult and expensive, that's too bad. This is a desperate situation, and as Captain Kirk used to say in such circumstances, "You got a better idea, now's the time."