Interview with sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson

so Stan tell us how did you first become interested in space well I was given a small telescope when I was a child an 80 power thing and and the and I saw Saturn and the Rings were there and it looked like a jewel and I got interested at that point we lived near the deserts of Southern California and there was absolutely tremendous viewing in at night just bare eye viewing and then in the high era you're up at about 10 to 12,000 ft at night and the stars are just out of this world so I always had an interest and then later I got reading science fiction and then the solar system is more or less like the local neighborhood for adventurers and so it it sort of followed so first seeing the Stars Then seeing the science fiction stories that take place out there and what does space mean to you now well I'm thinking of it as Earth's local neighborhood as the context for Earth that we're on a planet here we're orbiting a star and that that context is important for understanding and taking care of this planet that we're living on so it's a kind of a home the home environment now you're one of the very rare people who's eaten a bit of Mars can you tell us how that came about well yes when I was finishing my Mars Trilogy it was a really big push I was trying to finish blue Mars and I'd been working on the trilogy for most of 10 years and a space fan and a reader of the Mars books named Stuart from England sent me a grammar to of Mars and I didn't realize that if you have one of the snc meteorites you have a piece of Mars so then I went online and I got some more in a necklace for my wife that had maybe 10 little chunks and one of my friends said knowing the struggles I was having with finishing the book you should eat one and so I did it was basically a sort of mysticism to see if I could uh help bring the book home and does it have a particular Taste of it's like gravel now you've described space as one of the last great wildernesses could you explain to us what do you mean by that and now I think that's not quite right the Wilderness is a name that we have for a particular relationship to Landscapes here on Earth so that's all very well uh almost all Landscapes on earth have been lived on and impacted by human beings so that you might say that Antarctica as a Wilderness but everywhere else has been a working human landscape and so now we save some of these Landscapes from Human interference to try to keep the health of the entire echosphere going so Wilderness is great but that's not really what space is it's a It's The Emptiness in which the planets roll and that's not exactly Wilderness but you could say this that the outer space treaty is based on the Antarctic treaty and that our use of the other planetary bodies in this solar system might be governed by the ways that we treat um Antarctica and we seem now to have a great Obsession about Mars is there something particular about Mars that you think is special or is it just because it's the next great destination that we have to achieve well there is a real Fascination I'm I people have exhibited it to me now for more than 25 years and I've felt it myself and it's always been a little mysterious why uh but I think now it there are some factors it's real but empty you can see it with the naked eye that matters and then it's reddish and it has that strange glitch in its orbit it gets brighter it gets dimmer it seems to be signaling us and it's very charismatic in the night sky so the fact you can see it with a naked eye and you know it's real matters and now we know it's a planet like Earth but it's empty U nothing there and possibly dead possibly bacteria living underground there we don't know that and now that's an open question but the fascination comes from this combination of real bit empty and Elon Musk I think has described it as a bit of a fixed wrapper of a planet it it's quite a hard place to colonize is that right well it has the volatiles that you would need if you were going to terraform a place terraforming is a kind of Carl Sean idea the the planetary community in the late 60s early 70s began to talk about engineering a planet from a dead state to a space where human or and Earthly genetic materials could be uh put into that space and allowed to thrive like a garden and that of all the places that we knew about Mars turns out to be really good at that it has a lot of sunlight it has the frozen water it has some nitrogen and altogether if you had to pick the qualities that a planet might have to make it terraformable Mars is pretty good what's your best guess about when man will reach Mars well this really is just a guess put it this way if their human Community decided it was a priority then we could be on the planet in about 10 to 15 years but it is it's expensive and you can't make a profit from it you simply can't and also there's a hard part that um many people wave their hands at without coming to grips with and that is that it's hard to land an object gently on the surface of Mars we've only had a 50% success rate with our robot Landers and a 50% success rate when you've got humans on board is perhaps not good enough yeah so why should we go to Ms I think that there's something going on here that my friend Oliver Morton pointed out that we are interested in the hardest place that human beings can get to that they could never get to before that new technologies allow to be achievable able so in the 19th century everybody was focused on can humans get to the North Pole and then when that happened can humans get to the South Pole then it was Mount Everest and in 1953 we got to the top of Mount Everest then it was the moon and in 1969 we got to the Moon it has to be pointed out that in each of these cases once we got there interest in that place per se fell off drastically there are there's a little town at the South Pole nobody cares tourists go up Mount Everest for a fee nobody cares and we went to the the moon and then we stopped going to the Moon nobody was interested enough in the moon to keep an active Moon program going even though we had reached it so it's the reaching it and I'm suspecting that Mars is the same people claim a huge interest in Mars in fact it's a dead Rock and poisonous you can't go Outdoors you'd have to live underground so if we get humans on Mars it will turn into McMurdo uh which is the town in Antarctica that you go to where you start your adventures the people there are going to be happy they're going to be interested humans civilization is not going to care it's the destination so the moment we land on Mars people are saying I wonder if we can get to the moons of Jupiter I wonder if we can get to the moons of Saturn and so on Space Used to Be The Preserve of governments uh it's now become The Preserve of the private sector or at least the people putting a lot of money into space exploration of private sector is that a good thing do you think or is it always going to be a combination now of public and private sector well I hate that aspect I myself am a public uh over private person and government over business and the reason that Humanity was so interested in those tiny little Rovers that landed on Mars was precisely that they weren't commercial that they were owned by the public and they were out there for um the pursuit of knowledge only there was no profit to be made from those tiny little Rovers like Pathfinder and curiosity and that's the way I would prefer it to continue now that said it was always public private in that the US government and NASA would always contract out to Boeing and to other companies to build those rockets and right now we have a really good rocket company SpaceX um founded by Elon Musk that is making a really good rocket the Falcon 9 and the Falcon heavy and we needed a rocket like that a booster with enormous uh lift ability and reliability and now they can reuse the boosters and everything so the Innovation that is now possible because of the last 30 years of work on all fronts and the fact that low space orbit is profitable because of communication satellites means that we've got a situation where there's going to be more and more public private um Enterprises and everything but because mostly you can't make a profit like you can't make a profit on the moon you can't make a profit on Mars what you're going to end up with is a public private combination where hopefully space will remain a Commons underneath the rules of the outer space treaty where no individual Nation can make any proprietari claims but you still have um scientific exploration being done because because we need to know what space can teach us in terms of managing the Earth and what's NASA's role in this new space World well NASA has been great they're a federal agency the American public has supported it the Congress has only given it a certain amount of money and it's had to limit what it's done and make choices but within those choices um it's done the best it can and the robotic exploration of the solar system has been superb and really those camera views and those uh indirect sens that allow us to see what's going on around the other planets in the solar system in many ways more important it's the data more important than human beings having been there and putting humans in a place is vastly more difficult and expensive and complicated so I think NASA will continue to organize the effort and also subcontract out the jobs to the rocket companies that are building certain Rockets but if you were president would you increase their funding yes I would uh right now they're they're funding as a percent of the national budget what I guess I would like to see done is a flip of the Pentagon budget and the NASA budget that would be a good start now the first wave of space exploration I guess um you could say was quite utopian uh it was uh we are going to have a a man-made mission to go to the Moon um it's very much going to then the Star Trek era that this was bold exploration and in a way that kind of latest waver space exploration is fueled by some dystopian fears that planet Earth is under threat for environmental reasons or some kind of super intelligence might take over is that right do you think are we trying to escape planet Earth now if people are thinking of going to space as an escape hatch from problems on Earth they're making a bad mistake there is no Planet B Earth is our only home we cannot build a viable uh space for humans to live in anywhere else and especially not in the time that we are in a current ecological emergency here on Earth so that's a bad fantasy a sort of um let's start over somewhere else kind of moral hazard you create for yourself where it's okay to trash this planet or to kill ourselves because if 5,000 humans were alive on Mars that that would make it okay it's actually when you put it that way unsettling how wrong it is how fundamentally wrong on the basic physics of the situation not to mention the morality of it so uh things do seem to have changed from the spirit that that it began in but I'm not so sure that's completely true the space exploration began as a kind of utopian effort although it also came out of world war II's rocketry so it's always had a military component to it but we demilitarized space with the treaty in 1967 and it was seen as a kind of idealistic space of expiration I think people are still mostly interested in that when that kind of thing happens people are fascinated by the images that come back when people talk about making a profit up there first you can't do it except for communication satellites in low earth orbit and nobody really even considers that to be anything more than the sky so for space itself you can't make a profit and and when you talk about it as maybe a tourist destination the trivializing of space is just almost absurd it would be outrageously expensive and it becomes like the equivalent of bungee jumping you know bungee jumping you jump over a bridge you stretch you go down you come back up oh how wonderful bunging jumping upwards is going up into space you spend a half a billion dollars to do it and then you come back down is that really all space was for a rich person's bungee jumping I don't think so and nobody thinks so so uh what's going to happen I think is that it's going to be the public rallying behind their public space agencies the European Space Agency the Chinese space agency the Indian space agency and NASA are all going to be spending part of the people's Budget on projects like this and Contracting with private companies uh if tourism um piggybacks on that later on that's sort of the way things happen it's that way in Antarctica and almost everything that if you think about how is it going to be in space imagine how it's already been in Antarctica and it will be like that would you personally like to go to Mars if I could get to Mars in 2 weeks and get home in two weeks I would love to go to Mars uh the usual transit times are probably declared to be more like 9 months and uh that seems a bit much to me me imagine being trapped in a Motel 6 for you know 9 months and then I don't know that would be a close call we live in a global capitalist economy and capitalism depends on permanent growth and once you are in a finite system like the earth and its ecology there's a point it comes where permanent growth can no longer happen and that's one name for the crisis that we're in right now the ecological crisis that we're facing is the maxing out of the ability to continue to grow in a capitalist economy in Earth's finite system some people have then begun to imagine well that means that the next zone of expansion the next uh will be space itself and that's where we'll be able to keep capitalist growth going the problem is space has nothing that we can uh exploit and appropriate and turn into profit because what's most common up there is precisely what's most common here water dirt uh silica aluminum iron there's nothing that is up there in uh concentrations that we can turn to use so this uh dream of solar system as the next zone of capitalist exploitation is not going to work because we can't uh rally those places like we did the places here but in that sense do you think space is a symbol or an area of opportunity for genuinely Global collaboration and exploration yes I think because we all signed the outer space treaty and this was negotiated between the Soviet Union and the Americans back in 1967 and then now the Chinese and everybody else has signed off on it it's an area where you are not to make territorial claims and you're not to have militarized activities and then what you do there is research together and if we ever did find resources up there then the use of the resources would be done without making territorial claims again it would resemble the oan or resemble Antarctica so that's a great challenge of getting past nation state rivalries and getting to a broader human cooperation as to what we're what we're trying to do in the world and you don't think some of the plans for asteroid mining are going to lead to anything well I don't because the asteroids are made of nickel and iron and so what you when you're thinking oh you could go up there and you could get uranium no you can't could you get gold no you can't the asteroids are the most common stuff we have and Stone or else they're iron or else they're nickel one thing that has interested me lately is this common story that we used to have that Humanity was destined to go to the stars and inhabit the Stars I think is wrong and was a mistake based on our misunderstanding of just how big the universe is and what turned the key for me was the microbiome inside us that 50% of the DNA inside our bodies is not human DNA so when you go to the Stars you actually are have have to bring that healthy Forest that is you with you and keep it all healthy and all evolving at the same pace so then even the nearest stars are um you know 12 light years away to tetti that's 10 billion times the distance from here to the moon and that quantitative difference has creates a qualitative difference that means that essentially the stars are Out Of Reach and that story we've been telling ourselves is wrong and again even more emphatically there is no Planet B Earth is our only home and we have to make a good accommodation with this only home that we have when I wrote the Mars Trilogy um I pushed the timeline to the minimum amount that might be possible to terraform Mars just for the sake of my story to keep some characters around for most of it um now I still think that Mars is terraformable and would be great to do so but we've discovered it doesn't have anywhere near as much nitrogen as we thought it did and that creates a bit of a problem and but also it has perchlorates covering the surface which are essentially salts poisonous to human in a parts per billion range it's way more poisonous than we thought it was and also there might be bacteria living underground these are three new things I didn't know at the time and none of them are Stoppers but each of them is a big slower Downer and so now I would say about Mars yeah terraform it it might take 10,000 years it's still a great idea and uh to have a second home like that say it is 10,000 years from now Humanity if we've solved our problem should be just hitting our Prime at that point and then we would have this quite incredible achievement an earthlike planet that we ourselves gardened and put in place

Channel: Financial Times

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Keywords: business news, finance analysis, FT, Financial Times, finance news, international news, global news, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kim Stanley robinson interview, kim stanley robinson mars, sci-fi, sci-fi authors, mars trilogy, mars sci fi, spacex, kim stanley robinson space, space exploration, elon musk, nasa, mars interview, terraforming mars, space tourism, space orbiting, commercial space exploration, spacex investing

Id: BniF_Vl2w20

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2017