Runaway World

Cockpit Debate

     "Are you having doubts?" asked Andrew, suddenly wary.

     "Cheval says that you are. That you're afraid that the second Mars colony might fail."

     "I just think that it's a hell of a gamble, that's all. I mean, we're pretty well off right here on Earth, right?"

     "Well off?"

     "I mean, we're surviving, and not just surviving. We're thriving. We have a massive industrial base that can manufacture anything we want. Rovers, entire new cities when we want them. Even spaceships."

     "What good are spaceships if there's nowhere for us to go? If this planet were to be magically transported back to the inner solar system we could send missions of exploration to anywhere inside the orbit of Jupiter. Even further if we didn't mind spending time in hibernation, but out here... Even with a gravity assist from Malina we're a hundred years from anywhere. Once we're past Malina we'll be two hundred years from anywhere. Even with hibernation, no-one would survive a journey that long, unless some breakthrough is made in hibernation technology, which seems unlikely. The eggheads seem to think that there are fundamental limits on how long a human being can be kept asleep. Limits that can never be broken. If that's the case, then what good will spaceships be to us?"

     "New propulsion technologies..." Andrew began.

     "Pushing a spaceship requires energy. If we stay here, on Earth, the planet's geothermal energy is all the energy we'll ever have."

     "We don't know that. They were on the verge of solving fusion when The Freeze happened. If we could finally solve fusion..."

     "There were ten million scientists in the world before The Freeze. Now there are less than a hundred, and that's spread across all disciplines. Biology, chemistry, materials science... The people who were trying to solve fusion before The Freeze had been studying the subject all their lives and had been trained by people who had also been studying the subject all their lives. Even with all the records they left behind, essential knowledge has been lost."

     "Then we'll start again from scratch," said Andrew. "As our population grows, there will be more scientists."

     "There can never be as many as there were before The Freeze," the Constable countered. "They say that there will never be more than about a hundred million humans on this world. There can't be more than that. We just won't have the resources to support them."

     "That just means that it'll take longer. Maybe it'll take us a thousand years to solve fusion. So what? When we finally do solve it we'll have all the energy we want. Enough to send spaceships back to the inner solar system in just a few years even though we're five times as far from the sun as we are now."

     Kartoshka shook his head. "It doesn't work that way," he said. "The days when a single genius working alone in a lab can change the world are long gone. These days, science and technology grow from a scientific community of millions. There's a kind of, of..." He paused as he searched for the right words. "A critical size that a scientific community has to reach before it can start making real breakthroughs. A smaller community just can't make the same kind of progress no matter how long they try."

     "Says who?"

     "You've only got to look at the history of science. Throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries science and technology grew at an exponential rate. That's not just because each generation built on what the previous generation had achieved. That was part of it, but not all. The real reason was the sheer size of the scientific community. All the scientists in the world become a kind of a single brain. The larger it is, the smarter it is. I'm afraid that, if we stay on Earth, the limits there will have to be on our population means that there will never be any more real scientific innovations. No fusion, no anti-gravity, no faster than light space travel."