Alliance to Rescue Civilization - Recently Updated Pages

ARC Writings/Papers

smwolfe — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 08:38:28 CDT

ARC Writings, Papers and other References This page contains the writings and papers on the ARC concept as prepared by Robert Shapiro, William E. Burrows and Steven Wolfe. Many selections are in PDF format.

A new rationale for returning to the Moon? Protecting civilization with a sanctuary, by Robert Shapiro, March 2009

Advances in computer storage of scientific and cultural material add urgency to the need for backup on the moon.

The Space Review

"Why the Moon? Human Survival!" by Robert Shapiro, March 19, 2007

Planetary Dreams: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth (Wiley, 1999) p.259

An excerpt from Robert Shapiro's 1999 book titled "A Lunar Sanctuary" which provided the germ of the idea for ARC.

Planetary Defense Conference 2004

"The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth," presented by William E. Burrows, Garden Grove, California, February 25, 2004

The Edge Foundation, Inc.

Question submitted by Robert Shapiro to "Edge The World Question Center" as part of response to the following question posed by President George W. Bush: "What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?" (2003)

Ad Astra

The submitted text of “An Alliance to Rescue Civilization” By Robert Shapiro and William E. Burrows published in Ad Astra (Sept/Oct 1999) a publication of the National Space Society

Space Studies Institute

“An Alliance to Rescue Civilization: Long Range Strategy for Using Space to Protect Mankind” by William E. Burrows, a luncheon address tothe The High Frontier Conference XV, Space Studies Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey (May 8, 2001)

Space Times

Text from “Deeefense” an article by William E. Burrows published in the “Ideas and Opinions” column of Space Times (May/June 2002), a publication of the American Astronautical Society

Space Frontier Foundation (Burrows)

“The Alliance To Rescue Civilization: A Lunar Base For Planetary Defense” by William E. Burrows, Return to the Moon Symposium IV, Space Frontier Foundation, Houston, Texas (July 19, 2002)

Space Frontier Foundation (Wolfe)

"The Alliance to Rescue Civilization: An Organizational Framework" by Steven Wolfe, Return to the Moon Symposium IV, Space Frontier Foundation, Houston, Texas (July 20, 2002)
Paper text and PowerPoint slides available

Space News

Text of “Planetary Defense” by William E. Burrows printed in the Op Ed section of Space News (Sept 23, 2002)

ARC Leaders

shapiror — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:18:42 CST

William E. Burrows

William Burrows is Director Emeritus of the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University. A former reporter for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, Burrows specialties are space and national security issues. He is the author of the following books: Richthofen: a True History of the Red Baron (1969), Vigilante (1976), Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (1987), Exploiting Space: Voyages in the Solar System and Beyond (1990), Critical Mass: The Dangerous Spread of Superweapons in the Fragmenting World (1993 with Robert Windrem), Mission to Deep Space (1993) and most recently This New Ocean: A History of the First Space Age (1998),for which he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1999. In addition, Burrows authored a basic reporting text, On Reporting the News, 1977. His articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Harvard Magazine, and Harpers. Currently, Burrows is contributing editor to Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine. Curriculum vitae for William E. Burrows. Email Burrows directly: weburrows@aol.com.

Robert Shapiro, Ph.D.

Professor Robert Shapiro is a research biochemist in Chemistry Department of New York University. His research has centered on the chemistry of nucleic acids, with emphasis on the reactions of DNA and RNA with carcinogens and mutagens. He has also been concerned with the role (if any) of nucleic acids in the origin of life. His article "A Simpler Origin for Life was the cover story of the June, 1997, Scientific American. Books he has authored include Origins: the Skeptics Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (1986), The Human Blueprint: The Race to Unlock the Secrets of Our Genetic Script (1991), and Planetary Dreams: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth (Wiley, 1999). Shapiro has also published over a hundred and thirty technical and papers. In 2004, he was awarded (with physicist Paul Davies) the Trotter Prize in Complexity, Information and Inference. Passages from Shapiro’s Planetary Dreams were the inspiration for the Alliance to Rescue Civilization. For more information see Robert Shapiro's web page. Email Shapiro directly: rs2@nyu.edu.

Ray Erikson, M.Sc., M.E.

Ray Erikson is the Principal Engineer for Flight Materials, Inc., a Boston-based consulting firm specializing in aerospace environments and effects, material system problem-solving, and new material system development. His background includes systems engineering, structural design, stress analysis and materials development work on the Shuttle, the Space Station, various unmanned NASA probes, Air Force missile warning satellites, and some other space systems. He holds a patent on the truss-hex solar concentrator for space power generation, and currently co-chairs the Space Infrastructure Committee of the NASA Aerospace Technology Working Group. He has published a number of papers and articles on space infrastructure development. More complete biography. Email Erikson directly: ray.erikson@flightmaterials.com

Steven M. Wolfe

Steve Wolfe spent over five years as the legislative aide for space policy to the late Congressman George E. Brown, Jr. (D-CA). A high point of Wolfe’s career in Washington was the drafting and passage of the Space Settlement Act of 1988. Wolfe also served as Executive Director of the Congressional Space Caucus. In the 1990’s he built a career in the management of not-for-profit organizations, and currently serves as an executive for a major trade association based in New York City. Wolfe served on the Board of the National Space Society, his writing on space policy has appeared in The New York Times, Space News, Space Front, and Ad Astra. He has also appeared on radio and television speaking on space topics. Email Wolfe directly: wolfesm@aol.com

Alliance to Rescue Civilization Home

smwolfe — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 23:48:16 CDT

Because the most important reason for the space program is human survival...

"The question to ask is whether the risk of traveling to space is worth the benefit. The answer is an unequivocal yes, but not only for the reasons that are usually touted by the space community: the need to explore, the scientific return, and the possibility of commercial profit. The most compelling reason, a very long-term one, is the necessity of using space to protect Earth and guarantee the survival of humanity."

William E. Burrows The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 3, 2003 [full story]

Welcome

The Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) was first conceived by Robert Shapiro in his book Planetary Dreams: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth (Wiley 1999). Shapiro's close colleague at New York University, William E. Burrows immediately saw the wisdom of ARC and became the leading proponent of the idea.
This website was designed to allow those who share Shapiro's and Burrows' vision to exchange information and ideas that will advance this important mission. Please review these pages. Be part of this effort by contributing relevant links and papers, providing financial support, and volunteering your expertise. Join this effort to help focus the human space program on its most important purpose, human survival.

Now Availability

The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth, William E. Burrow's latest book is a comprehensive study of ways in which space can be used to protect the planet, from asteroid detection to home-grown dangers like WMD proliferation, pollution, and resource management. It calls for settling people off planet in stations and on the Moon and of establishing ARC's continuously updated archive.

Burrows Space News Article

smwolfe — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:24:48 CDT

Text of “Planetary Defense” by William E. Burrows
printed in the Op Ed section of Space News (Sept 23, 2002)

Planetary Defense It has been three decades since Apollo 17 became the last manned mission to the Moon. That is precisely how long the space program has been without an overarching sense of purpose.

While there have been a number of outstanding achievements since then – Voyager 2's Grand Tour of the outer planets, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Shuttle-Mir flights, to take only three – the space program is floundering because it lacks focus on a clear and truly important goal.

The International Space Station is not a contender. It has been downgraded by the current administration (which has a reputation for reneging on commitments), is hated by most space scientists, and is ignored by an indifferent public that sees no real purpose to it. Indeed, most educated individuals I know think that $500 million shuttle launches and astronauts bolting station modules together while dangling upside down at the end of tethers is horrendously wasteful and frivolous while down-to-Earth problems (pick one) persist for lack of adequate funding.

Yet these is a vitally important goal that the space community is uniquely qualified to address. That is planetary defense in its many manifestations. Access to space has given mankind the means to protect Earth from many threats for the first time. The three large asteroids that wandered into the neighborhood earlier this year, the closest streaking past Earth at an astronomically minute 75,000 miles, were sending a message. No astronomer who specializes in Earth-crossing asteroids and comets believes the planet is in imminent danger of a collision. But there have been catastrophic hits before – the best known being the one that finished off dinosaurs sixty-one million years ago – and there will be others.

Knowing that, Congress authorized the Spaceguard program ten years ago. Spaceguard (named after a similar program in Arthur C. Clarke's 1973 novel, Rendezvous with Rama) is currently trying to catalogue ninety percent or more of kilometer-size

Earth-crossers, or "city-busters," that could threaten Earth. NASA is an active participant in the program. Three decades warning of an impact would be necessary to nudge the intruder to a safer trajectory.

But asteroids and comets on surprise visits from the Oort Cloud are far from the only potentially calamitous dangers we face. The list includes massive volcanism and earthquakes, forest and water depletion, nuclear war, global warming, pollution, and a worldwide computer crash that could cause chaos in communication and transportation.

Many of these threats could be reversed or mitigated by using space in a comprehensive, multi-faceted, program with a single, clearly articulated, goal: saving the species by protecting Earth. That is hardly frivolous.

Species survival through planetary defense would justify a wide array of programs. Chief among them would be a reinvigorated manned program aimed at starting what would become a large colony on the Moon. The inhabitants would, in turn, be the keepers of a continuously updated archive containing civilization's artistic, scientific, political, and other records, as well as a biological component that could recreate many species, ourselves included.

Those of us who are working on the archive concept call it ARC, for the Alliance to Rescue Civilization, and are convinced it is necessary to back up civilization's record and the natural world for the same reason it is necessary to back up a computer's hard drive: to be able to recover from a crash. Spreading the seed and duplicating the record for safekeeping off the planet are the most compelling reasons to send people to space.

ARC would have a two-fold benefit. It would provide the means to resurrect the culture and biology of a severely stricken planet. And it would serve to further international cooperation because all nations would be invited to participate. There would, however, be a caveat. Since ARC would necessarily be an infinitely long and on- going project (not a time capsule, which would become less useful as time went on), it would have to be funded mostly by the private sector rather than be held hostage to the vagaries and whims of whatever political administration or even system that is in power. With a large-scale return to the Moon in the agenda, heavy emphasis on researching life in closed systems would also be included in the program, and so would the long-stalled development of single or two stage to orbit space buses.

Remote sensing would be another fundamental aspect of planetary defense. In fact, it already is, though it is not rationalized that way. CORONA reconnaissance satellite imagery of the Aral Sea from the early '60s, compared with much more recent Landsat imagery, shows startling shrinkage. Other orbital imagery is describing the break up of part of the Antarctic ice shelf. And the switch from on the ground measurement and guesswork to comprehensive satellite pictures is providing scientists with clear evidence that the world's humid tropical forest cover is being burned down and hacked away at an alarming rate. Unlike estimates made on the spot by experts looking around and trying to make measurements, satellite imagery depicting deforestation, pollution, urban sprawl, and shrinking watersheds is precise and conclusive. Whatever the political and economic decisions, the data are not subject to widely differing interpretation. Similarly, remote sensing can provide warning of a volcano's impending eruption because the ground above and around it heaves as the first explosion occurs and molten lava starts to move. Other satellites in the program would monitor solar flare activity, monitor carbon dioxide levels, measure ozone levels, and more. All of these operations should be brought together under the aegis of a single, unified, and integrated program run by NASA for the sole purpose of protecting the planet against incipient or sudden catastrophe. It should do this in close cooperation with the European Space Agency, national agencies such as those in Russia, Canada, China and Japan, as well as with U.S. Space Command, which would have the ultimate responsibility for "negating" whatever large dirty rock is heading our way. Cooperation for planetary defense would also have the residual effect of establishing an international commonality of purpose that would hopefully make the defense (and extension) of national boundaries seem less imperative.

ENDIT

Burrows WSJ Article

smwolfe — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:08:54 CDT

From The Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2003, p. A16

SPACE AND CIVILIZATION
By WILLIAM E. BURROWS

The remains of the orbiter Columbia and its crew bear testimony to a larger and more insidious problem than a tragic accident caused by mechanical failure. The real problem is not technological. It is political.

Rockets and the spacecraft they heave into orbit around Earth are inherently dangerous devices. A rocket engine that turns combustible substances like liquid hydrogen and oxygen or solid fuel into fire is undergoing a controlled explosion that can get out of control very quickly. Challenger, many of its unmanned predecessors, and a number of Soviet launchers -- one of which blew up on the launch pad in October 1960, burning 92 people beyond recognition -- have already shown that.

Rocketry's safety record has improved dramatically over the years and continues to do so. But it will always carry danger. The question to ask is whether the risk of traveling to space is worth the benefit. The answer is an unequivocal yes, but not only for the reasons that are usually touted by the space community: the need to explore, the scientific return, and the possibility of commercial profit. The most compelling reason, a very long-term one, is the necessity of using space to protect Earth and guarantee the survival of humanity.

In "Encounter With Tiber," a 1996 novel by astronaut Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes, the commander of a large interstellar space cruiser justifies its immense journey by warning its crew: "There's not a place in the universe that's safe forever; the universe is telling us, 'Spread out, or wait around and die.'" Indeed, this is an abidingly unsafe neighborhood. It is a cosmic shooting gallery in which one horrendous asteroid or comet impact roughly 251 million years ago virtually brought the dinosaurs into existence by killing off their competitors, and another, which struck about 186 million years later, is thought to have finished them off.

There are so many large asteroids that cross Earth's path with potentially catastrophic consequences that an international Spaceguard program has been started so astronomers can catalogue them. This would allow one that is on a collision course to be deflected or destroyed. No astronomer doubts that several are headed our way.

This is not to say the sky is falling. But it is to say that it is prudent to spread out. For the first time in history, we have the wherewithal to do so thanks to access to space. In order to ensure our survival, it is imperative that we move beyond the short-term "fight or flee" mentality and think about using space to protect Earth and civilization for the very long term.

To that end, some of us have started an Alliance to Rescue Civilization, or ARC, that would copy civilization's essential elements -- its cultural, scientific, historical, political and biological components -- the way a computer's hard-drive is backed up, and for the same reason: to protect against a crash. The idea is to have a continuously updated archive stored both on Earth and in a large settlement on the Moon that would be self-sustaining.

Planetary defense, in its various forms, is so important it ought to constitute the overarching focus of a space program that is now so unfocused it is in shambles. A solid defense requires constant and relatively easy access to space. And that, in turn, depends on single- or two-stage-to-orbit, reusable spacecraft that can carry people and cargo at frequent intervals and be serviced like airliners.

In other words, we need a second generation shuttle. What we have, however, is a grossly diminished fleet of aged and precariously capable spacecraft that are not conceptually much different from the Roman candles that carried the Apollo astronauts. The technology to change that is at hand. It is foresight and the will to do so that are lacking.

Planetary Defense Speech

smwolfe — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 13:59:46 CDT

The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth

William E. Burrows
New York University

Planetary Defense Conference 2004
Garden Grove, California
February 25, 2004

I would like to depart this morning from the specific purpose of this
conference – a discussion about protecting Earth from asteroids – to consider
the larger subject of using space to protect it from many threats, home-made
as well as celestial.

This meeting is taking place at a very fortuitous time; a time that may
see a decisive change in the way we use space. I was tempted to say that the
space program may be about to change direction. But I have a problem with
that. If "program" in this sense is defined as a coherent, articulated, national
goal, there is no space program, and hence no direction. And there has not
been one since Apollo.

What has passed for a program since the Moon landings has been
multiple projects and mini-programs, often in competition with each other.
Some of them, like solar system exploration and astronomy, have been
nothing short of brilliant. So has Earth observation in its multiple forms,
which has given us an unprecedented understanding of where we live, from
weather observation, to resource monitoring, to climate modeling, to
measuring the planet's dimensions and vital signs in extreme detail. The
benefits derived from what used to be called Mission to Planet Earth have
been incalculable.

As much cannot be said about NASA's overall mission or about the role
of its spacefaring humans. Internecine warfare between advocates of a
manned program and scientists who think keeping people in space is wasteful
and unproductive predates the space age and is still going on. Lori Garver, a
former head of the American Astronautical Society, and Robert Park, the
University of Maryland physicist, debated the issue on PBS as recently as
January 14, after President Bush announced the plan to return to the Moon,
then send astronauts to Mars and other "worlds beyond our own." I'll return
to the president's new space initiative in a moment. Lori made the point that
sending people to space is important because it fulfills humanity's need to
explore new horizons. Prof. Park countered that little or nothing worthwhile
in science investigation off-planet can be done by people. He maintained that
machines – robots – can do science better and cheaper. Humans are a liability
in space, Prof. Park said, and should therefore stay home and deal with
earthbound problems.

One of the benefits of having observed and reported on the space age
for roughly three decades is that, as Yogi would put it, it was déjà vu all over
again. It took me back James Van Allen's leading the charge against the
Space Transportation System, which includes both the shuttles and the space
station. He was particularly wrathful about the shuttles. Following the
destruction of Challenger, Van Allen published an article in Scientific
American calling the shuttle's siphoning precious funding from the Galileo,
Magellan, and other science missions "the slaughter of the innocent."
Ultimately, of course, they were not slaughtered. Galileo's investigation
of the jovian system and Magellan's radar mapping of Venus stand as among
the great science missions of the space age.

The problem with science, as Van Allen, Park, and other investigators
know, is that the average American relates to it the way he or she relates to
swallowing a whole lemon. That is why all four of Voyager's close encounters
on the Grand Tour – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – starred the
imaging team's daily slide show in Von Karman Auditorium at JPL. And that
is why NASA quickly capitalized on imagery of the Martian landscape from
Sojourner and, later, Spirit and Opportunity. The rocks and the stark red
panoramic scenes of our eternal neighbor evoked H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice
Burroughs, countless stories about aliens, and the possibility of life beyond
Earth. To the extent ordinary people can relate to anything about science
from space, they can relate to pictures. The haunting images of Saturn and its
fabled rings taken by both Voyagers are classics, and the ones of a blue and
green Earth splashed by white clouds against the black void of space have
become the icons of the environmental movement.

Knowing this from the day it came into being, and also knowing that
sending people like Yuri Gagarin to space was a dangerous but exciting feat
with which ordinary people could identify, NASA invested heavily in the
manned enterprise. The fact that life support systems were indeed incredibly
expensive made them more worthwhile to a new agency that wanted to be
both relevant and permanent.

In 1958, when NASA came into existence, the plan to send astronauts to
space followed Wernher von Braun's and others' script as laid out in an
historically important meeting at the Hayden Planetarium in New York in
1951. It was soon expanded in a series of articles in Collier's magazine from

1952 to 1954. Basically, the plan called for using shuttles to build a station
that would, in turn, be an embarkation base for manned expeditions to the
Moon and then to Mars and Venus. That blueprint was quietly put away
when John Kennedy ordered Americans to the Moon to trump the Russians
politically. Whatever the reason for sending them, their successive flights were
the greatest feats of human exploration of all time. Apollo had a clearly
articulated purpose to which most ordinary people could relate. Furthermore,
it was institutionally elaborate, requiring heavy engineering and a huge
industrial base, which spread and consolidated NASA's empire.

But Apollo's success created the kind of conundrum that was once
articulated by wary performers in vaudville in the '20s and '30s: Never follow
a dog act. What, in other words, could be staged to keep the audience's
attention after a dozen people finally walked on another world?

Apollo funding began to fall off in 1966, three years before the dog act
was performed, so it was decided to take out the old blueprint and follow it:
return to the original Space Transportation System, starting with the shuttle.
But a problem haunted NASA: unlike Apollo, STS had no overarching,
majestic, clearly-defined purpose. It was based on a vague generality: to
establish a human presence in space for the sake of establishing a human
presence in space. The problem was that von Braun and his compatriots were
for the most part engineers. So they thought like engineers. That meant they
were driven by the technological challenge of building machines that
overcame gravity to get people and other machines to space. That is, they
wanted to provide access to a new, vast, and formidably dangerous frontier.
But they left an overriding reason for doing so to others.

This created a problem for NASA that continues to this day: how to
justify a $15 billion a year budget that is, ultimately, spent in the sky for no
apparent purpose? The mantra of the zealots in the space societies was about
adventure on a new frontier and humanity's manifest destiny to explore
forever and colonize the universe; to go where no man has gone before, as
Gene Roddenberry and his colleagues put it.

NASA, however, understood that Star Trek was not going to make it
through the Congressional appropriations juggernaut. Its administrators
knew that Congressmen had industrial constituents who wanted profits, not a
search for Oz. They also knew, consciously or otherwise, that trying to match
or surpass the dog act was unrealistic. So they turned to smoke and mirrors to
sell STS.

They peddled the intuitive notion that reusables would be cheaper than
expendables. They even paid a Princeton, New Jersey think tank called
Mathematica, Inc. $600,000 in the hope it would find that the shuttle would
indeed be profitable. When Mathematica reported that only a marginal $100
million would be saved during the write-off period between 1978 and 1990,
NASA told it to recalculate the savings based on a mind-boggling 714 flights
during that 12-year period. That was more than a flight a week, each one of
which was supposed to haul 65,000 pounds to orbit at $50 a pound. But
NASA would never even come close to that. It would eventually average
about five shuttle flights a year, costing close to $.5 billion a flight. The cost of
lifting one pound of payload to orbit would therefore be $10,000.

Meanwhile, the space agency decided to eliminate the shuttle's
competition by killing the expendable program, and scrounge for every
conceivable mission for both the shuttle and the station. The emphasis was on
public relations. STS was sold as being important for manufacturing perfect
ball bearings in near-zero gravity, doing experiments to cure such dread
diseases as cancer and AIDS, opening the way to the human exploration of
Mars, carrying school and other science projects in relatively cheap so-called
getaway specials, launching spacecraft that could have gone on expendables,
giving rides to foreign honorary astronauts, coming up with Teacher in Space
and Journalist in Space programs to reach wider audiences, and a great deal
more. In the most honest of all possible worlds, the manned program would
be called Make Work. It was an exercise in elaborate deception.
Whatever else it represented, the Columbia tragedy was a horrific
symbol of the space agency's dilemma. Lost in the televised disintegration of
the orbiter, the recriminations that followed, and the thorough accident
investigation, were the details of its mission. Seven exceptional human beings
were killed, and a $1.8 billion spacecraft lost, carrying science experiments
that could have gone on an expendable. These included an Israeli dust
experiment and a fast reaction science payload, as well as a large research
module loaded with other experiments, many of them biological. Also
included in the science package were spiders, bees, scummy Central Park
pond water, urine, a magnetized New York City MetroCard, and other things
for "science experiments" by American and foreign school children. One
experiment was designed to find out whether spiders would spin different
kinds of webs in near-zero gravity. Another was intended to see whether
ordinarily short-tempered bees would become even more so in space. Fifteen
harvester ants from Syracuse, New York, were also on board to have their
dispositions checked in an "Ants in Space" project. The urine,
euphemistically called "space water," came from kids in Idaho and was to be
mixed with paint to see whether it could be used instead of precious water to
color structures on the Moon.

Again, those "experiments" and the others could have gone on an
expendable instead of being taken on a fabulously expensive and notoriously
finicky spacecraft by people who were not necessary for the mission.
Similarly, Challenger blew up hauling a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite
that also could have gone on an expendable. Meanwhile, the International
Space Station continues to run in circles, with successive astronauts
undergoing endless and repetitive physiological tests whose purpose is to see
how the human body would react to long-duration missions that are not even
being seriously considered, let alone in the works. Every orbit carries it over
three grounded shuttles and a space agency that is hemorrhaging its most
experienced scientists, engineers, and managers, not attracting new ones
because of its perceived paralysis, and is even dependent on its collapsed cold
war rival for access to the station.

With that as prologue, I will take a few moments to share what
President Bush recently called his vision of the future in space. On January
14, as I mentioned, he delivered an address at NASA headquarters that called
for returning to the Moon to establish a base from which humans will set out
to explore "worlds beyond our own," including Mars. Like a similar plan
announced by his father on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum
in 1989, the president's "space initiative" was long on rousing rhetoric and
short on specifics. (He even invoked the spirit of Lewis and Clark.)
The president solemnly announced that the surviving shuttles would be
retired in six years and replaced by a crew exploration vehicle – that's vehicle
singular – that would take astronauts first to the Moon and then to Mars. No
additional details on the remarkably versatile spacecraft were given. Since
there would be no manned access to space between the shuttles' grounding in
2010 and the all-purpose crew vehicle's launch four years later, it would
require a great deal of luck to reach the Moon and then Mars. But that won't
actually be a problem because all of this is fundamentally delusional. The
president said his space initiative will require an extra $1 billion over the next
five years – that a mere $200 million a year – and the diversion of $11 billion
from the shuttle's $86 billion budget over the same period of time. But that
would be just a tiny down payment. It, too, falls so far short of the actual
amount of funding that would be required to build a base on the Moon by
2020 that it could have been written by Lewis Carroll. When his father
proposed essentially the same scheme after, as he later confided, being "set
up" by NASA, the estimates ranged from $400 billion to $500 billion.

What worried the space science community about the so-called initiative
was that it would take a hit to pay for the president's "vision thing." It didn't
have long to wait. Two days after the space plan was announced, Sean

O'Keefe told stunned astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute
that there will be no more re-supply and refurbishing missions by a shuttle to
Hubble. The telescope that has been the crown jewel of astronomy for a
decade, is one of the truly great science instruments of all time, and is the
closest thing we have ever had to a time machine, will therefore be allowed to
die, possibly as early as 2007.

O'Keefe's rationale for abandoning Hubble is that refurbishing it on a
shuttle mission would pose an unacceptable risk for the spacecraft and its
crew, since there would be no hope of rescuing them in case of an emergency,
as there would be if they were on a mission to the station. This has
disgruntled Walter Cunningham, who flew on Apollo 7, the first manned
Apollo mission, and many other space agency veterans, including scientists.
Cunningham recently attacked O'Keefe's decision on several grounds. Risk of
catastrophic failure is greatest at launch, he said, with the shuttle's main
engines being the chief culprits. Next comes re-entry. Neither of these is
related to the mission. Cunningham went on to make the point that risk is
still not precisely understood, but that it is generally comparable for all
missions. More important, the veteran astronaut concluded, the Hubble
decision reflects a failure of will in a once bold agency that is now broadly
characterized as having "the wrong stuff." "If we fail at something," he said,
"it should be because we are unable to do it, not because we are unwilling to
try it in the first place. Our attitude in that golden age of flying to the Moon
could be summed up in the thought, 'If this mission fails, it won't fail because
of me!' Now, the administrator seems to be saying, 'If anyone dies in space, it
won't be because of a decision I made.'"

(I should mention as a footnote that Cunningham thereby became one
of the growing number of members of the space community who, however
unintentionally, are breaching the ancient rift between those in the manned
program who think people belong in space, and scientists – notably, of course,
James Van Allen – who have traditionally argued that space is about science
and sending people there is both scientifically unnecessary and phenomenally
wasteful of resources.)

As disturbing as the Hubble Space Telescope's fate is, it is
overshadowed by a more pernicious problem. In reporting President Bush's
speech, The New York Times noted that: "With the nation deeply divided
along partisan lines on the most pressing issues of the day, including the war
in Iraq, tax cuts and the environment, Mr. Bush's political advisers backed
the plan as a way of associating the president with a unifying and uplifting
election year goal that transcends politics."

My only quibble with that analysis is that, to the contrary, the plan is as
political as it is unattainable. The president is not likely to care, however,
because he will have left office before it is supposed to start and his successor
will want to set his or her own priorities in space.
I have one. Use it to protect Earth and our collective civilization.
Spaceguard, which began cataloguing kilometer-or-larger Earth-crossing
asteroids in 1998 – rocks that could carry the potential for catastrophe – is a
first step in that direction. Last summer, NASA's Near-Earth Object Science
Definition Team issued a report calling for the cataloguing of ninety percent
of Earth-crossing asteroids larger than 140 meters. As you know better than
I, there are many more asteroids that size passing through the neighborhood
than the larger ones, meaning the probability of a collision is higher. And
while a 140-meter asteroid moving at 25,000 miles an hour would not end
civilization on impact, it would turn a large city and perhaps millions of
people into a smoking ditch.

The problem with searching for the smaller ones, as you also know, is
not technology. It is money. As Alan W. Harris of JPL, among others, has
noted: it's strictly cost-benefit. Severely limited funds cannot be used to
search for the relatively little guys. And when I say limited, I mean just that.
Spaceguard's annual budget is $3.5 million. To put it in perspective, that is
almost eight times less than the $27 million NASA is spending to repair the
sliding doors on the seldom-used Vehicle Assembly Building.

It is time change direction. Access to space for the first time provides
humanity with the means of protecting itself against a wide variety of
potentially devastating threats. Some of those means are already in place.
Obviously an anemic Spaceguard is one of them. So is an armada of satellites
that monitor resources and short- and long-term environmental problems –
the destruction of rain forests, pollution, and the effects of global warming
being three of them – warn of dangerous weather like hurricanes and
blizzards, survey earthquake and volcano areas, and watch (and listen) for
superweapon proliferation and terrorist activity. It is also vital that we
drastically reduce the fossil fuel threat by orbiting satellites that would reflect
clean solar energy to Earth. All of these should be coordinated into a
Planetary Protection Program, run jointly by NASA, NOAA, the Department
of Energy, the military, and the collective intelligence establishment, whose
goal would surpass Apollo's.

The program would move people off Earth for a continuous presence in
orbit, perhaps in large stations at L-4 and L-5, on one or more captured
asteroids, and certainly in a large, self-sustaining colony on the Moon. The
reason for keeping large numbers of people off Earth was clearly explained by

Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes in their epic space novel, Encounter with Tiber.
Osepok, the captain of a colossal intergalactic space cruiser, justifies the long
journey to her crew this way: "There's not a place in the universe that's safe
forever; the universe is telling us, 'Spread out, or wait around and die.'"

Settling the Moon is better than going to Mars for a number of obvious
reasons having to do with cost and technology. But it also has to do with the
fact that should the home planet run into a catastrophe, a rescue mission
would take three or four days to get here, not six months to a year. In
addition, some of us believe that a continuously updated archive of our
civilization should be kept at a number of places on Earth, and also on the
Moon, as a backup in case the original records of our entire civilization,
including DNA and other living matter, are destroyed. We call our group the
Alliance to Rescue Civilization, or ARC, and we would like it to develop into
an international organization that would preserve Earth's whole record into
the infinite future.

Ray Erikson, a very bright and creative aerospace engineer who has
read portions of the manuscript of The Survival Imperative for errors (and
found them), has said that humans are short-term thinkers with what he calls
a "fight or flee" mentality. Others agree and say the unfortunate trait may be
genetic. Whatever its cause, it has to be overcome for the ultimately most
important reason: survival.

That is the most compelling of all reasons to go to space, and if tourism
and exploiting the Moon and asteroids for resources, and other economic
incentives help to get the process underway, so be it. What is important is
that we create a program whose overarching goal is to use space to protect
Earth. We owe posterity no less.

ENDIT

Excerpt: Planetary Dreams

smwolfe — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 13:10:28 CDT

Excerpt from:
Planetary Dreams: The Quest to Discover Life Beyond Earth (Wiley, 1999) p.259

"A LUNAR SANCTUARY"

Early in this book, I brought up our need for a new story; one that includes an accurate account of the scientific Universe, and generates a meaningful human future within it. The philosophy of Cosmic Evolution qualifies. It pictures our existence as the product of a linked series of events that have taken place since the Big Bang. In particular, the events on this planet which produced humans from self-organizing chemicals over the past four billion years represent a precious achievement. If we value the experience of human existence, and look forward to its continuation and improvement into the indefinite future, then we do not want to place the accomplishments of four billion years of evolution at risk.

But we stand at risk when our biosphere is confined to the surface of our home planet. An asteroid may descend with little warning and wreak havoc with our climate and civilization. Other natural catastrophes which remain unknown to us may have caused some of the earlier extinctions, and they may recur. Finally there is the threat of nuclear war, which has receded recently but certainly remains as a future possibility. Hopefully, we will escape all of these dangers, but we need an insurance policy.

Imagine that a secure, self-sustaining base existed separate from this planet. It supported a population of humans, together with those advanced species that we have come to depend upon. This modern Noah's Ark, unlike its predecessor, would also store the scientific and cultural heritage of our civilization. Computers would preserve most of this bulk, but perhaps some authentic manuscripts and works of art could find their way over as well. If some disaster swept over our home planet, this base could serve as a resource to reseed our civilization on Earth, once the conditions permitted it again.

The Moon would seem to be a logical place for such a base, though Mars or an artificial colony in space may have virtues as alternatives. The closeness of the Moon and its mineral resources give it obvious advantages. Above that, we have already invested our energy and our emotions in that world, and the construction of the base would bring those efforts to some good conclusion. The primary purpose of Moon Base would be to ensure human survival, but we could undoubtedly find other good uses for it while awaiting a Doomsday that we hope never arrives.

ARC in the News

smwolfe — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 13:08:15 CDT

Media Coverage of Alliance to Rescue Civlization

1. New York Time (August 1, 2006)
2. SPACE.COM (November 2003)
3. SPACE.COM (July 2002)
4. SPACE.COM (October 2001)

ARC Mission

smwolfe — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:40:19 CDT

The mission of the Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) is to protect the human species and its civilization from destruction that could result from a global catastrophic event, including nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague and asteroid collisions. To fulfill its mission, ARC is dedicated to creating continuously staffed facilities on the Moon and other locations away from Earth. These facilities will preserve backups of scientific and cultural achievements, and of the species important to our civilization. In the event of a global catastrophe, the ARC facilities will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops, livestock and,if necessary, even human beings to the Earth.

ARC Vision

The Alliance to Rescue Civilization is a very long-term international project. It seeks to copy and continuously update the essence of Earth in its many forms for safekeeping at a manned site off the planet (the Moon or a huge station are the leading candidates.) ARC would in effect comprehensively back up Earth's collective hard drive for use in rescuing and rebuilding the planet in the event of a catastrophic disaster, natural or man-made. It would in no sense be a time capsule, but would rather be an updated record of Earth's multiple life forms, flora and fauna, and its broad spectrum of arts and sciences, history, technology and all else that constitutes the planet's collective nature and culture.

In the event of a major catastrophe, for example worldwide plague, comet impact, nuclear war or social collapse, the staff of ARC will function in a rescue capacity rather than as librarians. They will be prepared to help the survivors reestablish a functioning technological society, or in the worst instance, to repopulate the Earth themselves, and re-introduce the additionally needed biological species here. The primary mission of ARC will be to secure our tenancy of this planet, although it is fully compatible with plans to extend human settlement beyond the Earth-Moon system. ARC will provide our manned space program with the central purpose which it has so sorely lacked, linking it firmly to human survival on our home
planet and elsewhere. The ARC facility will stand as a visible and inspiring symbol of our aspirations, one which can overcome the negative connotations associated with disaster relief. With ARC in place, of course, other scientific and commercial uses of space will be facilitated. ARC can serve as an engine that pulls many freight cars.

The large scope and lengthy time span needed for ARC will require a comparable support system. Hopefully, some version of the project will continue as long as earth remains habitable - it transcends national boundaries and the lifetimes of administrations and political systems. While funding from national space agencies and the corporate sector for research and development on specific systems would be accepted, adaptive archiving technology, for example, its core sustenance will be based on private sector philanthropy. As an international, privately endowed Foundation, it could not easily be held hostage by unfavorable local circumstances. ARC will attempt to persuade a significant fraction of the human population to support its activities, but has no need to achieve a consensus. Religious groups who believe Earth is a staging ground from which we all will soon be called to the hereafter, and nihilists who feel that any effort to secure our future is futile, can simply be left alone to follow their own agendas.

A trek up a high mountain still begins with small steps. In the case of ARC, we will need to publicize the idea, attract supporters, and gather an endowment. At an early stage, a director, administrative assistants, and advisory committees will be needed. Among the matters to be considered are possible stages and timetables for project development, the compilation of lists of material to be archived, questions concerning storage and retrieval of materials, an inventory of potential hazards that threaten our existence, a consideration of the resources needed for various rescue scenarios, and the design of an initial functioning lunar facility.

As individuals, we are accustomed to insurance as a means of protecting things important to ourselves - our homes, health, cars and our very lives. As a civilization, however, we are driving blindly into the future with no insurance at all, despite the fact that we have very many precious things that we do not want to lose. The scientific advances of the last generation, in space, computers and biotechnology, have now made it possible for us to insure our civilization, and ARC is dedicated to that purpose.