ABL Futurism

I always write about analyses on events in past and present because most of these analyses are about history related to socioeconomics, daily political events, and statistics (may infer future events although the inference is derived from past and present).  Nowadays, majority individuals seem to be tired of knowing various upsetting or even depressing present events, and knowing past events hardly guide to overcome from the recent unforeseen events to anticipate optimistic future outcomes.

At this time, this essay attempts to demonstrate the imagination of the future world structure.  It is simply an imagination not derived from my own analytic tools, and I am not an expert of astrophysics basing the design of futurism.  Therefore, this content is indeed an amateur work so hope the readers tolerate this amateurism. Nevertheless, this attempt based on my amateur-imagination might hint some productive idea-formation in my field of expertise socio-economics.   

This discourse about the imaginary future of the human civilisation is mainly based on the Kardashev scale distinguishing the civilisation development level into several types.  For example, the type I civilisation enables a civilisation to harness the entire energy of and control the entire atmosphere of their own planet; the type II civilisation does of their entire-solar system they are living in; and the type III civilisation expands this scale to the entire galaxy their solar system is located in. 

The current Earthian civilisation is considered to be the type 0.74 in terms of Kardashev scale.  The step starts from the rough proposal to develop the civilisation from this current level to the further, and it covers the brief imaginary strategy to evolve from the below type I to the point when it reaches to type II.

 

1. Evolving toward the type I civilisation while colonising the Moon and some asteroids 

Human individuals are ought to stabilise their living environment more than nowadays in order to develop their civilisation level beyond this state.  They are still prone to various unforeseen natural and political disasters hindering the development.  

The entire world cooperation will be mandatory to induce such a scenario so the political and socio-economic consensus among the entire human individuals living in this world will be the crucial key to implement it. At the same time, this cooperative unification must not invade personal liberty of these human individuals in order to maintain their happiness and the innovative free thinkings.  This is also crucial to encourage the members to voluntarily input their productivity and provide some innovations to research and develop this enormous plan. 

On the top of this aforementioned condition, the abundant physical material resources must be obtained.  The earth itself may not be enough to extract this amount of resources to raise the human civilisation up to the type I. In particular, various kinds of high-tech equipment require a multitude of rare metals which are more abundant in the Moon and asteroids floating in the solar system. 

Firstly, asteroid-mining might be demanded faster than colonising the Moon in order to obtain the already scarce rare-metals.  The artificial intelligence (AI) will be applied to remotely control the asteroid catcher launched into the space.  

There are various unique methods to reach the Moon.  The conventional method is rocketing a space-shuttle, which exhausts chemical resources and energy.  As the Moon expedition requires not only launching materials and various equipment machineries but also sending actual humans to the Moon via the space travel.  This process has to be far more efficient than completely relying on the energy inefficient conventional rocketing method in order to prevent the substantial environmental damage on the Earth.  

While capturing some asteroid and colonising the Moon, it is expected for the human civilisation to be developed to reach the fully type I by taking an advantage of the material development and the political cooperation.  They are expected to realise that their cooperation with more available material resources may enable their capacity to evolve their civilisation level.  

In addition, colonising the Moon to establish the stable moon-base is useful not only as a mining base for the resource mine but also as a transfer station for the further expedition toward the solar system.  At this point, humans become able to make a good use of resources from both the intraterrestrial and the extraterrestrial area within the circle of the Lagrange points where the Moon rotates around the Earth.  

On the other hand, the human population and the human-individuals' desire will expand further than things will be available at that point.  In order to avoid their conflict for limited resources and limiting both their mind and their available capacity, they will need to endeavour to evolve their civilisation beyond what is available in the Earth and her orbital satellites. Then, their expedition expands to the solar system. 

 

2. Terraforming Mars and Venus

Mars is the most notable candidate for the future immigration destination for humans by colonising it in an extra-terrestrial field.  The Moon is not capable enough to prop up the continuously growing human-population and civilisation scale. However, the colonisation process proposed here is different from many pioneers' proposal: Instead of launching capital equipment and humans directly onto Mars such as being done onto the Moon, the discourse here manifestos to completely terraform Mars by recovering the atmosphere which disappeared in the past.

In this proposal, Mars is treated not merely as some substation like the Moon and a big asteroid; It regards of Mars as a backup planet of the Earth where humans permanently station to live by breathing air, utilising water resources, and bringing in plants and animals from the Earth in the atmospheric environment. 

Reviving the atmosphere requires increasing the magnetic wave produced from Martian core.  The magnetic wave from a rocky planet's core protects the planet's atmosphere from the intense solar radiation destroying the atmosphere. When the substantially weakened magnetism, the atmosphere in the past was once stripped off by the solar radiation.  Therefore, strengthening the magnetic wave is essential. 

For the time being, there is no technological invention achieving to increase the magnetic wave from the planet's core so it assumes this technology will be invented in the future.   When this technology is invented and enough material and financial resources are prepared for, a set of the megastructure will be built based on this technology.  In order to strengthen Martian magnetism, these megastructures will be launched onto the Martian Lagrange points, L1 and L2, rotating around Mars.   They are assume to offer the mechanism of strengthening the magnetism from outside Mars on these Lagrange points.

When the magnetism is strengthened enough to sustain the atmosphere, the positive cycle of floating gas in Mars is assumed to emerge.  At this moment, carbon-dioxide (CO2) is trapped as a form of dry-ice.  When the atmosphere appears and the heat from sunlight remains in it, CO2 is expected to flow inside the atmosphere.  Then, Martian atmosphere will be warned up.

The huge deposit of water-ice is buried under Martian soil.  When the aforementioned atmosphere starts offering a warmer temperature, the ice will melt to produce water.  Then, oceans and rivers of water are expected to emerge.  Afterward, there will be a multitude of implemented methods to create oxygen, implant Earthian vegetations, etc. 

Terraforming and colonising Mars is important not only for duplicating the Earthian environment but also establishing the transfer station for Jupiter expedition.  They will need a significantly huge amount of hydrogen to extract from Jupiter for the next mission, terraforming Venus to colonise.  In particular, on the way to reach the type II civilisation (colonising the entire solar system), this potential of colonising Venus will be helpful to increase human-resources and to proceed the expedition to Mercury and Sun.

Venus, another rocky planet whose size is close to Earth, is another useful planet to terraform to enable human-habitation.  Venus has already contain her atmosphere despite its completely inhabitable condition.  Nonetheless, it is worth considering to take advantage of this already existing atmosphere.  

In order to transform this bizarre Venusian, a massive amount of hydrogen possibly extracted from Jupiter and/or Saturn will be bombarded into Venusian atmosphere filled with CO2.  The chemical reaction with CO2 and hydrogen is expected to produce oxygen and then water.  

Afterward, the next step is to shield Venus from the extreme sun heat and modifying the oddly long daylight time by installing some megastructure.  At that moment of technology, this will only matter of resources and motivation as the technology capable to achieve will be already available then.

During this process, when the situation becomes more or less controllable by humans, they will build a bunch of floating fortress shaped like a blimp to station inside there.  Unlike Venusian surface below her atmosphere at the pre-terraforming period, the temperature of the inside atmosphere above the surface is considered to be habitable.  

The next step will be the journey toward Mercury to construct the enormous factory to build Dyson Sphere surrounding Sun.  Dyson Sphere is a mandatory super-megastructure to produce the massive scale electric power enough to prop up the human civilisation spread inside the solar system. 

 3. Constructing Dyson Sphere from the factory and the power substation built on Mercury

This gigantic megastructure called Dyson sphere directly harnesses the energy produced from the nuclear fusion reaction of a star.  This is roughly estimated to produce the power equivalent to approximately 100 quintillion times of the electricity power plant equipped with the most efficient nuclear reactor available nowadays. Instead of capturing electricity from star-light by solar panels located in either the planet surface or the planet's orbit, the capturing equipment is settled directly beside a star itself. 

Some professional astronomers and many amateurs believe that there has already been an existence of Dyson sphere in the universe.  For instance, Hubble Space Telescope has detected a star in several millions light-years away showing the unusually frequent dimming of lights.  

Many sceptical astronomers have claimed that it is because of a bunch of space dusts and asteroids floating on this star orbit. Nevertheless, stars are the remarkable source of energy seemingly well-serviceable to sustain and expand a civilisation entrenched within or beyond a star-system. Therefore, there can be some alien civilisation successfully having constructed this gigantic megastructure to supply such a scale of energy power.

For humans living and thriving in the solar system, Dyson sphere will become an essential power supply source.  In particular, after expanding their habitation beyond their mother Earth, they will eventually need this scale of energy from the place where it is efficiently harnessed to meet their demand.  

At this period of development stage, they have to improve the living standard of their home planet Earth, maintaining the liveable environment for humans in their colonies, the Moon, Mars, and Venus, and continuing to station on asteroids and possibly the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.  Therefore, there will be a robust demand for the massive energy supply source of Dyson sphere for sure.

By means of the current understanding of physics, enveloping Sun with a solid shell of the sphere is so fragile that a collide with small asteroid will demolish the entire structure.  Then, instead of building a gigantic solid shell, many astrophysicists have come up with the idea of launching a humongous number of orbiting solar-panels (or the mirrors reflecting sun lights) and the energy collecting stations swarming around Sun. 

In order to keep these swarming parts floating, their materials have to be light and not easily colliding with the others.  In order to produce this humongous number, the design structure has to be simple as much as possible.  Thus, some astrophysicists have proposed the idea of combining the solar panel mechanism with the mechanism of the solar-sails 

The construction base must be build on the location with an abundant metal resource and near Sun. Mercury is the only candidate place to establish this base.   Mercury is the planet closest to Sun and metal-rich.  Furthermore, Mercury does not have an atmosphere so it is convenient to launch these parts onto Sun's orbit.  Then, it will be possible to constantly launch these parts by rail-guns from the surface of Mercury to Sun's orbit while repeatedly manufacturing these parts.  

The power transmission station between Dyson sphere and the other places will be settled in the Lagrange points L3, L4, and L5 of Mercury (L1 and L2 are too close to dodge the beam of energy power supplied from Dyson sphere).

4. Endeavour toward beyond the type II civilisation

After finishing the construction of Dyson sphere and successfully transmitting the energy supplied from there, this will be the point where humans will achieve to establish the type II civilisation of Kardashev scale.  

At that moment, humans will have explored the entire solar system to Pluto.  From then on, it becomes really difficult to imagine exactly how the human civilisation evolves furthermore.  

There is one perspective assuming that they will attach a gigantic thruster on Sun assisted by Dyson sphere to move the entire solar system all together.  It suggests this movement will be needed to dodge a shock-wave from a supernova or something threatening the existence of the solar system and the civilisation itself.

After these aforementioned events, it is beyond our comprehension to predict what is going to happen to evolve the civilisation beyond these imaginations. Yet, we have never know how the future will turn up to be meanwhile it is indeed interesting and might be helpful to imagine such a futuristic event.