Brian Cox: Why Earth’s orbit is the new Wild West and what that means for us all

I attended several meetings and conferences where, of course, many countries and international bodies that are trying to work on the management of space

I find that it's a challenge because, of course, it's always a challenge when different countries and different commercial interests and so on are trying to flesh out agreements about how you manage your frontier

but ultimately I find it exciting because what it means is we're now at the stage

where as the great Carl Sagan said we're beginning to take our first steps

out into the cosmic ocean and I always remember and he said the water seems inviting

so it's a tremendous opportunity What opportunities might space colonization offer? I think we're at the frontier of a very exciting time in our history as a civilization

because we are now I think on the verge of becoming a space-faring civilization in the

truest sense of the word let's say multi-planetary civilization so there's been a revolution

in engineering in the last 10 years or so the last decade because now we have reusable rockets

So SpaceX, now Blue Origin, have reusable rockets, which means that access to Earth orbit is cheap or at least cheaper than it's ever been before

So we are industrializing the space above our heads, just a few hundred miles above our heads, at an ever increasing rate

Of course, it's been very important to us for many years, decades, in fact

So satellite navigation, communications, weather forecasting, Earth observation, climate observation and so on

The observation of Earth from Earth orbit has been part of our lives, whether we think about it or not, for quite some time

But now, because we have the technology to access it cheaply, I think we are seeing a revolution

And so it will not be long before there isn't just one crewed space station in orbit, which is the International Space Station

There will be multiple space stations in orbit. There will be scientific research at a much higher level in orbit, commercial scientific research

There will, of course, be space tourism. There's an increasing demand on communications, for example

So the Starlink satellites, hundreds and hundreds of them up there. There'll be multiple competing constellations of satellites that allow us to make phone calls and access high-speed internet from any point on the Earth

And so that process is accelerating and it is going to accelerate further

So what does that mean? So there's a tremendous opportunity. It's incredibly exciting

Before we start thinking, by the way, about going out to the asteroids and mining them and building cities on Mars and building cities on the moon and so on

But let's just talk about Earth orbit first. It's tremendously exciting, huge opportunity

But of course, when you start to move outwards to a new frontier

then the frontier can become crowded. You can have competition for the real estate

You need some way of managing conflicts between, by which I mean physical conflicts between the satellites

What happens if someone's satellite comes close to another satellite How do you manage that? Do you allocate particular orbits? Or do you say that we're going to have some framework like air traffic control, where you have an avoidance system that everybody agrees on, whereas if two things come close, they avoid each other? That framework is not yet there

I attended several meetings and conferences where there are, of course, many countries and international bodies that are trying to work on the management of space

I find that it's a challenge because, of course, it's always a challenge when different countries and different commercial interests and so on are trying to flesh out agreements about how you manage a frontier

here but ultimately I find it exciting because what it means is we're now at the stage where as

the great Carl Sagan said we're beginning to take our first steps out into the cosmic ocean

and I always remember and he said the water seems inviting so it a tremendous opportunity but what kind of opportunities are going to open up Well we know for example

so already from our experience on the International Space Station, that sort of development of new drugs, for example

or development of new ways of building semiconductors, for example, silicon wafers and so on

lots of experiments have been done that suggest that there might be an advantage to on-orbit manufacturing

So it's in a microgravity environment of certain things, growing crystals and so on, which might be useful

And so as we begin to get more experience operating in microgravity

we begin to see that there are applications for particularly material science and biosciences

But beyond that, so when we start to move outwards beyond near-Earth orbit and build the infrastructure

that we need close to the planet to begin to move further out into space

then opportunities begin to open up that I find tremendously exciting. So one very well-known example would be mining asteroids

So one could argue, there are people that argue, that one of the biggest problems we face and have faced historically on Earth

is competition for resources. so not only just the pure competition which leads to conflict and war if you think those resources

are limited which they are on earth but also just the stress of course that you put on the earth

itself on the environment as we we our civilization grows and requires access to more resources it

damages the planet it creates conflicts and so on but if you have the infrastructure to begin to

move outwards, for example, to the near-Earth asteroids, then what you find is that resources

are no longer limited in any reasonable sense. There are vast amounts of resources out there

in space that we will have access to within the next decade or so, or certainly few decades

So that begins to transform the way that we think about our civilization, the way that we think about

expanding our civilization, increasing the capability of our civilization, and so on

I think, so I think there's a tremendous opportunity there to grow our civilization

crucially, without further damaging the planet that most of us will live on for the foreseeable

future. And that's why, for me, I'm ultimately optimistic about those steps that we're making

into space. I mean, I would not have imagined, I think, if you went back 20 years, that we would be

we would have so many rockets flying and coming back to the Earth again, and then flying again

Perhaps within my lifetime, but certainly at this point in the 21st century. So I think it's

exciting. But the challenges, as with all new technologies, and you could extend this debate

by the way to artificial intelligence or quantum computing as well as space flight. The challenges

come when we try to build the regulatory framework and you need a regulatory framework

One of the things I think we're very bad at on planet Earth is recognizing that we all live on

planet Earth. So we're all on the same spacecraft, let's say, making our way on our journey around

the sun and ultimately challenges about the management of space or the management of artificial

intelligence or the management of the power potentially quantum computers i think ultimately

are global challenges and we are very bad historically at facing global challenges together

so that would be the the my my worry um and of course just to say how you think about space

So literally, it's only a few hundred miles that way. Up there now, there are satellites whizzing around

other than the geostationary ones, like the International Space Station would be a good idea

It's in a country's airspace for a matter of seconds. So clearly, you need to develop some way of managing that environment

which involves international collaboration, because the environment the objects that are up there doing all the jobs that we want them to do don stay in any one country airspace for more than a few seconds or minutes And so it kind of obvious to me that we need a framework to manage that

When we contemplate the size and the scale of the universe and our place within it

which you're forced to do when you think about the distance scales and the sheer size and age of the universe

then I think it's very natural for us to tend to come to the conclusion that we don't matter at all

And it's true in some sense, just physically. What are we? We're little specks of just a collection of atoms on one mote of dust orbiting around one little star

in 400 billion stars in one galaxy amongst two trillion galaxies in a small patch of a potentially infinite universe

So clearly it is true. We are physically insignificant. So I've tended in the past to focus arguments or think about arguments of our value in the context of what does it mean to live these finite, fragile lives in this infinite universe

universe. And I can make a strong argument and have many times that notwithstanding our physical

insignificance, we may be remarkably valuable because the number of civilizations on the

average in a particular galaxy, any given galaxy, might be less than one on the average. Many

galaxies may not even have civilizations in them. If that is the case, and that it's speculative

but if it's the case then we would be remarkably valuable notwithstanding our physical insignificance

because we would be perhaps the only place in the milky way galaxy where collections of atoms have

come together that can think and do science and have conversations like this in a very real sense

bring meaning to an otherwise meaningless galaxy so that that has been my position for some time i

I think it's a good working hypothesis, by the way, as an aside

If you think that we, I think Carl Sagan said it many years ago

in some sense, if that's the case, we have a responsibility to the cosmos itself

Because, you know, we're a product of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution

but we might be a very rare and special product. But we might only be here, we'll only be here for a small amount of time

The sun will only be here for a small amount of time in cosmic timescales and so on

So I've tended to make that argument. But one of the great joys about reading other people's views about essentially being a scientist

is that you can come across a point of view and you think, I hadn't thought of that

that I might change my mind given that wonderful piece of thought

And I found it happened to me recently. I was reading a book. It's a very old book now by David Deutsch

who is one of the greats, one of the founders of quantum computing

So he really is a physicist and a thinker worth paying attention to

And he made a point, which I had heard before, actually, in a book called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

by John Barrow and Frank Tiffler, which was a huge influence on me when I was an undergraduate physicist

so I couldn't believe I'd forgotten this point. But David Deutsch and Barrow and Tiffler pointed out

that it's not necessarily the case that life will always be a speck

something that's very valuable and local in the universe, but doesn't make much difference on a cosmic scale

It's not necessarily the case. because you can imagine so let's take the earth as an example so you might say well a planet

is a very big thing and living things are very small so they don't make much difference to a

planet that's wrong because if you look at the earth its atmosphere is the product of life

it's got oxygen in it and high concentration it would not have that without photosynthesis

so obviously now our civilization has sculpted the surface of the earth you see it if you look

at the earth from space you don't just see oceans you don't just see a kind of common or garden

planet on the night side of the planet you see our civilization so we have now transformed the earth as a civilization but life has been transforming it for billions of years so you could say well okay so what what happens if we stay here we become a space civilization we don destroy ourselves or we we aren destroyed by some impact from space then could

you conceive of technology that could start to affect the solar system and the answer must be

Yes, we could imagine building cities on Mars. We could imagine, in physics, pure physics terms, terraforming Mars, turning it into a habitable world

We could imagine going to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. We could imagine going to the edge of the solar system

You could even imagine, could you imagine technology in a million years, let's say, that would allow us to begin to affect the lifetime of the sun

Could you imagine that? in physics terms according to laws of physics i suppose you could you could imagine a tremendously

powerful civilization that could start to i don't know throw material into the sun whatever it is

maybe it was ridiculous thing to do but you could at least imagine it and then you go a million years

two million years three million years 10 million years a billion years into the future imagine

that our civilization expands to the stars and becomes an interstellar civilization

Imagine our civilization populates the entire galaxy. There's nothing in the laws of physics

that prevent that. And imagine we start to understand the quantum theory of gravity. We

start to understand how space-time works. Imagine if we start to glimpse some underlying structure

in reality that gives us power that we've not yet dreamed of. Who knows in a billion years

And so is it really true that in the far future of the universe, then life will play no role

Or could it be that life could play a central role in the far future of the universe

And the reason that it reminded me of Barrow and Tiffler's magnificent book, The Anthropocosmological Principle, which I strongly recommend, is that in there they consider a cosmology, which sounds like science fiction

but you can conceive of it given the known laws of nature

It's a cosmology called the Omega Point Cosmology. So they consider a re-collapsing universe

Now, at the moment, our universe is accelerating in its expansion or whether it continues to do that forever, we don't know

But at the moment, there it is. But in a re-collapsing universe, you can at least consider a situation

where life in the far future is so powerful that it can begin to control the collapse of the universe

and try to configure it presumably by moving matter and energy around in some inconceivable way

you can you can just about construct this thing such that the the the ability of life to process

information, increases faster than the rate of collapse of the universe. And so what that means

what does it mean? It means that what's the appropriate measure of time for an intelligent

being? It's really, I think fundamentally, it should be considered, you should think of it as

the time it takes to process one bit of information. And it turns out that you can at least write the

equations down for a universe in which the ability to process information diverges to infinity

before the universe collapses so you you are in that case you almost say that life

manipulates the universe such that it becomes immortal right in the far future now i emphasize

this is complete you know it's beyond speculative so i'm not advocating for this

that for this position that that's the way that nature is but it's really interesting it was

really interesting to me to just think about it the the point i think the key point which is

interesting is that it's not necessarily the case that life remains insignificant on a cosmic scale

you shouldn't assume that because if life persists sufficiently long and becomes sufficiently

knowledgeable and powerful, then it may be able to influence larger structures, not just planets

and not just solar systems, perhaps not just even galaxies. And it's a very beautiful idea