Tired of Earth? Ready to colonize the galaxy? This book tells you how—no, really!
My friend and I are both dreamers, but we grew up with quite different dream preferences. I wanted to live in Narnia, while she had her eye on a farm boy from Tatooine; when I played at meeting legendary creatures with my Jennifer doll, she was playing Space Station with her Barbie. There was, however, a shared component to our dreams—the strong sense of wonder we both derived from our reading, whether science fiction or fantasy.
Several years ago, my friend pressed this book into my hands, insisting that I read it. I glanced at the title—The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps—and assumed I was holding a massive sci-fi paperback. With a name like that, what else could I expect?
In a way, I wasn't entirely wrong. As one reads The Millennial Project, a kind of scientific utopia is unveiled, a blueprint for humanity's future in space; author Marshall T. Savage has attempted to create a unified vision of what that future will look like and how we will get there.
Clear back in 1798, Thomas Malthus theorized that food and other resources grow only arithmetically, but human populations grow exponentially. While this theory has largely been discredited—technology has brought significant advances to food production, and wars, plagues and birth control have changed the spiraling rate of population growth—at some point or other humanity has the potential to saturate the planet. Yet author Savage believes we are unique in the cosmos, the only beings to gain true sentience; his main theorem is "we exist as a species for one reason: to bring Life to the universe." If this is so, our species will eventually be in dire need of Elbow Room. The only way to provide this room to grow over the long haul, claims Savage, is to spread out and start colonizing space now.
Savage has divided his book into eight main strategies for space colonization:
AQUARIUS - Space Colony at Sea
In deep-sea areas, build floating islands around ocean thermal energy converters (OTECs) to generate cheap power, feed the world's hungry and help reverse the greenhouse effect. Later, build bubble habitats underwater to learn in a "safe" environment how to live in space.
BIFROST - 21st Century Launch System
Instead of using costly and wasteful rockets where up to 96% of the vehicle's mass is devoted to fuel, create an electromagnetic launch tube tunnel supplemented with lasers in order to launch payloads (and eventually passengers) into space cheaply.
ASGARD - Space Colony in Orbit
Build a series of low-pressure, gravity-free bubble cluster space habitats in geostationary orbit around Earth.
AVALLON - Ecospheres on the Moon
Dome over the moon's craters to create permanent ecospheres, extracting the necessary oxygen from the lunar soil. Use such ecospheres as bases for mining, launching payloads (even cheaper under the moon's low gravity) and preparing for the next step—
ELYSIUM - Terraforming Mars
The author posits that Mars is a "freeze-dried" planet with all the resources necessary to make it a living world. By liberating the planet's frozen carbon dioxide and adding massive amounts of water vapor from several deliberately-impacted short-period comets, it would be possible to give Mars an
atmosphere—and thus a temperature—capable of supporting life.
SOLARIA - Colonizing the Solar System
To combat the long-range problem of overpopulation, create a huge collection of bubble habitats in the asteroid belt capable of sustaining 7500 trillion human beings, mining the Jovian and Saturnian systems for water and other necessary resources.
GALACTICA - Colonizing the Galaxy
A fully mature human culture made up of people numbering in the sagans ("billions and billions") will have the combined intelligence and technology to spread even further, colonizing the galaxy and beyond.
FOUNDATION - The Millennial Movement
Chronologically, this ought to be the first of the eight steps, since formation of the First Millennial Foundation (aka the Living Universe Foundation) is the method by which Savage and other like-minded individuals would make these dreams reality—but hey, he has to give you the "pitch" first, right?
Sure, it sounds cool, but isn't this all theory? Yes, but remarkably well-documented theory. Throughout the text, Savage makes reference to numerous scientific journals, published papers and other research in the specific areas he discusses. For those who wish to double-check his science, the book contains eight appendices, a 22-page bibliography and copious endnotes describing the science and technology of his proposed projects.
For a book so thoroughly researched, The Millennial Project is remarkably accessible. On rare occasions it reads like a physics textbook, but on the whole Savage manages to stick to a casual, very readable tone, similar to science fiction—indeed, at times he veers into science fiction proper as he speculates what the quality of life might be like in various space habitats. He's even managed to get Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the Grand Old Man of Science Fiction, to write a glowing foreword.
Of course, writing and thinking on this kind of massive scale, one is bound to run into problems. Marshall Savage displays a remarkable understanding of multiple technological advances and engineering techniques, but his writing reveals that he is a product of the 1960s and many of his ideas are still rooted in that time period. He waxes rhapsodic on sweeping communal enterprises, losing one's identity in solidarity with others, working for the Greater Good; at the beginning of the book he even quotes lyrics from "The Age of Aquarius." This attitude, while obviously sincere, has not aged well. Human beings are still unique individuals who are usually inspired to do things for personal advancement; when trying to set up a massive project such as this, appealing to a higher call works only in the short run.
Perhaps because of his New Age outlook, Savage also has real difficulties grasping the complexities of human nature. Most people would balk at the idea of eating synthetic foods created from blue-green algae, yet that is precisely how Savage suggests we feed our burgeoning populations. Not everyone will want to live in a space habitat, but Savage places the overwhelming majority of humanity among the asteroids by the end of this millennium—"Every person who has ever dreamed of having his own little world (including me) will be headed pell-mell for the asteroid belt." Really?
The political arena is another area where Savage does not excel. You may dislike or reject the word, but the truth is that human beings developed politics in order to get things done without having to kill each other. Pretending there will be no political difficulties in securing space for OTEC islands, or tunneling under the Serengeti Plain in Africa to create Bifrost, is hopelessly naïve. These are real problems, and they must be faced, not ignored, if Savage and those like him plan to do more than dream.
Another problem, of course, comes in the largely linear progression of Savage's treatise on galactic conquest for dummies. Each step depends on the overwhelming success of the one before; there is very little "fudge factor" to Savage's calculations. If ecospheres do poorly, or an attempt to terraform Mars is a disastrous flop, well, that's the end of that.
If there are so many holes in this book, why do I recommend it? For one thing, it contains that indefinable buzz, that sense of wonder, that I mentioned in the first paragraph of this review. Savage does a very good job of describing floating sea colonies, the low-gravity lunar atmosphere, and other exotic places that exist only in the mind's eye. Even if there are problems inherent in his treatise, leaps in his logic—even if you think he's completely nuts—this book is a highly entertaining read, and it gets the reader thinking on a gigantic scale. For that reason alone, I recommend it to dreamers, science fiction fans or anyone interested in nourishing the inner geek.