The Millennial Project

Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps

by Marshall T. Savage

Reviews by Phil Fraering & Phil Goetz

ISBN 0-316-77165-1 (hardcover), 0-316-77163-5 (paperback);

Little, Brown, and Co. 1994; 508pp long and $16.95 (Pb)

Review by Phil Fraering

In The Millennial Project: Colonizing The Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, Marshall Savage outlines a bold plan for spreading life throughout the cosmos. Savage is erudite, convincing, and knowledgeable, but the book’s (and the associated plan’s) greatest strength is possibly its greatest weakness: the fact that it is a bold plan. One man’s foregone conclusion is another’s unwarranted assertion, and it is probably a good idea to work out ventures where not everyone need be in agreement to begin with.

The Basic Steps

Savage has outlined “Eight Easy Steps” towards conquering the galaxy, consisting of ocean colonization, drastic reduction of launch costs, the establishment of space colonies (or “ecospheres”, described in great technical detail) first in free space and later on the surfaces of airless bodies like the moon, the terraforming of Mars, the transformation of the solar system into something like the original conception of a Dyson Sphere, and a program of galactic colonization.

Ocean colonization has been proposed on and off by many groups, and is especially popular in libertarian circles despite the unfortunate ending of the lamented Minervan Republic. Savage proposes as a first step towards learning about closed ecologies and volume-efficient architectures the construction of structures that are part arcology, part ocean-thermal power plant, and part oceanic aquaculture facility.

He believes that this ocean arcology will be necessary for people to learn to live in space, to get them used to trading personalized possessions for a mutable personal volume (since it seems that in his future, personal spaces will be defined not by possessions but by volume and information; I’m doubtful this can really be done.) Since I don’t know enough about architecture and city design to criticize his vision here in depth, I am going to try to analyze Aquarius in a slightly easier way, by analyzing his market.

Like other ventures, he believes the best location for such a facility is near the Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean, but not only for the reasons others have given, which involve the geographic circumstances of the area: his location is close to his market.

The proposed primary exports of Aquarius, as the project is called, are foodstuffs and power for Africa; he is probably at least half right, since there is no large-scale power infrastructure in

Review by Phil Goetz, goetz@cs.buffalo.edu,

I was lured into buying this book by the praises on the jacket of the entire surviving hard-SF old guard: Clarke, Niven, Pournelle, and Poul Anderson. If you want to attract stares and convince the mundanes that you’re wacko, leave this book on your coffee table. (“See my book on how to colonize the galaxy in eight easy steps? I think I’ll start tomorrow.”)

The book provides a step-by-step plan for colonizing the galaxy. Each of the first 5 chapters is an impressive achievement by itself. It looks like Savage has been gathering this information since the 1970s.

The Eight Easy Steps:

2. Aquarius (2015 AD): Floating cities. Motivation: Provide engineering and social experience necessary for space colonies. Functions: 1. Produce electricity, seafood, algae, and communications relay stations. 2. Provide room for growing population. Problems: food, building materials.

Solutions: algae, seafood, calcium carbonate and magnesium electrodeposition

Savage plans to use algae to provide the bulk of food for sea and space colonies. But the algae he likes are dangerously high in vitamins for anyone living on them exclusively. Savage proposes 600g (dry weight) of algae a day. Since he bases this on a 2500 cal/day figure which actually only counts resting metabolism, I shall up it to 840g. This would give you 1.4g = 528K IU/day of vitamin A (50K IU/day is considered toxic), 3g/day of potassium (.3-.5 mg is normal, 18g/day can cause heart and kidney problems), 21mg/day of zinc (25mg/day impairs copper absorption, 150mg/day may impair the immune system), and 361mg of iron (RDA is 10-15mg/day). The vitamin A is not dangerous if it is actually beta carotene, but the book doesn’t specify.

3. Bifrost: Build a magnetic mass-driver to move things into space cheaply. I consider this the most important step. This electromagnetic launcher will be in an evacuated tunnel at least 125 km long (for hardy human passengers willing to tolerate 225 g’s for 2 seconds on entering the atmosphere), whose tail end runs up a big volcanic mountain near the equator: Mt. Kilimanjaro (Tanzania), Mt. Kenya (Kenya), or Margherita Peak (Uganda and Zaire). The launched mass will have a block of ice on its lower end, which six 250MW lasers will vaporize to provide

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most of Africa at present. Savage proposes that dirigibles filled with hydrogen be used to deliver the energy, which solves part of the infrastructure problem. If Africa manages to grow out of its current economic and political problems, then early entrants into the market there will profit greatly in spite of the current situation. As Bernard Baruch said, roughly paraphrased, “The best time to buy is when blood is flowing in the streets — even if it’s your own.” The success of the Aquarius Project may be self-limiting if food is to be a major export item over the long term due to the peculiar problems faced in Africa in its current state of agricultural development.

Everyone has seen the pictures of starving children, broadcast worldwide, whenever the Horn of Africa has a significant drought; given such images, and the Malthusian mindset which permeates much social thought today, it is easy to conclude that these problems are all due mainly to either overpopulation or environmental catastrophe. This is not entirely true. Agricultural development in Africa is hindered by several unique factors: it is heavily dependent on manual human labor; for a period of several centuries, the legal regime has favored herding over agriculture or horticulture; there have been several bloody wars; and continuing political corruption ensures that no change in this is likely soon.

All of these problems feed on each other; with a large amount of human labor needed in order to produce food, a famine tends to simply reduce the amount of available agricultural labor with which to feed the survivors. This is why no matter how many people died in the last famine, there will still be deaths in the next one. A loss in some economies of scale will probably tend to make the next famine worse. This will also happen due to the bloodshed of

civil wars such as are going on there now. Combined with a bias in the legal community of many of the states, due to the Islamic law of the 15th and 16th centuries, towards goats and cattle as a more viable form of property than farmland, which encourages erosion and defoliation over large areas, the outlook looks bleak indeed. This situation will only change when there are real and stable regimes of law in place that respect private property and act to encourage agriculture and industrial development, or even allow such ventures to be possible without the loss of most profits (or even operating expenses!) as necessary bribes to petty officials or squad leaders.

While criticizing the market potential of Aquarius may initially seem off-target, it is the factor that determines whether it survives, and if it gains enough surplus capital to be able to move on to the project’s next steps. Since this isn’t a government project, it has to support itself. I think its goals are laudable, and that it probably has a chance of being profitable as well as worthwhile in its goals of attempting to feed the hungry. However, it has substantial competition, because a lot of the Malthusian roadblocks that dominate most of modern futurism are only in our head.

Only if political reforms were to come about would it be possible for Aquarius to operate in the market, but if that situation came about, within the decade there would be no need for food importation into Africa, and within two decades it

further thrust. Savage proposes that the capsules be designed as sonic shock-wave riders so they can glide back down for reuse.

Savage mentions a space station, “Valhalla”, to serve as as staging area to develop Asgard.

4. Asgard: Ecospheres in space. Function: Communications. (He doesn’t mention solar power for export to Earth.) Problems: radiation shielding, water, heat dissipation, meteorites, orbital junk, bone loss.

Solutions: 1. Use water for radiation shielding. 2. (He doesn’t say where the 6 million tons of water will come from.) 3. Circulate water through the radiation shielding to dissipate heat. 4. Use a recursive bubble structure to provide safety from meteorite punctures. 5. Use the Bifrost Bridge lasers to blast orbital junk. 6. He thinks we can prevent bone loss by electrical stimulation, although there is no good evidence that this is a safe or effective long-term treatment.

5. Avallon: Colonize the moon.

Problem: organic materials, esp. hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon.

Solution: Mine the Apollo and Amor asteroids.

Savage envisions the doming-over of bubbles. This looks nice in pictures, but may not offer practical advantages. (Building is easier on flat ground.) He doesn’t say how impervious lunar rock is to oxygen. I wish he had dealt with the problems

I doubt the Millennial Project in itself will succeed in being the main driver of a human presence in space. It suffers from a requirement of close agreement among its members. Savage hopes that new forms of electronic democracy will be able to forge a consensus and manage a society in ways that haven’t been seen before.

of construction materials and how to get them as well in this chapter as he did for Aquarius.

6. Elysium (2125 AD): Terraform Mars.

Problems: oxygen, water, spacecraft power (chemical rockets aren’t enough).

Solutions: 1. CO₂ atmosphere from Martian ice. 2. Water from comets steered to collide with Mars. 3. Power from fusion.

7. Solaria (2250-2500 AD): Transmute the substance of our solar system.

Problems: water, energy.

Solutions: 1. Water from the moons of Jupiter. 2. Dyson sphere/cloud. Clever plan to surround Sun with a solar-power skin which does not orbit, but is held aloft by sunlight pressure.

Savage discusses the effects of a vast population (e.g., 5 billion billion). At any given moment there would be 500M “Einsteins” and “Michaelangelos”. Savage says people will naturally organize into meta-beings, based on a shaky analogy to cells forming animals and brain cells forming brains. He proposes territory be given to whoever gets there first. This is nicely self-organized, but I think it would create a terribly uneven distribution. Savage doesn’t ask whether the first settlers are entitled to as much territory as they can use. (With nanotechnology and the ability to create life, one person could use an entire planet).

8 (viewed sideways) (3000-1000000 AD). Galactia: Colo-

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would be impossible to find a cheap kitchen appliance not made there. Industrial development, on the heels of the power distribution system Savage wants to build, would help supersede the current manual-labor agriculture system with something more efficient, which might or might not start to limit the market for Aquarius’ foodstuffs.

I’m going to limit my criticisms of the other steps in Mr. Savage’s plan to the next two immediate steps, partially due to my relative inexperience with the construction of Dyson spheres or the terraforming of Mars.

The next step after Aquarius is Bifrost, which is envisioned as a combination of mass driver and laser launch system to be able to launch massive amounts of things and people into space cheaply. I suspect that as currently conceived Bifrost is a bad idea. It requires the investment of tens of billions of dollars in a lump sum in order to be constructed, and its low costs are only realized if it captures a huge volume of traffic.

There are literally dozens of schemes or plans capable of achieving the same thing, given the same constraints of large amounts of capital and a large mass throughput. Proposals that come to mind include various large big dumb booster concepts, conventional laser-launch systems, mass drivers suspended from large aerostats, advanced airbreathing aircraft, reverse coilguns in orbit, and static and kinetic tether systems.

(A slight digression: an incomplete list of spacecraft propulsion technologies has been compiled by Dani Eder and is available on the internet at ftp://explorer.arc/nasa.gov/pub/SPACE/FAQ/eder.transport.list;

it is the most complete document of its kind that I know of. I recommend it as a good bibliography for anyone interested in the subject.) There are no current ways of telling which of them will actually be economical or even work, and I suspect that Bifrost goes about the whole approach the wrong way: it involves subjecting its payloads to enormous accelerations and aerodynamic stresses, which puts severe constraints on the shape of the vehicle, which may not make it efficient in all operating regimes.

I don’t think any of these problems are impossible to solve. I do believe, however, that it would be better to do a lot of small-scale research first. Jordin Kare has proposed subscale laser-launch facilities capable of launching a payload to orbit that would cost somewhere around $300 million dollars (I don’t have figures for how much it would be in today’s money, and the proposal is at least three years old and presupposed some infrastructure developed for the SDI program that may not exist). Test vehicles for some of the technologies in Dani Eder’s list would not be expensive. The Air Force is going to be building a prototype vehicle for testing the technology and ideas behind Mitchell Clapp Burnside’s “Black Horse” proposal. (Black Horse is a lifting-body rocket-propelled vehicle designed to refuel from a tanker aircraft after takeoff). There are a host of government and non-government proposals for SSTO vehicles.

With proposed communication satellite networks like Teledesic, there may be a market to develop some of these technologies immediately, and once the cost drops one or two orders of magnitude, the mechanics of the market changes.

nize the galaxy.

Problem: Fusion power won’t provide enough power for interstellar travel.

Solution: Antimatter.

This chapter explains why the galaxy on the front cover is green: Savage thinks light from Dysonized (“K2”) stars will look green. We will live in the “Mossy Way”. He doesn’t waste our time with speculation about faster-than-light travel. There is an under-informed section on the odds of life evolving, which trails into an explanation of why we do exist that strikes me as

His plan’s major flaw is that of Marxism: He assumes people are good. He requires mass behavior motivated by something other than self-interest. He argues that people can colonize space without losing huge sums of money, and that it will be profitable, but he does not claim that these colonies would be sound economic investments.

a wacky New-Age argument with quantum mechanics waved over it.

1. Foundation (Now): Constitute the First Millennial Foundation.

Contact: Marshall Savage, POB 347, Rifle CO 81650. Internet: mtsavage@pipeline.com CompuServe: 73163.3612@CompuServe.com World Wide Web: http://www.csn.net/~mtsavage BBS: (303) 625-3273, Voice: (303) 625-2815

Savage proposes to organize the Foundation as a true democracy, with no representatives. The book does not dwell on this point, but Savage clearly hopes that the Foundation will spread this anarchical self-organization across the galaxy.

The first step of the Foundation will be to publish a magazine, along the lines of Omni and Discover, to popularize ocean and space colonization. The second step is to move into books, TV, and other media. Third is a test sea colony in the Caribbean. (He doesn’t mention Biosphere II at this point, which I think serves a similar purpose.) The rest of this chapter is more inspirational than informational. (Note: The First Millennial Foundation’s 3rd annual Conclave will be August 4-6, 1995, in Denver.)

SUMMARY

Savage has vision and excitement, and communicates it. He has a knack for sig-file phrases, like “I am just a simple home-boy, and take no great interest in anything much beyond the Magellanic Clouds.” He’s gathered ideas from technical articles and presented them in a painless way, and added many of his own. The book does an outstanding job of generating ideas and excitement for expanding into space, and the plan is as detailed as one could expect within 418p.

His presentation has some problems. Savage speaks of every step in his plan with absolute certainty, so you seldom know whether a proposed solution is tried and tested or purely theoretical, or whether his knowledge is deep or shallow. His expertise is in space, and space travel and development. Outside

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It is not obvious to me that the ability exists to commit a massive amount of resources while entering the market later than everyone else, and hoping that the grand scheme being invested in is capable of competing with everyone else’s second or third generation developments past today’s technology in space access. The space launch market has faced a chicken-and-egg dilemma; the government was happy with high launch prices, and there wasn’t a large enough non-government market to justify the commitment of research funds. Teledesic changes this: its projected budget (from what I can tell from the sketchy information available) is enough to launch roughly a thousand 2000 lb. satellites, leaving nothing left over to build them. It requires a massive breakthrough in order to succeed.

Given this set of problems, I doubt the Millennial Project in itself will succeed in being the main driver of a human presence in space. It suffers from a requirement of close agreement among its members. Savage hopes that new forms of electronic democracy will be able to forge a consensus and manage a society in ways that haven’t been seen before.

I have my doubts about this. Even in a closely-focused group such as the Extropians, I find myself in disagreement with many others here on such basic topics as religion, the philosophy of science, and many economic issues. I don’t think this group is ready to design a space station by consensus or democratic action. Thankfully that isn’t the goal of this group, and the group can be structured so that I can cooperate with people I disagree with on common goals. Unlimited democracy isn’t working at the national level, in this state, or the cities I live and work in. It used to be a limited democracy, but that changed pretty fast at all levels: at the local level, all it took was one Huey Long. I don’t think an experiment where the Extropians tried to run each other’s lives by direct democracy would end peacefully.

Former members of such focused groups as the L-5 Society will remember the infighting and bickering that took place there, as what was a common interest group had to concentrate on total consensus in order to achieve political lobbying goals and failed in many of them, or succeeded in achieving the political goals at the cost of their ultimate goals.

Ten or twenty years from now, when we have cheap space access, there will be people willing to follow the Millennial Foundation’s vision. There will be competing visions: people unwilling to wait while all the myriad problems on Earth are solved before launching interstellar probes. I believe that the problem of the Fermi Paradox will be a driver of much space science in the next fifty years, and that within thirty years at least one robotic space probe will be launched towards another solar system to gain information relevant to solving the problem.

Is The Millennial Project a good book? If you want to read a book with a lot of good ideas relevant to space colonization, it is, and I enjoyed it in that context; I enjoyed the ideas without enlisting in the utopia. If you’re looking for an all-encompassing plan for space colonization, you will probably enjoy this book much more, although I have my doubts about such plans. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid Freeman Dyson’s books, which I recommend strongly, this is a good introduction to the concept of directed panspermia. If grand utopianism isn’t your cup of tea, though, you will probably find the book lacking.

that area, coverage varies. (In the two areas which I can judge, artificial intelligence and chaos theory, he speaks at the level of someone who’s read an article in Discover. But they aren’t important to his plan.) Some things are just wrong, such as the discussion on CaCO₃ deposition (which seems to be based on experiment, but you can’t be sure), and his suggestion that we dilute antimatter with water. Although there are 727 footnotes, you usually can’t tell whether an idea came from Savage or someone else.

Savage’s mystic revels annoyed me. (“North Polar cap of Mars: Cosmic coincidence or thumb-print of the gods?”) He believes that the galaxy has been prepared for us to colonize. If he would at least admit to belief in a God then I would not suspect him of committing grave teleological errors. But a first approximation of his teleology is that he thinks this universe was created for us, not by God, but by ourselves. (See Galactia above.)

His plan’s major flaw is that of Marxism: He assumes people are good. He requires mass behavior motivated by something other than self-interest. He argues that people can colonize space without losing huge sums of money, and that it

His presentation has some problems. Savage speaks of every step in his plan with absolute certainty, so you seldom know whether a proposed solution is tried and tested or purely theoretical, or whether his knowledge is deep or shallow. His expertise is in space, and space travel and development. Outside that area, coverage varies.

will be profitable, but he does not claim that these colonies would be sound economic investments. He thinks that people will telecommute from the colonies. I disagree; the only jobs in the ocean or in space will be ones that can’t be performed as cheaply in regular Earth cities. This problem affects the earlier stages (Aquarius and Asgard) more than the later stages. Savage doesn’t consider developments in nanotechnology or genetic engineering.

He says we must spread life throughout the universe, and foresees vast nature reserves on Mars. He doesn’t explain why anybody would build them other than for moral reasons, and indeed there is no other reason. Nor does he explain why humans would cherish other life forms in the future when most haven’t in the past.

Still, we need Savage’s vision. He has a long-term goal for humans and space — colonize the galaxy — rather than NASA’s short-term, wasteful, and ineffective “put a few people in space now”. To Savage, galactic colonization is not a fun way to spend money, but a moral imperative. So far as we know, all the rest of the vast universe is dead and empty. It is up to us to fill it with life. If we fail to do this before we are hit by the next series of asteroid strikes, or we do ourselves in, or our population grows until we are too poor ever to escape Earth, we condemn this great universe to be an empty graveyard for all eternity.

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