The Wet Route to the Stars

An industrially-driven, ecology-first vision for people who dream of space travel

Where is our technological development pulling us? What are the open frontiers and the places we can make the most near-term and long-term impact today? How does one reconcile the conflicting imperatives towards growth and sustainability? These are crucial questions for the present moment that I can’t answer in general, but that I believe in taking seriously and talking through, via particulars, with friends and colleagues.

Out of all the many topics to discuss, one of the big picture pieces that I’ve always been most inspired by has been space: off-Earth settlement and development. I’m sharing this now to make a brighter counterpoint to my last piece here, which covered dark sides of techno-optimism as expressed in reactionary modernism.

This essay intentionally minimizes certain big pieces of the future story, such as AI, nanotech, and finance, in order to keep a tight focus on what is materially distinctive in space itself. Those and others are deep, relevant topics that deserved more words than I could give them while still presenting my core points here concisely, but any comments about how they might play a role are absolutely welcome (though please try to make a good impression).

First we find harmony with the sea otters, then we invite them with us to the galactic core. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Space Stocks, Space Flows

Generally, when one hears talk about how to colonize the solar system today, one hears a familiar chorus. There’s a typical sequence of destinations: the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, the outer planets’ moons. There’s a typical set of target resources: precious metals, breathing gases, fuel gases, water. There are typical aesthetic ideals: hard-lined rigid structures in orbit; colossal yet intricate robotic mining rigs; silent sleek speed between interplanetary destinations.

I like these, but I also like the counterpoints: the bio-inspired spaceships of Revelation Space, vast ecological megastructures of space-adapted plants and posthumans as in Endymion, the eerie infovores of Echopraxia. And when I look at the actual history of the expansion of mankind over the surface of the earth, I think there is a basic problem with the typical emphases for space development: whereas all of these typical priority target resources are forms of stock resources, the history of human settlement shows that stock-driven colonization is reliably shallow, temporary, and exploitative. Expansion that goes beyond colonization, that is deep, sustainable, and generative, comes from settlements chosen for their flow resources.

Civilizations begin in river valleys, not at veins of ore. Great cities form at harbors and river crossings; the most prosperous agricultural lands, such as the floodplains of the Nile, the Ganges, and the Yangtze, are more often defined by their natural fertility regeneration capacities rather than just having the richest soils to start with. Prior to grain-based agricultural civilizations, fishing cultures on the coasts and rivers followed similar patterns.

Stock resources implicitly create races to exploit them and then to move on after the stock is exhausted. Flow resources implicitly create incentives to create and sustain stable ways of life.

For this reason, I have different emphases when I talk about settling the solar system. Instead of the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and outer planet moons, I talk about the oceans, Venus, Jupiter, and then the Sun. Instead of metals, breathing gases, fuel gases, and water, I talk about atmospheric chemical cycles, solar light and wind, planetary dynamos, and active geology. And for the aesthetics – we’ll get there in a bit.

In all of this I am emphasizing active flows, which correlate with dynamical fluidity, whereas passive stocks correlate with dynamical fixity. In simpler words: the flows are wets and stocks are drys. Hence my title: the wet route to the stars.

Venus: hot sulfuric acid fogs moving at 200 mph. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Vision for Venus Over Mars

Mars and Venus will each be heroic challenges to settle and bring in to the range of livable human habitats. Mars is brutally cold with almost no atmosphere, while Venus is brutally hot with a heavy, hostile greenhouse atmosphere. Each is Earth-like in only a very broad sense.

Neither of these two will be an easy challenge, and neither needs to be exclusive of the other. However, of the two, I am much more inspired by Venus for a simple reason: however hard it will be to settle Venus in the first place, once you have found a niche it will continually reward you for staying. Venus’s more active hostility is paradoxically exactly the reason to prefer it.¹

For instance, take the heat: Venus’s close orbit to the sun will make it a far more high-power-density location for solar powered satellites, atmospheric flying craft, or cloud cities. Solar powered flying drones designed to stay aloft indefinitely on Earth, once properly acid-hardened, would energetically fly among Venus’s clouds as well.

Or take the 200 mile per hour winds: this is a terrible danger right up until the safety is mastered and it becomes an incredible stream of sustainable mechanical energy.

Or take the sulfuric acid clouds and rain: Encyclopedia Britannica calls sulfuric acid “the largest single product of the chemical industry.” Industry on Earth relies heavily on free water availability and spends enormous resources to produce sulfuric acid; on Venus sulfuric acid will be free while water will become one of the single largest products of Venusian chemical industry. The inversion is unnatural to our intuitions and will require heroic innovation to adapt to, but it also promises immense and sustainable comparative advantage for some form of Venusian chemical industry relative to Earth’s chemical industry. Whoever finds that comparative advantage and develops it will have lasting reasons to stay on Venus and to love it as a generous home.

Even the furnace-like, high-pressure, volcanic surface of the planet may be an opportunity in disguise: these might be perfect ambient conditions for sustainable robotic metallurgy designed as a next evolution of more extractive Earth-based deep-sea mining rigs—after that deep sea high-pressure, high-temperature, high-corrosion terrestrial industrial robot technology hits predictable diminishing returns and increasing costs.

Currently, the most popular plausible vision for colonizing Venus suggests building floating cloud colonies in the sulfuric haze just above the cloud tops, where ambient conditions match Earth pressure and temperature and where Earth atmosphere is a lift gas, so that people could live inside the balloons of airships kept at steady altitudes. This vision combines with any and all of: flocks of solar-powered robotic gliders, surface mining and metallurgy rigs attached to the cloud cities by electronic communication tethers, ground-tethered wind-driven mechanical factories flying like kites in the lower atmosphere, and sulfuric-acid-rain-eating water-biorefinery airships. There might be many sustainable reasons to settle and live on Venus as more than just explorers, researchers, or resource extractors; it is a place that will offer immense and lasting flows to whoever learns any good reasons to participate in them.

This is a very incomplete vision, but it has several excellent features. Most important to me for this essay are just two: first, it fits on a track from Earth innovations if we first develop floating ocean cities, undersea technologies, and wind power technologies, which should be much simpler and earlier-priority than colonizing either Venus or Mars regardless; second, from the technologies and ways of life developed for the cloud cities of Venus, it’s a natural next step to the great gas giants of the outer solar system.

I’ll continue with that second one now in the next section, continuing the utopian high note that all current inspiring visions of space expansion keep central. Then in the next section, I’ll return to Earth to discuss how ocean homesteading and developing atmospheric technologies as first steps to Venusian settlement weave in another more grounded, sustainable, and ecologically-responsible bass harmony to complement the high optimist vision.

Jupiter’s complex reducing atmosphere swirls above rich reservoirs of fusion fuels. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Vision of a Jupiterian Fusion Era

Jupiter is already a prominent target location in extraction-based, stock-focused space colonization stories. There is a simple reason: futurists expect nuclear fission power technology to eventually give way to fusion power technology, and no planet has as rich or as accessible a reservoir of fusion fuels as Jupiter. Its hydrogen and helium content is unmatched among the planets; only the Sun is a richer source.

But from my perspective, prioritizing sustained natural flows, simply pumping Jupiter for these chemicals as if it were a vast oil reservoir would be an incredible waste and underutilization of its potentials. If the cloud cities of Venus are coming online and the tech stack for Venusian metallurgy and sulfuric acid industry have become sustainably profitable by the time the fusion power stack is advanced enough to reward mining Jupiter for light gases, significant portions of the tech stack for persistently settling Jupiter’s atmosphere could also be ready as Jupiterian He/H fuel extractors become established.

The atmosphere of Jupiter poses many of the same challenges that Venus’s does, but with certain variables flipped. Both have high winds and high pressures, but whereas Venus’s atmosphere is acidic and oxidizing, Jupiter’s is basic and reducing—posing the exact opposite corrosion problems, and also promising strong comparative advantages for certain chemical industries compared to either Earth or Venus. Ammonia and hydrogen sulfide are freely present in its clouds; free oxygen will be scarce. Venus may specialize in highly oxidized chemistry while Jupiter specializes in highly reduced chemistry, with the middle between them maintained on Earth.

More distinctively, while Venusian settlers will face radiation challenges from the more intense and nearby sun, Jupiter will present major radiation challenges from itself. Jupiter’s magnetic field is incredibly strong and vast, and the auroras around Jupiter’s poles routinely emit X-ray radiation. In fact Jupiter’s poles are hotter than its equator because its atmosphere is heated more by the strong auroras of infalling solar wind than by sunlight. While fusion researchers develop high magnetic technologies and radiation shielding for fusion power sources they will also be developing the technologies needed to harness the natural magnetism of Jupiter as a flow resource in its own right. To a properly prepared settler the prima facie dangerous auroras might begin to look like free, naturally self-maintaining particle accelerators. This could be an astonishing place to develop particle beam industries, possibly even femtotech.

The flows and dynamics of Jupiter below its clouds, meanwhile, remain deeply mysterious and largely unknown. The phase behavior of flowing hydrogen and helium at high pressures and temperatures is unclear, and while there is almost certainly strong convection and electrical conduction to support the magnetic fields, whether this is due to layers of metallic hydrogen or some other structure is unclear. What is clear is that there is a great deal of roiling energy in this planet, which is the largest and fastest-rotating in the solar system; core temperatures have been estimated at 50,000 degrees Kelvin (compare to Earth’s 5,000 degree core and the Sun’s 5,000 degree surface). It is too early to speculate as to which new industries or artificial self-replicating nanotech quasi-lifeforms might thrive in this environment, but whoever does find ways to harness these strong unknown flows will likely find themselves richly and repeatedly rewarded.

And once the radiation challenges, the high-magnetic industries, and the high-pressure hydrogen convection technologies are developed, there is just one more natural step before going out of the solar system—to jump in front of the near-Sun-orbit solar panel satellite arrays of would-be Dyson sphere builders—to dive in to the convection layers of the Sun itself.

This currently insane-sounding challenge will have become a surprisingly natural next step after all of the prior work is done, and, having done the dive, venturing to settle other systems will become unexpectedly natural as well: who needs to worry about planetary habitability or terraforming or even landing, when they’re comfortable simply diving into a target star directly to set up their next starting base?

But before I start speculating madly about galactic scale flows, attotech pulsar-surface industry, or settling black hole jets or accretion disks (and perhaps that’s just prelude to the wholesale development of a non-baryonic dark sector economy), let me depart from this techno-utopian high note and return to the steadier environmental bass line.

A stormy Western Hemisphere. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Working Towards These Visions in Earth’s Oceans, Rivers, and Clouds

I am not myself an unmixed techno-optimist. I am not at all sure that taking the wet route to the stars would succeed at getting us multigenerational settlements on Venus in the next thousand years, much less to the black holes at the center of the galaxy.

History is full of ambitious technological plans that overpromise and underdeliver, and it can take a surprisingly long time for newly discovered design principles to become practical to apply. Technology levels can move downwards as well as upwards. Sustained development with widespread prosperity requires more than just trusting to the tailwind of Progress or trusting to the forward pull of Vision.

However, even if the wet route to the stars takes several hundred years to settle Venus or never does, it has one certain advantage over the dry route for guiding developments on Earth: it helps channel the paths of techno-optimism through sustainable technologies rather than extraction technologies, better aligning cosmic dreams with terrestrial necessities.

I’ve already made several suggestions for how Venusian settlement technologies could develop out of terrestrial technologies. Three examples involved deep ocean mining, sunlight-powered flying drones, and kite wind turbines. Successful settlement is never solely a matter of material technology, however, and always also requires forming new functional social patterns and charismatic ideals. The technologies must fit together into patterns of life that people find inspiring to live, and in fact, historically, these inspirations come before new practical applications of a technology for life.

Before any sufficient group of people would move together to permanent residence in a cloud-floating city on Venus, there would almost certainly need to be prior examples of people living well in ocean-floating cities on Earth. And that in itself is already a big jump! (I was at the second Seasteading Institute conference in 2009 – I’ve seen the difficulties.) To make marginal progress on these massive visionary social transformations that may or may not in fact prove to be great ideas, it’s best to get them started with much smaller, already-appealing steps that will be worth attempting regardless of whether the grander vision can be realized.

These should be humbler, more tangible, and easy to contribute to without complete buy-in to the grand-scale projects. They should also be multiple, separable, and redundant, so that any and all can proceed in parallel with minimal mutual dependency, forming a portfolio of broadly aligned but distinctly motivated optimistic development movements. Almost any inspiring view of how Earth’s natural flows could become better supports to human life could fit into this portfolio, and there are countless of these.

Instead of describing these abstractly in any greater detail, I prefer to provide a few concrete sketch-examples of the sort of thing I have in mind. Each example will take the form of a possible regional American political-economic movement that matches existing social ideals and motivations to natural potentials for participating more fully in Earth’s spontaneous flows.

Sea Otter Nationalism 🦦🍣🌊

Kelp forest aquaculture seasteading for the West Coast

From cats on equatorial savannas to dogs in boreal forests, mankind has a long history of working together with the top predators of the major Cenozoic ecologies as part of its process of expanding into those ecologies itself. If seasteading is going to really make the oceans a new home for humans on the West Coast, it will probably be crucial to tame and befriend the native sea otters who manage and expand the highly nutritionally productive offshore kelp forests.

Kelp forest is already a wonderful source of high-end seafood and it is evolutionarily novel for the Cenozoic, with perhaps as much future potential for agriculture as teosinte and wild barley had twelve thousand years ago before domestication. With the right charismatic coalition of coastal surfers and holistic yoga girls, plus the charisma of the sea otters and the beauty of the undersea forests, there may be enough inspiration and energy available to pioneer near-shore kelp homesteading and new ocean pollution management politics more capable of protecting offshore animal ecosystems from toxins and human viruses.

Hibiscus Red Tribe 🌺💃🏽🌋

Caribbean cryptographic federalism

As Libertarian US cryptocurrency enthusiasts migrate offshore for favorable regulatory treatment; as the native populist leaders of their new host countries experiment, like El Salvador, with enthusiastic adoption of crypto; and as the Hispanics of Miami and Texas become more open to tactical alignment with Republican politics (especially the Trumpian variety), there appears to be a new nascent populist-libertarian alliance fusing colorful Caribbean cultural energy with international technical expertise.

On the purely political side, long Latin American experience with the hypocrisy of US regional governance efforts and regrettable subversion of left-wing idealism by dishonest actors has created fertile ground for popular crypto-libertarianism providing automatic, distributed accountability mechanics for popular oversight of government function. On the economic side, El Salvador’s proposed experiments with geothermal-powered crypto mining may prove a general template for breaking countries of the Global South out of the development trap that (a) building computational and electrical infrastructure is only profitable given high industrial demand for computation and electricity, but (b) industrial demand for computation and electricity will not grow unless infrastructure is adequate: tapping into international crypto demand provides (a) regardless of (b). There are many such political and economic threads to weave together into a new, grounded regional development movement for the Caribbean.

Bighorn Eyrie Syndicalism 🐏📡⛰️

Mountaintop union tech hubs in the Rockies

Driving through the grassy valleys of Colorado between peaks today, one can still palpably feel the land’s latent potential for regenerating the now-missing herds of sheep and flights of eagles of the pre-colonization Rocky Mountain ecology. The peaks themselves stream with strong wind and gleam with light, each promising reliable flows of green power.

Though today most of these peaks and valleys are empty, it is tempting to envision a future where organized mutual aid collectives of ranchers, engineers, and other workers come together to form anarcho-syndicalist or communist experimental societies in hollow honeycombs carved into these peaks.

Ranchers might ride out to follow and manage the local sheep herds accompanied by auxiliary solar drones maintained by the engineers who also mine the mountain’s interior. In a relatively lawless near-future American civil war scenario the individual mountaintops might be fortified semi-autonomous enclaves overlooking their valleys. The season and weather permitting, the eyrie dwellers could hang glide, ski, or mountain climb as they like in their collective backyard, practicing the skills needed to travel efficiently to other, similarly settled peaks without impractical dependence on high-maintenance asphalt roads. Wind focusing above the ridges might provide local rewards to develop kite-turbine wind power; the local natural gravels, grasses, and erosive stream patterns might support or inspire new thin-soil high-efficiency hydrological engineering; but only with a sufficiently compelling starting vision could the possibilities be explored with enough depth to know exactly which prove realistic and which prove mere fancy.

St. Lawrence Restorationism 🦫🚣‍♂️🌲

Riparian ecotechnics between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes

The industrialization of the waterways of the American Northeast mixed both early triumph of unprecedented prosperity by the end of the nineteenth century and later tragedy of unprecedented pollution by the end of the twentieth. The great shipping locks of the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes, for instance, exemplify the ambivalent legacy of this development, simultaneously making a vital and productive shipping lane while compromising natural river flow and inviting a steady succession of new invasive species into the Great Lakes.

The St. Lawrence itself is an ambitious target for restoration or redevelopment, but ecologically minded communities along other rivers of the region, for instance the Hudson and the Kennebec, could first organize their smaller regions as testbeds for proving various new river management concepts for later restoration of the St. Lawrence.

These tests could include new more fish-friendly hydroelectric concepts that make better use of natural river flow than typical dams, new agricultural technologies that better tolerate natural flooding and better protect rivers from runoff, new bioengineering-augmented biodynamic gardening methods to clean up polluted riverside land, or simply new river-minded lifestyles that center the clean river as a crucial amenity to greater effect. With the various subregions all cooperating and competing together to suggest and test components of an eventual restoration plan for the great St. Lawrence, the projects could all mutually support one another and find new reasons to subsidize and trade goods and know-how with one another.

A distant galaxy, an eventual destination? Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Full Route

All together, the wet route to the stars consists of the following broad steps:

1. Regional ecological-technological movements develop flow-participation technologies that adapt human civilization on Earth for more fluid environments, especially in oceans, rivers, and high winds.

2. These technologies form templates for innovations to settle Venus sustainably and permanently in atmospheric floating cities that manage solar satellite arrays in orbit, high temperature and pressure industries on the surface, and chemistry tuned for strongly oxidizing conditions in the clouds.

3. The cloud-city technologies and lifestyles developed for Venus are adapted for Jupiter, where the cloud chemistry is now reducing and fusion fuels are abundant but new radiation shielding and harnessing becomes necessary.

4. The radiation-hardened, fusion economy cloud cities of Jupiter provide the prior art for directly settling the convection layers of the Sun.

5. Once stellar environment lifestyles and industries are sufficiently self-sustaining, humanity expands to new systems star to star rather than planet to planet, bypassing the need for multigenerational planetary terraforming projects and the risks of fallible long-distance extrasolar planet surveys.

In my lifetime, I do not expect to see the end of step one, much less the whole sequence of one through five. I plan to live and die participating in various regional ecological-technological movements on Earth. Nonetheless, it’s natural to maintain some loose larger-scale, optimistic framing narratives for one’s narrower goals and expectations, and this “wet route to the stars” is one of mine.

At the same time humanity progresses along this wet route, it can also pursue the dry route without conflict. I have my doubts that extractive colonies would result in long-term, thriving, culturally independent settlements, but even then, metals and ices gathered from the asteroids and outer planet moons would certainly help with provisioning the more sustainable settlements on Earth, Venus, or Jupiter. Common technologies for inter-orbital travel in the solar system will certainly be useful for both routes as well.

My purpose for focusing on the wet route rather the dry route is, first of all, that the wet route is a reminder that techno-optimism need not imply an extractive race to the bottom where we dream of gobbling up one space rock after another like Tyranids. It can instead be a dream of complementing each solar system’s spontaneous evolution by participating in its already-spontaneous flows: forming fertile new specialized biospheres and new humane lifestyles for each planet and star.

Second, and even more importantly to me, it is an invitation to maintain patience and localism. In a flow-centered economy, every agent can have its own natural source of economic rents provided by its specialized complementarity to unique flows of nature. The grinding, alienating assumptions of perfect competition and interchangeability are given the lie by the reality of thousands of years of farming and fishing practice. Cutthroat competition and hard authoritarian exploitation in these settings reliably make deserts, by ruining soil or depleting fisheries, whereas dignified communal governance and deliberative constitutional government have a much stronger track record of maintaining long-term natural fertility and abundance.

And finally, it’s simply to my taste! I don’t get excited imagining myself spinning in a can moving from resource depot to resource depot. I do get excited about the idea of the first tree-like bio-organism or cyborg to reach autonomy on Venus, or the idea of taking a glide through Venus’s cloud tops wearing a thin wetsuit-like acidsuit. It’s hard for me to be awed by a Dyson sphere, but it’s easy for me to be awed by the idea of implanting a huge cybernetic pump into the center of the Sun to constitute a sort of solar heart. These might be terrible ideas, but they would at least be the sort of terrible idea that leads to more profound engagement with the essences of the alien rather than just exploiting the alien for what is externally familiar about it—not just using the alien as means to fulfill our existing goals from Earth, but also treating it as partner to inspire new goals entirely.

Regardless of whether you share any of these motives or have now been persuaded in any way to try exploring the wet route yourself: both ideally and in practice, everyone will follow the big picture visions that personally inspire them most. Whichever visions end up coming closest to what actually happens, if the steps we each take in those different visionary frames are practically and ethically well-grounded, we will all do good for each other regardless.

1. This pattern can also apply to dating, but be careful.