Remember how you read those issues of Silver Surfer from the ’60s and reflected long and hard about the possibility of pacifism when all an intergalactic traveler encounters was warlike aliens? The mad scientists at Darpa want you to put those musings to work on its most cosmic project yet.
Darpa recently launched a program called the 100 Year Starship, which is exactly what it sounds like: an effort to achieve interstellar flight by the year 2111. This is Darpa, so they’re dead serious. They also recognize that 2011-era technology probably isn’t good enough to forecast the state of the art over the next 100 years.
But technology isn’t sufficient for an effort as epochal as reaching other galaxies. That’s why they’re holding an open symposium on the implications of interstellar travel in Orlando come September. And they want you to submit your thoughts.
“This won’t just be another space technology conference — we’re hoping that ethicists, lawyers, science fiction writers, technologists and others, will participate in the dialog to make sure we’re thinking about all the aspects of interstellar flight,” David Neyland, director of Darpa’s Tactical Technology Office, said in a statement issued Wednesday. You’ve got until July 8 to submit “speaking abstracts for papers and proposed panels” to the project.
Topics Darpa wants covered:
- Education as a mission, who goes, who stays, to profit or not, economies in space, communications back to earth, political ramifications, round-trip legacy investments and assets left behind.
- Why go to the stars, moral and ethical issues, implications of finding habitable worlds, implications of finding life elsewhere, implications of being left behind.
- To have gravity or not, space and radiation effects, environmental toxins, energy collection and use, agriculture, self-supporting environments, optimal habitat sizing.
Of course, Darpa could get some really excellent advice from the Silver Surfer’s legendary co-creator: Jack Kirby, the King of Comics.
In 1972, NASA launched its Jupiter Plaque, a tablet meant to show life on earth — and a path to finding it — to any intelligent life that encountered its Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. The Los Angeles Times‘ magazine asked Kirby what he would have drawn for the project. He produced this image, implying Earth was populated by impossibly powerful beings:
According to his biographer, Kirby explained:
I see no wisdom in the eagerness to be found and approached by any intelligence with the ability to accomplish it from any sector of space. In the meetings between “discoverers” and “discoverees,” history has always given the advantage to the finders. In the case of the Jupiter Plaque, I feel that a tremendous issue was thoughtlessly taken out of the world forum by a few individuals who have marked a clear trail to our door. My point is, who will come a-knocking — the trader or the tiger?
Darpa surely doesn’t think of itself as the conquerors, but Kirby’s warning could probably inform the 100 Year Starship project. Not everyone we encounter will be as demure as the Silver Surfer.
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