Have A Say In Future Space Priorities For All Humanity – Part 2: From 2046 To 2101

In Part 2, we map humanity’s future space priorities and predict milestones and the technologies we need on the roadmap to take us beyond 2046 to 2076, and then onto 2101.  As in Part 1, I have listed 7 milestones and challenges for each time segment.

What Humanity’s Space Outreach Will Be By 2076

1. Space habitats capable of supporting hundreds of people will populate cislunar space and the lunar surface. These will evolve from the first lunar colonies and space stations like the Gateway, part of the Artemis Program.
2. Space habitats will incorporate simulated Earth and other levels of gravity to meet different needs. Some current commercial space station designs include adding rotating sections to simulate gravity. One of these would deploy VAST-Haven modules in a ring that would rotate. This was first proposed by Werner Von Braun in the 1950s. He drew plans for rotating space structures circling a central axis with different rings offering varying levels of gravity. By 2076, designs and builds of this type and in various sizes should be manufactured, assembled and deployed in space.
3. The first generation of humans who have never known Earth will be born in space. They will live in space habitats that will be self-sustaining with the capacity to provide space-based manufacturing, power and data centre hubs for Earth and a growing space community.
4. The first space cities will feature permanent populations in the low thousands. These will be self-governing and self-sustaining communities.
5. Mars will see the first of several small permanent habitats. These will remain somewhat dependent on Earth and the aforementioned space stations to meet all needs to sustain them.
6. Commercial fusion power should be a thing here on Earth within the next five years. For a growing space community, a deep-space transportation network powered by fusion is essential. The first designs for fusion engines today are moving from drawing boards to vacuum testing here on Earth. Perfecting this technology for propulsion will make space travel timely to support human existence in space, on the Moon and on Mars.
7. The first human scientific expeditions to the Solar System’s Ice Giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) will happen by 2076. Nuclear fission, fusion and electric drives will power spacecraft to reach Neptune, the furthest of the Ice Giants from Earth. This journey could last from 5 to 8 years. Robotic missions will precede these voyages. They will create waystations along the route and provide in-orbit support around destinations. Current interest lies in the potential for life on Europa, a Jovian moon, as well as Titan and Enceladus, two moons of Saturn.

Our Space Outreach by 2101

Stanley Kubrick took an Arthur Clarke science fiction novel and made the iconic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film Interstellar depicted a dying Earth and an expedition to find a new home for humanity on planets circling nearby stars.

By 2101, the pursuit of human cosmic expansion may begin. What will be behind this outward urge? What technologies will make this possible?

1. The driving outward urge by 2101 will be fuelled by confirmation of the existence of technologically sophisticated extraterrestrial intelligence (ET). In Part 1, I described SETI, our increasingly sophisticated Earth and space-based radio telescopes making ongoing discoveries of thousands of exoplanets circling neighbouring stars, and sifting through millions of radio signatures. We are only beginning to use artificial intelligence (AI) in searching through the data already collected. There are suspects today, and no doubt many more from data we collect in the future, making finding ET a good bet before 2101.
2. To make our communication with ET two-way, humanity will build massive space-based arrays capable of sending messages at light speed without degradation of the signal. Lasers and quantum computing technologies, along with AI, will be the keys to making this a reality. After all, we don’t want to start a journey without sending out a message ahead of time to announce we are coming, and also, we don’t want to start the journey without being invited.
3. Interstellar travel requires breakthroughs in transportation technology, currently well beyond current capabilities, but theoretically possible. For example, at 20% the speed of light, a spaceship would take 20 years to reach Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri. The use of laser beams, as proposed by Stephen Hawking in 2016, may work for nano-sized probes, but a crewed spaceship would never find a laser powerful enough to do the job. Nor would fusion engines achieve the needed speeds. Likely candidates that sound a bit Star Trekkian, therefore could include antimatter and dark matter propulsion systems. (No warp drives and bubbles, thank you very much.) Antimatter drives would use matter-antimatter annihilation to generate near-light-speed propulsion. Dark matter would use dark matter-matter annihilation to accomplish similar results. Both would cut travel time to our nearest stellar neighbour to 4 to 5 Earth-years.
4. A spaceship sent to meet ET will have to be self-sustaining. Its internal power source will be a fusion reactor. Its biosystems will be closed loop. It will need to harvest what it can from the space it travels through and recycle everything within the internal environment to support its passengers.
5. Cryosleep is often used in science fiction accounts of interstellar voyages. Cryobiology today can keep embryos in a deep freeze and thaw them for in vitro implantation years later to start a pregnancy. The ability to put people into cryopreserved states and then revive them later, however, is a considerable leap beyond embryos. It requires advances in molecular-scale biorepair, precision control of human metabolism and sophisticated life-support capable of neutralizing the potential damage from freezing and rewarming after an extended period, enduring long-term near-zero metabolism, preserving brain structure, memories and identity, and during revival, countering any thermal stresses on the skeleton and muscles, blood vessels, immune system, organs, internal gut biomass and more.
6. AI will transform long-distance space travel in 2101. The technology will make real-time decisions without crew or ground crew involvement, light-years away on Earth. AI will manage all aspects of spaceship operations as the crew sleeps. It will repair and maintain the ship, map and plan the route, and avoid hazards. It will operate with minimal biosupport, preserving life support for the crew in sleep and when awake. Today, we already have neuromorphic chip technology to begin building this type of AI capacity.
7. Robots will undergo transformative improvements between now and 2101. Perseverance on Mars has shown how versatile robots can be when exploring alien environments. Perseverance, lately, has received an AI upgrade allowing it to do its own driving. So imagine the robots of 2101 on future voyages to deep and interstellar space. They will be given human-level cognition, be self-learning, self-repairing, and capable of using in situ resources for manufacturing and repairing all spaceship systems. Crews will be able to create an augmented presence, becoming embodied within robots to explore hazardous environments or when doing dangerous tasks. Robots in 2101 will precede human crews on interstellar voyages, acting as pioneers and ambassadors, and organizing what is needed for the crew before it arrives.

So there you have my predictions of milestones that we will achieve by century’s end as we begin the outward journey to the stars. In describing the next steps, have I missed anything?