Adv. Space Res. Vol. 22. No. 3, pp. 433.439, 1998 Q 1998 COSPAR. Published by Elsevter Science Ltd. All rights reserved PII: SO273-1177(98)00168-3 Printed in &at Britain 0273-1177/98 Sl9.00 + 0.00 zyxwvutsrqpo TERRAFORMING AND THE COMING CHARM INDUSTRIES Frederick Turner zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA School of Arks and Humanities. University zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHG of Texas at Dallas, Richardson. Texas 75083, USA zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfed ABSTRACT zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA We will only begin to develop a truly spacefaring civilization when it is in our interest to do so. One key issue is what constitutes a human “inten& and even more important,how will human interests change during the coming em in which plauetaty engineering will become feasible. The Europeauexploration of the Americas is a valuable analogy: the true beneficiaries of the Colombian discovery were not the aristocrats, sailors and warriors but the farmemand plan&s that followed them. If we are to get an accurate pictureof the potential wealth to be gained frcnn the solar system, we must recognize the successive waves of economic energy through which our civilization is passing. It is already clear that the shrinkage of employment and investment that occurred in farming is already happening to the extractive and manufacturing sectors and will happen to the information industries and the biotech/mmokch industries that will succeed them. Finally, we will be left with the irreducibly labor- and capital- intensive human industries of what we might call “charm”. The chief naturalresourcesrequired for these industries in empty space and empty time, which would be plentiful in the new planetaryhabitats opened up by terraforming. ‘Ihe paper will explore a few of the pm&al and visionary possibilities of such a perspective. 0 1998 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. The disappointing progress of the U.S. space program was not primarily the result of the technical difficulties it faced, nor the dangers to which we were alerted by the Challenger disaster, nor its great expense, nor the sense that there were pressing social and ecological problems to be solved at home. Nor was it even the fact that the leaders of the program were World War Two era people with World War Two attitudes and style, who had not replaced themselves with fresh blood from another generation. All these were factors, certainly, but they are symptoms of a larger problem, which is: what does one do with Space once one has got there? We will only begin to develop a truly spacefaring civilization when we feel it is in our interest to do so. What interests of ours are met and served by going them? Space turned out to be just what the word originally meant, that is, distance and interval. ‘lhere is no point in going to distance or interval. There is no there there. One goes through space to get to where one has business or pleasure. Of course there are places on the other side of space, but they turned out to be just exactly the kind of places one would try hard to avoid if they were down hem on Earth--baking hot or freezing cold or poisonous or totally barren, and miserable to live in. Movies, of course, imagined these places inhabited by sweaty miners or oppressed factory workers or heroic warriors or ascetic scientists, who are almost the only people who for practical reasons go willingly to such places on Earth. But it is hard to imagine anything worth the transportation costs into and out of the Earths gravity well; one mines and manufactures to be able to afford the luxury of going into space, one does not go into space to afford the luxury of mining and manufacturing. There is valuable information to be gained out there, but it can be obtained efficiently by robots--which is not the same as actually beiig there. Certainly if we wanted we 433