Erasmo Acosta's Blog - Posts Tagged "interstellar"

I've lived in the US over twenty years. Originally from south America, I was sponsored under the H1-B program by a small software firm in 1996, and came to California to work in the hi-tech industry.

Reading my favorite sci-fi novels in English—which I reread many, many, times in Spanish as a teen—helped me learn the language. Although these days I only get to speak Spanish with my feline companion, I still have a strong accent when I speak to the rest of you.

Four and a half years ago, I embarked on a journey. Not voluntarily, I didn’t realized I was on it until much later, when I decided to write a sci-fi novel (more details in future blog posts). In a nutshell, I came to realize much of the technology necessary to dwell in space already exists. The challenges are mostly of sheer scale, but we don’t need to invent new physics.

I’m not talking about settling Mars, the moon, or other celestial bodies, but rotating habitats in space. Back in the 1970s physicist Gerard O’Neill first developed the concept. Today we still call these rotating megastructures, capable of housing millions, O’Neill cylinders. They replicate Earth’s gravity and atmosphere, allowing people to live inside them as comfortably as in the home planet.

Because the resources to build such structure will need to be acquired in space (mining asteroids and the moon) the first habitat will be considerably smaller than what O’Neill envisioned. It’ll take many decades to develop the manufacturing infrastructure, most of which will be lift from Earth using rockets, and gather enough building materials to build a tiny rotating habitat that will house a few hundred people.

With the initial space-bound infrastructure in place, we can begin mining larger sources of metals—like the planet Mercury—to build the first megastructure capable of housing millions. However it’ll be centuries before we witness the first O’Neill cylinder.

My novel, K3+, tackles these and many other topics. A billion years in the future, humankind becomes a true post-scarcity and egalitarian civilization. Eons before, ingenuity solved aging and disease, inequality, climate change, wars, and other predicaments we got ourselves into. Not only did humans build trillions of rotating habitats around the sun, housing quintillions of souls, but they went on beyond Alpha Centauri to conquer the Milky Way and hundreds of neighboring galaxies outside the Local Group.

Life is great and people live forever in their twenties looking bodies. True telepathy becomes possible by neural interfaces allowing people to exchange thoughts, far more efficiently than words. Genetic enhancements and nanotechnology enable these 200-IQ-point-beings to achieve extraordinary mental and physical feats.

The story then jumps to the early 21st century where we learn how humans overcame their deeply engrained planetary bias, which prevented them from seeing the incredible bounty a star like the sun is. After a failed attempt to colonize Mars, inequality and climate change trigger a massive human migration to space, while on Earth countries begin to collapse due to dwindling population.

K3+ hinges on the Fermi Paradox, but in the final chapter we encounter the first civilization, in the Virgo cluster, after over a billion years of space colonization. The aliens, which are neither humanoid nor based on DNA, are stuck in the middle ages—constantly at war. Humans soon become terrified that, in the distant future, the aliens will likely evolve into a super-predator that will threaten their survival, and face the ultimate moral and ethical dilemma.