Ra-Ra

Ancient Egyptians literally saw their god, and felt its power on their backs, on a daily basis. The god in question was Ra, the Sun-God. As gods go, this one is pretty special. It is the source of life on Earth, the tilt and rotation of which presents its surface in regular sequences to the solar energy that drives the weather, ocean currents and seasons. Life is adapted to intervals of daily and seasonal exposure to it in a myriad ways, and is therefore dependent on those intervals. So, ask yourself: suppose you could make the sun shine at night? That is – suppose you could turn night into day by distributing sunlight to the surfaces of the Earth which, by the usual diurnal rotation of the planet, are turned away from the sun for twelve hours or so regularly? How much disruption – havoc – would that cause, to how many things, in what ways? Would there be benefits that outweigh the downsides?

‘Aw, get away with you!’ you might say, preparing to scroll on, ‘this is nonsense’. Well: plans are afoot to do exactly this, so hang on a moment. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has just approved a plan by a new company based in California, Reflect Orbital, to position a satellite in low Earth orbit that will deploy a 60-foot mirror to reflect sunlight onto Earth at night. The prototype, Earendil-1, set for launching this year, will reflect a circle of sunlight three miles in radius onto the Earth, each circle persisting for three minutes. So far, not too threatening. But Reflect Orbital plans to launch 1000 bigger mirrors by the end of 2028, a further 5000 by 2030 – this time 180 feet wide and each reflecting as much light as a hundred full moons – and ultimately 50,000 of them to complete the project of turning night into day (New York Times 13.7.26).

I leave to you the project of thinking about what this would do to seasons and ocean currents, to plant growth, to nocturnal animals, to the temperature of the global climate, to human activity, to Earth-based astronomy, to – to everything. Let imagination rip. Instead let me ask you how a for-profit company in a single country, the US (inevitably), can presume to change the world in this way. Does no-one else have a say? There is something so adolescent about the very idea of ‘resolarforming’ Earth (I’m coining this term on the pattern of ‘terraforming’, that is, transforming other planets to be Earth-like), a sort of gung-ho ‘Hey! We could do this! – and there could be money in it!’ that one scarcely knows where to begin. Reflect Orbital says it will benefit solar energy farms, emergency services, construction (a 24-hour workday), agriculture with year-long growing seasons. Suppose it does so; at what cost?

‘One scarcely knows where to begin’: but in fact there is an obvious place to begin. It is to remind everyone that ‘It can be done’ does not entail ‘It should be done’. This false inference has caused us all a bucket of troubles from climate change to nuclear weapons to potential AI threats to the now-available technology for re-engineering human genetics (and that of other species, including lethal microbes) and so much more. The FCC has received a clamour of complaints (mainly from astronomers so far, the first to be alerted to this crazy idea; they need nights for doing their job), and in its response the FCC says that it is ‘only licensing an experimental project’ and ‘anyway its main responsibility is to ensure that satellite communications are not disrupted; we have no remit for what otherwise happens in space’. And there you have the precise nub of the problem: no remit for what otherwise happens in space. Because, effectively, no-one does. Space is a Wild West.

I brought out a book a couple of years ago, Who Owns the Moon, to set out concerns about the current rush to establish bases on the moon for mining and resource extraction. Competition – the frequent precursor to conflict – and sovereignty claims de facto or otherwise on parts of the moon and on accessible asteroids rich in minerals, are inevitable. Now, there are many benefits to be accrued from mining on the moon (better there than here); rare earths for example, and Helium-3, abundant in the moon’s regolith (the dust and rubble on the surface) but vanishingy scarce on Earth, could be a potential game-changer for clean energy via nuclear fusion. New technologies (remember that Teflon came from space technology, for just one of many examples) will be invented and new horizons of imagination and possibility will open as humanity expands into space. But at present there is only one international agreement, weak and out of date, for governing what happens in space: the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty, a Cold War arrangement principally designed to stop NATO and the Warsaw Pact alliances from testing or positioning nuclear weapons on the moon. Back then mining on the moon, moon bases, the already heavy militarisation of Earth’s orbital zone which is just a step away from ‘security’ arrangements on the moon and beyond, were the stuff of science fiction. Today they are current fact. And the 1967 treaty is all there is.

There are treaties and laws aplenty for the low-Earth orbital zone. But they do not apply beyond it.

Admirably as always, the UN has persisted in attempts to get stronger international agreement for keeping peace in outer space and ensuring that all on Earth benefit from what happens there. Naturally, our old friends the profit motive and national pride block it at every step, as with its efforts at a Convention on the Law of the Sea and other noble initiatives. I set out the situation regarding the moon, the UN’s efforts, the pessimism-inducing precedents (think Antarctica, the oceans, the rainforests, the climate) of failure to achieve global consensus on how we should behave ourselves. Here is another stark example of how madly destructive ideas are allowed to forge ahead in our multipolar, disagreeing, money-hungry, insensate world.

I was asked by a cab driver in Paris the other day, Why devote energy to thinking about the future when today’s world is in such a disastrous state? I replied that if we’d thought about the future twenty-five years ago, we might not be in such a disastrous state today. Of course, there might not be a future; see my recent Challenge of the Future as one example of the anxieties that present trends prompt. But if there is one, we need to think about it. Personally, I find evenings as I watch moonrise, glass of wine in hand, a good time for doing it, and would like to keep it that way.