Encounter With Tiber Read online

  At the end of the summer, he paid the remaining two years of his Stanford tuition in cash, sent his father a check for the past two years, and, after covering the loan and taxes, had $8500 left.

  The next summer, he talked a private foundation into a highly irregular grant that let him wander the earth for three months managing PVAT via modem while writing a report on “A Sustainable Planet” in a clear, literate style that made it salable to a commercial publisher. (To the surprise of the foundation, it turned out that Sig had drafted a contract that gave him all the earnings from this, leaving them with the report but no legal right to publish it.) Some people thought it was the equivalent of Paine’s Common Sense; others tended to compare it to Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? or Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

  As the business magazines summarized it, Sig Jarlsbourg had concluded that at least half of the most respected industries, ones that could be counted on in any portfolio, had to be shut down within the next century, and proposed a radical plan for putting them out of business. To the environmentalists, he had proposed that all the wild and beautiful places of the Earth, the common heritage of mankind, should be reserved as playgrounds for the rich. And, as he told me years later, “Actually, the only person I cared about what I looked like to was the one in the mirror. Though it didn’t hurt that people like Ted Turner and Richard Branson kind of liked me, too.”

  A fairer summary of the idea was this: the earth’s population was so large and the number of people who were either still in childbearing years, or had yet to enter them, so big a percentage of it, that only the most advanced technologies available could supply food, medicine, housing, and heat to keep them alive (and even then there was bound to be some starvation). Yet those technologies, in turn, were extraordinarily energy intensive, and every known large-scale method of producing energy had severe ecological drawbacks: relied on rare metals that were chemically active, and thus would have highly unpredictable effects when released into the biosphere; depended on complex molecules that were so similar to those found in living things that these, too, were bound to have disastrous effects; and so forth.

  Furthermore, these interacted; to avoid the hazards of gross pollution associated with coal, one might turn to uranium, only to discover more complex problems associated with radiation, from which one might turn to solar power, only to find that manufacturing solar cells required processing industrial quantities of a witch’s brew of heavy elements.

  To return to nineteenth-century or earlier technology would insure famine and plague; to try to keep going with advanced technology on the face of the Earth would insure a series of worsening environmental catastrophes. The escape hatch, then, was not to do it on the face of the Earth.

  After all, even if you were trying to, you couldn’t significantly pollute the quadrillions of cubic miles of space that lie within the orbit of the Moon; and that’s only the nearest and most convenient space. A hundred and twenty miles straight up was inexhaustible solar energy—and if you didn’t build the solar cells on Earth, from Earth-based materials, no worries about releasing biologically active metals. The asteroids and Moon contained every raw material needed, and when you were done processing you could leave the slag there and it would never hurt anyone. Eventually you could grow food up there—with no need, ever, for pesticides, since all you had to do was not take the bugs with you, and if by chance you did, you need only quarantine the infected crop—and open the door to hard vacuum and hard radiation to exterminate the bugs. The whole Earth could be supplied from space, at least in principle, with no need left for a smokestack or a chemical vat anywhere on its face, and virtually unlimited material goods for everyone.

  Or in short, Earthbound resources could not support the Earth’s population for more than another couple of generations, unless large parts of what made the Earth beautiful were destroyed, or a much higher percentage of the global population died young. Neither was acceptable. Therefore within fifty years—somewhere around the end of Sig’s lifetime—there would need to be an outside source for energy and minerals from either the seabeds or space. The seabeds were hooked to the global ecology in ways that were poorly understood, and there was little point in replacing ruining the land with ruining the oceans. So it would have to be space, and for the space source of resources to work at all, it must be cheaper than the terrestrial source. If it were, then much of the Earth would become too valuable to “waste” on agriculture and industry, and the planet would “re-green” as he called it.

  The key was cheap exploitable resources from space. But when Sig looked at the numbers of the time, “cheap” seemed like a very strange word to use. With technologies available at the time, it cost a thousand times as much to generate electricity in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) as it did on Earth, ten thousand times as much to move a passenger into LEO as it did to fly the same passenger across the Atlantic, and a hundred thousand times as much to create work or living space for a person in LEO as it did to create the equivalent in Chicago.

  By themselves those numbers did not intimidate Sig. When he had been out of college for two years, his Planetary Vision Adventure Tours had swelled, by acquisition and merger, into Share-the-Planet Tours, which had already become a giant in the burgeoning industry of low-impact high-priced ecotourism. Acquiring a dozen specialized firms to do it, Sig had built hotels offshore in deep water, flown comfortable living quarters into and out of Antarctica, put up independent, solar-powered buildings on Pacific reefs, and in every case filled them with people who wanted to see the wild world—as untouched as possible—without leaving any creature comforts behind. He knew that you could still make a profit in places that were very expensive to operate.

  Yet although you can get tourists to pay for all kinds of bizarre things—consider the number of ski lodges that are built in places where concrete costs six times the normal price and labor costs are double—tourism and other very high cost-per-weight industries can only be the beginning of getting people there. The first Western and Chinese traders to Borneo went for spices that were literally worth their weight in gold, but there wasn’t much traffic until it became a cheap place for tin and rubber at pennies per pound, and development didn’t take off there until it was possible to make computer components at pennies per ton. From a business standpoint, space could begin with tourism, but tourism would have to finance the research and technical improvements that could eventually lead to moving energy production, then mining, and finally industrial production itself, up to orbit.

  Chances were it would take a lifetime. That was okay with Sig, because—as he told me years later—“Well, I had a lifetime and I wasn’t planning to do anything else with it anyway.”

  Just as importantly, in the short run, his high-end ecotourism had given him an extraordinarily valuable set of contacts, for obviously the people his business served were mainly those who could afford thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for vacations of a month or more. Furthermore, though his relations with his father were poor, the family contacts he had inherited served him well. And many of his employees and consultants were necessarily experts in high-risk and extreme-conditions sports, and through them he met more adventurers.

  Thus, when he was twenty-nine, knowing the vacation habits of a dozen of the world’s wealthiest people well—and in contact with hundreds of adventurers from high-altitude balloonists to technical divers and extreme skiers—Sig Jarlsbourg was able to call together one of the most remarkable meetings of the twentieth century. Many of the people in the room—Ted Turner, Bill Gates, Michael Eisner, and Steve Forbes, for example—were nominally on vacation, attending the “free retreat” that Sig had offered them at his new Greenland Glacier Lodge, supposedly to both celebrate the opening of the new facility and also, because the conference began on Friday, July 16, 1999, and would conclude on Tuesday, July 20, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. J.F.K., Jr., was there, ostensibly to celebrate his father’s legacy, actually beca
use Sig had been quietly exploiting political contacts through that channel ever since Kennedy had taken his submarine tour of the Great Barrier Reef; and because Kennedy was there, several other people whose names were household words were there. Perot himself wasn’t, but four people from his national organization were, all quietly referring to themselves as “employees of a major national corporation and friends of Mr. Jarlsbourg.” Also in the group were members of the small elite of wealthy adventurers, including Richard Branson, just returned from yet another ballooning expedition. The bankers, perhaps, carried more weight, but they would follow the lead of the entrepreneurs and adventurers; the people with political connections mattered a great deal, but again, no one mattered so much as the dozen or so people in the room, most of them men, most in their late fifties or early sixties, each of whom commanded large fortunes without being answerable to boards of directors or other conservative forces.

  If Sig’s business had taught him nothing else (and of course he had learned an enormous amount from it), it would have taught him how to show people a good time and get them in a relaxed frame of mind, enjoying themselves while becoming alert and receptive. For the first three days the group mostly mingled, trying various kinds of remote skiing, taking excursions to observe rare wildlife along the seacoast and carefully planned no-impact visits to mountain valleys. Always, as they did this, they were reminded of how essential space operations had become to environmental and conservation projects; how fragile the Earth was and how many people needed a share of it now; and somehow—strange that a tourism mogul would do such a thing—they were constantly reminded that nowadays the number of high-adventure experiences available on Earth, while still very large, could be exhausted by a wealthy thrill-seeker before the age of thirty. By Monday at dinnertime—the last big meal of the vacation and the general gathering for the “special program” about which they had all been whispering to each other for three days now—they were all glad that they had come, happy to be there, reasonably fond of each other and of Sig … and vaguely uneasy, troubled by a sense that things could be much better.

  As the lights dimmed, Sig drew a deep breath, stepped to the podium, and began. Behind him a large high-definition screen sprang to life.

  “I think,” Sig Jarlsbourg began, “that we all understand each other here. We know how good life can be, and we know quite a bit about building for the future, about thinking of a few generations into the future. We know that our wealth is secure only as long as others do well enough, and we aren’t foolish enough to think that we can stay in our enviable position either by sheer force or merely by tradition. No, I think all of us here understand that if we wish to preserve our success, we must move on to other successes—and we must take the rest of the human race with us. Now, I want you to imagine something.”

  An image began to swim before them on the screen, not quite defining itself yet. “What I want you to imagine is this. All of us here know that the Earth is hitting its limits, and sooner or later—through exhaustion of fossil fuels, global warming, ozone loss, accidental release of nuclear wastes, or a dozen other possible scenarios—the world is going to take a disastrous turn, and no matter how much wealth and power we have, we will not be immune.

  “Not immune when it happens, anyway. You might say I am offering us a long-term vaccination.”

  The image on the screen swam into shape. It was clearly an aircraft, long and thin, with delta wings at its rear and a canard wing just behind the pilot’s cabin.

  “You of all people have sampled the pleasures of the Earth. Imagine, then, that you could sample pleasures beyond the Earth—”

  For the next few hours he took them back and forth, from what was possible and could be done tomorrow, to a vision of life a century further on when their grandchildren would hang glide off Olympus Mons on Mars and climb mountains on the back side of the Moon. He sketched out pleasures they had never thought of—and at the same time stressed how many hard and practical reasons there were for each step on the way. He pointed out that it would cost a great deal and involve great risks, and at the same time made them feel like they were the few, special people who could afford to take those risks and might well be the ones to lead humanity into its spacefaring future.

  Then he got more concrete. Space tourism, in the kind of long run that the super-wealthy families must deal with, could lead to space industrialization, which could lead to a cleaner, richer, safer world for everyone. Once private industry was operating freely in space on a big scale, the rest could follow quickly, because there were abundant resources of many kinds on the Moon and in the asteroids. But no one would go after those resources directly. Earth-based sources were invariably cheaper—“unless,” Sig said, “thousands of people are already going there anyway and there’s a known, cheap, easy-to-use technology for doing it. And that’s the point. If you want that better world, we need to see space tourism take off right away, and it can’t be as a plaything of a tiny group of super-rich people. It’s got to have broad-based public support and enthusiasm right from the start. And for that, ladies and gentleman, I propose—ShareSpace Global.”

  Sig had spent a decade learning to be a superb salesman, and he had spent almost as long learning how money worked. He knew what would titillate his audience and what would flatter them. And with careful timing, he had just announced the name of his company to be as the clock chimed midnight, making it the official thirtieth anniversary of the first landing on the Moon.

  The plan was breathtakingly simple: build up space-based tourism by beginning with simple earthly activities (trips to see space launches, tours of scientific facilities, high-altitude flights with zero-gravity experience guided by ex-astronauts); move rapidly into suborbital ballistic flights above the atmosphere; from there to orbital adventure trips and to luxury Hilton hotels in orbit; then low-altitude circumnavigations of the Moon—“and as far after that as anyone cares to go!”

  “So who’s going to go on these and how much are you charging for tickets?” a voice asked in a Southern drawl, out of the darkness.

  Sig knew the voice, pointed himself toward the speaker, and said, “Two classes of people. One, we have tickets available that you just buy, at a healthy markup. So you and your kids might just do it for a special occasion. Two—and here’s what’s important—we sell shares.”

  “Not like timeshare condos?” a voice asked from another corner.

  “Not much. Figure it’s a little like a church raffle, where the top prize is really great, the other prizes make you feel like the ticket was worthwhile, and the many people who don’t get anything are encouraged to think that they’re doing something good for the world as a whole. Now obviously only some of the people who buy shares get the big prizes, whatever those are as we develop—eventually, of course, the big prizes are the rides to space. Thousands more get consolation prizes of one kind or another intended to get them more interested and make them more space-crazy. And for those who don’t win anything, we discount your number of chances some percentage, and then put you back into the pool next time with that reduced number of chances. So nobody ever loses all at once, but there’s always a strong incentive to buy more.”

  “You didn’t say how much you’ll charge either for a flat-rate ticket or for a share.”

  “There’ll be a board of adjusters that changes that constantly; it’ll need adjustment all the time. But figure the first flat-rate tickets in each new class of service will be in the tens of thousands of dollars—which means, by the way, we don’t do it till our lift cost per pound is less than five percent of what the shuttle is currently running—and shares might be around ten dollars.”

  An older, white-haired man—whose face had been well known on television before he had gained and kept sixty pounds—put up his hand and asked, “Uh, I hate to mention this, but I do believe people like me could die from high acceleration, and that is just what I would encounter if I did this.”

  Sig grinned. “Well, w
e’d need to put you in front of a doctor and have him check you out. Some people can’t even handle excitement. And there are people with bad backs and brittle bones. But the numbers are like this: for a suborbital flight, the most you’d have to handle is 1.6 g’s—and 1.4 is more typical. So if you weigh 230, you’d have maybe five minutes of weighing ninety-two more pounds, which isn’t so bad if you’re lying flat on a couch. Even many people with heart disease can handle that, especially if we give them pure oxygen through a breathing tube.

  “For orbital flights we’d have to go up to about three g’s, and that is a lot compared to normal gravity at Earth surface—that 230-pound person would weigh in at almost 700—but what it really excludes is only people with severe osteoporosis, arterial plaques, or emphysema.

  “None of which are at all common in people with a passion for thrill sports. It’s true we’d be shutting out the lifelong overeating, heavy-smoking couch potato, but most of them aren’t out for a thrill ride anyway—if they were, they’d have been skiing or mountain biking or hang gliding on Earth, and they wouldn’t be in that shape.”

  The older man chuckled. “Well, it sounds like I’d be marginal. And at least I’d have ten years to lose some weight. I don’t suppose you know offhand what the acceleration for a Moon trip would be like? One thing you’re forgetting is that some of your passengers won’t be there for the ride, but for the view.”