The future of geography, p.1
The Future Of Geography, page 1
‘In his typical style – wielding a wickedly clever pen – Marshall provides a thoroughly enjoyable, dizzyingly thought-provoking, and technologically plausible ride through the terrain of solar space. Along the way, he shows how irretrievably entwined with space humanity has become, pathways to a space future we could take and, fortunately for us, a few that we should. I’m envious. This is a book I wish I could have written. Fortunately, I got to read it.’
Professor Everett Dolman, Professor of Comparative Military Studies and Strategy, US Air Force
‘A fascinating and crucial insight into how, even as humanity moves upwards into the final frontier, we’ll be influenced by the geographies of space. Marshall has done it again!’
Professor Lewis Dartnell, author of Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History
‘A chilling, insightful exploration of the political and military implications of our presence in space.’
Brian Clegg, author of Final Frontier
‘Astropolitics is a word I never thought would enter my lexicon – but after reading this fascinating book, I’m hooked!’
Dr Becky Smethurst, astrophysicist at the University of Oxford and author of A Brief History of Black Holes
‘If space is our future, this urgent book reveals that we’re in danger of handing it over to warmongers, plutocrats and conquistadors as rapacious as those on Earth. Tim Marshall shows us why we need to look up – fast.’
Tom Burgis, author of Kleptopia
Praise for The Power of Geography:
‘I can’t imagine reading a better book this year.’
Daily Mirror
‘A useful reminder of the value of consulting an atlas before blundering into world affairs, and especially so in times of rising geopolitical tensions . . . interesting insights.’
Financial Times
‘A skilful navigation of the regions that could define geopolitics for future generations. One to read to stay ahead of the game.’
Dharshini David, author of The Almighty Dollar
Praise for Prisoners of Geography:
‘One of the best books about geopolitics you could imagine: reading it is like having a light shone on your understanding.’
Nicholas Lezard, Evening Standard
‘A fresh and original insight into the geopolitics behind today’s foreign policy challenges.’
Andrew Neil
‘Sharp insights into the way geography shapes the choices of world leaders.’
Gideon Rachman, ft.com
‘Marshall is not afraid to ask tough questions and provide sharp answers.’
Newsweek
To my family
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART 1: THE PATH TO THE STARS
1. Looking Up
2. The Road to the Heavens
PART 2: RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW
3. The Era of Astropolitics
4. Outlaws
5. China: The Long March . . . into Space
6. The USA: Back to the Future
7. Russia in Retrograde
8. Fellow Travellers
PART 3: FUTURE PAST
9. Space Wars
10. Tomorrow’s World
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Selected Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION
‘I haven’t been everywhere,
but it’s on my list.’
Susan Sontag
WE EXPLORED THE WORLD AND DISCOVERED IT IS FINITE. Now, just as our territory and resources begin to run out, we find that the big, beautiful ball in the sky – the Moon – is full of the minerals and elements we all need. It’s also a launchpad: just as early humans went from island to island as they crossed the seas, so the Moon will allow us to reach across the solar system and beyond.
It’s no surprise, then, that we are in a new Space Race. To the victor the spoils. The challenge will be to ensure that humanity is the victor.
Space has shaped human life from our very beginning. The heavens explained our early creation stories, influenced our cultures, and inspired scientific advances. But our view of space is changing. It is now, more than ever, becoming an extension of the geography of Earth: humans are taking our nation states, our corporations, our history, politics and conflicts way up above us. And that could revolutionize life down on Earth’s surface.
Space has already changed much in our everyday lives. It is central to communication, economics and military strategy, and increasingly important to international relations. It is now also becoming the latest arena for intense human competition.
The signs that space is going to be a huge geopolitical narrative of the twenty-first century have been accumulating for some time. In recent years, rare metals and water have been found on the Moon; private companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX have massively lowered the cost of breaking through the atmosphere; and the big powers have fired missiles from Earth, blowing up their own satellites to test new weapons. All of these events have been pieces of the bigger story emerging.
To understand that story, it is helpful to see space as a place with geography: it has corridors suited to travel, regions with key natural assets, land on which to build and dangerous hazards to avoid. For the last few decades all of this was considered to be the common property of humanity – no sovereign nation could exploit or lay claim to any of it in its own name. But that idea, enshrined in several noble, albeit outdated and unenforceable documents, is fraying badly. The nations of Earth are all looking to take advantage where they can. Throughout recorded history, civilizations fortunate enough to be able to utilize natural resources have developed technologies to help themselves grow stronger, and eventually to dominate others.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We have many examples of cooperation in space, and many of the space-related technologies being developed, in medicine and clean energy for example, will help us all. Several countries are working on ways to deflect huge asteroids, capable of destroying the world, off a collision course – and it doesn’t get more common property than that. As the science-fiction writer Larry Niven said, ‘The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space programme.’ It would be beyond inconvenient to suffer another hit like that.
It’s taken a long time to get where we are. The Big Bang theory suggests that 13.7 billion years ago, give or take the odd few thousand years, every single thing in the universe that exists today was compressed into an infinitesimally tiny particle existing in nothingness. Some concepts related to the universe can be difficult to get your head around, and ‘nothingness’ is one that scientists argue over endlessly. They go into notions such as quantum vacuums, in which ripples in space can cause things to pop into existence, but after reading and rereading the theories several times over I’m never much further along. The universe is expanding – but into what? What is outside its current boundaries? I can’t imagine nothing. An endless wall of grey does the trick (beige is also available), but only for a second because, of course, grey is something and not nothing . . . and then I give up. Fortunately, theoretical physicists and cosmologists are made of sterner stuff.
From ‘nothingness’ the particle exploded – although it wasn’t so much ‘flash, bang, wallop!’ as ‘bang, wallop, flash!’ as it took about 380,000 years for the first particles of light to emerge. This is the cosmic microwave background, which scientists can see through modern space telescopes – all the way back, almost to the very beginning. You can see it for yourself in the static fuzz between channels when you tune an old analogue TV. The universe expanded and cooled, and gravity caused gas clouds to gather and condense into stars.
We now know that our Sun was formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago – a relative newcomer in the universe. A huge disc of gas and heavier debris swirling around the new star then created the planets and their moons in our solar system.
Planet Earth is the third rock from the Sun. It’s a good place to be. In fact, for now it’s the only place because if it were anywhere else – we wouldn’t be. Everything that has happened since the Big Bang has shaped the geography of what we see now and allowed us to evolve to where we are. Earth is the Goldilocks of planets. Not too hot, not too cold – just right for life. Earth’s position, size and atmosphere all contribute to keeping us grounded. Literally. Its size means gravity has enough strength to hold on to the atmosphere. Move elsewhere in our neck of infinity and we’d either fry, freeze or suffocate due to a lack of breathable air.
As the great American cosmologist Carl Sagan said in his book Billions and Billions, ‘Many astronauts have reported seeing that delicate, thin blue aura at the horizon of the daylit hemisphere – that represents the thickness of the entire atmosphere – and immediately, unbidden, began contemplating its fragility and vulnerability. They worry about it. They have reason to worry.’ You’d think we might take better care of it.
But humans have always been wanderers, and in the last century have begun to move far from our planet. Space is such a massive canvas that we have only sketched our presence on it in a tiny corner. The rest is there for us to draw on in detail – together. If we’re to navigate our way outwards into the next era of the Space Age in a peaceful and cooperative fashion, we need to understand space in its historical, political and military contexts, and to grasp what it will mean for our future.
In these chapters, we will look back in time to see how space has influenced our cultures and our ideas, from so cieties organized largely around religion, all the way to scientific revolutions. From there, it was the Cold War that drove the Space Race – prompting huge leaps in human endeavour and innovation that finally allowed us to break the bonds of Earth. Once out, we started to see opportunities, resources and strategic points worth competing for. We are now in the era of astropolitics. But what we’ve failed to establish so far is a set of universally agreed-upon rules to regulate this competition; without laws governing human activity in space, the stage is set for disagreements on an astronomical level.
In the modern era, there are three main players we need to know about: China, the USA and Russia. These are the independent spacefaring nations, and how they choose to proceed will affect everyone else on Earth. The militaries of each have a version of a ‘Space Force’ that provides war-fighting capabilities for their forces on land, sea and in the air. All are increasing their capacity to attack and defend the satellites that provide those capabilities.
The rest of the nations know they can’t compete with the Big Three, but they still want to have a say in what goes up and what comes down; they are assessing their options and aligning into ‘space blocs’. If we cannot find a way to move forward as one unified planet, there is an inevitable outcome: competition and possibly conflict played out in the new arena of space.
And finally, we’ll look far forward into our future, to see what space could hold for us – on the Moon, on Mars and beyond.
The Moon pulls the sea to the shore, and humans to its surface. Wolves raise their muzzles and howl at the silvery disc hanging in the night sky. Humans raise their eyes and look further, to infinity. We always have, and now we are on our way.
PART 1
THE PATH TO THE STARS
CHAPTER 1
LOOKING UP
‘To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.’
Stephen Hawking
Our solar system.
THE FLICKERING LIGHTS OF THE STARS TELL MANY STORIES. Long before we ever dreamed of venturing into space, before artificial light dimmed our view, we stared up at the skies and asked – why is there something rather than nothing? Much of human endeavour has been driven by our desire to reach for the stars.
The first recorded beliefs about creation, the gods and constellations must have come from an oral storytelling tradition stretching back into prehistory. All ancient cultures saw in the sky an idea of what might have created them, who they were, what was their role and how they should behave. If there were gods – and what else could explain what was seen – it was logical to believe that some of them lived in the heavens above.
Humans are hardwired to look at things and see patterns. People joined the dots and made a picture corresponding to what they saw on Earth and what they knew from their legends. Those in hot climates might see the shapes of scorpions or lions, while those in colder realms would pick out a moose. In Finland the Northern Lights are known as ‘fox fires’ because of the ancient tale of a magical fox whose tail swept snow up into the heavens, while in parts of Africa there is a legend that the Sun is behind the night sky and the stars are holes that let some of its light through. The stars were inseparable from our stories, myths and legends.
The earliest potential evidence of people trying to analyse and understand the skies dates to about 30,000 years ago, towards the end of the last Ice Age. In the early 1960s the prehistorian Alexander Marshack interpreted marks carved into animal bones as being lunar calendars. The bones show sequences of twenty-eight and twenty-nine points. Experts still argue about exactly what women and men in the Late Palaeolithic period might have known, but there is a body of evidence that they were studying the stars.
Scientists speculate that these early astronomers used their portable calendars as they moved on long hunting trips and migrations, and possibly for rituals. It makes sense that a way of marking time would develop. You would need to know when, for example, the mosquito season was about to begin, or when you should move on towards the trees whose fruit was ripe.
The more practical side of watching the skies was also crucial as hunter-gatherers became more sedentary, a process that began roughly 12,000 years ago. The first farmers and herders needed to know when to sow seeds and how long it was before harvest. Some of the Neolithic cave paintings found in Europe, which are over 10,000 years old, are thought to depict star formations. Again, the claims are debated, but the pattern of constellations can be found in some of the animal drawings. People who looked at the stars every clear night must have noticed that the lights were in different positions at different times, even if they had not yet worked out that 365 periods of daylight and darkness equalled one unit of time.
We are still a long way from any proof of accurate measurement of the movement of the planets and stars at that time. Even when we arrive at the beginning of the building of stone circles, the evidence is sketchy.
The oldest known is Nabta Playa in what is now Egypt. It’s sometimes called the Stonehenge in the Sahara, which is a bit unfair as it was built about 7,000 years ago, some 2,000 years before the world’s most famous henge. This is because the site was only discovered in the 1970s and fully excavated in the 1990s. It’s thought it was built by semi-nomadic herders to help them know when they should be on the move. There’s some evidence to suggest that the stones were aligned with key stars, such as Sirius, which is the brightest star in the night sky. Evidence for the more fanciful suggestion that they could also measure the distance to those stars is harder to find, mostly because, according to experts, it isn’t there.
The same is true of Stonehenge and the many other stone circles in north-west Europe. Stonehenge was first constructed about 5,000 years ago, by which time farming had been a way of life in the region for 1,000 years. It is safe to say that Stonehenge lines up with the Sun on the winter and summer solstices, but beyond that any association with astronomy is far more speculative. It’s known that great feasts were held near the monument from the 38,000 discarded animal bones found at a settlement 3 kilometres away. Alas, Druids are not thought to have been present at these events as they didn’t show up in Britain until about 2,000 years later, which must be quite disappointing for those people who descend on the site today dressed in white gowns and carrying sticks.
It’s when we reach back about 4,000 years that we begin to find written proof that people were analysing the skies with a high level of sophistication and the ability to predict movements accurately. Writing and mathematics were the keys enabling the breakthrough.
In around 1800 BCE the Babylonians, borrowing from their predecessors, the Sumerians, wrote down the signs of the zodiac based on the constellations as they saw them. They had long believed that the gods sent them warnings from the sky about future events such as famine. Priests developed the ability to record celestial movements on clay tablets and designed a calendar featuring twelve lunar months. That was the relatively easy part. After a few generations of storing the data, and using advancements in mathematics, they noticed that planets do not move in the same way in consecutive years but, given long enough, patterns of repetition do occur. This allowed them to work out where in the sky a planet would be on a specific date in the future.
It’s largely down to the Babylonians that we divide time into seven-day weeks. They saw seven celestial bodies, figured that each one oversaw a particular day, and so divided the lunar cycle of twenty-eight days into four parts. At the time, the Egyptians were using a ten-day division, which, had it lasted, would make for a long working week. As for a two-day weekend? Well, the Babylonians did designate one day for relaxation, but we can also thank the Hebrews for letting us know that if God wanted to rest on the seventh day, then so should we. Somewhat later, the unions won us another day off whether God wanted one or not.
The Assyrians, Egyptians and others made similar advances in astronomy, but humanity still believed that astronomical events were caused by the gods. Astronomy and astrology were inseparable. The ancient Greeks thought the same way as they took up the mantle of these scientific pioneers. The Greeks put their stamp on cosmology like no other civilization. By looking up at the stars, they also changed the way we think about the world.
