What Will A Human Presence in Space Look Like?

Okay, that's a pretty broad-reaching question in the title of this post, but one of the things I wanted to say was that it probably won't look like what most of us picture in our mind when we try to think about it.

Star Trek gives us gargantuan space stations and faster-than-light space vessels, made of metal, or at least made of atoms bonded together through the electromagnetic forces. Yes, there are a few exotic materials powering these ships, including anti-matter and something called Sub-Space. (Isn't it weird how Star Trek uses Sub-Space, meaning "under space" or "below space" or "less than space" or "falling short of space", while Star Wars uses Hyper-Space meaning "over space" or "beyond space" or "exceeding space". Make up your mind, you geeks. Is it going to be over or under? Above and beyond or under and in?) But the other thing Star Trek brings us is massive empty spaces. Basically the Star Trek Galaxy is a featureless ocean, dotted by the occasional star system, and crossed by tiny ships. And if we were to be able to look at a map of the galaxy produced by Starfleet, we would probably see a few well-established shipping lanes between inhabited systems, surrounded by a lot of empty space.

Okay, maybe this is what humanity in space will look like for the next few centuries. Even then, we're not realistically going to be exploring much beyond the Solar System. At best, we'll have gotten a probe to the nearest star. As far as Galactic colonization, as depicted in Star Trek, I think this will take quite a different kind of paradigm than what we see in that show. In order to colonize other star systems, we'll need a kind of infrastructure in order to get there. That is, we can't think of the Solar System as being mostly empty space, even though it kind of sort of basically is. When we're thinking of the universe, we need to start envisioning it as a place where gravitational forces have a kind of objective presence. That is, gravity doesn't just emanate from objects; gravity is those objects. This is because in space, gravity is all there is.

Just as a tiny electron has an incredibly powerful electrical charge that can affect its own atom as well as nearby atoms, despite having a size on the order of millions of times smaller than that which it can affect; so the machines that will eventually take us to the stars will have a similar reality. Indeed, objects in space could do away with the concept of volume or objective existence entirely, as long as the concept of gravity (and mass, and speed) are retained. Any given object in the universe can be defined entirely by its mass and its speed.

Now that we have this picture though, we can begin to make it more complicated. For example, what about galaxies? Galaxies are incredibly complex collections of objects, and yet can often be mathematically treated as individual objects. So on one hand you might predict some fairly straight-forward gravitational effects in the vicinity of a galaxy, but in observational practice, you might see some totally bizarre effects, in which the laws of gravity seem to be violated.

In a way, this is kind of like how it is with manned flight. People observed that they were stuck to the surface of the planet, and they believed that they couldn't fly. But they learned something about the effects of the atmosphere, including the fact that you could treat air, or gas, or the atmosphere, just like any other kind of matter, manipulating it, and causing it to support solid objects. The flight of birds was no longer a mystery.

So essentially, if you could manipulate the forces of a galaxy, you could create almost automatic shipping lanes, or currents, leading in and out of that galaxy. I don't know, something like that anyways.

I don't know if anything like this could work on a scale smaller than a Solar System, but if it did work, the technology required would be mechanical, not necessarily involving exotic particles or rare materials. You'd just have to know how to correctly position whatever material you need to generate lots of gravity. Instead of self-contained space ships, you'd have widely-spread systems, containing a vehicle in the core, several orders of magnitude smaller than the whole system.

So the human presence of space would look like, to outside observers, massive gravitational systems, conduits throughout the galaxy, through which pass objects so small they are virtually undetectable. At least, you couldn't use the same instruments to detect the conduits as you would use to detect the vehicles. There might be no evidence at all that the system was designed by an intelligent species, unless you happened to be located at one of the exits of the gravitational conduits.

In conclusion, a human presence in space wouldn't look like anything we'd be able to recognize as human, or possibly even as intelligent. You wouldn't be able to "see" our vessels at all, because our systems would move from the visual to the purely gravitational and theoretical. Sure, at the very core, there would be tiny human vessels, maybe even made out of metal. My point is that "structure" in space is not something made of struts and girders, but of gravity and mathematical predictions. We will need to leave behind the world of the electromagnetic, in favor of the world of the gravitational.

Anyways, I'm not the first to have such ideas, I just wanted to kind of share these thoughts. There are much more developed ideas in Carl Sagan's Contact, for example, though I have only seen the movie; I haven't read the book.